You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2007.
A few people have asked me for these two recipes, and I have been lax in posting them. Enjoy!
Whole Wheat Pizza Crust
1 pkg yeast
1 C warm water
1 1/2 C whole wheat flour
2 tsp. granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 1/2 C white flour
Dissolve yeast in warm water. Allow to rest 5 minutes. Stir in whole wheat flour, sugar, salt, olive oil, and 1 cup white flour. Knead in remaining white flour by hand for about 5 minutes or until the dough is smooth and elastic.
Grease a medium bowl. Place dough in bowl and turn to coat thoroughly. Cover and allow to rise in a warm place for 15 minutes.
Preheat oven to 425. Grease one 14-inch pizza pan or two 10-inch pizza pans and stretch dough to fit pan. Flute edges to hold fillings. Top as desired, and bake at 425 until cheese is melted and crust is browned.
Noel Piper’s Spaghetti Sauce — serves about 15
3 lbs. ground beef
1 Tbsp. oregano
1 Tbsp. garlic powder
2 Tbsp. salt
3 Tbsp. parsley
1 Tbsp. basil
1 tsp. black pepper
2-3 bay leaves
2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 large onion, chopped
6-10 drops Tobasco sauce
1 institutional-sized can of tomato sauce
Brown meat; drain. Stir in flavorings and spices. Add tomato sauce. Simmer at least 1/2 hour (but it’s better if you let it go longer!).
I frequently let the sauce go in the crock pot for most of the day…a 2-3 hours on high, and then low until dinnertime. You just have to make sure that the onions get soft. Also, recently I’ve been omitting the tobasco and we like it a bit better. If you include the tobasco, it doesn’t make it taste spicy…it just livens the flavor up a bit. I prefer it a bit sweeter.
Spaghetti sauce was a significant source of contention in the early days of our marriage. David was raised in a home where his mom made a meaty, tomato-pasty sauce, and I grew up in a house where my mom made a less meaty sauce with more diced tomatoes and a little bit of wine in it. Very different tastes. It wasn’t until 2004 (can you believe it, five years and we couldn’t agree on spaghetti sauce?!?!) that we came across this recipe in Treasuring God in Our Traditions and agreed on it. I make it up about once a month and freeze it.
Last night David and I went over to the home of our church friends, a family who has five children. We recently set up a babysitting exchange with this family and one other family at our church. Our hope is to spur one another on to having regular date nights with our spouses.
I had fallen into a routine where I was busy, I was used to being with the kids all the time and I hadn’t really thought about the value of an uninterrupted evening with my husband. Oh sure, I thought, it would be nice…but it was always low on the priority list when the rubber hit the road. We’ve always had plenty of people offer to watch our kids, and we’ve taken advantage of it, but this way we have a schedule and someone who’s expecting a call for a certain time. It makes it just a little bit easier knowing we’re pulling together to make this happen.
The funny thing is, last night our friends were saying, “this was the worst day…we almost called you so many times to cancel….” But then when they made it to the restaurant, ordered their food, and started talking, they realized that it was a really good idea to go out. And that’s the way it always seems to happen for David and I. We think, “it’s not that big a deal…we’ll go out sometime…” and then we finally do it, and we think, “WOW. This was really good to be able to talk. We need to do this more often.” It’s not that we don’t talk when we’re home, it’s just that our conversations frequently are interrupted by excited interjections, discipline issues, hurt feelings, bumped foreheads, and the like.
When was the last time you had a date with your spouse? What did you do? When can you make it happen again?
We happened to see the end of the Lakers/Spurs game the other day, where Kobe threw a nasty elbow at Manu Ginobli. I was happy to see that he was suspended, even if it was for just a game.
From Wikipedia:
Bush league is a general term used to describe an action or thing as being amateur, inferior or crude. In a literal sense, it refers to a low quality minor league in baseball not
associated with any of the major league teams. The term originated from the state of minor-league fields that often were ringed with shrubs and bushes.
Popular usage of this term is for any particular circumstance or situation that is meant to be conveyed as cheap, cheating, unfair or otherwise straying from honorable behavior. For example; in a sports game, if the referee makes a call that meets any of the above qualifications of cheap, cheating or otherwise unfair, a participant might say, “That call is bush league.”
Lest we all forget, another definition of “bush league.”
After my annual read-up on home management books like Home Comforts and Sink Reflections, I have finally started a “Control Journal.” I have never done this before, and what a difference it has made! Prior to this year, I have always operated on a schedule…but it was a chart, usually mounted inside a kitchen cabinet where it was sometimes ignored and sometimes forgotten. I now have a three-ring binder that sits on my kitchen island, with to-do lists, shopping lists, meal plans, and my day-to-day schedule sheets that you will see below. I’ve been using it for about three weeks now, and I can honestly say that I feel a bit more “on top of things.” And that’s including a week where I was down and out with strep throat!
I have learned a few things about myself during this process..
I have learned a few things about myself during this process..
- If the kitchen island is completely clean of clutter, I feel like I can conquer the world.
- My biggest time-waster is the computer…nothing else comes close. I knew this before, but lately I’ve been watching the clock. It’s pitiful.
- Ten minutes of time at night = thirty minutes in the morning. Better to leave the kitchen completely clean and ready for breakfast than to try to feed the family and clean the kitchen at the same time.
- I must continually remember that the process is about the people in my home, not the home itself. The purpose of this is to promote peace and health for my family. If I am in a hurried, annoyed mood while I am going about my cleaning chores, I am negating the purpose of it all.
- The FlyLady site helped me realize how my perfectionism actually paralyzes me. There seems to be a part of my brain that subconsciously says, “if it can’t be done perfectly, it’s better left undone.” So if I don’t feel up to scrubbing the entire master bathroom, I just leave it alone. But “housework done incorrectly still blesses your family.” And it’s better to just wipe down the sinks than to do nothing.
Now, I haven’t had a week where I’ve gotten everything done on my lists, but I have been wonderfully free of the harried feeling of spinning my wheels and not accomplishing anything. I now have this lovely little book where I can flip open to my list, and dive into the next thing. If it’s done, I cross it off and I know it’s done for the week and I don’t need to revisit it. Aaaah, that feels nice.
Meals have been cooked, the kitchen is slowly getting cleaner, and the bathrooms are clean. They won’t always be that way, but I hope that this little journal is a step in the right direction.
A few people responded that they would like to see my specific to-do lists and pages. Here they are. I’ve posted them here using Google documents; I hope that they are usable this way. If anyone smarter than me knows a better place to put files for sharing, please comment and let me know.
Daily to-do’s
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
My other lists (this includes my daily routines as well as my weekly cleaning checklist)
A couple of notes about these pages…
- I print off a week’s worth of daily (Monday through Saturday) pages (if not more) at a time and put them in my binder, usually on Saturdays when I’m planning meals. So the part of the evening routine that says, “print off tomorrow’s PODA” isn’t right. (P.O.D.A. means “Parade of Daily Adventures.” It’s a euphemism for “to-do list.”)
- The daily routine lists are in page protectors since they don’t change from day to day. The weekly cleaning checklist is in a page protector also, and I use a dry-erase marker to check off what I’ve accomplished. Then at the end of the week I use a damp cloth to erase it.
- You will see an item labeled “my second priority” every day. This is a phrase that I snatched from Large Family Logistics. It refers to the fact that my husband is my second priority, after the Lord. The phrase’s presence on my to-do list reminds me to think of him…something he’s asked me to do that day, something that will make his life easier, etc.
- I have basically melded the approaches of FlyLady and Large Family Logistics here. My daily assignments of “Cleaning day” and “laundry day”, etc. are borrowed from LFL. The author of the LFL site acknowledges our foremothers’ wisdom in devoting a day to each of these tasks.
I hope these are helpful to you!
I saw this on Shawnda’s blog and thought it was definitely worth passing on!
Aid To Women, a crisis pregnancy centre in Toronto, has been assisting a mom who is expecting twins next month. Recently she found out, that one of the babies (a boy) has Spina Bifida. This is a birth defect in which the spinal cord has not developed properly. According to the doctors this little unborn child’s condition is severe. He is probably paralyzed from the waist down and will need a shunt because of hydrocephali (water on the brain). The Mother cannot face this challenge and is booked to have a selective abortion of the spina bifida child in a few weeks. Aid to Women feels that if they can offer this mom a promise that a family will adopt the handicapped child she will carry him to term. Aid to Women is appealing to the pro-life community to offer a home and heart for the child.
CHN is a not for profit organization, formed 1990.
CHN – 11563 Bailey Cres., Surrey, B.C.V3V 2V4
UPDATE: Praise the Lord, someone has been found to adopt this little boy. Please continue to pray for others like him!
Girltalk is doing a series right now on one of my favorite subjects, food! Yesterday’s entry was entitled, “More than Necessity,” and the first in the series was entitled, “More than Food.” There is no occasion when meals should become totally unimportant. Meals can be very small indeed, very inexpensive, short times taken in the midst of a big push of work, but they should be always more than just food. Relaxation, communication and a measure of beauty and pleasure should be part of even the shortest meal breaks. Of course you celebrate special occasions—successes of various members of the family, birthdays, good news, answered prayer, happy moments—with special attention to meal preparation and serving. But we should be just as careful to make the meal interesting and appealing when the day is grey, and the news is disappointing….
That’s from Edith Schaeffer, to “whet your appetite” (groan).
Food cannot take care of spiritual, psychological and emotional problems, but the feeling of being loved and cared for, the actual comfort of the beauty and flavor of food, the increase of blood sugar and physical well-being, help one to go on during the next hours better equipped to meet the problems.
A couple is removed from a plane because after 15 minutes’ effort they cannot control their 3-year-old daughter to the point where she will sit in her seat with her seatbelt fastened. The company REIMBURSES them and offers them free tickets for next time, but no, they’re mad. They’re not ever going to fly that airline again. And they’re telling everyone about it.
My response to this? (I’m going to write this in tiny font so I don’t scare anyone)
GET A GRIP, PEOPLE! CONTROL YOUR CHILD!
/soapbox
I know, we’ve all had those days with our kids. But so help me…if one of my children was behaving this way, I hope I’d walk off the flight with my child firmly in tow before they had to remove us.
HT: Amy’s Humble Musings
Dr. Mohler posts on lessons learned during his recent health crisis.
I took a lot of pictures of Cam’s party on Friday but they’ll be slow in coming. I have strep throat again! So I’m going to concentrate on resting and washing my hands incessantly. 
Crazy Cake Decorating Lady was here this morning and she left this:
If you don’t usually read Challies’ blog, today is a great day to do so. He posted (with tongue in cheek) on Things I Hate About America. Please don’t stop reading at the end of the article…the comments had me in stitches, particularly “Tyler’s” list of Canadians he is thankful for (including “the greatest Canadian to ever exist, Alex Trebek”) and those that Canada can have back.
