Homemade Yogurt is Worth the Wait

I remember the first time I talked to a friend about making yogurt.  She brought over some that she had made a few days ago and it was so amazing!  Honestly, I did not like yogurt until I tried hers.  It was sweet instead of sour, with an smooth texture.  This was a few years ago, since I am sure I was either pregnant with Dominic or Charis. 

Soon after this day I went out and bought some yogurt starter and set out to try my own batch.  I had a propane oven that would only go as cold as 170 degrees.  I spent a whole day heating up the oven, waiting for it to be 115 degrees and then putting my culture into the oven in a glass jar.  It felt like forever before there was something the kind of looked like yogurt.  Let me just say, my first batch was not so great.  I tried three more times, but gave up.

Then a month ago a friend and I were talking about making yogurt in a crock-pot.  This is appealing for so many reasons.  One can make more yogurt at once and one doesn't have to devote the oven to a whole day of yogurt making.  I also got a special yogurt thermometer, because I know the first times I failed at making yogurt, temperature was a big part of that. ( http://www.amazon.com/Yogourmet-105-LS-9619-Yogurt-Thermometer/dp/B000N23Q1A/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1400882785&sr=8-2&keywords=yogurt+thermometer)

The first time I made my own batch of yogurt I used White Mountain Bulgarian yogurt as my start.  This stuff costs almost seven dollars at our local food coop.  It worked well as a start, but I wanted a texture just slightly less lumpy for my yogurt.  Plus, I wanted a slightly sweeter flavor. 

I went back to the yogurt start I bought a few years ago, I mean I bought a new packet of course.  Yogourmet yogurt start worked really well. 

So how do I use a crock-pot to make yogurt anyway?  I found this great website http://www.culturesforhealth.com/how-to-make-yogurt-in-crock-pot

Then I tried to modify it to work with raw milk.  I only heated the milk to 115 degrees.  This takes one hour in the crock-pot on warm.  Then I added the starter or 1/2 cup of plain live cultured yogurt.  Stir it in well.  Then cover the crock-pot and put at towel over the whole thing.  In about three hours use the yogurt thermometer to check the temperature of the milk.  If it is too cold then put it on warm for about 30 minutes.  Watch it closely.  Turn it off when it is back to 115 degrees.  Then wait. If it is late I night I will just check it when I wake up and warm it up if need be in the morning.

Climates change how long this will take.  It could take somewhere between 6-24 hours to look like yogurt.  There will be some liquid (Whey), but you can save this to ferment oatmeal, bake in bread, or look up other uses.  You don't have to do much.  You can leave the house, but keep checking it when you think about it.  Then when yogurt is done stain it with a cheese cloth.  Then put it in glass jars and cool it.  I have read,  one should put it in the fridge for about 8 hours.  There are cultures that can make you sick if you eat yogurt warm in fermenting process.  Cooling the yogurt in the fridge stops the fermentation process.  Yes, this whole process can take two days.  It is not a quick food to make, but worth it. 

Walnut Tea Cakes

I have been searching for a filling treat that has more nutrients in it than the standard Russian Tea Cakes I used to make with my best friend Carrie in third grade.  This was a Christmas time treat and it was a messy one to make.  We would cover ourselves in powdered sugar, but it was a lot of fun and walnuts taste great in cookies. 

1/3 cup of coconut oil
1/4 cup of raw honey (we got mint honey from the Yakima Valley, it tastes so great!)
1/2 cup of crushed walnuts
1 cup of almond flour
1/4 cup of coconut flour
1 egg
1/4 cup of crushed walnuts for dusting

roll into 2 tbsp balls and then roll in crushed walnuts.  Place on a cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for around 12 minutes. 

I hope you enjoy these as much as our family does.  :)

My Workout Journey Postpartum

The Truth About Reading

The moments I have wanted and dreaded at the same time have happen for me the last few months.  Tim and I took a leap of faith and decided to pull our kids out of their small Christian school and homeschool.  I thought it was going to tear the world I expected to have apart, but it hasn't.  Keep in mind this is the first time in 5 years I have not been pregnant and breastfeed and being a mom to several children.  I am just breastfeeding right now. 

I mentioned in a previous post that homeschooling was never something I planned for myself.  My husband did a lot of research on homeschooling, but I always thought my kids would do just fine in public school.  Then I had kids.  I knew right away that I did not want my sweet little five year old to be put in a class of seventeen to twenty kids to figure life out.  He was very quiet and we even waited until he was six to consider any kind of school.  When we really had to decide something we picked a small private school and were blessed with some help paying for it.  Joel went to school and opened up a lot socially, but I still questioned if we had picked the right place for him.  It was the best school we could find, but by second grade he really was not learning a whole lot. 

People started to make faces at me when they realized my son could barely read a sentence in five minutes and math was even worse.  We worked on phonetics every summer and simple math to keep him on track, but school seemed to erase all of our work.  I felt depressed, but also sad because I did not want to see my child struggle in school the way that I had.  So there you go, Tim was right. 

We did not make it through second grade.  I have been working on second grade with my son and first grade with my daughter.  My daughter would probably do well in any school in town, she just has that kind of personality, but my son is different.  Not a bad different and certainly not dumb.  The boy can figure out all kinds of things if he wants to.  As mom I can teach at all levels, but it is also important to me to help my son feel like he is not behind.  Plenty of kids don't really start reading until later ages, one just doesn't hear about it.  Maybe one hears, X percent of the population is illiterate.  Why is that the case?  How did this happen?  There are so many factors that go into reading.  If I had one kid I would blame myself so much more if he was like my first son, but I have a daughter who reads everything she can get her hands on.  Our home is filled with books.  I read to my children, so does my spouse, and grandparents.  These kids know that reading is fun and important.

A friend looked at me one day and said, "The nice thing about homeschool is that he doesn't have to read yet.  Most kids pick up reading when they want too."  I remember thinking, but are they being hassled like me about my child not reading?  Have a failed completely?.. and then it hit me.  She is right.  We can read history and science together.  We can focus on grammar and talking about stories.  We can do so much to make books still important, at a level beyond nursery school, and really get to know why reading is worth it. 

When I learned to read I was placed in the dumb group called the sparrows or something like that.  We knew we were dumb because while all the other kids had long chapter books, we had baby books to look at.  Let's face it, maybe I had some trouble reading, but I knew what a real book looked like.  I never really grew into a person who loves to read.  I can say now that I like to read, but I love to write much more.  My husband tells me I must like writing because there was less pressure on me to write.  I can say at younger ages that is probably true. 

So as I sit with my kids and feel like hopefully they are actually learning, I realize they are getting a lot more help than most kids are.  If my son was in school, reading at his level, he might slip through the cracks, but I am not going to let that happen to him.  I am more aware of where he is at and I am able to be alright with that.  As a homeschool mom my friend is right, he doesn't have to read yet.  As
I leave insisting on reading alone I have seen a lot more improvement.  My little boy is now interested in books, he wants to have a chance to read to me, and even if every word is not perfect he can get through a sentence in less time than before. 

I can give him a chance to practice and we will get there.  Everyone tells me that by twelve, homeschool kids usually can read.  I would not say my son cannot read at this point, but we do have more work to do.  In just a few months there has been a lot of progress.  Sometimes we are the obstacles in our children's progress.  Just because a system tell you that one should read by five years old doesn't mean that kids wake up one day reading.  It is our job to nurture a skill, not beat it out of kid.  Don't feel bad if you are in my situation.  I used to feel ashamed like I had missed one to many library story times or something, but just as kids walk at different ages, they also read at different ages too.  I would rather have a son who starts reading at twelve and loves it for life than a kid of reads at five and hates it.

Complete Change

It has been two months since my husband and I decided to homeschool our two oldest children (the other four are not school age yet).  In such a small amount of time I have watched our whole family dynamic change and grow.  My older kids are very helpful with the little kids and with household tasks.  The are begging to learn to cook and I have taught them both to make scrambled eggs so far.  Both of them could make mom and dad breakfast with a small amount of help.  This is great. Cooking is not the only home based task my kids are learning.  We all clean the house together and organize laundry.  So when do we find time for school?

The mornings are early in our house.  I wake up around 5:30 most days and everyone is awake by 6:30.  Joel and Ellie need to practice piano first thing.  It is hard to make them practice for a long time at these ages, so the often practice twice a day.  Dad is involved in as much of this as possible since he know much more about piano playing a music than I do.  We eat breakfast and by 7:30 I want us getting ready to do math.  The younger kids view this as coloring time.  I also will read stories if some of the kid want me too.  Next we have to work on Language Arts.  We have been focusing on writing about what we read, so this is parent focused.  I try to add things like nouns, verbs, etc.  and we have workbooks that include this as well.  Science is a family favorite, so often we all read about space, animals, or weather together.  Our activities are simple at this point, but fun.  History is all about the world this year.  We started with an intensive study of Bangladesh, but we are moving to brief histories of other countries now.  It is fun to see what the kids remember in a week. 

In the model where one is tested constantly, I realize that very little information sticks with me today.  Learning is such a natural process, but I feel like we forget this sometimes.  I used to be so afraid to homeschool because my kids might not learn everything.  The truth is, they learned less before.  Don't tell them, but they end up doing more work.  However it takes less effort because they are so much more involved with what we are working on. 

My biggest challenge is my younger four kids.  Some of them enjoy just playing on alone, but there are many interruptions.  We do not have much time for activities outside the home, but I make a point to take the kids to story time once a week.  Sometimes I feel like I should be doing more with them, but then I realize what they gain too.  They have older kids around playing with them, guiding them in activities, and they get to learn cool new information right along side the older kids.  Our family as a whole is bonding more than we would if the older two kids were still in school. 

I never planned to be a homeschool mom and I did not think the role would fit me, but now I can see how it can work.  The funny thing is I say I did not want to homeschool, but I used to imagine myself a teacher when I worked on my French Literature degree in college.  It has taken me ten years to figure out how to use my degree wisely and I think pouring all my skills into my children is not a bad way to use my liberal arts education.  This does not mean I only plan to educate my kids, but I feel like I am finally using my degree in some way. 

Pretty Fierce: Weightloss (Lindsey Brin) DONE!

Today is my last day of Pretty Fierce: Weightloss!  I am so excited even though I wish I could have maybe lost a few pounds more.  I guess that will happen when I start Pretty Fierce: Lean Out tomorrow.   The end results are:  I lost five or six pounds.  I say this because the scale moved around a bit and my lowest weight was 114 pounds three weeks into the program, but I ended at 116 pounds.  I started at 120.5 pounds.  Keep in mind the last three weeks focus more on muscle tone than cardio and the first few weeks are all cardio and some toning.  I feel safe to say I will probably see that 114 again if I bump up the cardio.  I think I lost an inch in my measurements, but I lost the document with my actual measurements.  I remember some of them and I can now fit into a pair of jeans I bought in a size too small because the company would no longer be selling the jeans and I knew I would fit into them someday.  I bought them after Charis was born and never used them.  Now two more babies later they fit!  Crazy.  I still wish my belly looked better than some of my friend's newly pregnant photos, but I was pregnant a lot in the last 8 years and this is the longest break my body has had in 5 years! 

I will post a photo soon.  I had my husband take one this morning, but now I cannot upload it until we update some software.

As for my overall sanity... I think working out takes away the element of wanting to feel better about oneself, but never doing much about it.  There is power in knowing that maybe I am not where I want to be, but I will be someday and there is some progress.  Between Ellie and Dominic I had two years of no pregnancies.  I did breastfeed that whole time, but the scale stuck at 118 pounds ( I was 101 pounds when I got pregnant with baby number one) and never moved.  I ran six miles at a time several times a week.  I did situps...all the stuff that worked in high school.  None of it helped.  I never restricted my diet, so that sure did not help.  I felt like maybe I would never enjoy getting dressed again.  Now I know that it doesn't have to be that way.  It isn't even that bad not eating every cookie I just baked, or just eating because I feel sad and lonely.  I like the energy from the workouts too.  I have not had caffeine on purpose for a couple of years now and I feel much better too.  The workout is all I need to feel ready for the day.  Even though I get moody, I was more moody with my daily cup of coffee.  Red tea is just fine.    I love the occasional latte too. :)  Decaf these days and it must be fair trade, swiss water processed.

I imagine I will always struggle a little with diet more than working out because I love food.  I love making food and I love eating food.  I have started to make up healthier ways to eat things, but let's face it, real ice cream is better that everything else...coconut is a close second.  I hate agave, so if it is coconut I must make it myself.  I think there are too many diet fads out there and I never want to have to say I will eat with your family if you follow all of these rules.  There are some things that I have to avoid like peanuts and that is frustrating enough.  

So there we have it...Still not perfect.  I still have 15 pounds to shed before I read my weight before no babies, however I am still breastfeeding so if I get rid of 5 to 7 pounds I will be thrilled at this point.  I need to keep some until I finish nursing.:0)  I am happy to be a few steps closer to my goal.

Week 6: Pretty Fierce Weight Loss (Lindsey Brin)

I only have two more weeks to go until I complete all of Pretty Fierce Weight Loss!  My weight has stood still this week, but I am not worried about that yet.  I seem to see a bunch of weight loss and then none and then some again.  Plus, I am glowing from being told by a someone at a shop I frequent (but maybe every 3 months or so) that I look great and I must have lost a lot of weight.  The true test is when people who barely know you can tell the difference, right?

This week is going to be tough with workouts.  My husband's new job has him leaving the house earlier and earlier.  Sometimes he is gone by 6:30 A.M.  I have had to change up my routine to fit a workout in after I put the kids to bed, but it is far less fun because I am then telling the kids to go to sleep constantly as I attempt to get the most out of my workout.  This is why mom's join the gym and just leave for a break.  The last week of workouts has a session that is over 70 minutes long, so figuring out how to get this done will be interesting.  I might be up super early that day.

Other thank working out, I am still attempting to find time to read.  I like quiet, so having the kids running around is not going to work.  Tim gave me one of his books to read and I hope to get it finished by the time we have our romantic Valentine's day dinner.  I don't always read what he reads, in fact he reads, and I write, but I promised him that my gift would be a conversation on the book of his choice this year.  Usually I just listen while he talks about his books.  It is not that I don't miss learning new topics, but being a mom fills 90% of my brain and the 10% left is used for projects.  However, I miss college and I miss great ideas and meaningful conversations, so it is time to attempt to add this back into the mix.

It is now almost one year since the estimated time of my dad's passing.  People say it hits hard again around this time and they are not kidding.  All of a sudden it feels like yesterday that I had the last conversations I would ever have with my dad.  I miss our trips with the kids.  My dad always took us on walks, trips to the lighthouse, aquarium visits, and so much more.  This is now missing and I wish he was still here to be a part my life.

The kids are missing him again too.  They go through periods of time where they talk about him a lot.  This is one of them.  He was going to take them camping last summer and they are still sad they never got to go.  They tell Isaiah that he would have loved my dad.

There really is no cure for the pain other than to feel it and find some peace in it.  I wish there was a zap of joy you could have to counter the pain, but pain is there and it is real.  31 is too young to no longer have a dad.  I think about how much more he could have been around to see.  It saw a lot of my failures in my 20s.  I am thankful he got to see most of my family, but we should have had more time.

Homeschooling is now a set part of our life.  We are making it work and getting everyone involved.  This week the little kids are involved in Joel and Ellie's mini play on firetrucks.  This play is a musical with their songs and dances to go with.  We plan to show Granny at a Sunday night dinner.  It has been a dream of mine to have all our kids be a part of dance together.  I can see that happening now. 

My new kitchen discovery is all about almond meal.  It is expensive so I got in bulk from Azure Standard.  We have been making fruit muffins using almond flour instead of flour and these muffins are filling.  Greek yogurt goes really well with them too.

Here is my recipe:
4 cups of Almond flour
3 eggs
1/4 cup honey or maple syrup
1/2 cup fruit
4 TBSP melted butter
bake for about 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven

line the muffin tin with 12 cups and fill evenly.  These muffins stay about the same size when cooked.  Ice with 1/2 cup of Greek yogurt and 1 TBSP of honey.  You will love them:)