Archive for » March, 2009 «

Garden Expanding

29 Mar 2009 by Adam

First a little update.

A few weeks ago we planted tomatoes and peppers – thanks Roses for the seedlings! Unfortunately, two were attacked by squirrels (or something) which prompted me to put up the net. We are hopeful they will recover. This week we’ll plant pole beans along the back trellis.

Interestingly enough, the net saved the rest from last weeks hail storm. I can’t say the same for my grapevines. Last year I had one cluster. This year I counted over twenty on a single vine. The hail storm took out about a third of those. Again, we’re hopeful; One of the vines had just started budding and the others are recovering.

Beautiful weather this weekend to continue where we left off. The first task was to get the second bed up. This bed was roughly based off the same no-dig approach but a bit more economical – we substituted the compost and manure with our community’s free compost and the Natural Gardener’s cow manure respectively. This will be the melon box hosting watermelon and cantaloupe. Fulton was all over helping with this garden since he’s the one who requested watermelon.

Next up is my own personal project:

What are these you ask? They are rhizomes. What are rhizomes? Roots used to propagate hops. You heard right. I am experimenting on growing my own hops for homebrewing. These here are Cascade and Nugget ordered from Freshops; two varieties that are pretty hardy and can be used in a large selection of brews. One they start growing – and they grow fast – I’ll rig up poles for the vines. They can climb up to 30 feet!

I’ve also added to my reading list The Homebrewer’s Garden. It helped me get the rhizomes started. Now if I can just clear out the area by the garage for some barley… :)

Here’s the box for the Cascade:

And the small one in the foreground here is the Nugget:

The other box in the background is our final and third raised bed. Sharon and I recently stumbled upon the All New Square Foot Gardening concept. It looks promising so we’re going to give it a shot here with raising cucumbers and squash vertically and a few other items on the ground. The soil preparation is quite different from the no-dig approach we’ve been using so we haven’t dived in yet but will soon.

Category: Garden  5 Comments

The Passion of Christ in Legos

26 Mar 2009 by Sharon

If this doesn’t inspire you to buy a set of Legos for your boy, I don’t know what will!

I think Fulton may be getting a set in his Easter basket.

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Hail Storm

25 Mar 2009 by Sharon

Just in case you missed out on all the fun…

Before the sun came out the street was also a blanket of white hail stones.

Here are some of the larger pieces of hail. The kids had fun collecting them after the rain stopped.

It doesn’t appear we had any damage to the house. Thankfully Adam was at work and the Scion didn’t get hit. Unfortunately, the grape vines took the worst beating. It looked as if we were going to have a large (over 20 clusters per vine) crop of grapes. Who knows what’s left.

Category: Events  2 Comments

Swedish Waffles

24 Mar 2009 by Adam

A Continual Feast suggests Swedish Waffles to celebrate the feast of the Annunciation. We gave them a trial run this evening before inviting friends over in the morning.

They sure do have a funny idea of what a waffle is in Sweden. We were really turned off by all the butter/fat/grease pouring out of the waffle iron. Sorry, Continual Feast, but this is a swing and a miss in our household.

Category: Recipes  4 Comments

First Homebrew

23 Mar 2009 by Adam

I finally got around to opening the Mr. Beer Homebrewing kit my beloved gave this past Christmas. It’s certainly a good way to familiarize yourself with the basics of homebrewing with minimal hassle. However, at the same time I’ve been making good strides through The Complete Joy of Homebrewing What I really enjoy about this book is that Charlie Papazian (the author) does not skimp on the details. He’s not afraid to dive into a bit of chemistry or horticulture to support what he’s talking about.

The book starts out with Papzian’s own beginner’s guide for the reader to make their first batch. His process was a bit more complex and involved than Mr. Beer, but honestly having read the book first I felt a bit “cheated” with Mr. Beer, like I missed out on a few key learning opportunities to experience for myself – i.e. determining if it’s time to bottle by using a hydrometer as opposed to simply tasting if the beer is flat (ready) or sweet (not ready).

The other thing that left me a bit uneasy with Mr. Beer was the amount of dextrose (corn sugar) used for fermenting known as their Booster product. While it is an acceptable practice to lighten the body and increase the alcohol content, corn sugar is generally used for economical purposes to speed up the fermentation process. A more “natural” method is to use dried malt extract to provide it’s own sugars. As Papazian says,”You will always make a far superior beer by eliminating and substituting or minimizing the amount of any refined sugar” and “[corn sugar] does not contribute to a true malt beer character.” In all fairness however, Mr. Beer does provide numerous recipes that utilize unhopped malt extract as opposed to dextrose. I will certainly choose one of those on my next batch.

All in all, I’m having a lot of fun with this and brainstorming ways to take it up a notch (…or two …or three). lt’ll be a few weeks before my first batch is ready for consumption. I’ll keep you posted.

Category: Homebrewing  3 Comments

A Bit of Advice

20 Mar 2009 by Adam

If honeybees ever invade your home:

  • Call a professional bee remover. They are more experienced than your typical exterminator; not to mention many are interested in taking the bees alive for their own apiaries and are less likely to douse your home with insecticides.
  • You absolutely; positively; no matter how many holes you create in your walls, floors, or ceilings; must immediately remove all the honeycomb and clean up the honey.
  • Find out how the bees got in and stop it up.
  • Be prepared for additional home repair. Not all bee removers or exterminators will entirely repair the damage or clean up the mess done to your home.

This is all I’m going to say on the subject.

Category: Uncategorized  One Comment

Protect the Pro-Life Conscience

19 Mar 2009 by Sharon

It seems that even though the Freedom of Choice Act has not been proposed yet, President Obama is undoing all the wonderful pro-life legislation that President Bush put into place one by one instead of in one packaged deal.  President Obama said he will rescind the pro-life conscience protection act.

There’s a 30-day period for public comment.

http://www.usccb.org/conscienceprotection/

Let your voice be heard!

Category: Faith  Leave a Comment

Baby G update

10 Mar 2009 by Sharon

We had our first appointment today at the Austin Area Birthing Center. It was kind of like a relaxed doctor’s office. I went through much of the same stuff as I had at my doc’s office. The only big difference is the midwives are not up to date on the whole progesterone stuff. So thankfully, before I left Dr. Love, I asked him what our plan was. Thankfully, my progesterone was SUPER high and the midwives are going to start weening me off. Woohoo!

She also check for the heart tones, but Baby G was playing tag and she didn’t get him. So, they wheeled in an ultrasound machine and did a quick check to make sure all was ok. We saw the flicking heartbeat and baby waved at us.

Category: Family  7 Comments

The Spear

08 Mar 2009 by Sharon

I began Lent reading The Spear by Louis de Wohl. I’m almost halfway through this 400 page historical novel on St. Longinus, the man who hurled his spear into Christ on the Cross.

In the past year I have become a fan of de Wohl, whom Adam has been reading for about the last five years after he was introduced to The Joyful Beggar, de Wohl’s novel on St. Francis. Each holiday I would get him another book and we have since acquired quite a collection. It wasn’t until last year that we read together the novel on St. Catherine of Sienna, Lay Siege to Heaven. I was hooked.  It was a good first novel for me since she is my Confirmation saint so I started out quite excited about it. But I never imagine that I would enjoy these novels so much. De Wohl has an incredible writing style that draws you in.  He really bring the saints and the times in which they lived to life. The novels are historical fiction but de Wohl stays true to as much of the factual events as he includes in his novels.

I asked myself this evening, why I am so drawn to these novels? Years ago a friend gave me the book, Rediscovering Catholicism by Matthew Kelly. In one chapter he wrote about the heroes in our lives. And he wrote that our heroes are the people we look up to and aspire to emulate. As Catholics our heroes should be the Saints! Isn’t that why our beloved Church gave them to us?! Since then, I have grown in greater love for the Saints and I have made it a point to celebrate their lives in our home as much as I can.

I came across an autobiographical article that de Wohl wrote. After his service WWII for the British army, he re-evaluated his life and asked himself how he was using his talents for God. What would people remember him for? He reverted back to Catholicism and he knew what his mission was:

Now what would be the examples that God would wish us to follow? Christ, of course. But then, Christ was not only a Man, He was also God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity; and how could Mr. Smith hope to imitate Him?

Perhaps that was the main reason why the Church taught us to venerate the saints. They were all human, and many of them had to combat all kinds of faults to reach sanctity in the end. I began to read books about the saints. Soon I realized that most of them were written by devout people-mostly priests and nuns-for devout people. I could not imagine that anyone living at the outer fringe of the faith, to say nothing of a non-religious person, would read them. Yet it was exactly that type of person who needed a saint’s example and guidance more than anyone else.

I began to ask questions and found that for a great many people a saint was “a person who was a religious fanatic,” or “a medieval phenomenon,” or simply “someone who prayed all the time” (which last was much nearer the mark, though not in the sense they meant). Saints were “plastercast figures,” “goody-goodies,” “disagreeable zealots.” Of a hundred people I asked, not one replied “saints are what I ought to be” or “saints are examples to be followed.”

But I had read enough now to sense, to feel, to know that apart from being just that, they were the most thrilling, the most interesting, the most courageous and even the most glamorous people of all. I decided to write historical novels whose heroes and heroines were saints.

De Wohl certainly accomplished his goal in this family of readers. De Wohl died in the early 1960s, and not all of his books are in print anymore or have returned to print (most are through). In fact the last novel he wrote and the last I purchased for Adam was The Glorious Folly, on St. Paul, I bought as an antique. This will be my next read as it picks up where The Spear leaves off. So, if you ever want to borrow one from our collection, let us know. You won’t be disappointed.

Category: Faith  2 Comments

Lenten Pretzels

06 Mar 2009 by Sharon

Therese, Fulton and I made pretzels this afternoon. It turned out better than last week’s (which is why I didn’t post last weeks) despite a few mishaps like halving the recipe wrong and spilling the flour.  But God is good and it was hard to even botch this up.

I got this recipe from my favorite holy-day cook book called The Continual Feast by Evelyn Birge Vitz. They have a ton of great recipes for the entire liturgical year including the feast days of some popular Saints.This is what it had to say about the pretzel:

The pretzel is a very ancient bakery item, which traditionally was eaten only during Lent. It appreared each year on Ash Wednesday and disappreared on Good Friday. It goes back at least to the fifth century: there is a Roman manuscript in the Vatican Library dating from that period which shows a Lenten pretzel. As to the shape: it is made in the form of two arms crossed in prayer. The word bracellae, “little arms,” became in German Bretzel, then Pretzel. These early Christians ate no dairy products in Lent, so the pretzel was made only of flour, salt, and water: it was as simple as it could be.

Ingredients:

  • 1 T. honey or sugar
  • 1-1/2 cups lukewarm water (100-100 degrees F)
  • 1 envelope active dry yeast
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 4 cups flour
  • Coarse or kosher salt
  • 1 egg, beaten

Add the honey to the waterl; sprinkle in the yeast and stir until dissolved. Add 1 teaspoon salt. Blend in the flour and knead the dough until smooth.

Cut the dough into pieces. Roll them into ropes and twist into pretzel shapes. You can make small pretzels with thin ropes, or large ones with fat ropes, but remember that to cook at the same rate, your pretzels need to be all the same size.

Place the pretzels on lightly greased cookie sheets. Brush them with beaten egg. Sprinkle with coarse salt. Bake 425 degrees F for 12-15 mintutes, until pretzels are golden brown.

It was a big hit with Therese!

Category: Uncategorized  2 Comments
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