Busy Hands Homestead

Last Friday afternoon we piled into our car, yes even the dogs, for a spontaneous trip with a friend and her family to Polebridge, Montana.  Well, we never quite reached Polebridge.  Just two miles shy of the town, we pulled our chain clad tiny car between to giant banks of snow and waded through fluffy white to the front door of a cabin.   For a time that seemed to stretch longer than the day and a half we actually were there, we stared out of windows catching glimpses of the impressive, towering peaks of Glacier National Park.  We tucked our toes in warm downy slippers, sipped coffee and hot chocolate and spent just enough time sledding, snowshoeing, tobogganing, and riding through the snow on a snowmobile to warrant early bedtimes for everyone underneath layers of blankets.   It was solidly winter; full of winter fun.   Not until breakfast with four bright eyed children did we discover we had forgotten milk.  Between the...

I recently posted the last few weeks of our family meals...  I thought I would offer a glimpse into the future of our family table.  Tonight Adam cooked dinner while I cleaned and rearranged the children's toy area. We had rice, steamed vegetables (cauliflower, mushrooms, peas and carrots) all smothered in peanut sauce. So, I am just going to list the dishes I have planned starting with tomorrow's dinner (Firday, Febuary 18th): Beans and Greens Tacos with Goat Cheese (vegetarian) Spring Rolls with Shrimp and Peanut Sauce (sea food) Pumpkin Soup (vegetarian) Egg Rolls with Sweet and Sour Sauce (pork) Spaghetti (vegetarian) Quiche with Zucchini and Caramelized Onions (vegetarian) Beet, Arugula and Feta Pizza (vegetarian) Sloppy Joe's with baked Potato Wedges (beef) Fish Cakes (sea food) Gorgonzola Linguine with Toasted Walnuts (vegetarian) Roasted Chicken with Winter Vegetables Spinach Stuffed Manicotti (vegetarian) Chi...

A little over a month ago I spent hours staring at Joanne's fabric selection.  I had a difficult color pallet to match.  Our bedroom floors are sage.  Adam and I have a two toned yellow bedroom, and Ivory and Sylvan's walls are orange and lilac.  We purchased all paint as partially used cans from Home ReSource .  The result is colorful and fun...  but oh so difficult to match.  I found a great orange fabric that happens to have a very similar pattern to our dining room drapes, and I was searching for a purple based fabric to hang against the orange walls.  The patters were just so full of bright purple butterflies, flowers and birds... not what I had in mind.  After a while I grabbed an unbleached muslin off of the rack and purchased 5 yards of it with the plan on stamping my own lilac pattern.   Every window in our house finally has curtains. I finally marked that project off of my list today.  How to make your own stamped...

aka: a new purpose for broccoli stems Our food scraps do not go to waste. A few are given to the dogs, some to the worms and the remainder to the chickens. In spite have having well deserving recipients of our food scraps, I do make an effort to utilize "the entire plant" in my kitchen. I recently prepared a few dishes that required the dark green crowns of broccoli, but not the stems.  I felt a little silly when I put the broccoli stems back into the crisper drawer of my fridge, but I had a plan for them. Broccoli stems are a part of the plant that even my husband will push aside and the kids, well, they usually just chomp the greenest of the green parts and leave the rest behind. So,  I felt even sillier as I rummaged through the freezer to retrieve a container filled with chopped up broccoli stems and I set it and the bag of broccoli stems on the counter.  I was going to turn all of these stems into cream of broccoli soup. I almost apologetically...

After breakfast and dishes I sat down with these fabrics...    to turn them into curtains... so, our living room looks like this: Our Sunday Snap shots.

"I am so excited for Valentine's Day!  That is when we get a lot of chocolate!" Ivory is running through the house wearing a blanket, coat, shoes and an umbrella: her version of Mary Poppins. "Oh really?"  I had not even thought of buying chocolate, and I know for certain I have no chocolate hiding anywhere in the house. I hope that if I just don't mention it, she will forget about all that chocolate she thinks she will be getting. Instead we have focused on making something for others. The kids and I baked a pie crust before Adam even crawled out of bed. And throughout the day we finished the filling, let it cool and now it is tucked away on the bottom shelf of the fridge. One flakey pie crust with a quick cheese cake filling...  I can't wait until Ivory pulls it out of the fridge and gives it to her dad. Happy Valentine's Day!

The day has been creeping. The moment I woke up I wanted to pull the covers back over my shoulders. I am on a string of late nights, and Sylvan is a string of sleepless early morning hours, so while my shelf at the clay studio is crowded with an increasing number of mugs and cups, my body is telling me to just stop and go to bed - I didn't listen and now have a cold. Last night I didn't crawl into bed until 1:30, Sylvan woke up before I managed to fall asleep, and I watched every hour pass on the clock across the room.  I nursed, changed his diaper, Adam got water, I took Sylvan to the bathroom, when he started screaming: "Pee, Pee!" at the top of his lungs.  I considered trying to convince him to go in his diaper, and decided that that would be counter productive to the potty training effort. I dragged myself out of bed, got myself and the kids dressed and staggered down the stairs for a quick breakfast before we drove across the Y to Ivory's Rookie S...

I was hoping to post these Sunday night... Whole Wheat Oat Bread and Cherry Poppy Seed Danishes in the making. Christmas Stockings for Adam and I Story Time A few snap shots of our day.

Some days are just hard: full of worry and stress. Sometimes, those days full of worry and stress happen to coincide with important days - Sylvan's birthday - to be precise.   We opened Sylvan's first birthday present before breakfast.   Slam dunk!  Adam fixed us all french toast and then we mulled over what to do.  I had not planned our usual birthday pot luck because, well, it was Thursday and Adam was supposed to be working until five and I had class at six.  My plan had been that we would have cake between Adam's work and my ceramic class, but our was wide open, too open, but we were going to make the best of the day.  We picked up and headed downtown to take dizzying ride after ride on the carousel.  When we ran out of tokens we strolled on.   We ducked into Taco Del Sol (you know it is a celebration when the Wests actually eat out), where both Sylvan and Ivory love the bean and cheese burritos. ...

Sylvan had been running around grinning, in a wonderful mood, dishing out hugs and kisses and just before I stepped out of the door, Ivory came down and I gave her a hug and a kiss as well. I touched up the little cups I had worked on the night before and then spent the next seven hours working on ten mugs.  Putting on layers of Shellack, wiping away the surface, creating texture and adding a slip trailed grid. I stared at the finished mugs in front of me. I had been handling them so long - looking at them for so long - that I could no longer tell if I liked them.  All I knew is that I wanted to go home. When I walked through the front door, Sylvan was napping. Ivory and Adam and I sat around the dining room table while she mixed color after color, testing each result until her splotch filled papers covered the table. Much too soon, I got back into the car and drove to the Missoula Community Food Co-op .  Hours later I finally walked through the front door and I ...

Every few weeks I sit down with cooking books spread across the table and leaf through the pages.  I have been planning our dinners approximately three weeks into the future.  I starting this project in November.  "Why?", you might ask.  Well to be completely honest it is because we have food stamps.  In spite of careful shopping I still managed to run low on food stamps by end of the month and it was an unnecessary worry in my life.  We manage to eat varied  mostly organic, fresh, made from scratch meals every single day sitting around the same dinner table (unless Adam is working out of town) sharing our day with family and sometimes friends as well. There are a few patterns that  have developed over the course of this experiment that I try to utilize to make the process simpler: soup and fresh baked bread once a week 2 or 3 vegetarian meals per week seafood once a week a salad centered meal once a week  pizza night ...