A Few Summer Projects

Here are some projects I have finished since July.

A treasure bag for Anna's unbirthday - thread crochet, lined with fabric:


Felt food - some for Devon and some for Owen - salmon and avocado roll and tuna nigiri:

A reversible apron for Gabriel's birthday:


A felt book of colors for Carter's birthday - based on this book I saw on Etsy:

Wordsmith Wednesday: Pottenger's Cats: A Study In Nutrition

I wish I had read Pottenger's Cat's: A Study In Nutrition (Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., M.D.), but as it is I finally got around to reading it while we were in Italy. I was familiar with his work from his association with Weston A. Price.
This book is a short but thorough summarization of his nutritional studies with cats as well as those with humans and the dietary recommendations for people. It is just 123 pages, so even a busy mama can read it - if you can get your hands on it. It is available from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation (who keep it as well as Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in print) or from amazon.com where you can view part of the book online.
Frances Pottenger was a medical doctor who ran a sanitorium. He used cats to standardize adrenal extracts after removing their adrenal glands. He found that his cats who were on a diet of cooked meat scraps, raw milk, and cod liver oil were poor operative risks, but that a second group of cats who ate a diet of raw meat scraps, raw milk, and cod liver oil were much more robust.
This lead to his nutritional studies where he observed the effects of diets including cooked and raw meat, cooked and raw milk, and cod liver oil over several generations of cats. He looked at their ability to produce uniform healthy offspring over multiple generations, their bone structure, their teeth and gum health, and their bone health and the amounts of phosphorous in their bones. He also used the composted manure from their pens to grow beans.
He obseved the raw meat/raw milk cats were robust generation after generation while cats consuming cooked foods showed poorer health with each successive generation. The cooked food cats also had higher rates of reproductive problems, parasites, respiratory problems, allergies, and had poorer dispostions. He concluded that there were certainl heat labile substances in the raw foods that increased their nutritive potential. His bean experiment results were more ambiguous, and it would certainly be very interesting for a more careful and complete study of this kind were undertaken today.
The book also details some of his nutrition analyses of humans as well as his research on the facial development of people who were breastfed or bottlefed.
His studies are as fascinating as Weston Price's, and their work seems to have drifted into the same place of relative oblivion. While their findings are not complete nor their methods considered rigorous by today's scientific standards, I think that these are very important issues that deserve further study. As we lead increasingly modernized lifestyles complete with ultra-pasteurized milk and other heat processed foods, we are likely causing ourselves many of the ills that are extremely common - infertility, allergies, and poor tooth and jaw structure (you know, the need for braces and fillings - it's not genetic!).
I have been affected with all of these maladies. I'm a third generation cat, if you will, and I have a lot of nutritional healing to do for myself and for the future generations of my family. We drink raw goat milk and try to eat raw meats - sashimi, rare steaks and medium rare burgers. We still have a lot to stive for if I am to be a "regenerating cat," a mama who was on a deficient (cooked) diet but who has been put on a raw diet.
The specific nutritional advice at the end of the book seems inconsistent with itself and with Pottenger's findings. There are some raw recipes but also lots of cooked ones that include items that the book (not sure if this part was from Pottenger or from the editors) recommends against (such as ham).
I hope that you will take the time to read this one. It really is one of those books that changed my life. It relieved some of the guilt I felt over Owen's dental health while energizing me to further improve our diet because my children and grandchildren really are counting on me.

How To Make Beanbags - A Tutorial

Owen and I recently made beanbags for Fin's second birthday. Owen enjoyed helping pick the fabrics from my stash of scraps and filling the bags with beans. He also requested some of his own. Here's what we did:

1. Select woven fabrics.
( We chose all blue ones - three solids, and three plaids. Denim from old jeans is great.)

2. Cut two, 4.75 inch squares for each bean bag.
3. Place each pair of squares with right sides together. Beginning about 1 inch from one corner, sew a 0.25 inch seam around the edges. After turning the fourth corner, sew 1 inch, and stop. This will leave a small hole in one side of the bag. Repeat for each bag.

4. Cut the corners at a 45 deg. angle close to the seam. (This will reduce the bulk at the corners and allow them to turn easily.)
5. Turn the bag right sides out. Use a chopstick to gently push out corners.
6. The edges around the holes should turn under on their own. Make sure they are straight and even, and press the bags with a hot iron. 7. Fill each bag with 1/2 cup of beans.
(We used a piece a paper folded into a funnel to get our navy beans in there more easily.)

Here they are waiting to be sewn up.
8. Sew across the whole length of each open side.
(I used a contrasting thread and a zigzag stitch.)
9. Give them to your little one.
(Here's my cheeky monkey with a basket of beanbags. You can use things from around the house as targets. Baskets, yoghurt cups, and laundry hampers all work great and are free.)

Tomatoes

On the way home from Cherry Crest Adventure Farm, we stopped by an Amish farm stand that advertised 25 cent/lb canning tomatoes. We got two large bags
for $12. After dinner, while I got started blanching the tomatoes and boiling the jars, Abram and Owen went to pick up some canning lids for $1.34/dozen. We already had a collection of canning jars and plenty of rings as well as salt.

After I washed the tomatoes, I blanched them in boiling water until the skins popped to make them easy to peel and cooled them in cold water. Then I pulled the peels off (and saved the scraps for the farmers at the market) and roughly chopped the tomatoes into a large pot. I boild these about 15 minutes.
I also boiled all the jars I needed and the lids and rings for 10 minutes to sterilize them.
I jarred up the hot stewed tomatoes into jars, wiped the lids, closed them with a lid and a ring and processed them for 45 minutes in a boiling water bath. Abram took over the last part of the water bathing as I nursed Owen to sleep rather late around 10 o'clock. He also sliced up a dehydrator full of tomatoes to have some dried ones.
We spend about $15 on supplies yesterday and about 3 hours of our time to get 13 quarts plus 2, 3-cup jars and a pint of tomatoes. Considering that we had extra lids left over, we spent about $1/quart for additive-free crushed tomatoes. Compare this to about $3.50/quart from the store, and I think we did quite well.
This renews my appreciation for the wonderful tomatoes that Ma canned for us last summer. She used tomatoes from our garden and gave them to us when we were down visiting. She didn't have enough tomatoes to fill up all our jars, so she also gave us pears too. Yum! I still need to write a proper thank you to her. What an amazing and wonderful lady she is!

Cherry Crest Adventure Farm

The weather has been absolutely beautiful lately, and yesterday we wanted to do something outside. We had been meaning to try out Cherry Crest Adventure Farm, so we headed over to the eastern part of Lancaster County.
Cherry Crest Farm was a 300 acre dairy farm until 2003 when they began raising beef cattle because it was difficult for them to stay in the black while dairying. The main crops on the farm are corn, soybeans, and wheat (no surprises there). Alongside the working farm, they have a very clean, family-oriented amusement park. There are no roller coasters or long lines, but there is lots of good, clean fun. We enjoyed riding in a tractor-pulled train of wagons,

sliding on potato sacks down the hay chute,

feeding goats using a hand-cranked conveyor belt,

playing in a bin of corn,

standing in a real Conestoga wagon (They were built in Lancaster County in an area called, well, Conestoga.)
playing in a wooden train, and seeing the real Strasburg RR train go past the farm again and again (although Owen was a bit frightened by the whistle which is LOUD),

and this really cool horse topiary.
We also liked the straw bale maze, the petting area where we petted new chicks and a kid, digging for fossils in a big sandbox, and lots of other low-tech fun. We skipped the large maize maze as the shortest time for the day was 35 minutes, and we thought it would be a bit much to ask of Owen. We found the whole park to be incredibly clean and well-staffed. They seem to employ a lot of people including lots of very young people who were all busy and courteous. We really liked the low-tech approach and appreciated the DIY (but well-executed) things to do. We will definitely want to go back here before we move away.

Peach Ice Kefir

We enjoyed our second batch of peach ice kefir tonight. Peaches are at their peak here now so we have taken advantage of the bounty. This (and all ice cream) is really easy to make. The trick is to add A LOT of salt. It freezes up in no time if you use a whole box of salt. We use the cheapest table salt we can find which always turns out to be less expensive than ice cream salt.??? If you don't like kefir, I think plain yoghurt would work well too. If you'd like to make kefir and need some kefir starter "grains," let me know so that I can send you some. We use goat milk and goat milk kefir.

Peach Ice Kefir
1/2 c. honey
2 eggs
4 egg yolks
2 quarts kefir
4 ripe peaches
~2 quarts milk
ice
salt

Beat honey, eggs, and egg yolks. Mix in kefir a little at at time. (This helps get the mixture homgenous more easily.) Wash, peal, and chop peaches. Stir them into mixture. Add enough milk to bring mixture to the fill line of a 1 gallon ice cream freezer. Mix well, and freeze. Don't forget to use lots of salt. It really does go quickly (less than 1/2 hour) if you use enough salt.

Wordsmith Wednesday: Sniff-Snuff-Snap!

This is one of our very favorite Lynley Dodd books. It's about a bossy wharthog who chases all the other animals away from the dwindling waterhole. This 1-10 counting book is a really fun read aloud because of the rhyme and great rhythm/meter (the best of any of the books we have read by Dodd). The refrain is a bit catchy, and I have found myself chanting it from time to time:
"Eeeeee!"
squealed the wharthog,
"SNIFF-SNUFF-SNAP!"
He chased them away
but they all sneaked back.
Back to the water hole
green and brown,
and slowly
the water went down and down.
It has great illustrations, and Owen and I enjoy looking at the baboons, yellow weaver birds, and all the other critters as well as the gathering rain clouds through the book.
Owen and I give this book a two thumbs up.

We'd like to thank our friend Carolyn for introducing us to Lynley Dodd who is a New Zealand author. Carolyn sent Owen his first two Dodd books when he was born, and Slinky Malinki Open the Door and Hairy McLary Scattercat are still some of his favorite books. Dodd's illustrations are realistic, detailed, and always interesting to examine. Many of her books use a lot of repetition so that kids can enjoy "reading" along with you. Although she makes excellent use of meter and rhyme (a la Dr. Seuss), it's not just sing-song nonsense. Her books show logical progression, and she uses lots of big words - bumptious, belicose, and the like. Her characters - Hercules Morse, Schnitzel von Krumm, Slinky Malinki, Bottomly Potts - are memorable and appear in multiple books. They often learn lessons. Her books are a bit hard to find around here, but they are well worth the hunt and the library requests if you have a little person to read to.