Money Making Minestrone!

Today Grace made five gallons of what we call Minestrone Soup. We didn't use a recipe but here's how we made it:

• In huge soup pot brown Italian sausage links (about 6 or 8) then remove and cut into little pieces.
• Then in the same pot saute' onions (2), celery( 1 bunch), carrots(8), cabbage(1), zucchini(5) and peppers(1) until soft.
• Now add one large can of tomato juice and some canned beans. (2- 16 oz cans your choice). We also threw in about 3 cups of frozen green beans. If I had had any spinach that would have gone in too.
• Fill the rest of the way with water. Add beef gelatin and spices like garlic, oregano, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, salt and pepper.
• Bring this to a boil and then simmer until done.
• About 5 to 10 minutes before lunch we added Orzo pasta (about 2 cups) which cooks up really fast.

We all love this soup! It is really good with freshly grated Parmesan cheese on top.

Today we had it with Cornmeal Scones, that Sarah made, and honey-butter but, it's good with any other bread or crackers too.

Cornmeal Scones:

1 1/3 cups all purpose flour

1/3 cup cornmeal

2 1/2 t. baking powder

1/4 t. salt

3 T. sugar

2 1/2 t. salt

3 1/2 T cold butter cut into small pieces

1/2 cup of milk

1 large egg

Heat oven to 375.

Combine dry ingredients in large bowl; cut in butter with pastry blender or 2 knives until like coarse meal. Add milk and egg and stir slightly just until moist. Knead on lightly floured board 4 times. Cover a baking sheet with buttered parchment and pat dough into 7 inch circle on sheet. Cut into 8 wedges, cutting into bu not through dough.

Bake at 375 for 22 minutes or until golden brown. Yummy!

Now 5 gallons of soup is alot...even for my family. But, I love having soup ready to heat and serve especially during busy home school days. We may take a gallon to a neighbor who recently lost his wife. And it freezes well.

Have you seen the "home-made" soup for sale at Costco? Looks to be about half gallon for about 10 dollars! So, I always feel like we've something that's really worth alot when I think of that. We guest-imated the cost of our "Minestrone" at around 20 dollars for 5 gallons. Most of our ingredients were organic, by the way. That beats Costco's "home-made" (which I have never tried). And it for sure beats good canned soup which runs around $2.90 for a 12 oz can (which I have tried and it doesn't even come close)! So for $20 we made what could have cost 116 dollars!! Add to that the blessing of the wonderful aroma of soup simmering, the bread baking, making together at home and it's worth even more!

"Better a small serving of vegetables with love than a fattened calf with hatred." Prov. 15:17

Homemaker at Heart!

There's something strangely delightful about "getting" to do housework...now that my girls have taken over most of it! Days like today when Grace and Mary are visiting Grandparents and Hannah and Sarah are away cleaning someone else's home... and poor Ruthie is recovering from the flu....I "get" to do everything! And I get to do things MY way. It makes me feel young again. I love the challenge of multitasking: get the washer running, and THEN sort the laundry, fill the dishwasher and get that going, put some meat and onions on to simmer for stew (or whatever) later, soak rice to cook for lunch and sweep up; leaving a nice pile of dirt mixed with blocks, legos, lincoln logs, and other miscellaneous treasures which Peter will have to deal with later. And even steal a few minutes to blog:)

This is not the way it is when everyone is home and up and running! Then I must direct, correct, inspect and so on. With so many to teach and train it's hard to break away and actually DO a job myself. (Not so much the more grown up they are of course). I don't think it's really fair to keep doing a task that I know how to do well when it is a skill that one of the children needs to have. Often, when I ask someone to do something they reply "I don't know how" and I say "Oh good, your just the right person for the job then". (So that excuse never works around here)

This morning I was reading in Isaiah: "Here a little, there a little, precept upon precept, line upon line etc..." At this point in my life I am still in the throws of living out this concept but also have proof that it works! My older girls are great homemakers! In fact they surpass my abilities in many areas and have actually taken over some areas of the work.

Take the laundry for instance. We have two laundry rooms each equipped with a washer and a dryer; one upstairs and one down. Accordingly, the upstairs laundry is to be done upstairs and the downstairs; downstairs. We have one person in charge of each level. In order to keep the utilities down we try to never use the dryer. I have never tallied the loads we do per week but you can imagine with eleven people living here...it's alot. Now if it's up to me I'll tend to "splurge" and throw things in the dryer to save time and labor. But the girls have fits and scold ME (especially one of them) if I do. So they have devised all sorts of indoor clothes drying methods and use them faithfully. Here's what our house looks like almost all winter unless we know we're getting company:)

"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might" Eccl 9:10a

The Way We Learn

Last week we traveled to Half Moon Bay to visit Grandma Joan for a few days. Yippee thought I, we'll be near San Francisco and at the beach....so many learning opportunities...Alcatraz, museums, the Exporatorium; no end to my list of things we could do. But things didn't go exactly as I had hoped. Jeff wasn't as "into" the my great ideas as I was. It rained some and it was New Years and we really just wanted to be with the Grandparents as that's the most important thing and it had been too long since we had visited.

I needed to something that has taken me a L O N G time to learn to do...relax and let my ideas go. So I did

Grace, Ruthie, Sarah and Mary enjoying the surf.



We all went to the beach and of course it was beautiful and a great learning experience all on it's own (without lessons, books or even tide pools). We played tennis, mini-golf, pool and walked the nature trail. We cooked and cleaned and ate and talked with the Grands. We watched "The Yearling" for the umpteenth time (after all it's still sort of new to Pete and Joe) it's a family tradition.

A lovely dinner with Grandma Joan.


Walking with Dad.




Games in the courtyard.

On the last day of our visit Grandma and Grandpa treated us to outdoor dining at a seafood restaurant for lunch. We had clam chowder, crab cocktail...the works! It was delicious! After that we walked along a pier where all sorts of small ocean going vessels were docked. A man pointed the way to a boat named "Promise" which had just returned from crabbing. So we ventured down to the boat and bought five live crabs! Sarah declared that she wants to be a crab fisher woman someday.


Pete and Joe with dinner guests


You can guess what we studied next day when we got home...crabs. First we looked up cooking crabs on the internet. Then of course, we cooked them. After that we read all about crabs, sketched them in our Nature Journals and noted the classification. Later that evening we cracked, picked and finally enjoyed eating our crabs just dipped in melted butter.







These are Mary, Peter and Joe's nature journals. You can click on them to view larger.


God wanted to bless us and He did. We enjoyed being with Jeff's folks so much. The children were sweet and behaved quite well. The learning thing happened naturally by taking time, explaining things and answering questions. Even the lesson "plan" that I couldn't quite pull off came together beautifully when I let God lead. I'm so glad I gave up because His ways are always above our ways and His thoughts are higher than ours.


Science class around the dining room table


Extra thoughts of note:
1) The day after our crab boat visit the morning news reported that a local crab boat capsized in Half Moon Bay...that really got the children's attention. Thankfully the crew was rescued.
2) I thought of asking Jeff if we might buy some fresh seafood to take home but thought better of it so he got the full blessing of his generosity.
3) I really wanted to suggest getting some clam chowder at the pier but didn't. I'm always telling the children that a treat isn't a treat...if you ask for it.
4) I came home rested since we didn't have to "be anywhere" or "do anything" ☻

God is good and GREATLY to be praised! I think we'll look up some ocean passages and use them for copy work tomorrow. Oh, and certainly we'll write thank you letters to our generous grandparents with our very best penmanship and grammar.