All in a day's work

Well, it appears that all-day Sunday cook-a-thons are going to be the only way to deal with all the produce until CSA season is over.  It was nice to have all the things I made last Sunday to eat throughout the week.  I'm sure I'll be glad for this Sunday's food, too.

So, first, I chopped and washed a bunch of salad greens so that I can easily pack a salad for lunch every day.

This gorgeous red cabbage came out of my garden this morning.

I shredded the cabbage in my Cuisinart, and it was positively purple.  Can't wait to toss some of this on my salad.

I also chopped up celery, jicama, peppers, radishes, and green onions to toss into my salads.

I had bought supplies to make lasagna with brown rice noodles, so I thought I'd carmelize the beautiful eggplant and one of the onions from the CSA to add to the lasagna.

The lasagna turned out quite delicious, if I do say so myself.

This is going to be a high-cal week! Lol!

I used up all the pasta sauce for the lasagna, and wanted something to put over the spaghetti squash that I baked in the oven, so I used some lemon balm from my garden, leeks and garlic from the CSA and peppers.

I added some chopped tomatoes from my garden, and made it all into a ragout.

The ragout over the squash was yummy!

I used the rest of the CSA garlic, CSA potatoes, & CSA green beans to make this scrumptious mix.

I chopped up a bunch of mixed kinds of peppers to ferment.

Mashed sweet potatoes!  I mixed in some butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, molasses, & maple syrup.  It's like a dessert.

Everything ready in the crockpot for overnight oatmeal- oats, raisins, cinnamon, allspice, fresh grated ginger, and some of the apples from the CSA share.  Breakfast should be good.

The times, they are a-changin' . . .

So, we're not homeschooling this year, as I've had to go back to work outside the house for now.  The kids are in public school, and making the adjustment far better than I am.

The blog will just be about food for a while, until we can hopefully resume our homeschooling adventure.

I've been too busy and depressed to get my vegetable pictures taken every Saturday.  The CSA shares have been delicious and colorful.  I've enjoyed eating them and making dishes with them.

Today, I did a little bit of cooking to get me through the work week, so I decided to share.  I kind of felt  like warm casserole-y foods on this first day of fall.

I made a variation of my brown rice spaghetti, grass fed ground beef, onion, spinach, tomatoes dish.

Sautéeing up some corn and green onions to make some more quinoa salad with honey lemon garlic vinaigrette.

Made a sauce of veggie broth with a little cornstarch to thicken it up, then added brown rice, chicken, & peas.

My sister bought me a gluten free crust, so I filled it with a bacon/cheddar quiche.  Can't wait to eat this puppy for brekkie tomorrow.

Pretty, pretty food

CSA Share #8

What happened to my picture?

I swear I took a picture of my CSA share yesterday, but it is somehow not on my camera/phone.  Hmmmm.

It has been a busy day.  Fitting ending for a busy week.  I'm wiped out now.

Spent the day cooking.  And cooking.  And cooking.  Didn't take photos of everything, but here are some of the delicacies.

Fried green tomatoes from my garden.  These were freaking awesome.

Two batches of pickles being fermented.  CSA cukes.  

Beans and onions with bacon bits.

Cole slaw from the giant cabbage in the CSA box.

It was a bacon-y kind of day.  I wrapped some bacon around slices of the other half of the giant cabbage and baked it in the oven.  I cooked the onions and beans with bacon.  Then, I fried up a package of chicken legs in the bacon fat.  Oh, yes, I did.

Aside from the dishes above, I made some hard boiled eggs, chopped up some veggies, and peeled and sliced up beets, which are now bubbling away on the stove.  Speaking of which, I should probably go check on them. I may have made something else, but my brain is foggy and I can't remember.

Have a good week, people.

Colorful share this week

Giant Cauliflower!

CSA share #5

Contained this enormous cauliflower,

So, I made this cauliflower gratinée.  I guess I fail at being a vegan.  

Oh, well.

Help! There are veggies exploding out of my fridge!

That's how I felt this weekend, so I decided to do something about it.  Most of yesterday, and a good part of today have been taken up with prepping, cooking, and storing a bunch of food.

First, I made a bunch of spring rolls (my new favorite treat) with avocado, mango, lettuce & our own garden's mint leaves.

This one had some issues, so I decided to gobble it up first.

Then I made a brown rice & bean, tex-mex kind of salad.

But- to use up the bulk of those exploding veggies, I made veggie fritters for the second time in a month.  These are definitely NOT low cal, but they are soooooo yummy.

I took a bunch of kohlrabi, some carrots, some broccoli, some green beans, some snap peas, some parsley, an onion, garlic scapes, and possibly some other veg that I've forgotten.  I chopped up a giant bowl full of veggies and then ran them through the food processor in several batches.  A couple batches I pureed pretty well, then I left a couple of the batches a little more chunky.  I poured those in a mesh strainer over the sink and pressed them to drain out some of the fluid.  

I put the pureed veggies in a big glass bowl, and mixed in enough eggs and gluten free baking mix and almond meal to make it stick together and look like this.

Then I poured some olive oil in the frying pan and let it heat up a bit.  Then I dropped scoops of the batter into the pan and flattened them out with the back of the spatula and fried them until they were dark brown on both sides.  These are very delicious, especially with a little Goddess Dressing drizzled on top.

To placate the picky people, I also made a pot of my homemade chicken noodle soup.  It does smell really tasty.

I also washed, chopped and bagged 4 heads of lettuce for easy use in salads.  Now I'm tired and don't feel like doing anything else!  Lol!

Pretty good start to the new season

We've had a good early growing season around here, so the produce is looking amazing fairly early in the CSA season.

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4
I have never seen such a huge kohlrabi in my life.  Looks like more  veggie fritters are on the menu!

The school year that almost wasn't . . .

I've been postponing doing a wrap up post for our 2012-2013 school year, because, in my opinion, it was kind of a bust.  I know I had cancer, and we still did a lot, and the kids are fine and blah, blah, blah. Trust me, I'm very thankful to be alive and doing well, and I'm exceedingly happy that my kids are healthy and energetic.  It's all good.

However . . .

I still can't help feeling bummed out about the year that I had planned that never got to be.  I never got my mojo back this year, and we sort of flopped along, doing things because I felt we had to do them, rather than having the things fit in to my master plan of school cohesion and harmony this year.  I had such high hopes for this year in the beginning of September.

Okay, enough whining.

Here's the lowdown on the remnants of our school year:

Achievement Night at Co-op was great.  The kids showed off the skills they learned, and we socialized and ate lots of goodies.

Language Arts:

We finished all of our Town Level of MCT, except for the vocabulary program.  Not sure if we will continue with it next year, or just move ahead to the next level vocabulary program.  I'll decide when I do lesson plans this summer.

We did one last book club in May, where the kids discussed Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. For a change of pace, I had us listen to this one in the car.  We all enjoyed the story, even though it was a little more mature than the material they usually read for book club.

Eddie participated in a homeschool Spelling Bee and really enjoyed it.  I think we will do this again next year.

We are doing a Capitalization Boot Camp this summer because neither one of these kids knows how to capitalize proper nouns or sentences.  

Everything Else:

I spent a bunch of time scanning some of their work, as usual, but never realized I was scanning them all in as PDFs and not JPEGs, so the darn blog won't let me upload them.  Suffice it to say, I'm not going to spend anymore time scanning, so I'll just tell you what we've accomplished.

Andrew had his portfolio review in the beginning of May, and Ed took his standardized tests in the middle of May, so after that, our minds were pretty much closed to doing any more school for the year.

Even so, we managed to accomplish a few things.

Finished the math book.  Now these kids are experts at long division.  They also had a couple of units on Roman Numerals, finding the area of a cube, and an introduction to fractions.

We are on Chapter 28 of 42 in our history book.  We are working over the summer to finish it. We are currently learning about WWII and the Holocaust, so it's not the most fun we've ever had in History lessons.

We haven't done much formal science since we finished our textbooks in April, but here and there we've learned a few things and read a few books about scientific things.

Since my last blog post, we did a few exercises in French and Latin and Logic, but for the most part we've totally ditched those subjects for now.  Same with Health and Art.  The kids have come with me on several of my Couch to 5k runs, so I'm counting that as P. E. 

The boys took a class on light and sound waves at the Lake County Metroparks.  It tied in very nicely with our Physics study.

We did some more experimenting with dry ice.

Andrew is modeling the paper chain we made this year.  Each link represents a school book that they read or that I read to them.

Andrew made this body model in his co-op class.

For the last project in their lab books, the kids were to come up with their own experiment to see if they could convert one form of energy into another form.  Andrew wanted to convert kinetic energy into potential energy by pushing the car and letting it roll until it came to a stop at the edge of the table.  He got it to work at least once.

Eddie wanted to convert heat energy into chemical energy, which would in turn, create kinetic energy.  His experiment kind of worked, but didn't turn out as he originally thought it would.  That was a good lesson, too.

Eddie was very excited about our garden and helped me plant.

They took a class on flight dynamics at the Great Lakes Science Center with their friend.

We are doing a state history unit this summer.  There will be an entire blog post about that.

To finish off our Physics study, the boys made cool simple machines with some Kinex education sets.

We participated in an awesome Ancient Greek Pentathlon.  Andrew was a resident of Thebes, and Ed was a resident of Corinth.  They followed the leaders of their city-states to all the events.

Discus

Javelin

Long jump

Wrestling

Running race

We toured a chocolate factory.  The free samples were yummy.

As part of our Ohio tour, we visited the science and history museum attached to the William McKinley monument.  This place was a blast!

So, all in all, we had a pretty successful year.  The teacher who did our portfolio review was pretty impressed at all we had managed to accomplish despite the cruddy start to the year, so I feel good that the year wasn't a waste.

I'm looking forward to this coming school year, and can't wait to start the lesson plans.  We are going to do things a little differently than we have in the past, and I'm excited about it.  I think the kids will be, too.

Have a great summer, y'all.

Edited to add:

 I almost forgot to post about Andrew's last play at Theatre Class.  They did a play that Mr. Dusten wrote- it was a story within a story.  Very cute.  The two youngest kids were sitting at the front of the stage, reading a story book, and the story then came to life behind them.