Orange Rolls

Recently we took a survey of our kids. It looked something like this:

Family Interest Survey
1. What is your favorite thing to do as a family?
2. What is something we’ve only done once or twice that you’d like to do again?
3. What is your favorite vacation memory?
4. What is your favorite family tradition?
5. What is your favorite holiday memory?
6. If you could have two hours with just Dad, what would you do?
7. If you could have two hours with just Mom, what would you do?
8. What is something new you’d like to try?

There were a few other questions, but you get the idea. The results were quite interesting, actually, and revealed to me something I really knew at heart, but absolutely confirmed to me afterward. It’s not the big things we do that make the best memories. It’s the little ones. Between ‘holiday memories’ and ‘family traditions,’ for example, every one of our five children said one of their favorite things was to have Orange Rolls on Christmas morning.

That tradition started with a coupon for Rhodes bread about eight years ago. I decided how nice it would be if, on Christmas morning, I could simply pop some ready-made bread into the oven that had been rising all night and not have to worry about making a big breakfast. I bought a package of orange rolls and the kids loved their special treat. I loved its simplicity. Now about a week before Thanksgiving, each child in turn will say, “Mom, don’t forget to buy orange rolls.” Somehow, I guess it wouldn’t be Christmas without them.

But I’ve recently been watching my food budget, and somehow it seems a bit extravagant to be buying two or three bags of frozen dough when I have a recipe that makes roughly three dozen cinnamon rolls for about $2. A quick look at my all-purpose cookbook enlightens me to the idea that the only difference between cinnamon-sugar and orange filling is, well, cinnamon and orange. Cinnamon-sugar is made by combining ½ c. sugar with ½ T. cinnamon. Orange filling is made from ½ c. sugar and one grated orange rind (which came to about a tablespoon).

Time for another experiment.

I got out my trusty cinnamon roll recipe that my aunt, Susan Smith, gave me when I got married. With her permission, I share it here:

1 T yeast
½ c. warm water
Place in bowl and let yeast rise.

½ c. sugar
5 T oil
1 t. salt
1 t mace
2 c. scalded milk (I microwave for 2-3 minutes)
3 eggs
7 c. flour (I’ll sometimes make 2-3 wheat flour)

Put sugar, oil, salt, and mace in large bowl. Pour hot milk in bowl. When lukewarm, add eggs and yeast. Add part of the flour and beat together. Then add the rest of the flour and mix well. Grease inner side of bowl and let rise until double. (About 1 hour). Spread dough out on floured surface (I use oil—just something so that it won’t stick to the counter). Spread into a rectangle. Spread dough with butter, and brown sugar & cinnamon. Roll up and cut into slices and place on greased baking sheet.
Let rise ½ hour. Bake 10-12 minutes @ 400. Frost and serve.

As of last month, I’ve also decided that homemade frosting is almost as easy, a little cheaper, and far superior to the store-bought tub variety.

4 oz. cream cheese
2 T butter
2 c. powdered sugar
1 t. vanilla
2-3 t. milk (next time I’ll try O.J. if I’m making orange rolls—I think it will give it the right color & flavor) Whip on high in mixing bowl.
Needless to say, my children were absolutely ecstatic about having our traditional Christmas fare before Thanksgiving. On your average Wednesday night, no less. I did freeze seven of the orange roll slices though. I’m still working on one more experiment before Christmas to keep one of my favorite traditions alive.

http://intuitivehomemaking.blogspot.com/

Pruning

I’m not much of a gardener. Generally, I plant every year out of obligation—I tried leaving our garden space fallow one year, only to come back from vacation to find weeds four feet high. It took longer to pull them all out than it would have been to tend the garden all summer. And we’ve never quite negated that year’s effects. Lesson learned.

Similarly, I should have been tending my fruit trees with a little more care. Last summer, we noticed how dead some of the branches were looking, but pruning them ourselves was a task more daunting than any of us could take on. We hired a professional. But a professional can only do so much when your trees are already dying. The peach tree didn’t make it. Despite our best efforts last year, we got no fruit and only a sad stump remains. I missed having fresh peaches this year.

Our apple tree, on the other hand, did a little better. The pruner topped the tree and took off all the dead wood, but warned us we may not have many years left with it. Half of what was left died, but the portion that remains bore the sweetest, best, and biggest fruit we have had in the decade we’ve lived here. Sixteen quarts of applesauce and numerous pies and cobblers resulted from half a tree. All thanks to a little pruning.

So this year I got braver. Not wanting our apple tree to suffer the same fate as its cousin, I read up a little on how to prune a tree. It was a lot simpler than I thought, though considerably time-consuming. I’ve pruned back our raspberry patch every year, so I wondered why it never occurred to me that I could use the same clippers to do the same thing for my other fruit-bearers. I spent a couple of hours cutting away all the unnecessary wood that would inhibit fruit growth. By the time I finished with the raspberries and grapes (this year’s permanent garden addition), I could barely move my right hand. But I’m hoping for payoff next year.

The thing I always forget during the times in between dreaded bouts of yardwork is how it provides me a chance for self-reflection. Over the years, I’ve become much like my trees. In many ways, I’ve become overgrown—allowing unnecessary things to crowd out the good things simply because I haven’t taken a little time to cut them back. How many interests and hobbies do I have that, while they are enjoyable, are not really profitable? How often do I have half-finished projects because there wasn’t room in my schedule to accommodate their completion? The ground below my apple tree is often cluttered with fruit that didn’t quite make it. Sounds like my workroom filled with unfinished sewing jobs, almost-done or ready-to-be-started crafts, and piles of things to someday be added into a scrapbook.

Pruning is hard work, and even a little painful sometimes, but then again, so is everything that gives us the best fruit. Pruning allows more light and space for growing fruit to reach its full potential. And it applies to human beings as well as plants. How many of my “projects” crowd out room for scripture study and prayer? How many evenings spent browsing the internet could be more profitably spent actually catching up on those scrapbooks or doing family history? And how often do I spend time around my children without really connecting with them simply because I think dinner or dishes need to be done first? I’m beginning to see now that it is time for me to prune back the things that clutter my life and do not bring any long-lasting results so that I can make room in my life for the things that will.

http://intuitivehomemaking.blogspot.com

Sunny Day

I guess I'm feeling a little juvenile now because sometimes I don't have any more attention span than a three-year-old and get easily distracted. While doing a google search, this is what came up:
Being the Jim Henson fan that I am, (I was actually listening to John Denver & the Muppets earlier today), I clicked on Cookie to see what I could see. The following article was the first on the engine search.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5gALnZVPAopb8hS40R1AgFXIrWyZA

This article is about Caroll Spinney, the man inside the costume. I marvel that a man who is 76 years old still loves his job after 40 years as an 8-foot-tall-6-year-old canary and a grumpy old green grouch named Oscar.

Despite my short attention span, sometimes I lose touch with the child in me. I carry the weight of such grown-up responsibilities like mortgage payments, grocery shopping, car repairs, and utility bills. My knees hurt if I kneel on the floor too long. And I find myself set in my ways and not always willing to learn or try something new. But this was a healthy reminder that we are never too old to sing the alphabet song or count to 40 just to know that we can. (I'll never be a decent mother now or grandma someday if I forget that entirely.) Like all of us, I occasionally just need a reminder that it's OK to be a kid at heart.

http://intuitivehomemaking.blogspot.com/

Pumpkin Experiments

At the request of my friend Penny, I bought a small pumpkin to see if it was possible to do something constructive with all the cut-out pieces of Jack-o-lantern faces when carving pumpkins this year. I’ve saved the seeds for years to toast them (which my kids love), but I’ve never used the actual pumpkin pieces. Turns out, it wasn’t that hard. Ever cooked squash? Same thing—except pumpkin is sweeter, closer to a butternut squash than anything. We eat a lot of squash and I’ve cooked it in a number of different ways over the last few years—boiling, steaming, and baking—so I wondered which would work best for pumpkin. (By the way, it’s worth owning a pumpkin carving tool—I not only used it for my pumpkin experiment, but I keep it in my utility drawer all year long for seeding squash and melons; does the job way better than any spoon.)
I cut the 5 ½ lb pumpkin into thirds and tried one each way. Guess what? They all turned out the same. It just needs a little water of some kind to turn the pieces soft when they cook. Personally, I prefer steaming because the pumpkin doesn’t absorb so much excess water, but take your pick of what’s easiest for you. Once the pumpkin is soft and cool enough to handle, the edible part can be easily scooped out of the tough outer skin. I put all of it into a 2-quart bowl (that it almost filled) and used a potato masher to turn it into pumpkin paste. I thought it would be just like canned pumpkin then, but that’s where I was mistaken.
(Steamed Pumpkin)
(Boiled)

(Baked)

It takes one more step to be useable. It was a lot mushier than canned pumpkin—I figured it was from the water it cooked in to bake, so logically, I just had to strain it out. Into the colander went the pumpkin and I continued to mash until most of the liquid was gone. I still never quite got it to the point that it looked like canned, but even as-is, it tasted good, so I figured I was on the right track. I also saved the liquid to see if I could make “pumpkin juice” of Harry Potter fame, but it’s still in my fridge and probably ready to throw out by now. Guess I’ll do more experimenting next week on that one.

(Cooked pumpkin with skin removed)

(Mash and strain)

I made pumpkin pie from a can a couple of weeks ago, which, if you look at it, has one ingredient: pumpkin. http://intuitivehomemaking.blogspot.com/2009/10/easy-as-pie.html I had used a 15 oz can, so I followed the recipe I used then and added two cups of my homemade pumpkin paste. The color was all wrong. I added more pumpkin, and it was still a washed-out orange. Hmmm, still not quite right. I ended up adding the entire batch of pumpkin to get the color right. But now it was too runny. Well, flour is a good thickener—I was going for the consistency of cake batter, so I added enough to make it ‘look right’ a little more pumpkin pie spice for good measure. The batter tasted good too, so I poured it into two pie shells and baked them for about 45 minutes.

Much to my surprise, and my family’s delight, the pies were delicious. Because they had so much fresh pumpkin in them, the flavor was richer than canned. Both pies were gone by the following night. And even though there’s a lot of fat in pie crust and a little in the batter, I just got my kids to eat 2 cups of veggies without them suspecting it!

This probably seems like a lot of talk for a small process, but I suppose you might say this was like High School science class for me. “What would happen if . . . .” Probably nobody will be cooking up five pounds of pumpkin pieces, but I’ll bet if you cooked pieces from multiple pumpkins, you could get at least two or three.

So, long story short: when you carve up pumpkins next week, throw the seeds in a colander and the cut-outs in a pan. Cook the pieces until they’re soft enough for a fork to mash easily, then scrape them into a bowl and strain out the excess liquid. If you have anywhere between 3-4 cups of pumpkin, you’re set. Add 6 oz (1/2 can) sweetened condensed milk, 4 oz. cream cheese, 2 eggs, ¼ t. salt, ½ T. pumpkin pie spice, and enough flour to thicken it to cake batter consistency ( ¼ - ½ c. ). Pour into pie shell and bake for about 45 minutes at 350, or until the filling no longer jiggles inside the pan. Cool and serve.

For toasted pumpkin seeds, rinse off the seeds until most of the mulch is gone, boil them in salt water for 5-10 minutes, then they will rinse clean. Melt 2-3 T. butter in microwave and add ½ t. salt for 2 c. seeds. (you can also add ½ t. Worcestershire sauce for a richer flavor). Stir seeds into butter mix until coated. Spread on a cookie sheet (it helps to use parchment paper) and bake at 300 for about an hour, turning every 15 minutes or so. Store in refrigerator when cool.

Happy Halloween everyone! (Hope that helps, Penny)

Patience is a virtue, right?

I believe that one of the reasons we have children is to remind us that temporal things don't matter. For nine years, we kept our table covered with clear plastic to protect it from food and fingerpaints--thus it was still pristine while all our chairs were demolished and sent out with this year's neighborhood cleanup.

Not long ago, we decided to ditch the ugly plastic. Our kids were mature now, right? Our baby has been in school for over two years now and knows how to treat things, right? Wrong! Our youngest child has a rather hot temper sometimes and has this habit of destroying things when she's angry--and she gets angry on a fairly regular basis. There are numerous examples of her explosive energy--like the hole in her bedroom wall, snapped-in-two pencils, and the countless almost-finished-but-not-quite-perfect art projects that have been shredded. (She can be a bit of a perfectionist too).

Well, I'm not even sure what made her mad this time, maybe she wasn't first-seated, but she had obviously dug a fork or knife into it and dragged it across the surface of the table for 2-3 inches. AACK! Luckily, John was there to calmly tell her that was unacceptable. I probably would have said something I'd regret later. Fortunately, I followed suit and told her how sad I was that she'd ruined something that's been nice for ten years.

She always feels badly for her misdeeds later, but what do you do when the damage is already done and often too bad to fix easily? She found me at my computer later that evening with a humble look on her face and two quarters in her hand--perhaps thinking that would fix things. We had a nice, long talk about how it never works to destroy things because you're mad. Lucifer destroys. The Lord creates. "Can't you find something constructive to do with all your angry energy?" We're focusing now on being creators vs. destroyers. As a visual image for her I quoted Pacha's wife when she gets upset in Emperor's New Groove: "I've gotta go wash something!"

It has made me think since then about President Uchtdorf's talk he gave last year called "Happiness, Your Heritage." He tells us that we can find joy in creating things. I believe it is because there is a real satisfaction in doing so. And like my seven-year-old (who I remind myself is still not accountable), only sadness can be reaped from anger because it leads to things that are destructive. And no joy can be found in following the adversary. How often do I get angry with my children because they're not quite perfect? How often do I wait it out until I'm calmer so I can deal with problems constructively? I have a lot of growing to do still, but slowly I'm learning that if I can be patient and deal with problems creatively rather than destructively, that my home is a happier place. I guess my baby and I will work on that together.

http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?hideNav=1&locale=0&sourceId=ae484bb52a73d110VgnVCM100000176f620a____&vgnextoid=f318118dd536c010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD

http://intuitivehomemaking.blogspot.com/

The Wonders of White Sauce

I remember looking at my grandma’s recipe box as a little girl. I was always puzzled by a particular card labeled “white sauce.” What on earth is that? Though I’m sure I asked and I’m sure she gave me an answer, I can’t remember what was said. It was only years later, when I had to start cooking for myself, I realized why a card with a list of only four ingredients would be in her recipe box. It’s basically the foundation of any cream sauce. I realized this week that I’ve never actually written it down, since it’s so simple (and I don’t always look at recipes anyway), but it is definitely a staple of my kitchen. Here’s approximately what I do:

Melt 3-4 T butter on medium heat, stir in 3-4 T flour until lumps are gone. Add 1 c. milk, a little at a time to smooth out lumps, then add another cup of milk (or two, depending on how thick or thin I want it). Stir in ¼- ½ t. salt.

And here are my some of my personal variations:

*Cream of Tuna : add one can of drained tuna to white sauce and serve over rice.

*Macaroni & Cheese: melt 1-2 cups shredded cheese into white sauce and pour over cooked macaroni. Often, I will add several varieties of cheese at once—a slice of Swiss, a handful of cheddar, and a sprinkle of Parmesan, for example. But the real key to winning flavor is adding sour cream or cream cheese too.

*Clam Chowder: add two cans of clams to double batch of thick white sauce. Drain clam juice into stockpot, add 1 c. water and 1-2 t. chicken boullion. In broth, cook 4 large potatoes (diced), 5-6 stalks celery (sliced), and 1 large onion (diced). When vegetables are tender, pour in white sauce. Salt & pepper to taste.
[Note: I usually only have skim milk on hand, but his is one recipe that either needs more butter in the white sauce or a richer milk or cream for really good flavor.]

*Chicken Tetrazini: cook 1 diced onion & 1 diced pepper in butter before adding flour to white sauce. Add 1 c. cheese until melted, 1 can Cream of Mushroom soup, and 1 can chicken chunks (undrained) to white sauce. Stir into cooked spaghetti or angel hair pasta.

I’m sure there are dozens more variations out there. Anyone willing to share?
http://intuitivehomemaking.blogspot.com/

Going Green vs. the Worst Messes

I think I'm a pretty environmentally friendly person. We downsized our 90-gallon garbage dumpster for a 40-gallon one, have a compost bin in the back yard for organic waste, and recycle just about everything else. While the city does't take cereal box liners in the recycle bin, I at least reuse them for things like crushing bread crumbs, rolling out pie dough, and transporting the compost from the kitchen to the outside bin(they typically don't leak). I even take my reusable bags to the grocery store now. However, there are just some messes that it's really greener to not go so green.

Tonight, Chris made spaghetti & marinara sauce for dinner--yet another recipe he'd gotten from school (I'm loving this cooking class of his). Unfortunately, the pan was desparaging. Tomato paste leaves a thick residue like no other. To set that in the sink to soak would then stain the whole sink and everything in it red, not to mention the amount of soap and water I'd need to clean that out too. Then there's the sponge I'd have to throw away afterward. Still holding out for a new dishwasher.

So paper towels are my friend. Fortunately they can easily solve many of the worst cleanup problems. I go for the big, thick, slightly pricier ones because it only takes me a couple to handle a really horrible job. Three paper towels later, that 12-inch pan won't even need to soak tomorrow. Sometimes we end up trading one type of "green" for another. Living green has its place, but so does just living.