Blog Carnival - Make It From Scratch

The latest edition of the Make It From Scratch blog carnival is published.
The host site this week is Po Moyemu - In My Opinion. Visit her blog to see all the great entries.
My contribution was my post about our visit to the Farmer's Market and the stuffed peppers that we made. Other entries run the gamut from recipes for gnocchi, cream puffs and how to make your own buttermilk to ideas for safe alternatives for common household products. Lots of craft ideas too - kid's fisherman knit sweater pattern, kid's craft recipes, monogrammed lavender bags and ideas for homeschooling - hands on learning.
This carnival is a lot of fun and a treasure trove of great ideas. Don't miss it!

The Farmer's Market

We have been making an adventure of the Saturday Farmer's Market this summer.
The market is held on the town green - there are animals to visit, honey to taste, home baked cookies to sample and bunches and bunches of vegetables to buy.

This Saturday we arrived in time to watch our favorite farmer unloading her crates of vegetables from the back of her truck.
We chose beets with the greens still attached (washing and then cooking both the greens and the beets was lots of fun). We bought yellow squash and zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers for Grampy and three giant bell peppers to make stuffed peppers for our dinner.

We used the crock pot to cook our stuffed peppers.
Maya used the potato masher to thoroughly blend the ingredients for the stuffing -
a basic meatloaf mixture of:
3 slices of stale bread torn into little pieces and soaked in
3/4 cup of milk combined with one egg
1/4 cup chopped onion
and 3/4 lb. lean ground beef
while I cut the tops off the peppers and cleaned out the insides.

We set the seeds aside on a paper plate to use later on, then stuffed the peppers with the meat mixture.
We poured just enough tomato sauce into the crockpot to cover the bottom of the dish,
put in the stuffed peppers and poured the remainder of the jar of tomato sauce over them.
The peppers stayed in the pot for 6 hours on low heat and then they were done!

While the peppers cooked, we decided to do an art project to remember the fun we had cooking our vegetables from the farmer's market. We got out our paints and painted a couple of sheets of construction paper green, like the peppers.
Once the paint was dry, we drew two large peppers on the green painted paper and cut them out. Then we painted those green peppers with white glue, covering all of the paper peppers. We did that so that the seeds we saved from the insides of our real peppers would stick to the paper. We set the paper peppers aside for the rest of the afternoon to dry. That night we had a super dinner and some new decoration for Grammy's kitchen!

Celebrate!

Only a couple of days left before the 4th of July Holiday –
Not really time for anything too elaborate (save those ideas for next year), but here are some good links that you may still find fun and useful.

A Kid’s Heart
has some neat online games – I really like the Patriotic jigsaw puzzles.
Use your mouse to drag the puzzle pieces into the correct places to put the puzzle together.
There are quite a few other games, some word searches and virtual fireworks too!


Family Fun has the directions for these Uncle Sam Ice Cream Cones


and for Fireworks Art (my kids loved this one! Take a hint from a teacher – poke a hole near the top of the straw.
The kids will still be able to blow the paint out to make the project, but they won’t get a mouthful of paint if they forget and suck in instead. And they will forget. Trust me)

A very easy Fireworks “painting” that the littler kids enjoy is done by painting a piece of black construction paper with white glue that has been thinned with a bit of water.
Let the kids shake multi colored glitter onto the wet glue, shake off the excess glitter when the paper is dry.
Sparkly and pretty!


Betty Crocker has this great Stars and Stripes Cake

Please come back tomorrow –
I’ve been given permission to display the Flag Picture Gallery from Ushistory.org.
Beautiful and Fascinating…

"Strawberry Cake With All Good Cream"

We made our first strawberry shortcake together this week - Maya and her Grammy. It was the "strawberry cake with all good cream" that she has wanted ever since she saw it in the April issue of a family magazine.
Another four generation creation - Great Grammy and Great Grampy picked the strawberries for Maya, Grammy and Maya made the shortcake and Mommy, Grampy and Maya "ate it all up."
A summer treasure.

We have more projects planned for our strawberries.

Here is an easy recipe for Strawberry Jam - it's a good one because it makes a small batch - two or three jars of jam.

We will need:
4 cups of strawberries,
rinsed and hulled (stems removed)
and
3 cups of sugar

Crush and mash the strawberries (we use a potato masher )
Mix in the sugar and pour the mixture into a large heavy pan.
Bring it slowly to a boil and continue that slow boil for about 10 minutes. You'll see when the jam starts to "boil down" in the pan - there will be a space of 1/4" or so between the mark on the inside of the pan that the mixture made during the early "high boil" and the level where the jam is boiling now.
That's the time to start testing for the "jellying point"
Dip a metal spoon into the boiling jam, then tilt the spoon until the mixture runs off. Watch the spoon. When the jellying point is reached, the last drops off the spoon will run together and slide off like a jam snowflake. Let the jam cool and pour it into clean jelly jars. Seal and refrigerate.

To see more recipes using strawberries along with some art and craft projects and strawberry fun, please visit Grandmother Wren's Project Page.
While you're there, check out her Summer Pages too!

Shop for Groceries Online?

This ad came in an email late last week and caught my eye.
I haven't been to Amazon myself to do any price comparisons with local grocery stores, but with free shipping...
Amazon Grocery offers over 22,000 non-perishable items including some of your favorite brands, shipped to your door, just like any other Amazon.com purchase. We've also recently introduced the Subscribe and Save program which is a great way to save money on items you use routinely. You can sign up for routine convenient delivery of products such as coffee pods, shampoos, laundry detergent or diapers and receive a 15% discount off Amazon's already low prices and free shipping on these items. The 'Subscribe and Save' option sure sounds convenient - combine it with free shipping and 15% off? I'm heading that way for a look!
(I didn't even know Amazon had groceries for sale...
this is very handy for a busy grandmother!)

Giving

Thursday is Great Grandmother's birthday. "What kind of cake do you think Great Grammy would like?"
Maya's answer was quick and sure "a Sponge Bob cake!"
Maya is obsessed with Sponge Bob. She calls everyone Sponge Bob. We have to call her Sponge Bob. If we call her Maya, she corrects us. She is Sponge Bob.
We don't know why or where this passion for Sponge Bob developed. She's never seen the TV show. Leaving aside the question of quality children's programming, she's never seen it because she's too young, it's not appropriate for a two year old.
She's in love with the Sponge Bob image.

Our project for today - a Sponge Bob cake for Great Grandmother's birthday.
We walked to the corner store in a misting rain, looking for puddles and rocks to bring home along the way. We chose a cake mix and frosting and some candies that I hoped would somehow transform themselves into Sponge Bob facial features.
We baked the cake. Measuring and mixing and stirring and spilling - the cake was in the oven.
Waiting...
waiting...
waiting...
then waiting some more while the baked cake cooled.

It was time to create Sponge Bob. We tinted the frosting just the right shade of yellow and argued a bit about not picking fingers full of cake from the dish.
The frosting was on and we pronounced it good.
Next came candy eyes and more frosting tinting for the blue centers (Sponge Bob has blue eyes and Maya has an eye for detail) Licorice was bent in the fashion of a Sponge Bob nose and mouth.

I stepped back and watched for Maya's response. We could have gone to the supermarket and bought a Sponge Bob perfectly portrayed in cake. Was that what we should have done? Is she happy with her cake?

"We did it! We made Sponge Bob! We need a candle to blow."
Tired and proud, Maya helped to cover the cake with plastic wrap and watched me put it into the cupboard to bring to Great Grammy tomorrow.
She did not ask for a piece of cake.
Her cake is a gift for Great Grammy.
She will bring it to her house tomorrow.
Then we will eat the cake.