This morning I broke in my new fruit juicer attachment for my Kitchenaid. Let me tell you, “Fresh Squeezed” is NOT the same as homemade, fresh squeezed! Nothing compares to the quality, flavor and sweetness of unprocessed, fresh squeezed, orange juice. Nothing.

So, what caused me to finally break in my new spinning fruit juicer? Well, I have great neighbors, many of whom own orange trees. Suffice it to say my basket was flowing over. As I’m not great at eating fresh fruit, I needed to find a way to use them. Don’t get me wrong, I love fruit but I’m super picky about sweetness. A tart strawberry can take me off the market for even trying another one for long spell. Oranges are a gamble. A really ripe one can be sweet and totally awesome, but get a tart or bitter one and I’m right back with the signing off for a spell page.

The greatest thing about my attachment was zero learning curve. It was obvious that I just had to plug it in to the front of my Kitchenaid and tighten the holding screw to keep it in place. I did find out quickly some lubricant was necessary. So I sprayed some cooking oil on the connector:

You can see the black lines at the top of the spinner, that’s where the spray went and instantly all the squeaks went away.

Then it was on to the juicing. I cut up 20 oranges of various sizes and held the halves up to the spinning device. I found the best speed was about 2. The seed/pulp catching tray caught the big stuff and the spinner did all the hard work.

I filtered the first few cups into the pitcher through a mesh cloth.

Then I got smart and put the cloth over the bowl:

I ended up with 1 quart of juice from 20 oranges (for reference, I’d average my sizes as medium), not bad for roughly 20 minutes worth of work this morning, minus a few interruptions to get the puppy out of the flower bed. *wink*

Looks like grapefruits and lemons are next.

Oh, and another fun tip I’ve learned and tried with success is freezing excess juice into ice cubes. You can add these to recipes and drinks to enhance flavor or cool a drink without diluting it. It’s so easy and works great.

This morning I took a moment to walk through my yard and enjoy the simple pleasures; to appreciate newness, marvel at the wonder of creation and drink in the goodness of a new day. Here’s some of what I saw:

Yummy Pork Salad

I love when things come together, especially after a day of the opposite happening. So I was tickled pink when last night I could pull of a truly successful dinner that was literally last minute. I’m not kidding about last and minute. It was 6:40, I’d just finished a project on the computer and no dinner started. I pulled out paper plates and threw the following together:

Baby spring salad mix
Baby spinach salad
Grated chedder cheese
Sliced mushrooms
Cooked, shredded pork
Cranberries
Fat free sun dried tomato dressing

It was splendid! It’s also very easy to customize with your favorite toppings or dressings. The key was already having the ingredients, especially the meat. Which brings me to the real purpose for this post.

Busy moms don’t have time to dilly dally in the kitchen or slave over Martha Stewart style dinners. This busy mom is always multitasking and thus needs all the help and tricks she can find to keep things moving smoothly. As a result, I’m a vigil simplifier. If there’s a way something can be simplified, I’ll find it. One of my favorite cooking and “mom chef” simplifications is using my slow cooker. Now before you go thinking I’ve put an entire recipe of multiple ingredients together for a scrumptious dinner, remember I’m a vigil simplifier and multitasker. We’re talking throw in a frozen roast before checking morning e-mail here. One of my favorites is pork loin roast with a small can of green chilies. After several hours it will start to break apart. This is the point when you can easily start shredding and pulling it apart with two forks. The meat can easily stretch through multiple meals all week long for my family of four. It seems that there’s always leftovers for quick lunches too. Here’s a few of my family’s favorite ways to make meals with the cooked meat:

Pork Tacos with corn salsa
BBQ pulled pork sandwiches
Cheesy tomato sauce with egg noodles and pork
Pork salad
Pork enchiladas
Pork and avocado sandwiches

All this comes from one pork roast thrown in a slow cooker with a small can of green chilies. There’s no prep time, no babysitting or slaving over a stove. Yet the results yield several “instant” meals later just by mixing and matching ingredients. A little BBQ sauce and you have a whole new venue, same with spaghetti sauce, and of course you can always leave it totally plain like in the tacos or on a salad.

Other things I’ve tried with success is throwing in a seasoning packet with a roast, like Lipton’s onion soup mix, etc. For a Sunday roast I’ll take the time to cut some veggies to cook with the roast, but during the week it’s a simple soup mix or more often a can of chilies, etc. The point is that once the meat is cooked you can stretch it so many ways with success and less stress.

The Halloween craze continues to run rampant in our neck of the woods. On our nightly walks we see nearly as many outdoor lights and displays as we do at Christmas. It’s truly a ’spooktacular’ phenomenon. My son tells me all the time that we don’t have enough stuff on our house. But we have more than I ever thought we would. Kids have a way of helping make sure that happens. I thought we were doing pretty well, I mean we have our ghost in the tree:

Some tombstones, a couple pumpkins, a skeleton, a witch’s broom and one of those annoying noise maker coffin boxes:

All are accompanied by a red/orange glow from the colored bulbs in the light fixtures, and I was especially proud that my plug in jack-o-lantern worked with my plug extension twisted into the light socket directly above it. Last year he sat hidden by the door, this year he’s front and center without an extension chord. However, Taylor wasn’t so easily impressed with my engineering feat. Lucky for me, he tends to lighten up when it gets close enough to Halloween to carve and light our pumpkins. *wink*

Halloween got an early start for us this year, the first weekend of the month to be specific. Cidnie decided she wanted to find and color some Halloween coloring pages. So she went to the computer and started printing out pages to color.

Taylor joined in the fun and then we cut them out and hung them on the mirror.

Last week we had fun making some Halloween decorations that Grandma and Grandpa gave the kids for their birthdays. We watched some of the movie The Labyrinth while making the skeleton. I still love that movie.

The month was already filling with Halloween things and then the cookie phantom and boo ghost landed on our door. So last night we made treats with the kids; two kinds of cookies and some chocolate dipped pretzel sticks. I was so happy with the way the cookie cutter cookies turned out that I wanted to share the recipe.

Basic Cookie Cutter Cookies

3/4 C Sugar
1/2 (1 stick) butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 C Flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons pear butter (I put in the pear butter because the mix was too crumbly. You could easily substitute apple sauce for the pear butter. )

My only complaint with this fun activity in past years is the need to make copies of stuff to give with the treats. In the past, I’ve ended up making my own version to print out (I promise to get all those in their many varieties up on my file section soon) and then I give extra copies to the families we share with so they don’t have the headache. But this year, the boo ghost smartened up and came with a website address to go get the information and picture from.

I have two weeks left to figure out costumes. Cidnie wants to be the confessor from the TV show “Legend of the Seeker” and Taylor wants to be Darth Maul.

So far I have Cidnie’s knives:

Looks like the sewing machine will be used for more than humanitarian quilt tops! Hopefully, I’ll find enough success to want to blog it when it’s done.

So that wraps up our Halloween 2009 Part I. In a few weeks I’ll have one full of the pumpkin carving, trunk-or-treats and Halloween night parties. *wipes brow* Is it Thanksgiving yet?

Over the years, I’ve learned the value of blogging a few things - things that I think I’ll remember but find the details got hazy. Some of my best recipe creations have been lost to the haze, but as soon as I started blogging some of my successes I’ve been able to go back and find them. Technology can be a helpful and beautiful thing. Another benefit for me personally is the way it helps me track progress on goals. I love seeing posts and pictures from big projects from beginnings to end. They say a target to be hit must first be seen, well for me the motivation to keep working on those targets comes from visually being able to view and comprehend my progress. It is literally my fuel for success. So this post starts the first of many on recording my progress toward my goal of true self reliance through the principles of Family Home Storage.

First a little history to understand my perspective. I grew up hearing the importance of self-reliance and preparedness. The wise counsel of preparation has been ever present in my life, although I readily admit that I’ve been only partially vigilant in following the counsel. Instead of a full year’s supply of emergency food storage, I had a couple month’s worth. Instead of financial freedom I convinced myself I was doing great because we were always paying more than minimum on our debts as well as putting money away in several different savings and investment plans. If anyone had asked me how I felt about things at that time my story would have been laced with illusions of grandeur through rose colored glasses. My wake up call came when disaster struck in 2001 and I learned the valuable lesson of direct correlation between our level of vigilance and our survival/recovery. The good news is that we survived a serious blow of six months with no income without declaring bankruptcy. The bad news is that we only barely survived and our recovery was monumental. I seriously underestimated how quickly all those reserves would go when used. We incurred increased consumer debt used to float us through the gap of my husband securing employment. There are not words to express the feelings of helplessness, frustration and entrapment which followed the many months later as we struggled under a mountain of debt and limited resources. Looking back, I see how our partial attention to self reliance played a critical role in our surviving our own emergency, but I can also see how full attention would have provided full benefit. Things would have been different. Things would have been better.

In September I helped organize and present an evening of instruction on the very topic of Family Home Storage. Through the process, I was able to identify several things I still haven’t and should be doing for my own success in this area. The first was moving my knowledge of what I had from my cluttered head to an easier and more tangible system. So this week I took my own advice and went through all my food storage to make an inventory. I pulled things off the shelves, wrote down what I had, reorganized my supplies and then moved all that wonderful information into a spreadsheet.

While I haven’t perfected my system, I now have a start. I organized my list into a column for checking when the item has met my 100% goal, a column for the item description followed by two columns one for “have” and the other for “need.” My goal was to quickly identify in the first column how complete my goal is, the purpose of the last column was to help me quickly determine items needing to be added to a shopping list. I broke the list out into sections that included my pantry, freezer, long term food storage and non perishable items. The goal for food is to get three months worth of usable storage and one year of long term/emergency basic food storage.

Yesterday I put my list on the door of my pantry. I added a checklist for myself and family members to write down when items are pulled and used so I know what needs replaced. I just used a large white mailing envelope to hold my list and attached a checklist on the front and a pencil.

I’ve got a good start to my three month supply and a decent beginning to my long term storage, but I am totally lacking in drinking water and a few other non-perishables. It is recommended to have two weeks worth of drinking water for each family member. The suggestion is 3 cases of individual drinking water bottles per person for that time. That means I should have 12 cases of water bottles, I have one. So my immediate goal is to add one case of water and one package of toilet paper to each shopping trip. In our last home, I’d get caught with my pants down several times when the complex had to turn our water off for repairs. Sometimes it would last a good half to full day. I was so grateful for the inspiration to fill my empty canning bottles with water. The number of times I had to run down to my storage room to get a pint of water was many! I know the value of having usable water available.

My next immediate goal is to start tracking how quickly I use the items in my pantry. That way I’ll know what a three month supply means for me and my family. Right now it would be pure guesswork. I will also start adding that step by step application of one extra can of something here, a few pennies in the jar there, etc. I look forward to sharing photo updates of my progress on my goal. I wonder if it will look anything like the picture in my head?

I’m constantly amazed at the satisfaction and boost it is to get simple things done. I tend to think about the things that need done so often that I’ve done them at least a hundred times in my head before I actually get the job that only takes once to be done. What a waste of energy.

I’ve been learning how much easier it is to tell my kids yes instead of no and the benefits far outweigh the inconvenience. For example, a few weeks ago I was doing something when my son came to me and asked if I’d please make him his favorite cookies. My first thought was no, I’m doing something right now. But I’ve been working on retraining myself to that initial reaction by asking why not and how long will it really take, so instead I said yes. I dropped what I was working on and spent the next 15-20 minutes making him his favorite no bake, chocolate oatmeal cookies. Not only did I have a very happy boy, it saved me hours of nagging and interruptions. I went back to my previous task and completed it with a smile on my face knowing I’d taken time to do something that really mattered. If there were any doubt, my son confirmed this simple act with multiple verbal thanks that night and at bed time told me how he loved me with a hundred hearts and I was the best mom he ever had. Those moments are beyond price and they cost me only 15 minutes of readjusting my expectations. It takes so little to move mountains in the home.

Inspired with such simple successes in the kitchen I tried on a few things I’ve been putting off like baking bread from scratch and juicing fruit. I threw a new twist on my banana bread by cooking a large batch in a bunt cake pan. I’ve made several batches of homemade bread now and look forward to exploring new and different recipes. A little success goes a long way!

I grew up with a mother who did a lot of home canning and preservation of foods. I burned her homemade bread when left on watch. I learned how to do things with her tools and I’ve put off doing similar things in my own home for the excuse that I don’t have all the same tools like her steamer juicer. But last week I picked up all those guava that fell of the tree and juiced them. It’s not hard to cook the fruit until tender and create a makeshift drainer. I used my strainer over a bowl and one of my old flour sack dish towels to strain and squeeze the cooked fruit.

I have fruit in bottles in my fridge for immediate use and ice cubes for future use. I can’t tell you how this simple thing lifted my spirits compared to last year’s efforts of picking them up, keeping them on the counter for a few days and eventually throwing the spoiled fruit away.

Other tasks are easier to see and therefore procrastinate, like my floors. With a little unplanned motivation last week I steam cleaned my family room carpet which led to finishing the job on the tile. Have I mentioned how much I love my steamers? Or how much I love seeing the ‘after’ clean from the ‘before’ dirt?

This Saturday, I’ll drop off what feels like a garage full of bags and boxes from the deep clean of forbidden closets and corners of my home. It’s so nice to feel the space and organization when all the clutter is gone.

Little by little things are getting done and that’s my whole point. It doesn’t have to be a marathon event or everything done at one time. Just taking the few minutes here and there to do one thing that’s needing done or bugging you can do so much for your self esteem and motivation. I’ve only recently been let in on the great secret that it’s never done. So I’m not worrying anymore about getting everything ‘done’, I’m focusing instead on completing a few tasks when they come up. There’s much to be said for obtaining balance with this mentality from making cookies to playing a game or reading a story with your kids to clearing out that one junk drawer that’s taking over to preserving instead of throwing out the fruit you didn’t get to before it over ripened. I no longer look at my calendar to see everything I have to get done this week or this month. The lists are taking a much needed sabbatical and I’m retraining myself to keep the little things little, but important enough to get done. I wish I could put into words how amazed I constantly am at how much more I get done and how little time it takes to do most things. At the end of the day I’m learning the value of the lesson to just do it!

So I’m sitting here wondering where the summer went. I feel like we’ve crammed two months worth of activities into July alone. Several times last week I went to the calendar thinking it was already August as a result.

We left town right as school got out this year for the kids. We brought home some cousins to stay with us after that trip and then we drove back a second time to Idaho. We had one more trip to Las Vegas for a family event the 3rd weekend in July. Now I’m sitting here with the vacation and traveling done, looking at the calendar and realizing my kids start school in 14 days and feeling rather dazed.

So naturally, I redirect my thoughts to all the future things I want to get done, etc.! Before I know it the weather will be great again and I’ll be balancing my time with outside yard and garden time. There’s so much I want to do.

I’m also finding myself longing to get back into some projects that I can wrap up. My photo project is moving back up to the front of the list. I want to get all my backups organized, tagged, etc. and I want copies of all my new digital photos to have paper copies in the photo books too.

I’ve recently thrown baking into my hobby list of things I want to improve on. I baked my first loaf of homemade bread last week. I’ve made a lot of things from scratch, but bread was always more intimidating to me and it’d always been so much easier to pick up a loaf when shopping at the store. It was much easier than I was expecting and it’s been received extremely well. I’m getting ready to branch out into specialty and dessert breads.

Before I know it I’ll be celebrating kid’s birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Time flies.

Tonight brought a happy surprise. My daughter has been begging me for quite a while to make her favorite dessert. It’s a miniature chocolate raspberry torte from one of her favorite dinner places, P.F. Changs. We bought some shot glasses and mini spoons shortly after the restaurant started offering their individual sized desserts. We’ve had fun doing various types at home, but to date I haven’t done her beloved chocolate with raspberry sauce. So tonight I decided to tackle it for her. I was going to make devil’s food chocolate cake but when I did a search online I found a copycat recipe for the Chang’s version so I used that. The flourless chocolate cake was dreamy and super easy too. My happy addition was finding that my apple corer worked perfectly for gathering up small circle sizes of the cake to fit the shot glasses.

I decided as long as I was going to do the dessert I’d see if I could make my favorite dinner dish from there too, Mongolian Beef. I was so tickled at how well it turned out! It was worth sharing, especially for bookmarking the recipe for later! I even snapped a photo of the leftover dish and it turned out pretty good too! Yay for sweet success.

My husband nicknamed me the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Queen this morning. It’s true, I’ve got a habit of taking on all types of projects on a purely “learn as you go” system. From finishing my garage, putting down a new wood floor and building furniture to crocheting blankets, creating recipes and everything in between, I’ve been known to tackle a wide variety of DIY projects. I blame Grandma Luthy. I’ve heard stories and have many things crafted by her able hands. She was the kind of woman that simply made what she wanted if it weren’t available for one reason or another. My motivation isn’t as admirable as hers; my primary motivation is simply that I’m cheap. I don’t like spending money, especially on things that I know I could do myself for a fraction of the cost. Today’s share - patio furniture covers.

I have two chairs and 60″ swing that needed done. But I was sick looking around at replacement cushions. It was easily going to cost a couple hundred dollars just for replacements. Knowing their purpose, abuse and lack of use I just can’t justify that. So I googled outdoor fabric and found a discount website. I was still dismayed to see that some of the fabrics ran an average of $12 per yard, but still $50-70 is a great deal over 4-5 times that much. Then I found their clearance section and I found some durable and heavier fabric for only $2 per yard. Score! Okay, it’s straight from the early 90’s and not what I’d choose if I were going purely on what I liked, but it was okay, and I’m learning so I ordered $20 worth. It arrived yesterday afternoon.

I cut out the old batting and used plain tissue paper (from the gift wrap bag) to trace out a basic pattern. The hardest part was sewing the closing seams after the padding was in place as I don’t have a heavy duty machine, but I made it work!

And here are the results:

I’m pretty happy with my $20 purchase. Now that I’ve done it I’d even consider paying more in the future for a pattern I really like! But for now, I’m happy knowing that’s another 5 years away. *smile*

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It’s always nice when you can start a week with some momentum of positive energy from the weekend. Saturday was a really productive day for me this weekend. By 11:00 a.m. I had mowed the front lawn, trimmed the bushes, harvested the garden and pulled the weeds.

We took a break for lunch at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. The kids weren’t sure they wanted to go anywhere until we told them we’d be hitting the movie theater after to watch the movie my daughter’s been begging to see for what feels like forever - Confessions of a Shopaholic. The lunch was great and the show was much better than I was expecting. In fact, I’d go see it again and even apologized to Cid for dragging my feet so much on taking her to it.

Then it was back home to process and store the garden goods. I pulled out the old canning stuff that’s been collecting dust since I left Idaho and got to work.

My extra effort in planting paid off with nice, big carrots to work with this season. It took much less time than last year and they were easier to work with. These were vacuumed packed like last spring’s crop as we found that worked really well for keeping “crunchy” carrots (according to my son). My vacuum packer is now over 11 years old and I’m afraid that we’ll have to purchase a new one soon, but it has sure paid its dues! I wish we’d had one of these when I grew up as it’s a great way to preserve your crops in addition to bottling.

We decided to pickle the beets this time as my hubby said it’s his favorite way to eat them. Admittedly, it took me a minute to remember how to do this even looking at my recipe card. Thankfully, I found it a lot like riding a bike and the knowledge came back soon enough.

During this process my daughter asked why we were doing this. We explained that you can’t eat everything from your garden when it’s ready because it will go bad, but we don’t want to waste it. These methods allowed us to enjoy the vegetables all year long. Her mouth fell to the floor and she said, “A whole year?!” we giggled as we informed her that all the carrots we’ve eaten since last year at this time were from that same batch we’d stored. It’s fun to see your kids start to get it.

Sunday was a nice day and I even refilled the cookie jar before bed!

There is so much to be said for seeing the rewards of your labors. It’s such a boost!

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