At the beginning of each week, I do two things. The first thing I do is look back on the previous week to see what I could have improved and then I try to plan the week ahead and utilize anything and everything I learned from previous encounters.
Because, Wednesdays, I travel to Jacksonville, Florida from Live Oak, where I live, I tend to focus on that trip far too much. I enjoy my visits with old friends and like making new ones too. I get excited about sharing the great stuff from Wainwright Dairy and Creamery and the opportunities for shopping and dining experiences that are not available out here in the country. However, I need to make the most of my whole week. Thursdays are usually a wash, because the pain in my back and legs from not having enough rest time takes a day to "get over."
Today, as I was rehearsing the week of April 23-29 I realized that I did not make one dime of profit. I enjoyed myself immensely, and there is a lot to be said for that, but that will not replace my vehicle when the miles have taken their toll. The true value of what I do is in getting to visit with my friends while I take nutrient dense products to those that value their health above most other things.
I do not have costly hobbies, so I am happy to "break even" on my fun day. When school starts up again next week for summer, (I am taking two classes) my days will seem more rushed. It is my plan to add to this first day of the week the planning and cooking or chopping of meals for the week. So in future blogs you may find more pictures and recipes.
Today I am making banana bread and a pumpkin swirl cheesecake and also some crunchy peanut butter cookies with just a bit of chocolate. When I make home baked products, I always make sure to use pure cane sugar, if the label does not claim 100% pure cane sugar, you are probably getting sugar from sugar beets. Unfortunately all the sugar beets in the general market place are GMO. http://www.non-gmoreport.com/articles/jun08/sugar_beet_industry_converts_to_gmo.php I do not always get organic sugar, but I try not to compound the damage these "unhealthy" treats and desserts wreak on our bodies.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Wonderful Wednesday!
As it g
ets hotter and I get busier, my interest in cooking disappears. Preparing and eating food becomes very simple in the summer. Raw vegetables, salads, eggs, cheeses, and some fresh caught fish are my staples. I am working on some interesting salad dressings made with our dairy products and will give some recipes after I have them perfected.It is time for me to head to the dairy and pick up some goodies for my friends in Jacksonville so it is really short today.
I am planning to do cheese tastings this year, so if you would like to host one, let's get it on the calendar.
Until Later ~ Rita
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Life, LOVE & happiness 4-11-2017
Good morning! that phrase is one of the many things I miss about my late husband. I share a home with my 23 year old daughter and unless she has to work in the morning, it is rare for me to be greeted before noon and "Good afternoon!" is not ever her greeting. That is life ...I love my children -- I miss my children. The eighteen or so years that I had the responsibility to provide a home, meals, clothing and guidance for my children is now in the past and I love the adults that my children have become. I have opportunities to watch and listen to my older two be parents to their children. Grandchildren are wonderful. I am amazed to see the patience that my children exhibit in their interactions with my grandchildren. I am sure that I was not the example for this parenting. Which brings me to believe, that I was the example of what they did NOT want to be as parents.
Are young people ever satisfied with the lives they are living? I vividly remember wanting more -- more freedom, more money, more friends, more fun. Perhaps it is because I am the oldest child in my family, perhaps it is a character trait (read flaw?), but I was not ever satisfied with easy. I could have had easy, but rejected it time after time. My happiest days were ones in which I accomplished something that was hard to do.
At this (hopefully) middle time of my life, I still want more. The hard things now are relative. It is hard to watch my parents grow older and not be able to do many things for themselves. It is hard to endure the physical pain I am in every day. It is hard to admit as a parent, as a person, that I do not have and have never had all of the answers. It is hard to self examine and view the results. Sometimes it is hard to write and share my feelings.
I do write for so many reasons: 1) It is cathartic. 2) My son is searching in to his family tree, if his grandchildren or great-grandchildren do the same, I want there to be something to find. I want to give them a sense of who the person is/was that is giving/gave them some DNA. 3) If anything I write can be helpful to someone else, I want to share and be helpful. 4) Writing is helping me be more aware of changes I need to make. 5) Writing is hard.
Until Later ~ Rita
Monday, April 10, 2017
Feeding People
4:30 am on April 10th, 2017 and my thoughts are on the food I will be furnishing for a gathering tonight, the breakfast meal I need to produce in a few minutes and the tiramisu that my daughter wants me to make for her workplace. Since preparing my first sit down dinner in 1975, I have thought about feeding people. A couple years later, I would have my first job working in a restaurant and begin learning about prep work, seasonings and the fickle palate of the American public.
The first meal I remember making was breakfast. I was learning to read quite well, so following a recipe was easy enough. Mom taught me that that a capital "T" meant a tablespoon and the lowercase was for a teaspoon. It was not until I actually made my first waffles that I was introduced to measuring spoons. Instead of the spoons we used to set the table for meals, there were these thin metal ones that rested inside each other and were connected on a ring. Those measuring spoons are in the drawer in which I keep my baking paraphernalia to this day.
When I was a young person, my dad worked and mom took care of the house and my younger siblings while I was dazzling my first grade teacher with my brilliance. I walked about a mile, through our San Souci neighborhood, in Jacksonville, Florida to Greenfield Elementary School swinging my lunchbox and singing the songs I had memorized from listening to the albums or 45s that my mom played while she washed dishes or mopped the kitchen floor. Of course a child's mind makes the words fit what she "knows". So, "Guantanamera", a song from Cuba, became "One Ton of 'Matoes" in my little girl mind. The crossing guard changed my tune to "Summer Time" and the words made sense and some other kids sang along here and there. The living was easy for children unaware of the lives being lost in Vietnam, having no real understanding of the meanings behind most of the popular songs of the late '60s.
That same walk home in the afternoon sun made me hungry. My mom would have home made whole wheat bread just coming out of the oven as I walked through the front door. After changing in to play clothes, my snack was a thick cut piece of that warm bread, lathered with butter (made in a quart sized Ball jar from the cream atop our raw milk) and honey, followed by a big glass of cold milk. I did not realize how good I had it; I wanted a sandwich (like the other kids) made from Wonder bread and Skippy peanut butter and wanted to have a glass of Ovaltine with it. My mom was not going to spend her food money on that stuff, so I had to ask for it when I was out with my Grandmother Norma. She would buy my requested brands and give the cute guy that put them in the trunk of her car a quarter.
My grandmother did her share of cooking to feed the people. The people, were hungry men that worked at the shipyard and came to her tavern at lunch time to eat her chili or ham sandwiches and have a draft beer. When we went to visit her at work, I was always allowed to have a huge dill pickle and I got to have a bottle of coke with a pack of salted peanuts in it and sometimes a piece of chocolate candy that had a cherry in the middle and some sweet syrup surrounding it. I heard different music on the big jukebox in the corner than what was played at home. I remember twisting my body to music by a guy named Chubby and throwing my arms up and down to do the jerk or holding my nose and bobbing around to act like I was swimming. Life was great fun.
Now, nearly fifty years later, I am the grandmother making home made banana bread for one set of grandchildren and biscuits and white gravy for the other set. The young ones dance, uninhibited, to music that has a great beat, but they have no understanding of the lyrics. I have fed thousands of people in my life, but none of the praise matters nearly as much as hearing my grandkids say "it is good! DD can I have more?" Yes, love, you may have as much as you like until it is gone.
Until later ~ Rita
The first meal I remember making was breakfast. I was learning to read quite well, so following a recipe was easy enough. Mom taught me that that a capital "T" meant a tablespoon and the lowercase was for a teaspoon. It was not until I actually made my first waffles that I was introduced to measuring spoons. Instead of the spoons we used to set the table for meals, there were these thin metal ones that rested inside each other and were connected on a ring. Those measuring spoons are in the drawer in which I keep my baking paraphernalia to this day.
When I was a young person, my dad worked and mom took care of the house and my younger siblings while I was dazzling my first grade teacher with my brilliance. I walked about a mile, through our San Souci neighborhood, in Jacksonville, Florida to Greenfield Elementary School swinging my lunchbox and singing the songs I had memorized from listening to the albums or 45s that my mom played while she washed dishes or mopped the kitchen floor. Of course a child's mind makes the words fit what she "knows". So, "Guantanamera", a song from Cuba, became "One Ton of 'Matoes" in my little girl mind. The crossing guard changed my tune to "Summer Time" and the words made sense and some other kids sang along here and there. The living was easy for children unaware of the lives being lost in Vietnam, having no real understanding of the meanings behind most of the popular songs of the late '60s.
That same walk home in the afternoon sun made me hungry. My mom would have home made whole wheat bread just coming out of the oven as I walked through the front door. After changing in to play clothes, my snack was a thick cut piece of that warm bread, lathered with butter (made in a quart sized Ball jar from the cream atop our raw milk) and honey, followed by a big glass of cold milk. I did not realize how good I had it; I wanted a sandwich (like the other kids) made from Wonder bread and Skippy peanut butter and wanted to have a glass of Ovaltine with it. My mom was not going to spend her food money on that stuff, so I had to ask for it when I was out with my Grandmother Norma. She would buy my requested brands and give the cute guy that put them in the trunk of her car a quarter.
My grandmother did her share of cooking to feed the people. The people, were hungry men that worked at the shipyard and came to her tavern at lunch time to eat her chili or ham sandwiches and have a draft beer. When we went to visit her at work, I was always allowed to have a huge dill pickle and I got to have a bottle of coke with a pack of salted peanuts in it and sometimes a piece of chocolate candy that had a cherry in the middle and some sweet syrup surrounding it. I heard different music on the big jukebox in the corner than what was played at home. I remember twisting my body to music by a guy named Chubby and throwing my arms up and down to do the jerk or holding my nose and bobbing around to act like I was swimming. Life was great fun.
Now, nearly fifty years later, I am the grandmother making home made banana bread for one set of grandchildren and biscuits and white gravy for the other set. The young ones dance, uninhibited, to music that has a great beat, but they have no understanding of the lyrics. I have fed thousands of people in my life, but none of the praise matters nearly as much as hearing my grandkids say "it is good! DD can I have more?" Yes, love, you may have as much as you like until it is gone.
Until later ~ Rita
Sunday, April 9, 2017
First Day of the Week
It's Sunday morning at 5:45, I have had my breakfast of home made chocolate chip cookies and am sipping my morning coffee from Papua, New Guinea. I have a friend that lives there and gardens for his living. As I drink this enhanced bean water (cream and sugar), I contemplate the vast differences between the life Apollos lives across the globe and the one I am living in Suwannee county, FL.
After realizing that I can not possibly know what another person's life feels like, I focus on my life -- what it is and what it is not.
I live in the comfort of a nation in which I can boldly state my belief that human beings are created in the similitude of God. Some of my friends might think me foolish for that belief, but we can agree to disagree without one of us having to be jailed. This is not so in some nations. I have another friend, (a messianic Jew) that visits his wife's family in Cuba each year. While there he preaches the words of Yeshua, but could be arrested for doing so. Although it is not my intent to preach, I could, if I wanted, and not have to fear arrest because I am a Christian or because I am a woman. That is the privilege I have because I am a citizen of the USA. I am grateful that I was born to parents that were born and raised in this country.
I have several friends that are naturalized citizens, they went through the processes necessary to make this land their permanent home. None of them take for granted the great freedoms we have and as far as I can see, they all work and appreciate the living conditions here. One friend related the amazement she felt from her first visit to a grocery store here in the US. She had never seen many of the packaged foods and was flabbergasted by the options in the produce section and how meats were portioned, wrapped, and refrigerated. Unless one has traveled to other parts of the world, it is hard to understand how much we have here. It is difficult to get young people to understand that we are not better people just because we have easier lives. Many in the US seem to confuse birthright privileges with entitlement. We, who were born here, should be happy that we have a free enterprise system. That we can, with few restrictions, conduct business to make money for ourselves and our families.
My coffee is cold and I must take my daughter to her workplace. I will jump down from my soapbox and get to the tasks I have planned for this day. I encourage you readers to consider your life and be grateful.
Until later ~ Rita
After realizing that I can not possibly know what another person's life feels like, I focus on my life -- what it is and what it is not.
I live in the comfort of a nation in which I can boldly state my belief that human beings are created in the similitude of God. Some of my friends might think me foolish for that belief, but we can agree to disagree without one of us having to be jailed. This is not so in some nations. I have another friend, (a messianic Jew) that visits his wife's family in Cuba each year. While there he preaches the words of Yeshua, but could be arrested for doing so. Although it is not my intent to preach, I could, if I wanted, and not have to fear arrest because I am a Christian or because I am a woman. That is the privilege I have because I am a citizen of the USA. I am grateful that I was born to parents that were born and raised in this country.
I have several friends that are naturalized citizens, they went through the processes necessary to make this land their permanent home. None of them take for granted the great freedoms we have and as far as I can see, they all work and appreciate the living conditions here. One friend related the amazement she felt from her first visit to a grocery store here in the US. She had never seen many of the packaged foods and was flabbergasted by the options in the produce section and how meats were portioned, wrapped, and refrigerated. Unless one has traveled to other parts of the world, it is hard to understand how much we have here. It is difficult to get young people to understand that we are not better people just because we have easier lives. Many in the US seem to confuse birthright privileges with entitlement. We, who were born here, should be happy that we have a free enterprise system. That we can, with few restrictions, conduct business to make money for ourselves and our families.
My coffee is cold and I must take my daughter to her workplace. I will jump down from my soapbox and get to the tasks I have planned for this day. I encourage you readers to consider your life and be grateful.
Until later ~ Rita
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