Finally Motivated!

Oh the glorious sun is doing wonders for my soul these days. I'm almost admitting to myself that I was feeling a little depressed this winter. You know that Seasonal Depression thing? Pretty sure I get that to some extent in the winter. I've had some crappy things go on this year anyways, which obviously doesn't help. I started taking a class in Jan called Family Studies. Have I talked about it here yet? It's wonderful and helping me own up to my selfishness and great need to rely on our Heavenly Father. This couldn't have come at a better time. I was beginning to feel quite bitter and awful. Anyways, I didn't mean to get into all this, so I'll just move on.
Here's a bunch of pictures in no particular order so I'm just going to talk about all of them and you can match up my blabbing to the photo. I hate blogger for that reason, and I know I complain about that a lot. I want to type all my stuff, then click and drag a photo into the place it should go. Is mac any better for doing that? Or is it just blogger that sucks?
Man I keep getting off topic! K, I'm talking about pictures. Here's one of my baby belly, surprise surprise! I haven't officially announced it in the wonderful web world yet. I'm about 17 weeks, feeling the baby move, and hopefully will find out gender next week, yipee! (side note the Monkey Moo is currently emptying out my wallet as we speak, and the Munchkin is cutting a flyer into teeny tiny shreds, whatever keeps em busy for now I guess). There's another pic here of this wonderful pin cushion I made. It has a cute little bag to collect thread bits and stuff. First sewing I've done in awhile. Oh I did make a skirt for Katelyn a couple weeks ago, which you'll see in the picture of them standing by the fireplace. It took 20 min. so it hardly counts for sewing. I love the fabric so much, and I love the fabulous stuff she comes up with to wear with it, like her "crazy tights". This pic of them was at the end of their Easter egg hunt we did for them. See the cute papers? That was a little treasure hunt they had to do, SO fun! Ok, I don't even remember what other pictures I posted. A really awesome mirror I found at a flea market that Matthew hung for me in our front entrance, which we still don't use because we don't have front stairs, boo. Ok, two food photos, which I should have saved for later because this entry is dragging on and on and I know some of you are asleep by now and I have a lot to say about food. Here we go. The muffins first. This is a recipe that I made up awhile ago and my sis-in-law improved on. It's usually banana, but lately it's squash because I'm really trying to not buy bananas lately. Don't know if you've noticed but bananas don't grow so well in northern Cananda. Squash however grows wonderfully and stores all year, so we have lots of squash. Here's the recipe, and believe me, this is a big deal to me that I'm sharing it. It's kind of my pride and joy and I feel like I could hoard it and someday sell it for millions or something. But I'm trying to get over that ridiculous idea and just share the love. I'm going to put little side notes next to the ingredients to be obnoxious, so roll your eyes all you want, but bear with me. I've been wanting to talk about food here for awhile, and here we go.

Holly and Aria's Banana, Pumpkin, or Zucchini bread (or muffins):
Wet ingredients:
1 C. Sugar (I use Rapadura which is evaporated cane juice and still has good minerals and stuff in it)
1 C. Honey (local because the bees will actually pass on antibodies for strains of bacteria and viruses in your area)
3 eggs (from your friendly local farmer of course, who knows you might build a life long friendship by buying eggs this way, it's exactly what happened to me)
6 overly ripe bananas, or two cups of your choice of squash (if you use bananas buy as close to home as possible, and buy organic because most things not organic are Genetically Modified, if you use squash grow it or buy it from your farmer friend)
1/2 C oil (I've used vegetable oil, coconut oil, or olive oil here, even extra virgin doesn't alter the taste of the bread. I have a hard time with oil because the oil that is local isn't really local because it's shipped around the country to be processed and packed and I'm not convinced that it's even that healthy for us anyways. I was pleased to find Costco carrying extra virgin olive oil in glass jars, but it's from Italy not California.)
1/2 C apple sauce (home made or from your granny or some one else that makes it from local/organic apples)
2 tsp Vanilla (are you getting sick of my notes yet? Well I cheat on vanilla and just buy it from the store, I don't even make it! Gasp! Actually I buy Watkins, it tastes better than the store stuff)
1 avocado (which doesn't grow here either, but adds a lot of wonderful moisture and nutrients to this recipe, you could use extra oil and eliminate the avocado if you're purely a local eater)
Dry Ingredients:
3 cups freshly ground whole wheat flour (again, you could use your friendly farmer for this connection, or try to find organic whole wheat flour)
1/2 C. fresh ground flax seed
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt (the good Celtic Sea salt type stuff)
Mix dry ingredients in a bowl, make well in middle, set aside. Puree the bananas or whatever and the avocado and the eggs in another big bowl. I use my immersible blender for this. Add all the other wet ingredients to this banana mixture. Fold wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Pour into 2 loaf pans, or make 24 muffins with it. Sometimes I top them with nuts, chocolate chips, or an oatmeal/sugar/butter mixture. Bake loafs at 325F for 1h20 min and muffins at 325F for 35 min. Make sure you do the tooth pick test because ovens are all different.

You thought I was done talking about food? Nope! A word on meat. That other picture down there was our supper last week. Steak, potatoes, and asparagus. We have wonderful farmer friends, I wasn't kidding about the life long friend because of eggs thing. I went out to Frans house about 4 years ago because I knew she had eggs. Today I don't know what I would do without her, she has become the dearest of friends. All that to say we get our meat from them too. I've blogged about that somewhere so I won't talk about it too much. I just want to say that if you do a little bit of reading, thinking and research you should hopefully come to the conclusion that meat from the grocery store on a Styrofoam thingy should not be bought. It's horrible yucky stuff, not to mention the meat industry and who's pocket that money is getting into. The potato's in that picture are from our garden. Fran actually planted extra potato's for me and had another garden bed out there for my squash and corn. Corn in norther Alberta?! Yes, it's true people, you can even grow asparagus here! Although the asparagus in this picture was a cheat, it's from California. I still cheat a lot on food. About the garden space though. We live in town (for now, boo) and obviously have limited garden space, which I devote to tomatoes, lettuce, herbs, peas, beans, etc. The bigger, and less labour intensive stuff goes out at the farm. My goal is to grow 100% of our food here, but in reality my hubbie loves his Bran Flakes (although I've convinced him the organic stuff in the recyclable bag is better, we'll deal with weaning him from that later) I love my chocolate, coffee and olive oil, and the kids love, well they love everything that typical kids do. Speaking of kids they have been wonderful while I sit here and bore you all to sleep. So now I'll go make supper for them. Thanks for listening, can't wait to hear the comments on this topic:-) Don't be too hard on me, this is what I do for many reasons and it has been a long time to get to this point.
p.s. I would like to add that I'm not judging anyone or saying anyone is wrong, I'm simply telling you about me and what I do, and trying to get people thinking a bit. I would also like to say that I'm no where near 100% local or organic, it's just my ideal. I'm also not a "yuppie" I'm just trying to get back to the way things used to be, like before the Industrial Revolution, ha ha.
p.p.s The ketchup on the plate next to the potato's is homemade with garden tomatoes and carrots, but I didn't need to mention that did I?