How to Make Homemade Vegetable Broth

 Into two crock pots, I put zucchini, carrots, onions, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, whole garlic cloves (and cilantro steams, because I happened to have them on hand. Instead of throwing them away, I put them in the broth.) I used all the small pieces and ends of vegetables I had saved and froze from the chopping at the start of meals. I also put in some fresh, whole vegetables I had in the fridge. I filled the crocks up with water and put them on low for ten hours. 

At the end of the time, I let the broth cool a bit, strained the cooked vegetables out, discarded them, and poured the broth into pitchers in the fridge. I am freezing the broth into Souper Cubes, so I can store them in the freezer until they are needed. This vegetable broth will be perfect for our curried chickpeas, a dish we make once a week and eat over rice for lunches. I also used some of this broth mixed with beef broth in a beef stew, since the beef stew had many of the same flavors as the vegetable broth- garlic, onion, and carrots, etc. 

Making my own vegetable will save several dollars per meal, because I won't have to buy boxes of vegetable broth from the store. Note: My whole family remarked at how good this broth smelled, and we know it will taste great. I make chicken and beef broth all the time, but this is the first time I've made vegetable broth. Until now, we didn't have any recipes that called for vegetable broth, but now that we are eating more healthily, we eat a few meals that need vegetable broth consistently.  

Opa!

Hooray! 

Dwayne and I are going to Greece this summer! 

We will be traveling with a group from our church to historic sites, especially those visited by Paul in the New Testament- including Athens! 

I've been reading Plato for years. Now I'm reading several of Aristotle's works for graduate school, so this trip is very personal to me. 

We studied Acts in church several months ago, and I became fascinated that it seems like Luke was deliberately speaking to the Greeks and making Paul out to be a new Aeneas. 

I'm fascinated with the connections between these Greek texts and ideas and the New Testament.  

My love of Scripture and my love of the Classic Greco Roman world combine in one perfect vacation! 

This trip feels like a kiss from God.

But I always joked that I'd never sail in the Aegean or Mediterranean. 

Having read the myths, it does not seem like a good idea, but this trip includes a three-four day cruise. 

Hopefully, it will not be anything like Gilligan's three hour tour or Odysseus's ten year journey home. 

In addition to the texts I am reading for graduate school, I will be assigning myself a reading list to prepare my imagination for the journey. 

First up, I reread Theseus and the Minotaur, since we will be visiting Crete and the ruins of a palace that what might have belonged to King Minos. 

Catan Tournament

Dwayne and I participated in a Catan Tournament at a local board game store. We both won 2 out of 3 games. We earned $40 dollars that we put towards the price of a new expansion- Explorers and Pirates. 

One Room Homeschool

Adele will often go to Avril for help with Latin. She doesn't have to go to her sister. She could come to me. But she likes going to her sister. And it's fun for me to watch them together discussing, laughing, commiserating. This picture represents what I love about homeschooling. There's no competition or compulsion. Learning is something we do together as a way of life, and those of us who are further along are constantly helping those still coming along the way and gaining even more mastery as we help them. 

Eating At Home

I made "Lad's Prime Rib Recipe" from Pioneer Woman with the mashed potatoes and the au jus this week. I added green peas, because we needed a vegetable, and I love to have peas with mashed potatoes. It was delicious! And we had meals with the leftovers. 

Dwayne pointed out that this prime rib actually costs less than what our favorite fast food restaurant costs when we all go out and order a combo. That seems insane. But it's true. 

We haven't eaten at a restaurant in weeks. The biggest reason we stopped eating at restaurants is because Norah and I can't eat anything with gluten, dairy, or sugar while we are treating our Lyme and co-infections, so that really limits menu options. 

And even the best restaurants add a lot of extras to their food, and after one bite now, we can all tell, since we have all grown more sensitive to sugar, butter, etc. 

We all begin to hesitate to eat anything at restaurants. So most of the temptation we once felt to go out to eat is basically entirely gone. 

Given our situation, we find it is usually easier to make what we crave at home, and we try and often succeed to make it better and fresher with less junk in it. 

We're eating well- making prime rib, pulled pork, pho, French fries- all the things we might have gone out to get before, because we didn't' know how to make them or weren't comfortable trying. 

We're all growing brave, knowledgable, and skilled in the kitchen, cooking and baking more and more- even with the limitations to our diet. 

And when we want "a break" from cooking, we just make simpler meals at home- chicken salad, homemade soups, egg sandwiches, etc. 

Eating more at home means we are buying more groceries, of course. 

We're also buying different and better groceries, too, so that adds to the expense in some cases. 

So we spend more on groceries than before, but we're not spending anything on restaurants, so the costs work out. 

By eating at home and cooking most things from scratch, we're controlling what we eat, we know exactly what's in our food, we're eating better, wholer, more nutritious foods, even when what we make isn't considered healthy food. We're all definitely feeling better, healing, and in general, having far nicer meals than anything we can get from most restaurants anyway!

In almost every way, in almost every case, we find that eating at home is better than eating at restaurants. 

Let Them Bake Cake!

Adele's reading "A Gathering of Days" for our homeschool right now. She came across a cake recipe in the book that she wanted to try, so I let her.  We're able to do more of that sort of thing since we aren't working on a homeschool community schedule that demands we finish a certain amount of material in a given week. Now that we're homeschooling solo, we can set our own limits on the week doing more or less, depending on what we want. 

In general, I'm letting the girls do more cooking and baking now, but not only that, I'm also asking/ assigning them to cook or bake something consistently as part of of their chores or schoolwork, depending on how the recipe fits into our day.

Looking back on the years homeschooling their older sister, I wish I had allowed her to cook and bake more, but she had so much homeschool work to do in a certain amount of time to be ready for our homeschool community meeting once a week that I couldn't imagine adding cooking or baking to her schedule. It would have been cruel to add more. 

But she might have been more prepared for adult life with more consistent practice. Though she is cooking and baking well anyway. She made black bean soup and tomatillo salsa for the family just a few days ago. So, as it goes, one can always learn things later, of course. 

But I would have had more help with the cooking and baking once she had learned to cook. That's the thing about Mom insisting on doing it herself. Mom ends up being the only who can do stuff, and that's no good for Mom or anyone else. 

So that's been one of the greatest blessings of letting go and letting the younger girls get in there and cook and bake (and make messes) in the kitchen more- there are simply more cooks and more baked goods in the house! And the more often they do the same thing, the better they get at it, and the easier it is on me, because the messes usually get smaller and smaller as they become more experienced. 

Paint Your Way Through Biology

Avril's taking another semester of Paint Your Way through Biology with Delightful Art Co. 

She makes a beautiful page like this weekly, incorporating art with the biology she's studying this year. 

Biology is full of facts, but it's all so beautiful! 

It would wrong not to take time to notice that. 

So I'm glad her ability to see the beauty in Biology is being nurtured right along with learning all the content and facts. 

Note: She's working through Apologia's Biology, doing some labs, keeping a lab journal, writing a few, formal lab reports, and she's also reading the text/ watching the videos of Devotional Biology as well.