Happy March and Beef Wellington

 Happy March!

I called my grandfather this morning and wished him a happy March and he told me this little saying that my great grandmother used to say:

“A pinch and a punch, first of March.”

“A punch and a kick for being so quick.”

It was new to me. Have you heard it before?

Today I made Beef Wellington. This was my second time and it is surprisingly easy. We get a cow butchered from time to time when our freezer gets low so we end up with every cut of meat- otherwise I would probably never buy such an expensive cut. We opted for the beef tenderloin roast instead of the filet mignon steaks this past time so I get to try to make this fancy dish. 

It starts with a seared beef tenderloin in the middle smothered in mustard. This is then wrapped in a layer of prosciutto smeared with cooked mushroom paste. And then the entire package is wrapped in a puff pastry dough brushed with egg yolks and sprinkled with salt. The key is not to roast it too long. Recipe says to cook it to 125-130 F, but it’s better to cook it to an internal temperature of 110 F and let it rest to 125-130 F. My husband really likes a rare steak so this is a must for our house. 

Yummy! So tender and delicious. I literally cut my slice of meat with a fork and it was as easy to slice as a piece of pumpkin pie. 

Simply Recipes had an easy to follow recipe for making the Beef Wellington. The first time I made it, I really dreaded making the puff pastry because I’d heard it was a lot of work, but I think it is easier than making pie crust because it only has 4 ingredients. An Italian in My Kitchen has a very simple recipe for Puff Pastry with easy to follow directions and pictures.

Homemade Pasta

I’ve been making pasta from scratch more lately. It is so much better than store bought!  My husband bought me a hand crank pasta roller and cutter from Lee Valley. It will cut it into thin spaghetti style pasta or thicker fettuccine style pasta.  

The ingredients are pretty simple: mostly just eggs and flour with a little oil and salt. I’ve been using just simple white all purpose flour but some recipes recommend wheat semolina flour. I happened to see that Wholesale Club has big bags of it last time I was there. If the price is okay, I might try it. 

I’m still working out the right amount of flour to egg. The dough is sometimes too wet and doesn’t cut cleanly or too dry that it’s super difficult to mix. 

This time I served Beef Stroganoff and corn with it. So yummy!

Flower Embroidery Patch for Jeans

 I’ve decided to try taking up embroidery. I’ve done a lot of cross stitching in the past, but only briefly tried regular embroidery 10 years ago. For my first attempt, I thought I’d just make a patch for my old jeans. But it turned out so nice, it almost seems a shame to put it on an old pair of jeans. I’ll have to show the jeans once I’ve got the patch on, but for now, here is the finished embroidery. 

Homemade Flour Tortillas

 

I’ve made flour tortillas before but my sister passed on this recipe to me that she uses. It is so much better. The tortillas are much more flexible and moist and easier to roll out. They turned out awesome and all were eaten the same night. 

Homemade Mac and Cheese

 I made macaroni and cheese from scratch tonight for supper. I don’t usually buy things like velveeta, cheese whiz or american cheese so I was pretty happy my Good Housekeeping Cookbook had a recipe that just asked for cheddar cheese. 

The roux had onions in it for extra flavour and instead of bread crumbs, I used cracker crumbs for the topping. It turned out pretty good. A double recipe yielded a very full 9x13 pan and there was still half a pan left for tomorrow’s lunch. (A few of the kids weren’t too hungry as we’d had clementines and zucchini muffins for a late afternoon snack, while others went back for seconds and thirds.)

Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream

 My oldest son asks to make cake almost daily. I bought a few cake mixes and have been getting him to make cupcakes. I supervise, but he’s ten and can do most of it himself.

I’ve been making Favourite Chocolate Buttercream from Sally’s Baking Addiction and it is so delicious. I tried her Favourite Vanilla Buttercream, but for me, it was a bit too sweet. Maybe I’m just too much of a chocolate lover, but her chocolate buttercream is divine.

We have our “blast chiller” now. In the winter, we often set baked goods out on our balcony to cool down quickly in the negative 20’s and 30’s. It’s convenient since it’s just off the kitchen. I prefer no sprinkles, but the kids will always want sprinkles. Actually, those chocolate sprinkles are pretty good. Next time I’ll have to get some of those.

Building a Ship

 My oldest son is always working on something whether it’s drawing or making melty bead things, or collecting and growing seeds. Recently he took up this project of building a boat from cardboard, craft paper and skewer sticks. He must’ve used up half a dozen glue gun sticks. But he is having loads of fun.

In the above picture, he put his plant pots inside to hold up his masts then later he glued on the deck and fastened the masts on. It even has a Crow’s Nest.

Venezuelan Sancocho

 I remember this soup that my friend’s mom made for me in Venezuela many years ago. It was so good that I could still remember what it tasted like so many years later after only having it once. It was a broth based soup with a variety of root vegetables including yucca and a rich cilantro flavour. When I saw yucca being sold in the stores, I finally decided to see if I could figure out what it was and ended up finding this soup called Sancocho that is made with different variations in Puerto Rico, Columbia and many other Latin countries including Venezuela. 

I followed the recipe for Easy Venezuelan Sancocho fromMommy’s Home Cooking. It was just what I was looking for. I’ve made it twice now (the second time without the yucca since it wasn’t available) and both time it was amazing. We get our beef butchered straight from the farmer so I replaced the Hind Shank with a beef bone and stewing beef and it was a good fit. I remembered my friend’s mom had put in a purple root vegetable and we happened to grow Purple potatoes in our garden this past summer so I threw some of those in as well. It was the right decision. 

It took me a while to figure out what the Yautia/ Ocumo was in the recipe. Around here it is called Taro Root and is usually available in the stores. Checking out is always fun because the cashiers never know what it is and can’t find it on their code sheet. The only thing that was different is that this recipe was a bit sweeter than my memory’s soup was and I think it is because of the corn. I don’t think my friend’s mom put corn in that time. One of these days maybe I’ll try it without the corn and see how it is. But all in all, it is delicious and I really love it!

I wish I could have served it with Cassabe crackers like we would have in Venezuela, but I don’t have that so I chose some other Venezuelan favourites. I served the soup with arepas, a typical Venezuelan fried cornmeal pancake. Yum! So simple and easy!

And all of my family loves the Venezuelan tejadas, pan-fried sliced plantain bananas. So yummy!

Gingerbread

 Seems like every winter the kids want to make gingerbread houses. It is becoming a New Year’s tradition. Usually we make a little house for each of them with graham crackers stuck on a little milk carton, but this year I actually made Gingerbread.

I used a neat cookie cutter for gingerbread houses that my husband bought for me a couple years ago. (The brand is Ricardo.)

The icing I made turned out really great. It hardened really nicely and was the right consistency. I used the Royal Icing Recipe from Preppy Kitchen. I was pretty hesitant to colour the icing since I didn’t want to make the cookie decorating more complicated that it already would be with all the kids, but the kids were really eager so I ended up separating the triple batch of icing into bowls and adding the colouring for the kids to mix. It actually worked out really wonderfully with the disposable decorating bags. 

I placed each bag in a tall glass, added the coloured icing, and tied the tops closed with the rubberband. When we were all set to go, I just cut the tip and taught the kids how to use them without the icing coming out of the top. Hold the top of the bag with one hand, twist with the other hand where the rubberband is until the bag is tight around the icing and then squeeze out the icing onto the cookie. It actually worked really well so even my four year old was decorating the cookies without any help from me. I helped my three year old twist it and let her squeeze while I guided it.

We just bought Smarties and Reese’s Pieces to keep it simple this year. I would have been better to stick with Smarties since the peanut butter in the Reese’s doesn’t really go with Gingerbread. Although I do wish I’d gotten some mint candies as well.

All in all, it was very fun and I would definitely do it again this with the coloured icing in the disposable bags.

Cookies

I was so happy with how these cookies turned out. I’ve been wanting to make piped butter cookies for a while now. I love how they all turn out in with these beautiful designs depending on how they are piped. Then I melted chocolate chips and dipped them. I followed the recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction for her Homemade Butter Cookies. They turned out beautifully. 

I also had a hankering for a cookie my mom used to make growing up and went looking for the recipe for these Dutch Spice Cookies. These cookies actually have a few names, others being Dutch Windmill Cookies or Speculaas. I followed the recipe I found on Curious Cuisiniere for Dutch Speculaas Cookies. I remember my mom chilling the dough that had been rolled into a log and wrapped in ceran wrap and then slicing up the log into circles for the round cookies. That is way easier than rolling it out and cutting out shapes and plus it was almost midnight when I was doing this so I wasn’t too eager to spend extra time rolling and cutting dough. Maybe next time, but for now this was super easy and they turned out really nice. Yum!

Potato and Leek Soup with Skillet Bread

I love Potato and Leek Soup. It’s pretty much potato soup with the onions replaced with leeks that give it such a wonderful flavour. I have lots of potatoes right now. We got some from our garden this summer and then we picked a couple huge bags up from some local farmers selling potatoes on the side of the road. I made Potato Pancakes a couple days ago and have been looking forward to this potato soup as well. I was so happy that I had 33% cream and fresh parsley on hand to put in and make it really rich and flavourful.

Maybe serving bread with potato soup is carb overkill but I usually serve bread with soup so I’m going with it today. It’s not like we eat only starches every meal. Haha! 

This Skillet Bread with Fennel Seed is one of my go-to recipes. It’s pretty fast and easy to make and is actually my only use for my ginormous 16” skillet right now. I made a double recipe and split it between my 12” and 16” skillet. 

You can find the recipe for this Skillet Bread with Fennel Seed at https://sweetpaulmag.com/food/breads/skillet-bread-with-fennel/.

All ready to serve!

Grasslands National Park

 Have you gotten a chance to explore Canada's natural beauty? Grasslands is our favourite place to go camping and we try to go every summer. When people ask where we're going camping, they usually have no clue where we're talking about even for people from Saskatchewan which is the province Grasslands is in. They can't believe we'd choose to go camping at a place where there is no beach, no showers and it is super windy. But we love Grasslands and I'll tell you why!

There's a reason Saskatchewan is called the land of the living skies. In the prairies, you can see miles and miles away especially if you find a high point to look down from. There are no trees to block your view. With the sky being so vast, this is one place where you can realize just how small we are on the earth. The sky is absolutely gorgeous and there are lovely lookout places where you can see the sunset over the vast space of land and the river run along in a snake of green on the prairies. On the far hills you might be able to see small black specks that binoculars will reveal to be bison. It is so beautiful. 

Because of the lack of trees and flat land, the wind can really pick up. This can make tenting difficult. Our tent pegs really well into the ground, but I've seen other tenters give up trying to set up their tent and opt for one of the otentiks. Most of the other visitors are in campers. The wind can make dishing out meals a little difficult too, but both the East and West Block Camping areas have a building campers can use for shelter and cook their food in if it is too difficult at the site. There are even propane barbeques available for use. But the wind really is wonderful. The days are so hot but the wind makes really helps to cool down and another plus to the wind is the lack of bugs. I've been to so many campsites surrounded by trees with no scenic view from the actual campsite where you are just getting eaten alive. It's miserable. But where there is wind, there are no mosquitoes. Yay!

There is so much wildlife. My husband loves to bird watch so this is a great place to do it from. There is such a huge amount of bird life there, from birds that nest in the grass and hop around hiding in the grass to birds of prey souring high up in the skies. The littlest kids loved to watch the ground squirrels come around investigating for food. After one meal, a little ground squirrel hopped into our pot we'd mixed pancakes in and left a little present for us. The kids liked watching the holes to see if the animals would pop up although we'd warned them not to dig in the holes as there could be tarantalas, black widows, rattle snakes or other biting creatures hiding in such holes. My kids also like looking for bugs and there are lots of grasshoppers and other small insects living in the grass. The West Block has other animals such as the bison, prairie dogs, and burrowing owls.

Besides wild animals, there is a lot of plant life. You might think that it is just grass, but there are a lot of varieties of grass, sage brush, cacti and wild flowers there. At the office, you can get a brochure that lists a lot of flowers that bloom there with a picture of the flower, it's name, the time of year it blooms and little boxes to check off if you found it. The smell is so fresh there because of all the grass too, it is so lovely. 

It is hot in the afternoon, so we often take a siesta in the tent at that time of day. We can open up all the windows on our tent to let the wind pass through. It is so relaxing to listen to the wind rustle the grasses and feel the shaded warmth of the sun in the afternoon like that. If the kids really need a cool down, we'll go for an afternoon scenic drive in our air conditioned van. 

Grasslands National Park is also a dark sky preserve. It is so far from any bigger towns that the night sky can provide a great view of the stars with no light pollution.

Although the East Block doesn't have bison or prairie dogs, but it does have lots of fossils. Dinosaur bones have been found there and my children easily found small pieces of petrified wood and fossils from animals. They were doing the test in which you lick your finger and touch it to the rock to see if your finger sticks to the rock to see if it was a fossil. They licked a lot of rocks. Haha!

We love Grasslands, the fresh natural beauty, the vast expanse of skies, and the variety of wildlife and plant life that we can explore there! It is a great place to take the kids and enjoy the creation that God made!

Online Resources for Home Education

So I'm sure you are all feeling the effects of the social changes with the current pandemic. If you have kids in school, you are definitely undergoing some big changes of suddenly having to educate at home. We are probably not being affected as dramatically as others since we already do most things from home, but there have been some notable changes. The kids no longer have swim or gymnastics classes and we can no longer get books from the library. The last issue has caused me to rely more heavily on online books so I wanted to share some of the online resources I am making use of.

Picture Books

I had been reading a picture book to the kids each day of our school. But now have turned to YouTube quite a bit to find some videos of other people reading the books aloud. There are actually lots! Most books I am interested in reading to the kids, I can find an video of someone reading it aloud. 

Besides Youtube, we are using Storyline Online for our daily picture book. The kids are loving it! They are especially quiet and attentive for these. It has appropriate background music to set the mood and close up views of the pictures in the book. All the readers have been really excellent that I've heard so far and begin with a short introduction of themselves and the book and conclude with something for the audience to think about. 

Reading Eggs

I had been interested in this before when I got a free trial in the past, but I finally bought a family subscription for 1 year. It really wasn't that expensive for all that is offered, $89 for 4 kids for a year. 

Reading Eggs teaches phonics in a step by step fashion through games and short video clips. It starts with the letters teaching the sounds they make and start putting them together to make words eventually teaching kids to read on their own. 

After the Reading Eggs, there is Reading Eggspress for kids who can already read. Although some of my kids can read, they haven't made much use of this part of the program, but I would like to try to interest them in it as it has a lot of books loaded there for them to read. 

The Mathseeds part is a fun way to practice math. The visuals are really great so they can see the numbers with the number of objects. I'm interested to see just how difficult the lessons will get. My kids are finding it pretty easy so far but the highest lesson they've gotten is 50 and there are 200 lessons. 

I should mention that there is a placement test to take before starting each of these so that the child can be placed at the appropriate spot in the lessons. Although my older two pretty much passed through the Reading Eggs portion, I wanted them to have more practice with long vowels and so set them back to that lesson to progress from there. As a parent, you can change where they are at if they are finding it too difficult or easy or just want to give them extra practice on something. 

The last section I didn't mention yet, is the Reading Eggs Junior which is for preschoolers. It has puzzles, matching and sorting games and other games for learning colours, numbers, letters and more. There is also access to short videos and books that are read aloud with pages to turn. There is a lock on the Reading Eggs Junior that won't allow you to leave the page unless you enter the correct numbers. 

I've been pretty pleased with this program and consider it well worth the money for the kids to have that extra practice with their reading through fun games that they will look forward to.

Scholastic

Scholastic has a section on their website called Scholastic Learn at Home right now.  It is divided by grade level groups. I am mostly using the PreK and Kindergarten and the Grades 1 and 2 section. Then it is divided into weeks with 5 days in the week. Each day contains a video of a picture book being read aloud, a non-fiction book that can also be read aloud and a couple of games. Then it has a learning video from a series called Watch and Learn that teaches something related to the story book and has a short quiz at the end. Then there is an suggested activity. For the preschoolers it is usually some sort of pretend play and for the Grades 1 and 2 it is usually to draw something creative like designing your own spider or draw community you live in or listen and draw what you hear. I was surprised how much my kids liked these. And it is nice for me to just sit quietly and let the computer to the talking for a while. (Does your voice get hoarse when you are teaching all morning? Mine does.)

Audio Chapter Books

I was lucky and had just taken out two chapter books that I wanted to read to the kids from the library just before it closed. But now that I've finished them, I've been looking for a way to continue our literature time with another book. There are lots of free audio books online right now.

I am planning to use Audible Stories: Free Audiobooks for Kids to read Alice in Wonderland. There are lots of other books on there at varying levels so I hope to continue using it. I was reading aloud to the kids while the kids to their drawings. (We do nature drawings every other day working through our bird book right now, and a page from Draw Write Now on the other day.) I'm looking forward to letting the computer do the reading for me and getting to join the kids and draw alongside them. 

Internet Archive

There is a huge archive online of books, many of them too old to still be copyrighted, but still good books. This Internet Archive holds many other things besides, but I like to use it for the books. I discovered that most of the old Hooked on Phonics books are uploaded onto this site. Great practice for the kids who are just starting to read! Some of the Thornton Burgess books are on there like the Burgess Bird Book, Animal Book and Flower Book. There are lots of classic books on there too like Mr. Popper's Penguins, A Little Princess and Chronicles of Narnia. Lots of Little Miss books too. I'm sure there are lots of things I haven't even thought to look up but besides digital books that you can flip the pages through, there are audio books too although I haven't tried them yet.

Other Educational Videos and Episodes

The most obvious resource is probably Netflix. It has Our Planet episodes, Magic School Bus, Wild Kratts, Sid the Science Kid and many other great educational videos.

We use Watch Cartoon Online quite a bit too. There are lots of preschool educational cartoons such as Blues Clues, Curious George, Creative Galaxy, Dinosaur Train and other non educational stories like Bubble Guppies, Bob the Builder, Thomas the Train, and Llama Llama. You could never exhaust this resource in your lifetime. I use it for additional episodes of Wild Kratts that haven't been put on Netflix yet too. There are lots of movies there as well, if there is something your looking for, all animated of course. But we enjoyed getting to watch the video after reading the book for Winnie the Pooh, the Wizard of Oz and Stuart Little all at this site.

I mention Youtube again here because it also contains lots of educational episodes. I like to go there to watch Bill Nye's science shows when it relates to what we are studying. There's also a neat science "youtuber" (is that what you call a person who posts videos on youtube?) called SciShow Kids. She posts about all sorts of science things, many of them questions that her fans have written to ask her to post about. Many of the posts are less than 5 minutes each, a length of time I don't usually mind adding to our school day if it helps explain or draw interest to the subject we are studying. She posts about such a variety of topics that almost anything we are studying I can find a post that relates to the topic. She has a puppet mouse that accompanies her and has real footage as well as cartoons of the topic to explain how things work.


Spanish Language

PBS has published a series of episodes called Salsa for Spanish language study. The language is simple and they make use of puppets for the characters in the show. Most of the episodes are based on well known children's stories and make use of simple phrases and specific vocabulary that is repeated over and over in the episode to cement the words in. All the talking is entirely in Spanish with no other language spoken in the episodes. Each episode is about 15 minutes. My kids really like these and have asked to watch them again.

I will mention here that many shows on Netflix can have the audio changed to another language. This can create some difficulty in understanding if the speakers are still moving their lips to the English words though. However, Peppa Pig has been reworked in Spanish with natural language and the cartoons moving their mouths with the Spanish words. We are learning about pets right now in our Spanish lessons and I was planning to watch the episode in which Peppa's school class bring their pets to school for a pet contest. Peppa Pig is also in German, French and Italian. I don't know if the cartoons move their mouths to go with each of these languages, but it definitely does in Spanish.

In Conclusion

In addition to all these other things I like to look for clips on youtube that relate to what we are studying. When we draw our bird from our bird book, I like to find a short clip of the real bird in the wild with the sound it makes. When we are learning about a certain famous place from our history it's nice to see the actual place in a video clip- we looked up the Parthenon in Greece and the Nazca Drawings in Peru. We may never visit these places in real life but we can at least see what they actually look like instead of just reading about it in a book. (A picture is worth a thousand words.)

What an amazing resource the internet is! I realize it can be a huge time sucking hindrance in our life, but it also can provide an endless amount of learning if we are using it properly.

Pies and More Pies

My husband got me a food processor and a mixer for my birthday/ mother's day. Did you know you can make pastry dough in a Cuisinart food processor? Well you can! It does a really good job too. I had a busy day last Saturday in the kitchen making these pies. As you can see my kids have already had their fingers in them, but they still tasted great. And I didn't cook then for my Mother's Day Sunday dinner. Yay! 

I made a French Silk Pie, Lemon Meringue and two Chicken Pot Pies. One went in the freezer for an easy meal later.

Nazca Drawings

We had a lesson last week in our history about the Nazca Indians of South America. It was an ancient civilization, but one of the most amazing things they left behind were these giant drawings they had carved into the earth that were only discovered when pilots started flying overhead and spotted them. The drawing were so big, they weren't recognizable from the ground. So when were were at the park on Sunday and the kids were complaining there wasn't enough play equipment to go around, I suggested they make Nazca drawings in the sand. They came up with some pretty neat ideas all on their own.

Primary and Secondary Colours Lesson

I love when normal family life and school mesh together. 

Today was my third son's 6th birthday. I made him a chocolate cake and proceeded to make Fluffy White Frosting to put on top. My son requested a rainbow cake, so I said I could make one but only with three colours: red, blue and yellow. 

The kids were actually really disappointed after seeing there were only those three colours and green in the food colouring box and insisted that there were six colours in the rainbow. So I insisted there were three and proceeded to mix all the frosting in three separate bowls with the three primary colours. 

Then I took out three more bowls and put two colours together and got them to mix them. They were so amazed to see the colour change and their interest was piqued to see what colour the next two colours would mix into. 

I then got to explain that all the colours are made up of these three colours and even brown was made from all three mixed together. I talked a little then about what primary colours and secondary colours were. I was pleased to see they were really thinking when one asked about black and then explained that black and white and all the colours in between like gray are shades, not colours and some animals and even people can't see in colour but only black and white. 

Then I showed them the ink packets in our printer. There are actually only the three colours and black that make all the other colours for printing. They were so impressed. So glad we could have that lesson on colours with a a special treat for my sons birthday. I hope to follow it up with a colouring lesson with pencil crayons in which I only allow then to use those three colours. We'll see. Maybe we'll try it with cross hatching too. I'll have to think about it. Sometimes I try things like that and have to tone back on the difficulty and just stick with simple colouring. Ha!

Cheese Lovers

Do your kids like cheese? Do you have a little cheese biter in your family? This is how the cheese usually looks in our family thanks to a little 3 year old that likes to take bites out of it. He will sometimes mistake the butter for cheese as well so the butter tends to look similar!

Giant Water Bug

This giant bug was in the water table in our backyard. It is about an inch and a half long and I was so shocked when I saw it. I didn't know we had such big bugs in this part of the world.

Excercising with Your Kids

So I'm curious. Do you exercise with your kids?