Country White Bread

Because I make most of the bread my family eats, I have many opportunities to experiment and try new recipes. I have some fun ones - chocolate, cinnamon raisin, Hawaiian. However, when it comes to basic bread, something with a good texture for making sandwiches, I have two recipes that I have come to rely on, Country White and Oatmeal. Country White has ended up being the one I make the most often because it is super easy and rises reliably. This recipe comes right out of the the booklet that came with my bread machine (Breadmaker Guide & Cookbook, Regal KitchenPro Collection Model #'s K6742 and K6743, page 36). I have made a couple of small modifications based on using the recipe and for personal taste.

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Country White Bread

7 to 9 ounces Milk
1 1/2 tsp Salt
1 Large Egg
1 1/2 tbs Butter, melted
1 tbs Sugar
2 tbs Flax Seed Meal (optional)
4 cups Bread Flour
2 tsp Bread machine Yeast

Place ingredients into the bread machine baking pan in the
order listed (i.e., wet things first then dry ingredients with the yeast
being last). Use the Sweet Bread setting.

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If your machine does not have a Sweet Bread setting, the Regular or Regular-Light setting will probably work. You'll just need to experiment a little bit to get it right.

Do not use this recipe with a timer setting, if your machine is so equipped, because you don't want the milk and egg sitting out at room temperature for an extended time.

Also, pay attention to and regulate the moisture content via the amount of milk you use. In the winter time, when humidity is nonexistent, I use every bit of 9 ounces. However, in the summer, when its 80% humidity I only use 7 or 8 ounces of milk. It will take some practice.

The Quest for Good Nutrition - Ode to Flax

For those friends of ours who have had or will have a sample of my cooking, it seems fair to warn you that you have been or will be consuming flax seed. Over the last couple of years I have been cooking more and more with flax, or rather ground brown flax seed. I put a tablespoon of it in everything I bake, from cookies, to bread, to pancakes. It does not change the texture, taste, or cooking requirements of these items so its a quick and easy change.

I also use flax seed oil whenever I make salad dressing. The oil smokes at higher temperatures so I do not recommend it for cooking but in salad dressings and other recipes that do not require heat, it is great. The taste, though different from olive oil, is just fine.

Why go the trouble you ask? Well, my patented mommy answer is that it's good for you. However, for those who require a bit more data, I will elaborate.

Brown flax seeds contain high levels of lignans and omega-3 fatty acids. There is a golden or yellow flax seed variety but it does not contain the high levels of good stuff that the brown does, so I don't use it. According to some studies, lignans benefit the heart, possess anti-cancer properties, and, in mouse studies, reduced the growth rate of in some tumor types. Flax seed may also lower cholesterol levels (good for those with a history of heart disease) and helps stabilize blood sugar levels (lessening the severity of diabetes and hypoglycemia). Add to all of this laxative properties due to dietary fiber content and it really hard to find a reason not to add it to our diet a tablespoon full at a time.

For the sake of completeness, I should say that consuming large quantities not necessarily recommended because the high fiber may cause constipation for those that don't drink enough water. I have also read warnings about large amounts of flax interfering with oral medications. By large amounts, I mean replacing your wheat consumption with flax seed meal, not a mere tablespoon or two per loaf of bread. Thus, since I don't use large quantities of the stuff, I am confident that I am cooking beneficially.

I find my ground flax seed meal in the health food section of our local grocery store. Out of the brands the store carries, Bob's Red Mill brand has the best price so far, though I still check the numbers periodically. If you can't find Bob's Red Mill at your local store you can order from them directly via the internet. I get a 1 pound bag at a time and it lasts about 2 months depending on how much baking I do and how pancake mornings my youngest son requests. Store it in a sealed container or in the refrigerator to prevent it from going rancid. Happy cooking!

My First Sale

I have made my first sale from my online shop, Hynek's Handmade. A wonderful woman (she must be wonderful because she liked my product) from Elgin, Illinois purchased a little boy's layette, which I had dubbed 'Weigh Anchor'. She made her purchase via PayPal last Friday afternoon, an event which left me momentarily giddy and had my 4 year old son saying, amidst hugs and kisses, "You did it, Mommy! You did it!" Thus, begins my crash course in the nuances and technical requirements of selling and shipping from a web based store.

I use PayPal so as to entertain credit card purchases. I have used PayPal to make purchases for a couple of years now but this is the first time that the money flow has ever been incoming. I discovered Friday afternoon, after the bank had closed it's books for the week, that you have to be a 'verified' PayPal customer to receive payments. This is a process which requires a test 'handshake' between PayPal and your bank account. Thus, I was not going to be able to claim my payment from my first sale until the handshake posted this morning. Already, I am three days later than I prefer in completing my end of the transaction and shipping the product. Not the most auspicious start; but I figured hey, I am new at this. So I penned a quick thank you note, printed up care instructions, gathered up my packing materials, and staged it all to be ready to go first thing this morning. That's when I discovered that the small flat rate box I was confident that I had was no where to be found. Oops.... Well, at least that is cured with a quick trip to the post office near my house. No great delay.

When I first set up my Etsy shop, I had settled on Priority Mail Flat Rate shipping as my method of choice. My thought was that that most of my products were small enough to fit in the smallest of the flat rate boxes which meant $4.95 to anywhere in the USA, a price that seemed reasonable at the time. However, no matter how I folded my little nautical layette, it would not fit in the small Priority box with out mangling the box, a very unprofessional package to say the least. So I located a box that did fit and, with a quick perusal of the USPS website, found that I could still make that $4.95 shipping payment. However, I also discovered that I can probably figure out a way to ship my products for less with a comparable amount of transit time. Ah, but that is a issue I will have to address another time. I must get my beloved first sale shipped to that wonderful woman in Illinois, who is probably already beginning to wonder where the heck her purchase is and why is this seller being such a slacker. I also have to pick my son up from preschool and get all my errands finished before the forecasted snow storm hits trapping me in my house for the next 24 hours; but these are all trivial details.

I walked in to the post office for the second time today, once more giddy with delight at the thought of completing the process of my first sale. The post mistress was great and a font of good information, I wish I could download her brain into my computer. It turns out that Priority Mail does not include package tracking. This is an extra service which costs additional money, beyond the $4.95 that I allotted for shipping. This is the point where I slap my forehead as though I should have had a V-8 and realize that, as a SAHM, I have been away from the business environment too long. OK, so I have had an inept and naive last few days, but I am going to remedy the situation with the shipping comparison spreadsheet that I am building tonight. I am determined to optimize things a bit and make the chaos of today improbable in the future.

The important thing is that the precious little 'Weigh Anchor' set is now on its way to Elgin, Illinois. I hope it gets there alright. I hope my wonderful first customer likes it. I hope it withstands the drool and spit-up to which it will soon be subjected. I hope I measured it right when I sized it.

Note: As of 07/26/2010, a copy of this article is also located at the Hynek's Handmade blog site.

Tending My Knitting

I have been knitting since I was in the 5th grade. I give credit for this to two wonderful women, neither of whom knew how to knit - my mom and my grandmother.

I surprised Mom when I expressed an interest and I remember the look on her face when she told me that it was something that she couldn't teach me. As a parent myself, I now understand what that look meant - "I really wish I could help you, darling, but I just can't. I feel helpless on this one." Seeing my disappointment, Mom suggested what my parents have always done when they did not know something, getting a book. She and I made a special trip to the library and we found a how-to-guide to knitting. Then she dug out her mom's (Grandma Emily's) double pointed sock knitting needles and some old rug yarn which had both been living at the bottom of her sewing box for 25 years or more so that I could practice the stitches pictured in the library book.

A couple of weeks later, I was visiting my grandmother in Houston. She saw me sitting quietly with the library book in my lap practicing my knitting and asked me about it. After I explained what I was up to, she observed that I was running out of yarn. She called a good friend of hers, who knitted, and asked where to shop for such things and got the name of a needle arts store not too far away. I remember walking into that store and being amazed at all the different yarns in the bins that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Then there were the all the different types and sizes of knitting needles and crochet hooks hanging from the floor displays. I was in heaven.

Grandmother explained to the shop keeper what I was doing and I showed the woman my sampler. She made a suggestion for a real first project, a garter stitch afghan in two colors. She wrote down the instructions, set us up with yarn and a pair of knitting needles. I spent my entire two week summer visit with Grandmother working on my afghan. Grandmother was very proud and told all her friends about my project. I still have it to this day tucked away in the bottom of our blanket storage. It is a study in learning to knit. You can see in the stitches where I finally learned the nuances of yarn tension and consistency.

Until I reached my 30's, I had always been shy about my knitting. I made a sweater for Mom, a couple of scarfs for cousins, and a sweater for a college boyfriend (which took a ton of courage). But for the most part, my projects were for personal use and the frequency of my knitting became few and far between. Then our friends started having babies and I picked up my knitting needles again to discover that I liked knitting baby clothes. The projects are small, relatively quick, and satisfying to complete. The compliments on the handmade layettes I have given away have done much to bolster my confidence.

Now I am a stay-at-home-mom seeking a way to feel as though she can provide something to our financial bottom line. After reading some encouraging articles about other women who have made successful businesses with their knitting, I have illusions (or maybe delusions) of grandeur for my own knitting potential, never mind the fact that such businesses have a much lower success rate than even restaurants. But, I have put together a simple business plan, have been chanting the mantra, "Start simple and small and work up", and have picked up my needles again. In the weeks that it has taken me to organize and build a small inventory, I have learned some new techniques/skills and have experimented with different yarn. I have all kinds of product line ideas and I love the creativity that is flowing. So we will see what happens. In the meantime, you can check out my new online store, Hynek's Handmade, on Etsy.

Note: As of 07/26/2010, a copy of this article has been migrated to the Hynek's Handmade blog site.

Potato Soup (Zupa Ziemniaczana)

What do you do when you have a bunch of potatoes that you need to use before they go bad? Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I tend to make soup.

If you ever have occasion to eat at the Kava House & Cafe in Swisher, IA, I highly recommend the Zupa (what they call their potato soup). However, in our quest to save-money-by-not-eating-out-so-much, I decided to see if I could find a recipe that came close. I pulled out an old Polish cookbook that my mom found second hand somewhere and, low and behold, there it was. After several iterations of making the recipe and lots of tweaking to suit my personal taste, I think I've come up with something that surpasses Kava House. My husband and kids all love it as well, which is all that is really important to me.

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Zupa Ziemniaczana

6 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
2 medium carrots, peeled and coarsely diced
2 celery stalks, coarsely diced
1 large leek, coarsely diced
3 qts of meat broth (see separate recipe or use 1-1/2 qts water & 2 cups broth or bouillon)
2 tbs butter
4 tbs all purpose flour
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/4 tsp ground pepper
1 cup skim milk
2 tsp parsley
1 or 2 lbs of bulk sausage (I use venison sausage but pork works too)

Place potatoes, carrots, celery, leeks and parsley in a stock pot. Add water and broth. Cover and cook over medium heat for an hour. Once vegetables are tender, mash with a potato masher a few times just to break the potato chunks up a little finer (we are not going for the complete mashed potato thing here...just break things up a bit to improve the texture). Reduce heat and simmer for at least another 1/2 hour.

In 1/4 cup milk dissolve the flour and whisk out the lumps. Mixture will be uniform and frothy. In a saucepan, melt butter. Stir in salt and pepper. Slowly add milk/flour mixture while stirring. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture bubbles. Slowly add remaining milk while stirring. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly (or it will burn). Remove from heat and pour into broth vegetable mixture. Simmer over low heat stirring every 10 minutes or so to prevent scorching on the bottom for at least another 30 minutes.

In a skillet, cook sausage completely through. Drain and discard the fat (if any). Add cooked sausage to the stock pot.. Simmer for at least 10 more minutes, stirring once. Serve hot.

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The real key to this being an awesome soup as opposed to simply a good soup, is in how you make the broth. But I am going to save that for a different post because it is a stand alone recipe/process. [Please see the 02/25/2010 posting for Homemade Meat Broth.]

This zupa recipe freezes very well so you don't have to try and finish all of this before it goes bad. I serve it with crackers (my boys just have to have crackers) as a stand alone meal. I am still tweaking this recipe a bit every time I make it. So if I come up with a variant that works even better, I will edit this posting.

Now just to cover my butt, in case I haven't altered the original recipe enough to avoid plagerism charges, here is the bibliography info for the Polish cookbook: Marianna Olszewska Heberle. Polish Cooking. HPBooks, Inc., Tucson, AR, 1985. Page31.

Early Childhood Development, School, and Alarmism

DS1 started 3 year old preschool (PreK3) last August. We enrolled him at a small, church affiliated PreK3 about 2 miles down the road and he has been going every Tuesday and Thursday for 2.5 hours per day. Given that DS1 has never been in a day care setting before and we live out in the country (i.e., no neighbors within his age range to play with), we thought it would be a good idea to get him into some kind of preschool setting as early as possible, primarily for social skills training and to make a few friends.

The first couple of weeks were rough because DS1 was in the afternoon class, which was during his nap time (though, he honestly only actually naps about 50% of the time though I do make him lay down for quiet time regardless). I had tried to get him into the morning class when we enrolled and was told it was full. Anyway, after seeing the sleepiness issues, the school agreed to switch him over to the morning class - big improvement.

Then, in November, one of his teachers mentioned that DS1 seemed to have what she viewed as Autistic or Aspergian type behaviors that she wanted us to be aware of. Now DH and I had noticed these same behaviors at home and they constitute things like hand flapping particularly when upset, answering questions by repeating back the last 3 words he heard, trouble focusing on tasks, and getting very upset when things don't work right the very first time. Since I have no idea what is considered "normal" behavior for a 3 year old, I responded as I always do - I did research, lots of research. Within about a week, I had eliminated autism as problem; however, there are a whole host of autistic spectrum behaviors and disorders including OCD, ADHD, and Asperger's Syndrome. I suffer from some OCD type behaviors (inherited from my father's side of the family) and, yes, I seem to have passed some of these on to DS1 and perhaps to DS2, but these are known quantities for me and are not related to the issues the teacher brought up. Asperger's was the only thing that seemed to fit some, not all, of DS1's behavior patterns; however, depending on which test method you use, he either had it or he didn't. These tests are fairly subjective as well (at least in my opinion they are) and, again, I could find no clear definitions for what was considered "normal" behaviors for a 3 year old.

So I called the pediatrician (who did not seem overly worried on this issue) and, at his suggestion, then I called the Grant Wood Area Education Agency and arranged to have DS1 observed by someone more educated on the subject of autism and Asperger's than I. We were assigned to Denese in the early childhood development group. Now, I thought Denese was a child psychologist and I was hoping that she would be able to answer my questions on Asperger's and what constituted "normal" 3-year-old behavior. My initial conversations with Denese left me feeling that she was refraining from giving direct answers until she had observed him and formed on opinion. Come to find out that she is not a child psychologist but a social worker instead. I am always a little nervous around social workers in the context of assessments, but she is nice enough and genuinely seems to want to help us out. I am, however, disappointed that we did not get a doctor's opinion.

After almost 8 weeks of periodic phone calls and rescheduling of the observation, Denese called out of the blue on a Monday in January saying she would be at his school in the morning if that was alright. Uh...OK. After this initial and rather short observation at school and a second, longer observation, Denese finally had an opinion - DS1 is a 3 year old and she did not really see anything that qualified as autism or Asperger's. However, she did note that she thought he had some language delays and made an appointment for us with a Grant Wood speech pathologist, Kelly. Note that no observations were made of DS1 in any other environment other than school at this point.

We met with Kelly in early March and she put DS1 through a standard language skills test for PreK kids. The testing took place in her office which had a couple of shelves of interesting toys which DS2 got to play with while DS1, much to his dismay, had to sit at a table and answer a stranger's questions about some picture in a book. Needless to say, DS1 was not into the testing. He was more concerned with when he could get up and play. If I had thought he would remain calm in that strange environment with me out of the room, I would have taken DS2 and gone for a walk while the test was administered. As it was, I don't think it was a good environment to get a descent set of scores. But what do I know.

Anyway, a week goes by and no results are communicated, so I prompt Kelly with an email and she gives me an informal rundown on what she observed and her opinion via email response. She said she was putting together a formal report and would get a copy of that to me later. To date, I still have not seen this formal report even though I have asked for it twice more. Anyway, in Kelly's opinion, Hank is normal for a 3 year old but his scores show that he "could be at risk for delays later on" and she identified a few areas that we need to work on.

Now keep in mind that at this point, I have gone from being told that my son exhibits autistic or Aspergian behavior to "he has some language skills deficits" to "he is at the low end of average which might put him at risk later on". It seems to me that everyone in this entire set of events, not matter how well intentioned they are, has been more than a little alarmist with me. They succeeded in worrying the heck out of me only to tell me in the end that “well he is 3”.

Quite frankly, in my humble and perhaps uneducated opinion, DS1 is just developing at his own pace following his own interests. Who cares if that pace and those interests don't happen to be “average”. I still don't have a clear definition of what is "normal" behavior for a 3 year old beyond what described in my American Academy of Pediatrics Handbook. Noone has been able to answer that question even though I have kept asking it. I don’t want to be one of those parents that says “not my child” to a teacher and turns a blind eye to potential trouble; but, geeezz, I can certainly understand now why a lot of parents do.

So where are we now? Well, Denese found another Grant Wood speech pathologist, Sue, who gives half hour early childhood language skills classes on Friday mornings at a nearby elementary school and suggested that DS1 would get some benefit from attending. I emailed Sue and DS1, DS2, and I have attended the last couple of classes. Sue is nice and good with kids and the classes are centered around a story and a game to incorporates the skill we're working on that day. However, near as I can tell, she seems to focus mostly on pronunciation, which is what the other kids in the class need help with. This is not DS1's issue at all. His identified skill deficits are based more on social uses of language and some cognitive understanding of some words. We have been working with him at home on these issues and Denese did talk with his teachers at school about how to incorporate some of this training into the daily class routine. I am already seeing improvement on these identified issues. We will continue with the Friday classes, which end with the school year in a couple of weeks, mainly because it doesn't hurt anything to attend and I am loathe to set aside social worker's suggestion for fear of being labeled a bad mother. (An unfounded fear, I know, but one that goes to the heart of my nightmares. However, my fears, unfounded or otherwise, are a topic for a different post.)

For those interested, I did a ton of research on Asperger's Syndrome during the course of this ordeal and its really a fascinating subject. I have all kinds of info on dietary changes and social skills training that are supposed to benefit Aspergians and kids suffering from autism. I can also suggest website and further reading if you want to learn more. Just send me an email or leave a comment.