We Moved: The Before and After Edition

 

I still can't find my daughter's doll bed, and the library claims we have one of their children's books, which, I mean, we might in a tub of Christmas decorations somewhere (because I've unpacked all of our books and it's nowhere to be found, so I'm banking on it being some place utterly ridiculous), but we are home, and it is the most lovely feeling. 

Especially when you can't leave. 

 

My husband spent the past year renovating, adding onto, and pouring his blood, sweat, and highly caffeinated self into his childhood home, the one his grandparents and then parents lived in as well. 

I kept the children alive. He poured concrete. I packed boxes. He got to know the folks at Lowe's and Menards so well they're practically sending each other Christmas cards.  

These are a few of the before and afters.

 

But after months of decisions on his part and "Wait. Did I say I wanted . . . ?" on my part, we are here. And it very much feels like home. 

Our big kids still ask about the "old house" sometimes and wonder if we're moving back or who's living there or why we couldn't move the old house into the new house. But slowly, little by little, they're becoming acclimated too, even if the first week after moving there were countless tears because little people couldn't remember where the new potties were or how to find their room. #toddlerproblems

So when it comes to practicing social distancing? We have a new house to roam, front and back yards made of mud for sloshing around in, and plenty of fresh air. We're here for it. 

Besides, we're farmers. If the TP really does run out, there are always corn husks. 

PS If you can believe it, this pantry used to be a bathroom!

So here's to staying home, staying calm, staying determined, staying joyful, staying in the Word, staying thankful . . . one day at a time.

Christmas Funfetti Cake Batter Truffles

My friend Sarah and I recently discovered that we have been baking Christmas cookies together every year for four years. We started out baking for an afternoon in my dinky kitchen in my little apartment in St. Louis, and now we've graduated to her spending the night and a Saturday baking away in the farmhouse kitchen.



She's a baking guru. As in, she made two cheesecakes while I . . . sat and was largely unhelpful. 

(My farmer also pointed out that the filaments aren't touching on my light bulb cookies, thus rendering them defunct. This is how you know you're married to a handy man.) 

Sarah also whipped up these Christmas Funfetti Cake Batter Truffles from Lauren's Latest, which were so tasty that I had to hide the ones she left us in the back of the freezer so my farmer couldn't find them. 

PLUS, you can get all the ingredients at Aldi, which is a big deal for those of us who don't like making nine stops at fourteen different grocery stores while out shopping. #thestruggleisreal PLUS PLUS, they have milk in them so . . . dairy!

This Christmas, channel your inner Sarah, hollow out a half hour to mix these truffles up, and pop these bad boys in the fridge/freezer for enjoying with your friends and family. 

If my mouth wasn't full of one right now, I'd tell you that you won't be sorry you made these. But . . . since I'm licking sprinkles off my fingers, you're just going to have to trust me on this one.

Deal? 

Christmas Funfetti Cake Batter Truffles

1 cup white cake mix
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon Christmas sprinkles + more for decoration
1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips or vanilla almond bark

DIRECTIONS:

In a large bowl, whisk cake mix, flour and sugar. Stir in melted butter, vanilla, milk and sprinkles. Mixture should be moist and be able to hold its shape easily when formed. Using a cookie scoop, form mixture into even balls and refrigerate 20-30 minutes.

In the mean time, melt chocolate in a double boiler or slowly in the microwave. Using a fork, drop one of the cake batter truffles into the chocolate and roll around to coat. Tap off the excess gently and transfer to cookie sheet lined with wax paper. Top with more sprinkles, if desired.

thanksgiving 2015

It's never good to step on the scale after Thanksgiving. It's an especially bad idea when you're pregnant. Nothing good can come of it. Just don't. Or don't look. Or live in denial. You have options. 

That's really the only downside to Thanksgiving. The upsides are countless. You get to spend time with your family, discussing everything from manure management plans to how to build life together in churches. Because that's what happens when you've got a pastor and farmers in the family. 

You can also wear princess dresses and help your grandma make the cranberries, but I really only recommend that if you're a 3-4-year-old girl. 

You can peel potatoes because you're the mashed potato queen . . . Ok, so the KitchenAid is the mashed potato queen but somebody has to show that thing who's boss. It also helps to have cute nephews nearby to pick up any scraps you may drop. 

You can eat until you feel like you're about to pass out. Or you can't breathe, which is really just like any other day if you're pregnant. Juicy Alton Brown turkey, lumpless mashed potatoes with sour cream and butter, homemade rolls, sweet potato bread pudding, strawberry pretzel salad . . . 

You can order up a pie flight: gooseberry, raisin cream, caramel apple and pumpkin. Or just eat a piece every hour on the hour through the entire Thanksgiving weekend. 

Or you can try to sample them before the meal even starts and while the girls aren't looking. It must be a guy thing. 

And when it's all over, you can go right back to the beginning: spending time with your family, talking about the things that matter and maybe, just maybe, sneaking a bite of turkey off the bone when nobody's looking before remembering that the scale knows . . . especially when you're pregnant. 

roasted cauliflower soup

Roasted cauliflower soup is not high on my list of favorite foods, namely because it's because not pizza, chicken salad, Taco Bell Crunchwraps or chocolate milk.

But my farmer came up with a tricky way for me to eat it . . . and other fruits and veggies too. 

And that's something for a girl who would live on dairy and carbs if she could. 

He told me that for every day that I ate my allotted servings of fruit and vegetables, we'd put a dollar in our vacation savings fund. 

So naturally I am now eating bananas and apples and squash and sweet potatoes like they're the only food left in the world . . . 

as well as roasted cauliflower soup. 

To be fair, while this soup features an entire head of cauliflower, it also includes milk, cream and bacon fat so . . . maybe I really just liked it because it DIDN'T taste like a vegetable. 

Hmmm. 

Here's the deal: If you like potato soup, or chowder, or anything a little heavier and creamier, this soup is for you. 

And me. 

Even though I don't even really like vegetables. 

And that's saying something. 

Roasted Cauliflower Soup

Yield 6-8 servings

1 large head cauliflower, trimmed and diced

3 T vegetable oil

6 slices bacon, cut into 1-inch pieces 

1 cup chopped onion

2 cups chicken broth

1 T fresh thyme

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp black pepper

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/8 tsp ground white pepper

2 1/2 cups whole milk

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 cup Parmesan cheese

For roasted cauliflower: Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil. Set aside. In a large bowl, combine cauliflower and oil, stirring to combine. 

Place cauliflower on prepared pan. Bake until cauliflower is browned, 25-30 minutes. Remove from oven, and let cool. 

For soup: In a large cast-iron Dutch oven, cook bacon over medium-high heat until crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon, and let cool. Crumble and set aside. Reserve rendered bacon fat in pan. 

Add onion to pan. Cook, stirring often, until tender, approximately 5 minutes. Add roasted cauliflower, broth, thyme, salt, black pepper, nutmeg and white pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature. 

In a container of a blender, puree soup in batches until smooth. Return to pan. Add milk, cream and cheese. Cook over medium heat until soup is heated through and cheese is melted. 

Garnish with bacon and cheese. 

bread inside of a cake

Being the baby of the family has its advantages. Your parents aren't as strict with you as they were with your siblings. Your bedtime is a little more flexible. 

And you don't have to cook the Thanksgiving turkey, no matter what age you are, because you're the baby, and babies just don't know how to do that very important adult-ish stuff.

Clearly.

What we CAN handle, however, is bread. 

Or cake. Or bread cake. Or brake. Or ca-ad. Kind of like turducken but more carby.

The instructions are super difficult, so you have to follow closely.

(1) Bake pumpkin bread. (2) Cut out said bread in the shape of pumpkin. (3) Bake the shapes inside a pound cake. (4) Eat. 

But don't be deterred. It's totally do-able. Maybe even more do-able than roasting a turkey. 

Plus, you get to load up on the scraps of the bread that don't get cut into the shape of pumpkins. 

I also cut turkey legs out of pumpkin bread, so I'm pretty sure that almost counts as making my own turkey, right, Mom?

Mom? 

You can use pound cake and pumpkin bread mixes or make your own from scratch. I do recommend adding a little pound cake mix to the bottom of the pan before stacking your cut-out bread inside it. 

Otherwise the bottom of your pumpkins/turkey legs get a little cut off, and if you're showing up to Thanksgiving with something as awesome as this, you can't afford one little flub-up. 

Older siblings are all over that nonsense. 

Once your bread-cake-combo-of-deliciousness has cooled, slice that beauty up and impress the turkey legs off the rest of your family. 

But mostly your older brothers and sisters. 

They can brine and roast and fry their birds. But only YOU can show up with a pumpkin inside a cake. See? Being the baby really does have its advantages!

farm blog round-up: the best of the best!

It seems fitting to use the term "round-up" when it comes to farming blogs because old Western songs about round-ups and Roy Rogers' theme songs basically pop right into your head. 

Ok, or just mine. 

Winchester 

Also, you should be forewarned that this post has nothing to do with our farm dogs, although they do enjoy rounding things up.

Trash, for instance. Bottles. Corn stalks. Cardboard. A random glove. Pretty much anything they can find within a three-mile radius ends up in our yard. 

Now if I only could teach them to find discarded vintage Pyrex, we'd be set!

For those of you who may live in the city but are interested in farm life -- and I know you exist because you say so on Instagram -- get your mouse ready to do some clicking and bookmarking. Winter's coming, you know, and there's no better way to spend time waiting for the next blizzard to pass than pretending you're out on the prairie with Pa Ingalls trying to find your way from the house to the barn just by holding on to a rope strung between the two. 

Ok, maybe that isn't as fun as it sounds. 

Still. 

Colt 

Common Ground: The site and blog are written by farmers simply starting discussions about how they produce the food that ends up on your table. And they're super good at helping you break through all sorts of myths and misinformation. 

Country Linked: This is a sweet blog that's just right for all the people who grew up in the country and love hearing stories -- and seeing pictures -- of day-to-day life on the farm that brings all those memories right back. 

Cow Spots and Tales: Just go ahead and zip on over to Lisa's blog riiiiight now. She's a runner interested in nutrition, but she's also a dairy farmer, so all those stories you hear about whether or not it's good to eat meat and if there's antibiotics in your milk? She sets the record straight on pretty much all of them. 

Dairy Good Life: Sadie's blog's tagline says it all: "Cows. Kids. Chaos. It's all good." And it is! Plus, we once stayed at the same hotel in DC while attending two different conferences. We never got to meet, but our IG posts told us we were at least in the same vicinity and that counts for something! 

Petunia 

Dairy Carrie: You've probably seen or heard of Carrie on Twitter . .. or in Chipotle's nightmares . . . or on Facebook. She's a wife and a mom and a dairy farmer and a blogger all rolled into one -- with a sense of humor and a quest to make sure the truth is told to boot. 

Prairie Californian: Beautiful pictures, delicious meals, the truth about gluten and things you never even knew about raising sunflowers -- you'll get all that and more by following Jenny's blog! Just be prepared to leave hungry pretty much every time you visit. 

My Barnyard View: Janet's busy blogging about dairy . . . while learning how to drive a combine . . . all at the same time. I can hardly keep up! 

The Pinke Post: Katie is a wife, mom and agvocate who blogs from the prairie where she -- prepare yourself for this -- lives 97 miles from a Starbucks! That's worth reading about right there! 

You may not have grown up on a farm or ever lived on a farm or even been to visit a farm. But thanks to these ladies and social media, you can still meet the people who raise your food. You can learn how crops are grown. You can ask questions about what animal care looks like. You can hear their stories and tell them yours too. 

Like the time our dogs thought they wanted to take off after a coyote but then Petunia decided to just lay down and bark instead. 

Um, or maybe just go read a good blog about life in the country.

Yeah. 

Do that. 

And their tails all wagged happily every after. 

real things

When I lived in St. Louis, my morning consisted of a twenty-minute commute through eight lanes of traffic. After I learned that the key to city driving is to drive about 10 times more aggressively than you're comfortable with and to realize that you might, at any point in time, be squished to death on the highway like a sardine between two semis, it wasn't so bad. 

But it is nothing . . . NOTHING . . . compared to mornings in the country. 

Fog. Sleepy cows. Barking dogs. Chickens putting up a fuss. Pick-ups  with farmers at the wheel, taking their time checking out the fields while finishing their first cup of coffee. 

Sign me up. 

If the sound of horns and sirens, squealing tires and doors slamming have got you down, find yourself a spot in the country. Stay a day or two. But if you can, wake up early. 

Nothing compares to laying in bed, with the windows open and a cool breeze blowing in, and slowly waking up to the sound of birds or, sometimes, to the sound of nothing at all. 

"The real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.” - Laura Ingalls Wilder 

do big farms = bad farms?

Spend ten minutes on Instagram or Twitter, and you'll find that there are a lot of myths about dairy farms floating around. 

And hog farms. 

And pretty much any farm out there. 

One of the biggest is that big farms = bad farms, which just doesn't make sense. Is a fun-size Snickers worse because it's bigger? No! Is a six-month-old baby bad because he's not a one-month-old? No!

That's just silly.

Here's why.  

homemade granola

You might think this post is about granola and how delicious and crunchy and wonderfully brunchy it is. 

pocket letters

Farming can sometimes seem like a lonely business. There's no Target on the corner, no Starbucks down the street, no mall down the road. 

It's just you, the land, the animals . . . and that random guy from the city who's actually trying to find your neighbor's house but turned onto the wrong gravel road and ended up in your lane instead.

bookish buntings

An English major can never have too many books. 

Even if they come in the form of a bunting. 

So if you need to indulge in a little book (or bunting) therapy, pull up the Martha Stewart website,  an old book you won't feel sad about dismantling, some paper and glue. 

I landed an anatomy and physiology book from the 1940s at a thrift store a few years ago. 

So naturally I'd want pictures of the human skeleton hanging in the living room. 

Once you've made your mini books (and Martha makes the process far more involved and undoubtedly beautiful here), clip them to a piece of ribbon or twine with mini clothespins (thank you, Wal-Mart!) just like you're hanging clothes on the line. 

Except for the part where it's snowing outside and anything actually on the line would be frozen in place.

If you happen to run across a helpful assistant, don't turn him down. 

Long arms come in handy. 

Martha (because we're friends like that) suggests using pieces of silk flowers in between books, but if you have paint samples on hand (like you do), you might just consider cutting those up instead. 

Then, balance one foot on the window ledge and the other on the swivel chair, hanging on precariously for dear life, while you put these up in the corner of your library. 

Or your living room. 

Or both if you can't tell the difference. 

And if it just so happens to match the blues and greens you've already got going, well, praise the Lord! It's the little things in life. 

And if anyone can tell me why my primrose is looking punky, please, by all means, holler out. 

No, seriously.  

Books and buntings. 

Libraries and living rooms. 

That's what I call a Sunday. 

What are you up to this afternoon?