Hanging out at Plot 15

Hello, I haven't been around for a while - I've been over here on my new allotment! 

In which the boy and I make fudge at late o'clock

Our lovely friends gave us some homemade fudge for Christmas. Embarrassingly, I consumed a vast portion of it, and ever since have been craving more. I found a recipe in How to Feed Your Whole Family... by Gill Holcombe, and was organised enough to buy the ingredients (a total of £3) with the weekly shop. Tuesday was full of fun, including my son uttering the immortal line "Mum, the girls are in the bathroom and they've put soap all over the floor and they've taken their clothes off and are sliding round on their bottoms..." That evening A went out for a Church curry night, leaving me to get the four of them to bed by myself (which A normally does, bless him). And I thought, Now. Now is the time for fudge.

So at 10pm ish, in an already messy kitchen, with a 7 year old helper* and a baby in one arm, I attempted to make fudge for the first time.

*I had come up to turn J's light out, and he said "but I'm tidying my room!" so I let him, and then A was nearly due home so I said he could stay up until Daddy got back, then he came down and asked if he could help... So goes bedtimes at our house. But he was genuinely very helpful, and of course we don't have to get up in the mornings!

Makes 36 cubes

2lbs (1kg) sugar. An entire packet. J's eyes nearly popped out of his head when I tipped the whole thing in.
6oz (175g) unsalted butter
1 tin (410g) evaporated milk
Roughly 1/4 pint (125 ml) milk

1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan (she's not kidding. I used the biggest one out of a set of three, and the mixture absolutely EXPLODED out of it when it came to the boil). Lightly grease and line a square or rectangular cake tin.

2. Pour the tin of evaporated milk into a measuring jug then top up to the 1 pint (500ml) mark with the milk.

3. Add the milk and sugar to the pan over a low heat and leave it for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has dissolved.

4. Bring to the boil, then boil rapidly for 15-20 minutes, stirring continuously, until the syrup reaches the 'soft ball stage', meaning 1/2 teaspoon of syrup dropped into a cup of cold water holds its shape and looks and feels like a piece of soft toffee when you squeeze it. This is good advice. I tested mine after 15 minutes due to the amount of mixture lost in the explosion, and it was exactly like that. You could pretty much tell it was ready as it gets very thick to stir.

5. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the fudge to cool for a few minutes (pour into a new pan if you can bear the extra washing up, and stand in a bowl of cold water), beating almost constantly. When it is thick, grainy and has lost its shine (looks like fudge, basically), scrape it into the prepared tin.

6. Mark the fudge into squares after about 15 minutes, leave it in the tin for at least 2 hours to cool completely, then lift it out, cut it up and store in an airtight tin.

From How to Feed Your Whole Family..., p232.

We only got 30 squares, due to the amount of mixture eaten lost. Gill also has some directions for extra flavourings like coffee and chocolate that you can add, but I didn't want to muck around with that on the first go.

DON'T WORRY when your saucepans (and oven, and work surfaces) are covered in this brown, rock hard, sticky stuff:

It just dissolved in hot soapy water when I washed them a day later.

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Make a Bang with a Breadmaker at a Bring 'n' Share

(Edited to acknowledge hubby's role in the yummy bread!)

I love the weekly Ladies Bible Study at our Church - there are between 10 and 15 children who come along with their mums, so it's a great time for my kids as well as me. Last week we had a special lunch to celebrate the Pastor's wife's 50th birthday, and I made pepperoni and mozzarella tear-and-share bread. It turned out ok, and it was actually quite embarrassing all the comments it got, considering that it was super easy. If I was really impressive, it would have been me rather than my lovely husband getting up first thing to put the dough on, and I would have had the children making it with me (ticking off maths, science, home economics etc!) rather than plonking them in front of the (sshhh) tv...

Anyway, if you fancy making a bang at a Bring n Share, here's the recipe (from the breadmaker's instruction book). Would also be good for a picnic.

Dough for Tear n Share Bread:

'Basic'-'Dough' (2h 20m)

Yeast 1 1/4 tsp
Strong White Flour 500g
Sugar 2tsp
Olive Oil 2tbsp
Salt 1 1/2 tsp
Water 310ml

Pepperoni Tear n Share Bread

Dough for Tear n Share Bread (one batch)
Tomato Puree 4tbsp
Pepperoni, chopped 50g
Mozzarella, grated 100g
Dried Oregano or Basil 1tsp
Olive Oil 1tbsp

1. Roll dough out into a rectangular sheet 1 1/2cm thick, approx. 24cm x 46cm
2. Spread the tomato puree over the dough and scatter the pepperoni and cheese. Roll up from the short end like a swiss roll.
3. Cut the dough into 4cm slices and place close together in a round, greased cake or flan tin (I just used an ordinary rectangular one), cut sides up.
4. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with dried herbs and allow to prove until doubled in size.
5. Bake at 220C/425F/Gas Mark 7 for 15-20 mins or until golden brown (might need a little longer, the middles on mine were quite dough-y still).

Taken from the booklet for the Panasonic Breadmaker. If you don't have a breadmaker I would highly recommend one - so easy to set the night before, and you get three small loaves from a packet of flour, working out about 25p each (I buy Tesco's Own Strong White).

The Home Service

I've just joined the Home Service, a membership organisation for Christian home-educators. It costs £20 for the year and I would highly recommend it. My membership pack arrived yesterday and contained a free copy of Making the Right Impression: The Experiences of 21 British Christian Home Educating Families, some back issues of their thrice-yearly newsletter, and an audio CD ("A Biblical Basis for Home Education" by Dr Stanley Jebb). You also get access to the members-only section of their website with more resources and downloads, a contact list of other home educators around the country, and the opportunity to go to the Home Service conference, held every other year at Cefn Lea.

Home Service are also on Facebook and Twitter: @HomeServiceOrg

If you look for them via a search engine you'll probably only get their old address (home-service.org) which they changed last year. The new address is http://thehomeservice.org.

Homeschool Group and Cheesy Pasta (far too late for a snappy title)

Went to a lovely homeschool group this afternoon - thanks Liz and Heather for organising it. There were around 10 families, plus some wicked chocolate and marshmallow cakes (can you tell that was my highlight?!). Fortunately E left some - she's the only one I can rely on to leave food now, the others just gobble it up (and I can't blag any for P yet!). Nom.

The children zoned out in front of the telly when we got home (love Netflix - X-Men and Spiderman are favourites at the moment) and I made Cheesy Pasta (or Macaroni Cheese without the macaroni) for tea. One of my favourite store cupboard meals - 50g butter, 50g flour, 1 pint milk, lots of cheese, a grating of nutmeg (if you like), any kind of cooked pasta, frozen peas (or other favourite veg), cooked bacon, maybe some breadcrumbs and extra grated cheese for the top. Make the sauce, chuck it all together and bung in the oven or under a grill (the chucking and bunging are essential). Something that all the children will eat (a rare occurrence!) and you can make double the sauce to put in the freezer for a super easy meal next time.

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Reading Round-Up

My goal this year is to actually finish the books I start reading. Here's what's on the go at the moment:

What did you expect? by Paul Tripp. Excellent book on marriage. I also have, and want to read, When Sinners Say I Do, by Dave Harvey

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Thought I would (belatedly) see what all the fuss was about. My goodness, this book is annoying - all the things I disagree with would certainly fill a whole post (Maybe one day). My favourite so far is this:

Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien civilisations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possible imagine. 

Because that's much more likely/easier to believe in than God?! I'm only half way through and probably won't finish this one.

Anne of Avonlea , by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Missed out on these when I was younger. They're very sweet. (You can read for free online if you search I think.)

I really like Like Mother, Like Daughter, for home-making tips (laundry, cooking, cleaning etc).

I've been reading about how Kimberly at Raising Olives homeschools her large family, as I've been thinking about doing school all together recently, rather than separating by age.

I've been reading "Benedict's Rule of Order for Housewives", over at The Common Room. I studied this a little at Uni, so it's brilliant to see the DHM adapt it for modern living.

Better Late Than Early, by R.S. and D.N. Moore. Fascinating look at research which shows that children should not start school until aged 8-10.

Good News for Those Trying Harder, by Alan Kraft. Every week David C Cook Publishing have a FREE Christian eBook to download. This was one of them. You can sign up here - they're only free for a day and you have to search via the amazon.co.uk website (if you're in the UK) as the links in the email are to the .com store.

The KJV, of course

Towards A Philosophy Of Education, by Charlotte Mason. Free here, with modern English versions.

Loving the Little Years, by Rachel Jankovic. Love her mother's books (Nancy Wilson) and I am enjoying what little I've read of this so far, but cannot imagine how Rachel, with four or five little ones, had time to write this book when I cannot find the time to even read it! Not a comforting irony.

Baby is sleeping through the night! (Well, pretty much, and for now.. Am not counting chickens yet (except the two in the garden)). She goes from 11pm-ish to 6am-ish. This post from Life in a Shoe is some of the best info I've read on getting babies to sleep well.

And of course, that's not including all our school books. Our lunchtime read-aloud at the moment is Charlotte's Web which I've never read before. Everyone seems to be enjoying it although DD(age 3) asks every time who Wilbur is, so I'm not sure how much is going in!

So. I will finish something. At some point. Anyway, well done for getting this far - as a reward, have a picture of a cute baby whom DH insisted on dressing up in proper clothes today...

        

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40 Days of De-Cluttering Challenge

Today I am starting 40 Days of De-Cluttering, with ladies from the Ambleside Online forum. Click on the link to go to the original blog post for the challenge. Stephanie at Keeper of the Home has created a detailed PDF which you can download for free, outlining nearly 40 (some days you do twice) areas of the home to concentrate on.

I am 99.9% certain that I will fall off the wagon at some point, but even if I just manage a few days my home will be less cluttered and messy than it is now (which is VERY!).

Not the most welcoming entrance hall. There is a teatowel stufffed into the letter box to keep the cold air out.

This is the, um, nursery.

Wish me luck, and join in if you like!

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