Category: Homemaking

40 bags of stuff. · Homemaking · Mary Mary and Martha · My world

40 Trash bag Challenge

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So far I have managed to get about 17 bags of stuff out of my house for good.  Most of this is old clothing and sheets.  In part because I haven’t even gotten out of the bedroom closet area.  Today I am heading into the bathroom and then on to the girl’s room. 

I was about to write that I hadn’t learned anything insightful so far, but that isn’t true.  When Kyle and I were going through the closet (I didn’t want to toss anything of his without his input) one thing we both noticed was how ofter we said “Wow, I forgot I owned that”.  We have some items that we more or less store in our closet and somehow things we like had dissapperead behind things we didn’t and before long they were completly forgotten.  So, the lesson I take from this is pretty straight forward.  Don’t store things you rarely use with things you use all the time.  Seperate them in some way.  Put them in a storage bag or box, move them to a storage area in your home, but sperate them in some way.  This lesson was reiterated with the linen closet.  Things had more or less been put back in a rather haphazard manner and so it was difficult to find sets, pillow cases had taken to hidding in the oddest places and a good portion of this problem was simply that there were too many items not regularaly used mixed in with the items I need every week.

Blogs I Know · Homemaking · Mary Mary and Martha · Simply Lovely Fairs

Simply Lovely Windows

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This week the Simply Lovely Fairs are featuring Simply Lovely Windows.  You can find links to many other articles about this topic at Paula’s Blog.

 

I dwell in Possibility–
A fairer House than Prose–
More numerous of Windows–
Superior–for Doors–

Of Chambers as the Cedars–
Impregnate of Eye–
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky–

Of Visitors–the fairest
For Occupation–This–
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise–

Emily Dickinson

I attended a conference for Catholic Women several years ago where there was a speaker who’s talk was about decorating a Catholic home. There were two things that I walked away with that have stuck with me ever since. The first was the question “would a visitor to your home know you are Catholic just by looking around?” and the second thought was something more vague about your kitchen sink and window being an altar.

I have to admit that my “modern woman ears” hear the words “kitchen sink” and “altar” in the same sentence and the feminists alarm bells start sounding. There is something oppressively patriarchal about the idea that your sink is some sort of altar isn’t there? How could doing the dishes have anything to do with religion unless it was in some sort of “keeping women barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen”? But then I come to my senses and realize that I really, really like that idea, mostly because I have seen it implemented so well.

My friend Michelle is a wonderful Irish-Catholic woman, mother to nine children with her first grandchild on the way. She is beautiful, a mix of wit and moxie, full of love and joy. Her kitchen window was the first time I have seen an “altar” window. Though I don’t think she would call it that. In fact she called it something like “the whole solar system in my kitchen window”  she would declare this while gesticulating expressively then go on to explain the amazing array of sun catchers and glass beads strung across the window, each one catching the light and in its own way special and little items on the sill each one with some tale.  All the planets were there each one sparkling.  Her children could tell you about them too. It had become a family story something that unified them, educational in a way and entertaining. But it was more. All creation lived in my friend’s noisy happy home. There was joy hidden in the corners and sorrows swept under the carpets and it was all there all the time. The solar system in the window was just one typical little thing. It was something that sprung organically from Michelle’s brain that became something fantastic. It served the same purpose as all our Church’s stain-glassed windows do: it beautifully illustrated Gods creation and made a tiny little kitchen into something whimsical and lovely.

When they moved and had to sell the house one of the things their realtor had told them was that the solar system had to come down. Apparently people looking to buy houses are not as interested in one if it has an eclectic collection of glass and string hanging in the window. It had too much character, was too eccentric, not really normal. Life in Michelle’s house wasn’t typical. Like so many things that God puts His hand into, it was something splendid, but certainly not marketable, and definitely not for everyone.

It takes a certain amount of insanity to be a person of faith to start with. While faith is the most logical reaction to a supernatural experience, I suspect many people are very afraid of God fearing either he is real or he is not, and deeply uncomfortable with either option. So for safety they pull the curtains shut and lock the shutters least the tiniest bit of unexpected supernatural joy slip in. I fear that many more simply feel it is best not to think about it all too much and turn on the TV and close the curtain to prevent glare on the screen. To be alive in faith is to fling the windows full open and let the sun come in and maybe even be like Pollyanna and string a few prisms across the window just for the added rainbows.

So many of my daily tasks center around the kitchen sink, all the cooking and cleaning that can become such drudgery if it is not done with a well motivated heart is often centered around the sink. Making this area lovely, having it reflect our faith to help bring our reflections back to God is a very sensible step in helping stay focused on not just doing the daily, needed tasks of living but living our vocation through those daily tasks. And that is the genius of the kitchen-window as an altar.

 

Homemaking · Mary Mary and Martha · My world · Uncategorized

Menu planning

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One of my old stand-bys is my 1950, Betty Crocker Cookbook, 1st edition.  (Now, I know that Betty Crocker wasn’t a real person.. but I still find a bit of humor in thinking of the cookbook as “Betty” — my grandmother is another Betty so maybe this adds to the charm, but either way I hope you can bare my bit of madness here as I refer to her as a real person.) My tattered red friend is not the reprint, but the original with all its sexist little comments and admonitions on being an active and productive homemaker.   It is filled with good advice about work habits, entertaining, recipe short-cuts, meal planning and nutrition.  

One thing I find most useful is this book assumes nothing.  It starts from the idea that the reader is a complete homemaking ingenue and goes from there.   So it actually covers things that one would have assumed that a young woman growing up in the 30s and 40s would probably know.  Betty Crocker advises that the homemaker plan menus at least one week at a time and better to do two weeks or even a month at once, to shop only once or twice a week.  The second shopping trip should be for perishables.   She suggests keeping a “well stocked emergency shelf”  to deal with those unexpected guests or inordinately hectic days where the lady of the house is too busy for shopping and cooking.  All sensible and good advice and I think that the starting point is spot on,  nutrition.

Now, Betty Crocker, 1950, is a little behind on the scientific discoveries of today.  But, Betty and her counterparts knew full well that little Judy and Johny needed nutritionally balanced meals so they could grow up and become useful and happy adults.  In the 1950’s cookbook there is no fudging on who is responsible for seeing that happens. Mom is the “go-to” person for healthy meals, clean and tastefully decorated homes and family entertainment.  The world has changed a great deal.  The young homemaker of 1950 was held to a somewhat different set of standards but, she also wasn’t facing some of the same temptations and bad habits that we face.  In the chapter on short-cuts she mentions that in larger cities there are places where you can pick up whole meals and take them home as a modern marvel, almost experimental in their novelty.   It was 5 years before Ray Kroc would open his first McDonald’s, packaged food was almost non-existent,  the first Swanson TV dinner wouldn’t hit the store shelf for four more years.  So, while the details of what was then considered a healthy meal are dated, the principles and the application of planning and preparing are, if anything, even more relevant to today than when they were written. 

Betty Crocker quotes the “Smart Homemaker” saying, “My meals are more nutritious since I’ve been planning them ahead.  I check in advance the basic foods and the daily needs of my family.”   To get a good idea of what those basic needs are I use the Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid.  It took more tweaking than I would have liked to figure out how to translate the pyramid into meals.  For some reason the geniuses at Harvard figured that spelling things out in “servings” wasn’t how people really eat.  To help out on this and to get a bit of a different angle I also looked at The UMIM Healing Foods Pyramid  which actually turned out to be more practical.  I finally got it worked out and could create a template for menus.  The raw template has “slots” for menu items that I can drop items from the different categories into to create meals.   

 I know there are many different food plans out there, with different claims to what is the most healthy way to eat.  And really, I am not going to sort that out or make any judgement for anyone else on that. Find what works for you according to your family’s tastes, your beliefs and culture and what makes sense to you.  What makes sense to me the two pyramids married with the idea of local and seasonal food and sustainable agricultural practices.   In practice we use too much red meat, I am not giving up my coffee and there are those Goldfish crackers. 

One thing that has surprised me is how much effort it really took to get to this point.  My grandmother learned menu planning in her home and while working as a cook for a ranch.  My mother has often told me how little she learned at home, her mother apparently shewed her out of the kitchen more often than not but mom did have a home economics class in high school.  My mother did the homemaker thing when I was very young then entered the work-force, never to look back and swore she wouldn’t be some 1950s housewife who’s greatest achievement was having the cleanest toilet on the block and by the time I made it to high school home economics was optional and sort of looked down on.  I came to adulthood ill-equipped to manage a family menu, much less a household and I have had to basically teach myself.  

My next menu planning article will break down into a little more detail about how you get from theory to shopping list.