Chocolate Sunrise Surprise

No way!!!! 8:30 am on a Saturday morning and the kids aren't upstairs begging us to make breakfast yet!  Uh Ohhhhh!!! I vaguely recall hearing cupboards and jars and other random things being opened and sounds like they were happily working together on something.  8:45 am a smiling daughter comes up and then a smiling proud son.  "We made breakfast for you Mom and Dad!"  How could we not get up and go try it.  Luckily I was first so I could do the small taste.  A plastic bowl full of chocolate something. "Dad, we didn't put eggs in it like the last time so it's good." That explains the slime consistency a couple weeks ago of a similar mixture.  I had to leave the room before Mom had her big spoonful.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! from the kitchen as she tasted it.

Ingredients that we know of:  Mustard, Chocolate Quick powder, Hershey's chocolate syrup, Grated Orange peel, freshly juiced Orange juice, 8 drips of Cholula hot sauce, water, vinegar (not sure what kind or how many kinds), maple syrup, instant apple cider pack.

“My Book House” edited by Olive Beaupre Miller

“My Book House” edited by Olive Beaupre Miller is my favorite collection of children's literature.  The 1st edition is my favorite in the green binding from 1922.  The second set that I have enjoyed is the blue bound set published in 1948 for a thirty second printing with a copyright of 1937.  As I was reading from book 2, "Story Time", to my son this morning, I thought of looking online again to see what was currently available and found that some of the editions and volumes are online.

This morning we enjoyed reading "The Little Red Hen and the Grain of Wheat," "The Little Gray Pony," "Ole Shut-Eyes, the Sandman," "The Two Crabs," and "Belling the Cat."  Volume two has shorter stories with many authors as well as fables adapted from AESOP.  Volume one has wonderful Nursery Rhymes and Verse with Illustrations.  All the volumes have great illustrations and I would love to frame many of them but the books are too wonderful to take apart.  My mother read these as a child and she read them to me, and I read them myself and to my sibbling, and now I am reading them with my children.  I hope to find digital easily read versions for my children to have them for their children. 

There was a reprint sometime in the 1970's or 1980's but so much had been taken out that they weren't the same.  Although, if one of those versions were available, I would probably buy it.  The older copies' pages are getting brittle and their are fewer and fewer available online and in bookstores.

As time permits, I may do more with My Bookhouse on this blog but for now, here's some starter resources if you aren't lucky enough to have any of the volumes or didn't grow up reading them.

A 1921 easily read scanned version of the "The Latch Key" volume can be found at :
http://www.archive.org/stream/thelatchkey01millarch#page/n5/mode/2up
If the link doesn't work, try a copy and paste in the browser or the site may be gone.

The following two links are to a blog by a librarian in South Carolina that gives some good information about the volumes.
http://mybookhouse.net/about-ms-kathy/

http://www.mybookhouse.com/2006/09/my-book-house-backstory.html

Wikepedia also has some information on the author and the series.

Fresh Fertilizer and the Green Garden? Memories of the Circus in town.

 I hope to find and post a more elaborate update I remember getting after this email sent from Mormor on January 25, 2010.  It took more than the few weeks estimated for the smell to blow over.
Hi...Dad just had 9 yards of Bovine Assisted Compost (Buffalo Droppings) dumped on our front driveway...a member of our stake presidency raises buffalo and gives piles of this stuff away free...Dad is spreading it on front and backyard about 2 inches thick...he is out to have a better looking yard in the spring than the whole street...You really can't smell it if you stay inside the house and shut all the windows and doors...When standing on the front porch and the wind blows...well that's another story...He has two teenagers from the ward helping him this afternoon...He says that when he has used enough of it, he is going to invite the neighbors to spread some on their lawns too...It will probably take 2 or 3 weeks for the perfumed smell to go entirely away...Well, it won't be hard to find our house...just follow you nose...Dad came in a while ago and sat down...I didn't tell him but he did have a strong smell about him...All for now,  Love, Mom

How does your garden grow? When I was little, I remember hearing stories of the circus coming to town from both Mormor and Papa.  Mormor's stories included ones about the Gypsies that cooked up her grandfather's pet pig for breakfast without them knowing when in town at the family's campgrounds and motel.  The story of the ciricus in town from Papa's dad, My Papa, is one I've never forgotten whenever fertilizing with manure is spoken of.  The circus came to town and Papa Louis was planting a tree at the time.  He got some elephant poop to use as fertilizer from the circus and carefully mixed it with the dirt to plant the new tree hoping it would work well.  It did something quite strange though.  The tree died and the stake used to hold the tree up and give it support sprouted and grew instead.  So the moral of the story with elephant poop is to make sure you plant a tree you want to die and a stake you want to grow. 

That also reminds me of the story of how Aunt Gayes took got showered on at the circus.  Not sure if this was the same circus and for that matter not sure if this was at the zoo.  It doesn't really matter I guess when remembering pee and poop.  There was a loud commotion at the lions den and Aunt Gaye and her friend raced to see what was happening and why there was such a crowd around the cage.  The two girls wiggled in and made it to the front of the crowd to see the lion roar, lift a leg and spray her with something not quite lemonaide.

Creative Idea for Canned Wheat Home Food Storage

After growing up moving what seemed like 10 tons of cans of wheat and rice and beans and honey and TVP from house to house to house to house... through the years, and remembering the metal on the bottoms of those early metal square cans digging into my fingers almost to bleeding,  I thought it would be fun to post an email from Mormor a couple years ago.  I remember the years of wheat bread, hot after school with butter and honey we had to melt on the stove before microwaves because it was all crystalized from the metal containers.  Sometimes we would strain the honey because a batch or two still had bees in them.  I remember trying to make sandwiches with the wheat bread but having to cut thick pieces so it wouldn't fall apart and then chewing for half of lunch to finish half the sandwich.  I remember dad loving cracked wheat cereal that was like swallowing gravel and having to force myself to keep swallowing and not gagging as I was forcing it to stay down and go down my throat.  Lumpy Cream of Wheat was almost as much a treat as the birthday box of cold sugar cereal we could choose once a year and as Mormor said, when the box is gone, it is gone.  9 kids and one box of cereal went pretty quickly.  Mormor just said it didn't fill us, and she was right.  When we would later save and buy our own cold cereal, we would still be "starved" after completing a whole box on our own, which was pretty hard to hide and do because the guilt of not sharing with sibbling watching was too much to not share at least a little.

I remember Dad loving to make homemade granola with grains and nuts and what seemed like every unsalted, unroasted, raw stick and weed mixed and lightly, very lightly mixed with some honey, then baked and then split up.  Yes, I groaned and said, why can't we just buy real granola cereal or even Grapenuts cereal?  I was old enough to add up the cost of the ingredients and it seemed they were about the same price.  At least the youngest ones didn't catch on to how the oldest two or three of us knew to quietly serve ourselves the parts with the cashews and nuts we liked first.  We tried making homemade Grapenuts, basically really hard whole wheats flat bread that we would hammer up with a hammer or try to grind in the blender until Mormor would catch us and say we were going to break the Osterizer. (the blender was always called an Osterizer no matter what brand it was, kind of like all scrub cleaning powder was called Ajax, and like all margarine was called Oleo)  Well, I remember from elementary school that wheat had been found in some piramid and was still able to be grown so it lasts forever.  That makes it no surprise that the wheat we kept moving around as part of 2 years worth of storage for up to 11 people sprouted and grows in Mormor and Papa's yard today.  The following email is true and about a month after it was sent, went to visit and the "visitors" were still there.

2/4/08  Welcome to Birdland!  Dad went through the 17 old cans of wheat (33 pound tin ones) which we have been storing for over 40 years and only lost 2 cans of wheat, 1 can of rice, 1 can of cornmeal and 1 can of beans...He dumped the contents of the bad cans on our front and back lawn...This was about 2 weeks ago...Each day more and more birds started coming into our yard...There were about 15 birds the first day....I went outside just a little bit ago to see how the bird population was coming along....for the past 3 days we have been hearing constant bird chatter from inside our house going on in the front and back yards...and a lot of bird poop on the porches....Get this - it is raining a lot today but it doesn't seem to bother the birds any...I just went outside in the front yard...perched on our roof were 49 birds....in  the next door neighbor's tree covered with probably 75 more birds chirping away...across the  street on two roofs I counted between 40 and 50 birds....on our front lawn there were 35 birds that didn't fly away when I came out... they were too busy eating...Next I went to the kitchen door...about 15 birds were perched on the back of the outside chairs sleeping and about 45 birds on the ground eating....and more birds perched on the fences...I feel like our home is in the middle of a bird pavilion like they have at the zoo.  I keep thinking about that old movie that was called "The Birds"....Thank goodness the birds in our yards are kind.  They like to peck the roof...sounds like someone is knocking at the door all the time.  When a car drives by our house most of the birds fly in the air in a flock and the flock swerves into trees...I have seen flocks of birds swoop in the sky before...but never saw them come back to their departure spot.

Oh well, thought you all might like to know that life is never dull...even after you children left the nest...One good thing about all of you being out in your own homes is that there is always room in the garage for Dad now to park our car so the birds cannot decorate it.....I think the loud chirping is their way of signaling all their aunts, cousins and uncles and grandparents...I came back inside and started typing this email and just now looked out the den window...I see more birds than I can see the grass underneath them...There must be 150 or more on the front lawn and front sidewalk. The beaugenvilla bush outside my den window has no flowers  but it is full of birds too...every branch has 2 or 3 birds sitting on them....Thank goodness they all go to sleep at night...our quiet time. 

Maybe we shouldn't put out that much bird food again....Bye for now, XO,XO, XO from Mormor, Alias Mom

Mormor's Christmas Eve Huge Gingerbread Cookies

Oh Mom, this has been a fun Christmas tradition since the 70's and I think we started doing this in the San Bruno house on the top of the mountain.  I think that was when things like the mistake with me using baking soda instead of flour for a cake happened.  We used to take bed sheets and have two of us holding 2 corners each and have the strong gusts of wind pull us up the iceplant hill behind our house up to the school fence when we would jump at the same time.  This was also the beginning of "Vanilla Cinnamon Milk" on those cold days we would be bundled up and frozen from playing outside.

For those who don't know Swedish, Mumu should be spelled Mormor even though Mormor is Farmor to most of the 40 - 50 grandkids.  Thanks for this recipe a couple years ago.

If anyone has a really clear shot or two of yours on the full cookie pan, please send it so I can post it with this recipe.