Morning Dunham Smoothie

I have been making a morning smoothie a lot lately. Mostly because it is a great way to get your vitamins (I have made my own vitamins in an herbal tincture over the past year, but I also have the same "formula" in a powder and can easily blend it in a smoothie. That'll have to be another post). I have certain non-vegetable likers who really need the greens and vitamins too and this is an easy way to get those to them. Here is our current recipe (well, I haven't actually measured anything - that's just how I cook):

1 1/2 - 2 cups frozen fruit (we use cherries and apricots from our trees this past summer)
1/2 cup plain yogurt (Brown Cow, Cream on the Top)
1 -2 cups fresh baby spinach (Costco, glorious Costco)
2 T orange juice concentrate (the kind with no garbage in it)
about 1-2 T raw honey
1-2 heaping T flax seeds
1-2 heaping T vitamin powder (I make my own, but it is very similar to More Than Alive Superfood. Or you can buy all of the individual herbs there and make your own.)
about 1/16 - 1/8 tsp. of cayenne pepper (depending on who will be drinking it)
enough water to make it all move in the Vitamix

If it isn't sweet enough you can add more OJ concentrate or a little more honey. Yes, it is kind of brownish green, but no one here complains - it tastes that good!

2 moms, 9 kids, 342 pounds of apples and 120 quarts of apple sauce

And an all day into-the-night experience. When I told my kids "just keep picking" until all the 5 gallon buckets, laundry baskets, boxes and bags in the Expedition were full, I proved just how truly terrible my spacial reasoning /eye balling measurement skills are. I was just hoping that I had enough to make the applesauce experience worthwhile like it was last year - how could I be expected to remember what the 215 pounds of apples we had last year looked like? Well, I can tell you that it couldn't have looked anything like that pile of apples I hauled in, because we had 342 pounds....hello!! We pulled in the Rickel's driveway at 10 am and left at 2am; 120 quarts of applesauce later.

The kids pared apples for 8 hours!!


NO wonder they look psychopathic here.


At 6pm, when it looked like this, I knew it was trouble - we had two ovens and 2 roasters baking apples so that we could run them through the mill; 2 large pots of cooking applesauce on the stove; 2 cannisters of canned applesauce processing (with 7 quarts in each); and all those apples UNcooked on the counter - still needing to be cooked in the roasters/oven. It was bad - very bad. About that time, I started apologizing for my over-zealous, apple picking episode.

The really crazy thing is - I don't even like applesauce, in fact, it grosses me out. BUT 4 people in my family do LOVE it and that makes up for it, I guess. And that's just the kind of self-sacrificing mother that I am. It had nothing to do with the fact that I am just a little bit social and spending all day with some of my favorite people sounded like a party to me, and I can't stand to miss a party - no, it had nothing to do with that - it was all a sacrificial, giving kind of thing on my part.
I don't think anyone will let me pick the apples next year (or any year after) without some very strict guidelines and supervision.

Homemade Yogurt

We own a share in a friend's cow and so we pick up raw milk each week. Sometimes we get surplus milk (extra that won't last long) and if we aren't going to finish it all before it goes bad, I make things with it; buttermilk, kefir. Last week, Paige gave me some packaged powder starter and I used the recipe on the back and the package. I made 1/2 gallon and it turned out great - nice and thick just like store bought. This week, I decided to try it again using a Sue Greggs' recipe and 4 T from last week's yogurt batch as my starter. It turned out just as thick as the batch with the commercial starter. Woo-hoo! It was so easy too....in winter, you can just set the 1/2 gallon jar next to the wood stove to culture overnight - perfect. Not sure what I'll do in summer.