Beautiful, delicious and deceptively simple. What more could you want in a muffin? This particular muffin gave me great joy as well, because my daughter made it. My floral obsession is rubbing off.

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup milk
2 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup lilac blossoms and buds
crab apple blossoms to garnish

Preaheat oven to 400 degrees. Rinse lilac blossoms and make sure to remove all green parts of the flower as well as any bits of stems or leaves that fell in. Blend butter, sugar, egg and milk. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt. Stir dry ingredients into the butter mixture. Fold in lilac blossoms.

Fill greased or lined muffin cups 2/3 full. Bake for approximately 30 minutes.

After the muffins are cool, ice with your preferred icing and garnish with crabapple blossoms just before serving. Crabapple blossoms are perfectly edible. They do not, however, last very long. Collect them shortly before you need them and if needed, you can float them in water if they have to wait very long. They are stunningly beautiful when first placed on the muffin, but after an hour, they look pretty wilted.

You could candy them to make them last longer which I’m sure would be stunningly beautiful and delicious as well. But also way too much work for me.

I love them just the way they are.

“Mommy! Mommy! You should come out and try the honeysuckle. It is so good!”

“Yes, I’ve heard it’s delicious.”

I looked at Mouse, excitedly coaxing me outdoors. I had always wanted to try honeysuckle. So I gathered the children and followed them out the backdoor and up to the playground by the tiny church where we used to live.

“Um, this isn’t honeysuckle.”

She popped a little purple flower in her mouth before I could stop her. Bug and Bear followed her lead as I grabbed their hands and told them to stop.

“You never eat plants if you don’t know what they are.”

“But I do.”

“No, you don’t. You only think you do. I’ll show you a picture of honeysuckle. This isnt it.”

“But it tastes good.”

And such was my introduction to henbit, so called because chickens love it. And it is perfectly edible for humans as well, thankfully. Those little purple flowers are delightfully sweet and with my love of floral jellies, I’ve always wondered what a henbit jelly would taste like. But the flowers are awfully tiny and spaced too far apart for a convenient harvest.

So every spring, my girls sit down by the garden grazing on the tiny purple flowers and I wonder what else I could do with this first green of spring in bloom before even the dandelions.

This year I decided to do something besides wonder.  Instead, we gathered, rinsed and chopped then folded them into a simple batter for henbit fritters. And we served them with the redbud jelly I had just finished processing.

And everyone loved them.

Henbit fritters

1 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup kefir (or milk)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 egg
1/2 cup diced henbit

Stir dry ingredients. Add liquids and stir until smooth. Fold in henbit and fry in butter. Serve with honey, syrup, jelly or whatever you like.

We are rather new to this whole wildcrafting thing and stick to the things I know or are not easily confused with other, less edible plants. Have you ever eaten wild foods? Or what would you like to try?

Potatoes are traditionally planted on Good Friday, so I thought I’d share a potato post for anyone thinking about planting potatoes this spring.

Also, I would like to note that this whole planting potatoes on Good Friday thing is just a tradition dating to way back when. Way back when, potatoes were a rather new thing in Europe. Way back when, Irish Protestants were not so fond of potatoes as they are now. In fact, way back when, they sort of had this idea that potatoes shouldn’t be eaten because they weren’t mentioned in the Bible. Irish Catholics skirted the issue by planting them on Good Friday, thereby baptizing the little spuds and making them holy. So now both Protestant and Catholic Irishman are well known for their love of potatoes. And the rest of us are stuck planting them on Good Friday and not even knowing why.

Or so I’ve read.

Either way, the whole Good Friday thing has nothing to do with what is best for the potato. But if you plant on any other day, every single person you mention it to will let you know that potatoes are to be planted on Good Friday. Nevermind the fact that the date varies every year. And that some Good Fridays we could be under a foot of snow.

Potatoes are to be planted on Good Friday and that is all.

But first you need a seed potato.

Seed potatoes are potatoes set aside from the previous year’s harvest for the purpose of putting them back in the ground to start new potato plants. They aren’t seeds at all. But they haven’t been dusted with chemicals like most potatoes in the store which prevents them from forming eyes.

They should look healthy and almost like something you’d like to eat if it weren’t for all the eyes looking back at you. They should not be shriveled up sorry looking things that were thrown in a bucket at the front of the store in hopes that someone who knew nothing about seed potatoes would be attracted by the price and buy them anyway.

Last year, that someone was me. I was never all that interested in planting potatoes. We eat a lot of potatoes but they just don’t cost that much. Why bother? But then we moved out here and with 3000 square feet in my garden, why not throw in a couple of potatoes? Half of them never sprouted. But the ones that did? Oh my were they delicious. And I also found out that you can start harvesting new potatoes as soon as the flowers disappear. And that you can continue harvesting potatoes until they’re gone. You don’t have to wait until the plant dies back in the fall. That’s only necessary if you want to prepare them for storage. And if you lay down enough mulch, theoretically you can store them right there in the ground. I thought, “How cool is that? I can harvest potatoes all year long and not worry about storing a single one!”

So this year we have twice as many. And I started with healthy looking seed potatoes that start arriving in stores a little before Good Friday.

After you’ve collected all your healthy seed potatoes, it is time to cut them. Each cut should be at least two inches and have a couple of eyes.

Those eyes, by the way, form the plant, not the root. Cutting your seed potatoes not only gives you more plants for less money, it actually makes each plant healthier. If you did not cut your seed potates, each of those eyes would try to become a plant, resulting in potatoes with a lot of vegetative growth, but not a lot of actual potatoes.

So cut them. Unless they are small to begin with and only contain a couple of eyes. Those can be planted whole.

After cutting all your potatoes, you need to spread them out and find a cool place to store them for at least two days.

This allows the cut to scab over and “heal.” A tough surface develops that will make your little cut potato pieces more resistant to soil borne illness, mold and just turning to mush in moist soil after planting.

When they are suitably hardened off, it is time to plant them. Usually, you plant them cut side down a few inches deep with at least a foot between each plant. After the plants come up, you hill another 6 to 8 inches of soil on top of them to keep the potatoes nice and deep and out of the sun. We plant them just beneath the surface and then mulch with 6 inches of straw.

Then, when those first new potatoes are ready, we pull back the straw and enjoy garden fresh potatoes whose skins are so soft and tender they are somewhat prone to washing off right along with the dirt.

And yes, my potatoes are already in the ground. And yes, I know that I’m supposed to wait until Good Friday.

It can be pushed aside. It can be buried. But somehow, it always works its way back to the surface.

Because pain demands to be felt.

The Fault in Our Stars is a simple teenage love story made complex because all the characters are dying. And through lots of big words and references to Kierkegaard and William Carlos Williams.

Which for me was the biggest barrier to really getting “into” this book. Not that I can’t handle big words and references to philosophers and poets, but I had a difficult time believing that the main character full of these observations was a sixteen year old girl who obsessed over a single book.

Once I got over that, however, I rather enjoyed the book. I was a little surprised by the acclaim it seems to be getting and the term “modern classic” I heard describe it. But then, it is worth reading and it does contain some kernels of Big Ideas absent in so much that passes as literature.

And there is that one observation. That pain demands to be felt. Delivered so perfectly it etched itself into my mind.

It reminds me of my own pain set aside during the day to make way for the busyness of raising five surviving children. Buried under a list of chores that are never completed. Drowned out by the din of life. And yet it is always there lending an extra measure of edginess to my voice when even the smallest things go wrong.

And when it gets to be too much, I sit on the edge of my bed and stare out my window like I have so many nights. I can still see him coming into my room in the morning, a little head bobbing toward my side of the bed. I can still see how he reached over the edge and used the weight of his head and a little boost from the bedframe to clamber up onto the bed. I can still feel his weight crawl over me and I can still feel the way he snuggled into my back on chilly mornings before the sun came up.

I still miss him.

And the pain demands to be felt.

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This is a paid review for BlogHer Book Club but the opinions expressed are my own.

It’s spring at Roscommon Acres which means there is work to be done in the garden.

And lots of digging.

The strawberries have already begun to push up through the straw.

And so has the fall planting of garlic.

The chickens are out.

The guinea fowl are out.

And Timmy sits on top of the hill taking it all in.

Our first flowers have made their appearance.

Much to the delight of a little boy.

And at the corner of the garden lies a little cup left lying where Tiggy last used it.

Because there just doesn’t seem to be anywhere else for it to belong.

Updated to add pictures of Jake’s tracks for comparison (he’s our Bernese Mountain Dog and at 95 pounds, the biggest non-livestock animal around that I know of!).

I do see claw marks in his, though they are not nearly as distinct as in the tracks of our other dogs. The other dogs’ tracks look picture perfect, like they were taken directly from the guide book. His are indistinct enough that once the mud dries and the track starts to disintegrate, you might not be able to see them anymore. Other than that, they look like dog tracks to me, but then I KNOW that they are dog tracks. But his tracks are also a lot smaller, by almost an inch.

Back to the original post, with pictures of our mystery tracks:

So we had some excitement over the weekend with the discovery of tracks possibly belonging to a mountain lion. My children actually discovered them a few days before while out looking for our steer, but I figured they were Jake’s and sort of forgot about it until Friday when I finally got around to taking a look.

Now I wish I had gone down sooner. The tracks are deteriorating and none of them are very good. But they do seem to be cat tracks, and that would be one big kitty.

I even forwarded the pictures to the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission who asked me to go back and take more pictures. Unfortunately, the first were the best and clearest, but we did learn a lot about tracks and tracking. Like you know that guy on TV that says things like, “Lion passed by here about 18 hours ago. Male, three years old. Stalking something off to the right . . . ” It’s totally not like that at all.

The hunters and wildlife people I showed the track to said things like, “It looks like a cat to me. A bit big for a bobcat. Do you have cougars in your area?” and “It looks like a cat, but tracking is really more an art than a science. Can you set up a game cam?”

I think I wanted something more like, “That’s a big dog. You know any big dogs around there?” Because then I could laugh and think of Jake, our Bernese Mountain Dog, as the ferocious beast he is not. And not think of mountain lions prowling about within a mile of my house and right across the path my children took home.

But so long as we had something so exciting down the road, we gathered about the computer to learn a little about track identification and learned a few things. Like the basic differences between cat tracks and dog tracks.

General Points:

1. The dog track is generally oval and longer than it is wide. Cat tracks are generally circular and as wide as they are tall.

2. Dog tracks usually show claw marks. Cat tracks rarely do.

3. The two middle toes of dog tracks are usually even. Cat tracks have a leading middle toe which tells you whether it is the right or left foot. In the above illustration, that would be the cat’s left foot.

4. The dog’s heel pad comes to more of a point and you can draw an imaginary “X” between the outside of the middle toes and the top of the heel pad like this:

Which brings us back to our mystery track.

But you can’t really see the heel pad. Which is why we had to go take more pictures. Unfortunately, these were the best pictures of the best track, but this one did appear to show the heel pad a little more.

And it does appear to be a little broader, with no way to draw imaginary “X’s.”

And something else I found interesting. Most of the tracks were a muddled mess I couldn’t make much of. Like this.

But did you know that mountain lions generally walk by putting their hind foot in the track of their forefoot? And that can make their tracks a little less distinct.

And now I’m happier than ever for my little dog pack even as noisy as it can be.

If you are interested in learning more about tracking, Kim Cabrera has an excellent site we find ourselves on every time we come across an unfamiliar track. And of course she has a whole page devoted to mountain lions.

I have been making the simplest of all cheeses for some time now. That is where you take kefir (or yogurt), pour it into some cheesecloth and leave it hang over a bowl for one or several days until it reaches the consistency and tartness you prefer. But after forgoing granola cereal served with kefir two days in a row, I suddenly found myself swimming in kefir.

So I decided it was time to up my cheesemaking experiment and try to make some congetella, a mozzarella-like cheese made using kefir rather than rennet. Unfortunately, my directions were rather sketchy. Since I used a little of what was written and filled in the blanks with my own imagination, I am guessing this is not the fussiest of cheeses and is therefore suitable for a beginner.

After all, I didn’t even understand the instructions and I was quite happy with the results. All you need are:

• Whole milk
• Kefir (more about making kefir)
• Kefir whey

I started with ten cups of whole milk and one and a half cups kefir in a stainless steel pot. My original instructions said something about kefir (pH 5.5) which made no sense. Since milk is approximately pH 6.5 and kefir is approximately pH 4.5, I’m guessing I was supposed to add enough kefir to bring the pH of the mixture down to pH 5.5. But I have no way of measuring pH, so I just started with that.

I then stirred it slowly while heating it to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Or rather, my apprentices did.

180 degrees is like a magic temperature. When you hit it, all of a sudden the whole thing turns to curds and whey. Or at least I was pretty sure that was what was supposed to happen because that’s what happens when I heat just the kefir. But nothing happened. I had a couple of little lumps, but I suspected that was just the original kefir I had added.

Since the curdling is really a factor of acidity, I decided I needed more acid. A shot of vinegar? Or some more kefir? I opted for some kefir whey and added about a cup. The curdling started, but I still had curds floating in milk, so I added more. Next time I’ll measure, but I finally got what I thought I was looking for.

I poured that through a colander and got a little cheese and a lot of whey. There are lots of things you can do with whey, but I already had more than I really knew what to do with so I fed it to the dogs.

Next came the spinning. Basically, you just knead it and it begins to hold together. Plus you sample it. At this stage, it doesn’t have much flavor, but I could taste something vaguely reminiscent of mozzarella.

I think we didn’t spin it long enough based on what happened in the last step. I am hoping it will be somewhat like learning to make bread was and at some point you can just feel when you’ve added enough flour and don’t measure anymore. Some day I hope to feel when the cheese is ready.

But for now we spun until the children started to get a little silly and then rolled it into balls. The balls were then covered in cold water to let them set for half an hour.

The last step was to set them in a brine solution made of 1 part kefir whey and 1 part salt water. I left them in that for another half an hour before I realized our cheese balls were starting to disintegrate. I took them out, packed them a little and set them on a plate in the refrigerator.

I was planning on using it for pizza that night anyway, so I didn’t really need to store them for long.

The texture was a little grainy, but the taste was about perfect. While making our pizza, everyone took generous samples and after the pizza was done we all agreed that the cheese was the best part.

Well worth the experiment and the parts that didn’t work quite as expected. We will definitely be trying this again and if I get more of an actual recipe together as we gain experience, I will share that as well.

Have you ever made cheese before? I want to try some hard cheeses, but there is so much time involved, I’m a little nervous!

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If you are interested in purchasing kefir grains, I sell them for $10 (which includes priority mail shipping) to anywhere in the US.

I ship them every Wednesday and include an instruction sheet to get you started. If you try to order and this indicates I’m sold out, drop me a quick message and I’ll let you know when more will be available. All profits are donated to Tiggy’s House. Thank you!

The week of Tiggy’s birthday, we decided to take a vacation. Time to get away, time to not think of the little boy who wouldn’t be celebrating his birthday with us anymore, time to meet some of the many wonderful people who have supported us for so long though we knew each other only through the pixels of a computer screen.

And we went hoping to share stories of children in Nepal who had escaped horrific tortures we are uncomfortable even speaking about, much less in front of children, and the hope that was offered them through the gospel. We shared the mission of Tiny Hands International and how they could help provide a loving home and a future full of dreams for these children by helping raise money for Tiggy’s House.

But we didn’t expect to be so blessed ourselves. So many people opened their homes and their hearts to us and presented us with a beautiful gift that is but a small symbol of the many fingerprints that have touched our lives over the last 14 and a half months.

Our own blassing tree.

Thank you, everyone. You cannot know how much your comments, emails and facebook chatter have meant to me through this time. You have all left fingerprints on my life which I know are the fingerprints of God.

Packing, organizing, making lists. Mind on what I want to say about faith and grief and Tiggy’s House. Worried that when the time comes no words will come. And I have a book review due on Tiggy’s birthday.

How I didn’t notice that way back when I applied, I do not know. It only just occurs to me as time is running out and I realize it isn’t getting written before we leave. The book wasn’t getting read before we leave.

I take it to the car, to the passenger seat, so it won’t get forgotten.

And I didn’t really know what the book was about. The Rules of Inheritance. The title wasn’t really suggestive of anything to me.

So I start reading it somewhere south of Beatrice, after our last errand and we’re finally really on the road. And I realize this is going to be hard. Hard to read. Hard to review.

It’s about a girl, a young woman, really, consumed by the grief of losing her mother at 18, and then her father. Both to cancer. Both after years of medications and hospital stays and alternative treatments.

And she is lost. Adrift in a sea of grief. The alcohol, the cigarrettes, the sex, the abortion at 19 . . . it is all so raw and so hopeless and so close. I have a husband, children and a faith that sustains. I have anchors so that when the world seemed to wash away, there was a limit to just how far I could drift.

But I was always aware of the darkness on the other side, always a little afraid of just how strong the desire to escape was. But Claire Bidwell had no such anchors in her life and she spent years running away from her grief.

Except that only left her deeper within its grasp.

And I’m not really sure whether or not to recommend this book. It is good. It is well-written. It is hard to read. I don’t regret having read it and it certainly gives insight into just how hard it can be to lose someone you love. And there is hope as well as you are slowly introduced to an older, more mature Claire who stops running and starts finding a way to help others. But the journey is ugly and maybe not one everyone will want to accompany her on.

This is a paid review for the BlogHer book club, however all opinions are my own.

My little four year old LE, I think, has been teaching me something about prayer. A little about patience. A little about the faith of a child. A little about thankfulness. But mostly about prayer.

At bedtime, you see, we read a little story, talk about it and then pray. And Bug, though she is a little older, goes first, because LE’s prayers go on and on and on and on and Bug invariably falls asleep.

“Dear God,” she begins.

“I love you so much I just want to kiss and hug you. When I get to heaven, I’m going to give you a big kiss right on the cheek and I’m never going to stop kissing and hugging you . . .”

["um, Mommy? Do you think God would like it if I kissed him?" -- "Yes, dear. I think God would like that."]

“. . . Thank you for Mookie and for Tiggy and Bug and Bear and Mouse. And thank you for giving us such a good mommy and daddy. Thank you for Bunny and my bed and my sheets. Thank you for my bear and my ponies and my bus that says the ABC’s. Do you like my drawings on my wall? I made those for you. And thank you for my wall . . . “

And my mind started wandering in there somewhere after thanking God for her wall. And I prayed my own prayer of thankfulness for this little girl overflowing with love for her God. And I prayed for a small measure of her thankfulness that sees everything around her as a beautiful gift.

“. . . and thank you for Jesus and octopuses and glasses. Amen.”