I stand at the sink, drinking a glass of water as it turns immediately to sweat. I think this has to be a sign of dehydration and have another glass. I’m about to make my rounds, checking on the poultry, filling water dishes, making sure the animals are cared for. Last week on one of these water-bearing excursions I got dizzy and have since been much more diligent at making sure I have something to drink before going out.

Fresh water for the geese, the ducks, the broilers, and the chicks in their respective pens. Fresh water for the chickens who are out free ranging–one dish at the entrance of the coop, one in the shade of a large tree. Fresh water for the dogs. Fresh water on a table in the garage for the cat just in case the wind blows the door shut and she happens to get trapped inside.

I check on the garden to see if any of my vegetables struggling for a bit of space amongst the weeds need some watering to make it through the rest of the afternoon. The state is underwater with water volumes rivaling the Great Flood of 1993. Neighboring communities were evacuated. The Missouri has left its banks with flood waters covering one lane of Highway 2, five miles from where the river is supposed to stay. My husband is stuck in Creston waiting on a train that is waiting for flood waters to recede before it can pass.

Fortunately, the garden is still moist enough. It always seems strange when I need to set out a sprinkler in light of the ongoing news reports, but we live on a hill and mostly the rain only manages to increase the humidity for us.

Finally, my afternoon chores are finished and I walk up the hill toward the house, toward a nice, tall glass of refrigerator tea, toward a window fan that will provide a little relief from the heat.

Sweat is dripping from my forehead, plastering my hair to the side of my face and the back of my neck. The shirt I wear in lieu of sunscreen sticks wherever it finds skin. I lift it off my shoulders seeking just a little air. Suddenly, a breeze. . .ever so slight. . . comes down the hill to meet me and ruffle my shirt.

A breath of fresh air.

It is followed by a stronger breeze, a distinctly cooler breeze and I let it pick up my shirt and push it off my shoulders.

I bask in the coolness.

I can smell the rain on the changing wind. I can feel the temperature dropping. I close my eyes, breathe the clean, fresh air, drink in its refreshment.

And I wonder for a moment if the seemingly unbearable heat is worth it for the pleasure of just this small breeze meeting me as I walk toward the house.

Summer is here and getting hot, hot, hot! It’s the perfect weather for yogurt: yogurt over fresh fruit for a light breakfast, blended with frozen fruit for an afternoon smoothie or frozen for a refreshing treat as the temperature rises. Unfortunately, our little one quart yogurt maker can’t keep up with the demand this time of year, but it doesn’t have to.

After all, all that handy little appliance does is keep my culture at 85 degrees or so until I turn it off. With outside temperatures staying in the 80s and 90s, there is no need whatsoever to plug in my yogurt maker and I can now make yogurt by the gallon.

All you need is a little yogurt, a lot of milk and a pan to heat it in.

Ingredients:

8 oz yogurt (plain, unsweetened and with live, active cultures)

1 quart milk

Procedure:

1)  Heat milk to about 180 degrees Fahrenheit to thoroughly pasteurize but do not let it boil. This makes sure the only bacteria you culture is the yogurt making bacteria (lactobacillus acidophilus). I’m real exact about this. I stick my pinky in the milk and if it “bites,” it has achieved the proper temperature.

That’s because I learned to make yogurt from a Kurdish woman and I was under the impression they weren’t in the habit of using kitchen thermometers.

2)  Set milk aside to cool to somewhere between 80 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Again, you can double check with your pinky. If it is slightly warmer than lukewarm, it’s ready.

3)  Stir in yogurt. Or should I say lightly mix in? The more you stir, the more sour your yogurt will be. I usually add a little milk into my yogurt and stir to make it liquidy then stir that into the milk with three or four slow strokes.

4)  Cover and set aside for eight to ten hours where it will stay warm. A covered porch, a garage, or if you’re fortunate enough to not have AC like us, then you can just set it on the counter.

5)  Refrigerate when thickened and sweeten according to taste. With sugar. With honey. With homemade mulberry syrup. With your favorite jelly. Or just eat it plain. It’s that good.

Now, the ingredient proportions do not need to be exact. You just need a little yogurt to get your yogurt started, but this proportion seems to work well pretty consistently without taking too long. And you know the best part? You just need to save back some of this batch to start your next batch! No need to buy more yogurt for your next batch.

After awhile, the yogurt culture will get “tired.” Meaning that you’ll suddenly have a thin batch. Then you know it is time to buy a new container of yogurt to start your next batch. This usually happens to me when I leave the yogurt starter in the refrigerator for a few days before trying to start the next batch. The sooner you use it, the better it will be.

Your homemade yogurt may not be quite as thick as store bought, but it tastes much fresher and you have complete control over how you sweeten and flavor it. After awhile, you will notice that store bought yogurt has a sort of strange, gelatiny feel to it. That’s because a lot of yogurts are made with a thin yogurt thickened with gelatin.

Yours is 100% yogurt, 100% fresh and 100% delicious!

Running a quick errand, fiddling with the radio, the children chattering in the back and I caught a glimpse of motion ahead and to the right. Not perceiving exactly why, I stopped the car and waited. Slowly, cautiously, a deer emerged from the underbrush and just stood at the side of the road, seemingly as captivated by me as I was by her. The children unbuckled and leaned over the seat to get a better look and still she just stood, watching us watch her.

Read the rest over at Heart of the Matter…

The mulberry, though actually a collective fruit rather than a proper berry, is a nutritious little thing that grows wild in many places. They grow on relatively small trees and remind me somewhat of blackberries though not quite so delicious. They’re fragile, don’t store well, are sort of a pain to collect when they’re growing at the top of a spindly tree but so worth the effort if only you know what to do with them.

What you do with them is make jelly or syrup. This is how we do it.

1. You need a source of fresh mulberries. About a month ago, a rumor began circulating that we had a mulberry tree on the property. When I finally got around to walking down with the children, we discovered not one, but two mulberry trees.

2. You need children. Preferably your own since you’re going to send them to the top of a tree and get them back slightly discolored.

The goofy grin has nothing to do with mulberries, however, and everything to do with pointing a camera at a five year old.

3. You need patience and lots of time. For three days, I sent the children out to collect mulberries. For three days, I received purple children and three or four berries in return. I finally joined them and the bucket was filled surprisingly quickly. I even still got purple children out of the deal. And they weren’t the only ones enjoying the harvest. See this purple little bill? It led me to yet two more mulberry trees.

4. You need a recipe of some sort. This part proved about as difficult as getting children to put berries in a bucket rather than their mouths. Maybe it was a good thing I had an extra three days to search.  See, everything I found included corn syrup and seriously the main reason I am willing to go through the trouble of making my own syrup is to get away from the corn syrup in everything.

But then I finally found this, a recipe for Sharab El Toot. And for the homeschooler in me, it was a wonderfully educational adventure to incorporate into the mulberry picking. The children didn’t like the end product so much. Well, except for L.E.Fant who drank everyone else’s, but the pictures on the site were lovely and we all enjoyed sampling some Lebanese refreshment.

This is a slightly modified recipe, intended for canning. And let me tell you, this stuff is fabulous on ice cream. Wow. After having some at my parents’ house, I went out and bought ice cream just to put the syrup on.

Mulberry syrup

4 cups mulberry juice
8 cups sugar
1/2 cup lemon juice

To get the juice from the mulberries, you can use a food mill. But we don’t have one. So I threw them in a pot with a bit of lemon juice and a bit of water and heated them up while squishing with a potato masher. Once it was heated and mushy, I poured the mess into a muslin bag and tied it over a pot to drip overnight. In the morning, I mushed the bag until I couldn’t get any more dribbles out.

You can add some syrup to the mush to make jam, or fold it into muffins. I, however, was a bit lazy about separating all the little green stems from the berries so I fed the mush to the chickens who were already filling the hen house with purple poo since discovering we had mulberry trees. They were pleased.

Add the lemon juice and syrup and heat slowly. Bring to a boil, stirring continuously. Cook down to desired consistency. Or add 1/2 cup of pectin, but we just cooked it down. Skim the foam regularly for a nice clean syrup. Process in a boiling water bath.

Try some Sharab El Toot. If you like flavored waters, you’ll love it. If not, well, at least you’ve tasted a bit of Lebanon. Then get some ice cream and try not to overeat.

(Image courtesy oceandesetoiles’ Flickr photostream under a Creative Commons license.)

Enjoy! If I don’t post for another week, just know I’m feverishly collecting mulberries to replenish my dwindling stores before they’re gone for the season!

canning preserving syrup mulberry syrup

And I should have told you about it ages ago, but here it is. Waiting for you.

I’ve been craving a little spring amidst all the dreariness we’ve had of late, but it doesn’t look like it’s making an appearance until this weekend. Fortunately, this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling is delivering a virtual spring in all its flowering beauty.

Tonight, should I not simply fall asleep as I did last night, I shall share our chicken slaughtering adventure from yesterday. Don’t worry, there won’t be any graphic pictures. There would have been, but as you know, I am without a camera.

It’s Mrs. Mama Hen’s first time hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling so stop by and show her some love!

Well, it seems our year of changes shall include yet another change. The addition of another little bundle of joy come December or so.

Wow.

I’m not actually sure how to express my thoughts, but maybe that is because I’m sleeping through most of them.

I have a garden to plant, chicken tractors to build, geese to prepare for and you don’t even want to know what my house looks like right now. Oh, and did I mention homeschooling?

And mentally, there’s something about six children that I can’t quite get my mind around. Maybe because I’m still imagining going into labor while snowed in without power in the middle of nowhere. A not-so-pleasant fancy aided along by my mom’s friend telling me about someone she knew being taken to the hospital on the paramedic’s snowmobile.

But I don’t even know anyone with a snowmobile.

Maybe I can borrow Mr. B’s tractor–his sprayer, since we are trying to learn what all this stuff is we see all around us every day now. We were watching it on the fields yesterday. I think it has enough clearance to go right over our minivan.

Or maybe I can just go get a hotel room for a month. Except hardly anyone has rooms to accommodate a family with five children, let alone six.

The children are excited. They have been arguing about whether the new little bundle should be a boy or a girl. They have finally come to an amicable agreement, however.

“Mom can just have twins! One of each! That’s fair, mom, right?”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

Can you imagine?

Well, I’m attending my very first writer’s conference this weekend and have decided to step outside myself a bit and participate in the public readings this evening. The only problem is, I need something to read.

That’s where I need your help. I’m going to bring along one of my blog entries because, well, that’s all I have at the moment. But which one to bring? These are the ones I’m considering at the moment:

In which my husband tries to burn down the county

Late night visitors, or attack of the coyotes

In which I beat off a coyote with a box of Rice Chex

Which one would you suggest? Or can you think of another that might be appropriate?

Oh, and, uh, what do you wear to these things?

Thanks!

Congratulations Holly Canfield! You won the Share the Harvest Challenge! I hope you enjoy gardening and I’ll email you shortly to get your gift certificate sent!