Perhaps I would have gotten more into the book if I were Buddhist. Perhaps I would have gotten more into the book if I had any connection to the issues surrounding binge eating and binge spending. Perhaps I would have gotten more into the book if I hadn’t been reading it through the lens of my own loss.

Because really I never quite accepted that Geneen Roth, author of Lost and Found, had really lost anything of value. Money, yes. A lot of it. But it was money invested with Bernie Madoff, not money she was really using for anything at that moment. She didn’t lose her house and really, worrying over a mortgage is not the same. She still had food on the table and really, shopping at Costco isn’t that bad. She still had opportunities to go to New York and stay in hotels for speaking engagements and really, forgoing that $1000 pair of glasses is hardly suffering.

And I suppose it didn’t help that I knew from the start that she got it all back within a year and a half.

Or maybe it was just because she didn’t really spend that much time on the loss itself. There was a moment there when she is on the satellite phone with her husband to tell him what happened and he says they are no longer the kind of people who can afford to talk on a phone that costs $10 a minute — there I felt a sense of the loss. But she moves on rather quickly to the lessons learned from her tailspin that lasted a couple of weeks and to her analysis of her (and our culture’s) desire for more.

But I lost a child. There are no get togethers where people ask questions like, “If you could choose between getting it all back or keeping the lessons you have learned through the loss, which would you choose?”

Because questions like that only make sense when you are talking about losing material things. Things which only have the value you affix to them.

And while I identified with her sense of living “in the moment,” the need to pull her thoughts back to the here and now where they did not run wild with panic and fear for the future, it has neither been freeing nor beautiful for me. I do not stop and appreciate the beauty of the rose, drink in the smell of springtime before a rain, nor find comfort in the abundance I already have.

Those, rather, are the things I have lost, “. . . for all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

There is only one source of comfort for this longing in my heart and it isn’t here in the present for not all that I treasure is here. It isn’t in the many little gifts I sometimes barely perceive for they are as fleeting as the flower before it fades. It isn’t in myself for I have not the power to bring back my little boy.

Instead, I rest in the promise of the one who created him. Who said that life is not what we are living for and death is not the end. And in the glimpses I catch between the tears, I see something so brilliant that it leaves this world looking as pale and empty as it did the day Tiggy died.

And I remember that this is not the world we were created for.

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

Mother’s Day is fast approaching and to celebrate the special mother in your life, we are hosting a giveaway of our beautiful Family Bracelet made from genuine Austrian Swarovski crystals in the birthstone colors of mom, dad and all the children. This can also be made as a Grandmother’s bracelet with the birthstone colors of all of the grandchildren.

To enter, simply leave a comment sharing something you love about a mother in your life. A winner will be selected at random April 20, 2012 and notified via email.

In the meantime, we have this and many other lovely items in our etsy shop. Between now and Mother’s Day, you can get free dometic shipping on all orders by using the coupon code “MOTHERSDAY”. And as always, all profits are donated to Tiggy’s House, a children’s home in Nepal to rescue children from sex trafficking.

So Easter is coming up rather fast and a few people have asked me how you go about coloring brown eggs. My first response is, “Oh my goodness? Have you ever just loooked at them in the basket? They’re beautiful just the way they are!”

But I get it. With a dozen (or two) layers, you see that every day. And I have children, too. Children who don’t actually remember ever dyeing eggs. Somehow, that suddenly didn’t seem quite right, so we embarked on an egg coloring adventure to show you some ways you can decorate your already colorful eggs this Easter. If nothing else, it helps you remember which ones are boiled and which ones aren’t when you open the refrigerator.

For starters, you can color them just like any old white egg. You know how the yolks of those farm fresh, pastured poultry are just a richer, deeper, more satisfying color than the store bought eggs? Well, it’s kind of like that when you compare dyed white eggs to dyed brown eggs. The eggs in the top row were originally white. The eggs in the bottom row were brown eggs dyed in the same dyes for the same amount of time to show the color difference.

Those were dyed using the directions on the back of the food coloring box: one half cup water, one teaspoon vinegar and 20 drops of food coloring, in varying combinations.

If you have young children, stickers are always a treat. And can even usually be picked up for a dollar or two.

A little crayon allows for interesting designs. The egg will pick up the dye everywhere the crayon is not, allowing children to draw pictures, write their names, or sketch the Japanese symbols for love and long life.

This one didn’t turn out quite so well as we had hoped because, well, farm fresh eggs don’t always peel as nicely as store bought eggs. They take some aging and sometimes some refrigeration after boiling for the shell to come off cleanly. But we tried our version of Chinese tea eggs. Simply crack the shell of the boiled egg and then dip it in the dye. When peeled, you will have something like this.

Provided your egg white doesn’t come off with your egg shell as the whites of fresh eggs are wont to do.

And should you try that, do not throw away all that egg shell. Instead, put it in a bowl and crunch it up into little pieces. A little glue and Voila! You have a lovely selection of colors for a beautiful mosaic. My daughter isn’t finished with hers, yet, but you can see the beginnings of a very eye catching egg. As well as a nice project for the older children while the younger ones are simply slapping stickers on theirs.

And finally, there is the silk wrapped egg. I first saw this done with silk scarves, but who has a ton of silk scarves lying around? That they want to cut up and boil? Not me. But I do have scraps of recycled silk sari yarn, so I thought I’d try that to see what would happen.

First, you wrap the uncooked egg in your silk yarn. Or scarf.

Then you tie it in a sock. The only real purpose of the sock is to keep the yarn from falling off. The best way I found to do this was to stick my hand in the sock, grab hold of the egg and slowly turn the sock inside out over the egg so the yarn wouldn’t be rubbed off. Then tie it so it stays tight.

Set it in a pot to boil for ten minutes. It may take some creativity to get it to sink if your sock wants to float. I laid a pair of tongs on mine. When it finishes, you will have a lovely bit of abstract art created by the silk dyes rubbing off on your egg.

And with those few tools and a couple of hours, your children can create a few dozen masterpieces to share with friends, hide and of course eat.

How do you normally decorate your eggs?

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!