the best sandwich ever

I am not a fan of winter...but I am surviving. Part of what is getting me thru is the food that I was able to preserve and put up in the pantry during the last growing season. I am finding so much joy in the preserved taste of summer; organic and free of high fructose corn syrup. It makes me so happy when I open my pantry and see all the beautiful colors in the clear mason jars. I have been gardening for 4 or 5 years now, but this is the first year I have really figured out how to preserve the harvest so that it lasts all year. It has opened up a whole new world for me and I can't imagine gardening any longer without doing it. We live within walking distance of a grocery store and would survive just fine without doing the work or growing and preserving our own food, but I can't even find words to explain how much our lives are enriched by the process of intentionally growing, tending, harvesting and preserving our own foods.

Here's a sandwich I made the other day from things we grew this summer:

Dehydrated tomatoes

along with dehydrated zucchini, eggplant and red peppers soaked in a little olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette with a little dried basil and kosher salt.

I added some minced garlic and made a paninni with provolone and feta cheese.

topped off with some pickled banana peppers and fresh fenugreek sprouts!

Soooooo good, I felt like I was back out at the farm eating a my picnic table!

I am beginning to dream and plan for the upcoming growing season. I can't wait to get my hands dirty again and watch the little seeds sprout and grow! I plan to begin starting seeds in the next month or so. We are planning to grow as much as we can in our very small yard and work in the midtown neighborhood community garden as a family. I hope to preserve by canning and freezing even more food than we did last year now that I know how much we eat in one winter. My goal is that every year we would become just a little more self sufficient in how we eat. How rewarding to walk out in to my yard for my lunch rather than start up the van (I am going to be honest with you, I don't really walk there, although riding my bike there more is one of my goals this summer!) and go to Family Fare!

Come back! In my next post I will share how I canned over three dozen cans of applesauce and applebutter in the outdoor kitchen while living in our camper!

hello again

I must apologize for my long absence from the blog world. I know your wondering where I've disappeared to and I have heard from more than one person that they are getting sick of seeing Urban Chickens every time they check in here! I feel like I owe you an explanation. It was a crazy few months for us. The holidays are always very busy in my family, because almost everybody's birthday is in December. This year we started it all off right after Thanksgiving with a big family gathering. It was the first time ever that my whole family with all our new members have all been together at the same time! In the last year our family has grown significantly, with Laura and Wayne getting married and the birth of Julie and Davie's first child, Ayana. We managed to get a family photo with everybody in it! That's a big feat for us, he last family photo we have is from when Lily was a baby and has only 6 people in it!

Days after this gathering, we started off December with the very scary news that my then three month old niece, Ayana had a tumor on her adrenal gland. She had a very large belly so an Ultrasound was ordered and from that it was immediately obvious that she has a tumor and was admitted to Devos Children's Hospital. She underwent many tests and a biopsy. The diagnosis was a Neuroblastoma. Cancer. Needless to say it was an overwhelming time and there were lots of ups and downs, but she is an amazing little girl. She has the sweetest temperament and is just truly a happy baby. It was hard not to feel optimistic when she was smiling at you. She even learned to giggle while there!

Thankfully the tests came back well enough that she was sent home after only one week in the hospital. Rather than to pursue Chemo and other treatments the doctor thought it should just be monitored and observed. She sees the oncologist once a month and will have a CT or MRI every three months, but since leaving the hospital, all signs are showing that the tumor is shrinking! This strange form of cancer has been known to do that, but it is rare that it is not treated with Chemo. Her belly is significantly smaller and she is still acting completely healthy. Praise our Father!

Here's some recent photos of my girls with Ayana, or as Daisy calls her, "Ayana Baby":

The girls have my mom's baby buggy from when she was a little girl. We just got it out of storage the other day. They love pushing their baby's in it, but always long for a real baby to play with in it because they have heard the story about how when I was 8 and my sister Laura was 5 and baby Julie came along we used to push her around in it. When Julie stopped over the other day with Ayana, you should have seen the excitement in Rosie's eyes!

We let her try it out for a moment, very supervised! But Ayana looked a little overwhelmed!

So stay tuned, I'll try to keep up on the posting! I've got lots to fill you in on! I pray your having a peaceful winter and staying warm. Blessings!

Urban Chickens

I think one of the biggest things we learned out on the farm is how easy it is to raise chickens and how much we love fresh eggs! The girls favorite job on the farm was collecting the eggs.


We had two of the older laying hens living in our yard out at the farm. We named them Beauty (the black one) and Mops (the brown chicken). They were great pets and they put up with a lot of abuse from our kids!

Being back in the city is an adjustment and one of the hardest things is the feeling of loss of control over our food sources. I will never get used to buying my eggs in the grocery store. I plan to go back to urban gardening in the spring and I have been sprouting in the kitchen, but I am hoping that by springtime we will have the ability to have some laying hens in the yard here in downtown Grand Rapids. Having land to farm is wonderful, but even after living on 32 acres, I am amazed at how much food can be produced in a very small yard and I really believe it is possible to raise much of your own food even in the city. We have quite a few neighbors practicing Urban Homesteading and raising much of their own food. There is a movement building momentum right now working to change the city ordinance which prohibits keeping chickens in the city.

If there is anyone in the Grand Rapids area that is interested in getting involved in the recently formed Urban Chicken Movement, please consider joining us at the Eastown Neighborhood Association this Wednesday Novemeber 11, 2009 at 7:00pm.

We are all very hopeful the ordinance will be changed soon. There is quite an interest in this topic. We also have a facebook group Urban Laying Hens...Chickens for Grand Rapids.

Here are a few reasons I believe Hens can live in the city:

1. They don't need much room, there are some great chicken tractor designs that you just move around your yard every few days to keep the chickens on fresh grass and they will mow your lawn for free.
2. Seven laying hens produce as much waste as one average sized dog, but unlike dog waste, chicken waste produces great compost material and fertilizer for your garden.
3. They don't make much noise, you don't need a rooster.
4. They are beautiful and living things are wonderful to have around.
5. Chickens provide pest control in your garden, eating harmful bugs and slugs.
6. The eggs they produce are much healthier and more nutritious than those you buy in the store.

and here is my favorite reason to have chickens in the yard:

7. They eat up all your kitchen scraps!

Here are Beauty and Mops enjoying leftover stale cake! Okay so maybe that's not the best thing to feed them...

Introducing an old friend.

Sarah of WanderCraft is a friend of mine from way back. We were born and raised in the same neighborhood in Ypsilanti, and spent lots of time together as kids. We manage to stay in touch a little bit these days, thanks to our blogs! She makes the sweetest photojournals and has just opened her Etsy shop, WanderCRAFT design! Check it out, her stuff is super cute and really affordable!

Handmade Holidays!!

It's that crafty time of year again! No more gardening, no more trips to the beach or playing outside, and I am sad to see it go, but the thing that always gets me through this time is having time to do creative projects. This is my favorite time of year to craft. What better thing to do when the weather turns so cold and dark, and this is my favorite place for new ideas and inspiration this time of year: Sew, Mamma, Sew!

They just started their 3rd Annual Handmade Holidays event yesterday!

Everyday of the month of November there is a blog post with great project and gifts ideas for the holidays! Click on the button to check it out, and tell your friends!

For even more ideas, go thru the archives and look at the last two years Handmade Holidays master lists!

The Grand Tour

Our New House:The front porch wraps around the whole front of the house.
The yard is not very big, but it'll work.

The front hallway

The coat closet! I am so excited about this, I've never had one before!

The living room. Sorry about the crappy photo, I was in a hurry. I don't have too many complaints about the house, but this paint color is one of the few. It's a very wierd pink/coral color and it's in over half the house. I hope to paint this room a soft yellow when I get a chance.

THE CRAFT ROOM!!!

This room was also pink, down to the window trim and baseboards. It was aweful, so before I moved anything into it I painted it white. I am very happy with it. It is so bright with the two big front windows.

The day after I finished painting, and I was going to start moving stuff in, the neighbor across the street who was moving out, put this table and 4 nice solid wood chairs out on the curb! I am so glad I happened to step out on the porch (The only place I had phone reception until we got the land line) in enough time to snatch them up!

My fabric stash is in here! I picked this IKEA side board up on craigslist for $50!

I spend alot of time in the kitchen, and I am so happy to have plenty of room to work!

This is the pantry in the back hallway off the kitchen. Lots of room to store all the applesauce I canned and all of our gluten free flour!

The Dining Room

There is enough room for us all to sit down at the table together!!!! I m so thankful for this. Our old kitchen was ridiculously small and it was so difficult to sit down to a meal together. The girls also have a little table of their own where they eat lots of snacks and draw and play.

Making Our New House a Home

We are begining to feel settled in here and the older girls are both in school. We have been working hard to establish our rythyms and routines. We are all very thankful that after the crazy roller coaster ride of not knowing where we were going to live, that we ended up in this house and it works so well for us.

I have been enjoying getting things moved in and set up in our new house and it's starting to feel like home. I have an amazing craft room to work in, which has allowed me to make some things for our house instead of going shopping. Luna needed a new bed and our bed needed a nice blanket both for warmth and to add some color to our room.

The blanket I made from cut up, felted wool sweaters and backed with flannel. It was pretty easy and only took me one evening and part of the next day to finish. I plan to make another one for the couch with red, orange and brown colors in an attempt to tie together our bright red couch and retro orange chair!

Another quick little project I finished this week was this new purse, just in time as my old one was really wearing out. I found the felted bag at The Outlet for only $4.50 and used some wool sweater scraps from the blanket to sew on some pockets.


I really miss being able to grow our own food in the huge garden out at the farm and collecting fresh eggs, but I figured there had to be some way to produce some of our own food still, so I decided to try sprouting.

SPROUTS

The ones on the left are Fenugreek seeds, which I am anxious to try and the ones on the right are chick peas. My first go at sprouting, last week, I tried mung beans. Because of my lack of expierience, I used way to many seeds and had sprouts coming out of everywhere! They were very good, but I had to get creative in trying to use them up which inspired trying this new recipe:

FRESH SPRING ROLLS

I found the recipe in the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites Cookbook and we (Rich and I anyway, the kids weren't big on them cause they were raw and not at all like the egg rolls at the Chinese restaurant that they love.) really liked them. Rich made a sweet garlic dipping sauce to go with them.

We definitely eat well round here! I love having a kitchen that is big enough to work in, a dining room to sit down together in and a dishwasher to help with all the dishes we dirty!

I am still trying to use up all of the zucchini we grew in the garden this summer so the other night I made a double batch of zucchini brownies and zucchini bread. The bread recipe came from my favorite Better Homes and Gardens cookbook and turned out great with part rice flour mix and part sorghum flour and a little xanthum gum. The Zucchini brownies are from the Simply in Season cookbook that I have been using alot for ideas about what to do with the garden's produce.

ZUCCHINI BROWNIES

Simply in Season
by Mary Beth Lind, Cathleen Hockman-Wert
Serves 18-24

• 1 cup / 250 ml flour
• 3/4 cup / 175 ml whole wheat flour
• 1/3 cup / 75 ml baking cocoa
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
Combine in large bowl.

• 2-3 cups / 500-750 ml zucchini (shredded)
Stir in.

• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup / 175 ml sugar
• 3/4 cup / 175 ml brown sugar
• 1/2 cup / 125 ml plain yogurt
• 1/2 cup / 125 ml oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
Combine in separate bowl and beat with fork. Stir into zucchini mixture. Spread evenly into greased 9 x 13-inch / 3.5 L pan.

• 1/2-1 cup / 125-250 ml semisweet or mint chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup / 125 ml nuts (chopped; optional)
Sprinkle on top of batter. Bake in preheated oven at 350F / 180C until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 35-40 minutes.

Enough room to live, friends nearby, crafts and good food!! It doesn't get any better! In my next post, I'll give you the grand tour of our new house!