Fruit Leather

At risk of exposing myself to much ridicule from friends I am sharing this post with many who do not know about my secret bloggin' life.

When we were at the lake with our small group, I had a Tupperware filled with two batches of the fruit leather that the children and I prepared. One was mixed berries {strawberry, raspberry, and blueberry} left over from Mary Frances' baptism lunch. The other was blueberry/peach.

The other mother's were as intrigued as I was when I was first introduced to the concept of fruit leather about a year ago here.

I was intrigued because I have never been a fan of "fruit roll-ups". Even as a child it was not something I gravitated towards, but as a mother I knew that my children would love it ~ anything sweet, chewy, and different for them. I like the idea of knowing what they are eating and controlling the sugar content. Plus we are always up for a project in the kitchen.

Well, when I was searching online for a blueberry preserve recipe, I came across some additional directions for making fruit leather, and I knew I had to try it with some of those blueberries we picked.

I found the information here and here.

I've included some pictures of what we did in our kitchen:

Wash 2 cups of ripe or over-ripe fruit.

Put in the top of the double boiler. Cook for 15-20 minutes. Stir.

Place cooked fruit in the food processor* and puree. Add two tablespoons of lemon juice. Add sugar if necessary.

Line jelly-roll pan with parchment paper and spread pureed fruit evenly over the top.

Now for the not so exact part. The temperature on my oven settings doesn't go lower than warm so I placed the prepared trays into a warm oven for 4 to 6 hours and then turned the oven off, but I left the trays inside over night.

I think our leather could stand to be chewier, but it didn't keep my children from consuming mass quantities of fruit leather over the last month.

*I am a sucker for my food processor. I use it for a multitude of tasks throughout a typical week in our kitchen. Without double checking, I can almost assure you the directions recommend the blender, but I typically use a food processor for making puree instead of a blender. In my eyes, it just works better and faster, but you may have different luck with a blender.

Quatro

A month is too long to go without posting a blog update, and I apologize for my absence in the blogosphere ~not that our presence was really missed.
For all of you who were worried, rest assured that we are here and we are okay. Well I think we are okay... When I update you on our life, you might think I need to have my head examined. I've complained that I may never sit at my sewing machine again while I had a friend exclaim that I was never going to post on our blog again. In time and with patience both will happen again.

We are in full-time summer survival mode around our house. I feel like I have bounced from one trip/event with hardly a moment to come up for air in between. It has been an amazing yet extremely busy summer. We have certainly made lots of memories that I will cherish for a lifetime. It has been a good transition from preschool to real school for our family and I have few regrets.

There are a few memories that I won't cherish and those mainly involve the chaos in my house. At any given moment my house is a mess, my children are a mess, my car is a mess, even I am a mess, but we have had lots of together time. Together with our family of five. Together with extended family. Together with friends. Sadly, I have not taken enough pictures to capture these memories, but let me reiterate we have had a ball.

We've made some of those recipes I was dreaming of creating with the 5+ gallons of homegrown blueberries that I brought home in June. We made blueberry preserves! However, I added too much water so we have blueberry syrup instead of preserves for Christmas gifts. No worries, it has been tried and tested on pancakes by my children and their friends, and they tell me I can still give it as gifts. {Maybe I should not trust an almost five year old and her brothers in that department, but it feels good to think it is done.} My mother recalled a year she did that same thing, and she suggested serving it on ice cream.

We made a patriotic trifle for the 4th of July. It included angel food cake, vanilla pudding, fresh blueberries, fresh strawberries, and some of that blueberry syrup I was telling you about. We've made blueberry cobbler and an even better blueberry pie, and my children feasted on fresh blueberries meal after meal for the better part of three weeks. We are still enjoying some blueberry/peach fruit leather.

Okay enough about what we did with the blueberries and on for the life update.

We've enjoyed lots of lake living ~

over the 4th of July ~
with old Mobile friends ~ see more details here with newer Birmingham friends ~with our small group ~



Mary Frances was baptized ~ I'll dedicate another post to that special event.
And there is more ~ The title implies but I have to tell you we are expecting our 4th baby. I keep getting questions such as, "are you excited?," "was it planned?" and comments such as, "Wow!," "Really, four?" The answer is yes, we are super excited and yes it was planned. Frank and I have both always wanted four children. We have even wanted four children in our less than 1700 square foot house with rotten windows and moisture damage.

Now for the house, that is the part of our craziness that was not part of the plan. As many of you know, our long term goal, hope, dream, and desire has always been to tear this house down and build on our lot. It was not our plan for this year, but we have had a few things happen this summer that we can ignore no longer. We sprung a leak and have a blue tarp on our roof and I'm afraid we have some significant mold issues in our bathroom. The problems with our house coupled with the extraordinarily low interest rates have made this the time.

We've engaged an architect and talked to builders. My head is spinning with dimensions of rooms, specifications of appliances, details of reclaimed brick and hardwood floors, the benefits of Pennsylvania vs. Tennessee blue stone, the color and shape distinctions between sandstone and moss rock as well as a myriad of other details.

I hope you feel caught up on the goings on of our life. I will leave you with these...

Kerplunk

Do you know the book Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey? We love books in our house and I particularly love reading my children the books that I heard over and over as a child. I guess those could be considered classics. Books by Robert McCloskey fall into that category. Blueberries for Sal and Make Way for Ducklings are probably our favorites.

Yesterday, I felt a little like Sal's mother. Fortunately, there were no bears ~ just my children dropping berries into their buckets to hear the kerplunk and then gobbling them up equally as quickly.

My mother and I took the children to my Uncle Tres' house to pick blueberries. This is just another example of how blessed I am ~ my uncle has what might be considered an orchard of blueberry bushes. They are enormous {more like trees than bushes} and organic, and they yield amazing quantities of blueberries. Each summer I try to make one trip to his home to stock my freezer for the year. With each trip I am secretly dreaming of picking enough to make blueberry preserves ~ something my grandmother did each year when I was a child. Most homemade preserves are delicious ~ how can they not be with so much sugar ~ but I am a complete sucker for homemade blueberry and fig preserves! They taste of my childhood and the hours those that went before me spent over a hot stove canning.

Picking blueberries is not difficult. In fact, many of these were the perfect degree of ripeness to allow them to just pop off of the bush. But as anyone who has three young children can tell you, having children adds a different element to life, and as you can imagine picking blueberries was quite interesting.

This is basically how it went... Mary Frances was quite helpful {maybe 5 is the magic age}! She picked and Walker ate while Stephen played with the piles of recently cut grass and attempted to climb the ladder.

Actually this was the most successful attempt I have had with picking berries with my children. Maybe it is because they had each other. Maybe it is because they are older. Undoubtedly it is because the weather was perfect ~ overcast and threatening making it cool and breezy. After several hours and a picnic lunch we made it back to Sagwah with two large buckets of berries.

I'm dreaming of blueberry preserves, blueberry cobbler, blueberry fruit leather, and maybe even a blueberry pound cake to take to the lake for the 4th of July. I hope this will leave us with just enough to freeze for pancakes throughout the year.

I hope to be back soon with some of the fun things we do with these berries.

For now I will leave you with this thought...

Patterson would say we had a good day!

The Tide Ebbs and Flows

I'm not sure if I have conveyed the reason we have had the privilege of once again spending time over the bay. We are here for my double first cousin, Dillon's wedding. Therefore, it has been a fun-filled week and a half with family ~ close family and extended family ~ Just so you have an idea of what this entails...

The house we are renting, Sagwah, is filled with close family ~ my family of five, my mother, her mother, my brother and his growing family.


All of the festivities took place at my aunt and uncle's home. Not only did they play host to parties Thursday through Sunday, their house is filled with their three grown children and their own families.


Another aunt shares a condo very nearby with her husband and for the weekend her son and soon to be daughter 'n law.


My paternal grandmother lives in an apartment just up the road.


Various other relatives came from Mobile to partake in the wedding festivities.


If you were around in the spring, I think you know we welcomed baby Sarah into our family. This is my brother and his beautiful bride, Anna's sweet baby. My children are smitten!



So were the cousins... or at least the girls {minus Baylis} ~


I promise, she gave him the idea! You can even ask her daddy.



Sisters catching up...


I don't know about you, but I love my family so much that it can hurt. I truly want to spend time with them, but they sure can drive me crazy and even make me angry probably because I am overly sensitive, desire perfection, and wear my emotions on my sleeve {just to name a few of my faults}. But amid those bumps and bruises are the bonds that make us want to come back for more to create more memories such as these...

Idol worship

turns to silliness
Wedding moments...



Just like the tide emotions ebb and flow yet family remains constant. My Great Uncle Billy and I were talking last night, and he shared some thoughts which I believe are spot on. He has recently turned 90 and become more philosophical than ever. He was talking about people and about relationships and making the point that how we react to situations is a choice. My paraphrase: Unlike the ebb and flow of the tide, we can choose how we respond to our emotions, our fears, our frustrations, and our disappointments. One of his points was that some people choose to hold on to resentment and in my opinion {not what he said} this leads to bitter unhappy folks. Others choose to let go and move on. In all of our relationships, we have a choice whether we see the good things or see the bad things in each other and in those relationships. Believe me in each of us and in every relationship there is plenty of both ~ after all none of us are perfect ~ as hard as we try or as much as we might want to be. So be the bigger person, let go and see the good in life. Learn from those difficulties and frustrations. It makes the ride all the better.

Born with the Bay in His Blood

I think Stephen has the bug and has it bad. Now that I am here, I recall this sentiment from the time we spent at Point Clear last summer. My middle child loves this place which is wonderful beyond words to me. I actually have tears in my eyes as I type because it gives me such joy. There is also a touch of sadness behind those tears since we can't just jump in the car and make weekend jaunts to March Inn. This sadness is deepened as I think how the impact of the BP oil spill is going to change the world as I know it, but that is another story for another day.

Don't get me wrong I think everyone in my family has had a fabulous time and would love to come back again and again, but Stephen in particular has loved being over the bay. He has played hard and unfortunately not slept as hard. He rises early and goes to bed late. He wants to do it all ~ fish, crab, swim, sail, play in the sand, jump in the waves, watch the boats, point out the pelicans and seagulls, ride bikes {or trikes as the case may be}, and just watch the waves crash on the beach.

One afternoon I coaxed Stephen into his nap by asking him to dream what our next adventure was going to be. When he woke up, he told me he dreamed about riding his bike to see the ducks and so we did.

We have rented what to us is a perfect bay house. Not too fancy but comfortably nice with everything we need and then some. It reminds us of our beloved March Inn yet with the comfort of air conditioning. One unexpected bonus was the crab trap. When I pulled it up "just to see," there were to my surprise five large male crabs and a mullet. Now how he wandered in, I'm not sure, but I was delighted. Not only did I have enough crabs to boil but also bait to attempt to catch some more. Stephen was enamoured by this whole process and is longing to catch more.

When you get to end each of your days with this surrounded by family and friends, who wouldn't have the bug and have it bad!