It's Taco Tuesday!

Sorry Taco Time...it's Taco Tuesday at our house too!

I used to make my own taco shells quite often...I'm referring to something I wrote in the last blog when I say I didn't want to drag all the hungry yard apes to the store with me because I forgot to get shells for tacos during my last shopping trip.

Here's my recipe for these....it's super duper easy and they taste great...but can be a little time consuming so start supper early or have supper late....unless you've got some help or do these earlier in the day.

Home Tortillas
-2 cups all-purpose flour
-1/2 teaspoon salt
-1/4 cup margarine
-1/2 cup warm water

-Combine flour and salt in a bowl, cut in margarine, and then add the water into a well formed in the middle of the mixture. Combine into a dough and knead lightly.
-Divide into 12 equal parts. Lightly grease your hands with some margarine and roll each ball of dough with your hands to coat them with fat.
-Cover with a cloth and allow to rest for about 30 minutes.
-Roll each ball into a thin 8 inch circle on a lightly floured surface. Pull or stretch if necessary. Allow to rest by cooking the tortillas in the sequence they were rolled out.
-Cook on a hot ungreased griddle until brown speckles appear on the underside. Use spatula to squash down and flip to cook on both sides.
-Finished tortillas can be stacked between paper towels or the folds of clean tea towels.

Don't worry if they are not perfect circles because they just... won't.... be... but your family will love them anyway.

Now these tacos take some time to prepare and I usually enlist the help of somebody in the household to help me with these. OR I just buy taco shells when I do my weekly grocery shopping trip. (I'm much more organized than I used to be with shopping trips--when the kids were little I was such a scatter-brain!)
Our family likes the store bought shells in the different flavours like the spinach, cheese or tomato-flavoured shells.

BUT I always make my own taco seasoning...here's my recipe for this mixture and we love, love it! I double or triple this recipe, use about 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (we like it strong) to the meat and store the rest in a clean labeled canning jar with a tight lid. Keeps well for many months in the pantry.

Taco Seasoning
-6 teaspoons chili powder
-5 teaspoons paprika
-4 1/2 teaspoons cumin
-2 1/2 teaspoons onion powder
   or onion salt
-1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
-1 teaspoon garlic powder
-1/2 to 1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon oregano

-Combine all the ingredients in a bowl. Stir or whisk well and store in an airtight container in a cool dry place. Stays fresh for at least 6 months.
-When making chicken, beef or pork tacos--brown the meat in a frypan and drain. Add 1/2 cup water and enough taco seasoning to your preferred taste then simmer until most of the water has evaporated--about 10 minutes.

..and there we have it.
It only takes about 5 minutes of my time to mix up the seasoning and because we have tacos every month or two, it's well worth making a big batch of it and always having it on hand. It saves a few pennies and tastes much stronger than store-bought seasoning mix. We always had to buy two packages anyway to get what we wanted. I dislike bland food.

Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice....and Cheap

When the kids were small, I hated packing up everybody (and there was always a resistant baby to drag along) so I could just pick up a few things at the store just before supper time. I decided to make some of my own spices, syrups and mixes and with a little creativity could go a week without stopping at the grocery store except to quickly pick up milk, bread, and eggs. And those were often things I could ask Mike to pick up along the way from work.

I was raised by depression-era parents so I can get quite frugal when I want to. That is a skill in it's own.

Some of my favorite do-it-yourself mixes are things like seasoning salt (I have two such spice mixes that we enjoy), chocolate syrup, coffee creamer for my homemade iced coffee, sweet coffee mix, Italian seasoning, ranch dressing, and many many more. Some I've looked up on the internet and usually end up tweaking the recipe slightly. Some recipes I've found in old cookbooks like dog biscuits and chocolate pudding. It amazes me how we've forgotten how to make simple mixes instead of dishing out so much of our hard-earned money for something that doesn't taste that good.

Here's what I've been making a lot lately, since the weather has turned nice...finally....
It tastes a whole lot better than Timmy's iced coffee, in my opinion anyway, and you can make this as sweet or as strong as you'd like.

As you can see, the second batch I made this week is almost gone!

Iced Coffee:
     Put a heaping cupful of ground coffee in a clean 4 litre ice cream pail. Fill with cold tap water. Put the lid on the pail and let it sit on the counter overnight or at least 8 hours.
After the coffee and water has soaked, pour it through a few layers of cheesecloth. (I lay my cheesecloth in a strainer and set it on top of a pitcher.) Refrigerate.

Creamer:
     In a blender put one can of sweetened condensed milk, 1 3/4 cups of milk and 2 tablespoons of vanilla extract (I've tried rum extract and it tastes great too). Blend well and pour into container(s) and refrigerate. Lasts a week and a half at least (or until the milk expires). May have to shake before using.

Put a few ice cubes in a glass, fill with your cold coffee and top off with your homemade creamer. You can tweak it as you like by adding more coffee to make it stronger or you can use heavy cream instead of milk in the creamer to make it creamier.

We've been enjoying this home-brewed iced coffee for the last few years.....Mike and I seemed to have acquired a fetish for iced coffee but it was costing a bucket of money every week--something had to be done!!

Bye Bye, Birdie

When my oldest son was about 7 years old, he wanted to sleep in a tent in the backyard one night. I was a little hesitant about letting him do it because we had lived in this city for only a year or two and were a little concerned about the crime here. I tried not to show my fear and told him "Okay, and I'll leave the back door unlocked in case you need to come inside in the night." That night, my husband and I helped him get settled in the tent, kissed him goodnight and went inside to get ready for bed ourselves. It was a restless night for me. At about six a.m., Brody came running into the house, stood by my bedside and whispered really loudly "I did it, Mom!" He was so so proud of himself!

Brody's Grade 1 Picture

Now Brody is moving almost across the country to Ontario travelling in a van that he has fashioned into a camper. I don't know when I will see him again. I will miss him dearly but I know this is something he needs to do. After all, he's 21 years old, working night shifts slinging burgers at Denny's...who wouldn't want something else in life?

I can't help thinking of the time when he was this little boy determined to sleep in the backyard in a tent. I worried back then about whether he'd be okay and I worry now. Motherhood isn't easy.

Below my worry, I'm excited for him. He is young, single and nothing is holding him here. I want to hug him and not let him go, but that wouldn't be fair to him. Brody is craving adventure--I see it in his eyes. He's got a friend living in the area where he'd like to go so I know he won't be totally alone. He also enjoys his own company and I know will enjoy trying and seeing new things. The girl who stole his heart is out east too. She's a lovely girl that still holds his heart although they broke up a couple of years ago. They still talk...a lot! (Maybe one day they'll let me write their story.)

The day he left, it was a windy cloudy rainy cool day....the kind of day for a funeral....you know what kind of day I'm talking about. My heart ached all day as I was thinking of Brody, alone, sleeping in his van somewhere along the TransCanada highway. I can't help wondering "Did we teach him well enough to handle whatever may happen on this trip?"

I'm confident that we did.

A Mother Can Brag, Right?

My baby girl just turned 14 years old. Fourteen I said. She's starting high school in the fall.

When she was little, we thought she was the prettiest little girl in the world.....and she still is. We even considered chaining her up at home--never letting her go anywhere---so nobody could break her heart. That is, until, she was about 5 or 6 and she said her first vulgar word--my fault---totally my fault--sorry about that.

She is a sweet heart. Raelynn is very soft-spoken and gentle. I see a lot of myself at that age in her...except for the sweetheart, soft-spoken and gentle part. I see her struggles and I wish I could take any hurting she's feeling away from her. But I can't.

She is very different than her fourteen-year-old friends. Her friends look like they're going on 18 or 20 years old whereas Raelynn actually looks younger than her 14 years. She will be asked for identification FOREVER. She's very mature for her age and is getting herself mentally ready to move out on her own one day. She can cook, bake and clean. She manages her allowance surprisingly well. She's getting phenomenal grades and has been on the honour roll in her middle school for two years now.

But look out! If she gives me a smile and challenges me to a game of ping-pong, I know some horns will start growing out of the front of her head any minute. She can get tough when it's called for.

Little things about her make me smile. It won't matter how many disagreements we have or how far away she will move from me one day, I will always see her eyes when she observes a beautiful sunrise.

I'm forever grateful that God chose me to be her mother.

...and by the way...she didn't want me to post a recent picture of her on my blog so the picture you see above is from a long time ago.

Mennonites Don't Dance......Unless it's for a Good Cause

When I was growing up in southern Manitoba, it wasn't uncommon for people to throw what we called a Social Occasion, typically shortened to a Social, to raise money for say, somebody getting married, a sports team or somebody going through hard times to help pay for medical bills. It was always quite a shin-dig. All funds raised, minus the cost of setting it up, would go straight to whomever it was being thrown for. You'd buy tickets, either ahead of time at a participating business, or at the door the night of. When you'd arrive at the party, you'd buy tickets for your drinks, socialize with whomever was there and laugh and dance the night away to the popular music-man set up on stage taking requests anything from pop, rock, country and rap.....whatever your heart desired.

There were always plenty of things going on like raffles, 50/50 draws, silent auctions, door prize draws....whomever the Social was held for, could walk away with a good chunk of change.

In our community, the information about an upcoming Social would spread like wild fire. Oh yes, us Mennonites could spread news as if it was The Last Faspa.

Of course, it's us Mennonites who aren't very good Mennonites that would attend these things. You mix booze with Mennonite up-bringing and the Good Lord only knows what could happen!

It was our Mennonite Go-Fund-Me in a way but it was way, way more fun. It was a great fundraiser and fun as heck. Anybody could throw a Social as long as one followed the rules with liquor permits and gaming laws.

Most of the Socials were held in the neighbouring town of Morden because our little town of Winkler was dry.....well, we called it dry but you could go to the local bar and have a beer. (Just beer...they didn't serve anything else but many different kinds of beer.) Morden was less Mennonite than Winkler so that was convenient for the "closet" drinkers.....you don't want to be hugging a bush on a Saturday night in the front lawn of the community hall, emptying your innards from drinking too much vodka and OJ, and suddenly Uncle Henry drives past from having borscht and fresh buns at Grandma's house! Oy vey!

Maybe they have them here in Alberta?? but I haven't heard anything. Of course I'm an "old lady" now and not in the loop like I used to be. I have to be told by my children what's hot and what's not.

What Stitchery Is This?!

A couple of weeks ago I was quite stressed about things going on in my life. I turned my rage towards my quilting. I had a pattern that I wanted to get started on but hadn't purchased the fabric for it yet but I needed something to keep my mind at ease...NOW! So I eyed my fabric scrap pile and went about cutting and sewing, piecing together fabric willy nilly with absolutely no regard for matching colors....well, that's not entirely true. I do have some standards.

I was very pleased when I got this blanket together.....it turned out kind of cute!

I know I'm being a whiney baby. When I step back and take a look at this quilt, I see my stress that I had at that time. It really wasn't so bad. There are many people out there that have much, much worse problems than I do.

I have our taxes to prepare for. I feel another quilt coming on.

A Wrinkle in Time

I love wrinkles. Really. I wish every wrinkle on my face could talk. "Hey! I was born when Brody cracked his face on a motorcycle peg at the age of three!" or "Look at me! I'm a three-pack that started out when Coleson broke his arm for the second time!"

My wrinkles would not be as interesting to talk to as some people I've come across in my life. Several years back, I worked nights at an independent living complex. I didn't have too many interactions with the seniors that lived there, but every now and then one of the residents couldn't sleep and would come sauntering into the common area in hopes of meeting up with one of us night-shift girls. I would make a pot of coffee (these people didn't care if caffeine was going to keep them awake at night because they were up anyway) and we'd have a seat in the comfy chairs and talk or just watch TV together. Once they started talking, oh the stories they would tell! There's nothing like listening to glory days of an era gone by.

I'm sure many of the stories I heard were embellished but that's fine by me.....it made the tales much more interesting!

There's also the happy wrinkles. We call them laugh lines. They are beautiful. Each of my laugh wrinkles could tell you a joke.

Unfortunately I have those nasty angry wrinkles too.....too many of them. I know I've got a permanent scowl going on. They have stories too.

The most I can do is take care of my skin by washing it every morning and every night and smearing on a good moisturizer. I wouldn't want to erase all my facial lines....maybe just soften them up a bit. I like looking in the mirror and know that I've lived and all the tears and laughter had a purpose.