The Reluctant Mommy Blogger

I can make cute pancake faces, too! Plus I got pumpkin into the kids.
The restaurant certainly couldn’t manage to do that.

It was so nice last week that the kids had lunch on the deck on Thursday.

I have a Presidents Day story time coming up next week and I just got
the books in the mail from Amazon. Now I need to just throw together a
small craft and get some coloring pages printed up.

We had such a beautiful day that I decided on this Valentines Day we
would start a small garden of radishes. That and Trent asked if he
could plant a vegetable garden and radishes are the only seeds I have
on hand. Good thing, too, they grow fast.Hunter just liked playing with the dirt, but Trent really got the
point of the activity. He was very excited to fill the cups with dirt
and place the seeds in it.

I got Trent his own mouse for the computer since the track pad was
just too hard for him to use. Now he can paint coloring pages and use
all the preschooler games I before deemed unworthy due to lack of
mouse. He is having so much fun with it and is really starting to get
the hang of it. I wish I had taken a picture of the two of them paying
attention to the computer.

Since I am hosting a Valentines party play date tomorrow, I decided
that Trent and I should work on some decorations while Hunter napped.
I thought it might be fun to do a construction paper chain in pink,
red, white and purple. Trent really got into it and I think the
results were really good.All I did was cut the paper in half lengthwise and then cut horizontal
strips that were about an inch thick. I then showed Trent how to make
a link and have it looped through another link. We used tape to
enclose the links. Between the two of us we got the chain done pretty
quickly. It would have been even faster if we hadn’t had to go to
Trent’s first ever dentist appointment. That went extremely well,
mostly because Trent is a good kid.

Anyway, as you can see in the pictures, this activity completely
absorbed the kid and he focused all if his concentration on it.

For Christmas Garrick gave me Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of
French Cooking.” One of the first things I looked at in the books was
the chapter on baking bread with one thing in mind: French bread. I
have been making my own version of French Bread for a little while now
and was curious about the correct way to make it. I read through the
twenty page selection dedicated to this one type of bread and was
astounded at the amount of discipline that is required for this French
staple.While I really look forward to one day making some French Bread in the
way listed in my new cook book, for now I will stick to my much
quicker version. Being the busy mother that I am I do not have an
entire day to dedicate to baking a loaf of bread. Plus my bread is so
yummy as is that I always have people asking me how I make. So I will
put my recipe and instructions here to send folks when they ask.
Without further ado, Marla’s version of French Bread.

1 1/4 cups warm water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 1/2 cups flour
1 tablespoon yeast

Part of the secret of why my recipe is so fast is because I use a bread machine to do most of the work for me. I add all the ingredients in the order I have listed above, as per the machines instructions, and use the dough setting. If you are using a bread machine, add the ingredients according to its instructions. If you are going to make your dough by hand, combine the water, sugar, salt and yeast and let sit for five to ten minutes. Add in the flour and knead this dough for fifteen to twenty minutes. After that, place the dough in a floured bowl, cover with a towel and let rise in a warm spot for about forty five minutes.

Now that your dough has completed it’s first of two rises, place it on a floured surface and roll it out no wider than your widest baking sheet. I like to use a marble rolling pin for this for two reasons. One, the flour tends to stick less to a marble rolling pin. Two, the weight of a marble rolling pin is great for evenly rolling out any dough.

Once your dough is rolled out nice and flat, roll it up jelly roll style. After completing rolling up the dough be sure to pinch the dough closed. Your dough should be long and thin once you have come to this point.

Now that you have completed pinching the dough closed, spray down your baking sheet with a cooking spray (or your choice of greasing technique) and place the unbaked loaf seam side down. Make diagonal slash marks across the top of your loaf with a sharp knife, or a razor if you have one available. Put a cloth over the loaf and let rise for another twenty to thirty minutes.

Remove the cloth and place the baking sheet with the loaf on it into a preheated four hundred degree Fahrenheit oven for twenty minutes. Once the twenty minutes is up, just turn the oven off and let the bread sit there for another five to ten minutes, or until you serve your meal. A nice warm loaf of French bread is so great with dinner.

We almost always have bread left over and have discovered (surprise, surprise) that the next morning it makes for wonderful French toast. I’ll have to post a recipe for that later. You should also note that Trent  is getting exceptionally good at handling a camera, a bunch of the pictures up there were taken by him.

Today I had H doing a paper ripping project and of course T wanted to
join in. Afterwards I didn’t want to just throw out all the scraps so
I decided to have kids make a mosaic with them after nap time.
Unfortunately I also decided to give them some lollipops as a snack. I
thought the lollipops were made from white chocolate, but were made
from hard candy. So, in addition to the sticky mess, the kids were
more interested in the candy then the project. Still I think the
project turned out pretty good.

Today we made equality cookies and read “The Story of Martin Luther
King Jr.” by Johnny Ray Moore. While we ate our cookies we talked
about how all the cookies were a different color but they are all the
same. Just like real people. I got the idea from Almost Unschoolers.