An Ordinarily Extraordinary Day

Right now, atthisverymoment, I'm rather stiff and feel as if I've been on my feet all day which makes sense because I HAVE been on my feet all day. But, on the inside I feel alive and invigorated and not at all ready to go to sleep even though it is almost midnight.

Perhaps that is because I'm still riding the wave of satisfaction I feel at being rather domesticated and homey today. And, I don't mean simply cooking and cleaning because I DO do that daily. What I am referring to is more of an attitude of domesticity, of delighting in nurturing and caring for my family rather than simply seeing daily tasks as necessary evils.

Here's a run-down of my day:

First, I went out back to the jungle we call a garden and picked some ripe tomatoes and zucchini. I put the not-quite-ripe tomatoes in the kitchen window and the others I placed carefully and neatly in little rows on the counter top to await the boiling hot cauldron into which I planned to plunge them. More on that later.

Next, I'll confess I had myself a little computer time. There are four of us and one computer and no TV so the computer is used quite a bit and when I find it unoccupied I take advantage of it.

After catching up on blog reading, I piddled about doing laundry and sundry household tasks. Then I cooked lunch. After which, I got busy putting up some of our garden produce. I knew we would not eat up all of the zucchini we had so I shredded it and put it in Ziploc bags and froze to use in zucchini cake which I've never made, but I have a recipe for it and it looks to be sort of like carrot cake which I have made and quite enjoy.

Speaking of carrots, the girls picked some yesterday (oh how they do love to pull up carrots), and we made a carrot cake to take to church out of some of them, but there were plenty left. So I shredded those suckers and froze them, too.

Later, while the kids and their daddy went swimming, I mulled over what to do for dinner. Shockingly, inspiration hit quickly, and I got to work. We had green beans from our garden, baked beans, and a barbecue chicken recipe I found in my latest Simple and Delicious magazine. I think it was called Monterey barbecue chicken or something such as that.

The chicken was topped with barbecue sauce (of course), chopped green onions, tomatoes, a slice of bacon and some shredded cheddar cheese. And, I was thrilled to put this dish together using green onions and tomatoes from MY garden. Plus, we had the green beans from the garden, too. It IS exciting to grow one's own food especially when one has never done it before. Who knows, the novelty may be gone next year, but I don't think so.

Our delicious dinner was accompanied by yummy cheese biscuits which I made from scratch from a recipe in what must be Paula Dean's first cookbook ever.

And, and, I also made a blueberry crisp for dessert! With blueberries we picked ourselves! For free! Blueberries are quite expensive at the grocery store so when friends offered to let us pick blueberries from their bushes, I snatched up the nearest buckets I could find and set off to get enough to last a while because, guess what? I freeze them. And, do you know that frozen blueberries make tasty cool treats to eat by the handful right out of the freezer? They do. Yum!

After dinner, I set my cauldron, I mean kettle, on the stove to boil water for my tomatoes. After the water begins boiling rapidly, I will drop the tomatoes in for no more than a minute. After which, I will scoop them out and immediately plunge them into a bowl of ice cold water. Doing this causes the tomato skins to virtually slide off.

Doodlebug came along about this time and wanted to help so I told her what to do and let her go to it. She peeled the tomatoes, cut them up, squished the seeds out and put them into Ziploc bags. Then, she made tomato juice out of the leftover bits by squeezing it and running it through a sieve. There wasn't a lot of juice, but after Doodlebug got through with those tomatoes there wasn't anything left, but a little squished glob of tomato skins and seeds, and that went into the compost so nothing was wasted.

Really, my day was quite ordinary, but to me that was the beauty of it. It has taken my husband and me almost sixteen years to get where we are, but we are trying to live more deliberately. To find joy and satisfaction in growing some of our own food and freezing it. We are trying to stay closer to home and live a less hurried life and teach our children to do the same. Everyone is so hurried these days which is not necessarily the same as being busy. We were busy today, but not hurried.

Sure, I've had days like this in the past, but they were always scattered sparsely amid the hurried days, but now these unhurried, satisfyingly busy days are becoming more frequent. Oh, I know I'll have other hurried days in the future. They can't be entirely avoided, but my goal is to make them the exception rather than the rule.