Catching Up

Here's what I've been up to lately:

Trying to make lots of good food while I still have access to fresh fruits and veggies.

Here's a pizza I made from scratch.



The recipe for whole wheat pizza dough came with my bread maker.



Next time I'll grease the pan, even though the recipe said not to . . .

At least it tasted good!

In addition to the quasi-disastrous pizza, I made two huge pots of vegetable beef soup recently. My mom and I found a place at her local farmer's market that sells really reasonably priced grass-finished beef. For $3.75 a pound they sell "soup bones" which do in fact contain a bone, but are mostly huge meaty slabs of yummy-ness. When I used to make beef and vegetable soup with bones from the grocery store I always had to supplement the soup with additional stew meat or whatever meat I had in my freezer. Not necessary with the Jordanal Farms meat. The first pot I made, which cooked down to four big containers of soup in my freezer, cost about $6.50 for the meat and $3.00 for some of the veggies from the farm stand down the street (corn, carrots, potatoes, and an onion). The rest of the vegetables (green beans, peas!, and tomatoes) came from my dad's garden and were free. Yum.

Sorry I have no pictures of my soup :(

I also got some incredible Italian Sausages from them (also reasonably priced) that made a great meal I might have blogged about before - I've made it three times now because we love it so much. The first time I was trying to use up zucchini, fingerling potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and basil. I threw in some garlic for good measure, and cooked it down into a stew-like concoction. I added some store-bought frozen meatballs to the mix, and it was really good. But the next time I used the sausage instead, and it was even better (and I felt better about what I'd cooked.) This time I didn't have any fresh basil, but I had some dried basil in my cupboard which worked out well enough.

Michael and I sent our wedding invitations out.

We went out for breakfast to our favorite local bakery/coffee shop on Saturday morning, after stopping by the post office to check the weight on our invitations and to buy stamps. We carried the stamps and invitations into the bakery, ordered, sat down, etc. While I was filling my coffee cup one of the employees asked if she had seen a wedding invitation in my hand. I expected her to say congratulations or something sweet. Instead, she sighed and said, "I don't miss that at all." I didn't think it was going to be that bad. After all, over the summer my mom and Michael's mom came up to help address the envelopes, so I thought the hard part was over. HA! It took us most of a weekend to get the directions sorted out. (Okay so we did decide to drive to Madison to make sure the directions were good, and while we were in Madison we might have stopped by Ginza for sushi . . .)


And I've been trying to keep Oliver looking good.


I swear he actually loves this! Usually I brush him while he's laying on the couch, but that evening he wanted to snuggle on the floor, and I got out his comb.

Yesterday I spent an hour and a half brushing him. He was in heaven.

Other than that, I've been working hard at learning how to make social studies relevant and accessible for 7th and 8th graders. I've been trying to implement different strategies to reach different kinds of learners. Some people learn best by reading independently. Others learn best through spatial representations of facts. Others learn best by listening. Some learn best by actively doing things - which could be in shop class but in my class it is more likely to be dividing the class into a House of Representatives, a Senate, and three smaller committees, and actually engaging in the process of making a bill into a law. On Friday we wrote 7th grade social studies constitutions. It was a low-key day because it was homecoming, and everyone was excited about the parade that afternoon - all of my students did remarkably well. This weekend I am creating guided notes for my students who need a little bit of help in order to be able to transfer ideas that they read in the book into their own words on paper. It's kind of tedious, but it feels good to know that it will help my students learn this stuff - and not fail the next test!

Finally, yesterday Jenny and I went shopping at the Tanger Outlets in the Dells. We'd never been there before, but we will probably go back. We found some awesome sales (buy one pair of boots at regular price, get two pairs free) and then we went out for sushi at the Ginza in the Dells. The sushi was awesome, even if the service was kind of slow.

Okay, I better proofread this and then get to work!