Burritos

My sister and I decided to mass produce burritos.  We figured we'd have enough meat and fixings for 48 burritos each... a total of 96!  We used three large packages of ground beef from Costco, 6 large peppers, 3 cups of brown rice and unmeasured amounts of seasonings and spices.

Just a few of the peppers

The head chef, my sister and best friend

The first batch of filling

The first few burritos wrapped up

This project took up most of the day.  My older kids helped with the little ones and at one point or another one of the babies was sleeping.  What a great day of talking, laughing and now we have four dozen burritos in our freezers!

Another tooth!

She is SO cute!!

Mornings

My favorite time with you is first thing in the morning.
It's a good thing I'm a morning person 

and don't mind getting up early.

I genuinely enjoy our quite moments together.  No one else is awake and it's just the two of us.  After your morning nursing and snuggle in my bed we mosey downstairs since you are ready for something to eat.  You "help" me make my coffee and then we prepare your hot cereal.  

I think this is the time that I hear the most new words from you.  

There's no one to interrupt you or speak louder than you.  

You have me all to yourself and you truly appreciate having my full attention. 

Rather than wish you'd sleep in late and wake up in the rush of the day, I will enjoy each of these mornings with you.
You are my baby and I will hold on to these moments forever.

Bread Making

Last week, Joshua and Andrea took a school field trip to the Ukrainian Cultural Village, east of Edmonton.  One of the activities was to make Paska bread.  Unfortunately, some kids didn't have the opportunity to try the bread and so being quite experienced in the kitchen, I told my kids that we would have our own bread making lesson at home.  I dug up my Oma's original recipe (which happened to be in my Mom's handwriting) and tried to figure out how I was going to bake bread without the luxury of my bread machine!

And so we began with the basics... how they did it in the "olden days" as my kids say.  Heated the milk on the stove, used traditional yeast, and waited the full 1.5 hours for the first rise.

{we were so excited to see the water and yeast chemistry "work", since that meant I did something right}

We moved on to the next steps of mixing the flour and letting it rise.  Delighted faces were around after the first rise.

SUCCESS!!

I kept half the dough for traditional buns and let the kids created their own.  

When I was growing up, my Oma always ensured that there were fresh buns ready to eat every time we came to visit.  Now being as Dutch as we are, there was (is) only one way to eat fresh, hot buns and that is with butter and sugar... lots of each.  As I baked today, the memories came flooding back as the sweet smell of bread filled my house.  I took a bite and was brought back to my childhood days of visiting my grandparent's house in Neerlandia.  I hope I can provide some of those same memories for my children and grandchildren in the years to come.