Lard Part 2: Cooking with Lard

I promised that part two of my lard series would be about cooking with lard.  I'm very tempted to jump ahead to step three, now that I have picked up the biggest sack of pig fat I've ever seen from Rettland Farm....

...but the lard making will have to wait!  I will start with a couple of my favorite recipes using it.  The first, from a cookbook called More With Less: Recipes and Suggestions By Mennonites on How to Eat Better and Consume Less of the World's Resources is a basic recipe for refried beans.  I know, I know, most people hate refried beans.  But I LOVE them.  For a short time after I got married, I bought the canned refried beans from the store, and never thought anything of it.  Then one day I looked at the label and saw "lard" and I thought, "Well that can't be good for me!"  And I gave up eating them.  Fast forward a good many years, and a good many cookbooks, books and food documentaries later, and I come to find out that lard (properly sourced) isn't bad for you!  In fact, it's a very healthy alternative to the processed fats found in the grocery store.  (See my previous blog post on lard for more info.)  Around the same time, it also happened that one of the cookbook bees in my kitchen bonnet was More With Less which had a super simple recipe for refried beans.  I had to try it!  And once I did, I never went back to canned refried beans.  I make these in a fairly large batch--often doubling or tripling the recipe below.  Then, I place two cups of the beans into a quart sized ziplock bag, shmush the bag flat, and freeze the beans in little piles.  These make the BEST mexican dips, nachos, wraps, etc. and are especially nice to have on hand for meatless Fridays in Lent!  Here is the recipe from "More With Less."

I realize this looks like dog barf, but I promise, it doesn't taste like it!

Bagged Beans

Mexican Refried Beans

1.  Soak overnight 1lb. dried pinto, pink or kidney beans.

2.  Add: 6 cups water and 2 chopped onions (optional, but I would never leave them out!)

3.  Bring to a boil, cover and simmer until beans are tender (about 3 hours).  I also do this in my crockpot, just letting the beans cook until they are pretty mushy.

(Although it doesn't say so, if there's still too much liquid in the beans, I drain some of the liquid off at this point.)

4.  Mash beans with a potato masher (I use my immersion blender.)

5.  Add 1/2 cup hot bacon drippings or lard.

6.  Mix well and continue cooking, stirring frequently until the beans are thickened and the fat is absorbed.

Salt to taste and add optional seasonings like chili powder, cumin, etc.  (I leave them plain for picky children.)

Pie Crusts

I have used lard often as an ingredient in pie crusts, turnovers, or empanadas.  Lard makes pastry tasty and fluffy.  I don't have a standard pie crust recipe, because unfortunately I'm one of those people that likes to try new recipes all the time.  I've used the one from King Arthur Flour's website numerous times with wonderful results.  A quick Google search will reveal tons of lard pie crusts.  In fact, just out of curiosity, I Googled it again today, and imagine my joy when I stumbled upon this book:  Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother's Secret Ingredient by the editors of Grit Magazine! (This might be one I have to get my hands on soon!)  The MotherEarth News website has given us a preview of the pie crust recipe from the book, which I am including below.  

Ingredients:

3 cups all-purpose unbleached flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups lard, cold and coarsely chopped
1 egg
5 1/2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon vinegar 

Instructions:

In a large bowl, combine the flour and salt. Using a pastry blender, cut in the lard until the mixture is very fine. In a separate bowl, beat together the egg, water, and vinegar.

Make a small well in the flour mixture and add the liquid; mix just until the dough comes together in a ball. Divide the dough into 4 equal pieces and flatten into disks; wrap individually in plastic and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before rolling.

To make a double-crust pie with a solid top crust, roll out 2 disks of dough about 1 inch larger than the pie plate. Fit one crust into the bottom of the pie plate. Fill the pie with the desired filling; slightly moisten the edge of the bottom crust. Take the second crust, fold it in half, gently place it over the pie filling, and unfold, centering it on the pie plate; press the edges into the bottom crust to seal. Trim the excess dough to leave an overhang of about 3/4 inch. Crimp or flute the edges with your fingers. To allow steam to escape, gently prick the top crust with a fork several times or slash vents with a sharp knife.  (Makes 4 single or 2 double pie crusts)

Biscuits and Scones!

The only time I ever made successful biscuits was when I used lard.  Oh my gosh, they were terrific, flaky, and dangerous enough that I haven't made them again because my children went nutty over them.  Don't get me wrong, it's nice when they like my cooking, but since I am trying to move them away from the "Beige Carbohydrate Diet" that they crave so much, making another batch of biscuits seemed like a bad idea!  I can't remember which recipe I used for the biscuits, but again, Google to the rescue!  I think these Ham and Cheese Lard Biscuits by Emeril Legasse sound like heaven, especially if you are using some ham or bacon from Rettland Farm!  :-)   

I can't talk about cooking without admitting my Downton Abbey obsession.  One of the things I love about the show, aside from that hysterical Maggie Smith, is the food culture it portrays.  Many scenes with the servants happen in the kitchen, where something is always cooking.  And its seems the family is constantly around some table or other, eating or having tea.  During these scenes, I feel like I spend an unusual amount of time trying to figure out what they are actually eating!  Well, no longer do I have to wonder!  This website is devoted ENTIRELY to the food (and food culture) of Downton Abbey and that period in history.  (Could the Foodie Downton-Wannabies of the world be any happier???!!)  On that website I found a scone recipe, and feel pretty certain it will be making an appearance in our house soon.  I am no chef, but I wonder if a little lard/butter combination, or even substituting all lard in the scone recipe would make them even fluffier?    

My friend Kristina, who knew I was doing this "lard series" brought over an entire crateful of wonderful old cookbooks/homemaking books.  Some of these, no joke, are from the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Looking through the books this week has felt like taking a stroll back in time.  (I appreciated this experience so much, as I often feel that I was born in the wrong one!)  I thought I'd share a recipe or two from my favorite book of the bunch.  The title: A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband.  (No good Catholic blogger could post a book with such a title if it hadn't been written in 1917!)

If you have any favorite lard recipes, be sure to send them my way!  Hopefully I'll have a nice tub of it to put to use soon!  And stay tuned for the last installment, where I will document the lard-making process!  Can't wait!

On Faith and Cake

I made a birthday cake today for the first time.  From scratch.  Don't get me wrong, of course I've made a cake before, but never for one of the girls' birthdays, and certainly never one of those fancy, two-layered things.  It was always, "I'll make the frosting but get a boxed cake" or vice versa.  But Caeley, undemanding and sympathetic child that she is, requested a "chocolate cake with turquoise icing."  And I, feeling guilty that we are having a kinda boring birthday, decided to acquiesce.  (She had that big surprise party a month ago, so I don't feel too bad!)

It wasn't until I was piping the number "9" on top of the cake that it hit me.  I thought, It has taken me NINE years to get up the courage to make a CAKE?  REALLY??!!!  As someone who likes to think she makes a lot of things from scratch, this was quite disturbing.  It was also a lightbulb moment for me.  If it took me nine years to make a cake from scratch, and I LOVE baking, is it any surprise that our faith journeys also take so long?  Is it any surprise that they all look as different as all the cakes might look if you asked five friends to come over and bake their favorite cakes?

(As usual, it occurred to me that there are some parallels between baking and a walk of faith.  Bear with me, as in my Stock post, I'm drawing some pretty strange connections here, but this is how I roll...)

The first task in baking is making sure you have the right ingredients.  In terms of faith, these ingredients include (but are not limited to!) proper formation/knowledge, an open spirit, graces that come from the Sacraments, prayer, and works of charity.  But sometimes you might not have buttermilk (let's call it proper formation) and there are substitutes (milk with lemon juice, or seeking out the information from reputable sources.)  Just because you are missing one ingredient, doesn't mean you can't make the cake at all.  It just means you might have to run out to the store (Church, or to friends who can help you along in the faith, etc.) and get it (or find a substitute.)

Then you have to put them together in the right proportions.  That's the hard part, I think.  But God does give us a recipe.  In some ways it's a difficult one to follow.  Maybe at times it seems like it's written in hieroglyphics, but He does spell it out loud and clear for us if we have the "eyes to see."  When we make our faith cake, and we choose to add "too much of this" or "too little of that" (or we so loosely follow the recipe that we really aren't) and the cake doesn't turn out the way we wanted it to, we can't say the recipe was faulty.  On the flip side, there are ways we can add to the "faith cake" recipe to make the end product even better.  (I'm thinking here specifically of special devotions to Mary or to a specific saint, extra practices in our faith life that uplift us that aren't spelled out as "necessary" for the recipe.)

It hit me as I was washing up the cake pans, that there are much scarier things than making cake.  The biggest one, for me and for so many people, is the journey of/to faith.  It took me nine years.  For a cake.  I was afraid of getting it wrong.  Of making something that wasn't good enough.  Of ruining a child's birthday.  Of falling short of what was expected of me in this little role I play in this world.  And taking steps towards God, towards Truth, is infinitely more terrifying.  You could get it wrong.  (But He's so happy to see you're trying.)  You could offer to Him, at any given moment, something that isn't good enough.  (He loves you anyway.)  And you could make choices that might ruin your day, your week, maybe your life.  (But He forgives you and waits for you to get up and continue the journey.)

Lent begins soon, and I will be fiddling with the ingredients of my "faith cake."  I will be adding some things and taking away some things, but still staying true to the recipe.  I might not make the perfect choices for this Lenten cake.  But I guess, like the real cake, the important thing is to just trust the recipe, get in the kitchen, and start baking.

January: Highlights and Lowlights

In the past, January has been a notoriously hard month.  Holiday hangovers.  Kids struggling to return to the normal routine. Bodies in withdrawal when all the sugar (cookies) are officially gone.  This year has been different though.  I think, by far, it has been the best January I remember having in a long time.  Here's a quick peek at our highlights and, to borrow a phrase I first heard from my friend Alexis, the "lowlights" of our month.

Highlights

#1: Food  

January is always about returning to healthy eating for us.  I realize how much better I feel when I remember to feed my body well and do simple things like take my vitamins and drink water!

Homemade Refried Beans

Beans ready for the freezer

Broccoli Spinach Quiche

Gluten Free Carrot-Date Muffins

Spinach-Feta Pizza

My favorite breakfast: Spinach, Onions and Sun-dried Tomatoes sautéed.  Then two eggs cracked on top and put under the broiler (over the veggies) for 2 minutes.  Served with farm sausage and steamed broccoli.  YUM!

#2: Birthday Celebrations

Due to a staff training exercise for Daddy's students, both my oldest and youngest daughters celebrated their birthdays this month.  The surprise party held for Caeley in the middle of the school day was super fun.  She truly had no idea.  

I love this kid.  

And this one.

And my baby turned two, but you heard all about that already.  :-)

This is how she feels about Elmo.  All the time.  Every day.

We had to save the candles.  She plays with them still!

#3: Witnessing Creativity

There's nothing else to do in January but host circuses and play dress up and paint... 

Circus folk.

I refuse to name the college kid in this picture in order to respect her privacy and prevent her utter humiliation.

Captain Ailin to the rescue.

She's also obsessed with paint.  And playdoh.  And water.  And anything else that destroys the house in seconds flat.

#4: Getting Outside!

The weather this January was just ridiculous.  In mostly a good way (see below for my caveat.)  We had a touch of snow, but tons of sunny days that were nice enough to really go outside and enjoy.  What a treat!

I feel like I should have a bowling ball to knock these pins over with.

One morning we went out for ice cream.  Just because we could.  It was WARM.  And SUNNY!

Shooting hoops at the ARCC

#5: Feeling the Call of the Chickens and the Garden

The warm weather has me tricked.  I'm afraid to admit that I would be happy for winter to be over, especially when my farmer Will told me that the chickens will be laying in mid-March.  I'm ready!  With the days growing longer, and the temps hovering way too close to fifty for this time of year, I'm ready.

They are getting so big and pretty!

The white Leghorn and her obnoxious tail crack me up. 

Letting the girls start bug control before I plant the hoop house.  Soon?  But you know the minute I put seed in the ground, it will snow 85 feet.

This is a close-up of Elizabeth's neck feathers.  She truly is a gorgeous chicken, and her feathers are  nothing like her sister's.  She's our hands-down favorite, though it seems that the others pick on her for being so docile.  I'm already envisioning that she will be our most faithful layer.  :-)

#6: Hitting the Half-Way Mark for School

Eighteen weeks have come and gone.  We are in week twenty-one of school.  We have fifteen left.  We can do this.  We're in the "post-holiday groove."  The normalcy of life after the holidays, and getting the school work really done is wonderful.  It's such a short window, I have to seize it and hang on with tooth and nail.

#7: My friend Mary

You might've seen in my recent post that I'm focusing more of my spiritual life this year on Mary.  It's been a shocking experience for me.  I won't bore you with some long treatise about it, but by far, she has been the best part of 2012.  I feel like my life has changed in a month, and the fact that prayers are being answered in my life in a way they never were before is not something I attribute to coincidence.  

Lowlights

#1: The Almost Superbowl

It was awesome to have our football season as Ravens fans last as long as it did.  But so hard to swallow the loss to New England.  What a great game, but one that I wish we could've won!  Next year is our year, boys!  (P.S.: Kinda happy NE lost to NY.  Okay, not kinda, VERY!)

The students had Ravens cupcakes for our biggest football fan!

#2: Running Over a Chicken

I stupidly decided to move the coop during the day when the chickens were down in the penned area.  And I ran over the foot of one of my Speckled Sussex chickens.  She YELPED like a dog.  I felt terrible. Her foot turned purple and huge the next day.  She hobbled around like a sad little thing for days.  But lo and behold, it wasn't broken and she is fine now.  Lesson learned.  Only move the coop when they are locked in the house.

#3: The Weather

Okay, I know I put this in a highlight too, but let's be serious.  Not enough cold weather means that not enough bugs will be killed off over the winter.  As a gardener, this makes me super nervous.  My husband thinks I'm a nut case and that I'm imagining this problem.  But I got bit by what I could almost promise you was a mosquito the other day, and there was a YELLOW JACKET on our kitchen floor yesterday.  We get quite enough bugs around here for my taste, and I could use a little bit of winter to set things right.  Not to mention, having FOUR seasons is a really nice thing.  It makes you appreciate each one so much.  I want to be excited when I see my garlic popping up in the SPRING.  But it's already popping up, along with my chives, parsley, and mint!  

#4:  The HHS Mandate

I don't have it in me to get into this in this post.  I was in such a good mood looking over all our highlights from January that I don't want to end on a sour note.  But a sour note this is.  Sour.  Sour.  Sour.  Blech.  

Is it February ALREADY???!!!!

Making Stock & Taking Stock

In all my "Soup on Saturdays" posts, I've been remiss in not mentioning the key to great soup: homemade stock.  It seems like such a simple thing, but I think it's an culinary art form that has been somewhat lost.  It's not hard, and if you haven't been doing it, just try it once and see the difference it makes in your soups.  I bet you won't go back to store-bought stock again!

First, take bones.  Beef bones or chicken bones.  Preferably with some good hunks of meat left on them!  Place them in the biggest pot you have.

Add at least 3 onions, 3 or 4 carrots, as much garlic as you can handle (I do at least 5 cloves), some celery, and fresh cold water.  (If I use a roasted chicken carcass, I include the roasted onions and garlic from the roasting pan, too, which makes the stock AMAZING.)  Some people put herbs into the mix, but I don't bother.  For me, this simple base works so well, that I'm afraid adding too much would ruin the magic.

Place on the stove to boil.  When the nasty bubbles (brown if it's chicken stock or blackish if it's beef stock) come to the surface, skim them off.  Apparently they spoil the stock.  Not to mention it just looks gross, and who wants to eat that???!!!

Yuck.

Turn the heat down to a low simmer.  Cover.  Now here's the secret.  Simmer for at LEAST 24 hours.  I know that seems ridiculous.  And like a fire hazard.  But I promise it isn't.  (I remember the very first time I made homemade stock.  We lived in Baltimore.  We had a gas stove.  I couldn't believe I was supposed to leave my gas stove on low all night.  So I woke up paranoid at least three times that first night to check on it.  The second time I made stock, I only woke up once.  By now, I'm fairly confident that I won't burn my house down.  And it helps that I have an electric stove!)  The long simmering time allows all the delicious marrow from the bones (the vitamin and mineral store-house!) to really permeate the soup.  It also makes a really RICH, dark broth.  If you check it at 12 hours, it won't be nearly as dark as it will at 24 hours, and the darkness is what you want.  The darkness is the flavor.  (Think of French Onion Soup, and how rich and dark the broth is....)

My finished beef stock.

Turn off the stove after 24 hours.  Let the stock cool down until you can safely ladle it into jars.  I freeze mine in old spaghetti sauce jars in 2 cup portions.  A large pot will make somewhere around 10-12 cups of broth, more or less.  With a few simple ingredients, you can provide yourself or your family with weeks, if not months of delicious soups!

It's not a difficult process, but it does need to be given time.  And as we approach the season of Advent, I'm reminded that pretty soon we will be 'waiting' in a very special way for the birth of Jesus.  I'm reminded that I need to step back and 'take stock' of my life and where I'm at mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually.  Advent is, after all, the official New Year of the Church, a time to start over, begin again, and experience a bit of our own rebirth.  (What a truly new year it will be with the new Roman Missal coming out!)

The way I see it, the entire purpose of Advent is to "prepare Him room."  I need to ask myself if my focus is enough on God or too much on the little things.  How easy and tempting it is to be distracted by all the Christmas shopping, baking and decorating!  While those things have a rightful place in the Christmas season, they shouldn't be the focus.  This Advent, I'd like to make the Sacrament of Reconciliation more of a priority in my life.  That nasty stuff rising to the surface of my soul soup needs to be scraped away too!  I'd like to try to make it to at least one additional weekly mass and take time out of my day for quite prayer time.  These are simple ingredients.  I dare say that too many more ingredients might spoil the magic, just as with the stock.  But they are are do-able with a bit of sacrifice and focus on the right things.

All-in-One Update

I've been finding it terribly hard to get to blogging lately.  We're getting over one wave of the bad cold with Baby A, and now it seems that I'm getting it.  I'm also beginning a large computer project that I take on this time every year, and so any free computer moments have been given over to that.

While we've had our fair share of annoying, cranky, sick, and tired days, there has also been a lot of fun fun around here.  I thought I'd break this post into a quick update in the following categories:  Chickens, Home, Garden, School.  (If I had a "U", I'd make a cute acronym like CHUGS, but alas, I lack a "U".)

Chickens

The chicks are heading into their 4th week.  They have gotten so big, and their true feathers are coming in. I placed a wire/mesh covering over the top of the brooder because they love to practice jumping and flying.  I found one on top of the waterer the other day, which is just way too close to "flying the coop" for my taste.  The girls are as helpful as ever with them, and Ailin has finally started to enjoy interacting with them.  

Giving the chickens some time outside.

I love how their feathers blend in!

You can see how I've raised the feeder and waterer, both to make it more comfortable for the chickens to feed now that they are taller, and also to keep them from kicking so much of the pine bedding into them.

A chicken.  On the playset.  Ailin finds it amusing.

Happy girl!

I think the one on the right is Runty.  But I can't tell anymore!

Home

My Soup on Saturdays plan has been working marvelously.  I should mention that I usually double the amount of onions, garlic and seasoning in pretty much every soup I make.  :-)  These are the soups we've had so far:

1.  Quinoa Minestrone (I use a version of the recipe from Whole Foods, which I alter depending on what is in season, what grain I want to eat, and what I have on hand.  It's a great starting point for whatever Minestrone you feel like making!)
2.  Cheese and Broccoli (Super secret family recipe.  With one gigantic Velveeta brick.  'Nuff said.)
3.  Black Bean (Already wrote about that adventure!)
4.  Sweet Potato with Pear
5.  Italian Sausage with Cabbage
6.  Lentil and Swiss Chard Soup

My favorite has been the Italian Sausage with Cabbage.  All three girls loved it, and I couldn't believe it when they were stuffing their faces with CABBAGE!  Hooray!  It's similar to another one of our family favorites, Sausage, Kale and Lentil Soup, but it was lighter, simpler, and just as delicious.  The best part about this whole "Soup on Saturdays" plan is that I have had instant lunches for myself, since I'm really trying to eat less wheat and more veggies these days.

I've also tried making a couple new recipes this past month or so.  I tried a new Stuffed Shells recipe, which was super yummy.  I also tried my hand at Beef Empanadas for the first time.  I left out the olives and raisins in the recipe, because who puts olives and raisins in something with beef and expects kids to eat it?  (I would've done it if I had been making them for myself...)  Empanadas are a LOT of work.  I doubled the recipe, and had some leftover to freeze for dinners this week, but I'm not sure I approve of how much work they were for how much you actually get.  Perhaps taking a shortcut and buying pre-made refrigerated dough would help.  They were delicious, though.  My goal for November is to get all the squmpkin we harvested this summer cooked and frozen.

Outside the kitchen, we celebrated Halloween and All Saints Day recently.  That was a lot of fun.  Caeley put together her own St. Rose of Lima costume this year, so that saved me from having to worry about it.  For Halloween she was Robin Hood, which she had decided as soon as we started reading the original story for literature.  (It is a pretty fantastic story.  I had never read it, and am really enjoying our Wednesday afternoons with the merry men of the Nottingham.)  Meara was Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha for All Saints, and a black cat for the millionth Halloween in a row.  I can't believe the leotard part of the costume still fits her.  Ailin was Raggedy Ann for Halloween, and melted down when I tried to put her in the angel costume for the All Saints party.  A fallen angel.  Literally.  

Robin Hood + Black Cat

Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Man

Coolest Pumpkin Ever.  GO RAVENS!  (No, I didn't carve this--we saw it out trick-or-treating.)

Kateri and Rose of Lima

St. Joseph Joe and Ailin

Musical Chairs is always such a hit!

Garden

Helping harvest the turnips.  

Garlic is in.  Turnips are out.  The girls helped me harvest them yesterday.  We still need to cut the greens off, wash them, and figure out what the heck you do with turnips.  I was clearly feeling adventurous when I planted them, because I have, in fact, never eaten a turnip.  Nor do I have any idea how to cook one, what one tastes like, or whether my husband or children will even like them.  Caeley is super excited, though, because apparently in her "Little House on the Prairie Cookbook" there's a recipe for mashed turnips, so I guess we'll give that recipe a try with a couple of them.

CHEESE!

Picking turnips

Greens, Carrots, Sage and Thyme

The hoop house is really serving its purpose.  My mesclun greens are flourishing under it, the oregano and rosemary are still alive, and if it weren't for the slugs, my spinach would be doing much better.  The slugs have given up somewhat on the kale, so that's finally coming in nicely.  (Directly behind Ailin in the picture.)  The real pain in the butt was the surprise October snow.  In the middle of my Saturday morning Bible study, I had to run outside and clear all the snow from the plastic because it was getting completely weighted down by that wet, heavy mess.  I had to find garden tools and sticks to prop up the plastic in the middle of each hoop so that the snow would run off it.  Next year, I will fashion some poles cut specifically for this purpose, which will work much better than what I had to throw together on the spot.  In spite of the "work" involved,  I am pretty excited to still be picking my salads out of the garden well after our first frost.

School

We organize our school year into three twelve week trimesters.  There's so much I could say about how our first trimester is going.  I will need to do a longer post at the end of the trimester, but overall, I am happy with our progress.  I think I might need to cut down our work load slightly, as it seems like we never really finish all I want to do.  And I realized that I planned too much "extra" stuff for Meara, and that my focus this year for her needs to be basics--math and reading.  I think I'm going to let her be more self-directed about what she wants to learn for "science" this year.  I might have over planned, but I'd rather overplay and feel free to cut back than vice versa.  Caeley is loving grammar, Meara is starting to read and is more motivated about the whole process, and Ailin knows most of her letters.  (No, I don't purposely teach her anything yet.  She has this set of Sesame Street books with letters on the front.  Since she's obsessed with Sesame Street, she has learned the letters from reading these books with us over, and over, and over, and over.  Today at Panera, she saw the "EXIT" sign above the door and shouted "X! Over there!"  It was a pretty cool moment!)

The homeschool group on a tour of the
Historical Society of Frederick County

Aside from the "book learning," we've been taking a nature class every Friday, which is awesome, and on the other Fridays there are things like Little Flowers, Little Saints, and field trips.  There always seems to be something going on, which has made our days fly by!

The homeschool group at the nature center class. 

On a hike, thinking of words to describe nature for the Hiaku poems later.

 I do know that I am gearing up to push through these next 2 weeks until Thanksgiving break.  We are ALL (Daddy included) taking time off to rest, recouperate and decompress from the first trimester.  I'd like to take a field trip day to the Native American museum in DC to round out our unit on Native Americans, and hit the art galleries to hunt for the Fragonard pictures we studied this term.  I am so looking forward to it.  It is during that break that I will probably reemerge to do a more proper blog post. :-)
PS: I'm too sick and tired to preview this for grammatical, punctuation, or any other errors.  Pardon me if there are any. :-)