Chapter 8: Sunday
On Sunday morning, when Almanzo makes his way to the kitchen, Mother is busy making stacked pancakes. Mother makes stacked pancakes every Sunday before church. Bless this woman, I teach Sunday school and attend church afterwards, I only have time for a few quick cups of coffee. When my stomach roars during the service I think to myself, ” ‘Jesus is the bread of life’ must be a metaphor.”
Anyway, the Wilder home seems much more lively on Sunday morn than the Ingalls home. Mother is making pancakes and setting the top crust on the chicken pie that the family will eat after church. Father is brushing the driving-horses so that they shine and all are rushing to get dressed.
Church is 5 miles from the Wilder home but transportation is no matter. Father has the best horses in New York State, the horses pull the family by sleigh, they trot the whole 5 miles, and arrive at the church stable in thirty minutes.
When church is finished the Wilder family returns home for Sunday dinner. Almanzo has rye ‘n ‘injun bread, chicken pie, and pickled beets. For dessert he enjoys pumpkin pie, then apple pie with cheese. Apparently gluttony was not preached at the Wilder’s church.
Having recently taken a week off from work to thoroughly enjoy my spring break, I watched a bit of morning t.v. This mostly included PBS Create but I did catch a cooking segment on the Nate Berkus Show (guilty pleasure) that featured homemade chicken pot pie. I was horror struck at the whipping cream and flour used to bond the inside of the pie. I’ll even go a step further and call this butt-bond, as in it will bond itself directly to my butt.
This weight-watcher knew just what to do. I looked to Hungry Girl, click the link below to view chicken pot pie minus butt-bond.
http://www.hungry-girl.com/newsletters/raw/710
I chose to make my crust from scratch instead of buying the Pillsbury version, I’m a rebel like that.
Chapter 7: Saturday Night
I was excited to read this chapter and compare it to the Saturday evenings and Sundays at the Ingalls home.
Saturday is baking day in the Wilder household, as it was in the Ingalls household too. Almanzo’s mother is frying doughnuts; she rolls the dough out and slashes it into long strips. She doubles the strip, twists it, and places it in a copper kettle of hot fat.
The dough sinks to the bottom, then floats to the top and will roll over to cook on the other side. The narrator explains that some women make there doughnuts in a “new-fangled shape, round, with a hole in the middle.” Not Mother Wilder,“she didn’t have time to waste turning doughnuts.”
Saturday night at the Wilder house is also similar to the Ingalls household. It is bath night and off to church on Sunday morn. After supper, Royal and Almanzo carry a tub outdoors to the rain-water barrel. Royal uses a hatchet to break up the ice in the water barrel and Almanzo dips the water and chunks of ice into the washtub. The ice was heated on the stove and one at a time the family bathed in the kitchen, near the heat from the oven.
Here at this little house we are lucky enough to have indoor plumbing and city water. Our water bill is higher in the summer because we water our garden twice a day. By the time August rolls around we are praying for rain everyday so that we don’t have to wrestle the garden hose. This year we are placing a rain barrel beneath a down spout to help control the increased water usage.
There are plenty of DIY-ers out there with how-to videos on making rain barrels. Our local Habitat for Humanity had several donated so we opted to purchase from them, rather than spend money at a hardware store to make our own.
We will remove the pipe that carries water from the down spout and away from the house, then adjust the spout to drain into the barrel.
Chapter 6: Filling the Ice-house
In this chapter, it is so cold in New York that the snow is described as sand under foot and if you were to throw a little water into the air it would come back down as balls of ice. This is what is described as “perfect weather for cutting ice”. When blocks of ice are lifted from the pond it will not drip water, but instantly be frozen.
Almanzo’s father hires two men to use a cross-cut saw to cut the 20” thick ice into 20” blocks. The blocks of ice were loaded onto the bobsled and taken back to the ice-house. The ice-house was high off the ground and made of wide boards with space in between. The solid floor was covered with sawdust and the blocks of ice were placed on the sawdust. It was Almanzo and Royal’s job to fill the cracks between the blocks with sawdust and tamp it down with sticks. They covered the top of the blocks with sawdust and then father would place more blocks on top. This was very hard work and the time passed quickly.
When they went in for dinner Mother had made: fried apples ‘n onions, roast beef, brown gravy, mashed potatoes, creamed carrots, boiled turnips and buttered bread. For dessert he had bird’s nest pudding.
It took several days to fill the ice-house. With the blocks of ice buried in sawdust they would not melt in the summer heat. Mother would use the ice to make ice-cream, lemonade and cold egg-nog.
For this little house project, I found a recipe for the bird’s nest pudding that Laura writes of. According to the description in the book, it sounds as though my crust came out okay but I did not have any syrupy brown juice. It appears to be soaked up by the crust. It’s hard to tell when you are cooking from heirloom recipes. Also, the critics did not seem very impressed, but I have not accepted defeat. I will try again.
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/birds-nest-pudding/
P.S. It looks really good, right?
Chapter 5: Birthday
It is Almanzo’s birthday; he is officially 9 years old. Children today countdown to their birthday weeks in advance; they prepare birthday wish lists for family members that inquire, “What would you like for your birthday?” Then, when mom, dad, grandma or grandpa gets a look at what’s on the list, it’s like a stake to the heart. Video games, iPhone, iPod, iPad, iWant, iWant, iWant-consumerism is an ugly beast when it possesses your children.
Consumerism had not yet been born in 1866 and little Almanzo is not even aware that it is his birthday; his father reminds him at the breakfast table, his birthday gift- a calf yoke. Almanzo stays home from school and uses his calf yoke to train his father’s calves. When teaching the calves to come closer at the command of “Giddap” he motivates them with bits of carrot.
Feeding animals is the inspiration for this Little House Project.
Story Continued: When morning is gone, father comes to get Almanzo for dinner-time. After eating his meal, mother asks him to fill the wood box. In the woodshed, Almanzo finds a second gift- a sled made from hickory. The kid is genuinely surprised; he spends the afternoon sledding outside. Almanzo takes a short break to snack on apples, doughnuts and cookies. He can hear mother upstairs working on her loom and goes in search of father. He is in his attic workroom shaving wood shingles.
After checking in on both of his parents Almanzo returns outdoors to sled. Much too soon the day comes to an end and it is time to do chores.
We don’t have livestock here at our little house but we do have two dogs and two cats. One of our dogs is a puppy in training, in other words, we bribe her with a lot of treats. It shouldn’t come as a shock that dog treats are made in China; by manufacturing our own treats we reduce consumerism, packaging, and our carbon footprint.
I chose to make dog treats but did a little research on commercial dog food. I was curious to know when we started processing our animal’s food. The first dog biscuit was commercialized in the mid-1800s. Canned horse meat was introduced as pet food after WWI. You read that correctly, some entrepreneur up-cycled the dead horses killed in battle. This is probably the same guy that started telling people dogs have different nutritional needs than humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_food
I am sure there is a plethora of dog treat recipes available online but here is the recipe I used:
1- 1/2 C whole wheat flour
1/4 C dry powdered milk
1/4 C water
1 egg
1/8 C vegetable oil
2 T unflavored yogurt
1/2 C chopped liver
Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Mix all ingredients. Roll the dough into bite-size balls according to the size of your dog. Bake 40-45 minutes. Let the treats cool and serve.
Mixing the ingredients. Its not pretty, more importantly, its not horse meat.
This recipe actually makes quite a bit. This is just the first batch out of the oven.
Meet the Senator-aka Padme. A Little House bonus, that is an up-cycled, made in China, dinosaur toy I turned into a barrette. You may recognize Padme from a 1980s re-make of “Girls Just Want to Have Fur”.
Meet the cutest dog in the world- Princess Buttercup. By the looks of that chin(s) she should be put on a raw food diet.
Chapter 4: Surprise
In chapter one I mentioned that Almanzo and Royal are afraid of the older boys in the school yard. Turns out, they had good reason to fear the Hardscrabble boys, these boys were hardcore thugs. The school board had great difficulty employing a school teacher because these boys would beat up any teacher that tried to discipline them. One teacher lost his life due to a thrashing given by the boys of Hardscrabble settlement.
Almanzo is greatly concerned for Mr. Corse, his teacher, so much so that he cannot learn his lessons. Bill Ritchie and his gang are notorious for being disrespectful and provoking a teacher so that they can “thrash” them. This little punk is why we have alternative schools within the public school districts today.
When Bill Ritchie and the Hardscrabble gang ignore the warning Mr. Corse extended to them previously in regards to being tardy, Mr. Corse asks them to come to the front of the classroom to be disciplined. The boys start up the aisle to dish out their own form of punishment. Mr. Corse pulls an ox-whip from his desk and coils it around Bill’s legs and jerks him off of his feet. With every attempt to get up and come after Mr. Corse he gets another lashing from the ox-whip. Finally, he runs from the classroom crying. The rest of his cronies escape the classroom without receiving their whipping.
Mr. Corse then coils the ox-whip and places it on his desk. He wipes his face with a handkerchief and straightens his collar. All of the students are pardoned for not learning their lessons, rightfully so, considering the dramatic distraction.
This past summer I purchased a yard of fabric with a vintage design that reminded me of my grandma Violet. I have decided to use that fabric to make handkerchiefs for grandma. Grandma and Papa are farmers, so they spend a great deal of time outdoors. Grandma likes to use bandanas this time of year to wrap around her head to protect her against earaches.
I used this bandana as a template.
The fabric.
I used Imagene, my serger, to create a narrow hem. The same can be accomplished with a sewing machine, there is just more to iron and pin.
Chapter 3: Winter Night
After supper, Mother and the girls cleaned the dishes and swept the floor, Father cut up potatoes and carrots to feed to the cows the next day, Royal greased his boots and Almanzo greased his moccasins using tallow.
Once they finished these tasks they gathered around the big stove in the dining room. This stove sounds amazing. The front of the stove was in the dining room and the back of the stove warmed the parlor, the chimney warmed the bedrooms upstairs and the top of the stove was an oven. I wonder if I could have one of these installed to replace my existing oven.
Royal popped popcorn in the stove and the entire family, including Mr. Corse, sat around the warm stove eating buttery popcorn, apples, and drinking hot cider. Mother sat in her rocking-chair knitting, Father used broken glass to scrape a new ax-handle, Royal carved a chain of links from pine, Alice worked on her embroidery, and Eliza Jane read the New York weekly newspaper aloud. Man, I wish my family were more like this. We all tend to zone out in front of an electronic device at the end of the day. I do make an effort to knit while zoning in front of the television.
Father mentions to Mr. Corse that it’s 40 below outside and it will be colder by morning. At midnight, Almanzo’s father goes outside to stir the animals that don’t fit in his barns. He makes them run around the barnyard until they are warmed with exercise. Otherwise, they will freeze in their sleep. Almanzo and Royal get out of bed at 5am to do their morning chores. Afterwards they go into the house to eat breakfast before walking the mile-and-a-half to school.
It’s only natural that I would want to use this chapter to knit something since Mother is knitting, but to quote BFM, “This is not a knitting blog Dandy; you need to do more than knit.” [Roll eyes here] Am I right? Probably not, most likely you would all like to see something other than the cool socks I just knit.
In this chapter Eliza Jane reads the newspaper out loud as her family sits around the stove, each working on their individual projects. During this time last year I tortured myself with a Microeconomics course; I was required to purchase a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Convinced that I would find a purpose for the unread papers, I piled them up in my basement. Just when I was about to deposit them in the compost, voila, purpose appears. I will repurpose the remaining papers into seed pots.
I can start my seeds in these newspaper pots and plant them straight in the ground when the time comes. These pots don’t look super sturdy which is why I have old yogurt containers on standby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW4t_6dTAvA
Chapter 2: Winter Evening
Right away Chapter 2 reveals that Laura and Almanzo’s childhood is monetarily different, on an exponential level. The Wilder barnyard is described as having, “…three long, enormous barns, around three sides of the square barnyard. All together they were the finest barns in all that country.”
After walking home from school, before going into the house, Almanzo goes into the horse-barn to begin his chores. The horse-barn is 100 feet long. At nine years old, Almanzo cleans the soiled hay out of the stalls and replaces it with new hay to make clean beds for the cows, calves, oxen, and sheep. After pitching hay into the mangers he grabbed a milk pail and stool to milk Blossom. This is the one cow that his little hands were strong enough to milk. This is incredible; I should set higher standards for my children.
Father, Royal and Almanzo finish up and go to the house. Father washes first, then Royal, Almanzo washes last. The women are bustling about in their hoop skirts getting dinner on the table. Remember in my previous post I had written that Mr. Corse, the schoolteacher, was spending two weeks at the Wilder home? So far it is unclear, to me, if this large meal being prepared is due to their houseguest or if it is an everyday occasion.
The dining room was decorated in chocolate-brown wallpaper with green stripes and rows of tiny red flowers. Almanzo’s mother dyed rags green and chocolate brown and they were woven into a rag-carpet to match the wallpaper. This home sounds extravagant in comparison to Caroline’s tiny, one room cabin in the woods.
What did Mrs. Wilder serve her family and houseguest for dinner? For starters: mellow baked beans with salt pork, boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy, bread and butter, mashed turnips, and stewed yellow pumpkin. To finish: plum preserves, strawberry jam, grape jelly, spiced watermelon-rind pickles, and pumpkin pie. Even this meal seems extravagant compared to what the Ingalls’ would eat-houseguest or no houseguest.
I am going to use this chapter to advocate spiced watermelon-rind pickles. My former husband’s mother turned my children and myself into big fans of these sweet treats before telling us it was watermelon rind. Even watermelon rind tastes good when cooked in vinegar and sugar. In the US this treat is considered Southern Cuisine but European countries have their own variation of this recipe too.
The recipes found online for preserving watermelon rind are endless. I favor Better Homes and Gardens recipe in the 2010 edition of You Can Can to be my favorite. I will warn you, preserving watermelon rind is a time consuming project but totally worth it.
http://www.sbcanning.com/2011/07/canning-and-preserving-watermelon-whole.html
The link above contains the exact recipe that I use from my Better Homes and Gardens canning book.
Do yourself a favor and use a spice bag or cheese cloth to contain the cloves. Removing the little buggers is an unnecessary hardship. I originally left them loose for esthetics.
Chapter 1: School Days
I find this chapter title to be a dirty little reminder that I have to start another semester of school next week. Farmer Boy was the second book written in the series but the third book to be published. It is also the book my local, used bookstore had on hand so I decided to read it next.
This book was not written about the Ingalls family; instead it is about the Wilder family and Almanzo’s childhood in upstate New York. Almanzo is just shy of nine years old and this is his first year of school. He and his brother Royal, 13 years, his sisters, Eliza Jane, 12, and Alice, 10, are walking to school in the snow.
Almanzo’s face is cold but his woolen clothes keep his body warm. The wool came from his father’s sheep; his underwear is white but his mother had dyed the wool for his outerwear. The author says that Almanzo’s mother used butternut hulls to dye the thread for his waistcoat but doesn’t mention what is used for the other garments.
After walking a mile and a half they finally reach the school. Five big boys, around the age of 17, are scuffling outside. Almanzo and Royal are frightened although Royal tries to hide his fear. These “big boys” are from Hardscrabble Settlement and all of the students are afraid of them. They smash sleds and swing little boys by the legs and let them fly loose, headfirst, into the heaping snow.
The teacher’s name is Mr. Corse; he is described as kind and patient. He stays at the home of each student for two weeks. Wha? Once he has stayed at each home he closes school for the term. It is the Wilder family’s turn to provide Mr. Corse with two weeks of hospitality. Should be an interesting two weeks.
For this first Little House Project in Farmer Boy I decided to use some leftover cranberries to dye a potholder. Being a knitter, I was thrilled to work on my crochet skills and crocheted a double-thick potholder. I actually did this little project twice but the first attempt failed because I experimented with an acrylic fiber. The second time I crocheted my potholder using 100% cotton and I was impressed with the results. Here is the site that I referenced for natural dying. Don’t ignore the warning about acrylics not taking color, totally true.
http://steampunkworkshop.com/cheap-and-easy-fabric-dye-natural-sources
I call this color washed-out cranberry.
Could also be a receiving blanket for the Flaming Lips gummy fetus.
Reflection
I have finished Little House in the Big Woods and I want to reflect on the changes I have made and whether or not they have been practical.
1. Preserving food- we have found food preservation to be a necessity. It is fun and it improved my self –esteem. We are not completely independent from the supermarket but I feel a quiet pride when I listen to people talk about the price of groceries. I think, “If they only knew.”
2. Beer Bread- It didn’t take long for me to become tired of beer bread and my children also became tired of eating the different combinations that I made. However, it is fast and convenient when you need a loaf on the double.
3. Reusable grocery sacks- Probably one of the projects I am most proud of. I have made several of these bags and found other canvas totes stuck away in a closet that make nice grocery sacks too. Since chapter 3, I have saved a multitude of plastic sacks from a landfill and conserved quite a bit of oil.
4. Homemade Christmas stockings- I finally finished all three of my children’s stockings and I got better at making them with practice. The old store bought stockings were donated to my grandmother since she doesn’t have any stockings for her great-grandchildren. This is not a project that will be used often unless I sell the stockings for extra income.
5. Soap making-I used all of my rebatch soap and hope to expand my soap making skills in the next book.
6. Mending clothes- Nobody WANTS to do it but somebody has to. I currently have another 2-3 items waiting to be mended.
7. Harvesting walnuts-Will probably never happen again.
8. No yarn shopping- Well, this was going good until my favorite local yarn store decided to close forever, after 7 years of business. The owner had a huge sale, so I shopped and said good-bye to a truly enchanting American business. Maybe this will make it easier to consume less yarn.
9. Rags and remnants- I loved this project; I have remnants and used sheets waiting for me to cut them up and create another rag rug. I need a long, oval rug for my closet; the floor is concrete. Rag rugs also make great gifts and would probably bring in extra income if I were to sell them.
10. Beekeeping- Before I even started, I discovered that one of the most difficult things about beekeeping is the initial investment. It is not an inexpensive hobby. I hope to purchase my bees in the next two weeks. I will have to buy my deeps and accessories a little at a time before the bees arrive in the spring.
11. Dry active yeast- Making bread with dry active yeast requires planning. It can’t be stirred together and thrown into a pan to bake immediately. I have always thought that I was good at planning but recently I had to face the music. Apparently I am tone deaf. I haven’t given up hope.
12. Pumpkins- I love pumpkins, the weirder looking the better. I hope to start a pumpkin patch in the next few years. The pumpkin bread and pumpkin hummus I made were both impressive.
13. Sock Toys- It is a relief to finally use those socks without a match. Old socks also make good dusting mittens.
I am excited to start a new year with a new book. Farmer Boy was the second book written but is the third in the series. I’ll be working from it next since it was available at our used bookstore.
Chapter 13: The Deer in the Wood
The timing is too perfect to be planned. Only by accident have I made it through the final chapter of Little House in the Big Woods at the end of the year. Only to discover Ms. Wilder has saved the best chapter for last. It is a chapter where Pa is overtaken by the beauty of the woods in the moonlight and comes home empty-handed, with no meat for his family.
Pa has made a deer-lick in an open space in the woods by pouring salt onto the ground. He goes out into the woods, settles in a tree and dozes off to sleep. He wakes as the moon is rising and sees a buck at the deer-lick. Pa tells Mary and Laura, “It was a perfect shot. But he was so beautiful, he looked so strong and free and wild, that I couldn’t kill him. I sat there and looked at him, until he bounded away in the dark.”
Pa goes on to say that he remembered he had a family at home that needed good fresh meat and he would shoot the next animal that came along. The next animal that came along was a fattened bear, and a doe with her fawn after that. Pa was unable to shoot any of them. After telling Mary and Laura why he hadn’t brought home any meat for their dinner, both of the girls expressed happiness to eat bread and butter.
At bedtime, Ma sat in her rocking chair knitting a sock and Pa played Auld Lang Syne on his fiddle. You may not recognize the title of this song; but you have heard it and maybe you will share in its English translation in less than a week.
Should old acquaintance be forgot; and never brought to mind?
Knitting socks is one of my favorite pass times; but it doesn’t help me to reduce my consumerism. I have decided instead, to turn socks with holes or socks that have no match into chew toys for my dogs. Did you know most of our animal’s products (toys, treats, rawhide bones) are made in China?
These socks have remained in the bottom of my laundry basket for a year or longer. Tired of their singleton lifestyle, I have decided to repurpose them.
I cut off and discarded the toe and the heel and cut the remainder into 1.5 inch strips.
I sewed the strips together at each end making one long rope.
I wrapped the long rope up like a ball of yarn. Voila, a ball/chew toy. It cost nothing and was made in the USA.
This chew toy idea came from a book, Sewing for Children, written by Emma Hardy. I turned the sock inside out and stitched a “U” starting at the toe, turning at the heel and making my way back to the toe. Then, I used scissors to cut right down the middle of the “U”. I turned the sock right side out and used old batting, saved from the shams that I cut and sewed into Christmas stockings (Chapter 4), to stuff the toy. Last, I sewed the top of the sock, now the bottom of the toy shut. Now my dogs have a sock monster with antennas (or antenni?).
