"Whose Side Are You On?"

I am writing from a hotel room in Chantilly, Virginia, where my two older children and I have been helping to campaign for Congressman Frank Wolf. There is much I'd love to say about the experience of working together to help re-elect leaders whose values and policies you support and admire, but that will have to wait for another (less busy) time!
The purpose of this post is to share with you the incredible sermon I heard this morning. We attended Cornerstone Chapel here in Leesburg, VA, and heard a very bold, straightforward, gutsy message called "Whose Side Are You On? - An Election Day Sermon." No, he doesn't endorse any particular candidate. He doesn't endorse any one political party over the other.

But he does give a very thought-provoking and convicting message regarding the Christian responsibility to exercise the right to vote which I think every believer should have heard this Sunday. Further, he addresses the Biblical principles that thoughtful, careful, prayerful believers (whether Democrats or Republicans, supporters of Obama or supporters of McCain) must consider when casting their votes in a particular direction. I know I never would have heard a message like this if I'd been at my home church this morning, so I'm glad I was here and got to hear this one.

If you are a Christian believer who has not yet cast your vote in this election, please take the time to watch this message. And feel free to let me know what you think.

A Confession and a Plea

Okay. Here is something silly, but it is what I believe will probably be revealed - in time, once I've gotten a handle on it and gotten a system going - to be my single greatest "practical failure" as a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom. Not having a handle on this area causes large amounts of stress in me and causes my family to spend large amounts of money it doesn't have to spare.

What is it? ...the lack of an organized, well-thought out, planned-for-and-scheduled menu strategy for any given day before that day is underway.

Literally, I am usually deciding what to make for any given meal somewhere between an hour before and an hour after that meal needs to be served!

I am so organized in many areas, but getting a meal plan together for a week's worth of meals just isn't happening. It has never been happening. For whatever reasons, I simply have not been able to pull it off, despite several unsuccessful attempts.

Sometimes I find myself pulling frozen meat out of the freezer on the afternoon of the hoped-for dinner, defrosting in the microwave or a sinkful of warm water. Sometimes I find myself serving the same things week after week, just because they're easy at the last minute and my family likes them. Sometimes I find myself grabbing fast food or some other unhealthy option just because it is dinner time, and I can't even pull off one of the last minute things before my family goes berserk. Even fast food, however, is exorbitantly expensive when there are six of you! And even if it weren't, there is not money for eating out on a regular basis in our family's financial picture. It is the single greatest saboteur of our very tight budget, and there is simply no room for it as a consistent "bail out" option because of my lack of planning.

So, please! Those of you who have this under control, please help me! How do you do it? When? What? I need practical and specific advice here... HELP!

How to Make Homemade Yogurt

What a boring title. What a boring topic. Sorry. Several friends have asked (including the one in the comments section of my last post) and it seemed easier for her and others to find it if I posted it here rather than in a reply comment. So, here it is, for whomever cares about such things.

Homemade yogurt is a staple in our home. We consume obscene quantities of it. My kids love it. Homemade yogurt is cheaper and healthier than the store-bought variety. It isn't difficult to make at all, but it—like any other "homemade" venture—is more difficult than picking it up at the store. It will be worth the trouble to you if your family eats it already and you want to cut the cost and the sugar and the preservatives down.

NOTE: Homemade yogurt is not kefir. Although yogurt is very healthy and beneficial to the digestive tract in its own right—and quite delicious—if you are interested in the kind of health benefits I extolled in my last post, you will need to choose kefir instead of yogurt. Kefir is also much easier to make than homemade yogurt.

Don't take that to mean that yogurt is difficult to make, however, because it isn't. But it does take a bit of prep work, and a good bit of time to sit and incubate. (Yogurt is a cultured product, like cheese, and has to incubate in a temperature-controlled environment for a certain amount of time.) You can either throw it together in the evening and let it culture in the oven overnight—which is what I do—or put it together on a day when you won't need your oven and let it culture during the day.

To get started, you will need milk, glass jars and lids, a starter yogurt from the store or from your own last batch of homemade yogurt, and sugar/vanilla if you want sweet yogurt instead of plain.

Here's how you do it: You will need clean jars and lids. (No need to sterilize—if they went through the dishwasher, straight from the cabinet will be fine.) You can use pint jars or quart jars, too, if you'd rather. I use any combination of sizes which I have clean and ready to go. Good "free" jars come from removing the labels and saving the jars and lids from Classico tomato and basil sauce or Mountain Ridge pure raw honey (both about quart size with a one-piece standard Ball lid), or Bonne Maman jellies (about cup size with a pretty red and white checked lid). Of course, you can just use Ball canning jars, too, if you want to pay for them and don't mind the two-piece lids. It helps if most of the jars you use take the same kinds of lids so that you know right away which lid goes with which jar as you're making your yogurt.

I start with a gallon of milk, which makes about 10-12 cups of yogurt in the end. (This lasts us not quite a week.) I use whole milk, which makes the yogurt creamier and thicker in the end, but I've used 2% as well, so I know that will work. I'm not sure about 1% or skim, but I wouldn't hesitate to try it if this is important to you. Since I've also used raw milk, or milk with added soy milk or rice milk in it, I think it is pretty tolerant of most base milks.

If you want plain yogurt, add no sugar. If you want vanilla yogurt—sweet versus plain—add however much sugar you like before you heat up the milk. (To get the same sweetness as the store-bought variety, you will have to add at least two cups of sugar to the gallon of milk. I add about 1/2 C. sugar per gallon now. This makes it slightly sweet but not at all "sicky sweet" like from the store. If you and your family like how sweet the store-bought kind tastes, you'll want to make your homemade yogurt pretty sweet at first to "win yourself over," then gradually reduce the sugar as you go. You'll barely notice if you just cut back a little each time.

Heat the milk in a large pot to just barely boiling. (Add the sugar at the beginning, if you use it, and stir to dissolve.) Once the milk comes to a light boil, remove it from the heat and let it cool down to the same temperature you'd want the liquid for making a yeast bread. (If you're not familiar with this "pretty warm but not hot" feeling with your finger, you can use a candy thermometer the first few times. You want it around 100 degrees, but it must be between 90 and 110. If it is too cold at the time you add the starter, it won't culture. If it is too hot, you'll kill the culture.) When it is this temperature, add about a tablespoon of vanilla (if you want it).

For the starter yogurt, I use some of the previous batch until such time that my kids end up eating all of it without saving me some starter. When this happens (about once a month or so), I start fresh with a store-bought starter. In order to get the best "health benefit" combination of live cultures (the friendly bacteria that turns the milk into yogurt), I start with a combination of Stoneyfield Farm (plain) and Activia (vanilla) brands. This combination contains the widest variety of beneficial intestinal flora, and seems to give the best "set up" power and balance of sweetness versus tartness. However, you can really start with any plain or vanilla (not flavored) yogurt where the container says something like, "Made with active live cultures." I take about half a jar (of the cup size) of my own yogurt, or a few tablespoons of each of the store-bought ones, and put it in a plastic mixing bowl and whisk it smooth. Then I take a measuring cup (I like to use one with a detached handle that can hang on the side of the pot, but whatever is fine) and transfer some of the warm-but-not-hot milk into the just-whisked yogurt. I stir it in, and repeat until the bowl is full. I then pour that bowl of liquid back into the remaining milk in the large pot. (This process adjusts the yogurt to the temperature of the warm milk gradually, preventing a shock that could kill it. Since I don't bother to check the temperatures anymore with anything but my finger, I figure it doesn't hurt to be careful.)

Once the milk and starter are combined in this way, use the same measuring cup to transfer the mixture into your clean jars. Cap them and put them into a metal baking dish (for no other reason than to make transport easy and to keep them from tipping over in the oven) and place it into your oven with either the gas pilot light or the electric light bulb on. Close it up. (I latch it with the self-cleaning oven latch as a signal to myself and the others in my family that yogurt is culturing so we won't go by and accidentally turn off the light.) This (leaving the oven light or pilot light on) will maintain the correct 90-110 degree temperature range for culturing the yogurt. It will set up in a few hours, but I regularly leave it for twelve or more since I culture it overnight while we're sleeping. Once it is set up, transfer the jars to the refrigerator and enjoy!

Homemade yogurt is slightly less firm than store-bought yogurt. You will quickly get used to this, but if you really miss the texture of the latter, I remember reading that you can add some gelatin to the milk to make it more firm. I've never done this, so you'll have to find it in a cookbook or elsewhere online if you want to know how to do that.

If fruit-flavored yogurt is really important to you, you will have to add the fruit flavoring once the yogurt is made. You can use some sort of jelly/preserves or a liquid fruit syrup for this purpose. The more you stir the yogurt, however, the more liquid it will become, so be careful here.

If you eat a few bites from the jar and then add Welch's 100% grape juice to the jar and shake, you'll have pretty good replica of those probiotic-type drinks they sell in teeny little bottles for a fortune.

My kids' favorite way to eat this yogurt is as "yogurt and oats," which is where they add raw oats and stir it into a meusli-esque sort of blend. You can add apples, bananas, and walnuts or almonds if you want a true meusli treat.

Well, in my attempts to be super-detailed so I won't leave anything out, I'm sure I've scared most of you off and made it sound much harder than it actually is. It is a standard twice-a-week process in our home, and every member of my family (from the seven-year-old daughter to the 40-year-old husband) could do it in their sleep by now. If we can, you can!

Let me know how it goes!

Entertaining Strangers

"Keep on loving each other as brothers. Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it" (Hebrews 13:1-2).

This weekend we went to the HEAV conference in Richmond. It was wonderful... challenging, convicting, encouraging, invigorating. There are so many things I need to "process" about all we heard, some of which I'm sure I'll do here, but for now, I'm really pondering this verse.

Why? Because this weekend in Richmond, Iivo and I stayed with a total stranger... a friend of a friend, a fellow believer, a "brother" whom we contacted to see if we could stay with him on Friday night. This sort of ministry is something we do all the time, but I'm realizing more and more that it is not something usually practiced easily and freely within the church Body. Even having someone into our home to share a meal can be daunting to many of us, so the thought of hosting overnight guests - particularly ones we don't know - is terrifying. I would like to suggest that it needn't be. We have found it to be a significant blessing, both to ourselves and to our family, whenever we are on the receiving end or the giving end of this experience.

The conference this weekend was not free. The food we had to eat while away from our own kitchen was not free. The home school curriculum I purchased while there was not free. The gas it took to get us there and back was certainly far from free! And so the fact that we did not have to spend further Kingdom money for lodging while we were there was a huge financial blessing to our family.

We are so grateful that this young single guy Rick chose to "not forget to entertain strangers..." in this very low-risk, high-yield sort way. His beautifully-restored 1930's house in the Fan has extra bedrooms in it, and he was happy to have one of them filled for this particular night. What did it cost him? The money it will take him to run the washing machine on our sheets and towels. What did it save us? A lot of money.

But even beyond that, it was a deeper spiritual blessing to both him and to us. We provided opportunity for him to serve the Lord by serving His Body in this way, and he provided us opportunity to humble ourselves by making known our need. And the Lord blessed both of us with an experiential picture of His Body in action. "Keep on loving each other as brothers." Do we really believe that we who call ourselves by His name are actually family? Do we really believe that we are to share with others what the Lord has given to us? Do we really believe that Kingdom money spent on necessities like evening lodging while at a Convention could be better spent on other things?

By the way, our kids are watching... and every time we as their parents invite in a stranger - and we prepare the house and change the sheets and run the vacuum and set out the towels - they are seeing the Body of Christ in action. And so it is even on the other end, when we come home with tales of the house we stayed in... a home belonging to one who was a stranger on Thursday afternoon, a new friend by Thursday night, but a brother all along.

Thank you, Rick, for serving the Lord by serving us. May we ever be open to doing the same!

Farewell to pine nuts...

Today we bought a new (to us) car. I've been praying for the past few weeks for the Lord to provide a car for us, and I believe this 2003 Volkswagen Jetta is the answer to that request.

We can't really afford it, even though it is a great deal, but it is a long time coming, and we're biting the bullet to try to make the payment work. Iivo has been driving my 2-door (grrrrr!) 1992 Honda Accord since our first child was born. Although it has only(!) 125K miles on it (Hondas are known to go to easily to over 200K miles), it is getting to the point that it has some pretty expensive repairs on it a couple of times a year.

So, how did this come to pass? Well, a few weeks ago, my van went into the shop for routine maintenance, but had to stay for a couple of days. The kids and I took the Honda, and Iivo got a ride to work. I was shocked. The car is a yukky ride. It has been a few years since I've had to drive it. It is quite old. It isn't very clean inside or out. The radio doesn't work. (He poured coffee in the original one, years ago, and this is an after-market multi-disc-changer-thing he put in, back in pre-MP3-player days. It sucks.) The windshield wipers create an impenetrable blur on the windshield. (Don't ask why he hasn't had them replaced yet, because I don't know.) It was generally just unpleasant.

Also, it has been dumping about half a quart of oil per week on our driveway for weeks now, so the taste in my mouth - as far as an assumption about how the car is doing - both cosmetically and mechanically - is rather sour. I told him we should probably think about starting to make financial provision for another car for him sometime soon. He assured me that he is fine driving this thing with the big fender dent in the back until it dies. (Don't ask me about the time he put our twelve-year-old daughter behind the wheel in our suburban neighborhood, and she freaked out trying to pull into our driveway without so much as a single braking, crashing BOTH of our cars simultaneously!)

I am pleased that I have a husband so willing to sacrifice, and not at all caught up in "image" and stuff. It makes our life as a single-income family trying to pay for homeschooling that much easier.

But I am also so pleased that the Lord has chosen this time around to give him a little luxury. This Jetta has heated leather seats, and sport wheels, and a sunroof. The stereo system plays cassettes and CDs, and will easily accommodate his ipod. It has a 1.8L turbo engine and looks pretty great, too.

When we were considering whether or not to buy the car, Iivo said, "I don't need all those bells and whistles... just something simple that gets me to and from work... we're paying for fanciness." But I reminded him that - at the price they were asking - we WEREN'T paying for fanciness. The Lord was just throwing it in to bless Him.

God is so good to us! Now we just have to figure out how to sacrifice what we need to to make the payments work. Iivo's comment to the kids was simply, "Well, kids. No more pine nuts in our salads for five years."

We've been here before. Early in our marriage, after we bought our house and I was home with our first child, he was bringing home around $1600 a month, and our mortgage payment was about $800 a month. That left $800, and we had to pay about $300 a month for health insurance. (This was just major catastrophic coverage, too, so our deductible - even at that price - was $5K.) So there was $500 to pay for everything else... power, phone, water, sewer treatment, etc. After all the bills were paid, I had $200/mo. left to buy anything I bought. ANYTHING. We're talking food, clothes, gas, diapers, haircuts, tampons, EVERYTHING else each month. It was pretty tight, needless to say. There was nothing like cell phones or cable TV. We bought our clothes at thrift stores. (still do...) We had dial-up Internet for years after everyone we knew was online broadband. We furnished our home with things from yard sales. (Literally. If we wanted something, I'd put it on the "yard sale prayer list," and - if we actually needed it - it would always come.) I resisted the urge at the Pampered Chef parties, and said no to the jewelry or clothing ones.

We ate a lot of beans. We didn't eat a lot of pine nuts. And we made it.

So here we are... three more kids later, with gas three dollars more per gallon! And we're stepping back into the "austerity program." After the pine nuts, the next thing to go? Eating out. Our family spends a relative fortune when we all eat out together. It is easily our largest budgetary sinkhole. It will be hard to give up, as it is such a social part of our lives as a family, and with most of those around us. (Even those around us we know who are lamenting how much they're financially struggling are always going out to eat after church.) It also is often the result of just not having gotten the meal together, given the craziness of the homeschooling day. But we're committed to trying to make it work. I'll keep you posted how it is going...