An enterprising young man in town has opened up his own mini farmer’s market in what was a defunct gas station and then used car lot. He’s in the process of converting from harvest theme (Indian corn, gourds, pumpkins, etc.) to Christmas (trees & poinsettias)so he posted on Facebook a great sale on pie pumpkins and squash. I love winter squash, which grew around my Gram’s home in Massachusetts. She would mash it and top it with butter, brown sugar, salt & pepper.
If I hadn’t just been down to visit Baker Creek Seeds I would have passed by the extremely large, salmon-colored squash, but I recognized them as Pink Banana Squash which a fellow at Baker Creek highly recommended for taste. Now however, I’m not only going to roast the squash for Thanksgiving but try to save the seeds for next Spring.
As luck would have it, I had a butternut squash (I told you I loved them) on hand so you can compare the sizes. It was the largest one I could find at Walmart and cost me $3.00. The heirloom squash was on sale for $2.00 and will probably yield 3-4 times the amount of meat.
I sliced the squash into sections and hut each section in half to remove the seeds and put the meat into the roasting pan. This was a big ol’ turkey roaster, not just a 9 X 13 pan.
The pulp didn’t seem nearly as “slimy” as some squash I’ve dealt with and the seeds separated fairly easily.
See the seed all by its lonesome near the top of the mat. I started looking over each one to cull any that 
had been nicked by the knife or seemed less than perfect. Really, there were soooo many seeds in this giant that I only saved half for seed and roasted the rest for snacking. Of course if you really want to start saving seeds you should cull them from more than one plant – you best specimens to ensure strong future crops. I’m just using what I have available to me – which was the best looking squash at the stand.
I then had to wash all the little bits of pulp off the seeds by rubbing them between my fingers under water. I have several Silpat mats I use for baking that I spread the seeds over for drying.
Let me be up front and say that I at least a third generation bibliophile so I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to review a book, especially one with such an amusing title—At Home in Dogwood Mudhole. There really is such a place…it’s in Tennessee, and author Franklin Sanders moved there with his family before Y2K (does anyone else recall what a disaster that was supposed to be?). The first of three planned volumes is subtitled “Nothing That Eats,” a reference to wife Susan’s order not to buy any animals for their new home. I’m not sure what wasn’t clear about that order but it didn’t take long before they had dogs, pigs, horses, and chickens, chickens, and more chickens.
I knew I liked the author’s sense of humor when I read of all things, the Acknowledgements page. He began by stating: “People fudge a lot when they say ‘this book wouldn’t have been possible except for the help of’ and then list everybody they know from the president to the second assistant tire checker.” I found myself giggling at all the zingers tucked in like Easter Eggs amongst all the pages, like “When we shop for chickens, ‘dog-resistance’ is our first concern….any chicken with a life expectancy greater than a quark needs both supersonic speed and a profound mastery of evasive tactics.” Other times the humor is drawn out into more of a story – the $30 dog that ended up costing more than $1000 by the time damages and vet bills were factored in.
Dogs are a favorite topic, as are visits to the local flea/farmers market, Civil War (pardon me, the War for Southern Independence) re-enactments, family ties, and an ongoing legal battle with the IRS. The book is really a compilation of newsletters written to customers of Sanders’ small business-- The Moneychanger. You’ll find it organized by month and year (from 1995 to 2002), but really that’s the only organization. Sanders jumps from topic to topic—he might recommend a restaurant in one paragraph and switch to talking about how his cows can herd up pigs in the next. Some months he has a lot to say (June 2000 had over 5 pages about hauling hay) , but other months he’s pretty terse (January 2000 was only half a page when Y2k turned out to be no big deal).
I wasn’t drawn to curling up with this book and a cup of hot chocolate for an afternoon of reading, but it was easy to pick it up and start reading just about anywhere when I found 15-20 spare minutes. True, it helped to try and stay chronologically so I wasn’t stuck wondering where this new dog had come from, but I could skip over the passages about the court case with the IRS without feeling like I missed something. We live in a rural setting and every so often I fancy a go at raising chickens or beekeeping, I think a virtual visit to Dogwood Mudhole will keep my feet on the ground and my head out of the clouds.
Volume One: Nothing that Eats (379 pp.) is available in paperback for $22.95 or eBook format (Kindle or PDF) for $16.95. You can read a sample chapter of Volumes One and Two on the Dogwood Mudhole’s website.
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| Matching Quiz for younger students |
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| Older students can type in answers |
| Singular | Plural | |
| 1st Person | I eat – je mange | we eat – nous mangeons |
| 2nd Person | you eat - tu manges | you eat – vous mangez |
| 3rd Person | he eats – il mange | they eat – ils mangent |
Full disclosure time—we are very familiar around this house with Apologia Educational Ministries . We’ve used their What We Believe worldview series since we reviewed it several years ago and we’ve always used their Young Explorers elementary homeschool science books in our homeschool. Author Jeannie Fulbright has been leading us to explore creation from Day 1 (Astronomy) through day 6 (Land Animals of the Sixth Day and Anatomy & Physiology—creation of man). So we had a good idea what to expect when we had the opportunity to review the newest title in the series, Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics (in fact we were chomping at the bit to get it in our hot little hands). Along with the main textbook we received the Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics Notebooking Journal . Let me cut to the chase and say we highly recommend all of the books in the series but I’m sure you’d like to hear a little more about this title in particular.
test tubes (the text says to use plastic cups but they’d have to be very narrow because the depth of the liquid needs to be at least 4 inches). We inserted the straw into the first and when it had about an inch of blue liquid in it we put our finger over the top to create a vacuum to hold it in place (I think everyone has done this with their soda at one time or another). The we pushed the straw into the next liquid—an inch deeper than before, and lifted our finger. The denser liquid pushed the first further up the straw, but when we reapplied our finger trying to lift both liquids layers out we could never get the suction to work. Both liquids ended up dribbling into tube #2. Schnickelfritz and I both tried several times and this picture was as far as we got. If someone has successfully completed this challenge and knows the secret please leave a comment. 
