Christmas Tree

I grew up with a real Christmas tree for a few  of my formative years, at least, before my mom got sick of picking out all the needles from the carpet. I was so sad when she got an artificial tree, and she said when I have my own place, I can have whatever kind of tree I want. 

Even though I've been on my own for over a decade, this is the first real tree I've put up. Or rather, G put up. He did the heavy lifting. 😜 When we first got married we decided we'd only have real trees. The year we got married, I put my artificial tree up and we got rid of it after the season. Our first year, we moved/were remodeling the new house, so we didn't set up a tree. Last year, we were in the hospital with Jaron. Third time's the charm! 

G got a nice one from the garden center. They aren't selling trees this year, instead they got a few for their employees and longtime patrons to purchase. 

Ours arrived on our homestead before Thanksgiving, but because of our travels, we waited to put it up until we got home from Japan so no one would have to water it. Of course, it was buried under a snow bank. Then the frigid temps made G want to wait until warmer weather showed up to bring it in the house. 

Thankfully warm weather came and the tree made it inside ...

Jaron loves it. So far he's stayed away from it, although certain ornaments really lure him in. I hung the soft, nonbreakable ones around the bottom. 

I have all my ornaments from when I was a kid, and we have the ornaments from the wedding ornament shower G's family hosted for us. No ornaments from G though. I told him I felt bad the tree is mostly "me" and he said, "Well, let's get mine from my parents'!" We sorted through their decorations and brought a whole bunch back. We have a lot of ornaments... Still, I found room for his too. 

Tada!
 

One thing we didn't discuss about trees is what goes at the top. Me: star. G: nothing. I won that battle. 😄

Frozen Eggs

With the cold weather, some of the eggs have frozen before we can collect them. Instead of throwing them away, I crack them in a bowl and we eat them right away. 

This morning, I wondered how a frozen egg would cook. G really enjoys a runny yolk, so I thought I'd try cooking one from frozen figuring it would thaw/cook slowly and leave the yolk the perfect runniness for him. 

Step one, crack the egg. I mean, it's already cracked, so actually step one is to take the shell off. It came off in pieces.

Step two, fry in pan. Eggs on the left are normal, egg on the right is frozen.

It's getting there! It took a long time and didn't ever spread out.

The finished product. There was a nice runny yolk in the middle!

Japan!

Surprise! We were in Japan the past two weeks (roughly). We're home now (got home late Friday night). Our travels went well, safely, although there were a lot of delays with our flights. The flight to Japan is about 13h from Chicago. The way home is quicker at 11.5h. Jaron did very well with the flights. We brought a bunch of books and snacks for him which helped him pass the time. He slept most of the flight home. 

G and I adjusted to the time difference in Japan fairly quickly. Jaron on the other hand realllly struggled with jet lag. He woke up at 2am completely wide awake and ready for the day to start. He wasn't very interested when I made him go back to sleep. He laid in bed for a couple hours babbling to himself while I patted his back, trying to make him sleepy. Eventually he gave in and fell asleep for a few more hours. The same thing happened the next night. After about three or four days he had adjusted. Much more crying than babbling with this adjustment back to MN hours...

But, back to the trip! We had a phenomenal time. 

Our first day there, we met up with our international students from last fall, Hohomi and Yua. They showed us around Asakusa (part of Tokyo) and sponsored kimono rental for all of us for the day, even Jaron and G!

Over the course of the trip, we ate some amazing Japanese curries, a ton of rice, and a boatload of greens/seaweed/fish. Even Jaron! He loved everything he tried. 

We spent one night near Mt. Fuji. 

Ate at a delightful "small plates" restaurant. The owner didn't speak English, so she spoke into a translator that read her words back to us. She told us there was no menu; she is a Japanese mama who likes to feed people. Do we trust her to feed us? We did! And she did not disappoint. She brought dish after dish, including a whole fish. She took the bones away and brought them back a while later cooked until they were crunchy and edible. They tasted strangely amazing. 

We got ice cream at one of the parks/gardens- muscat grape and red grape twist (this area grows both varieties), and a Japanese maple and lilac.  Jaron really wanted to try it as you can see... 

Eating a Fuji apple at Mt. Fuji. So tasty! 

We ended our trip with a week in the mountains near Osaka where G's cousin Kyle runs a permaculture center (Pamimomi). They were doing a permaculture workshop for part of our time there, and even though it was primarily taught in Japanese, we tagged along for a few sessions. 

The view of the valley from the permaculture front yard:

Kimchi, making bamboo charcoal, and butchering chickens were all part of the workshop. G did a chicken all by himself so he'd be able to butcher our birds back home (the other person in the picture below is Tom, a plaster apprentice of Kyle also helping butcher). 

I spent a lot of time in the kitchen at Pamimomi. I helped cut veggies for kimchi and helped the cooks prep other food for meals. They have big windows overlooking the valley below. 

Drying persimmons and spicy peppers.

Kyle had a bunch of permaculture books, and in my downtime I enjoyed reading those outside. Jaron enjoyed napping in the 50° weather.

Pizza night cooked in the wood-fired pizza oven made by Kyle. Normally, meals are cooked over wood burning stoves either inside or outside. 

We stayed in a guest house about a five minute drive from the farm. In Japan they like to say that you always know what temperature it is outside because the temperature outside is the same as inside. They have very thin walls. The walls in the picture below are covered in paper. 

At night wooden walls slide into place on the outside of the house to help it be a little bit warmer. We had heated blankets and a kerosene space heater to keep the room warm at night. It was still pretty chilly! But we all survived. 

The table I'm sitting at in the picture below is a heated table! There's a heater centered underneath, very flat, and the blanket keeps all the warmth in. These are very common in Japan, and it seems like a lot of people practically live under them in the cold months, haha. I would love one for our house...

In the morning, The guest house host would bring us breakfast. Always a wide variety of foods, always delicious! 

G was struck by the quantity and quality of ornamental trees in Japan. So well kept! Lots of pruning! 

November and December are yuzu season in Japan. Yuzu is also known as a Japanese lemon and has a wonderful citrus flavor. G and I harvested 100kg for Kyle that were getting sold to a local juicery. 

There were probably 300-400kg still left on the tree. Kyle said it must be a bumper year! Yuzu isn't very good to eat fresh off the tree. Instead it's mostly used to make juice or jam. We love all forms of yuzu, and enjoyed it frequently in dressings on salads when we ate at Pamimomi.

Before we knew it, it was time to head home! Jaron slept most of the flights home. We had minimal delays. It's very good to be home!

Christmas Bows

Now that we're home from our trip, it's time to decorate for Christmas. I'm not much of a decorator. In fact, I haven't decorated the past two years, although that's partly from circumstances out of my control. Last year we were in the NICU and the year before that we had just moved into our house/it was still being remodeled. 

So. This is the year we're doing it up festive!

G bought a real tree that's been hanging outside in the snow. We thought about putting it up before our trip, but someone would've needed to water it every day, and we didn't want to make that much work for G's parents, so we waited. This past weekend was too cold, so the tree is going up in the next couple days during our "heat wave". 

In the meantime, I can do other decorations. 

This is my favorite Christmas wall hanging I got at one of the Immanuel silent auctions. It would hang on a thumb tack in my apartment during the Christmas season. G is morally opposed to a thumb tack as a hanging apparatus, so that limits where I can hang this. I don't want to just put a nail in the wall for a short time.

There's a place in the stairwell going downstairs where I normally have a cross picture frame hanging. I figured that I could swap them out for Christmas. However... I have the cross hung with two thumb tacks. 😆 

The frame is light enough (no glass, just wood and ribbon), I knew it would never fall down and G would never notice the thumb tacks. But the way the ribbon for the cross is, it needs two tacks instead of one. I knew the thumb tacks would be obvious with the Christmas hanging, so I decided to add a bow at the top big enough to cover the thumb tacks. 

Youtube was very helpful for this. I found a video with slow instructions on how to tie a double loop bow with ribbon. She recommended chopsticks taped to the counter at the width you want the bow. 

A few minutes later, voila! I attached the bow to the Christmas hanging with a twist tie.

Here's a close up of the bow. Can't even see the thumb tacks. 😎

 ...Although you can still see a couple of old thumb tack holes from when I had messed up on hanging the cross picture. 😬

Container Potato Harvest

We didn't want the potatoes to freeze, so we moved the containers in the garage and insulated them with hay and straw bales until we could get to harvesting them. 

It worked pretty well! Some of the plants started growing again...

The dirt stayed soft and for ease of harvesting we dumped the containers on the garage floor. 

It was a simple matter to pick the potatoes out of the pile. The one tricky part was the layer of gravel I put in the bottom of the containers... Was that for drainage? Weight so they didn't blow over? Regardless, the small rocks looked surprisingly like little potatoes and harvesting didn't go as quickly as it could have. 😅 

I was disappointed in the quantity of potatoes we grew. I expected the bins to be full of good sized potatoes. We did get some good sized tubers, but there weren't the bushels I expected. 

Red potatoes were the worst producing. The sun bleached my identification tags and we mixed up the order of the bins, so I don't know how the other varieties grew. 😬 

Well, the sweet potatoes were easy to identify. They grew long and scraggly (the right side of the bucket). 

The last step in harvesting potatoes was setting them out to dry/harden their skin. I laid them out in the laundry room on a screen held up by a crate to allow the air to flow in all directions. 

The sweet potatoes too... Don't they look strange??

If I did the sweet potatoes over again, I would definitely fill the pot with dirt right from the beginning to give them more room to grow. 

I wonder why the harvest was small... Maybe it was a decent amount given the number I planted. This was my first time growing potatoes, so I'm not sure how many per plant is normal. 

The potatoes stayed in the bins a long time after the green plant died before I harvested them. Could some have rotted from the rain? Possibly. 

I found a few soft/half rotted potatoes as I dug around. Those could've been a result of freezing (the bottoms of the tubs weren't insulated and were sitting directly on the garage floor). Maybe more rotted from rain or freezing. 

It could also be a nutrition issue. The regular potatoes probably needed more fertilizer than I gave them. I kind of left them to their own devices this summer. 

I remember needing a lot of dirt to mound them the few times I did (because they had grown so tall in between moundings). I wonder if I checked them more frequently and added dirt gradually, they would've produced better. 

Will I plant potatoes in containers again? Yes, the harvesting method was too easy not to do it. I'll definitely do more research over winter on container potato tips! 

One Class Sub

I subbed for a high school chemistry teacher today. It wasn't as hard as you would think. MCA uses a block schedule, so I only had one class from 1:30-2:50pm. Six students were in class and it was a review day. Their teacher had scheduled an email to send to her students before class with links to their review Kahoots. I did a couple of the Kahoots, just to see how much of my chemistry I remembered... I'm a little rusty! 😅 The students did well though! 

Fun fact, their teacher married one of my former students! He recognized my name when she sent me an email with instructions for the day, so she mentioned that in her email- "P.S. My husband asked why I was emailing you because apparently you taught him at Immanuel when he was in 2nd grade or something?? You are a saint because I know he was an awful child."

It was actually in 5-6th grade (and 7-8th), and while he was mischievous, I never thought him awful. Actually, his class was probably my favorite class of students I've ever taught. Or maybe time is making my memory rosy. 😂They were so eager to learn. I remember them asking to turn the lights off, shut the shades, and sit on beanbags in front of the classroom so it would feel like a movie theater when we did science and social studies. 

One memory of this particular student was when my college biology professor came to Immanuel to do a forest biology lesson. We searched for and collected spiders in the woods. This student convinced his classmates to pay him to eat a bug (or spider? I can't remember). Anyway, one of his classmates took him up on it and he ate the bug in the woods. 

Buckwheat Piecrust

We ran out of flour. 

I know, how does that happen? 

Truthfully, it was all the muffin recipes and the two breads. I had to get creative in my baking until we could restock at Costco. 

Enter pastie pie. (I wanted to use up some wilted carrots and cabbage). We had buckwheat flour in the pantry so I found a buckwheat pie crust recipe that I actually had all the ingredients for.

The pie crust was pretty dry and crumbly, but it tasted good. I made a sauce to combat the dryness.

I've made the sauce before with goat milk. This time I used Greek yogurt and added a splash of lemon juice to add tang. It worked!