From the Valley

More-with-Less Cooking

A while ago at a used book sale I saw a cookbook that looked familiar; sure enough it was a copy of one of the staple cookbooks which a dear friend and mentor had on her shelf. I bought it for about $2 and forgot about it.

I found it again at it is a perfect guide for the food project we are setting out on. The book was published in 1976 so some of the statistics are wrong now, however, how to make sure you are eating whole proteins with legumes and grains hasn't changed, nor has the fact that meat costs a whole lot more per gram a protein as the vegetarianism options.

The book is More-with-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre and is filled with good old fashion Mennonite cooking sense. Now I am not Mennonite myself but every Mennonite I have met has had an appreciation of good food, and usually lots of it.

So here we go, aiming for a less meat and lower cost meal but more filling and satisfying!

First meal attempt:
Six-Layer Dish
I was craving a casserole type bake anyway.

Layer in order given in a 2qt. greased casserole, seasoning each layer with salt and pepper:
2 medium potatoes, sliced
2 medium carrots, sliced
1/3 c. uncooked rice
2 small onions, sliced
1 lb ground beef
1 qt. canned tomatoes
Sprinkle ove;
1 Tbsp brown sugar
Bake at 300 for 2 1/2 - 3 hours
Options:
Just before ground beef add 1 c. cooked kidney beans, drained.
Substitutes browned book sausage for ground beef.

I'm adding the beans, substituting chicken and omitting the onion, mostly because of what we have available in our pantry. It's not normally what I would make, but nothing we wouldn't normally eat, and it does look more filling than what I would normally make. I am looking forward to it.

Hopefully it cooks down, or the 2 qt. pan might not have been big enough...

A Quest to Eat for Less

So we're looking ahead at our third month in Saskatoon. It's not as glamorous as we hoped but we are making ends meet, barely. Eventually my husband will get more hours at his job but it means lots of work first and probably two more years of school before he's at sustainable full time. That seems to be the difficulty of breaking into the counselling business.

There are three major things that we're working on at the moment; two are for our personal lives, one is for work.

For work, both of us are working together at setting up a group pre-marital counselling seminar. It is going to be ten three hour sessions, likely once a week for four to ten couples. This is something that after talking to pastors from various local churches seems to be a need. So we're putting our schooling to work at getting this together. Eventually, my husbands boss would like to offer this through his work too, but since he is not working at a Christian counselling center we will have to modify it to be less Christian. Now, I don't know how that will change it, other than some wording, because I feel that all sound marriages are based in Biblical principles whither or not the couple believe in the One who created those principles. We will just have to work it out.

For ourselves we are going to do to things: We realize how much stress we have been under with the move and are going to take some time for ourselves just to study Scripture together. We're using a book to guide us, it is one that I have read before but am looking forward to reading again. The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows by James Bryan Smith. We also have the second book in that series, The Good and Beautiful Life: Putting on the Character of Christ. I am looking forward to working through these and memorizing Scripture with my husband.

Second, we are looking to eat better, really to eat for less. Both in the sense of eating for less money as well as for less junk and calories. Both of us, when we are stressed start to eat more food, and less of it healthy. So we are sitting down and actually planning out healthy meals, instead of just cooking whatever we can find. This means eating less meat, it is often the most expensive thing we eat, and making sure that we are getting full proteins and lots of vitamins and minerals from what we are eating. Lentils and beans are becoming our friends, they are cheep, chalked full of goodness and I still get to feel full after eating.

God is good, all the time. The work will be worth it when it all comes down to it.  I know that even though we feel like we are coasting at the moment, God has a plan for us. Sometimes I worry but I know that we can lean on God and do the best with what He gives us. Moment to moment. All the time, God is good.

Start of the Great Church Hunt Adventure

Today is the first Sunday we are here so that means our first new church! My husband and I have agree to searching criteria:

1. They need to have sound doctrine and theology 
• thanks to Bible college we know what we believe and have talked about this extensively 
2. Enjoyable music 
• for us that is a healthy mix between new and old songs
• a willingness to try old songs in new ways
3. Active and healthy community
• we may have been spoiled by our Bible college town church but I hope not
4. Close to where we live
• we feel that geographic location is important to worship
• I feel that it is a part of the way that God built us to live in community
5. Larger congregation (this is my husband's desire)
• He comes from a larger church, I from a smaller church. This is just a common disagreement from our rural/city out looks. Although it's not as important as the other points.
6. Feel
• This will likely be the deciding factor. Feel may not be the proper description for it: it will be part discernment, part prayer, part weighing the other criteria. It's a discussion that will not be taken lightly.

My husband is pessimistically expecting this adventure to take about two months. I am hoping for a shorter time than that. I would like to set down roots in a community soon, but I do want to find the right place to do so. 

Lawson Heights Pentecostal Assembly is first on our list.

In a sea of boxes.

So today is the second full day we have been at our new apartment. I got my computer and internet set up but we are still in a sea of boxes. The living room is almost free: I count only eight where at one time it was full, but the rest of the house is still fairly stacked. We packed just about forty cardboard boxes and a few totes on top of that. Who knew we had so much stuff?

My In-laws are still here and I am so thankful for them. It helps my motivation for unpacking to have them around as well as it makes it seem a little more normal. I am sure I will be lonesome when they leave. Adjusting will be interesting.

A Needed Reminder

Spiraling closer, a year in review part 2

We move in a week! Oi, I need to be packing instead of blogging.

So I left off coming home from Christmas at my parents. The depression that I had be fighting to deny was catching up with me and I felt like I was on a bad roller coaster. January sucked. It was cold and there were storms. My husband and I had started to seriously consider moving come May because his full time job would lay him off for the four months when college was not in session and there were not people here to feed in the cafeteria. The future was less certain than ever. I did not know where God was calling us and the uncertainty frightened me. I couldn't talk to my best friend because as uncertain and frightened as I felt, I knew her situation was much worse. Then we had a big fight. It was 90% my bad communication and I knew it as soon as the words left my mouth, they weren't how I meant to say it but it had been said. I apologized and waited. Like I said, January sucked.

February did not get much better. I got a second job because I had been working at Zellers and they were closing all their store at the end of March. My emotional state was a wreck, trapped in a cycle of guilt, and then there started to be constant stress from scheduling conflicts at work. I don't remember much else of February.

March I quite one job, the scheduling difficulties were too much for me. That left me with a job with very few hours a week but at least it was less stress. I put my spare time into getting a feast ready for the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism; Lots of fun! If you're interested in history you should check out your local group.) 

The first week of April was exceptionally crazy. On top of my birthday, Easter and the feast my husband and I were hosting, my husband got a job interview Good Friday, was accepted for the job to start ASAP, we found out we had lost the hall for the feast Saturday, had a mad scramble to find a new hall in one week, had a 18th birthday party for a good friend, made a new outfit for the feast, found the new hall did not have a kitchen, cooked a meal for 45 in three different kitchens and carted the food to the hall, had two friends over night, and succeed in running a nearly hitch free event that everyone enjoyed!

After that run-on-sentence of a week, April slowed down only slightly. We confirmed we are moving to Saskatoon and found an apartment. We got all the finances (almost) in order to get said apartment as well as finding me a job up there. Now it's just packing, cleaning and letting reality set in.

Today the world feels lighter--especially with the 20+ weather all of a sudden!--but I still have bad days, and really bad days more often than not. I know that God has blessed us in this move, everything is coming together despite my fears and I do look forward to what He is bringing around this bend in the road.

The saddest part of all this has been leaving my church family that has grown here in the seven years I've lived in this funny little college town of Caronport. Last Monday we all had supper together and they sent us off with pray. It brought tears to my eyes and gave me more hope than they can know. I will hear from them all again, although not as often perhaps, and I know that God will have a community waiting for us in Saskatoon too.

So that has been my year. I look forward to my fourth year of marriage and what it will bring, God willing.

Odd

Just a note;

I had 22 page views on Wednesday after having like 20 in total for two years. Odd...

A Year in Review, part one

Come the first of May we'll be moving to Saskatoon. It was around May last year that we finished our degrees and moved across town to figure out what we were doing next. It was a year in limbo, no longer students, not working in our train fields and barely making it by. There were both good and bad events, as in every year. And now I look forward to a life of possibilities that I had not dreamed of before. Each day God is surprising me with what plans He brings out of the chaos.

Over the summer both my husband and I struggled to get our act together and get our applications in for Seminary. I was looking at the counseling program and my husband debating between the pastoral counseling or the straight counseling programs. Both of us were struggling to write the simple five to eight page paper about ourselves. Looking back, we were tired from school, both of us spent seven (or more) years getting our B.A.s. My husband did come out with two full B.A.s and I had a B.A. with a minor, but still it had been a long run, especially since we both when to college straight out of high school. I also think that God had some important things for us to learn outside of classes.

In June we took in a high school student whose parents live over seas. So, in the second year of our marriage, we became guardians to a 17 year old who is now an undeniable part of our family. Walking with her as she grew in this year has been the best thing of this year, through all the ups and downs. We celebrated her 18th birthday this month and it has been a blessing to see her grown into a woman of God. Even as she moves on to board with someone else next year she will still be a part of our family and I thank God for the time that we've had.

Around the same time we also adopted a stray cat from down our street. I have missed having a cat around so much and I do think that those small animals affect my mental health. Minerva has been a hand full as she has grown from an overly excited fuss ball to a cat who is overaggressive in fear of other people. We are going to the vet soon to ask about her eyesight though; I am more and more convinced that she is at least partly blind and that is why she is so aggressive towards people who are not normally in the house.

In May my best friend got married. It was beautiful and fun and exciting. Although I have decided that I will not give the gift of a wedding cake when I am in the wedding party again, that was just too time constraining. It was a fun few weeks of preparation and parties and I was so glad for my two close friends that they would be starting their lives together.

We were active in our Church, co-leading a house church with our good friends. As the semester for the college students went on it became more difficult for us. Our house church was a majority college students and we were no longer peers but we were still trying to follow their schedule. (Perhaps this next year being out of a college town I will not think along the lines of the school year but that is still hard to imagine.) There was growth, but it was small and not always in the way we wanted to see it. We struggled through and tried to rest in the knowledge that God had plans that were not ours.

In early November, my Princess-cat, who was just over 19 years old, fell asleep in my mother's lap and did not wake up. Earlier that day I had seen them on Skype and I knew than that despite my hope, Princess would not make it until our Christmas visit. It is still hard months later. That cat was my best friend through out middle and high school, she knew all my secrets and mostly kept them: she would tell my parents if I wasn't in the house by 11 pm, so no sneaking out for me.

For Christmas my husband and I flew down to Southern Ontario to be with my family. It had been two years since I had last been home, although my Mom and Dad had made it out for our graduation the previous April. There was a lot of visiting and a lot of eating but it was restful too, a busy restful. I came back with a renewed sense of God's calling in my life and the conviction that I had been running from it in the year before.

That is the first six months of  this past year. I had a lot more to say than I thought and I could say a lot more. I will continue this later.

At Some Point

The feeling of chaos hasn't died off after graduation. At some point I need to figure out how to put it into words so I can remember it.