Cooking Squash

Gluten-Free Gourmet

Squash Cooking

Now we’ll see how to cook the squash for the cheesecake. We usually use either: one small butternut squash, two sweet potatoes, one acorn squash plus one sweet potato, or one small pumpkin.
I like to use a large knife and mallet to cut the squash in half; then I scrape out the pulp and seeds (the chickens love them). Next, place the squash and/or sweet potatoes in a pan, skin side down, in about an inch of water. Heat to boiling and simmer for 20-30 minutes.

Scraping Squash

When the squash pieces are soft, dip them out of the pan. After they cool, use a spoon to scrape the flesh out of the skin. It should be about 3 cups, ready to use in your next cheesecake. We like to do ours the day before so it’s always ready in the fridge. This fall we’ve been enjoying our own garden squash in the cheesecake—what a flavor!

Squash Cheesecake

Gluten-Free Gourmet

Beating Cheesecake

This recipe has a special twist on regular cheesecake which gives it extra creaminess and flavor: cooked squash. I cook butternut or acorn squash, sweet potatoes, or pumpkin and mash it up. The cheesecake is quite fast to whip up, and we eat it all the time as a high-protein, low-carb, and delicious snack. Also add it to top off any meal.

First, combine in a bowl and beat well:

1 8-oz bar cream cheese            1/4 c. honey          1 t. vanilla

      1/4 c. oat/rice flour        1 t. cinnamon       1/2 t. cloves                            

Then beat in:           3 free-range brown eggs
Finally, add and beat well:

3 c. mashed squash, or 1 16 oz. can pumpkin 1/2 c. water

Golden Treat

Pour into a greased 9x9 casserole dish and bake at 350° for 45-50 minutes, til it’s nice and brown on top. Cool, cut, and dip out small slices.

Happy Birthday

Artist's Gallery

Birthday Card

Today is my Little Sister's birthday, and so I'm posting the card I painted for her. We used to live by a barn full of cats, and this beauty was my sister's favorite. I hope it makes her party a very special celebration. Happy Birthday Little Sister!!

Christmas Dinner

Gluten-Free Gourmet

Winter Feast

Our family enjoyed a wonderful dinner on Christmas Day. Although we did deviate from our menu’s guidelines a little, the unusual dishes were well worth it. The vegetable pie (far left in photo) and meatballs were all low-carb foods but still delicous—I’ll post the recipes sometime. We bought a packaged cornbread mix, which contained wheat and cornmeal, and even added bacon, but served little enough that (we hope) it wasn’t a problem one time. Same for the cherry pudding, which took condensed milk. The pink jello was really extravagant: cranberries, apple, orange, cream cheese, and flavored cherry and orange gelatin. What a pack of flavor! When you usually eat healthy, you can manage a few extras once in a while. Happy holidays to all!!

Merry Christmas

Artists' Gallery

Candle Light

This post is to say to all my dear readers, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! This is my theme Christmas card from last year; I painted five or six original copies assembly-line style to send out. I composed the scene myself, with no reference photos at all, which is kind of unusual for me. And here is the beautiful verse which I wrote inside the cards.

"For it is the God Who commanded
light to shine out of darkness,

Who has shone in our hearts to give

the light of the knowledge of the glory

of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

2 Corinthians 4:6

Fireplace Shelves

Do-It-Yourself Decorating

Shelf Display

Now for the wall shelves next to the fireplace: I first removed the piles of books and clutter. Then I created a nature display with glass jars and leaves, bark, pinecones, and rocks we’d collected. Several more of my paintings created a complimentary background. This area will probably be getting even more work once we get our color scheme going. For now, this is a big improvement!

Fireplace

Do-It-Yourself Decorating

Fireplace Display

We decided to divide the large room between the study area and living room. To start with, we realized that the fireplace couldn’t really be used as a focal point because of its position in the room. We thus decorated it as simply a pretty backdrop. After covering up the fireplace opening (it was an ugly shade of green), we hung the guitars for display across the fireplace. I cleaned up the mantle and decorated it with paintings, seashells, and plants. Interesting combination!

Room Survey

Do-It-Yourself Decorating

Beginning Seating Area--Desks + Clutter to Left

The layout in our house made it hard to find a place for the living room. Besides the kitchen, there were two other rooms. The first was so small you couldn’t really fit a comfortable a seating area. The second was much larger, but broken up by the front door, a staircase, three windows, and an out-of-use fireplace with wall shelves. At the time, the room held cluttered desks, schoolbooks, computer equipment, and musical instruments, plus the couches. The living room set felt like it was pushed off in the corner, with no definition or color scheme. So my job was to incorporate all our work areas, plus a seating area, into these two rooms.

Starting From Scratch

Do-It-Yourself Decorating

A "Perfect" Living Room

Decorating is more than putting up pictures, hanging curtains, or even arranging furniture. Decorating really means creating a comfortable yet attractive room that serves a variety of purposes. A daunting task, to say the least! And I believe that the living room is most difficult room of all. For our family, the oddly-sized rooms of our old farmhouse and somewhat unusual furniture mounted an even greater challenge. So, what do you do if you don’t have the perfect room or furnishings? First, come along with us on our living room journey!

Beginning Furniture: Sofa

Couch

To begin, let me tell you about our furniture. We started with an antique couch we purchased second-hand years ago (it was red at that time but we since recovered it) and a very large futon sofa which folds into a bed. We liked neither piece of furniture, but couldn’t find a good replacement for the couch. As for the sofa, we removed the whole wooden back frame, and cut off half of the cushion, resulting in a low, deep bench and cover-less cushion. Also, add to that a swivel arm chair and several end tables. This was the situation when I took on the job of redecorating our living room.

Goodbye, Birchie

Backyard Poultry

Birchie in the Yard

This is one of our Araucanas named Birchie. On Friday while we were away, a little hawk flew into the tree in our yard over the chicken pen. The hens all crowded into the wire-enclosed runs as usual when they see a hawk, so it couldn’t swoop down and grab them. But this bird flew down to the ground outside the run and reached through the wire to catch its prey. Sadly, it was Birchie. This was our very first loss to a predator in the past two years of keeping them, and we really don’t know why it happened just now. The other 23 hens were quite traumatized and spent the next few days huddled in their house.

Laying a Blue Egg

Here is Birchie in the nest box (before it stopped laying for the winter). It had beautiful feathers and was always a little smaller than the other hens. When I let the hens free-range, I liked to pick it up and give it a boost into the air so it could flutter down like a bird. Birchie would tag along after the other two Araucanas, peeking out from behind its feather tufts. Recently, though, it was staying alone in the house much of the time, like the other hens were harassing it. Birchie was a joy to raise for the nine months we had it. I think I’d rather have enjoyed it and then lost it, than never have raised it at all.

Fireworks Card

Artists' Gallery

Flower Card

Did you recognize this as another painting from that same photograph? This is actually a greeting card I did about a year before the large painting. As the instructor at my art class pointed out, it’s quite a bit darker than the photo. The background, especially, is too dark, but I like the depth it creates. I kept putting on more and more of the pure paint color to try to lighten it up; I later realized you add white to the paint to get the lighter shades. And lighter shades make all the difference in a painting!

Fireworks Photograph

Artist's Gallery

Reference Photograph

And now, here is the photograph that I used for the “Fireworks” painting (view it here). You can see how the painting followed the basic structure of the photo, and the front flowers have the same tilt and overlap. The colors are a little different, since I did the painting to match our living room. The flowers are also arranged much more geometrically in the painting, which has some good effects but does look a bit unnatural. Are there any other differences you see?

Frying Eggs

Backyard Poultry

Sunny-Side Up

Yum!! Nothing is better than a free-range, rich yellow egg sunny-side-up! The fresher the egg, the more the white stands up, and these are no exception. We had always got our eggs from a local farmer who has natural feed and large barns for his hens, and we thought those were much better than grocery store eggs. We didn’t know they could get better—these eggs are truly liquid gold! Here is a riddle I read once about an egg.

In marble halls as white as milk,

Lined with a skin as soft as silk,

Within a fountain crystal-clear,

A golden apple doth appear;

No doors there are to this stronghold,

Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.

Gift of Eggs

Backyard Poultry

Egg Carton

Although we could eat all the eggs we got, we also gave them away as gifts. The ones above were for our landlord, who operated this farm for many years. The livestock has been long gone except for a few barn cats—until our chickens arrived. In the old barn you can still see the milking stalls, the cattle walk for loading cows on the truck, the musty hay loft, and some old machinery. The family who milked the cows always lived in the house here. So I think our landlord is happy to see farm animals on the place once again!

Nestbox

Backyard Poultry

Hen in Lower Nest Box

Here’s one of the young hens trying out the nest box. At first they’d lay their eggs almost anywhere, but soon they became very particular about laying, preferring nests that already had eggs in them. You could tell which hens were lower on the pecking order, since they’d have to leave the more-desirable nests if higher-up hens wanted to lay! We had this double-decker nest box to use when the chickens were out in the runs, and two boxes in the henhouse. The ones in the house were opened from the outside—but, for the hen’s sake, no spying when occupied!!

Basketful of Eggs

Backyard Poultry

Eight-Egg Day

Aren’t these eggs a beauty? There’s nothing better than going out and collecting freshly-laid eggs from your own nest boxes. It took my eight hens about six weeks to get up to seven and eight eggs a day. I even took pictures of every single egg I brought in for a while, I enjoyed them so much! Our next discovery was that Acorn, our “Easter egg” Araucana, did not lay blue eggs! (You can see the eight eggs here, and none is blue!) Later, I found out some Araucanas lay “pink” instead of blue eggs. I guess Acorn cheated on us—have to try again next year!

First Egg

Backyard Poultry

An Egg in the Grass

It was early August and the chickens were out in their runs on the grass as usual. I was just out checking their water and food, and suddenly—surprise!—I saw a little brown egg lying in the grass! What an exciting moment!! Since it was a week and a half early, and no nest boxes yet existed, we quickly constructed a makeshift box and put it in the run. The chickens all took great interest in it and took turns climbing in and out (even the rooster!). I’m not sure if they understood the nestbox’s real purpose or not!

Wildflowers

Artist's Gallery

Wildflowers on Roberts Pass

This painting is very similar to “Fireworks,” only it’s a watercolor that I painted two years earlier. I combined several photographs we took on a biking trail called Roberts Pass near our house. The greenery was next to impossible, and the goldenrod and honeysuckle proved very hard in watercolor! I donated the painting to a fundraising auction for our local Madison County Parks and Trails, who maintain the bike path.

Glass Frame

Here is a little poem I wrote about the painting a while later:

To make a painting of the trail,

I chose a subject—flowers.

I carefully drew each one to scale,

And painted them in layers.

Soon purple, lavender, and white

Stood out against the green.

I’d caught a sparkling memory of

A radiant summer scene.

Fireworks 6

Artist's Gallery

Framed Painting

And now . . . my finished painting in its hand-made wooden frame. Final touches included fluorescent highlights on the petals and a few more details for the bachelor’s buttons and flower centers. I was pretty pleased with it, and entered it in our local Madison County Fair with several of my other paintings. They all won First Place! (To be entirely truthful, each one was the only entry in its category—but the judges still seemed to like them a lot.) “Fireworks” now hangs proudly in our living room over our newly-covered sofa.

New! You can now purchase this painting as a greeting card here at my Countrygirl Art shop on Etsy.com!

Fireworks 5

Artist's Gallery

Filling out Foliage

Can you spot the difference? It’s the leaves this time. I already had a good dark background in there, so all I had to do was add a lot of thick, light paint to bring the leaves out to meet the flowers. Besides each leaf having a light and dark side, the foliage gets light towards the background. It was quite a job! I also realized (toward the end) that I needed to create an overall pattern in the tangle of green to lead the eye around the picture. How do you think I did with the paths in the foliage?

Fireworks 4

Artist's Gallery

Flowers

Those highlights really pop now! I used lemon yellow on the black-eyed Susans, dusty rose and gold on the coneflower, and light red for the zinnias, blending it into the darker shades on the petal edges. The background flowers, though not as sharp, are also taking shape. Those blue blobs will hopefully turn into bachelor’s buttons. I’ve also worked a lot on the flower centers. The next step will be giving the foliage more depth to match the flowers.

Fireworks 3

Artist's Gallery

Priming for Highlights

Are you wondering what all this white paint is doing here? If I were to just paint the highlights over the petals, the dark colors would show through and tint the paint. So artists often do an undercoat of white to make sure their light colors are bright enough (lighter paints, especially yellow, tend to be more transparent than darks). It can take two or even three coats of white paint to really cover up the dark paint. This painting is still in the “mess stage” (professional art term thereJ…), before all the elements have quite come together.

Fireworks 2

Artists' Gallery

Background Darks

Here is the beginning of the shaded areas of the picture. Dark colors are vital to all paintings. They give depth, create feeling, and punctuate the future highlights. I have had paintings that just didn’t “pop,” and that’s usually what the problem was. You should also use the darks to create general patterns and paths through the painting, especially in foliage like this, which I haven’t done very well so far. Remember, this is only my second large canvas to paint!

Fireworks 1

Artist's Gallery

Undershading

Here is one of my more recent paintings, from last July (Fourth of July, that is—hence the name). If it looks washed out, that is correct, since this is only the underpainting. I’m trying to establish where the shapes, lights, and darks are, while keeping the colors close to what I want them. This painting is a collage of wildflowers from our flower beds, and I’m trying to match the colors to our new sofa cover fabric. It’s going to be interesting!

Jelly Souffle

Gluten-Free Gourmet

Beating Egg Whites

Is your mouth watering yet? I'll tempt you with one more dessert recipe. This is a very simple souffle which has almost a cake texture when finished. Better yet, it uses no flour, only eggs, and so it can be enjoyed as often as you like. We'll start by beating 3 eggs whites til they form stiff peaks.Next, beat well in a large bowl:

3 egg yolks                         1 T. water                  1 T. honey

Pour in the egg whites and fold together til just mixed. Bake in a shallow, well-greased small pan at 400° for 8-10 minutes, til brown on top. Remove from the oven.

Sliced Soufflé

After the pastry cools (and sinks considerably), gently flip it out of the pan, upside down onto a plate. Spread the bottom generously with real, fruit-sweetened jelly—my favorite is strawberry. Fold the soufflé in half lengthwise and cut in quarters. This recipe makes four small servings, but could be easily doubled if you'd like more.