Catholic Mothers On-line

Yup, that's what I am! I've just joined this blogroll, and if you check out my sidebars over on the right you'll find some of my favorite catholic mothers on their blogs - including KC at The Cabbage Patch!

I haven't visited all the blogs on the blogroll yet but I'm looking forward to doing so. Maybe I'll see you there as I'm out and about on my cybertravels!

Welcome Back!

My all-time favorite magazine, Victoria, is back! I was introduced to this wonderful publication when my 12 year-old son was in kindergarten. I was visiting with my mother-in-law and saw it on her coffee table.I immediately fell in love with it, so much so that she sent the issue home with me. The next thing I knew, I had a subscription!

I still have that issue (August 2000!), and all the other ones that came so faithfully each month in the mail. I loved reading them, poring over the pictures and articles, learning how to make our home gracious and lovely. I often found myself turning to them whenever I set out to decorate rooms in our house or beautiful tables for parties. Just this winter, I sought their help a when my older daughter and I held a mother-daughter Valentine tea for her fifth grade class. I never threw one away, because they were so gorgeous, informative and inspiring.

Turns out, that was a smart decision too, because eventually, Heast Communications stopped publishing Victoria. We faithful readers have been Victoria-less for many many months (years!), but the light is shining at the end of the tunnel! According to one of my favorite bloggers, Dawn at "By Sun and Candlelight", subscriptions are already available! The premiere issue will be a November-December one. I just reserved mine!

Bread Baking Bliss

About a year ago, we renovated our home pretty much from top to bottom. I'm now the happy owner of a beautiful, big, sunny, eat-in kitchen, complete with my dream stove , a La Canche with a 5 burner cooking top and 2 side-by-side dual fuel ovens. As a mother with 4 children, this is the room where I live most of my life. As a woman who loves to cook, it is also the room where I can get messy and create my art.

Now, anyone who is here on fish stick night might quibble with that description of my cooking, but bear with me. For the most part, I try to cook the meals I serve from scratch. I love shopping for ingredients, planning menus, and then getting to work. When I'm, chopping, dicing, sauteing, braising, simmering, baking, seasoning, and stirring, I'm creating. I'm creating something delicious for my family's table, and a happy atmosphere in our kitchen.

I'm trying to teach my children that food is not just something you grab on the run. It is a good gift from God, and we can take that good food and work with it to turn it into meals that nourish us body and soul. Even really little children love the magic of turning ingredients like flour and sugar and butter into cookies we can serve for an afternoon treat. It is a wonderful hands-on lesson that teaches the rewards of labor can be sweet.

We are losing something as people when we fill our grocery carts and pantry shelves with factory produced foodstuffs. We're losing the knowledge of how to make our foods ourselves, we're losing the chance to connect with our kids in the kitchen and pass those skills onto them, and we're losing the satisfaction and joy that come from sitting down to a table to eat a meal we've made with our own hands. More and more, I want to forestall those losses. So, to that end, I've set about learning how to make the bread and pasta that my family eats. I don't mean the occasional loaf of specialty bread, although I think that's delicious and fine. I mean I am trying to figure out how much bread my family eats each week (toast, sandwiches, bagels, English muffins, hamburger or hot dog buns) and how I can set up a baking schedule that will produce it right here in our very own ovens. I'm going to try and rotate my way through a variety of recipes to come up with our "house" varieties, and then work to estabish when I need to get baking. I'm planning on turning to my kitchen mentors Mark Bittman, Gerard Auzet, and Julia Child for their recipes.

And I'll turn here to share the progress I make as we go along.

Say Cheese!

Saturday night we hosted our first ever cheese-tasting, and here are the 5 beuaties we sampled. We tried 2 soft cow's milk cheeses from France; a Brie de Lyon and a Livarot from Normandy. Also from cow's milk were 2 Italian cheeses; a Piave Vecchio from Veneto and a Blue del Moncenisio from Piedmont. Finally, we sampled a goat's milk cheese (chevre) from Burgandy, France, a Charolais. We served them at room temperature with the 2 baguettes and some red wine. The ground rules for picking these 5 were that we try enough cheeses to get some good contrasts, not so many that we'd get fatigued palates, and that we experiment with cheeses we'd never tried before.

How were they? Well, they were all DELICIOUS. Starting with the French cheeses, though, I'll give you a bit more of a description than just that.

The Charolais (the rough cylindrical one) was smooth,creamy,and delightfully bitter. The taste is also a little sour, and not salty. This cheese is pale yellow inside, with a creamy texture more like a brie, almost melting onto the bread rather than crumbling when spread. It was very different from other chevres that I've tried, which tend to be white, thick and somewhat like a crumbly cream cheese.

The Livarot , as you can see, has an orange rind and is a soft, creamy yellow cheese. It has a sharp tang, is VERY bitter, and somewhat of a "stinky cheese", if you know what I mean. Very full flavored and strong. It was cut somewhat by the bread and a big hit with our guests.

I, however, preferred the Brie de Lyon. This is a cheese you could eat all day (or all evening, like us!). With it's white soft rind and butter color it looked like Bries I've sampled before. But it really surprised me. The cheese was not at all bitter or sour. It was mild, creamy, thick, smooth, slightly salty, and buttery. In fact, it tasted somewhat like butter, only better.


Now onto our Italians. The Piave Vecchio is a hard cheese. It looks like a Romano cheese, pale golden color with some white flecking. It is dry and a flakes easily. It is a much gentler sweeter cheese than Romano, perfect for a cheese tasting after dinner party because it is salty but also has a very fruity flavor that Iwasn't expecting. I loved this cheese and wil definitley buy more of it. I think it would taste wonderful with pears.

The Blue del Moncenisio was a knockout. I've only just grown up enough to start liking blue cheese in the past year (and I'm a lot closer to 40 than I am to 30...). but still, this is the best Blue I've ever tried./ The cheese is, like all the others on our plate, a golden yellow. The blue veins, however, are more of a soft, sagey green than a blue. The veins are large too, giving the mold the appearance of folded fresh chopped sage. Creamy, a little sour, tangy, a bit pastier than the Brie. This cheese aslo has a very floral bouquet that contrasts deliciously with its own saltiness.


If you're looking for a great way to serve cheeses and don't want to sample 5 at once, try serving a cheese course. At our house, we've been happily working our way through the recipes in this book since Christmas. So far, every one has been a hit.

Bon Appetit!

How I Feel In Spring

Just like my tree.

In For A Penny, In For A Pound

I am so happy to be here! I've been dreaming of starting a blog for more than a year now but have wondered how on earth to do it. I've decided that the best way to learn is just to jump in and begin. Since that's the way I've learned pretty much everything in my adult life, I decided to name this little blog in honor of that give-it-your-all hopeful spirit. Jump on in and join me as I figure out how to combine blogging and life here at home as the mother to 4 happy energetic kids who are sure their mother will never master the speakerphone, let alone the blogosphere.