7 Quick Takes

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The Garden of Holiness will be changing soon. It will have an updated look and I'll be better able to organize the different features: recipes, homesteading posts, marriage and parenting topics, podcasts, and fashion tips so they are more searchable. Stay tuned!

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In Texas the old timers’ names for meals can be confusing to outsiders. The midday meal is called lunch if it is light and it is called dinner if it is cooked. If lunch is called dinner then dinner is supper. Supper is lighter and often leftovers from the day’s dinner. We use lunch and dinner both to name the midday meal depending on the fanciness of the feast. If it's just sandwiches, it's lunch. If there was an oven involved, it's dinner. We often have loud conversations across various rooms of the house that sound like this.

Mom: "Come and eat!"
Kid 1: "What are we having? Is it lunch or dinner?"
Mom: "It's soup. It's lunch."
Kid 2: "I wanted dinner!"
Husband: "Oh, aren't we having lunch? This is cooked."
Kid 3: "I didn't want it cooked!"
Mom: "Would you people just eat!"

You just have to be born here for it to make sense. My parents were born here so I have the habit of it, but I'm not sure I'm fluent as a native speaker of Texan.

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No matter what we wind up calling it we almost always eat breakfast, our main meal at midday, and a lighter meal at night. My husband’s work schedule means he leaves in the late morning, so I cook breakfast everyday, get the day rolling, and then cook our dinner to serve before his workday starts. That second meal together is invariably rushed, so the meal we get to relax together as a family and enjoy each other’s company is breakfast, so it is a big deal at our house. I have tons of good breakfast recipes that I thought I’d share.

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Pumpkin Rolls

This was a new one we made up on the spot using pizza dough and pumpkin. It was inspired. I’ll have to cook it again in order to get the measurements more exact because like all good creations, I added this and that and wasn’t too specific about amounts.

You can use any pizza dough recipe or a ready made dough from a can. I'd give you my recipe but when I make pizza dough I make it with 12 cups of flour, so I didn't include it here.

Take enough pizza dough for one pizza and roll it out thinly into a rectangle. Take a cup of pumpkin and 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar and mix. Spread over your rectangle of dough. Roll up the dough into a tube. Cut the tube into 1 to 2 inch rolls and set them onto a prepared baking pan (either greased or parchment papered). Bake rolls at 350 for about 15 to 20 minutes.

Glaze with 1/2 cup powdered sugar and about 1 TBS pumpkin mixed. The glaze should drizzle with the consistency of cinnamon roll glazing and then dry solid.

You can play with this recipe, adding or taking away sugar. Next time I’m using cinnamon in it.

--5--

Pumpkin Bread

This recipe is adapted from taste of home

3 3/4 cup flour
3 cups sugar
1/4 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
4 eggs
2 cups pumpkin
1/2 cup olive oil
handful of dried cranberries
handful of dried cherries
1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. In another bowl whisk together the eggs, pumpkin, and oil, Stir mixture into the dry ingredients until moistened. Fold in the dried fruits.

Spoon into two greased loaf pans. Bake at 350 for 70 to 80 minutes until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes before removing the pan to wire racks to finish cooling. Makes 2 loaves.

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There will be no Podcast this Wednesday as we enter into Lent. As a matter of fact, this month I have been Podcasting for one full year. Whoot!

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In two weeks, my dear friend Rozanne Ohmes will be back on the Podcast. We're starting a new series of talks. We are talking Contraception and NFP. Our first show on February 20, 2013, will cover intimacy in a surprising new way, then in the next show on February 27 the ladies will tackle the problems of modern marriage in light of a contraceptive mentality. The following week of March 6 our husbands will tackle the same topic from the men's perspective. Don't miss it!