Easy German Brown Bread

I just mentioned in a post about eating German Brown Bread today -- good thing we'd made a batch yesterday (for cooking math!). This is a fabulous recipe that makes three good-sized loaves and is wonderful with cream cheese ....

Ingredients:

• 1 cup raisins (be generous)
• 3 cups boiling water
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup white sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup chopped nuts (be generous)
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 tsp baking soda
• 3 cups rye flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 2 cups all-purpose flour

Preparation:

• Stir raisins into boiling water. Let cool.
• Mix the sugars, eggs, vanilla and nuts. Blend well. Add to raisins/water (DON'T drain the raisins, you want that good brown water too!)
• Measure dry ingredients into bowl. Stir in raisin batter.
• Fill 2 or 3 well-greased loaf pans a bit more than half full.
• Bake at 315 for 45-60 minutes.

Hard to believe it's almost April ....

... when you wake up on March 29th to this --->

especially when you've been wearing shorts, sandals and short-sleeves for the past few weeks. I do think the snow on this tree is beautiful and I can get a good idea of exactly how much snow we've gotten by the way it falls on the topside of the branches.

Another great indicator is the kids' plastic picnic table which always seems to be in a spot to make the best snow-gauge. And since it's open underneath, the snow stays cold enough to give us a chance to measure it! Pretty cool, eh?

The silver lining in this snow-filled cloud today is that it means we get to snuggle on the couch and read, read, read (with breaks for hot chocolate and German Brown bread!)

Brothers, caught in the act ...

So, what do you think: did they just do something naughty or are they getting ready to?

Today, the Church celebrates ...

... the Feast of the Annunciation, when Mary gave her YES to God and the World was changed forever.

I love this image of the Annunciation that I found on the Internet -- but I don't know who did it. Any guesses from my readers? It's absolutely lovely with the blues and reds. It is also one of the few Annunciation pictures where Mary's head is slightly above Gabriel's head -- showing that she truly is Queen of the Angels.

For a field trip we went to one of the older parishes here in Denver -- Annunciation Catholic Church -- was established in 1883 and the current church dates to 1891 or so. The stain glass windows are amazing! We came home and did a stain glass craft -- a couple of those suncatcher kits where the plastic melts within the metal frame and looks like stain glass! These are much harder to do than they look but the kids are pleased with the results so that's ALL that matters. They also understand a bit about how careful glassworkers had to be to get the real stain glass windows to look so good so many years later.

[NOTE: the Feast of the Annunciation is March 25th; when it falls on a Sunday (as it did this year) the feast is moved to Monday. It's also dh and my anniversary, so we have double to celebrate!]

Yesterday, my kids got the best present ...

... they received their First Sacrament of Reconciliation! Yep, on March 21, 2007 at 4:00 p.m. my LegoManiac and his sister, String Bean, were given the great honor of having their souls cleanses of any actual (vs. original) sins that were on their consciences.

We are so blessed to have as administrator of our parish a wonderfully loving priest who walked the kids through the process and taught them that Reconciliation is a fantastic gift from God that only helps out. It's not something to be feared or ignored, but rather encouraged and looked forward to.

This was a point that my dh and I constantly reinforced with the kids as we prepared them for this Sacrament. For too long, many people have thought that Confession, Penance or Reconciliation (all names for the same thing) was something to be feared. Protestants don't understand why we would want to go to a priest to tell our sins.

As Fr. Leo Trese explained in his The Faith Explained

the peace of mind and soul which the sacrament of Penance imparts to us is
one for which there is no substitute. It is a peace that flows from a
certainty, rather than from an unsure hope, that our sins have been forgiven and
that we are right with God. (pg 433)

So the break that we've made in our relationship with God, by using our free will and going against God's will, is remedied through this Sacrament. Who wouldn't WANT to go to Confession?

Saints and Cooking

I love my mother -- not only does she live with us (which is a blessing in itself) but every so often she buys me little treats that just make my day. WELL, for Easter this year in lieu of chocolate, she did one better (and even gave it to me early). She got me a copy of the book I've been drooling over since I first saw it a couple of years back: Cooking with the Saints by Ernst Schuegraf.

This is an absolutely perfect gift for me! Schuegraf includes write-ups of saints that have fascinating facts (some "cocktail tidbits" that you can throw out at your next Catholic dinner club meeting) about each of the saints -- some 73 in number! A gorgeous picture accompanies each of these saints. But the really great thing (after all, we do have lots of Saint biographies around this house) is that there are authentic recipes for each of these saints -- ethnic specialties for the feast days as well as classic dishes that have been linked to the saint for some reason. There are main dishes, desserts, breads and other goodies scattered throughout the hard-cover volume.

Last night, for St. Joseph's Day, we made two of the dishes -- Pasta di San Guiseppe (pasta with sugared nuts and olive oil) and Pane di San Guiseppe which made the best bread (and tons of it!) based on a recipe from Sicily. What a feast!

This book is THE book for living the liturgical year! I'm so thankful that mom got it for me. A Continual Feast by Evelyn Vitz is a close second (but I already own that one!) for living the liturgical year ...

Ain't it great to be Catholic?

Living the Liturgical Year -- the month of March

March is a fabulous month for celebrating our Catholic faith. Not only does the month surround our Lenten journey, but we've also have wonderful saints to help on celebrate the joy and gratitude from God's many gifts to his pilgrim people.


From Catholic Culture, we find the following list of celebrations:

3. Katharine Drexel (USA),

7. Perpetua and Felicity

8. John of God,

9. Frances of Rome; Bl. John Ogilvie (Scotland)

17. Patrick

19. Joseph, husband of Mary

23. Turibius de Mogrovejo

26. Annunciation of the Lord (normally on the 25th but moved as the 25th this year is a Sunday)


Now these saints are all really cool -- all had different "jobs" from God; all fulfilled their missions as God wanted; all (we Catholics believe) are now in their Glorified Bodies and hanging out with God. How cool is that? Praying to these guys is like asking your mom to get permission or help from your dad -- they're right there with the big guy!


And my family is fortunate because a few of these March saints are family patrons -- St. Joseph for my son, St. John for another son, St. Katherine Drexel for a daughter and the Annuciation (which is not only a Marian feast -- so I claim all those -- but also dh and my anniversary).


And of course there is the ubiquitous St. Patrick, Patron of Ireland and all folks Irish -- and every year there seem to be more who claim the heritage in order to run around in green losing sight of why this Saint is so revered and honored.

So we will find out about these Saints of March and live the liturgical year through celebrating their lives and faith in God and His Word. We will pray to them, honor them and ask for their intercessory powers with the Lord. We will try to emulate their faith and belief in God's many wonders, trying to incorporate their good works into our own. And maybe, just maybe, we'll all be able to live with them in Heaven through Eternity.

Important Men of the World

I was at two different conferences this weekend. On Friday, I spent the day down at the Wells Fargo Theater in the first of a two-day conference, Living the Catholic Faith, sponsored by the Archdiocese of Denver. On Saturday, I attended an all-day class on the new Benjamin Franklin exhibit that the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is sponsoring until May 20th. Both of these all-day events were geared to educators -- those who work in front of people, evangelizing through their teaching and actions, teaching the truth to those who may not have heard the truth before.

The interesting thing about these conferences, and why I'm posting about them, is that I realized the great schism between what I heard on Friday and what I heard on Saturday. On Friday, I attended a lecture by noted Chestertonian scholar and president of the Chesterton Society, Dale Ahlquist on the Christian threads woven throughout GK Chesterton's writings. On Saturday, I heard about all the various facets of Benjamin Franklin.

How do these two men -- G.K. Chesterton and Benjamin Franklin -- complement or contrast the other?

Chesterton was obviously an Englishman of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A product of a middle class home, GK didn't go to University, opting instead for an art education. So, he wasn't "educated" in the classic sense of that British term -- he didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, didn't go to the proper prep schools and was not a member of the Anglican Church. He was an outsider and yet his writings were taught in schools for years as being spot-on and philosophically intellectual. Chesterton, although proud of his writings, felt that he was just a word-smith and down-played his innate intelligence.

Franklin was a product of a middle class tradesman's family -- the 10th boy in a family of printers, chandlers and tradesmen in the 1700s. Franklin had only two years of formal schooling before he was taken out of the school-room and placed in various apprenticeships until he wound up at 14 with his (abusive) older half-brother to learn the printing trade. At 16, Franklin ran away from Boston to Philadelphia and the rest, as they say, is history. Franklin became known as a philosopher, inventor, statesman, economist, and bon vivant -- but he continued to call himself a printer. He was proud of his accomplishments (and was an amazing, if not narcissistic, self-promoter) but always clung to his "leather apron" background.

So, these two great men were pulled themselves up "by their bootstraps" and really made a name for themselves. But Chesterton, whose philosophical thoughts are well-worth investigating, came to the Catholic church through rational thought processes while Franklin despaired of organized religion, was a deist (didn't believe in Christ's divinity) and Free Mason, and thought of himself as a progressive.

15 years (!) before Chesterton came into the Church of Rome, he wrote a book called Orthodoxy. This book is a defense of the Catholic faith -- and no better has been written since. Reading Orthodoxy will convert even a Ben Franklin because of it's tight, logical, conclusions which prove that Christianity -- as practiced by the Roman Catholic Church -- is the ONLY answer for humanity and rationality. Within the pages of Orthodoxy you'll find a essay that decimates the "progressives" and asks instead to look at tradition, to look back and see what worked and what didn't and to move ahead accordingly. And as you read other books by GK, you'll find yourself inextricably in agreement with this Renaissance man!

But, Franklin is studied in our schools and Chesterton is basically ignored. Franklin is considered a forward-thinker and Chesterton an old fuddy-duddy, English writer of a past era. Since both died a long time ago -- I wonder which one was right? I'm banking that Chesterton's rational embracing of Catholicism is the right choice while Franklin's progressive dismissal of organized religion is the wrong choice. But both men deserve to be studied by students and adults -- both have much to share with our current age!

What do you think?

Sundays during Lent ...

... are not considered part of Lent, around here anyway. Whatever we've sacrificed during the week, we can have a bit of on Sundays. For instance, our family gave up sweets and desserts, so here are the littles on Sunday evening (craning to see the TV from the dining room -- we gave up TV too!)

Second Sunday of Lent: The Transfiguration

This week the Gospel is taken from that of St. Luke (Chap9:28-36) which is known as the Transfiguration. Jesus takes Peter, John and James to pray on the mountain. Suddenly, Moses and Elijah appear and Jesus is changed into "dazzling white" garments. The apostles are shaken, but Peter, coming out of his stupor is ready with a plan. Peter always has a plan. His plan, not always God's plan. So God interrupts Peter and says "LISTEN -- Listen to my son".

This is what I need to do more of -- listening! Being quiet (this is the hard part) and letting God tell me what he wants of me....being quiet and "hearing" God's plan ... this is hard, but I'm really trying this Lent to shut up and listen more.....

We got the nicest gift yesterday ....

... in the mail. The envelope was pretty inocuous -- just a 4"x5" envelope with the family name and address across the front. But inside ....

It seems that some dear friends of ours in Raleigh, NC are reading Pope John Paul 2's letter on families for Lent. The mom writes that:

when we read, "...families that trust in God and have opened themselves to the
gift of life in their children; homes where you sense an atmosphere of joy,
enthusiasm, initiatives, simple faith and intense unity" we thought of your
family as an example.

WOW! What a gift to know that we are such a light to these dear friends.

BUT, on top of that gift of compliment, she writes further:

Our family will prays 200 rosaries for your family and intentions this
Lent.

Double WOW! What a gift these folks are to us -- and we hope they never forget just how much we love and miss them, too!

Stations of the Cross

An ancient tradition in the Catholic Church is for the faithful to "pray" the Stations of the Cross on Fridays during Lent. This is to remind us of Jesus' sacrifice: we walk in his footsteps to Golgotha, we feel Mary's sorrow when she meets her beloved son, we weep with the women of Jerusalem, we help put Jesus in the tomb and roll the stone not knowing if we will ever see our cherished Brother again ...

For children (and adults), it can be very hard to remember the 14 different stations. A few years ago, I saw this suggestion for symbols of the various stations, and have since incorporated the practice of using these symbols to help my children "pray" the Stations of the Cross.

Station 1 -- Jesus is condemned to die -- string to bind his hands

Station 2 -- Jesus takes up his Cross -- a small wooden cross

Station 3 -- Jesus falls the first time -- a band-aid

Station 4 -- Jesus meets his Mother -- a rosary

Station 5 -- Simon helps Jesus carry the cross -- a heart for charity

Station 6 -- Veronica wipes the face of Jesus -- cloth with Holy Face on it

Station 7 -- Jesus falls a second time -- a band-aid

Station 8 -- Jesus comforts the weeping women of Jerusalem -- tissues

Station 9 -- Jesus falls a third time -- a band-aid

Station 10 -- Jesus is stripped of his garments -- a piece of purple cloak

Station 11 -- Jesus is nailed to the Cross -- a large nail

Station 12 -- Jesus dies on the Cross -- a crucifix

Station 13 -- Jesus is taken down from the Cross -- a picture of the Pieta

Station 14 -- Jesus is laid in the tomb -- a rock or stone

This is what happens ....

... when a home taught child watches the classic TV comedy about life in a German prisoner camp, "Hogan's Heroes" show (courtesy of DVDs from the library):

He builds his own tank, of course!

There are few things nicer ...

... than having a candle-lit (yes, the candle is lit, you just can't tell) breakfast with a brand-new 7 year old!

And, my how she has grown:

Happy, happy 7th birthday to our dear little one!

You bring joy to our hearts everyday!