The Bed & Breakfast served a rather interesting breakfast of things like lutefisk and hard-boiled eggs, Swedish meatballs, and yes, Swedish Tea Ring.

This past Resurrection Sunday, I decided to revisit this wonderful treat and make a couple of Tea Rings for my family.  The consensus was a hearty, “YUM!”

Swedish Tea Ring

1 pkg active dry yeast
1/4 c. warm water
1 c. milk, scalded
1/3 c. sugar
1 tsp salt
1/3 c. shortening (I used butter instead)
2 eggs, beaten
4 1/2 c. flour

Raisin Filling
½ c. sugar
2 Tbsp cinnamon
½ c. raisins

Almond Glaze
1/3 c. butter
2 c. powdered sugar
1½ tsp. almond extract
2-4 Tbsp hot water

Chopped walnuts & Maraschino cherries, optional

Soften yeast in warm water.  Scald milk and add sugar, salt, and shortening.  Cool to 100° (lukewarm).  Stir in 1½ cups flour, dissolved yeast and beat well.  Add eggs.  Add enough remaining flour to make a soft dough.

Turn out onto lightly floured surface.  Knead until smooth and elastic.  Place in lightly greased bowl turning dough to grease entire surface.  Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled (about 1 hour).  Punch down.  Let rise again until doubled.

Divide dough in half and round up each half.  Roll each half into a 9″x13″ rectangle about ¼” thick.  Spread each half with 1 Tbsp softened butter and half of Raisin Filling.  Roll as for a jelly roll.  Seal edge.  Shape each into a ring with the seam side down.  Place on greased cookie sheet.  With scissors, snip 2/3 of the way to the center at 1½” intervals.

Let rings rise until doubled.  Bake in preheated 375° oven for 20-25 minutes.  Drizzle with Almond Glaze and decorate with nuts and cherries, if desired.

dala horse photo credit

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One thing I have found to be challenging as a large family homeschool mom is feeding 3 meals a day plus snacks day in and day out to a rather large and diverse group of people.  At any given time, I have teenagers, toddlers, and babies – all with different palates and needs.

Many of you already know breakfast is not my forte.  I like to eat it, I hate to cook it.  I’ve never been real awake in the mornings.  I can remember as a youngster never feeling as if I had fully awakened until about 10:30 am.  I always wondered why teachers thought math needed to be taught first thing in the morning when I was so very tired.  I am most on top of my game starting late morning and again at about 4:00 pm.  I try to have things on hand that can easily become breakfast, but rare is the occasion that I actually cook a hot breakfast.

*GASP*  Now, you know my secret!

So, now that you know, here’s a list of breakfast ideas – Roberts family style!

• cereal
• fruit
• toast with peanut butter
• hard boiled eggs
• muffins
• breakfast cookies
• yogurt
• baked oatmeal
• pancakes with real maple syrup
• fried eggs

Next is lunch.  By this point, we have been going strong with school and I almost hate to stop for nourishment!  Lunch happens here between 12 and 1 pm – or whenever there is a natural lull in our school day.  Occasionally, Daddy joins us, but most often, it is me and the 6 children.  We typically have a light lunch rather than something heavy for two reasons:

1. Our big meal is at night.
2. It is better and simpler to make something that takes less preparation when in the middle of a school day.

Here are some of our favorite lunch ideas:

• pizza or lunch loaf using homemade quick and easy pizza dough
• bagel sandwiches
• quesadillas
• taco salad
• cheese slices, crackers, & fruit
• sandwiches
• nachos
• egg salad

After we’ve cleaned up from lunch, we head back into our school day.  If I were pregnant, this would be Rest Time, but as it stands right now, only the 18 month old is taking a nap right after lunch.

Our school day is usually finished around 2:30, but this is not a good time to go outside since our road becomes quite busy at that time of day due to the high school down the road.  So, at about 3:00 pm we have a snack and then head outside.

Snack ideas:

• cheese & crackers
• fruit
• foldover peanut butter sandwich
• veggie sticks
• smoothies
• cookies – yes, cookies

After we have played outside for a while, I head inside (usually with a helper) to prepare for supper/dinner.

We eat supper between 6 and 7 pm due to Daddy’s schedule.  This is typically our biggest meal of the day since Daddy is home.  This is also the meal I am most creative with.  I like to go through cookbooks and my index box full of recipes I’ve been collecting for over half my life and pull interesting recipes I would like to try or family favorites.

Some recent meals have been:

• Italian Pot Pie
• Winter Soup
• Large Family Style Pot Pie
• Bierocks
• Egg Rolls & Rice

Now, we all know you can’t feed your crew without either buying or growing your own food (or a mix of both), so here are a few of my favorite shopping posts:

Once a Month Shopping Series (how we shop once a month and save!)

One Store Shopping Method

The Subscriber Pack contains a One Store Shopping Planner and the Bulk Grocery List from our OAMS trips!  To get yours, subscribe to Raising Arrows here:

Other Resources:

• Affording Kids Series
• Mega-size family recipes from A Baker’s Dozen
• Large Family Cooking blog
• MOMYS cookbook – My favorite large family cookbook – only 2 in stock at the time of this writing!

Don’t miss the other blogs participating in the 10 Days Series! Click the button below to find a listing of all the blogs and topics!

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This was supper last Thursday night.  It was a hit so I thought I would share!

Italian Pot Pie

1 lb ground beef (or buffalo)
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
1 medium green pepper, coarsely chopped
8 oz mushrooms, coarsely chopped
1 Tbsp minced garlic
2 – 8oz cans of tomato sauce
1 can (14.5oz) fire-roasted tomatoes, undrained
basil and oregano (get them fresh if you have a kitchen garden!)
Quick & Easy Pizza Dough
grated Parmesan
Mozzarella cheese

Brown meat in a large oven-safe skillet with onion, green pepper, mushrooms, and garlic.  Stir in tomato sauce, tomatoes and seasoning and set aside.

Preheat oven to 375°.

Meanwhile, make the Quick and Easy Pizza Dough.  Roll pizza dough into a circle that fits over the top of the meat mixture. (if your skillet is small, this pizza dough may need to be halved.)  Lay pizza dough over the top of the meat mixture and bake for 12-15 minutes.

Sprinkle crust with Parmesan and mozzarella and serve!

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This weekend is full of celebrations for many families.  Our family is doing some extra celebrating as well and I wanted to share that with all of you!

As with most celebrations, food is major part of the festivities.  Here is the majority of the groceries I purchased for the weekend’s events:

Passover

This year, we will be celebrating a Passover meal at home as a family on Friday night.  Last year, we received the Hand-crafted Seder Plate Set (shown above) from The Jerusalem Gift Shop.  I’m looking forward to using it!

Here’s the menu for our Passover:

Buffalo Roast (because I couldn’t find any lamb and decided we’d follow the tradition of not having lamb since Christ was the Passover lamb and there is no need to provide a lamb anymore)

Unleavened bread (rather than traditional Jewish matzah, we’ll be using our Lord’s Supper Bread)

Horseradish

Parsley & Salt Water

Charoset – I am making this myself and it will be non-alcoholic.  Here’s my recipe:
2 lbs of apples
1/2 lb of walnuts
1/4 cup cinnamon
enough grape juice to form a paste (consistency of mortar)
Blend apples, walnuts, and cinnamon in a heavy-duty blender (I’ll be using my Vita-Mix).  Add just enough grape juice and blend until it reaches desired consistency
note:  I’ve never made this – so this will be a big experiment!

And a fun little FYI – earlier this week during school, our family sat in on a live Seder meal at The Homeschool Channel.  You can watch the replay by clicking this link. (If that link doesn’t work, try this one and scroll down until you find it.)

Egyptian Celebration

It just happened that we finished our Ancient Egypt unit in time for a celebration supper while family would be here to celebrate Resurrection Sunday with us.  We are very excited about this since it has been a very long time since we have had family attend any of our celebrations and homeschool reviews!  This event will take place on Saturday afternoon.  The older children have put together games, presentations, and even a quiz for the others in attendance.  I’m so excited about how nicely this all flows with learning about Passover.  I think all of this will really drive home the importance and Biblical significance of Egypt and the events that took place there.

Here’s the menu for our Egyptian Celebration:

Buffalo Steak (not traditional at all, but it sounded really good!)

Cucumber Salad

Palace Bread

Grapes and Cantelope
Radishes
Pita Bread
Hummus

Resurrection Sunday

We attend church in the evening, so with Listening Pages in hand, we’ll be there!  However, prior to church, we’ll be fellowshipping with Ty’s mother and Granny over a traditional Resurrection Sunday feast!

Here is our Resurrection Sunday menu:

Relish tray
Ham
Cheesy Potatoes
7-layer Salad
Rolls
Fruit Pizza
Swedish Tea Ring (we used to be night managers at a Bed & Breakfast that served these…fell in love!)

So, that’s our weekend in a nutshell!  What will you be doing?  How will you be celebrating our being set free by Christ’s blood and conquering of death so that all who believe may live?!

Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow!

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Since then, it has plagued me as to how I could make that recipe work for regular soap, especially considering my husband goes on a lot of business trips and comes home with all these little bars of soap that never get used (mainly because I don’t like the mess bar soap creates on a counter).

Last week, necessity became the mother of invention.  We were out of soap refill, I was tired of paying for it (we go through a lot of soap!), and I had some extra time to figure out how to make the 4 bars of hotel soap I had on hand into liquid hand soap.

I started by grating all the soap.  They were all different kinds from different hotels.  The 4 bars together equaled 2 cups of soap shreds.

I put those shreds in a large pot on the stove and began adding water and more water and more water.  Several times I had to let the soap cool so I could test the consistency and then yes, add more water!  Finally, at 20 cups of water, I had a usable soap!

So, here’s the recipe at its lowest ratio:

Bar Soap to Liquid Hand Soap

1 cup of shredded bar soap (hotel or not)
10 cups water

Melt soap in water in a large pot on the stove.  Let cool slightly and poor into containers.  Soap will thicken as it cools.

I can’t wait to see what you’ve been up to this week!

I also want to take a moment to tell you that all this month on the Welcome Home Link Up I’ll be featuring my friend Renee’s Norwex business! That’s right! You told me about Norwex on my one-day cleaning post, Renee emailed without even knowing I had written that post, and I am now the proud owner of Norwex products! I’ll be telling you more about this adventure next week! But, in the meantime, look through her site, and if you would like to order anything, please contact her at DrPoschen at cox dot net so I get hostess credit (so I can get more of these great products!)

{and check out the Spring Sale from A Slob Comes Clean – coupon code: SPRING gets you her ebook on taking back your house for only $3!)

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I am half Irish, half German (yes, that explains a lot!).  Every year, our family celebrates the Irish tradition of St. Patrick’s Day.  This year, I’m offering subscribers our Irish Supper recipes in a handy ebooklet just in time for St. Patrick’s Day!

All you have to do to get this month’s subscriber freebie, is sign up below with your email address and verify your address when the Activate Your Subscription to Raising Arrows email comes to your inbox.  The very next email you get from me will have the link and password you need!  Enjoy!

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Recipe adapted from 100 Days of Real Food.  Lovingly nicknamed Birdseed Granola because of it’s tendency to cause your husband to exclaim, “Is this birdseed you’re feeding me?”

Birdseed Granola Bars

• 3 1/2 cups steel cut oats
• 1 cup raw cashew pieces (or other nut)
• 1/2 cup raw sunflower seeds
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon grated or ground nutmeg
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup honey
• 2 teaspoons vanilla (see my recipe for real vanilla!)

1.  Preheat oven to 250 degrees.  Prepare a rectangular pan (I like 100 Days suggestion of using parchment paper).

2.  Mix steel cut oats, cashews, sunflower seeds and spices in a large mixing bowl.

3.  Heat butter and honey together in a small saucepan over low heat. Once the butter melts, remove from heat and stir in the vanilla.

4.  Pour over the dry ingredients and stir together with a rubber spatula until evenly coated.

5.  Spread mixture onto prepared pan in one even layer. Bake for 75 minutes. (yes, really)

Granola becomes crisp as it cools (if you can wait that long).  I break it into bar-sized pieces; however, uniformity is next to impossible.

Store in air tight container at room temperature for up to 2 weeks.

Love this stuff!

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Two years ago, I posted about making my own laundry detergent.  I mentioned how I had left behind the liquid in favor of the dry.

Fast forward through time and you will find me not using either.  Until recently.

I decided I was going to try again after reading this post from Mooberry Farm.  She had a little different configuration of the same ingredients I was using.  But, the real difference was I no longer had any of our homemade castille soap, so I had to purchase some Fels-Naptha.

For those of you who don’t know what Fels-Naptha is, it is a heavy-duty laundry soap in a bar (often used for stain treatment) that costs about $1.15 per bar.  You can buy it in just about any supermarket in the detergent aisle.

Let me give you the new measurements and directions and then explain a little more (I tweaked the directions a bit from what was on the Mooberry site):

Homemade Liquid Laundry Detergent
1/2 bar of Fels-Naptha
1 cup borax
1 cup washing soda
2 gallons of water, divided

Also need:
a grater
a large saucepan (8 cups or larger)
large bucket or container with lid
liquid storage containers for finished product

1. Grate 1/2 a bar of Fels-Naptha into a saucepan (I still use my Bosch grater).

2. Cover shavings with 4 cups of water and heat on low, stirring often, until soap has melted.

3. Remove from heat.  Add the borax and washing soda and stir in another 4 cups of water.  Mixture will resemble pudding.

4. Pour mixture into a bucket or other container with a lid (I used a cooler–see photo below), add another 24 cups (or 1 gallon + 8 cups) and stir well.  In fact, you may want to use a whisk.

5. Let mixture set overnight.

6. The next day, the congealed soap will have settled to the top.  Stir it back in and pour into storage containers if you’d rather not dip your hand into a bucket every time you do the laundry.  I used old laundry detergent bottles.

Use 1/3 – 1/2 cup of detergent per load of laundry.

And yes, you can use it on your cloth diapers too!

A few notes of interest:

*I didn’t have enough old detergent bottles to pour into, so I keep a very hard to open cooler with the remaining amount in my laundry room.  This has proven to be a very good method.

*I don’t add essential oil.  It would take way too much to make a difference in the smell, so if I ever add any, it will be tea tree oil for it’s anti-bacterial properties.  I’d rather use my yummy-smelling essential oils in other ways.

*Speaking of smells, Fels-Naptha does have a distinct, yet not unpleasant, odor.  However, that smell does not transfer to your clothing.

*The reason I think this is doing so much better than my homemade castille soap did, is because Fels-Naptha is intended for laundry.  Additionally, upping the amount of borax and washing soda helped the consistency greatly.

*This does not suds.  It’s ok.

*The mixture ends up looking a bit curdled.  It’s ok.

Now, for the question that will determine if I continue to make my own laundry detergent…

Is it cost effective enough to be worth my time?

First off, the time required to make this is nominal.  It’s easy, folks!

Secondly, I am going to use very general numbers since prices vary regionally.  If you want it exact, use your own region’s prices.

Cost Breakdown:
Fels-Naptha – 1/2 bar = 58¢
Borax – 1 cup =  53¢
Washing Soda – 1 cup = 44¢
Water – 2 gallons from tap = 20¢
Total per batch = $1.75
Total per load = 3¢

For me, each batch fills around 3 of the containers I had on hand.  We only use one kind of detergent and for that size it costs around $3.00 a bottle when on sale (and it goes on sale often).  I do have to use a bit more of the homemade detergent than the store detergent, but not much.  So without factoring that in…

Cost difference = $7.25 in favor of the homemade detergent

And since we taken it this far, let’s figure my savings for a year if I only used homemade detergent…

Let’s say it takes me 2 weeks to go through each 50 fl oz bottle of detergent.  That means every 6 weeks, I am making more at $1.75 or buying more at $9 for 3 bottles.  That’s $15.17 a year for the homemade and $78 a year for the store bought, which equals…

Yearly savings = $62.83

Is the trouble it takes to make my own laundry detergent (again, nominal) worth $62.83?  In some seasons, I’d have to say no, but right now this feels like a significant savings for very little work.

What do you think?

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Creamy Chicken Salsa Soup

2 large cans Cream of Chicken soup
2 large cans of water or milk
4 chicken breasts, cooked and shredded
1 jar salsa
1½ c. corn

Garnish with: sour cream, shredded cheese, tortilla chips

Put all ingredients in crock pot on low for 4-6 hrs.

{Sorry, there isn’t a picture!  I’ll add one later!}

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I love to bake no matter the season.  I love to see my children’s (and my husband’s) eyes light up over what new treat mama has created.  It’s easy to want to bake when you have such an appreciative family!

But during this time of year, there are always extra special treats!  We bake and make candy and share with neighbors and friends. It’s the only time of year I make fudge and candy cane cookies and there are always plenty of bowls and beaters to lick!

We usually share our treats with the mail lady and the garbage men.  Yesterday, the mail lady brought us a note thanking us for the goodies and telling the children how she ate them with hot chocolate that evening.  You should have seen the delight on their faces!

Some of our yearly yummies are:

Buckeyes (shown above and affectionately called “Buckin’ Bulls” around here ala my 7 yr old)
Candy Cane Cookies
Snowballs
Chocolate Revel Bars
Fantasy Fudge
Thumbprint Cookies

I also like to experiment and try new recipes, but I prefer to stick with treats that are simple and quick.  I have no desire to spends hours in the kitchen crafting the perfect cookie, so anything that can please my crowd with the least amount of effort gets my vote!

I’m also anxious to try some of the yummy treats I saw at An Oregon Cottage, the cinnamon popcorn at Amy’s Finer Things, and the edible gifts at Many Little Blessings!

One good thing about having a large family is that with so many mouths clamoring for a tasty treat, no one person ends up with too much!

What are your favorite Christmas treats?  My children would love to try something new!

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