Eggs, three ways

Happy Easter (Monday), everyone!
There was no chance of a blog post yesterday, I was in a candy coma.

The Easter Bunny sure does have good taste in candy!

We had a beautiful weekend celebrating together and I thought a lot about holiday traditions: the ones that everyone shares, the ones we bring from our heritage, the ones we make for ourselves. I thought I'd share one of each.

Dyeing Eggs
This is a fun tradition that's hardly unique to our family, or even to Easter! Did you know that in China, dyed eggs are passed out at a traditional party held for a one-month-old baby to announce his/her name? The meaning is similar. Just as at Easter, the eggs symbolize new life.

I hard-boiled a dozen in good old colossus (remember it?).

I just learned that you can steam eggs to hard-boil them and in colossus it is as easy as pressing the steam button and walking away. Life changed. If you already knew this, congrats, you win this round of "Most Efficient Life." But also, WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME? I have been messing up hard-boiled eggs for years...

We used a kit. I'm not cool enough to make my own dye.

They had fun with this for about 10 minutes, then asked if they could take the water outside to make a lemonade stand.

This entertained them for a full 90 minutes. Go figure.
Finished product:

And also:

Sirek, aka Easter Cheese

Grant's family is of Eastern European heritage (Russian, Croatian, Serbian, etc.) and my family is 100% British Isles. This meant that when we got married we got to merge lots of holiday traditions and learn some new ways to celebrate. Most of these revolve around food and hey, I'm not complaining!

Grant learned how to make Sirek (which is one of MANY possible spellings, but it's pronounced like SID-ack) from his dad and no Easter is complete without it.
It takes a LONG time to heat up a dozen eggs and a quart of milk (throw in some salt and white pepper) at very low heat while constantly stirring.

B helped. Little Guy just photobombed.

This part takes close to an hour. When it hits that magic spot -- cooked to curds, but not too rubbery -- you have to tie it up in cheesecloth and let it drain.

I know what you're thinking: Where is the cheese in this Easter Cheese?
Easter Cheese, it turns out, is neither cheese, nor all that particularly Easter-y.
Discuss.
The finished product is, well, congealed scrambled eggs. I don't know why they don't call it that. Wait, yes I do.
When Grant told me about this, I was appropriately grossed out. Now, though, after fifteen Easters with the guy, I can't imagine celebrating without it. It's become our tradition and now we will pass it down to the kids. If there's a better metaphor for marriage (slowly cooking, congealing together over time) I haven't found it yet.

Tastes significantly better than it sounds like it would.

Bird's Nests

Finally, I love cooking projects with my kids. It's one of the traditions that I'm creating with them that means a lot to me. I hope it means a lot to them, but I'm also willing to bribe them with chocolate until they say they enjoy it.

I saw these little Bird's Nests online and just had to make them. It was such a good excuse to eat fistfuls of Cadbury mini-eggs (the BEST!!). I used this recipe from a very cute blog called "Chef in Training," but I modified a few things. Some pics:

These, on the other hand, taste EXACTLY as delicious as you would imagine.

There's something that unites these "eggs, three ways," these seemingly unrelated traditions, borrowed and passed on. The driving force behind stirring eggs for an hour is the very same thing that makes a family in China dye eggs to celebrate the new life in their family. It's the same thing that led Jesus to gather his friends around him and start a new tradition, one we still keep verbatim more than 2000 years later, of breaking bread and remembering Him. 

It's love.

Love for those who came before us, and love for those with us now. And maybe the hope that some day, when we are long gone, this time of year will come around and they'll remember that love. Maybe they'll even teach their children to make Sirek. 

Spring Cleaning

The Garden Team at B's school had some hard work to do this Saturday morning.
After receiving a grant from Wild Ones, we will be planting native wildflowers that will help attract native pollinators to all of the gardens planted around the school. Native plants are important to our ecosystem for three reasons:
1. They provide food for the bees, birds, and butterflies who are hard at work pollinating other plants.
2. They have deep roots which act as an early, natural water filtration system before runoff reaches our streams and rivers.
3. A lawn of native plants (instead of turf) reduces our carbon footprint. And it's just so much prettier!
Before your wildflowers can bloom, however, you have to prepare the ground. We were tasked with clearing a bed on the sunny, south side of the school. This was no easy task!
Aided by a volunteer team of eager middle schoolers, we worked for a few hours and finally had a clear bed to plant!

B looked for rocks. When she read this she informed me she is holding a doughnut hole. So not really helping at all.

Some of the roots we had to dig up were huge!

We dug up and bagged more than thirty bags of debris.

Little Guy's contribution was to eat 2 cookies and 7 doughnut holes and then play on the playground while the rest of us worked.

Finally seeing some progress! It's not quite beautiful yet, but the groundwork is laid.

Work hard, play hard. 

It's so satisfying to work hard at a project and actually see the fruits of your labor. Even more satisfying was working with this group of middle schoolers. It reminded me of how much I admire this age group. They are so optimistic and so powerful because they do not yet know their own limitations. Middle schoolers can change the world simply because they believe they can. I think this is why I write about them. And for them.

I'm doing quite a bit of spring cleaning on my writing, too. I've been incredibly privileged to have received invaluable feedback from two very talented friends who agreed to be early readers. Danielle, an incredible writer and an inspiration to me in many ways, provided specific and detailed critiques and encouragement. Martha, a copyediting master and designer extraordinaire, went over my manuscript with a magnifying glass. The results look a bit like this:

Not unlike the southside garden bed, I have a mess to clean up and many bags of refuse to pull out of this novel before it is ready to bloom into something beautiful. 

I am rolling up my sleeves.

I have my tools in hand.

I have a great team beside me.

I am ready for spring cleaning!

Sláinte!

The little Dragans and I are pretty proud of our Irish heritage, especially around this time of year!

They're also very proud of their Russian and Slavic heritage, stay tuned for an Easter recipe in a few weeks!

In a rare bout of crafty inspiration (seriously, this hardly ever happens, crafts usually give me hives) I came up with a fun little St. Patrick's Day project and we thought we'd share it with you!

 

Disclaimer: I'm not much of an artist or a craftswoman, my sister got those genes, so these aren't meant to be my entry into an unofficial "Best Mom/Artist of the Year" competition. Just a fun activity with the kiddos. Not Pinterest-worthy. Not even really #Pinterestfail- worthy, although that is a very entertaining timekiller.

We started with simple black origami boxes. I really love origami and find it really relaxing. If you want to make the simple box, or any number of other fun folds, I'd look here. I made these ahead of time for the kids, but I think B could have handled it. To jazz them up a bit we added some fun Irish sayings in metallic sharpie (!) like "Happy St. Patrick's Day" and "Sláinte" which means good health, or basically "Cheers!" in Irish Gaelic.

Then we painted cardstock strips to look like rainbows. We had markers, crayons, and watercolors on hand, and I really think the watercolors looked the best. 

I did a quick staple surgery to make the rainbow and then we glued on cottonball clouds. Thank you, Sunday school, for teaching me how to gently pull apart a cottonball until it looks like a cloud. 

Then it was time for the best part -- filling the pot with gold! We used Rolos and Hershey's Nuggets for our gold because, well, they're gold. And delicious. Obviously we sampled some, it would be very rude to deliver unsampled treats to friends and neighbors. A pretty funny dichotomy of personalities emerged in candy distribution methods. B is of the "I will count out an equal number for each pot" mentality whereas Little Guy adopted the "fistful" method in between attempts to steal more samples. Very telling. They should use this as a job interview question.

This was a really fun project and we already delivered our first pot o' gold to our wonderful neighbors. We have big plans for the weekend of St. Patrick's Day celebrations like checking out the green river and making a feast of corned beef brisket and cabbage.

True or False: I bought all of the Irish/St. Paddy's Day products at Costco.

False.
I bought ALL BUT ONE of the Irish/St. Paddy's Day products at Costco because I already had that one at home. It was the Kerrygold butter, or according to the Little Dragans: the good butter. 
Because Irish kids know what's up.
Sláinte!

BONUS BYTES FROM B

Hi,

It’s me B,

I had a great time decorating the box.

You can let your imagination go wild!

Have you ever made a holiday gift for other

people? Like us and subscribe!

See you next time,

B

Unexpected

This crack appeared on my windshield out of nowhere, and on my birthday no less.
Thanks, Universe.

After empirically proving that I could not wish away the crack, I called around and made an appointment to get the whole windshield replaced (argh). Cost aside, I actually had myself talked into an enjoyable and productive morning of errand running, reading and phone call returning while I waited for the work to be done. Multi-tasking queen.

But then little guy threw up his breakfast. And the whole day changed as we would now be a party of two for the windshield adventure. Too far to train it home, we were stuck for at least a few hours. Temperature: a sunny 19.

A funny thing happened, though, with this unexpected, unstructured time to ourselves.
We wandered.
We searched for Great White Sharks.

Great news, the city is safe. Little guy thought he saw some penguins, though.
We found a Toys R Us and spent, no exaggeration, an hour looking around.

We'll pretend it was like going to a museum... a museum of capitalism and desire. We managed to escape with just one purchase, and a pretty fun one at that.

The plastic stands are called "navigation guides," which I guess is the Star Wars consumer-approved way to say "finger puppets."
We worked up quite the appetite, guess that stomach bug was short-lived.

You're going to want to dunk that donut right in the coffee, guys, the restaurant didn't get its name by accident. Oh, and it's a French Kruller, because they're the best.

It wasn't what I expected from my morning which began with me nearly losing my temper over how many times this kid has been sick this winter. I commented to Grant that it feels like we've been stuck in the breakers, barely getting our feet back under us when another wave of sickness just rolls in and knocks us out again. But it was a great morning, as much for its unexpectedness as for its forced lack of agenda. We get these little gifts sometimes, reminders to slow down and put away the to do list for just a second. Sometimes it takes a cracked windshield, or a stomach flu to make us pay attention to them.

So yeah, thanks, Universe.

Little last thoughts with Little Guy:

I liked going to the store because I saw an Ewok, and now I feel better. Do you want the Millennium Falcon or the TIE Fighter to win in a battle?

Sweetness from Trees

There's a specific time of year when winter begins to thaw, but spring has not yet awakened, when something almost magical happens in trees.The nights are still freezing, but the mercury begins to creep above thirty-two during the day. These are the days when you aren't really sure which jacket to take, though you definitely still need one. This exact time of year is the optimal time to tap maple trees for sap to make maple syrup!

B's class had a field trip this past week to the North Park Village Nature Center and the lovely Ms. Liza and Ms. Ashley from their staff led us on an adventure through the woods to try our hand at tapping a tree for sap.

First, we learned some of the science behind maple syrup. All trees produce sap that can be boiled down to make syrup, but the sap from maple trees, and specifically sugar maples, produces the best taste. The trees must be at least forty years old which allows them time to grow to at least fifteen inches in diameter before they can be tapped, although the optimal age seems to be sixty to eighty years old.

After the leaves have fallen off of the trees in the fall, they have no need for the starch that they have produced, so it is stored up in their roots where it converts to sugar. Then, as the days grow longer and increased sunlight begins to warm their trunks, all of this stored up sugar rises up the tree and into its branches, ready to feed the sprouting buds and growing leaves that will soon dress them.

Some other organisms had some stored up sugar in their roots that needed to be released, too, and this path was taken at a full sprint, our only speed of the day.

Tap the trees too soon and the sap won't flow. Wait too long and it won't taste good because all of the sugar will be feeding the leaves. Harvesting maple sap is a time-honored tradition that traces its origins far back to the history of the indigenous peoples on this land.

Tapping the trees is a three part process. We drilled a small hole, called a button, into the trunk.
Then we inserted a metal spile into the button.

 Finally, we collected the sap as it dripped from the tree. 

We tasted the sap straight from the tree and it was sweet, but woodsy, and very diluted, almost like coconut water. The kids all said it was disgusting, but I enjoyed trying it. While we didn't get to see any of the refining process, the next step would have been to boil down the gallons of collected sap to make syrup. It takes forty gallons of sap to produce just one gallon of syrup, no wonder it's so expensive!

Maple syrup is such a delicious gift from nature. I always keep it in the house and we enjoy it on pancakes, waffles, or a piece of breakfast sausage that accidentally finds its way into the pool on the plate, yum... Today we enjoyed some on popcorn, which was a first for me, but very tasty!

In the past, I've struggled with this season of the year, preferring even the blanket of snow or the first buds of spring to this muddy time of brownness and waiting. I saw it as a bitter end to another hard, long season, winter's ugly last word before throwing in the towel.

There is work being done, however, beneath the thawing ground and in the brown bark of those trees, and the sweet reward at the end of this season is nature's promise each spring that it was merely resting and preparing to be fruitful again. Now I think I will try to view this thawing time as "maple syrup season," and celebrate with a pancake or two.

If you'd like to learn more about maple syrup or try your hand at tapping a tree here in Chicago, you can check out the Syrup Festival at the Nature Center on March 19th!

BONUS BYTES FROM B!

Hi! It's me, B! My favorite part of the field trip was when we got to drill the tree open. There are more than one hundred ways to use maple syrup. What is your favorite? Like us and reply!

See you next time!
B

Welcome! Stay a bit, have some sushi with us!

Well, hello! Welcome to my new cozy little spot on the Internet. I hope that this will be a place to show you a little bit of fun from our lives each week. I might miss a week here and there, apologies in advance. In the future I hope to be sharing news about my series of books, Korrigans Nine! For now, I'll just bring you some "Dragan Tales" as they come up!

Last week the little Dragans were asking to make sushi, a fun project/meal that we've made before. We learned how to make rolls from some friends while they lived here for a few years before moving back to Japan. I was intimidated by making it before they showed us that it can really be fun and pretty easy so I hope you feel inspired to make some, too! We are lucky enough to have a great Japanese section at our local grocery store, so that helps for buying the nori, roasted seaweed wraps, and sushi rice, which is much stickier than long grain rice. We made ours today with avocado, carrots (purple carrots, naturally, because purple is the best color of anything and everything), and cucumber. You can use all sorts of ingredients and really get creative with it!

First, we prepared our ingredients. I had some excellent helpers in the kitchen. I also use that rice cooker, which honest-to-goodness cost thirty bucks and I probably use it every other day. It's a bit of a colossus on the counter, but it cooks rice (or really any grain), steams vegetables, is a slow cooker, and does your taxes. Well, maybe not that last one.

Once you've got everything prepared you can start rolling up your sushi. 
Spread about a cup of the cooked rice onto the nori. 

 Add your ingredients to the middle of the roll. 

Roll it up from the bottom. These bamboo mats are really useful for making a tight and smooth roll. We got them as a unique wedding present, along with sets of chopsticks and the beautiful platter you'll see later, and really love them! 
Cut the roll using a moistened knife and there you have it!

We made four rolls, which was way too much food for the three of us, and had plenty of leftover rice, nori, and vegetables for another day. Well, all but the avocado which was mercilessly poached by sticky little fingers during the rolling process. No names.

In Japanese, the phrase itadakimasu is said before eating, similar to how we might say bon appétit. It literally translates to, "I humbly receive." Here's our best version of the pronunciation!

Hope you enjoyed this first Dragan Tale! Stay tuned for more!
BONUS BYTES FROM B:
Hi, Its me B,
I had a great time experiencing making sushi.
Have you ever made sushi? Tell us about it and reply!
Toodle-oo!
B