Listening to Christmas Music

I love Christmas! All year long I look forward to when I can finally turn on Bing Crosby and spend all day making sugar cookies. I don't know what first sparked my intense love for this holiday. Maybe it's the fact that all the "crafty" ( crafty in the Hobby Lobby sense not the negative connotation) ideas I get all year long suddenly seem completely called for. There are cookies to bake for the next door neighbors, holiday cards to make, not to mention those hand made Christmas gifts that I'm sure no one can live without. Oh and a house, or in our case two houses and a car to decorate. This week my list includes making hot cocoa mix, two brand new quilted stockings, a knitted scarf, and cookies for a party at the elementary school.

Pumpkin Pie

Do you have a good description of pumpkin pie? I found out last weekend that trying to describe the taste of pumpkin pie to someone who has never tried it was quite difficult. Really what does pumpkin taste like?????

Because it is really hard to find canned pumpkin here in the UK (although I've been told not impossible) most American's just bring cans with them or beg someone from home to send one for Thanksgiving. Always ambitious, I set out to make a pie from a real pumpkin and with the help of the great Google was able to do it without going crazy. Basically you prepare the pumpkin the same way you would a squash and then just blend it for smoothness. After that the steps are about the same as using a can. It did take some time (would have been less if I had steamed the pumpkin instead of baked it) but it was really satisfying to free myself from another cooking limitation.

Now we will show our English friends what pumpkin pie really tastes like.

A few weeks ago we received news that we are going to have to return to the states and wait for our visa to be processed here in the UK. As you can probably imagine this has been a very tough time for us but we have been well supported both by the church here and everyone in the states. If you would like a little more explanation you can read our official letter on our website by clicking (or copying) this link:

http://web.me.com/lovejoysinmorley/Lovejoysinmorley/Furlough.html .

So we will be returning to the states on November 2nd which seems to be almost flying towards us. Please keep us in your prayers as we wait for this to get sorted out.

Look Mom! No measuring cups!

It's been quite a while since I've been able to post because during the flurry that was our youth weekend I managed to get sick. Then like any good girl with out insurance I tried avoiding the doctor for a few days and finally had to break down and go (found out it costs me nothing to go to the walk in center here and I could make an appointment so all I paid for was my prescription which only cost 7.20 pounds if you wondered. Try doing that for under 10 dollars in the states... that's for another blog) .

I have thoroughly explored and been won over by the metric system in my kitchen! "GASP!" I have for the past 3 months been trying to navigate both my American cookbook measurements, and the measurements I get all of my food and any new recipes in. Now, don't get me wrong I have nothing against my cups but I have found some very nifty uses for the grams and kilos I get here. Luckily I was blessed enough to find a digital scale in the house when we got here so my first attempts at "British" cooking weren't too painful. But since then I've improved a bit and learned to use the scale to it's full advantage.

For a girl who loves to bake, as you may well know if you've read my previous posts, I have spent an awful lot of time washing up the multitude of cups and half cups and measuring spoons that my baking leaves behind. The wonderful thing about my scale is that now I can simply lay down a sheet of grease proof paper (or baking parchment, or cling wrap) set the scale to zero and spoon on my first ingredient to where I need it then dump it in the bowl I'm using. The great part is that I can use that same paper to measure all of my ingredients because I won't be dipping it into anything so when I'm finished all I do is ball up the paper, put it in the bin, and go on about my merry way with no cups to clean. Or... Or... and I really love this one... I can set the bowl on the scale and set it to zero measure in my first ingredient, then set to zero again and measure in my second ingredient and so on! Hooray!!!! That is, as long as you carefully monitor as you put things in the bowl other wise you wind up trying to scoop sugar out and all you get is flour and ... well I'm sure we've all had that moment.

As wonderful as my new scale is I really don't see anyone in the states really wanting to figure out how many grams are in a cup of flour. Believe me I've tried and even with the internet it's not fun realizing that every ingredient has a different weight and most of the conversion websites disagree. So until Betty Crocker goes metric I suspect the joys of no measuring cups will escape most of us. On second thought I don't think I would trade my picture cookbook for any newfangled one no matter what the benefit. Supplement, maybe but not trade, it's a matter of tradition :)

The Best Laid Plans

A very small shot of one of our lessons during the youth weekend

Well, the Morley youth weekend has come and gone. I'm sure everyone has experienced at least one event in their life that could not be planned for enough and youth weekend is one of those. Every year Morley hosts a weekend where youth from all over the UK come and enjoy some uplifting speakers and fellowship with other Christians their age. It is, as we would say here, "absolutely Brilliant!". There are quite a few churches of Christ in the UK but they are much more spread out than in the states, so youth weekends are a great spiritual shot in the arm for some of the kids who come from smaller churches and might not have a large group of Christians their age to interact with on a consistent basis.

Morley typically has one of the largest youth weekends of the year for a few reasons. First, we are the first congregation to host a youth weekend after the summer break so the kids are anxious to see their friends from camp again, and second, we are one of the most centrally located congregations when you consider all of Scotland and England. Because of these and other reasons our relatively small congregation has to put in a lot of work to make things happen. Still, despite our building bursting at the seams and our fears that it might not all come together the youth weekend is always a huge hit with the kids. This year we had about 90 kids who arrived anywhere from 8pm to 1:30am Friday night and stayed with us through Sunday afternoon. Figuring out housing is always one of the most exiting parts of the weekend. The boys all bed down in the church building with their sleeping bags and just forego showers for the weekend, while church members open their homes to the girls. I think we shared about 40-50 girls and maybe 6 drivers between 7 houses. The ladies of the church also managed to provide two dinners and two lunches for about 120 people with all the drivers and members from Morley included. I was so amazed to see how God used the congregation here to provide such a positive weekend for the youth. An event this size could really be a pain to host but because of hard work, willing hearts, and a lot of prayer and help from our Father the weekend went really well. It was a great testament to what God can do when his people trust him to provide.

Down on the Farm

On Thursday's Jed and I usually meet with some of the ladies for lunch at the church building. It's always such a nice way to get a little bit of extra fellowship time with anyone who happens to not be at work or school on a Thursday. We have about five to six ladies who come on a regular basis. Yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous day with no rain in sight, which is saying something but then that's another post. Still, one of the things Yorkshire living has taught us is never waste a sunny day. With that adage in mind one of the Ladies suggested we all go out for sandwiches and enjoy the sun. So we all piled into the two cars we had available and headed for "Charlotte's Ice Cream Parlor" (They do sandwiches and coffee as well). In total we had 4 ladies, a young mother with 2 small kids, me and Jed, and another lady who met us at the ice cream parlor.

When I say ice cream parlor it just doesn't fit with the American idea of and ice cream parlor so I will explain. Many of the working dairies in England have realized that selling there goods to supermarkets really puts a strain on them because of the prices they get. I'm sure there are many other solutions but this dairy farm found that by cutting out the middle man they could make and sell ice cream and turn a much better profit. Enter the ice cream parlor. Charlotte's now has a nice ice cream parlor with a gorgeous view of the surrounding village and the lush green fields (courtesy of all our local rain) and a play area outside for the kids. Sounds good doesn't it? It would be a wonderful place to go if the description stopped there but it doesn't... They have small pens lining the car park and the playground with all kinds of friendly animals including, goats, sheep, donkeys, geese, a rooster, and a hen house. As if that wasn't enough they even have a mini golf course. With all of this the place is perfect for kids and because you can see the animals and play on the play area for free it's definitely the place to be on a sunny day. Needless to say we had a wonderful time enjoying the sunshine and the views from the picnic tables, and you really can't get better ice cream than when you can count the cows it came from.

Cinnamon Rolls!

The Finished Product!

So with the youth weekend coming up I thought that I could put a little bit of time in early in the week to make cinnamon rolls for the girls that will be staying with me. My recipe is out of my cookbook from Desdemona, Texas. It's really the only American cookbook we brought with us mainly because it was the smallest one we had. The recipes are absolutely wonderful because they were all donated by ladies from the local community which I think makes them really fun to try because I always feel like personally thanking the lady whose recipe I just used.

I had a hunch that this recipe was going to have a rather large yeild when I read the subtitle: "West Texas Fair Winner, 1972" and then saw that it require 11 cups of flour. I have made this recipe before but I have always cut it in half. Still I was not quite prepared for the sheer volume and I also failed to notice that I only have two large mixing bowls which I thought would be enough... So yesterday I began mixing and realized before I even put the dry ingredients in that the bowl I had would not be big enough so I got out one more bowl and split the dough and everything seemed to work out fine. After the first rising there was still plenty of room so I thought they would be ok overnight in the fridge until my husband opened the door the next morning and took this picture.

Needless to say this took quite a bit of creativity to fix but I have learned a few tricks thanks to this situation so I'd like to share. One: once you have dough that is ready to be taken out of the bowl I found it was easier to handle by coating my hands in non-stick spray as opposed to flour. I made this batch about 3 days in advance of when I really want to use it so I formed my rolls and then gave them time to rise once more before putting them in the freezer (I've never had to do this before so we'll see how it goes). Because I don't have enough pans I lined each pan with cling wrap and sprayed the wrap with non stick, the spray is very important if you don't want half the dough to stay on the wrap when you take it off. After the rolls rose to I slipped the pans into the freezer long enough to harden the dough while we went out for a visit When we came back I lifted the rolls out of the pan in the cling wrap and used the pan for the second half of the dough. Now all that's left to do is pull them out a few hours to thaw and then bake them. Hooray!

The beginning of the blog

Well we've been in Morley for over 10 weeks and things are great. We're getting ready for the youth weekend this weekend where 80 to 100 kids between 11 and 18 will spend the weekend here in Morley. All the speakers have been set and confirmed and all of the fridges and freezers have been filled but there is still a lot of work to be done so this weekend should be quite exciting.