Rain!

So, after a week of DC getting drenched (seriously there's a place in DC that's flooded three different times) we finally got rain!
I'll refrain from commenting on my FRUSTRATION with the weather patterns. They're not moving the way radars are supposed to move! Weather is supposed to come from the west and move to the east and be done. What's happened this past week is a storm will bubble up and stay there. It's like ninja storms. At first there's no rain and then all of a sudden there's rain and the bubble of rain just stays there! It doesn't move! So the poor people who are crossing their fingers that the massive rain storm will move a few more miles so her soccer game will be canceled have their hopes dashed. But the storm bubbled up over us yesterday so I'm not complaining too too badly. Even though there was no soccer game to cancel.
Btw the first inch of this was accumulated within the half hour after dad and I got home. Kinda intense!

Colorado

 This is a post about Colorado.

Beautiful, majestic, wonderful Colorado.  Where I spent eight years of my life.  Those years were some of my favorite years growing up and I have made it a goal to somehow get back there to live or vacation often when I get older.
A few events had to happen before I had the privilege of living there.  So I'll start at the beginning:

I was born.

Haha just kidding, it starts even before that :) 

Back when mom and dad were about our age ( my dad is such a cheeser btw, check him out standing behind Uncle Steve who is kneeling on the right).

They decided after high school to become cadets at the Air Force Academy located in Colorado Springs, CO.  They met in the Catholic choir while there.

One thing led to another and I was born!  Oh wait, sorry, that's the best part but I keep skipping some other life events along the way ;)

 They got married in the Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel.  It's a pretty iconic building and when one sees a picture of it they immediately associate it with the Air Force Academy and Colorado.

Here is the Cadet Chapel three weeks ago surrounded by smoke from the Waldo Canyon Fire that burned in Colorado Springs.  Massive drought conditions and erratic weather and winds spurred this fire to burn down many people's homes and it came very close to the Air Force Academy and many more homes.  Watching the fire and the stories unfold from half a country away was hard.  This fire affected Colorado Springs and even though I do not live there anymore I still feel like I belong there.  It was my home and still is my home and this fire threatened my home.  So I wanted to write a post about what Colorado means to me.

After graduation mom and dad moved away from Colorado and began their lives serving in the Air Force.  They moved to New Hampshire and I was born.  Then they moved to Kansas where dad went overseas for a while and lived in a tent (pictured above) while fighting in Desert Storm.  Sarah was born while we were in Kansas.  Then we all moved back to Colorado.

 

And built a house.  

Poured the foundation.

Watched it being framed.

Had the walls put up.

And enjoyed the finished product!  This was where daddy did his first forays into landscaping and rock walls.  This is where Becca was born.  On the left side of the driveway is where I fell rollerblading and broke my wrist.  I rescued baby bunnies from the window wells in the backyard.  We would release the bunnies in a big field next to our housing development.  We put our Christmas tree in the bay window out front.  My room was in the front on the left and Sarah's room was in the back on the left (becca slept in Mom and Dad's room since she was a baby).

When we first got to Colorado it was just me and Sarah.

We liked doing things like going to Cheyene Mountain Zoo.

Here we are at Farish which was a military nature park thing where you could fish and camp and hike.  I think the one and only time I've been fishing was here (I didn't catch anything).

 

One of our most favorite places to go was Garden of the Gods.

 

We made sure to take all the relatives that came there as well. 

We also took relatives that came to visit to Seven Falls. (people wanted to come visit us because 1. I'm amazing and 2. Colorado is awesome!)

Towards the end of our first three years in Colorado, Rebecca was born, making it a lot harder for our family to be seated at restaurants . . .

Here we are at Flying W Ranch.  It's a ranch that served a cowboy style dinner and you would go and eat on long picnic tables and listen to their band play as the sun set.  This ranch burned to the ground in the fire.

Here is our church.  St. Patrick's.  We went here both times we lived in Colorado.  Daddy sang in the choir the first three years and when we came back he sang, mom played the piano, and as soon as I was old enough I joined as well (by then Sarah and Becca were old enough to not massacre each other in the pew if we left them alone all mass).  I received my First Communion here and so did Rebecca.  Since mom and Dad and I were singing all mass we sent Sarah with the camera to capture Rebecca being holy.  We have no other proof besides those pictures . . . jk :)

After those first three years we moved to Texas.  Mom went to the University of Texas to get her PhD. and Dad got out of the Air Force and got a degree in Urban Planning at UT at the same time. 

When we came back to Colorado three years later we did a lot of the same things we had done the first time.

We built a house.  (Becca and Sarah's rooms were in the front and mine was the window on the second floor in the back.

I had a great view of the mountains from my bedroom.

Daddy took his landscaping skills to new limits and built a lot of stone walls and planted a lot of plants :)

It snowed.  Duh it was Colorado!  We sledded down the road one time when it snowed a foot.

We also hiked a lot.  It's one of my favorite things to do.  When we were first back dad was looking for a job and interviewing so we went on a lot of cough-forcedmarches-cough hikes.

We went to Garden of the Gods again as well.  Here Becca and I are.  I think this was when Sarah was off at Girl Scout horse camp so she's not with us.  This was 2000 so it wasn't the year of the Hayman Fire, but a few years later that fire prompted Sarah to have to evacuate horse camp.  Fires are a reality in Colorado since it is so dry.

This is our favorite park.  Sarah learned to ride a bike here and I climbed trees.  There were swing sets and trails and we had many a picnic.

Colorado is such a magical place and I'm very happy that I was able to call it home for the years that I did.

Spelt Bread

As a follow up to Sarah's bread machine post, I wanted to post a bread post of my own.  Bread machine bread is great.  It takes you longer to take out and put away the ingredients than it does to actually put the dough together.  Then you just let it bake for four hours.  The only problem with it is the size of the loaf.  Let's face it, it's a cube.   Using two slices to make a sandwich would result in sandwich large enough to feed a football player.  And cutting one slice in half would be enough to feed a ballerina.  Which brings me back to our main purpose of making our own bread, we want to use it for sandwiches and it's helpful when the bread can be sliced into semi-reasonable pieces!  This bread rises in a loaf pan so it's more conducive to our purposes. 
The other feature of this bread is that it uses spelt flour.  Spelt is an ancient grain and is high in fiber.  Back in the day wheat was easier to modify so they took it and bred it and made a lot of different strains of wheat.  Spelt pretty much stayed unchanged.  It's healthy since it's a whole grain just like wheat, but interestingly enough people with a gluten allergy or gluten intolerance can process spelt easier than wheat, and they don't have to eat something funky like xantham gum or arrowroot flour! 
So I purchased some spelt flour and got down to making bread!

Here are the ingredients:  6 cups of spelt flour, 1/3 cup of honey, 1/3 cup of oil, 2 tsp of salt, 2 tsp of yeast, and warm water.  You'll also need a mixer with lid and a beater and a dough hook.  You can do all of the mixing and beating by hand, but I find it faster to mix with a mixer so that's what I do!  (You can also double the recipe if you have a Bosch mixer according to the recipe but that makes four loaves of bread and I have never seen a Bosch mixer so I used the trusty KitchenAid).

Oh look a strawberry!  Can you see it?  Yeah I barely could either, they're TINY!  But it did grow and I picked it this morning and thought I'd show you :)  Now back to the bread.

First add three cups of spelt flour.  You need 6 cups for the whole recipe but only add half of it at first.

Then two tsps of salt.

Then two tsps of yeast.

And mix it all together.  I use the beater attachment because I think it mixes dry ingredients together better than the dough hook.  Or you could use a whisk.  Those are perfect for mixing dry ingredients (Btw I refuse to buy a sifter.  Who needs a metal coffee can looking thing to mix dry ingredients together?  Not me!)

Once the dry ingredients are mixed together add the wet ingredients right into the bowl.  Start with the oil (you can use vegetable oil or olive oil).

THEN add the honey.  Sarah mentioned this too.  You add the oil first so that the honey will slide right out.

See that brimming cup full of honey? That sticky crazy concentration just waiting to get all over your fingers and in you hair?!

Well it's pouring out quite nicely.

Nary a drop left to show :)

Now time for the hot water.  I just turn my tap water on as hot as it will go and let it run for a minute or two to get it suitably hot.  During this time you could fill up a pitcher with the not-hot-enough-yet water to water house plants if you'd like.  You also have to guard the faucet constantly or your father will come and turn it off telling you that you are wasting water.  Fathers obviously don't understand the concept that THE YEAST WILL NOT REACT UNLESS YOU HAVE HOT WATER and THE WATER HAS TO RUN FOR A MINUTE BEFORE IT ACTUALLY GETS HOT and NO THE WATER WAS NOT RUNNING FOR TEN MINUTES DAD, I"M NOT STUPID!  Fathers also have to be told this repeatedly.  Just fyi.
Anyway, I like to get the temperature above 120 degrees but any water hot enough for washing dishes in will do.  Make sure it's not boiling water though (212 degrees).

In goes the water.

In still goes the water . . .

Now mix it all up.  Not too fast or too much, just enough to make sure all the dry ingredients have met the wet ingredients.  Like a middle school dance or a speed dating event LOL no I have NOT been to a speed dating date thing.  Not yet at least . . . I may have to.  Who knew there were so few smart, nice, employed/educated, Catholic guys who like working out, Harry Potter, and don't drink themselves silly on the weekends!  And yes that does have everything to do with spelt bread because . . . well just because!

 This is what the mixture will look like.  Not very pretty but it's not done yet!

Now cover the bowl (I used the lid to the KitchenAid mixer bowl but if you are not using a KitchenAid, have lost the plastic top, or something else that prevents you from using the lid, just cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap or glad press and seal) and put it in a decently warm space.

While the yeast is eating all the sugar in the honey and getting bigger let us consider our olive oil jar.  Yes those are apples and berries and I think there are pears and other random ugly fruit on it too.  It matches nothing in our kitchen but we needed it.

You see, this gorgeous, hand-painted ceramic olive oil pourer came back with me from Italy and I love it.  Sadly it was not sold with a glass bottle.  Maybe Italians have a lot of glass bottles with the right sized openings to fit these toppers.  Well we American don't.  The only ones we have found that fit the blasted thing have horrendous apples on them, but we over look that small fact and focus instead of the beauty of the topper and smile :)

After about an hour of looking at our olive oil jar the covered mixer has doubled in size and has lots of bubbles.  It also smells yeasty.

Bubbles are a good thing!

Now time to add the remaining 3 cups of flour.  Just dump it right in the middle of the mixture.

I like to use a spoon to fold the flour in initially.

Then I put the dough hook on and let it go for about 5 minutes until the dough has pulled away from the sides of the bowl.  If you aren't using a mixer with a bread hook, just mix the flour into the wet mixture and dump it out onto a counter and knead it for five minutes.  You burn more calories that way too.

Big massive sticky blob.

Divide said blob in half and shape into logs.  Put the logs in two greased loaf pans .  (I floured the outside of my dough logs but you don't have to)

And cover the pans with a towel.  Now put the pans in a warm space (your oven may have a bread proofing setting or just put them in the sun by a window) and let them rise for at least an hour.

See how the towel has puffed up?  That means the dough has risen!  (that sounded religious lol)

It has risen and has filled up the pans.
Then you just stick it in a 350 degree oven for 25-30 minutes and it should come out looking awesome.

You can tap the top of the loaf and if it sounds hollow its done.  Or just look at it and if it's toasty it's just fine.  The greased pan helps the bread just pop out.  One of the things I enjoy most about this bread is that is has a mild flavor and it not the overpowering wheat taste!  So happy bread making :)