A dear young friend finds herself at a college which doesn’t feel quite right for her, much as she is working very, very hard to make the best of it. As she searches her heart and begins to consider the possibility of switching to another school, it occurred to her to ask the Angels for a sign.
Gotta love that Angel clarity!
Here is the requested recipe for Teddy’s Blueberry Buckle- There are a lot of great Teddy recipes and Teddy stories in the Cookbook.
Teddy was part of the farm from the beginning. When we broke ground for our farmhouse in 1987, Teddy helped us clean out the foundation hole. She was wearing persimmon colored cashmere because, even when you are shoveling out a big hole in the ground, you need to look GLAMOROUS!
Teddy was in the thick of everything at the farm for several decades. Her job in the office was to label all the bottles AND kept us all in yummy snacks. She did both with great panache!
Happy New Year one and all. Here at the farm we are bracing for Storm Hercules. Time will tell if this name was appropriate! Love and Blessings! Molly
It has been really fun to hear your feedback about the cookbook.
After the whirlwind of creating the cookbook, I had no perspective on what it would be like to see it for the first time or get acquainted with its recipes. Most everything in the cookbook is so familiar for me that I had no idea which recipes were going to call to you. I have been really interested in what you are telling me you have tried. For example, I love the beet soup recipe but didn’t expect it to be as popular as it has been. I expected everyone to gravitate to the dessert recipes but this hasn’t been the case- I do hope you go there at some point- The recipe for my mother-in-law Mary Ann’s Pecan Pie for example is so easy and scrumptious.
The only tricky part of making it this year was waiting for the sun to come out to take a photo of the unbaked pie waiting its turn for oven space.
Oven space was in short supply because Ben and I got a little ambitious with our dinner plans for the big family reunion dinner and did a Feast of the Seven Fishes. The oven and cooktop was log jammed for two days. Seviche, Gravalax, Herring Salad, Ben’s Crab Rangoon from the cookbook, Shrimp and sausage gumbo, baccala, and oysters were our seven fishes.
We are thinking maybe Feast of the Four Fishes next year….Seven is a lot of fishes! And the raw oysters shown here at the spread are shown very small as they are not terribly attractive unless a food stylist works on them (none on staff….so far though everyone is fighting over who gets to be the hand model).
Anyways, back to the pile up at the oven. We also needed to make a second pie, and Sour Cherry Pie was the choice. Luckily I had the recipe right in front of me.
This pie is Emily’s favorite pie. Note I have already spilled water on this page of the cookbook. Good thing I can locate another copy if things get dire and I light my copy on fire or pour hot molten maple syrup on it or something.
It was a good sour cherry season here at the farm so the freezer is full of pitted cherries. I defrosted some for the pie (Canned sour cherries work great with this recipe as I found out during bad cherry seasons).
Then I added the sugar, flour and almond extract,
and got Uncle Ben and Grace to grate some almond paste into the bottom of the crust ( This was my cooking mentor and dear friend Teddy’s trick for amping up the flavor of a pie).
After putting the cherries on top of the grated almond paste,
I checked in with Grace who really just wanted my iPhone,
dotted with butter,
put on a top crust, crimped the edges, cut vents and brushed with egg yolk then baked.
I must confess I failed to take any photos of the pies once they were cut into. I couldn’t see the pies over the sea of dishes left to wash after preparing the seven fishes, plus Grace was using my phone.
Sheba has been with us for almost a month. Life with this four pound bundle of mischief is an adventure. Here’s my first report on what I am learning.
When it comes to Flower Essences for Sheba, all I can say is thank goodness for spritzer bottles.
Sheba is a rescue puppy. She needs Flower Essences but doesn’t exactly sit in front of me and open her mouth like dear old MayMay and Riley learned to do. There is just no other way to get her Flower Essences to her other than spritzing over her as she races by. This is actually quite fun as I enjoy her little dance as the Flower Essence spray hits her fur. You know you love it Sheba!
A fifteen month old baby girl and a three month old puppy take mayhem to a whole new level. Sheba and Grace are quite the combination. They think as one. If I turn to see what on earth Sheba is chewing, Grace will dump over a 25# bag of bird seed and begin to spread it all over the kitchen floor. The quieter these two get, the bigger the mess. When both of them are not in the same area, I have to chose my target priority and Grace always wins. Sorry about that Miguel. They were nice shoes before Sheba got a hold of them but Grace heading for the flour bin had my full attention.
Here they are trying to break out of their controlled environment to join Reina in a romp for the ages. Sometimes they work the perimeter like the raptors in Jurassic Park.
Puppies like yarn as much as kittens and frankly they do a lot more damage than kittens AND a lot faster. This is the before picture. I will spare you the after one.
There was a reason people suggested that getting a puppy in winter was not the best idea. Think 5 am trips outside when it is 20 below and dark! Really dark! On the bright side, I have been seeing a lot of the moon.
As so many of you told me, terriers have a lot of personality and I love it.
No regrets.
Well maybe some regrets if you are Ben and it is your sweater with the strange holes.
It has long puzzled me that the people who work the hardest to be a healing force on the planet are also the ones who get slammed first by the rising vibrational energies of the planet. Somehow I have never been able to quite wrap my head around the fact that those who try to be the most loving actually feel the rising vibrations before people who aren’t so occupied with trying to be their most loving selves.
Finally a healer friend shared an image that helped me understand the why of this. Caretakers, healers and those involved in trying to be their loving best are like the head geese in a formation as the formation flies into new territory.
Situated at the head of the formation the head geese shelter others and take the brunt of the headwinds. Like head geese, caretakers take the biggest battering from any shift in energies as they literally push into new territory first so it is not so hard for others to follow.
There has been a big amp up of energies on the planet in November and now December. This means caretaker head geese are feeling both tired and perhaps a bit perplexed by the radical contrast between the old energies and the new energies we have all flown smack into.
There is something incredibly exhilarating and alive about this new energy we’ve all flown into, but it doesn’t always feel great. At least , not yet.
This new energy can feel very disorienting. All activities not grounded in selfless love feel lifeless, while on the flip side, when we are in our hearts and acting from this place of love, everything feels radiant and amazing. But it is a challenge to stay in that love place. We need to be gentle with ourselves when we slip into the disorienting zombie place of old dead illusionary and habitual preoccupations.
Let’s face it, this flight into spiritual freedom is probably going to happen in a messy, bumpy way. We are all used to slipping back and forth from heart felt love to ego activities without feeling such an enormous difference in the two states. One always was a state of sleep/illusion and one was always a state of awakeness/love/reality but NOW it suddenly feels that way. There is just no confusing the two states of being. But the thing is, its disorienting to suddenly experience this divide so clearly.
Per usual, a big wave of interest in the same Flower Essences by all of you underscored our own sense of this dramatic transition. It reminds us that there are a lot of us trying to creatively and lovingly make sense of this new terrain.
The rise in vibration has been quite alarming to many and never before have we sent out so much Red Clover to help people stay calm and not panic. Understandably, if habitual activities and pursuits suddenly feel completely dead to us as in ZOMBIE DEAD, it’s a strange new world.
Fortunately, everything is solved by the same activity- centering in our hearts and living and loving from that place- and not only are there are Flower Essences that support us to go there, ALL CREATION supports us to make this leap because our planetary home is now holding this higher vibration.
Our Venus Garden Flower Essence combination for this season, Love It and Leave It was created by the Angels and Elementals before we knew we would need this support, and I appreciate the grace of this. We must really let go of all that was and embrace what is.
The Angels’ Flower Essence creations for 2013 are just one of many reminders that we are not alone as we deal with this bewildering if amazing territory. We have wise helpers and each other. And the particular helpers from the Angelic and Elemental realms remind us that being a force of love is our only way forward and show us the way through such models as the Flower Essences.
Love is the only real thing and in this brave new world, it is definitely feels that way!