TJ Hirst

Enjoying the last days of summer vacation.
Be back tomorrow.

Filed in Everyday Lite

The first time I made my mom’s traditional crumb coffeecake, my husband did an impersonation of the Swedish chef and called it “Ka Hoo Fee Cake.” We don’t drink coffee, so the name stuck, and our kids can’t say it any other way. When I was growing up, this cake was a special birthday breakfast cake we often ordered from Mom’s kitchen. Whatever we call it—mom’s coffee cake, breakfast cake, crumb cake or “Ka Hoo Fee Cake”, it’s worth it whenever we get to indulge in this food memory on Saturday mornings. We can never wait long enough for it to cool.

Cinnamon Crumb Coffeecake

½ cup shortening
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 cup milk

Topping:

8 tablespoons sugar
8 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons cinnamon
6 tablespoons butter or margarine

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a large jelly-roll pan with shortening or non-stick spray. Make the topping first by combining the sugar, flour and cinnamon in a small bowl. Cut the butter or margarine into large chunks and cut into the cinnamon mixture with a pastry cutter until it resembles coarse crumbs. Set aside.

Cream shortening and sugar in an electric mixer. Add eggs and beat. Measure dry ingredients in a separate bowl and whisk to combine. Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture, alternating with the milk, until all has been combined. Beat well. Evenly spread batter in the pan. Sprinkle the topping over the batter.

Bake for 15-20 minutes. Cool slightly and serve.

Filed in Recipes

The Questions: Have I Seen the Hand of God Reaching Out to Touch Us Today?

For all my grumbling lately about being overwhelmed with busy extras, I have failed to recognize some of the important ways my family works together to make our house a well-ordered home.

This week, in particular, I noticed that help. On Monday night they agreed to forego playing a family game to gather camping gear for this week’s trip. My youngest daughter and son worked with me, and we organized the tents and sleeping bags.

Nh’s scout camp experience reminded me to “be prepared” with essentials like rope and a lantern with fresh batteries. Kh’s attention to detail encouraged me to put together a container of dish-washing essentials like dish soap, paper towels, scrub brush, drying towel and dishcloth in a dish pan with a lid while she made a similar bucket for hand washing.

While we did that, Paul and our oldest daughter worked to fix her broken bicycle. When we camp, we choose a site near one of the many bike trails in Minnesota’s trail system. Eh’s bike gears haven’t worked all summer, and that meant the whole family couldn’t go on a family ride. But in a matter of an hour or two, Paul fixed the gears and her flat tire, saving the time and money of a visit to the bike shop. I know he is pretty handy at the technical stuff, but this was an unexpected bonus blessing.

And now, we’re all happy campers.

Filed in The Question

Read Part I here.

Some of the best gardening advice I’ve ever received is to locate a garden close to the places you go most often. You will step into it more frequently and attend to the little needs. Having a roof-top garden just outside our second floor living area makes gardening a part of my everyday summer routine. When I sit on the bench in the mornings, I notice and nurture. During the day, I can’t stay away. Even now, my hands smell of cilantro as I type on my keyboard from the two-minute stop out the door to pinch off the tops before they flower.

Our roof deck garden grew over time after architectural planning and construction. When we moved into our new home in June 2005, harvesting seemed a long way off and the only hint of a garden I had beyond the black layers of the roof-scape system were miniature roses in a pot.

Landscape Planning The process of transforming the roof deck into a roof garden began with landscape planning. We wanted an annual vegetable garden in raised beds with grass surrounding them and a small patio. We decided not to plant perennials on the roof deck since we weren’t sure how the warmth from the heated garage below would impact perennial plants.

We sketched different ideas on a scaled drawing of the roof deck. Then, a friend suggested an H-shape for the raised beds, reflecting the first letter of our last name. That design idea worked well for us and we began planning around an H-shape.

Building Raised Beds Since my husband had served as the general contractor for our house construction, months after we moved in, many extra materials still sat on the site. These included three partial pallets of sand-colored concrete block sitting on the edge of the cul-de-sac that needed to be moved.

I’m a believer in using what you have first and figured these would be a good material to construct the raised beds, which we would build first.

The reality of moving a couple of hundred concrete blocks from the street in front of our house to the second floor above our garage exhausted us, but we did it.

We thought we could make a pulley system and lift them up one or two at a time. In theory we could probably have done it, but it turned out to be much quicker for the whole family to haul them up the inside stairs one, two or three at a time. Once all the blocks made it to the roof, we loose laid or dry stacked them two deep in the shape of an H.

Dumping the Dirt We hired a landscape company to find a source for the soil we wanted and to help devise a system to deliver it to the roof. We used a mixture of top soil and vermiculite, to reduce the weight of the soil. The landscapers rented a piece of equipment with a conveyor belt that raised to a slant from the ground to the roof. They shoveled the soil onto the conveyor and dumped it at the top where they used a wheel barrow to move the dirt around and fill in the raised beds.

The depth of the soil is 14-16 inches deep in the raised beds and varies from 3-8 inches where we planted grass. We filled a portion with sand and laid patio pavers on top of that.

Planting the Roof We finished landscaping the roof garden in September and planted grass seed that month. It came up nicely right away. The first two years the grass struggled during dry spells, even with water. But now that the root system is established, the grass is flourishing around the raised beds, and it makes a soft carpet for bare feet walking.

We planted annual vegetables the first spring and enjoyed a harvest of zucchini, tomatoes, carrots, peas, peppers, cucumbers and lettuce. We’ve experimented with other vegetables and annual flowers since. Corn takes too much space to grow very well, and we resist planting potatoes because we worry that there won’t be enough depth. However, gardening on our roof now feels as natural as our yard garden did.

It may have started out as an architectural novelty or a gardening experiment, but now it serves us well without serving all our produce to the animals. And my husband, Paul, can pitch the idea to his clients that come to his architecture firm and they trust him because he’s done it.

Beyond its functionality, the space feels like our own private enclosed garden raised a couple of levels above the concerns of everyday life.

Filed in Stories

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

“I don’t want to tell you again to leave your sister alone,” I yelled down the stairs.

“OKKKK. . . .” my son said.

Does this sound familiar at anyone else’s house? For some lucky souls, school starts this week or next; we have two more weeks to go. I thought I’d lose my mind when I tried to comprehend all that we have piled into those two weeks.

In addition to all the last minute doctor appointments, schedule pick-ups, open houses, meetings with teachers, band camp, we still need to buy school supplies and school clothes, and we’re going to try to squeeze in a much-needed family camping trip. Shopping for school supplies is on the schedule for today.

When I woke up yesterday I just want to sit down to the computer and write a thoughtful post for Try-It-With-Me-Tuesday challenging myself to spend some quality time with my children. In actuality, I really wanted to escape and spend some quality time alone.

Instead, I did my motherly duty and I ignored my computer and my desk and my “me time” and went to check on my kids’ assignment to clean out their individual cabinets and organize their desks. What I saw seemed hazardous, but I held on and suggested I could work with them. Then, they knew what that would mean.

We spent most of the morning cleaning, tossing and reorganizing. We emptied every cabinet and reassigned each child a new cabinet, plus one for me and one for supplies.

I’d avoided this project all summer. Ironically, now, the more we did, the more energy I felt to tackle the other projects that would domino from this one. The final result impressed all of us. Now, if we can just keep it that way until school begins.

Back to school is my new year. Is it that way for you? What do you plan to organize?

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

Filed in Try-It-With-Me Tuesday