TJ Hirst

I slept late after the alarm sounded. The sun didn’t stream through my windows at 6 or 7 a.m. like usual. A steady rain awakened me an hour later, and the weather outside seemed like a a perfect day to sideline any schedule at all. The kids agreed, and we determined we would take the ultimate relaxer—a sweat’s day.

Now this might look like a Saturday in December but the sun doesn’t shine at 6 a.m. or 6 p.m. at that time of year in Minnesota. We are mid-way through summer break, and we’ve become a bit exhausted by the constant activity.

The rain gave us a slice of something else to do. We lounged through breakfast and the newspaper, took hot baths, curled up on the couch with my daughter to finish reading The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (a great book), and baked. While I strolled through my Google Reader a little slower than usual, my husband walked in the front door from his office and said to KH, “What’s up, ‘nut?”

“Mom and I are making raisin and cinnamon bread,” she said.

We sliced into the loaf for lunch before it even had a few minutes to sit. The steam rising from the thick chunks of bread seemed to be an anomaly on this summer day. Here’s my mother’s recipe:

Honey Wheat and Cinnamon Raisin Bread

3 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons yeast
1/3 cup oil
1/3 cup honey
2 ¼ cup hot water
3 cups white flour

Mix first three ingredients in a large mixing bowl and set aside. Measure next three ingredients into a medium bowl and stir until honey is well mixed in. Pour liquid mixture all at once into flour mixture. Stir with a heavy spoon until flour is all wet.

Add white flour 1 cup at a time, mixing in well after each cup. Mix last cup in with hands, kneading as you mix. When it is mixed in well enough that the dough begins to stick to your hands, rub the bottom of the bowl with shortening. Continue kneading just until mixed well and ball of dough is greased. Turn over in bowl and let rise until double in bulk, about 30 to 60 minutes.

Turn dough out on a smooth surface and knead until a smooth ball forms. Cut into two equal pieces. To form each piece into a loaf, use a rolling pin to flatten and expel air bubbles. Fold each side in—more at one end than the other. Roll small end toward wide end. Pick up and place in a well-greased standard-sized loaf pan. Cover with a towel and let rise just until even with the top of the pan, about 20-30 minutes. Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. When it is finished it will be golden brown and sound hard when you tap it.

For Cinnamon Raisin Bread: When you leave the dough to rise the first time, put 1 cup of raisins in a 2 cup measuring cup. Cover with very hot or boiling water. Allow these to sit while the bread rises; it will plump the raisins. Drain the liquid when you are ready to roll out the dough. After the dough doubles, cut into two pieces. Roll each piece into a rectangle. Sprinkle with a cinnamon and sugar mixture. Scatter raisins on top. Fold edges over and roll each rectangle up into a loaf. Follow instructions above for baking.

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.

Today is the day to report progress and results for the June Reading Challenge and the other Try It With Me Tuesday Challenges for the month. They included:

Read food labels this month to be more aware of servings size and nutritional value.

Write down everything you eat for one week.

Eat at least 5 fruits and vegetables per day for one week.

Did you try them with me? If so, leave a comment below about the one(s) you tried and tell me how it changed your eating habits. If you would like to write a post on your own website about what you did, you can include your link in the comments or send it to me, and I will publish it for you.

Read food labels this month to be more aware of serving size and nutritional value.

This part of the challenge educated me. I was in denial about how much and what I actually eat. My awareness prompted me to seek out new foods and foods I used to eat but gave up to accommodate family eating plans. Keeping an eye on nutrition facts also changed what I ate when eating out. During the week that I was on vacation I discovered smaller a la carte items like wraps with veggies to replace “the meal” or “basket” options on the menu. Ironically, reading toward better eating showed me that the foods I need most are those that are not pre-packaged with easy labels but whole foods that don’t come in a box.

Write down everything I eat for one week.

Keeping a food journal for one week and then recording my servings of fruits and vegetables the following week steered me toward proper serving sizes and amounts. Recording held me accountable to myself. I also identified the patterns of why I eat. For instance, the weekend days of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday needed a whole note page to themselves, rather than just the half pages for Monday-Thursday.

I must be a social eater. Peer influence, especially in a family, to change what you eat is tough. However, my children decided to modify our butter usage and change to Smart Balance. And I let everyone know that I am eating for me, now, and not for them. Consequently the important change I have made is to eat when I am hungry.

Eat at least 5 fruits and vegetables per day for one week.

I needed this “requirement” on myself to eat better foods, not just cut out junk foods, as the last challenge of the month. It was the one that most changed what I eat. It was easier because my children used the worksheets I printed from Dole’s website and tried this challenge with me.

We drastically changed what we ate, especially by choosing fruits and vegetables for our snacks over crackers or packaged snacks.

Thanks to a comment from my friend Alison about V8 Fusion, I started drinking V8 juice again, which I love, but stopped buying because no one drank it but me. My current afternoon snack is now a serving of V8 juice, which is an easy way to get 2 servings of vegetables.

Well, my goals this month have been mostly to receive a healthy education and motivation to eat better than ever. In the past I have reduced my food intake but never started with a shift in lifestyle thinking. That’s what I needed after fifteen years of shopping and cooking for the needs of a family. This has been about changing my meal-planning and shopping and cooking habits as much as anything. Fortunately, I do feel the support of my children and my husband and that’s going to make the biggest difference for me in long-term success.

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.

I sent my children to pick strawberries in Grandma’s garden while my mom and I cleaned the kitchen after dinner. They came back after only 15-20 minutes with just a handful of berries and said, “There weren’t very many there. They were either too ripe or not ripe enough.”

The next morning I took a turn picking strawberries. I worked from one end of the patch to the other, looking under leaves. I checked each plant. I checked each berry. With slow but deliberate effort, I picked a tub of strawberries from the patch they said had been all picked.

They must have expected to only pick strawberries whose appearance was uniformly perfect, like a grocery-store strawberry. Maybe, too, they did not know that each strawberry ripens at its own pace, making multiple pickings of the same patch essential.

KH came out, saw the fruit appearing from my diligent work and worked alongside me. The value of each strawberry grew in our eyes. She saw visions of berries atop pancakes with whipped cream. Now, the treat itself would mean more. Certainly, it would taste better.

For me came the realization of one of the pitfalls of our modern lifestyle. We are far removed from those who produce our goods and services. As a result, we come to expect more and better fruit for the same or lower cost without a recognition of the cost or value involved. In the case of strawberries this means cheaper labor from sources who will do the work we no longer want to do. In the end, we lose sight of that work’s value and the fruit it produces.

While our family is not going to move to my parent’s farm and produce all our own goods and services, the lesson that “whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap” reminds us of the true value not only of the fruit but the laborer as well.

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 am busy reading and writing toward better eating habits, even while I am away visiting at my parent’s family farm. How are you doing on the June Reading Challenge to be more aware of what and how much you eat?

Now that I recognize and record what I am eating, I need a little push to change what I eat. At lunch I read the serving size for baby carrots and realized I would need to eat 10 carrots. While that would only equal 40 calories, in my mind that was a lot of chewing. I put five on my plate. So, now, I introduce the third challenge in my healthy eating plan for June:

Eat at least 5 fruits and vegetables per day for one week.

This challenge is inspired by my children’s participation in the Dole 5 A Day Live show in Mrs. Vanvickle’s 3rd-grade class at Lowell Elementary School. Each of my three children starred in this eat your fruits and vegetables skit as Bobby Banana, a salad sister or an announcer. The catchy songs (we even sing them together at home) and presentation motivate me every time I see it to really try to eat my five fruits and vegetables.

You can listen to the Salad Sisters singing from the salad factory here.

Eating 5 to 9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day provides a variety of health benefits. Fruits and vegetable are rich in vitamin C, vitamin A, fiber and other nutrients and contain hundreds of phytochemicals. Along with physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight, eating 5 to 9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day promotes good health and reduces the risk of cancer, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.
Dole 5 A Day Facts

The Dole Food Company is a founding member of the National “5 A Day for Better Health Program” and its 5 A Day website has some great printable resources for families, including a 5 A Day Challenge Chart, which I am going to use to track my progress.

Do you want to Try It With Me?

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.

My Daily Question: Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us today?

When I ask this question of my children at the dinner table, sometimes they say, “I don’t have an answer.”

It is difficult to see how God has actually helped them in their life that day. They think of the good things that have happened, but when looking at the source of that good thing they may think, “Well that wasn’t a spiritual thing that happened, so it probably wasn’t Heavenly Father who helped in that.”

I, too, struggle to find blessings from God in just the temporal day-to-day living. However, an acquaintance at church taught me a lesson of gratitude.

This woman is a manager at the Pizza Hut where I took my daughters to dinner to redeem their Book It coupons. I actually didn’t want pizza, so I ordered the Boneless Buffalo Chicken Strips from the appetizer menu to be served with their dinner. When the server brought them, she acknowledged that the basket didn’t look as full as it should and that she requested another order that would be up soon. I appreciated her generosity and service and thanked her.

After finishing our dinner I paid at the cash register, spoke a bit to my friend from church who was working that night and I took the change back to our table for a tip. Happily, I encountered our server just passing the table at the same time. I looked directly at her and said, “Thank you.”

It wasn’t until my friend spoke at our church on Sunday about gratitude that I fully understood that the small blessing of a peaceful dinner came because a server quietly corrected a mistake. In her talk she said, “In the restaurant business, many do not say thank you anymore. They may say have a good day or something like that but do not express appreciation. When we thank other people we are thanking our Heavenly Father.”

Her phrase, “when we thank other people, we are thanking Heavenly Father” points to the source of all our blessings whether that connection is obvious or not. This experience reminded me that all good things come from God. Therefore, any answer to this daily question, by my children or myself, may include the seemingly routine efforts of others as blessings from God.