Category: Our Sustainable Home

This March, we are once again reviewing our pantry and foods, writing out more weekly staple recipes, and replacing anything that is not homemade with fresh cooks and bakes like our breads, pasta, and savoury crackers.  We eat mostly fresh vegetables, but these other grain-based foods are not only healthier when handmade, but they taste amazing.  This also means there is less to buy and less to recycle.  We used to make mostly everything, but during renovations, and when we were building our new kitchen, we had to buy a few things.  Now, we’re back to adoring our aprons and stirring up some weekly delights.  My upcoming cookbook (vegan, organic, sugar-free) is growing, with a few new recipes being added in this spring.  It feels good to grow and make our own food, to know what we’re consuming, and to teach our family how to be sustainable and healthy.  We also lessen the concern about germs coming home from the store this way.  Cooking is a way of life, and I’ve always connected to it.  You don’t have to take a class.  Just try things.  You’ll get it.  And then…enjoy!

Tonight’s little dinner is a sumptuous pasta of fennel, peas, garlic, beans, lemon, and fresh noodles.  The dough is like tender dumplings, and it hardly takes a moment to do.  The process is fun and soothing, especially after a long day of testing various types of artwork on the new printer…  I am very particular about colour matching.  Why paint something with beautiful colours just to have it be so very far from the original?  My eyes/brain sense colours well.  I only wish printers did, too.  I’ll make sure the prints are accurate before releasing my newest collections.

New Spring Nursery Baby Animal Art Prints are coming up!  The book illustrations are featured in my upcoming Green Witch Children’s Book.  They’re very sweet and come in neutral natural colours to suit any nursery design.

Little cooks love to name their very own noodle styles, reminiscent of how each region and family in l’Italia name their pasta.  This one is like a shorter twisted pappardelle, which we did cut the dough with that special rolling pin.  It’s fun to collect all the different pasta tools.  I’ll show a pasta here soon, made with a pasta machine.  We also like to make ravioli.

Every week, I make bread and biscuits.  It is a meditation.  The house is scented in love.  Fresh bread and soup are simple earth-connecting sense memories.  We love to keep our food tasting how it was grown.  Carrots taste carrots.  Soon, we’ll be in our gardens, growing up fresh herbs, veg, fruit, and flowers.  I very much look forward to sensing the pollinators again.  Those sweet bees…

I may do part of my film-plan to share cooking lessons again.  I’ll post about that growing project later on when I have more time.  This month is all about editing books and releasing very patient collections…ones that have been waiting on my desk for me to catch up with them.  My unique wax seal stickers release this week!  Wishing you a peaceful day, ~Love, Amor Milagre

Music of the Moment:  I’ll be on the Water, Akron Family

My husband found my old ipod in a box and I’ve been enjoying my old mixes, though my poor ears and scalp aren’t used to wearing headphones anymore…ow.  We’ve been very quiet this past decade as baby cries, house building/renovations, and neighbour pollution are painfully overwhelming to the senses, especially with hyperacusis, high sensitivity, PTSD, and blinding/deafening migraines.  It is a violent harmful act to inflict inescapable sound and vibration pollution on others.  Listen to music so that only you can hear it, inside or with headphones.   I moved away from unkind loud houses and cities in search of quiet nature, only to have our neighbours smoke endless poisonous fogs and blast a wall of unending sound/vibration pollution of their music most of the year.  No, this crazy town won’t help to prevent this.  Why?  I don’t know, as all of this inconsiderate maliciousness was illegal only a few years ago.  Prevent suffering and illness with empathy.  Our family has directly developed serious health conditions from these terrible neighbours’ actions.  It’s most upsetting.  It is not easy to deal with and puts us in danger.  We don’t need more illness.  This was supposed to be our healing time.  So, in your life, be aware of how you affect others.  How do your choices even affect your own Self?  We are all connected.

Now, we’re making a few small ‘peeps’ here and there, even listening to music on low, out loud in the house, and singing along.  I’ve missed listening to music whenever I want.  I suppose I’ve been listening to it in my head all these years and it comes out in humming lullabies.  Our homeschool music lessons and exercise routines have always been fun times to learn new songs, but it’s a fraction of what my past musical life used to occupy.  We are hoping to find a family piano soon.  I had to sell my instruments years ago for rent.  We do have little harps and drums for school here, but I miss the bigger stringed echoes on my heart.  I used to write songs and play, privately.  I grew up in a place where music was taken too seriously, but simultaneously in a non-serious ridiculous way.  It wasn’t a free space for expression, only for criticism.  My little family now is naturally musical, and I encourage all the sweet notes to be enjoyed each day.  I remember every note and lyric to every song I’ve ever heard.  I’d like music to be mine again, a joy.  Singing helps me to breathe.   It’s a connection with the soul.  The memory is astounding.  I teared up at some nostalgic bus ride playlists…music was always my best friend.  You can always count on music to suit any mood.  It’s fun to revisit.  A lot of the songs were so very 90’s, like Fountains of Wayne, I looked down expecting to see a striped shirt under overalls, a mood ring, and to look up to see an old TV playing Pete & Pete.  It’s amazing how music is a time travelling portal.  I skipped over a lot of the albums on purpose.  It’s also a bit difficult when music can hold so much emotion.

Which songs do you light up from when those first familiar notes strum in your brain?  I hope they’re good memories for you, Darlings.  You choose everything!  Listen to what you like now.  I wish I had explored even more types of music when younger, and didn’t just absorb what was around me.  The genres I love now would have definitely been more uplifting than what was playing then.  My favourite blast from the past today was an old bluesy jazz song…one that went on and on in the best way…so full of life…and I had recorded it off of a staticy myspace speaker, yes… and now I’ll get to listen to all sorts of wonderful songs to find who made it.