Baking Bread and Little House books

I have been reading The Little House Series with my children as part of our school this year. Wow, what an experience it has been. Right now, we are reading the Long Winter, and Laura Ingalls Wilder is describing the 7 blizzards that have hit their little town of DeSmet, ND. We have lost track of which blizzard has hit as of late, but one thing that has really hit home to us is that they have been living on nothing else than potatoes and brown bread for over a month. They don't have meat and they are running out of wheat berries to grind for bread. They only have a little sugar left to serve with their very weak tea and they are considering killing their cow, Ellen, and her calf to keep from starving to death.

Having grown up watching the Little House on the Prairie on TV I am realizing now how different the books really are. Stepping out of the dramatization of a weekly program all of which shows them hardly ever leaving Walnut Grove, I find myself completely drawn into their lives.

One of our assignments last week was to spend an evening without electricity. Dining by kerosene lantern (we do actually have one), and visiting and playing by candle light. I chose Valentine's Day to do this experiment - how romantic! I even fixed dinner by lantern to get the feel for what Caroline Ingalls had to do day in and day out. What a challenge it was trying to cook by that dim light. I am one that has to have all the lights in the kitchen on when I cook.

Our children loved dining by candlelight and Ariana (my oldest DD) asked if we could make this a yearly Valentine tradition, she loved it so much! I realized that I don't require as much electricity to live by and that I can save us some $$$ if I just did half of what we did that night. My dh is very pleased with that idea. ; ) Now we use the candles and turn out the lights more.

The other thing I have done more of with the Ingalls in mind, is to bake bread. I was taught by my own mom in 5th grade (the one year she homeschooled me) to bake. She taught me how to make it a business and I sold bread to our friends and neighbors. So, I decided to pick it up again (the baking part anyway). Only now I rely on my bread maker. Whenever I bake a loaf, it is gone so fast, I have to make another loaf. So today I made 3 loaves. It has been a great feeling of accomplishment. Here are the loaves on the right (the one on the left is made with different flour than the other two. The one in the middle I let rise too much, and my fav is the one on the right. Also, pictured here is my mom's homemade apple butter spread on one of the slices).