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The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 7,200 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—10,226 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane 

For this week’s Farm Kitchen/Icing on the Cake Expert Level Young Cultivator Merit Badge, Nora, Piper, Andy, and the Hostess with the Mostess (that’s me) all joined forces.

For the good of cake.

Yum.

Now, we had all gone through rigorous training to bring us to this day. After all, we had baked our way to success (and one or two failures) through the Beginner and Intermediate Level Badges, and so thusly, henceforth, and so on and so forth, forever and ever, amen, we were set.

(My waistline? A whole ‘nother kettle of fish.)

We had made our homemade, from-scratch cakes earlier and then we read through the badge requirements for this, our final cake badge: woe was us … we were supposed to decorate the said cakes and take photos.

Umm, hello? Those cakes had been digested in our tummies for a while now.

So, we did the next best thing, considering the holidays were upon us …

Andy, Nora, Piper, and Jane’s Gingerbread/Pretzel Houses

Supplies suggested:

• pretzel rods/sticks (Lots and lots. As the age-old saying goes, one for the house, one for my belly.)

• gumdrops (You can buy organic candy here. They even have kosher gummy cubs!)

• red-hots

• licorice ropes

• chocolate rocks

• coconut

• icing for piping

• “cement” for glue

• graham crackers

Now, depending on whether you want to eat your creation or just stare lovingly at it all season long, you will want to choose your ingredients accordingly. Piper and I were more about the architecture of the thing and we had our own snack stash nearby, so we skipped the homemade icings and used hot glue. Shh. Don’t tell. Andy and Nora, on the other hand, were all about noshing on their houses like Hansel and Gretel, and so we made sure they got their hands on most of the good-for-you organic treats, and homemade “cement.”

“Cement” for gluing houses together:

Beat 4 egg whites with 1 t cream of tartar till stiff. Gradually add 4 cups powdered sugar (I said, gradually, Andy!) and beat five minutes. Will harden quickly, so keep a towel or plastic wrap on it when not using.

The pretzel sticks/rods are adorbs for making log cabins. Coconut can be edible snow, or can be tinted with green food coloring to make grass. You can also use half-and-half, pint-sized or half-gallon-sized, empty containers for your house frames. Paint, or decoupage, and then add your candy décor. Rock chocolates make excellent chimneys.

photo by Jeff Markham via Wikimedia Commons

We had ourselves a little Christmas village when we were done. Were they cakes necessarily? In the purest sense of the word? Cakes, per se? Okay, maybe not precisely … but what is cake but something that brings people together in the kitchen? And that we did, me and my elves. And I’d say, it was joyful and triumphant.

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Welcome New Sisters! (click for current roster)

Merit Badge Awardees (click for latest awards)

My featured Merit Badge Awardee of the Week is … Becky Gilson!!!

Becky Gilson (Bearprairiechick, #6695) has received a certificate of achievement in Garden Gate for earning a Beginner Level Gaining Ground Merit Badge!

“I read worms eat garbage. I found a worm factory on craigslist and keep it in the kitchen. I also started a compost bin for the garden.

I started with worms I found in the yard, and they are thriving and multiplying in their new home. The compost is coming along nicely, and I plan to purchase bulk worms for it from our local supplier this spring.”

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The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 7,200 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—10,226 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane 

The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 7,200 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—10,226 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane 

For this week’s Farm Kitchen/Food Allergy Awareness Intermediate Level Merit Badge, I tackled my newfound knowledge of that lowly, insidious issue of food allergies, and wrestled it into the kitchen.

That’s right. What good is knowing things if you aren’t part of the solution, am I right? Of course I am.

I set about rewriting three family recipes with a food allergic person in mind. What if, for example, you have a loved one coming over for Thanksgiving dinner and they are gluten free? How will you serve that oh-so important and not to be neglected Turkey Day staple, the stuffing? Or, say your uncle has a craving for a slow-roasted ham, but can’t tolerate any form of sugar in the glaze? (And who doesn’t? Have a craving for slow-roasted ham, that is. I mean, come on. The day I don’t have a slow-roasted ham craving is the day you know to bury me six feet under.) I mean, it’s a pickle really.

Don’t get me started on pickle allergies. If there is such a thing then I declare, this is a world I cannot be a part of.

Anyway. I had no such uncle, nor any gluten-free friends at the moment, so I took a different approach: I pretended.

That’s me, Jane, the Great Pretender. I pretended I was allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, and dairy.

But, Janey, you’re saying, peanuts are a nut, you, you NUT! Nope, peanuts are a legume, thank you very much. You can be quite allergic to tree nuts and not to peanuts, and the other way ‘round.

photo by jules / stonesoup via Wikimedia Commons

Cue the melodious strains of a back-to-school special … the more you know …

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that it wouldn’t be that hard to avoid nuts (or legumes), especially if you’re doing your own cooking, but you’d be wrong. Or at least, wrongish. I reached for a bottle of Asian salad dressing as a marinade for my chicken (I was making lettuce wraps) and belatedly read the ingredients. Yep, you guessed it, peanut oil.

I was glad I hadn’t picked soy as one of my food allergy ingredients to avoid because then I really would have been up a creek without a paddle. I try to avoid soy anyway, but boy do they ever put it in everything (it’s nearly as everywhere as gluten is). My chicken lettuce wraps turned out okay, but they were missing the crunch of a few sprinkled nuts, I must say. I tossed some corn nuts in as a replacement (they were … weird).

Next, I whipped up a batch of my world-famous Everything But the Kitchen Sink Cookies, but with variations. I had to take out all the nuts once again (grr!) and not only that, but I had to remove the dairy as well.

Wait, is butter a dairy?

photo by Armmark via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t wanna do this anymore …

I substituted coconut oil and applesauce for the butter (if you’re going to tell me coconut is a nut, I’m going to have to slap you with a cookie), and replaced the nuts with some dried fruits and some extra oats for texture.

They were pretty tasty, although I will probably have to rename them Everything But the Kitchen Sink and Not To Mention Nuts and Butter Cookies. Which makes it a little hard to file in my recipe box, but no matter.

The third recipe I revamped was a fruit smoothie. I thought it’d be easy, until I realized I couldn’t replace the cow’s milk with almond milk, because … nuts! And I couldn’t replace the almond milk with cow’s milk, because … dairy.

So I threw some strawberries in a blender and added some tequila and called it a day.

Welcome New Sisters! (click for current roster)

Merit Badge Awardees (click for latest awards)

My featured Merit Badge Awardee of the Week is … Rebecca Alvarez!!!

Rebecca Alvarez (TinyChinaCows, #7224) has received a certificate of achievement in Outpost for earning a Beginner Level Speak for the Trees Merit Badge!

“I’ve had this National Geographic Field Guide to the Trees of North America on my bookshelf for a while, so when I read the requirements for the “Speak for the Trees” badge, I snatched the book from the shelf and headed outside. I live in an apartment complex, but we have many different trees that need identifying! I identified the three required for this badge, but I’m certainly going be taking more tree-finding walks while the weather is nice!

I had lots of fun identifying our trees! The first one outside my building has peeling bark that looks like it’s been painted in watercolors and tosses these fuzzy spheres at us every year. It’s an American Sycamore, native to the Eastern U.S. (I took a photo, included below.) Another nearby tree turned out to be a Crepe Myrtle. It showers the sidewalk with flowers every year and is native to Japan and China.

Finally, it turns out that we actually have two different species of oak trees pelting us with acorns lately. One is Live Oak, native to our area and festooned with Spanish Moss. The other seems to be a Laurel Oak, which, according to my book, is a hybrid and is frequently used in Florida landscapes. On my next walk, I’m going to try to identify some of the palm trees we have around here.”

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The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 7,200 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—10,226 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane 

For this week’s Each Other/Big Kid Now Beginner Level Young Cultivator Merit Badge, I wrangled Piper, Andy, and Nora to earn their badges together. Birds of a feather flock together like peas in a pod. Or something to that effect.

Anyway, this badge was all about daydreaming towards the future and answering the ever immortal and infamous question that the under-18 crowd gets asked twenty-eleven times in their short life spans:

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Buzz Aldrin walks on the moon, July 20, 1969, via Wikimedia Commons

Now, this seemingly innocuous query can cause panic, anxiety, and hives in young adults of the teenage variety (and some of the just-graduated college age group as well), but these particular whippersnappers found it intriguing.

Especially when I assured them that the sky was the limit (after all, who doesn’t want to be an astronaut?).

It really got their gray matter working overtime. Piper was coming up with career notions as fast as she could write them down with her trusty hot-pink quill pen, Nora firmly stuck to her #1 choice, but Andy was … well, surprisingly thoughtful.

I mean, you could have knocked me over with Pipe’s hot-pink quill pen. He was really stewing and brewing and weighing his options. It was like he was … was … thinking. Anyone who knows and loves a preteen boy knows this is rare indeed: like seeing a unicorn on your way to the market or something.

I say this in love.

But ‘tis true.

Then he *gasp* wanted to go the library to research his Top Ten Career Paths. I couldn’t say no to that request. (Though I was still filled with apprehension after our last trip there. Would there be a photo of me with a red line crossed through? Would I be banned for shouting, spilling my coffee, and losing half the children I had arrived with? It’s not easy being Auntie, I tell you.)

photo by Wpcpey via Wikimedia Commons

We set off like a herd of turtles and made our way to the Non-Fiction Kid’s Section—where none of us had actually been before. It was a whole new world there, chickadees! I always thought Non-Fiction was a bit on the borrrrrring side myself, but once again, I have changed my wicked ways.

I settled down with a biography of Julia Child while the three ankle-biters perused. Each of us had brought our own reusable shopping bag, both for ease of transport and also to cut down on the squabbling. Well, actually Nora brought a suitcase on wheels, but the librarian didn’t even bat an eye. Sometimes I think librarians have seen things that would make a lesser gal squirm in shock. They’re like the unsung heroes and ninjas of the literature world. Also, if the zombie apocalypse happens, I’m heading to the library, post haste.

The book about Julia was making me super hungry. I was having a hard time focusing on our assignment, but luckily the kids were doing well. The Non-Fiction section was pretty picked over by the time we were done with it and I kinda hoped there weren’t any other Young Cultivators eager to earn this specific badge today (or in the next two weeks, since that’s how long we had our books for).

On our way home, we had to drive-through for tacos because … well, Julia.

Want to see what the trio of intrepid daydreamers checked out?

Stay tuned!

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Welcome New Sisters! (click for current roster)

Merit Badge Awardees (click for latest awards)

My featured Merit Badge Awardee of the Week is … Brenda White!!!

Brenda White (#6769) has received a certificate of achievement in Each Other for earning a Beginner Level Languages/Culture Merit Badge!

“My daughter who is now 29, was diagnosed at 20 months with a severe to profound hearing loss. She started wearing hearing aids at 2 years of age. I have learned a lot about deaf culture and sign language. My daughter was raised in a educational setting called total communication. She reads lips (which isn’t taught but is something she just can do), signs, and speaks. My family started learning sign language when our daughter was about 2 1/2 years old.

My education has turned out well! She now lives in Washington D.C. and is a chef. We Facetime often using sign and speaking. I communicate well with her deaf friends and have been accepted into their community.”

The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 7,130 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—10,150 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane 

Wondering who I am? I’m Merit Badge Awardee Jane (MBA Jane for short). In my former life…

For this week’s Out There Kids/Whistle While You Work Beginner Level Young Cultivator Merit Badge, I took little Piper by the hand and off we went to frolic merrily in the field behind my house.

When was the last time you frolicked, my peeps? A day, a week, a year, or ten years? I heartily recommend a little frolicking at least once a month. It’s good for the soul, the legs, and you can soak up some Vitamin D. It’s a win-win, that frolicking.

Woman in a Meadow by Grace Hudson via Wikimedia Commons

Anyway, where was I? Right: in a field with an exuberant small fry. We weren’t here just for the pasture time, no, we were here for something serious. Something badge earning. Something I call Grass Whistling.

Never heard of it? Well, I’m hardly surprised, you anti-frolicker, you.

The glorious squawk of a grass whistle is one of the most giggle-icious sounds you’ll ever hear in the great outdoors, and anyone who can pick a blade of grass can. do. it.

Here’s how:

1. Pick a thick piece of grass that’s about 6-8” long.
2. Pinch the grass with the thumb and index finger of the left hand.
3. Keeping the grass smooth and tight, press the right thumb against the left.
4. There will be a little hole between your thumbs that is divided by the grass blade.
5. Press your lips against the hole, blow good and hard, and get ready for giggles. You’ll be amazed how loud you can honk!

I know, I had you at ‘giggle-icious,’ am I right?

We got to honking so loudly, a flock of geese stopped by and invited us to Canada. Of course we had to decline; we were having too much fun.

photo by Laslovarga via Wikimedia Commons

It took some practice, of course, and Piper got the hang of it before I did, naturally, but we became so good we thought about starting our own two-person band. We already had Emmaline, the Bovine Princess, thoughtfully staring at us as she chewed her cud, so we were pretty sure we could drum up a respectable audience (even if half of them were barnyard animals and honking fowl).

Not only is grass whistling good for keeping you young at heart and on tune, but it’s a handy-dandy trick to know at boring parties, or when you’re waiting for your little brother to end his soccer match, or just when Mom tells you to go outside and play and your bike tire is flat. It’ll gain you friends and influence people. Okay, maybe that last one was a bit of an exaggeration, but still. It’s a life skill, chickadees.

Quite frankly, it’s right up there with frolicking.

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