Hungry for a baked potato but not ready to heat the oven to make it?
A cost effect way to bake a potato in the heat of the summer is to use your crock pot.
Start by carefully washing each potato and pricking them with a knife. Then wrap each potato in aluminum foil. (This is important to direct the heat right to each spud.)
Then put the potatoes in your crock pot and cook it on high for 4-6 hours.
The potatoes will come out tender and delicious!
I love to do this on Sunday mornings. I’ll prepare the potatoes before church and let them cook all morning in one crock pot with a chicken or roast in another. When we get home from church, hungry and tired, lunch is ready without using the stove!
Our road was quite busy tonight with a parade of Amish buggies.
Since our nearest neighbors to the north and the south are Amish, a buggy sighting is nothing unusual. But to see this many in one evening, told us that one of the neighbors was having a work night for the young people.
A work night is a big social event in the community. The young people all gather at one of the homes. Then the girls help the lady of the house with whatever job she has (quilting, canning, snapping green beans) while the young men help the man of the house with something (digging fence posts, laying fence, a building project).
Then after they’ve worked awhile, they gather together and play volleyball and enjoy refreshments provided by the host family.
It is pretty late when they return home. We will often hear the buggies on the gravel as we lay in bed. But we don’t mind. It’s refreshing to know that these youth had an evening of service and good clean fun.
And we also wonder if there’s any courtin’ being done down there in the moonlight…
It’s time to turn the calendar page to August; the month of back-to-school sales, heat, humidity, and red ripe tomatoes!
I have the first of my crop lined on my counter waiting to be eaten. As the season progresses I’ll be picking and canning every other day or so.
There will tomatoes covering my counters, overflowing to the table, and piled in boxes.
Then I will pull out my stock pots and canners and replace the tomatoes with jars and jars of homemade spaghetti sauce, ketchup, and salsa.
But all that will come later, this is just the beginning. These first tomatoes are meant to be eaten fresh and enjoyed by palates who are tired of those tasteless ones from the store.
These first few will star in BLT’s and perk up lettuce salads. They will be cut up with peppers and onions into fresh salsa, chopped up and added to spaghetti, and eaten fresh right off the vine while the juice drips down our chins.
Yes, we’ll savor these first of the season tomatoes, forgetting for a moment all the work that they will soon bring!
At a recent Youth Group camping trip, my oldest children were quite impressed with the shoes one of their buddies was wearing.
At least, I think you could call them shoes.
He had taken a pair of ankle socks, turned them inside out and covered the inside with duct tape. Then he turned them right side out and covered the outside with duck tape.
He claims they are water proof and very comfortable, but did admit they didn’t work well on gravel. (It ripped up the tape.)
I’m afraid the mother in me thinks they don’t have much support or traction.
But, I will admit that I think they are pretty cool looking and will definitely attract attention.
And yes, I let my kids make a pair, too.
Why? Because around here we all know that,” Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver.”
Rural America.
To some it may seem isolated and lonely. The midwife who delivered my Angel Girl had to drive several miles on gravel and turn several times to find us.
Her comment was, “This may not be the end of the world, but I think I can see it from here!”
But what those people don’t see is the real community that exists in a rural area.
For example, I ran errands yesterday with my sister-in-law from Chicago.
We stopped at the REC to pay our bill and I was greeted by name. The same thing happened at the bank a few minutes later.
A stop at Dollar General included a chat with the check-out gal and our visit to local thrift store not only yielded us some great buys, but also visits with 2 neighbors.
Our last stop of the trip was the grocery store where not only did the check-out gal know me, she punched my card for my sister-in-law’s purchases (she figured we were related) and then offered to carry out our bags. That’s small town service at its best.
My sister-in-law was impressed.
I don’t blame her. It impressed us, too. We were so impressed that we moved here.
Now we’re planting our roots deep and doing all we can to keep the feeling of community alive.
What a heritage!
Hungry for a baked potato but not ready to heat the oven to make it?
