New e-book for sale - St Patrick's Day

Announcing my latest e-book 'A Cherished Hearts St Patrick's Day'

As I said in the last e book release I am hoping to do a number of these books to share with you all.
I know this is on the eve of St Patrick's Day and am sorry to drop it at the last minute but life circumstance forced my hand.

Any way in this book - "A Cherished Hearts St Patrick's Day" it continues with some of the same content as the last one along with  a host of new activities.
'A Cherished Hearts St Patrick's Day'  contains over 90 pages of content: including crafts- of which some are edible, recipes, A St Patrick Snakes and Ladders Game, mazes to solve, pictures to colour and information not only on St Patrick but some information about Ireland and it's heritage.

The book has all original content and is still only $14.99 AUD for over 90 pages of printable information.

 

 Blessings to you and your homes,
 

St Patrick Celebration 2016

 Favourite Feast Days are important don't you think?
St Patrick is a special day in our home and we love to celebrate with food, books and activities.
I love to set up  with our various bits and pieces for our Feast Days

Everyone loves pancakes right?
So what could be better on St Patrick's Day than green tinted  pancakes in a shamrock shape?

 After breakfast we set up the table for our learning for the day.

 I usually set out the books we are going to read for the day along with any printed out work, craft activities and painting.
When we set up for Feast Day I usually sit up one end and the children work around the table and work while I read them the books.

 As usual  I had the various colouring pages ready to go and we love to keep them as records of what we covered.

 My little workers !

Our collection of St Patrick books for the day.

 The Leprechaun  cake has been a bit of a tradition for a while now and the little kids are especially keen each year to be the first ones to taste it. 

The fruit rainbow for lunch was gone in a flash along with the Leprechaun cake. So a little healthy along with a little sweety was a good mix. We totally forgot the shamrock cheesy muffins for lunch too so we had them the next day.

 So how does that look for a lunch?

 After lunch the younger ones wanted to do a 'play' and Trahaearn was the first to get dressed up and start work on his 'shoe business'

 So here are our little  play actors before the play.

 Our Soaked Irish Soda Bread is always a huge hit -sadly only one piece each

After Dinner which naturally is Irish Stew (recipe in this post) we had the Chocolate THM Muffins with Mint Frosting for sweets before starting to  watch Darby O'Gill before bed.

May the Strength of God pilot us. 

May the Power of God preserve us.

May the Wisdom of God instruct us.

May the Hand of God protect us.

May the Way of God direct us.

May the Shield of God defend us.

May the Host of God guard us.

Against the snares of the evil ones.

Against temptations of the world 

May Christ be with us!

May Christ be before us!

May Christ be in us,

Christ be over all!

May Thy Salvation, Lord,

Always be ours,

This day, O Lord, and evermore. Amen.

Blessings to you and your homes
 

St Patrick Day 2015

One of the biggest celebrations during Lent is of course St Patrick and as usual we covered those three main aspects of a celebration in our home for this favourite feast day-
1. Food
2. Decorating and
3. Colouring and word searches while reading books about the particular feast day. 
At breakfast time instead of our usual 'table time' activities we read about the life of St Patrick from various sources including the book Tales of Irish Saints, 
After jobs were done we reconvened at the kitchen table to read our various picture books, even though I could not find one of our favourites Jamie O'Rourke  and the Big Potato, we did read our books that are tradition on this day.

Our favourites are St Patrick's Day in the Morning and the sense of tradition and family in The St Patrick's Day Shillelagh is very heart wrenching (well for me anyway)
We set up our St Patrick display on the buffet and hutch and even found a small snake for St Patrick this year :)

Our food consisted of Corned beef and Cabbage, mashed potatoes, carrots, beans and peas.
Soaked Irish Soda Bread and for sweets this year we made a Leprechaun Hill Chocolate Cake with a couple of cute little Leprechaun's and their treasure outside it.
Vellvin had been working on a Sprouted Wheat Chocolate Peppermint Oreo but we ran our of time for that little goodie and had them the next day instead.
Lunch had been our Shamrock breads with cucumber and 'prickles' (Trahaearn's word for pickle) placed in shamrock shapes on top of buttered bread (a big no no for us really)

Moran and Myffwyn had to run out to Girl's Brigade and Stephen and the older ones had plans to go out to (which didn't quite work out) so we didn't actually sit down to eat together for this celebration.
This was something that was quite new for us where we were not all together for a special celebration and it lost a little something in the process.

Any way a belated St Patrick's Day to you all!

Blessings to you and your homes,

Soaked Irish Soda Bread

We have used this recipe with much success over the last few years. It is equally as delicious as the non soaked recipe I have used since well....forever.
It is generally reserved for St Patrick and St Brigid Feast Days but is a special occasion food for us as well

 Ingredients-

5 1/2 cups spelt or Kumut flour ( the Kumut  is more like a wholemeal flour compared to the white spelt we usually use)

2 cups  buttermilk

Port

1 cup dried currants and soak in Port

1 tsp bicarb soda

1 tsp Celtic sea salt 

Method:

Put five and one-half cups spelt or Kumut flour in a bowl, then stir two cups fresh buttermilk into the flour. Combine the flour and buttermilk well until the two are thoroughly mixed together to form a soft, shaggy dough.

Cover well and tightly, allowing the dough to sit at room temperature overnight or up to eighteen hours – a process referred to as “soaking.”

In a separate bowl or small container, pour out 2 cups dried currants then pour enough port over the currants and or sultanas to cover them. If you do not have whiskey on hand, or do not wish to use it, cover the currants with filtered water brought to room temperature.

Allow the currants and or sultanas to soak in the port for the same amount of time you allow the flour to soak in buttermilk – overnight to eighteen hours.

The next day, after the dough and currants have sufficiently soaked overnight or up to eighteen hours, strain the currants from the whiskey reserving the whiskey for another use as you see fit. Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius 

While the oven preheats, turn the dough out onto a floured surface and gently knead  the whiskey-soaked currants, one teaspoon baking soda and one teaspoon celtic sea salt into the dough. Flour your hands, as needed, and shape the dough into a nice, full and round ball.

Cut a deep cross into the top of the dough. When ready place in and bake for twenty-five to thirty minutes.

After the soda bread has baked for 30 mins reduce the heat  150  and continue to bake for another fifteen to twenty minutes.

Remove the bread from the oven and allow it to cool thoroughly before serving.

Or if like us you like it hot and smothered with butter just eat it now.

Blessings to you and your homes,
 
Linked to Wise Woman Link up
Linked to The Art of Homemaking Mondays

St Patrick Day Celebrations 2014

St Patrick's Feast Day.....Hurrah!!!
What did we do to celebrate?

Well the first thing Moran did was to look for some clover as we have done in the past. Except it is much harder to find clover here than in our Tasmania house. Poor Moran looked all over with no success until we told her there was a small patch just outside the chicken coop.

 We decorated the house with some of out already made decorations from past years. We made nothing new this year.

 Colouring pages are a big hit in our house every feast day.

 Followed closely by word searches, mazes and crossword puzzles.

As the children work I read from our selection of picture books

 We had already read one of our St Patrick books at breakfast (so it is not pictured)

 Jamie O'Rourke is a huge favourite not only on St Patrick's Day but through out the year. Of course the Darby O'Gill books are fun for older readers but we could not watch the movie as Autumn had taken it to Sydney with her.

Moran was very patriotic and dressed her dolls in a semi green outfit each and then covered them with the clover she had picked.

Lunch was a traditional clover leaf sandwich using both cucumber and gherkin and the Irish flag using celery, cheese and carrot.

Moving on to dinner we  decorated the table and had

Corned Beef,mashed potato, cabbage and then a mixture of green, white and orange vegetables

Rogan made Irish Soda bread which we love and we had some left over for breakfast the next day.

Doesn't it look good!!!!

After dinner when everyone else went to bed and it was just me and my cup of coffee I decided it was time for a little Baileys Irish Cream and a browse through a good book.

Not too shabby an end to a very busy feast Day
Happy St Patrick's Day to You!!!

Blessings to you and your homes,
 

St Patrick Day Celebrations 2013

St Patrick celebrations in our home are ones we really enjoy.
We celebrated early due to the fact we had our Autumn home for the weekend and so wanted her to be a part of our family celebrations.

I tried to find green colour clothes for everyone , but it seemed we were a little lacking this year. However I love the little Irish girl above, truly she is so adorable in temperament and so sweet too.
She has missed having her big sister home and so spent a lot of time with her 'buddy'

We decided we needed some new decorations and it was lovely setting up the decorations in this new home which is so much more, well, 'homey' feeling than the old place!

Autumn was very involved in the decorating phase this year and this was a double blessing as I loved seeing her still part of our family celebrations. Paper chains are always a very popular choice and so we made some from crepe paper this year.
I was a little disappointed when I went to Spotlight and discovered that the only choices for decorating involved green beer images. So we just used the paper chains and set up things a little differently.

 The other item we bought was pipe cleaners, they really are a versatile decorating item. Autumn is making them into little shamrocks for the dinner table as well as one for everyone to keep to put in our memory boxes.

 While we were still organising decorations Arwen and Trahaearn decided that they really were ready for lunch.
As we were having a simple lunch of shamrock leaves on sourdough bread and an Irish Flag consisting of celery, cheese and carrot sticks, this was quickly done.
Arwen insisted on using the Irish Flag as a place mat!

 The shamrock leaves were made from both gherkins...............

 and cucumbers. There are very popular in our family.

There are some in our family who still love Vegemite, and so  we rarely have sourdough bread said person felt the need for  a vegemite shamrock because she deemed it essential to the feasting.

 Rogan was so engrossed in the book he was reading that he could not put it down even for lunch!!

 So our decorating was a major part of how we celebrated. Don't you love the  shamrock tower?

 We have this huge area in the family room of doors that made the perfect setting for our wall decorations.

 I love this little shamrock with pictures. We tend to reuse some decorations and this is one we use each year.

 I was able to set up our St Patrick or Irish Fable books on the wood stove along with our Painted St Patrick as it was not cold enough to light yet.

 These two are probably my favourite books each year.

This is another decorative to celebrate this day. We have the Irish Girls I made last year along with the Leprechauns from the year before with the rainbow and gnome  well Leprechaun house all siting on a green silk with a river running through. We do have Father Pine with his purple vestments on as we are still in Lent. I also made this banner from here Part 1 and Part2

 Table centerpiece all ready and waiting for the meal.

Each person is given a shamrock and a printed laminated card to be kept or used as a book mark each feast day.

I was trying to get a few pictures from our table looking in all directions to the other decorated areas.

In our family it goes without saying that we have Irish Stew for dinner.

For Sweets we had gluten free chocolate cupcakes with  lolly leaves for shamrocks on top of slightly green coloured cream, very popular.

As a special treat, well for the grown ups, I did make my version of Bailey's Irish Cream.. I tried to buy the chocolates for the children but couldn't find any in the shops.

The recipe says it will last up to 2 months, but I seriously have my doubts. It is so much better than the bought version and a little glass is enough. Believe me I tried a larger glass and it was way more than I could ever drink, where as the bought stuff I can easily do a wine glass full.

We did not manage to have our Soaked Irish Soda bread till the next day. Confession time- it really was like a flat bread as someone, no names mentioned forgot to put in the key ingredient for SODA bread.
Still it was very very good and none was left on the plate.

Well after this our Autumn went back to Uni where she is really settling in and enjoying all that is on offer there. We miss her still but were so glad she was here for this special feast day.

Praying you all enjoyed your own celebrations of this most special saint, well in our opinion at least.

ST PATRICK PRAY FOR US!!

By the way we did do some formal lesson work with the word searches, crossword puzzles and colouring pages, but we put them in their note books before I took photos this year.

Blessings to you and your homes,