This is one of a series of posts called Milk Runs which are intended to provide short, clear teachings from the Bible and their application for Christians. For more information about the series, please see the explanatory post. Now to the regularly scheduled programming:
You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. …just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.
Romans 6:18-20 (NIV)
What an amazing word of hope! We who are in Christ Jesus are set free from our sins. They hold no more power over us – they are not our great desire. When we were lost, we…
Persimmon trees here in north Missouri are not loaded with fruit by any means, but the soft native fruits are falling and we are gathering them just as quickly due to their delicate nature. Many people have never eaten persimmon fruit and i think i know why. It’s a lot of work – not hard, just time-consuming – to process them.
The golf ball sized soft fruits contain 4-7 seeds, which comprises half the weight and volume of the fruit. Add in that the seeds are slimy and difficult to remove and the effort hardly seems worth it. But their taste is so smooth and naturally sweet that they don’t need making them into sauce or jam – the spread is just that tasty. No sugar added.
Fruits picked up from the ground are very soft and need to be worked up and frozen immediately.Never waste anything – these seeds will go to compost.I put the ‘meat’ of the fruit into my Ninja thing and whip into this lovely sauce, then freeze it in 2 cup containers for use throughout the fall and winter. This can be used as a sweet spread just right away.
Bill Smith’s Persimmon Pudding (8-10 servings)
INGREDIENTS:
½ cup softened unsalted butter
3 cups persimmons
2 cups buttermilk
1 ½ cups sugar
3 large eggs
1½ cups flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Whipped cream, optional
DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease two 8 ½” diameter by 2” deep cake pans with butter. Use a food mill, sieve, cone strainer, or by hand remove the seeds from the persimmons and puree the pulp; it will reduce them from 3 cups to 2 cups. Combine the puree with the buttermilk. Beat the remaining butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment until fluffy. Add the eggs one by one. By hand, in a large mixing bowl, stir the persimmons into the butter.
Sift all the dry ingredients together and fold them into the persimmon mixture. Pour the batter into the baking pans and place the pans in a larger pan filled halfway up with warm water. Bake, uncovered, for 1 hour or until the pudding is firm at the center, has pulled away from the sides of its pan, and a paring knife inserted into the center of the pudding comes out clean.
Serve hot with fresh whipped cream. This keeps well in the refrigerator for 4 to 5 days and reheats beautifully in the oven.
This bark has a yellowish mold on it, but the shape and size of the bark is quite unique to a persimmon tree.
The most recent issue of Rural Missouri carried a short article on composting. I never seem to get around to building a compost pile, but i compost all the time on the fly. I compost straight into the garden or pasture. The less materials have to be handle the better in my book. BUT, on a small scale with limited space for growing plus needing a place to ditch those apple cores and coffee grounds, backyard or porch composting is awesome!
Lots of ship to home meal kits out there on the market. Anyone using these services? What do you think? i’m thinking of ordering one just to try for fun and see what they are like.
Here’s a link to a comparison article from Money, but there are several comparison checks on the internet using different companies and services.
There is little doubt this situation is just as bad in the US and around the world. Yet the big food companies (not food producers) tell us we’ll all starve if we don’t buy their products to produce more food. It’s a pack of lies. We waste far too much food. What we have is a distribution problem and in the first world countries we have so much food that we are incredibly picky.
Food waste is a subject i feel is important – as a cattle rancher and mom, i hear a lot of people complain (in the US) about the high cost of food, yet most producers (meats, eggs, chicken, vegetables, fruit) barely scrape out a living. The facts are that the cost of production continues to skyrocket, yet, by and large, the producer’s income has remained stagnant while the consumer’s cost has risen only a little. The margins are very thin and oftentimes only the much aligned farm subsidies provided by the govt are the difference between going another year and losing the farm. We could utilise our resources much more efficiently and produce a great deal more foodstuffs. But there is no reason to do so. Food is so cheap, we would simply lose money.
That huge pile of parsnips that Mr Fearnly-Whittingstall is standing in front of could consumed by cattle or sheep or just returned to the soil to be ploughed back in, but will it? For sure, the food you throw into your bin at home will go only to the landfill.
Interesting article – Neat how survival/frugal living/done-for-centuries lifestyles are now becoming ‘haute‘! Doesn’t everyone already do this?! Well, maybe not the fancy recipes, but food should never be wasted. Egg shells and coffee grounds make awesome soil amendments. Whatever parts of plants you simply cannot stomach can be turned into compost or fed to the chooks. Or feed all those scraps to worms which you can use to go fishing. But don’t ever let food go to waste!
“All the comments to the article are spot on and i can add nothing to them. I thought most people already knew this stuff, but apparently not if the article is accurate in stating the 40% of our food produced goes to waste. Then again, I have personally seen family members throw out a bowl of perfectly good fruit simply because one item had a soft spot on it! I had to choke back my admonition!”
Tia’s Terrific Tummy Satisfying Pancakes and Organic Oat bran pancakes for supper (tea) tonight at Refuge Ministries in Mexico, Missouri.
Probably everyone already uses this little trick, but i just today thought of it: use the boiled egg slicer to slice the strawberries. Wow, fast and easy!
Tia’s Terrific Tummy Satisfying Pancakes
4 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons salt
4 tablespoons baking powder
4 eggs
2 tablespoons vanilla
3-4 cups milk (it’s up to you for desired thickness)
Combine dry ingredients, then add liquid ingredients stirring just until moistened. Pour onto hot griddle turning when bubbles form on top and bottom is light brown. Cook just until done. Don’t overcook. I like them somewhat raw. Top with butter and syrup, jam, applesauce, or fruit. This recipe makes about 30 six-inch pancakes. Yum!
“All the comments to the article are spot on and i can add nothing to them. I thought most people already knew this stuff, but apparently not if the article is accurate in stating the 40% of our food produced goes to waste. Then again, I have personally seen family members throw out a bowl of perfectly good fruit simply because one item had a soft spot on it! I had to choke back my admonition!”