Leaven and "The Village Children"

The bread making this week was not successful, we tried a recipe from Nourishing Traditions, a sourdough one, and the dough did not rise neither taste good...This week we are trying again, probably with kamut flour, which we know taste delicious when a proper sourdough is achieved: my friend bakes splendid loaves with it, she must have a beautiful starter and knowledge from her ancestry Croatian roots.

Here is a link to one video that we like for encouraging the bread making: www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1D23yFkNiA

The slow process of fermentation with the sourdough makes the bread-making more like an art, and the product is better for digestion. This happens in many things in life, where slow paced processes take precedence in quality offering: the broth making for 24 hours, the homemade mayonnaise, the soil tilling with horses for three days instead of three hours of motor tilling, the compost making from slow decomposition of cow manure during the winter, etc....if we all knew the advantages of these versus their cousins products, delivered in a fast paced industry world, we would feel cheated and will turn our eyes to the older times, at least in referring to the use of time itself!

Now that the novel is published we found an idea to make a special children's book, it would describe the life of a village, in the light of the ideas of faith and stewardship, where the children of one household will be inviting us to get to know the characters of all the people living in this farm village.

The first four books will be geared toward toddlers until 5 years old, following the seasons and having a simple line of the story; the next series will be written for the older children, where the line story gets a little more adventurous and will go in depth to know the different villagers: the neighboring family farms and their trades in this ideal landscape.

We will take ideas from the Bilbo Baggins homeland, from the Amish culture, from distributism and the Catholic faith among others.The children and families in the book will follow some ideals like homeschooling, homebirthing, etc... Let us know if you have any ideas or would like to be a part of this task. We ask for prayers and for God to guide us in this, because without Him we are nothing.