Back in November my father and husband were both diagnosed with diabetes.  This was a wake up call for me because I am very overweight, have PCOS and am already dealing with insulin resistance.  Our family was eating the “American” way.. out of boxes and from fast food restaurants most of the time.  Obviously, it was time to fix the problems – and at this point we had no choice.  So, we decided that no more “junk” or empty calories were coming into our house.  Only the occasional bag of chips or cookies – and homemade if possible where we control the preservatives and chemicals.  We decided to buy a lot more fresh fruits and veggies.  Seeds and nuts became our new snack favorites.  We dusted off the bread machine and started pulling out all the recipe books.  I started visiting blogs to get new recipe ideas.

I promised some of my friends I would post some of our new found favorites.  This recipe has 2 parts – but is so VERY yummy! It’s from the Prevention Diabetes Diet Cookbook.  It’s one I would highly recommend if you have someone who is diabetic in your family.  Even if you don’t, it’s full of healthy recipes that limit the carbs and sugars – something we all can use!

You start off by making the basic tomato sauce.  You could buy a spaghetti sauce at the store – but they are usually so full of sodium.  This one is worth the extra step.  You will have left over sauce you can use to make mini pizzas for lunches also. You can refrigerate the sauce in an airtight container for a week.

Basic Tomato Sauce

2 teaspoons olive oil

1/2 cup chopped onion

1/2 cup chopped carrots

1/2 cup chopped celery

3 garlic cloves minced

1 can, 28 oz. diced tomatoes

1/4 teaspoon salt

ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat.  Add the onion, carrot, celery, and garlic and cook for about 10 minutes.  Add the tomatoes (with juice) and salt and cook for another 10 mins. Season with pepper to taste.  Remove from the heat.  Puree the sauce in a blender in batches until smooth.

Italian Potato Dumpling Casserole

3/4 cup part-part skim ricotta cheese

1/4 cup fresh basil, thinly sliced

1/2 cup (2 ounces) grated reduced fat mozzarella cheese, divided

2 tablespoons (1/2 ounce) grated Parmesan cheese

1 egg lightly beaten

3 cups basic tomato sauce (see above)

1 package (16 ounces) potato gnocchi

2 cups spinach leaves, thinly sliced

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Lightly coat a 1 1/2 quart casserole dish with vegetable spray and set aside.  In a small bowl, combine the ricotta, basil, 1/4 cup of the mozzarella, Parmesan, and egg.  Stir until  blended and set aside.  Spread a thin layer of the tomato sauce in the reserved casserole dish.  Layer half the gnocchi and spinach.  Using 1/2 the ricotta mixture, place small dollops on top of the spinach.  Cover with another thin layer of sauce and repeat the layers again.  End with a sauce layer.  Sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup of mozzarella on top.  Bake for 40 mins. or until the top is bubbly and the cheese is lightly browned.  Makes 6 servings.

We have also made this adding chicken strips (uncooked) in the very bottom of the pan.  1lb will cover the entire pan if you cut them in half.  (makes them thinner where they cook easier also!)

The laws still stands as written for crafts persons of children’s items and new products – including those from Europe. So, this is still a huge issue.

For the Jan. 8th clarificaiton click here.

I also added a new resource to the Iditirod Unit study. It’s a free book from Currclick and is at the bottom of the list. Don’t miss it! It’s free and one you need to download to save if you plan on studying Alaska in the future.

Mikah got a beautiful new doll for Christmas. It’s a Berenguer doll made in Spain. She is a 21 inch doll and extremely life like. We get stopped several times a day by folks who think “Alex” is real! Mikah treats her baby really well. Today she took her Christmas money and went shopping for some clothing for “Alex.” It’s great, because 21 inch dolls wear newborn clothing and Mikah was able to get some great deals at our local Kid to Kid resell store. It’s a good thing Mikah got Alex this year, because on Feb. 10, 2009, all the laws for children’s toys are changing.

As of Feb. 10th many European manufactures will not be selling their products in America. That means all those great wooden toys made overseas will not be available here. The doll Mikah got for Christmas probably will not be sold here anymore… Why? Because of the intensive testing that is now required for products made after Dec. 22nd to be sold here in the USA. This cost manufactures a lot of money to get each product certified and the smaller companies just can’t afford it. But now, all toys coming into the USA must be tested and certified at a high cost. This means smaller companies would have to raise prices on items sold in the USA. One company estimated it would raise their prices 50% on wooden toys and that would more than likely make them too costly and deplete the US market for the toys. The irony? Europe has much higher standards already in place for Children’s toys.

Remember the baby clothes Mikah got today for her doll? Well, the new law also includes the resell of children’s clothing! Do you shop resell? Goodwill? Yard Sales? As of Feb. 10th it will be illegal to re-sell any used children’s products including toys and clothing.

Do you buy used books? games? DVD’s, textbook etc.? Yep, you guessed it… not under the new law. Goodbye homeschool book sales, used book stores, Ebay deals…..

Do you or someone you know handcraft or sew items intended for children? Without paying out big bucks to have each item certified, not anymore.

Think of the lost jobs… the lost wages, for store owners and artisans who sell children’s products. Think of all these items now going into landfills as opposed to being loved by a second child. Think of the families who depend on the savings buying from second hand shops.

I am all for protecting my children. I made sure the doll Mikah got for Christmas was safe and free of phthalates. But, I also know its a European toy and tested under strict guidelines.

According to online news sources “ Adding to the confusion and frustration is the fact that the U.S. Consumer Products and Safety Commission is not returning calls or e-mails to the countless re-salers and even journalists who have tried in vain to get clarification on what the law means to garage sales and how it will be enforced.”

So, the question is, how will the new law effect homeschool book sales, yard sales, etc? Will there be barter parties in our futures?

For more information go to US Consumer Product Safety Commission.

]]> http://goalongs.com/?feed=rss2&p=109 0 http://goalongs.com/?p=75 http://goalongs.com/?p=75#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:32:22 +0000 admin http://goalongs.com/?p=75 Today I wanted to share a WONDERFUL unit study we did last winter. The Iditarod is a yearly sled dog race across Alaska. We learned about dog sled racing, math, geography and more– all in a 2 month unit.

Here is a list of what our unit study consisted of:

** We joined the Iditarod Project. The eIditarod Project is sponsored by Walter McKenzie, and is open to students in grades K-8. Using the Official Iditarod Website, classes (And homeschool families!) will study the trail and the mushers and select one team to follow online for the 2009 race. You will be asked to create a wall-sized map of the trail and track the progress of your team using race updates on the official site.The EIditarod Project has its open registration period through January 9, 2009!

** For the unit we read 2 books. There are more out there, but based on the ages of the students we picked “The Mystery on Alaska’s Iditarod Trail”, by Carole Marsh and “Akiak,” by Robert J. Blake.

** I created several notebooking pages to go along with the unit study. You can snag them HERE. We also collected pictures off the internet of packed sleds, race dogs, booties etc. and made notebook pages for them also.

** Hands of a Child has a Iditarod lapbook we used for information and some elements to place in our notebooks. They also sell a Sled Dogs lapbook that we used. (If you download the freebies from Currclick and Hands of a Child you might have it! I got it free at some point.)

** The Official Iditarod website has a teacher’s section with a lot of great activities. I did this lesson plan with a group of students. It was time consuming to make all the “mushers” but the graphing lesson was worth it. I didn’t have the blocks the lesson suggests, so, I made my own. You can snag them HERE. (Note: I had mostly younger students and we did bar graphs – here is the worksheet I made to use with them)

** Another thing we did was to subscribe to the “Insider.” We were able to stream short movies daily about the mushers, the dogs, the checkpoints etc. More information can be found at the Official Iditarod Website. It’s a well spent $20 is you are doing the unit and can afford it. I also purchased a dog bootie, a large map, and the official program last year for the store on the Iditarod site. (They have a CD of lesson plans for a reasonable price, but I never could determine if they were the same ones on the site for free)

** Plus, you can add science in and talk about SNOW! I have a lot of resources for this and will upload my links etc. at some point!

** One thing I got recently for free (and you might have it as well! 2 sites have offered it for free in the past few months- I just can’t remember who! Sorry…) is “Aunt Sarah’s Alaskan Cookbook.” If not, it’s only a few dollars at Currclick. It would make a great addition! One chapter is a children’s dog sled party complete with a menu and recipes!

** Currently, Currclick has a free download for “Free Alaskan Extension From January Book Bag, 2009″ It looks great for a variety of ages. There are some great resources on the Iditarod included.  There are also some Montessori type 3 part cards and book suggestions for all ages.  It also includes some activities for the preschool set.

Have fun! We did

Today I want to share a great resource I just got in my email. Micki over at Senari has a new section (New to me anyway!) that she offers monthly freebies on. It’s in the “Teaching Tips” section. For January she has freebie bingo games for Rhode Island, Maryland, Louisiana, California and Nevada. There is also a state outline bingo. The games are detailed and great for older elementary /middle school.

There are language arts resources and Catholic education resources as well. From her email “January features the Sentence Board, a reference tool, practice lessons and manipulatives for the Noun-Verb Pattern. The lessons and manipulative integrate Catholic/Christian sentences, and they are in Word format so you can enter your own sentences if you wish.”

These are all great resources for those of us that take a Montessori approach! (Other eclectic homeschool families may find them equally useful. Montessori uses a sentence diagramming type approach – jut colored coded and easy for the student to comprehend!)

Anyhow, come back tomorrow   (Oh, I planned to finish relinking everything as well…. just haven’t been able to get to it.  To see one of the things thats kept me busy visit www.tootlebugz.com, my digi scrapbooking blog.)

To be fair to IX we did violate their TOS (Terms of Service) Somehow hackers got into an old database Tyler had set up for a web forum, doesn’t use anymore, and had forgotten about. I don’t fully understand what was going on – but if you do a search on IX Web Hosting you will find they have had on ongoing issue with hackers over the past few months. Hackers cause the CPU usage to go up – and the TOS states that if you leave holes that allow hackers in its your fault. The CPU usage is what the TOS addresses and it doesn’t matter what causes it to spike. The concern is the shared servers and how your spike adversely effects others. At any rate, because of their TOS, and because this same thing happened in our account almost a year ago, and because Tyler caused a TOS by having “higher than normal” CPU usage due to a shoutbox he installed in April as well – we had 3 strikes – and for IX than means you are out. PERIOD. Do not pass go – you lose your files, your time … everything. Their TOS states this will happen and they will not give you access to your stuff – and they were unbending on this rule. We lost a whole website we had created for our homeschool group. (a non profit group – and we did the website for free… spent hours on it – but didn’t know how to back it up because it was a Joomla site. I know… our responsibility… ) So, bottom line, you get hacked? Your fault… oh well. … no sympathy.. nothing… The main thing is that at IX they don’t seem to value their paying customers. Just my opinion and view based on how we have been treated over the past 2 years with them…. and then there is that hacker thingy… do a search… wish we had!

So.. the content of Goalongs is gone…. but I will be rebuilding it. Lucky for me that Google has most of it cached! Granted all the links from other sites will not work right and that will mess with things some – but at least I can easily get some of my stuff back up.

-Papers 1—-Papers 2—-Elements—-Ribbons—–Plooper-