If you haven’t seen the newest Johnson’s ad yet, you’re in for a treat …
Welcome New Sisters! (click for current roster)
Merit Badge Awardees (click for latest awards)
My featured Merit Badge Awardee of the Week is … CJ Armstrong!!!
CJ Armstrong (ceejay48, #665) has received a certificate of achievement in Outpost for earning a Beginner & Intermediate Level Speak for the Trees Merit Badge!
BEGINNER
I have always been interested in the trees growing in our area, but it became more of a “project” to learn more after a fire in July 1994 that destroyed our house and most of the natural wooded area around it. So, in order to replace trees, we did a lot of research on what would grow well, knowing that we could never replace the trees that grew here naturally and took many decades to do so.
We planted Colorado blue spruce, aspen, Ponderosa pine, white fir, yew, Alberta spruce, golden raintree, Japanese pagoda, sour cherry, apple, and pear trees in our yard and they are all doing well. Not all of the native trees were destroyed, and what we do still have growing on our property are: cedar, pinon, cottonwood, and scrub oak. While they are not “trees,” we also have native sagebrush, rabbit brush, and even some prickly pear cactus.
INTERMEDIATE
In the immediate area of our house, there are lots of natural wooded areas and orchards and not too great of a need for windbreaks. However, in the dryland farming area just to the northwest of us, there are acres and acres of farmland that are wide open and susceptible to wind erosion. Thus, the windbreaks are a great need and many folks have successfully planted trees that are suitable to the area and the dryland farming concept.
We have some beautiful parks in the towns in our community, and they have planted Colorado blue spruce, Ponderosa pine, and Navajo willow trees there. While not native to this elevation, the blue spruce and Ponderosa pine are native to Colorado higher elevations and they do well because they aren’t far from “home.”
It’s been a challenge to replace trees we lost, but we are happy with what we did plant and the growth we’ve seen. We have some absolutely stunningly beautiful trees in our yard!”
The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 6,269 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—8,908 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! MJ
Wondering who I am? I’m Merit Badge Awardee Jane (MBA Jane for short). In my former life …
For this week’s Farm Kitchen/Bread Making Beginner Level Merit Badge, I first had to learn the difference between two very simple, yet very ingenious, common kitchen ingredients: baking soda and baking powder. Hey, they’re not just for brushing your teeth and scrubbing your cutting boards anymore, peeps.
I’m blushing to admit that A) I have never really learned the difference, and B) I have mixed them up more than once. And just a friendly helpful hint from me to you: baking powder does not a Red Devil Cake make.
It turns out the two are amazingly similar: so similar, in fact, that you would think they are interchangeable. But alas … weeping and gnashing of teeth … negative, ghost rider.
Although you can, in a pinch … (Get it? A pinch? A pinch of soda? HA!) … use powder in place of soda, though you would need a larger amount. But vice versa? Just ain’t true, Magoo.
Both are basically sodium bicarbonate, but baking powder has other ingredients as well.
Photo courtesy of Joe Mabel, Wikimedia.com.
Here’s a great explanation from North Carolina State University:
“What’s the difference between baking soda and baking powder? Short answer: acid. But it can make a big difference for baked goods, so let’s explain.
Baking soda has only one ingredient: sodium bicarbonate. Sodium bicarbonate is a base that reacts when it comes into contact with acids, like buttermilk, yogurt or vinegar. This reaction produces carbon dioxide (CO2) in the form of bubbles, like a liquid foam (think of the grade school experiments involving fake volcanoes, vinegar and baking soda). When making baked goods, the process is called “chemical leavening,” because the trapped CO2 gas makes the dough or batter rise.
But when baking soda comes into contact with an acid, it pretty much reacts immediately. And that’s a problem.
For many baking recipes, you want an extended reaction, so that the rising doesn’t take place all at once.
Baking powder addresses this problem because it is “double acting” – it has different ingredients that create CO2 gas at different stages of the baking process.
All baking powders contain sodium bicarbonate (just like baking soda). But baking powder also contains two acids. One of these acids is called monocalcium phosphate. Monocalcium phosphate doesn’t react with the sodium bicarbonate while it’s dry. But as soon as the baking powder is stirred into a wet dough or batter, the two ingredients begin to react, releasing bubbles of CO2 and causing chemical leavening.
But to extend the chemical leavening process, baking powder also contains a second acid, either sodium acid pyrophosphate or sodium aluminum sulfate. Neither of these acids react with sodium bicarbonate until they are both: A) wet (i.e., stirred into the batter) and B) hot.
In other words, sodium acid pyrophosphate and sodium aluminum sulfate won’t start reacting with the sodium bicarbonate until after you’ve put the dough or batter in the oven. This means that the batter rises for a longer period of time, making lots of bubbles (and a fluffier cake, muffin, or whatever).”
Anyway, enough of the science-y stuff, gals. Just call me Jane the Brain.
Onto baking some bread in order to earn my badge … let the smacking of lips begin.
Hermann Sondermann (1832-1901), kehr vom Backhaus via Wikimedia Commons
Sunday, March 8, was International Women’s Day, helping to kick off Women’s History Month in March. Women’s Day has been celebrated in America since 1909 and in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland since 1911. In 1975, the United Nations finally declared it an international holiday.
Companies and organizations around the world and the web are celebrating women, and here are a few of the sites I thought you’d enjoy.
Biographile, Random House’s nod to literary biographies, celebrates with “quotes from 9 literary ladies.”
Maya Angelou, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood, Biographile.com
Microsoft reminds us that girls like science, too, with their latest commercial:
The initiative, a collaboration between the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, posted this celebrity-, fun- (and fact-) filled video:
And the winner of the One World Family Calendar giveaway is:
Lisa VonSaunder, who said:
“These herder woman look like Masai tribeswomen. I support small business people in emerging nations by donating small amounts to Kiva.com. which is a micro lending organization. They loan like $100 or so to small businesses usually run by women, and then that allows them to make huge changes in their lives. They have a 95% repayment log. I urge you to go the site and look at the people you can help make a living directly. I chose my latest person, a cobbler in Burkina Faso, the poorest nation in the world, and he paid back my loan in less than a year. That is equivalent to double his yearly salary! This is the way I think and help globally.”
And the original post for the GIVEAWAY was (thank you to all who participated):
I recently picked up two of these handy “family calendars” with the intent of gifting one. Plus, I wanted to support the organization behind it. The One World Family Calendar features beautiful photography of people from around the world, along with space for daily schedules for up to five people. It’s a beautiful calendar that will help you plan the rest of your family’s year.
This calendar comes from the New Internationalist: People, Ideas, and Action for Global Justice.
With new technologies, the whole wide world is at our fingertips, and we can help those in other countries as well as our own by shopping with a global responsibility in mind. And if you don’t think you support buying things from overseas, take a closer look around … that melon purchased in December probably came from South America, and that cell phone positively came from the other side of the globe. And wait … before venting about buying American-made, please realize that it’s an opinion typed on a computer that was most certainly made in China, Japan, or Taiwan. Sorry, Dorothy, but we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re all part of a bigger picture, and that picture involves supporting workers around the world—not governments, but workers, people like you and me. So my stand is, I support workers, wherever they happen to live. Made in the USA, awesome. Project F.A.R.M. (First-class American Rural Made), love it. And yes, Made in the World. For me, they’re no longer mutually exclusive.
To win this beautiful calendar, tell me why you’ve decided to embrace the whole wide world and ALL the working people in it. We’ll put your name in a hat and pull out one lucky winner sometime in the next week or so. Stay tuned!
Buy props used in MaryJane’s books and magazine!
5% of profits will benefit www.firstbook.org, a non-profit that provides new books to children from low-income families throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Here’s how:
MaryJane will post a photo and a description of a prop and its cost along with a few details as to its condition here: https://shop.maryjanesfarm.org/MaryJanesCurations. It’s a playful way to be the new owner of a little bit of farm herstory.
