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The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 7,200 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—10,226 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane 

For this week’s Farm Kitchen/Food Allergy Awareness Intermediate Level Merit Badge, I tackled my newfound knowledge of that lowly, insidious issue of food allergies, and wrestled it into the kitchen.

That’s right. What good is knowing things if you aren’t part of the solution, am I right? Of course I am.

I set about rewriting three family recipes with a food allergic person in mind. What if, for example, you have a loved one coming over for Thanksgiving dinner and they are gluten free? How will you serve that oh-so important and not to be neglected Turkey Day staple, the stuffing? Or, say your uncle has a craving for a slow-roasted ham, but can’t tolerate any form of sugar in the glaze? (And who doesn’t? Have a craving for slow-roasted ham, that is. I mean, come on. The day I don’t have a slow-roasted ham craving is the day you know to bury me six feet under.) I mean, it’s a pickle really.

Don’t get me started on pickle allergies. If there is such a thing then I declare, this is a world I cannot be a part of.

Anyway. I had no such uncle, nor any gluten-free friends at the moment, so I took a different approach: I pretended.

That’s me, Jane, the Great Pretender. I pretended I was allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, and dairy.

But, Janey, you’re saying, peanuts are a nut, you, you NUT! Nope, peanuts are a legume, thank you very much. You can be quite allergic to tree nuts and not to peanuts, and the other way ‘round.

photo by jules / stonesoup via Wikimedia Commons

Cue the melodious strains of a back-to-school special … the more you know …

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that it wouldn’t be that hard to avoid nuts (or legumes), especially if you’re doing your own cooking, but you’d be wrong. Or at least, wrongish. I reached for a bottle of Asian salad dressing as a marinade for my chicken (I was making lettuce wraps) and belatedly read the ingredients. Yep, you guessed it, peanut oil.

I was glad I hadn’t picked soy as one of my food allergy ingredients to avoid because then I really would have been up a creek without a paddle. I try to avoid soy anyway, but boy do they ever put it in everything (it’s nearly as everywhere as gluten is). My chicken lettuce wraps turned out okay, but they were missing the crunch of a few sprinkled nuts, I must say. I tossed some corn nuts in as a replacement (they were … weird).

Next, I whipped up a batch of my world-famous Everything But the Kitchen Sink Cookies, but with variations. I had to take out all the nuts once again (grr!) and not only that, but I had to remove the dairy as well.

Wait, is butter a dairy?

photo by Armmark via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t wanna do this anymore …

I substituted coconut oil and applesauce for the butter (if you’re going to tell me coconut is a nut, I’m going to have to slap you with a cookie), and replaced the nuts with some dried fruits and some extra oats for texture.

They were pretty tasty, although I will probably have to rename them Everything But the Kitchen Sink and Not To Mention Nuts and Butter Cookies. Which makes it a little hard to file in my recipe box, but no matter.

The third recipe I revamped was a fruit smoothie. I thought it’d be easy, until I realized I couldn’t replace the cow’s milk with almond milk, because … nuts! And I couldn’t replace the almond milk with cow’s milk, because … dairy.

So I threw some strawberries in a blender and added some tequila and called it a day.

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My featured Merit Badge Awardee of the Week is … Shannon Hudson!!!

Shannon Hudson (hudsonsinaf, #5349) has received a certificate of achievement in Garden Gate for earning a Beginner, Intermediate & Expert Level Putting Away for Winter Merit Badge!

““For the Beginner badge, my oldest daughter and I froze strawberries, tomatoes, and most recently, blueberries. The strawberries and blueberries we freeze on trays individually first, and then place in freezer bags. The tomatoes we wash off, and then just put them in the freezer in a container. I also shared this information on my Henhouse.

We enjoy frozen produce, especially fruit. With the summers being so excruciatingly hot, pulling frozen fruit out to eat, or for smoothies, is extremely refreshing.

For my Intermediate badge, I dehydrated tomatoes, peppers (both sweet and hot) and multiple types of herbs. I also investigated different methods for drying produce. We generally use a dehydrator, though some of my herbs, I air dried. You can also sun dry, oven dry, or microwave dry. For my family, I made spaghetti, using frozen tomatoes, with dehydrated peppers and herbs.

Making spaghetti sauce is one of our favorite ways of using frozen tomatoes. When I pull them out of the freezer, I place them in a colander. As they thaw, a lot of the excess fluid drains out, this reduces the cooking time for the sauce.

For the Expert badge, I investigated the different methods for canning food – there is oven canning (I haven’t tried this one yet!), water bath canning, and pressure canning. We have canned tomatoes, fruit products (sauces, preserves, jams, syrups, pie filling, and just sliced fruits), dried beans, green beans, and broths. I also made some beef jerky in my dehydrator using grass fed brisket, as well as sharing about canning with the Henhouse.

For the dish using foods I had preserved, we made chili. I used both frozen and canned tomatoes, canned kidney beans, dehydrated peppers, and dehydrated herbs. It turned out scrumptious. I really want to try my hand at oven canning… I would like to learn to make gluten free pasta, that I dehydrate, and then oven can. Still working on this one though.”

The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 6,065 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—8,688 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! MJ 

For this week’s Cleaning Up/Going Green Expert Level Merit Badge, I burrowed myself into my abode for a couple weeks and buckled down in some serious green projects. See, there’s a nasty piece of carpeting in my bedroom I’d been ignoring for quite some time, and I’d been feeling guilty each time I ran my dryer when there’s perfectly excellent sunshine right outside, and, well, suffice to say, I needed to spruce up my green living a bit to earn this badge.

I rolled up my proverbial sleeves (and the literal ones, too), donned my cutest and hardest-working apron, and got to work.

Here’s what I accomplished with a couple of afternoons, some know-how, a little grit and determination, and several slices of Gluten-free Apple Cake:

• I yanked and pulled, tore and ripped, pushed and shoved, rolled and kicked, and in all other ways, completely and utterly abused the poor carpet. No, I wasn’t beating it clean; I was removing it altogether. I could have gone the cleaning and out-gassing route, but let’s be honest, I’m more of a dismantler than a … uh, mantler. You know what I mean. And also I wanted an excuse to buy an adorable little shag rug for right beneath my bed to squish my tootsies into each morning. Call me shallow.
• I bought a length of clothesline and squinted my eyes at my backyard. To be honest, the front yard would have been slightly more perfect in my quest for line-drying clothes, but I kind of figured my neighbors didn’t want to stare at my unmentionables fluttering in the breeze. I’m selfless like that.

Short of waving my magic wand and making two trees line up perfectly in my backyard, I was stumped. I stood, feeling dejected, in my wide-open space, with my coil of rope in my sad hands. Then it came to me. The laundry room window lined up perfectly with my one lonely pear tree! Voilà! I was back in action. I rigged it up just like they do in all the old-fashioned movies with shots of the cities. You know the ones that go from apartment to apartment, sometimes slung right over the streets? With my clever pulley system, I am feeling several shades of grand. I even feel a little like a Disney princess somehow, and I must confess to singing to the squirrels and chipmunks and birds as I line up my yummy-smelling laundry to dry. Another point for the backyard and the neighbors, as my singing voice is … well, unique.

• I also needed a new coat of paint in my pantry (holiday baking is here, my pretties), and so I took advantage of my green streak to purchase a couple of small tins of non-toxic paint. My cinnamon-colored pantry with ginger-colored trim is begging for a batch of Christmas cookies right now.

• I arranged my best go-to books about greening up your life in alphabetical order, and then let my friends and neighbors know they were available for borrowing. My books, not my friends and neighbors. Rent-A-Friend? Ha! I may be onto something there. But in all seriousness, have you seen this?

The next part of this badge (hey, it’s the Expert Level, dahlinks—it takes time) was to donate six hours to a friend in need of greening up. But first, let me bask in the glory that is my shaggy rug, munch another piece of cake, and finish crooning to the woodland critters.