Sauce, or Neapolitan Gravy and cupcakes.

Wednesday was the next step in putting together our spaghetti dinner.  It was a little ambitious, but we worked to make gluten free chocolate cupcakes and the tomato sauce for the spaghetti.

We started with the cupcakes, because they could bake while we were working on the sauce.  We chose Gluten Free so that everyone could enjoy them, and used gluten free vanilla, and have gluten free frosting to complete them on Thursday.  This cake mix called for vanilla, eggs, milk, butter, and lemon juice.  Rather than make a layer cake we decided on cupcakes so that each person could have their own to frost.

We used cupcake papers to make it easier to clean up afterward.  Aida and Yaida got to crack eggs, stir the ingredients into the whipped butter, and use the mixer.
 

After we put the cupcakes into the oven to bake we looked at the sauce ingredients.  Because we had a limited time to work, we doctored canned tomato sauce, meaning we fixed it with our own ingredients to make it to our own taste.  I had brought in my basil plant from home, and we sniffed at and tasted the fresh basil leaf, then examined dried basil from a store.  We looked at and smelled dried oregano, garlic powder, black, green and white peppercorns, and onion powder. 

For our sauce however, we would use fresh garlic and finely chopped white onion.  We cooked these in a small amount of olive oil until the onion was clear and cooked through.  Cooking peppers, onions, garlic and other vegetables before putting them in the sauce is necessary, because these ingredients will not cook further once they are mixed with tomatoes.  So rather than have crunchy, raw onions in a sauce it's better to saute them before hand.

Once the garlic and onion were cooked through we mixed in 1 tablespoon of dried basil and one of dried oregano, as well as a teaspoon of salt.  The girls chose the dried basil because they said the fresh basil smelled too strong.  At this point the cupcakes came out of the oven.  When they were cooled they went into the refrigerator to wait until Thursday for frosting.

We added the onion mixture to two cans of processed spaghetti sauce, that you would buy in the grocery store.  To give the sauce a little more texture, and to make it more fun to eat, we added a can of diced  tomatoes.  Bringing the sauce to a boil we turned it down, covered it and simmered the mixture for an hour on low heat.

When the sauce cooled, we put it in the refrigerator with the meatballs to wait for Thursday, when we would combine them with pasta for a meal.

The Great Spaghetti Caper

Summer is only halfway through, but this will be our last week to cook with the Breakfast Buddies.  Because we had done one week discussing salad, and one week with desserts, this last week we chose to do an entire meal, including elements that you might find in our container garden.  The peppers in the garden were not ready to be harvested, so that was talked about instead of including the ingredients in our meal.

Tuesday we started with making meatballs.  Meatballs are fun to make, you can get your hands messy and create.  Our meatball recipe came from the Betty Crocker cookbook, and involved baking the meatballs in the oven to prepare them for putting into spaghetti sauce.  The nice thing about this recipe is that the cooked meatballs can then be frozen in batches, ready to be pulled out of the freezer for a quick weeknight meal.

The meatballs contained ground beef (we used 90% beef), plain bread crumbs, Worcestershire sauce, milk, and eggs.  The meatballs were seasoned with dried minced onion and a small amount of salt.

First we washed hands with soap and water.  Reading through the cookbook recipe, we talked about meat safety, types of measurements, and doubling recipes.  Aida and Yaida cracked the eggs, added most of the ingredients, and mixed the meat and other items together with their clean hands before rolling the mixture into walnut sized balls and placing them in the disposable baking containers.

Once the meatballs were in the oven the dishes and our hands were washed and the table cleaned while we waited for them to bake.  The girls waited until the finished meatballs were cool before tasting one each.  When the meatballs were cool enough we covered them and put them into the refrigerator to wait until Thursday.

Weeding the beds.

This being a gardening week for the Breakfast Buddies, we concentrated on weeding and watering.  With temperatures unbearably high, these were not comfortable tasks.

Yaida went above and beyond in weeding, collecting the pulled weeds, and watering the flowers and vegetables.

Weeding the bed in the front of the property to keep the

 Bethlehem Townhouse 1 sign looking neat.

The Container Garden!

One of the ways to put a bit of green into your life inside of a city is a container garden.  We had space, next to the Community Room, and we had containers provided by a man and a woman who provided them by Freecycle.com.  We had some seeds provided by another woman on Freecycle.

Next we needed dirt and the plants.  The planting season didn't work well with the schedule of the Homework Club, and the Breakfast Buddies Summer program started fairly late.  Perhaps in the future we will be able to start the seeds early enough with the Homework Club, but this year it proved problematic.

Ten chili peppers and six sweet peppers were donated, already blooming, and planted into the containers outside of the Community Room.  Seeds were also planted, and more will be tried throughout the Summer.

They will continue to be cared for by the Breakfast Buddies, but it will be interesting to see how their interest in the plants goes.  Concern has been voiced about the possibility of theft and vandalism.  We will have to wait and see.

Getting Involved with the Bethlehem Townhouse 1 Flower Beds

Our first opportunity to plant came from the Bethlehem Townhouse 1 flower beds.  The maintenance staff usually purchase these flowers and plant them in three beds around the site.  These were the Bethlehem Townhouse 1 sign bed, the Maintenance Office bed, and a circular bed out in front of the Leasing Office.

The Maintenance Office bed was where we planted the bulbs in the Fall.  The plants that were provided  were paid for by Interstate Realty Management, and were Vincas, flowers that are meant for full sun.

 

Before we started planting the I showed the children the weeds growing in the bed, mostly grass and sorrel.  Creeping Wood Sorrel (Oxalis corniculata) looks like clover, but is edible, and slightly sour.  We pulled a lot of sorrel out of the beds before beginning to plant the vinca.

After planting the vinca we watered the beds well (borrowing a resident's watering can), and talked about watering the flowers regularly over the summer.  Watering is now on the schedule for the children's chores in the Breakfast Buddies Summer program.  The beds look very nice.

Getting Started with Gardening!

Apologies.  It's been a while.

We have been doing a little gardening here at Bethlehem Townhouse 1.  When I say "we", I mean the kids from the Homework Club, from the Breakfast Buddies Summer program, and me.  It started in the Fall with bulbs.

As you might know, Spring bulbs are planted in the fall.   They hibernate under the ground over the course of the winter, and then grow from the bulbs and bloom in the Spring.  They do not have to be replanted each year, which means they are perennials (coming back each year without care).

Children from the Homework Club planted bulbs for plain daffodils (jonquils) and red tulips in the Fall.  In March the bulbs sprouted, and started to grow.  Below are two daffodils, and then two of the red tulips.

The children found the flowers exciting, although there was vandalism and many of the blooms were taken or removed.  Here is a pictures of one of the daffodils.

Because the children worked well with the bulbs we decided to put together a raised bed garden next to the Community Room door in the summer.  We looked for grants to pay for it, because planting a garden does cost for the wood for the raised bed, or purchased raised bed, the dirt, tools, gloves, and plants or seeds.  Unfortunately, we were not chosen, and decided to work out how to put together a Container Garden in the cheapest manner possible.

Using FreeCycle.com, an online community that puts people in contact with each other who have things to give away that they don't really need, and that others might be able to use, we received the containers and some seeds.  We would use them for the Breakfast Buddies Summer program.