Cinnamon Applesauce Muffins

I do a lot of baking for my family. My kids love having a muffin with their breakfast, and this is a recipe I came up with that is a family favorite. They are sweet, moist, and loaded with delicious cinnamon flavor!


Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar ( or honey )
4 teaspoons baking powder
3 tablespoons cinnamon
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup applesauce
2 eggs


Instructions
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
In a bowl combine flour, cinnamon, sugar ( do not add honey to dry ingredients if you are using honey ), baking powder, and cinnamon.
In another beat together milk, applesauce, eggs ( and honey if you are using honey ).
Combine wet and dry ingredients, mix until combined.
Put mixture into lined muffin cups.
Bake the muffins until a toothpick comes out clean, around 13 minutes.

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Backyard Edibles - Violets

Now that spring is here one of our favorite backyard edibles are back, violets! Around this time every year our yard, like most other yards in our area is covered in these beautiful purple flowers. What a lot of people fail to realize is that these flowers ( or weeds as many call them ) are actually edible, and delicious.

Violets are extremely easy to identify. The leaves are heart shaped, the flowers grow on a leafless stem, have five petals, and are usually a blue-violet color ( sometimes yellow or white ).  They usually bloom in the early spring through early summer months.



Violet flowers and leaves contain beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin C. The flowers have a bitter sweet flavor, and the leaf tastes slightly like a lettuce or spinach. The flowers are perfect for jellies and syrup. I personally like to eat the leaves in salads.

My family enjoys making violet syrup the most! My daughter, Kairi, happily picked violets today, knowing I would make syrup so we could make one of her favorite drinks, violet lemonade    

After picking the flowers, give them a good wash, and remove any stem pieces. Kairi picked two cups worth, which is enough for me to make some syrup with.

To make the syrup you will need -
2 cups of violets
2 cups of boiled water
2 cups of sugar
a splash of lemon juice ( optional )

Bring the water to a boil, pour the boiled water over your violets, and let it steep for a minimum of a couple hours, I have even left it over night. Drain ( you can use cheese cloth if your strainer has large holes, this will prevent small bits of flowers from ending up in your water. At this point your water will be a purplish green color. 

Put the violet water and two cups of sugar in a pan, stirring often, do not bring to a full boil. Remove from heat once your sugar is fully dissolved. At this point you can add the lemon juice. We do this because it brings back more of the beautiful purple color. Pour into a container ( I like to use mason jars ) and store in the refrigerator.

As mentioned before, we add this to homemade lemonade, our kids just love it!

This syrup also makes a wonderful, refreshing drink when poured into sparkling water with a splash of cream!

Sources - http://www.ediblewildfood.com/wild-violet.aspx

Starting our 2019 garden!

One of the very important life skills we are dedicated to teaching our children is the importance of organic gardening. In the past years we have done most of our gardening at my parent's property,
because they have land ( we live in town and do not have the best soil ).

This year we have decided to do things a little differently and we are building garden boxes. We plan to do about half the gardening here, and half the gardening there. It will hopefully make the work load easier for all of us since I was not always able to get out there to help with the never ending chore of weeding!

Recently we started some seed inside. We planted cherry tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, sugar snap peas, basil, spaghetti squash, and butternut squash. All those items will be planted at my house. Along with the strawberries that I planted last year and lettuce that will be started from seed.

Out at my parents property they are planting potatoes, spinach, corn, beets, tomatoes, and green peppers. This list will probably grow, but as for now, these are the confirmed items.
                                                




                                               


The gardening is one of the elective classes that our children are doing this spring, summer, and fall. They will be involved in all aspects of the planting, tending, harvesting, and preserving. They made garden journals to keep records of what we do through out this time, plus have study space for projects, and lesson.

The journals were super simple projects. I bought five lined notebooks, a package of construction paper, and let them decorate their cover as they saw fit.   
                                  


My husband and my father both work for a company that gives away a lot of scrap wood, so all the wood for my boxes has been free. We are using five inch construction screws. The main cost for this project comes from filling them. They will be filled with a mix of top soil and compost.    
 

I already have some containers for gardening. They are currently filled with lettuce, peas, basil, and green beans.  I will need to build at least four boxes to finish planting what I have started in the house.

Who else in planting a garden with their kids? What are you growing?

Be sure to come back over the next few months for updates on how our garden is growing! Thanks for reading.

Welcome to raising em wild!

Welcome to Raising 'em wild! My name is Whitney, wife to Chris, and mother to Alexzander age 13, Destiny age 11, Kairi age 9, Amelia age 7, and Cassandra age 5. I started this blog as a way to share all the wonderful things we are teaching our children.
                                         



We home school our children, and we aim to make their education more than just books and tests. We have been teaching them about wild life, gardening, nature studies, and for the last year we have been teaching them about wild edibles.

I will be posting blogs that cover all the wonderfully wild things we teach the kids, recipes, information, and much much more!

Thanks for following our adventures and stay tuned to see more!