My friend, Mindy M., told me about this recipe for powdered and liquid laundry detergent from the "Everyday Cheapskate." It's hypoallergenic, environmentally safe, and works as well in the old top loading washers as in the new front loaders. It calls for Fels Naptha soap, but I made mine with Ivory and it seems to work just as well. Best part is, it costs less than a dollar to make 2 gallons of liquid detergent. I haven't calculated the cost for the dry, but I'm sure it's not much different.
For Liquid Laundry Detergent:
3 pints water
1/3 bar Fels Naptha Laundry Bar Soap, grated
1/2 cup Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda
1/2 cup 20 Mule Team Borax
1 quart hot water
2-gallon bucket
Mix grated soap in a large saucepan with 3 pints hot water, and heat on the stove over low heat until dissolved. Do not allow to boil. Stir in Super Washing Soda and 20 Mule Team Borax. Stor until thickened. Remove from heat. Add 1 quart hot water to 2-gallon bucket. Add soap mixture, and mix well. Fill bucket with more hot water, leaving a few inches at the top, and mix well. Set aside for 24 hours, or until mixture thickens. Use 1/2 cup of mixture per load.
For Powdered Laundry Detergent:
1 cup grated Fels Naptha Laundry Bar Soap
1/2 cup Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda
1/2 cup 20 Mule Team Borax
Mix and store in airtight container or bag. FOr light loads, use 2 tablespoons. For heavy loads, use 3 tablespoons.
If you use Fels Naptha Soap you may notice that you need to reduce the amount of fabric softener you use, or eliminate it altogether--an extra savings!!
If you have trouble finding any of these ingredients you can order them from Soaps Gone Buy, or call 1-800-SOAP.
Happy Washing!
Monday, August 13, 2007
Recipe for Laundry Detergent
Recipe of the Week: Nonna's Loaded Oatmeal Cookies
When I was a little girl my nonna used to make these gigantic oatmeal cookies loaded with chocolate chips, raisins, and walnuts. This recipe is sturdy enough to support all those morsels, and still soft enough to make them heavenly!
Nonna's Loaded Oatmeal Cookies
If you prefer a less sweet cookie, you can reduce the white sugar by one-quarter cup, but you will lose some crispness. Do not overbake these cookies. The edges should be brown but the rest of the cookie should still be very light in color. Parchment makes for easy cookie removal and cleanup, but it’s not a necessity. If you don’t use parchment, let the cookies cool directly on the baking sheet for two minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack.
INGREDIENTS
2 sticks unsalted butter (1/2 pound), softened but still firm
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
3 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1. Adjust oven racks to low and middle positions; heat oven to 350 degrees. In bowl of electric mixer or by hand, beat butter until creamy. Add sugars; beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in eggs one at a time.
2. Mix flour, salt, baking powder, and nutmeg together, then stir them into butter-sugar mixture with wooden spoon or large rubber spatula. Stir in oats, chocolate chips, raisins and nuts.
3. Form dough into sixteen to twenty 2-inch balls, placing each dough round onto one of two parchment paper–covered, large cookie sheets. Bake until cookie edges turn golden brown, 22 to 25 minutes. (Halfway during baking, turn cookie sheets from front to back and also switch them from top to bottom.) Slide cookies on parchment onto cooling rack. Let cool at least 30 minutes before serving.
Buon apetito!
Dinner Party Menu for 22
Yesterday we had guests for dinner. There were 22 of us total and our guests arrived around lunch time so we started with four large ham and turkey hoagies (with fat slices of tomatoes), cut into four pieces each (the little ones further split theirs in half) and some delicious dip and chips:
For dinner I tried to make my sister's recipe for Bolognese sauce but I'm not sure it came out as good as hers. I served it over Mafalda (like mini lasagna noodles), with freshly grated Parmigiano and Romano cheese, a tossed salad of romaine, tomatoes and feta chunks, and Pane Rustica.
For dessert my oldest daughter made two double recipes of Peach Batter Cobbler, from delicious local peaches we bought for .50 a pound at the farmer's market:
Peach Batter Cobbler
1/2 stick salted butter
Melt the butter in a baking dish while pre-heating the oven to 350 degrees.
Mix the dry ingredients and stir in the milk, whisking just until incorporated.
Dump into the pan with melted butter and scatter 2 cups of fresh (or frozen) peach slices over the top of the batter, sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of sugar and bake 30-40 minutes or until the batter is golden brown.
Let cool slightly before serving with vanilla ice cream.
A combination of peach slices and blackberries or black raspberries is yummy, too!
Buon apetito!
Family Artists
Yesterday my nonna and uncle came for a visit and my uncle brought me two more of his paintings. The first is a Modigliani, my favorite one!
The other is St. Philip by George de la Tour:
Last year he gave me my first Modigliani:
And a reproduction of a painting my Zio Dino painted years ago and which has hung in my grandmother's kitchen since before I was born:
My Mother is an artist, too, and for our new house warming gift she gave me the Sweet Kissing Icon:
There are quiet a few artists in my family (my Father, my sister, my daughter and my son, too). One day I'll post some more of their masterpieces!
St Andrew Bobola
Yesterday we had guests for dinner and one of them, our dear friend Mark R., told the story of the life of St. Andrew Bobola, of whose tortures at the hands of his Orthodox persecutors many saints have said were surpassed only by those of Our Lord during his Passion. In a time in our Church's history when some among the heierarchy would have us believe that the Orthodox need not be converted to Catholicism thanks to "radically altered perspectives and thus attitudes" engendered by Vatican II which will "pave the way for future relations between the two Churches, passing beyond the outdated ecclesiology of return to the Catholic Church," may the example of this Polish martyr, St. Andrew Bobola, be the model of a true and traditional disposition of Roman Catholics towards the scismatic Orthodox. St. Andrew Bobola, Pray for us.
In Sanguine Christi,
Recent Headlines:
"End Catholic Prosyletism" Russian Patriarch Demands
St. Andrew Bobola
"For most martyrs, one persecution is enough. St. Andrew Bobola, who died for his Catholicism in 1657, was, in a sense, doubly persecuted. Long after his death his body was again grossly mistreated by enemies of his faith.
Andrew, the scion of a distinguished Polish family, was born in Sandomir, Poland, in 1591. In 1611 he entered the Society of Jesus at Vilna, in the present Lithuania. Ordained to the priesthood in 1622, he was appointed pastor at Niewiez. There he won great favor, not only for his pastoral efforts but also for his heroic care, in 1624, of the victims of plague.
Father Bobola spent his whole active priestly career working in Vilna and elsewhere as a missionary. He enjoyed great success in bringing back lay Catholics to the practice of the faith, and in persuading whole villages of separated Orthodox to return to union with the pope. In the concurrent political and religious struggle between Poland and Russia, the Jesuits became marked men, Bobola in particular. When he entered a town that had a large non-Catholic population, the townsfolk made a practice of sending their children out to insult him and try to shout him down as he preached. Andrew did not allow himself to be discouraged by them or even impatient.
Eventually, however, the Polish Jesuits were driven from their churches and colleges and had to take refuge in the forests and wetlands. In 1652 Prince Radziwill invited them to live in one of his residences at Pinsk, in White Russia. Bobola accepted the invitation, although he knew that Pinsk was an even more perilous location.
In May 1657, Cossack cavalry raided Pinsk and the surroundings. Near Janow they seized Father Andrew and gave him a severe beating. Then two of them, tying him by a rope to the pommels of their horses, made him stumble back to Janow behind them.
At Janow the priest was interrogated and ordered to abjure his Catholicism. When he gave a firm reply, the officer nearly cut off his hand with a sword. The barbarity with which he was then treated was almost unbelievable: scorched and skinned by his tormentors, his nose and lips were sliced off and his tongue torn out. The prayers he uttered to Jesus and Mary seemed to make his bitter executioners all the more furious. Finally, they beheaded him. They cast his mutilated body on a manure pile.
The dead missionary was buried in the crypt of the Jesuit church in Pinsk. Forty years passed. Then in 1697 his tomb was rediscovered in the ruined church and found to be perfectly incorrupt, even though it had never been embalmed. Still clearly visible on the fair flesh were his wounds and mutilations. It was as if God, by this miraculous sign, had wished to preserve the evidences of his cruel martyrdom. Father Andrew's tomb at once became a center of pilgrimage and many miracles were reported. The cause for his canonization was soon introduced, although circumstances prevented his being declared a saint until 1938.
Over a decade before the canonization, the treasured relics of Blessed Andrew had been submitted to new indignities. The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in 1917. In 1922, Soviet troops took over the shrine church (it was then in Polotsk) and, knowing of the reputation of Bobola's body for being incorrupt, broke open the tomb. Unimpressed, apparently, they stripped the body of its clothing and threw it on the floor. It was then taken to Moscow and put on exhibit in an atheist medical museum as an illustration of religious credulity. Thus did the saint undergo his second persecution.
When he learned of the desecration, Pope Pius XI asked the Russian government to consign the relics to him. Once the whereabouts of the body had been discovered, Father Edmund A. Walsh, an American Jesuit, as an emissary of the pope, succeeded in bringing it to Rome in 1923. After the canonization, the relics were carried back in triumph to Poland. Today they are finally at rest in the church of St. Andrew Bobola in Warsaw. The martyr's frame is now rigid and his skin is dark, but the body is still well preserved and bears even today the marks of his hideous tortures."
--Father Robert F. McNamara
A Year With The Saints
The examination of conscience, which all good people are accustomed to make before going to rest, in order to see how they have passed the day and whether they have gone forward or backward, is of the greatest use, not only to conquer evil inclinations and to uproot bad habits, but also to acquire virtues and to perform our ordinary duties well. We must, however, observe that its best use does not lie in discovering the faults we have committed in the day, but exciting aversion for them, and in forming a strong resolution to commit them no more.--Father M. d'Avila
Examination of Conscience for Adults
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Shielding Children
Why Johnny Quit Church
This is an excellent article on shielding our kids from bad influences, and why, if we don't, even if we do all the positive things to keep our kids Catholic (Mass, Rosary, Scapular, etc.), they could still go astray and even lose their faith. It's not easy raising kids Catholic these days and it seems parents need to play it safe. Our children's souls are too precious to take chances with.
After the Mass there is no greater prayer than the Psalms...
Psalm 1
The happiness of the just and the evil state of the wicked.
1:1. Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence: 1:2. But his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night. 1:3. And he shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit, in due season. And his leaf shall not fall off: and all whatsoever he shall do shall prosper. 1:4. Not so the wicked, not so: but like the dust, which the wind driveth from the face of the earth. 1:5. Therefore the wicked shall not rise again in judgment: nor sinners in the council of the just. 1:6. For the Lord knoweth the way of the just: and the way of the wicked shall perish.
Exposition on Psalm 1
A Year With The Saints
"The Divine Office is one of the most excellent works in which we can be engaged, as the Divine Praises are celebrated in it. It is an employment fit for angels, and therefore it ought to be recited not by constraint or custom, but by choice, and with the application of our whole soul."--St. Mary Magdalen de' Pazzi
