Small groups are an important part of our church. Back when the church first started, every member was required to belong to a small group, or module, as they were then called. Church business and pastoral care were a central focus of the module, and each module had a representative that attended the council meetings. However, as the church grew, so did the church council, until there were about twenty-five members, give or take a half-dozen, sitting on church council. It was not an efficient way to get things done.

The church has now restructured, and while small groups are still important, they are not required. Church council now consists of the chairs of the church commissions and the pastors, about ten people. As a matter of fact, I am on church council because I am chair of the youth commission. And I am not in a small group. Things have clearly changed.

So why the sudden lecture on our church structure? I really don’t have a reason, except that I felt like explaining some things about our church. Oh, and because I was going to say something about small groups. Yes, that was my point—small groups.

When Mr. Handsome and I started attending the church together (I was attending before we even met), we were approached by some church members to see if we would like to join their module. We did, and it was a very good thing because the people in the group all turned out to be committed, loyal friends.

(In fact, the following year when we packed up and left the country for the Boonies of Nicaragua, they did not forget us, bless their hearts. David and Tina kept a steady stream of care packages headed our way—packages not only for Christmas and Easter, but also for Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving and Just For Anyhow, and probably also for the Fourth of July and St. Patrick’s Day and our anniversary and birthdays… Jim and Ann actually came to Nicaragua and lived in Managua for a year, though not because we were there, and they came to visit us in our home; their daughter Sara visited us a grand total of four times that year. One of those times was when she served as tour guide for another family from our small group, Linda and Keith and their three teenagers, who bravely endured the bumpy, eight-hour long, headache-inducing bus ride to our little place. I alluded to their visit in the previous post.)

Every December our small group had a tradition of meeting at the local Mennonite highschool (where it was, and still is, Tina’s job to counsel and guide the students) to make Christmas cookies in the large kitchen with the industrial ovens and cookie sheets. Everyone brought containers of pre-mixed homemade cookie dough and we all spent a Sunday afternoon baking and decorating, divvying out the cookies amongst us, and returning home with a wide variety of goodies.

Mr. Handsome and I participated in the Cookie Baking Fest for the year or two that we were living in the valley and still with the group, but I don’t remember much of what we made (though I do vaguely recall that Tina made something involving Ritz crackers, peanut butter, and dipping chocolate that was sinfully good)—except for Linda’s butter cookies. She and her crew turned out mountains of the cookies, all different shapes and sizes, and decorated every which way. I begged the recipe from her, and now I make these cookies every year. Actually, I make them more than once a year—they make beautiful heart-shaped cookies for Valentine’s Day.

This dough is excellent for shaping because the dough is easy to handle and the cookies hardly rise at all while baking. And let me assure you, they are not just a dried-out sugar cookie; they are a butter cookie, delectable in their own right. Topped with a thin icing, they are splendidly exquisite, perfect with a cup of coffee.

Butter Cookies
From Linda

2 1/4 cups sugar
3 cups butter
3 eggs
3 teaspoons vanilla
8 1/4 cups flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt

Beat together the sugar and butter. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat some more. Add the dry ingredients and mix well.

Refrigerate the dough until it is thoroughly chilled. (You can store the dough in the refrigerator for several days, and it also freezes well.)

On a floured surface, roll the dough out to about a 1/8-inch thickness. Cut out the cookies and place on ungreased cookie sheets. The cookies do not rise much, so you can place them fairly close together. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-12 minutes, or until the edges are lightly browned. It’s important for the cookies to have some brown to them because it adds flavor. Cool completely before icing with buttercream frosting.

To freeze the cookies, place the iced cookies on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer for about half an hour till the icing has hardened. Gently set the cookies in a plastic container, placing wax paper in between each layer, and then return the boxed cookies to the freezer.

PS. Orangette just posted a recipe for butter cookies that I just may have to try. I do so like a good butter cookie.

PPS. Measurements for when I only have 1 pound of butter (so I don’t have to keep doing the math every time): 1½ cups sugar, 2 cups butter, 2 eggs, 2 teaspoons vanilla, 5½ cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and ½ teaspoon salt.

The outside play area has recently gotten a pretty big boost with the addition of our “new” trampoline. It’s smaller than the one we had before, but it has a net.

Though I suppose some could argue that the lack of a safety net made the kids play safer and now they will get rough and careless and we will have broken bones and black eyes galore. On the other hand, maybe it was just luck that there were no accidents for the two years that we had a net-less trampoline.

All this talk of broken bones and good luck is starting to make me feel a little uneasy, so let’s not discuss this anymore.

The work on the clubhouse keeps moving along.

Now that it’s getting dark so early, they don’t have much time to work on it after Mr. Handsome gets home, but they work as long as they can.

So that’s why the pictures are so dark—it’s dark outside.

It’s a good thing the outside play area is getting a face-lift. Two of Mr. Handsome’s siblings and their spouses and kids will be descending upon our home over the Christmas holidays. The one family has five children and the other family has three, so that means that there will be eighteen people eating and sleeping in our home. Our house is plenty big, about 1800 square feet, but it will feel like an 800 square foot house what with all the coats and hats and boots, air mattresses, pillows, towels, and dirty dishes piled about. Not that I ever let dirty dishes pile up around my house.

I am not daunted by the prospect of smashing in lots of Mr. Handsome’s family members. No, not at all. When we lived in our 300-something square foot, one-room adobe house (that we built with our bare hands) in Nicaragua we once had nine people staying in that space. Granted, we were only together for one day (or was it two?), but we had no running water, and the refrigerator was just a little bigger than a dorm fridge. And there were scorpions. But we were used to hauling our own water, using a pee-pot at night (though not when we had company—we spared them our tinkle-tinkle sounds), and dealing with scorpions.

The scorpions were nasty. They looked like Sin Incarnate. We learned to peer down in the latrine before delicately perching our tender bums on the cold concrete, to shake out our shoes before slipping our feet into them, and lifting our pillows and peeking under the bedsheets before crawling into bed at night. And Mr. Handsome got a lot of practice dashing for his machete and then smashing everything in sight as he frantically tried to chop the evil creatures as they skittered away. Despite all that practice, he had an uncanny ability to almost never hit the little buggers.

And while we are on the subject of scorpions I might as well tell you that once Mr. Handsome pulled on his jeans without shaking them first, and well, let’s just say that it was a unique way of putting on jeans, which involved much yelling and leaping about and culminated in a high-speed strip show. Another time a scorpion fell from the ceiling tiles, right down the inside of my sweatshirt, and then it was my turn to treat him (and my poor brother) to my own version of a strip show. Scorpions have a way of bringing out the r-rated in a person.

Back to the upcoming onslaught of company. I am very excited. Really, I am. But, if I’m going to be honest, I need to tell you that I’m also stressed. I tend to panic fairly easily, and Mr. Handsome tends to be unsympathetic to this emotional weakness of mine. When that happens, we do not make a very good team. Saturday’s conversation went something like this:

Me: We need to sit down and make a list of all the stuff that has to get done.

Mr. Handsome: Uh-huh.

Me: There is a lot of work we should do now so that we aren’t so rushed closer to the time, you know.

Mr. Handsome: You’re getting stressed, aren’t you.

Me: You are so observant. Yes, I’m getting stressed! There will be eighteen people in this house. Do you realize what that means?

Mr. Handsome: Yeah? So what? What’s there to do? The house–

Me: So what? So what? I can not believe you just said that! Where is everyone going to sleep? What are we going to eat? I have to think through all that ahead of time! I don’t want to work nonstop while that everyone is here! I want to enjoy the visit, too! And we don’t just have that visit to get ready for—we also have to get ready for Christmas. And my family is coming before your family and then we’re traveling to Pennsylvania. What’s there to do?!

Mr. Handsome, speaking calmly and slowly, and with (how dare he!) a smile in his voice: Just calm down, okay? You are getting worked up over nothing. They could all walk in the door right now and it would be just fine. What is there that really needs to get done? I think the house is fine just as it is.

Me, totally taking the bait and knowing it, but unable to help myself—I am shrieking, stomping, and flapping my arms: THAT IS NOT TRUE AND YOU KNOW IT! YOU ARE MAKING MY ANXIETY WORSE! YOU ARE NOT BEING HELPFUL, SO STOP IT RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE!

And so then he stopped it (smart man), and I made a list and he absentmindedly listened to me without any arguing (again, smart man), and then he went outside to set up the trampoline and when he came in that evening, he went straight to the back hall which he proceeded to reorganize and thoroughly clean.

I felt much better.

If I give the impression that I don’t want to have company, I’m sorry because that is most definitely not the case. I love having company, especially family.

But these bouts of panic are just something I have to go through, kind of like a ritual cleansing. Thankfully, these attacks only strike every now and then (sometimes once a day, and sometimes, in my weaker moments, once an hour), and they are not totally without purpose. They do a very fine job of getting Mr. Handsome on board (they are much more effective than rational conversation, as you can see from the above conversation), and when Mr. Handsome gets on board, the house gets clean, lickety-split, and then the company comes (yippee!) and we all, me included, have a swell time.

I haven’t written here for awhile. You may think that I have been doling out water and flour three times every day, day in and day out for the past month, but I haven’t. I put the babies to sleep again, and after a break that lasted several weeks, I woke them up, just last Wednesday.

After the first day of feedings, both starters looked pretty flat and the whole wheat starter smelled dead (in other words, like flour and water, no tang to it), but the next morning they were alive and well. I breathed a sigh of relief, and on the third day I started baking.

I’m trying to bake every day, in preparation for our Christmas company and travels. It makes my mornings a little crazy what with all the measuring and pouring and all the doughy containers to wash.

I have a nice little system though.

I first get out the four loaves of bread that have been in the refrigerator overnight. I take off their shower caps and cover them with a towel.

Then I mix up a batch of the country white. While that dough is mixing,

and then resting,

I measure out the ingredients for the whole wheat.

After the country white is done, I simply transfer the dough to an oiled bowl, cover it with a shower cap, and dump the pre-measured ingredients for the whole wheat into the mixing bowl—I do not wash the mixing bowl between breads.

Somewhere in there I get my continuing starters measured into clean jars, fed, and set back in their corner on the counter.

And the leftover starter dumped into a little bowl, ready to add to the compost and for one of the kids to carry it out to the chickens.

Several hours later it is time to get busy again. I bake the risen loaves.

Then I grease the newly-emptied bread pans, cut and shape the new loaves, put them in the pans, cover them with shower caps, and let them rest at room temperature for an hour before putting them in the refrigerator.

After that, all that remains to be done it to feed the babies at noon and before bed, and to package up the freshly baked bread loaves and carry them down to the freezer.

Like I said, it’s a little crazy, but only for this week, or until I get about 16-20 loaves of bread. Then I’ll stop.

I already did stop with the whole wheat starter. Instead, I’m now doubling my white starter baby so that I can make a double batch of breads based on the white starter, such as the rosemary-olive oil and George’s Seeded Sour.

Ps. I made some changes to the whole wheat recipe, which I noted here. The dough was just too wet for me to work with.