HOMEMADE BREAD & POTATO HARVEST

HOMEMADE BREAD

Margie has been off from school for two weeks for POTATO HARVEST. That's right we live in Idaho! She had a huge To-do list to accomplish during the break and one of the things was to make wheat bread for the very FIRST time! We have all these cans of wheat and have done nothing with them yet. Let the fun begin!

The first thing she did was GRIND up all the wheat. You have to put it through the grinder twice to get it to fine enough. But that didn't take too long. Then of course she just followed the recipe and when everything was said and done....this is what came of the baking...

A beautiful loaf of Homemade Wheat Bread! It tasted so good. Margie was extremely proud of herself. She is becoming so domestic!

But alas, it would not be a wonderful Margie experience without a wonderful story to go with it. She almost caught the whole house on fire. She had divided up the dough into the two different pans and put them both on the oven top to rise again before putting them in the oven to bake. Well, as she was cleaning the bathtub she heard the Smoke alarm go off and was quite concerned. She quickly ran out of the bathroom and looked on the stove and saw a bright red burner and a towel on fire....we are talking HUGE FLAMES!! She turned off the burner and ran to the flour, because that is what you are suppose to put fires out with in the kitchen right? By the time she came back she realized what a dumb idea that was...still the smoke alarm is beeping very loudly! She moved the bowl and towel over to the counter and did a maneuver of taking the non-burning side of the towel and bringing on top of the burning side of the towel. She smothered the fire. Hit the towel a couple of times and the fire was out! Whoo hoo...accomplishment! No worries, the bread was ok, too! And, to make it even more of a Margie story, after all was said and done and everyone and everything was safe, Margie thought...MAN I WISH I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN A PICTURE OF THAT FIRE! But there is no time for cameras when fire is involved!

POTATO HARVEST

Margie was going to be able to work Potato Harvest, but it didn't really work out. But she was still curious to what it was all about. So, Friday afternoon, Morgan and her mom took her out to the farm to see how it was all done. It was amazing!

This is a potato field. Where the magic all begins. They have three different trucks that are out on the fields. The first one is the digger...it goes through and digs up four to six rows of potatoes at a time. Then another truck comes by and picks up the potatoes and shoots it into another truck that will transport them to the cellar area. If there is not a truck to transport the potatoes near the truck who picks up the potatoes, nothing gets done. They have to wait for a truck to be there.

Once the truck that transports the potatoes is full they bring them to the cellar area. But the journey is not through yet. They first have to go through a long conveyor belt apparatus where there are workers (this is what Margie would have been doing) who sort through the potatoes. They pick out any bad ones, rocks, dirt, or anything else that should not be in the cellar. They were moving pretty fast and there were so MANY potatoes!!!!

There were also some pretty BIG potatoes.

This is Margie picking out her potatoes inside of a potato cellar. Look at that mountain! It is just so amazing that there were so many potatoes. And to make it even more amazing, these are all SEED POTATOES. They are just there to make more potatoes next year. But we eat them too! Good thing we LOVE POTATOES. What a fun learning experience!