Little House Birthday

E desperately wanted a 'Little House' birthday party this year.  As I'm not much on elaborate birthday parties, I decided we'd make her actual birthday special by having a 'Little House' Day.

We started the day with some Almanzo Pancakes and Fried Salt Pork.  Almanzo Pancakes are buckwheat pancakes.  I forgot to buy buckwheat from the store the week before so Jut had to run to two different grocery stores in the morning to find buckwheat.  If you've read the Little House series, you know how often they eat fried salt pork.  I was really excited to find it in the local grocery store this fall and had been waiting for a good opportunity to try it.

If you've never had salt pork before, think of a huge hunk of bacon that you slice up.  It is preserved with salt instead of whatever they use for bacon.  So, we sliced it up and threw it in a pan and fried it because that is what they did in the books.  E was the first to try it and she spit it right out.  Jut and I tried it and decided it had enough salt in a tiny bit to suffice you for a week.  Then, we googled how you were suppose to prepare it.  Most sites suggested boiling it a couple of times before frying it to get rid of most of the salt.  Oops.  I boiled it twice and it was mostly edible afterwards.  However, we didn't eat it plain.  I used it in the baked beans that I made for E's party the following weekend (and they were the best baked beans I've ever made...go figure).

The pancakes were okay.  E really liked them and ate several.  Jut and I weren't the biggest fans of the buckwheat but we smiled and ate them up.  We should have used molasses instead of syrup but the birthday girl wanted syrup, so we all happily ate our pancakes with syrup.

After breakfast, we set up to make some butter.  We poured our heavy cream into two jars and started shaking.  After a while, the cream wasn't moving anymore (and the kids were done shaking/rolling the jars) so we scooped it out of our jars and called it butter.  But, it was really more like stiff whipping cream...(shh, don't tell E.  She thinks we still made butter and insists on having it on her toast in the mornings.)  Maybe we'll try it again sometime and actually make butter.


For lunch, we had a pretty traditional lunch for our house except that we made Town Party Lemonade.  The kids had fun helping me squeeze the lemons for our fresh lemonade.  It was delicious.  E decided that it had to be the beverage for her birthday party.

We played Little House after lunch.  We pulled in the large stove box inside to be the 'claim shanty'.  It was fun.

For supper, E requested venison because that's what the Ingalls ate.  So, I found a recipe using venison and cooked it up with some fried Johnny cakes (and I can't find the recipe again), broccoli and more town lemonade.  For E's birthday 'cake', we had Heart Shaped Christmas Cakes, which are sugar cookies.

After dinner, we went to E's favorite place for ice cream and went out to visit with G'ma.  No more 'Laura' activities.

It wasn't an action packed day.  E is still waiting for her sewing lessons that were suppose to happen on her birthday, and I'd love to find a wash board and have her wash her clothes like 'Laura' did.  But, overall I think she had a great day and enjoyed her special "Little House" day.

 

Happy Birthday, E! 

Note:  I'm not much of a photo journalist...there are many things that didn't get documented in our special day...but there were a few shots of the activities that accompanied our 'Little House' day.