Missionary Muffins

With four children five and under, whom we home school, we find it hard to find a free minute anywhere. As a result, our life has become an exercise in efficiency. We have a twelve-week menu rotation with standardized shopping lists. We have a laundry schedule that not only includes specific laundry days, but that requires you to only wear certain colors of clothing on certain days of the week. We have a a cataloging system for the children's toys, so we always know which pieces are accounted for, and which ones are missing. Actually, we have a cataloging system for almost everything, from the organizing of monthly bills, to the filing of Ensign articles. (The Ensign project is actually a fairly new development and a rather clever one if you ask me. As we read the Ensign each month we assign topics to the tops of articles. Then at the end of the month we dissemble the magazine and file the interesting articles topically into our church documents filing cabinet.) Not only is it kind of crazy how organized we are--perhaps literally--but we also absolutely cannot stand to waste anything. Not time. Not money. Not energy. Not Resources. Consequently, we are always having to find ways to get more efficient.

Recently, I have figured out yet another way to do this. This time the project deals with meal planning and food storage. For those of you who know me well, you know I am obsessed with food storage, both in having it and rotating it. This obsession led me to the development of a twelve-week menu rotation so that I would know exactly what I needed in my three-month food supply (not to mention simplifying my grocery shopping with standardized shopping lists!). It has also turned me into a made-from-scratch kind of cook, as well as a canner and food preserver. Ultimately, it has set me on a quest to figure out the perfect way to have, grow, store, and rotate our food. It is never far from my thoughts, and I am always revising the way I do things. That's why this new project is so wonderful. You see, every Sunday, I make homemade muffins or sweetbreads for Sunday breakfast. This can be time consuming, and rather expensive in the off season of the ingredients I use. Actually, in addition to expensive, it can be nearly impossible with some ingredients. Take pumpkin , for instance. I only like to use fresh pumpkin in my pumpkin bread; however, pumpkin is only available part of the year. This is a real problem. But thanks to that pumpkin predicament, I decided to start doubling my Sunday morning muffins and sweetbreads and freezing loaves to have during the off season. Then, after giving it some more thought, I realized that if I always doubled my breads, I could systematize my muffin schedule. In fact, I can always double my recipes so that each Sunday I make two loaves and 24 muffins. We eat the muffins, and I freeze the loaves. After 14 weeks of making breads, (that's 4 weeks of zuchini bread, 4 weeks of banana bread, 3 weeks of spiced applesauce bread, 3 weeks of pumpkin bread), then I can drop down to only having to cook once every four Sundays for the remaining 38 weeks of the year. This is ideal not only because I have to have fresh, not frozen blueberry muffins at least once a month, but also because it uses all of our extra produce AND increases our rotatable food storage while saving me time and money. It's delightful.

And, to make it more delightful, this bread making project recently solved another of my problems. (I love it when you can kill two birds with one stone.) The problem was that Halloween fell on Sunday. My own children were part of a Saturday night trick-or-treating group that some church members in our area put together. I still, however, felt uncomfortable handing out treats on Sunday after telling my own kids we couldn't go out. So, would I just turn out my lights and refuse to answer the door? That might perplex my neighbors since they all know we have kids and they can clearly see our cars are at home. I thought and thought about how I could get around handing out candy on Sunday without offending my neighbors. Then, Halloween morning, as I was making my third installment of pumpkin bread, I had the answer to my problem. Missionary muffins. I called the kids in and had them help me quadruple my recipe. Then we went after church to do some reverse trick-or-treating. We delivered muffins to all of our neighbors and explained our families love for the Sabbath and Sabbath day observance. It was a perfect solution. Hooray for Missionary Work! It was also the last time I will have to make muffins for a while. Hooray for efficiency!