Friday, August 17, 2018

Ladies - This is NOT proving the point you think it is!

Here's a quick recap of the rationale behind the Stay-At-Home Daughter movement. 

The "theology":  Bible says that women need a male authority figure at all points so girls need to live at home under their father until they are handed off to their husband.  The theology is neither deep nor reflecting any portion of the Gospels, but no one seems to notice or care.

The educational correlation: Women are meant to be wives and mothers.  The main forms of post-secondary training in the Western world make women less likely to be wives and mothers so girls should avoid traditional education options once they graduate from homeschool.  The traditional works of women including cooking, basic household chores and childrearing are so complicated that a young woman who stays at home and helps her mother (or other Godly Woman (TM)) will end up so far ahead of women who attend college, receive vocational training or work after high school.  (No part of this section is demonstrably true, but no one seems to notice or care, either.)

I have a rather dark sense of humor and I've been enjoying watching the recipes published on the Maxwell Family's Titus 2 blog by Teri Maxwell or Sarah Maxwell along with Jill Dillard's published recipes on the Dillard Family site.  I'd call the recipes basic, but I feel like that's insulting the recipes found in real basic cookbooks.

I'm going to share my favorites by writer:

Teri Maxwell:

I have a sneaking sense of sympathy for Teri Maxwell.  I believe she really wants to be helpful to women who don't know much about cooking - but she's not great at explaining the theory that underlies the details.
How to Flash-Freeze Strawberries:
  • The process she describes is not flash-freezing; it's just ordinary freezing.  
  • There's no tips or anything that is noticeably different from what I have in the standard Ball Blue Book....
  • The reason we half or quarter strawberries and other fruits is two-fold.  First, cutting a whole fruit into smaller pieces speeds the freezing time up markedly since the amount of time it takes to freeze is mostly dependent on the size of the fruit.  The second benefit is that smaller pieces can be packed more tightly when frozen.
Make the Most of Your Leftovers:

  • This post demonstrates how to make a casserole out of leftover rice, pork spare rib meat, ham gravy with ham bits, and a few biscuits.   The resulting casserole sounds heavy for my tastes - but that's no sin.
  • My bigger issue is that she doesn't - or can't - generalize that specific example into a broader idea.   I think the post would have been so much more useful if she explained that leftover meat and vegetables can be made into a casserole by combining them with a grain product like rice, tortillas, hearty breads or noodles and a condensed soup or sauce.  To assemble, put a layer of grain product on the bottom followed by the meat and vegetables.  Top with a shallow layer of grain product.  Pour sauce over top.   Cook at 350 for 30 minutes or until heated through.     
    • For leftover chicken, I use tortillas, tomatoes, corn, ricotta cheese and green enchilada sauce to make enchilada casserole.  
    • Leftover beef combined with egg noodles, cream of mushroom soup, a little bit of wine, and green beans makes a nice casserole, too..  
    • I don't have a great leftover pork casserole - but pork fried rice is a household favorite.
Sarah Maxwell - the dedicated Amazon Affiliate writer:
  • That's a fascinating title.  An equally honest title would be "Brown meat.  Add commercial taco seasoning.  Buy an Instant Pot through our Amazon affiliate link so we get cash!"  The reason they didn't use that title is that there would be nothing left in the body of the post.
  • An Instant Pot is a pressure cooker that can also be used as a crock-pot.  There are a lot of times that a pressure cooker is a great choice.  A pressure cooker speeds up working with dried beans, lentils and rice of all types.  Pressure cookers can do amazing things with tender foods that can get gross if over cooked like shrimp and eggs.   Using a pressure cooker/crock pot to brown hamburger or ground poultry makes NO sense.   That wastes so much energy that it is insane. 
  • I've always found this one painful due to Sarah Maxwell's angst seeping through the post.  The post is so clearly written to list six fairly expensive items in the Maxwell's Amazon affiliate links program.  The purpose is obvious - but Sarah also seems to realize that most of her most dedicated readers don't have around $100 to drop to buy a ceramic coffee dripper, coffee bean grinder, milk frother and reusable insulated tumbler to make the perfect cup of mocha.  But she needs to drum up the income and so we have this post.
This post feels like it has multiple writers involved so I'm assuming that Teri and Sarah were involved in this classic:
  • An excellent recipe to use for an open house or any other party where you invited 500 people and forgot to ask them to RSVP.   
  • Let's see: 70 cups of cooked pinto beans and 15 pounds of onions with 4 cups of spices/flavorings.  I have a well-supplied kitchen but this would overwhelm every pot, pan, bowl and cup I own in the process including my boiling bath canner and pressure canner pressed into service as really big pots.
  • I have to give Sarah (or whoever wrote the post) credit for detailing all the steps the family goes through.  At the same time, the process is completely crazy!  The process of cooking the mountain of beans separately from the hill of onions and the peppers simply creates more dishes to wash and more time on the blender/mixer without adding anything to the finished recipe.  
  • If they were to add some cumin, garlic and oregano to the burrito mix, it would change their lives.  Just saying.  It's a magical part of burritos.
At least the Maxwell recipes require some skill at cooking.  Jill Dillard seems to be specializing in creating/remembering recipes for children too young to reach the stove. 

Cinnamon Toast:
  • Like Joseph Duggar, I enjoy cinnamon toast.  Unlike his sister, I've never even thought about writing out a recipe for adding sugar and cinnamon to a buttered piece of toast.  
  • Do I get credit for "Honey-flavored Breakfast Cereal" if I explain how to drizzle honey on corn flakes?
  • Tortillas, pizza sauce, and cheese.  Microwave for 1 minute.  
  • If this is really for a meal instead of a snack, I'd substitute bagels instead of tortillas and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.  It's amazing - but probably not cheap enough for large broke families.
Jill Dillard's secondary theme is accidently exposing how huge families need to skimp on protein to feed everyone.  After all, Cinnamon Toast has very little protein and Poor Man's Pizza is only slightly better because of the protein in the cheese.  Here are some more:

Easy Chicken and Noodles
  • This is a giant pot of egg noodles and diluted cream of chicken soup.  Using cooked chopped chicken is optional.   
  • She notes that her family would eat it with homemade bread (ATI teaches that the line about "Give us this day our daily bread" in the Our Father means you have to bake bread daily), a big salad and fruit.  That sounds yummy - but unless the big salad is made with lots of hard boiled eggs or beans  - this meal is really low in protein.
  • The Duggars got this recipe from a family friend.  It makes 20 enchiladas out of 20 tortillas, 5 cups of cooked rice, 4 cans of cream of chicken soup, four cups of cheddar cheese and one 12.5 oz can of cooked chicken.  Each enchilada has 0.6 oz of chicken in it; a serving of meat for a child age 5 and up is supposed to be around 3 oz.  My toddler routinely eats more than 0.6oz of meat at a sitting - and he's tiny!
I know I'm supposed to be a dunce at cooking since I went to college - but this week we've had citrus-stuffed slow roasted chicken with green beans for dinner one night followed by chicken soup made with the back, rib, wing, neck and thigh meat from the roasted chicken combined with fire-roasted tomatoes, corn, green peppers and zucchini. 

I think I'll stick to the cooking I learned from my parents.....

11 comments:

  1. I don't envy QF families trying to feed so many people on a very limited budget. If it was me doing the cooking, I'd probably gravitate to the vegetable and lentil soup my spouse and I lived on during a period when we had very little money.

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    1. Lentils, beans, chickpeas... All cheap stuff that´ll fill you up for a long time. And that pressure cooker will actually come in handy if you´re using dried instead of canned. They can still use chicken stock for taste if they want to. Depending on where you live four cans of cream of chicken soup will buy you a whole chicken that´ll give you around 600g of meat AND a carcass to make a great stock.

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    2. @Anna - you can see the difference between the amount of meat used in the Maxwell Family that had reliable income from Steven's engineering job and the Duggars whose income prior to TLC was intermittent and highly variable.

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    3. @Unknown: Yeah - in the US a large fryer chicken runs around $7-8 dollars but they go on sale for $3-4 dollars a few times a year. We've also got options for bags of frozen chicken breasts that run $5-7 dollars that provide a few pounds of meat.

      I think one of the problems is that the sheer number of children with parents who had limited life experience makes everything harder. The Duggars married when Michelle and Jim Bob were both teens. During the time frame where most US people are living alone or as a married couple with no kids and learning how to cook on the cheap, the Duggars were producing a baby a year. Learning how to cook dried beans from scratch isn't hard exactly - but doing it while trying to care for so_many_young children is much harder.

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    4. That's a good point. My husband and I married around 21, which is plenty young, but our only child was born five years later. We had time together to figure some of our lives out well before we had to negotiate a baby in the mix. I know plenty of people who had babies earlier in their marriages, but most of them were people who had married later in life than we did. It feels like the QF community is setting their kids up for failure by insisting they marry as early as possible and have as many children as they can.

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  2. Well, I guess the Joshua generation has at least that going for them: they know nothing BUT struggling to make ends meet.

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    1. I've been wondering if that was the plan all along. Having a lot of kids at a young age without much education or career training is going to greatly increase the risk of poverty - but most of the families will never know the difference after a few generations. Especially if the leaders who have benefited from a college degree (cough - Maxwell- cough - Bates) make sure to wave the flag of "We don't need an education to make bank" while living off monies from college educations.

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  3. Those "leaders are in for a rude awakening if they think the downtrodden masses will still be able to send the amount of money their way they're used to now. I'm so sorry for those kids.

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  4. Considering the poor nutrition is a risk factor for pregnancy complications this could be part of why the next generation isn't putting up the big numbers like the first did. This movement is really pretty unsustainable in a age were subsistence fastening is no longer practical.

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    1. *farming not fastening

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    2. I agree that poverty complications including food shortage and nutritional imbalance are likely causing issues for the next generation of QF believers.

      The first generation had the advantage of having access to the financial and logistical supports of a more standard size family of origin. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar came from average income families - but since their parents only had a handful of kids, the senior Duggars got and get a decent amount of support from the grandparents. Compare that to the amount of logistical support the older daughters with babies receive from Michelle. I mean, Michelle Duggar still has a house full of teens, preteens and elementary age kids; she's not easily available to care for a baby or toddler. Really, the older sisters have received more support from Jana than anyone else - but I doubt she'll be single forever - at which point the Duggar girls are way behind in the amount of support.

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