Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Stay With the Tried and True

My Mom’s and Dad’s 1915 Five Roses Cookbooks:
They each brought a copy into their marriage.

Do you have a collection of old family recipes or cookbooks? Many of us are fortunate enough to have such treasures, lovingly passed down to us. They’re worth hanging on to.

The recipes might be contained in a cookbook, or written down on index cards and filed in a plastic or wooden box. They may be handwritten and neatly organized in a binder, or simply clipped from the newspaper and stuffed haphazardly into the pages of an old cookbook.

But no matter how the recipes are filed, there’s an easy way to tell which ones are the best:

The pages they’re on are a bit of a mess.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Only Horoscope You Need

Signs of the Zodiac on an Astronomical Clock

What’s your astrological sign? Are you a Libra or a Leo? Do you read your horoscope daily and make life decisions based on that advice?

Or maybe you follow Chinese astrology, which is based on the year in which you were born rather than the month. The Chinese are about to celebrate the Lunar New Year, heralding the beginning of the Year of the Rat.

Both of these systems teach that the time cycle in which you were born determines your personality, and to some extent the course of your life. But this might leave you with a sense of being powerless, at the mercy of impersonal forces beyond your control.

Isn’t there something better to help you navigate your way through life?

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Get Ready for God to Act

Pouring cupcake batter into prepared muffin tins.
Photo by Gina Dittmer.

When you read a cake or muffin recipe, it will usually instruct you to preheat your oven and get your baking pans prepared before describing how to make the dessert itself.

But why do it in this order? Why not make the batter first, and let it sit there in the bowl while you leisurely grease or line the baking pans and let the oven slowly heat up?

There’s a very good reason to have everything prepared before you start the actual baking, and it has to do with how leaveners behave.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Fill in the Blanks

Photo by Michael Gaida on Pixabay

Did you know that some people make a hobby out of “reading” the forest in winter? By that I mean identifying trees despite their being bare of leaves this time of year.

This can be quite challenging, because frankly, many species of trees look almost identical to each other without their leaves. How do these nature lovers do it? How do they “fill in the blanks” and distinguish one species of tree from another in winter?

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

What Is Your “Burning Bush”?

Photo by Leonora (Ellie) Enking on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

You’ve got to love a plant which turns pink in the autumn. I’m referring to the Euonymus alatus shrub, whose leaves change from green to a vivid, hot pink this time of year.

One of its nicknames is “burning bush,” because in autumn the shrub looks like it’s on fire. It must have reminded people of the burning bush Moses encountered in Exodus 3, through which God spoke to him.

I think God uses many different ways to speak to us today, each a “burning bush” tailored to our unique personalities.

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