Sunday evening, we had guests over for a taco night. I made iced tea, taco meat, and rice, and our guests brought toppings and taco shells. The rice I make is a Chipotle-style Cilantro Lime Rice, and it’s so good. Since I was cooking for a crowd and I didn’t want to make two pots of rice, I tried to squeeze as much rice as I could into one pot (I dumped a whole 32 ounce bag of Aldi’s organic white rice into one pot). It worked okay, except—this particular recipe calls for extra water and then draining the rice through a fine mesh strainer. My strainer holds less than 2 cups of rice at a time, so it was taking me a while to get all of the rice drained and into the slow cooker I’d be serving it in. By the time I got to the bottom of the pot of rice and water, I had quite a bit of watery, mushy, gelled rice. I wasn’t going to serve that to my guests, but I didn’t want to waste it (I’ve been watching grocery prices lately—ouch–so I figured every little bit could be used). Besides, I cook with white rice flour (I have Celiac), and this was pretty much white rice flour with water, right?
The day after having guests over, I pulled the gelled rice out of the fridge and scraped it into a mixing bowl. I added two eggs, some shredded cheese, green onions, chopped ham, baking powder, garlic powder, a little bit of gluten free flour until it seemed like the right texture, and some melted butter. I poured it into my cast iron scone pan and cooked the made-up mixture. It turned out to be so yummy! My husband was surprised, again, that I had “made it up,” because he thought the “recipe” turned out so well. When we were first married, he started calling me a “rebel in the kitchen,” because I would change recipes all the time.
I homeschool a bit like I cook. I have always seen curriculum as a general guide for how to do things, but then I’ve veered off the page and added my own “ingredients” and omitted some others. Recipes and curriculum are great for teaching the basics of how to do this thing. Once you get it down, and you know what a basic muffin batter recipe includes and should feel like, you can get creative and make it however you like. The same is true for homeschool curriculum–once you learn the types of books and materials to choose, and the cadence of a homeschool schedule, you can plan your days exactly as you wish.
With food sensitivities, I have had to learn to change recipes to fit my dietary needs. The same has been true of our homeschool curriculum. When I would purchase boxed curriculum sets like Sonlight, for example, I would find that I didn’t like particular books for our children. You might say, our family had “sensitivities” to those books. So, I learned to swap out books and cross out the titles we wouldn’t be using. At first, I felt some mom guilt about this–was I giving my kids an adequate education if I didn’t read all the books? But I let that go, because I know my kids’ needs (and sensitivities) better than anyone on the planet.
Working from recipes can be expensive. Here’s how it’s gone for me so many times: it’s payday, yay! I sit down and make a menu for the week. I use Plan to Eat and load in all the recipes I want to use. I print the grocery list from Plan to Eat, which is usually several pages long–for one week. I go to the grocery store, and my receipt is about as long as the grocery list. Whoa. I just spent two weeks’ worth of grocery money on one week of groceries. The next week, I “wing it” and just cook what we have left in the house and whatever we have stored up in the freezer and pantry. Have you noticed this?
I find that our grocery budget takes less of a hit when I use recipes as general ideas and then I substitute ingredients for whatever I already have. I prefer to stock up on the staples, especially when I can get them on sale or in bulk (like through Azure Standard). I like to go to the farmer’s market (or out to my garden) and find whatever is in season, and then “make up” recipes as I go…I find I spend far less money on groceries when we live this way, when I compare it to the perfectly planned-out menus I’ve made.
One downfall to my rebellious way of cooking is that occasionally, I can’t replicate the foods I have made. This is one benefit of following a recipe: the results can be duplicated over and over, with a certain degree of predictability (there are a few factors that can alter a recipe, like humidity, elevation, and changes in packaged ingredients). Carefully planned curriculum is also great if you want the same duplicated literature experience across multiple households. But–do we need that, homeschool moms? I can see why it would be useful for a public school to maintain the same exact curriculum across all fourth grade classrooms in the district, but most homeschoolers broke away from that kind of rigidity for good reasons. Do we need people telling us exactly what materials to use every day of the school year in our homeschool journey?
You can think of a boxed curriculum set like Sonlight, or My Father’s World, as a perfectly planned-out menu. It’s kind of like purchasing a meal kit from Hello Fresh and pulling all of the exact ingredients you need out of a box, at exactly the right time. It’s nice to have an organized plan, and it definitely takes less “brain power,” but there is a cost for that convenience, too. There have been seasons in my life when I needed that kind of organization–and that’s okay. Most of the time, though, the frugal side of me takes over and I want to plan things myself.
To homeschool the way I cook, I stock up on “ingredients” (books) when I can find them on sale or at used book sales. I organize my shelves in a way that makes sense to me. Then, I use those “ingredients,” measured carefully, at just the right time. Deciding the “right time” for each “ingredient” is the part that takes some thinking, but I don’t mind doing that kind of thinking. I created a system that works for me as a loose kind of “rule” for where to put my “ingredients” and when to use them, kind of like setting up my freezer and pantry in a way that makes cooking creatively a possibility for me.
I decided to start with Claritas Publishing classical memory work. It’s built around four cycles. I love teaching over four classical cycles. This gave me some context for how to organize my books:
Cycle 1
- Science: Biology
- History: Creation to the Fall of Rome
I label these books with a red dot.
Cycle 2
- Science: Astronomy, Geology
- History: The Dark Ages Through the Early Explorers
I label these books with an orange dot.
Cycle 3
- Science: Chemistry
- History: Dutch Revolt through California Gold Rush
I label these books with a green dot.
Cycle 4
- Science: Physics
- History: Victorian Era through Modern History
I label these books with a blue dot.
This helped me organize my “ingredients,” but I had quite a few books that did not fall into these categories. I decided to divide up the following topics among the four cycles:
Nature
Other Science Topics
Character Traits
Composers
Artists
Poets
Handicrafts
Life Skills/Survival Topics
Hymns
Faith/Catechism/Apologetics Topics
Geography
Biographies of Missionaries and Other Famous People
Read Aloud Chapter Books, Other Literature “Just for Fun” (Not tied to history)
Read Aloud Picture Books (Not tied to history)
Electives
Now, I know where to stick everything on my shelves, and I can literally just grab a book off of the shelf of whatever cycle we’re in and do school with my kids. I post all of the books I suggest at The Gentle Learning Company. I also create reading plans for those who like more of a “recipe” to follow. The difference between the reading plan I make and those that come with a Sonlight package is that I give options. For historic literature in a particular cycle, there are multiple picture book options per week and then five or more “tracks” of literature to read aloud or to have your child read independently. I set it up this way because I hate feeling restricted to one plan of action. I like to improvise and choose what is best for my family. I figured you probably do, too.
Plus, I want you to have the ability to use the reading plans as loosely as I use recipes. If you’ve got other ingredients in your “pantry,” feel free to substitute. I’ve been working on picture book lists for Cycle 4 this week, and I just chose books about the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad and the Iris Potato Famine for weeks three, four, five and six. You might go to your local library and find a book that isn’t on my list (probably because it was out of print and $40). Grab it! Use it! I want this kind of freedom for you, and I hope that the cycles I’ve set up can provide a little order to your planning so that you don’t feel totally out of control.
If I were to make the gelled rice muffin/scone things I made yesterday without any idea of the general ingredients that go into baked goods, or without any concept of how to mix and bake a recipe like that, it would have been an utter failure. I could have pulled out all the wrong ingredients. (I’m trying to think of ingredients that would throw the whole thing off, but I keep thinking of ingredients that could have worked somehow…chocolate chips–make them sweet—oats–could’ve worked…Hmmm!). Anyways, the point is, I needed to have a little bit of knowledge about cooking, the order of cooking, and to have the right ingredients on hand and in an organized place to be able to pull off that “recipe” and have it turn out okay. My hope is that the GLC reading plans will be exactly like that kind of knowledge and organization for you–while giving you the freedom to be a “rebel in the kitchen” like me–or, a “rebel in the library.”
Do you cook with recipes, or do you like to make up dishes as you go? Do you homeschool like you cook? Share your thoughts!