In these shaky economic times, I think it would be good to start channeling Laura Ingalls Wilder. You know, that pioneer girl, author and American icon of independence and self reliance? I was first exposed to Laura when I was a little girl. The school library was one of my favorite haunts early on. Babar the Elephant, Curious George, Winnie the Pooh and Dr. Seuss were some of my favorites, but I'll save that for another hub.

One day when I was in 4th or 5th grade, I discovered Laura Ingalls' books, and devoured them as fast as I could check them out. I was from a poor family, so reading about a little girl who was poorer than I opened my eyes quite a bit - here was a little girl who only had one doll - a rag doll her mother and she had made from fabric scraps, buttons and yarn from the sewing basket, and who wore the same dress every day to school, yet she was a happy little girl.

Hmm.

I loved reading about Laura's adventures in the covered wagon driving for days and days, sometimes seeing no one except prairie hens and bunny rabbits. And then when thery got to where they were going, her father decided to just build a house for them right where they landed, and he felled trees and made logs and hauled the limbs and clay from the creek to build them a house before snow fell. In between his work on the house, he hunted the wild game that ran free on the land and made fish traps to catch fresh fish for them to eat. In the house, Laura and her mother and sister cooked, sewed sheets, made patchwork quilts, took care of the baby girl, and crocheted lace other things you couldn't go out and buy because there were no stores around and even if they were, money was scarce. As she grew, Laura learned how to milk cows, churn butter, make candles, tend the family's vegetable gardens, feed the chickens, make sausage and cheese and even help her father in the fields. If a dish or tool broke, they carefully mended them, prolonging its usefulness and learning to be thrifty in the process. Even when they were idle, no one really rested..they spent that time reading stories to the baby, mending dresses or making dresses for their dolls, or sewing blocks for their quilts.

Notice how, as the girls grew, their mother lengthened the sleeves and hems of their dresses instead of buying new ones. Laura later wrote that she also had patches sewn onto the elbows of her dresses to extend the life of the garment.

And so the ghost of Laura Ingalls Wilder has stayed with me my whole life, making me appreciate simple things and see the beauty and fun in them as well. Laura's husband, Almanzo Wilder, had a very different life than Laura's.

He was from a wealthy family and never went without, yet he too appreciated simple things and understood the value of hard work from an early age. From age five or so, Almanzo was up in the wee hours before dawn, helping his father and brother on the farm during tough times, like when an early freeze threatened their potato crop - everyone helped then, from little Almanzo to his sisters and even his mother.

The Little House Cookbook

Some of my favorite elements in these stories I enjoyed reading about were their holidays and celebrations, and the food they ate - Things we don't eat but which were interesting nonetheless. One of Almanzo's favorite dishes as a boy was Apples n' Onions, which was basically just fried apples with onions, and which was served as a side dish. Or apple pie or turnovers for breakfast. Or ice cream on the hottest summer days, made from ice that the boys, their father and two neighboring Frenchmen who lived in the woods had cut during the winter freeze and stored in the ice house, a shed that was filled with blocks of ice packed hard with sawdust to keep it from melting. I thought of how much hard work it took three men, two boys and two teams of horses just to harvest the ice when all I had to do was go to the freezer and get some out of the ice tray. I always thought it would be neat to see recipes for all of the dishes in a cookbook, so one day, when I was all grown up, I was surprised when I found The Little House Cookbook at the bookstore! I thumbed through it and was delighted to see a recipe for every single dish both families cooked, along with a little snippet from the book with each recipe, as well as commentary from the author on what certain words meant - For example, they used saleratus quite a bit in baking or when making bean soup, which is really just baking soda. Or Cambric Tea, which they drank on the coldest winter days, and which is made by adding milk and brown sugar to hot tea. Sounds strange to use brown sugar but it was cheaper than white sugar and if you make this recipe it's surprisingly soothing.

There's even a little section devoted to Almanzo's Popocorn & Milk theory, which suggests that if you fill a glass with popped popcorn and another glass of the same size with milk, you can add all of the popcorn in the one glass to the glass of milk one by one and the glass of milk will not overflow. Of course, Almanzo never really could find out since experimenting with food just for fun would have been wasteful. So tonight I decided to finally test Almanzo's theory for myself, because I sort of wondered too.

For my challenge, I used two identical 4-ounce juice glasses. The popcorn glass held approximately 60 pieces of popcorn. (61 to be exact.) First, I filled one glass with milk and one glass with popcorn. I tried to make sure that the contents were at the same height:

Then, I dropped one-by-one as many popcorn kernels I could until I couldn't put anymore in. This is the first pass, which was 20 kernels of popcorn:

The second pass, with 20 more kernels:

And the third and final pass, with 21 kernels:

The result - The popcorn glass is emptied; all its contents in the glass of milk, and not a drop of milk spilled over. Hooray Almanzo, you were right!

Hmm, I wonder if this is how Corn Pops got their start.