A Traditional Farm Life - Stove Hot Cocoa

A Traditional Farm Life

By Shasta Hamilton 

Greetings from Enterprise, dear friends!   Partially hidden and around the corner, I am listening quietly as exotic place names waft through the air to my chair.

“Where is Bangladesh?” one asks.  Necks crane, eyes squint, looking closely at the new world map on the wall.  One after another, places our children have heard about are named, and the map is searched until the location is found.

It’s the first day of school at the Hamilton’s.  Our “scholars” are getting acquainted with two new wall maps—one of the United States and the other of the world.

Our Geography lessons will be informal, but hopefully interesting to the students, as they find the places they read about.  The same friend that gave us the maps also generously furnished an outdated Junior High Geography textbook for our perusal.

We can’t afford to take our family of eight on a trip around the world right now, so the world must be opened to our children through the pages of a book.

Our children are voracious readers, so the Geography textbook is already in high demand.  (Perhaps a lesson on sharing should come first?) 

Through this book’s pages our children are “meeting” children from China, Russia, Mexico, etc.  Full color pictures of a day in these featured children’s lives leap up from the page.  Perhaps surprisingly to our youngsters, these children in far-flung countries don’t look too much different than folks we see around town every day.

It’s a lesson worth learning.

How can we understand our own small world without an understanding of the big picture?

For our family, the “big picture” is formed by family discussion and directed study.  What better place to start than with a book?

It takes a lot of “food” to feed this family of bookworms.  If we don’t have what we need in our own family library, we head to a public library.  Simply put, books are an integral part of our lives.

You can imagine our surprise when we heard recently that the books are disappearing from the public schools around us.  It is our understanding the good old-fashioned, plunk-down-in-front-of-you textbooks are being rapidly being replaced with electronic versions on personal student computers.  Not being particularly tech savvy ourselves—by design—this is hard for us to digest.

We just love books, particularly the old ones.  Reading an old book is a full sensory experience—the smell of yellowed paper, the crackle of the page turning, stories read drawing you so near to a forgotten time you can almost taste it . . .

Dear friends, I know the wonders of modern technology are seductive, but please don’t relegate the printed page to a musty, old, forgotten closet.  A book never runs low on battery, and is a suitable companion for all seasons. 

Please call me old-fashioned. . . I can’t imagine curling up in my favorite chair of an evening with a cup of hot cocoa, staring at a glowing screen for hours on end.  I’m getting a headache just thinking about it!

The extent to which you use modern technology is, of course, a personal choice—your choice. 

It is safe to say you won’t find me leading a charge against your favorite glowing screen, for I have quietly retreated to my favorite chair with a beloved, musty smelling, crackly sounding, dog-eared relic of literary history—an old book.

As summer turns to fall, cooler evening temperatures make a late night cup of hot cocoa while snuggled up with a good book sound tempting. 

I

f you’ve only had the kind of hot cocoa where you put powder in a mug and add hot water, you’ll be amazed by full-bodied, rich flavor of hot cocoa made on top of the stove.  It’s kind of like the difference between a glowing screen and a good, old-fashioned book.

Top of the Stove Hot Cocoa

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup Hershey’s Cocoa

Dash salt

1/3 cup hot water

4 cups milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.  Mix sugar, cocoa and salt in saucepan; stir in water.

2.  Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture boils; boil and stir 2 minutes.

3.  Stir in milk and heat.  DO NOT BOIL.

4.  Remove from heat; add vanilla.

Yield:  6 servings.

Copyright © 2015 by Shasta Hamilton

Shasta is a fifth generation rural Kansan now residing in Enterprise, Kansas.  She and her husband own and operate The Buggy Stop Home-Style Kitchen with their six home-schooled children.  You can reach The Buggy Stop by calling (785) 200-6385 or visit them on the web at www.thebuggystoprestaurant.com.

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