LITTLE Women was a BIG Success

I have just become the new leader of a GREAT girls program called Little Women from EcceHomoPress. Below is their description of the program.

The Little Women Hospitality Program, developed by Ann Milligan Callaghan, is a two-year, Catholic girls', ten-month program that aims to teach young ladies the various aspects of hospitality. Each month, the girls learn a new skill or "charm" as up-and-coming hostesses, young women, and Catholic mothers. The ten skills in Year I are as follows: cooking, cleaning, setting and clearing a table, manners and conversation, preparing a room for a guest, writing correspondence, bringing hospitality to others, sewing and dressing modestly, putting on a tea party, and running a book club.

The program is set up for bi-monthly meetings, but I had to tweak it in order to alleviate the stress of driving too far and too often. We will have a total of six girls and each girl has to travel about an hour to get here, with the exception of Bubbles and one other. My solution, as suggested by one creative mom, was a monthly retreat day.

We meet the third Saturday of every month. Each morning session is the lesson, games, and binder information. Everyone brings a packed lunch and we enjoy each other's company for lunch. The afternoon session is a field trip or service project. All the moms who have committed to the program are happy about this arrangement and I am LOVING it. It seems a whole day of interaction allows us to go deep into conversations and projects. Of course after everyone left, Bubbles commented that she wished it were every weekend! :)

The first session was cooking. The book had excellent ideas and recipes to try with the girls in order to get them familiar with the basics of cooking. Some of the suggestions included explaining how to level off measurements, how to separate eggs, and how to stiffen egg whites. I also wanted to include skills such as proofing yeast, zesting, kneading dough, folding egg whites, and creaming together butter and sugar. In my own cooking experience, it seems these few techniques can really improve your baking.

The girls were alternately adding milk and flour mixture to our creamed shortening and sugar.

Doesn't that look great? Well, it didn't taste too great. For one thing, I cooked it too long. Oops. The other thing I figured out the next morning when making biscuits. The girls had used two sticks of shortening which equals TWO CUPS of shortening instead of the one cup they needed. So, it was a bit on the heavy side. YIKES. It did have good crumb though. The recipe I opted to use was perfect because it called for creaming, zesting, stiffening egg whites, and folding them in! How perfect. The other recipe which I wanted to make, but didn't have all the ingredients for, was my mother-n-law's Italian Cream Cake. It also had all of these steps.
Now, because I'm an over planner and I also get uber excited to get it all in....I also had the girls making homemade pretzels. These taste about as good as the kind at the mall. In order to do this they had to proof yeast, knead dough, let it rise, punch it down, and portion it out.
Here they are rolling out the ropes to be twisted into pretzels. The recipe called for 3ft (36 INCHES) of rope, but we just did about two feet~~maybe a little less. So, the result is below.
Fat, little pretzels that tasted heavenly!
In between the cake cooking and dough rising, we took time to work on our information for our binders. Each of the girls is creating a binder to keep as a reminder as well as inspiration in what they will have accomplished this year. I had made a sheet with the cooking terms explained in case they need it for future reference. I also included a sheet with emergency substitutions, two empty recipe cards (which the girls had time to look through cookbooks and copy recipes they were intrigued to try) and a discussion sheet we used to talk about ways to use our cooking skill in the name of hospitality.
This was the last sheet I included. The LW manual suggests that the girls refer to Our Lady of the Eucharist as our Holy Inspiration on this skill. I love that! We can partake of physical food for our bodies, but only God can give us Himself as food. Naturally, Mary gave herself in order to be the mother of God and we give of ourselves when we take the time to cook for others. I drew this picture so they would have something to color/create and found some great Bible verse to compliment the theme. Hubby then put it all together for me in a PDF so I could print it off. I thought they turned out well.

After a beautiful lunch, outdoors in 80ish degree weather, we headed over to a local restaurant for our cooking field trip. I had spoken with the manager about our group and our day's lesson. She took it upon herself to instruct the girls further.
Here, Ms. Alice, one of the workers, explains to the girls how to garnish a plate and the UTMOST importance of keeping it clean. The girls also got to see how orders came in, got out, and little shortcuts to cooking fresh foods quickly. The cleanliness of the kitchen was impressive to all the girls. I loved how the owner stressed that if you clean while you cook, you won't be in the kitchen for hours afterwards. Since it is my kitchen that Bubbles is always using, I liked that extra push for cleaning. :)
In the end, we headed back to the house to create thank you cards, eat the remaining pretzels, and squeeze every last minute out of our time together.
Through all this day, Sweetness was entertaining a mom extraordinaire. For whatever reason, other than the obvious one that this mom is awesome, they became best friends that day!

So, next month is how to clean a room properly and I have strict orders from the manual to not dust or pick up much since the girls will be learning to do this properly. This has me super excited. I'm thinking the girls might need to make some fancy gloves just for cleaning....Hmm!