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Starters for Amish Cinnamon Bread, also known as Friendship Bread, are making the rounds.

Ever wish you could do something different with it?

My wish was answered this fall when my friend Diane Owen passed along some extra recipes with the starter she gave me. All that I’m sharing with you are based on a basic biscuit recipe that my husband Andy particularly likes. He says these biscuits go great with coffee.

That’s a good thing. I never could get the coffee cake recipe to turn out the way I thought it should. It is a tasty but not a very attractive cake.

The cornbread and pancake recipes will come in handy for Thanksgiving weekend.

Here you go:

Biscuits

1 cup starter

1 cup flour

¾ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

1/3 cup oil

Drop by tablespoon on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 400 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes. Do not overbake or they will be tough.

Pancakes

Mix for biscuits and add 1 egg and enough milk to make pouring easy.

Cornbread

Mix as for biscuits except use only ½ cup flour. Add 1 cup cornmeal and 1 egg. Bake at 375 to 400 degrees for 25-30 minutes.

Coffee Cake

Mix as for biscuits. Add ¾ cup sugar, ½ teaspoon cinnamon and 1 egg. Topping is 1 teaspoon cinnamon, ¾ cup brown sugar, scant ¼ cup butter and 2 tablespoons flour. Crumble topping. Pour batter in greased 8-by-8-inch pan and sprinkle topping over batter. Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes.

For more great recipes, check out Arlene Mannlein’s Cook’s Choice column every Thursday in the Life section of the Herald & Review.

Ever wonder why we tend to be such creatures of habit?
Why we follow the same routine every day to get ready for work, park our car in the same aisle of the parking lot every time we go to the store, go to the same restaurants over and over and sit in the same pew every Sunday morning in church?
As someone who does all these things, I sure have.
The first two things I do so I don’t have to rely my memory — so I don’t come to work without brushing my teeth or waste time pushing a full grocery cart all over the place looking for my car.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever my automobile when I ready to leave this year’s Farm Progress Show. I finally had to push the panic button on the remote and even that took quite a few steps because I had to be somewhat close to my car for the alarm to sound.
Life would be so much easier if I could keep my mind on what I’m doing instead of racing ahead to the next thing or thinking about something else altogether.
We also maintain these sorts of habits, I believe, to cut down on number of decisions we have to make. The last two examples on my list spring largely from that desire as well as that for social acceptance.
If you don’t believe that, then you haven’t been part of many painfully long discussions about what course of action to take with everyone claiming to be flexible — until a suggestion is made, that is.
Because other people are involved, you sometimes don’t have the option of occupying a different space. If I’m running late for water aerobics, often the only spot left at the proper depth is the same place I usually stand.
One time when I went to class with my hair perfectly straight, one of the other regulars said she didn’t recognize me until I took my usual place. That gave me a laugh.
It also made me think taking the same places in the pool makes it easier for us to remember each other the same way a seating chart helps a teacher learn the names students when they are new.
Should we try new things and do familiar tasks differently more often? Should we exercise our brains more than we do?
I’d like to hear your thoughts and ideas.

For those of you who think people are essentially selfish, take a short walk in my shoes.
In the past month I have had the honor of meeting several members of Eisenhower High School’s Class of 1963 and writing about the energy and joy they get from the support group they have formed around two classmates battling terminal cancer.
Just this week I met six members of Millikin University’s Alpha Phi Omega Service Fraternity and watched them have fun raking an elderly man’s lawn as one of the many things they do to help the community.
This past weekend I had a great Saturday at home, and I spent it serving others.
First I looked up material to teach my adult Sunday school class the next day in church. Then I made like Martha, went to the kitchen and cooked a lot of food.
Some of it was for a colleague and his family. Another co-worker was kind enough to organize a weekly schedule of meals to help this family through a difficult time, and the schedule filled up right away.
I also made a pot of white chili to take over to my sister-in-law’s the next afternoon. (Check Arlene Mannlein’s Cook’s Choice column in next Thursday’s Life section for the recipe.)
Rosie has taken her father into her home rather than put him in a nursing home and was expecting relatives coming from out of state. I decided bringing food was the least I could do to support her in keeping the tremendous commitment she and her husband have made to take care of her dad.
I’ll bet you’ve also seen many examples of servanthood. It’s like we are programmed to serve our fellow human beings and feel our best when we are doing just that.
The United Way of Decatur and Mid-Illinois maintains a list of volunteer opportunities on its Web site. First Call for Help accepts donations of goods to give to people who need them.
You don’t have to look too hard or too far to find ways to help others. With the approach of the holidays, the time is right and the need is great.
So get out there now and do what you can. You’ll be among the beneficiaries.

Members of the Decatur Jobs Council, largely representatives of social service agencies, still encounter people who have never heard of them.
Imagine how I feel, having written 38 full-length articles that at least mention the council, starting with a report about its first meeting at the Decatur Housing Authority’s Ullrich Center on Oct. 27, 2005.
Since that time, different members of the council:
— ran the Opportunities to Succeed job readiness program through Homeward Bound for 18 months;
— operated Fresh Start Catering for more than a year;
— conducted a workforce readiness program two years ago that prepared 20 women for clerical jobs, potentially at Archer Daniels Midland Co.;
— operated the Revitalization Minority Advancement Program for more than a year;
— held two rounds of a welding training program late last year and early this year.
— started a community gardening project this year called Decatur Is Growing Gardeners, or DIGG.
Some of these initiatives did not last or work out as well as envisioned, but the purpose of all of them was/is to get disadvantaged people into jobs and help them keep them.
There was a great need for this when the Decatur Jobs Council got started, with many employers having trouble finding workers with the necessary skills to fill open positions.
Now that the Decatur area is struggling to climb out of nationwide recession, you have to be impressed that members of the council are continuing to meet and work to fulfill its mission of removing employment barriers for their clients. They believe there will be room in the local job market for “rehabilitated” workers, if you will, once again.
Because of that, they are helping to organize a two-hour community meeting at 10 a.m. Nov. 19 at the Decatur Public Library to discuss how to best use federal economic stimulus funds and other resources to address the economic and workforce development needs of the Decatur area.
Their partners are the Chicago Jobs Council, Decatur Area Education Coalition, city of Decatur, Economic Development Corporation of Decatur and Macon County, Decatur is Growing Gardeners, Dove, Inc., Spannaus Consulting and Workforce Investment Solutions.
It’s hard to imagine an issue more important than this, so contact Missy Batman by Thursday with your plans to attend.
She can be reached at mbatman@endowdecatur.org or 429-3000.

Project Linus allows women who love to make blankets to give the fruits of their labors, usually anonymously, with seriously ill and traumatized children.
But the organization’s work can also strengthen family ties.
Take the Central Illinois Chapter’s last Make A Blanket Day Sept. 18. The fall event at Decatur’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was devoted to making special weighted blankets for children with autism.
Patsy Schumaker of Decatur, among more than 125 blanketeers that day, came to make such a blanket for the grandson of her close friend Betty Swinger. “I hadn’t heard of these weighted blankets before,” she said. “They are much heavier than I expected.”
Weighing about 30 pounds, the blanket is light blue with a star on it and was completed in time for Swinger to give it to her 8-year-old grandson herself.
Swinger, 71, of Forsyth died Oct. 19 after a long battle with cancer.
Her daughter, Becky Barnes of Heyworth, said her son Andrew loves the blanket and it made her mother happy to give him such a special gift. “They’re very expensive,” she said. “If he’s upset, I’ll bring it to him to calm him down. Sometimes he’ll cuddle with it on the couch when he’s getting ready to go to sleep.”
Schumaker could have gone out to lunch with her girlfriends on blanket day, as she usually does on Thursdays, but she feels good about how she spent her time. “I’m glad I could do that for Betty and her grandson,” she said.
I myself heard from two readers wanting a weighted blanket for their grandsons after my story on blanket day was published in the Herald & Review. Both, I’m told by chapter coordinator Mary Balagna, have gotten the blankets they requested. Balagna writes a blog of her own to keep her blanketeers up to date.
One women who wrote to me lives in Shelbyville, and the other was Dusty Taylor of Pana. She said her 6-year-old grandson has had his blanket about a week and carried it with him everywhere when he first got it.
“It’s got dinosaurs on it and is just darling,” Taylor said. “I can’t thank those lovely ladies enough for the good they are doing!”
In yet another case Dorothea Ducy of Decatur wanted a weighted blanket for her 5-year-old great-grandson but didn’t feel confident enough to make one herself while helping out at Make A Blanket Day. So she worked on labeling weighted blankets and Balagna herself wound up making a weighted blanket for Jacob Angell of Decatur.
His parents, Jeff and Tonya Angell, say Jacob uses the blanket to unwind after attending classes at Pershing Early Learning Center and also to go to sleep at night.
Ducy said she is thrilled with what Project Linus is doing for children and also happy to have been a part of the Christcare Stitchers of Central Christian Church for the past four years. “We have fun and support each other,” she said.
Like the ripples from a pebble dropped into a pond, the good done by Project Linus just keeps spreading farther and wider.

Believe it or not, I was still in elementary school during the ’60s. I never took part in an antiwar protest and as an adult never belonged to a union or walked a picket line.
So it was a brand-new experience for me to tag along last weekend when hundreds of Illinois residents, supplemented by scores of other people from around the country, stormed Chicago financial institutions to demand more consumer protections from predatory lending and help for people losing their homes to foreclosure.
Staffers from the Bloomington-based Central Illinois Organizing Project took the lead and quickly demonstrated why the agency has a form of the word “organize” in its name.
Hotel accommodations, including arrangements for luggage and meals, were already set, and leaders kept everything peaceful during each demonstration by instructing participants not to run and to obey and be respectful to police.
Protesters were even told to switch their chant to, “Police Need A Raise,” whenever their relationship with officers hinted at turning confrontational.
That didn’t come close to happening. Indeed, the final group activity before heading outside for an “action” always included lots of chanting to lower people’s inhibitions about doing it.
Even so, I still saw many people in the group who didn’t chant, cheer or clap. As a journalist gathering information for a story, I didn’t do those things either.
I was kind of surprised there wasn’t more training for participants in this Showdown in Chicago. But staffers with CIOP and other agencies under the umbrella of National People’s Action always seemed to have the crowd under control, quietly asking certain people to move so others could see their speaker and clearing the way for others to move closer.
That I was often in a good spot to take photographs was likely no accident.
The most exciting experience was being one of about 100 people who went in small groups to the hotel where members of the American Bankers Association were meeting. Dressed in business attire so as not to stand out, we crammed into four separate hotel rooms until the remainder of the participants had gathered across the street from the hotel entrance with their signs.
With 22 people in the room I was in, the wait seemed longer than it actually was. It was then that I learned about the plan to congregate suddenly in the lobby, close to where the bankers were preparing to have dinner, and broadcast demands with a megaphone.
The plan went off without a hitch but was over within minutes as hotel security quickly escorted the insiders outside to join the others.
The Rev. Robert Bushey, an associate pastor at Central Christian Church in Decatur, has emerged as a local leader in this movement and has already blogged and posted video about his experiences in Chicago.
John Baird, a member of the church, just sent me a Power Point about these same events. You can view it as a PDF.
As for whether all this will lead to some significant change, only time will tell. But it’s heartening to be reminded that Americans, even those who are not so rich or powerful, can still exercise their right of free speech.

This is the time of year for caramel apples, the World Series and scary movies.
For readers of the Herald & Review, it’s also time to look for “Grading Our Schools,” the newspaper’s annual report on how area school districts and schools did on state achievement tests.
While many educators objected years ago to our effort to compare the performance of schools and districts in our circulation area, they now seem to expect it and even call us if they think they’ve missed it. Realtors and Chamber representatives have also been known to clip it and request extra copies to promote the quality of life in their communities.
I’ve worked on “Grading Our Schools” for more than 10 years, and Staff Writer Valerie Wells has worked on it just about as long. The requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are a challenge to explain, but we strive to do a better job each year at making the subject understandable.
This year’s report is scheduled to appear in Sunday’s Herald & Review, complete with tables showing how 41 area school districts did on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test and the Prairie State Achievement Exam. Such details the Decatur district’s 21 schools will also be provided.
For those of you who don’t want to wait until Sunday to see those tables, they will be posted on the Herald & Review’s Web site by Friday evening.
Also on our Web site for the first time, in tabular and searchable database form, will be the results used to determine whether a school or district has made adequate yearly progress, and if not, which areas came up short. This information includes results from the Illinois Alternate Assessment given to students who are not able to take the other tests.
A special thanks to Graphic Artist Jean Zerfowski and Webmaster Bridget Sibthorp-Moecker for helping to make all this happen.
Hey, I know candy, baseball and Halloween are more fun.
But do take time to examine this report card on our schools. Checking our work and adjusting our methods, as any good teacher will tell you, is best way to ensure that we continue to make adequate progress on one of our most important tasks.
And that’s educating our children for the future.

Want to learn a game that’s great fun and can be played by an intergenerational group?
It’s called the Name Game and is played like this: Each player writes a name on a piece of paper and passes it to whomever is chosen to be the reader. The names can be that of real people, living or dead, or that of a character, animated or otherwise. The reader reads the names aloud twice then puts the slips of paper away.
The person to the left of the reader starts the guessing by asking someone if he or she is George Washing-ton, if that was one of the names read. If the answer is no, it’s now time for the person who was asked to take a guess. If the answer is yes, then the first player keeps going until he or she guesses wrong.
Players whose secret names have been guessed cannot win, but they can offer helpful suggestions to whomever is guessing as long as the guesser can recall their identities. Such players can be good resources for rembering whom has been asked what and also some of the names the guesser may have forgotten were in the mix.
The only player not guessed is the winner.
Once my friend Coleen Myers introduced me and other members of our potluck/board gaming group to the Name Game, it’s been a must-play ever since.
Coleen has since moved to Iowa, but she tells me via Facebook that a Bible study friend from Omaha introduced their group to it years ago. “The part I’ve always liked the best is that small children can even play it,” Coleen writes. “I think we had 8- and 9-year-olds playing with us in Omaha.”
She also put me in touch with her friend Brenda Royer, who says she can’t remember who taught her the game but that it was a good activity for a group that was constantly changing.
“To switch it up, we would choose ‘themes’ for a game, like deceased famous people, cartoon characters, colors, zoo animals, etc.,” Royer writes. “The Name Game was a great way to have some fun without needing to know the group dynamics and background of each individual.”
I’ve lost playing the Name Game many times because my husband figured out who I was, but I fooled him at least once. He actually helped my cause, after he’d been guessed, by telling the others I wouldn’t know who Dan Fogelberg is.
Fogelberg’s is one of the few names I’ve been able to win with.
The Name Game is probably not the greatest way to learn people’s real names, but it is an entertaining way to learn about some people you may not have heard of and also the people you’re spending time with.

Anyone who believes romance can’t last wasn’t in choir practice with me the other day.
As the rehearsal came to an end, Dean Hadden, the husband of second soprano Joel Hadden, entered the room, surprised her with a “Happy 50th Anniversary” balloon and blew her mind with a small, gifted-wrapped box that contained a gorgeous diamond ring.
Then he led us to another room in the church he had personally set up for a cake-and-coffee reception. Because he is also one of the church custodians, his presence and preparations didn’t tip off his wife about what he was up to.
His grand gesture brought tears to Joel’s eyes and to ours.
Those of us who’ve been married for any length of time know that marriages are not built on moments such as these. Rather bricks are added to the foundation each time spouses support one another through the hard times that inevitably come and celebrate together the joys life brings.
Even so, a surprise now and then is like discovering the container of ice cream that’s been sitting in the freezer all week isn’t gone after all.
One of the best my husband pulled off was when he told me on a rare day off together last December he was taking me someplace I’d never been before. The only other clue was his suggestion that I bring my camera.
I really didn’t want to know where we were going. I like happy surprises, and I was touched Andy had come up with one for me.
Our destination turned out to be Hardy’s Reindeer Ranch near Rantoul.
I thoroughly enjoyed seeing some of the ranch’s more than two dozen reindeer up close and hearing how their ornate and asymmetrical antlers grow back differently every year. I even got to feed one a graham cracker.
Co-owner Mark Hardy says the ranch offers many activities in the fall, including a corn maze and paintball shooting gallery.
But what I remember most about our visit was how it recaptured the excitement of when my relationship with Andy was new.
That same magic caused five decades to fall away from the bride and groom beside me in church not long ago as they embraced beneath an anniversary balloon.
Shining faces such as these give those of us who have not been married quite so long hope for our own marital journeys.

Gloomy weather seems to rub off on people.
A friend said it’s even cloudier in Germany than it has been lately in the Decatur area and that the people there tend to be crankier for it. I’ll have to take her word for that.
But it sure explains why so many people, including me, believed the eighth annual WSOY Community Food Drive Oct. 9 would fall short of an ambitious, 350,000-pound goal. It was cold and rainy that day, and people had been living in a tough economy ever since last year’s food drive.
Instead, the collection totaled a record 382,000 pounds of food for Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army.
What a ray of sunshine it was to see the community’s generosity triumph once again, although now that the long-absent sun is back out, it no longer seems so surprising.
Such a powerful sense of community needs to be channeled into regular, year-round giving to the city’s food pantries. This is something that the Human Service Agency Consortium has been trying to do by getting organizations to adopt months in the year when no major food drive is taking place.
One way of helping, used this year by the Peggy Baity family in Decatur, is to invite birthday party guests to bring fresh, nonperishable food for a local food pantry. Ian, her son with Bob McKeown, did that when he turned 13 in June, then she and husband Jim Baity did the same when their daughter Grace Nichole turned 1 last month.
The haul from two parties surpassed 60 bags of food for Catholic Charities.
I have another idea I’ve been trying out. In my quest to buy groceries at the lowest prices, I’ve purchased extra boxes or cans and taken them periodically to the Northeast Community Fund.
My contributions may not add up to much, but if more people found a way to donate on their own in addition to participating in food drives, pantry shelves would never be bare and fewer people would go hungry.
If you have a system of giving that works for you, I encourage you to share it here.
With the way Decatur came through on the WSOY food drive, I am sure regular giving is also a goal within the community’s reach.