One of my all-time favorite foods is pizza. Since I am the one who cooks all of the food in my house, I decided that every Friday is pizza day. I like to have total control over what goes on my pizza because it makes it easier to please everyone who will be sharing it. I can put onions and mushrooms on my half and leave them off for those who want the boring half. One thing I NEVER do is make a plain cheese pizza.…
I plant a lot of tomatoes in my garden every year. And I mean a LOT of tomatoes. My husband and I load up several 5 gallon pails for days. Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in tomatoes, and by the end of the canning season I don’t want to see another tomato for weeks!
I had already processed about 700 pounds of tomatoes by the time we shot this video. I make spaghetti sauce, salsa, tomato paste, and tomato juice.…
We recently had to make room in our chicken castle for some new egg layers, so the old birds had to go! Older egg laying chickens are not usually ideal for eating because they are very tough and just don’t have much meat on them. The best thing to do with these old birds was to can them. Canning chicken makes it wonderfully tender even on these less than ideal hens.
This video goes through our process from catching the chickens all the way to cooking them.…
In this video, I am showing how to save spinach seeds. You might be asking, “Why not just buy new seeds every year?” There are several reasons to save seeds.
Save Money
I realize that seeds are very inexpensive, but if you buy a lot of them it starts to add up. Saving your seeds may not save you a noticeable amount of money, but for some families every little bit helps.
Know What Works
We live in a plant hardiness zone where a lot of crops don’t do well because of our short growing season and extreme cold in the winters.…
The ditches near our homestead have an abundant supply of elderberries in the late summer, so we like to take advantage of nature’s bounty by making elderberry juice.
Elderberry juice is not a drink that you take for the taste. It is often sweetened to make it more palatable. My husband and I each put a tablespoon of unsweetened elderberry juice in our daily dose of kombucha (which is a fermented drink). The addition of elderberry to kombucha makes both a little more pleasant to drink.…
I keep a very small garden (especially compared to my mom and sister) and I love peppers, so a large portion of my garden is dedicated to different pepper plants. Since I also love to write things down in my journal, I draw out my garden map before planting and fill it in as I plant to remember what goes where. This year, I also decided to track when I maintain and harvest from my garden.…
Family has always been a very central point in my life. As a kid, I would often choose to stay home and hang out with my family rather than go out with friends. My best friends all through school were my little sister and my big brother. Almost all of the trouble I got into involved at least one sibling or cousin.
When it was time to move on to another phase of my life, my mom, aunt, and grandma were my “wedding-in-a-box.” They were my decorators, caterers, DJ, photographer, florist, tailor, and baker.…
I was invited to a girls’ night last week and I wanted to bring a special treat. I always remember going to Grandma O’s house as a young child and having these delicious peanut butter bars. Grandma O always had the bars and oatmeal cookies (which you can find the recipe for the cookies here) readily available for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They really were a special treat for us kids. I wanted to share that little bit of my childhood with my new friends.…
Just this last week I decided it was time to cut down on the amount of sugar that I consume. My poor complexion has been awful and I have a feeling it has a lot to do with all the Easter candy and junk I’ve been eating.
On the other hand, my 4 year old has been begging me to make cookies with her. I have a hard time saying NO to such a cute little face.…