Our family has been fighting some germs over the past couple of weeks, and the coughing was getting to be a little much. It was time we brought out the big guns – Amish cough syrup.
I came across this recipe online about a year ago on The Milk Mans Wife blog. The tincture on the blog is referred to as Snake Juice.
The recipe calls for lemons, onions, honey, peppermint schnapps, and blackberry brandy.…
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.…
We have moved on to the next step of making hard apple cider with our Mr. Beer kit.
This time we are on the bottling step. First, we sanitized our bottles and added a little sugar to aid in the carbonation. We could have left the sugar out and went with a flat cider, but we don’t particularly like the taste of hard cider in general so that didn’t seem like the route we wanted to go.…
I have 3 kids, so light colored clothes don’t usually stay clean for all that long. And I have never liked or bought commercial bleach. It stinks. It can ruin clothes. And I have been known to spill and/or drop liquids from time to time, and spilled bleach is a bad idea.
Recently, my grandma complained that the kids white clothes looked a little grungy, so I decided to find a way to “bleach” their clothes without the bleach.…
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.…
A few years ago my husband bought me a Kitchenaid. I absolutely love it (and him)! Since then, we have bought a couple attachments for it that I have been very pleased with. Today I will share my experience with using the grain mill attachment.
Prior to purchasing the grain mill attachment I used my mother’s Champion grain mill. The flour that was made was a rather coarse whole wheat flour. I didn’t have a problem with it, but some might.…
I have recently started feeding my chickens egg shells. Why do I do this? Simple. Egg shells contain large amounts of calcium. Chicken need calcium for producing eggs. Egg shells=eggs. 🙂 This is what I do to feed the egg shells to my chickens.
After I use an egg I will rinse the eggs out thoroughly. I place them onto a drying rack with paper towel underneath.
Once the shells are dry I throw them into a bucket (that I only use for egg shells).…
Winter weather has come to Wisconsin. Snow has fallen and the cold wind is blowing. It’s that time of year for me to do what I can to insure my orchard will be happy and healthy next spring. I think that the biggest “predators” for my apple and cherry trees are deer. I have heard it mentioned numerous times that Irish Spring soap is the best at keeping deer away. I’m going to share with you how I use the soap method to deter deer from eating my trees.…
A couple weekends ago we invited one of our daughters and a couple grand kids over to try out the new Whizbang apple grinder and cider press that we just finished making. The basic instructions for both devices came from Planet Whizbang.
The apple grinder is made using half of a double sink and a garbage disposal connected to an open end PVC pipe. The stand is all made with metal scraps because my husband works at a metal fabrication shop.…
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.…