Homemade Mac And Cheese

So as many of you know, I have been taking my family completely back to "scratch" with our meals. It's a slow process and is not happening over-night. One of our last favorite meals was to find a easy Mac N Cheese recipe to teach the girls. Found one and it was a hit! So here are some pics as well as the recipe:

Here are the ingredients...

Fred is having one of her first lessons in cooking...

Bring milk to a slow boil...

It was so good!!!

I found this recipe at Hillbilly Housewife:

Mac ‘n Cheese

§                       1 quart prepared (reconstituted) nonfat dry milk

§                       2 cups uncooked macaroni

§                       2 Tbsp. butter or margarine

§                       2 cups cheese, shredded or finely chopped

§                       1/2 tsp. salt

Pour milk into large pot and put over medium heat, bringing just to a ‘bubble’ (do not boil hard).
Turn burner heat down to low and stir in the uncooked macaroni.
Simmer over low heat for 5 minutes.
Stir in butter or margarine, cheese, and salt; stir gently so butter and cheese melts.
Pour mac and cheese mixture into a baking dish.
Bake at 350°F for about 30 minutes or until browned on top.

You can add buttered bread crumbs to the top for a crunchy topping if you wish.

This Mac ‘n Cheese dish is so easy to make, you may never again buy one of those boxed mixes!

ENJOY!

Tutorial: How to Make Frozen Burritos

So if you have been reading my blog for long, you know that I am trying to completely go back to the basics and cook/bake everything from scratch. As a result, you don't have a whole lot of "fast" foods for when you are in a hurry. So now I am working on making some things that are fast to have in the freezer for those times.

This first one is frozen burritos for on the go! So here is my pictorial tutorial (say that ten times fast!):

To start, you need tortilla shells, refried beans mixture or whatever for your filling and cheese. 

Now, we usually make our own tortilla shells from scratch. But wouldn't you know it, we were out! So I picked up some that were on sale. For our filling, I used refried beans, rice and olives.

These are small shells, so I used my small cookie scoop to put the beans on.

Two scoops...

 Then some cheese....

 Fold one...

Fold two...

 Fold three...

 Fold four...

Place on cookie sheet...

 Rereat above steps till you have a full cookie sheet...

 Place in the freezer for about 20 minutes...till they are firm.

When they come out, they should hold their form like this...

Somehow I deleted my last pic, but what I did was then place the 20 burritos in two freezer bags. Wrote the contents and the date and popped them in the freezer to be used later!! 

When you are ready to eat them, take out as many as you need, put them in the microwave or toaster oven and Enjoy!!!

See how our seedlings are doing:

We are having SO much fun watching our plants come up! Starting work on the backyard raised beds on Saturday, Lord Willing...

Today: Bread Making and other...

Today is Applesauce Bread! Looking forward to it. Did not add walnuts as it asked for because half of us are allergic. However, I think it will turn out just fine!

I was talking to a friend earlier today. She wanted to know if it is cheaper to make my own bread. Here is what I came up with: Our family normally goes through a store bought loaf of bread in a meal, with a couple pieces left over. For the cost of a 25 pound bag of flour, I can get any where from 12 -15 loaves of bread. For that same amount of money, I can only get 4-8 loaves of store-bought bread. The other benefit is that I know exactly what is going into my family's bread. There are no additives or preservatives or fancy words that I can't pronounce. Also, these loaves of bread are bigger loaves, so they go further. I have noticed that one home-made loaf goes two or three meals. I used to spend $32-40 of my family's grocery budget on bread every month. Now I spend about $8, once a month, to buy a bag of flour. A win-win situation! Healthy and inexpensive!

On other news, I have one child who is not feeling well for some reason. So we cancelled other things that were supposed to happen today and just hanging out. I am planning on getting some little projects done that have been sitting around waiting for me to finish them! They are just little projects, none of them taking more than a few minutes, so hoping to get a bunch done.

Bread Making Recipes

So we have a unique situation in our home. It took several years to get used to this idea for me: My husband LOVES to bake and cook! He loves it! He informs me that it helps him relax. After seeing how much his father loves the kitchen, I have learned to relax and let my guy take over at least two-thirds of the kitchen. Not that I hate cooking or baking, but he loves it SO much more than me!

Anyway, for years we have made home-made bread off and on. We love it, but never baked it as a necessity, more as a treat. After seeing the cost of bread rise and considering that we go through almost a loaf of bread a meal, I have decided that we will start making our own bread from now on! Besides, we like our bread better than store bought anyway!

I would love to collect recipes from people and am hoping that I will get some responses to this blog!

Yummy Bread Pics:

Doesn't that make you want to get your hands in some flour right now???