Blast From The Crazy Past: A Jump Back To 2005

Welcome to memories...my memories....welcome to a Blast from my Crazy Past!

I was digging around and found this blog post from 12 years ago!

The girls would have been 10 months, 2 years old, 5 years old and 7 years old...

Making Almond Cheese

I have been slowly taking my family to a gluten free lifestyle. I say slowly because none of us have celiac disease or anything that is making us need to drop gluten cold turkey. So we are slowly making lifestyle changes where gluten is involved. And we are also starting to eliminate some dairy products and replacing them with almonds.

One of the main reasons for this is that the children and I, including our son who is adopted, have eczema issues as well as seasonal issues. Changing to a more gluten free diet should help with this. I have to admit that I am starting to see some changes already.

We have been having fun making almond milk, our own almond flour and this week we added almond cheese to our repertoire. Turned out super yummy with just a couple things we want to tweak: needs a tad more salt and we need to puree it a little longer. It was a fun family project and you will find the link to the recipe we used below:

Simple Almond Cheese Recipe

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!

Frugal Recipe for Dishwasher Detergent

So, as most of you know, I have been on this extreme frugal lifestyle. I have been that way most of my life, but decided to take up more of a challenge in the past six months. To the point where we have been able to save on almost everything you can think of!

The latest one is dishwasher detergent. I have had this recipe, actually two recipes for months. But was waiting for my Cosco-sized detergent to run out. I tried this recipe in my dishwasher this morning and it worked great! After much demand on Facebook for the recipe, I decided I better post it! I don't know where I found this recipe online, so I can't give kudos unfortunately:

Mix equal parts of borax and washing soda (found in the laundry detergent line). Increase the washing soda if your water is hard. 


There was no notation of how much to put in, I just filled one of the little cups in my dishwasher where the soap goes. It worked great!

Here is another recipe that I have not tried yet, but I found it on Grocery Shrink. This gal has a wonderul list on things that you can do yourself to save money. Here is this recipe:

1 cup salt
2 cups baking soda (the one you bake with, not like the recipe above.)
2 cups borax


Mix altogether and store in a airtight container.
Use 1 teaspoon in each soap compartment in your dishwasher.

Backyard Work...(Update: Some pics added)

I woke up this morning and thought, "Wow...it is going to be a perfect day today. Let's get started!" So we got breakfast and chores out of the way, then headed out to the backyard. I had one of the girls bring out a Bible story book and we started our day right there in God's outdoors!

While some of the girls did school indoors, one of my girls joined me outside to do her school work while I worked. Every now and then we would find something interesting to share with the others. It was alot of fun!

So what was I doing outside? Well....I have a dog. Also an outdoors cat. I would put pics up of their cute selves, but I am on my husband's computer and am not finding any pics on here....(I will add some later!) (Added!)

At any rate, my dog is part chihuahua and part "doxie". A sweetheart, but in case you don't know, "doxies" like to dig. We have never had problems with her digging under fences or anything like that. She is very happy in her backyard with her peeps. However, she does like her holes. Well, she decided that she was going to dig in my potato barrel. I was NOT amused! I decided to put some old chicken fencing up around my raised beds and barrels. I think it will work great, but it was WORK. Whew!

I also planted the rest of my veggie seedlings! I have a few flower seedlings that are not ready to plant, but other than that, I am down to the plants I will be directly sowing into the soil. I love how God made His system of providing food for us!

Then I took the weed-eater to the whole backyard. Didn't take long and that was another workout! Add in the raking of the grass and boy was I ready for lunch afterwards!

After lunch, I hung up a privacy curtain in our walkway in the backyard. This would be really hard to explain without you seeing my yard. To give you an idea, we live smack dab in town. Basically we are surrounded by school buildings, our church, businesses as well as a couple sweet neighbors! On three sides of our yard, there are bushes, a fence and a building. In our walkway, there was no privacy and people could see right into our backyard. Anyway, I now have this nice privacy curtain hung up. I really like how it looks!! In fact, it looks like it has been there all the time.

We also set up a table for our future BBQ's/picnics and doing school outdoors. After that, we set up some other things to get our living area ready for the next 6 months. When I say we live outdoors during Spring/Summer/Fall, I am not joking! We take it seriously! An extension of our living space and of course, the garden is out there.

I forgot to mention that I also ironed and put up some darkening curtains for the sliding glass door heading out to the patio. In our main living space there are sliding doors and a HUGE picture window that need help in the summer to keep the heat outdoors where it belongs. These curtains help keep it cool in the house, not to mention that they are one of my favorite colors! :)

Tonight, I am hoping to get our awning set up and possibly my clothes line!!! Can't wait!!! I will try and take some pics tonight and add them to this post so you can see what I am talking about and maybe it will make more sense! Pictures always help me!

Today: Purging the Shed

We have a shed on our property that we are able to store things in. It has been really handy and I have enjoyed it up till the last two years:

A couple years ago we stored some things for someone. We were only supposed to be storing for a couple months. Those couple months turned into a couple years. Then they moved and didn't want the stuff. In the meantime, we had no way to even get to our stuff because their stuff was in the way. It resulted in us haphazardly moving things around here and there till we could get to what we wanted. Over the past few months I have been able to get in for a hour or so at a time. I would tidy and give away a few things, but it just hardly made a dent. 

So....guess what? This afternoon while the sun was out, we dug into that storage shed. It took almost 4 hours, but we got it done! It is completely organized, cleaned out and best of all I was able to give away a TON of stuff including:

• A baby bouncer. (Uh...Lil Mr is three years old.)
• A Stroller. (Repeat above...)
• A dining room table. Not the greatest condition, but works.
• 7,000,000 Reader's Digest Books.
• Two lawn chairs.
• A huge box full of misc. small things.
• A baby bassinet. (Was going to keep this for my girls....but decided not to.)
• Several bags of clothing and jackets. (I think this were supposed to go to Goodwill some time ago and got side tracked...)
• Two old youth desks. The old kind where the chair is attached to the desk. I wanted to keep them so bad, but just no room in our house.
• A tall tin Nutcracker. (Decided our house isn't cut out for him...)
• A vanity with mirror.

And so much more! I mean, we can actually get to the freezer now. The bikes can be parked and not stacked. It's a miracle! 

The downside would be that I am completely worn out now and contemplating a early bed time!

Have a great day!

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.

Question about canning...

So I have canned off and on for years. Sometimes with my grandma, other times on my own or with my hubby. We have always used the big stock pot that we have. However, I have been watching some youtube videos on canning and a majority of them use a pressure cooker. Now I know for a fact that the pressure cookers fly off the shelves during canning season, I used to work at Walmart in the housewares section. My question is:

Is one better than the other for canning? What do you use, a stock pot or a pressure cooker?

Tonight's Menu: Homemade Chicken and Bean Soup

Yesterday I tried making a new recipe with my Crockpot chicken. I poured a can of Tomato Bisque Soup over my chicken breasts and cooked them up. They were a hit! After taking the chicken out, there was the lovely soup base leftover, so I decided to try my hand at soup. Here is what we did:

1. Took the the leftover chicken breasts, broke them up and put them in with the soup base.
2. Then put the Crockpot on low all night.
3. This morning, I took some beans leftover from making refried beans for tomorrow night's meal, they had not been mushed yet, and added that.
4. I also took the black beans I had soaking all night, boiled them on the stove and added them.
5. An hour or so before dinner, I am going to add some lentils. As well as some leftover corn and rice from last night's dinner. 

This meal is smelling good already!!! Not sure how we will last till dinner, but we will try! I figure this meal will cost us about $.50 for the whole meal, for seven people! Top that!!! I would say free as it is mostly leftovers, but we did add the lentils and beans, so it cost a little something. 

All in all, feeling happy about feeding my family in a frugal yummy way!

Can Opener Troubles...

I have had a wonderful Pampered Chef Can Opener for about 9 years now. However in the past year, it has become increasingly more difficult to use. Sometimes taking two or three times around the can. Ever since I working my short six months in retail several years ago, my wrists have started to show signs of carpal tunnel syndrome. So going around the can several times about makes me want to grind my teeth after the second can of tuna!

I would love to know what your favorite can opener is and what you love about it! I loved the Pampered Chef Smooth-Edge Can Opener because I didn't have to worry about the lid dunking into whatever food I was opening. Also for the first 7-8 years I had it, it worked nicely with hardly any effort.

So, tell me about your can opener!

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???