Homemaking on the Homestead

Hello Friends! I wanted to give you a blog update. My 12 year old grandson arrived on Friday night and we've been so enjoying our time with him. I've decided to take the week off of my regular blogging so I can continue to focus on him. I may pop in with some other blog posts, but I'll get back to my regular weekly blogs next week.  He says he doesn't like to smile for pictures :D and doesn't like his picture taken, but he did let grandpa take this one of the two of us. Despite his face, he is having a great time here!    Crystal :)

Good Morning!! This week was a one stop, one store, easy haul. I seem to be in a pattern lately. Every week I shop at Winco and every other week I also stop at Costco. The Winco only weeks are typically small and help balance out the larger Winco/Costco weeks. With that, here is my haul..  I picked up the basic fruits and veggies. I only needed a few apples and oranges because we still had some at home and I only needed to make sure we made it through the week.  The veggies were also my typical salad veggies.  A bag of lettuce mix, red cabbage, green cabbage, mushrooms, kale, grape tomatoes and a sweet potato.  Dairy only included milk and half & half. I picked up a couple cans of olives for the pantry, flour tortillas and corn tortillas. The frozen corn was on sale for $1.88 for 8 little half ears. I could have gotten some fresh corn but the fresh corn was expensive and not really looking all that great to me. I'll wait until lat

Good Morning! How are things going for you this morning?  I hope all is well.  I woke up to a very cool feeling house. I had a couple windows open and shut them and then went and started a little fire. Yep, it's June 19th and I'm still needing to make fires to heat up the house now and then. I know the real summer will come eventually and there will be a nice break in the fire making. Which is good as we are close to being out of wood. This last week was good and busy. I had a couple trips to town, went on a hike with my oldest son, chatted with my oldest daughter to see how her 2 weeks of duty had gone (she's Army Reserves) and had a visit with my youngest son, a doctors appointment and other bits.  Hubby has been working on our barn doing some repairs. We don't have animals anymore but the barn needs to be maintained and mice and moles were having a great time in there.  He's repaired the foundation in areas and is putting down a new

Good Morning! My weekly post of cooking and meal planning inspiration for you! :) Monday was leftovers so I didn't need to cook anything until Tuesday. On Tuesday I cooked up a pound of Jimmy Dean sausage and added lots of  veggies with it.  While that was going I started some brown Jasmine rice in my Instant Pot.. When the rice had finished cooking I added it (about 3 cups) to the sausage and veggies.  I added some extra seasoning, salt, pepper, garlic. This was simple and tasted so good! I made a salad and baked a package of Jiffy Corn Muffins to go with the meal We had this for a couple of nights before moving on to BBQ burgers. I've had a lot of fun trying out different things with my burgers. Last week I shared how I added feta cheese to them.  This week I tried something new.  I made bacon swiss burgers. I started by cooking up some bacon. I did it in the oven because it's pretty quick this way and easy clean up. I cooked the whole poun

Good Morning!! This week was a Winco and Costco week. My first stop was Winco.. Fruits and veggies were the first thing I picked up. I didn't need a whole lot of veggies so ended up with spinach, mini peppers, grape tomatoes, roma tomatoes and some beets.  I seemed to basically pick up pantry stocking items (Ramen noodles, cereal, ketchup, cornbread mix and tortilla chips).  I saw the instant mashed potatoes on sale for .88 cents. I don't normally buy things like this... but... I admit to liking the convenience nowadays! :)  Since buying them I've used one of them, the loaded baked potato one shown in the picture. My thoughts are this... they taste good and they are super easy to make, however the ingredient list on the them is a mile long! Healthy, they are not. In a pinch they'll be nice to have on the shelf, but I'd take homemade mashed potatoes over these any day. My total for Winco this week was $49

Good Morning! What a slow going morning for me! I'm typically a morning person but last night had a hard time sleeping. It suddenly got quite hot here and it made it hard to sleep. Eventually I fell asleep as things cooled down. Was not yet ready for real summer, ha ha! Normally we don't get hot like that until mid to later July. It's a 2 day heat blast and tomorrow we'll be back to or normal upper 70's again.  I've been so busy lately. One of the fun things I did last week was a get together with a dear friend of mine, her daughter and 6 children and my daughter and her 5 children. Such and enjoyable day! We went to hike/walk in an area that my son and I had hiked several weeks back. They have the harder hike on one side of the road (the one my son and I did) and the easy, paved 1 mile walk on the other side. With all the little ones and strollers of course we did the easy walk.   I moved to this area 23 years ago. The first person I met he