Homemaking on the Homestead

I know I have done a “trim the budget” on making economical sandwiches in the past. Anyone who missed that blog post can find it here: http://homesteadinghomemaker.blogspot.com/2010/03/trim-budget-sandwiches.html     But I have a new sandwich for today… A Ham Sandwich.. which is not that new, but I was pretty excited by my latest stash of sandwich meat in the freezer.. which of course was ham.. I bought a 6lb ham from Costco. I cut off about 2lbs to use for sandwiches. I ran this through my food processor until I had small pieces (not ground up, just chopped small). I put one cup of this meat into each freezer bag. One cup will make about 4 sandwiches is what hubby takes to work each week (one sandwich a day times 4 days). When I was done I had enough sandwich meat for 8 weeks.. not, bad… :) One of the cups of ham I put in a small bowl to make into sandwich meat for this weeks lunch. I chopped up a bit of onion and added that and some mayo to the my lunch meat...

Wow.. the title of this sounds a bit disjointed! :) Well it is.. but they are a few things that have come to my attention in the last couple of days. IE.. It is official.. I hugely DISLIKE Internet Explorer. It freezes on me and shuts down and restarts at will, it does not display some pages correctly, at times can take literally forever to load a page or completely abort the operation altogether, and other various annoyances that I could name, but won’t .. because if you use IE you most likely already experience some of this.. So after a lot of urging by my kids I made the switch to Firefox.. I tried Google Chrome and it was not bad, but Firefox has won. I think it took me so long because I just don’t like a lot of change in life.. I work more efficiently when I do familiar things repeatedly each time (like opening up IE when I turn on my computer in the morning). But there is a point where it is a way more inefficient use of my time to fight with something. So now I am a Firefox...

I love egg rolls. Awhile back I started making them myself and found out how easy they are to make. They are a bit time consuming but then again any food made one piece at a time is a consumer of time :). The one prepackaged product I do buy for these egg rolls is the wrappers. I am sure if I worked on it I could figure out how to make them, but that seems way more time consuming than I am willing to go! I can’t say these egg rolls rank up there with extremely healthy food, but I like to think they are healthier than what I could get in a restaurant (and way less expensive!). First I make the filling for the egg rolls. Now this is the part that some may not like.. I don’t really have measurements……. I usually start with one head of cabbage. But even that is a little tricky.. is it a big head or small or medium, etc.. I just buy what the grocer is selling. This time the head seemed medium but pretty dense. I also had about half a head of purple cabbage in the fridge that I add...

With green beans behind me now I patiently await the arrival of red tomatoes. I have tons of green ones so the question I have now is will they turn red before the weather turns too cool. I am hoping so because I have been nurturing these plants since the middle of March and I really want to see them all turned into spaghetti sauce!! :) I also have almost 200 corn plants as well that I am hoping will add up to a lot of corn on the cob in my freezer. Here are some updated pics of my garden:     I sure have done better in years past on the weeding, but this summer has kind of taken on a life of its own… teaching two kids to drive, heading into town three days a week for drivers ed, and having my honey gone a lot (he is currently remodeling one of our rentals and it needed everything replaced and redone. He spends just about as much time working on this as he does working his regular job) and this means that I am keeping the w...

In the last week I was able to get all my green beans picked and processed. Well, there are still a few growing but those will be used for eating now. The rest have been canned up. I got two more really good size pickings. Here was the second picking along with my cheerful helpers who helped me to snap them… I made a second batch of 3 Bean Salad and again got 12 quarts (technically it was 6 quarts and 12 pints worth). Then I did the third picking last Tuesday… While this picking was not as big as the last ones it still yielded me 11 quarts of canned beans.. I am happy that I am off to such a productive start to my canning season. I am hopeful that tomatoes will be next. My 35 tomato plants are loaded with lots of tomatoes, but for now they are pretty much all green.. so the question is, will the warm summer weather hang around here long enough for my tomatoes to ripen? We will see… :)

Green Beans Early this week I was weeding and watering my garden and realized that my green beans were ready for their first picking. On Wednesday my boys and I went down to the garden in the morning and did our first picking. I was really shocked at how much I got! I have one row planted (a pretty long row at that).. and here is what we had after I got them all washed up and ready to be snapped… My husbands request every year is 3 Bean Salad ( http://www.thefamilyhomestead.com/3beansalad.htm ). He loves it, and so do I. My kids are not crazy about it, but that just means more for him and me! LOL.. Before going down to the garden to pick beans I got my red beans and garbonzo beans cooked up and all my veggies prepared. Then Sierra and Isaac and I put on some zippy music and sat down to start snapping the beans. When that was done I made up the 3 bean salad. I ended up with 12 quarts of it. I still had tons of beans left so I canned up those too.. and ended up...

Today promises a wonderful day at home!   I have been in town both Monday and Tuesday so I am looking forward to today.     I have a few orders to pack up and get to the post office and some household chores to do and with the help of my two youngest children we are going to tackle some weeds in the garden this afternoon.  As I was weeding the other day I thought to myself..  isn’t it funny, I have to nurture and take great care with my veggie plants, protecting them, feeding them and helping them along while the weeds (if left to themselves would destroy the garden) need no help at all to cause havoc..  I had to laugh a bit..  vegetable plants and weeds really paint some interesting life pictures.  They could be compared to our own lives or  raising children (nurturing and protecting) and the weeds themselves can be compared to sin in our life (if left to themselves the weeds destroy, with diligence the weeds are destroyed).....