Homemaking on the Homestead

Since the end of August we have celebrated 3 birthdays… the first was for my beautifully sweet daughter in law, Lolot.  My son really gave her a great party.. lots of friends, food and fun. She really enjoyed all the attention and we all had a great time.  Below is a picture of Sierra and Lolot at her party.. The second was my beautifully sweet daughter Leanne! She is such a great daughter.. I just love her to pieces.. she is sweet, kind, loving, caring, respectful, giving, helpful, and a fantastic dancer. She has been taking ballroom dancing classes for about a year now and is an excellent student. Her instructors have told her she is making extremely fast progress through the classes and she hopes one day to maybe be a dance instructor herself. She is also working on her college degree and is in her junior year. She has been doing this at home. She is working on an English degree. She loves to write. She also loves kids and thinks she may use her degree to work as a teach...

Happy Fall everyone!!  Are you enjoying fall like days on your homestead yet?  We have been for a bit now.  Hard to believe the end of September is here all ready.  Seems like a lot has been going on at home and I have not had the time to post much and I have lots of updates but only time this afternoon for these..  the rest will follow!  I have been harvesting corn and tomatoes!  I picked about 40 lbs. of tomatoes.. I used 10lbs to make a batch of salsa. You can find the recipe I use here: http://thefamilyhomestead.com/cannedsalsa.htm   I got 15 pints.      Then with the rest of the tomatoes... I made spaghetti sauce which I canned up. I ended up with 15 quarts of sauce. I am really praying I will have enough tomatoes to do another round of both salsa and spaghetti sauce.  We will see.. so many of my tomatoes are getting mushy before ripe enough due to all the rain.  But there are some dry days in the forecast...

Beets were an after thought with my garden this year.  I had given up on root vegetables because it always seemed that the moles would push them up and out as they made their tunnels each year in my garden.  But I was at Walmart and saw beet seeds for a $1 a package and said, what the heck, for a buck I will give it a try again.     On Friday I went to my garden and knew it was time to pick the beets.  They had survived the moles and I was curious to see how much I would get.  I picked them all and after they were cleaned up and the tops taken off, I weighed them...  and there were 15lbs!  I was pretty happy! :)     So I pulled out my recipe for pickled beets and got to work.   I cooked them up in my big canner pot because they would not fit in any other pot I had.  When they were done cooking (about 25 minutes) I drained them (saving the beet juice) and ran them under cold water while I cut off t...

I really did not have any other great creative thoughts when I named this recipe.. so it has a little bit of a boring name.. but not a boring taste! :) This morning when my hubby came home from work he saw my package of brats (Johnsonville brand from Costco) sitting on the counter. I was going to come up with something to make for dinner using them, but had not figured it out yet. He was hungry and said they looked really good.. Well you know I just never could say no my hard working hubby. So I did some quick thinking and cooked a couple of them up. Then I cut them in half (the long way) and put them on some toasted homemade bread that was covered with mayo and Dijon mustard. I piled sauerkraut on top and some sliced swiss cheese. I put them under the broiler until the cheese was melted. Well.. he was in heaven.. ;) This little throw together meal for him gave me the inspiration I needed for dinner. I started off with 3 ½ pounds of Brats (minus 2 brats :). Plus about 4lbs of ...

It has been a few days since I updated my blog. I have been swamped with online time. I opened up membership on my message board for one week. I got 115 new members! That is a lot of new faces to get to know! I hope to open it again in a few months, but for now that is all the overload my moderators and I could handle! :) Between approving new members and dealing with life at home I managed to do so freezer cooking. I spent a few days this last week stocking the freezer. I was pretty much completely out of my typical freezer stash. I can’t say enough how convenient it is to have meal starters in my freezer. I love the ease of putting together a meal on a busy day when I have food ready to go in my freezer to create a big variety of meals. I tend to like meal starters better than whole meals in the freezer as there is so much more flexibility. A meal starter is a part of a meal that is already cooked and ready to go. I wrote a whole ebook on this very thing. You can see more about th...

This is a nice frugal way to stretch a 12 oz can of apple juice. With a little help from some tea bags I end up with a gallon of yummy apple peach tea. Here is how I do it.. You start with one 12oz can of frozen apple juice concentrate and 3 of your favorite bags of tea. I am use peach tea, but you can use any type you would like. I put a pan of water on the stove and add my tea bags. I bring the water to a boil and remove it from the stove. I let this sit for about 30 to 40 minutes to get nice and strong.   Then I add some sweetener. I am use honey. I add about ¼ to 1/3 cup of honey. You can add sugar if you would like and I would suggest about ½ cup if you do. However if you don’t need your tea super sweet you can skip the sweetener altogether. The apple juice will sweeten it up some too. Then I pour this mixture into a 1 gallon juice container Then I add enough water to bring it to the 2 quart mark on the container   Then I add the can of apple juice F...

I have been absent from the blog world for a few days due to some of my online time being spent approving new members to my message board. For those who have emailed me or asked on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Family-Homestead/115582552812 when I was going open up membership on my message board.. well the time is right now! :) I have had the board open since Thursday afternoon. I have had to work through a few glitches.. The process for membership to the board is a 2 step process.. so I have had a lot of people doing step 1, but not step 2… OR doing step 2 but not step 1.. In the first few hours the board was open I had over 40 ladies join and lots more since that point.... so I don’t have time to chase anyone down and let them know they missed a step… If you are interested in joining the board you can read this webpage: http://www.thefamilyhomestead.com/membershipinfo.htm for instructions. PLEASE follow them exactly.. :) If you are not familiar with m...