Homemaking on the Homestead

Good morning! The rain came back to our area, with a vengeance! We had thunderstorms (which is not all that common here), hail, wind and rain, lots of rain. It most certainly feels like fall now. The rain has actually been a good thing for us. We get our water from a spring on our property. It flows into a reservoir that holds 1200 gallons of water. From there it flows, by gravity, to our home. If we have a dry late summer and fall the amount of water coming from our spring will start to get less and less. On very dry years we've even had it dry up completely. When that happens we have another spring that we utilize to pump water into the reservoir. Each fall we keep an eye on the flow of the spring. We were starting to get a little concerned as the amount of water coming into the reservoir had gotten down to drops. So we knew we had 1200 gallons of water and were hoping this would last until the rains came back. Well, it has. The ground has soaked u...

My pantry was in major need of some love. It has been very low on my priority list this year due to my health. Now that I'm getting on the other side of all that I wanted to get it in order again. I'm a, simple is best, be frugal type of person when it comes to projects like this. When I'm ready to organize things my first thought is NOT running to Walmart or the Dollar Store to purchase containers and organizing items. I'm not saying this a bad thing, it's simply not my thing. When I do want to organize an area the first thing I ask myself is, what do I have in my hand? Meaning, what items do I already have that will work and give me the desired end result. I will say that I often save containers if I think they have a future use for organizing. One that I love is the plastic container that my hubby's Pub Mix comes in.  These are nice and big and work perfect for storing bulk items.. ...

Good morning and happy Monday! I hope your week is starting out great. I'm feeling pretty organized heading into the last week of October (believe it or not! The year is flying on by :). I spent time over the weekend planning our menu. I went through the freezer and looked for things I wanted to use. It's easy for food to fall to the bottom of a chest freezer and be forgotten. I'm continuing my quest to use up leftovers and cook smaller amounts of food to avoid to many leftovers. And when I do have leftovers and we're ready for something new, I freeze those into individual servings. Those work great for my hubby to take to work or for TV dinner nights.    Here is what I have planned for this week.. Monday: I made potato soup yesterday and we will have that again tonight. I'll add a salad on the side and some crackers. Tuesday: Enchiladas – I'm going to make them with store bought green enchilada sauce (I actual...

Happy Friday! It's time for this weeks grocery haul. The first stop this week was at Costco.    I like Costco's romaine lettuce hearts. They're small and have very little waste compared to what I get at Winco. I also needed to restock diced tomatoes, salsa, ranch dressing and english muffins.  I picked up another case of Vita Coco (coconut water). They have it on sale this month and I bought some last week. I wasn't sure if I was going to like it but found I LOVE it. I decided to get another case while it was still on sale. I picked up a bag of frozen mango chunks for making smoothies. I was out of chicken, or at least bone in, skin on type chicken. I love to use it for fried chicken, bbq chicken (both in the air fryer) and I use it to make soup/stock. I bought chicken thighs and chicken legs. The thighs were $1.29 a pound and the legs .99 cents a pound. That's a good deal around here. ...

Good morning friends! I hope you are having a great week so far. I've been busy around the house in the last few days. Over the weekend my son, Jacob, came up for a nice visit. We enjoyed seeing him and getting all of his life updates. Monday was a quiet day and a little on the cool side. It seemed the perfect day for making a nice big pot of chili and some corn muffins. Yesterday I spent some time getting my pantry shelves cleaned and reorganized. It was getting to be quite the mess in there. I'm really enjoying fall this year. The days have been beautiful. Dry, sunny and not to hot. The evenings cool off and leave a nice crisp feeling. We haven't had our first frost yet, but that may be coming soon. While I was out grocery shopping last week I picked up a couple little mum plants to sit in front of my door. I didn't bother replanting them, because I know they won't last long. I put them in one of the buckets t...

This was such a yummy recipe. I say it's for two, but we had enough for two dinners. So, depending on appetites it could feed 4 people as well. I cheated and bought a pie crust. I'm doing more and more baking but I find some days my energy level is not ready for baking and all the other things I need to get done. So I purchased the pie crust... I started this recipe by cooking my chicken in my IP. My chicken was partially frozen. I added extra water because I planned to use the liquid/stock for the recipe. You can also used store bought stock or water and bouillon.  When I was done I cut my chicken into bite size pieces. You can also shred it if you would like. Cutting is my personal preference. I then chopped my onion and sliced my mushrooms. In a large frying pan I melted the butter. When the butter was melted I added the onions and mushrooms and let them cook until they were soft... I then sprinkled the flou...