Homemaking on the Homestead

  Beans are a great way to stretch the grocery budget. Black beans have been a favorite in my family for many years. In this post I'm sharing a few black bean recipes from The Family Homestead (my previous website). You can add meat to any of these recipes or serve them meatless. ***************************** Black Bean Burritos 6 cups cooked black beans 2 cups salsa 1 cup shredded carrots 8 oz. cream cheese 6 to 8 whole wheat tortillas 6 cups cheese This recipe makes a large 11x15 casserole. If this is too much for your family I would recommend that you make 2 of them in a 9x9 casserole dish and freeze one, unbaked. In the morning I get my black beans cooking. It takes approx. 3 cups dry beans to have 6 cups cooked beans (you may have a few left over that can be frozen and added to soup in the future). I cook my 3 cups beans in about 12 cups water and 1 T. salt for 2 ½ to 3 hours. After these have cooked you can then assemble your meal or refrigerate them and do it ...

I posted this several years ago on The Family Homestead. I will be sharing more recipes soon using brown rice.  My basic brown rice cooking instructions below are stove top instructions. I now prefer to cook my brown rice in my Instant Pot. I'll be updating that info as well!  Brown Rice: A Healthy Way to Stretch the Grocery Budget Are you looking for a way to stretch out the food you have and feed your family on less money? Then you need to look at the foods that are inexpensive in quantity, filling, easy to work with but most of all they have to be healthy alternatives your body can use. They must help to provide vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber and other valuable nutrients. One excellent food is rice. But not just any rice.. it has to be brown rice if you are concerned about health. Rice is easy to cook, mild in flavor and adds greatly to nutritional value. Brown rice is loaded with B vitamins, manganese, phosphorus, iron, copper, selenium, fiber, essential fatty acids an...

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...

I make broth often. I love having it on hand for easy and delicious tasting soups and other recipes. I typically make chicken broth or beef broth. My daughter Leanne was in charge of the cooking one night and asked if I had any vegetable broth. I told her no I did not and that got me thinking how easy veggie broth would be to make. What I did not think about right at that moment was how economical it is to make as well. You can have several cups of vegetable broth sitting in your freezer waiting for the moment you have a recipe that calls for a can of broth for virtually free. I say virtually because, well, you do have to buy the veggies to begin with, but let me show you how it is practically free. What do you do with your vegetable scraps? You know, the carrot peelings, the ends off the celery, the onion skins, the tomato cores, the outer layer off the cabbage and so forth. Well in my house they either get fed to the goats or they go in the compost pile. Now I have another use...