Sunday, November 27, 2011

Post Thanksgiving....

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We did here, although it was quiet with just us and the girls.  We did cook primarily homegrown foods for our dinner, with a certified organic free-range turkey as a side.  Claire did persuade us to cook her mashed potatoes even though we ran out of those last week, so I guess you could say we cheated.  But nevertheless.... we have much to be thankful for.

We have some Chinese cabbage, turnips and Mesculin mix salad greens growing out in the field.  In recent weeks we have processed not one but three deer here at the house (one Steve got and two others were given to us).  We ended up saving the backstrap and the tenderloin for the freezer, we canned over 30 jars (giving that a try tonight) and made 20+ lbs. of sausage.  Steve and I usually run out on a Sunday to the grocery to pick up our groceries for the week and we can usually check out in the express line we have so few items.  

We have also recently given up boxed cereal for the girls.  They never got free reign on the cereal aisle.  We always checked labels for sugar content, whole grain, etc.  but they are getting increasingly more expensive and even the more "nutritious" cereals are highly processed.  We have started to make muffins at home as we always have with whole wheat, whole oats, wheat germ etc.  We can add just about anything such as pumpkin or zucchini and the girls will eat them as long as I throw in a handful of chocolate chips.  What I have started doing is making a couple dozen and putting them in the freezer.  They can pull one out and heat it quickly for breakfast and toss another in their lunch bag and it will have defrosted by noon.

We are about to make our second batch of homemade laundry detergent.  We made it about 2 months on the first batch.  It probably would have lasted longer but I was a bit more generous than the one tablespoon the recipe called for.  Three simple ingredients:  borax, laundry booster and grated soap.  Last time I used my scrap soaps but this time I'm out of scraps so I'm substituting ivory soap.  I also tossed in some essential oil for smelly stuff.

My next blog post will be about our Christmas gifts.  We have decided only to purchase a couple things for our girls and for the angel tree at the library, so anyone else we will be giving a gift to it will be homemade.  

The next few weekends we will be working at the Denton Farm Park at the Christmas Train:  http://www.countrychristmastrain.com/.  I'm working the train (yay!), the girls will be elves and Steve will be a floater, likely alternating spots in the living nativity.  So, we will have to post pictures.  I'm not the best at posting pictures as it's a pain on this computer, but I will try to do so more often.  




No comments:

Post a Comment