• Garden

    Spinach

    Hey friends! How are things going? I’m going a little crazy here. But I am also feeling very grateful for the opportunities this quarantine business has provided. For example, I always kind of liked the idea of homeschooling. But we decided not to go that route, and I was satisfied with that choice, but I have sometimes wondered. Well, I’m not saying that I am rocking it or anything, but we are making it work. And it turns out, I like public school. 🙂 And my daughter does too, which is great because for a while there she was begging to do home school. There are a lot of great…

  • Thoughts

    Chocolate Chip Cookie

    Okay, so this doesn’t really fall under my normal scope of this blog. It is really just something that I make a lot and think about even more. I am pretty nerdy about baking. And one of the main reasons I started this blog was so that if people ask me how I do something I will have the all the information in one convenient place. Then I can just send them the link. And, not to brag, but my cookies are pretty popular anywhere I take them, and something I get asked about quite a bit. Also, now that we are in quarantine I haven’t been able to make…

  • Freeze Dryer,  Preserving

    Freeze Dryer

    We bought a freeze dryer! It has been so much fun. We had been thinking about it for quite a while. We kept seeing commercials from Harvest Right about their home freeze dryer. We talked about it for a long time. As you know we get a lot of produce and I like bottling things. But I feel like so many of the methods for preserving foods reduces the nutritional value. Freeze Drying is different. It preserves food and makes it shelf stable for many years without changing the nutritional value much at all. So we both really wanted to get a freeze dryer it was just a question of…

  • Growing Produce,  Thoughts

    Not Just Produce

    I realize that I have not posted about all the things we have been doing. I am hoping that next year will be a little better. But the fact of the matter is that I have spent most of the spring summer and fall growing something. Not produce, it’s a baby! A baby boy to be precise. If you are friends with me in real life you already know this. But I just wanted to make sure it was documented in my blog as well. It turns out growing a baby takes a lot out of a person. Looking back on the summer and fall I have realized just how…

  • cooked apples
    Canning,  Growing Produce,  Preserving

    Applesauce

    I love applesauce. I love eating it. I love making it. And I really love how it makes my house smell. Cooked apples with cinnamon …mmmmm… nothing really beats that. The other major plus for me is how many apples it takes to make applesauce. If you have an apple tree you know what I am talking about. When you get a big crop of apples there is just no way that you can eat them all before they start going bad. This is what we were dealing with this year. Applesauce is a great way to use a lot of apples and make them shelf stable. Then you can…