In the Kitchen

Fall is here, days are shorter, cooler and the rain has started. Few things are more comforting on a cold rainy day than some hearty, home cooked food. The rain put a hold on outside projects so my Sunday was now open for an indoor activity. Homemade chicken pot pie …

I grabbed a bag of Arrowhead Mills whole grain pastry flour while at the local grocery store. It was new to me, looked intriguing and I wanted to try it. I pulled up Arrowhead Mill’s website for recipes and found this fantastic recipe for extremely moist pineapple raisin carrot cake …

We finished up the cucumber harvest with a batch of sweet and tangy bread and butter pickles. First, cucumbers were cleaned thoroughly, then cut into appropriate spears for the jar sized used. I used half pint jars and cut the cucumbers accordingly. Even though the cucumbers were harvested at obviously …

The cucumber harvest has been plentiful…and relentless. Perfect!  They were planted with the intention of making some homemade pickles before the end of summer. These beauties are a pickling variety purchased from John Scheepers.

I’ve had an interest in making butter for a short while now. The topic came up in conversation and I made a mental note that I should look into it and that was the end of it. We aren’t big on butter as a condiment in this household (except of …

Recently the new dishwasher was installed which led us to the dilemma of finding an environmentally considerate detergent. We settled on a recipe for a detergent consisting of Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda and 20 Mule Team Borax. 20 Mule Team Borax is sodium tetraborate (borax). Its a naturally occurring …

The country living grain mill is like the grand daddy of all grain mills and if dropped onto most every other one would literally CRUSH IT! We had always wanted to make our own flour so that we could have the freshest bread and a grain mill seemed like the …

To keep our canned goods rotating we’ve set up a Shelf Reliance Cansolidator Harvest 72″ unit. This unit holds up to 600 cans although we don’t have ours filled to the maximum capacity. It’s actually pretty empty at the time this picture was taken. Assembly took about 2 hours and …

Wanting to try something new I decided making a loaf of homemade wheat bread would keep me busy for a few hours. I was anxious to try out our Country Living Grain Mill that had arrived a few weeks before (a complete write up on that will be coming soon). …