I decided that this year, I wanted to make my own pumpkin puree.  I usually buy a can or two each winter to make pumpkin bread, but of course there are issues with BPA in the can liners.  Making my own seemed to be the best solution!

Tomato sauce wasn’t even my first project, but it was the one that weighed most heavily on my mind. While friends were gathering up strawberries and other earlier crops to make jellies and jams and all sorts of things, I was just waiting. My family won’t eat jellies and jams so there was no reason to make any. But tomato sauce! We go through that like crazy! It was one of the biggest things I’ve planned to can and no, I am STILL not done! But I actually did this one in a few different stages so I “perfected” my technique a bit. I’ll share with you the way that I did it, and explain why some of the other ways are not my preferred way. Here we go…be prepared to get messy!

Butter.

It’s a wonderful fat. However, buying GOOD butter (grass-fed, organic) is expensive. We’re talking anywhere from $5 – $9 a pound. That can get expensive, especially if you go through butter like we do (about 1 – 1.5 lbs. per two weeks). However, making it yourself is MUCH cheaper! And it’s easy, too. Today I’m going to show you how.

Written by Kate Tietje I came up with this recipe when a friend visited. It was delicious. She said, “I …

As I was roasting a chicken to make the week’s meals (gravy, stock, etc.) I thought…I bet some yummy herb-roasted potatoes would be great with this. I’d just gotten some very delicate, organic Yukon gold potatoes from our CSA so I was dying to try it. Ben wasn’t a fan, but the kids loved them and so did I. So here they are:

Sprouted grains. I’ve mentioned them before, but I’ve never told you HOW to do it, have I? Hence, today’s tutorial. 🙂

Sprouted grains have a ton of health benefits.  They’re more easily digested and nutrients more readily absorbed, they are full of extra vitamins, especially B vitamins (did you know that’s why white flour is enriched with B vitamins?  Because manufacturers know they should and do contain these, but stripping the bran off gets rid of them), some gluten-sensitive individuals can eat them, they contain few to no anti-nutrients — they’re wonderful!  Of course, it’s best to reduce your intake of grains overall, but when you eat them, sprouted grains are the best you can get.

It had been on my plan to make lemon-poppy-seed bread anyway when I started getting lots of zucchini from my CSA.  So I thought, I ought to make some zucchini bread too!  However, I didn’t have a recipe for either that really worked for me yet.  Then I got the brilliant idea to combine them into one delicious, healthy bread.  I had also sampled some cheesecake that had nutmeg in it and the flavor had reminded me of lemon zest, so I thought, I bet that will be the perfect spice for this bread.  I probably could have even added more than I did.  The result was fabulous — moist on the inside and chewy-crunchy on the outside!

Okay, this is the post I promised awhile ago!  The one that I was trying to get to work out but that wasn’t going well?  But now I figured it out!

The other day I got a craving for peach tea, and decided to see what happened if I mixed some things together. This is what I came up with.

It’s actually kind of scary.  I do major grocery shopping every two weeks, and I spend two or three days before each shopping trip carefully making my meal plan and then checking and re-checking it to make sure it meets our family’s current goals and needs.  Then I make my grocery shopping list based on the meal plan, checking and re-checking that too.  It doesn’t NEED to take this long, especially not now that I’ve got a good routine going (I’ve been doing this faithfully for over a year), but I actually enjoy it.  Am I strange?  Probably.  But that’s okay.