We LOVE goat milk around here and have found many good uses for the 20-40 gallons (depending on the time of year) we get daily. This short video shows some of the ways we use the milk other than our goat milk soap. Have you ever had goat milk or put it to any of […]
Baking bread is a much loved event around here. My children could sit and eat warm bread fresh out of the oven three times a day if I let them. We have lots of different ways we make bread depending on how much time we have. This is one of our most common. Add water […]
I admit it – one of my absolute favorite dessert combinations is chocolate and peanut butter. If I’m going to indulge (or over-indulge), chocolate and peanut butter is definitely my weakness. Fletcher, it seems, also shares my weakness because his favorite dessert to make is homemade peanut butter cups. He loves to make them and […]
We have a lot of friends who are vegan. So I try to have some good vegan recipes on hand for when they come over. One of our favorite vegan meals is a black bean stew with quinoa (pronounced “keen – wah”). As with most of our crockpot meals, it’s a great recipe for kids […]
We generally don’t make a big fuss about birthdays around here, but we do have several traditions that are important to us. One of our birthday traditions is to start the day with Breakfast Birthday Cake. Emery has been trained to safely cook, and usually volunteers to make it the day before it is needed. We usually make […]
In my experience, most people have never eaten real artichokes. Sure, they’ve had artichoke hearts or artichoke dip. But the whole artichoke? Nope! In fact, most people are very surprised to learn that portions of the artichoke leaves are not just edible, but yummy! Artichokes are actually a biennial plant. That means that they don’t […]
Greyden (10 years old) makes most of our crock pot meals. This morning I asked him to make split pea soup. He has been trained on this meal and is capable of making it by himself. First he washes his hands with our goat milk soap (of course). Then he removes the kid-friendly recipe I made […]
I think it is very important that we teach children to cook. My children start learning when they are two years old how to help mom in the kitchen. I give them things to pour and stir and scoop. As they get older, they start learning how to make their own sandwiches and blend their […]
My wife orchestrates what we eat around here. Periodically, she goes food shopping, brings home what she bought, and drops it in front of me and asks, “Will you marinate this for me?” When I’m marinating meat, I don’t follow a recipe. I make it up with what leftover ingredients we have that need […]
I usually decide what’s for dinner, but the children do much of the actual cooking. When I was food shopping the other day, there was a good price on cut up beef for stew. Since Greyden and Emery had recently harvested our sweet potatoes (a key ingredient for my beef stew), I bought some. Jim is our marinade […]
I learned a lot about cooking from my Italian Grandmother. She was a great cook. Unfortunately, she was also the messiest cook I’ve ever known. I think she used every single cooking item in her entire kitchen everytime she cooked. I believe this because she regularly left the cleanup to those of us who enjoyed […]
I used to make risotto a lot, but it is so time consuming, that I haven’t made it in a couple of years. But I’ve been craving it, so I decided to figure out a better way. Here is what I did. You’ll want to cut this in half or quarters if you’re not feeding […]
Every holiday season (and sometimes during the year) our family makes homemade marshmallows. They are ridiculously good and nothing like store bought marshmallows. You will need an electric mixer for the recipe. A candy thermometer is not necessary, but is very helpful. This time, Brett made them (she has been trained on how to cook […]
We love food made with persimmons. If you’ve never tasted a persimmon, it has a unique flavor but it goes well with recipes calling for pumpkin puree. We’ve started harvesting our 2013 persimmons, so it was time to finish the 2012 persimmon pulp we had frozen and hoarded. We had quite a bit of it, […]
We went strawberry picking this past summer. We cut up and froze all the extra strawberries. Since we’re going to be moving this upcoming summer, I’ve been working my way through our freezer and pantry, trying to dwindle down our supplies. When I came across the frozen strawberries, Emery volunteered to make strawberry shortcake. First […]