Those Darned Socks!

I wear wool socks. That's pretty much all I have. If you have wool socks, you know as well as I do that they tend to wear out on the pressure points - the ball of the foot, and the back of the heel - pretty quickly.

With the price of good wool socks, though, it's not very cost-effective to just toss them once they get thin or get holes worn in them. That's why it's a good idea to learn the age-old practice of sock darning!

Fruit-on-the-Bottom Yogurt Cups

Making yogurt at home is easy. Most of us know this. However, getting your family (and sometimes even yourself!) to actually EAT your homemade yogurt can be a trick, because the flavor and consistency is rarely like what we're used to buying in the store.

This is how you make like-store-bought yogurt cups, with your own pastured milk, no GMOs, and no refined sugar.

Fun With Sourdough

I figured since I posted how to *use* sourdough starter to make bread, it might be handy to know how to make the starter in the first place.

Ok, first off, this is how I made a sourdough starter that worked for me. I'm pretty sure there are loads of people who can and will detail how I'm DOING IT WRONG, but this is how I did it.
Here's the super complicated process:
Put a half-cup of water and a half-cup of flour in a bowl.
Take a whisk and stir it up. Walk around your kitchen while you whisk. Visit the fruit bowl. Go hang out where you keep your bread. Stand by an open window. You're trying to capture some native yeast spores in your sticky flour paste.
Now cover it loosely and let it sit for 24 hours.

Super complicated, I know.

Baking Bread

"Mom, when I move out and have my own apartment, can I buy bread from you?" - Emily, age 14

This is how I make my sandwich bread, and it works for any proportion of whole wheat bread flour to white bread flour. I usually use 100% whole wheat. I make two loaves at a time.

Scrapbook Cookbooks

A few years ago, when my brother got married, my mom got together with all the women in our family and put together a cookbook for his wife. We put each recipe on its own page in a small scrapbook, and took some time on each one to make it interesting and pretty.

Well.....it turned out so well, we all got jealous. Fortunately, Mom had the foresight to scan each page into her computer before wrapping the book up, so that next Christmas, all us girls got identical cookbooks as gifts!

They see a lot of use. Each one of us has added to them, altered them, expanded them...and when a wedding approaches, we get out the scrapbooking supplies, buy a new scrapbook, and get busy!

This fall, I decided that, as a way to keep the recipes that my family REALLY likes all in one place, a new cookbook was in order. I'm not really a scrapbook-y kind of person....but I love the paper, and making a cookbook is an excellent way for me to get to use it in a practical way!




So, I gathered my supplies.