I’ve always believed that that of all our budget categories, the grocery budget is the easiest to save on from month to month. For the most part, there’s very little you can do about your mortgage, there’s only so much you can do to reduce energy costs, and I don’t know about you but our […]
Growing and Using Cucumbers
Cucumbers are one of those vegetables that people tend to love or hate. My family is mostly filled with cucumber haters but that doesn’t deter me from growing cucumbers every summer. They’re worth growing even if only a couple of us like them. Like zucchini and summer squash, cucumbers can be quite prolific which is […]
Growing and Using Passionflowers aka Maypop
Soon after my husband and I got married, he brought home a beautiful purple flower that he had found on a pasture fence line. It was a passionflower, Passiflora incarnata, which is also known as maypop in areas where it grows wild. We’ve been growing and using passionflowers ever since. Beautiful flowers aren’t the only […]
Chicken and Rice with Creamy Cilantro Sauce Recipe
Chicken and rice is favorite combination at our home. What’s not to love – it’s a delicious and frugal combination? When you purchase a whole chicken it’s one of the least expensive meats and rice (even our favorite, basmati rice) is cheaper per pound than pasta. One of our staple chicken and rice meal is […]
How much to plant to feed your family?
Have you ever wondered how much you should plant to feed your family all year? There are so many variables and I thought it would be fun to talk through some of those things and to help give you a starting place. What does my family like? One of the first questions to ask yourself […]
Edible Perennial Plants for the Food Garden
When most people think about the food garden, they think about annuals like tomatoes, cucumbers, and broccoli. But there are many perennial vegetables, fruits, and herbs that will grow in all but the very coldest gardening zones. Every year we try to plant edible perennials in our garden. Our goals is that over time we’ll […]
Vintage Skills for a Modern Life
When I left home at 18 I could cook spaghetti and scramble eggs. I could sew on a button and “kind of hem” pants. I could balance a checkbook. And I could change a tire. Other than that, I didn’t have many homemaking skills – notice making a bed is not on the list of […]
How to Make Homemade Soup ~ with links to over 70 recipes
Don’t you just love soup? I realize some people may say they don’t like soup but how can they really know? There are thousands of ways to make soup, have they tried them all? These are the questions I ask my non-soup loving family members. Homemade soup is so very versatile and while many people […]
How much is enough?
How much is enough? And what does enough mean anyway? These are questions that often go through my mind and I wonder if they go through yours too? A few years ago I was talking with a lady from church about canning the elk her husband had brought home from a hunting trip. She later […]
Tips for Decorating Cookies With Children
I love decorating cookies with my children. In fact, our oldest son was probably just 2 years old when I decided we’d decorate cookies together every year. So, for more than 20 years we set aside a day in December to make cookies and decorate them. Now that my kids are older, not everyone participates […]