homemaking

A Little Something Homemade

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Now that summer is upon us, it seems that the sun is just soaking up all of that lovely moisture in our skin.  I recently found a great recipe for homemade lotion that contains only five ingredients, and they are all readily available.  The best part about this lotion is that you can incorporate various flowers and herbs that you have growing right in your backyard.

The recipe can be found in this book and it is so easy to make that the girls and I were able to whip it up in no time yesterday.  The scent we tried this time is lavender vanilla patchouli, and we are really happy with the result.  We have also made lavender and lavender rosemary and all have turned out great!  (Can you tell we have a lot of lavender in our garden? 🙂 )

Putting Food By: Rhubarb and Strawberries

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Today I bring you another quick food preservation tip.  Today’s topic:  rhubarb and strawberries…The perfect combo!  Rhubarb and strawberries freeze beautifully and it takes little time.

For the rhubarb:  Rinse the rhubarb and allow to dry.  Then cut off the rough ends of each piece.  Cut the rhubarb into 1 inch bits, toss into a gallon size freezer bag and you are done.  Throughout the year, I simply pull out the desired amount of rhubarb I need for a recipe, allow it to thaw out and you are all set.

For the strawberries:  Wash the strawberries and pinch off the green leaves and stem. Allow the strawberries to dry.  Then place the strawberries on a cookie sheet or baking pan.  Place the pan in the freezer for a couple of hours.  (This will allow each strawberries to freeze individually, so that you don’t have a giant mass of frozen strawberries in a freezer bag that you can’t use.)

Once the strawberries have frozen, toss them into a gallon size freezer bag and that’s it!  I pull these frozen jewels out all year long to add to our smoothies.  You could of course allow them to thaw and use them in baked goods as well.

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Some of our favorite home preservation books are:

Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (There are some great canning recipes scattered throughout the piece.)

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader

New Addition

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We have lived in our current house for four years this coming July, and from the moment we set foot inside our new home and unpacked our boxes, we have had a rodent issue.  I have been completely ill equipped to deal with this problem because I have lived my entire life in the city, and have apparently lucked out in that I have never seen a mouse in a house, in my entire life. But now I seem to find myself in midst of a full bore rodent festival.

We have chipmunks digging holes all over our yard to the point where my oldest can no longer practice her cartwheels in the grass for fear of a sprained ankle.  We have voles burrowing underground and eating all of our raspberry brambles from the roots up.  We have mice running all over our yard, under our deck, and in our house.  Yuck, yuck, yuck.

We have tried traps, deterrents, poison, and even had an animal proofing professional come out and check out our situation.  Since the rodent expert visited us last fall we, thank God, have not had any more mice in the house.  However, they are still running rampant outside.  And my fear is that it is only a matter of time before those little suckers figure out a new entry point into our house.

I told my husband in early spring, when the snow melted away to reveal vole tracks all over our yard and half of our raspberry patch again killed off by those vermin, that we needed a new solution.  Enter Rajah, the newest addition to the Fagan household.

If you would have told me five years ago that I would end up a cat owner, I would have told you that you were absolutely insane.  I have never, ever liked cats.  But now the girls and I have found ourselves absolutely head over heels in love with this little one.  She was given to us by the eight year old daughter of the family we visited about a month ago.  On our visit, little Rajah was only a few weeks old, with very little fur and still nursing from her mama (who is one of the best mousers on the farm…YES!).  On Saturday we went to visit the farm again, and to adopt our new kitty.

Saying the girls love her in an absolute understatement.  My five year old especially, has not left her side during her waking hours.  In fact, as I write this post the girls are playing at their grandma’s house and the poor girl cried for ten minutes before we got in the car because she didn’t want to leave Rajah.

My hope is that she takes after her mommy and can hunt down those pesky rodents, but for now we are just enjoying play time and snuggle time with our newest addition.

FYI…The girls named her Rajah because that is the name of Princess Jasmine’s (from Aladdin) pet tiger 🙂

Putting Food By: Garlic Scapes

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This month marks the two year point from when I was able to start staying home with my little ones and really begin to start honing my homemaking skills.  The past two years have been magical, challenging, and as all new adventures are….educational.

One of my greatest feats I have been able to tackle has been putting food by for my family for those cooler months when food is not as abundant, or doesn’t come up at all.  Now, I word this as a feat because I was always so intimidated by the entire idea of food preservation.  I felt like there was so much research to be done, classes to be taken, and all of this was daunting because that meant time, time, time.

However, now that I have done the research, I have come to realize that putting food by does not have to be alarming at all.  And in all honesty, it doesn’t have to take up much time either.

My biggest source of information when it comes to food preservation has been talking with farmers and other shoppers at the local farmer’s markets.  You can learn a lot talking to the nona who has been canning tomato sauce for 50 years, or the farmer who has been freezing their strawberries for as long as they have been growing them.  And the great part about these conversations is that they don’t take any more than a few minutes, and then you can be on your way, ready to begin your preservation journey.

Yesterday I had one of these fabulous conversations with a local farmer who was selling garlic scapes.  Garlic scapes are the green off shoots that emerge from the soil when growing hardneck Rocombole garlic.  It looks much like a green onion, but a bit thinner and curly.  The farmer told me that you can prepare garlic scapes as you would green onions, but it obviously adds a lovely garlic taste to the dish instead of an oniony one.

The farmer then proceeded to tell me they freeze beautifully.  This made my ears perk up because I’m always in the market for food I can put by for another day.  She told me to simply rise off the scopes and cut them into one to two inch sections.

Then you simply place the pieces in a small zip lock freezer bag and freeze.  She told me she will pull a few chunks out if she is making chilli or soup in the winter time and she just throws them in the pot frozen and they cook up nicely and give the dish delicious spicy flavor.

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Some of our favorite home preservation books are:

Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (There are some great canning recipes scattered throughout the piece.)

The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader

Burlap Placemats

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While on our visit to Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin back in December, we were told that burlap bags worked great as covers for compost bins.  Our tour guide told us that they obtained all of their burlap bags from local coffee roasters for little to no cost at all.

It just so happens that there is a local coffee roaster housed just two store fronts down from my husband’s fitness business, so we decided to investigate and I’ll be darned that they literally had closets full of burlap!  The owner said that there is one local farmer that comes regularly to pick up some of her extra bags, but other than that she was just waiting for someone to take them off her hands because she hated to just throw them out.

Well, my husband walked out of there with a tower of burlap sacks, towering far above his over six foot frame.  While we did use a few of the coffee bags to cover our compost bins, we were left with a lot extra stock.  So, I started to look through my crafting books for different things to do with burlap and I came upon one of my Amanda Blake Soule favorites, The Creative Family.  In this book, Amanda discusses the use of burlap to introduce children to sewing.  The wide spaces in the burlap make for easy needlework for young children.

After feeling inspired, as I so often do after reading Amanda’s books, the girls and I got to work.  The girls each took turns sewing using roughly 1 X 2 foot pieces of burlap (I simply cut up one coffee bag), embroidery floss, an embroidery hoop and a large needle.

After the girls reached a point where they were satisfied with their work, I removed the hoop and used my sewing machine to sew on a bit of fabric to the back of the burlap.

This quick project (It only took about 45 minutes from start to finish…including clean up.) ended up turning out quite well and the girls now have their very own hand crafted snack-time placemats.

Now I just need to come up with some more projects to use up the other twenty burlap bags I have 🙂  If anyone has any crafty ideas, please feel free to leave a comment.  I would love to come up with some more ideas.

Remembering

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This weekend was spent remembering those who served and currently serve this wonderful country of ours.  Here is a look at what we did as a family to celebrate this weekend…