I won! Thank you to Stone Cottage Adventures

 

I linked up with the Great Blog Train Giveaway and I won this amazing prize from Marci at Stone Cottage Adventures.

I love the handmade soaps, and look at the cute little bags they came in. She also included some wonderful tea bags. Such a fun treat and thank you so much Marci.

Great Book series for young readers- Dave and Pat Sargent Books

We have 3 little ones: ages 8,6 and 2. The older two are of course really getting in to reading. I happened across a book written by Pat Sargent a while back at a yard sale or something and it had been in my daughter's book shelf. One day she found it , and read it. She couldn't put it down!.

Then she read it again. And again. I started looking online at Ebay, Amazon etc. and found that Pat Sargent has a whole series of "Barney the Bear Killer" books, as well as many other books her and her husband Dave have written.

The series my daughter really loves, is about Barney a black and tan coon hound, and his owner an 8 year old little girl, and their adventures in the Ozark Mountains. It is a wonderful series and I have since read them all to myself, and aloud to my younger daughter. My older daughter has read them all herself multiple times.

They do have another series for younger readers that each one teach a moral or character lesson.
They are called the Animal Pride Series and are very nice as well.

 

They do have their own publishing company as well and I have found many books at a bargain price at www.ozarkpublishing.us  . Many of the paperback books on that site are only $1!

 

I know it can be hard to get kids interested in reading sometimes, but this is a series my kids all really really love, and hopefully some of you will find it as lovely as I do.

One Small Thing- Soup Bucket

Yes a Soup Bucket!

It's been unusually cold here, and soup is just nice on a cold night isn't it?
One small thing I've been doing for a while is to keep what I call a Soup Bucket in my freezer. It's really just a few freezer Tupperware type containers, but here's the premise:

- Every so often I have a few little tablespoons of veggies left over at the end of a meal.  Instead of throwing them out, I put them in the freezer. This works well for things like green beans, carrots, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, even kale or spinach. Just throw it in there.

- Also when I make corn on the cob and have maybe one or two cobs left, I'll cut it off the cob and put the kernels in my bucket.

- We had a wild boar ham about a month ago and I had a few pieces left, I cut it in hunks and put it in my bucket.

- So yesterday I had to take all three kids to the dentist, I had made a loaf of fresh bread, and soup sounded good.

For the base of the soup I freeze tomatoes from the garden, so I took a few out, defrosted them, and ran them through my blender. It made a great tomato base.

I put it all in the crock pot and by the time we were back from the dentist we had a lovely meal ready for us.

Happy Homesteading Ya'll!

Super Frugal and Fun Birthday Cake

With three little ones, plus a husband, plus myself it seems like birthdays are coming around pretty often.

Next time instead of purchasing a super expensive bakery cake, try this. I do it for most of the birthday's around here.

Make their favorite kind of cake, and frost it. Then spell out there name with colored chocolate candies ( aka M&Ms). It's always a hit and done for probably about $4 total, if that. The biggest expense are the candies. The kids love to help decorate as well.


Happy Homesteading Ya'll!

Adventure to Petit Jean Mountain

Time to get out of the house for a bit. Our weather can be crazy, flurries one day, 60 the next, sunshine, rain. oh my. But here is a little trip we took not to long ago to explore Petit Jean Mountain...

 I mean really, isn't it beautiful?

 You probably can't see this, but I'll paraphrase, basically when French settlers came over here, there was a young couple in love, and the girl couldn't bear to be away from her beau so she pretended to be a boy so she could take the trip with him. She was a tiny thing so they called her Petit Jean or " Little John". Once over here in the new world she made it for a while but passed away from some kind of fever, and the grave markers are still here. It is on a beautiful mountain on the river, and is a State Park now. It's wonderful to camp, hike and picnic at.

 The grave....

 I like this picture, don't worry they aren't close to the edge, there is a little shelf of rock just a few inches below what you see as the drop off, so they couldn't fall far from here.

We had a great time and love to get outside and explore.

 

 

Happy Homesteading guys!

Book Review- Sweetie-licious Pies: Eat Pie, Love Life

I have shared my recipe for my Old Fashioned Chocolate Pie before:

 

And I do love pies. I think pies are something that really epitomize hospitality and just old fashioned baking.

 

I am a member of Goodreads which is a great site for those of you that love books. There is an opportunity for giveaways for books that are newly released that you can enter, and then to share reviews with others, etc. It's a nifty little place. Recently I won a book about Pies!!

 

 

 Pies! A whole cookbook about Pies. This is a great cookbook that also talks about the people the recipes came from, stories about when the pie was served etc. There are great pictures and recipes of all kinds of pies as well as vintage photos from the authors family and friends. I read it through like a novel, not like a cookbook.

I like how it starts out with three options for crusts, ( including an original crust and a graham cracker crust, then also talks about different types of toppings like crumble. You can mix and match crusts and toppings and really have a lot of options for what your family likes. I'm looking forward to trying some of these recipes out this Fall and Holiday season with my family. I just wanted to share this super fun book, you can probably find it on Amazon, and I think it would make a great gift or even a coffee table type book.

Happy Homesteading Ya'll
(and Happy Pie making)!

Freeze your peppers to use later

 

I have posted before about my Pepper Relish. It's good stuff ya'll! People just love it. Me and the hubs just sit around thinking about what else it would be good on... Anyways, yesterday we picked some of the year end peppers. We have been slacking on picking them and I wanted to make sure I got them off the vines before they went bad. However I did not have time to make relish with them last night.

I use all kinds of peppers. Some are sweet, most are hot though. I love having different colors as well. The orange, red and yellows just really make beautiful relish.

 Then I just put them out on a dish towel and let them kind of air dry.

Then I package them up in gallon ziplock baggies and put in the freezer. I ended up with 5 of the large bags, then one little quart bag. Also I didn't notice, but the dishtowel I was using has little peppers on it .  How fun.  Then sometime this winter when it is getting dark early or we have some time to spend inside, I'll either can the relish myself or bring the frozen peppers to a canning party :) I'll probably end up with a few more bags before the the plants completly quit making....

we are still using many of the jalepenos ( they are our favorite) for cooking on a daily basis. I also will freeze a gallon or so of jalepeno pepper slices to use this winter in homeade salsas, pizzas, tacos etc.