Making Liquid Hand Soap in a Blender (Just Two Ingredients!)

Staying clean and killing germs seems to be on everyone's minds these days, and the number one way to do this is still good old soap. Our great-grandmothers knew how to make their own, and so can we (it's a lot easier now for us than it was for them!) Thanks to blenders, silicone molds, and slow cookers, soap making doesn't have to be an all-day, sweaty job, producing something that could burn your hands. It's a pretty simple process really, and with modern tools and ingredients we can be sure of a safe and effective product.

This is also the best way to know just what's in your soap - if you have chemical sensitivities, or just don't like all of the added colors and scents, making your own is a simple way to know exactly what's going on your family's skin. And if you're into essential oils, you can easily add them to your finished product to give it whatever scent or other properties you desire. I like to add some peppermint eo to mine in the winter, for that candy cane sort of scent (and also because it repels spiders and mice!). In the summer, I use rose geranium eo for its tick-repellant properties (there are a lot of lymes-carrying ticks where we live, and rose geranium is supposed to be one of the most potent natural tick repellants). But feel free to use whatever scents you like (rosemary for better memory? citrus for a cheerier mood?) Or use none at all! You're in total control!

Here's how I make my soap:

You'll need just two ingredients (well, three if you count water), olive oil (NOT extra virgin - for some reason this doesn't work well. You want the cheap stuff, or even pomace grade if you can get it) and lye (for bar soap, you want sodium hydroxide; for the liquid soap we're making here, potassium hydroxide works better).

A word about lye: yes, this stuff is used as drain cleaner. Before saponification (chemically bonding with oil and turning into soap) it is very caustic and can cause chemical burns on skin. In the quantities we're using here, and in the contained environment of the blender, it's usually not overly dangerous, but it's still smart to be cautious, and not to do this around children and pets. If you do spill some on your skin, the best thing to do is to wash it off with soap and water (NOT vinegar). Once your soap is made, there will be no lye left - it will all have turned into soap (that's why all soap recipes should include more oil than lye; that way all of the lye has enough oil available to turn into soap, with a little extra just in case. This is called "superfatting" in the soaping world).

If you're still scared of lye, think of it like this: hydrogen and oxygen are extremely flammable. We all learned in grade school that a fire can't burn without oxygen (that's why candle snuffers work). But if you chemically bond the two, you get water, which we use to put out fires. The properties are completely changed. It's the same with lye in soap. Finished soap won't burn you.

You  also want to make sure that your olive oil is pure olive oil, and not a blend with other oils. Each kind of oil or fat (fat is just oil that is solid at room temperature) has a different ratio for bonding with lye to make soap, so if you have different kinds of oils you need to adjust your recipe to account for this, or you could end up with soap that still contains unbonded lye and can burn your skin.

OK, now that we got all of the safety information out there, I can show you how easy (and safe!) it is to make your own soap.

Here's my recipe:
9.12 oz (258.55g) water
3.04 oz (86.18g) lye (potassium hydroxide)
16 oz (453.59 g) olive oil

It's very important to have an accurate scale (as I said above, you want to make sure you have more oil than lye in your soap). Measure out your ingredients carefully, and if in doubt, err on the side of more oil and water and less lye, just to be on the safe side. But better not to doubt!

1. Measure out your water into a glass jar you won't use for anything else (I just use an old salsa jar)

2. In a separate container, measure out your lye.

3. Pour the lye into the water (never the other way around, it could "volcano" and overflow the jar and burn your hands). I always step out onto the porch for this so that the toxic fumes that are created can dissipate.

4. Let the lye and water mixture sit for 5 minutes, until the mixture looks clear. You can stir it with a metal spoon to make sure everything blends well. Make sure to leave it somewhere where it's safe from children and pets. Also, be aware that this will get really hot! Never use plastic for this (it will melt, and bond with your lye to make something else) and be careful what you set it on.

5. Meanwhile, measure out your olive oil into your blender. Make sure everything is tight and working properly - you don't want it leaking! This is why I also put my blender in a pan; if it does leak, it will go into the pan and not all over the counter top. Lye is particularly hard on butcher block counter tops - ask me how I know!!!

6. When your lye is ready, bring it inside and pour the lye mixture into the olive oil (you might want to use an oven mitt - it will still be really hot!) Cover the blender and turn it on to a relatively low speed.

7. Wait. Soap made with pure olive oil can take 20-30 minutes to blend. Be patient. Remember, Grandma used to have to stir this by hand all day!

You'll know this part of the process is done when the soap "comes to trace". This means that the soap has a thick, pudding-like consistency, and that when you stir it with a spoon it leaves a trace of where the spoon has been, it doesn't just flatten out again like when it's fully liquid.

At this point, you have your soap base. If you wanted to make regular soap bars, you could pour this into your mold and let it sit for 4 weeks to finish saponifying ("cure"). It's not finished soap yet; all of the chemical reactions haven't fully happened.

Or, you can speed up the process with heat, which is what we'll do in the next step.

8. Pour the soap base into a slow cooker. I like to use my Instant Pot, because the stainless steel insert doesn't react with the soap. I've done this in a regular Crock Pot, and the process eventually (after multiple batches of soap) ate away at the enamel and ruined the pot. I don't worry about having a separate pot for soap making, since once it's cooked I have finished soap, just like what I use to clean the pot after cooking.

You'll want to cook the soap base on low for several hours, stirring a couple times just to make sure it's cooking evenly and to see how it's coming along. It will go through several stages; it will start out like pudding, then look something like applesauce, and eventually get to a stage when it looks more like yellow mashed potatoes, with no liquid left. When it's thick like this, it's ready for the next step.

Again, this is a point where you have options. You can pour it into a mold and wait for it to cool to make bars (it's fully soap at this point, so you don't have to wait for it to cure), or you can mix in water to make liquid soap, as I'll show you in the next step.

9. Mix in 5-6 cups of water. This, for me, is the tricky part. Too much water, and you end up with runny soap (which you can cook off; just turn your slow cooker back on and let the excess water evaporate); too little, and your soap is too thick and gloppy and will clog up your pumper (to fix this, just add more water - which is much easier than boiling off excess, so I usually start with 5 cups of water and tweak from there).

Mixing it can also be a challenge; I like to use my stick blender, which does a pretty thorough job, but leaves the soap foamy, so you need to wait for it to settle before pouring it into its final container. A whisk and good old elbow grease will do the job, too, with less foam - but I'm lazy and have a stick blender.

As I mentioned before, you can add essential oils to your finished soap, either to the whole batch when you store it or to the pumper when you're ready to use it. You want to add them at the end, when your soap is cool, since essential oils are heat-sensitive.

And that's it! Kind of putzy, and it does take a while (most of it waiting while the blender runs or the soap cooks), but not really that hard. In only a few hours every month or so, you can keep your family stocked with soap!

Fast and Easy Ricotta Cheese

In the last few months, I've finally gotten back into the habit of making cheese regularly (click here for my basic cheese recipe from way back in 2013). And since I usually make about four gallons of milk's worth at a time, that leaves a lot of whey behind. Being a waste-not-want-not kind of girl, of course I use it to soak my chicken feed (whey contains albumen, a protein that laying hens need for egg development) or add to my garden (whey is a rich source of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and many other micronutrients, and can be applied directly to the garden). But before I use it for either of those, I cook it one more time to make ricotta cheese.

I had read that you could make ricotta simply by heating the whey leftover from making a rennet cheese until a fine cloud of cheese forms just under the surface. Then you simply strain it through a cloth overnight and voila! a lovely dish of creamy ricotta.

While this method does work, the yield is ridiculously low and the process is excessively putzy. The cheese made this way is extremely fine, and quickly clogs up the straining cloth. If you want to keep the whey draining, it's necessary to scrape down the cloth almost constantly (which takes HOURS for this quantity of whey), and even so you end up with only about a cup of cheese (from the aforementioned nearly four gallons of whey).

I was just about ready to give up on making ricotta altogether. It was just too much trouble for so little results. But then, a few days ago, I was re-reading David Asher's The Art of Natural Cheesemaking (you can see my review of the book here) and saw his recipe for "fast ricotta". And just like that, I found the solution to my problem. In his recipe, he not only boils the whey briefly (where the first recipe simply heated it until the cheese started to separate), but he also adds 1/4 cup of vinegar. This made a HUGE difference. From the same whey, in less than half an hour (with no scraping of the cloth), I made a full quart of ricotta cheese.

What a relief! I have to admit, the kids were laughing at me as I did a happy dance around the kitchen. It was so much faster, and so much easier. Manicotti Monday has been saved!

In case you'd like to try this for yourself, here's what I did:

Fast and Easy Ricotta Cheese
Heat the whey leftover from making a rennet cheese; bring to a boil. You don't have to stir; the boiling will take care of that for you. Add 1/4 cup of vinegar (white or apple cider vinegar both work fine) or 1/2 cup of lemon juice and bring back to a boil for a moment. Then turn off the heat and let stand for 5-10 minutes.

Line a colander with a damp cotton dish towel and set into a pot large enough to catch your whey. Scoop out the cheese (or just pour all of it through the towel if your pot is small enough; I have to ladle most of it out before I can lift the pot). Most of the whey will drain immediately, but you can hang it if you'd like it to drain more.

Here's my setup (very fancy, I know)

When it's drained to your liking, scoop the cheese into a container and refrigerate. Ricotta is a soft cheese, so you should use it within a week.

Easy Onion Chip Dip From Scratch

One of my favorite snacks as a college student was chips with onion dip. My mom had always made it by mixing sour cream with the powdered Lipton mix, so of course that's what I did, too. Until I started thinking about what might be in that package. Here's what I found on the ingredients list:

Onions (Dehydrated), Salt, Corn Starch, Onion Powder, Sugar, Soy Sauce (Fermented Soybeans, Wheat and Salt), Caramel Color (Sulfites), Maltodextrin, Corn Syrup (Dehydrated), Yeast Extract, High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Disodium Guanylate, Disodium Inosinate.

I don't know about you, but I have no idea what "disodium guanylate" and "disodium inosinate" are*, and what I do know about corn starch, corn syrup, and maltodextrin, I'm not really happy about. So for a while I gave up on my favorite snack, until I found this recipe using simple, healthy ingredients (most of which you could grow yourself, if you wanted!) I like to use organic herbs and spices and organic sour cream - but feel free to use whatever you're comfortable with.

I actually served this dip last Sunday, when we had friends over (who asked for the recipe, and inspired this post! So if you like this recipe, thank Monica for making me share it.)

French Onion Dip

2 Tbsp minced onion
2 Tbsp onion powder
1 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp each dried parsley, celery seed, and turmeric
16 oz sour cream
Blend dry ingredients and mix into sour cream. Can be served immediately, or refrigerate overnight to let flavors mingle.

*So I googled it, and it turns out disodium guanylate and disodium inosinate are food additives similar to (and often used in conjunction with) MSG, with similar possible side effects. No thank you!

Homemade Sausage Seasoning

A friend asked me about making sausage from home-raised pigs, and I realized I hadn't posted my breakfast sausage recipe yet! I've been using it for years, so I can readily vouch that it's been well tried and tested!

This recipe makes 2 tablespoons of seasoning, which is enough for about 2 pounds of sausage. Feel free to multiply or divide it as you like - I usually make a big batch so I always have some on hand.

Sausage Seasoning

2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground black pepper
1 1/2 tsp sage
1/2 tsp marjoram
1/4 tsp savory
1/8 tsp ginger
pinch cloves and red pepper

Mix it all together, and it's ready to use! I generally mix my seasonings in when I fry up my sausage, but if you prefer you can certainly mix it in when you grind your meat, too. 

Homemade Sheboygan-Style Bratwurst

Independence Day is coming up this Thursday, and in true American fashion, we will be grilling out. And since our great state is Wisconsin, what we'll grilling will be brats. If you love brats as much as we do, but also hate all of the MSG, nitrates, etc. in most brats as much as we do, then I'm here to share the joy I've found with you.

I should note that these are infinitely customizable - feel free to add cheddar, jalapeno, or whatever you like. Our local brat shop - Louie's Finer Meats in Cumberland, Wisconsin - offers a dizzying array of specialty brats featuring everything from onion and garlic to cranberries, blue cheese, and wild rice (my favorites are the blueberry and cheddar and the mushroom and swiss).

Homemade Sheboygan-Style Bratwurst

3 pounds of ground pork or beef (include at least half a pound of pork fat in that total)
1 Tbsp salt
2 tsp ground white pepper
1 tsp dried marjoram
1/2 tsp caraway seed
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 Tbsp minced fresh garlic
(2 tsp red pepper flakes optional)
Stuff casings according to manufacturer's direction. Can be frozen, or grill and serve.

My husband also likes to "hot tub" marinade his brats before grilling - he puts the brats in a crock pot set to low, then adds a bottle of beer and a sliced onion.

Enjoy your summer cookouts, and have a happy Independence Day!

Simple Home Smoked Ham

In my previous post I outlined how I make bacon from our home-grown pork; to make ham, I use the same basic recipe, with just a couple of tweaks:

1.Cure the meat for a longer period of time. Since it's a bigger cut of meat, I like to cure it for three days instead of just one, which gives the salt more time to permeate the pork.

2. The other change was for my husband's preference. In my first attempts at curing ham, I followed the bacon recipe exactly, just leaving it in the refrigerator longer, as I said. When I made a pot of potato soup, however, my husband requested that I leave out the maple syrup when I make ham - the sweet flavor just didn't taste right in the savory soup. So I changed that as well, and the recipe became even more simple: just salt and smoke.

Simple Home Smoked Ham

2 pounds pork roast
3 Tbsp salt (I use canning/pickling salt because of the finer texture)
Smoke as in the bacon recipe, again to an internal temperature of 160 degrees. This will take a little longer than for the bacon due to the thickness of the meat.
Feel free to adjust the recipe to whatever size cut of meat you have; just try to keep the same meat to salt ratio.

I should note that the finished ham will be fully cooked in the smoker; no further cooking is necessary, so you can go ahead and slice it for your sandwiches!



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How Much Money Can You Save By Raising Your Own Food?

For many people, one of the main reasons for rasing your own food is to save money. Taking out the middle man, cutting out the costs of labor and transportation - it only makes sense. Add to that the idea that foods harvested right from your back yard can be richer in flavor and nutrients (saving you money in health care costs) - and of course gardening itself can be a great form of exercise (saving you money at the gym, too!)

But how much money can you really save raising your own food? I ran the numbers for last year (which are lower than they'd normally be, since I only had a minimal garden as we worked to set up our new homestead), and found it can be a lot!

Our biggest savings was from our pork. We raised two hogs this year, which we purchased for $100 ($50 each). They ate about 2,125 pounds of organic feed, bringing our total cost up to $1156.28 (this is actually about $300 more than we would usually spend because of an unforseen delay in our butchering date - you can read about that here). We butchered them ourselves and will be smoking all of the meat at home, so the only processing cost will be for the equipment we purchased (this was our first time butchering our own pigs) for $296.20. So our total cost was $1452.48 for 300 pounds of meat in the freezer, not counting the bones (which we'll make into broth) and lard. We'll be making all of this meat into pork chops, bacon, ham, and bratwurst (this is Wisconsin, after all. We love our brats!) From our normal sources, we would have paid around $3,140 for that amount of meat (in those cuts), so by raising our own we saved just under $1,700 (again, that's counting the price of the processing equipment and the extra feed from raising them longer than we expected). If you'd like more information, you can read more about how much we saved by raising our own pork in this post.

We also raised a batch of 50 broilers this year, each bird averaging 5 pounds. Purchase price was $71 ($1.42 per bird), and total feed cost was $458.84 (about $9.18 each). That price is for organic feed, which is generally about twice the cost of regular. We did the butchering ourselves and used chicken tractors we had already built (you can see my post with building plans here), so our total cost was $529.84 (or $10.60 per bird; about $2.12 per pound, dressed).  Our normal source for organic chicken charges $3.50 a pound, which would come out to $875 for the 50 chickens we raised. So our savings was $345.16, or $1.38 per pound.

From those chickens we also made broth (also known as stock). The cheapest source I have for organic chicken broth is Walmart, which charges $2.50 for a quart. I don't usually measure exactly when I make broth, but a conservative guess at how much we made would be a gallon per bird, which would multiply out to 200 quarts a year, or $500. Since I already calculated the cost for the bones in the meat total, there was no additional cost for the broth.

Our free range hens (which we only had from May to December in 2018 because of our move to the new house) gave us 2,235 eggs this year, at a cost of $297 in organic feed.  If we had paid $4 a dozen (the going rate for organic eggs around here), those eggs would have cost us $745; a savings of $448.

So the animals on our farm alone saved us around $3,000. We weren't able to have much of a garden this year, but we did raise about $116 worth of butternut squash (our cost was just $5 for the seedling plant) and $30 worth of mushrooms (which cost $25 for the spawn, but will give us harvests for years to come). I didn't add up how many tomatoes we harvested (the kids ate most of them before they made it into the house!) so I can't calculate the value of those. Conservatively, then, our tiny starter garden netted us only $121, but obviously that number will go up significantly when we're able to garden more extensively this summer.

But what really surprised me was the amount of money our countertop microbial "farm" saved us. We have kefir smoothies every morning for breakfast, using 3 pints of kefir per day for all seven of us. Using a supermarket price of $4 a quart for plain organic kefir ($6 for our 3 pints) times 365 days a year, that would cost us $2,190. Making our own from organic milk that costs us $1.50 a day instead of $6, which saves us $1,642 over the course of a year - all for less than a minute or two of work per day.

We also make our own homemade kombucha (you can find my recipe here). You can get kombucha at Walmart for about $3 a pint, and we make 2 gallons every week. That would cost us about $2,500 over the course of a year. The tea and sugar required to make that same amount at home would cost around $150, for a savings of  $2,350 (we flavor it with raspberries harvested for free from a friend's garden, so that added no extra cost).

When you add those it all up, our total savings, even without much of a garden, was over $7,000. Our total expenses for all groceries over the past year was around $14,000, so we cut our grocery bill by a third! I can't wait to see how we do next year!

How about you? As you can see, some of the biggest cost savings were "raised" right on our kitchen counter (ooh, that reminds me - I didn't count my sourdough bread! I'll have to calculate that out next . . .) How much do you save by raising your own food?

Home Smoked Bacon

I was really wracking my brain to think of an exiting title, but really, what's more exiting than that? Bacon is the product of a kind of miraculous alchemy, a blending of meat, salt, and smoke to make one of the top five most spectacular foods ever created. Knowing how to work that spell and make this magic at home (so you know exactly what is (or isn't) going into your bacon) is one of the greatest homesteading skills you can achieve!

I first heard of this recipe from a class I took at the Hay River Traditional & Green Skills 2018 event. The class was called Makin' Bacon! Home Smoking Basics, taught by Brett Laidlaw, a blogger and author with a cabin in northwestern Wisconsin, less than an hour from where I live (here's a link to his blog, which I encourage you to check out: troutcaviar.blogspot.com)

In his class, he showed us how to choose, cure, and smoke bacon in a cheap backyard grill. The best part? He gave out free samples of the finished product, so we could know if we liked it before we went to the trouble of making it for ourselves at home. Smart guy!

Here's the recipe, straight out of his book, Trout Caviar: Recipes from a Northern Forager:

Home-Smoked Bacon

2 pounds pork belly
1/4 cup maple syrup or brown sugar
3 Tablespoons salt (I use canning/pickling salt because of the finer texture)

Rub the pork belly with the maple syrup, sprinkle salt on all sides, and let cure, covered, in the refrigerator for 24 hours, turning occasionally. For a brown sugar cure, mix the sugar and salt and pat it evenly on all sides of the meat. 

The next day, rinse off excess salt, pat dry, and smoke at 200-220 degrees for 2-3 hours. The bacon will be both smoked and fully cooked. If you are unsure about whether the bacon is cooked at this point, set your mind at ease by placing it in a 200 degree oven for 30 minutes. A meat thermometer inserted into the bacon should read 160 degrees. 

Be sure to sample a small slice of he still-warm bacon straight from the smoker and sweating fragrant fat. You'll see that it's more than worth the small trouble of smoking your own.

See how easy that is? Only three ingredients, and if you use an electric smoker with a temperature probe (here's a link to the one I have), it takes all the guesswork out of it. I just rinse the marinaded meat, pat it dry, and set it on the rack. Insert the probe, shut the door, push a few buttons, and a few hours later - pork perfection.

If you don't have a smoker, he details in his book how to smoke your meat on a regular backyard grill. It's more putzy than an electric smoker, but you can still get the same amazing result.

Either way, it's suprisingly simple, and the results are well worth the effort (I heartily second his recommendation of sampling while it's still warm - and perhaps licking the pan . . .) Make sure to save any drippings; these are great for greasing the pan when frying eggs, etc.


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Basic Buttermilk Pancakes

With all of the maple syrup making going on, of course the kids have been begging for pancakes. And of course, being a loving mom (and geeking out about the awesomeness of making homemade maple syrup), I've given in and made them once or twice in the last couple weeks. For just a simple, basic pancake to smother in maple syrup, this is my favorite. They're super simple to whip up, they come out light and fluffy, and my kids love them.

Basic Buttermilk Pancakes

1 1/4 cups flour (sprouted whole wheat is my go-to - here's how you make it)

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

2 Tbsp butter, melted

1 1/4 cups buttermilk (regular milk works fine, too - just add 1/2 tsp cream of tartar to activate the baking soda)

1 egg, beaten

1/2 tsp sweetener of choice (honey, sugar, or maple syrup all work great)

Mix dry ingredients, then add liquid ingredients. Fry as desired.

Maple Syrup Making Tips

Today we boiled down our fourth batch of maple syrup, bringing our finished syrup total over three gallons - which means we've officially "paid off" my investment (meaning I've produced enough syrup, in terms of dollars, to offset the money I paid for the equipment. So the rest of the season, as the saying goes, is gravy - costing me nothing but my time and energy (which I really don't mind spending sitting around a campfire with the kids).

While I'm by no means an expert, I have learned a few things in the last few weeks. Most of these pertain directly to the Simple and Inexpensive three-pan boiling system I've been using, but some are fairly universal.

1) Maple syrup season comes just as the snow is leaving, which means the ground will be very cold and very muddy. I like to use kleenexes, newspaper, junk mail, and other "burnable" trash to start my fires (making use of it instead of sending it to the landfill - another plus for this method), but these all tend to wick up water and then not light up. To get around this, I've found it helpful to make a base of small branches under where I'm starting my campfire. This lifts my paper and other firestarting materials off of the cold, wet ground and keeps them dry.

2) Another trial-and-error tip I've learned is that it's helpful to take the time to make sure your setup is level before you start your fire and add your sap. If your pans are tipped, you can't boil as much sap in each pan, which makes the whole process take that much longer.

Catywampus pans - see how one side is full, but the other side has hardly any sap?

3) As I mentioned in tip #1, maple syrup season comes in the early spring, when there is still a good chance of wintry weather. In the middle of my last sap boiling afternoon, the weather suddenly turned and it started snowing. Of course, the last thing you want is more water in your sap! So I pulled out the canopy we'd used for the farmer's market last summer, which worked like a charm (but now smells very strongly of campfire smoke!)

Oh, no! Snow! Time for Sap Camp!

4) After 16+ hours over an open fire, my boiling pans are now very black and sooty. Instead of trying to get all of that grime off of the outside of the pan (I do scrub out the inside, of course), I simply slip the entire pan - once it's cooled off - into a plastic garbage bag. That way they don't make a mess of wherever I store them until the next batch of sap is ready. Each pan gets its own bag, and then I nest the bagged up pans together for storage.

5) It's helpful to have one pot for transferring the sap from the boiling pans into the kitchen, then another ready to filter the sap into for finishing on the stove. You want to be able to preserve as much heat as possible during this transfer to save time and energy boiling off the last of the excess water, so it's best to think ahead and have things ready so you can move quickly.

6) Since you need to make sure your sap gets to exactly 7 degrees above boiling, it's very important to have an accurate thermometer. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have one (the new digital one I bought shorts out from the steam, apparently, and shuts off before it gets up to the final temperature), so I've been depending on the "sheeting" test (which is fine in my situation, since I'm only making syrup for my own family, not selling any).

7) A useful tip I learned at Sam Thayer's class was that you can sterilize your jars of syrup (similar to canning) by inverting them for 4 seconds, as long as your syrup is above 180 degrees. So if you put your syrup in jars right away after boiling, they should be plenty hot (217 degrees here in northwestern Wisconsin). Make sure all surfaces have been touched by the hot syrup so no bacteria remain alive, and your syrup should stay sterile until the jar is opened.

I'm sure there are many more things I'll learn as I go, but hopefully these will save you some time and headaches as you get started.

Those of you who've made maple syrup before - do you have any tips for me?

(You can read more of my maple syrup adventures here, here, and here)

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Stretch Your Dog Food Dollar with Homestead Scraps

As a homesteader, I try to be very careful about counting the cost vs. benefit of all of the animals on our property. Each needs to fulfill a role (or our freezer), at the least possible expense.

So when I was walking through our local Farm & Fleet store the other day looking at dog food, I began to reconsider the worth of our pug/dachshund cross. Is she really worth $30 for a 40 pound bag of Iams? I won't even pay that much for chicken feed - and last I checked, our dog hasn't laid any eggs lately!

My daughter, of course, thinks she's worth every penny; and she does serve as a pretty effective doorbell (a loud, high-pitched, hey-that-scary-car-is-still-parked-in-that-same-spot-it's-been-all-weekend-oh-wait-that's-yours kind of doorbell, but still . . .), small rodent deterrent, spill licker, daughter's-bed-warmer, and general source of amusement. She also sings along with the Hallelujah Chorus, so there's that.

Which means she's staying; but it would be nice if we could somehow make her food a little cheaper. So I started researching dog food recipes.

The first thing I noticed was that most of the recipes I could find were NOT cheaper. Chicken breast, rice, special vitamin supplements - this was definitely not going to save me any money. But every so often I'd find ingredients that got me thinking: Liver - I have plenty of chicken livers from butchering our birds, and even though I still haven't found a pate recipe that anyone but me will eat, I can't just throw them away! Eggs - Wisconsin winters mean cracked, frozen eggs, which I don't let my kids eat, but the dog could; Squash - the garden always gives us more squash than we can handle; Apples - how about that experiment where I turned the leftover apple smash from our cider making into applesauce, but it didn't really taste so good? It turns out, there are a lot of things that would make good dog food going to waste in our house.

So I developed a basic recipe, built off of otherwise wasted foods on our homestead:
1/2 cup squash or carrots
1/2 cup meat (chicken hearts, meat from soup bones, etc.)
 - or - 1 egg (with shell; the added calcium is good for them, but smash it well so they don't cut themselves)
1/4 cup livers
1/4 c green vegetables (green beans, etc.)
1 Tbsp fat (lard, chicken fat, etc.)

This is only a base; we substitute, add, or leave things out all the time. I regularly add bone broth - it's mostly water, after all, so it's cheap, and it's a great source of collagen to help our old dog's aging joints. In the winter, when the pigs are tucked away at freezer camp, the dog gets most of the whey from my cheesemaking, too.

Now, I know what you're thinking - this isn't perfectly vitamin and mineral balanced like the stuff in the bags! There's no veterinary nutritionist overseeing this! But hold on a minute. Look at your diet - do you eat the same nutritionally balanced pellet every day? Or do you prefer a varied diet of healthy foods? And no one is saying this has to be your dog's only food - in our family, we mix a homemade "stew" for our dog's supper, but still give her kibble for breakfast - partially for "nutrient insurance" and partially just because we're lazy. 😉

And if you are lazy like us, you can actually make up a big batch all at once in the fall (or whenever) and freeze or pressure can it. A rule of thumb for canning is that your time and pressure need to be what's required for the ingredient that needs the most - usually the meat ingredient (you can check the canning times for most foods in the Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving). That way, you just have to pop open a jar when your dog's meal time comes around, rather than cooking a separate meal for her every day. And if a whole jar is too much for your small dog, you can refrigerate the extra and she can have leftovers the next day (just like your kids!)

So I've found that the key to saving money feeding your dog can be looking at the healthy food you're already raising for your family and seeing what's being wasted. Just like we save our kitchen scraps to supplement our chickens' ration and minimize their feed bill, think about what would otherwise go unused that would make healthy and delicious dog food. And remember, this is an animal that eats chicken poop like it's candy - what seems gross to you might be a gourmet delight to her!


Please note - the links above are affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking I will receive a small commission, but your price remains the same. Thank you for your support!

Sprouted Corn and Soy Free Chicken Feed

Confession time: It's been just over a year now since we moved, and while we've worked hard to make this place our home, I haven't done much to make it a homestead. We have the laying hens, and we raised a batch of meat birds and a couple pigs last year, but honestly I feel like I've been on auto-pilot as far as homesteading is concerned.

Then a few weeks ago I discovered Justin Rhodes' YouTube videos, and in particular the Great American Farm Tour. I've been binge-watching obsessively ever since, trying to stave off cabin fever  by seeing how farmers all around the country manage their farm systems. He calls his videos "edu-tainment", interspersing information about permaculture, seed saving, and animal husbandry with clips of his adorable children and "the Beautiful One" (his wife Rebecca). Even my husband will watch them with me! Mostly to humor me and because the Rhodes kids are so cute, but still . . .)

One of the things in the Rhodes' routine that reminded me of something I needed to start doing again was soaking chicken feed. He claims you can feed 30% less feed if you soak it, due to the higher water content and higher digestibility. While I don't soak/ferment my chicken feed the same way he does, I do like to mix my own corn- and soy-free ration (I posted the recipe here), and this time around I'm stepping it up and doing a four-day sprout on my whole grains.

My Sprouting Station

I re-use old lettuce containers as my sprouting trays, and they work great. On day 1, I put 4 cups of wheat seeds and 2 cups of oats into the container and cover them to about an inch over the seeds with plain water. In the picture above, you can see that I've also been adding some dried pea seeds I had leftover from a couple of years ago - just trying to use them up. I should note that you should only use seed that is meant for animal or human consumption, to be sure that they haven't been treated with chemicals to inhibit sprouting (which of course would defeat the purpose, and also possibly make your animals sick).

On day 2 and 3 I rinse the seeds using this strainer from Amazon, which I bought for straining chicken broth in my Instant Pot (but I use it much more often for rinsing sprouts!) I let them drain out a bit, then return them to the container and put it back on the shelf until the next day. (In case you were wondering, that orange clip is there so that the handle doesn't fall in and stick to the seeds - it just makes things go more smoothly.)

On the fourth day, I pour the sprouts (which have little white seed tails by now) into my feed mixing bucket and add 2 cups of black oil sunflower seeds, 1 cup of ground flax, and 1/4 cup of Fertrell Nutribalancer. I mix it all together and feed it to my birds - 13 old hens, 6 just-starting-to-lay pullets, 1 rooster, and 2 guinea hens. Out of this mix of birds, eating just this home-mixed feed and kitchen scraps, I'm averaging 7 eggs a day, which I think is pretty good for our sub-zero, three-blizzards-last-week mid-February in Wisconsin!

Looking so majestic, standing in his feed trough! Ha!

The links to the seeds above are just for example; this is definitely not the cheapest way to purchase these seeds! I would recommend contacting your local feed mill, buying club, or even Walmart to find what's available in your area. I did buy my Instant Pot and strainer on Amazon, though, so go ahead and get yours there, too. 😉

Also, please note - the links above are affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking I will receive a small commission, but your price remains the same. Thank you for your support!

Pumpkin Puffs

. . . because cream puffs are the best dessert ever, and because it's fall, so everything must be pumpkined!

I was reading through a fun book I saw at the library - The Year of Cozy by Adrianna Adarme - and found (among many other things I immediately bookmarked) a recipe for No-Bake Pumpkin Chiffon Pie. The author said she "fell in love with chiffon pies a few years ago; they're wonderfully light, and their texture is silky smooth." Maybe it's just me, but this description immediately cried, "Cream Puff!" in my mind. So I tried it. The original recipe calls for rum, which my kids didn't like, and beaten egg whites for its lightness. So I decided to try it again, after tweaking the recipe to our taste. First step: compare all of the pumpkin pie recipes I could find with all of the Boston cream pie filling recipes I had. So I pulled out my book of family recipes, my Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, and, of course Joy of Cooking.

The latter was, as usual, the most helpful in "reinterpreting" a recipe - there I found that folding in whipped cream to the the cooled custard would give it the lightness I was looking for. I served them to my kids (and also to my husband, sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and niece and nephews, who were visiting that day - a good excuse, I thought, to try out an extravagant new dessert. Thankfully, they're used to being experimented upon (and when it comes to dessert, they don't seem to mind!) Plus, Debbie brought a back-up dessert of leftover apple crisp, so even if it flopped, we were covered). The verdict: an unqualified success (Debbie even asked for the recipe - and took all of the apple crisp back home).
So Debbie (and everyone else who shares my love of all things pumpkin and all things cream puff) here you go:

Pumpkin Puffs
Puff pastry:
1 cup water
1/2 cup butter
1 cup flour
4 eggs
Heat oven to 400 degrees. Heat water and butter to boiling in a medium saucepan. Stir in flour all at once, stirring until mixture forms into a ball and leaves sides of pan (about 1 minute - I like to use my Kitchen Aid hand blender for this). Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating until smooth after each addition. When all of the eggs have been added, drop by spoonfuls onto a baking sheet. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, until puffy and dry. Cool, then cut off tops and scoop out any soft dough remaining inside.

Filling: 
3 Tbsp water
2 tsp unflavored powdered gelatin
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/3 cup heavy cream
1/3 cup maple syrup (honey or sugar work fine, too)
2 eggs
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
1/8 tsp cloves
1 cup heavy whipping cream
3 Tbsp maple syrup (honey or sugar work fine, too)
In a small bowl, sprinkle the powdered gelatin over the water and let rest. Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, mix the pumpkin, heavy cream, maple syrup, eggs, salt, and spices.  Cook until mixture begins to thicken. Transfer to a bowl and stir in the rum and gelatin. Refrigerate. 
Whip the cream and maple syrup. Beat chilled custard to soften; fold in whipped cream. Spoon into prepared puff pastry.  
 

Chilled custard

Blended custard

Folding in the whipped cream

Ready to spoon into the puffs

Chocolate Sauce:
1/3 cup maple syrup (honey or powdered sugar would also work)
1/2 cup butter (coconut oil is fine, too)
1/2 cup cocoa powder
dash salt
Mix together in a double boiler until melted and smooth.

 Drizzle over pastry top.

 Devour!


Click on the picture of the book above or the link in the text to view a full description on Amazon.com. 
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Healthy Mayonnaise

Here's another condiment that's so easy to make at home, you really don't have to put up with the processed soybean oil version you buy at the store.

Healthy Mayonnaise
1 cup oil (sunflower oil works great in this; for the most amazing BLT ever, make it with melted (but not hot) bacon fat!)
1 egg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1/2 tsp honey
1 Tbsp distilled vinegar
2 tsp lemon juice
If you have a stick blender, you simply add all the ingredients to a pint-size jar, rest the stick blender on the bottom of the jar, hit the "on" switch, and slowly raise the shaft to the top of the mixture. It should take about 5 seconds.

If you're using a conventional blender, you need to put all ingredients but the oil into the blender, mix lightly, then drizzle oil into the blender jar as slowly as you can. This will take much longer, but the final result will be the same.

Fudgy Maple Syrup Brownies

This has become my go-to dessert recipe; my husband asks for it all the time (and my brother- and sister-in-law always request it when we visit them on Friday nights (with homemade ice cream on the side, of course!)
And of course I always oblige, because they're so easy to make!
 

Fudgy Maple Syrup Brownies

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup cocoa

2 eggs

1 cup maple syrup

1/2 tsp vanilla

3/4 cups flour

1/2 cup nuts (optional)

Mix all together, pour into 8x8 pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Chocolate Whipped Cream

I made this as the frosting on my husband's birthday cake today - yum! And so easy!

Chocolate Whipped Cream
1 cup heavy cream
2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup maple syrup
Mix cream and cocoa powder well, then whip until soft peaks form. Slowly drizzle in the maple syrup and continue to whip until stiff.

Super Sauerkraut

It's finally done! Isn't it pretty?

I've made sauerkraut once before, using the "Three days on the counter in a mason jar" method, and it was good, but then I read the Sauerkraut Survivor series and realized I might not be getting as much probiotic bacteria as I thought.

So I started looking around for a better system, even going so far as to order a Pickle-Pro lid on Amazon (which I never did use, but I'm thinking it will be great for when I make apple cider vinegar this fall). But before my pickle-pro arrived in the mail, I found these clamp-top jars at my local Farm & Fleet store (which were what I really wanted in the first place), so I grabbed two, ran over to the food co-op and bought a head of organic red cabbage, and giddily drove home to make some kraut!

The actual recipe is so simple - just slice up your kraut, let the salt bring out the juices, and let it sit in the cupboard for a month (that's the hard part!)

Here are the more technical directions:

Super Sauerkraut

Quarter, core, and shred cabbage, discarding outer leaves. Put in a large bowl and sprinkle with 1 Tbsp sea salt (or ½ Tbsp sea salt plus ¼ cup leftover kraut juice from previous batch). Cover bowl with a tea towel and set aside. After about a half hour, stir, then recover and set aside for another half hour. Stir again; at this point it should be getting juicy (no pounding required - let the salt do the work for you!) Transfer cabbage to a sterilized fermenting jar. Press down firmly to remove any air gaps and pack cabbage tightly, leaving 1” head space (actually, according to this, you don't have to have the brine covering the cabbage if you use the clamp-top gasket jar). Attach cover according to jar directions and keep in a dark place at room temperature for four weeks. Best eaten 4-8 weeks after initial shredding. Refrigerate after opening.

Of course, you can do this with green cabbage to make a "normal" looking kraut, but I like using the red cabbage because it makes such a bright presentation.

Here's to homemade probiotics!

Homemade Press-less Raw Cheddar Cheese

When a friend of mine told me she made shreddable, meltable cheddar-style cheese in her kitchen at home - without a cheese press - AND that she would be willing to show me how, you can imagine how thrilled I was! When she added that the milk is only heated up to 100 degrees - so technically it can be a raw cheese (if you have a source of raw milk that you trust) - I could barely contain myself. We've finished off the last of our store-bought cheese and are now eating exclusively home made - no more colorings and questionable milk! (If your kids are put off by the fact that it isn't orange, you can buy coloring, or experiment with home-made colorings.)

Press-less Farmhouse Cheddar
(This recipe makes about 3 pounds of cheese. You can certainly make a smaller batch if you prefer, simply divide the recipe accordingly.)
3 gallons milk
3/4 tsp mesophilic culture
1/2 tablet rennet
2-3 Tbsp cheese salt (I usually use canning/pickling salt. You need a non-iodized salt, so table salt and sea salt usually don't work.)

I make this recipe in a big 21 quart canning kettle, which will hold all 3 gallons of milk. Actually, I use two, one for the main cooking kettle and one nested under it for a water bath. You'll need to heat the milk slowly, so a water bath is very helpful.

Heat your milk to 88 degrees F, then add the culture powder and mix it in thoroughly. Cover and let stand for about 40 minutes.

Break a rennet tablet in half and place one piece in 1/4 cup cold water. Dissolve the tablet completely, then pour it into the cultured milk, stirring it in gently. Cover again and let sit for 40 more minutes, until the curd separates out (it will look like very thick yogurt, and if you pull it away from the side, watery yellowish whey will fill in the gap). Cut the curd into half-inch cubes (using a long knife, cut one way, all the way to the bottom of the pan, making slits a half inch apart, then do the same in the opposite direction to make half-inch squares. Then as best you can, cut diagonally to get as close to cubes as possible.)

Heat the water in the lower kettle until the curds reach 100 degrees, making sure to go slowly - the curds should only gain 2 degrees every 5 minutes. The whole heating time should be around 30 minutes. Stir the curds gently up from the bottom every so often to keep the curds from matting. You will notice that there is a LOT more whey.

Once you're up to 100 degrees, cover your kettle and let the curds sit for 10-15 minutes. Then drain as much whey as you can without losing any curd (save the whey! You can use it to make ricotta (click here for my ricotta recipe), save it for boosting your sauerkraut or other ferments, feed it to your chickens (whey is high in protein, so it makes a good supplement to their feed. Better yet, soak their feed in it for a day or two for a fermented wet mash!), or even sprinkle it on your garden). Then flop the curds out into a colander with a bowl under it to catch the remaining whey. Mix in the salt (I do this with my hands, crumbling the curds and mixing them until the salt is completely incorporated), cover, and let stand in a warm place overnight (since my house is pretty cold this time of year, I put the bowl and colander inside the bottom canning kettle (that I was using as a double boiler - it still has warm water in it), cover it, and then put a towel over the top to keep it warm.) If you want to, you can put a plate on top of the curds with a jar of water on top to weight it down, as a minimal imitation of a cheese press. I've done it with and without, and haven't noticed too much difference.

In the morning, flop the finished cheese out of your colander and store in a covered container in your fridge. This won't keep as long as a pressed cheese, but it can be used in any of the ways you normally would use cheddar (I've never had any go bad - but then again, it's never lasted more than a week in my house!)

As I said, this cheese is very versatile - it shreds nicely, melts well, and slices just like you'd expect.

And it goes very well on scrambled eggs, as my children will attest!

If you aren't sure where to get rennet and cheese cultures, they're pretty easy to find online. Here are the links to where to find them on Amazon:

This post is part of the Homestead Barn Hop,  Sunday School, and The Creative HomeAcre Hop. 

Update: I have since learned that this isn't really a true Cheddar cheese, but more like a base from which you can make many different kinds of cheese depending on your aging process. Depending on how you continue, this basic fresh cheese can be made into Cheddar, Camembert, Mozzarella (string cheese!), blue cheese, or even Limburger! And according to David Asher, author of the book The Art of Natural Cheesemaking (which I highly recommend - this link will take you to the book on Amazon), you can even make this using kefir or whey from a previous batch as the cheese culture.