and also recipes for canning pickles, relishes and produce right from the garden!
Showing posts with label Cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cooking. Show all posts
After many months {possibly years} of writing, editing, cooking, editing again and finally off to the printer- we are so excited to annouce that the Homestead Blessings Cookbook is now available at our website www.homestead-blessings.com !!! Yeah!!!!
Full of lots of pictures from the homestead kitchen and garden, hand sketched drawings by Mama, stories and tips from the farm and over 150 recipes that are easy, fun and centered around the home and farm.
Recipes for homemade breads and Lemon Meringue Pie...
and also recipes for canning pickles, relishes and produce right from the garden!
So gather 'round in the kitchen and open up the Homestead Blessings Cookbook to try new recipes and have some good 'ole fashioned family fun! We hope this book will be a blessing to you and your homestead!
and also recipes for canning pickles, relishes and produce right from the garden!
Howdy Y'all!!
It has been a while since we have blogged because summertime on the farm brings very busy times!:) Our garden looks more like a jungle now and feels like one too with humidity and all, but somewhere in that jungle we find broccoli, cabbage, onions, peas. Today we canned a few quarts of cream of broccoli soup. That will be so wonderful in the winter when broccoli is scarce.
Our cherry tree is giving us some cherries now and Hannah baked a most delicious cherry cobbler last Sunday for dinner. Yum! We also have lots of beautiful tall weeds that we like to pull up and throw back onto the compost pile. It is wonderful "green food" for the garden. We planted cotton for the first time and it is coming up so well!! We are excited. Hope to use for pillow and quilts this winter. Speaking of quilts, we are blessed to announce that the 10th in the Homestead Blessings series, "The Art of Quilting" is now available on our website www.homestead-blessings.com come by and visit us today!
We are also, for the month of June, giving away our CD, "Farther Along" with every order of the 3 pack, 6 pack or 9 pack of the Homestead Blessings series, but only at www.homestead-blessings.com.
These pictures are from a couple weeks ago and things are already starting look different now. We hope to talk to y'all again soon. Thank you for all the kind words of encouragement! Enjoy your gardening and homesteading wherever you may be!!!
It has been a while since we have blogged because summertime on the farm brings very busy times!:) Our garden looks more like a jungle now and feels like one too with humidity and all, but somewhere in that jungle we find broccoli, cabbage, onions, peas. Today we canned a few quarts of cream of broccoli soup. That will be so wonderful in the winter when broccoli is scarce.
Our cherry tree is giving us some cherries now and Hannah baked a most delicious cherry cobbler last Sunday for dinner. Yum! We also have lots of beautiful tall weeds that we like to pull up and throw back onto the compost pile. It is wonderful "green food" for the garden. We planted cotton for the first time and it is coming up so well!! We are excited. Hope to use for pillow and quilts this winter. Speaking of quilts, we are blessed to announce that the 10th in the Homestead Blessings series, "The Art of Quilting" is now available on our website www.homestead-blessings.com come by and visit us today!
We are also, for the month of June, giving away our CD, "Farther Along" with every order of the 3 pack, 6 pack or 9 pack of the Homestead Blessings series, but only at www.homestead-blessings.com.
These pictures are from a couple weeks ago and things are already starting look different now. We hope to talk to y'all again soon. Thank you for all the kind words of encouragement! Enjoy your gardening and homesteading wherever you may be!!!
Blessings,
The West Ladies
Mama gathering from the garden.
Simple springtime beauties.
View from the back porch.
Out of railroad ties and old pots, life springs forth!
Calendula and Kohlrabi.
Broccoli harvest.
Calendula flower.
Onion bed.
Our little friend makes fresh mint tea.
Squeeze the juice from the leaves...
And pour it up!
To see more on how to make fresh delicious mint tea go to www.homestead-blessings.com and check out "The Art of Herbs" in the Homestead Blessings DVD series.
Hello to all!
Sunny days = running sap from the giving maples! Yeah! We are grwoing cotton this year so now you can call us " cotton pickin' sap suckers"! Ha Ha !
The wood cook stove is full of large kettles with wonderful "sweet water"- almost maple syrup!
Early this moring the house was very warm with smells of maple syrup and freshly baked bread. Now I'm getting "purdy" excited about planting and all. I started flats of broccoli and cabbage about 2 weeks ago in our kind nieghbors green house. Last night I planted 2 flats of seeds, parsley and edible flowers, yeah!
Went outside this morning to look over large garden area, gonna have it plowed with a team of Percherons. Hope to get ya'll some pictures of that! Hope to plant some snowe peas tommorrow, clean up, plan and pittle in the raised beds and all! Right now they look pretty bare. Found some old gourds up in the hayloft, we'll use those for Martin bird houses- can't wait!
Hope you can get outside and have fun too!
(P.S. My fingernails are dirty. That means it's nearing spring, which is great but... to keep that dirt thing from happening, you can scrape your fingernails acroos a bar of soap- then after you are done working in the garden just wash up! You'll have more soap than dirt!)
Blessings to your Homestead!
Vicki for the West Family
Sunny days = running sap from the giving maples! Yeah! We are grwoing cotton this year so now you can call us " cotton pickin' sap suckers"! Ha Ha !
The wood cook stove is full of large kettles with wonderful "sweet water"- almost maple syrup!
Early this moring the house was very warm with smells of maple syrup and freshly baked bread. Now I'm getting "purdy" excited about planting and all. I started flats of broccoli and cabbage about 2 weeks ago in our kind nieghbors green house. Last night I planted 2 flats of seeds, parsley and edible flowers, yeah!
Went outside this morning to look over large garden area, gonna have it plowed with a team of Percherons. Hope to get ya'll some pictures of that! Hope to plant some snowe peas tommorrow, clean up, plan and pittle in the raised beds and all! Right now they look pretty bare. Found some old gourds up in the hayloft, we'll use those for Martin bird houses- can't wait!
Hope you can get outside and have fun too!
(P.S. My fingernails are dirty. That means it's nearing spring, which is great but... to keep that dirt thing from happening, you can scrape your fingernails acroos a bar of soap- then after you are done working in the garden just wash up! You'll have more soap than dirt!)
Blessings to your Homestead!
Vicki for the West Family
Here are the promised pictures! Wow, are we busy today! The sap has been running like crazy and so we have 150 gallons of sap to cook down today! There are 3 different fires we have going right now so we can boil down all the sap. Thank the Lord for this wonderful "run", hopefully we'll have enough to keep us in sweets till next year! :) Well, I better quit this rambling and get back to the sap. Y'all enjoy the pictures!
Blessings,
Cecilia for the West Family
Blessings,
Cecilia for the West Family
Homestead Happenings
Well we have been busy making bread, sewing dolls, cooking maple syrup and getting ready for spring. The air has warmed up quite a bit outside and the spring birds are singing. Speaking of birds, I have had fun taking pictures of robins, chickens and our goats. The goats love to nibble on my apron when I'm taking their picture. They don't hold still either, just jump around and such. :)
We have been working on the cookbook, trying out new dishes and deserts, we'll all have to do a lot of juicing after this!! Hah, hah!
Hopefully we'll have some more pictures up soon . Until then...
Blessings,
Vicki for the West Family
"The trees of the Lord are full of sap..."
Well the sap is running and we have tapped around 30 trees and have cooked down about gallon of syrup so far. It takes 30-60 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup depending on the year. This year it is taking about 60 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup.
The beautiful sugar snow we had last week has really helped with the sap flow since the nights are right below freezing and the days are up in the 50’s. The other night we read a chapter out of “Little House in the Big Woods” about how Pa went to Grandpa’s to make maple syrup and sugar. Another good book to read about making maple syrup is
“Maple Sugar for Wendy Foot” by Frances Frost. It is an older book but a great read aloud for the whole family to enjoy.
There is a lot of hard work involved in making maple syrup, but the product of beautiful amber color sweetness to pour over hot pancakes is a great reward. The “tapping” of the trees, collecting the sap, boiling down the sap into syrup which can be a long process in itself. But the good news is, you don’t have to live way out in the boondocks or even have a farm to make your own maple syrup! If you have a few sugar maples in your yard, you can tap those trees, collect that sap and cook down your syrup in your own kitchen! We have friends who live in downtown Birmingham who are making their own maple syrup right there in the city! Here is a good book list for you to gather information from:
Making Maple Syrup, By Noel Perrin ( A Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin)
Backyard Sugarin’ By Rink Mann ISBN 0-914378-20-1
The Maple Sugar Book By Helen and Scott Nearing ISBN 0-8052-3400-4
And remember there is a world of information out there on the internet!
Here are a few facts about making maple syrup:
When the temperatures get below freezing at night (32 degrees) and stay above freezing in the day, that is when the sap is running up the trees from the roots to the very tip top branches to get the tree ready to begin budding. It is at this time that you want to tap your trees. For the state of Tennessee, this usually happens at the end of January or the beginning of February.
The older the tree, the more sap it is able to produce. The Maple tree can live to be a hundred years old, some have even lived to be up to 300 years old.
The American Indians were the first recipients of maple tree sweet sap; they then shared it with the early American settlers.
Once a tree is big enough to tap (at least 10 inches in diameter) it can be tapped year after year.
Sugar Maples do not reach tappable size till forty or fifty years after planting.
Maple trees that have been tapped produce larger quantities of sugar water and contain more nutritive materiel than trees that have not been tapped. Tapping does not hurt the tree at all.
1 gallon of maple syrup weighs 11 pounds.
We use maple syrup for all kinds of things. Many times we substitute regular sugar for maple syrup. It is our main source of sweetener that we use, so it is very important for us to make at least 8 gallons of syrup for the year.
In between boiling down sap we have been making sour dough starter using freshly ground rye flour, brewing Kombucha tea (both recipes we got from Sally Fallon’s “Nourishing Traditions”) organizing our sewing room, quilting and playing in the snow!
Here is one of our favorite recipes using maple syrup:
Maple-Pecan Popcorn
8 cups popped popcorn
1 cup pecans, toasted
½ cup butter
1 ½ cups brown sugar or raw sugar
½ cup maple syrup
¾ tsp. salt
½ tsp. baking soda
Grease a large bowl with butter or oil. Add popcorn and pecans to bowl and toss together. Line a large baking sheet with foil grease with butter or oil, set aside. Combine butter, sugar, and syrup in a heavy bottom saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly, then cook, without stirring, until mixture reaches 300 degrees on a candy thermometer (we just let it get real hot and bubbly for approximately 3 to 5 minutes). Remove immediately from heat and stir in salt and baking soda (mixture will foam). Quickly pour caramel over popcorn mixture and with an oiled spoon, stir until thoroughly coated. Turn mixture out onto baking sheet and spread into a single layer. Allow to cool slightly, then break into bite-sized pieces. Enjoy!
Well, I better be getting off this computer trap and get busy with the days living! Ya’ll should do the same! J
Proud to be Southern Sap Suckers,
Cecilia for the West Family
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The beautiful sugar snow we had last week has really helped with the sap flow since the nights are right below freezing and the days are up in the 50’s. The other night we read a chapter out of “Little House in the Big Woods” about how Pa went to Grandpa’s to make maple syrup and sugar. Another good book to read about making maple syrup is
“Maple Sugar for Wendy Foot” by Frances Frost. It is an older book but a great read aloud for the whole family to enjoy.
There is a lot of hard work involved in making maple syrup, but the product of beautiful amber color sweetness to pour over hot pancakes is a great reward. The “tapping” of the trees, collecting the sap, boiling down the sap into syrup which can be a long process in itself. But the good news is, you don’t have to live way out in the boondocks or even have a farm to make your own maple syrup! If you have a few sugar maples in your yard, you can tap those trees, collect that sap and cook down your syrup in your own kitchen! We have friends who live in downtown Birmingham who are making their own maple syrup right there in the city! Here is a good book list for you to gather information from:
Making Maple Syrup, By Noel Perrin ( A Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin)
Backyard Sugarin’ By Rink Mann ISBN 0-914378-20-1
The Maple Sugar Book By Helen and Scott Nearing ISBN 0-8052-3400-4
And remember there is a world of information out there on the internet!
Here are a few facts about making maple syrup:
When the temperatures get below freezing at night (32 degrees) and stay above freezing in the day, that is when the sap is running up the trees from the roots to the very tip top branches to get the tree ready to begin budding. It is at this time that you want to tap your trees. For the state of Tennessee, this usually happens at the end of January or the beginning of February.
The older the tree, the more sap it is able to produce. The Maple tree can live to be a hundred years old, some have even lived to be up to 300 years old.
The American Indians were the first recipients of maple tree sweet sap; they then shared it with the early American settlers.
Once a tree is big enough to tap (at least 10 inches in diameter) it can be tapped year after year.
Sugar Maples do not reach tappable size till forty or fifty years after planting.
Maple trees that have been tapped produce larger quantities of sugar water and contain more nutritive materiel than trees that have not been tapped. Tapping does not hurt the tree at all.
1 gallon of maple syrup weighs 11 pounds.
We use maple syrup for all kinds of things. Many times we substitute regular sugar for maple syrup. It is our main source of sweetener that we use, so it is very important for us to make at least 8 gallons of syrup for the year.
In between boiling down sap we have been making sour dough starter using freshly ground rye flour, brewing Kombucha tea (both recipes we got from Sally Fallon’s “Nourishing Traditions”) organizing our sewing room, quilting and playing in the snow!
Here is one of our favorite recipes using maple syrup:
Maple-Pecan Popcorn
8 cups popped popcorn
1 cup pecans, toasted
½ cup butter
1 ½ cups brown sugar or raw sugar
½ cup maple syrup
¾ tsp. salt
½ tsp. baking soda
Grease a large bowl with butter or oil. Add popcorn and pecans to bowl and toss together. Line a large baking sheet with foil grease with butter or oil, set aside. Combine butter, sugar, and syrup in a heavy bottom saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly, then cook, without stirring, until mixture reaches 300 degrees on a candy thermometer (we just let it get real hot and bubbly for approximately 3 to 5 minutes). Remove immediately from heat and stir in salt and baking soda (mixture will foam). Quickly pour caramel over popcorn mixture and with an oiled spoon, stir until thoroughly coated. Turn mixture out onto baking sheet and spread into a single layer. Allow to cool slightly, then break into bite-sized pieces. Enjoy!
Well, I better be getting off this computer trap and get busy with the days living! Ya’ll should do the same! J
Proud to be Southern Sap Suckers,
Cecilia for the West Family
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Dairy Delights
Howdy Everyone!
We would like to share with y'all about making your own whipped cream! It is sooo easy I'm sure anyone can do it. Start with the chilled heavy whipping cream (about 2 cups)sometimes it helps to chill the bowl you'll be whipping in. We like to use hand cranked egg beaters (since we don't have the electric type) to whip our cream with. What you basiclly do is just beat the cream until it is like the consistitensy of cool whip or stiff egg whites. Right when it starts getting thicker and fluffy, add 1 tsp. vanilla, enough maple syrup to sweeten as you like, and a pinch of salt. The whipping of the cream is like your 15 minute farm girl work out! Sometimes we trade off and share the healthy exercise! This makes a great topping for any kind of desert or just to enjoy by itself. Here are some pictures of a No-Bake Raspberry Swirl Cheese Cake that Hannah whipped up right out of her head! She is good at that kind of thing. Hopefully this recipe will be included in our cook book coming out this spring! For more great recipes check out our newest DVD "The Art of Dairy Delights". This video includes how to make yogurt, mozzerella cheese, butter and much more!You can see it at www.homestead-blessings.com. Alright, better be going- y'all take care and have a blessed day on your Homestead!
PS: Coming up next, maple syrup season!
A Gingerbread Barn Raising
Over the holidays we spent our time building a gingerbread barn. It was so much fun! We had never made a gingerbread house/barn before so this was a great adventure for us!
Hope y'all enjoy the pictures!
Blessings,
The West Ladies