Garden ....then food, lots of food :D

We planted our potatoes yesterday.

Here is what one of the potatoes we planted looked like. We just cut up regular potatoes you get from the grocery store and we cut them so there was at least 2 eyes per section. Here they were already sprouting in my cabinet. :) I cut these about 5 days earlier and put them into brown paper lunch bags to let them "scab" over. I wanted the fresh cuts to heal and get a tough edge to them to prevent rotting and disease.

1st row, red potatoes.

Better view of our small, 1st take potato bed.

Row furthest left is the red potato bed, middle row has a few red potatoes in it that we couldn't fit in the 1st row and the rest are russet potatoes. 3rd row furthest to the right has 5 cabbage plants then the rest of the russet potatoes. Cabbage and potatoes are companion plants and the bed next to this furthest away from the cabbage is our lettuce bed and lettuce and cabbage are NOT companion plants. So I wanted to keep them as far from each other as possible.

The 2 older kids were cleaning the wood Mr. Smith had chopped down so after all that hard work we had s'mores! 1st fire for the season. We seem to do this earlier and earlier each year! :D YUM.

This is a few meals I am writing about. I make almost every meal from scratch and I love to share recipes, so here they all are from the past couple of days.

Homemade Chicken & Cheese Quesedillas

Ing:

Tortillas:

2 cups corn flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/4 cups water

Chicken & Cheese:

1lb chicken pre cooked season with salt and pepper

1 8oz bag mexican 4 cheese shredded cheese

lettuce

tomatoes

hot sauce (optional)

Directions:

Separate the dough into 8 balls and roll flat. Cook on well oiled frying pan 2 minutes per side.

Then add chicken & cheese and whatever else you like to put on.

I used this to make the tortillas

I had to use a frying pan to flatten these because kiddo #3 broke my rolling pin. They are a little thick.

Here they are cooking.

Here is Mr. Smith's quesedilla....he loves the hot sauce.

Chicken & Dumplings

Ingredients:

3 1/2lbs chicken

8 cups chicken broth

6 carrots

1 onion

1 (15oz) can peas

dumplings:

2 cups flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup water

Directions:

In a large, wide pot simmer the chicken in the broth until tender, 30 minutes or more. While the chicken is simmering peel and cut the carrots and mince the onion. Remove the chicken and set aside. Pour the carrots and onion into the chicken broth. Leave simmering as you skin, bone and shred into bite size pieces. Then in a separate bowl mix the flour, baking powder & salt. Cut the butter into pea size pieces & distribute throughout the flour mixture. Add the water and knead 8-10 times. if the dough seems too sticky add more flour. Roll the dough out to 1/8th inch thickness and cut into roughly 1 inch squares. (I use a pizza cutter, soooo easy!) Bring broth with veggies to a boil, if your broth seems to be low add 2-4 more cups. When boiling drop in dumplings, cover pot and reduce heat to simmer for about 10 minutes. Overcooking the dumplings will cause them to fall apart. Then add the can of peas & chicken back into the pot and serve!

Veggies cooking! This makes the carrots very very tender where they melt in your mouth.

Dough.

my raw dumplings

cooking the dumplings

DONE! It is soooo good! We don't have a problem with leftovers with this! They don't even realize they are eating carrots!

Italian Mozzarella Wings

Ingredients:

12 chicken wings

8oz mozzarella cheese, cut into 24 cubes

1 large egg

1 cup garlic and herb breadcrumbs (You can use any, I use these because they make it taste like a mozzarella stick)

1/2 cup chopped up mozzarella cheese

salt

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cut a slit into the meatiest parts of the chicken wing. Stuff a cheese cube into the slit and press the meat back over the cheese. In a shallow bowl, beat the egg. In another shallow bowl combine the 1/2 cup mozzarella and the breadcrumbs and salt. Working one wing at a time coat each wing with egg then the breadcrumb mixture and place on a greased baking sheet. Bake until golden. It only took mine 20 minutes.

Slit at the top on the left and slit on the bottom on the right. Cheese shoved into both.

Breadcrumbed and ready to go into the oven. You can see the extra cheese chunks on the outside.

DONE! :D these were sooo good. I might just have to make them again this weekend.

Homemade Yogurt

My kids literally INHALE this stuff! Not that I mind....its good for them, but it takes up a lot of my food budget. So I tried to make it on my own yesterday/last night.

Ingredients:

2 quarts milk (or 8 cups)

1 cup dry powdered milk

1 cup plain yogurt with active live cultures listed on label

thermometer

2 tablespoon jam or jelly

Directions:

1. Add milk & dry milk to crock pot and stir well.

2. Turn crock pot on, cover with lid and heat up to 185 degrees

3. Turn off crock pot and remove lid and let cool to 115 degrees

4. Add 1 cup plain yogurt and stir well

5. Replace lid and wrap crock pot in 2-3 towels. You can leave it on your counter if your house is fairly warm or in your oven (NOT ON) The yogurt needs to stay between 90 degrees - 110 degrees during this time. Let sit 6-8 hours or 10 hours for a thicker yogurt with a stronger taste.

milk and dry milk going into crock pot

Yogurt I used

If it does not say this on the label then it will not work to make your own yogurt.

Dry milk I used

Wrapped in 3 towels shoved in my oven right before I went to bed.

Woke up and this is what I found. YOGURT!

I mixed in 4 tablespoons of the homemade strawberry jam I made a few weeks back.

I used a 2nd foods baby food to show how much I got out of this recipe. It is a lot! You need to put sugar into the yogurt as well to taste. It is quite bitter if you don't. I am letting mine completely cool in the fridge to start taste testing again. Learned my lesson! HA HA This is also a lengthy process. It took 3 hours for my crock pot to heat up to 185 degrees and 45 minutes to cool to 115 degrees. Then I put it into the oven to keep warm (my house tends to be cool) and it took all night while we were sleeping. I added more strawberry jam because I didn't really get a good strawberry taste when I taste tested it. I also found out how bitter yogurt can be! :) If you look even on the big plain yogurt container I got there is 17 grams of sugar in there. So they know, the taste of yogurt needs some sweetening.