Thursdays: From Scratch (Week 4)

Making things from scratch has become an everyday part of my life.  Just about everything that we eat is made from scratch.  I am thankful to Sarah for leading us in this challenge.  It has been a learning experience and challenging at times.  There have been times when I have been stressed out because of all the time involved in making everything from scratch.  Many days we have just done school work in the kitchen on the floor while waiting on something in the oven or something rising.  The children have learned how to cook right along beside me.  In fact, 2 of my five children now have homemade aprons made by me.  It makes me feel like a proud momma when I see how excited they are about cooking and about wearing their aprons with confidence.  Just this week, my seven year old daughter made scrambled eggs with turkey for breakfast and my nine year old son made pancakes.  Our youngest loves to sign cook with her hands and knows right where her apron and step stool are being kept.

This journey has been a tremendous help when it comes to saving money.  All you need to do is buy the basic staple items and be amazed at what all you can make with just the basic items.  I would like to give you an example.  My mother-in-law brought lots of trix yogurt for the children.  I have been making our own yogurt for some time and looked at this as an opportunity to stretch the yogurt and make it last a lot longer.  I have a yogurt maker and I poured 7 of my  glass containers full of milk and brought it to a boil where the milk was coming up the sides of the pan.  Then I let it cool down to 110 degrees and took out about 1 cup of the milk and mixed it with 1 of the 4 ounces of trix yogurt and then poured it back in the pan.  Next, I mixed it and poured it into the individual cups and let it warm at 110 degrees in the yogurt maker for about 10 hours.  When it was done, I screwed on the lids and put it in the refrigerator and ate it for breakfast the next morning.  I now think that I have 8 cups of trix in the refrigerator which will made 56 cups of yogurt.

Chocolate oatmeal cake and stromboli were also big hits for our family this week.  I found the recipe for chocolate oatmeal cake over at Phoebe's blog and the recipe for stromboli was Grandmother's bread that I just rolled out and added american cheese slices and turkey slices.