At Home My Way

This fantastic Surprise Zucchini Jam will be a great way to use up those ever-growing zucchinis in your garden.   It turns out fantastic and uses no pectin!  Ding-ding-ding - money saver!  (Jello is lots cheaper than pectin!)   I ate mine on some bread/toast and it was amazing!  I just couldn't imagine what it would taste like??  However, I was pleasantly surprised.  Great for biscuits, toast, even over cream cheese/served with crackers as an appetizer!  It would make a fun homemade Christmas gift, too! I am making lots more varieties of this recipe.  My husband's grandma always used apricot jello. Strawberry jello is supposed to be great! Also, I thought it would be good to use pineapple jello and include some ground jalapenos for pepper jelly.  Lots of possibilities here! Since this recipe uses no Surejel/pectin, I was very skeptical. However, after a sit overnight, it was all set up.  In the fridge, it was the perfect "...

So... yesterday I posted a recipe for Homemade Tomato Soup .  And you gotta have crackers with tomato soup, right? YUP! This weekend I also tackled my first batch of homemade crackers.  Crackers are one of those "bucket list" recipes for me that not everyone would think to make at home, but I really wanted to try them.  I found my recipe on a favorite, one of the most informative sites ever- The Prudent Homemaker .  This site is a wealth of information for making everything homemade and for all kinds of tips on how to save the hard to earned buck.  I encourage everyone to hope over there and check it out! I was very pleased with the crackers.  They will be a terrific base recipe for adding all kinds of seasonings, oils, cheeses. I made Brandy's basic recipe and added my own twist on seasonings, a little salt, etc.  They turned out GREAT!  The key is to roll them absolutely as thinly as possible.  Note that they don't rise so very li...

The weather has been glorious lately.  Beautiful days and even more perfect nights!  We LOVE to get together with some dear friends and sit around a fire on Friday and Saturday nights.  Our friends have the perfect spot, back behind some trees in a little clearing.  Lots of good laughs, talking, solving the world's (and our own) problems, a little drinking...and lots of EATING goes on there... LOL. My friend and I agreed as we were getting the fire going last Friday night that this was OUR kind of camping!  A fire, some chairs and blankets, fun food like hotdogs and smores, and OUR OWN BED AND A SHOWER at the end of the night!  No tents, bugs, bath houses and dirt! Love that! Our friends really put out a spread for us Friday night.  They had veges and dip, chips and home canned salsa, smores, hotdogs, brownies and this delicious dip.  This "bean dip" is one of our favorite things to eat when we get together.  (Well... we have also be...

Tonight is homemade pizza night at our house.  I normally like to have some pizza dough in the refrigerator for Friday nights and Saturday lunches.  I know that one of those meals will definitely be pizza.  The most affordable way to eat pizza is AT HOME MY WAY!  The recipe for the dough for making pizza and Homemade Pizza Pockets is "here" and "here" .  (Remember that you can make lots of things using this dough, like Homemade English Muffins , a pizza bread , or even just some simple crusty bread to go with soup.) Sometimes, by the end of the weekend, we've eaten all the pizza we want and there's just a little dabble of dough left, like this: What to do with such a small amount of dough?  Make Homemade Pizza Pockets for the freezer, of course!  You can tailor them to have just the fillings you prefer and later in the week, you will be so glad you have some homemade goodness in your freezer for lunches on the run!    I'...

Easy Mexican Pizza     New Year's Day always makes me want to re-evaluate my life.  Get control, get organized, save money.  In order to do that I really need to stick with a menu plan and make a better effort at using the abundance of food that I already have in my pantry and freezer.     We had a nice little amount of snow around New Year's, enough that after my small (and pretty uneventful) surgery on Friday, that I didn't want to drive anywhere to get lunch.  But I didn't have anything ready that I could just grab or to make a sandwich with.  I was going to have to be a little creative. I decided that I was going to revamp my arsenal of cheap and quick things to eat in order to avoid unnecessary trips to the store or out for fast food.  This is first of many "Quick on the Table" ideas that I hope to be posting this year.   I've read on several blogs about quick tortilla pizzas but...

It seems we are all looking for new ideas for supper. One of my favorite blogs is called " Homemaking on the Homestead " and I found this recipe for "Nachos for a Crowd" on Crystal's blog. My pickier daughter decided this SOUNDED GOOD to her so I added it to my meal plan for this week and made it last night. IT WAS WONDERFUL! I had already cooked some pinto beans (we love those with everything from taco's to rice & cornbread) and put some in the freezer in med-size containers, so I had them ready to go. I imagine you could use canned pinto beans and even a combination of one can of pinto beans and one can of refried beans would be good, because the recipes calls for you to mash half of your cooked pinto beans as you add it to the cooked hamburger. Anything like that would work. We both LOVED this recipe! We decided it would be great to take for potlucks, to have for a dip when you have friends or family over, and also to freeze ahead for later. M...