Showing posts with label make your own. Show all posts
Showing posts with label make your own. Show all posts

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Chamomile-from flower to tea- make your own today

I try to make some of our own tea around here and so far, one of the easiest to make is Chamomile. It is nice, soothing and can't be beat for mild taste and flavor. To get started making your own, first you must plant chamomile plants. You can do this from seed or from already started seedlings from your local nursery. Once I got mine started, they reseed themselves every year and there has been no need to replant. This is a pic of the actual plant. Not that the flower heads are small about the size of baby peas at the most. As your plants bloom with the flowers, then you go and pick all the millions of tiny little flower heads off your plants and keep them. They take a long time to collect so you need to do this over and over to collect enough. I do it about ever 2 or 3 days and dry it each day and keep adding it together to make a larger amount.
This is a picture of one small batch of the chamomile that I have picked, cleaned and have laying out on the dehydrator. You can use any type of dehydrator that you may have, or even put it in a very low oven (warm setting) or even with a pilot light on and let it dry out. It really doesn't' take to long because it is very small to begin with.
Once all the chamomile is dry, then I place it in a plastic baggy and keep adding to it every few days. It takes a while to collect and to actually accrue any amounts, but it does happen. Once I get about 1 cup of dried chamomile, then I place it in a food saver bag and remove the air, so that it will "save" for a long period of time, without losing any flavor. That is all it takes to make your own wonderful Chamomile tea, right from home.
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Sunday, May 18, 2008

Outdoor Cooking!

This is my husbands version of making flat bread. He has them on the gas grill, on a pizza stone, cooking up outside. They were delicious. We also cooked some chicken, porksteaks and some port tenderloin on a wood fire in the fire pit. Cooking outside in such wonderful weather is awesome and keeps the house cool too. We love it.Posted by Picasa

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Tasty Dinner

Check it out, we had a wonderful and delicious dinner the other night and I though I would share it with everyone.
Cullen made some oversize flour tortillas and on them we spread some mashed avacado (that I added a bit of lemon juice to) onto them. We took some lettus (from the garden) and some cherry tomatoes and added some vinegrette dressing and tossed, added it to the tortilla then added some chopped grilled chicken breast... YUM!!! The kids do not like avocados so simone used salsa on hers insted and kenny used sour cream...but they all turned out great!!!

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Friday, May 09, 2008

Meat Everywhere

We went to day and picked up our pork from the butcher. We had two whole hogs taken in to process. One hog was 202 lbs and the other was 200 lbs at live weight. Their dressed weighs were 145 lbs and 143 lbs for a total of 288 lbs of meat. This pork is nice, lean, and oh so delicious.







We ended up with:
27 packs of bacon
65 packs of ground pork
23 packs of ground sausage
1 huge whole ham
2 packs of baby back ribs
1 pork fillet
18 packs pork chops
7 packs pork steaks
2 packs heart/tongue
2 packs heart
4 packs spare ribs
2 packs ham hocks
2 packs neck bones
2 very large bags of lard

Our End cost was ONLY $1.40 PER POUND!!!!!!!!!! OH my gosh this is so, so super!!! Posted by Picasa

Friday, May 02, 2008

Back in the Garden Again!!


We have been working on the garden again...between the rains and the freezing weather that is.

This is a pic of one of my raised beds that have green peas planted in it. We made some "natural" and "recycled" trellises for them out of some old branches that we trimmed off of some trees. The vertical ones have y tips and the horizontal ones lay in the y's. We just pushed them down into the ground one at a time and it worked out well for us.



This is my hard working husband, who is tilling more of our garden up. We planted peppers in this area today.
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