Christmas Baking Ideas

These are some of the cutest and easiest goodies to make for Christmas.  We simply dip pretzels into some almond bark and the children and grandchildren LOVE to decorate them in any way they choose.  Honestly, these are much easier to do and clean up than sugar cookies.  Usually when we get half way done with sugar cookies, I am left to finish decorating and clean up and by then, I'm exhausted!

Here are some other GREAT ideas for you that I will be doing this year....

White Chocolate Peppermint Fudge

Dinner Tonight

Source

Our family really enjoys Meatloaf, especially since we started having our own grass fed beef waiting patiently to be used in our freezer.  My recipe is my Mother's own famous recipe with lots of good spices, sauces and a bit of oatmeal, and bran in it.  It is delicious, but takes quite a bit of time to prepare.  

Today, on Pinterest of course, I came across this easy sounding Meatloaf recipe that I decided to try.  You can find it and many other delicious recipes on my Yummy Recipes board.

The recipe calls for:

1 pound of ground meat (beef or turkey)

1 egg

1 box of Stovetop Stuffing

1 cup water

Mix it all together and bake in a bread loaf pan at 350 for 45 minutes.

That amount might feed a smaller family, but we like having Meatloaf sandwiches from the leftovers so I doubled the recipe using:

2 pounds of grass fed, hormone and antibiotic free, Highland Beef

2 free range, home grown chicken egg 

(probably from a Barred Rock hen, the one that likes to eat all of my Kale)

2 boxes of incredibly processed Stove Top Chicken made with Whole Wheat

2 cups of raw milk

I used the whole wheat to make myself feel better about using processed boxes of stuffing with so much other excellent home grown and raised ingredients.

When it's just about done baking, I'll smother it with our homemade Amish Tomato Ketchup from our homegrown tomatoes......YUM!!

To finish the table, we'll have some canned peaches, spiced applesauce and hopefully a small salad from the lettuce still growing in the greenhouse!

I promise, if the recipe isn't any good, I'll be sure to add on to this post to let you know, but since we love stuffing, I'm pretty sure we will enjoy it.

~ Much later.....this recipe is delicious.  Our daughter said it was the best Meatloaf she had ever tasted!  I will tell you that you can clearly taste the stuffing in this meatloaf, so if you do not care for stuffing, I wouldn't advise making it.  If you love stuffing the way we do, you have GOT to try this!!

Christmas Baking List

Christmas Cutout Cookies

Aren't these beautiful?  Occasionally, I wish mine looked like these.  Everyone always says that practice makes perfect and I've been making these for over 30+ years and have never had them come out this pretty!  Oh well, maybe if I was a perfectionist it would really matter to me.  The most beautiful cookies I know of are the ones my children and grandchildren make.  Those are the ones that have broken edges, too much icing and tons of sprinkles on them, but they portray love and laughter and family!

Sewing Ideas

The idea of sewing brings to mind images of such beautiful, dainty and resourceful women sitting in their parlors wisely using quiet hours of the day to clothe their families.  My reality of sewing is something more like a tornado has swept through my sewing room with patterns and fabric stretched all over the table, while the rest of the area is dotted with measuring tape, spools and bobbins of thread, and any other immediate sewing tool I might need.

Sweet Stuffed Peppers

Last year I chopped up my abundance of sweet peppers and put them in the freezer.  They added beauty and great taste to almost every meal all winter long, however, I still was unable to use them all.  This year I decided that our family would eat more of them as stuffed peppers instead of slicing them into different meals and they are terrific cooked this way.  I've also heard that you can stuff them and freeze them too, so I'll be putting lots of them away in that manner for this coming winter.  I'm so glad to find different ways to use these tasty treats.

Sweet Stuffed Peppers

1 pound ground beef
1/2 cup uncooked long grain brown rice
1 cup water
6 sweet bell peppers (any color)
2 (8 oz) cans tomato sauce (I use spaghetti sauce)
1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder (or cook 1/2 of a medium onion with your ground beef)
Salt and Pepper to taste
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning (or crumble your homegrown herbs of Basil and Oregano into it)
1 cup cheese of your choice...Cheddar, Colby Jack, Mozzarella etc.

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

• Cook the rice and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat, cover, and cook 20 minutes.

• In a skillet over medium heat, cook the beef (and onion) until evenly browned.

• Remove and discard the tops, seeds, and membranes of the bell peppers. Arrange peppers in a baking dish with the hollowed sides facing upward. (Slice the bottoms of the peppers if necessary so that they will stand upright.) 

• In a bowl, mix the browned beef, cooked rice, 1 can tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and pepper. Spoon an equal amount of the mixture into each hollowed pepper. Mix the remaining tomato sauce and Italian seasoning in a bowl, and pour over the stuffed peppers.  

• Bake 1 hour in the preheated oven, basting with sauce every 15 minutes, until the peppers are tender.  10 minutes before they are done, sprinkle cheese over their tops.

 I hope you enjoy! 
 


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What's For Dinner?

I know I'm not the only one spending more time outside than inside these days and if you're like me, you lose track of time trying to get one more plant transplanted or one more garden bed tilled and fertilized.  Today was one of those days.  There was only enough time to throw some odd thing together, but what?  While I cooked up some hamburger meat I tried to figure out what to do with it and began going through the cupboards.  There was some whole wheat spaghetti noodles so I boiled some water for those...grabbed a jar of fresh spaghetti sauce and coated the bottom of a cake pan with some sauce.  Drained the noodles and put them in the cake pan, swirling them through the sauce and then added the hamburger....sprinkled the top with some rainbow garden peppers and covered it with shredded and Parmesan cheese, then put it in the oven for 20 minutes on 350.  The family loved it and it was one of the easiest things I've done.  Colorful too with red, yellow, green and purple peppers on it!

Do you remember in my last post that none of the chicks were supposed to be named?  Well meet Amy, the local

Homemade Bread

The past several days here have been bitterly cold, snow on the ground and frost on every tree.  It makes for beautiful mornings and great days for baking, sewing, plotting out our spring gardens........countless things!  Yesterday we made our usual bread for the week and I finally had the time to take pictures of the process to share it with you.  This recipe is an old Amish recipe that I got directly from an Amish bishop here in our neck of the woods.  For some reason, his still tastes better than mine, but its still the best bread I've ever made.  He hand grinds his wheat, which I am not able to do until we get our mill.....if you're reading this honey....by spring would be nice!  Other than that, I make it the same way he does.

Gather your ingredients...

As you can see, I have been using my bread maker for mixing the dough.  I used to mix it by hand, but my hands don't take kindly to mixing bread dough with a skinny handled wooden spoon.  (Another thing for the wish list....a BIG handled wooden spoon.)  This recipe is one that was taught to me by one of our Amish Bishop neighbors, except he makes it by hand (not a breadmaker obviously).  It is supposed to make about 7 loaves of bread, but since this entire recipe will not fit into the bread maker, I do it in halves for the mixing part.

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 cups white flour
• 2/3 cup white sugar
• 1 handful of salt (my handful isn't as big as his so I use about 4 tsp and its good)
• 2 packages of yeast (or 2 Teaspoons but note the picture with the size of the teaspoon)
• 3/4 cup lard (we use pig lard but you can also use oil or shortening)
• 2 quarts of warm water
• 3 cups whole wheat

You will add more flour as you go until it isn't sticky, about 3 more cups or so, you have to just figure as you go.

Now the smaller spoon pictured here is a regular table spoon, the larger spoon is the one we use for measuring the yeast.  You don't need a large serving spoon, just something in between a serving spoon and a regular spoon.  

I put the ingredients into the bread maker in the order of the liquids first and then the dry ingredients, yeast last on top.  Make an indention in the top of the flour, big enough to contain your yeast.  I don't know if this is necessary, it's just a habit I have.

If you decide to use a bread maker for half of this recipe at a time like I do, just set your bread maker on the dough cycle, otherwise mix all of the ingredients together in a large bowl, continuing to add flour until the dough isn't sticky and then knead it.  

I usually leave the lid to the bread maker open during this first mixing part to add flour about a half a cup at a time.  These next few pictures are a bit fuzzy due to the mixing of the machine, please excuse that.  you can see in the first picture that it is still runny so I'm adding more flour.

Here you can see the dough beginning to form and pull away from the bowl, I'm still adding a half cup of flour at a time.  It mixes in pretty quickly.

Here the dough has formed a firm ball and has pulled away from the edges.  It is still a bit too sticky, but I go ahead and turn it into a bowl.

This dough is still too sticky, I can really tell now that it's in the bowl.

This time I add just one more half cup of flour, knead it slightly and the dough transforms into...

 I let the dough rise for about an hour or so in front of the fireplace with a dish towel over it.  It should almost double in size.  At that time, I'll punch it down and then let it rise again for another hour or so.

Now the dough gets turned out onto the counter and divided, placed into greased bread pans and let rise one more time.  Only let it rise till it is barely over the bread pans, otherwise you might get too much air in your bread.  I know some people poke holes in the tops of the dough to release the air before this rising step, I don't bother with that.

 Bake at 350 degrees for about half an hour or so.

This batch isn't the prettiest batch I've ever made, but it is soft, hearty and delicious with soft crusts even without buttering the tops!  It's delicious smothered in homemade butter straight from the cow!

ENJOY !!!

I've tried to explain my process in detail, but when you do something so often, you tend to forget little things others may need to know.  If I have done that, please let me know and I'll gladly fill in anything I've left out :o)

You can find me linked up at:  Homestead Revival, Nourishing Treasures, Growing Home, Far Above Rubies, Raising Arrows, Skip to my Lou, Penniless Parenting, Titus 2sdays, Raising Homemakers, Frugally Sustainable, Women Living Well, Raising Mighty Arrows, Deep Roots at Home, Fingerprints on the Fridge, Farm Friend Friday, Life as Mom, Farmgirl Friday, We Are THAT Family, Becoming Homegrown