homemade Archives - Page 4 of 4

April 9, 2019June 17, 2019

Homemade Frittata Anyway You Want It

I’ve told you about how I look to clean out the fridge when I cook, so I don’t unnecessarily waste food. This homemade frittata is the perfect example of that.

A frittata is basically a Quiche without the crust. It contains eggs, a meat, veggies if you want them and generally some kind of cheese.

The perfect part of this dish, is that the ingredients are anything you want them to be.

You always want to use an oven safe pan, because after you saute the veggies, you’ll add the rest and put it in the oven. I use my cast iron frying pan. I love that thing. Nothing beats cast iron.

The Basics In a Homemade Frittata

Eggs

I always use a dozen eggs. When I make a homemade frittata I make a big one. This way, we eat it as breakfast throughout the week or it can be a breakfast for supper kind of thing, which is always good too.

There are only 2 of us at home, so a frittata of this size will last a few days.

The final frittata mixture just before stirring it all up and adding it to the frying pan.

Meat

I’ve made homemade frittatas with bacon, sausage and ham. I’ve not used chicken or beef or venison, but I don’t know why you couldn’t.

I generally use about a pound of meat. Some people may not want that much meat and that’s okay. But my husband is a meat and potato kind of guy and he like a lot of meat. But, so do I really.

Veggies

This list could be almost endless. Any kind of veggie you like can go into this. I always start with onion, but the list can vary greatly depending on what you have in the fridge and what you like most.

Here’s a list of all that you can use in a frittata. It’s by no means all inclusive, there are just so many things you can use.

Green peppers
Hot peppers
Mushrooms
Squash
Spinach
Any other kind of greens
Green Onions
Asparagus
Tomatoes
Potatoes/hash browns

Sliced potatoes. I never peel my potatoes, I just scrub them. These make great tiny french fries too.

And the list can go on and on. Just look to see what you have in the fridge that needs to be used up, or what you like, chop it up and add it to the skillet.

Cheese

My family loves cheese. I say family because my grandkids LOVE cheese. I refer to my granddaughter as a cheese monster and she agrees.

You can use pretty much anything you can grate, from cheddar of all kinds to Parmesan, goat cheese or ricotta.

Depending on the blending of veggies, meat and spices will depend on the type of cheese you would like to add.

Building Your Homemade Frittata

1. Cook whatever meat you’ve decided to use first. As a rule, a pound will do. If you’re cooking bacon, you’ll want to crumble it after it’s cooked.

2. Chop your veggies and saute them. If you’re using onions, saute them until they become clear. For other veggies, you’ll want to saute them until they just become soft. Remove from heat.

3. Whip the eggs with a whisk. Sometimes I add a little bit of milk because it adds a little bit to it and can make it fluffier, but it’s not necessary. Then add whatever spices you like into the eggs. This could be thyme, basil, rosemary or just salt and pepper.

4. Add your meat and cheese to the eggs and stir just to combine well.

5. Pour your egg mixture into the skillet with the sauteed veggies and then just kind of smooth it out on top spreading everything out evenly.

6. Hopefully you’ve read this whole article before you started so you know to preheat your oven to about 350 deg. Once the oven is ready add your skillet to the oven and cook for about 35 – 40 min. When you insert a knife in the center and it comes out clean, you’re good to go.

Now your homemade frittata is done – what about a topping?

A slice of homemade frittata just waiting for a topping.

After you remove your frittata from the oven, you can add more cheese, or gravy or even salsa, if you like. Be creative. I bet there are a ton of toppings I haven’t even thought of.

A homemade frittata is not exactly a quick breakfast, but is really good and really easy to make. I like that I can run through the fridge and find a way to use up all the little bits of left overs. Therefore, eliminating allowing them to go bad and having to throw them out.

When you make one, let me know what you put into it and how it turned out. Or if you’ve made them in the past, let me know what all you added to yours. How did you do it differently? I’d love to know, so please let me know in the comments below.

Until next time – Health, Wealth & Blessings – Tracey

April 2, 2019March 31, 2019

Beyond Homemade Lasagna

Homemade lasagna is always good, just like every other homemade goodness. This lasagna is “Beyond” because not only is the lasagna homemade so are most of the ingredients.

This won’t be a recipe in the conventional sense. In my usual fashion, there really isn’t precise measurements for the ingredients. It’s really all about what you like which determines how much of each you add

Lasagna is generally a layered pan of meat with sauce, cheese and noodles. The order and amounts are entirely up to you.

I follow that rule with most recipes, hence, I’m terrible with precise measurements.

The Homemade Ingredients of the Homemade Lasagna

The Meat

Lasagna usually contains a meat of some kind, but not always. (We like veggie lasagna too.) The meats used can range from hamburger, sausage or as in this case venison. My husband hunts so we don’t buy hamburger, we use the ground venison from his deer.

I also can venison so when I don’t have time to cook, which generally means I don’t have time to thaw meats too, I can open a mason jar of already cooked meats and mix it however I need to.

I can meat in quart jars and that comes to about 2-1/2 to 3 cups of meat per jar. Again, not an exact measurement but close enough for government work (as my dad used to say).

The Cheese

If you’ll remember a few posts back I had a failure in my homemade mozzarella cheese making. You can see that failure here.

I told you then that the ricotta that came from that would be lasagna soon. And here you go.

I did figure out that I should have salted the ricotta cheese. I rarely salt things, but this is one of those “note to self” things for next time. That was something i didn’t add to the post either, but again, I should have.

The Sauce

The sauce is made from home canned tomatoes. Several years back we planted a lot of tomato plants and almost none of them grew, so we got nothing out of them.

Because of that we planted a LOT of tomatoes a year later and they all produced copious amounts of tomatoes. I can’t even tell you how many pints I canned that year. Thus, I’m just now using up the last of them.

All I did was drain the liquid from them, mash them up and add some salt, basil, rosemary and garlic. I had a partial jar of spaghetti sauce in the fridge that I added too, just to use it up.

The Noodles

I bought them. I haven’t had the pleasure of making that kind of pasta yet. I’ve made the noodles for chicken and noodles, but that’s a different recipe.

The Process

Mixing the Sauce and Meat

As I said before, I drained the liquid from the tomatoes, added salt, basil, rosemary, the other sauce from the fridge and a few teaspoons of garlic (sadly that was from a jar too).

The amounts of each of those are entirely up to your preferred taste, depending on how much you like each. I would generally start on the lower side, tasting every so often to make sure it suits you.

Then I added the meat, mixed it in completely and again allowed it to come to a simmer until all was thoroughly mixed and heated throughout.

The Noodles

As soon as I added the meat to the sauce, I started a large pot of water to boil. After the water came to a rolling boil, I added salt and then the lasagna noodles 3 or 4 at a time. In the end I used 12 noodles.

After they boiled about 8-10 min, I pulled them out and laid them out on wax paper.

Building the Lasagna

Lay 3 noodles in the bottom of a 9 X 12 pan, then layer on the meat and then the ricotta cheese. I also layered in mushrooms in ours, just cause I really like mushrooms. You could add onions, green peppers, carrots or even a spinach or kale if you wanted to. Use your imagination.

If I had it to do again, I would have made more meat sauce, just to make that layer a little thicker.

After the last layer of noodles, I added the remaining meat on top, then the last of the ricotta cheese, then sprinkled about 1/3 cup of Parmesan cheese. Again this was a little bit that was left in a container in the cheese drawer, so I used it up.

The finished build with parmesan cheese sprinkled over the top

Cover with foil and bake in the oven at about 400 deg. for about 40-45 minutes. You’re not really cooking this, but you do want it to heat completely through enough to melt the cheese in the center.

The finished product. Sorry for the fuzzy picture.

After that, I pulled it out of the oven, removed the foil and added shredded mozzarella over the top and placed it back in the oven for about 10-15 min. Long enough to melt and brown the cheese.

We love broccoli. And yes, that is a paper plate. We love them.

Using up Leftovers

Throughout this recipe you’ll notice a theme. I’m a master at going through the fridge and using the last bits of things that seem to fit a recipe. I hate wasting food so when I can find a way to use it, I will. If it fits a recipe I’ll try and find a way to use it.

Although this really isn’t what you would consider a conventional recipe I hope you found some use in it. If nothing else, I hope it inspires you to look through your fridge and figure out how you can use all those little bits of ingredients in a homemade meal of your own.

Do you have a piece mill dish you make? Let me know how you use up the stuff in your fridge. I’d love to hear how you piece mill meals.

Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a post.

Until next time – Health, Wealth & Blessings ~ Tracey

March 10, 2019March 10, 2019

Homemade Butter

Who doesn’t love homemade butter? Well, truthfully, I didn’t think I did up until just several years back.

The only thing I thought real butter was good for was for popping pop corn. Although, real butter makes popcorn taste awesome, I can’t imagine now, how I ever thought such a thing.

These days I can’t imagine NOT liking homemade sweet cream butter. And in my opinion, it makes everything taste better.

Making butter really is easy, although it can sometimes be a bit messy.

It’s the one recipe I know of where you actually start with 1 ingredient and finish with 2 products. How can you beat that??!!

Your ONE ingredient…Cream.

I get my milk from a neighbor, straight from the cow.

When I get it, there is usually about a cup of cream on top that I dip off and put in a pint mason jar before using the milk.

I’ll generally save this up until I get 1-1/2 or 2 pints.

I have used whole milk before and it worked just fine. It tasted good too. But the butter from actual sweet cream from the top of your milk is just…….sweet.

I’ve found it doesn’t take as long if you let the cream come to room temperature first.

Getting started….

You’ll need a standing mixer. The first time I made butter I used my hand mixer. Mostly, because it was all I had. It worked, but I almost ruined my mixer. The butter just gets too stiff for something that small.

So a standing mixer, that’s your best bet.

I poured all the cream in the picture above in the bowl for this.

You’ll want to start slow so you don’t slosh cream all over. Slowly, increase your speed as the cream begins to turn into something more like whipped cream.

Start on low and slowly speed up as you go to prevent a mess.

I cover my mixer and bowl with plastic wrap to keep from making a mess. You can see why here.

This is why you cover the bowl with plastic wrap. It can get messy.

If you’ve ever made whipped cream, that is all you’re doing, except after it gets to the whipped cream state, keep going.

Here it’s beginning to separate. You can tell by the way it starts to clean the side of the bowl as it mixes.

It won’t take long until the butter fat separates from the butter milk.

Keep going.

Soon you will have what sounds like a watery mess. That means you’re done.

That watery substance is buttermilk. Before to keep that for pancakes, biscuits or anything else you might make with buttermilk. My granddaughter loves buttermilk pancakes.

This is the buttermilk I got from this batch of butter.

Now separate the buttermilk from the butter and wash your butter in cold water.

You can always mark your buttermilk and freeze it until you’re ready to use it.

Now, you’ll wash your butter under cold water until the water runs clear. This can take several minutes. The cleaner you can get your butter, meaning the more buttermilk you wash out the longer your butter will last.

It’s better, but not ready yet. Keep washing.

Now, if you use real butter, you’ll know that it’s much harder than margarine. Your homemade sweet cream butter is no different.

Using this right out of the fridge is not going to spread on bread or biscuits real easy. But if you toast your bread or pull your biscuits out of the oven and put your butter on it and let it slowly melt, oooh yum, it’s heaven.

Now would be the time to add salt if you wanted salted butter.

You want you can add herbs to your homemade butter, making a great herbed butter for more savory uses. It easiest to do this right after your wash it and before putting it into the fridge since it’s not real hard at this point yet.

If you don’t need more butter in the fridge, you can wrap it tight and put it in the freezer. I’m not real sure how long it will last in the freezer, because frankly, it’s never had to stay in there very long. But it’s a good way to keep it for a while. Although, I’ve found that homemade butter lasts a long time in the fridge too.

I’ve always wanted to try adding honey to it too, but just haven’t done that yet. I always loved honey-butter when I was a kid.

If you’ve tried that, let me know how it worked out in the comments below.

I hope you find this useful. if you do, please let me know.

If you try it, I’d also love to hear how it turned out.

Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a DIY.

Until next time….

Health, Wealth & Blessings ~ Tracey

March 5, 2019February 26, 2019

Homemade Shampoo

Shampoo….a necessity of life. But store bought can be expensive and have all kinds of unnecessary stuff in it. Not only is homemade shampoo really inexpensive and easy to make, now you’ll know what you’re putting on your hair.

You do need a few ingredients that you may not have in your cabinets as a regular basis, but once you buy the few ingredients you need, you can make so many batches the cost really is minimal.

What do you Need

Here’s a list of the things I use in my shampoo. You can find many different recipes with different ingredients. Be sure to look at several of them to find what works best for you.

My hair and scalp is naturally dry. So this shampoo leans toward dry skin.

Organic liquid soap. I use Dr. Bonner unscented. You may have something different you like better, and that’s fine.
Fractionated coconut oil
Aloa vera gel. You can also use vegetable glycerine if you’d like.
Essential oil. Whatever you like best will work.
An empty bottle. I used an empty 8 oz Witch Hazel bottle.

Putting It All Together

I’ll tell you up-front, I’m horrible with using actual measurements. It’s a rare occasion that I actually measure the ingredients when I make shampoo (or pretty much everything else), but I worked hard at using measurements for this post. Your welcome.

First, you need to know that the container I’m using is about an 8 oz container. So I first filled the container about a 1/4 of the way full with the liquid soap.
Next add about 3/4 to 1 tablespoon of both fractionated coconut oil and aloa vera gel (or vegetable glycerine).
Add about 1/4 teaspoon of vitamin E oil.
And finally add about 30 drops of essential oils. I used grapefruit just because I love the smell of it the first thing in the morning. (Interestingly enough, I can’t stand the taste of grapefruit though).
To finish up just add water to fill your container.
Shake your shampoo a couple shakes before each use.

Fill a quarter of your container with your liquid soap. I use the unscented soap so I can add my own scent.

About about 3/4 to 1 tablespoon of aloa vera gel and franctionated coconut oil.

Please know this recipe is a basic recipe. These measurements are approximates depending on what you want or need. You can adjust the ingredients to make it your own, to fit your hair and scalp type.

I find this mixture works for me, but you may want to try a different type of oil or you may not want to use the vitamin E oil or use a different type of essential oil. The beauty is you can make it your own.

So, as you can see, this is just a basic starting point. This recipe pretty much gives you a place to start or to work from and then customize for your hair and scalp type and your individual taste.

You can always make a bigger batch, but I’ve just not seen the need. It’s so easy to make, I just don’t feel the need to make large batches.

Now if I could only find a recipe I like for conditioner. Let me know if you have an idea. I’d lover to hear.

Let me know how you used this recipe and how you changed it. If you have a different recipe, feel free to share.

I hope you enjoyed your visit and this post. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an article. Every week is different and I try to cover a variety of topics.

Until next time – Health, Wealth & Blessings ~ Tracey

February 19, 2019February 24, 2019

Homemade Vanilla Extract

I love using homemade vanilla extract when I cook. The flavor and aroma of homemade vanilla is incredible.

I’ll take homemade vanilla over chocolate any day of the week.

Vanilla

A vanilla bean is actually a fruit from an orchid. And it’s the second most expensive spice after saffron.

This recipe only takes 2 ingredients. It just can’t get any easier than this.

I try to always use organic beans.

Jars

Since you get to choose, choose jars that you like. I don’t know about you but I have a collection of jars of all shapes and sizes. I liked these.

I had 5 beans left, so I divided them evenly. I’ll just let it sit longer than I usually do before I begin to use it.

I generally like to use 4 beans per bottle. But I’ve used 2 to 3 before too.

You can use bottom shelf vodka for this, but use the highest proof you can get. I think this was 80 proof. I would have preferred 90, but…

Make sure you fill to cover your beans. Then put in a dark place and let it sit for at least 6 weeks.

This is my current bottle. You can pull your beans when it gets to the flavor you like. But I leave them because I don’t think you can ever have too much vanilla.

Homemade Vanilla Extract

Ingredients

2-4 Vanilla Beans
1 1/2 to 2 cups (about a pint) of vodka

Instructions

Add beans to a glass jar
Fill the jar with vodka, enough to cover the beans
Sit in a dark place for at least 6 weeks.

I think the longer it sits the better it is.

Try using your new vanilla extract in a batch of lavender cookies from last week

I really hope you’ll give it a try. If you do, let me know how it turns out. If you have a different recipe, feel free to share in the comments below.

I hope you all had a fabulous Valentine’s Day.

Next week I’ll show you how to make a corn dollie. A fun craft for you and your kids or grandkids.

Until next time – Health, Wealth & Blessings ~ Tracey