First Day of Spring

My seeds have been started!

First thing this morning (after breakfast, of course), Adam and I went to work in the dirt and officially started our 2018 gardening season. I thoroughly enjoyed having a little helper working alongside of me. He was so excited to be able to help and happily watered the starting pellets and watched them grow. He is so detailed and careful for a two year old, and took his job seriously when I let him plant the pepper seeds.

I had a hard time figuring out how many of each item to plant, since I'm hoping to sell some produce on top of stocking up and feeding my own family, so I just threw some seeds in the dirt and we'll see how we do! 

I'm going to try three different tomato varieties: Roma (since they bring a high dollar at the produce auction and are a specialty item), Beefsteak (because who doesn't want a giant tomato or BLT sandwich), and Amish Paste (because this is my tried-and-true paste tomato. It has never failed me in all my gardening years, even while I've attempted and failed growing a number of other varieties.)

For peppers, I'm using seeds I had left from previous years. Besides bell peppers, I used up the rest of my jalapeno seeds. I'm hoping to sell those. There weren't any at the produce auction last year, and there are always gobs of men who attend, so I figured I'd take the chance and watch the market!

In addition to the tomatoes and peppers, I decided to try some flowers, too. I've never had success with them, but I have too many packets of seeds sitting around unused. Ideally I should have started them weeks ago, so I guess you can call them an experiment, too. (But then again, what do I do that isn't an experiment?) The varieties I planted are Marigolds and Evening Primrose. 

Evening Primrose are known as an enthusiastically spreading plant. I'm going to see what it does here in Mid-Northern Michigan where it gets below -10*F in the winter. I had the seeds so I thought I'd give it a shot. Another experiment I guess.... but this one is not going in my produce garden! 

Deep Freezer - Before and After Organizing

....Aaand here are the results of my freezer cleaning!

A couple weeks ago, I posted my brim-full refrigerator before picture, and a nice, sparkly after picture, along with a teaser of my deep freezer before picture, which revealed a freezer so full it's about busting at the seams. As promised, I have returned with an after picture and a list of what's really stored inside!

The main reason the freezer was so full is because I had just received a cows worth of beef bones, which I turned into some delicious bone broth. Once I was able to clear those out, I finally had room to rearrange and take inventory of what was inside.

I had a pretty good idea of what I had before I started, since the freezer came with these nice handy, dandy dividers where I can section off categories like ground beef, steaks, roasts, etc. These are super helpful because we buy our beef in bulk and can fill up an entire section with one variety of cut rather than everything being strewn about and it being a treasure hunt whenever I manage to dig below whatever is on the surface. 

Because of this, I did not dig through the steak section to see exactly how many of each cut I had (round, sirloin, etc.). Knowing I had an almost-full section of steak was good enough for me to know we weren't going to run out anytime soon!

Ta-daaa! 

Here it is! The after shot. Still full, but much neater.

And here is the inventory. I included the list of my upstairs refrigerator/freezer inventory, since I am frequently transferring things between the two.

Since making this list, I have used up the whole turkey, a roast, some steak, a bag of zucchini, the beets, a bag of hotdogs, and several pounds of butter. It has been nice having this list handy so I can plan my meals accordingly without having to open my freezer, although I do sometimes get better inspiration when I see the actual food. :) 

Want to know what's cooking? I have a beef roast in the crock pot at this very moment! Mmm.

Cooking for a Crowd: Episode 14 - Rice Krispie Treats

We've had quite the weekend driving all over the state! Instead of going out on Valentine's Day, we decided to skip the rush and the late mid-week night by having our date night on Saturday instead. It was our second ever kid-free date as parents. I thought it was special, and enjoyed the rare chance of having undivided husband time with no responsibilities or interruptions. Our kids are super fun, but it is like pushing the restart button on life and sanity when mom can get out for a minute to breathe.

Because of spending many hours on the road - and all day doing it, I had limited time to create a dessert for the next day's meal. Thankfully I was prepared and had a few things in my pantry that I could pull together.

On my last trip to the "big town", I had a coupon that was good for $1 off any boxed cereal purchase. Boxed cereal is on my "I don't usually buy" list. Maybe 1x/year for a special dessert, like Christmas Chex.

One [of a few] big reasons we don't buy boxed cereal is because it's not worth the money! I personally don't find cereal very filling, and can eat a half a box in one sitting. At an average of $3-4 a box, this is really pricey. Instead, I make my own cereal (either granola or grape-nuts) for the day we need a quick breakfast or snack. 

But back to that coupon. At $1 off, it wasn't worth my time trying to use it unless I was able to get a really good deal. Honey-nut cheerios were on sale, and the cheapest cereal per box, but it's not something we normally eat, and it's not very versatile, so I decided it wasn't a good buy even though the price was decent. The next best buy was Rice Krispie cereal, on sale for $2.50 for an extra large (maybe 18 oz.?) box. This was even cheaper than their standard sized box! With my coupon, this brought the price down to $1.50, which I thought sounded good to me since I could use them in a variety of recipes like Rice Krispie treats or granola bars. I did have crowd dessert in mind when I put them in my cart, and ended up getting a couple bags of marshmallows that day as well so I would have them on hand just in case.  

So, on that day that I was gone until 8pm, Rice Krispie treats it was. My two year old and I had a grand time in the kitchen together that evening. We got to share of bowl full of the leftover Snap, Crackle and Pop cereal while we were melting the marshmallows for the treats. This was the first time I'd ever attempted making Rice Krispie Treats, and I had no idea previously that it was basically just marshmallows and cereal! As a junk-food illiterate chef, I guess I learned something new that probably everybody else knows.

[By the way, another thing I learned this year was that Cool Whip is found in the frozen food section! I've never bought Cool Whip before, and have no plan to ever ever, since it's nasty and I don't even want to eat it, but I had NO idea it was a frozen item and was surprised when I walked through the freezer aisles to see it. This might confirm how unknowledgeable I am in the junk/processed foods department. I really don't mind being uneducated in this area.]

I made 3 recipes of Rice Krispie Treats, which according to the box was enough for three 9x13 pans full. Each recipe took 6 cups of cereal and one 12 oz. bag of marshmallows. Since I don't have three 9x13" baking pans, I used a half sheet pan and a smaller 7x11 pan. My cost into the cereal was $1.50, and the marshmallows were $3.38, so my total dessert cost was $4.88. It made about 52 squares (if I'm remembering correctly), and I was aiming to serve 40 people. Cost per square was 9 cents. 

There weren't as many in attendance as expected, so less than 40 mouths to feed, but people did some snacking after the meal was finished, and we had about 12 pieces leftover.