Tasty Tuesday: Buttermilk Pancakes

I recently shared a couple posts about making homemade baking mix and making your own buttermilk.  In this post, I will combine those two ingredients into one of the best tasting pancake recipes you will ever try!  These are by far some of the best pancakes we have ever had, they are so fluffy and tasty!  I double this recipe for our family of 6.

Ingredients:
2 cups baking mix (or Biquick)
1 3/4 cups buttermilk
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg

Directions:
Stir all the ingredients together.  Pour 1/4 cup scoopfuls on heated griddle or skillet and cook until edges are dry.  Turn and cook until golden.  Serve with your favorite pancake toppings!

Blessings,

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Diary of a Stay at Home Mom

Tasty Tuesday: Homemade Baking Mix (Bisquick)

Since I prefer making my meals from scratch, I don't often buy mixes like Bisquick anymore.  Most of the time I don't mind, but once in a while I miss the ease of using it, especially in the morning when making pancakes or waffles.  Recently I came across a recipe for homemade baking mix, so I thought I would give it a try.  It works wonderfully! As easy and as tasty as recipes using Bisquick!  I made up a huge batch of this and am storing it in the freezer so it is all ready to go when I need it.

Ingredients:
5 cups flour, all-purpose or whole wheat (I use my freshly ground soft white whole wheat and it works great!)
1/4 cup baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar or sucanat
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 cup butter

Directions:
Mix all the dry ingredients together.  Cut in the butter with a fork or pastry cutter until the mixture is fine crumbles.  You can use it in any recipe that calls for Bisquick or baking mix. It can be stored at room temp for up to 2 months or in the freezer for up to 6 months.

Blessings,

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Diary of a Stay at Home Mom

Tasty Tuesday: Homemade Buttermilk

Buttermilk is super easy to make at home.  Even easier than homemade yogurt, but similar in that you need to culture the milk.  First you will need some buttermilk culture.  You can order some from places like Cultures for Health or go the easy way like me.  I just buy some cultured buttermilk from the store.

If you start with the cultures you will need to follow the directions your receive for your first batch.  After you have some cultured buttermilk, you can use some of that to make future batches.  Place about 1/2 cup of the cultured buttermilk in a quart jar and fill the rest of the way with milk.  Put a lid on and give it a gentle shake.  Then let it sit at room temp for 24 hours. Store in the fridge.

 Here's a jar of half used buttermilk that I currently have in my fridge.

The culture kits at Cultures for Health say that some can be used again up to 8 times and some indefinitely.  I have found that using buttermilk from the store usually only works for 4-5 times for me, but I usually am buttermilked out by then and need a break from finding recipes to use it in anyway. :)  Someday I may need to invest in the starter kit and keep it going though.

Blessings,

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Homemade Cream of Mushroom Soup

I used to use a lot of cans of cream soups.  They are so easy to throw into a casserole to make it creamy and yummy!  One time though, I was completely out of cream of mushroom soup but didn't discover that until after I had started making something.  I needed something quick, so I got out my trusty Betty Crocker Cookbook to see what I could use instead.  It recommended making a thick white sauce and adding in mushrooms.  After finding out how easy it was and how much healthier our dinners could be, I have almost completely quit using canned soups.  I've also done a bit of experimenting to make cream of chicken and cream of celery soup with almost the same recipe.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup chopped mushrooms
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1 cup of milk

Directions:
Saute mushrooms in the butter in a saucepan over low heat.  Stir in the flour, salt, and pepper.  Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until smooth and bubbly.  Gradually stir in the milk and heat to boiling, stirring constantly.  Boil and stir for 1 minute or until thickened.

For cream of celery, substitute 1/2 cup celery for the mushrooms.  For cream of chicken, substitute chopped chicken for the mushrooms and 1/2 cup of chicken broth for 1/2 of the milk.

This will make about 1 can of condensed soup, but often I will triple or quadruple the amount and put the extra in jars in my fridge or freezer to save for later.  It's not as easy as opening up a can of soup and dumping it in, but if I have some ready to go, then I only have to cook it up once in a while and the rest of the time it is just as easy as dumping it in!  It is very tasty in Chicken Tetrazzini or Chicken Pot Pie!

Blessings,

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No Heat Curls: Rag Curl Tutorial

Sweetie has stick straight blond hair.  So straight that it absolutely doesn't hold curls when I've tried curling it with a curling iron.  Any hair that actually curls, will be straight again within 10 minutes.  While this makes it super easy to do her hair on most days, she is sad whenever we have tried to curl it and it doesn't work.  We have been reading the Little House on the Prairie series and once it was mentioned that they used rags to make their hair curly.  I wondered if that would work for Sweetie and so we gave it a try.  It worked beautifully and Sweetie had curls that stayed ALL day!  Her hair was even still curly the next day!  It is super easy too, so I thought I would share with you how we did it.

All you need are strips of cloth about 6 inches long and 1 in wide and wet hair.  We've done it right after Sweetie takes a bath in the evening and I just cut up an old pair of ripped pants into our strips of cloth.

First, start by taking a small strip of hair and wrapping the end around one of the strips of cloth, right in the middle. 

Then continue rolling the hair around the strip all the way up to the head.  Then take the ends of the strip and tie a knot in it. 

Continue doing that with all of the hair until it is all tied up in the strips of cloth. 

If you want smaller curls, use smaller sections of hair and do more of them and if you want bigger curls, use bigger sections of hair.  Then go to bed for the night.
When you wake up in the morning, take out the strips, style your hair, and ta-da, beautiful curls that will hold for a long time!

Blessings,

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Perfect Hard Boiled Fresh Eggs

I love having fresh eggs from our chickens, but have you ever tried to peel hard boiled fresh eggs?  It is not pretty. 

The peel and the egg never want to seperate. It takes a long time. By the time you are done, you are left with very little white still attached to the yoke and the rest is stuck to the many little bits of shell that didn't want to come off.  My kids think that this make the eggs taste worse or something because they always fight over who gets the best looking egg.  It doesn't even matter that I am going to cut it up for them and they will never know the difference.  But I recently came across a great idea on how to get fresh eggs to peel perfectly!  The secret is to steam them!

I just get some water boiling and then put my steamer basket full of eggs over it (with the lid on!) and let them steam for about 12 minutes.  Immediately put them in cold water to stop the cooking process then peel.  And ta-da, perfect peeled eggs! Unless your 3 year old insists on peeling his own... ;)



If you are looking for a really good egg recipe, you might want to check out my Easy Egg Casserole Muffins! 

Blessings,

Linked up with:
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Safe For My Family AND a New Business!

Since having kids, I have really become more aware of a lot of the products that we use in our home. I try to find things that I know are safe to use around them and are healthy for them. Before Mark and I got married, he was a preferred customer in a great business that carried a variety of products that are very safe. We continued to use these for a number of years, but then I set out to find ways to save money and make things myself so we stopped purchasing. I have found a few homemade things that work well, but with our many little ones running around and trying to keep up with our schooling, I just don't have the time to make them myself. There's nothing like running out of laundry detergent in the middle of wash day or remembering you used up the last of your deodorant after your workout. ;) It's so much easier to just have them stocked in my pantry instead of finding time to make more.  There were also a lot of things I couldn't make or they didn't work the way I hoped and so I was still purchasing a lot of things. So we decided to become preferred customers again. I love so many of their products! They have this amazing lotion that is one of our favorite products. It is great on my kids' dry skin and has even cured the cracks Mark gets on his feet when nothing else has helped. I have been getting some deep spring cleaning done this week and the kids love to help. I feel completely safe letting them use the cleaning products because they are all natural! They have a complete line of cleaners, nutrition supplements, first aid products, hygiene products, and makeup/skin care products. All of them are completely safe and healthy for my family. Another bonus is that I can still order online and do my shopping in my pajamas! :)

In signing up again, I was also introduced to the home based business aspect of this company. Because Mark was already signed up when we got married, I hadn't heard too much about how easy it was too have my own business at home. Well, now I know, and we have decided to supplement our income a bit (or hopefully a lot!) by starting our own home based business! I can do as much as I want or as little as I want or as time allows with our busy schedule. I can even do almost all of it using just my computer and phone!  If you would like to see a good video about it on YouTube, you can watch this one that I found. It has some great information.  I would love to help you find safer products for your family or help you easily earn money from your home.  Whether you are just interested in purchasing safe products for your home, starting your own home business, or both, please email me at mmtolsma at juno dot com and I can also give you more information.

Blessings,

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Cleaning A Gas Stove

I love cooking with my gas stove.  I grew up with it and when I had to use electric when we first got married, I had a hard time getting used to it.  I was very happy to have it once again in our current home. One thing I hate though is trying to clean the metal grates and pans.  With as much cooking as I do, it is inevitable that things will get spilled or splattered on them.  And then when it gets cooked on, it sure doesn't want to come off.  I am a little embarrassed to show you this picture, but this is what my stove looked like a couple days ago. 

 Some of that is fresh and would scrub off, but most of that is pretty well stuck on.  I have spent hours (literally) and tried every cleaner I could think of the try get them clean, all with no success.  Until today, that is!  I came across a very handy tip last week, gave it a try, and now my stove looks like this:

Amazing!  And hardly any scrubbing was involved!  Want to know this amazing trick so your stove can sparkle too? :)  Ammonia is the answer.  With little kids in the house, I don't normally keep ammonia around, but I ran out to get some just for this.  All you have to do is put the grate in a gallon zip lock bag along with 1/4 cup ammonia, seal it up, and let it sit overnight.  (I recommend putting it out in the garage or on your deck.) The fumes from the ammonia will do all the work for you and in the morning, all you have to do is wipe it off!  A couple of the most stubborn spots took a little elbow grease, but for the most part, it all came off so easy!  Now you too can have a sparkling clean stove!