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Sorry I missed blogging last week. I was away on business during the week and was so tired and trying to catch up during the weekend. Today I am off of work to be with my kids during spring break. DH and I have been splitting the week up. I made some farmhouse cheddar cheese. I have heard that people have had good luck with this recipe, so I am interested to see how it comes out. I tried making ricotta again from whey, but this one did not turn out very well. Oh well, the pigs will enjoy the whey. I have also been working on my butter making and got about 1 1/4 cups this time. Last weekend I made my first cottage cheese. It was good but different than store cottage cheese. This week has been about paperwork around our house with tax day quickly approaching and we are working on fire stuff still and adopting our foster daughter. One exciting thing I did accomplish was getting my first order from Azure Standard. They are a company that delivers health food type items in bulk. They have delivery trucks that come once a week to our area and drop at one home and then several families go there and pick up. I got some oats, beans and flour. Next time I am going to be ordering a grain mill and wheat berries so I can begin grinding my own flour. I have got my storage room set up with 7 gallon food grade plastic bins with lids that I can store the bulk items in. I need to continue getting some more, but it is a very satisfying feeling. There were a couple of questions in the last entry's comments that I wanted to answer. The first was on what books I bought. Well, I got Stocking Up by Rodale Press. I have several of their books and they are great. It covers making cheese to canning and much more. I also got a season by season pioneer cookbook. I got lots of ideas from it on what to cook in season and how to use my canned and stored goods. The last book is called Making the Best of Basics, Family Preparedness Handbook. Published in the last 70's it covers what kinds of foods to stock up on, how much each person needs, and recipes on how to cook from the items. It has been very useful so far. One of the ways I have using it is in figuring how to cut down on my grocery bill. I calculated how much of the basic items our family should use in a year and then I calculated how much that would be each month. Using the bulk Azure Standard catalog I priced out an allottment for groups of food for each month. I came up with about $200 for a month of bulk purchases. That will leave me with about $50 for milk and fresh veggies and fruits. The process did make me realize that we are spending too much cleaning and hygiene items. So, I at least I feel like I am making progress on bringing our grocery bill down.
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Posted by Becca