Before our family moved to Alton I thought about how our family would probably become a little more self sufficient. Not necesarily by choice but my neccesity living so far away from a grocery store and such. Tonight's dinner brought these thoughts back to my mind. About 98% of our dinner tonight was litterally from scratch, homemade, etc.
Tonight I made Madelyn's absolute FAVORITE meal of all time. 
Let me back up for just a moment.... For several weeks now we've had the opportunity
to take part in milking the family cow. We milk every saturday night. Some milkings our better than others. For instance 2 weeks ago and for a few weeks before that all we were getting was about a gallon of milk. This is not enough milk to last our family an entire week. So I've had to stock up on store bought milk. Then something happened, the past 2 weeks we've gotten more then 3 gallons on our turn milking the cow. This is great but it's been hard to drink all of our "fresh" milk plus the store bought before it goes bad. So having about 6 gallons of milk in my fridge and knowing in 2 days I may have another 3 gallons I decided I had to do something. I talked to a few sister-in-laws and decided to try my hand at making cheese. Yesterday with Emily's help we took 4 gallons of milk and made mozzarella cheese and cheese sticks, then using the left over whey we made ricotta cheese. It turned out GREAT!
So back to tonight's dinner... Our dinner consisted of store bought jumbo shells stuffed with our homemade ricotta cheese and mozzarella cheese. The shells were then smothered with our homemade spaghetti sauce we put up this summer with what we reaped from our garden.
Our sides for dinner was beans that we canned this summer and garlic bread using our homemade bread and dried parsley flakes we also put up this year. I did sprinkle a little garlic salt which was from the store. 98% homemade, the only 2 store bought items used in tonights meal was the shells and garlic salt. This definetly doesn't happen a lot but it's kinda neat to see the rewards from all our hard work over the past few months of gardening, canning, freezing and then yesterday spending a few hours making cheeses coming together in one meal. I was curious to hear what the kids thought of dinner not realizing it was mostly homemade. Madelyn and Hunter both thought it tasted the same. I did too. Emily and Brayden didn't have a comment and Kory will be eating our meal for lunch tommorrow. I'm anxious to hear his opinion. Overall though I thought dinner was GREAT!
Let me back up for just a moment.... For several weeks now we've had the opportunityto take part in milking the family cow. We milk every saturday night. Some milkings our better than others. For instance 2 weeks ago and for a few weeks before that all we were getting was about a gallon of milk. This is not enough milk to last our family an entire week. So I've had to stock up on store bought milk. Then something happened, the past 2 weeks we've gotten more then 3 gallons on our turn milking the cow. This is great but it's been hard to drink all of our "fresh" milk plus the store bought before it goes bad. So having about 6 gallons of milk in my fridge and knowing in 2 days I may have another 3 gallons I decided I had to do something. I talked to a few sister-in-laws and decided to try my hand at making cheese. Yesterday with Emily's help we took 4 gallons of milk and made mozzarella cheese and cheese sticks, then using the left over whey we made ricotta cheese. It turned out GREAT!
So back to tonight's dinner... Our dinner consisted of store bought jumbo shells stuffed with our homemade ricotta cheese and mozzarella cheese. The shells were then smothered with our homemade spaghetti sauce we put up this summer with what we reaped from our garden.
Our sides for dinner was beans that we canned this summer and garlic bread using our homemade bread and dried parsley flakes we also put up this year. I did sprinkle a little garlic salt which was from the store. 98% homemade, the only 2 store bought items used in tonights meal was the shells and garlic salt. This definetly doesn't happen a lot but it's kinda neat to see the rewards from all our hard work over the past few months of gardening, canning, freezing and then yesterday spending a few hours making cheeses coming together in one meal. I was curious to hear what the kids thought of dinner not realizing it was mostly homemade. Madelyn and Hunter both thought it tasted the same. I did too. Emily and Brayden didn't have a comment and Kory will be eating our meal for lunch tommorrow. I'm anxious to hear his opinion. Overall though I thought dinner was GREAT!
2 comments:
that is so stinkin awesome!!
I am so jealous. I really want to learn how to make cheese!!!! And I also need to know how you made your home made spaghetti sauce. I made some tonight from my tomatoes I preserved from my garden and it was HORRIBLE!!! You need to email me and let me know your recipe and how you preserved it.
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