cooking related post

If you don't like to cook, this may not be the post for you to read, :)  

I love to cook (just not clean up afterward LOL) I love to make things from scratch, and this week
we really got back in that mode of cooking. 2 weeks ago, I made up some of my home made mixes in bulk (ranch dressing meatball mix) and Katie and I made over 7 dozen meatballs to freeze.

Thursday night, Katie made homemade laundry detergent for the first time, and we took some to my friend Janna with the ingredients to make her own batch. It's been a while since we did this, and got some new essential oil the other day, so we mixed up a batch.

Also,I have been wanting a wheat grinder FOREVER because grinding your own wheat right before you bake is SO good for you.  But I have had to settle for grinding at my sort- of local grocery store, which is better than nothing.  But a little while back I ran across a post on the Net about using a burr mill coffee grinder (has to be a burr mill!)  which made sense because a lot of wheat grinder use burr mills. Someone mentioned a Cuisinart one, I looked it up on Ebay, found one for 19.99 and bid.  Yeah me, I won!  So we have been happily grinding our own wheat for a week or so. I bought a 25 pound bag of wheat berries at the grocery store, and Food Savered it in half gallon jars, made it much easier to store.

Have I mentioned that I added a food saver handheld to my kitchen arsenal? They are on close out right now on the food saver site for 10.50, regularly 50 bucks, worth every penny.  I hated messing with the hoses and such for sealing up leftovers, etc.  This handheld makes it a CINCH, Katie loves doing it.  I have also been converting over to Jars for storage instead of plastic, this has made life so much easier.

So, on Friday, my friend Janna took us to the Kansas City, City Market.http://www.kc-citymarket.com/farmersmarket.html

I never really go there (except for a couple of field trips to the Arabia Steamboat museum) because it always seemed so far away, and kind of a hassle getting downtown.  It took 7 minutes from my local Sam's Club! And it was on Friday when the prices were cheaper, oh my! We got strawberries, gorgeous strawberries for a dollar. Six green peppers for a dollar, 3 red for a dollar. And the ethnic stores were amazing!  Huge bins of fragrant spices, $1 a scoop (big scoop!) Needless to say, we will be back very often!

And it was SO fun to go with Janna! Her children are delightful, and she is so laid back and fun.
Her parents (our pastor and wife) were missionaries when she was younger and they lived in Nigeria for several years. Janna lived in Egypt for a year after high school, so she was very familiar with the products in the various stores, and even spoke Arabic with one of the shopkeepers.  It was such an amazing trip!

Making chicken soup today, I feel really yucky. i think it is just allergies, but I feel like chicken soup and we are almost out of my last batch. And with the yucky fall weather starting in already, its time to stock up on soup, :)

Hope everyone has a great rest of the weekend!
B