New way of living

So with the birth of our fourth child Cody, we have discovered he has food allergies. He can't eat gluten, dairy, or eggs. So we as a family will be removing those from our house with the exception of eggs. I wont be baking or cooking with eggs, but if someone wants to make them selves some eggs that's fine. I will try and keep up to date with the blog on how this is going.
This is going to be a huge change for our family. I don't see the gluten being as much as a challenge as the dairy. Because we love cheese, yogurt, cream cheese, cheese, and some more cheese. I'm also going to have get back to basics and cooking way more from scratch. Which I was doing before but was so tired I started buying more convenient foods. So not much of that going on in our house any more.
I can say that when we do find something that is gluten, dairy, and egg free, I feel like I hit the jack pot. Like just the other day at Costco I found some chocolate chip cookies! And the best part is they taste amazing! Even my picky husband likes them.
So goal one is to use up the food we have in the house that contains gluten and dairy. I'm socking up on the new foods that are gluten free, and that we can use for cooking with in place of the dairy and gluten foods we used to cook with. We will probably end up donating a lot of food to the local food bank as well.

Home Made Yogut

So if your kids are like my kids they would eat yogurt all day long every day. I don't know about you but as a single income family of 5 soon to be 6 I can't afford that. So what else was I to do. I went looking online for ideas on home made yogurt and found it to be super easy. You don't need a fancy yogurt maker or anything like that. I used my crock pot. Now I have made it on the stove top before, but I found the crock pot to be a 1000 times easier.

So here is what you need for your home made yogurt:
Milk- I use whole milk, but have used 1% as well and it came out just fine. I have heard that you should not use skim milk. If you want to do a dairy free yogurt then you might want to do some more looking online for other sites that would have better info. I do plan on making a dairy free one someday but just have not done it yet. But when I do I will do a post about it.
Starter Yogurt- This is a yogurt from the store that has LIVE ACTIVE CULTURES in it. That is a very important part or your yogurt will not turn out right.
Crock pot- any size will do, but the bigger the bigger the batch of yogurt.

Take your milk and pour it into your crock pot to the top. Turn it on high and let it sit. You want to have little bubbles around the top, but not boiling. It should be around 200 degrees at the highest temps. What your doing is killing off any bacteria in the milk.
Next turn your crock pot off and let it cool down to about 115-120, this is important that it's below 120 degrees.
Once it's cooled off scoop out some of the warm milk into another container, you don't need much maybe 1/2 to 1 cup of milk. Take your starter yogurt, about a 1/2-1cup depending on how much milk you are using. (you can't use to much) and mix that with the milk you scooped out. Mix this well. This will warm the yogurt up before adding it to the main mix. Once that's done then pour it into your crock pot and mix well. You don't need to make bubbles while mixing, you can be gentle about it.
Once it's all mixed up take your crock pot and place it in your oven, make sure your oven is turned off. Wrap a towel around it and let it sit over night.
The longer it sits the thicker it will get. I have let mine sit for up to 14 hours before.
The next day take the crock pot out of the oven, remove your lid and check out your yogurt. Now there will be a watery part on top, you can either just mix that in (which will make your yogurt a little thinner) or scrape it off the top, that's what I do.
Your home made yogurt will not be as thick as store bought yogurt, because most store bought yogurt contains pectin in it to help thicken it up. You can however strain your yogurt through cheese cloth to help make it thicker.
Scoop your yogurt into containers and place them in the fridge and your done. That's it. It's ready to eat.
If you want to add flavor like vanilla or honey to your yogurt you can, add it when mixing your starter yogurt into the batch of milk.
Also set aside about 1/2-1 cup of your yogurt you just made for your starter yogurt for next time. You can do that about four times before you need to buy another starter yogurt.

We now use our home made yogurt in place of sour cream a lot. We have put it in tacos, and made ranch dressing with it so far. It came out perfect, though I would not add honey or vanilla to the batch if you plan on doing that, not sure that would taste just right.
Enjoy!

Car seat safety

There are a lot of great car seats on the market today to help keep your kids safe. Well the wonderful people over at My Precious Kid are doing a give away!   http://www.mypreciouskid.com/blog/2013/01/diono-radian-r120-car-seat-giveaway/ follow the link to enter! But hurry today is the last day! 

How to stretch a whole chicken into many meals

So you have a whole chicken you need to cook and you want to get as many meals out of it as possible. Well how many meals you will get out of it depends on the size of your family you are feeding. You should be able to get at least two meals out of it no matter what.

Day 1: Place the whole chicken in your crock pot. If your chicken is still frozen make sure you get it in there in the morning so it will be done by dinner time. If it's thawed out then you can place it later in the day like around 12 or so. Or you can cook it all day on low as well.

Frozen cook on high most of the day, check with a meat thermometer to be sure it's fully cooked.
Thawed either low starting in the morning, or medium heat in the afternoon.

Once the chicken is in the crock pot add your spices and seasonings. You can add things like a pinch of salt, garlic, bay leaf (this will come in handy the next day for sure), thyme, rosemary, and just about anything you think sounds good. Play around with the spices and find some your family really likes.
There is no need to add water, let the chicken cook in it's natural juices for the day.
DINNER TIME: Now your chicken is done it's time for diner, I normally pair mine with a side of rice and a veggie for the first night. It's simple and easy.
When you go to clean up after dinner let your crock pot cool down and place the whole container with all the left over chicken in the fridge. This will make it easier for you tomorrow for dinner.

Day 2: Pull your crock pot with your chicken left overs out of the fridge and place it back in the base of your crock pot. Fill the crock pot with water and make sure the whole chicken is covered. Set the crock pot to medium heat and let it simmer most of the day.
Now you can think about what you might want to make with your chicken, there are a number of recipe's out there that call for chicken. But keep in mind the spices you used yesterday while cooking your chicken when choosing another dish. I have done a chicken casserole, open faced chicken sandwich with gravy, chicken over rice with gravy, things like that. This will also depend on how much chicken you have left on the bird. If you have a large family there might not be much left. If that's the case you can skip down to day three. If you have a small family you might be able to de-bone the chicken and get two days of "Day 2" out of it. ( I will explain de-boning in a moment).
De-boning chicken. Once your chicken has been simmering in the crock pot most of day under water it's time to de-bone it.
You will need two forks, a plate, bowl, and a pasta claw thing (don't know what they are called for sure). Take your claw and soup out some of the chicken and place it on the plate. Take your two forks (it will be very hot so I would not want to touch it) and start to pull the meat away from the bones. Place the meat in the bowl as you pull it off the bone. Keep doing this until you have all the meat off the bones. Place the bones, skin, and fat back in the crock pot. You now have your chicken for your second dish all ready to go. Let your crock pot cool off and place back in the fridge.
Day 3: Place your crock pot back in the base and place on high for a couple of hours. After a little while get out a strainer and strain all the bones and fat out of your broth. Now add some chopped up carrots, celery, pea's, and other veggies you would like to have in your chicken noodle soup. Taste your broth to see if it needs any more spices and seasonings. Turn your crock pot to low and let it simmer all day.
Just before dinner take some of the broth out and mix a little bit of either flour or corn starch in a cup. make sure to blend well, and add it back into your soup to help thicken the soup up. If you want to add some dumplings do so about 20 mins before dinner time so they have time to cook. I just use Bisquick for my dumplings.

So there you have between two and four or more days (again depending on family size) of dinners from one whole chicken.

We have a kitchen!

So the kitchen is put together finally. Working stove, dishwasher and fridge. Only have our glassware, mixer, and bread machine to dig out and then I think the whole kitchen is unpacked. Right now we are on the hunt for a wood burning stove. I think we may have found one but they said they would not hold it for us until tomorrow so I have to call when we leave in the morning and see if they still have it, it's on the way out to my parents house where we are going tomorrow already.
So this weekend will be as follows, Friday going to my parents house to get more of our stuff and borrow a ladder. Saturday cleaning out the gutters before all the rain gets here for the year, this is Oregon after all. Sunday my birth grandparents are coming over to see the house for the first time, and take a look at everything, plus my birth grandpa was a contractor and said he can give us a hand with our bathroom remodel when we start it.
So we have a lot going on, oh and we still have to finish painting Ross's room before he gets home from Idaho this next week. We will get there and we have all the time in the world to put everything together.
Oh and the kitchen is put together but I'm STILL scrubbing the faces of the doors and everything. Plus once we get the house all put together then we will be packing up one section at a time and sanding it down to paint it. Oh it never ends it never ends.

Making our house a home

So last Saturday we moved into our new house. We love our house even with all it's little problems, and yes we keep finding more little problems as we go along. But really we don't mind it's ours, we don't have to ask to do anything to it, we can get a pet when ever we want and not have to pay a deposit or something like that. We painted the kids rooms, Peyton purple and Ross orange.
So far with moving in we have fixed the hot and cold water knobs for the washer, that was a bigger project then we thought when we started it. Because of the age of our house we had to get a special adapter for our water lines. So ended up having to cut the drywall and the water lines to put the adapters on so we could put new knobs on. Good so that's all working fine now, go to hook up the washer and the lines leak, okay fine not a big deal just needs some new O rings. Well after starting a load of cloth diapers I hear the washer stop so I go down to unload it to hang the diapers up to dry. Well after opening the washer I see that it's still full of water :( The washer does not work, it wont spin or agitate or anything but fill with water and make a buzzing noise that smells like something is burning. So I pull out all the wet diapers ring them out and take them to the laundry mat to finish them up. Get on Craigslist and find another washer in town install and bam! we are back in business.

So on to the next project, fixing the upstairs toilet that wont stop running. This was one pretty easy and we did not run into any drama with it, thank goodness. We still have to fix the downstairs toilet since it just runs as well but that project can wait for a little bit.

We are now back upstairs again working on a few more things. I went to load the dishwasher the other morning and when I pulled out the lower drawer the upper one fell down inside the dishwasher, oops. So I called my mom and asked for the extra one that she had in her garage if we could have it. She said yes, because she loves me so much, and Pat is now installing that one. It turned into a little bit more of a project then we thought but we are learning to expect that with our house. We also got to see what the old kitchen floor looked like, so glad they put new flooring down yuck. And our floor under the dishwasher has some water damage from a leak under the kitchen sink so that has been added to our repair list as well. It's not something that needs to be done right away so it can wait just a little bit before we go tearing up the kitchen floor.

I will fill you all in tomorrow or in a few days about our stove adventure we went on yesterday. But right now I need to get back to unpacking and putting some more things away to make this house a home.

I'm a big kid now

So we are buying our first house. We "should" be signing papers any day now. But we are not holding our breath since we have been thinking that for almost three weeks now. But it will happen in due time, we just hate the waiting game. Plus it does not help living with my parents and really wanting to be in our own place.

So during this time I have been reading reading reading like crazy on ways to save money in our new house. So far I have been making un-paper towels. I have been upcycling flannel sheets that I have been buying at the thrift store for less then a $1 each. I have also been making family cloth out of them as well, for pee only for our family only. We will have TP for guest and others to use :) Anything that I can make that we can reuse over and over will help us save money in the long run.

I also have been planning a nice garden at our new home. I have it in my head what I want to do where. I have started buying some herb plants that I will plant off our back deck in a pot to help cut down on having to buy herbs at the store whether they be fresh or dried. I also plan on planting some raspberries, blueberries and strawberries as well. Last weekend Pat and I took the kids and went blackberry picking and I made a batch of blackberry jam. I hope to make a few more batches this year, but with the weather being so mild the berries are taking longer to turn. Which weather wise is fine by me I hate the heat :) But as for produce I wish it would warm up just a little so we could get the some good berries and veggies going. I hope that the price of everything does not go up to much because of the weather.   

So once we get all settled into our new home I will keep updating on how we are saving money as a family. The grocery shopping will be a challenge since we are limited to where we shop if we don't want to drive over an hour to get to. But really with the area we are going to be living in it's all worth it.