It’s summer time and that means it’s time for preserving food for my pantry and freezer with all the good, garden produce available.  I love going to the local produce Amish auction.  It’s an amazing place to find bulk food for great prices in my area! 

The Plow Boy Auction is open from May to October [...]

This week has been a long week of focused food preserving around my house.  I still have lots more food to can and freeze, however, I ended the week with lots of frozen corn, lots of shredded zucchini, some peaches and was able to get a good start on my canning for the season. 
I put my [...]

I don’t know about you, but I hate buying jelly or jam from the grocery store.  Almost all of the grocery store jelly has high fructose corn syrup. 
Our solution is that we make our own jams and jellies for much cheaper and with an incredibly impressive taste. 
Today, we started making peach jam with some of the [...]

Perfectly imperfect, organic, round zucchini!
My food preserving week continues….There is nothing quite like preserving your food at home.  I love canning!  Today, I have been working on canning up yellow squash, zucchini and tomatoes together.  I’ll use these jars for making squash casserole later in the fall and winter. 
I started with washing and cutting these [...]

We also started tackling the peaches on day two of our food preserving week here.  There is nothing quite like sweet summer peaches!  We’ve eaten a whole lot of fresh peaches over the last month!  I just picked up two more 3/4 bushel boxes of peaches and they are scrumptious! 
These bulk peaches cost me $14 [...]

I have a lot of once a month cooking and pantry stocking plans coming up in preparation for before and after I have my baby.  One of the bulk meals I will be making is homemade spaghetti sauce for spaghetti and pasta.  Today, I only made one large batch but was able to get 10 quarts of [...]

Each Wednesday here on my blog, I am highlighting the old fashioned pantry and thought I would share this great story I found on another gardening blog.  I couldn’t help but be awed and amazed at this woman who grew up in the 1930’s, not only for the amount of work that went in to [...]

The Penny Pantry multi tasks when it comes to building a large pantry for pennies!  You can build a nice pantry stockpile using coupons at the grocery store, but I believe to really build a pantry for pennies, you need to utilize a garden and canning!  You can really cut your grocery bill by incorporating [...]

I ran across Ruth Stout last year when a friend of mine (Thanks, Sherry) apologizing gave me a video about Ruth Stout.  I say apologizing because Ruth Stout was a bit quirky and odd in some of her thinking and practices.  Despite that fact, there is a wealth of gardening knowledge that one can gain [...]

I’ve been working my way through a book entitled Self-Reliance:  Recession-proof your pantry. It is a short book from Backwoods Home Magazine that a friend of my let me borrow.  Wow– is it amazing.  Amazing how ignorant I am when it comes to knowing about building a real, well-rounded pantry that will last longer than [...]