Pioneer Woman at Heart

One of our kids actually made a sandwich using my homemade sweet potato butter and peanut butter.  She said it was pretty good.  I love it on toast at breakfast, but have yet to try it on a pancake or waffle.  This is not canned with a water bath method.  It is stored in the freezer, so I am making sure we continue to use it, as well as our pumpkin butter.

Happy Homemaker Monday!  In all the not-so-fun tribulations brought to me already this morning, I will find the joy today.  I'm joining Sandra at Diary of a Stay at Home Mom today, with today's post.

Dolly Parton ha d a coat of many colors.  I now have a scarf of many colors.   I need another project, like a need a hole in my head. However. I've wanted to learn the corner to corner (C2C) crochet stitch, and I'm using up leftover, leftover yarn. While I'm crocheting the scrap blanket, there are small balls of yarn.  That would be the "leftover, leftover" yarn balls.  They are too small to even make one row across the blanket, so they are in a basket. My inner, "you can't store that anymore " and "can't waste it mode" (again) kept poking at me .

I am still deep cleaning, sorting, tossing, and donating.  The kitchen has been an obsta cle course for a few weeks.  Book shelves moved out, more piles of books to donate, misc. items stacked in piles ready to be bagged....and I started on my roll top des k. I have to admit, I dreaded the desk cleaning. Oh the guilt that flooded me for a ll thos e lost days of writing.   Oh the joys of finding th ings again.   I found 3 long lost , large eye needles and a n eedle threader I had been looki ng for.  They were all in the bottom of a can used for pencils in my desk.

As we enter into a new year, a new gardening season, and a new stock-it-up season, I am tracking more. It's not to late to start (I told myself).  We ran out of items over this winter, and I want to be better at that.  So, in my own planner, in which I keep track of bill payment dates and such, I am now writing down what we use. Every time I open a package of paper towels (writing down the number in the pkg.), Kleenex, peanut butter, softener salt (always running out), dog food, cat food, coffee (oh, we drink a lot of this), I will write it in my calendar.  At the onset of next winter, I will have a better idea of how much we use, and what to pre-stock before the snow starts falling.

Strawberry Chocolate chip muffins.  These were so delicious.  I sort of made it up.  To save on the organic milk budget, I used powdered milk, then tossed in some leftover mini-chocolate chips.  The family loved these for breakfast or snack.  It uses canola oil, so here is where my canned applesauce comes in handy to stretch that budget too.  Organic oil is not cheap either.

Before I start, there are many cookbooks you can borrow from you library on making pasta.  The very basic recipe is easy to make.  You can make a small batch or large batch of noodles. The first time (2010) I ever made homemade noodles, I used a pizza cutter to cut my noodles, after rolling them with a rolling pin. They wer e no t "pretty" but delicious.  The first re cipe I tried, use d egg whites vs. the whole egg. I've since then changed recipes.