Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Make your own laundry soap??

I have been making my own laundry soap and I LOVE IT... i have finally found one the i really like and love the smell of it... so clean smelling!
Grate the bar of fels-naptha with your cheese grater... DO NOT LET THE KIDS MISTAKE IT FOR CHEDDAR... because is does look like it, and it almost happened here.


Add 1 cup washing soda , 1 cup baking soda and 1 cup borax.. I store it in a plastic Tupperware container and use about 1/8 cup per load... it does not get sudsy like normal store bought detergent... but it gets the job done for a fraction of the cost!
P.s. I start the washer and put in the soap and let it fill up about 1/2 way before i put the clothes in, that way the soap can disinagrate first.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Prickly Pear jam!!

I noticed the abundance of prickly pear fruit on my neighbors cactus, and decided to mosey on down and ask if i could pick a peck! And my three year old noticed the heart... so many things us adults look over!!

So my children and i picked quite alot of pecks... what is a peck anyway? Here they are, boiling in my canning pot, then I squeezed all the juice out of them





and got all the juice out, and made some prickly pear jam.. and it looks GOOD!
Great Christmas presents!!




Wednesday, November 17, 2010

i think its time for a blog post

Focus, focus, focus... come on I can do it... I know i can... I can post on this blog more than once every 6 mo. to a year.... I must...here are just some random pics of.... I sometime this past summer... some yummy pizza I made with some homemade pesto that I grew in my super small non-producing garden. A yummy squash and tomato tart with Parmesan cheese, that i made sometime this summer. (wish I could remember the recipe)
Here we are pickling...130 jars... crazy!!!! it took 4 days and i bought every jar in the Verde Valley... well it seemed like i did!!


The artichokes THAT I GREW no joke... that is the only thing that I could really grow in my garden. We harvested about 30 of them. Amazing!!!



The rewards!!!!! I have pickles everywhere, in every nook and crany of my house.


We had a great summer, and on to fall!!! Its finally starting to cool off here in sunny AZ. I actually had to put on socks the other night. Yippee!!!
More to post tomorrow... I'm going to do it!!!!