Well, practice makes perfect. And this, my friends, is as perfect as I’m likely to get making bread. Not to brag or anything, but I FAR prefer our bread to the sliced mystery you get at the grocery store. I like this stuff so much I’ve asked Jess to pack two slices (with homemade butter, …

I promised you Homemade Week last week, and I made good on that promise by staying home on Friday. So no post. Actually I wasn’t home much that day, having accepted an invitation to spend my day off first at the local high school career day, talking up my career (such as it is), and …

Well a few months back I mentioned my homemade laundry detergent and bragged about what a great job it did getting our clothes clean. There was only one problem: it was lumpy. This must be because I used half a bar of Fels Naphtha soap ( which I completely forgot to use this time). I …

Wow, that sounds sinister, doesn’t it? It sounds like the name is not so much spoken as intoned: “The Killing Cooooonnnnnne,” like a tool of unspeakable torture. Actually it’s a quick and merciful way to dispatch a bird, and I got mine at Home Depot.
Or more accurately, I got the sheet metal for it at …

To Absalom’s legs, that is. The ones with the spurs on them.
Absalom met his Maker on Saturday morning. Here’s the fixin’s for rooster soup, just before Jessica bagged them to put in the freezer:
It was not a pleasant end. I’m really sorry, Absalom, but I didn’t know what I was doing. By the time I …

Jessica met me on the stairs last night carrying a fresh load of laundry up. She held out Jacob’s freshly-washed baby blanket and said, “Feel this!” With my keen sense of the obvious, I said that it felt soft and fuzzy. She said, “It’s way soft and fuzzy! And clean! It seems like since we …

Here is Sarah examining the first batch of laundry washed with our homemade laundry soap. It was just coming out of the dryer (no clothesline; autumn is pretty rainy around here) when Sarah, age 2, came galloping in to help. She put her head into the dryer and –which is cuter, a dumb old batch …

We were running out of our previous batch of window/surface cleaner last night so I whipped up some more. Last time I refilled this commercial Windex bottle was the first time I had ever made my own concoction, and it worked so well I don’t think anybody noticed (except the color was a little different). …

Six eggs! That’s the most yet this season. But while daughter 1 and I were down taking care of the ducks this morning, Beautiful was already boiling eggs for breakfast, so we’ll have these another time.
I dumped granola into my bowl and overshot. Then I was in a rush to eat and get out the …