The Kitchen

I won't claim to be a great cook or baker.. I follow the recipes and I don't go far from them.. but I love food. My Grandma Jean and my mom always tell people when I was a little girl I would look through the grocery ads and say, "mmmm... Strawberries....mmmmm....peaches...mmmm....bananas..". It's true. I love food. And it wasn't until about two years ago that I began to really enjoy baking and cooking.

We're a very frugal family. We don't have a huge grocery budget, so we have to improvise..a lot. But it's improvising that has made cooking fun. I love to Google substitutions for things a recipe calls for. For example- if you don't have butter or oil (or don't want to use them) you can sub. apply sauce. If you need whipping cream (not for whipping though.. more like for cream in a sauce) you can use milk and butter.

For my 23rd birthday we only had one car and Jordan had it for work and I was home with the kids and wanted to make myself a birthday cake. So I made my first Carrot Cake. It took me almost an hour to grate baby carrots by hand. I called Grandma Jean and I told her what I was doing and she laughed and then told me to use baby food carrots... I didn't do it. Carrot Cake will always remind me of her.

I learned how to make dry beans in a crock pot.. make my own pie crust from scratch, make bread, cinnamon rolls and pizza dough from scratch... I LOVE cooking from scratch now. There is something very gratifying about bringing all these ingredients together and making something that tastes a million times better than something that came from a box. I feel proud when I put something on the table that is made completely from scratch.

My kids love cooking too. They love to help in the kitchen and I love to let them help. My grandma Jean always let me help her in the kitchen. One time I was making brownies with Grandma and my cousin, Hailey. Hailey was 3 years old and told me that Grandma lets her crack the eggs all by herself... and I believed her. So I let her and then I spent the next 15 minutes making sure I got all the egg shells out of the batter. I know better now than to let me kids crack eggs by themselves.

I wanted to share a few recipes I've tried over the last couple of days. They're all new recipes and they turned out great.

PB&J Granola- If you like peanuts and peanut butter this is for you! The first time I made it I got distracted on pinterest and burned the granola. I was so mad I wanted to scream. Like I said before, we're a frugal family. We don't have money to be throwing away food!.. but it was burned so I had to. I tried it again the next day without the computer close by (so I wouldn't get distracted) and it came out perfectly. It only took about 20 or 25 minutes and I turned it every 5-7 minutes to keep it from burning.

Raspberry & Chocolate Chip Muffins- King Soopers had raspberries on sale 4/$5 so we had lots to use before they went bad. I thought these were delicious.

Vegetarian Tortilla Stew- I made a 1lb bag of black beans in the crock pot and added all the other ingredients as the beans cooked. It was so yummy!