A few weeks ago we were cleaning out the freezer to make some room for beef from a nearby farm. I found some frozen pumpkin and decided to make these muffins. They have a gentle spiciness and hold up well when traveling in the car!
Pumpkin Muffins
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
¾ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp Ground ginger
1/8 tsp nutmeg
Pinch of allspice
8 Tbsp butter, room temperature
½ cup sugar
¼ cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs
½ tsp vanilla
¾ cup unsweetened pumpkin puree
¼ cup buttermilk
½ cup raisins
½ cup chopped nuts
⅓ cup sunflower seeds for topping
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Prepare your muffin tins by buttering them or using paper liners.
Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and spices.
Combine the butter and sugars. Add your eggs one at a time then add the vanilla. Add the pumpkin and buttermilk and then the dry ingredients. Fold in the raisins last. Divide the batter evenly into the muffin cups.
Ready for the oven!
Bake 25 minutes or until done. Cool for five minutes in the pan.
Cooling in the pan.
Then remove the muffins to a wire rack to finish cooling.
Best Ever Pumpkin Muffins
Makes 1 dozen muffins. If you manage not to eat them all these muffins also freeze well!
The gardening season may be winding down but there are still chores to be done. I need to cut back my hosts, day lilies and iris.
I also need to put the tomato cages and hoses away in the barn along with the wheelbarrows.
Trusty wheelbarrow
Here in the northeast fall is also the time of year to plant daffodil bulbs.
Daffodil bulbs ready to plant.
Ideally you should plant your bulbs as soon as you get them. It’s nice to have a sunny day to do your planting. Often I put it off and end up planting on a cold, blustery day. This year I chose a nice sunny day to do my planting. You want to plant the bulbs when your soil can still be worked, this gives the bulbs a chance to develop roots and establish themselves before winter arrives.
The rule of thumb for planting bulbs outdoors is to set them two and a half times deeper than their diameter. For my daffodil bulbs this meant 5-6″ deep. If you want a naturalizing look to your planting, take a few bulbs in your hand, toss them gently on the ground, then plant them where they have fallen.
Gently toss your bulbs in the garden.
Dig a hole in the dirt with a trowel for each individual bulb.
Place one bulb in each hole.
Special bulb-planting tools are available at garden centers; they make it easy to dig neat, circular holes. Place the bulb in the hole and cover with dirt. In the spring before growth or flowering begins spread a complete fertilizer over your flowerbeds. The spring rains will carry the fertilizer down into the soil.
Daffodils
Planting bulbs requires patience because you have to wait almost six months before you can enjoy the flowers! Patience is a good virtue to practice, it involves waiting. In our society we want things immediately, which is why so many people have debt problems! If we would learn to wait and save for something we want rather than “buy now, pay later” we would be much better off financially! Even stocking your party requires patience. A pantry does not become a well-stocked pantry overnight. It takes months of careful planning and preparation, which is a good rule to live our life by!
Daffodils everywhere
So I will be patient, the bulbs are planted and I will wait to enjoy their beauty. I will look forward to the daffodil blooms come spring.
Daffodil blooms.
A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. Gertrude Jekyll
Often when you want to save money the advice you are given is to keep track of all your spending. While this is good advice and will help you to expose any wasteful spending habits you may have there is another way to save money, examine your trash!
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When you look at what goes into your trash you will see what you are spending your money on and what is being wasted! If your goal is to save money you do not want ot find these ten things in your trash!
Disposable products. DO you find paper towels, napkins plastic silverware, paper plates, disposable cleaning wipes and Baggies? These are all things that can be replaced by reusable options. Reusable options are cheaper over the lifetime of the product than their disposable counterparts.
Wasted Food. Leftovers, produce that has gone bad, expired canned goods and food thrown away because no one liked it is all wasted money. Don’t buy food that you know you won’t eat and regularly go through your pantry so you will use up items before they expire.
Boxes and wrappers from highly processed foods. There are so many food items found in the grocery store that are highly processed. Not only are these items bad for you but it’s expensive! Boxed and frozen dinner kits, canned food like Spaghetti O’s and most boxed snack foods fall into this category. It is much cheaper and healthier to make your own homemade version.
Single serve product wrappers. Those prepackaged snacks are convenient but expensive. It would be much cheaper for you to purchase the bigger size and parcel it out yourself.
Cans and candy bars from vending machines. Anything sold in a vending machine is overpriced. Bring snacks and drinks from home
English: Snack MachineWikipedia)
Discarded junk that could have been sold or donated. Books, DVD’s, household items and clothing can all be sold or donated as long as they are in serviceable condition. If you are throwing away serviceable items in the trash you are throwing away money.
Packages from Commercial Cleaning Products. Did you know you could easily make your own cleaning products at home? They work just as well and will save you so much money! Vinegar, baking soda and essential oils can be used to make almost any product you need.
All Purpose Cleaner
Take out boxes and wrappers. Do you find yourself ordering take out often? If your trash is full of wrappers and boxes from pizza or fast food, try cooking at home.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Single use water bottles. Instead buy a sturdy, reusable bottle and drink tap water. If you hate your tap water buy a water filter. It will still be cheaper than buying single use water bottles.
Papers and magazines you don’t read. If you find that you are throwing away issues of magazines and papers unread, you’re wasting your money. Stop your subscriptions. You can often go to your local library and read the same magazines for free.
Shopping bags, tags, and packaging from new stuff. When your trash is full of shopping bags and tags from clothing, wrappers and packaging from new stuff ask yourself if it was really needed. Try looking for deals at your local consignment shop instead of buying new all the time.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Once you follow through on all these steps there will be very little left in your trash. You will find yourself saving money and generating very little trash!
Our frost last week put an end to our blueberries, but what a good harvest year it was. We’ve enjoyed Blueberry Torte, Blueberry Lime Jam, Blueberry Lemon Bread, Blueberry Muffins, Blueberry Crisp, Blueberry Vinegar and now Blueberry Lemon Sauce. This sauce would make a nice gift in a basket filled with a package of pancake mix. It is also delicious served on ice cream or even a cheesecake. I like it over plain homemade yogurt! You can also double or halve this recipe with good results. I have to say that blueberry-lemon has got to be one of my favorite combinations!
Blueberry Lemon Sauce
Ingredients:
8 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen)
1 lemon
1 – 1¼ cups sugar
½ cup orange juice
Directions:
Pick over the berries and remove any stems or soft berries.
Finely grate the zest from the lemon. Halve the lemon and extract the juice, discard the seeds.
Combine the lemon zest, lemon juice, 1 cup of sugar, the orange juice and blueberries in a large stainless steel pot.
Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Lower the heat and simmer for another 1-2 minutes. Taste and add additional sugar if the berries are very tart.
Ladle the hot sauce into clean, hot jars, leaving ¼ inch headspace.
Add lids and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes for long-term storage.
The sauce can also be ladled into sterilized jars, covered and refrigerated for up to 3 months. Perfect over plain yogurt or vanilla ice cream!
This Blueberry Torte recipe is adapted from one I found on the King Arthur website. If you haven’t discovered their site stop by and check it out, they not only sell all sort of wonderful flours and kitchen bakeware but they have so many wonderful recipes!
This is a dense, thin cake, which is wonderful with any of the end of the summer fruits: raspberries, blueberries, plums or a mixture. I’ve made it with plums and it was delicious. Today I used blueberries.
Blueberry Torte
Ingredients:
½ cup butter
¾ cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup all purpose flour
2 cups of blueberries
2 Tbsp sugar mixed with 1 tsp cinnamon, to sprinkle on the top
Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease an 8” square pan.
Combine the butter, sugar, baking powder and salt, beat until smooth.
Add the eggs, beating until combined. The mixture may look somewhat coagulated, which is just fine. Add the vanilla. Add the flour, mixing to make a smooth, stiff batter.
Spread the batter in your pan, It will be stiff and will be spread fairly thin. Sprinkle the blueberries on top and sprinkle with the cinnamon-sugar.
Bake for about 40 minutes or until done. The cake showing around the berries will be a light golden brown. Remove from the oven and serve warm or at room temperature.
Yesterday was a cold rainy day here. I had plans to get out and photograph what things look like around here but it was pretty wet. Instead I’m going to re-post one of my original posts from three years ago! I imagine most of you have not read it!
Our growing season in Vermont is a short one. The ground is really too cold to plant until the end of May and we’ve been known to have a frost as early as Labor Day weekend! My dream is to have a greenhouse to help extend the season. We have friends that have a beautiful greenhouse and they have the most wonderful peppers and tomatoes long before we ever see ripe vegetables in our garden. Until my dream comes true I find ways to extend the season in other ways. In the spring I use a cold frame to serve as a halfway house for my tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. When it’s time to move them out of the house but it’s still too cold to move them into the garden I use the cold frame. In the fall I usually use row covers.
Using row covers.
I’ve planted lettuce in mid August and when the nights started getting colder I covered my lettuce crop with row covers.
Row covers extend the season.
This helps extend our growing season often by several weeks or more. It’s nice to be able to harvest fresh lettuce when the rest of the garden is no longer producing!
Enjoying fresh lettuce in October!
This winter I plan to read Eliott Coleman’s book: Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables From Your Home Garden All Year Long. Maybe I too can become a four-season gardener here in Vermont.
Looks like we’ll get our first frost this week! Over the weekend I went and picked everything I could that might be damaged by a frost including the zucchini. With such an abundance of zucchini I made a batch of zucchini relish.
The same friend that shared her chocolate zucchini cake recipe also gave me this wonderful relish recipe. I don’t even buy relish any more as this is the family favorite. Another wonderful way to use up zucchini! Making this relish is a two-day affair so be sure to plan accordingly.
Zucchini Relish
First Steps:
Shred 10 cups of zucchini and 4 cups of onion: let stand in a big bowl overnight in water with 10 Tbsp of canning salt.
The next Day:
Drain zucchini, rinse and drain again. Place in a large pot.
Remaining Ingredients:
Add these remaining ingredients and cook over medium heat for 30 minutes:
I love zucchini and I use it in many ways from making a zucchini quiche to zucchini relish. One of my favorite ways to use up zucchini is making a Chocolate Zucchini Cake. This recipe is especially good if you have some oversized zucchini that need to be used up. A friend of mine shared this recipe with me years ago and we’ve been enjoying it ever since.
Chocolate Zucchini Cake
Ingredients:
½ cup butter
½ cup oil (or use part applesauce to cut fat)
1 ¾ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
½ cup sour milk (can sour good milk with a teaspoon of vinegar)
2 ½ cups flour
6 Tablespoon baking cocoa
1 tsp. soda
pinch salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ t. ground cloves
2 cups choc. chips ( I usually use less)
½ teasp. baking powder
2 cups finely shredded zucchini
nuts (optional – I don’t usually use them)
Directions:
Beat butter, oil, eggs, vanilla and sour milk. Mix dry ingredients and add to
creamed mixture. Beat well, stir in shredded zucchini.
Pour batter into greased and floured 13x9x2 pan, sprinkle with the chocolate chips and bake 325 degrees for 55 minutes.
I usually pour the batter into two 8×8 pans and freeze one for later. This cake freezes well!
Best way to enjoy this cake is warm with a little ice cream!
It’s not fall yet on the calendar but it sure feels like it. Our nights are getting chilly and the forecast for this week is for cooler days too! I don’t mind as I feel much more invigorated when the days are cooler. I seem to get a lot more done outside. One of the first chores is to get the tomato cages put away in the barn.
Cages to be moved to the barn.
There is still a lot to be done in my gardens. The dead seedpods need to be cut back along with the dead flower stems. Eventually I’ll be cutting the hostas, daylilies and iris back to the ground but for now I’ll just cut back the dead stems and neaten up the garden beds.
Dead seedpods to be cut.
Believe it or not I still have a lot of blueberries ripening up. I go out every other day and check our bushes. The chickens are always so curious; they love it when I throw them an occasional blueberry!
Chickens are always close by when I’m picking blueberries!
I’ve been picking beets too. There are still a few left in the garden. I love cold beets on my salad!
There are still some carrots waiting to be picked. I like to leave a few in the garden until we have our first frost; it sweetens them up a bit.
Still a few carrots in the garden.
I’ve finally been able to pick a few ears of corn. They are so delicious!
September harvest
Now that most of the tomato plants are pulled I’ll use one of the raised beds to plant our garlic. One large raised bed full of garlic seems to be just enough to get us through until the next harvest.
Planting garlic is so easy. I’ve been growing our own garlic for the last couple of years and I don’t know why I never tried it before that! I find that garlic is one of the more satisfying plants to grow in the garden. Once the garlic bulbs are planted there is not much more you have to do. Planting the garlic is very easy. Prepare your garden bed and break the garlic bulbs into individual cloves.
Garlic broken into cloves.
I plant the hard necked garlic, which does very well for me.
Garlic in the spring.
Plant each clove about 4 inches into the soil, about 5-6 inches apart. Cover lightly with soil. They should be far enough into the soil so the frost doesn’t push them up.
Each clove is pushed into the soil.
Once the garlic is planted mulch the garden bed with straw. Nothing else to do but wait until next summer when it’s time to harvest! In the meantime I’ll be enjoying the garlic I harvested this year!
We’re all interested in saving money and there are numerous books and blogs to help us reach our goals. Maybe our goal is to get out of debit or pay off a car loan or even pay off our mortgage. Perhaps you just want to reject consumerism and trim the unnecessary expenses from your life. You can get by with a lot less than you think you need and manage the things you can’t cut (food, transportation to work) for much less than you’re paying right now.
What do you think the top 10 frugal tips are? After spending hours on the various websites and going through the numerous books on frugal living that I have here’s the list I came up with.
1.Ditch Cable TV. Cable TV is a huge expense, depending on your bill it might be $50-$100 a month just to watch TV! If you are still paying for Internet there are a number of other ways to access TV shows without cable.
HK Cable TV Settop Box QCR1032 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Several services provide streaming television shows, but to use them effectively you need a way to connect your TV to the Internet, either through a direct Ethernet connection or through a separate device, like a computer, Xbox or Playstation or Apple TV.
Popular TV streaming services include Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. Some of them offer current TV episodes, some only have past seasons. Deciding which one works best for you depends on whether you just want something to watch or really need to keep up with the latest shows. These services typically cost significantly less per month than cable, although if you need to purchase a computer or gaming system to access the service, add that cost to your evaluation.
If you are a big sports fan then this probably isn’t a solution for you. On of the biggest problems people have with getting rid of cable is the inability to watch live sports.
2. Use your local library. Take a trip to your local library and you’ll find all sorts of books and movies available free of charge.
3. Eat Out Less Often. Who doesn’t enjoy a nice meal out, it’s fun but far more expensive than eating at home. Make it a challenge to eat at home more often. Having a family meal several times a week is a great way to keep in touch with your spouse and your children and promote good family discussions.
Relaxing after a wonderful meal.
4. Group Your Errands I don’t know about you but we live quite a distance from the nearest large town. If I’m going to drive 40 minutes to go to the store you can be sure that I’m going to have a list of errands I will take care of on that trip!
5. Make your Own Cleaners Not only will this save you money but it will be healthier for you. Homemade cleaners work just as well as store bought cleaners and are a fraction of the price. You can make your own laundry detergent, hand soap, window cleaner and all purpose cleaner just to mention a few.
Homemade Cleaners
6. Start saving your change. Take an old piggy bank or a glass bottle and empty your change into it at the end of each day. At the end of the year take the change and deposit it into your savings account. You’ll be surprised at how the change adds up.
7. Don’t always purchase new clothes. Instead find a good local consignment shop and check it often. If you must purchase new clothes buy off season and check the sales rack.
A shirt from the sales rack or the consignment shop can look just as good as something you’d pay full price for.
8. Make a wait list. If there is something that you really want wait at least three days or longer. Give yourself time to think about whether you really need it or not. Shop online and see if you can find it cheaper elsewhere.
9. Pay your bills on time! Use a calendar alert so you don’t miss important deadlines like paying taxes!
Bills
10. Pay for your groceries in cash! I can guarantee you will never overspend on groceries if you are paying in cash. It means to have to keep a running tally as you go through the store but you will think twice before putting an item in your cart that is not on your list.
There are numerous other ways to save money. The important step is to decide today that it’s time to take your finances under control and move forward. It’s a wonderful feeling to know your bills are paid and you have money in the bank!
Nancy on the Home Front 