Eggs and garbanzos for breakfast!

Bear had eggs and garbanzo beans for breakfast.
... She enjoys talking with her foods before she eats them all up.

Cottage cheese at home, no carrageenan!

Found out tonight just how easy it is to make cottage cheese at home. . . Which is a great usage of all the milk Cora gets us :)

Take a gallon of your favorite percentage of milk and heat it to 180 degrees fahrenheit, stirring most of the time to prevent scalding. Once at that temperature, add 3/4 cup of vinegar -white or apple cider, again, your choice.
Stir in the vinegar and remove from heat. Let rest (i.e. Walk Away from it, go fold clothes or let the dog out or make a sandwich) for ten (10) minutes.

Pour into strainer lined with cheesecloth.
(You can put the strainer over a pan or bowl to catch the whey for drinking, watering plants, or other things I'm still leaning about)

Rinse with cold water, after removing the bowl slash pan that was under the strainer.
Let drain, add salt or seasonings if you desire, and eat.

You can add a little milk or cream to the curds, too.

This cottage cheese doesn't come out in neat little squares, but it tastes just as good - or better -because the only ingredients are milk and vinegar! :)

It's a great way to put your extra milk (if you get free milk with WIC or a food pantry) to good use.

New Favorite Sandwich Bread.... (recipe at the end, if you can stand it!)

For a few years now I have been making bread in my bread machine.  That bread machine (inherited from my mama) lasted until this past fall, when it went spazzo on me. We ventured to the mall in hopes of finding a new one, and finally scored a great deal on a little Sunbeam with 12 options (including dough, jam, and cake!).    I started cranking out bread again, happily knowing I was feeding my family healthy food with no extra ingredients or hard-to-pronounce additives.

Fast forward (rewind?) to about a month ago when we started getting excessive amounts of milk, what with the milk vouchers we got at our local food pantry and the 4.5 gallons a month that I qualify for with our WIC checks. .... and then I got diagnosed with gestational diabetes, meaning that milk-by-itself was out of the question.   I figured out that I could turn all that "undrinkable milk" (even more so since my husband can't drink milk without feeling ill afterwards) into delicious yogurt. 

So I started cranking out yogurt by the (huge) crockpotfull. I made some of that yogurt into yogurt cheese, and strained some further to a more Greek-yogurt consistency.  Just this last week, I combined 3 quarts of my Greekified yogurt with 2 cans of pumpkin puree, about 4 tablespoons of brown sugar, and a good helping of pumpkin pie spice. As I watched my handy KitchenAid mixer (an investment that has proved its worth over and over!) blend all the fun together, it came together beautifully smooth and tasted just like pumpkin pie! 

... The only downside of all this yogurt is there're only two of us at home to eat it. So now I get to start freezing it in baggies and such and make my own go-gurts :)   

.... add to that the vast amount of whey that is left after straining my 4 quarts of yogurt:   Each gallon of milk ends up making 2 quarts of Greek (thicker) yogurt and 2 quarts of whey.  

What to do with allll that whey?? 

whey'll, ..... 

I froze about 6 ice cube trays full of whey to put in baggies to add to soup later, and found that I can also add it to bread. 

So to experiment, I took my favorite bread-machine recipe and switched things up a little.  Just out of the oven, and husband already ate a slice with NOTHING spread on it! :)  

Here we go!  

Ingredients: 

Add to pan: 

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup ground oatmeal 

2 1/4 teaspoons yeast 

2 tablespoons white sugar 

1 teaspoon salt

Then add (also to pan): 

1/4 cup (plus a tablespoon or so more)  olive oil

1 cup whey (to replace the water in the original recipe, and add more nutrients!) 

Gently stir ingredients together (I use a melamine chopstick) to make sure nothing gets left behind on pan walls, and put in bread machine on the sandwich setting. 

Go do something productive or restful for about 3 hours, and try not to eat the whole thing as soon as it's done (because it's hot). :)  

I like to store my awesomesauce bread in a 2-gallon Ziploc bag :) 

new waters

As it turns out, I qualify for WIC because of our tiny human that's taken up residence in my abdomen.   I wasn't really sure what to expect of the program, but our income was just low enough that we "got in."   The process was relatively easy-  bring a few paystubs, our IDs, and proof that said tiny human existed. ...  First time really being identified as a "family of three" -  even though most places wouldn't count an unborn child as a person (for discounts and such), WIC did. It was encouraging to have someone other than the church acknowledge our little one as "counting."

It is humbling being "part" of this government-sponsored program, but humbling in a good way - we're in-between jobs right now, and I know we need to be very, very frugal with the finances God has given us as we wait on His timing. I truly believe He allowed us to make "just enough" to qualify - really, we're only a thousand-or-so dollars away from the cutoff - for WIC and still be able to pay for some of our loans. It's allowed us to be able to bless other people financially as well with the few dollars that could have been spent on milk or eggs.

Then this morning we took another step of trusting God's provision, if you could call it that-  the woman who set us up with WIC told us about a free food pantry (not income-based, just free for residents of our county) just down the road from us. . . So we ventured downtown and parked at a meter - 25cents for a half an hour - culture shock for this city girl :p - then went inside to sign in and sit in the waiting room. We only waited for about 40 minutes as people were "called back" to get their groceries and such. The atmosphere was so much fun - people either knew each other or acted like they did. There was a Korean War veteran, an Army vet, a couple with a yearling, a gaggle of old ladies, and a Sophia(from the Golden Girls)-act-a-like, as well as many, many mustaches.  (I told David I felt left out that I didn't have one!). We amused ourselves by watching (among all these people) a tiny chihuahua and its owner across the street at a bike shop. When we got called back, all the volunteers were very friendly and "got us through" quickly.  Fun fact of the day - we got at least a pound and a half of venison!  ... I remember one of David's coworkers telling us that the farmers and hunters in the area donate their deer meat) It was a really neat experience, and we can go back each week if we need to!    God really is good, and He's provided so much!



Additionally, we got to go to a baby shower - for our very own tiny person!  Our church family here threw us a shower - announced it on the 13th, and held it the 20th. It was so much fun - a bring-a-dish-to-pass meal (that's more fun to say than "potluck") that they call a "Clean Culinary" because each family is to bring their own place settings. They had a baby food guessing game - I did pretty well, and the pastor's daughter - 14 years old - made such great faces when tasting the food .... much like babies do! :D  The other game they did was a drinking contest - apple juice in baby bottles. I couldn't get the cap off my bottle, the college-kid David just started chugging (ha!), and the 96-year-old sweetheart Thelma kept taking the whole top off to swig "when no one was looking."   I just sipped it occasionally and encouraged Thelma :D  ... then I had to go wash my mouth out with some of my sweet tea from all that baby food and juice haha.

Then David came and sat by me and we opened presents since our little one can't reach through my tummy and open them on his/her own yet.  Baby was given so much neat / useful stuff!  Some of it was from the registry, and some of it was "from" the registry found elsewhere, and some of it was just neat stuff that we didn't register for! :)  Baby is already so blessed, and not even born!  They gave us several cute outfits, hats, mittens, blankets (one homemade swaddler, and a stroller blanket, too!), an umbrella stroller for when baby's bigger, lots of books - a set of Planes board books that Papa already read - a whale bathtub we had on the registry, some diapers, wipes, and wash / lotion, ...

All we really need is our stroller/carseat combo - this one - to take baby home. . . since we have a Pack 'N Play already, but we'd like a crib, mattress, and changing dresser, as well. ...   We're well on the way to purchasing our travel system with gift cards from baby's fans :)
We're so grateful that so many people have been praying for us and gifting us with things for this little one. God truly is good, and we want to remember that to tell our little squishy every day.