Great Ideas Need a Home!

I realized as I was baking bread yesterday, that baking and cooking and the quality of each depends more on technique than anything! You can take a perfectly good recipe and butcher it by not using the correct techiniques in baking. My intent is to blog about the recipes I find that are great, how I made them--what worked and what didn't as well as just other helpful things I come across as I strive to make life simple and organic and use less waste. I am jumping into the world of gardening for the first time, learning how to use a charcoal grill, and homeschooling my precious girlie! Follow along with me if you wish and see what God has in store for me in the next few months :)

I have plans for a 5x20 foot garden this summer to save money on produce over the summer and give us all a good reason to be outside daily. Mother Earth News has an entire article on how to do it, and how the woman (author of Edible Landscaping) saved around $700 on produce in one summer! I have a charcoal grill I'm going to learn how to use, with hopes of re-creating a fantastic recipe from my brother Dustin. It's a honey chicken marinade that you grill with lots of peppers, onions and mushrooms! YUMMY! More on that later!

This year is going to be an adventure as I move forward into learning new things and actively repurposing things around the house. I've already began saving up egg cartons for seedlings and have high hopes for what is to come. My only stumbling block is that I promised myself I would organize my house first--which has 2 spaces left for sorting. The storage area upstairs and the basement! So before spring arrives I'll be racing to accomplish those two tasks without letting the rest of the house go to shambles while I work.

An idea I ran across today that I want to mention before I forget was sewing your own produce bags for the grocery store! Now isn't that fantastic? No more "unrecyclable" produce bags beign thrown into the trash--and by creating your own you can customize the sizes!
Something to think about if you buy a lot of produce!

As for the bread I was baking yesterday, I'll let you know how it turns out. The first loaf I made last night was dense but edible. Today I warmed it in the microwave and dipped it in my tortilla soup, and that was delicious. I'm making the second loaf (this is a store it in the fridge recipe to make a loaf a day) tonight or tomorrow and we'll see if this one rises!

Positively Purposeful!
Melissa