Bread, butter and pest control

Well, I did it. I made my own butter. I did cheat a bit though. I used the Magic Bullet. Not exactly the self-sufficient homestead way to do it, but I needed to know what it would look like. I currently have a jar of cream sitting out over night so I can shake it up tomorrow, the non-electrical way.

I was surprised how excited I felt when I made the butter. Even though I only made a small amount, it really felt good to make something of my own, with organic cream that came from a local Ontario farm. And because we don't use butter all that much, it is something that I can keep on doing without it getting over whelming. I've been experimenting with different types of cream to see which one works best. Once I find out which one produces the best butter, I'll post how I did it. My next attempts will be with whole milk (milk that hasn't been homogenized) and a high fat cream then I started out with. I'm excited to see which one works best.

My next project this weekend was to make bread. I had made bread in my teen years quite often so I felt pretty safe taking this step. While we eat almost exclusively whole grain breads, I made a white bread because it was what I knew, and because I wanted to get back in the swing of kneeding without having to worry about the actual recipe, since I had followed it before. The bread turned out great, and it wasn't as time consuming as I remember it. I was able to make the actual dough in about 20 minutes, and then it is all about it sitting around to rise, so I did other things. Definitely something that I can continue to do with a toddler and a baby on the way.

My pride and joy for the weekend, after Husband and Mini Me attacked it for dinner:


Feels so good to feel your family quality food :D

Next thing on the agenda for this weekend was the vegetable garden, which used to be a flower garden. The entire thing is only three feet by eleven feet, but we will be transplanting the roses and tulips to take over that part of the garden as well. That will make it 20 feet long.


Unfortunately, the whole bed is totally over grown with Star of Bethlehem bulbs and sprouts. And most of the bulbs are only about 3-4mm wide. And yes, they look like little sperm. Millions and millions of little sperm. In my soon to be vegetable garden. Just lovely.

If I'm lucky, which only happened twice in two hours, I find clumps of them together, but it is pretty rare. They also mulitply like rabbits, so I know that I'm going to be pulling these out of the garden for years to come. I just hope it doesn't affect the veggies any. I guess we shall see.

One more picture of my buddies, the worms. I saw tons of them, which made me so happy! Here is one that was crawling back in to the dark after I disturbed it while turning up some of the blasted bulbs.