7. Find 5 interesting places/events to visit in local area (4/5)
My husband took the kids to the local festival for some fun while I spent a couple of hours making pizza sauce from tomatoes in the garden. They had fun.
16. Make something we want out of stuff laying around/trash rather than buying. (4/5)
Been working on an item in the backyard. It is now useable, but not finished. Used an old bunkbed, placed it on two pallets, put some scrap wood cut to size in where the bottom bunk mattress would be (those were trashed... full of mice), and am cutting a bunch of branches from the trimming I did around the farmyard this summer into sticks to cover the sides to make it like a 'tree fort' of sorts. Not sure how I'll do the top yet, as I need more wood to cover that so it can be another seat or lookout, but for now it works at the fireside for sitting.
22. Finish cleaning barn office and redoing the awards/putting them up in frames
I aim to work on this during the week yet. I finished the sitting/kitchen area and got the frames up, but the actual office desk (which we started and got somewhere on earlier in the year) is full of random piles of things again and needs more work than I thought. Also, since this has 4 zones, I've completed 2 of them now... the kitchen/seating area, and the shower/sink area. The laundry/storage area needs doing and the actual office zone. Both were started. Both had a lot done. Both have been undone somewhat as they are more 'used' it seems. I guess I didn't have as much of a maintaining plan in place for those areas.
27. Fix floor properly in bulk tank room
Hoping to work on this sometime this week.
42. Read entire Bible in a year (26/66 books)
I'm just finished Psalms and starting 2 Corinthians.
54. Try 10 new recipes (8/10)
I made a zucchini boat recipe that used cottage cheese. Recipe can be found here. It was really good! My oldest two kept getting more. We used 4 rather large zucchini a friend gave us and only had half of one left at the end of the meal (we served it with sausage). It would be a lot quicker if you already had the cottage cheese rather than making it yourself.
Also, not sure if it should count or not, but I made tomato sauce from my garden tomatoes (since that is it's own item, I won't put it in here).
Today I made a crockpot cabbage soup using all sorts of garden veggies. It looks and smells delish. We'll see how it tastes. Since I had so much cabbage, I made a 'second batch' by prepping all the veggies and spices and putting them into a freezer bag for later. Recipe can be found here.
Edit to add: I made two new recipes before Sept 1. Apple juice (from crab apples the size of cherries. Just take off the stems, wash, chop in half, boil water and cover for a few minutes before turning off and letting sit for a number of hours with a cinnamon stick and a large scoop of honey mixed in. The kids love it! And the chickens love the leftover apple pieces.) The second recipe was a creamy zucchini sauce. I got more zucchini we needed to use up, so this is what I did last night for supper.
93. Make salsa or pizza sauce from scratch. DONE
Spent two hours on this on the 26th. Whew! Biggest problem is how tiny my tomatoes are. They just didn't want to grow to full size and they are starting to ripen already. I was afraid of them going bad, so I blanched them, peeled them, pureed them, cooked them down and then saw all the little seeds and strained them out. I'd do that before cooking next time, to be honest. Added my spices and my 2 lbs of tomatoes (which was probably about 50 of them, it was ridiculous the amount of work that took) became 2 cups of pizza sauce... which promptly went on the pizzas I made for supper that night. Tasted great! Too much work for tiny tomatoes, though. I'd do it again if my tomatoes were larger. Most of mine were barely bigger than cherry tomatoes! Here is the site I used for a recipe.
95. Successfully grow a garden
Been harvesting tomatoes! The pepper plants have little tiny peppers starting. I am not getting any cucumbers this year. My mother in law did a lot of gardens with the kids and yesterday they brought me 30 corn cobs which I made 18 for supper, and the other 12 blanched and froze (1.5 kgs of frozen sweet corn! Yes!). Making soup currently using one of the cabbages she had me take from the garden (she has quite a few... I honestly don't know what else to do with cabbage besides soup as my kids don't like cole slaw). Also used beet leaves, celery, and for the first time in years we have carrots in the garden! Trying to use up all the giant zucchini she gave me. That thing is giant! Half of it was 4 cups chopped (after removing the seeds and the peel). I still have another quarter of it in my fridge. Been chopping it up and cooking with eggs and ham and cheese at breakfast lately. Used half of it today in the cabbage soup... 2 cups for freezing, 2 cups in the crock pot.
15 down, 86 to go! We are 132 days in.
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