2 things I can relate to...

Have you done your visiting teaching yet this month?

Why I do what I do

This is a video of a newscast in south Florida. It is about the Southeastern Guide dog program and really gives you an idea of what I do and why. the video takes a bit to load and it says 26 minutes but the part about Southeastern is the first 8 minutes. So if you have the time I would love for you to watch and see what I do and why I love it and get such a great satisfaction about my time and effort.The Couple at the end Bob and Mary are actually in my group.




This is another shorter video of a girl and her Guide from Southeastern named ANDRE. He was raised by my Area Coordinator Rita.

Good Question

Well I already got my first question about the Laundry Soap and I thought it was a good one. The question was How well does the soap work and does it leave your clothes dingy.Since using the soap I have not noticed any problems with the darks or towels etc. However Cr and I did see a bit of dinginess in our whites.The issue was easily solved though by filling your washer with hot water and adding the laundry soap and a few cups of powder cascade. Stop the wash and let your whites soak for about 20 to 30 minutes. Then run the load as normal. This should fix any dinginess and you don't have to do this during every load, just when you notice a bit of dinginess. Cr and I also like using fabric softner. I have a downy ball that we use. It gives the clothes a pleasing smell and obviously softens them. Softner is not too expensive and a big bottle of it lasts a long time. This is also what I use for the dryer sheets. If you find your darks getting faded or dingy you could always try a color bleach too.I always have a stain stick hanging around too. I have 3 kids and they get dirty, even with store brands a stain stick was required for some of their clothes. The costs involved with buying a few of the helpers to the soap etc. is minimal and they tend to last a long time so the cost of them is spread out. Well it has worked great for us and when I first started I had to buy a box of borax for 2.00 a box of Washing soda for 2.25 and since making our own soap I have bought 2 bars of Zote at 99cents each. So a total of 6.25 cents.I have not had to buy the borax or washing soda since and still have probably several months worth left. The only thing I have to buy more of is the zote because it only makes 3 batches of soap each. I have not bought store brand Laundry soap in 4 months. I used to buy laundry soap at 10-12 dollars a bottle ( Gain) and I usually had to buy 2 a month. So in my mind in the 4 months I have been doing my own I have saved $73.75. Wow. Definitely worth it to me. Hope this helps answer the question and encourages a few of you to try it.

Food Storage and New Recipes

WARNING: this is a long post, keep reading if you are interested in some great recipes and ideas for food storage including laundry soap. If you don't care you can skip it.

The last few years I have been so focused on Food storage but I have not had the financial resources to sustain building a food supply. Our tax return has blessed me with the ability to start our food storage. I have been so excited. So the first thing is I have been trying out new recipes and ways to save money and be more independant of stores supplies. I know I have told you all before that I am making my own laundry soap and I have a new way of making my own reusable dryer sheets. Not only is that a great help to the planet because I am not using waste but it saves a great amount of money because dryer sheets are not cheap. I have also been getting together with a few great friends these last few weeks to experiment with different recipes and ways to make my own foods. We have done Flour tortillas, corn tortillas, and tried our own granola bars. The flour tortillas were great. I did not get any pictures of those because I forgot. The corn tortillas we tried 2 different recipes. I don't eat corn tortillas for tacos but I like to fry them up and make my own chips out of them and then we dip them in salsa or eat them with our taco soup or taco dip. The first recipe we tried we got off of allrecipes.com !We chose this recipe to try because it uses corn meal and flour. The other recipes use corn masa mix. I thought that in a food storage situation you would most likely have corn meal not corn masa mix. I did think about it afterward and we probably could store corn masa mix just like you would flour so we may try another recipe with corn masa mix and see how it compares. Anyway, this recipe get mixed and then sits to rise. After that you roll it out and cook it. It came out funky shaped.. because I can't roll dough to save my life, but I did not need to worry about its shape because I was just going to cut it up and fry it anyway. I found this recipe cooked easy and when it was fryed it had a crunchier, thinner taste and acted more like a chip so it would be great for salsa or a taco dip.




The second corn tortilla Recipe was one I had in a food storage cookbook. It was mixed with almost an identical amount of ingredients but it was made into a very thin mix like a crepe mix. Then you cook it just like it were a crepe. My mistake was that I kept putting too much batter in the pan so the tortillas turned out thicker and more flour tortilla like. The interesting thing though was when I fried them they were slightly crispy on the outside but had a soft inside and when we dipped it in the taco dip it tasted just like a taco bell chalupa ( which I love) so even though I messed up it ended up being in our favor. So I will actually use this recipe again for taco dip because we liked the chalupa taste better than the chip taste.

Corn Tortilla Recipe
1 cup flour 1 cup corn meal 1 egg
1 tsp salt 3 Tbls oil water til thin. (about 1-2 cups )

This batter needs to be thin like crepes. You just heat up a skillet and cook like crepes.



I also took the time and found a taco seasoning recipe. I always buy taco seasoning pouches from the stores and they are always pretty reasonably priced at usually around 69 to 99 cents a piece. I thought that was pretty good and never bothered to try making my own. Well the other day I was making dinner ( tacos) and I got all the way to the part of putting in the seasoning, open up the cabinet and ..uh oh no seasoning. How did that happen? Anyway I was forced to make my own. I found the recipe on allrecipes.com again and I tried it. It is a little on the hot side so if you don't want it really spicey I would reduce the amount of chili pepper and red pepper flakes you put in. Otherwise it tasted just like the pouches ..if not better. So then I thought, price wise is it worth my time? So ( good teaching idea coming up) Chace and I used our math skills and put them to real practical use by calculating the cost of each spice serving in each homemade batch and figured out the cost of making your own seasoning pouch is only 26cents a pouch. The store is more than twice that. My smart son asked the question about my time and is it worth it so we decided to figure it out. I use a pouch a week on average because we love us some mexican food. Anyway when we took how much we saved ( based on a store brand at 89cents each)and mulitplied it out and found out that we will save on average about 81 dollars a year by making our own. WOW. How many more sauce mixes or spice mixes do I buy that I could actually make myself and possibly save a lot more money. I gaurantee I will be finding out=)The best thing was showing Chace that not only are there very practical ways to use all this math they are cramming down him at school but it also showed him very mathmatically that sometimes it takes a little more effort to do things yourself but it is definitely worth it. You should have seen his face when he realized how much of a difference it makes because before we multiplied it out he just saw it was only a 63 cent difference, why waste time..who cares right? Now he knows better.

The last thing we have done so far is our own Granola bars. I have to admit though that this recipe in my oppinion was not a success. It was too dry and when I tried another batch and increased the wet ingredients and decreased the cooking time it still did not make a difference. Too dry. So I was not going to bother giving you this recipe because we did not like it but I thought I would go ahead and show you the one we used so you would not bother or you could try and maybe I just did it wrong.(Granola Recipe)



I was trying to find a recipe that would equal the chewy granola bars from quaker. My kids love to munch on those and I hate all the extra suger etc. they add as well as I would love to save money and have a good recipe when we may not be able to go to the store and buy quaker. Anyway I just found another recipe from someones cooking blog ( new Granola Recipe)so I will try it and let you know if it turns out ok.

When we got our money the first thing we did was go to emergency essentials to get some food storage items. My first desire was a wheat grinder and the second was a quality dehydrator. We decided on the hand crank grinder because it was less expensive and lets be honest when it comes time to use food storage we probably wont have electricity so why pay hundreds of dollars for an electric one?



We went with a more expensive dehydrator hoping that it will work very well for what we need it to do. We want to dehydrate all kinds of fruits and vegetables and I had heard from friends and others that if you go cheap on the dehydrator it will probably not be able to do what you want it to do and that it is not a good resource for food storage.Cheap dehydrators also tend to have to run a lot longer to get the desired effect and therefore also use a lot more energy to run them.The biggest reason I wanted a dehydrator is because you see all these #10 cans of freeze dried foods from Mountain House and they want a good amount of money for them. So we would like to try and recreate their meals by dehydration and see if it works first of all and if it does, how much can we make and how much money do we save doing it ourselves. My 2 concerns are what can I safely dehydrate and how long is its shelflife. If anyone has a good resource for this information let me know because I am still looking for one.Our first experiment will be trying to recreate scrambled eggs with ham, gr pepper, red pepper and onion in it. It is obviously a breakfast item. Mountain house has it in a freeze dried 2 serving packet for 7.99 a pouch. I am hoping to make it ourselves for a lot less.



This is what we decided to purchase.This baby boasts " That it only costs 1 to 3 cents per hour to run. It has a unique computer-controlled heat sensor that analyzes temperature 60 times per second to ensure a stable drying environment.The Computer-controlled LEQUIP food dehydrator analyzes temperature constantly to ensure a stable food drying environment, and the temperature is adjustable between 93° and 158° F. There is no more technically advanced dehydrator than the L'EQUIP." That is the companys own words and part of its description. Amazing huh. Well it should arrive in the mail in the next few days and I will be trying it out. I will update everyone on how well it works and whether or not I would recommend it. It also comes with a 12 year warranty so hopefully that means the company stands by their product.

Anyway I have had requests before so I decided to add in the recipe for Laundry soap on my blog. This was in a food storage cookbook that my good friend from church got for me. We love it. It is so fast and easy to make and it really does save you a lot of money.

You need:
A 5 gallon bucket ( you can get them from Home depot in the paint department.When I got mine it was on sale for 3 dollars)
a bar of ZOTE soap. ( you can get this in the laundry isle of your local supermarket)
Borax powder ( this is also in the laundry isle)
Arm and Hammer Washing Soda ( this is not baking soda. I could not find this at walmart but I did find it at a local grocery store in the laundry isle)

Recipe:
1/3 bar of ZOTE
1/2 cup washing soda
1/2 cup borax

Instructions:
Grate the soap and separate it into thirds. Put 1/3 of the bar into a saucepan. Add 6cups of water and heat it stirring occasionally until the soap melts. Add the washing soda and borax and stir until dissolved.( I would add these gradually or they get stuck to the bottom of the pan and do not dissolve as easily.)Pour 4 cups of plain hot water into your 5 gallon bucket. Then add your soap mixture and stir. Now add another 1 gallon and 6 cups of water and stir again. Let the soap stand for 24 hours and it will gel. It will not be a solid gel but will look like an egg drop soup.It is also a low sudsing soap so if you don't see suds that is ok. You use 1/2 cup per load.

Cr and I use 1 cup per load and I make it in double batches.It is up to you how much you put in your load and how much you want to make at a time.A double batch of the soap fills the 5 gallon bucket and then you don't have to make it as often. It only takes about 15 minutes to make from start to finish and it ends up costing about 2 cents a load compared to 35 to 50 cents( depending on the brand soap you buy)per load.

This is the 5 gallon bucket I use



This is what the gel will look like. It really does look alot like egg drop soup.







I hope I did not bore anyone but if you braved the post and read it then you must have been interested. I hope it helps and I hope to have more posts with recipes and food storage finds.I have felt so strongly the last few years about this. I know it is the Lord telling me this needs to be a priority in my life so I have decided to make it one. So Happy food storaging to me and you=)

What?

So as I sit here I think about things, people, places and life in general. Then I thought what if I sit here and really pay attention to all the weird mind wanderings..what does all my brain power go into thinking about. So I thought I would write a few as they come to me like ... Why is Shaylyn always so hungry, its not like I don't feed her.I can't believe valentine's day is on Saturday.
I have no idea what to do for Cr especially since I am broke. A card and a kiss should do I think. AHHH Elmo's voice on the TV is giving me a headache.Where did Sabrina go? She better not be getting into the food bucket again. What am I going to do for dinner tonight?Oh I just looked at the time...my friends should be over any minute. We are having a playdate and the moms are making valentines cookies.I need a new Vacuum..mine sucks..oh wait actually it doesn't suck=)hence the reason for needing a new one!!Can you believe a friend of mine wrote down her thoughts for 15 mintues. I don't think I have that many thoughts in that long. I would be embarassed to say how long I wrote my thoughts because it would show how badly my brain functions. I love game nights with our friends,I wonder what games we are going to play this week.Oh my friends are here. Happy cookie making to me!

10 Years

So as of last friday Feb. 6th Cr and I have been married for 10 years. I can hardly believe it has been that long. They say time flies when your having fun.Wow I can't tell you what a diffucult road it has been to get to this point.In comparison to now we were just babies when we got married. We have grown so much and are truly learning how to be an eternal couple. I love Cr so much. I can't imagine my life without him, good and bad. We went out and celebrated on Saturday. We went to a shop called IKEA. Some of you may know it and others may not but it is a very cool home furnishings store. I could not believe how inexpensive most of their stuff is compared to other stores. We had a great time dreaming about remodeling our kitchen and some other fun things. Then we went to a Japanese steakhouse where they cook on the grills right in front of you. That was awesome. The food is amazing and just the overall experience is cool. There was some significance for us too. We had gone to a Japanese steakhouse for our 1rst anniversary and then this past weekend for our 10th. We said the next time we go will be for our 25th=).
TO MY LOVING HUSBAND A FEW THINGS i LOVE ABOUT YOU:

1. I love your smile and your silly little laugh
2. I love waking up with you
3. I love that you are my best friend
4. I love that you have so many dreams and great ideas especially when they are the same as mine.
5. I love that you are a worthy preisthood holder and you bless our family
6. I love that you go to work for us every day
7. I love that you love your family and care about us more than anything
8. I love it when you cuddle with your kids, it reminds me of how much you care for us
9. I love your crazy Afro, even if you swear its not a 70's thing=)
10. I love your backrubs
11. I love that you think I am the most gorgeous person even if I don't

I could go on all day. I love you Cr and I look forward to many, many more anniversarys together. Happy 10th anniversary.