Five or six loaves at a time.

I use my bosch mixer for this recipe. It is big enough to handle it.

This is how I cut my bread. It is just a bread slicer guide. You stick the bread on and it has grooves that show you where to put your knife through. I just bought mine at a thrift store. I have seen many at the thrift stores. I just use a bread knife to cut it, so it doesn't smoosh it. I have seen cheap bread knives like the one I use at The dollar tree, for a buck.

We make our own wheat bread. The recipe we use makes 5 loaves at a time. One recipe and cooking time lasts us all week and beyond. Yes we eat lots of peanut butter and jellies. I freeze my loaves of bread and use them whenever we need them.

I use my Bosch mixer and this recipe:

2/3 cup honey

2/3 cup oil

5 1/2 cups warm water

3TB. SAF instant yeast

1 1/2 TB. salt

16-18 cups fresh whole wheat flour (I never use more than 16 cups though)

3 TB. dough enhancer

Combine the oil, honey, yeast, dough enhancer, salt, warm water and 5 cups of fresh whole wheat flour in bosch mixing bowl. Allow this to sponge for 5-15 minutes while you prepare your pans. Add to the above mixture additional flour until the dough begins to clean the sides of the bowl. Knead for 6 minutes in a bosch mixer. Be careful not to allow the dough to become too dry by adding too much flour at this point. Oil your hands and form dough into loaves, rolls, pizza crust or pastries. Let it rise until doubled in size (30-60 minutes) and bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Bread is done when it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom and the bottom and sides are golden brown.

This is Debbie Bartons recipe and I bought my wheat grinder and bosch from her. She is a wonderfully, sweet homeschool mom and she is always at homeschool convention. You can check out her website at http://www.sonrisewg.com/ I get the dough enhancer, bread bags and wheat from Debbie. I buy my yeast at Sam's though, it is a little cheaper, and you get two big deals of it (though it is not SAF yeast it is Fleishmans).

Feeding the Freezer

In our house it is hard to cook dinner everyday. So I like to do what I call "feed the freezer." Some people call it batch cooking. It's where you do a bunch of cooking and freeze meals to use for another day. This method works well with making "all of one sort of meat", such as cooking up a bunch of chicken and making meals out of it. Or making a bunch of ground beef meals. I would love to "once a month" cook but find this method works better for me. As my little ones just can't seem to function without me for a whole day while I am cooking.

This week a friend told me about a great sale price on bone-in-chicken. So I stocked up and have made my first batch of meals out of it. I boiled the chicken and made broth, seasoned the broth with sauteed onions, celery, and added some chicken bouillion. Then I deboned and chopped up the chicken. I froze the broth with some chicken in big ziploc bags and made 5 meals of chicken noodle soup. I will just boil some egg noodles on the day we eat the chicken noodle soup and add them to it. Quick and easy meals, ready to go for another day. And I had 3 small ziploc bags of chopped up chicken leftover to freeze ready to pull out for another meal. I will probably use this chicken for quick tacos and just have to make some mexican rice or refried beans to go with it.

I froze the ziploc bags full of soup on a flat cookie sheet so it would be easy to stack later.

So that's 8 meals of cooking mostly done. I plan on making fresh rolls or biscuits on chicken noodle soup day, as that will make a nice fun extra. And maybe experiment with a few new recipes for cornbread for variety.

I am in the midst of trying to downsize our food budget. So in our household for the month of January and maybe beyond, we are declaring 1 day a week as chicken noodle soup day, and 1 day a week as beans and cornbread day. That is 8 dinner meals out of 30 for the month that are extremely cheap. I would say I have cut my dinner food budget almost by a 3rd, just by doing these two things. But I will forge on and try and share other things we do.

***So a great tip to share would be buy meats on sale and plan, make meals out of them.