Clarifying Butter

Yesterday the store had fresh Butter on sale so I thought why not can some butter.

The first step is to take the butter out and put it into a pan to melt down slowly make sure you stir so it doesn't scorch on the bottom of the pan.

when the Milk products surface you simply scim the foam off of the top.do this till you can see the butter below. The milk solids can be saved and used on toast etc afterwards just cool and use like normal.
Once you have skimmed the solids off of the top. turn off the stove and let cool. the additional solids will settle  at the bottom of the pan. then gently pour the clarified butter into another pan.
From here you simple pour into the jars you plan on canning wipe the top of the rim and place in a pressure canner.
Can at ten pounds of pressure for sixty minutes.
This product is normally sold as Ghee but can be canned much cheaper when butter is on sale.
Happy canning. great for your food storage and great to eat..

Easy Mosquito Control

The pesky little critters are enormous around here. Reminding us of the movie Jurassic park.. Now what to do with them.. Boy.. Well we decided to make a fine and easy trap to catch them.
Taking an old Soda bottle.We prefer the two liter Coke Bottle.
At the top just before the top starts to narrow you take a scissors and cut around the bottle. This is the funnel.
turn this so it is inverted into the bottle. Paint the bottle black
take 1/2   cup of brown sugar
to 2 cups of water
mix the two together at room temperature add one package of baker's yeast
pour this into the coke bottle put the funnel in the top and tape around it set  in a spot secluded away from where you sit the sugar and yeast and water mix will produce co2 mosquito's are attracted to co2 and will fly into the bottle. replace every week to two weeks.
I will make and show you a more permanent trap in the near future but this one will get you started in mosquito control for now.

Waffle Stix

Today I had a request from the grandkids for my ( Famous to my grand children ) waffle sticks. We had purchased a wonderful waffle stick iron years before from www.amazon.com the waffle stick iron is made by hamilton beach company. the other one we have is from cuisnaart.
The kids go nuts over them. I have two recipe's for these.
The first one is
3 cups of flour
1 cup of sugar
1 Tbs of baking powder
1/2 tsp of baking soda
1/4 cup of oil
1 tsp of vanilla extract3 eggs
milk

spray the waffle stick or waffle iron with spray grease and  pre heat.
once made bag them for future use and freeze.
the grand kids love these and have me make them very often.
for a real treat use different types of flour I have used whole wheat flour and bran flour for a different approach.

Going Green

Biggest thing for us here at the old homestead is making a gentle path along our way through life. A few few years ago we had the thought what will we be remembered for. I was a work a holic until my health made me slow down. So the kids don't really have many memories of me from their youth. Well we walked into our home and found on the tv a group of leaders in the energy industry saying that in order for them to keep energy at present demand increases they would have to raise the energy costs between one hundred and four hundred percent in the next ten years after changing the channel we seen our president saying that he thought the answer to the USA's deli-ma was to lean towards green energy. After thinking about this it all made sense somehow. Not saying that global warming is the fault of mankind or nature made. But thinking that if as a society we did adopt his plan and put a small system on every home in our state alone the cost would be approximately the same as three of the larger wind turbines create one point five million new jobs and have a total possible output of seven hundred mega watts of power rather than nine.
Our Mission was made. This is what we would do to leave out mark and show our kids and grand kids what we thought was the right thing to do for the future of society.
The plan is to teach the grand kids
 how to do several different things all dealing with going green. What I will attempt to do here is show a series of different things from solar projects, home canning, food dehydration, and growing your own food either in raised bed gardens to stationary apartment balcony gardens vertical and horizontal.
I will make my weekly addition and post photo's of what we have going on here at the old homestead.