We like making our own homemade baby food from sweet potatoes. We put in the effort so we can control the ingredients and ensure our boy William Tell has foods without a lot of chemicals we can’t pronounce.
For example, today’s recipe for sweet potatoes is….
Wait for it…
Sweet potatoes and water.
Making it could not be simpler – peel and cube sweet potatoes, boil until soft, mush and serve.
I find it is easy to use a food mill to get a consistent texture, but you don’t have to do so.
Our boy likes it, and it saves quite a bit in food costs.
Now that Genny is getting healthy, she constantly searches for healthy recipes. She is proud of the lifestyle changes she has made, and I can see a difference in he – both physically and emotionally. She is wanting to slim down some more before we get serious about another child. But I can see a new baby eating homemade food exclusively.
To be fair, homemade food is more time consuming to make than opening up those little jars, but it is not hard and does not take that much time to make.
I have always wanted to make my own pasta, and its been on my list for a long time, but I really didn’t want to mess with hand cutting my own noodles, and I did not want to buy a $50 dollar pasta machine.
However, while researching another project I happened to find a $20 sheet press for polymer clay that looks exactly like a pasta roller. Being the cheapskate I am, I started thinking about even cheaper ways to solve the problem when it hit me. Play Dough is Dough… A play doh fun factory is around 6 dollars, and if it didn’t work, my wife could use it in her class (she is a special educator that works with autistic children).
Here is my attempt to make an Improvised Pasta Maker from a play doh fun factory toy.
To test I just made a simple pasta dough recipe 2 cups flour, 2 eggs, knead until you have a ball of pasta dough.
I dug through the package to get the dough press and the two sliding bars with different sized holes and shapes.
After some experimentation, I found that the bar with the 4 small squares made the best compromise between shape and ease of use. If I tried to press the dough through the very small holes, the pressure created caused the dough to escape from every available orifice on the machine.
Once I had the noodles made, I simply dumped them in a pot of boiling water and cooked for about 3 minutes.
This works, but unless you want to make stars or some other funky shaped noodle, then I found it much easier just to hand cut the dough into noodles. But I think it was a neat experiment, and as I said in the video, once my boy gets to the age where he likes playing with play dough, we will recreate this experiment to start crossing over into cooking.
Here is a recipe for homemade baking powder, which is an essential ingredient in many baking recipes.
I add it because it can be cheaper to make it in bulk on your own (depending on if you can get cheap cream of tartar – a byproduct of wine making), and because many commercial baking powder products contain aluminum sulfate.
Homemade baking powder also keeps aluminum out of your food.
Ingredients:
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon corn starch (optional – used to reduce caking, which what the sulfate does)
Procedure:
Mix the baking soda and cream of tartar together until well combined.
Use immediately
If you want to store it, add a teaspoon of corn starch to the mixture, and stir.
This will absorb any moisture from the air, store in an air-tight container.
A lot of people may wonder why go through all the trouble to make something you can easily go to the store and buy and it is hard to explain to them.
Partly the reason is because most of the time homemade is more healthy, but that’s not the real reason.
Sometimes, homemade is cheaper – but that is not it either.
Homemade may be the only thing available in a disaster, and that is a great reason to know how to do it.
But its the same reason some people climb mountains – because it is there, and because I can.
While messing around on youtube I found the neatest youtube channel from a guy named meatmangary.
He had a couple of cool videos that I took and modified to try something new.
Basically the Meat Man cooked a cheeseburger using his waffle iron – since I had played with my waffle iron to make hashbrowns. I wanted to try this, however, since Gary had already done the cheeseburger I wanted to try something new.
What came to my mind was Chicken and Waffles…
This is my attempt at Waffle Iron Chicken
Would cooking ground chicken on the waffle iron and eating with syrup and waffle taste as good as it sounds.
Simple answer – yes…
What is important is to well oil the waffle iron, be patient and let it cook through before opening, and to make sure you don’t over-cook the chicken.
My wife liked this recipe and told me it’s something to make again – besides that – it is easy and doesn’t need a lot of cleanup.
This is an awesome recipe. I loved it, it was simple, and it was cool. Of course what I think cool is not what most would think was cool.
The recipe for green onion wraps is something I have not seen anywhere else, it’s not my original idea (a coworker at the prison’s girlfriend used to make them for him when her husband was out of town).
Whatever the source, these green onion meat wraps are great at parties and well worth making.
Even if I disagreed with my co-workers method of getting this recipe for this appetizer (sometimes known as a dried beef roll-up), I almost started rooting for the husband to go out of town, as these things are very good.
Functionally, they are a lot like my recipe for cowboy sushi. Which is to say they are a savory vegitable wrapped in sweet cream cheese and a meat. They also are something novel, which on first glance, seems to be questionable. However, like my sushi recipe, they are addictive once you try them.
This recipe is great tasting and both fun and easy to make.
Recipe for Green Onion Wraps
Ingredients:
Jar of dried beef (small 3 inch circles of sliced beef that are like an unflavored pepperoni/jerky)
Softened cream cheese
Bundle of green onions
Procedure:
Cut the roots off of the ends of your green onions
Place a large dollop of cream cheese on the center of a slice of dried beef
Center the end of the onion on the slice of dried beef (perpendicularly) and wrap the beef around the onion end
Eat buy inserting the whole blob of beef in your mouth and biting the onion in two – it tastes extremely good…
Alternatively I have found this site which describes an alternate recipe (which is easier, but not prettier, way of doing a similar thing)…
Hope you enjoy this.
