DIY Elderberry Syrup – it’s SO easy!

I’ve mentioned a few times recently on the Homstead Emporium facebook page that we’ve been making, and taking, Elderberry Syrup and many have asked how to make it, so I thought I’d share on the blog, just how simple it is!

DIY Elderberry Syrup Kit

 I first tried elderberry in lozenge form after reading about how it can aid in boosting the immunity, and overall health. I found some onsale at well.ca and thought I’d give it a try. I REALLY wanted to buy elderberry syrup, but the price was just way too high for our family of seven. With the small size of the bottles, we’d be going through one every day or two!

Then I met Delia, from Delia’s Pantry! She’s local, also moved to our area recently just like us, and also attends our church. She let me know that she had Elderberries in her new shop, Delia’s Pantry, and I could get them at a good price through her. As it turned out, she’s due any day with her second child and needed a postpartum stash, so we actually were able to work out a trade! What a blessing for us both!

My first batch, I simply used what I had on hand. Dried elderberries from Delia, cinnamon & ground cloves in my pantry. I didn’t have ginger, so I omitted it from my first batch.

Since then, Delia has brought in organic cloves, organic ginger, and quality cinnamon, so my next batch was MUCH nicer!

To make my syrup, I used the recipe found at wellnessmama.com

It’s as easy as putting all your ingredients, minus the honey into a pot. Bring it to a boil, simmer for a while, strain…

Add in your honey.

And you have GLORIOUS Elderberry Syrup!

It really is, that simple! And, the cost of making it myself is SO small that now, we can have Elderberry Syrup every day! When my youngest was sick with stomach flu last week, I added just a little to some ginger-ale (with real ginger in it) so that I knew she was at least getting SOME vitamins and energy!

Now I add it to ginger-ale as a refreshing treat for myself too.
A friend mentioned it’s great on pancakes too! At over 20$ for a tiny bottle, there’s no way we could do that. Now that I make it myself, we’ve got LOTS, so we’re going to try it! It sounds too delicious not to!

Delia’s Pantry and I have joined forces to offer simply DIY Elderberry Syrup making kits at Homestead Emporium! The kit comes with everything you need, except for the water and honey! A recipe is also included in the kit!

You can purchase the kit direct through Delia’s Pantry facebook page, or if you’re already familiar with shopping Homestead Emporium, you can purchase through us. Either way is fine with both of us! Delia’s got some other awesome things available as well, so it’s worth checking out Delia’s Pantry facebook page. Since she’s just recently opened shop, she’s still working on an actual online ‘storefront’ and with her second child due any day (her due date was a few days ago!) she may be just a little while getting that completed. If there’s anything you’re wanting from her, you can contact me as well and I can always ship for her, to you and combine the orders into one package! We see each other at least once a week, so that’s not a problem to combine from both our shops! It will be our pleasure to serve you the best we can!

Tea & health.

Like many others, I enjoy learning about healthy options. One of my latest learning adventures has brought me to herbs & berries etc. that I never thought of before.

First, I learned about Elderberries, and Elderberry Syrup. I had bought elderberry lozenges when I found them on sale and put them to the test over Christmas. Everyone around me had gotten the flu, but I didn’t. I can’t say for certain it was the lozenges, but I figured it was worth the effort to learn more. Through a friend, Delia of Delia’s Pantry, I learned how to make my own elderberry syrup and we now take it often! It’s so easy! I’ll share how on a blog post very soon.

Then Delia brought in Stinging Nettle Leaf, and I wondered why? Then I learned one of its benefits is helping pms. No need to research any further, I was sold and asked Delia to add it to my next order! I also liked what I read about dandelion, and decided to order a little to try also.

I’m not one to remember taking a lot of different things, but I’ve found one way to easily take all these new things I love.

Every morning I make myself a pot of tea!

I made up a personal blend. I start with my favorite loose leaf tea, cranberry fresh from TeaDesire.com
Then I add in some stinging nettle leaf, some dried dandelion root, and dried elderberries.

My teapot is one of my favorite thrift store scores! I had been looking for a heavy duty glass teapot for years!

I steep my tea for quite some time, then add in honey & elderberry syrup, stir well and allow it to cool. Once cooled, I pour it into a very large drink bottle and sip cool healthy tea all day!

I have a VERY hard time getting enough liquids into me, I don’t get thirsty for water, I don’t feel store bought juice is healthy, and I’m too busy to get in much hot tea, so this method works perfectly for me!

How about you? What are some Ways you’ve learned to add healthy herbs etc. into your life?

Ice Balloons? Ever tried it?

Last spring or summer I had seen this idea shared on Facebook and couldn’t wait to have cold weather so we could try it!

It’s simply balloons filled with water, and food coloring. We put them outside to freeze and hopefully before tonight’s birthday party we can peel the balloons off. They should look something like pretty ice marbles!

I’ll share ‘after’ photos later! Hopefully it works!

How to turn 1 chicken into 3 meals for your large family, plus 2 lunches for your hubby.

This is a quick and ‘dirty’ post!
I say quick & ‘dirty’ because I’m posting it from my phone, and using phone photos. Probably a big ‘no-no’ among real food bloggers but I’m not a ‘real’ food blogger!

Too often I don’t share tips, tricks, or daily goings on at the homestead because I just don’t always have time to snap great photos, edit, upload, and write a big long post! So I’m going to start doing more ‘quick & dirty’ posts from now on!

Every Tuesday my four girls have Taekwondo. It’s right around our usual dinner time! I like them to eat a little dinner before they go, but not a full meal or they will get cramps. Then by the time they get home at 7:20, they need a real meal so… I decided that Tuesdays would be Homemade Soup Tuesdays. This way they can have half a bowl before they go, and a full meal of soup with some bread, biscuits, or buns when they get home! Works great!

Right now we have an abundance of whole chickens in our freezer, often I’ll start with one of those. Today I realized that, like me when I first began making soups, maybe others don’t know what to do with a whole chicken! So I snapped some photos along the way because this way, is SUPER easy! And super frugal!

However, you do need to be ok with handling cooked chicken. With your bare hands.

First I start out in the am by simply putting a whole frozen chicken into a BIG pot of water, enough water to cover the chicken. Some might put spices in now but I give the scraps to our dogs & cats, so I hold off on adding anything. Nothing goes to waste this way!

I bring it to a boil and cook it hard for a while, about 30 mins or so. Then turn it down to medium heat for about another 1.5 hours or so, leaving the lid on. I’m aiming for a real good broth out of the chicken.
(You can also transfer it to the crockpot if you don’t want to leave it on the stove top.)

Once the chicken is well cooked and I’ve got a flavorful water left, I pull the whole chicken out of the pot of water, being careful not to let it break into a million bone-y bits!

I set the chicken aside on a platter to cool down.

Then I start to turn my water/soup base that’s left in the pot, into a real soup.

Today I added a large can of diced tomatoes, some baby carrots, left over peas from last nights dinner, chopped celery, onion, and spices such as poultry spices and anything else that sounds good. I also added a cup of barley. Last week I added noodles. Next time I’ll add wild rice.

If I feel there’s not enough flavor, I also add a little chicken soup stock. Since I make such a huge pot of soup, the flavor from one chicken doesn’t always seem to be enough otherwise.

This is my soup before adding the chicken meat.

I turn my pot on medium-medium high and bring it back to a boil. Let it boil for about 5 minutes and then I turn it down to low.

It’s time to get my hands dirty and tear apart the whole chicken! Yes, I use my hands. It’s the fastest and best way to get the job done well.

First I remove all the skin and set it aside for our dogs & cats. Boiled chicken skin is slimy and gross. You get get over it after a few times.

Then I remove obvious bones.

Next, I pull off the nice white meat, the chicken breasts ect. and set them on one dish for another meal.

Then I separate the garbage meat, from the meat suitable for my soup. Anything slimy, an unappetizing color, or just not pleasant looking goes onto the scrap dish.

Yuck to me, but a special treat for the pets!

This next plate full is what will go into the soup.

Some of the dark meat on top is close to being for the pets, but it just made the grade.

All I have left now is the empty carcass!

My two helpers get to clean up the juices and bits left on the plate!
(Never the chicken bones though, raw chicken bones yes, cooked chicken bones NO.)

And the good stuff goes into the pot for two meals worth of soup for the whole family, and one lunch for hubby to take to work. Sometimes some of the kids will have it for their lunch too.

The white meat I set had aside earlier is then divided up, some for another meal, and some for two chicken sandwiches for hubby’s lunch!

For the full family meal, one of us will either make chicken quesidilla, chicken wraps, chicken sandwiches, or any other chicken dish we can come up with! One of the kids will usually make the next meal from the left overs, since it’s so easy now that the meat for that meal has already been cooked!

And that’s how I turn one small whole chicken into 3 full family meals and at least a couple of lunches for this family of seven!

I know this post isn’t pretty, but hopefully it’s practical for anyone just learning how to make the most out of a chicken!

A checklist to share with you.

Trying to share a pdf with you all, we’ll see if it works. It’s an After Dinner Checklist.

The kitchen remains to be a bit of a sore spot for me at times. With seven of us living here, I guess I figure it really shouldn’t be all that difficult for the kitchen to simply remain clean at all times, or at least, be clean when we all head to bed each night!

I do realize that seven in the family, most of whom like to cook, bake, and spend time in the kitchen, will guarentee more MESS in the kitchen too, but the youngest in the family are now almost 13, and everyone else is older then that, so I figure there’s really no excuses any longer for any kitchen mess to REMAIN!

However, it seems some reminding is often needed and there’s not much I hate more in life then NAGGING! So I much prefer LISTS! They are silent, yet ‘in your face’, and when created beautifully, who can argue them?!

I found a similar list here: http://www.raisingarrows.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Nighttime-Kitchen-Checklist.pdf

But I wanted to change the list up a bit to suit our own personal needs, and to fancy it up a little. If something is going to hang in my kitchen, I’d like it to look at least a little ‘pretty’!

Let’s see if sharing it here on the blog works! I’ve never tried to share a pdf before!

AfterDinnerChecklist

And for yet another tip today, if you still haven’t been able to figure out the “how to’s” of pdf’s, down load openoffice.org! It’s wonderful! It turns anything I create into a pdf, which shares nicely via email etc.. When it was time for the eldest two to have resume’s made up, I helped and created them on openoffice.org and changed them up into pdf’s. They turned out so professional! And they both got the jobs they were aiming for, so I guess the resumes worked!

My weeks, in reality. Getting things done in the home.

I don’t REALLY spend all my days whining.  It’s too busy around here to do much whining. In my down time, like when I’m in my queen sized bed all alone at night, knowing my husband is alone in another bed, far away from me, wishing we could be together, that I do the most of of my whining.

Or in the morning before the kids are up, and I’m doing my devotions in front of the fire. I get all melancholy, stare at the fire, and find I have a hard time writing in my prayer journal because I feel like I’m writing the same things over and over again. Asking God to just let our family be together again. I try really hard to fill the pages with prayers about other things, prayers for other people, yet I find myself still coming back, in the end, every single day to, “Please, just bring our family together again… and let us get on with it already.”

In reality, my days between my morning devotions and my bedtime are busy and that’s probably a good thing. Who wants to have too much time to mope and whine?! I sure don’t!

Since about the middle of December my kids have been sick. This is very rare for us. So far, I’ve been able to fight it off. I’ve spent most of that time though FEELING like I’m fighting. Never feeling 100%, but yet not really feeling SICK either. Just dragged out, tired, like the way you feel when you’re in your first trimester of pregnancy (and no, there’s no way I’m pregnant, if God’s going to provide us with a miracle, it won’t be that one!) I’ve been fighting with no energy, never feeling all that great, and just needing sleep a lot more then I normally would, yet not actually having the time to get even enough sleep. This has been making it even more difficult to stay on top of everything in the home.

Most nights are spent up til after midnight, either working, or just because there’s not enough hours in a day to get it all done. I find I can’t get everything done early enough lately, but I also like to spend some time with the kids before they go to bed, and also have some down time of my own. This means I’ve been getting to sleep around 2-3 am most nights, or should I say, mornings?

This really isn’t such a great routine. I need to get out of it.

I shared about my breakdown a couple of weeks ago after the first of the year.
Well, one of the issues was trying to stay on top of this HOUSE, which is for sale, which people call or email me to want to VIEW, at any given moment! To say I detest living in a ‘show home’ would be putting it mildly. I am SO tired of having our home for sale! I want to just live my life, have my personal photos on the wall, and let my family be who they are!

My kids and I are NOT neat freaks. We’re not slobs either, but we ARE busy people, who spend a lot of their time being creative!

Did you know that most creativity brings about some mess with it?
And clutter?

BUT, I’ll be darned if having our home for sale is going to dampen my kids creativity and learning processes! These messes though, the continual messes, do kind of get a little over whelming when you’re also trying to sell your house!

For example, Elsa loves to make cakes and is learning how to use fondant. She’s been spending any extra money she’s earned (or received for her birthday & Christmas) on fondant and cake making/decorating supplies lately. When she works on a cake(s) she uses the entire dinning table. I’m not going to stop her either. However, we also need to eat at that table, and… making cakes and getting creative with all her fondant etc. can take her DAYS.

Shaylah, on the other hand, LOVES to draw, write, and read. At any moment you will find drawings, pencils, pencil crayons, markers, even crayons, pages of writing, and then books, just about anywhere and everywhere. I DO encourage her (OFTEN) to put all these drawings in her art folder, her writings in her binder, and to keep all her ‘tools’ put away, but again, Shaylah can spend days on projects!

Julia, well she also loves to read a lot, but her biggest messes are in the cabin/studio, along with MY biggest messes. We both LOVE fabric, and we both hate to waste anything, so all our fabric clippings, unless they are too small for ANYTHING (which means smaller then 2×2 inches around here), we save to be used for other things later on. Waste not, want not, right?

All those fabric scraps, then all the fluff (Oh the fluff!!!) from all our cutting… well, we could vacuum twice a day and still have fabric fluff floating around the studio. Especially the bamboo velour, our favorite fabric to work with of course. The fluff that comes off that fabric while you cut! It’s incredible. When I’m finished work, even my eyelashes are covered in fuzz. I don’t bother wearing mascara “to work” anymore. Fabric fuzz on top of mascara… it’s not so pretty.

Then there’s Joshua. I won’t go on to share about how the work shop looks right now. My son is into mechanics, and welding, and all kinds of other stuff… need I say more?

Alesia, well… she’s a typical 20 year old and into hair products, clothes, books, movies, clothes, hair products, make up, and make up (oh, did I repeat some of those?). She also loves to cook and bake. I really enjoy her cooking and baking, we all do, so I try REALLY hard not to complain about the mess… too often. She’s been able to cook a meal for a party of 12 or more since she was about 13 years old. I’m proud of her for that! I just wish cleaning came as naturally as the cooking… lol She works out of the home though about 30-36 hours a week, and helps with the business too, so I feel guilty asking her to clean too often. However, cleaning as she goes… well I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

During that time I had my ‘breakdown’, I realized something needed to be done around here. My older two kids KNOW what they need to do. I don’t feel I should have to “nag” them to get their work/cleaning done (I won’t say whether my theory on not nagging ‘adult children’ actually works…). But I knew I needed to figure out a new plan of attack with the younger three girls.

We’ve tried daily chore charts in the past, but honestly, they just don’t work for us.
Then I got to thinking about how things are done at a “job”. Take some fast food restaurants for example. If you go in the bathroom, often there will be a sheet on the back of the bathroom door that each employee needs to ‘sign’ to show that they cleaned the bathroom at a certain time each day. This way, the manager knows when, and what, has been done.

I realized this could work in a busy home too. Having a list for each ROOM, rather then a list for all the children on the fridge.

Their bedroom, the upstairs bathroom, and the hall, etc. are NOT near the fridge. Having a list with those chores, on the fridge, just makes no sense to me!

So this is what I did! I printed out some pages, just simple chore chart pages, and then sat down with all three girls at the table and we decided what needed to be done in each room, and who would do each task.Then we made squares so that they could put in a check mark as they finish each task! These lists are hanging in each room, or on the doors of each room, where ever is most appropriate.

It’s been going pretty well. I think there’s always a lot of confusion for children if they don’t know exactly what’s expected of them. Heck, the same can be said for adults too! If we start a job and the boss simply says, “Here’s the job, now go at it!” how are you going to know just what it is that is expected of you?!

Now the kids know exactly what’s expected, and exactly what THEY each need to do in each room of the house. It worked out that in each of the larger rooms, there’s about 6 jobs they need to cover so each one has 2 jobs. That made things simple because we wrote those jobs down, then I let them each pick which of the two jobs they liked best! They all like doing different things and each was satisfied with the tasks they have to do.

For the smaller ‘rooms’ of the house, they each choose one room. Julia is in charge of the downstairs bathroom, Shaylah the upstairs bathroom, and Elsa is in charge of the stairs/hallway.

What’s my job? To keep on top of the dishes, and the laundry and do the deep cleaning where needed. We all felt that if they did all the ‘little’ things like sweeping/vacuuming floors, etc. (we have a VERY small house, these are SMALL jobs) then I would take care of the biggest jobs.

And that’s how we’re trying to stay on top of things in our home!

How do YOU organize chores etc. in YOUR home? 

Battling cold and flu BEFORE it begins!

Since winter is just about upon us, I wanted to share what we did last year that seemed to have worked to ward off any colds and/or flues. I say it seemed to have worked because I didn’t get a cold at ALL last year, and this is what I did to try and prevent it.

Every single time I started to get even a hint of a sore throat, I’d eat some minced garlic. It was really easy too, since we have our smoothy in the morning and it’s real thick, I’d just put a bit of smoothy on a spoon, put about 1/2 a tsp of garlic on that, then cover it up with more smoothy and swallow it REAL quick. I couldn’t even really taste it, at all, and I never noticed any stinking like garlic like I expected we would. Ha! No one wants to walk around smelling like a garlic clove!

Then we’d drink lemon juice in our water.

And, we never got any colds AND, those two items (minced garlic & lemon juice) are relatively inexpensive overall, compared to a lot of stuff that’s out there to ward of colds. With the garlic and lemon juice, you also know just what you’re putting into your body, unlike any capsules etc. that may be recommended.

Healthy AND inexpensive. You just can’t beat that in my opinion!

A hair tip

While I think of it, I’ve been wanting to post a tip!

You’ve probably seen the new hair care products, the ‘dry wash’ shampoo you can use between washes if your hair is starting to look a little… ‘greasy’? For lack of a better word.

These seem to be the newest thing.

Well you can achieve the same thing using…

of all things…

baby powder!

With 3 sisters and one bathroom growing up, we could not wash our hair EVERY day
(I still don’t wash my hair EVERY day! It’s really not good for you and just not neccessary!) so one of my sisters, I believe it was my eldest sister Ellis, found out this neat trick!

That was about 25 years ago, and to this day, I still brush in a little baby powder into my hair when it’s not looking it’s best and I don’t have time to wash it! And let’s face it, lately, I do well to find time to wash my hair more then twice a week!

And the best part, you don’t need much at all. I sprinkle just a little on my hands and run it through my roots mostly, then brush. We’ve been using the same travel size bottle here at my house (I have four daughters!) for months now.

And there’s your helpful tip for the day!
If you’ve got a beauty tip to share with the world, let me know and I’ll share it here!