I buy a lot of things in bulk. Flour, sugar, dried beans, oats — I keep five-gallon buckets of most of these in my basement. But I’ve also made the mistake of buying things in bulk that I absolutely should not have bought in bulk, and ending up with food that went bad before we…
For years, salsa was one of the first things I canned every summer. It made sense — tomatoes were coming in fast, salsa is one of those things you can never have too much of, and canning meant shelf-stable jars I didn’t have to think about again until I opened one. There was just one…
If you’ve been curious about home canning but nervous about where to start, jam is my honest recommendation. Not because it’s the most useful thing to can — though a pantry full of homemade strawberry jam is pretty great — but because it’s genuinely forgiving, fast, and teaches you the water bath process without the…
This question comes up every single canning season, usually from people looking at a stack of used lids after a big batch and wondering if they have to buy more. The answer is different for each part of the two-piece lid system, so let me break it down clearly. Jars: Yes, Reuse Them Glass Mason…
My kid has zero interest in reading about science. Doing science is a different story entirely. And fermentation turns out to be one of the best hands-on science units we’ve ever done, because the experiment is something you can eat at the end — which raises the stakes considerably from the average baking soda volcano….
One of the most common questions people have once they start canning meat is whether they can modify the recipe — add seasonings, change the liquid, throw in some vegetables. The short answer is: some things are fine, some things aren’t, and the distinction matters more for meat than for almost anything else you can….
Salsa is one of the most-canned things in August and September, and it’s also one of the most misunderstood from a safety standpoint. Not because it’s complicated — the process itself is simple — but because the recipe modification rules are stricter than most people realize, and a lot of popular blog recipes skip the…
Most high school economics curriculum teaches personal finance and theory. Useful, but abstract. What I wanted for my own kid was something where they could see the math working in real life, with a real thing they might actually do. A cottage food business turns out to be a nearly perfect vehicle for that. Here’s…
We homeschool, and one of the things I’m most grateful for is that nobody is making my kid sit at a desk when the garden needs looking at. That sounds obvious, but it took me a while to stop feeling guilty about it. Time outside isn’t a break from learning — for younger kids especially,…
My kid is good at math when it’s connected to something real. Give them a textbook problem about a train leaving a station at 60 miles per hour and watch the motivation evaporate. Give them a problem about how many quarts of tomato sauce we need to put up this summer based on how much…
