 Welcome back to my channel and welcome to the first video in this kitchen. I am so excited to just share with you so we are actually in the process of painting and doing a lot of things so right now all of the cabinet doors are out of here and they're being painted and so if you see some things kind of not quite finished around here that's what's going on we've got paint back there that needs to be finished so there's a lot going on but in the midst of everything of course meal prep still has to happen cooking still has to happen I still have little ones that need to be fed and all of that so I wanted to share with you what I've been up to in the last couple of days I've been doing some food preservation that has needed to get done I've actually been working on doing some home-canned baked beans I've had these beans for quite some time and I'm also working on emptying out our freezer because I think in about a month or so we are getting part of a beef and I'm gonna need that freezer space so I've had a lot of like odds and ends in the freezer that I needed to get out so part of the baked beans that needed to come out of the freezer was the bacon I had bought some bacon ends to put into my baked beans so I need to get that out of the freezer so you're gonna see some projects going on over the next couple weeks that's really just weeding things I have frozen grapes that's not gonna be in today's video but I do need to do some grape jelly just get those out of there and so that's what the projects are going to be mainly focused around so let's rewind a little bit and I'm gonna tell you what I've been doing over the last couple of days and then we'll talk about what we're gonna do today one of the things that I wanted to get stocked up in my cellar was some beef broth and beef broth is so incredibly simple to make is very very cheap at the butcher place that I got this I think that these were 99 cents a pound and of course I'm going to get a lot of beef broth out of this and you can add whatever you want to your beef broth I like to kind of empty my refrigerator just whatever I have on hand so here I'm putting in a bunch of parsley and some celery I'm gonna put in some onions and carrots and just give it a wonderfully rich taste this is why homemade broths can taste so delicious they just are so rich in all of these flavors and I actually did this the night before I wanted to can up my broth and just filled this up this is a 22 quart cooker I'm not sure exactly the right term for this we just always call them the big cooker so they're kind of like a crock pot but on steroids a really large crock pot my mom has a bunch of these because she does catering in our area and so I usually borrow one from her or I have one around that is from her and so here I'm just adding salt and pepper and I'm also doing some dried minced onion as well and then I'm just gonna fill it up to the top with water so that I can get a lot of great beef broth out of this and then also the night before I wanted to do a bunch of this I soaked a bunch of beans and I'm going to be making homemade baked beans like I said earlier and you can really use any beans you want to I just did a mixture of some red kidney beans some navy beans and I think some small lima beans I can't even remember all of what I did just a mixture and I soaked them in a big bucket so this is amazing overnight they absorbed all of that water and filled the entire bucket and soaked beans just cook a whole lot quicker so that's why you soak them and then here is all the bits and pieces out of my broth that I scooped out with a large strainer before starting to do the smaller straining of it so whenever I do my broth whether it's chicken broth or beef broth and you all may have seen this in a video before I keep cheesecloth on hand I use it for a lot of different things and this is one of the purposes I keep it on hand for I don't like little things in my broth I like my broth to look very clear and beautiful when I look into the jar so over top of a mesh strainer I will put some cheesecloth so that it can catch all the little bits and pieces that may have been floating around in my broth from it cooking all night long I don't think I mentioned this but I'd like to cook my broth for a long time I would say at least 12 hours if I can't get even 18 or 20 hours out of it I like a really really rich broth and it also makes it almost more like a stock or a bone broth where I could even dilute it and add some water to it so here before I put the rings and lids on I'm just taking a little paper towel with some vinegar on it and wiping the rims because anytime you have a fat content in your item that you're going to be canning you want to wipe the rims to make sure there's no grease on there so it doesn't mess with your seal and then I also like to actually can my broths in pint size I almost prefer that over a quart size a lot of times a recipe will call for two or three cups and so it's nice just have a smaller size so here I have my little helper Haisley she was playing hard you can see by the hair she was just around the kitchen this day and kept asking me for a job they always love to help and so I was using my big 10 quart pressure cooker so this would be like an insta insta pot but it is just considered a pressure cooker because it's not insta pot brand to cook up my beans because it cooks them very very fast so we were just loading that up through the day to get them cooked and then here is some of my bacon ends and I'm throwing them in my air fryer because it just cuts down on the mess and it makes me some crispy bacon pieces to put in with my baked beans so since the canning process it does in fact cook the product that you are canning you can mix cooked and raw things together you can actually can raw beans dried beans however you need a good amount of water in there so that they can absorb that and I wanted my product to pretty much be already made in the jar that's why I pre-cooked the beans but I am putting my onions in raw so that they can just go ahead and cook in there through the canning process and here is all of the fun ingredients this recipe is actually my husband's grandmother's baked bean recipe it is not anything healthy but oh my goodness are these good and some people would consider these to be barbecue beans because there is barbecue sauce in there you've got some ketchup you've got some brown sugar you have some ground beef which you're gonna see me scooping here out of the pressure cooker because that's another great way to make ground beef really fast and bacon and all the yummy delicious things and everyone in our house really really loves these there's something that we do for a quick lunch because they're almost like a meal in a jar or a meal in a can you know you see that a lot right now people are sharing meals in jars and this is pretty much what this is however you could use it as a side to like pulled pork or a barbecue item as well and so he asked me last year if I could can up his grandmother's recipe because he loves it so much and it just works out perfectly so I will leave that in the description box below for you guys to follow along if you want to make this for yourself of course I'm making a huge batch of it and in the recipe it does call for cans of pre-made beans from the store you could take that route totally however with the way I'm doing this and using dried beans this is very very inexpensive very inexpensive to use dry beans and cook them yourself because a bag of dry beans are often around a dollar or two and it makes a lot a lot of beans so all I did to use the cooked beans versus store bought canned beans is I just measured out my beans after they were cooked and just made the equivalent to how many cans of beans the recipe calls for so here I am putting them into pint jars I just like to use a wide mouth pint jar for something that is messy and will make it easier to wash the jar once we've emptied it kind of my thoughts behind using a wide mouth versus a regular mouth and I actually ended up with about 60 or so jars of baked beans okay so today I wanted to bake something and I actually am going to be using the lemon juice that you guys saw me preserving in the last video I really want to make some lemon bars they are one of my favorite bars and I have not made them in quite some time and my family really loves them so I gonna whip some of those up and then we're gonna also go ahead and make dinner for this evening alright so to start out we are actually going to need a cup of softened butter so I'm gonna just pop this into the microwave and I'm going to just melt it real quick we're mixing together kind of the crust part of the lemon bars so it's very simple to put together I also need to actually preheat my oven as well the process of this kitchen has been so exciting if you guys don't know I actually have a home channel which is linked below so once we are finished with the kitchen you will see a video over there on the entire process and everything we did and if you could only see the before you would be even amazed at how far we've come so far all right so we are just going to mix the butter in it melted a little more than I wanted it to but we're gonna mix it with some powdered sugar and just some white flour and the powdered sugar is gonna give it that good smooth consistency and more like a mouth-in-the-mouth texture that's really what lemon bars are known for they're just this wonderful texture and as usual I will leave the recipes in the description box whether they are linked there or I sometimes have them written out there as well one thing I really like about this recipe is it is made for a 9x13 pan and I feel like a lot of lemon bars kind of like brownies can the recipes are often made for an 8x8 pan so this is a good like family or a large family recipe for lemon bars and since I don't bake much of anything without some vanilla in it I'm gonna splash some vanilla in this too vanilla is something that my mom was always very liberal with and if you guys know my mom is a baker she actually grew up in a bakery and so she's got all the good tips and tricks and she always says add vanilla okay so you could mix this with a fork or anything else but I actually have a I think this is called a pastry cutter I can't quite remember I know that you use it to make pie crust and I'm just going to kind of mix it together with this it'll help to cut up that butter that wasn't melted and just mix it all in really nice so you can see as I'm going here we're starting to get a more deli consistency I'm gonna call that good and because of the butter content in this you do not need to grease the bottom of your pan if you hear little sounds it's just my pressure canner doing a natural release on my stove because I have the last of my baked beans going in there so you're just gonna press the dough out into the bottom of the pan it doesn't have to be super fancy because we're actually gonna be putting another layer on top of here you just want it evenly distributed now we'll bake this for 15 minutes at 350 while the crust was baking in the oven I went ahead and mixed up the couple of ingredients you need for the lemon part on the top of it and I love the texture of this it's very gooey it's just got a wonderful texture so there you see me getting some of the lemon juice out that we popped into the freezer last week and you all did that with me and this is just one more recipe I know a lot of you are requesting that I share how we make lemonade with that so I will do that sometime soon but this day this is how I'm using it so once you have the eggs and everything all whipped up here and the crust comes out of the oven I like to wait till the crust is just a little bit brown around the edges that kind of tells me that it's baked fully through you just go ahead and dump that next layer on and pop it back in the oven okay so our lemon bars are done and out of the oven they have this kind of like bubbly top to them which is actually gonna get covered up with some powdered sugar once they're cut into squares but we're gonna let this thing completely cool in the refrigerator so that we can enjoy this after dinner tonight so for dinner I'm going to be making a very very simple broccoli chicken casserole and we're gonna do it all from scratch the original recipe actually called for cans of cream of chicken soup but I actually don't keep that in my house on a normal basis so if I get it it's usually because I'm making something for a meal that I'm taking somewhere else or you know maybe for a quick meal but I don't have it in my house today so we're gonna start out with dumping two bags of frozen broccoli again kind of working on emptying out my freezer into my Dutch oven here we're gonna get this steamed up we're only gonna steam it for or like cook it for about five minutes and while that's happening we're gonna go ahead and mix up our cream of chicken soup on the stove top I love this recipe because it uses frozen broccoli I know that fresh broccoli sometimes can be a little pricey in store so being able to use frozen broccoli versus fresh is a little bit of a money saver now I'm gonna go ahead and show you all how to make a cream of chicken soup now you could use mushroom as well I've done water and I've cooked up mushrooms kind of in place of the chicken broth that you're gonna see here so it's basically some butter and some flour some milk and then chicken broth and a little bit of salt and pepper and that is about it you really this is so so easy it doesn't take long it really only takes a couple minutes on the stove to thicken up and you're good to go and you don't have to use the store-bought cream of chicken soup again this recipe will be in the description box now we are just going to assemble everything which is gonna be really fast and easy but wasn't that incredibly easy to make cream of chicken soup I love it because I know every single ingredient that went in it it's with my homemade chicken bras and so it's got great salt in it I use the pink Himalayan salt and I just don't have to keep it on hand because I have all the ingredients on hand all the time and it's just it really only takes like five minutes to make so I'm gonna scoop out the steamed or lightly boiled broccoli here but before I do that I actually need to grease my 9 by 13 so I'm gonna use my handy little oil dispenser thing here that I know so many of you have and love I know like over Christmas time a lot of you got these and they are so great it's probably one of my favorite Amazon finds ever because I don't have to ever keep any oil sprays on hand and I can use like my organic oils and whatnot saves a lot of money so now I'm just gonna scoop the broccoli florets into the bottom of here we're just gonna kind of layer everything so I do feel a little bit silly about this but I got out a quart of shredded chicken to use in this since it's already ready for me it's good to go and I should have drained this and use this broth to make my chicken or cream of chicken soup but I forgot and so I opened up as you saw a small jar of broth so what I'm gonna do with this is I'm actually gonna drain the broth into a separate jar so I can save it and use it to make rice later on or something like that because we're probably going to do potatoes with this so I'm gonna give you a little trick if you like to reuse canning lids and I know some people don't do that but I do that so to save the rubber seal from getting punctured with a fork or a pointy can opener I just take a butter knife like this on the edge of the jar and I pull up and it gives me a seal that hasn't been punctured which is great because I do reuse my lids and I can get into that in another video I think I talked about it but anyways I'm actually gonna take the jar of the lid just to help kind of hold the chicken back and pour this in here because I hate to waste a broth I hate to waste anything if I can find another use for it isn't that amazing that there's almost a whole pint of broth in this quart of shredded chicken and then we're just gonna take all of this chicken and put it right in here and it's cold it's not cooked yet or any I mean it's cooked but it's obviously I'm sitting in my cellar not hot for me to grab here so we're just gonna layer this all in and I really feel as though I need to season this broccoli so I'm actually gonna get my salt and pepper and kind of season the broccoli and the chicken here so I was getting so excited about us eating this casserole for dinner and Cory walked in the door just as I was finishing up layering it here as you see and he decided that him and I were gonna go out on a date so we actually didn't end up eating this this night but that's fine because I can either pop it in the freezer or put it in the refrigerator which is what I did I put it in the refrigerator for the next night's dinner but that's what's great about meals like this is that they're ready to go no matter when you want to use them and this would make an excellent freezer meal I don't think I mentioned this but there's also some mayo that goes in with the cream of chicken soup just to give it a nice rich flavor and then you're gonna layer some cheddar cheese on top of that I love cheddar cheese with broccoli that combination is so delicious and then you can go ahead and use breadcrumbs and mix it up with a little bit of butter to top it off but I didn't have any on hand but I did have some Ritz crackers so I just put a sleeve of those into a bag and crunched them up just to give a nice little crunch on top of this casserole and like I said we'll be serving this with potatoes and maybe a salad of some kind I had to show you the end results of the lemon bars we actually gave some of these to our neighbors as well and they are just so delicious the girls have been loving them they have that nice tart pop especially for warmer weather months hey friends so it's actually the next day and I'm about to go run a few errands I thought it would take you along with me I'm gonna try to incorporate more of just normal everyday life like I used to in a lot of my videos but I did not mention this in any other talks I had about this new house then where we're living and stuff but it is very rural it's far out and we do have internet here we can pretty much do everything like I can do my editing I can we can like watch Hulu or Netflix or anything like that but I cannot upload from here and this problem we are going to get fixed hopefully within the next month we have to get like a satellite system put in so that it is strong enough for me to upload but in the meantime I actually have to go to my sister-in-law Sarah's house and drop off uploads every time I upload a video it's a little bit of an extra thing in my week but it's just the way it is just what we have to do right now so I'm actually heading to her house to drop off uploads and she has eggs for me I love getting her eggs because she gets all different colors and they're so pretty and I really need some eggs and since I'm going that way there's also a thrift store down near where she lives and I kind of want to stop in there I've been trying to thrift a little more than I used to or I should say this I used to thrift a lot and then I kind of got out of it and I'm trying to get back into thrifting some more especially with where we're living because the girls are outside pretty much all day long like until the sun goes down they're outside playing and so the clothing that they need a lot of it is just they need stuff they can get dirty and it doesn't really matter and I didn't spend a lot on it so keeping that stuff around is important and I also need some more warm weather clothing for myself so I think we're gonna swing in there and I thought I would just take you along with me so like I said I'm trying to get back into thrifting a little more often I feel like it takes consistency consistency is key when it comes to thrifting to find all of the goodies and we have several different thrift stores in our area here I'm showing you this mug I thought was so cute we had some little gems even though I didn't need them I've been on the hunt for a different glass wear set and this one was really cute but the glasses were just a little too small for me and I wanted to also show you here is some canning jars I know that I have personally been able to find a lot of canning jars at thrift stores for a really good price this one here was $3.99 for a pack of four which made each jar a dollar that's a very good price so check your thrift stores for canning jars and then I have such a weakness for baskets so that's always something that I'm checking out and looking at at thrift stores you can use baskets all over your home for so many different uses so here's a couple of the things that I snagged I caught this cute little miniature basket for the girls play kitchen up in their room and then I found this little treasure basket this was for Haisley each of the girls have been able to thrift a treasure basket and Haisley was the only one that didn't have one so we found this one for her for all her treasures and then I grabbed these other two baskets just for odds and ends things to store in my cabinets and they just work for so many different things I always find a good use for them and then I also found this really cute dress I'm so excited about this it's gonna be a fun summer dress I love the colors so thanks a lot for hanging out with me today you guys if you're new here don't forget to subscribe I love to hear your feedback on this style of video that I did today and don't forget to leave a comment give this video like and I'll see you guys in the next one