 I have had a hot question that you all have been asking the last little while. So what we do is use a lot of something called common sense. Oh, it's brought such a smile to my face. Hey friends, welcome back to my channel and welcome to a video that you're probably going to see a bit more of over the summer. And that is just a lot of really collecting different projects throughout the week that I'm doing and putting them all together into a video and showing you all what I've been up to this week. We had some of the last of Corey's softball. We went blueberry picking and I've been freeze drying blueberries. We have had loads of rain. The garden is starting to grow little miniature versions of the full size vegetables that it will eventually produce. We've gotten a couple things out of the garden at this point. So first off, I'm going to show you a bread recipe that I'm pretty much labeling as my own recipe. It initially started out as following a old Mennonite bread recipe and then I made my own tweaks and then I actually somehow followed the instructions wrong and the bread turned out absolutely perfect. It's now our favorite bread. So I'm going to label this as my own absolutely favorite bread. So to start off, you're going to go ahead and put a cup of warm water, three tablespoons of yeast and two tablespoons of sugar into the bottom of your mixing bowl. I just turn on my dough hook and kind of combine those things together and then you're going to let that sit while you do the next step. It's going to get nice and bubbly and this bread is a bit more on the sour side. It's not sour dough, but a little more on the sour side. The next step, you're going to need some really hot water. So I like to use my tea kettle for this, but you could use the microwave to warm up the water. So you're going to need a two-third cup of oil and this is the part where I think it makes this bread taste the best and that is using avocado oil. I used to get my avocado oil at Costco and I found an even cheaper jug of it on Amazon. So I will go ahead and link that below. That's a great Amazon bulk food product and it's obviously accessible to many, many, many of you. So along with the oil, I put one-third cup of sugar and four teaspoons of salt and of course I like to use my pink Himalayan salt. To all of that, I'm going to add two cups of boiling water or very, very, very hot water. You just want to dissolve the salt and the sugar as much as you can and of course, combining in that oil, it just kind of helps it all become one liquid mass. I guess. Once you have your salt and sugar pretty well dissolved, so I use a whisk, you're going to go ahead and you're going to add in two and a half cups of cold water. So you're going to mix that together and you'll see me put my finger into the mixture just to make sure that it's not too hot to ruin my yeast in my other mixture. So here you're seeing all of the yeast be nice and bubbly in there because it's reacting to the sugar that's put in there and now you can put in whatever flour you want to. I've been using the brand All Trumps flour. I got, I think it was a 50 pound bag of that the last time I bought flour and it's been making really excellent bread. I don't believe that it is technically a bread flour but it just makes really, really good bread. So here's the part of the recipe that's a bit different than other recipes. You're going to only put six cups of the flour. There's more flour that will go in it but six cups which is about half of the flour for the whole recipe in with the yeast mixture and then you're going to add in the oil mixture as well. You're going to mix that up really, really well and then you're going to allow this to rise. Most of the time before a bread recipe rises you put all of the flour in and with this recipe we are only going to allow that first half of the flour to rise for the first rise. So I covered it up with a dish towel. Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring today's video. So you all know that I have used Skillshare for years. I absolutely love their platform and all that they provide especially at an amazing price point. If you are someone that is wanting to learn a new skill in a huge variety of topics you will love Skillshare. It's set up in a classroom, more of a platform where you can communicate and chat with other people taking the class. You can also access your projects if you are going to follow up with doing the projects for the class. There's just so many bits and pieces that they have thought of to make this one amazing learning platform. So you all know that I have my two YouTube channels here on YouTube and I'm always looking for ways to help increase my content here on my platform and really further my career. Skillshare offers things like productivity classes which of course helps me to get more into my content if I'm being more productive and they also offer a lot of cooking classes. I have been wanting to learn more about fermenting foods lately and to share that information with you all so I know that I can access Skillshare for those types of classes. The way I got started with Skillshare is I use their one month free trial. It's a great way to just discover Skillshare and decide if you wanna continue with a subscription which I will promise you'll want to continue with the subscription. So the first thousand people to use my link in the description box gets a free month trial. I know that you all will love it and you're going to discover new skills through Skillshare. And one little trick I like to do whenever I'm baking bread and I make bread every other week, I freeze half of it so we have half of it for the next week and then the next week I make fresh bread. So when I make bread, I like to make something in my kitchen that uses the oven. So while the bread is rising and proofing, my oven is on so my kitchen is a bit warmer than usual and I can set my bread dough on top of the oven on the stove top, not with it on but it's just a little warmer because the oven is on. So sometimes I'll bake like a cobbler or if I need to bake something for dinner time if you're making cornbread for dinner, you know, it gives you the opportunity to do that. So this day I decided to make a double batch of baked oatmeal. We needed it for the freezer and here I'm using some of my canned butter. I know you all have been requesting and requesting and requesting for me to show you how I can my butter. It lasts five years on the shelf and I am going to do it when I find another good sale on butter. So keep an eye out for that. I will eventually show you all how I do that. So here I'm scooping some of it out because I need a cup of melted butter for my double batch of baked oatmeal. Now this baked oatmeal I has made with canned fruit. You can use fresh fruit. I will leave all of these recipes written out in the description box with the different options of how you can do this. So this day I'm actually emptying out a bunch of canned fruit in our refrigerator that was just kind of sitting in there and I wanted to get it used up. My daughter's requested I do a peach strawberry baked oatmeal. So I had some strawberry jelly or jam. I'm sorry, I know most of the world calls it jam. We end up calling it jelly just cause I don't know why. And I had some canned peaches that needed to be used up. It wasn't quite enough diced fruit for this. So I also had a few canned pears in the fridge and I just took them out and kind of broke them into pieces and added them in as well. So this is just a good fruity baked oatmeal. And also keeping in mind that these were canned with a little bit of sugar and of course the jam has sugar in it as well. So I scaled back the brown sugar when I'm adding things like that. So keep that in mind. If you look at the recipe in the description box, you will want to scale back on the sugar just a bit if you're adding other sweet things. And instead of milk, you can add milk to this. I used the juice from the canned pears or peaches. Might have been the peaches. And I actually learned that little trick from Three Rivers Homestead. She's so huge on really saving all that you can out of your canned goods. So using the canned good juices and broths is really yummy in different recipes like this. And this also makes this a dairy-free option. So if you are someone that needs a dairy-free baked oatmeal, you may want to try this out. All right, so to the brown sugar, I added in the brown sugar. And again, I scaled that back. I'm also adding in some baking powder, two teaspoons of baking powder and one teaspoon of salt and also one teaspoon of cinnamon. And just like vanilla, we don't really measure our vanilla or cinnamon around here. I just dump it in because we enjoy it and I kind of eyeball it. Once I have all of that mixed together, I go ahead and add in the oats. Now one little note, so since my mixer is kind of busy helping me make my bread, I like to make a recipe that's simple for me to mix up with a whisk. So if it's like a brownie batter, cornbread batter, baked oatmeal, something I can kind of easily mix up without my mixer while my bread is in my mixing bowl rising. So here I am putting some oil onto a large cookie sheet. It's not the biggest. I think it would be a half-baker sheet. And then I'm dumping my baked oatmeal recipe on here. And like I said, this is going to give me enough to put about half of it into the freezer and we'll have baked oatmeal for a while. Now I'm going to make a little note. So since I added the jam to this, it did put more liquid into this. And I should have added a little extra egg, so maybe another egg or two, because it ended up a tad bit crumbly. So I just wanted to make a note about that. If you're adding jam to maybe take into consideration, it's also adding more liquid as well. So here you're seeing that first half of the flour, yeast, all of that, you could see that it had gotten nice and puffy. And I just turned on my mixer and just kind of beat it down a little bit. And now I'm going to add in six and a half to seven cups of flour. And then that's all the flour that's supposed to be in it. So I'm going to mix that together. And I just slowly use my dough hook. If you're using your hands, you probably have a big dough bowl that you're mixing it all together with. It's all kind of the same thing. So I mix that in and now I'm gonna let that rise again. And I'm gonna let that rise to double. One of the things when I first started making bread that I had to learn is I couldn't let it rise too much. You can actually let your bread rise too much and then you end up with really, really, really fluffy bread. And it's great for butter and jelly and those sorts of things, but it doesn't really hold together to make slices for sandwiches. So that's why you need to keep an eye on it and not let it get overproofed and over risen. So if you've been having that problem, that could be part of the problem. So here I am starting into some green beans and I got my water on the stove to blanch them. And as I did, I realized that my dough was ready to be punched down. So here I am punching down the dough after it's risen to double. And what I have learned also is I used to get really dry bread. I've learned that I make it just bulky enough with the flour to be able to work with it. And I work with it with a little bit of oil. So I'm just dumping a little bit of avocado oil on the top of it and then I'm scooping down into it. You can see that it's slightly sticky and that's okay. That means that you're gonna end up with really good bread and not really, really dry bread. So once I put some oil on the top part of it, I go ahead and dump it out. You can see how stretchy and gooey it is from all of that gluten. I do personally eat mostly gluten-free, but my husband and two of our daughters do not. And so they enjoy this bread thoroughly. And for myself, once in a blue moon, I have it for a treat. So I dumped it out. I put a little more oil on it. I even put a little more of the oil on the counter. And I'm just working it kind of into a ball. I take my dough cutter. I love this thing. It's from Amazon. I'll leave it linked below. And I kind of cut it into four pieces. I don't weigh them or make it anything perfect. Just more four pieces that look about even. And once I have them divided out, then if anything gets a little too sticky, just add a little bit of oil to your fingertips and you'll be able to work with it. And again, some people would do flour in place of that oil. And I just have found that this is what works best for me and really makes me some nice loafs. So here I'm just kind of turning the bread in on itself to make the top of it nice and round. And then I'm gonna go ahead and put it into my greased loaf pans. And this recipe does make four loaves, as you can see. And we eat roughly two loaves in a week. It just depends on what we are doing. Sometimes it's only one loaf. It just depends on how many times people have toast or how many sandwiches are needed. Or if we use it for anything else, if we make burgers and need it, that sort of thing. I wanna take this dough recipe and actually try making hamburger buns with it. I haven't tried that yet. But like I said, it's kind of a new recipe to me, but I've been making it for a couple of months now and I just really, really enjoy it. All right, so now the green beans. Why am I doing green beans? So I got a bag of green beans at Market and then my neighbor actually called me up. She is horse and buggy Mennonite and she said, my green beans are exploding. I have way too many. Would you please come pick some? So we have been doing some green beans. I have canned green beans from last year on the shelf. So I don't need a lot. However, I wanted to do a few frozen bags. I don't often do frozen green beans, but just for a more crunchy stir-fried green bean. I have so many memories of doing green beans with my mom growing up, snapping them and my girls also enjoy this as well. So here is a shot of that baked oatmeal. It turned out so yummy and my girls were just already begging to cut into it. So they went ahead and had it. So here my loaves have risen to about double. This is the part where I often let them over-rise is I think they need to be huge before I pop them in the oven. And I've realized that they've raised somewhat in the oven too. So you don't wanna over-proof them. So I put them in the oven to bake and while they were baking, I got into my green beans. So since I'm going to be freezing these, you wanna blanch them for about three minutes. That means bringing water to a boil, dumping them in, let them sit in there for about three minutes and then I put them into ice water to stop that cooking. And basically what that does is helps to seal in a lot of flavor. It just makes a lot, a much more high quality product when it comes out of the freezer. And then I just bag these up into quart-size Ziploc frozen bag, freezer bags and I'm just gonna throw them in the freezer. Now, as I get more from my neighbor, I don't know what all I'm gonna do with them. I probably wind up canning them. And I may even pickle them. My sister-in-law, they really enjoy pickled green beans. And so I called her up and asked her how she does hers. I've never done it before. So you guys may see that in a video coming out soon. So here is my bread. I'm just dumping out of the pans. And then your last finishing touch is to take a stick of butter, run it across the top. Now if you're dairy-free and you're wanting to stay dairy-free with this, you could also take a brush and brush a little bit of avocado oil or any other oil across the top of them. And then they are ready to go. You can put them in the freezer. You can do whatever you wanna do with them. So I'll take go along with the bread. I thought this was perfect for this week. So last year I had put a bunch of grapes into the freezer. We bought way too many grapes for grape juice and grape jelly. And we recently got a quarter beef and I knew I had to do something with them. So I got the grapes out. I cooked them up. I strained off the juice. And then I followed this really simple recipe again in one of my Mennonite cookbooks. And I just cooked it all up and I made some grape jelly. And I'm gonna be honest, this is really my girl's favorite. Of course to go along with that yummy bread you just saw, they love grape jelly. And this is truly grape jelly. It doesn't have any of the bits and pieces that jam has in it. It is just made with the juice and pecked in. Again, I'll leave the recipe below for you all. But this is just a little tip for you. If this fall you really wanted to make some grape jelly but you don't have time to, you can definitely freeze your grapes. Mine were from last fall. And you can turn around and make some really delicious jelly. So you just water bath can it. And I do stack my jelly jars in my canner. So I was able to get all of these in the canner. And I think, I will make sure to put it down below but I think you only water bath them for about five minutes. Something like that. And then you're good to go and you can pull them out and let them cool. And I like to keep little extra towels around that are specifically old towels for canning so that I have a place to rest these types of things on. Hey friends, so it is the next day actually from the bread baking and all of that. And I'm sitting down to have a little afternoon cup of coffee. And I've had a couple questions lately that you all have asked over and over. And so I know that there are questions that are good to answer, especially when you're kind of wanting to learn how to do a lot of the old ways of home making, canning, freezing, those sorts of things. And so I'm sitting here with my cup of coffee. I actually went thrifting and I need to cut tags off of this stuff and get it in the laundry. And I thought I would kind of do a little chatty answering a mini Q and A and also show you all some of my thrifting finds. So we have a thrift store in our area that one day a week they have what they call family day and they have half off a lot of their things. So that is why I got a nice stack of stuff back here. I'm kind of hunting for the opposite season. So it's summertime right now. And so I'm looking for pieces of clothing that would be more for winter time. Of course, if I run across to something that's really nice for the current season, I will also snag that as well, especially when stuff is marked down to $2, you know, or a dollar, you can grab it and see if it will work. And if not, you can always re-donate it. But I'm gonna show you a couple of the non-clothing things first, cause those are always fun, home good things. So I've been keeping my eye out for a spring form pan. And I've just kind of, it's been one of those things. I'm like, I could really get into making cheesecakes again. I had decluttered mine years ago and haven't missed it a whole lot. But I think with summertime and fresh berries and things like that, it was like, you know what? If I find a good spring form pan at a thrift store, I'm going to go ahead and snag that. So this was $5.99 half off, so it's $3.00. So I'm really excited about making some cheesecakes. And then I'm always looking for baskets. I think I mentioned this before that like, I always gravitate to the basket area or bins at thrift stores. And so I like finding little ones because I always find a use for them. So I found this little square one, which is absolutely adorable. It almost reminds me of a berry basket kind of. And then this little round one. And I have some of these or this size. And I always find little things I need to stick them in a closet, in a shelf, somewhere like that. And then another thing I've been keeping my eye open for is lids, lids, is containers with lids. It's particularly like serving containers. We have gotten in the habit of trying to dress up our table at suppertime. So like lighting candles, placemats and putting our food into serving dishes. Well, it's nice to have a serving dish whenever it has a lid. So whenever you're done eating, you don't need to transfer it into another dish to be stored in the refrigerator. You can just put the lid on it and put it in the refrigerator. So I found this one and I don't know the girls might have taken the sticker off of it. They did, but I think it was only a dollar or two. So to be honest, I feel like I scored really, really big this week. I don't go every week, but I've been wanting to get in the habit of going because I feel like there's just so much that you could collect and slowly find. So I found a few things for the girls that I think will be great as fall pieces. Of course, they can use them now, but more like jumpers that they could put turtlenecks underneath of and that sort of thing. So I found this cute little jumper skirt. That's a denim. And then this little jumper as well. And I just love this like plaid kind of print here. And this is for Haisley, my youngest. And she loved that as well. And I found a few dresses for myself. That's something that if I find a nice dress, I'm not going to pass it up. And this one here was very fall-esque, I guess. Had the very like dark fall, winter colors. And it just goes like around, I think past my knee just a little bit. But I thought it would be a really nice one. I could even wear with leggings. A few long sleeves. I'm not going to show you all of these just because they're just shirts. But this one here I thought was really cute. I had like a very feminine bottom on it. This here almost resembles like lace sort of, but it's soft and it's a long sleeved as well. So this I would have paid about $2.54. And it's just a cute floral dress. Has buttons down the front. Again, something I could transition into fall with a sweater. And I also am keeping my eye out for pants and shorts for the girls. I am really particular about the pants and the shorts that not only that I wear, but also the girls. Cause we do like girly things and we like dresses and skirts around here. But we also like shorts and pants. And sometimes certain activities are just more appropriate in shorts or pants. But I'm always hunting for shorts and pants that are feminine or that are just appropriate for the ages of my girls and things like that. So I found this really soft, loose, flowy pair of pants for Everly and she's really excited about these. And I think they'll be great for this winter. And I also found a pair of shorts for her that are nice Bermuda shorts. They have a great length to them. And these I also love finding the ones with the adjustable waist because that means that they can wear them longer. And I can get them just a little bit bigger and they'll be in them for a while. Linen pants and linen shirts are always something I'm looking for at thrift stores. I just think they're beautiful and comfortable and can sometimes give a more feminine touch to an outfit. And so I found these linen pants and also I found something that was really cool. So of course I've been telling you that I want to get into making my own clothes. And I found this dress that I think is so cute. I think especially for a fall color or in winter color it's this like pretty green, but this is a homemade dress. And as soon as I noticed it, I was like, oh, that's so neat. You can tell because the inside of it has a raw hem. So they did not do a rolled hem on the inside and that gave away that it is a homemade dress. So just sharing a few of my fun finds. Now I'm gonna get on to some of your questions. So I have had a hot question that you all have been asking the last little while. And that is, do you reuse your lids? I think in a video or two ago on canning. I think when I was canning these strawberries you all noticed that some of the lids had writing on them from obviously a previous canning batch. And I have talked about this before. However, I think the video that I did on answering a lot of canning questions, the audio was a little bit messed up on it. So I may need to this fall or sometime soon do another video on just like canning 101 if you all are completely new around here. I am from a Mennonite background. My mom and my dad and my husband's parents also would be from a Mennonite background. So a lot of the things that I know and grew up knowing are because that's the way that we've done things for generations and generations. And actually with Cory's parents there is Amish in the family as well or was. And so there's lots of knowledge there and lots of tried and true things that have been done for generations that if I always have a question I know who to call for that question usually and lots of helpful things. So my mom always reused lids like and Cory's mom has always reused lids and grandmothers have always reused canning lids. So whenever I actually first came on YouTube or like started even seeing other people from around the country or around the world doing canning which I'm gonna hesitate to say around the world because I've gotten comments here on my channel that there are people in other countries that actually practice a lot of the same canning practices I guess that we as coming from the conservative backgrounds would as well. So I'm not exactly sure if it's just because these are the rules that someone has set up in the US. That's why a lot of people do this I'm not sure but a lot of people I found out actually don't reuse their lids. They throw them away or they will reuse them for like a dry good in their pantry or something like that but they don't can with them again which is so foreign to me because we never did that and it seems kind of wasteful to me but again I understand everybody has their ways of doing things and that's perfectly okay. So I wanted to explain that a little bit more in depth because I know some people have even messaged me personally on Instagram and wanted to understand how and why we reuse lids since that is seems to be backwards from the way the US does a lot of things. So what we do is use a lot of something called common sense. So you just want to check out your lid and I actually even have my daughter do this sometimes like when I'm getting ready to can we keep a big old butter bucket or like would be like an ice cream gallon bucket with lids in them. I have one for my large mouth and one for my regular mouth lids and I do, I feel like there's kind of a couple times when I check these. So when we're washing dishes and we are taking stuff out of the dishwasher or taking stuff out of the sink if it's a bad lid and I notice it's a bad lid I immediately throw it out. But sometimes that's not always me doing that and sometimes it ends up in our stash anyways. So when I go to can I will often have one of my daughters go through and check the lids. So what we do and I can insert a little bit of footage of like one that I would keep and one that I wouldn't keep. So I will look at the rubber seal around the edge of the lid and I will make sure that nobody used a fork to open the jar and that's something in our house that everybody pretty much knows. We don't use forks to open up jars because it ruins the lid. So a lot of times I will actually take a butter knife and they use the flat side of the butter knife put it underneath of the lid and just kind of use my thumbs and pull up and it will pop open and you don't damage the seal. And then you can use the lid again. So I will check the seal really carefully. If there is any kind of black on the seal or the lid I will throw it away. If there's anything that just looks questionable I will throw it away. And I'm gonna tell you all this. And of course I have not been canning as long as my mom and my mother-in-law but in my years of canning I have never had a lid be faulty because I reused it. If I've ever, I've rarely had lids be faulty in general. If I've ever had a lid be faulty it's because I overfilled the jar or like some other reason but not because I reused the lid. And I'm talking that I reuse lids and seal my food and keep that jar for over a year and it's still sealed. So again, if you're not familiar with this you may be like, what? But this is how for generations in my family in my husband's family we have can't. And in fact my mom, I believe I'm trying to recall through the years I know my mother-in-law does this all the time. She will keep jars from the store. So if she buys a jar of Alfredo sauce or a jar of spaghetti sauce that's from the store she will keep the jar and the lid and can in it and reuse it. And I know that a lot of older people that may be watching this will probably say, yeah, that's how we did it because it was a jar and it was a lid that you didn't have to go purchase separately like we do for most all of the canned goods now and it was something you could reuse and use and use and use. And that's the thing, like I will just use them until they don't look like they should. If there's rust, if there's any type of black on it, if there's any type of cracking in the seal I won't reuse it. So again, like I'm saying, a lot of common sense goes into reusing lids and the worst thing that's gonna happen, this is the other part that I think people don't quite understand or maybe as their fear of reusing lids. The worst thing that will happen is your lid not sealing. That would be the faulty part with the lid with reusing a lid is that the lid doesn't seal and the food is going to stink. It is going to mold because air is getting inside of the jar and it's not going to pop when you go to pull the lid off. If I would ever pick up a jar and I could like lift the lid off or whatnot then it's definitely not a right lid. It hasn't sealed correctly. But like I said, I have so rarely had that happen and this next part may really shock you all but even with reusing, I do not boil my lids and I know that that's something that most lid companies have said you don't need to boil the lids. We used to boil the lids before we would put the ring on and all of that and even with reusing my lids I still do not boil them and I still get great seals and some people will say, well, if you're reusing a lid and you should put them into some boiling water with a little bit of baking soda to soften up that seal to make sure that it seals again. I've never done that. I've reused lids for a long time. They still always seal unless it's another issue like overfilling your jar or something like that. So to go along with this question about the seals and I get lots of comments about that I also get comments where people are saying your food isn't sealed, your food isn't okay because you took the rings off the jar. Well, I will challenge that. So whenever you leave a ring on a jar there's a couple things that can happen. Number one, they can give a false seal. So there's times where you might leave the ring on the jar and it looks like it's sealed. The top of the lid looks like it's diverted in the way that it does when it's sealed but the reality is that ring is the only thing keeping that lid on the jar. Though I always tell people you wanna do the lift test you wanna take the ring off the jar you wanna pick up the jar by the lid and as long as you can pick up the jar by the lid it is fully sealed and you are good. So the second thing that can happen is if you leave the ring on and this is the thing my mom always taught me is you can and probably will have rust on your lids because there's no way to unless you're gonna take the ring off and literally put the ring back on which really doesn't make a lot of sense again, cause you could get a false seal but you are going to pull that out of water whether you're taking it out of a pressure canner there's been steam inside the pressure canner or a water bath canner you're lifting that out of water and so there's going to be water inside that ring and it's eventually going to rust. I've even had jars where I haven't taken the rings off for like maybe about a week or so and I've had a rust ring or a ring of rust inside of that little ring so taking the rings off is really a better practice than leaving them on. Okay, so another question I've been getting can you give us some resources on great Mennonite cookbooks and I have a few that I'm going to show you they are really hard to access in fact, my mom had some old cookbooks that we have our favorite recipes out of and I wanted copies of them and it took a little bit of digging around to find some of those cookbooks the best place you can find it is in little Mennonite stores so if you live near a community that you can go to and find them that's great I do have one in particular here that's my I would say go to 110% and that one's on Amazon so I'm going to show you that first so this book is called The Mennonite or not the but Mennonite Country Style Recipes and Kitchen Secrets and actually I think if I have this right we always say like we play the Mennonite game and the Mennonite game is who are you related to and how are you related to so-and-so and all of that but I think that this person that wrote this Esther Shank is my aunt's sister-in-law if not it's a relation to her through marriage and she is the one that actually kind of got my mom onto this and then I wanted my hands on it and it teaches you so much stuff like this is like I don't know how to explain it like the handbook of old ways of cooking this actually also has the list for water bath canning everything so and I've talked a little bit about that before if you wanna know how the Mennonites water bath can things like meat and stuff like that this will have all of that in it for you it also teaches you how to make bread teaches you how to make really good pie crust it just teaches you how to do everything I mean it is a chunk I don't know if you can see and actually I am probably soon going to take this to a office supply place and get it ring bound because it is a little bit hard to lay open completely but I use this thing all the time has lots of canning recipes in it as well it's just got everything what she decided when she went to write this book and why she wrote this book is she had a couple of daughters and she was thinking they were getting to the point of getting married or moving out and she really wanted to make sure that they had everything under their belt that she ever could teach them about cooking about hosting she's even got tips in here about when you should serve your coffee you know people over things like that and so she decided to write it all down in a book so that her daughter and other people that maybe didn't have a mom that cooked a whole lot and stuff like that could learn and could have everything at their fingertips love, love, love this book it's worth its weight in gold okay the second one I did not look this up before I sat down to film this video so I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to link it below but I'm gonna give you guys this tip I think I got this on eBay, I think I don't think it's on Amazon but I'm gonna go ahead and do a little researching I will link what I can if not just search the title on eBay and you may be able to find it so this is a cookbook that my mom used oh my word, my entire life it's called The Basics and More Cookbook and this is actually a revised version from what my mom has my mom's is literally falling apart she has pages of it that are just shoved back into it or else I'll find pages of it around her house sometimes but this book is also another go-to like if you want a quick and easy recipe and if you are familiar with Mennonite Cookbooks then the inside of this is going to look awfully familiar and it's just written very simply it usually has the person's name underneath of it of where the recipe came from and it's just a super, super handy book so of all of the ones I have and I do have a fair amount of Mennonite Cookbooks and things like that I decided to grab these two and I have a third book I wanna show you all but these two are the ones that if I'm looking for say I wanna make brownies I'm usually digging into these two before I move on to any of my other ones to see if I can find a quick and easy recipe and another thing too is I have a lot of Cookbooks and there was a few others that I would really love to share with you but they're not online so they are literally just in Mennonite little stores and places like that All right, so this is actually a cookbook of sorts I wanna say but I've been getting a few questions on herbal remedies and home remedies and things like that and these books pretty much like we live right in the middle of a lot of horse and buggy Mennonite and so if I ever mention this book they always are like, oh yeah, I have that or my mom has it or whatever and this is a book that is written by Rachel Weaver and she actually has four books and I will leave all of them below because they are on Amazon and it's called Be Your Own Inquotations Doctor and it says 101 stories she's got lots of stories on simple things that you can do and I can't even tell you how many times this book alone has saved me, my extended family, my mom like lots of people, my mother-in-law we all have it from having to go into a doctor's office it's got so many fantastic resources in it and there is a second one and there's one for mothers and there's also one for like getting different plants and things that grow in your possibly in your yard to use for different things and if this is not your cup of tea that is completely okay you know some people I know are just not interested in doing things with home remedies and stuff like that that is okay I just wanna make that super clear and that's probably my biggest hesitation in sharing a lot of the things that I personally use or do is because it's just not everybody's cup of tea and it's not really what my channel is about is home remedies and things like that however I know that a lot of you have asked me questions about that and so I just wanted to go ahead and share that resource and I will link it below and you all can let me know what you think of it if it's something that you're interested in one thing I do wanna say about this book before I stop blabbing about it is that it is a extremely, extremely, extremely practical book like if this could have another title I think like just practical home remedies could be this title it's just things that you probably have in your house already and also stories of people that she has helped actually I can show you the back of this picture she's no longer living as far as I know but there she is with her family and I think most of them are Mennonite or a branch off of the Mennonites but she has so many stories of people that she helped in things that they did and it worked I have never had anything from her book not work so there's my little spiel on that and an easy little resource for those of you asking about herbs and home remedies so anyways, I hope that that was not too long for you guys and I hope it wasn't too chatty but you know, that's the thing you all have been asking questions and I knew that the answers to these questions that I answered today were kind of long ones they weren't just like a quick little response to a comment so that's why I wanted to address them here make sure that you all knew what I was talking about and yeah so anyways, I need to get on with my day I wanna get this video up today probably so you guys will get to see it right away thanks for hanging out with me I have so much fun stuff coming up here on this channel and I don't know if you can tell but I feel like I'm just kind of easing back into just things I love and I mentioned that in my life update I'm not even gonna go into that but I just feel like we are in a place of life right now that's just so exciting our house has kind of come together if you all missed it on my home channel I put up the video on our kitchen from kind of start to where it's currently at and it's pretty much finished with maybe some touches down the road that we may give it so that was really big when you're a cook and you are in the kitchen a lot having your kitchen not operating the way that you want it to or just kind of out of sorts makes things a little bit more difficult in your life so that being done has given me a huge stress relief and yeah so let me know like I said I haven't been on Instagram all that much so reading your comments lately on my last couple of videos ah has brought such a smile to my face and just feel like I'm reconnecting with my audience which I absolutely adore I would love to do like some sort of meetup at some point or something like that it would just throw me to meet so many of you and I don't know I live in central Pennsylvania I am about two hours away from Lancaster and I've contemplated having like a meetup in Lancaster if I ever did just because I know that that's a central point and a lot of you may be from that area let me know if you are in PA where you think a good meetup spot would be if I ever did that in the comments below and maybe we can get something going maybe like this winner when we don't have projects on the go that we could do something fun like a coffee day in a coffee shop we could I could like rent part of a coffee shop and sorry we live in the country there's flies just all over the place I heard Megan Fox saying that the other day if you guys don't watch Megan Fox you need to check her out she's a Metta Knight mom that is just I can relate to her so much and she's always on the go she's so busy busy busy but anyway thank you all so much for watching today and if you're new subscribe love it if you joined my little corner of the internet here and don't forget to give this video a like leave a comment below I respond to all the ones that I can and I will see you guys in the next one