 Hey friends, welcome back to my channel. So today I'm basically just taking you along with me while I'm working in the kitchen. There's not a lot of huge structure to this day other than I just had a couple different things I needed to get done, some meals I needed to get prepped, just knocking stuff off my list. So if you're in those shoes and you're going to get some motivation or inspiration out of this video to get your to-do list done, then I'm glad you're here. I'm starting out this day by putting a spaghetti squash into the oven. I want to encourage you all to experiment with squashes. We are in a fall season right now and squash can be so good for you. And for some people, it's just a matter of learning how to cook with them. So once I had the squash in the oven, I pulled out a bunch of vanilla beans. I have been needing to start some more bottles or jars of vanilla beans. It takes about six months to a year for vanilla to extract in a alcohol and that's what I'm going to be using to extract today. And I got these tubes from Costco. If you all watched my Costco haul, I don't know if it was the last video or the video before that. These are from Costco. I did decide though that I wanted to start more vanilla than what I had initially got at Costco. So I got the second pack from Amazon. I can leave them linked below in case you want to try this yourself. So basically you want to have about five vanilla beans for every cup of extracting liquid, whatever you're going to use. I think there's more options than using just alcohol out there. You can definitely look that up. If you want to do an alcohol free version. But I just went ahead and got a gluten free alcohol to extract and just fill up the jars. These jars work so great. They're the perfect size for the vanilla beans. And then I put the lids on and I label everything and you really want to let things sit for quite some time. I do like to let mine sit a whole year. I know some people will pull them sooner than that but I definitely think they need a whole year. So I get to show you a new toy in my kitchen. And that is this spice grinder. I found it on Amazon and it works so well. Plus it has a stainless steel cup which I am so big on. I really love finding things that aren't plastic or coated metals. And I decided to try it out my first time using it. With black peppercorns. And this I want to be able to just grind this as I need to fill my little canister and my pepper shaker and just kind of grind as I need. And this works so well. I've actually been even using it for herbs and things like that to powder them. And the little stainless steel cup detaches and it's dishwasher safe. So it's just so easy. I love this thing. I can't believe I haven't had one sooner. It works so well. And this organic black pepper is super delicious. I can leave that link below too. I found that on Amazon as well. And we just love having fresh ground black pepper on hand. It's so delicious. And I just think that it elevates recipes so well. So once your spaghetti squash has roasted and I usually do mine at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes you wanna flip it over and let it start to cool unless you're gonna eat it right away. But I'm gonna use this in a recipe. So I wanted it to cool down before I started handling the squash. So I've been experimenting a lot with oat flour. If you don't know part of our family is gluten free. Not everybody. So you see a mixture of recipes here on my channel. But I really wanted to start using more oat flour because first of all, it's very accessible. As you can see here, I'm making my own in my blender. But also it's just a really healthy version. A lot of gluten free flours have extra starches and gums and just, I don't know, not always the most healthy ingredients. And so I've been experimenting with using this for a lot of different things. You can even make a pizza crust with oat flour which I haven't tried yet, but I really would love to try. So I just went ahead and pre-blended or ground a bunch of the oat flour. And we're gonna make some blueberry muffins with this oat flour. And spoiler alert, these muffins were unreal. My husband doesn't even really like muffins and he even thought that they were really, really good. So if you just want a good, healthy muffin option, I can't recommend this recipe enough. I will leave it in the description box below. It's got very low sugar. You can add an alternate sweetener if you want to and it's pretty heavy on the blueberries which I think is part of what makes it really good. Of course, you're getting an extra added serving or two of fruit, which is amazing. So I just did the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in another. So the eggs and some oil and you can use a nut milk or you can use regular milk. I'm just using some raw, organic milk here. And I just whisked the wet ingredients separate from the dry ingredients. And there is some of my homemade vanilla. I also put some homemade lemon extract in this as well. I think that lemon extract is so great in blueberry muffins just because it helps to give a, I don't know, another note besides the vanilla and the blueberry. And it just gives a more complex flavor that we really enjoy. So then I just combine the batter and as you can see, I'm just hand mixing all of this. You could get out your mixer and mix it in your mixer as well. It just was really simple to mix together by hand. And then I pulled out my jumbo, I think, that's what they're called, jumbo muffin tins. This is just the size I always think muffins should be. I think in the past I've made some mini muffins, but sometimes they kind of dry out when they're in a mini form. So I just love using them and then using these brown paper liners. They work great because once you have the muffin, which you'll see when my daughters are eating them here after a little bit, you can just open up that wrapper and it makes a nice little plate and you don't have to get out extra dishes. Kind of comes with its own container. So I just divvied out the batter into 12 jumbo muffins. So like I said, I had a lot going on this day. I was pulling out some canned shredded chicken out of my pressure canner. And then I was reloading it here in a little bit with some chicken broth. So we'll get there, but I wanted to pull out my embossing labeler and get a label on this canister because I definitely feel like oat flour is a new staple in my kitchen and I like having it ready to go for me in a canister. So like I said, I had some chicken broth. So what I like to do, and I've shown this on camera before, I was just kind of going through my day in this video and not necessarily showing every little aspect of this process because I have shown it before, but I like to roast up my chickens. So I did three in my big roaster and then I shred the chicken and put that into their own jars and canned that separately from the broth. And then I take the broth and I put that in two jars for chicken broth. And we make rice with this, obviously soups. It's such a versatile product and you're able to control the ingredients when you make it yourself at home, which I really love. So I'm just wiping off the rims with some white vinegar just to make sure that none of the fat from the broth got on the edges because sometimes that can cause a faulty seal. And then you just wanna go ahead and follow the instructions for your pressure canner for how long you wanna pressure can broth. And so I just had that going. When I'm gonna be in the kitchen all day, I really do like to have a project like that where maybe I'm just keeping an eye on it, something in the oven, something on the stove top, so I can just watch it as I'm doing other things. So my muffins were ready to come out. Oh, these are so good. As I'm recording this voiceover, we actually ate them all and I need to make another batch. The girls just blew through them and they were also good, even sliced in half with a little bit of butter spread on them. Just delicious. So as you can see, the girls couldn't even wait until these were cold. They made the whole house smell so good and they were just so excited to eat them. So they sat at our homeschool table in our sunroom and enjoyed a healthy, delicious snack. Watching your children enjoy the things that you make is one of the biggest rewards when you're someone that cooks a lot from home. So the next thing I wanted to prep was some rice and I actually used what I had left from filling my canner of the chicken broth. So I went ahead and just put that in with the rice, put some salt in and cooked that up and then I also got some meat going. So I wanted these things prepped for some really quick tacos this week and that way we just had to heat it up and we were good to go for a meal. And I'm using my homemade taco seasoning. I think somewhere in the last two videos, I shared my taco seasoning recipe and while those things were on the stove cooking, we're gonna go back to focusing on the spaghetti squash. This is probably one of my personal favorite recipes. I love this. A couple of years ago, I came across this recipe or something very similar and I love to recreate it. So I just melted about a half a stick of butter in a bowl. I'm adding some seasoning, some nutritional yeast, about a cup of sour cream and I'm just mixing that all together. I'm going to add in some of my home canned diced tomatoes and then I'm going to also add in some home canned chicken just to give some protein. And if you've never made a spaghetti squash, I feel like the first time you make one, it's just so mesmerizing. It's so amazing because we're so used to seeing spaghetti pasta pre-made but you just take a fork into the squash and kind of loosen up the sides and you will see how the spaghetti just starts to appear and it looks just like spaghetti. But in my opinion, it tastes so much better than spaghetti. It has a very, very buttery flavor. I always love pairing butter with this squash because it just matches the flavor. It's so delicious. We actually eat spaghetti squash often with just some melted butter over it, plain. But in this recipe, obviously I'm creating kind of a sauce for it and you can tweak the surround. I just kind of use what I had on hand to make kind of a creamier sauce. And once you have the whole works combined, you can put it into a pan. This actually would make a really excellent freezer meal as well. And I love giving you guys freezer meal ideas and things you can put in your freezer and prep ahead of time. And this one is a great freezer meal option. And if you wanted to use like a dairy-free sour cream, you could totally do that. And another thing you could also do is add more dairy by topping it with like a shredded cheese. This time, I just wanted to keep things really simple and I just put it into a pan to be put in the oven sometime throughout the week. And I did not top it with cheese. I just left it untopped and we still loved it and enjoyed it. And there's just something about having a creamy sauce with those pops of tomato in it that is so delicious to me. So as we are winding down with the food preservation season, I would love to hear your favorite thing that you canned or froze or preserved this year in the comments. Let me know what has been your favorite thing, whether it was your favorite thing to actually do. Was it exciting to do or do you just really love the way that it tastes or the way it turned out? So back to the rice here, I am just adding a little jar of tomato sauce to this just to kind of make a, I don't know if you wanna call it mexi rice and I'm adding some smoked paprika just to give it a little bit more flavor. And I'm gonna put these things just into a storage container and put it in the fridge. And I love having glass storage containers because if I wanna pop it in the oven to reheat it, I can. Or if I wanna pop it in the microwave, we haven't always had a microwave. We do right now, but I just love that in a glass container you don't have to have a microwave to reheat it if you don't want to, you can put it in the oven. So here I'm pulling out my broth and this is so rewarding. It's just, I love having home canned broth. It's so delicious and the flavor just tops anything store bought and it's really easy to make. You can even freeze broth by the way if you're not someone that cans things. But thanks a lot for hanging around with me today. I, it wasn't a huge video, but I thought you know what, I'm gonna be working in the kitchen. I'm gonna turn on my camera and share with you all what I'm working on. And if you are new here, hit that subscribe button for a lot more content like this. Leave me a comment below and I'll see you guys in my next video.