This post contains affiliate links. I will be compensated for purchases made through those links at no additional cost to you. All views expressed are my own. Thank you for your support! After babying and protecting and watering and cutting back and fertilizing my strawberry patch over the last 3 years, this year it is starting to produce like crazy! I am in heaven over it! I've made us Strawberry Shortcake and used them in smoothies, but now I am wanting to be able to preserve some. I've frozen berries in the past, I do not like the result of simply canning them in simple syrup, and I have plenty of Strawberry Jam in my cupboard. Then, I saw an idea for making Strawberry Pie Filling and I realized that would be the perfect way to preserve some of these beauties! Today I had enough strawberries to measure 8 cups of sliced strawberries. I wondered if that would be enough to give me at least 2 quarts of pie filling. I remembered that I did have some frozen strawberries still in the freezer. My mind started working and I came up with a process that has worked very successfully, tastes so good and is beautiful in the jar! I'm going to share that process with you today.
2 Comments
This post contains affiliate links. I will be compensated for any purchases made through those links at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support! This past weekend was our church's general conference. It is a day when we watch church on television with our family and listen to inspired messages from our church leaders. It happens twice a year and many families have traditions that make the day even more special. With our family, I've always served a big breakfast on Sunday morning. We had my son and his children with us for conference this time and I was talking to them about what we should have for breakfast. My granddaughter asked if she could make donuts! I thought it sounded like a great idea and suggested that we make a chocolate ganache to cover them in because the kids all love chocolate donuts with sprinkles! My amazing granddaughter took everything into her own hands and used the Pioneer Woman's recipe for Homemade Glazed Donuts. I had asked her if she wanted to make baked donuts, but she said that she preferred fried, and I can't blame her for that! The dough is to be made the night before and refrigerated until the next morning. So, Saturday night she made the dough all on her own in my Kitchen Aid. Then she wrapped it up and put it into the fridge. We were a little worried that it might grow to large and over prove because it was in there longer than 8 hours, but it was fine. On Sunday morning, she rolled out the dough and allowed them to rise while we watched the first session of conference. In the meantime, I made everyone eggs and bacon to tide us over until the donuts were ready! The only thing that I really did to help her was to make sure the oil was up to the correct temperature (375 degrees F.) before she started frying the donuts. Having the oil at the right temperature is crucial to a fried donuts success. If it isn't hot enough, you will have oily donuts. If it is too hot the outside will cook but the inside will be raw. Pioneer Woman gives some good tips with her recipe to help with that. Jayda was great at following the recipe to the T! The donuts and donut holes were perfectly cooked. Really, I just stood there and watched her, taking pictures and when she took them out of the oil onto paper towels, I flipped them over to soak up the oil. I 'm just so stinkin' proud of her! Her confidence with cooking and baking is really growing! Neither one of us had ever made ganache before, but we have seen it done on TV a million times. We worked together on that and it was so easy! Ganache In a largish bowl, add 9 ounces of chocolate. We used a dark 60% cacao chocolate chip. In a sauce pan, heat up 1 cup of heavy cream just until it begins o bubble to a boil. Immediately pour the hot cream over the chocolate and whisk it together as the chocolate melts. Also add a tsp of vanilla at the end. I poured the Ganache over the donuts and my granddaughter followed behind me with the sprinkles! Now we have ideas for other ways to use ganache! Thanks Pioneer Woman for the great donut recipe! Hope you all give it a try and have the success that my granddaughter did! Other kids baking posts This post contains affiliate links. I will be compensated for any purchases made through those links at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support! Hello everyone! Helen here, back from the beautiful state of Georgia where I was visiting and helping Alicia who had her third child who decided to make an early entrance to this world! He and his mom are doing great now. It was such a blessing, just 2 days before Easter, to have that tiny baby get to go home. I hope all of you had a blessed Easter and that you felt the Savior's love in your lives and the hope of the resurrection as we did this year. Because the baby was able to go home earlier than we thought, our plans to celebrate Easter with friends changed. So, my daughter's family and I had a smaller celebration than planned, but it was perfect. We quickly came up with a dinner menu and I drove off, GPS in hand, to the grocery store to gather the ingredients! The dinner was a delicious, delightful success! One of the dishes that my SIL prepared was my favorite of the day! It was this Potato Crab Salad that he remembers his mother preparing for his family throughout his childhood. It is so simple to prepare and fresh tasting. It was a great addition to our traditional dishes like ham and rolls. With ham, you want to have potatoes, but this was much easier to prepare than scalloped potatoes! If you are a seafood love like I am, you will love it. When I arrived back at home, I was still thinking about this salad and had to whip it up for my husband and I. After getting my SIL's recipe, I put it together with a couple of minor adjustments because if the ingredients that I had on hand.
Although we served this as a side at our Easter Dinner, it makes the perfect stand alone salad for lunch or a light dinner. Let us know if you give this recipe a try! Enjoyed this post? Here are others you may love:
Hey everyone, Lindsey here! As you may know by now, mom is in Georgia with Alicia. Alicia gave birth recently to her third child. Unfortunately there were complications with her pregnancy and baby Sebastian had to come early, so he is spending time in the NICU.
The good news is, he is doing really well! Alicia is pretty much a pro at dealing with babies in the NICU since her oldest son Adrian also was born early and had to spend time there. I wish I lived closer so I could help out with watching kids, transportation, cooking, cleaning etc. I started wondering, what can I do to help my sister while she is dealing with this stress while she is in Georgia and I am in Arizona? I figure I am probably not the first person who has a friend or family member with a NICU baby, and maybe you too were wondering, what can I do to help them? So I asked Alicia, what are the things that NICU parents need? These are her answers: IDEAS to help out nicu parents:
1. Food: At the top of her list was helping out with meals. Of course, most NICU parents are spending many hours in the hospital, and making some good homemade meals isn't easy! This can become exponentially harder when you have older kids who still need to eat, and/or if the hospital is kind of far away from where they live (which is the case with Alicia).
If you live nearby you could drop off meals at their home. Alicia said they set a cooler on their porch in case people dropped off meals while they weren't home. If you have a large cooler you could offer it up for meal storage. Or, if you know them well enough that they feel comfortable giving you a key, you could offer to drop by at certain times during the day to move meals from the cooler to the refrigerator or freezer indoors. For people like me, who live far away, it is so much easier in this day and age to digitally send gift cards to restaurants in the area, or even just a reloadable VISA type card that they can use anywhere. I have also ordered food from a family favorite and had it delivered. So easy to do out of state! You could also offer to pick up groceries for them, and again, you can do this from far away through things like Instacart, Amazon Pantry, or other grocery delivery services.
2. Babysitting: This one is obviously easier for those who live nearby, but if your NICU family has older kids, volunteering to babysit the older kids is a huge help! Even before my mom was able to fly out to help watch Alicia's older kids while they were with Sebastian in the hospital Alicia had people who lived nearby, like our cousin Tara, and some friends of theirs, who helped watch the kids and make sure they were taken care of so Alicia and Adrian could focus on the baby and Alicia's recovery while at the hospital.
3. Helping to clean: Another big help as your NICU parents are traveling back and forth to the hospital, especially since mom is recovering from giving birth, is help cleaning up their house! I remember when Emily was a baby one day one of my ministering sisters through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints texted me and said she was going to come over and clean while Emily and I slept. She came over and cleaned my kitchen and did some laundry and then left. We were sleeping. She didn't ask to hold the baby or try to have me sit up and chat with her. She just came, served, and went home. It really meant so much to me that she was willing to do that! Can you imagine how much more it would mean to someone who's baby is spending time in the NICU? To be able to come home to a clean house can really lift your spirits when everything else can feel so crazy.
For those who live far away, if it is in your budget, maybe you could hire someone to spend a few hours cleaning at your friend or family member's home, as long as they're comfortable with it.
4. Baby supplies: If the hospital will let you dress baby, it can be helpful and comforting to parents to be able to have clothes to dress their little one in, in order to feel some sense of normalcy while they're in the hospital. Plus, if baby came early enough, they might not have supplies yet, and it can help them feel like they're ready to bring baby home when the time comes.
This is one that people who live far away can do as well! Alicia had a gift registry on Amazon and I was able to send her some diapers for Sebastian from all the way in Arizona. I know I'm not the only one who did that for her. Since their second child is six, and they moved prior to the baby being born, they needed some supplies and Sebastian came just before Alicia's baby shower. So sending baby items is so helpful! Alicia also specifically mentioned getting mom a good breast pump. With a NICU baby mom's usually aren't able to nurse at first. If breastfeeding their baby is a goal mom has, you can support her in that buy getting her a good pump, or spare pump parts so she has everything she needs to pump! (Including a mini fridge to store the milk in!)
5. Care package for the NICU parents: Along with the breast pump and supplies you can send a care package of things mom (and also dad) will need to keep their energy up! I love this Honest company New Mama Care essential gift kit linked above! You could also get mom Gatorades (Gatorade was a HUGE help with my milk supply!) and snacks for while they're spending their day in the NICU. A care package could also include hand sanitizer, breast pads, nipple cream, maybe a neck pillow for dad if he falls asleep in the hospital while mom is pumping or something, a small night light for night time pumping, ice packs, and a small cooler for transporting milk.
6. I'll add my last thought that as you are trying to help, try not to be an additional burden on mom and dad. If you have more free time to say, I can come to your house on this day to set up the nursery for you, then that is great! But if all you can manage right now is to send a gift card, don't try to schedule for anything extra that might require them to meet you, or arrange their schedule around yours. Sometimes a simple note or text letting them know you're thinking of them and praying for them can go a long way to energize their spirits.
Having a little one in the NICU is obviously a stressful time in a parents life, so remember, in your goal to be helpful, don't add to their burden, you're just trying to lighten the load any way you can! |
Creators of Hot Cocoa Bombs! (copyrighted)
Author
Helen Reynolds: Mother of six children , grandmother to eleven! I love to cook, craft and create things and I especially love doing that with my family, So, when my lawyer daughter, Lindsey, my artist daughter, Madalynn, and I came up with the idea of Hot Cocoa Bombs, this blog was born. Then, one more daughter, with her technical and science skills, plus creativity has joined in to round us out! Read more about us here! Archives
May 2024
|