Living On A Dime

Tag: canning

  • Homemade Snow Ice Cream Recipe And Snow Cones

    Homemade Snow Ice Cream Recipe And Snow Cones

    Make a sweet treat on a snow day with our homemade snow ice cream recipe! Snow ice cream is a wonderful treat for the kids and mom and this recipe and video make it easy!

    Make a sweet treat on a snow day with our homemade snow ice cream recipe! This is a wonderful treat for the kids and mom to enjoy together! This recipe and video make it easy!

    With snow in most of the country I thought I would post these recipes and tips for a fun frugal snow day, including our homemade snow ice cream recipe!

    There are lots of great ways to enjoy snow days or make them better for the kids. We have a family tradition of making snow ice cream every year with the kids and they look forward to the first snowfall with enough snow to make homemade snow ice cream. We have one child who doesn’t like milk or ice cream, so we make snow cones for him and I am including our easy snow cone recipe here, too!

    Sometimes, people get a little weird about using snow on the ground, but never fear! We have been making snow ice cream for years and nobody has died. Of course, you want to use fresh snow that has recently fallen and not dirty snow or, even worse, yellow snow! haha!

    After the recipes, I included some pictures of some of our snow adventures, including sledding, snow surfing when you don’t have hills and igloo building, which we did for quite a few years when the kids were younger!

    I put some pictures of our place too! Enjoy!

    Tawra

    Watch our “How To Make Snow Ice Cream” videos below!

    How To Make Snow Ice Cream video

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    Homemade Snow Ice Cream Recipe

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    This homemade snow ice cream is a super special sweet treat that kids especially love! It’s a wonderful adventure for kids on a snow day to gather fresh snow to make their own ice cream. Our kids have always loved it and yours will, too!

    • Author: Tawra
    • Yield: 4 servings

    Ingredients

    1/2 cup milk, sweetened condensed milk or cream
    1/4 cup sugar
    1/4 tsp. vanilla
    2 cereal bowls fresh clean snow

    Instructions

    1. Mix milk, sugar and vanilla together.
    2. Stir until vanilla is dissolved.
    3. Add fresh snow and stir gently until it is thoroughly mixed.
    4. Serve immediately. Serves 4.

    Our kids love it when it snows because they love making and, more importantly, eating homemade snow ice cream!

    Genuine Kansas weather gnome

    Genuine Kansas Weather Gnome

    The directions say, “If it’s covered in snow, it’s snowing!”

    Here's an easy 2 ingredient snow cones recipe you can make with fresh snow or crushed ice! A prefect treat that the kids will love!
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    Easy Snow Cones Recipe

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    • Author: Tawra

    Ingredients

    Crushed ice or snow
    1 pkg. flavored drink mix* (flavor of your choice)

    Instructions

    1. Mix drink mix with half as much water as the directions indicate to make a thicker syrup.
    2. Chill 1 hour.
    3. Just before serving, crush some ice or pack snow into your cup. Tu crush ice, you can use either a snow cone maker or put some ice cubes in a plastic bag and pound with a hammer.
    4. Pack the snow or ice chips into cups.
    5. Pour chilled drink mix over the ice and serve.

    Notes

    *You can also use fruit juice boiled down to half with food coloring added:
    Apple juice: green or red food coloring
    Grape juice: purple food coloring
    House winter wonderland
    winter wonderland - snow covered playground
    david with a snowball

    First, a stay dry tip: Slip plastic sacks over the kids feet to keep them dry. Put them on over the socks and the put on their shoes. Tie the handles around their legs.

    sledding behind a lawn tractor mower

    If you don’t have a 4-wheeler get out the lawn mower!

    Kids sledding in the snow

    Baby Jack’s First Sledding!

    snow surfing behind a lawn mower

    Snow Surfing In Kansas. This is how you have fun in the snow with no hills!

    From our snow storm 2 weeks ago

    Mom and Jack in the snow

    Jack’s first time in the snow (with mom not feeling so great :-)

    gathering snow for the snow fort

    Elly and BJ collecting snow to make igloo bricks. They used a plastic tub to make the snow bricks.

    building the igloo
    bj building the igloo

    BJ and David working on the igloo

    the homemade igloo is taller than Elly
    Elly sand dad in the ogloo

    Elly and Mike posing with the final product.

    [dining]

  • Turn School Supplies Into Christmas Gifts

    Turn School Supplies Into Christmas Gifts

    Just before school, when school supplies are on sale, is a good time to stock up on lots of little gifts that will be great for Christmas! (more…)

  • Potato Flake Sourdough Bread Starter Recipe

    Potato Flake Sourdough Bread Starter Recipe

    Here’s a potato flake sourdough bread starter recipe that you can use to make a starter that will make yummy sourdough bread over and over again! (more…)

  • Canning and Freezing Garden Produce

    Canning and Freezing Garden Produce

    Save money eating home grown produce all year! Try these easy tips for canning and freezing vegetables from your garden or from the store.

    Save money eating home grown produce all year! Try these easy tips for canning and freezing vegetables from your garden or from the store.

    Canning and Freezing Garden Produce

    We get quite a few questions this time of year about canning and freezing garden produce. This can be a great way to stretch your garden leftovers so you can be enjoying them long beyond the regular growing season. Since it is “harvest season”, I thought I’d share a little of my experience and give you suggestions to make it easier if you decide to try.

    Unless you have a garden or receive free produce, canning your own can be more expensive than buying it at the store. I tried canning for years and between the sugar and spices, it cost me quite a bit. If I had to buy the fruit that I was going to can, it was even more expensive.

    If you have your own gardens, you will probably have to do some canning and freezing if you want to make the most of your garden produce. Freezing is the best route to take when possible. You don’t need as many ingredients and it takes less time. When you have things ripening like crazy, time is important. Later, during the winter when it is cooler or you’re not so busy, take the fruit out of the freezer and make your jams or jellies.

    Of course, you may want to can your veggies. Canning them is a good way to preserve them, but it is more difficult and expensive than freezing. If you decide to go ahead and can them, when you are exhausted from canning or when you’re running out of time, don’t forget that you can freeze many vegetables, too.

    Dehydrating Garden Produce

    If you are short on freezer or cabinet space, you might consider dehydrating your produce. I love to dehydrate everything. You can dehydrate veggies. They work great in stews and soups.

    You can dehydrate fruits and later eat them as-is or use them in trail mix, rehydrate them and use in muffins or breads and even use dehydrated apples in pies. You can make fruit roll ups by pureeing fruit and pouring on a special tray for your dehydrator. I saw apple chips advertised on TV for $25 for 3 Pringles-sized cans. Those are so easy to make and much cheaper with your dehydrator.

    If you’re considering canning

    I canned for years. It was one homemaking skill I was glad I knew, but was very willing to give up. It was a lot of hard work during the hottest time of the year and then, if the least little thing went wrong, all those expensive ingredients and hard work were wasted.

    I’m not saying don’t can. Try it! I think everyone should at least have that skill and knowledge under her belt. If you are going to have a garden and want to make the most of it, you will need to know that preserving the fruits of your labor will have to be a part of that. At the same time, don’t brow beat yourself if you find canning exhausting work and get discouraged over it.

    It may be too late this year to do this but, if you can (no pun intended), it will help reduce the cost if you buy your canning supplies at garage sales or thrift stores. You might even post online or ask in the want ads if anyone wants to get rid of her canning supplies.

    Last thoughts…

    Another thing to note is that I didn’t always do things by the book. (Of course, for canning, you need to be careful that you always do the canning correctly for health reasons.) One time, I received several bushels of apples at one time. I had a baby, a toddler and a kitchen that was being remodeled at the same time that we were starting a new business in our home. I had my hands full and couldn’t get the entire bunch of apples done. I didn’t want them to go to waste so, in a desperate move, I took them all, put them in bags and just threw them in the freezer. I didn’t blanch them, core them or anything.

    Later, when I went to use them, they worked great! I discovered that when I washed them (under warm water) the skins just fell off of them. I then cored and sliced them and they made beautiful apple butter and applesauce.

    I can’t cover all the details about how to can and freeze all the different types of fruits and vegetables in this post, but here are some links you can use to pick and choose the exact information that you need. The first two are about canning and freezing and the last one is about dehydrating.

          -Jill

    [dining]