Just printed this week, a cookbook that may become your go-to source for  your cooking:

The Chameleon Cook:
Cooking Well With What You Have

140 pages of adaptable core recipes, frugal cooking information, rules-of-thumb, and guidelines for cooking everyday food with what you have on hand, including how to adapt to cooking without eggs, dairy, sugar (honey instead), or wheat.  It also includes an index.

  At 5½“x 8½“ it's intended to be easy to fit in any size kitchen.  Any level of cook will find it useful, from beginners to old-hat.  I recommend it especially for college students, missionaries, newlyweds, or anyone wanting to expand their understanding of how to make a recipe work. 

  It has a laminated cover for durability, full-color cardstock chapter dividers with photos, and your choice of plastic coil binding or plastic comb binding.
 
Cost is $14 if purchased through me, $14.95 if bought retail.  Copies may be purchased at John and Jennie's Bosch Kitchen Center, Not Just Copies, and the Sandy Bosch Store.  You can order by calling (801) 541-6999, leaving a comment on this page, or emailing me at singyourwayhome@comcast.net

Chapters include:
-Introduction and Tips
-Appetizers (Snacks!) and Beverages,
-Soups and Salads
-Vegetables and Side Dishes
-Main Dishes
-Breads
-Desserts
-Cookies and Candy
-This & That

Categories in Main Dishes include
-Beans (including cooking them from scratch, and how much is in a can)
-Eggs
-super-adaptable Red Sauce and White Sauce
(make your own Cream of Mushroom Soup and more)
-Meat, including how to make a cheap cut tender

Sections in This & That:
-Cooking Grains
-Miscellaneous
-Dairy Foods
-Dehydrated Foods (both making and using them in your regular recipes)
-Home Remedies
-Homemade Cleaners
-Seasonings, Jam, and Syrups


Some recipes in the sections include:
-Croutons
-Edible Playdough
-Fruit and Nut Energy Bars
-Granola, Granola Bars
-Homemade "Honey Bunches and Oats"
-Brown Bag Popcorn
-Cream Cheese Spreads
-Making simple fresh cheese and cottage cheese
-Snow Ice Cream
-Sweetened Condensed Milk (two versions- one using powdered milk, one using evaporated milk, cream, or half-and-half)
-Culturing Yogurt
-Apple Cider Syrup (Lower Sugar Syrup)
-Five-Minute Marmalade and a dozen ways to use it
-Honey Mustard
-Honeybutter
-Quick Strawberry Jam
-Seasoned Flour
-Seasoned Salt
-Simple Syrup and variations
-Home Remedies- Coughs, Insect Stings, Lowering Fever, Natural Deodorant
-Homemade Cleaners- Floor Cleaner, Furniture Polish, Laundry Soap, Liquid Soap, Carpet Spot Cleaner, Stain Remover, using vinegar, Window Cleaner.

If you need one (or more) shipped, I charge only the actual shipping cost plus the price of a padded envelope.

Call or e-mail today!

-Rhonda

What is this weed? 

Learn from a free, full-color weed guidebook online.

Photo courtesy USU Extension

One of the secrets to good gardening is knowing what you're dealing with.  This applies to pests, soil, weeds, fertilizers, plants, growing seasons, and more.  This week I found two great resources to help you with a couple of these.  I'm especially excited about a guidebook, Common Weeds of the Yard and Garden, from the USU Extension office.  It's a FREE, 220-page guide with photos, plant descriptions, information on how to manage the weed, and any historical uses it has had, whether medicinal or edible.  If you want a hard copy, either print it out yourself, or contact the USU Extension Office.  Their information is included in the guidebook.

In case the link above deoesn't work, you can get it at http://extension.usu.edu/files/publications/publication/Horticulture_Weeds_2011-02pr.pdf

Understanding Fertilizer  is a quick-to-read, one-page article about the basics of fertilizers. 

And just for good measure, here is a list of 50+ free cooking/baking e-books from
The Prepared Pantry http://www.preparedpantry.com/Free-cooking-baking-recipe-e-books.htm 

Did you know the plant in the photo above?  It's Common Mallow.  My kids call the little round seeds "cheesies" and love to eat them.  Every part of this plant is edible, and the 'cheesies' can even be used to make meringue and marshmallows. (There are recipes for these in Edible Wild Plants, by John Kallas.  He also has a website, http://www.wildfoodadventures.com)

Have a happy day!

Rice and more...

Barbecue Sauce.  Make it quickly using tomato sauce as the main ingredient.

White Sauce- simple to make, and the base for several recipes.

Main Dishes card 3  Recipes for pureed (any)vegetable soup, simple pasta sauce (starting with a can of diced tomatoes or tomato sauce, rice- basics, fried rice, Spanish rice, and rice pudding (which is breakfast food around here).

Main Dishes card 4 covers how to roast meat, methods of tenderizing it, simple soup, and white sauce with instructions to make it thin, medium, and thick.  Includes options for making it gluten-free.

Card 1 includes chili, cooking beans, white sauce/gravy, and omelets.

Card 2 is all about potatoes: potato pancakes, mashed, roasted, oven-fried, and baked.

Here's the next bit of the book.    Have you had enough time to look through the other sections yet?

Desserts - apple crisp for one (or more!), other flavors of Crisp, no-baked Cheesecake, lowfat New York style cheesecake, Pudding/ Cream Pie filling and variations.
Fruits and Vegetables- dressed-up green beans or other vegetables, the 'creamy' salad family: Coleslaw, carrot salad, Waldorf salad; ways to cook vegetables and flavors to add, how to steam-saute vegetables; roasted winter squash, green salad ideas, fruit salad ideas.

I’ve put together a cookbook of basic recipes and cooking concepts (like how to take a basic yellow cake recipe to make any number of variations). It was designed to be portable and highly useful.   I hope it is!   I had non-cooks, college students, and young missionaries in mind.    It’s typed in 3x5/4x6 card format, so you cut out the cards and slip them into the sleeves of a small photo album. This collection fits perfectly in a 72-sleeve album.  If you only find bigger ones, you can use the extra spaces for blank cards to write recipe notes on, or slip a photo of the food in the sleeve next to the recipe.  If you like the photo idea, I already have pictures of lots of them.  Email me if you want them, rhair2473@gmail.com

Rather than give a link to the whole cookbook, I’ll put an installment of it once or twice a week here on my website.  That way you have time to really look through the recipes, at a manageable pace.  The first one is below:


Cakes and Frostings page 1
Cakes and Frostings page 2

Note on printing these pages:  the links open to GoogleDocs.  To print, select GoogleDoc's print button, don't do Control-P or you'll print the browser page and only get half the recipes.