Recipes for the Things We Make

When we posted about roasting our own coffee, we mentioned that we made some other things from scratch as well...granola, bread, yogurt, laundry & dish detergent. From the comments we learned friends and family would like to learn how to make these things as well. Most are very easy and can save money over time along with giving you the opportunity to say you made it yourself.

Dry Dish Detergent
Equal parts of washing soda, borax and regular dry dish detergent (helps with the rinse cycle). We usually do 1.5 cups of each and it lasts about one month because you only need 1-2tsp/load with a regular sized dish washer.

Laundry Detergent
Ingredients
1/3 bar of fels naptha or ivory soap
1/2 cup washing soda
1/2 cup borax powder
6 cup water
4 cups HOT water
1 gallon plus 6 cups water (each water is added at different times)
Containers to hold detergent in will need to equal 2 gallons

Grate the soap and put it in a sauce pan. Add 6 cups water and heat it until the soap melts. Add the washing soda and the borax and stir until it is dissolved. Remove from heat. Pour 4 cups hot water into the bucket. Now add your soap mixture and stir. Now add 1 gallon plus 6 cups of water and stir. Let the soap sit for about 24 hours and it will gel. You use ½ cup per load.

Yogurt
Things you need: crockpot, milk, starter yogurt
Process takes 24hrs with little hands on time

1. Plug crock pot in, place temp on low, add 8cups milk; the lower the fat content of the milk the thinner your yogurt will be. We usually use 2% and it still is very thin unless you decide to strain it.
2. Leave the crock pot on low for 2.5 hours.
3. After 2.5 hours, unplug crock pot, keep lid on and leave for 3 hours.
4. After 3 hours, take about 1cup of milk out of crockpot and add 1/2 cup of yogurt to be the starter, wisk together and then pour into crockpot.
5. With crockpot still unplug, wrap in big towel to insulate and leave over night.
6. Next morning you can eat it. If you would prefer it was a thicker texture you can place a big coffee filter in a colinder and place the yogurt in the coffee filter. It will filter the liquid out and become thicker.

We love to add things to our yogurt - granola, sugar free fruit preserves, frozen chocolate chips or some honey are all our favorites.

Granola (this is my mom's recipe)
Process takes about 15hrs with 45min hands on time
Ingredients:
Large container of old fashion oats
1/2jar sunflower seeds, unsalted
1cup coconut
1cup slivered almonds
1/2cup sesame seeds
mix in 20oz cup - 1/2 full of HOT water, 1/3 more honey, 1/8 of oil

1. mix all well in later mixing bowl
2. pour into 3 9x13 pans
3. Roast in 200 degree oven stirring occasionally for 2hrs
4. lower temp to 170 degrees and leave over night.

Now we are working on making our own cheese. I'm sure you'll hear about it soon...ricotta, goat, mozarella, it's going to be wonderful.