French Bread Pizza

I am sooooo far behind on my posts.  Time is not on my side lately with kids school, cheer, hockey, work, harvesting, and preparing the farm for winter!!

This is a quick very economical meal.  No tricks here!  Add a green salad and your whole meal for a family of 4 is under $10.

Another wonderful thing about this meal is everyone can have what they like on their pizza!

Onion Meatballs in gravy over rice

Always a tasty dinner when you are pressed for time.  Doesn’t take much preparation even when making your own meatballs and quick brown gravy (cheater’s gravy) is what I like to call it.

You can find the recipe on my Facebook page here:  Onion Meatballs

Apple Walnut Muffins

With apple season in full swing, these are the perfect morning treat, lunchbox treat, after school snack, late night treat …well you get the idea.

Super easy to make.  I like to use my jumbo muffin tins to make these as..well..simply because a regular cupcake tin is just not enough.

Delicious!

Ingredients:

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup) softened

1 tsp. vanilla

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 cup white sugar

dash of salt

2 eggs

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 3/4 cups flour

1/2 cup milk

2 cups of peeled chopped apples

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 375 and spray/grease your muffin tins

Cream butter, sugars, vanilla and salt.  Add the eggs.

In a separate bowl mix the baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and flour.

Mix the milk into the butter mixture and add the flour mixture slowly until just incorporated.

Fold in the apples and walnuts

Make your crumble topping:

3 Tbsp. butter

3 Tbsp. flour

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/8 cup white sugar

1/8 cup brown sugar

Mix this with a fork making it into crumble to sprinkle on top

Fill the muffin tins about 3/4 full (or make them even)

Sprinkle the crumble on top

Bake for approximately 25 minutes (or until toothpick comes out clean)

These freeze very well or store them in an air tight container for up to 4 days (they won’t last that long!)

Makes 12 jumbo muffins (or you can make the regular size cupcake muffin

Sunflowers turned to seed

We have bird feeders we use throughout the winter and fill them with sunflower seeds for the birds.  This year we planted a sunflower garden to grow our own seeds.

The first picture is the patch 2 weeks ago in full bloom.  The other 2 pictures are when we planted the garden in June and 3 weeks after the first planting.

We shared this patch with our pumpkins.

As you can see this worked very well.  The pumpkin picture is just one row and we have 8 rows with pumpkins.

The beautiful sunflowers are now turning to seed so tonight we took the time to cut all of the heads off to use to feed the birds throughout the winter.  Some of the heads are loaded with seeds while others have already been worked on by the birds.

In the end we have 2 very large bags filled with flower heads and seeds.

We will hang these from trees throughout the winter for the birds to pick at.  They will also be used as a treat for the chickens.

You can see how they enjoy picking at it once it’s hung in their run!

Spaghetti Nest Cupcakes

I’m still here and very busy lately!!  Tonight we had spaghetti nest cupcakes for dinner.  Always a fun dinner for the kids even the teen queen who does not like sauce.

You can find the recipe on my Facebook page tonight here:  Spaghetti Nest Cupcakes

Shared on The Chicken Chick Blog Hop