Feeding 11 Without Dairy ~ Mozzarella, Ice Cream, & Ranch Dressing from Scratch

This week on the homestead, we’re cooking up some delicious dairy-free meals to feed our family of 11 — all made from scratch and full of seasonal goodness. 🍕🌿🍦

We start by making homemade dairy-free mozzarella that melts beautifully on grilled pizzas cooked over charcoal. Then we head out to gather elderflowers and turn them into a sweet syrup that’s the star of a refreshing dairy-free ice cream. And we finish things off with a creamy, tangy dairy-free ranch dressing that’s perfect for summer salads and garden veggies.

These simple recipes are perfect for families managing food sensitivities — and they don’t sacrifice taste one bit. Whether you’re cooking for a big crew or just looking for allergy-friendly inspiration, I hope today’s video encourages you to get creative with what you have and cook with joy.

Use code THREERIVERS for 10% off VEGEGA raised garden beds –
https://www.vegega.com/?ref=threerivers

Get an extra 10% off your canning lids using the code THREERIVERS10 at https://forjars.co/?sca_ref=1911152.zksyUWaERC

Inventory system –

Inventory book – https://shrsl.com/4rhkz

Learn More About Our Freeze Dryer – https://affiliates.harvestright.com/1179.html

Here is my planner – https://shrsl.com/3b808

How I Set Up My Planner – https://youtu.be/1imHPo9fjxA

Learn more about where we purchase our bulk food – https://www.azurestandard.com/?a_aid=hXtiNKxFVe

More FAQs about our family – https://youtu.be/WpLeHpxH7M8

Our Amazon Storefront – https://www.amazon.com/shop/threerivershomestead

Follow us on Instagram @threerivershomestead

Some of the above links are affiliate links. This means we earn a small commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you.

#DairyFreeCooking #HomesteadKitchen #BigFamilyMeals #GrilledPizza #Elderflower #FromScratch #MomOf9 #ThreeRiversHomestead #SeasonalEating #foodallergies

hello friends it’s Jessica from Three Rivers Homestead and in this week’s video we’re going to do some more seasonal foods that we ate this week from things that we’re growing on the homestead or things that we’re experimenting with here we’re going to make some dairyfree mozzarella cheese and then we’re going to use that on some pizzas that we’re going to cook outside on the grill and then we’re going to harvest some elder flowers so I’m going to make an elderflower syrup that we’re going to turn into an ice cream and we’re also going to make a homemade ranch dressing but the first thing I want to do is harvest some garlic scapes it’s that time of year if you don’t know what escape is it is the flower stock of hard neck uh garlic plants soft neck varieties of garlic will not produce these scapes but hard neck varieties will and like I said the scape is the flower stalk and you can chop it up and use it in many dishes to give it a very mild garlic flavor it’s not quite as strong as the bulb of the plant but it does give a garlic flavor that’s absolutely delicious and so we always enjoy this time of year now in past years I’ve done many videos on some ways that we preserve these i’ve done pickled garlic scapes and shown you that process many times we’ve also dried these into a powder to make um a garlic scape uh powder that’s wonderful and I also love to make pesto out of these and we’ve frozen that pesto before um so I will link videos that show those processes for you in the video description we’re going to do something different in this video but I need to get all of the scapes first and I have some of these bunches of I call it my perennial garlic as I have planted garlic every year sometimes I toss random bulbs that don’t look great out into the junk woods here or they end up in various spots around the garden and I just let those go and um don’t harvest the garlic bulbs every year and that little patch gets bigger and bigger and bigger um so we do harvest the scapes from that area and I leave the bulbs underground to continue to grow so it’s always a nice surprise to pull um to see how many scapes we have growing out in this area of the the wooded area it’s it’s nice um to be able to harvest more scapes from there so this is what we got this wasn’t all of them i left some on the plants that looked like they were still a little small and were growing and these are the mature scapes that I wanted to deal with today and so like I said I’m not going to be canning these or drying them this year what I want to do is chop them into little pieces and we’re going to freeze those i’m not going to blanch them first we’re just going to freeze them raw and my goal for these is to wait until my basil plants are big enough to harvest um basil for pesto and then I can thaw packages of these scapes to add to my basil uh to make pesto later on or I can thaw a package of this and add it to stir fry it’s delicious like that or if I decide in the future I’m out of garlic powder I could also toss these into the freeze dryer to make powder later on so like I said I’m not blanching these before I freeze them but I am going to vacuum seal them and that will just keep them fresh for as long as possible so I just portioned them out into an amount that I thought would be good for a batch of pesto and we’re going to get those in the freezer and then I left a lot of them fresh in the fridge that we’ll be eating in some of our meals throughout the rest of the next couple of weeks the next project this week was to make some dairyfree cheese and this is the recipe book that I am using to do this i had bought some macadamia nuts from Azure Standard specifically for this purpose and we’ve been snacking on them so I knew I needed to make this cheese before you run out of the macadamia nuts um so it’s really simple we started by soaking our macadamia nuts i’m doubling the recipe so I did two cups of the nuts and you can see that overnight they swelled up with the water and softened a bit and I drained those and to it I’m going to add some unsweetened unflavored almond milk yogurt i typically don’t purchase this but I bought it specifically for this recipe and then I’m going to add arrowroot powder as my thickener i’m adding a little bit of avocado oil and then we’re going to add nutritional yeast i did two tablespoons of nutritional yeast to give that cheesy flavor a teaspoon of salt and then a little bit of apple cider vinegar then we’re also going to add one clove of garlic and we’re going to mix all of that together now I am making substitutions the arrowroot was an approved substitution in the book but this recipe called for agar powder and that is not something I keep in my house and I don’t want to purchase an extra ingredient for this i do have um beef gelatin powder in the house and I read online that you can substitute one for one using this it’s just going to affect the way that it melts so I went ahead and added two tablespoons of beef gelatin powder and we’re going to see how it turns out so once I have it mixed as thoroughly as I think I can get it here with my immersion blender we went ahead and threw that in a pan on the stove and we’re going to heat this up to sort of get that gelatin to activate um also the arrowroot powder needs to be heated and then those things once they’re heated and then they cool down later on will help to thicken this and um gel it kind of in the same way we use our arrow root powder for like pie filling and things and in the same way the gelatin would be used for jell-o so we have it heated up um to the point that I’m satisfied with i’m pouring it into these silicone molds from Super Cubes i think that that will help um get them out a little bit easier you can use the kind of bend the silicone a little bit to get it to come out it spent um a day in the fridge and then this is what it looked like so we do have to change our expectations when it comes to dairyfree cheese we are not going to get the same result as we would with a dairybased cheese um and this was a first try so we’re going to see how it is the texture of it reminds me of something like tofu it’s very spongy and soft um so I don’t know if that is the beef gelatin and if I would have used the agar powder if it would have firmed up a little bit more but it’s definitely more like a soft cheese and it was extremely difficult to cut through um but I haven’t had mozzarella in so long so I don’t really remember what it’s probably been 15 years since I’ve seen mozzarella cheese like this i don’t remember what it’s like to cut through but this was the texture that it was like um for here and so I think this would make an amazing spreadable cheese almost like a cream cheese i will say that the flavor is amazing in this you can definitely taste the nutritional yeast um it’s delicious so we’re going to go ahead and make some pizzas and see how it goes on there so I’m going to link my uh pizza dough recipe in the video description here’s a quick screenshot of it this is the easiest pizza dough i make this all the time i’m tripling it on this day so we have enough dough for my whole family and I added garlic powder and oregano to the dough and then I’m just going to get it in my Bosch mixer and let it knead the dough for me i love my handy little appliances that save me so much time and energy i’m very grateful for them and once it was needed by the machine I could take it out and I always like to finish it by hand just to make sure that I get it to the desired texture it was extremely warm this week up to maybe 85° on several days so I was trying to keep the heat out of the kitchen and so we are going to use our green egg cooker here and the pizza stone that um we have that goes with it to make these pizzas but first I needed to grab a couple pints of pizza sauce this is home canned pizza sauce that I made in a video for you uh a couple months ago and I’m so grateful to have these conveniently canned up it just saved me some time and not having to make my sauce on this day but I did need to cut up some of our toppings that Miss Hannah here is sneaking um but just a little variety of different toppings we’re going to do personal pan pizzas on this day i cooked up some Italian sausage and then of course we have the cheese and it’s just much easier to let everybody when we have this many people in the house it’s much easier to let everybody kind of make their own pizza versus trying to just make several large ones that will make everybody happy and the children love this it’s just something fun for them to do to pick out their toppings and make their own little pizza it was just a really nice day adam was home from work and so we were able to kind of do this as a family and make some fun memories so I was very excited to see how the dairyfree cheese would do on these pizzas and I am happy to say that it turned out great i was worried that they would just kind of melt into nothing and they didn’t they it stayed firm enough if anything and I think it’s because we cooked these on the grill that we didn’t get enough heat from the top um I’m wondering how these would have done in my oven inside of the house if maybe um it would have kind of browned the cheese a little bit more on the top but overall it did get a little melty and it was a creamy texture that like I said was delicious and the kids said they would eat it again so we have tried store-bought dairyfree cheeses before and we were just really not satisfied with them now in terms of texture they do melt a little more like dairy cheeses but they’re full of some kind of weird ingredients that we don’t necessarily love and um just don’t seem to be worth it for what you pay for them in the store versus what you get out of it it just has never seemed necessary but if I can make it out of ingredients that I have in the house um that are maybe a little bit healthier I don’t mind making this for the children and they loved it so we’ll be saving the rest of our macadamia nuts to experiment with other types of cheeses and the rest of the cheese that we didn’t use on the pizzas this week I went ahead and made some homemade bagels and we spread it out like cream cheese and that was also really delicious so um this was really versatile and I’m um I might experiment with the agar powder sometime just to see if it gives a different texture but I absolut absolutely would recommend using the beef gelatin if that’s something you have in the house and you wanted to try using because everybody was satisfied with the results that had tried that on their pizza so you guys know that I don’t eat gluten so everybody always asks “What do I eat on days like this when we’re making pizza for the children?” And typically what I will do is make myself a salad and then I will use the sausage and all of the veggie toppings and things like that to make my own little pizza salad but I tried a new salad recipe from my friend Crystal at Wholefed Homestead and I will link her YouTube channel in the description if you want to check her out she’s amazing and I tried out her homemade ranch uh dressing recipe this week and I really loved it so it was mayonnaise and mustard salt and Italian seasoning and then I added some red wine vinegar i don’t know if you guys will remember I made a batch of red wine vinegar for a video a long time ago this was like leftover red wine that I used for cooking that had kind of been in my cupboard for a while so I just threw an apple cider vinegar mother of vinegar in the jar with the wine and it turned out amazing and so I decided to use that in this dressing and my goal is to use up that red wine vinegar in my dressings this summer because I’ve been having salads quite often so we did add a little bit of sugar also and then I’m going to use avocado oil for this dressing and we mixed it all together and it did have a lovely ranch flavor i really enjoyed it ranch dressing is something that I miss since we’re not unable to have dairy due to my son’s allergy and this tasted enough like ranch to kind of fill that desire to have ranch dressing on on a salad every now and then so we will definitely be making this again and I am grateful for Crystal for sharing her recipe she shared it on Instagram last week and I thought I would try it out and I’ll bring you more salad dressing recipes over the next couple of weeks because we have tons of salad or lettuce growing in the garden so I’ve been eating salads pretty much with every meal in some way shape or form and so typically for meals I’ll just eat the meat and the veggies and the salad and leave the carbohydrates for the rest of the family something else that is in bloom this time of year are our elder flowers so this is the flower of the elderberry if you’ve heard of things like elderberry syrup um the this is what the flower looks like and you guys have to smell this sometime in your lifetime it is the most fragrant beautiful smell it reminds me of summer and um this elderflower tree this elderberry tree grows in one of our chicken runs and the birds typically don’t let us get any of the berries they eat them all before we get to them so I always try to harvest some of the flowers before it goes to becomes berries just so we can enjoy something from the tree before the the birds eat it all so we got our little basket of elder flowers in the past I’ve made jelly out of it i’ve made elderflower cordial um which is like a drink that you can add to carbonated water that is just delicious it smells like summer today we are going to make an elderflower syrup and then I’m going to make ice cream out of it so the first thing we want to do is really wash those um flowers well because there can be all sorts of bugs and dirt and things on them and then I’m going to remove the actual petals from the stems we don’t want to use the stems just the fragrant flowers and I have my nice pot here full of them they smell it just smells like sunshine we are going to add a quart of water to the pot and then I’m going to add four cups of sugar and then elder flowers pair really well with a lemon flavor or also honey we did a4 a cup of lemon juice you could also add some lemon zest here if you wanted to um lemon extract or even just whole lemons if you wanted to but we’re going to stir this up and get it on the stove and bring it to a boil and after I let it boil for just a couple minutes then I removed it from the heat and then I let those elder flowers sit in that syrup solution for a full 24 hours before I strained them out that really helped infuse the syrup with the flour flavor next thing we’re going to do is take a couple cans of this organic coconut cream and I’m going to pour it into my elderflower syrup and I’m also going to add a few eggs this will help thicken up my ice cream and then we’re going to pour this into our ice cream machine after we blend it all really thoroughly and just like with the dairyfree cheeses when you make homemade dairyfree ice cream I feel like you have to change your expectation it’s not going to be as creamy and thick as a regular dairybased ice cream unless you add all sorts of strange ingredients and thickeners and things but um it does make a delicious refreshing ice cream like treat if you you know just expect it to be something different and my kids rarely have dairy based ice cream um obviously my allergic son never has it but the other kids have had dairy based ice cream outside of the house before but this is what they’re used to and they love it it has a strong coconut flavor but the elderflower syrup just added an extra something special to that this week and we were really excited to make that and enjoy those elder flowers it’s a special time of year we only really get to do that this time of year other than that we’ve just been busy with school and life as a large family this week i completely potty trained Miss Hannah which occupied a whole lot of my time and I’m grateful to have that task out of the way we also spent a lot of time catching up on some house maintenance you guys know I was pregnant and had terrible morning sickness through last summer so a lot of the house projects that we wanted to do didn’t get accomplished because Adam was filling in for me as Mr mom while I was sick and his time um he just wasn’t able to use his time during the summer to accomplish a lot of these projects so we’re doing a lot of painting and fixing of things that we didn’t get to last summer i’m working on digging myself out of the hole I got my garden into last year all of the weeds went to seed in my neglect um and just not being able to care for the garden during my pregnancy and so all of those weeds that went to seed are now coming up this year and I’ve got a good manage on most of the actual garden beds but my pathways are a mess and so I’m not aiming for perfection this year i don’t need my garden to be picture perfect i just want it to be productive and to feed my family well so I’m just kind of taking it one step at a time it’s like my canning challenge that I do every August every bit counts and that’s how I look at it it’s like every pathway that I can get cleared is one more cleared pathway every bed that I can get weed-free is just one step closer to having a weed-free garden and I’m just looking at the garden in these little chunks you know it’s like they say how do you eat an elephant you do it one bite at a time and so that’s where a lot of my extra time has gone to lately is just kind of working in the garden and I love that it’s so peaceful another thing that we love this time of year is just spending time outside as a family um enjoying the property playing sports um being outside on the deck and just enjoying God’s creation so I hope you enjoyed this little peek into our life this week it was uh a wonderful week we had great weather and we were able to accomplish a lot i’m going to be back next week with another peek at what we’re eating seasonally what is coming in from the garden i’m excited we have some summer crops starting to flower so pretty soon we’re going to have like tomatoes and cucumbers and things so check that out in the coming weeks i hope your week is blessed and we will see you next week friends