The Best Fresh Salsa Recipe ~ Plus More Large Family Homesteading

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Hello friends it’s Jessica from Three Rivers Homestead and I have another video for you this week it’s actually a shorter video than I normally put out and that is because we sort of had an emergency happen in the kitchen later this week so I wasn’t able to do the canning project that I was going to film for the rest of this week’s video my fridge died probably on Thursday I think it was it started to warm up and by Friday we knew that it was completely dead so Adam had to P the whole fridge out of the kitchen and take it outside to defrost it and he’s still working on trying to get that um fixed so that hopefully we don’t have to buy a new refrigerator but I don’t know if you guys are like me but I cannot do big kitchen projects like canning or even cook a big meal if my kitchen is in disarray and everything had been kind of pulled out so that canning project that I planed to do for you guys just didn’t happen I’m hoping to get to it this weekend so that I film it and include it in next week’s video for you so you get a shorter video this week but other than our little kitchen catastrophe it was a wonderful week we had some very mild weather where the temperature dropped which was such a nice break and as you can see outside it’s kind of Muddy and wet and dreary because of the rain and the cloud cover that we have but we will take it because I am just not cut out for extremely hot weather I much prefer the milder temperatures and the garden absolutely loved the rain that we received so you can see that the kids were out early in the morning taking care of the homestead and all of the animals I love that I have such capable helpers that are able to do this work for me because there was a time when the children were younger where I had to do all of these chores myself maybe with little helpers on my side who were learning and then over time they learned from me and were able to take over those chores and while they’re outside doing all of the animal chores in the morning I can be inside making a nice hot big breakfast for them so it’s a huge time saer it’s great teamwork we all work together to get the job done so speaking of breakfast I’m going to share a breakfast recipe that we enjoyed this week using strawberries we have a lot of fresh strawberries coming out of the garden right now and the majority of them we eat fresh because I mean who doesn’t love fresh ripe strawberries but when we have some extra strawberries I like to bake with them and making muffins is one of my favorite things to do so we are going to make some strawberry and cream muffins I am doubling my recipe to make two dozen muffins I start with four cups of flour and then I’m adding to that one cup of sugar and then we will need 4 tpoon of baking soda along with with one teaspoon of salt and those are all of our dry ingredients we’re going to get all of that mixed together then we’ll start working on our wet ingredients so this is my basic fruit muffin recipe I have made this with all different types of fruit for you guys most commonly I’ll use it to make uh blueberry muffins and so when I substitute something like strawberries in this recipe I just want to chop the fruit up into pieces that are about the size of a blueberry when you bake it you don’t want to have a massive chunk of strawberry you want to have a nice pleasant size with each bite so just chopping these strawberries down into the prop appropriate size for the muffins but you could use any kind of fruit in this I’ve used other types of berries I’ve used apples anything that you can cut into little pieces like this now the next thing we’re going to do is add our oil you guys know that I like to use olive oil in most of my baking but the price of olive oil has gotten so high that it’s now comparable it’s the same exact price as avocado oil in the places that I shop and avocado oil has a higher Heat point which is actually more ideal for baking and cooking so we’re switching over to avocado oil in a lot of our recipes lately and that’s what I’m adding here is one cup of avocado oil to the muffin mix and then we need to add our eggs we’re just going to add two eggs these are from our chickens of course and then we need to add a little bit of vanilla extract that’s homemade extract straight from the vodka bottle that’s how we make it here and then we need two cups of liquid you could use any kind of milk I’m going to add a can of this coconut cream but since it’s not quite two full cups of liquid as I mix this batter together I might need to add a little extra water to get the rest of the liquid that the recipe requires I ended up adding another maybe 1/4 to A3 a cup of water just to get the batter to the appropriate texture to get our muffin cups filled before we do that we had a little guy whose feelings were hurt in a little argument with one of his brothers so we’re going to make him feel better and he can hang out with us until he’s ready to go play again then we can fill our muffin tins now you guys are probably wondering why do I use muffin cups for my muffins well I like to limit the amount of dishes that I have to do I am already cleaning dishes for sometimes 10 people in cups and utensils and pots and pans so this just makes cleaning these muffin tins a little easier um and speaking of cleaning I am kind of making a mess with this so I’m going to have to clean the counter but we are going to get these in the oven on 400° for about 20 to 25 minutes I’m going to make some scrambled eggs to serve with the muffins and this is what they look like coming out of the oven I’m going to show you these in natural light here by the window to show show you that they do brown nicely on the top but the lighting in my kitchen is just terrible so when I show you the difference of the muffins under my regular kitchen lights with out the natural light from the window you can see they look much more pale but they do brown um we have our scrambled eggs here and then we have some bowls of coconut yogurt for the children and this is a pretty typical breakfast that we have been eating um throughout the summer sometimes if I’m motivated I’ll run out to the garden and grab some Swiss chard or some fresh Shives or something to add to the eggs but this is most days we’re doing some kind of muffin and eggs and you know a couple other things for breakfast that’s what those strawberries look like inside the muffin they smell delicious and a lot of you like to ask um you know that I can’t have um wheat or a lot of grains or sugar and so what do I eat on the days that I bake something for the children and my go-to breakfast lately is I just fry up one potato and I serve it with a couple eggs and that is what I like to eat for breakfast okay I learned something this week that I want to share with you guys this is some volunteer chamomile that is growing out of the side of one of my garden beds here in the garden I intentionally planted chamomile last year and it’s spreading everywhere which is not a problem I love chamomile tea so we’re harvesting these flowers and we’re going to freeze dry them um for future batches of tea but I noticed earlier this year that I had all these little chamomile plants that were popping up in my driveway and I was like how on Earth did a bird carry that much seed from the garden all the way out here to the driveway I was so confused and then a friend on Instagram told me this week that this is actually a wild form of chamomile that’s called pineapple weed it smells just like it and has the same medicinal properties but it likes to grow in grally areas so this is just something that nature decided to start growing here it’s not related to the chamomile that is growing intentionally in my garden space but I just wanted to share this with you guys because I learned it this week and maybe you don’t have chamomile in your garden right now but if you find that you have these little plants growing in your gravel driveway or somewhere else on your property you can Harvest them in the same way that you would traditional chamomile dry it and use it for tea so maybe some of you um can go out and search around see if you find this and make yourself some wonderful Homegrown Tea from it now we’re back in the garden and I need to harvest some cilantro I want to make some homemade salsa out of some fresh ingredients but I got distracted by all the beautiful radish pods these are my favorite snack I’m going to share some recipes with you next week on how we use these in our cooking but I’m going to snack on some while I get that cilantro to make My Salsa so I started out with one pint of of canned black beans and I’m going to add to that about a pint of canned sweet corn from last year and then we need to add our Tomatoes obviously to the salsa so everybody likes their Tomatoes at a different consistency some like really big chunks what I like to do is throw my tomatoes in my food processor and kind of pulse them until they get a lot more liquidy I like a runnier um more liquidy salsa texture when it comes to my tomatoes so I just put them in the food processor it saves me a lot of time not having to chop all of those Tomatoes it’s really helpful and then the same is going to be true for our onion I’m just taking one red onion and we’re going to do the same thing throw that into the food processor and let it do the work for us and chop that down into pieces and you can do it however um whatever texture you like you can just make it into an oniony you know liquid or you can have chunks of onion if that’s what you prefer now we need to add our Peppers so obviously here in Ohio it is a long time before we’re going to have ripe sweet peppers that have begun to turn colors in fact our pepper plants are just now beginning to flower so I had to buy these from the store and I just like a variety of colors of your sweet peppers in order to um add different colors to the salsa I think it just makes it beautiful so those are a sweet pepper and then we also want to have add some hot peppers and since I don’t have any in the garden I but I do have a lot of pickled hot peppers from last year’s Garden so I’m just adding some pickled jalapenos probably the equivalent of about two large jalapenos and that’s the amount of spice that I put in so that my little kids will still eat it if it were just the older kids eating it I would probably add more like a habanero pepper or maybe some extra jalapenos to give it some more kick but little ones won’t eat it if it’s too spicy and then of course we have our fresh cilantro here we’re just going to get all of that in the food processor and pulse that until it’s all chopped up and then we can put this together to make our salsa this salsa is really best when you let it sit for a little bit after you make it to let all of those flavors kind of blend together it’s just reminds me of Summer this is one of my favorite things to make in the summer when I have fresh cilantro available and I was craving it this week so we that is why we’re making it now you do need to add a little bit of acid to it my favorite thing to add is the juice of a couple of limes but if I don’t have limes in the house I’ve used lemons before and that tastes really good if I don’t have lemons either sometimes apple cider vinegar can work really well you just want to have a little bit of acid added to that and then all we need to do is add our salt now sometimes I’ll add a little bit of garlic to it you can add cumin crushed red pepper is also nice if you don’t have any hot peppers available kind of do whatever you want with this but I just love these beautiful colors and once again I’ll show it to you in the natural light so you can see it’s just oh so fresh and tasty so what I like to do is make a bowl of this sometimes for lunch I’ll just cook up some taco meat and the kids will make their own Nao plates with this but lately in the summer we’ll just make a big bowl of this and I’ll set out some tortilla chips and the kids will snack on this after the in the afternoon and with eight kids you know it’s a big bowl but it doesn’t last long the boys are telling me that they would prefer more spice and I had to remind them that the little kids would not eat it if it was too spicy so I told them next time I’ll pull a bowl aside for them and add a little extra pepper to it so just thought I would share one of my favorite sumary recipes I love that the garden is starting to to produce and so I can bring you recipes now with fresh ingredients instead of the home preserved ingredients that you guys are used to me sharing in my recipes so hopefully next week this fridge that Adam has torn apart will be fixed and I can get back to my canning um I have all of these mulberries to process we’re going to make some jam and some other fun things from those so many other things are starting to come in from the garden I love this time of year like I said we rely on a lot of canned and preserved Foods throughout the year and summer is the time we just love to load up on Fresh Foods like the fresh strawberries we’ve been snacking on fresh salsa lots of fresh greens and our salads and things and I’m just excited to take you along on this journey of sharing how our food changes uh throughout the year you can see that the junk Woods here is coming alive and the bees are absolutely loving that I know a lot of you guys had questions about whether or not I’m still keeping bees you guys know that I was attacked by a swarm of bees last year and sustained about 40 stings from that and was really not sure whether or not I was going to continue to keep bees and then the decision was sort of made for me my be my hive that I had my one remaining Hive actually died over the winter but before I had a chance to get all of my equipment disassembled a wild swarm has moved in and so now I have a new Hive so God sort of made that decision for me I was going to give up and not keep bees but he sent some bees to me he wants me to overcome my fear and continue to work with them so we are going to um see what we can do and um hopefully Lord willing we will harvest a lot of honey this fall from this new wild swarm that has moved in okay and that is it for this week like I said it’s a shorter video but I will make up for it next week and get to that canning project that I wanted to share for you I hope you guys are all having a wonderful week and the weather has been Pleasant for you wherever you are and we will be back um have a wonderful week friends and we will see you next Sunday