Here you will find some of our favorite recipes and beef cooking tips, thoughts about cooking implements and tools, a listing of my favorite cookbooks and some helpful hints to make cooking for your family something you can really enjoy!

At our house, we try as much as possible to prepare the majority of our foods from scratch, using healthy ingredients. Now, do I grind my own grain for my bread every day? Do we grow all of our own vegetables? No, we're not quite there yet. But we do try to pay close attention to what we eat, how it is prepared and how and where it was grown or raised. We try to eat a diet free of artificial flavors, preservatives and colors.

It is amazing to me the items in the grocery that have artificial colors added for no good reason I can see (almost everything does - check it out next time you go shopping). For example, why does chocolate cake mix need red food coloring? Why does sweet relish in the store have yellow food coloring? What ever happened to all natural, pure vanilla flavoring instead of vanillin? Why does the baby wash need to be purple or blue? What is with all the corn syrup and partially hydrogenated fats?

These are things I ask myself when I shop and try to teach my girls to have inquirying minds about. I can't help but think that people ate healthier food in my grandmother's day; food grown on their own homestead with their own hands from seeds they'd saved ~ when butter was homemade and your ice cream wasn't cotton-candy flavored.

I hope you enjoy these recipes as much as my family does.