Prepped Living Blog

Disclaimer - This blog post contains affiliate links for your convenience. As an affiliate, I may earn from qualifying purchases. Purchasing through these links is optional, but each purchase helps to keep our blog going. Thank you for your support! Backstory Our family really enjoys coffee. We have a small selection of methods to make coffee - both electric and non-electric. We have an electric coffee maker, a French press, an AeroPress, and a camp stove percolator. We enjoy grinding our beans for the freshest coffee, so we have a couple of options for that as well. Our electric grinder is a quality hand-me-down from a favorite cousin. Our hand grinder was a gift from me to Husband one year. I did a lot of research to find a nice, durable grinder with metal parts that could be taken apart and cleaned ( this 1Zpresso grinder  is the updated version of the one we have). We are satisfied that our coffee-making options are pretty well covered. Our only challenge is that coffee beans d...

As most of you know, both Husband and I grew up in households with very modest incomes. Our grandparents were either farmers or ranchers. They grew and preserved a lot of their food. Our parents continued this by canning, hunting, and gardening through much of our childhood. We carry on the tradition of growing and preserving food for many reasons: We know our food is healthy, it helps keep our grocery budget affordable, and it allows us to build up a pantry for lean times.  Tomatoes and jalapenos for hot sauce; calendula, comfrey, and parsley to dry Health issues have pushed us to branch out and learn to do even more projects ourselves in an effort to further reduce the toxins in our food and environment. Some of these projects can be enjoyed right away, like canned sauces, fruits, vegetables, and meats. We had been canning off and on throughout the summer and now have a nice variety of items in the pantry to enjoy in the months to come.  Canned hot sauce and tomatoes for the...

This past week we canned organic apple-pear juice. A friend of ours invited us over to pick apples and pears from their fruit trees a couple of weeks ago. We filled two five-gallon buckets with fruit and returned home to let the pears finish ripening. When everything was ripe and we had the time, we washed the fruit, sliced it, cut out the blemishes, then put it in the canner/juicer.  A bucket of pears and apples It took four batches, but we ended up with seven quarts of apple-pear juice. Ten gallons made seven quarts! 🫣 Juice from two different batches of apples and pears   Note: This newsletter contains affiliate links. Purchasing through these links helps support our website and blog at no cost to you. Thank you for your support. We are fortunate to have a steamer/canner/juicer that my mom handed down to us. It uses steam to release the juice from the fruit. If you have everything sterilized, all you need to do is fill the jars once the juice is ready, attach the lids and...

We finally did it! We made homemade soap! I had been really nervous about it due to the causticity of the lye, but youngest daughter came over one afternoon and we braved the experiment together. Overall, it was a good experience, though I did have a big mishap. I didn't get the lid to the lye container screwed on tight enough, and when I picked it up (by the lid, of course 🙄), it fell, tipped over, and spilled half its contents. This became a learning opportunity on how to best neutralize lye pellets. I am slowly making my way through neutralizing half a container of now-dirty lye pellets (I was mixing the lye-water solution outside to better vent the fumes and had to sweep them up, dirt and all). 😂  For our first experiment, we followed the recipe and directions from  The Soapmaker's Companion , a book we had sitting on the shelf waiting for the moment when I would finally try soap making. We used the recipe for the Soap Essentials Bar II (p. 18 in my copy) and added lemon...

As noted in previous blog posts, we have made several batches of different salves over the years. However, we had not yet experimented with making black drawing salve. Black drawing salve gets its name from the color of the salve, which is owed to the activated charcoal powder that it contains. Husband's   grandmother once shared her memories of buying black drawing salve from the Watkins representative that would come door-to-door when she was young. She mentioned that it was something they always had on hand for splinters, boils, insect bites, and minor irritations. We were looking forward to making our own medicinal drawing salve to have in the medicine cabinet. While some black drawing salves use corrosive ingredients that can be harmful, the recipe we found uses safe, natural ingredients.  For our first time making this salve, we followed the recipe by Living Simply with Valerie . (Note: please go to the website for the recipe. We are will refrain from posting here in ord...

We have homemade salves a few times over the past five years. We have made healing salve, balm of Gilead, and St. Michael's oil. Each of these are wonderful salves with slightly different beneficial properties. We have given away several jars from each batch (these make lovely gifts!) and they have all been well received by the recipients. Of the three kinds we have made so far, our all-purpose, go-to salve has been the Herbal Healing Salve . Each batch is slightly different based on what infused oils we make and use each year, but the basic recipe we follow is this one we put on our website. We have used this for rashes, cuts, bruises, dry skin, swollen tissues, and insect bites. We were nearly out of the healing salve we made a couple of years ago, so it was time to make more. We started this year's batch by solar infusing a mix of olive oil, coconut oil, and avocado oil with calendula, plantain, and a small amount of comfrey. Once that was done infusing (see DIY Infused Oil...