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Here is an excellent article written by Marilyn Moll and a link to testimonials following:

I received the following letter of inquiry about baking and grain storage:

Dear Marilyn,

“Looking at the prices for the grains, I don’t think it would be cheaper to buy and grind your own flour, so I’m wondering what the benefit would be. How would you store that much grain without bugs or vermin or mold getting into it? It seems like a fabulous idea, but how do I do it?” Connie G.

Here is my response:

Dear Connie:

Thanks for writing and asking great questions! Let me answer your questions one by one.

First of all, I do believe that when you compare homemade whole grain bread to commercial equivalents you will not only have significant cost savings but you will have the satisfaction of filling your home with a fragrant aroma and beautiful, nutritious loaves of bread that can not be compared easily to commercial bread.

Whole grain bread offers significant nutritional benefits because it contains at least 26 naturally occurring vitamins and minerals along with good quality fiber and wheat germ oil missing from commercial breads. The grain refining process removes the bran, and the wheat germ oil and most of the nutritional value. White refined flour has four B-vitamins left in it which are not in the original proportions. That’s It!

Consuming white flour product is like being robbed. Your body needs nutrient dense foods and refined flour baked goods are devoid of health enhancing nutrition.

Your body needs nutrient dense foods for good health. The term “nutrient dense” refers to foods that naturally contain a high spectrum of vitamins, and minerals. Spending our family’s precious grocery dollars on items that are largely manufactured and processed from inferior ingredients is associated with a number of common degenerative diseases, such as hemorrhoids, constipation, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and allergies which are associated with low fiber diets along with the consumption of refined and processed foods.

Economics of Home baked bread

Recently, I calculated the cost of making Marilyn’s Famous Whole Wheat Bread. My cost came in at just over a dollar even at the higher cost of grain. There is probably less than 25 cents worth of grain in each commercial loaf of bread. Today, a 1 1/2 pound loaf of whole grain costs at least $4.00.

By using your own quality ingredients you will be able to make superior tasting bread for a lower cost because you will be eliminating the cost of the plastic disposable packaging, the bakery’s overhead for producing the bread, the transportation costs to ship the bread from the bakery to the store, the bakery manager’s salary, costs of undesirable ingredients and other costs of purchasing ready-made breads.

Depending on the size of your family and how many loaves of bread your family consumes each week, you can calculate the annual savings. For example, in my family, we consume four loaves of sandwich bread a week. Commercial equivalent bread costs $4.50 in my area. Compare $18.00 a week with $5.00 a week! If you make cinnamon rolls, dinner rolls, homemade pancakes, waffles, biscuits etc., you can quickly add up the savings over commercial flour.

Health Benefits

Several years back, a customer told me that she quit baking her homemade bread for a while, and that is when her son had an appendicitis attack. She believes it was related to returning to a white bread diet. The emergency surgery and hospital bills were covered by insurance, but their portion of the bill would have more than paid for a brand new mill and mixer.

The point I’m making is that when we take responsibility for our family’s health, medical bills can diminish dramatically. Another customer contacted me recently and reported that making nutritional changes in her family’s diet during a one year time period had cut their medical expenses in half that year compared to the previous year. This resulted in savings of over $1,000 for her family in medical and pharmacy bills. Our family has not needed to see a doctor for other than emergencies (a broken arm, a bike accident) or sports and camp physicals for many years.

Satisfaction

A mother who is busy at home cooking and baking from scratch for her family will enjoy the fruit of her labors not only financially and nutritionally but also in terms of better health. Her children will arise and call her blessed. Her husband will also. She will enjoy the intrinsic rewards of knowing that she has been a wise steward of her family’s resources and provided well for her family (Prov. 31).

Grain Storage

Whole grain can be stored for hundreds of years as long as it is stored cool and dry. The bran, or outer coating of grain, protects the each grain from deterioration until the bran is broken and ground into flour. Once flour is made, every particle of the flour is exposed to oxidation and nutritional deterioration.

I have always stored grain in six gallon plastic food grade pails or buckets in the coolest part of my house and never had any troubles with pests or mold. A cool place and a dry place are key. Storing whole grains is not only economically wise in uncertain times but nutritionally superior.

I also believe it is biblical to store grain as you recall the story of Joseph who was lead through dreams to store seven years worth of grain for a famine that lay ahead. I’m not predicting a famine, but I do believe in uncertain times grain and food storage is our protection against economic hardships.

More . . .

I would like to share a few tips I have, but look forward to your tips!

Outside toys stay in a rubbermaid tub outside. It has a lid so that keeps the rain/snow out. Just keep it out of the sun so it doesn’t get brittle. The real trick to this is reminding the kiddos to put their toys back in the tub! But this keeps them outside and not in my house, but they aren’t all over the yard.

We have lots of wind here, so trash can be a real problem in our yard. So I pay my son (or daughter) to go collect it. Sometimes they will use the wheelbarrow and think it’s great fun.

For homeschool, I found 3 plastic magazine racks at the dollor store. Since they are skinny, they fit perfect on the school table across the back. Each child has their own. This has been a great way to keep up with school papers that uses a space otherwise never used.

In the kids bathroom, I also found 3 cute plastic baskets for their individual stuff. They fit on the shelf above the toilet. This gives them each a place to store their personal soaps, deodorant, hair clips, etc.

I’m anticipating all your ideas!

First thing you need to do is organize your freezer space. You can’t use it, if you can’t fit anything in there. If all you have is an above fridge freezer, don’t fear – you can make great use out of that space too! If you are blessed to have added freezer space in the form of a chest or upright, be thankful! I’m gonna focus mostly on the above fridge freezer since that is what most have. My freezer didn’t have any shelves in it for whatever reason, so I bought plastic shelves from Wal-Mart and placed a large one that was the same length as my freezer space. This gave me double room instantly! The next best thing you can do to conserve freezer space is the containers you use. I have never been a fan of buying matching square containers, but if that is in your budget or you already have some – enjoy! I actually use freezer bags. I fill them up, then lay them flat to freeze. They remain in a flat, stackable form. And you are using only the space you need. If you fill a square container half-full, you still have to use the whole space of the container.

Now that your freezer is looking better, what do you put in it other than frozen pizzas? Here are some of my suggestions:

Spaghetti Sauce – I make a large batch in the crock pot and then freeze meal portions in quart sized freezer bags. Stack and freeze.

Pizza Crust – Make the dough and roll out the pizza crusts. Bake at 400 for about 10-15 min. Then freeze flat. Once frozen you will need to package them in something. This can be tricky, but I found crock pot liners work pretty good!

Bread Rolls – I make a large batch of rolls, then set them on a cookie sheet to freeze. Once frozen solid, I place a meal portion in quart size bags. Obviously these won’t freeze flat, so they usually stack on the very top or in the door.

Veggie Stock – I take the ends of my celery, onions and carrots and turn it into yummy soup stock. Boil water with these leftover veggies with a little chicken boullion and salt and pepper for a few hours. Drain the liquid off the veggies and let cool before placing in gallon size bags. Freeze flat.

Taco or Sloppy Joe Meat – I try to make a double batch of these whenever I make them. Then take and store the extra meat in a labeled quart bag and freeze. It will be ready for a quick meal.

That list should get you started. Think up your own ideas and share!

To begin you will need at least a 1″ binder (I prefer a 2″ binder). Then a word processor and printer will be your next necessary ingredients. With that set, you can do almost anything!

Get creative. Make a cover for your notebook that expresses your personality.

For ideas on what to add to your notebook, think about how your day goes. Do you need a daily, weekly, or monthly calendar? I prefer a monthly calendar for me since I don’t have a lot of appointments per day and I like to look over my month at one time. Do you plan your meals? Do you need a sheet to jot down all meals or just dinners? If you homeschool, do you need a lesson planning section? Do you have (or wish you had) a cleaning schedule? Jot down which days you mop and which days you wash sheets. After you have written down all your thoughts and ideas, now its time to actually create and print out these sheets.

For those of us who just don’t want to or don’t have time to make these pages there are many places to find them online. But if you want something specific to your life, you may want to create your own.

Organized Home

Heart at Home

My friend, Courtney, has done a fabulous job on her notebook. Check it out at The Crosland Family.

There are so many options out there. I will be created mine next weekend and posting pictures soon! I can’t wait to feel organized.

Since this week I am focusing on Mommy-hood, scheduling always seems to bubble up when mommy’s get together and I am especially focusing on such a topic this week. First I would like to start off with my experience, then I will flood you with some great resources.

Schedules change! And will always change! As your children get older and new children arrive, the needs of your family will change and so will your schedule. Once you accept this fact, scheduling becomes a more fluid project than a rigid one. I loved Terri Maxwell’s Manager’s of their Homes, but setting such a rigid schedule was not for our family. But her book is chock full of ideas for making a schedule, like what tasks need to be done and how long should they take. I still use her idea of making a list of what each person’s duties should be to get me started with a schedule.

I break my day up into sections and then decide what tasks should be done during each section. This works for us. Here is our basic schedule for this year:

Our morning block starts at 6:00am and ends at 9:30am. Here are the things we set out to accomplish during that time:

Send oldest to school.

Breakfast for everyone else.

Care for the animals.

Bible Quiet Time and Prayer.

Morning Chores.

Snack.

Middle of the day starts at 10:00 and goes until 3:00pm.

School: Math, Cursive, and Bible.

Lunch.

Quiet Reading Time and Nap for the Baby.

School: History, Grammar, and Science. We also finish anything else we need to catch up on.

Snack.

Afternoon starts at 3:30 and ends at 6:30.

Afternoon chores.

Oldest gets home from school and does homework.

Dinner.

Evening:

Care for animals.

Hang out with Dad.

Bedtime by 8:00!

That is how I schedule! Simple. That leaves plenty of room for flexibility. If I have a specific project that I want to get done, then I will schedule it separately within those limits. My biggest tip today is not to get stressed over your schedule! I do believe you need one, well I most definitely do! But I would get stressed out because I didn’t finish the dishes at 9:00am and it would ruin the remainder of the day. So now I have a guideline I follow and its amazing the amount of things I can get done in one day!

Here are some great resources as you try to plan your day:

Managers of their Home

Stories of Time Unit Study

Go Mom!

Mommy Tracked – printable calendars!

There is this really great book that I read years ago that really boosted my motivation, but now I can’t find it. I will update this post with it when I find it!

Hope that was enough to get you started. Please share your ideas with me!

The first thing that made the biggest difference in my meal planning success is the worksheet I use. If it is not easy to use, I’m not going to use it! I will be offering my meal planning worksheets for free to my readers soon. (So keep checking back!)

The second most important thing is to schedule time each week to plan your meals. I find doing any more than a week’s worth of meals at a time is overwhelming. I do my meal planning on Friday’s and my shopping on the weekend. But if you don’t schedule time to do this then it usually never gets done.

I also discovered that meal planning is great when mom is not home! I had to leave home for a retreat this weekend and I planned all the meals for my husband. I made sure he had all the ingredients he needed and that it was easy, nourishing meals. This sure beat my family eating fast food all weekend! Here is the menu that I planned for my husband:

Friday
Dinner – Roast and Fresh Spinach. I started the roast in my slow cooker Friday morning. All he had to do was cook up the spinach and serve.

Saturday
Breakfast – Granola. I made some the morning before.
Snack – Fruit
Lunch – leftovers. We usually eat the week’s leftovers on Friday’s for lunch. I just saved the leftover day for Saturday so all he had to do was heat up the food.
Snack – dried sausage
Dinner – Fajitas. I had defrosted the pre-seasoned fajita meat. My husband loves to cook outside on the pit, so this was fun for him.

Sunday
Breakfast – cereal. I don’t usually buy cereal, but I did for this occasion.
No snack because they were at church.
Lunch – bring coleslaw to the church potluck.
Snack – fruit
Dinner – dine out with mom.

Now my husband didn’t follow it exactly, but he did real close. He didn’t have to think about what to make them. I have to leave again this weekend to visit my sister and I have already planned out their meals. This worked great!