Americans Can't Cook & Marketing, Thrifting, Jamming, Farm Aid Fun

                  
Americans Can't Cook & Marketing-
I was in Target today, and was walking thru the small appliance section and was struck by something: most Americans can't cook. There was a huge assortment of speciality appliances- 1 serving battery-operated ice cream maker, quesadilla maker, waffle maker, mini-stick waffle maker, and on and on. I thought of all the things people used to make without these speciality appliances! Folks just used a skillet and pot, or improvised. If you buy all these kinds of items, they have to be stored, take up counter space and aren't free. What's the point? It creates an illusion that they can cook. "Buy this special contraption and you can cook too!"

                         
Most young kids think cooking is microwaving food, macaroni and cheese comes from a box with orange powder inside (ew) & cakes come from a boxed cake mix (one of the easiest things you can make from scratch IMO). There's just a warped sense of what cooking is versus what it can be. Cooking can be simple and pretty straight forward. Need a chopper? Not really- buy a good knife and work on your knife skills. Quesadilla maker? Just use your skillet. Mini waffles sticks? Think french toast, and slice em up. I get dizzy just thinking about it. While I do have a food processor (10 years or more old), Magic Bullet and a few other old contraptions, I know how to cook without them. And that's a good thing, as Martha would say...

Thrifting-
I found two really nice books today for $3.00 total, lots of good home fixes and recipes-

These recipes sounded pretty good:

Jamming-

I found some decent Oregon berries yesterday (pesticide-free) and made some very low sugar jam today from this recipe Low/No Sugar Strawberry Jam  I made a large batch using about 7 cups of berries and added only about 1/2 cup sugar, no fruit juice. It came out really tasting like berries, and not so sugary-

I found some $1.00 packs of 75 small decorative labels (to label canned foods) at Target today in their "home schooling section", cute!

Farm Aid Fun-

After reading about the terrible droughts, and wanting to do SOMETHING, I found the Farmaid.org website. I saw these really cute pewter ornaments and ordered them. Really cute and went to a good cause... Now if I could find a place to hang them until December....

Dave found this really little egg in our berry bushes. I knew one of the New Hampshires was going to start laying today, man she was squawking!!!! They'll get bigger I'm sure :)