The long days of summer loom before me ominously as I contemplate having all 3 of my boys home from school. I have a love/hate relationship with summer these days. I love the warm sunshine, trips to the beach and eating fresh food out of my backyard. I hate the constant fighting and entertaining my boys demand.
One thing that helps me tremendously is having homemade food in the freezer ready to go when they start getting hungry & I'm exhausted from a day of summer fun. For May Money Saving Mom is having a freezer cooking challenge and I'm joining in. Today I spent two hours (mostly) in the kitchen and I made 2 loaves of banana bread and 2 pans on cinnamon rolls for the freezer (while also dealing with a feisty 3 year old). For extra credit I made 4 jars of yogurt and a quart of water kefir.
Here's my kitchen half way through today's two hours of kitchen fun. Notice the cooling jars of milk for yogurt, the bread maker mixing up dough and my computer playing i-Tunes.
After the bread maker finished the dough, I quickly rolled it out, mixed up some cinnamon and sugar, spread the butter & then sprinkled the sugar topping.
In the midst of all the baking I also made up a batch of whole milk yogurt. Here are the jars going into my cooler to incubate for 24 hours. If you want to learn how to do it yourself go HERE. My kids & I love this yogurt and I make it about once a week.
I made up another quart of water kefir to ferment on the counter.
This banana bread turned out great even though I reduced the sugar in the recipe. It was so yummy that my kids tried to cut their own slices on the loaf on the left when I wasn't looking.
I baked & froze the 2 larger pans and ate (with the kids help) the smaller pan of cinnamon rolls. This was the first time I've had my rolls come out so thin and small but they sure tasted good all the same.
I got a lot done in just a couple hours and I'm planning to continue the freezer challenge throughout May. Thursday I'm making a whole lot of whole wheat chocolate chip pancakes.
