Boston Baked Beans from Scratch

I am SO obsessed with cooking from scratch. I have no canned foods in my pantry....CRAZY right?   I had recently made my sisters famous white bean and chicken chili (delish) and soaked more beans than I needed. What to do, what to do.....For dinner I had a roast in the crock pot, potatoes boiling for some mashed potatoes and what should we have as a side dish?  Baked beans sounded good....hmmm....I wonder.....so I turned to my favorite place to search out recipes ...allrecipes.com, and wouldn't you know it?  I found a recipe for Boston Baked Beans from SCRATCH and it have a 4 and a half star rating!  Well I was out of bacon, but had everything else and my beans were already soaked, so I tossed everyting into my small crock pot and let them cook away the rest of the afternoon.  The smell was a amazing, but they tasted even better.  I am hooked. I will never buy canned beans again.  ENJOY!http://allrecipes.com/recipe/boston-baked-beans/detail.aspx

The Hillbilly House

All of my life I have wanted a small piece of property in the country to have an enormous garden, fruit trees and chickens.  With limited finances and my husbands and my shared desire to stay out of debt we knew this would not be an easy thing to find.  However, we also know that the Lord wants to give us the desires of our hearts and knew that someday we would find our small piece of heaven here on earth.  I would occasionally look at craigslist and real estate listings, but everything was WAY out of our price range.  Then one day as I was checking out online listings I found a small piece of property was only 3 miles from our home and backed up to a timber!!  Not surrounded by corn fields!! In Illinois?  Was this even possible?  To top it off, it was something we could afford to pay cash for!  I couldn't wait to call the realtor to see it.  We drove out to find it immediately and OH MY, WHAT A MESS!  On this lovely 0.65 acres facing the lovely timber and privacy all around, was THE MOST horrible house you can imagine!  It looked as if they just kept adding on a few feet as they found the lumber. Built on top of dirt, the floors were caving in, the ceiling was falling down, critters had definitely made their homes in the walls and attic, and the wiring had been done with lots and lots and lots of electrical tape. DREADFUL!  But, as we looked at it we knew that the value was in the property and NOT in the house!  We made a low offer right away, he countered with a reasonable counter offer and the property was ours!  We immediately cut down the 3 plus foot tall grass inch by inche with our small riding lawn mower, put in a HUGE garden and starting planting blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and apple tree and a plum tree.  We got chickens and moved the rabbit production there as well.  It is still a huge mess though.  Transformation will take us several years and we will turn the horrible hillbilly house into a cozy cabin.  I am blessed to have a husband who can do anything.  I know it will be ALOT of hard work, but I am certain it will be worth it. I Praise God for that hard work and for giving us the desires of our hearts.  God is good........