Homemade Instant Oatmeal Packets

Instant Oatmeal is very simple to make at home. It takes 5 ingredients and about 20 minutes. 

Cinnamon Raisin Oatmeal

List of Ingredients (for each bag)

1/4 Cup of Quick Oats 

1 Tbsp Ground Quick Oats

1/2 tsp Sugar 

Pinch of salt

1/4 tsp Cinnamon

Handful of Raisins

 With the first four ingredients you can mix and match any dried fruit flavor combo you would like.

I listed ground oats as one of the ingredients above and that is the big trick to getting your homemade version to feel like the store bought kind. I put 1.5 cups of oats in my blender and mix them on low until they look like bread crumbs. 

You can add as much or as little of this mix to your bags as you want. I like 1Tbsp but if you want it to be thinner then go with less. 

20 bags (that is only 1/2 a box of oats)

I know the pictures is not that appealing but most oatmeal does not look all that great so no judging until you try it! I truly think that the homemade stuff tastes better but it is less sweet, if you need to have it sweeter then add a little more sugar or put some honey in it after you warm it up. I make mine with 1/2 a cup of milk.

Now for some stats 

Store bought Instant Oatmeal has around 31 ingredients

Homemade has 5 

The cost per packet for store bought is $0.30 per packet

Assuming you have sugar and salt and do not need to buy them

 homemade costs $0.15 per packet

300 Screws Later....

Spring has been extremely busy around here!

My hubby and I spent every available weekend this spring expanding and moving our square foot garden. As you remember I did quite a few posts last spring about my four raised beds. They did great and I learned a lot, including the fact that I need more growing space. There where a few things that greatly needed to change this year with our raised beds.

Placement
- The beds were not located in the best place for sun. I picked a convenient location for me but not really for the plants. Well that has changed, we moved the garden to the center of our backyard where we have the most sun! Who needs grass?

Construction
- We had great intentions with the first beds but they did not hold up well at all. This time around we made the beds to last. I am going to do a separate post on constructing raised beds. 

Size
- The first garden was a good start but this girl needs more space to grow! So we tripled the size of the garden and made a verity of different sized beds for both planting convenience and aesthetics.

Maintenance
- My hubby had a heck of a time mowing around the first garden and keeping the grass at bay. This time we made a substantial border, cut out the sod from the beginning and put down gravel.

Here are the beds set in place before we cut away the grass.  Let me tell you cutting out the grass and then leveling the beds was one of the hardest jobs we have done at our little homestead. I was sore for days after that step.

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Here is the plot after we cut out the grass. We rented a sod cutter that runs a blade right under the grass and cuts it off at the roots. Then you have to roll up the sections of grass and move them somewhere else. Grass is very very heavy and we had to move A LOT of grass... I had no idea how hard this step would be.

Stay tuned for how we built the beds and how the garden looks now all filled with plants!

Dinosaurs and Oatmeal

I am going to let you in on a little secret, I get bored playing with my son's toys. I know that is shocking but fire trucks and Thomas can only keep me engaged for so long. I think that my little man feels that way too sometimes. Little man just turned two and is learning and exploring his world more than ever. 

I was on a mission to find activities that would keep his attention and keep me engaged and involved with play time.  It was getting way to easy for me to zone out and not engage as much now that he is able to have more self directed play and I did not want to lose that interaction completely. 

In comes the sensory box, and boy are they fun! I love a good theme and sensory boxes are all about the theme! What is a sensory box, you ask?

A sensory box is a container filled with any kind of tactile material that kids explore with their hands. With a sensory box, children are using their sight, touch, and smell to experience their environment in a totally new way. 

For our first box I used rolled oats and wheat puffs as the base, then added a $2 pack of dinosaurs and some old measuring spoons for digging. I set this up in the middle of our living room on a big sheet. This project took me 10 minutes to put together and $5 in materials that I will be able to reuse in different boxes.We spent the better half of an afternoon playing with the box and he absolutely LOVED it. 

All of our materials

An old plastic container as the box

Here it is all put together

Little man LOVED the box and only made a little mess. I did not mach his shirt to the box on purpose, although I do love a complete theme!

Mason Jars

I love Mason jars! 

I use them for canning, freezing, and short term food storage in both my fridge and pantry.

They hold spices on the walls of my kitchen. I am a very slow decorator, mostly because I cannot commit to anything and I'm not very good at seeing the whole decorating picture but I knew I wanted to do this as soon as we moved into the house.

My kitchen is very long with only one set of upper cabinets. I wanted something on that big wall that would stay clean but also be useful, in came the Mason jars.

You can use them as a flower vase 

Find this vase and many more here

I love the blue color here is the link

Turn them into soap dispensers!

You can buy these jars from this Etsy shop

Use them outside in the garden as hanging lights or lights for a party. 

You can find these lights here

Lifehackers has a great tutorial on how to make solar powered jar lights! I am going to make these in the spring and I will post our pictures then but here is a link to the project if you want to do an indoor project to get ready for spring! 

Follow this project here

I am lucky to still have old Mason jars from both my Grandmother and Great-Grandmother. They are the old blue jars that still have the Zinc lids, you can see one of them pictured above. I do not use the Zinc lids for canning but I do use them with my spice jars. If you like the look of the Zinc lids you can find bags of them at antique stores but they are becoming harder to find so grab them when you find them! 

How do you use Mason jars??

Exciting News

Well, it's 50 degrees outside. By the way, I live in OHIO! That is just crazy, I actually saw a tree budding today… boy, is he confused! 

I have some exciting news to share! My hubby and I are looking for homesteading property!  We looked at our first round of houses today. Most of them were no-goes for various reasons, too much money or damage that we do not want to deal with, etc. We are looking for our “forever” house so we are being fairly picky.

We did find one house that has a great 8 acre property with a small orchard and chicken coop! The house is very small… at this point I think we are just going to watch and wait. I have been doing research on what to look for in a homestead property and I am not coming up with a lot of people in the looking/buying stage. 

There are a lot of great established homesteading blogs out there but I thought I might talk about our search from the beginning. 

A lot of things go into finding the right property but we have really narrowed our scope to the big three as I will call them.

1.       Location of property – This is the biggest one for us. You cannot move the land once you buy it and we are trying to stay to a specific area to stay close to family. 

2.       The property itself – We can change something like plating the garden, adding trees, all of that, but we cannot bank on being able to buy more land around us so we need to be ok with the size; we are hoping between 5 and 12 acres. 

3.       The house – My husband is extremely handy and my father-in-law knows most things that my hubby does not. We can fix a lot about a house, but it needs good bones and we need to be able to live there right away. We also would like something a little bigger than we have now if possible.

I will keep everyone updated on the search and what we are finding!