Homestead Recipes: Cooking From Scratch For Easy Dinners
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Eating at home doesn’t have to be complicated, with this post, you will learn all of our best tips and tricks to getting a homemade homestead meal on the table!
We love homestead recipes because they are simple and use what you already have on hand. It is all about using what you have in your garden, have stocked on your shelves, or what you have leftover to make new meals that are homemade and full of wholesome ingredients.
We have compiled a list of some of our best tips, tricks, and hacks for using homestead skills to get a home-cooked meal on the table for your family. Whether you live on a homestead or in an urban apartment, these tips will help you make meals quick and efficient while reducing your food waste. These tips are great for the homestead or if you simply have a personal goal of eating more at home. They are all tried and true and methods that we use in our very own homes!
Use what you have
The below questions are a great way to help think of how to make the most of what you have while wasting the least. It is always the first thing to think about before starting to cook your meal.
- What is going bad/leftover? Use it up so it doesn’t spoil and go to waste!
- What is fresh or in the fridge that needs to be eaten? You always want to make sure to eat fresh foods so it doesn’t go bad before you can eat it.
- What is in the freezer? Start with the oldest or most abundant to rotate through your supply.
- What is canned/quick? We love using homemade canned goods to get dinner on the table quickly.
Use shortcuts to make homemade meals
One of our favorite shortcuts is to have canned meat on hand. Having shelf-stable meat is so much easier than having to wait for it to defrost. We love that you can easily make comfort food with the shortcut of using canned meat such as chicken Alfredo. Plus we get to use fresh dairy products from our milk cows! Then we add ingredients such as garlic and cream cheese and dinner is done in no time. Find more easy and delicious from scratch recipes with canned meat shortcuts with canned roast beef and canned chicken.
Another shortcut to use is adding an easy sauce to your dish to take it to the next level. We love to can a big batch of our Rhubarb BBQ Sauce to add to meals throughout the year. It is tangy and sweet thanks to the addition of brown sugar, and it pairs so well with a variety of meats!
Eat seasonally
Whatever the season is, we always focus on the types of meals that we can make with fresh-picked fruits and vegetables. While it is important to always keep a stock of canned or frozen foods, sometimes we like to see how long we can go before opening up a jar of canned food when it’s fresh eating season. During the summer months, we love to make simple salads with fresh spinach or lettuce, snacks with apples, carrot sticks, or cucumbers, and desserts filled with fresh fruit like strawberries or blueberries. And then during the winter, we will make easy soups and stews with winter squash or use canned veggies that we preserved in the summer.
Keep it simple
Stick to basic ingredients that repurpose well. With any cut of meat, our meals typically start out as a chunk of meat, a carb, and a vegetable. By the second or third meal, we will turn it into a soup. Or you can turn it into an easy quesadilla with leftover meat and melted cheddar cheese or whatever type of cheese you have on hand. You can see our outlined way to meal prep with this method in this blog post here!
Keeping all the ingredients simple allows for a mix and match of ingredients. You can easily take items from one meal and then put fun twists on them to create something different. For example, it’s common for us to have oven-roasted potatoes for dinner, and then throw them into eggs in the morning. Leftover rice turns into fried rice with chunks of meat from a different meal.
One of our favorite easy and delicious recipes we always have on rotation to make many different meals out of is our Simple Roasted Chicken recipe. We can use the main content of the chicken for the first meal and then shred the rest of the remaining meat to easily throw into dishes. Then, we save the bones and make a batch of bone broth.
Grow foods with a long shelf life
Preserving takes a lot of time, but there are many foods that don’t need to be preserved. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, winter squash, all have long shelf life and don’t require canning or freezing. We like to grow an abundance of these vegetables so they will last through the winter without having to be preserved.
Stay one meal ahead
The best kind of meals are those that will last for more than one meal! We like to always make leftovers that are easy to repurpose to create new meals. If there’s leftovers we are mindful to freeze them or use them within 4 days.
Learn new skills
If you want to learn more about sufficient living and learn how to can and preserve your own foods, check out our canning course, Yes, You Can! Where we take you step-by-step to learn all the ins and outs of canning!
Yes, You Can: A simple method to preserving food!
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