Living Life in Rural Iowa

One of our favorite summer meals to eat is Hamburgers and Baked Potato Slices. Both are simple and easy to make. You can also have dinner on the table in under thirty minutes!
I start with the Baked Potato Slices first. We use garlic salt to season these potatoes because my family is addicted to it. However, you can use any seasoning you want!
Baked Potato Slices
3-4 potatoes, sliced 1/4 inch thick Cooking spray Garlic salt or any other seasoning you prefer
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. 
Slice the potatoes. Spray your baking sheet with cooking spray. I use olive oil cooking spray, but you can use whatever you have on hand. Lay the potatoes slices on the baking sheet. 

Spray the potatoes with cooking spray. Then sprinkle the potatoes with garlic salt or your chosen seasoning. Spraying the potatoes with cooking spray may seem weird, but it helps the seasoning stick and the potatoes to cook better. 
Put the potatoes in the oven for 20-25 minutes. You want them to be a little brown o…

Our home. We love coming home to it, resting in it, and just generally being home. Our homes are our safe places.

Or are they?

Getting our home ready for an emergency was not at the top of my list of things to do. That was really bad of me, but I was more focused on other areas of preparedness. This year, however, I have been made more aware of the fact that my home needs some improvements and some safety/emergency equipment. The realization that I was slacking in this area hit me hard and made me question how we would do if there was an emergency. I had the feeling the answer would be not very well.

The time to get these things done is now. If you are not ready for emergencies at home, would you really be ready for emergencies anywhere else? These are the four areas that I am working on in my home and I bet you need to either work on these or at least check them out.

Fire safety has been at the top of my mind. We have always had a plan to know what to do in case of a fire, but I knew I n…

Hello! We are having some very lovely temperatures here! The wind seems to want to blow too, but it feels so good to be outside soaking up the sun.

We got a fair amount of yard work done. The branches are piled up in three piles around the house and will be loaded into a trailer. Some of it will be burned and some of it will become mulch for the garden. The kids did most of that work as well as picking up trash around the yard.

I have my raspberries dug up and will get them replanted as soon as I get a new spot ready. I am excited to have them out of my garden and ready to get a new, bigger patch going. We all love fresh raspberries!

I also found out yesterday that my garden will be tilled in two weeks. I am excited about that too. I want to get my own tiller, but I am shopping around for a decent used one. I bought my seed potatoes, onion sets, and shallot sets yesterday too. I might buy more seed potatoes, but I am waiting to see if I do or not.

We, mostly Rob, got the garage cleaned ou…

Many of us have been prepping for quite a while. We started by getting some more food, a few cases of water, and some gear. Then prepping took over our lives and we now have a lot of prepping things and a good size food and water storage. 

I have been prepping for longer than five years, but I know that I have areas of my prepping I need to revisit. I bet you do too. As I have been decluttering and reorganizing, I have noticed things getting a little out of date, maybe a little dusty, maybe a little rusty, and some of it definitely being unused. I know our emergency plans are out of date and we have a lot of revisions to make. 

Sound familiar?

Here is a list of things you need to check if you have been prepping awhile. While we should be checking our preps every six months to one year, time does get away from us and we get busy with other things. Now is as good time as any to get your preps in line for, you know, just in case!

Preps to Check:

Check Water

Check containers for leaks and aging…

What happened this week?

This week was a little exciting, a little bit frustrating, and has a little bit more work involved for us.

We are down a chicken. One of the full-grown layers was killed by a hawk. In all the problems I thought I would have with keeping my chickens alive, this was not one problem I thought I would have. Hawks are not a big problem, but we had noticed three of them nesting on the property. We weren't sure what kind of hawk they were, but now we know they are the chicken-killing kind of hawks.

Since I like my chickens to free-range a bit, the hawks need to go. I would like to do it humanely, but if we have to shoot them then we will. Shooting the hawks is probably illegal, but I have more invested in my chickens and would rather not lose them!



In the frustrating and creating more "work for us" category, what you see above is the remnants of my clothesline. We had a dead tree fall on Tuesday and take out the clothesline. Both poles will have to be repla…

One of the skills I have probably worked the hardest on was to make my own bread. I wasn't very positive about my ability to learn how to make bread, but I knew I needed to learn how.

I had a bread maker, but I didn't like how the loaves came out of the bread maker. The crust was very chewy if not hard as a rock. Then I discovered the dough setting. Oh my. I found out that the bread maker could do the dough part, then I could take the dough out, put it in a bread pan, let rise again, and bake the bread. Wonderful!

That only works as long as the bread maker works. Something happened that the coating peeled off the bread maker pan and I didn't like having the coating in my dough. Somehow, I doubt that was healthy for anyone.

I had dabbled in making the bread from scratch and now the time had come to move beyond dabbling into full-time mastering the bread-making skill. I learned how to make bread using my KitchenAid mixer. That mixer makes life a lot easier! However, I wanted to…

Happy April! April seems to be the month that truly feels like Spring to me. That may be because the weather and temperatures seem to be better. We have had great temps the last couple days, but of course the wind has been blowing hard! We haven't gotten much done outside as a result.

And sorry about missing last week's update. My mind went somewhere else last week and I totally forgot about this on Monday!

Rob accepted a welder position at one of the local manufacturing plants. This is a big change for him since he has been a trucker for the last fifteen years. He wanted a job that did not include trucking long hours and he found one. I am so excited for him!

We have gotten a lot done, but we still have so many things to do around the house. Rob got the shower and tub re-caulked. He also cleaned the living room carpet which I do every spring. He is really good at fixing a lot of things. He is definitely a rock star in my book!

We have been purchasing more things to fix small and …