Selected Ingredients That Are Home Grown Or Locally Sourced

Are you ready to put all that hard work good use and enjoy home grown ingredients?

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Now that winter is in full force here, with its cold blistery days occasionally mixed in with what we now consider warm 40° days. It is soup season. One of my favorite things to enjoy during the cold months is soups and one of our go to recipes has been chili. What makes it even better this year is that everything we are using is either home grown or locally sourced. It’s such a good feeling to see our hard work being enjoyed this winter after a long fall of canning and preparing everything.

Beans

The white and black beans are from a store but we canned them earlier this year. The pinto beans grew in our garden this summer.

I use a chili base mix that we can for a quick meal! All I need is to brown the hamburger, which we buy from a local Nebraskan, and put it all in a stock pot to let it simmer.

Sometimes I even have my meat already cooked and frozen so it’s ready to go. This means putting it all in a crockpot and have dinner ready when I get home from work. I love that! As our kids are getting bigger they are becoming busier. Having meals ready to go is one thing that makes evenings smoother. I personally like to have home cooked meals almost every night of the week. I love knowing our meals are home grown.

Simple recipe

My chili recipe is pretty simple: I add a jar of tomato juice, a jar of diced tomatoes, a jar of black beans, a jar of white beans (sometimes), a jar of kidney beans, a jar of pinto beans, a jar of chili base and a pound of cooked hamburger. Sometimes I add an extra jar of tomato juice, depending on what I think it needs. then flavor if needed.

The best part is everybody in my family enjoys chili. It’s also one of those meals that always goes over well when I take it on the road. All I have to do is take all the jars with meat already cooked and dump them into a pot or crockpot once I arrive.

Do you have a go to quick meal that you love and your family loves? Please consider sharing in the comments I love getting new recipes and ideas.

Faith

There is significant amount of biblical symbolism tied to plants, seeds, and the act of growing. The idea of sowing seeds and watching them grow aligns so well with the concept of faith: that small acts of trust can lead to something larger and more fruitful.

One of the most well-known verses that connects faith to growth is Matthew 17:20, where Jesus says, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” The mustard seed is tiny, but with faith, it can grow into something mighty.

In your garden, maybe the fresh ingredients you grow can be a way of experiencing God’s provision and care. There’s also a lot of beauty in the idea of the garden as a place of peace and prayer. For instance, Jesus himself spent time in the Garden of Gethsemane, which can remind us that gardens are often places of both physical and spiritual renewal.

Do you find that your time in the garden feels like a place of prayer or reflection?