Farm to Fork

A cheap & easy meal that my family enjoys is purple hull pea soup.  I make it in the crockpot & I like to eat mine plain in a bowl with the broth.   It's a whole healthy meal in itself but you can make a pot of rice & cornbread to go along with it & it's over the top yummy!  The other night after class we made grilled cheese sandwiches to eat with it & that was good too.

Purple hull pea soup (Totally Farm to Fork or homemade version)

4 cups frozen purple hull peas (picked from the farm just down the road)
1/2 c. chopped green onions (from my garden & frozen)
1 quart chicken broth (I make & freeze)
pinch of cayenne pepper (from my garden, dehydrated & then ground up)

Put all in a crockpot & set on low for about 6 hours.

Done!

Of course you can make this with store bought ingredients & it's good too but there's just something special about knowing it all came from close by.

Cayenne Pepper!

I haven't posted in a little while as we've been busy. We have been back to homeschooling for a week now & other things around here are getting adjusted.  I will share some of that later, but for now here's our latest project. 
This was our first time to try to make our own spices from scratch and it turned out very well.  Before putting them into the dehydrator the peppers were washed & set out on towels to dry.
My husband took the following pictures:

This is a quart sized jar. So 1 full dehydrator yielded almost a quart of ground pepper. 
It smells wonderful, almost like a spicy, smoky smell & taste.
I'm very happy with the results & have another dehydrator full & running now!