This month I had the pleasure of sharing my home with a good friend and her daughter. The addition worked wonderfully and freed both of us single mothers up enough that we got to try a few new things.
She encountered some misfortune and picked up a guardia infection at a singing workshop over the summer. After a fairly unpleasant illness and a round of some serious antibiotics she was inspired by my shiny new Nourishing Traditions cookbook to try some fermented foods. Once we got started we never looked back! Read the rest of this entry »
Well mini-harvest. We didn’t really grow a lot this year being that most of the spring was spent shoveling compost and rocks. But the yard is largely done and looks great (minus the giant pile of rocks left over).
What I did plant was a bed of potatoes which did extremely well. I didn’t weigh the few early potatoes I pulled up but the fall harvest was 40lbs! Out of one bed. That is darn near our annual needs at this point this makes me very happy. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the many problems with living alone is that you don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of. You can do whatever you want in an instant and the only flack you’ll get is from you. This can be good or it can be bad. Like when you decide to have 15 yards of gravel delivered maybe a second opinion is a good idea. Maybe 10 would be lots.
And those life choices that you make the plans for the future, the goals. They are more fun achieved with someone, or maybe it is just easier to stay on course when more than one of you is in it. You’ve had the discussion, you’ve made the decision. You’re doing it. Read the rest of this entry »
Remember all those greens I helped dry last year? I never tasted any of them. I never even heard how it went other than, oh yeah it was awesome. So, note to self, don’t work with that person again if you’d like to actually learn something.
Fast forward to this year and I have been eating lettuce for the past two months like it was going out of season. Because it is. The one thing I noticed last year was a significant lack of green things in our winter storage. So this year I intended to change that and have been dehydrating and blanching up a storm. Sort of, not really. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems to me that if you are going to all the trouble of canning food on the premise of being self sufficient, preserving the local harvest and such that buying pectin for your jams is a little bit counter productive. I mean it’s not like your great grandmother bought her pectin from the grocery store. She made it from scratch and she likely didn’t even have to leave the larder. Read the rest of this entry »
The book is filled with recipes on how to make fermented foods, from scratch, no cheating, no grocery store tricks just good old fashioned food preparation. It’s a slew of work I’m not going to lie but having mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup in my refrigerator that I made myself feels pretty darn good. My kids are happy too because they like ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise prior to now we just went without.
That’s kind of how I roll. If I can’t grow it, make it, or get it local we do without. I wish it was contagious.
Krystal Williams
Beautiful B.C.
Day Dreamer & Margin Doodler
