Click any picture to view full size. 1. Butter, homemade lamb lard, and flour. 2. Fats cut into flour. 3. Chopping homegrown onions. 4. Mixing egg and water for pastry. 5. Pastry dough on plastic, ready to chill. 6. Pastry dough chilling in fridge. 7. Grinder cooling in freezer. 8. Onions sweating in olive oil. 9. Chopping pork butt. 10. Lil picking fresh thyme. 11. Herb, salt, and pepper mix. 12. Bowls ready to grind. [...]

A story of a homesteader who meets her match in the common hot dog. Go Girl! Bone local beef with a sharp knife, grind it (standing on a stool because you’re a short girl), and mix with salts. Feel so powerful that you go on to make cucumber relish. The next day, you’re ready to freeze, grind, freeze, puree, stuff, and smoke! There’s a heat advisory, so shut the windows before you leave for morning [...]

Last week I shared how to make hand-rolled beeswax candles. This week I offer recipes for this spice rub and cocoa mix. The series concludes next Monday with ideas for perfectly packaging your handmade gifts. My parent’s kitchen counter always has a crock of this spice rub alongside the baking canisters. Dad uses this rub for large cuts of meat he later smokes and as a topping for grilled salmon. Because of the sugar content, [...]

After a dozen years as a vegetarian, I have returned to an omnivorous nature. It all started after we killed and butchered Red the pig. The meat was so honestly procured and preparations so delicious smelling that I could not resist a few bites of bacon, then guanciale, then ribs and more. I noticed that when I ate Red’s meat, my tummy stayed full for a long time. I didn’t eat extra starches. I wasn’t [...]

We are posting this for Labor Day weekend in honor of all the people like us enjoying a family camp out this weekend.  We will spend 3 days at East Harbor State Park on the Lake Erie shore.  Expect another camp food post when we get home! So in line with all of our efforts to preserve/store food, Rachel had the idea that I should write a short post on making jerky.  The advantage to [...]

To this point I haven’t posted much on our kitchen/food blog. Rachel has been after me to remedy this oversight and now the Restaurant Widow has taken me to task over not posting about my meat CSA. First off, what is a CSA? If you are reading a food blog, I expect you know already. For those who do not know, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The basic concept is that at the start [...]