Summer has arrived, and so has an abundance of fruit! I am so excited to be preserving fruit from our land for the coming winter months. We have collected rhubarb and strawberries and wanted to preserve what we’re unable to eat fresh. I have been freezing berries whole and unwashed, so they don’t stick together. […]
Young salsify buds and leaves The salsify has spread across our property. A main criticism of planting salsify is that it spreads so readily. I haven’t figured out why this is a problem yet. Usually we hold out until fall when we harvest salsify roots, but since we have such an abundance of shoots in […]
We lost another one of our maple trees this past year, leaving not much chance of maple syrup production. We had heard about tapping black walnut trees, and since we have two nice sized ones have been dutifully collecting sap. Alright, so perhaps I haven’t been that good at keeping up with it, but Rob […]
Today is my husband’s birthday. The children are always excited for anything ‘birthday!’ So we did it up right; we blew up balloons, made cupcakes, and wrapped him up a big present (work gloves, a watering can, some ‘real’ cinnamon sticks and a photo book of a recent vacation). Rob is a modest man. He […]
Last week we finally cooked up the squirrels that have been waiting in our freezer. Being as we are not ones to waste anything, we kindly took the squirrels from my father-in-law who had been ‘culling the herd’ in order to protect his birdseed. Rob skinned and dressed them around Christmas time, and they have […]
I have known for a while that a microwave is something that I don’t want to be in my kitchen. It was one of those things that I knew I should not be using, but didn’t have the capacity to see how life would be possible without it. When my husband and I lived in […]
We have some wonderful friends who eat an exclusively raw diet. They came over for dinner a couple weeks back, so I was inspired to get out our favourite raw cookbook, Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine by Gabriel Cousens, M.D.. I am always so pleased with what I make when it comes from this book. A common […]
We have been on a journey to reduce the amount of processed food in our lives for quite some time now. I have found that I have food sensitivities to just about everything processed (namely corn, wheat, sugar, and preservatives like sulphites or citric acid – which oddly enough is usually sourced from corn). Because of […]
I haven’t posted a recipe for a while, so I thought I would share this one for my favourite hummus! Ingredients: 1 small onion, chopped 5 gloves garlic, minced splash of Olive Oil 2.5 c cooked or canned chickpeas (garbanzo beans) ¾ c tahini or natural peanut butter 1.5 tbsp Braggs or soy sauce ½ […]
I recently met a garlic farmer who introduced me to a wonderful chemical in garlic called “allicin.” He explained how there were two chemicals in the garlic, “allinase” and “alliin” which remain separated within each garlic clove. They are there to protect the garlic from pathogens in the soil. When the garlic is attacked by microbial […]
