I mentioned previously that we’d come home from the chicken farmer’s house with a carton full of eggs in all shapes and sizes. 8, to be precise. Now why on earth would I do that, when I produce all our own eggs? Unless…. The chicken farmer had roosters. Lots of big, beautiful roosters. And remember? […]
It’s been about two months since Josh’s split any wood. Not his fault – first the timing was wrong, and then we had a thick, icy layer of snow over everything forever. In the mean time, we ran out of small firewood. So faced with a beautiful sunny day in the 50s, a child playing […]
Sofía and I went to meet a very nice farmer lady the other day, and when we came back home guess what we had in our trunk? Ten 2-week-old broiler chicks and a carton full of just-laid eggs (more on those later). Their pen is much bigger than it looks; in this pic they’re crowding […]
Sofía and I made these adorable little peanut-butter-and-jelly cookies for her Valentine’s Day party. It’s a Martha Stewart recipe and these cookies are incredibly delicious and even better the next day! Besides also being insanely adorable. What more could you ask for in a Valentine’s Day cookie? I made a few good tweaks to the […]
Because Valentine’s Day falls on a Monday this year, we decided to have our Valentine’s Day Dinner on Sunday instead. Grilled lobster with basil-garlic butter. Homegrown micro-greens salad with toasted walnuts and homemade honey-mustard-apple-vinegar dressing. Sofía got a skewer with five huge shrimp. And for dessert: Chocolate souffle with homegrown eggs and blackberry-port-brown sugar sauce […]
Ever wish you could get real, fresh-roasted coffee without paying $16/lb or more? That you didn’t have to start your day with supermarket-grade brew? That you could get your hands on better coffee without braving a sneering barista* and hordes of scornful yuppies? What if you could get really good, really fresh-roasted coffee and support […]
The wood stove is still amazing me. One log at a time and we’re able to heat half the house all day long. That means no heating bill, people. (For this half of the house, anyway). Now if only the extended snow hadn’t kept us behind on splitting wood. We’ve got a metric ton of […]
Sofía’s really starting to get pretend-play now. She used to just make up her own nonsensical games, but now she’s actually pretending to be something. Case in point – we saw Astroboy once or twice and for the last few weeks, she’s been a non-stop flying robot. (Her absolute favorite thing to be is a […]
It might be in the kitchen that I took the most baby steps towards self-sufficiency in 2010. It was here where I did the most experimenting, at least. It was a whole lotta fun to try my hand at a bunch of skills I’d always wanted to learn! I can now make soap from scratch, […]
I know I said I was going to regale you only with my retrospective blog post series for another 2-3 days, but I just couldn’t sit still. I decided to make my own butter and I have to share! You know I like to cook, and I like to cook things that taste good. The […]