Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
I’m all for saving the dandelions for the bees, except when they invade my strawberry patch. I’d tear out tomato volunteers if they got between me and my strawberries. There are always a couple of dandelions that land in just the wrong place, and pulling them up by the root ensures they don’t just come right back. So now you’ve got dandelion plants, roots and all.
Well, when life gives you dandelion root, make dandelion coffee!
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Walking through the forest, most people never realize how much food is growing all around them. Sure, most people know you can tap maple trees for syrup and that you can collect acorns from oak trees. But what about the others?
Birch trees are edible in a number of different ways. Birch trees can be tapped for syrup, and the nutritious sap is used medicinally in Eastern Europe. The early spring buds are aromatic and flavorful if you can catch them before they break bud. But beyond that, the inner bark can be made into a surprisingly nutritious flour, containing with 500 to 600 calories per pound of flour.
Now that I’ve tried it, I found that it tastes quite a bit like buckwheat flour, and it makes delicious cookies.
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Pork stock is one of the most unappreciated bone broths. Sure, we’re all ok tossing a ham bone into the split pea soup, but few people think about making a dedicated stock out of the tasty goodness of pig bones. Pork stock has its own unique, rich flavor that works well with all manner of soups and stews. Any soup that includes bacon would be made tastier by using pork stock.
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I’ll be honest, the main reason we bought an instant pot was for beans. I know, you can make anything in an instant pot, but all I wanted was to be able to take dry beans from the pantry and have them on the table as quick as possible. We’ve tried making out own canned beans using a pressure canner, but it’s not quite the same as dry, shelf stable beans to dinner in under an hour.
Great Northern Beans are a staple in soups and stews, and they’re the main ingredient in my easy cassoulet. If you use canned beans, they’re flavorless. But simple great northern beans cooked in homemade bone broth adds a richness that’s hard to get any other way.
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Springtime is egg time on our homestead. The ladies are laying daily, and we can hardly keep up. At the start of April we’ve just finished making maple syrup, so why not combine two Vermont spring treats? Though I’ve made maple custard many times, I’ve fallen in love with these maple pots de creme.
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Nose to tail cooking is all the rage these days, but finding tasty ways to use the odd parts can be a bit tricky. Our ancestors came up with pig trotter recipes because they had to, and now I’m looking for pig trotter recipes because I want to. It’s a different motivation, not built out of hunger, but built out of curiosity.
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Mid-Winter is cassoulet season in our house. When winter stretches from October to May, you need something, more than the traditional “holidays” to keep your spirits up. Every February we make a different version of an old French classic: Cassoulet.
A combination of white beans, confit, sausage, bacon and just about every animal in the farmyard makes its way into a cassoulet. While cassoulet is delicious, it’s very time-consuming. With two toddlers in the house, this years version needed to be simple.
Thus this “easy cassoulet” was born.
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We love to make maple lemonade in the summertime. Just a bit of maple, some fresh lemon juice and a can of seltzer if you want to get fancy.
With a cup or two a day, that’s a lot of lemons. It seems a shame to let all that tasty lemon zest go to waste, so why not make limoncello?
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A spring staple for northern gardeners everywhere, rhubarb is one of the very first plants to bear after the snow melts. While strawberry rhubarb pie is the most well-known way to cook rhubarb, the sky is the limit.
Rhubarb has an acidic, tart flavor with just a hint of sweetness. That high acid content is what makes it great for desserts, but it also means that rhubarb complements meats and savory dishes.
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I love the idea of putting a meal on the table by using ingredients we grew fresh on the homestead. So many desserts incorporate the flour, which is hard to grow on a small scale. Pots de creme are a traditional dessert that’s naturally gluten-free, and can be made using ingredients grown right in our backyard.
Honey, eggs, cream and lavender come together beautifully for these homemade honey lavender pots de creme.
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