Our Self Sufficient Home

Earlier this week I found myself with a couple of brown bananas. That always means it’s time to bake and the recipe of choice was my sugar-free banana bread. My recipe calls for no added sugar…all of the sweetness comes from juice or fruit. This time I did add some chocolate chips but skip those if you want to keep it healthier. I use a combination of flours to make it dense and full of wheat. Here it is:

First things first: Mix the dry ingredients.
1 cup Whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup Wheat Bran
1/2 cup unbleached white flour. ( you can sub more whole wheat flour if you’d like)
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 heaping teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
sprinkle of salt Read the rest of this entry »

Preservatives, artificial colors, hydrogenated oils, artificial sweeteners…when did our food become chock full of stuff OTHER than nutrients to nourish and feed our bodies?
For a long time I’ve followed the old “if you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it” rule pertaining to the ingredient list. I also eliminate foods if they have an ingredient 12 syllables long. No way can that be natural. If the ingredient list takes up 1/3 of the side panel, it has too much crap in it and most likely doesn’t resemble real food.
The easiest way to avoid the crud in our markets is to shop the perimeter where the fresh stuff typically is- easier said than done. Sometimes I want crackers and dehydrated pasta with pasta sauce. And occasionally, I WANT DONUTS *gasp*.

In the previous post Is our food toxic? The importance of eating organic, I outlined one way to improve the quality of what goes in our bodies while reducing our exposure to harmful chemicals.
Now, I’m going to briefly outline some of the other junk in our food that I think should be avoided.
Don’t expect a full list of every bad ingredient in our food supply.

Here are a few basics:
Preservatives: used obviously to preserve food, making it edible for a longer period of time. It’s a luxury to have the time and resources (or a nuisance depending who you might ask) to pick fresh produce everyday or bake fresh bread to make your meals.
Some common preservatives are:
Sodium Nitrate, which when ingested by humans, can convert to nitrous acid. In animals, nitrous acid increases the rate of cancer.
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At some point in the past few years I’ve become very aware of what we eat and what we’re exposed to on a daily basis. Maybe it’s the talk about pollution, or the constant recalls of commercially produced foods and prescriptions, or the possible long term health effects of eating antibiotic laced and hormone injected meat…the list goes on.
Whatever the reason, I’m aware and trying to reduce my exposure. I’ll tell you a huge part of my concern stems from the fact that I work in an industry where chemical exposure is the norm every day with most people making little effort to minimize that exposure.

So, where to start? How about FOOD! There are so many different aspects of food toxicity. I will break it down including the points I find most important for me in a few different posts so check back for the rest.

I remember years ago when eating organic was the new fad. I was still very young and convinced it was a new scheme to lure people into spending more money for a product, be it peppers, cheese, you name it, that didn’t taste a whole lot different than the “regular” version. So what gives?
It’s not just about taste. You’re paying for the conditions in which the food is produced.
There are numerous agencies; you probably recognize the USDA Certified Organic logo on many products, which inspect every company that wishes to label their products as organic.

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Santa brought us a frozen yogurt /ice cream machine and boy have I had a ball experimenting with it. After a few gelato (YUM!) recipes, which I will be sharing soon, I decided it was time to find a less sugary alternative. The answer? Homemade Frozen Yogurt! The idea of a frozen dessert machine was enormously appealing because who really wants to spend 5 bucks for a measly amount of overpriced mass produced ice cream? Not me. And I don’t like the alternative which is cheap, poor quality, mass produced ice cream or frozen yogurt.

The ingredients are simple as can be:
2 Cups Natural Plain Yogurt….no sweeteners, no added flavors, no junk- just milk, cream, pectin and cultures.
1/2 Cup Whole Milk Read the rest of this entry »

These clay bread bakers were received as a gift for our wedding and have been sitting in the cabinet patiently waiting for some attention. Today,  I had a few hours to spare and was looking for something to pair with my homemade baked potato soup. Homemade bread fit the bill. Rather than use a traditional bread pan as I usually do I was feeling the need to experiment a bit.

Easy enough. While the yeast was doing it’s thing in the bread dough I started prepping the bread baker. This particular one is a Romertopf bread baker. First step is simply soak it in water for 15 minutes. Clay bread bakers mimic the conditions in a brick oven which is the ideal way to bake bread. This dish is made of terra cotta which naturally absorbs moisture and gives bread a crisp crust and moist interior. Read the rest of this entry »

In order to prepare for Christmas festivities this year, I started preparing batches of cookie dough to freeze. When I had a quiet evening I would whip up a batch or 2 and freeze it. When Christmas eve rolled around, my task was simply to toss them in the oven. I was so pleased with the ease of this method that I plan to continue to freeze dough to minimize food waste. With only a few mouths to feed it’s impossible to eat an entire batch of baked cookies  before they go stale. Ok, not  impossible but unhealthy to say the least. Honestly, this is a great way to help eat those sweets in moderation. I froze a total of 4 varieties but have lost some pictures.
Here are some chocolate filled Russian Tea Cakes. The key to successfully keeping individual cookies is to freeze them completely before allowing them to touch.

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Fall is here, days are shorter, cooler and the rain has started. Few things are more comforting on a cold rainy day than some hearty, home cooked food. The rain put a hold on outside projects so my Sunday was now open for an indoor activity. Homemade chicken pot pie fit the bill. Actually, I made the filling 1 day then made the crust and baked the pot pie on day 2.

I had 2 chicken breasts that I browned in a pan the evening before, the remains of a package of chicken breast since that much chicken is always far too much for one meal feeding 2 mouths. The chicken was diced and set aside. All the veggies were also prepped and set aside- potatoes, carrots, celery, mushrooms, onions, parsley, and peas.
In a large pot a couple tablespoons of butter were melted and the onions were added. Crushed garlic, thyme, and salt and pepper were added. A few tablespoons of unbleached flour were added one at a time and mixed well to create a roux which will later thicken the liquid. The mixture was cooked for a few minutes then slowly chicken broth was added to the roux mixing constantly to ensure the flour mixture incorporated smoothly into the liquid.  I used one can of broth then added all of the veggies and chicken then topped off with more liquid. This way, I was sure to have just enough liquid since I was aiming for a thick stew liquid and not a soup. The pot was covered and cooked for an hour or 2.

Buttery, flakey, brown, melt in your mouth pie crust can be so simple. 4 ingredients is all it takes.  I made enough crust for a full size pie and 2 small pies. Here are the measurements I used: 2  ½ cups flour, 1 cup COLD butter, about ½ cup COLD water and a few pinches of salt. The butter should be cubed then added to the flour and salt and cut in until it’s crumbly. I don’t get bent out of shape if some of the larger clumps won’t break down because this is what helps create the flakiness. The cold water is slowly added and mixed. I prefer a fork for most of the mixing. Form the dough into 2 balls and refrigerate for a few hours.

The dough was rolled, the pie pans were filled, the delectable pies baked until golden brown and the house smelled incredible.

I grabbed a bag of Arrowhead Mills whole grain pastry flour while at the local grocery store. It was new to me, looked intriguing and I wanted to try it. I pulled up Arrowhead Mill’s website for recipes and found this fantastic recipe for extremely moist pineapple raisin carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. These scrumptious little cupcakes are full of texture and have just the right amount of sweetness.

Whole grain pastry flour is light in texture, much lighter than whole grain or wheat flour and has a low gluten content. Its not recommended for use in breads or recipes that call for yeast but is great for cakes, cookies and pastries.

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We finished up the cucumber harvest with a batch of sweet and tangy bread and butter pickles.

First, cucumbers were cleaned thoroughly, then cut into appropriate spears for the jar sized used. I used half pint jars and cut the cucumbers accordingly. Even though the cucumbers were harvested at obviously different sizes it is important to have end pickles that are the same size to allow for even and thorough cooking/processing.

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The cucumber harvest has been plentiful…and relentless. Perfect!  They were planted with the intention of making some homemade pickles before the end of summer.

These beauties are a pickling variety purchased from John Scheepers.

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I’ve had an interest in making butter for a short while now. The topic came up in conversation and I made a mental note that I should look into it and that was the end of it. We aren’t big on butter as a condiment in this household (except of course slathered on fresh steamed corn on the cob) but use it sparingly for cooking and baking. I cant really pinpoint why the idea was so appealing to me because we so infrequently eat buttered anything but I think the lure was making something that all my life I’d bought at the store without ever considering the homemade alternative. After picking up a homesteading book and leafing through to the homemade butter and cheese chapter my interest was renewed. A few days later while reading Mother Earth News there was a snipit on homemade butter. Now I was convinced I had to try my turn at making butter…and what was there to lose? The process is incredibly easy and if it didnt turn out I was only out a little bit of time and a few bucks but would still gain the experience.

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Recently the new dishwasher was installed which led us to the dilemma of finding an environmentally considerate detergent.
We settled on a recipe for a detergent consisting of Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda and 20 Mule Team Borax.

20 Mule Team Borax is sodium tetraborate (borax). Its a naturally occurring substance. Interesting history of the company- the brand name was registered in the late 1800′s when borax was discovered in Death Valley. Teams of 20 mules were used to transport the borax to a location where it could be refined with water. Read the rest of this entry »

The country living grain mill is like the grand daddy of all grain mills and if dropped onto most every other one would literally CRUSH IT!

We had always wanted to make our own flour so that we could have the freshest bread and a grain mill seemed like the obvious choice for that. However, we also wanted to be able to use the grain mill if we did not have power, and we wanted one that would last a life time the country grain mill fit the bill perfectly!

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To keep our canned goods rotating we’ve set up a Shelf Reliance Cansolidator Harvest 72″ unit. This unit holds up to 600 cans although we don’t have ours filled to the maximum capacity. It’s actually pretty empty at the time this picture was taken.

Assembly took about 2 hours and was a bit tedious. The frame work goes together easily with a little help from a mallet.  For each slot there are multiple cross supports that snap into place and they each need to be fitted to the correct can size so the cans rotate smoothly which was the time consuming part.
Once the unit was put together we had to seriously consider which canned goods would get a spot in the cansolidator and which would remain on the shelf in the pantry. Only the foods that we use on a regular basis and felt we could get through before expiration got a spot. The other foods that we don’t keep many of on hand are living happily in our pantry!

Wanting to try something new I decided making a loaf of homemade wheat bread would keep me busy for a few hours. I was anxious to try out our Country Living Grain Mill that had arrived a few weeks before (a complete write up on that will be coming soon). It took me a while to find a recipe with basic ingredients that I already have around the house . I don’t make bread regularly so I don’t have bread flour which was called for in many of the recipes.

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