Naleśniki with Vanilla Ricotta

Last night, in an effort to use up some extra milk we had sitting in the refrigerator, I made up a big batch homemade ricotta. There are many recipes but I use Carroll's recipe from Home Cheese Making. Using fresh raw milk and some citric acid, I heat the mail up to 185 - 195 degrees and let the milk separate. I usually stir and read a book while the cheese cooks. Once the whey isn't milky anymore, it needs to sit for 10 minutes then be strainer. Pretty straight forward and simple. But what to do with almost 2 lbs of ricotta?

Outside Spring Cleaning

During the dark gray days at the start of spring, I typically hear everyone talking about spring cleaning. On our Upstate New York homestead, opening the house and airing it out, beating the carpets, changing our curtains over (from winter to summer ones) and all the other little chores that are associated with spring cleaning typically don’t happen. If by St. Patrick’s Day the Christmas decorations are all stored safely in the attic, I am usually feeling pretty good. (Disclaimer: While all our Christmas decorations have been packed up, tubs are still sitting in the hall, waiting for twenty empty minutes. I am still pretty happy and the world hasn’t ended so a few more days won’t hurt.)

Don’t get me wrong, we do spring into cleaning, it just doesn’t happen to be inside. Spring is always busy on a small homestead. Between planning our gardens, yard work, seed starting, transplanting and record keeping, the days are filled quickly. It can be overwhelming, even to those of us who have been homesteading since we can remember. The trick for us is to remember to do outside work smartly. This doesn’t always happen and yes I will give you some examples if only to make you laugh and remind you that these things are every day occurrences on a homestead.

Read the entire article at Gluesticks.

The Dirty Life - Fish Chowder

Even though I have finished reading the book (see the review here), some of the recipes in the book still haunt me, especially at dinner time. Usually I don't have enough time to make whatever I was thinking about but I did decide to make an effort to make the fish chowder when I got the other morning.

In planning to make the chowder and because we were out, I made fresh bread first thing. What goes better with homemade soup than bread? (You can find my bread recipe here.)

The Dirty Life

I came across The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball by accident when I was looking up books on Amazon. It was one of those recommended books and since I am a book addict I clicked. The first few pages grabbed my interest as they talked about cooking, organic farming and a dream. The Prologue did everything a good prologue should do: give some background information, sets the setting and hooks the reader.

My Knead For Bread

As amazingly simple as bread can seem, finding the right recipe is incredibly hard. While most recipes contain the basics: flour, yeast, salt, water and fat (butter, oil, lard, etc.), some also require eggs, milk, sugar. Even the simplest of recipes have different ratios of flour, yeast, salt and water. How then do you find the right one? Trial and error. Unless you are lucky enough to know someone who makes amazing bread already and will willingly give their recipe. I am not that lucky. I grew up with white bread from the store. In starting this adventure, I had hoped it would be pretty simple. As with some many skills that were considered "basic" when my grandmother was a child, basic does not mean easy. Are the recipes easy? Mostly but that doesn't mean getting the flavor you want is easy. Please do not let that discourage you because once you find the perfect recipe for you, you will find bread making a wonderful addition to your life. Does it require some time? Yes but just like with laundry, when you load the washer and then the dryer, the results are something wonderful. Yes it took time for the bread to rise, not once but twice. Yes you had to wait not only for the bread to cook but also for it to cool but the smell of fresh baked bread? Can't buy it. The pure joy that comes with cutting that first piece and savoring it (usually knife still in hand)? Priceless.

One Seed, Two Seeds, Three Seeds... Weeds

I have read many articles, blog entries and books about people's love of gardening. The authors all seem to be happy working hard in the sun, planting and pulling weeds. Me, not so much. For one, it is hot in the summer sun and I burn. Second, aches, pains and blisters oh my. Thirdly, there is always something else I would prefer to do... cough, cough relaxing in the shade with a book.
Needless to say, I am always looking for something to minimize the amount of work my garden requires, while still producing the all the delicious bounty of the previous years. I know you are probably thinking, hey chick, it takes hard work. You are right but I would still love to work smarter instead of harder. So this winter as I was checking out too many gardening books and memoirs from the library, I stumbled across Lee Reich's book Weedless Gardening.

Blueberry Lemon Coffee Cake

Perusing a blog hop recently, I stumbled upon this delightful looking recipe for a Buttermilk Blueberry Breakfast Cake. (Can you tell that blueberries are one of the reasonably priced fruits this time of year?) I have been told over and over that I can replace buttermilk with kefir so I decided to test it out at my parent's house last weekend.

Butter & Garlic Croutons

When you make your own bread, I swear we either run out or we have quite a bit leftover. Last week, after the bread started to get a little stale, I decided that I didn't want to make bread crumbs with it. I wanted to try making my own croutons. I am always hearing, "Oh they are so easy, I cannot believe you don't make them!" So it was time to get on the wagon and I figured, what better time to test them then February when we aren't eating a lot of salad so I would have time to perfect my recipe.

Turns out, it really wasn't anything I needed to perfect.

The Writings of Jenna Woginrich

Late one night, I relaxed in bed with my fiance at my parent's house reading Mother Earth News. The house I had bought a year and half earlier was under structural and functional construction. While working on it, we were living in my old bedroom at my parent's house. Tucked into bed, I read an article called Life on the Homestead. I didn't notice the author. I didn't really care who it was because reading it, it could be anyone, including me. I read the article aloud to my fiance. He wasn't as impressed or moved by the article as I was. I dog eared it and read it again a few nights later. I would be willing to bet that I still have that magazine with the dogeared page.

Years later I would read an excerpt from a book called Made from Scratch and get so excited that I would literally leap out of my computer chair to tell my husband about the book I had just found by the same author, Jenna Woginrich, who had written the article from Mother Earth News a few years ago. He, of course, had no idea what I was talking about. I though, was over the moon. The woman who I had felt so connected with through her writings, had written a book. Not just any book, but from the looks of Amazon, a book that told her story and gave me practical information I could use on our small homestead. I promptly requested it from the library, along with her other works, Barnheart and Chick Days.

Honey Blueberry Muffins

Last week, organic blueberries were on sale. The kids ate about half the package before the blueberries started to look a little sad. You know what I mean, no longer fresh but not bad enough to be a lost cause and toss them to the chickens.

Feeling rather homey, I decided I would make muffins the next morning and hunted for a good honey blueberry recipe. My Retro Kitchen had a scrumptious looking Honey Blueberry Muffin recipe. Not only did it look good but her forgetfulness and substituting were right up my alley.