This article explains how to dig razor clams and how to clean razor clams. I’ve also included a recipe for our favorite way to eat them, fried! Razor clams are one of those foods that is so delicious it makes you unable to do anything but mumble about how delicious they are and eat until you explode or the clams run out. They can a bit of work to dig but trust me, you will Read more…
Meat from grassfed and pastured animals can get tough and dry if cooked like conventional meat. In this article I’ll explain why there’s a difference and how you can keep your grassfed and pastured meat from being tough and dry. Thinking of the sleepy peeping of chicks from the back seat makes me smile even now. I hadconvinced AJ that it was time again to raise another batch of Cornish cross meat chickens. We made Read more…
It’s that amazing time of year where the seed catalogs come pouring in and I dream about the garden. Okay, Its more like I obsess about the garden. How many square feet can I plant? How much and what kind of seed do we need? What do we have room to start early? How many pounds of potatoes do we actually need to plant to feed five people? The endless questions I ask myself! I Read more…
Hello my lovely folks, I hope you all had an excellent New Years, Christmas, Thanksgiving and anything else you celebrated. It’s been quieter than normal around here; our life on the other hand has been some form of chaos for the last six months. I thought it was high time I filled in the large- er, huge may be more appropriate- gaps for you and gave you a look around our new place. Be forewarned, Read more…
This raw cranberry relish is sweetened to taste. The whole lemons, limes and oranges mellow and sweeten as they soak up the sugar but keep the relish bright. Raw cranberry relish is simple, great to make ahead and gets better with age. Make a batch of raw cranberry relish for Thanksgiving and save some to eat at Christmas too. Certain things make it the holidays for me. Snow and wood smoke, are big. Read more…
I’ve been sketching farms for as long as I can remember; stacks of fences, chicken coops, barns, gardens and houses. I’ve written intricate plans for buying land and building farms, I have thousands of idea to make the place pay for its self. I came up with most of those ideas as a little kid with a big notebook and plenty of them are still great ideas. It just so happened that I’ve spend Read more…
This is the hardest time of year for me. It’s a time to hold our breath, in between winter and spring, with long dark days. It’s so easy to drift off the path we laid for our self when the sun was bright and the grass green. This is the most important time for me to practice self-care and part of that is staying on a schedule. Having a schedule gives my days and weeks Read more…
My grandma tells stories of the family dipping a literal bathtub worth of smelt and dip nets so full they broke when pulled from the water wrong. I had never had the opportunity to harvest smelt before but with her stories of a bountiful and delicious harvest I jumped at the chance when a day opened this year. Due to stock mismanagement our current smelt run is much humbler than the one she remembers. The Read more…
When I was finally old enough to realize books were awesome I become a veracious reader. I loved anything inspiring and I especially loved books about animals and how different cultures lived. The Little House on the Prairie® book series is one of my favorites and one of the first series of books that I read. I was fascinated with how the pioneers lived. Since I lived a good a portion of my childhood in Read more…
Homemade lacto-fermented ketchup is one of the easiest things to make! If you can taste and stir, you can make this. I’ve always had a lackluster relationship with ketchup. I liked it, sometimes, but it was always so sweet and one dimensional that I could never really get excited about it. One day we were at a restaurant and they had a bottle of Portland Ketchup Company Ketchup. I wasn’t expecting anything from that bottle. Read more…