Recent Posts

Well, the real answer to the post title today, is "not a whole lot," though not for a lack of food. My boy brought a GI bug back from school, and kindly shared it with my whole family this week. I didn't feel particularly ill today, but my appetite is still largely MIA. I did...

For breakfast I ate (what else?) rutabagas with ground beef and sage. I find it interesting that I am still able to enjoy these simple ingredients so much even entering week five. True, I’ve turned on turnips, but they were on thin ice at the outset. Generally, I find each meal I eat immensely satisfying, and I...

Before Christmas - before I began this whole experiment - I went shopping prior to a snow storm. Less than a foot was called for, but the roads would be dicey for a few days, and so, while not packed, the supermarket was a bit more crowded than usual. The produce and meat cases were...

Don't worry, I'm not resorting to small game as a major source of sustenance. If I were, I'd be gearing up to quit in a few days when I hit my 15% weight-loss limit. The lack of variety in my diet is boring though. When I saw this rabbit sitting still on the frozen streambed, I thought,...

I have stumbled upon a gray area in our rules that I did not account for at the outset. Last night I received a gift of a big tub of yogurt. My neighbor drives trucks for Chobani and brought me five pounds of plain yogurt. Chobani is huge and he did not actually make the yogurt, nor did...

Despite the title of this post, no, I didn't go so far as to require all my food be cooked by wood. Modern stoves are convenient and time-saving and believe it or not, I do plan to do things other than feed myself this year. Yesterday, while chopping several lunches worth of roots to roast,...

In a previous post I mentioned that I don’t think I’m particularly prone to anthropomorphizing the livestock. While I do think they have states that vary, I doubt very much these are similar enough to the commonly understood meanings of the words like “emotion” or “mood” to make them useful. But not ascribing to cows the...

The background carrots are straight out the root  cellar, the foreground guy has been washed. Washing before storing tends to shorten the shelf life of roots. Carrots are a staple around here. I don't know if there is anything to the commonly held 'wisdom' that the vitamin A precursors called carotenes are good for the...

Before beginning this blog post, I recommend you sit down. You might think that what we’re doing - growing all our own food for a year - is kind of out there. (Whoa, you might say to yourself, I’d really miss Fresca, not to mention Habbersett brand scrapple!) You might think it would be too much time...

This may just be the keystone to the home-grown food arch I'm living right now. I've grown a lot of produce in other years, but storage has always been less than optimal. Keeping crate upon crate of roots in the basement of the old farmhouse worked for a few months, but the conditions were not...