An entry in The Household Economy I love butter. I grew up eating margarine, but those were dark days indeed and I try not to think about them now. Instead, I think about butter, and I eat it. I slather it on toast, on cornbread, on pancakes, on pretty much any sort of baked good. [...]
Archive for the ‘homesteading’ Tag
How To Make Raw Butter 23 comments
Considering Butter: A Philosophy of Homesteading 24 comments
An entry in The Household Economy A few months back, I read a Sharon Astyk post in which she wrote about a new cookbook of sorts, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese. In the book, Reese engages in a wide variety of food-centered homesteading activities, like making butter and baking bread, making [...]
The Cult of the Expert 14 comments
An entry in The Household Economy — ∞ — “A system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average—one is tempted to say ideal—American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturalists and ‘agribusinessmen,’ the problem of health to doctors [...]
Ending Our Exuberance 16 comments
An entry in the How To Be Poor series In my previous entry in the How To Be Poor series on voluntary poverty, I argued that many people’s dietary choices reveal the sort of luxury we have available to us today in industrialized nations. By choosing what we eat from a wide variety of foods, [...]
The Household Economy: A Return to Normal 17 comments
An introduction to The Household Economy As I write this, the smell of fresh, baking bread is wafting from the wood stove here in the farm’s main, communal house. The bread is one step in my attempt to come up with an easy and tasty recipe for sandwich bread. I’m doing this not because I [...]
Thanking the Sun 2 comments
Today I awoke to blue skies. This may not seem surprising–it is August, after all–but even at this time of year, sun cannot be taken for granted here on the Oregon coast. The last week has been cloudy and a bit cool, with only a few brief stretches of good sun. As such, we’ve been [...]
The Fermentation Prelude: How to Extract Whey from Raw Milk 2 comments
An entry in The Household Economy My earliest homesteading activities involved food. I think this is common and appropriate; food is basic and elemental, inspiring and accessible. It makes sense within our culture to homestead via food because food is still so capable of connecting us with the earth on a basic level. Despite the [...]
Living With the Other – An Introduction and Consideration 2 comments
To Begin With I’m currently living with an evergreen blackberry. It’s growing up out of the earth through a very tiny crack between the bottom of the wall and the floor of my yurt. It’s dark green, with jagged leaves, a stalk that thickens by the day and thorns that grow ever more sharp and [...]
