After a super busy holiday season (visit LeAnna’s Blog) for a glimpse of what we were up to), we’ve taken the sweet lull of January to reflect on the past year. Last year was the first time we ever made anything resembling resolutions. For us, it was a list of goals and dreams for the coming year, scrawled out on a steno pad and magneted, totally ignored, to our refrigerator.

While our actual goals were varied in nature, the essence of most of them was that we wanted to learn more old-fashioned skills and move toward a greater level of sustainability for our family. The good news is that even though we never checked back in with last year’s list, we actually achieved a fair number of our goals. While not everything we did was food related, it sure was a recurring theme. So here are some highlights from our year in food:

We baked all of our family’s bread.

We started making our own yogurt.

We learned to make mozzarella, ricotta cheese, and butter.

We made pizza from scratch (crust, sauce, and cheese).

We started making our own granola.

We turned half of our backyard into a garden and ate or canned the produce.

We canned tomato sauce, apple butter, pear caramel butter, huckleberries, wild blackberries, strawberry jam, marmalade, and peaches.

We made a lot of sundried tomatoes and pesto.

We froze gallons of wild blueberries.

We made really hokey apple wine.

We made our own marzipan from fresh almonds and marshmallows from scratch.

And we failed repeatedly at making an edible bagel.

Here’s a little collage of our yumminess:

Two pounds of yeast and a bunch of canning jars later, we’ve discovered that we had been duped into believing that the homemade lifestyle is far more difficult than it actually is. Rather, we found that it was not only enjoyable but empowering to take control of our family’s food, that the end-product was far better than its processed equivalents, and that spending time in the kitchen with our children was easily the highlight of the day.

You can expect more homemade updates in the future as we continue to expand our old-fashioned, made-from-scratch lifestyle. In the meantime, if any of you have a good cracker recipe, we’d sure be grateful if you’d share it!

Did you learn or try anything new this year? What are your goals for the coming year?

If I had to choose one taste to remind me of childhood, it would be homemade biscuits (my maternal grandmother’s recipe) spread with homemade apple butter made by my paternal  grandmother. I inherited my grandma’s apple butter kettle, which is a large traditional copper kettle blackened with use, which stands on four cast-iron legs to be used over an outdoor fire. It looks a lot like this one they use at my parents’ church. That’s my dad stirring the apple butter.

I dream of getting my grandma’s kettle cleaned up someday and using it again, but for now we are forced to make our apple butter indoors. This year we bought a bushel of low-spray Ginger Gold apples from our friend’s farm.  A whole lot of them were eaten straight off, but we did manage to save some for canning.

We used an old-fashioned peeler to prep the apples, which worked great. Ella in particular loved cranking the handle.  (The worms loved the peelings.)

After we peeled all the apples, we gave them a coarse chop so they’d cook down faster.   We finally found a way to keep our preschooler busy while we were work: We gave her a butter knife and some apple slices and set her to work.  She took her work very seriously and ultimately declared, “I love helping you cook, Daddy!”

All those chopped up apples went into a stock pot along with a bit of fresh apple cider to start them steaming.

When they were very soft, after an hour or so, Brent mashed them up with a potato masher, all the while regretting having given away his immersion blender years ago.  Once we had a fairly smooth apple sauce, we added lots of cinnamon and some sugar.   This lovely, fall-ish concotion simmered for another hour or so until it had cooked down by about a third and, most importantly, it looked and tasted like apple butter. We packed the hot apple butter into sterilized jam jars. While lots of old-timers will just let the jars seal themselves, we processed ours for 10 minutes in a boiling water canner.  Here’s our finished product all set for winter eating and for giving as Christmas gifts.

After we made this, Brent found an amazing sounding recipe for Pear Caramel Butter, and we decided to try that too.  We made some changes to the recipe that we’re quite pleased with.  We left out the lemon juice, cut the nutmeg down to just a pinch or so, and added a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract.  It made a fantastic spread and is definitely worth your trying!  We enjoy it spread on all kinds of things – pancakes, biscuits, and of course, a spoon.

How’s your fall canning going?

When you decide as a family to live on one-income so one parent can stay home with the kids, people will often tell you, “You’re so lucky to be able to afford to do that.” But the truth is there’s very little luck involved. Instead there’s a whole lot of cutting back, reprioritizing, and being extremely creative about how you spend your money and live your life. You also find a lot of creative ways to make extra money. In the past, they used to call it egg money: the money that housewives would make selling their excess eggs from their chickens. In our family, since we don’t have chickens, our egg money has come from a lot of other places: LeAnna writes and edits local history books and radio shows. Brent sold two lbs. of our red wiggler composting worms. Brent does a little computer consulting for a friend. He even sold a few photos to GRIT!

Lately we’ve been working on a family mission statement. We realized that we really wanted to prioritize raising our kids ourselves and also making our home a center of creative industry.

To that end, we came up with an idea to make some new egg money. That’s how our unhipster etsy store was born.

A few months ago, Brent and I were preparing to travel to New York City. As I lay in bed that night, I began to realize how dreadfully unhip I had become. There was no way I could ever be as hip as anyone in New York City. In fact, after a few years as a stay-at-home mom, I was so unhip, I could be an unhipster.

Since then, I've begun to embrace my life as an unhipster and it's been surprisingly liberating. For one thing, if you're worried about being hip, it's never really cool to like something too much. But if you are an unhipster, you can feel free to revel in all kinds of old-fashioned, unhip things like cooking biscuits in my grandma's cast-iron skillet, making strawberry jam, and dreaming of living on a farm in the country some day.

I also discovered that there were a lot more unhipsters like me out there. Are you an unhipster?

You might be an unhipster if:
Your idea of a good weekend would be building your own smoker,
You get totally geeked out at a Farmers’ Markets,
You forage for your own food,
You spend more money on potting soil than Pottery Barn,
You are saving up for a pressure canner instead of an iPhone,
You grow your own food no matter where you live.

That is how I happened upon the idea for an unhipster line of t-shirts featuring silhouettes of timeless, rural gear like cast-iron skillets, canning jars and tractors. The designs are hand-painted from hand-cut stencils based on my artistic renderings of old-fashioned stuff (mainly from our kitchen).

Feel free to check out my new Etsy shop called Unhipster: Gear for Rurally-Inclined, Old-fashioned People.

Would any of you consider yourselves unhipsters?

Do you have any creative ways you make “egg money”?

We have had our gardening ups and downs this year. You may have heard that it has rained almost every day this summer in Massachusetts, so our poor waterlogged plants haven’t had much of a chance. But we are beginning to reap the benefits of our home garden. We’re getting a bowl full of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes every day. At first every ripe tomato went directly into Ella’s mouth, but finally there are enough to share. We have tons of other unripe tomatoes on the vine waiting for some sun to ripen. We have some yellow leaves, so we’re praying they don’t get hit by the late blight, which is wiping out whole fields of tomatoes around here.

We’re also getting quite a few zucchini, which seem to grow about four inches overnight. Fortunately, we are big fans of the secret placement of zucchini in everything from cookies to bread to smoothies, so we are happy. Ella has even rewritten the Raffi song, “I like to Eat Apples and Bananas” to be “I like to Eat Apples and Zucchinis.” Of course, she doesn’t really like to eat zucchini that much at all, but we’re hoping the song will sink in. We also started a whole host of other squash, pumpkin, and gourds, which we forgot to label, so now we are watching every day to see what they will turn out to be. 

Our bean crop had a few disadvantages going in. First we mixed up our beans and planted the pole beans in the garden and the bush beans by the fence. Next we actually followed the directions on the package that said to plant them 6 inches apart. So we only planted like 12 plants. We could have planted them a couple of inches apart and actually produced more than two servings of beans. Good to know for next year. The Royal Purple Pod Beans did win the most interesting vegetable from the garden though. We love the color combo of the dark purple with the vivid green when you break them. Of course, when you cook them, they turn just plain old green.

We’ve also got peppers, cucumbers, carrots, onions, our second planting of lettuce, tons of basil and other herbs including lemongrass.

Our biggest surprises were our berry crops. The good surprise is we actually have strawberries on the plants Brent grew from seed. Our friend who works on an organic farm said we should probably pick them off so the plants will produce next year, but we just couldn’t do it. Our first strawberries!

The less good surprise was that the very prolific huckleberry bushes we also started from seed are not the wild huckleberries that grew on LeAnna’s grandparents’ farm in Kentucky, but are actually garden huckleberries, which don’t actually taste very good. Any ideas for what we can do with them?

We’ve definitely learned a few things in our garden experiment. First, we need to plant a lot more to feed our family for the summer and be able to can. Second: it seems to benefit most anything to start it from seed before planting it in the ground. Third: We miss our CSA more than we thought we would, especially those giant u-pick fields. Depending on how the rest of the month goes, we’re thinking about joining a local college’s Fall Semester CSA and trying to take advantage of the u-pick and seeing what we can preserve. Until then we’re supplementing our diet with lots of free, foraged berries and local fruit and produce from farmstands. How has your garden been growing?

If you’ve ever read one of our past posts here, you may have noticed that our current preoccupation is learning to enjoy life more by re-mastering skills from our rural/agrarian pasts. Recently, however, we decided to one-up ourselves on that. We decided to go further back into our ancestry. Beyond large-scale agriculture, beyond subsistence farming, and all the way back to the hunters and gatherers of centuries past: We went foraging for blueberries.

In our neck of the woods, there are plenty of berry farms. Some of them are even low-spray. We have friends who regularly pick multiple pounds of berries at these farms. And if we were reasonable human beings, we might very well do the same. But driven by an internal convergence of Yankee frugality and a desire for adventure, we drove off to the countryside to see if we could re-discover a plot of conservation land our friend once showed us where blueberries grow wild and abundant. That is, if you can find the place – and if you can beat the birds to them.

So on a whim on Sunday afternoon, we headed up to the hills and after twice deciding we were lost, finally stumbled upon the place. After a cool, wet start to the summer, the blueberries were just starting to ripen. And best of all, we seemed to have noticed this fact before the birds. The only problem is (and if you’ve ever picked wild blueberries you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about) wild blueberries are about ¼ the size of commercial blueberries. Generally speaking, this is fine with me. I find their small size is better for baking, and even (I would argue) offers a more densely-concentrated flavor. However, it does mean that it takes you about four times as long to pick the same volume of berries. You pick and pick and pick and look down to discover you’ve only gathered about half a cup. It can be a bit discouraging. Add a very hungry 9 month-old into that mix, and it all begins to feel a bit Sisyphean.

But we did in the end have a lot of fun and even manage to freeze a few quarts of berries for the winter. Best of all, it was all free from the land (just like our ancestors used to gather), beyond organic (being totally uncultivated and sandwiched in the middle of conservation land), and to boot, a good adventure for the whole family. The desserts we get to eat afterward really only sweeten the deal.

In addition to LeAnna’s fantastic blueberry-banana bread, here’s a new favorite recipe we recently whipped up: blueberry shortcake. It’s the variation on whipped cream that makes this fantastic. Feel free to alter the cake in whatever way you’d like, or even try other berries if you’d prefer, but please, oh please, try the whipped cream.

To make the shortcakes, prepare your favorite vanilla-flavored cake recipe, baking small quantities of it in jumbo muffin tins, yielding mini-cakes approximately 1 ½ inches tall.

The recipe for the World’s Happiest Whipped Cream is as follows:

3/4 cup of well-chilled whipping or heavy cream
3 tablespoons of sugar
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup well chilled sour cream

Whip the cream and sugar until it forms soft peaks. Add the vanilla. Gradually fold in the sour cream until it is mixed well. Chill.

When the cakes are cooled, slice the mini-cakes in half, top with whipped cream and some blueberries, then the second layer of cake, more whipped cream, and more berries. Yum.

Have you ever foraged for food? What have you found? Where do you like to hunt for it?

Before we get to the subject of strawberries, you must go read Kitchen-Geeking’s response (A Little Bit About Knitting) to Brent’s last blog about knitting. An interesting cross-application to cooking as pleasurable work.

And on to the strawberries:

After having massive berry envy all week from hearing friends talking about the strawberries in their CSA farm-shares, we had to get ourselves to the U-pick fields.

We filled up the 10-pound container they gave us easily enough. It wasn’t until we got home that we discovered that 10 pouds of rapidly ripening fruit was not going to stay fresh long, and we had to act quickly.

We made a strawberry tart, strawberry sangria, strawberry-yogurt freezer pops, strawberry smoothies, salad with strawberries, popovers filled with strawberries, and just over a gallon of strawberry jam.  Despite a few days of strawberry-overload, there’s still quite a bit on our strawberry to-do list: strawberry wine, canned strawberry-rhubarb pie filling, not to mention tucking some away in the freezer.  So it looks like we’ll be headed out for another ten pounds or so soon!

This is just one way that we’re trying to keep ourselves in local foods this coming winter.  What’s your favorite strawberry recipe?

As I believe I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve always been a bit of an odd duck. While my hobbies are arguably charming in an adult, they are undeniably quirky in a child. From teaching myself to bake bread in 4th grade to getting a pasta roller for my 12th birthday, I was a collector of unusual hobbies. The winner in this string of strangeness, however, was the fact that I, as a grade-school boy, learned to knit.

I grew up in a house full of women. And perhaps even more formatively, I grew up in a church full of old ladies. While my high school peers were out partying in the woods, I was sipping soup at luncheons. The fact that the gang I ran with couldn’t run anymore never really fazed me. So I adapted to their culture – meaning I brought my knitting along to meetings, cranking out lopsided scarves for family members who graciously accepted – and even occasionally wore – them.

Eventually, in a desire to masculinize my hobbies, I gave up knitting and tried my hand at whittling and at wiring oil lamps for electricity. I had very moderate success at both of these, but found that wood shavings and metal shards were not as welcome on the living room rug as were the tufts of fluff left behind after a long night of knitting.

A few years later, however, when my wife was pregnant with our first child, I felt this need to knit. I don’t know if it was some kind of weird, empathetic nesting instinct, but I wanted to create for my child – crafting with my own hands something that would warm and comfort her. As an aside: I did, somewhere along the line, decide that at the very least, I needed a more manly knitting bag – and I picked up a Sears Craftsman tool bag – very manly and durable, if perhaps a bit at odds with its original purpose.

My wife, LeAnna and I have been thinking a lot lately about work. We’ve been wondering if perhaps we’ve been mis-educated to believe that avoidance of manual labor is the pinnacle of education and evolution – that to prove that we’ve arrived in the world, we should work with our heads and not our hands.  What we’re wondering is whether that system has steered us wrong, disconnecting us not even so much from our heritage, but from some essential part of who we are as people. That as people, we were made to create. That on some level people were meant to work for their food. And that, similarly, part of our care not just for ourselves but for each other involves a physical act of creating. In my Eastern European family, that often involves cooking food for each other – and, of course, applying a liberal dose of guilt until the person eats it.

Similarly, I think my experience with the baby blanket was about that same impulse – the need to use my hands to physically contribute to the well-being of my unborn child. And for me, that had to be more than simply bringing home a paycheck that pays the mortgage. So when we found out we were expecting our second daughter, I was not at all surprised to find myself at the craft store, picking out the perfect yarn for the blanket in which we’d take her home from the hospital. Into that blanket, I knit more than a cabled pattern of blended angora – instead, it was knit with hope, and love, and just a fair dose of hard work.