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?