It’s a bit like Satie. Or, in our case, Satie played by daughter Emma on our old piano. On a fresh Saturday morning, spring sunshine gleams in the dining room windows (which you can tell I’ve washed, not altogether effectually, with my homemade window cleaner) (It’s the squeegee’s fault!). These cold jars of cider have …

Well, practice makes perfect. And this, my friends, is as perfect as I’m likely to get making bread. Not to brag or anything, but I FAR prefer our bread to the sliced mystery you get at the grocery store. I like this stuff so much I’ve asked Jess to pack two slices (with homemade butter, …

Wait a minute …Doesn’t canning happen with harvest? Like fall time? Yup. But it also happens whenever a surplus of empty jars coincides with a big sale on frozen chicken breasts. Jess had me pick up some meat on Monday, and when I got home on Wednesday there were 25 quarts of canned chicken (and …

I promised you Homemade Week last week, and I made good on that promise by staying home on Friday. So no post. Actually I wasn’t home much that day, having accepted an invitation to spend my day off first at the local high school career day, talking up my career (such as it is), and …

Actually I can’t make weeks at home, so I can’t truthfully advertise homemade weeks. If I could, I would have made about a thousand of them already and quit my job. In the absence of that, however, I’ll document all the homemamde stuff I made this weekend. I’ll also try to document how those homemade …

As I write this I’m eating homemade butter on homemade wheat & buckwheat bread. (What is buckwheat? If you can tell me without Googling it or looking in Wikipedia, you win! I have no idea what buckwheat is. Jessica ground some to put in muffins the other day and there was still some buckwheat flour …

But you really should have sent some of your snow our way. If everybody goes outside right now (you’re all home from work and school anyway, right?), takes a deep breath, and blows as hard as they can, it should push the storms all the way to, say, Ohio.
We’ll have to make do with our …

I hate to keep braying about this, but I don’t hate it so much that I won’t keep doing it. This is (Ta-daaa!) our first all-homemade meal. At least that I can recall.
Milk: neighbor’s cow. (I won’t be getting a milk cow anytime soon.)
Waffles: homemade from wheat we ground, oats from our storage, and various …

Doug sings Sm
My friend Drew has been trying to compress this video enough to post on the blog. He finally got it, thought I look a little compressed as well (it feels somewhat squashed). I hope you like it; feel free to pass it along, but include the disclaimer below.
What is going on in this …

We are a condiment family. A great portion of our fridge is filled with ketchup, BBQ sauce, oriental sauces, salad dressing, jam, mustard, mayo, …. We like to fancify our meals, so we use dips and sauces frequently. Here are three condiments you can make on your own, and they will be three less …