I discovered something pretty magical: homemade butter! I am not the first backyard homesteader to discover the wonderful simplicity of making homemade butter, but I am the first one in my house to discover it. The process is simple, simple, simple. Get some heavy cream, pour it half full into a jar, then shake-shake-shake for about ten minutes. Voila! The cream thickens to the point
Archives for 2010
Crooked Beaked Chicken
My sister raised a new batch of hens this past September and I was with her and my nephew when they picked out new chicks. We brought them home and noticed one of the baby chicks had a slightly crooked beak – like millimeters off. It didn’t seem like a big deal… at the time anyway. Weeks went by and the crooked beak became much
Unsustainable Choices
A few weeks ago I started to second-guess our decision to keep our house in Portland, rather than selling it when we had the chance before starting grad school down in Eugene. A weekend of back-breaking labor in Portland though cured me of that feeling. When we say we’re “going home”, we still think of that house as our home. The house smells like our
Canning Tomatoes
Class is in full swing at the Urban Farm, but there is still more produce than 68 students can handle. The first week of class I came home with another, somewhat smaller, bucket of tomatoes. I’m not really hurting for marinara sauce anymore and we are pretty stocked on ketchup. I decided it would be best to just simply can these guys as-is. Canning tomatoes
Canning Pears
Remember September? Where did the rest of that month? I had a birthday, it turned from summer to fall, school started, I kept bringing home buckets of produce from the Urban Farm, and I made multiple trips to the store to buy more canning jars. That sums up how the last two or three weeks have been for me. According to some local farmers, it
Holy Tomatoes
Almost every evening since I’ve been back in Oregon has revolved around some sort of food preservation. The produce… it waits for no one! The canner assumed the position on the stove next to my copper stockpot, where they have been actively bubbling away since. The tomatoes started ripening in late August, so when we got into town we graciously accepted about 40 pounds of
Asian Pear Cider: Redo
We harvested a few buckets of asian pears from my mom’s house right after we moved into our new place in Oregon. There more things still in moving boxes than there were out of boxes, but the harvest waits for no one! If you don’t drop what you are doing to preserve now, you’ll miss your window for the season. I decided to try another
Road Trip Recap II
We continued our road trip west from New York to Oregon after a long break in Oklahoma. Kansas was an easy day, with flat freeway and a horizon line that seemed to go on forever. When we did briefly stop, we were greeted by some of the nicest people I’ve ever run into on the road. Most people noticed the license plate from Oregon and
Road Trip Recap
We started our road trip from New York back to Oregon with a stop to first visit Monticello. After that, we headed south on the beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway. I am admittedly pretty Oregon-centric in my viewpoint. I think Oregon is a beautiful state with diverse terrain and awe-inspiring natural places. However, this road trip opened those blinders of mine to recognize how many beautiful
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