It is impossible to homestead in any way without becoming kind of obsessive about food. Though I have always been a self-proclaimed nutrition-geek and chef, my day now revolves around food as never before. First thing in the morning, before I even put on the coffee (now that’s love!) there..
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Because warm homemade bread is basically love in carbohydrate form. Two of my ‘kitchen’ goals for our little homestead this year were, 1) to keep my kombucha continuously brewing, and 2) to bake bread every week. We are gluten-free as my youngest son has some issues with digesting it and..
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Tamales are traditional Costa Rican cuisine. While the ingredients are simple, they are time consuming to make. They remind me of my Ukrainian family making perogies, women working together in an assembly line to make hundreds for a special event or holiday. Last Friday we were invited to join a..
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I have a confession to make that usually puzzles my clients and students who know me to be a food “expert”: I don’t usually eat fruit. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s that, for some reason that I have never fully understood, my body just doesn’t seem to..
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Warning: This recipe is not going to be perfect pizza dough. You could never toss it up into the air while singing Italian folk songs. It is, however, fairly tasty and doesn’t fall apart instantly once it’s cooked, which is a step ahead of many gluten-free crust recipes. 4 cups..
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Remember last time I wrote one of these and it seemed vaguely optimistic? Forget all that. We are currently in the depths of the rainy season. The good news about this is that, as it pours for hours every day, nothing needs additional watering. Here are the downsides: the soil..
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Medicinal plants, fruit: Mamon The fruit stacked high on the table at the market looks almost alien. Spiky, with little barbs radiating outward, bright red and about the size of a ping-pong ball; here in Costa Rica, this fruit is known as mammon, though in Asia it is better known..
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The good news is: food is actually growing. The half-dozen pots of lettuce I had planted as we were getting settled are large and we are consistently pilfering leaves for salads. We’ve had our first little crop of radishes and celery, green onions and herbs are in abundance. Almost every..
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As part of our shift to try to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle I wanted to have animals to help provide more protein for our diets (eggs, milk, cheese). The tricky part is that I have no clue what I’m doing. Perhaps you don’t know this already, but I’m not..
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OK, so some of you may have been reading about our renovation process and how we are going about rehabilitating the cabinas we have purchased in the jungle. Part of this whole process however is the idea that we are going to live as self-sufficiently as possible and that means..
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