If you've noticed the blog was a little quiet, you weren't the only one! We're moving to a new blog address called Farm and Hearth!
Head over to www.farmandhearth.com and leave a comment on our blogwarming post - you will be the start of something big! And follow my Instagram feed for crazy-delicious food!
But what do I mean, big? |
| photos by Sami Roy Photography |
During my husband's deployment through 13-'14, I spent less time on the computer and more time filling my hours with our baby, volunteering on New Earth Farm in Eastern Virginia. An organic, biodiverse, sustainable, water-conserving farm led by Farmer John and Farmer Kevin and their team, this is a farm that is shaking things up. We troweled in the dirt, washed eggs, worked the farmer's market stand, dug potatoes, chased sheep and watched lambing, picked kale with red-numb fingers in December and harvested tomatoes in sweat-sticky August. I started working at the farm as a fermentation and food preservation expert, and following the vision of our farm manager Kevin, we developed an entirely new facet of the farm called the Food Lab. Here, in an airy, high-ceilinged building designed by interned architects and built entirely by donations, we experiment with food, create, invent, fail and laugh, and I teach classes in our new Food Lab - kombucha, advanced kombucha, sauerkraut, charcuterie, pasta, canning, lacto-fermentation ... and I take the classes mobile, too, teaching at Williams-Sonoma, Whole Foods, Norfolk Botanical Gardens, local garden clubs, private classes, area shops and markets.
I finished my 200-hour yoga teacher training, took a prenatal yoga teacher training to add to my Simkin Center doula training and then immersed myself in a few other teacher trainings both in Virginia and in Seattle, meeting Manju Jois, Troy Lucero, Suzanne Hiite and other yoga legends (I am heading off to the Baron Baptiste Level One training in August 2014! Very excited). I'm still writing for the San Francisco Book Review and their Alphabet Soup and Critical Eye blogs, and I began writing for a magazine after they came to the farm for a photo shoot and a four-page spread on the Food Lab. Journalists and magazine writers from around the world started calling for media visits every week; schools drove buses of children out for tours. All - and I mean all - the top chefs in our area, keen on the best tasting, freshest produce and the unusual weeds, bugs and herbs we could provide, started descending on the farm and hammering us with questions, the most passionate of them digging in the dirt themselves and foraging with us for wild plants. They started inviting me in to their kitchens for private, pre-hours sessions with them, working to create the most delicious, unusual, ancient foods together. Farm Table events, where brilliant chefs designed a menu based on whatever we had to harvest that day and fourteen paying participants attend to cook and eat with the chef, started selling out back to back.
Whole Foods, Williams-Sonoma, local goat farms, butchers and pork farms, Bonfire Magazine, and other wonderful area providers and organic farms joined the charge as class sponsors, providing ingredients, tools, publicity, whole-hearted support. A photographer volunteered her time to come shoot events, edit the photos and get them back to us - she shot all the pictures in this post! An appliance store donated a dishwasher. Area chefs donated used tools. Farm visitors donated cash, kitchen gear, time to paint and sweep and mop, just plain shook our hands and encouraged us to keep doing what we were doing. Contractors gave tools and materials for our building, time, skill. With a massive group effort, the building was put together, the classes fell into place, and the people started coming.
With the scope of the blog ever evolving and my audience constantly growing, the name of the blog has itself evolved and I've had to move to a different platform - quite a daunting prospect in the blog world, but I am ready to take it on with your faithful reading support! All the good information on this blog will stay here, safely housed and accessible for us to search, read and bookmark, and the best posts will also be imported over to the new blog platform to find a fresh, new look.
Watch in shock and awe as farm-tested recipes straight from the field roll out, photos and news clips and tutorial videos, hilarious and piquing interviews, even horror stories roll out on the new blog! You'll even start seeing things for sale. Events will be posted on the blog so you can find when a class is coming to a city near you, and is a cookbook in the works? I can't say anything officially. But maybe we've finally heard your demands? Class tours will start to open up nationwide as I do a West Coast series in August in Seattle, Washington! And you can always visit us on the farm for a tour, a class, or just lunch with the farmhands - every day, at about noon. We'd love to have you.
Mrs H
www.farmandhearth.com
instagram.com/foodlab_newearthfarm
A must-have guide for any homemaker. Not only covering the rudiments of canning - explaining in detail and with illustrations how to both pressure can, and water-bath can - this book also address freezing and dehydrating, the other two most popular forms of food storage. With recipes that have become our family favorites, and simple, straightforward instructions on everything from jerky to chutney to pickles to flash-frozen kale, this book is a staple for the kitchen shelf! 
A favorite of mine, it has my most-well-loved recipe for lemon curd, an egg pasta I can hardly live without, and a collection of popsicle recipes that saw me through the hottest, sweatiest days of a post-partum summer! I absolutely love this book, and every recipe I have tried from it has been an A+ winner. And the sequel, which I don't yet own, is doubtless just as wonderful and beautiful: 
An outstanding book that every DIYer, urban homesteader, home cook and processed-free-fan should absolutely own. 
If you are one of those cooks like me who wasted untold bags of flour and yeast on bread that came out thick, heavy, ugly, and lumpy ... Welcome this book with open arms. Regardless of your skill level, Reinhart will perfect and upgrade your bread, bun, pizza-dough, cinnamon-roll, biscuit, baguette and boule skills to the level of artisan. I always wanted to eliminate store-bought bread items from our kitchen, but my bread wasn't nearly satisfactory and it always seemed so complicated a chore. After this book came to our home (recommended by 
Another recommendation from the Miz, this book is a winner. It is my particular delight to choose a new item every few days to accompany our dinner, and this book wormed it's way right into the center of my heart. I love it. I love it. Recipes for cookies, bread, cake, biscuits, all the usual plus more - and all using whole grains, delicious, wonderful, comforting, beautifully laid out and with two sections of photos. 
My mom got me this book for Christmas and I almost cried the first time I made the crust and it turned out so exquisitely! A beautiful, thorough compendium on PIE, this book is not only beautiful, but useful. 
My second cookbook ever (the first was 
, a book which I still own and LOVE the recipes from), this book has all the important recipes, variations, lessons, tips, tricks and even historical anecdotes for anything Flour that comes out of the kitchen, from doughnuts to butter cake to sourdough starter to waffles! This book is possibly (being one of the oldest in my collection and well-loved) one of the very messiest I own!
Outstanding book covering all the basics of the kitchen: every cook should own this book. Every recipe is a go-to, trustworthy and successful dish. I have never had a flop from this book! 
An excellent book for everybody learning to make their own yogurt, soak their own grains and brew their own medicine. 
This book is so much fun! I love how the recipes in it can be whipped out in short order (but big flavor!), and it has been my saving grace more than a few times. 
I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. My older sister owned it growing up, and when I married Mr H I instantly went and bought this book (actually, I bought it just before we got married, so I wouldn't have to live a day without it). Whenever I have a quick dinner I need, a long dinner I can start early, or a vegetable I am at a loss for, I flip through this very simple, spare book. Lots of recipe, very little extra foofoo, it gets straight to the point. All the soups have been winners, from Avocado Veloute to my age-old classic well-loved dearly-adored Caldo Verde! 
I accidentally left this book at my friends' house and she texted me how she was secretly glad I did! When I came a few days later to pick it up, she said she was hastily trying to finish reading the entire thing! Not only have I been stunned and boggled by the quality of the dishes in Chesman's repertoire, but I love her seasonal take on produce, especially useful to me since I prefer to cook with local and in-season foods. Tackle turnips, love leeks, and krunch kale with all her fantastic recipes! 
As you well know, this book has melted into my kitchen with such love that I can't even get it off my kitchen counter. This is the best slow cooker book available! 
I "borrowed" this book from my mom three years ago. Still "borrowing" it. Can't let her "have" it back .. Ever! I love how the recipes in this book all go into one pot, and come out like gourmet, way-too-much-work-went-into-this dazzlers. Whenever I use a recipe from this book, I feel like a fancy chef (the book includes wine pairings, in case you are a fancy chef!) and I've never had anybody turn down a meal from this book, ever! 
Don't let yourself head into another summer season without this ice-cream guide to see you through! No longer can I eat store-bought ice cream (Dreyers? Please ... spare me the sixty ingredients!), not after enjoying real ice cream. The chocolate ice cream in this book? So wicked, you can only eat a tiny bowl. The cream cheese? Ginger? Lemon? Tin Roof Sundae? Stop me, please! I love this book. 
Goodbye canned soda. Hello home-carbonated drinks! The title just about sums it all up, and you can 
This book is one of the newest in my collection, so I actually can't say it is splattered yet. But I wanted to include it here because I truly enjoy all of Ina Garten's cooking so much. I was introduced to her friendly cooking show when I was working as a hospice volunteer, and one of the patients I sat with wanted to watch her show many times. I realized how easy her cooking was, how simple, straightforward, and fresh. Using just a few quality ingredients, she was setting a table that looked out of this world! 
You know why I wanted this book so badly (
This book isn't a doctor, but it can help pinpoint the causes of various malaises and offers solutions from the comfort of your home. 
An excellent guide for homesteaders today, this book will get you started on hog-raising and gardening! 
Great, simple recipes - all of them delicious; lots of color photographs! 
This is a big fat book with lots of revolutionary (to the Westerners) and flavorful ways to use spices. I enjoy international cooking for the simple reason that, while not only bringing new flavors and textures to my plate, it also expands my view of certain foods and helps shift paradigms in thinking about say, cinnamon or star anise. 
A book from my native Washington state, this beautifully appointed book is a sophisticated treatise on preparing fresh salmon, crab, lobster and more. 
What a gem this book is in my collection! It has saved me more than once with an overful refrigerator of produce, while on the hunt for a new way to use some bountiful vegetable. (Eggplant jam? Summer squash pasta?) 
Actual italian recipes (think: not Olive Garden) with lots of pictures, although the pictures are not really my favorite part. The best, fastest and easiest pizza crust I've seen yet is in this book; pizza bianca and acutal italian pizzas (no cheese!) will please everybody!
Looking to do some vegan baking? This miniature book has way too many recipes for its size! 
Almond milk, smoothies, cashew cheese and other excellent ways to prepare raw and vegan food: use as a supplement to your already-nutritious diet, to learn some new ways to prepare vegetables and nuts, or if you are a raw foodie it will be an excellent all-purpose "cook" book! 
I love this book - and recommend it to anybody starting a vegetarian diet (or vegan, as any recipes not vegan have alternate ingredient options). It was a chance find in a bookstore and I am glad I stumbled across it; soups, lasagne, even dessert and appetizers are included - and all of them with ordinary ingredients you can find in the grocery store. 
Unglutenites rejoice - lots of recipe titles you will recognize but in exciting - gluten-free - new ways! 
