by KerryAnn Foster on September 18, 2010 · 0 comments
in Beans,Beef,Casein-Free,Chicken,Gluten-Free,Grains,Main Dish,Menu Mailer,Nut-Free,Recipes,Soy-Free
I field a lot of questions about corn and cornmeal and how to absorb more nutrition from it. My answer is that if you wish to use corn, the best way to do so for the average cook is to use Masa Harina. Masa is corn that has been soaked in lime, dried and ground into cornmeal. Store your masa, like all corn flour products, in the freezer.
Masa can be used to make tortillas, cornbread-crusted dishes and more. Due to the change in flavor brought about by the lime, it especially works well with Mexican-flavored dishes. I sometimes make a pan of masa-based cornbread to go with Mexican dishes when we’re tired of rice.
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by KerryAnn Foster on September 13, 2010 · 0 comments
in Casein-Free,Crock-Pot,Egg-Free,Emergency Preparedness,Gluten-Free,Grain-Free,Homesteading,Menu Mailer,Natural Disasters,Nut-Free,Recipes,Soups,Soy-Free,Vegetables
Winter is coming.
A couple of weeks ago, I stood at my kitchen window in the early morning. Looking through the fog, I saw one single, yellowed leaf float down from the trees. My throat tightened. Last week in the same early morning time at my sink, I saw several more fall, dancing gracefully. Friday, I crested the steep hill on my road to see the Appalachians displaying change visible from a great distance. Today, I see the trees across the street are turning. Red and yellow. This morning, I had to grab a robe when I got up. The kids complained their feet were cold on the wooden floors. Friends are telling me the Blue Ridge Parkway, not far from home, already has yellows, oranges and reds beautifully visible.
Winter is coming. Soon. [click to continue…]
It looks as though my prediction of two chicks being male and one being female is correct. In the last week, their coloration has become more distinct than even the picture I posted a few days ago. The girl is very dark and the two boys are getting lighter by the day. So it looks like we will get to replace our roosters after all.
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KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.
Beginning this week, the Menu Mailer is doing a series of weekly mailers called ‘Back to Basics.’ If you are subscribed to the mailer, you will receive these issues as part of your regular subscription. In addition to receiving all of the instruction in Menu Mailer format complete with your weekly menu, preparation schedule and shopping list, we will be covering such topics as:
- How to produce tasty and moist roast beef in the crock-pot and the oven.
- How to pick cheaper cuts of meat.
- How to roast a whole chicken in the crock-pot and the oven.
- How to pan-sear chicken without drying it out.
- How to brine meat.
- How to stir-fry.
- How to roast vegetables.
- How to make soup.
- How to make ‘cream of mushroom soup’ replacement.
- How to lacto-ferment vegetables without whey.
- How to use your broiler.
- Homemade mayonnaise
- Homemade spice mixes
- How to reduce sugar and additives in your diet if you are new to Traditional Foods.
- Homemade dressings
- Homemade sauces and gravies
- Homemade gluten-free breads- quick breads, flat breads and sourdough.
- How to soak and cook grains.
- A variety of egg cooking techniques.
- How to cut up a chicken.
- KerryAnn’s formula for great hamburgers, meatballs, meatloaf and more.
- Nourishing breakfasts, snacks and desserts.
- What to do with leftover, cooked meats.
- How to make stock.
- How to make ghee.
- How to make yogurt.
- How to make water kefir.
- How to make kombucha.
- How to make other lacto-fermented drinks.
- How to take a technique and change it into multiple different recipes.
- How to stretch meals and save on your grocery budget.
- How to decrease your time in the kitchen.
- A Traditional Foods Thanksgiving and Christmas.
- How to hide vegetables and liver in your meals.
- And much, much more.
Once you master these basic techniques, you can make a wide variety of meals using different spices and ingredients. Your family will never realize you are using the same basic recipes, again and again, to turn out a wide selection of meals!
If you’d like to join us for this series, please subscribe to the Menu Mailer or the Mailer and Archive Package Deal at the CTF Website. The website will be updated weekly so you can join in on the class in progress without missing an issue. We will also offer the course for sale, in full, at its completion. We plan to run the series for at least 16 weeks, through New Year’s, but we are taking suggestions for items you would like to see included in the series, so we will add weeks as needed to incorporate in those requests as well.
The Menu Mailer costs as little as $1 a week! Sign up now to take advantage of this full series with the added benefit of having your menus planned out for you, one week at a time.
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KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.
We recently had two hens hatch out some chicks. Here are pics of the babies. They are three week old little balls of fluff and curiosity. One of them is behaving like a dominant little rooster already and one is acting like a peaceful little hen, allowing herself to be held and petted without screaming and fighting. The third one I haven’t been able to get ahold of yet to evaluate, which alone tells me it’s likely a rooster, too.
It’s been incredible to watch the mother catch a bug or grab some scratch when we let her out, get back into the coop and call the babies over to her to teach them what to eat. She’ll disable a bug just enough so it can’t get away quickly. Then she’ll give a special call and the babies come running. She drops the bug and the games begin. It’s pretty funny to watch them all gathered in a circle, head down and butt up, staring at the same point on the ground while the mama talks to them. The babies respond to both mothers, which is something I did not expect. Last year, the brooding hens attempted to kill each other’s chicks but these two hens seem quite happy to raise these babies in tandem. One of the hens didn’t have any of her hatchlings survive due to a mistake on our part, so she has adopted a chick from the other mother.
The last brooding mama should hatch her babies out within the next two days if any are going to survive. This is her first time brooding, and so far she has managed to crush two eggs a couple of days before hatching, and kill one baby that was a few hours old. If she successfully hatches any, they will be moved into our ‘maternity ward,’ a large dog crate inside the coop. These babies pictured above and their mothers will be moved out into our specially-made chicken tractor meant for chicks, as the nesting site is low to the ground so the chicks can get in without trouble. This will eliminate the problem of not being able to let the babies out until they can negotiate the three-foot drop out the run door to reach the ground. One of the ‘perks’ of living on a steep slope is that every door to the chicken coop is several feet off of the ground. 
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KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.
