How to Cook from Scratch (Without Spending all Day in the Kitchen!)

Switching over to a healthier, real food lifestyle can seem a little bit daunting at first, especially if you’re used to grabbing fast food on the way home from work or popping a TV dinner in the microwave.

Cooking your own meals is the best way to save money, avoid the artificial ingredients in many processed foods, and ensure that the food you’re eating is good quality (since you know exactly what ingredients you’re using and how you’re preparing them.)

When you hear the phrase “cooking from scratch,” though, you might think of someone from your great-grandmother’s generation, spending hours and hours in the kitchen. But while it’s true that cooking healthy food from scratch takes might take more time than popping a TV dinner in the microwave, it doesn’t mean you have to spend all day in the kitchen either!

How to Store Vegetables for Winter

Whether you want to store your own garden-grown produce or whether you want to take advantage of a bulk discount for fresh vegetables from a local farm stand or farmer’s market, one of the most important things to know is how to properly store those vegetables for the winter.

Storing produce for the winter is something we don’t always think about today since we have the option of running out to the grocery store anytime we want, but our ancestors had to plan carefully for winter storage to make sure they would have a well-preserved food supply to last through the winter without spoiling.

Old-Fashioned Friday #93

Old-Fashioned Friday

Welcome back to another week of Old-Fashioned Friday! Old-Fashioned Friday is a weekly gathering place for bloggers to share their ideas, tips, discoveries, etc. about real food, natural health, and old-fashioned living. Just like the quilting bees and front-porch gatherings of the “good old days,” Old-Fashioned Friday is a spot for bloggers and readers to stop by for a visit to greet one another and to learn new things.

Each week I will be featuring the three most-viewed posts from the previous week, so make sure to check back for next week’s carnival to see if you were featured! I’ll also be pinning to my Pinterest boards as much as I can all of the posts that follow the guidelines.

Finding Edible Weeds on a Plant Literacy Tour

A few weeks ago I visited Old Sturbridge Village (a living history museum focusing on early 19th century life in New England,) and one of the things I did while I was there was to take a plant literacy tour to learn about edible weeds.

It was an absolutely beautiful day with blue skies, sunshine, and a slight breeze, and if I hadn’t needed to get home to let my dog outside, I think I could have stayed there all day walking around the village and learning about the different plants.

The tour guide was one of the costumed interpreters from the village, and he seemed to know just about everything there was to know about plants, both the ones growing in the gardens and the ones growing wild along the roadside.

10 “Newfangled” Foods Our Ancestors Never Ate

Of all of the things that have changed a lot in the past few years, our food supply is definitely one of them! And a lot of those changes have occurred in just the past century.

These foods may seem commonplace to us today, but in the scale of human history, these are all very recent, “newfangled” foods that the people of our great-grandparents generation viewed with a lot of skepticism at first.

Here’s a list of ten foods our ancestors never ate that didn’t even exist before the 20th century:

How to Make Homemade Yeast

For a long time, I had been confused about the subject of yeast. The only yeast I knew about was the little packet of active dry yeast or rapid rise yeast that I would sprinkle into my dough. But then I started collecting 19th century cookbooks and found recipes that called for “one gill of fresh yeast” among the other ingredients.

Once I finally figured out what a gill was, though, (about a half a cup,) I was even more confused. I would have to use how many little instant yeast packets to equal a whole half a cup?!

After doing some more research on period cooking, though, I found several recipes for how to make homemade yeast that helped to solve the mystery a bit. Most involve the use of hops or potatoes added to boiling water and flour. The problem with all of those recipes, though, is that they all call for adding “a bit of good fresh yeast” to the mixture – which was exactly what I didn’t have!

Grow Your Own Herbal Medicine Cabinet

The more I learn about natural health, traditional foods, and old-fashioned living, the more I realize that people in our modern society keep getting further and further away from the idea of home health care. By home health care I mean treating minor health complaints with natural, homemade remedies rather than relying on over-the-counter drugstore medicines.

(Before I continue, I need to clarify that I am not a doctor or a medical professionsl, and I don’t claim to be any kind of expert when it comes to medicine. I’m not advocating the idea of ignoring serious medical problems by any means. With many health issues, the wisest choice would be to seek medical help, and as always, make sure you do your research before making any decisions about your health.)

Traditional Home Remedies

What I’m talking about when I say home health care is the idea of using simple and natural homemade remedies to treat the little things, like a cold or a stomach ache. I’m talking about the importance of becoming more aware of our bodies and learning how to use the natural remedies in our own kitchens to help us to achieve the best health possible rather than immediately running out to the drugstore to buy something for every little complaint.