Getting There

Book review: The Little House Cookbook.

I have always been fascinated by the pioneer time period, and I also love cookbooks featuring traditional recipes. When I was recently given this book as a gift, I knew it would be right up my alley. I dove right in and read it from cover to cover.

It's a fascinating book with surprisingly, more space dedicated to historical information than to the actual recipes. The book is divided into chapters by type of food; for example, Staples From the Country Store, Foods From the Woods, Wilds and Waters, Foods From Gardens and Orchards, and Thirst Quenchers and Treats. Each chapter begins with an essay detailing the historical information of that type of food at that time.These essays are so interesting!

Then before each recipe is a quote (mentioning the dish) from one of the books, and an explanation of how the dish would have been prepared at that time, by either Ma Ingalls or Mother Wilder. Every single recipe in the book (I think there are 100) is for a food which is mentioned in one of the books--so these recipes are truly authentic pioneer recipes, not modern interpretations of what pioneers ate.

Some recipes are there more for interest than for anything. For example, it's unlikely that I'm going to make stewed jackrabbit anytime soon...but there are many recipes here that I do want to try, especially the breads, cakes and pies.

One thing I found most remarkable about this book was the simplicity of the recipes. People in the past made food to nourish themselves--good, simple food with few ingredients. Spices and flavourings were used sparingly if at all. This is what I personally like. Today's recipes in comparison seem too fussy and fancy, with too many flavours and ingredients masking the simple flavours of the foods themselves.

A cherished addition to my cookbook collection, equally delightful and useful. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is enamoured with the Little House books, even if it is read only for the historical information.

Thinking about Christmas.

It's been over a week already since I've posted here. Time flies! Things weren't very fun in our home for a while--Chris and I were ill as well as the boys--but I'm happy to say that now the flu bug is completely gone, we are all happy and healthy and things are back to normal.

It's ironic actually, that we all fell ill right after I posted about the importance of having daily routines. Because when our routines were interrupted by the general sickness about, I felt the unpleasant difference keenly. It confirmed for me how important those daily rhythms are for me, not only to accomplish all I want to do each day, but for my very peace of mind. I'm so glad that we're back into our daily rhythm.

We're getting towards the end of November now, and since I started to feel better a few days ago and my energy returned, my thoughts have been drifting ever towards the upcoming holidays. In past years Christmas often felt like a chore for me, but this year I feel more excited, I suppose since I have learned to appreciate the real things in life more, and pay attention to the superficial things less. Christmas, seen as a time for family fun and togetherness, a time to enjoy homemade gifts and treats and old and new traditions, has more meaning to me now than it did when I stressed out over all the things I felt I should buy.

This Christmas, my husband and I will be making gifts for the children to go along with the few books and stocking stuffers we'll be giving them. Creating things makes me happy and I'm excited about this, even though I know I am getting started too late and will be rushing to finish everything on the 24th.

First I'm making a quilted purse for my daughter's best friend. I'm using this tutorial I found, only instead of starting off with plain material I'm sewing together some quilting scraps that a friend gave me. Probably for an extreme beginner this is biting off more than I can chew, but I'm trying to just dive in and not worry about acheiving perfection. I'm having fun with this so far. I'll post a picture when it's done.

My other projects also involve sewing, but I can't really talk about them here because my children do read my blog!

Apart from gift giving, I have enjoyed making up a list of Christmas baking the children and I will be doing. It's mostly things we've made in the past: Cherry Chocolate Shortbread Mounds, Maple Glazed Shortbread, Raspberry Thumbprint Cookies, Gingersnaps, Truffles, and of course Gingerbread Men. We don't really do any entertaining over the holidays, but how can you have Christmas without cookies? We'll enjoy the baking ourselves, and I'll bring a big platter over to my mom's house on Christmas day.

I took out Tudor's 1966 Christmas book, Take Joy, from the library. It contains mostly Christmas poems, stories, legends, and carols, which is all very nice...but the best part of the book is at the end, where she described the numerous traditions her family had every year in their Victorian farmhouse for Christmas. It made me think a lot about traditions, about how important and enjoyable they are. They are the yearly rhythm to our lives, and in my mind are just as important to a family's well-being as the daily or weekly rhythyms. I am always looking for new traditions to add to our family's holidays. This year, perhaps a homemade advent calendar that can hide homemade treats? This idea looks like fun. Although everyone enjoys traditions, I believe they are especially important to children-- they make them feel secure and happy, and give them something to look forward to all year.

What new traditions are my readers planning to add to their holidays this year? Or what fun things do you do every year? Please share! I would love to hear about it. 

Book Review: Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving

When I wanted to get a book on canning, I decided to get the Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving. Bernardin is the brand of canning supplies and jars that is the most widely available in Canada, so I figured it was a name I could trust. It's a thick book too, at 448 pages.

This book is a good one for beginners, because it has a fairly large section at the back called "The Art and Science of Food Preservation," which explains everything a person would need to know about home canning. For those who want to jump right into canning without reading too much, the first section of the book has recipes for five popular foods (Strawberry Jam, Mint Jelly, House Salsa, Traditional Corn Relish, and Dill Pickles) that are heavy on the detail. I found this strawberry jam recipe to be helpful the first time I made jam, because I was a bit nervous and the recipe gave easier and more detailed instructions than most recipes do.

Also within this cookbook are a troubleshooting section and an extensive glossary, that are helpful to a novice canner such as myself.

Another nice feature of this book is the sheer variety of recipes. Flipping through the pages, I see so many interesting recipes that I'd like to try some time in the future, and lots of recipes that would be excellent for gift giving. The book includes sections on jams and jellies, canned fruit, salsa, relish and chutney, condiments, pickles, and tomatoes. After all this is a small section on pressure canning with a handful of recipes. 

Overall, I like this book and I can definitely see myself using some of the more creative recipes in the future for holiday gift-giving. However, my one complaint is that the variety of unique recipes means that some basic recipes have been left out. For example, when I wanted to make raspberry jam a few days ago, I was surprised to find no recipe for plain raspberry jam in this book. There was a natural jam recipe using tart apples instead of pectin that requires a long boiling time, but not a regular jam recipe. This wasn't a tragedy, since the sheet that comes inside the box of pectin has recipes for all the basic jams and jellies, but I did think it was strange that a book with the word "complete" in the title didn't have a recipe for raspberry jam! 

I would recommend this book to novice and experienced canners alike for the easy instructions, and for the large number of interesting recipes--but I don't think it's really a complete resource for canning. In the future, I'd like to get a few more canning books to ensure I have easy access to all the basic and traditional recipes I would like. Although perhaps I'm just making up an excuse to buy more books...something which I'm good at. :)

Book Review: The New Self-Sufficient Gardener

Probably most people who are enthusiastic about the back-to-basics, self-sufficiency movement have heard of John Seymour, who is often called "The Father of Self-Sufficiency". His classic book, The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It, is a real gem and likely sits on many of our bookshelves. He also wrote an interesting little volume called The Fat of the Land which details the adventures he and his wife had starting up their first homestead in the UK back in the late 60s. I plan on reviewing both of these books in due time, but today I'd like to talk about Seymour's volume committed exclusively to gardening: The New Self-Sufficient Gardener.

This book is an updated 2008 edition of the original, which was published in 1978. Simply put, this is a wonderful book for those of us who want to do more than just putter in the garden, but actually get serious about producing our own food. Seymour explains--in his unique, no-nonsense style--how to garden organically, how to best enrich the soil, how to maximize space in the garden and how to obtain the greatest yields possible. He also talks about preserving food, and other things complimentary to gardening, like keeping chickens, building fences, or making your own wine.

There are no photographs in this book; instead, the pages are filled with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations. This feature alone makes the book a delight to read.

There is a large section near the beginning of the book with nothing but illustrations, to help the gardener identify and classify all the different plants. Later, the book moves onto more detailed instructions, plant-by-plant. Some of the more commonly grown plants, like tomatoes or potatoes, get several pages of information.

All told, I like this book very much and I would highly recommend it to anyone who would like to be more self-sufficient by gardening. If you already own The Self-Sufficient Life, I would add that The New Self-Sufficient Gardener contains a great deal more information about specific plants; for example, while The Self-Sufficient Life contains only one paragraph about growing melons, this book has a full page about melons.

The book that I have photographed above is actually a library book; but although I can get this book any time from my nearby branch, I think it is one I would like to purchase so it can have a permanent place in our personal  homesteading library.

Book Review: We Took To The Woods

We Took To the Woods was originally published in 1942. It in author Louise Dickinson Rich describes in fascinating detail her life in the rugged backwoods of North-West Maine with her husband, young son, and their husky dogs. It's a wonderful book for independent, self-sufficient, outdoorsy types.

In the book, Louise attempted to answer the questions she most regularly heard from people about their backwoods existence, questions like "How do you make a living," and "What do you do with all your spare time?" She answers these questions honestly and in great detail, and adds in a healthy dose of amusing anecdote. Her writing style is warm, simple, and straightforward, and filled with tongue-in-cheek humour.

I was fortunate enough to find an original 1942 edition of the book at a used bookstore for a few dollars.

Louise and her husband, Ralph, lived a highly creative, flexible, self-sufficient lifestyle. They grew a vegetable garden, gathered food like blueberries from the wilderness, and made their living doing a wide variety of odd jobs, including writing.

Oh, you can get along with very little cash money in this country if you know the ropes and are sufficiently adaptable. --pg. 44

The chapters of this book are filled with stories of this family's interesting adventures, sometimes with animals, sometimes with the weather, and sometimes with other people. Louise sometimes goes off on pretty long tangents when she starts telling stories, and it's all good reading.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I love learning the stories of people living on the fringe of civilization, who are making their own way outside of society's conventions. Some of the most memorable parts of the book for me included Louise's stories of giving birth to her son, Rufus, in their cabin without a doctor; the time she cooked lunch for the nearby lumber camp, with her young son tied to a tree where she could see him; and the time she visited a friend on the Outside. It was the first time she had left the woods for four years, and she had to go digging through her closet to find some reasonably suitable clothes, because all she ever wore was pants, and this was in the 30s when women still usually only wore skirts .

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in an independent lifestyle, or just anyone who dreams of "getting away from it all" to go live in the woods. Definitely a worthwhile read.

Book Review: Make Your Place

Since I love books, I own a lot of books, and also like talking about books, I thought it would be a nice idea to do a book review here now and then. For my first review, I'll talk about a fun little book called Make Your Place: Affordable, Sustainable Nesting Skills.

This little volume is unique in that the author, Raleigh Briggs, has not only illustrated the book, but written the entire text in her own handwriting. This gives the book a casual, quirky style that makes for a fun read. 

Make Your Place  tries to show the reader that we can all take care of ourselves, our homes and our gardens without the use of expensive and/or toxic products from the grocery store or pharmacy. The book is divided into three main sections: Health and First Aid, in which Raleigh gives information on using a variety of herbal remedies; Non Toxic Cleaning and Body Care, in which she lists her personal recipes for different cleaning tasks; and Gardening, where she gives tips on cheap organic gardening, which she calls "the greatest nesting skill on Earth."

I really enjoyed reading this book--all three sections of the book gave me loads of ideas for things I'd like to try. However, I will say that this book is not comprehensive, but more like a jumping off point for those interested in the self-sufficient lifestyle. For example, the book gives Raleigh's personal recipe for homemade deodorant--but I have seen many other different recipes on the Internet that might be equally good, so I would likely do a bit of research before I decided to make the recipe listed here.

However, for someone who is just getting started with making their own household products, this book would be excellent, because it assumes the reader has no prior knowledge and lays everything out clearly. It's easy to understand, and as I previously said it's a fun book to read. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in making their own natural products for home and garden.