Hello and nice to meet you! I'm Rose Blankenship.
My favorite favorite thing ever is to cook up a big ole' storm, so my daughter says, "Mama, this is SO good!" Then my toddler says, "Mmmmm!" and my Man says, "Oh, baby, this is amazing!"
I live way up on a mountain in the forest. Our homestead includes lots of goats, some rabbits, chickens, pigs, honeybees, and a lovable Rottweiler.
I'm here to share a little bit of this from-scratch magic with you.
It's taken me quite some years to figure out how to feed us well. How to use all the parts of the pig, keep everyone full and healthy without refrigeration or running water, and feed the seemingly unquenchable demand for bread. I've grown SO much more efficient, figured out better systems, and also, learned to enjoy the journey: even when it's slow and messy.
I would never ever have imagined that one day I'd be waking at dawn to milk goats and put some sourdough in the oven. But here I am, and it's the most wonderful, beautiful kind of life I could have never imagined.
Behind the Camera
This blog is a collaboration with my daughter, who takes the majority of the photographs, and helps with the recipes, too. I refer to her here as "Filia," which means "Daughter" in Latin. Filia is a passionate goat shepherdess, who can often be found in the barn. She also likes drawing, building things out of wood, and enjoying everything the forest has to offer. She's a wild country girl!
About the Recipes
I only publish recipes that:
- Make us feel good
- Taste really really good to multiple testers
A third requirement for Farmhouse cooking is that it has to fill us up and sustain us through many hours of physical labor.
Our motto over here is, "Everything from nature, nothing from a lab." It's an ideal that we strive towards. We use no refined cane sugar, no unfermented soy products, no preservatives, no synthetic vitamins or minerals -- for ourselves or our animals. This means some of our recipes are very different than others you'll find on the internet or in cookbooks. A lot of these recipes took a lot of improvisation and experimentation to figure out. Here are some substitutions I like to use:
- Maple sugar, maple syrup, or honey for cane sugar
- Celery juice for curing salts
- Baking soda and lemon juice, or sourdough starter, for baking powder
- Fermenting for canning
- Herbal mixes for synthetic mineral mixes (for our animals)
- Home-grown cheese cultures for lab-grown ones purchased online
- Wild-caught yeasts for synthetic ones (for bread, mead and wine)
- etc., etc.!
There's a lot of overlap between our lifestyle and the ideas of the Paleo movement, as well as the traditional foods movement. But we are non-dogmatic. Nothing beats the joy of an occasional strawberry pie for dinner on a hot day.
You can make most of the recipes you find here in any kitchen using foods from the grocery store. If you raise your own animals or have access to farm-fresh food, these recipes can help you make the most of these raw materials.
If you're wondering where to start, I'd recommend making a batch of our very favorite chocolate-chip cookies.