Today I conquered another thing I’ve always wanted to be able to cook well: Soft white dinner rolls. My entire family loves them, and I’ve never been able to make them, only beginning yeast breads a few years ago, once or twice a month (which were only marginally successful until the last year).
This, after making the best pizza I think I’ve ever eaten for dinner yesterday. Things like this are not necessarily amazing feats, but they satisfy me more than one might expect because, well, some of them are hard won battles, and most of them are just so practical and good to win.
Here is a list of some of my kitchen wins over the last year:
Soft White Dinner Rolls
Shortbread
Pie crust, and, by extension, pies (fruit and savory)
sandwich bread
Pizza Crust (also Pizza Sauce and the rest of the pizza)
Enchilada Sauce
Pita Bread
Tortillas (flour and corn)
Scones (I had these perfected, but I added a new flavor to my repertoire: rosemary fig)
Hot Cocoa
I know I’m missing some. And there are many successes that I’ve had that I have not tried to replicate or came out good but not great.
I just pulled two loaves of bread from the oven. They’re cooling, and the cozy smell of baking is warming against the chill of impending dusk.
Bread is a hard set of lessons, and I’ve yet got a way to go. But my change in thinking is evidence of turning the corner.
The homey kitchen smells of baking bread.
These loaves are truly my first homemade. I’ve baked bread before, but I’ve always nervously followed some recipe that had what seemed like endless and inefficient steps. These inevitably resulted in disappointing loaves, as if they had to suffer the consequences of my disdain. For better or worse, today’s loaves are made of sheer ingenuity and an unwillingness to suffer a strange set of steps. Plus, my low flour until my Azure order delivers necessitated my inclusion of ‘bread flour, of which I had plenty which has been sitting for months. (Why do all the bread recipes call for all purpose flour?)
All my best homestead gains are from the kitchen (with sewing a solid second place). I’ve learned countless lessons this year, some so incredibly basic and useful I shudder to think I hadn’t known them before.
And baking in particular has seen my biggest gains.
I’m almost never left alone here. (Is being with 37 domestic fowl, 13 cats, two hogs, and a hound alone?) In the first twenty minutes, I fished out a handful of 9mm rounds and loaded them into my handgun. I went out to our makeshift driveway range and fired one just to make sure all was functional. It was loud, as I had I remembered it would be, but the neighbors here don’t mind.
Night will fall soon. The chore of dragging the dog to his kennel and closing up the coops will mark the official beginning of nighttime.
My loaded weapon is stashed. I am ready to pretend I live alone for a few nights. There’s fun in the “what if” of it, at least at first. Alone in such wild country. Left to dance to my own rhythms. Inevitably though, the weight of aloneness will become more unmanageable than the thrill of the make-believe, and I’ll get lonely. Such is the way of it. Headstrong as I am, I’m not made for solitary confinement.
There’s no dinner to make; laundry is humming inside the house. An owl across the gully is getting an early start. I hear the occasional car growl past on the old gravel road. A chorus of frogs is singing a soft, endless whistle-tone.
I don’t want this sunset to end, but it will. Very soon. Night will beat through the field and brush towards the porch and press against the windows. I’ll be submerged with held breath until morning, when the rooster starts thinking about his mash and starts screeching around the house even before the first wisps of dim light over the eastern hill.
So I don’t recall which one of the homestead personalities said it, but:
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
By which is meant that we tend to struggle so much with the worry we need to get something flawless that we never get the task completed, or in many cases, even started.
Sometimes, city girl that I am, I struggle with how much effort has to go into everything. When you’re not buying a plethora of convenience products, the steps involved in making dinner can seem endless. And while I receive much satisfaction knowing that I can make a hearty and tasty meal from base ingredients, preserving the knowledge of how to actually create food from sourceable ingredients, sometimes exhaustion sets in. Basically, I’ve learned to become lazy about everything.
But the casserole was pretty good.
And after failing many times at making a biscuit I found as enjoyable as the frozen ones at the grocery store, tonight I finally (and almost effortlessly) surpassed their deliciousness factor. Why can I not make a biscuit but I have learned to make an excellent scone? Funny how that works.
I made a plain scone with half the amount of sugar, cut it n squares, and out of the oven came some very tasty, buttery biscuits. I’m calling that a kitchen win.
Also, I finally stopped whimpering to myself about my brassica (and overall garden) failures. I admit to feeling a bit defeated by the scorecard on this year’s garden, but there’s nothing to be gained by feeling sorry for myself about it. I made some tough decisions with pruner and hand spade, and I’m moving on.
Not sure if that’s a garden win or not, but it’s something.
So here I am, making my very daunting first post on this shiny new blog. With the rollover of 2024, the start of a new year, it is a good time to make goals. Especially because we’re just beginning to become established at our new property, and it seems reasonable that before I get down to sharing our progress, I want to make sure I explain who I am and what we’re about.
But who am I? Categorically, I mean. Is this to be another homestead blog? Am I a homesteader? Reflexively, I want to answer that question in an eager affirmative, but I feel somewhat fraudulent. I was born and raised in the city, and suburban life is all I know. What is a homesteader and is our property a homestead? What defines these words? Am I legitimate? As a homesteader?
What is and what is not a homestead? It isn’t acreage, because many homesteads are proudly on extremely modest parcels of land. It isn’t distance from large cities, because some homesteads are urban or suburban. Is it cattle? No, as many homesteaders have none of those. Gardens? Chickens? Many people who definitely do not consider themselves homesteaders have these.
Unmowed pasture.
I was discussing this with Scott yesterday on another one of our 6 hour drives between the city and the farmstead. This led to more fundamental questions. What distinguishes a homestead from a farm? Is it volume of crop? Is it a particular amount of gross farm income? Scott seemed to feel there were discrete definitions for farm and homestead, but I argued for the homestead as a subcategory under the broader classification of farm.
Wikipedia, at this moment in time, begins the entry for “Homesteading” thusly: “Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food, and may also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craft work for household use or sale.“
Cans on a shelf
Homesteading is a lifestyle? With chief characteristics of subsistence farming, food preservation, and small scale crafts? This seems reasonable, I think.
Again, this leads to more questions. Do I have a homestead lifestyle? When one starts out on a quest from pure consumer to successful subsistence farmer, how far along that path must one be to be living the homestead lifestyle. Is it making the first step, having the first success, beginning to mentor others or provide food to the surrounding community that gets us there? Or, are we merely homesteaders if we think we’re homesteaders?
For those of you who have been homesteading for some time, particularly those in rural areas, can you recall the way most of the local native population seems unimpressed with your goals, treats you like a bit of a freakish outsider, and seems suspicious of your intrusion onto their home turf? This is a factor in feeling alienated and caught in between your new vision and idealism and the reality of the gaps in your knowledge and the even deeper gaps in your connection to your new community and home.
After much personal contemplation on the matter, my though is this: in modern parlance, “homesteader” conjures up a sort of a Joel Salatin-inspired movement of people who want to go back to a more basic lifestyle, closer to the resources necessary for their survival. I feel that I align very well with these same goals, but I’m hesitant to associate myself with a movement. It is of benefit to me that so many others are doing what I have been working towards doing, and passing on their knowledge by way of internet and social media. I love watching the vlogs, listening to the podcasts, reading the books, and just simply talking to homesteaders, but at the end of the day, what I most want is not to feel connected to other people, but to the earth. To time and antiquity.
I sit on our land and grow in my love for it. I want to carve out a life here. Just that.
