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Homestead Recipes
Welcome to the homestead recipes category – the heart of The Nourishing Hearthfire, where real food meets real life on the homestead.
Here you’ll find honest, from-scratch recipes that turn garden produce, raw milk, eggs, and home-raised meat into nourishing meals, ferments, and preserved pantry staples.
No processed ingredients, no fancy gadgets – just traditional techniques that have fed families for generations.
Learn to cook with what’s in season, master fermentation (sauerkraut, kimchi, and brine-fermented vegetables), preserve the harvest (canning, dehydrating, root cellaring), and bake desserts and treats that are both nourishing and tasty.
Every recipe is written for busy homesteaders who want food that tastes like home and builds self-reliance. Recipes will work on or off the grid.
Whether you’re making your first batch of yogurt or filling the pantry for winter, these are the recipes that turn abundance into security and ordinary meals into something worth gathering around the table for.
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Simple Flapjacks
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Flapjacks is a bit of a confusing name for this delicious slice. Some people use that word for pancakes, and other people know all about this delicious crunchy oaty buttery treat. This has been a favourite recipe for many years. At picnics it disappears very quickly, at my market stall I get complaints if I do not bring it along. When I want to make something really quick and simple for a treat, this is often what I turn to.…
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Pickled Garlic Scapes
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When growing garlic, the flower stalks (also called garlic scapes) are removed soon after they appear, to direct the plant’s energy towards growing a bigger bulb. These garlic scapes are really tasty, and I use them in any recipe that normally calls for garlic. They can also be pickled or fermented to preserve them for later. This recipe uses the ‘hot jar, hot lid, upside down’ method that is used in many parts of Europe and Australia. If you live…
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Quinces: How to prepare, cook, and preserve them
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Quinces are an easily-grown fruit that’s often ignored in modern diets. Not many people know how to properly prepare them, and they can seem a bit fiddly and slow to cook compared to other fruits. I think it’s definitely worth learning to prepare and cook quince – they are like no other fruit, and there’s something deeply warming about the way they taste on a cold autumn day. My favourite way to cook them is to slowly simmer them in…
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Easy ways to preserve tomatoes off the grid
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How to preserve tomatoes off the grid In A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen I included recipes for five of my favourite ways to preserve tomatoes with water bath canning – as tomato passata, tomatoes in brine, pizza sauce, salsa, and tomato relish. I’ve recently tried a couple of different methods that I’d like to share here. These are excellent methods for preserving tomatoes without electricity or canning. Fermented tomatoes I’ve been intrigued about fermenting tomatoes for a while, ever…
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How to make rustic tomato passata
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Rustic tomato passata: An easier way to bottle tomatoes This year I did something I’d been thinking about for a long time. I bottled our entire tomato supply for the year… I’d delayed this in the past due to annoying finicky instructions that insist on peeling the tomatoes, removing seeds, putting them through an expensive single-purpose gadget, and all kinds of stuff, but in the end I thought it was about time I tried this myself, using nothing more than…
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Curing Bacon and Ham without Nitrates
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How to cure pork without nitrates There are two ways of curing whole pieces of meat – a salty brine, or just plain salt. I will share recipes for both. Which method to choose – brine cure vs plain salt Brine-cured meats are preserved for a shorter time, and also are ready to eat sooner. We chose to cure one leg of ham in the brine, to be boiled for our midwinter feast, and we cured the side bacon in…
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Spiced Elderberry Oxymel (Elderberry Syrup)
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Here is a simple way to make a healthy medicine for the cold months ahead. An elderberry oxymel is like a slightly less-sweet elderberry syrup. I can’t say enough good things about elderberries, and this way of preserving them for the winter can be used either as a daily boost to health to prevent colds and flus, or as something taken when you are sick to relieve the symptoms and get rid of the cold or flu quickly, or just…
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How to Make Butter Off the Grid
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All you need to make butter is a bowl, a whisk, and some cream. Ingredients for homemade butter The cream used for making butter should have no additives, just cream, and if it’s créme fraiche for making cultured butter, then it will have cultures as well (here’s my recipe for culturing cream at home). Cultured cream is far far easier to turn into butter than sweet cream (and it’s delicious too), so if you’re doing this by hand like I…
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Roasted Butternut Squash and Spinach Salad with Cheese
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I’ve never successfully made a hard cheese with a natural rind before. On a biodynamic fruit day, back when we still had Buttercup the cow, I mixed some of her milk with some of our goats milk, cultured it, sort-of followed an asiago recipe (I am not so good with all the continuous stirring), pressed it, salted it, and put it in the makeshift cheese cave to age. Roughly once a week, mostly on other biodynamic fruit days, I would…
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Salted Caramel Cheesecake Pie (grain-free)
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There’s not much else that needs to be said when there’s salted caramel and cheesecake in the title. I will say that you could make this even more special by adding a drizzle of melted chocolate to the top after it’s cooled, or you could use chocolate instead of caramel. I made my own cheese for the one in the photos out of some Greek sheeps yoghurt, but it will work well with all kinds of soft cheeses (such as…
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Mason Jar Chèvre (easy 1 minute soft cheese)
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An easier way to make soft cheese Chèvre and other soft cheeses are pretty easy to make to begin with, but they usually begins with boiling water and sterilising everything in the boiling water, which adds extra time and hassle to the process. I’ve been getting massive cravings for chèvre, so much that I even looked at soft goats cheese in the shop (before quickly moving away, knowing that I can make better stuff at home) and knew I had…
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