Introducing… A Year in an Off Grid Kitchen!

November 12, 20201 Comment

I’ve been quiet on this blog for the past few months, because I’ve been working on something very big…

I’ve been busy creating a cookbook that teaches the kitchen skills that are most important on a homestead, as well as a huge amount of adaptable everyday homestead recipes.

When the the panic buying, empty shelves, and restrictive rations hit earlier this year, it was not a problem for my family, because we knew these skills, and knew how to feed ourselves without the supermarket system. With the help of this book, you can learn these skills too.

I’ve created a Kickstarter in order to pre-sell enough copies to cover the printing costs. Running a Kickstarter means we can cut out the middleman, so I’m able to offer you a better price than the future retail one, while also being able to offer extra ebooks and other goodies.

Here’s the link to the Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/706848724/real-food-cookbook-a-year-in-an-off-grid-kitchen?ref=b91p7r

There’s also an earlybird offer of extra stuff for people who back the Kickstarter in the first 48 hours, including the best natural home cleaning book I’ve read, plus documentaries on rocket ovens, hugelkultur, and more. You can find out more about the earlybird offer here: https://permies.com/t/151135/Earlybird-bundle-Grid-Kitchen-Kickstarter

My book is now published!

June 15, 2019Leave a comment

For over two years I was deeply immersed in writing about goats. I dreamed of the goat book I wish I’d had when I first started, and began to create it. I wrote all about keeping dairy goats on a small scale, and making natural cheeses from their milk. Over 50,000 words later, with all kinds of unexpected surprises and struggles, I now hold the hardcover edition in my hand and know that it’s completed!

I didn’t do this alone, but with the help of many wonderful people that supported the book on Kickstarter. Thank you!

You can now find my book ’Backyard Dairy Goats’ on Amazon, Book Depository, Permies, and anywhere else you would normally buy books.

Since the book launch I have been putting a lot of creativity into writing the cookbook that’s been brewing in my mind for the past few years, and will still be a bit quiet on this blog, hopefully I will find some recipes to share with you all soon, and some baby goat photos in October.

I have also recently been a guest poster at Permablitz, writing about keeping dairy goats in suburbia, and I will be doing some more goat-related posts in the next few months.

Backyard Dairy Goats: A Natural Approach to Keeping Goats in any Yard

October 31, 20182 Comments

I am excited to announce my new book Backyard Dairy Goats: A Natural Approach to Keeping Goats in any Yard

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To help cut out the middlemen involved in publishing I’ve started a Kickstarter campaign for the book. This means that if you’d like to pre-order a copy for less than the future price, you can easily do this on Kickstarter. You’ll get bonus mini-ebooks too, and the option of other exciting rewards like cheesemaking kits, tree planting, and getting your name on the acknowledgements page of my book.

The campaign is only on for 20 days, so please click here if you’d like to read more about it and be a part of this unique and independent new book.

Backyard Dairy Goats is a book focusing on raising dairy goats in a way that respects their nature, on any amount of land. My aim with this book is to make backyard dairying achievable for anyone.

Most books about goats focus on keeping them on a larger scale, and don’t address many issues for those who just want some milk from a couple of goats in the backyard. Topics covered include:

•Natural goat health, how to prevent and fix most issues without a vet.

•Small batch cheesemaking.

•Everything you need to know about goats – their behaviour, how to feed them, handle them, what they need to thrive, and so on.

What this book is about:

•Caring for goats in a way that respects their goatness.

•Getting dairy goats now, wherever you are. It doesn’t have to be a dream that may happen one day in the distant future, it could happen now, and this book will show you how.

•Learning from observation, and goat behaviour in the wild to provide the right foods for goats to thrive.

•A permaculture approach, looking at the whole backyard ecosystem and the many interactions between goats, animals, garden, people, and trees.

•Cheesemaking and home dairying without artificial weird stuff.

•Goat dairy as a homemade staple food, for health, survival and self reliance. Recipes included.

Not just for backyards

This book is relevant for larger bits of land as well, especially in the early years while you’re waiting for perennials to grow or waiting to build more fences. Goat milk provides an instant harvest, with a minimal amount of brought-in feed, using smaller amounts of land and food than cows, while providing manure for the garden.

Click here if you’d like to learn more.

Perfection

June 12, 2018June 13, 2018Leave a comment

I am not that great at describing foods. I sometimes laugh at the descriptions on the back of wine bottles, and at the obsessions that plague the cosmopolitan boomer-inspired worlds of recipes and restaurants, when to me there is just nothing like simple foods created traditionally, and there’s not much to say except ‘perfect’.

This cheese deserves praise though. I will post pictures of it and tell its story.

This cheese was the last cheese I made this year, towards the end of March when I switched back to once a day milking. I’ve had a few hard cheesemaking fails this season due to my rennet being old and stored badly, but there is just nothing like homemade hard cheese, raw and full of flavour from wild cultures, so I persist in trying them every so often. This one used a ‘washed curd’ technique that gouda and havarti use, I used some of my homemade viili yoghurt as starter, and I probably made it on a fruit day in the biodynamic calendar. I used an 800g cheese mould, using 5-6 litres of goats milk.

Lately my land and house have been wanting to grow camembert-style rinds. As this cheese became soft-looking as it aged, and the sides of the rind ‘splooged’ (for lack of a technical word) I noticed a beautiful white rind forming on the splooged bits. At some point it stabilised, but I eyed this off every time I tended to the cheeses, wondering if it would be similar to camembert when I cut it open.

We cut it open the other night, it was like no other cheese I’ve had. Cheese perfection that doesn’t fit into any little cheese category in a book. This cheese can’t be replicated with packets of cultures and milk from the shop, it is just like all good foods should be, an expression of the land that makes it.

I sat it next to the ripening chorizos and saucisson secs in the larder, to spread the white bloom.