Inside the Homestead Kitchen
Homestead Kitchen Tour
Seasonal Eating
Homestead Kitchen Essentials
Pantry Staples
Sourcing Local Food for your Homestead Kitchen
Inside the Homestead Kitchen
When you step into my homestead kitchen, the first thing that you’ll notice is that there is food everywhere! Garlic and onions hang from beams, our pantry is full of home canned goods, and there are baskets of vegetables on every available kitchen shelf!
Fresh, local, and seasonal food is essential to the way I prepare meals – I start with a walk around my garden and create a meal plan based on what is ripe and ready to harvest at the moment. In the height of the growing season, I focus on storing and preserving food to feed my family through the winter months. It is important to me that as much food as possible comes from my own garden or from farmers I trust.
My homestead kitchen is not fancy, nor is it full of gadgets. Instead, it is stocked with trusted tools that I love, a pantry full of dry goods, a root cellar full of stored food, and a garden out the front door. It is a place where food is chopped, stirred, cooked, baked, preserved, and most importantly, shared.
It is a place where community is created. A place where a local economy is strengthened, and a place where I can make a difference in the health and well-being of my family. I hope you enjoy the video tour of my homestead kitchen. – Teri
Homestead Kitchen Tour
Password: kitchentour
Homestead Kitchen Tour from Teri Page on Vimeo.
Seasonal Eating
One giant step towards supporting a local food economy and creating a sustainable food culture in your homestead kitchen is embracing seasonality. Purchasing, growing, and eating foods in season creates a demand for locally grown produce, cuts down on food transportation costs and environmental impact, and honors our body’s inherent seasonal rhythms.
I often think back to the book Little House in the Big Woods. Laura and her sister Mary each received an orange as a very special addition to their Christmas stocking. Back then, oranges were such a special gift because they simply were not available in Wisconsin! Of course these days, oranges are plentiful in any season, at any store, and yet they have lost some of their preciousness.
The first strawberry of the year, the first ripe tomato, the creamy warmth of a butternut squash soup in late Autumn, maple sugaring in the late winter, these experiences remind us why eating seasonally can be such a wonderful gift. Each food is treated with a special reverence as it “comes into season,” creating food memories and rituals that are strongly associated with a certain time, season, and place.
If you grow a garden, you naturally become in tune with the seasonal rhythm of the harvest. But even if you don’t grow a garden, here are a few ways to embrace seasonal eating:
- Attend your local farmer’s market to purchase locally grown, fresh, and seasonal foods
- Sign up for a CSA share. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and is most commonly associated with a weekly food box
- Locate a few u-pick farms in your region and mark their opening day on your calendar. Make picking a yearly ritual with family or friends
- Host a seasonal potluck – for instance, in summer, make it a salads and grill dinner, in winter, host a hot soup club
Homestead Kitchen Essentials
As you spend time in your Homestead Kitchen, you may find yourself wishing you had certain tools and supplies. I rely on a few favorite pots, pans, and appliances to make the process of cooking from scratch and preserving food more fun and efficient.
However, don’t think that you need to go out and spend a lot of money to purchase a whole kitchen’s worth of new supplies! I began homesteading when I was very young and I simply did not have the funds to go out and buy expensive equipment. However, with careful thrift store combing (or nowadays Facebook, Craigslist, and eBay combing!) and a few carefully considered purchases, my husband and I were able to stock our homestead kitchen with the tools we needed.
Here are some of my favorites:
Pots & Pans
- 1-3 stainless steel pots of varying sizes (I use my 2 gallon pots most often, but also have smaller and larger sizes)
- A canning pot
- 1-3 Cast Iron Skillets of varying sizes
- Two stainless steel sauce pans – one small, one medium sized
- A Dutch Oven (I adore my Le Creuset enameled cast iron Dutch Ovens. I got them at a steep discount because they were seconds.)
Appliances
- Food Processor
- Blender
- Hand mixer
- Toaster
For Food Preservation
- Glass mason jars in Pint and Quart sizes
- Canning lids and rings
- Stainless steel funnel for canning
- Stainless steel food mill for making applesauce, tomato sauce, removing seeds from fruits, etc.
- Water Bath Canning Pot
- If desired, a Pressure Canner
- Freezer containers (Some people prefer to eliminate plastic from their homes and use glass mason jars or glass storage containers. Others simply use plastic bags.)
- Dehydrator
- Screens for drying herbs/food
- A thermometer
- Various boxes, buckets and/or crates for root cellaring
General Cooking Supplies
- A supply of stainless steel and wooden spatulas and spoons
- Lots of stainless steel bowls of varying sizes
- Tongs
- Wooden cutting boards
- Good quality knives (At minimum a chef’s knife and a paring knife)
- Measuring cups and spoons
- Wire whisks
- Vegetable peelers
- Graters
- An assortment of strainers – some small wire mesh, some larger for potatoes, pasta
Specialty Supplies
- A Sun Oven or other solar oven
- A water filter/purifier such as a Berkey filter
- A mandoline
- A lemon juicer
Pantry Staples
Here is a list of things we like to keep stocked in our pantry. This lists reflects our personal preference, but maybe yours is different. For example, if you are gluten free, you know the baking mixes you prefer. You also may cook with different herbs and spices. Different products may be locally available in your region. For example, Tatiana always had olive oil on hand until she moved to the Champlain Valley and found a farm that makes organic sunflower oil. Teri raised pigs last year and rendered their lard into cooking fat.
Herb/spice cabinet
Salt
Pepper
Allspice
Basil
Bay leaf
Cardamom
Cayenne
Chili Powder
Cinnamon
Cumin
Dill
Ginger
Nutmeg
Oregano
Paprika
Parsley
Rosemary
Sage
Thyme
Turmeric
Dried ancho chillies (or chipotle peppers)
Herbamare (salt and herb blend)
Sweeteners
Honey
Maple Syrup
Sucanat
Sorghum
Grains
Cornmeal
White flour
Whole wheat flour
Oats
Quinoa
Millet
Rice (brown or white depending on preference)
Popcorn
Nuts
Almonds
Cashews
Coconut flakes
Pecans
Walnuts
Or other regionally available nuts
Seeds
Sunflower Seeds
Sesame Seeds
Chia Seeds
Flax Seeds
Dried Beans
Black beans
Garbanzo beans
Lentils
Pinto beans
White beans
Oils/Vinegars
Butter (grassfed)
Lard (grassfed)
Extra virgin olive oil
Sunflower seed oil
Coconut oil
Balsamic vinegar
White wine vinegar
Apple cider vinegar
Rice wine (or brown rice) vinegar
Ume plum vinegar
White vinegar (for canning/pickling)
Condiments (can be store bought or homemade)
Ketchup
Barbeque Sauce
Mustard
Hot sauce
Horseradish
Fish sauce
Soy sauce/ tamari/ nama shoyu
Miso (dark, light, or both)
Other
Pasta
Gelatin (grassfed)
Baking powder
Baking soda
Teas, coffees, hot chocolate
Cocoa powder
Sourcing Local Food for your Homestead Kitchen
When you center your diet and your kitchen around local, sustainable food sources, you inevitably find that you have to move from the impersonal to the personal. In fact, one of the joys of eating locally and seasonally is connecting with the people who grow the food you eat. That may mean that you grow a bigger backyard garden, and in turn learn more about your own skills and capabilities, or it might mean shopping at the local Farmer’s Market and coming face to face with the people who grow food in your region.
Sourcing the majority of your diet locally is very fun, and can also be challenging; It’s not as easy as heading to the supermarket once a week! So please be gentle with yourself and strive for improvement, and not perfection. The first step is deciding to make a change, and you’ve already done that by enrolling in this course!
Teri lives in the Midwest and Tatiana lives in the Northeast. Both of them live in a four-season climate, so they know that their window for sourcing local food is largely in the summer and early fall months. During that time, they can grow or purchase vegetables, many types of fruits and berries, eggs, dairy, meat, sweeteners (honey and sorghum for Teri, maple syrup and honey for Tatiana), and some local grains. The website Local Harvest is a great resource for finding growers in your region.
The growing season for both Tatiana and Teri essentially ends in late October, so eating a seasonal, local diet in the winter months is much more challenging. Throughout the winter, we can still purchase eggs, dairy, and meat locally, but fresh, local vegetables and fruit are simply not available. It’s important to plan ahead and stock up on good storage crops such as winter squash and sweet potatoes. Tatiana cans lots of jars of applesauce and freezes berries. Teri’s family built a root cellar and fills it with apples, potatoes, root crops, cabbage, and cheese. We purchase bulk quantities of food that is not attractive enough for market, but still perfectly edible and delicious. A lot of local eating in the winter depends on food preservation. Later in this course, we’ll learn about many different ways to preserve food so you’ll have the tools you need to stock up!
It can be very useful to list out local food sources in order to plan local, seasonally inspired meals. We created a local foods sourcing spreadsheet to help you organize your own sources of local food. You’ll also find an Eating Local Foods mini eCourse in the Bonus Materials that we hope you enjoy!
Sourcing Local Foods Spreadsheet