Our Urban Homestead's Kitchen Today

I feel like a real homesteader, you know, those farm wives that are all self sufficient and do everything themselves from raising their own food to transforming it to something that will feed their family for long periods of time, etc... all entirely from scratch. Though we don't live on a farm, what we have is definitely a little suburban homestead, and today I homesteaded to an extreme.

It started off this morning when I went in to the city to refill my pantry that was getting bare. I foraged a bunch and got some great things, and then after that, went to the farmers market and got a bunch more things very frugally. Details on that will be in tomorrow's post hopefully...

But ever since I got home, I've been non stop taking care of all the produce that I brought home.

I first cleared off my counters enough so I could take pictures of my haul on the counters, and then had to clean out the refrigerator to make room for everything in it that I brought home. I took out the stuff that, unfortunately, I let spoil. Other leftovers I combined to make supper for the family (leftover rice and leftover lentil soup, with the addition of some tomato paste, became rice with lentil sauce, and I served that with cabbage salad made from a cabbage about to go off). I found a Paleo meat dish and had that for my supper (more on me and paleo vs my family, hopefully in tomorrow's post as well.)

I then sorted out my fridge and put like with like, and then found room to fit everything in my fridge that I bought. Well, almost. I took out some produce from my fridge that needed to be cooked or otherwise it would go bad...

I had some beets, radishes, fennel, and hot peppers.

I cooked up the radishes and fennel together with some salsify leaves and root that I foraged today, and some sweet potatoes that I bought today, and the woody tips of asparagus that I... foraged today.

The rest of the asparagus that I foraged was steamed, and I will be attempting to make a hollandaise type sauce, egg and dairy free, to serve over them. I boiled up the beets to extend their shelf life, and tomorrow they will be made into a salad.

I bought jaggery today, and boiled it into jaggery syrup to use instead of honey.
I took the hot peppers that were getting soft, cut off any bad parts, and boiled them up in some vinegar and a little water with some salt. When they were completely cooked, I blended them up with some garlic powder and a little bit of the jaggery syrup to make a nice hot sauce, kind of like a cross between green tabasco sauce and sriracha.

My kombucha had been finished a while ago but I ran out of white sugar to make a new batch, so when my husband bought some, I made a few jars of kombucha and set them to ferment.

Last but not least, I had this huge amount of wild mustard that I foraged, and I didn't have room to put all the plants, in their regular form, in my fridge. So first I stood there for far too long, dividing up the plants, taking out the woody stalks and separating the softer leaves from the flowering heads. Once that was done, I put all the flowering heads and unopened flowers that look like mini broccoli clusters but taste spicy like mustard in a jar with some salt and water and I'll be fermenting them until they seem right, and then I'll attempt to blend them up to make a wild mustard condiment. We'll see if it works, but it's worth the experiment.
I took a bunch of the wild mustard leaves (this specifically is a species that, when raw, is more spicy than bitter, unlike the one that grows all over closer to me, that is more bitter than spicy, even when raw), and chopped them up and mixed them with grated carrots and grated fennel bulbs, ginger, garlic, hot pepper flakes, salt, and water, and am attempting to make a wild kimchi with them. We'll see how it comes out.

I put the rest of the wild mustard in the fridge, and tomorrow I plan on making some Asian style pickled mustard greens with them.

All that made me so exhausted, but I made sure to clean up my kitchen even so...

That's all for now. Signing out!


Did you do any homesteading type things lately? What did you do?