Eight Acres

My slow cooker has become one the most useful tools in my kitchen for producing real food that is also tasty and cheap.  I use the slow cooker most often for four different dishes: Making Stock I used to think making stock was too hard.  And when I read Nourishing Traditions it sounded ever more difficult because the recommendation was to cook the stock for 12-24 hours, rather than just 2-3 hours I had read before.  I couldn't figure out how to make stock for that long.  Then I saw on a blog somewhere that I could use my slow cooker (sorry I can't link back, I forget where now, but this is another good example ).  I felt so stupid that I didn't think of this myself!!  It is so easy and you don't have to worry about burning the house down.  I keep bones and vege scraps in a bag in the freezer and when I start to run low on stock (or if we cook a roast chicken), I'll load up the slow cooker with everything from the freezer, add a carrot, onion, an...

Last week I started to review the introduction to Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig.  This week I'll start on the first real chapter of recipes, called Mastering the Basics, which includes cultured dairy, sprouts, stocks, sauces and salad dressings. Cultured Dairy The strange part here is that we got Bella , our house cow, before I read this book and before I knew anything about the whole raw milk debate .  We drank raw milk sometimes when we visited our friends on a dairy farm, but we never really valued it as we should have.  My husband really wanted a cow because he liked the dairy lifestyle, and I couldn't see a problem with it, as I described previously , it will make it easier for us to get steers for beef instead of having to buy them locally.  Our friends told us they'd found the perfect cow for us, small, tame, already with a calf and used to being milked in the dairy, so even though we weren't totally ready , we brought home Bella...