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Recommended: How to Cook That

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Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

This week, I would like to recommend a really excellent and interesting YouTube channel. How to Cook That, with Anne Reardon. Along with the YouTube channel, there is a website, and various other social media, Patreon, etc. sites, linked on the About page.

This channel has been putting up videos for 9 years, and the videos cover a LOT of ground! The primary focus is on dessert how-to’s, like this one from 2012.

Reardon – with the assistance of her incredibly brave husband! – also recreates some historical recipes.

That one is rather terrifying! :-D

They also put out “Clever or Never” videos, where they test out various kitchen gadgets.

We used to have the French Fry cutter they tested out here! Ours worked a lot more easily. I think the one they tested may have started to get pretty dull. :-D

Then there are her mind boggling Teeny Weeny Challenge videos.

I just can’t imagine working in that scale! Talk about going all the way, with that miniature kitchen, too!

The thing that first brought me to this channel, however is on a very serious note. Anne Reardon is a food scientist, and she has put out some very important videos. If you’re on Facebook at all, you’ve probably seen the cooking “hack” videos go by, which show several quick clips of “how to” make or do various things food related. Some of them simply don’t work. Others are actually dangerous.

With so much current pandemic misinformation around, she also did a video on some of that, too.

There is just so much great stuff here, in such a variety of food related topics. I highly recommend subscribing to the channel and spending some quality time checking out the videos!

The Re-Farmer

Morning battles! and, a rescue?

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The kittens now being able to climb to the top of the stairs makes visiting them in the morning rather treacherous!

Getting into the basement is difficult enough as it is, with the door opening over the stairs the way it does. Doing it while juggling a pitcher of fresh water, a bucket for the old water, while dodging kittens who want to climb my legs or dash into the entryway before I can close the door makes it that much more challenging! :-D

The cats upstairs, and the kittens downstairs, have discovered the space under the door.

Oh, and to make things even more challenging, I had Beep Beep trying to climb me, too!

Thankfully, the lure of wet cat food was enough to draw them away, so I could leave safely! :-D

While doing my rounds outside, I had to check out the grapes.

Because I may have killed one. :-(

Now that they are leafing out, a couple of evenings ago, I took the pruners to cut away the old, dead growth that should have been pruned away last fall. A piece I cut away twisted as it fell, and I suddenly realized that a fresh vine I thought was growing from behind and below, was actually growing out the back of the piece I’d just cut.

I was so upset with myself. This was a strong, healthy vine I’d just killed.

Could I save it?

I cut the live vine from the stem and tried to see if I could bury the end, so it would root itself. Attached to the trellis as thoroughly as it was, I couldn’t pull it down far enough.

Well, there’s a tire planter right there, with a giant insulator I’d used as a shallow planter last year, in the middle of it.

I attached the vine to another piece to hold it in place, then added soil from the planter to the bottom. Once the cut end was buried, I watered the whole thing, thoroughly.

Can you tell which vine got cut?

I came by, fully expecting the cut vine to be drooping and dying, but it’s looking as fresh and green as the others!

It’s the one on the far left of the trellis.

Here is the base of it. There are even fresh new leaves, still strong and healthy looking.

Could I have actually have managed to salvage my mistake?? Does anyone reading this know much about grape plants? Will this root itself and survive?

I certainly hope so!

The rest of my rounds included checking the garden plots, and I was disappointed to find one area of carrots looked like something had dug them up. It turned out a cat had used it as a litter box. :-(

It also looks like we lost at least one more sunflower to something, but in total, there are more seedlings today than yesterday.

My rounds, however, were very fast this morning. The mosquitoes were insane! While we did not get the predicted storms – they swooped even further south than I thought they might, and we didn’t even get much rain – it is hot and muggy and perfect conditions for mosquitoes.

Once the morning rounds and chores were done, I had to make a quick run to the post office, then into town for some errands, so I’m a bit behind on things I intended to do outside. I’m going to have to start on clearing away where we’ve decided to build the cordwood outhouse, and since it’s too wet to continue working on the lawns, today would be a good day to get into that.

I will have to slather myself in bug spray, first, and hopefully not sweat it all off in the first few minutes. :-/

The Re-Farmer

Morning smiles – and a surprise!

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When visiting the kittens this morning, I was viciously attacked!

By a Nicco! :-D

Saffron has one eye that is a bit gooby, so I took the time to clean and medicate it. Then, after they’d all had a chance to devour some wet cat food, they all went after my legs!

They are tearing my clothes to shreds. :-D

Also, they really, really like my shoelaces.

Even Beep Beep got in on the action!

For a cat that has spent her entire life outdoors, she is really taking to this “inside” thing – and having access to people to cuddle!

Later on, while checking the trail cam files, I found a lovely surprise.

Other than discovering that FedEx made a delivery after we got home yesterday, and left a package shoved into the gate. I never even saw it, when I did my rounds! If I hadn’t seen the video, I would never have known until this afternoon. I was expecting it to come in the mail, tomorrow.

No, it was this surprise that really made me smile.

That baby is so adorable!!!

They found a spot in the fence where they can both squeeze through the barbed wire, without the mom having to jump it.

The baby can fit through any part of the fence, just by ducking its head. :-D

So sweet!

Also, there’s a package in the middle of that gate. It was shoved into the chain.

Even while walking up the driveway this morning, knowing it was there, I couldn’t see it until I was almost right at the gate!

At least FedEx can find our place. Unlike UPS. !!

Lots to smile about, this morning. :-)

The Re-Farmer

What on earth is that?

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I spotted a mystery while checking the trail cams today!

Watch closely, behind the deer.

We have a mystery critter!

It’s too big to be a squirrel, and squirrels are not out at night, anyhow. It seems too small to be a raccoon or a skunk. Those are large enough that they would be identifiable, even with the infrared flash.

About the only thing we are pretty sure of is, it’s likely a rodent of some kind. :-D

Any guesses?

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: The Prairie Homestead

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Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

You would think that, having grown up on the farm, I wouldn’t need to be looking up all these resources on how to live on a farm! :-D Our situation is very different from how I grew up here, though, since most of the land is rented out, and our focus is on a relatively small portion of 1 quarter, around the house. We aren’t to be the sort of farmers my parents were, so homesteading resources have been more in line with what we are looking to be doing over the next few years.

Unfortunately, I’m not finding a lot of Canadian ones, so there’s quite a lot that just doesn’t apply to us. We don’t have the climate for soil conditions. Which is fine. There is still lots to learn! And a lot of “homesteader” skills can be applied anywhere you live.

Like cooking from scratch. That’s a big one, for me, and these skills kept food on the table during some pretty lean years! It was just what we did, when I was growing up, but I definitely learned to appreciate those skills over the years!

The Prairie Homestead is one of those resources that are quite useful, even for those who live in urban areas. The channel started quite a few years ago, with the first videos going back 8 years, and there were a few time gaps before things got into the groove, to where videos are being posted weekly. The focus now is largely on from scratch cooking, and the site owner has a cook book out as well.

Here, you will find videos on how to make things like butter, broth, pasta and sourdough starter, and even how to render lard.

You’ll find videos on how to start seeds indoors, planting, and preserving food, as well as starting a new garden.

Some of the earliest videos include how to milk goats and cows, and others about livestock care. More recent videos include one on their home schooling routine.

I like the really wide range of topics included in their videos.

They also have Facebook, Instagram and podcasts, as well as web pages.

The Prairie Homestead has sections for from-scratch cooking, starting a home stead, growing food and DIY.

The Prairie Homestead Cookbook.

Heritage Cooking Crash Course

Learn How to Can Food

No surprise, then, that one of their videos is about how to support a homestead through online business!


Lots of great information, and I’m really glad to have found them.

I hope you find it useful, too!

The Re-Farmer

Gardening progress: sunflowers are in!

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Today has been a lovely, cool day! Perfect to get those sunflowers done.

I had assistants.

When I started filling the holes with the soil mixture, the Potato Beetle decided to sit his butt over one of the next holes! My first thought was that he was taking a dump and I went to push him away. He just flopped onto the ground and looked at me as if to say, “Yes. Rub my belly. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

Then he moved over to the next hole and sat over it, watching me. When I moved to fill that one, he went to the next one and lay down.

With his butt over the hole.

What a weird cat. :-D

Creamsicle was also fascinated by the holes.

I have no idea what he was seeing down there that was so interesting! :-D

The soil mixture in the little pool got quite a lot of rainwater, along with the water I’d already put into it, so it was quite saturated. I was still finding pockets of dry peat, though! Still, this was perfect, as it meant I didn’t have to drag buckets of water over the very rough ground to water the soil mix, first. I could just go straight to planting.

I decided to alternate the two varieties. The row still marked with flags starts and ends with the variety that can grow 10-12 feet high, while the other row starts and ends with the variety that can grow 6-8 feet high. The varieties ended up lining up with each other where the two rows overlap.

And that will be it for today, with it being Sunday. I just did what had to be done, before we got more rain (if we get more rain; we’ll see if the forecasts are right for a change).

Next, for this area, we will be adding a straw mulch, little by little, as well as taking the opportunity to dig up the burdock that’s starting to come up, as well as the self-sown trees that are showing up.

Tomorrow, weather willing, the priority will be to get more of the squash transplants in. Quite a few more are ready, now. And I might even be seeing some of those gourds finally emerging, too!

Putting in a garden this year is really changing what is being worked on outside. The original plan was to spend the first 2 years cleaning up the inner yard, the next year or two working on the outer yard, and moving beyond the outer yard as we could, after that. With my husband ended up in the hospital for 3 weeks last year, and many trips to the city to see specialists, things got more focused. Which worked out, since we ended up focusing on cleaning up where the old wood pile used to be, and finding that wonderful soil we have planted the carrots in. For this year, we will continue to work on cleaning up the spruce grove, but will also have to get things done in the outer yard, and now keep up on the garden beds. Oh, and build that new outhouse as a cordwood practice building, too.

First, the garden needs to be planted.

Then, we can mark out where we want to put the cordwood building and start clearing the space and removing sod. Cleaning up the spruce grove, etc., will continue in between stages of building. I’m hoping I can borrow my brother and his trailer, and visit a salvage yard for materials to use as a floor/base. I’m thinking along the lines of pavers, but who knows what else we might find! :-)

Little by little, it’ll get done!

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: XiaoXi’s Culinary Idyll

/ Re-Farmer / 8 Comments

Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

My very first Recommended post was for the YouTube channel Liziqi. I love the video format that makes it accessible to all, including those who don’t understand any Chinese language. Since discovering this channel, I’ve found a couple others that I now follow that are similar, yet very different. This is one of them. XiaoXi’s Culinary Idyll, which focuses on both cooking and hand crafts.

I didn’t know that, when I stumbled on the first video I saw: How to make delicious braised chicken out of stone.

Out of stone? That certainly piqued my curiosity when it showed up in my feed, recommended by YouTube.

As I started watching the video, I was perplexed. Where is the chicken? What is he going to do with that rock he dragged out of a riverbed?

By the time I got to the cooking part of the video, I was completely hooked.

How do you braise a chicken out of stone?

First, find a rock and carve it into an exquisite cooking pot.

This is a very new channel, less than a year old at the time of this writing. So it didn’t take long for me to go through all of the videos.

The first videos started off with a very different feel. At first, it was straight up cooking videos.

Other videos featured a lot more people and activities.

Then the crafting portion came into the picture – with a sense of humor!

Are you having trouble making traditional noodles by hand? That’s okay – use a machine!

First, cut down a tree…

As I worked my way through the videos, from oldest to newest, I got the sense that the makers of these were kind of feeling their way around on the focus. Where the Liziqi videos started out with just her, filming herself until she could finally hire a couple of people to do the recording for her, these videos appear to have been made with a professional film team from the start.

I’m okay with that.

The format they seem to be settling on is basically just the one guy who first makes a thing, then somehow uses that thing to prepare a food. Both of which are gorgeous.

Then you get to watch him eat. :-D

I readily admit, every time I see the guy working in his shop, I suffer from an extreme bout of tool envy.

You’ll see him doing everything from forging a frying pan (one of the few videos where he cooks food, but you don’t see it being eaten at the end), to weaving various useful objects (I will never look at a bamboo steamer the same way again!), to making things with wood and resin and…

…succulents?

While there is a lot of focus on traditional crafts, there is definitely a modern, even high tech, side to some of these videos.

While these are hardly “how to” videos, they are still quite inspiring – whether you’re looking for ideas on things to make, or ideas for cooking traditional Chinese food!

Or going fishing with a woven, waterproof hat you just made.

Even if you have no interest making the things or cooking the food, the videos themselves are beautiful to watch, and seeing his exquisite attention to detail is a pleasure in itself.

I highly recommend working your way through all of the videos.

You might not want to do it while hungry, though. ;-)

Historical cooking: chickpea soup with fried bread

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One of my Recommended posts was for the Historical Italian Cooking YouTube channel. Recently, they put out a new video for a super simple dish made with ingredients we typically have on hand. Today, I was able to give it a try!

Here is the video.

You can also visit this link for the written recipe.

This is an ancient Roman dish; chickpea and leek soup, with a fried flatbread called lagana.

About the only thing we had to go out of our way to get for this recipe was the white wine.

There was one ingredient we couldn’t find, though. Durum wheat flour. Any type of flour is just now becoming easier to find, but there’s no chance of finding any out of the ordinary flours. All Purpose flour, which is what we have, is made with a blend of hard and soft red wheat. Here in North America, durum wheat tends to be used in pastas. It’s the sort of thing we’d have to go to specialty stores to find. I’m sure I could find it in the city, but certainly not locally.

So I substituted AP, since that’s what I had.

First, the soup ingredients.

Another substitute I made was to use canned chickpeas instead of soaking dried chickpeas overnight. The recipe called for 2 leeks, but has almost no other quantities given. I had 2 leeks, but they were pretty massive, so I used 2 cans of chickpeas to balance out the quantities. There’s also the white wine, some olive oil, and caraway seeds ground with a mortar and pestle. I eyeballed most of the quantities based on watching the video. :-)

The soup was started by boiling everything but the leeks in salted water for 10 minutes. Then, the leeks are added and cooking continues for another half hour.

While that’s being done, the flat bread is made.

The flour was the other thing with a quantity given: 300 grams.

Unfortunately, my kitchen scale disappeared. So we had to use a converter. I used a little under 2 1/2 cups of flour. Salt is added, then a dough is formed with some warm water. That’s it, that’s all!

After the dough is kneaded until smooth, the recipe said to divide it into 10 pieces. There are 4 of us in this household, so I divided it into 12 pieces, instead.

The pieces of dough are then rolled out into rough circles.

The recipe calls for olive oil to be used to fry the bread. Olive oil has a low smoke point, so I modified the recipe a bit more. I added a bit of vegetable oil to increase the smoke point a bit. I was just frying in a pot on the stove, so this was more of a safety issue.

Once the oil was hot, the rolled out dough was fried, one at a time.

The dough bubbled up a bit in the video, but not into big dough pillows like this! :-D This could be because of the different type of flour, or even because of the oil blend.

Not that I’m complaining! :-D

These fried up very quickly. Maybe half a minute on each side, to get them to a golden brown, before placing them on paper towel to drain. The bubbles cracked on a couple of them, allowing oil to get into the pockets. That took a fair bit of draining! The bread was finished well before the soup itself was.

They look absolutely amazing!

Taste test time!

The soup itself was very mild tasting. Possibly because I used more water than in the recipe. I couldn’t distinguish individual flavours of the caraway or the wine, for example. No one ingredient overpowered the other.

The lagana bread had a surprising amount of flavour for something that is just flour, salt and water! The outside was crispy, while the inside was chewy. It went incredibly well in the soup. A real balance of flavours. Making one without the other would not be as good as the two together.

This is a remarkably easy soup to make. The lack of quantities in the recipe made it a bit more interesting to work out, but that just gives room to adjust to one’s one preferences!

I can definitely see us making this recipe again!

The Re-Farmer

Finding Goats (video)

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I went to check out the goats at our gate after seeing them on the security camera – and they came to check out the weird human with the shiny thing in her hand…

As I write this, it’s 1C (33F), with a “real feel” of -5C (23F). It’s supposed to drop down to a low of -1C (30F) and feel like -7C (19F).

Not only do I have the light we’d used to keep the cats’ water bowl from freezing last year in the mini-greenhouse to keep the planting trays warm, but I just made a shelter for the goat outside our door, using the saw horses and the crochet’s blankets we’d used in the sun room for the cats.

Yes. I made a blanket fort for the goat.

I don’t know if she’ll use it. She is really dedicated to standing at the door.

I think I know why. The person who originally owned her had a pen built up against the house, where there was a side door. When we lived in that building, that door led to what was a shed to store inventory for when the front of the building was a general store. The shed is now here at the farm, being used to store my parents’ old belongings, and there is now a set of stairs under that door. I remember driving by and the only time I ever could see the goats was when one of them was at the top of the stairs, at the door. The set up we have must feel familiar to the goat!

But it is so chilly out there, and she won’t leave the door to go to any of the places around that she could bed down in. I am really hoping she’ll use the shelter I rigged up for her!!

The Re-Farmer