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By Mark Zeiger, October 1, 2013

After bagging the garden-raiding porcupine (see The Critter Gitter Gits Its Critter) Michelle made porcupine bourguignon. The resulting meal was an extreme example of eating locally.

The onions, garlic, side salad, and—in this case, even the porcupine—came from our garden. The red wine for the sauce came from our homemade stock. We used hawkwing mushrooms harvested from the slope behind the cabin  Even the bay leaf, while not strictly local, came from my grandfather’s bay tree. (Periodically, my cousin sends us an envelope of dried bay leaves harvested from the tree.) We also had homemade bread, made with whole wheat we ground ourselves from stores that came with the cabin.

Most of the salad dressing ingredients (see Our Favorite Scratch Salad Dressing Recipe) a few of the herbs and spices in the main dish, and the butter for the bread came from the store. If you want to get technical, the components of the red wine also came from elsewhere. The rest came from the “homestead” compound.

It was delicious, by the way!

Porcupine bourguignon, a complete meal from the homestead (Photo: Michelle L. Zeiger).

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By Mark Zeiger, February 14, 2013

The hardest part about finishing the writing process is the certain knowledge that soon after completing it, the perfect addition to it will appear.

The morning after I published my latest ebook, Sacred Coffee: A “Homesteader’s” Paradigm, Michelle and I breakfasted on sourdough pancakes.

For me, there can be few more fitting toppings for a stack of sourdough flapjacks than spruce honey. I finished the dregs of one jar (carefully wiping it out thoroughly with a dry pancake—waste not want not!) and opened a new one, mindful that it was the third to last jar. A quick calculation confirmed that we would finish our remaining honey by May, just in time for the spruce tip gathering season.

This led us into a discussion about eating seasonally, and how that affects the value of food. Continue reading 'Food Value'»