Finally, it feels like Spring! The temperatures have warmed up and I’m tempted to step into my gardens and start cleaning up.
At the least, I’ll be rotating my compost piles this weekend. Its been a long winter of adding scraps of veg, chicken poop, and shavings from the coop. It needs to be rotated and aerated. I’m hoping to have a great batch of compost from last season to start my Spring garden off right.
One thing I’d like to plant this year on my urban homestead is a patch of asparagus.
One of the best things to come from raw milk is nata. Nata is the cream that thickens and congeals from boiling raw milk. Its naturally sweet, creamy, silky, and tastes absolutely fabulous dolloped on top of toasted homemade, European style bread.
Today, many people that drink raw milk are under the assumption that its a traditional practice. Really, the way its gone mainstream specifically within various health groups is quite modern.
Traditionally, the people that drank raw milk were farmers – those that owned their own dairy cows.
In most other countries and cultures, raw milk has always been boiled first to kill off any pathogens or bacteria before being consumed. This is true for my family in Spain as well as my cultural friends that have come to live in the United States from various locations throughout the world. They have each grown up drinking raw milk; however, it has always been boiled before being consumed.
One of the things that brings the biggest smiles to their faces is when I mention raw milk. Not for the milk, but for the nata. It’s one of those treasured flavors that can only come from boiling milk with cream. Either raw or non-homogenized pasteurized milk.
Many people would never think to boil their raw milk; however, one thing to note is that when most people boiled their milk at home, they would only bring it to a boil – A temperature of about 110F – 120F. At that temperature, although some of the beneficial bacteria and enzymes are destroyed, many are still preserved and the danger of any pathogens present in the milk are destroyed.
Today, the lowest temperature of pasteurized milk that we can find at the market is VAT at 185F. As you can see, raw milk boiled over the stove top at home is a more nourishing alternative with the added benefit of being able to enjoy nata.
My family currently drinks raw milk, but in truly learning what has been traditional to my family I am thinking about starting to boil our milk before consuming it. Although I completely endorse anyone that makes the decision to feed their family raw milk, stories like this help me understand why my family in Spain took the time to boil their milk first.
Currently, I boil VAT pasteurized, non homogenized milk when I make my families homemade yogurt.
It’s Simple Lives Thursday! My favorite day of the week where you share your tips and recipes for living a simple life. Whichever blog that you choose to link up your post, it will show up on all 4 sites! As a reminder, this blog hop is a way to share with many people your posts on what you are doing to live a simple life. Whether that’s gardening, raising urban chickens, homeschooling, sewing, making your own deodorant, or cleaning supplies… we want to know about it! If you’re into homeopathy, ways to save $ by conserving energy or other ways to live frugally… we want to know about it! If you bike, cook real food, homestead or farm… we want to know about it!
Your Hosts (for the time being, due to hosts taking breaks)
1. If linking real, traditional and simple recipes, please make sure all ingredients used are whole. Such as whole grains, vegetables, legumes, meats, even sugar. In order to keep the integrity of “nourishing” food, we will delete any recipes that utilize processed, boxed foods. We are definitely not going to be ingredient policeman, however, please note that this is a hop hosted by advocates of the real, local and sustainable food movements.
2. Please link your posts back to one of the hosting blogs. This is a common blog hop courtesy. This link helps build the Simple Lives Thursday community by sending your readers to all of the other participants posts. We all end up sharing and learning from each other.
3. No giveaway away or otherwise primarily advertising oriented posts. Keep your topics to fit our simple living theme of “consume less, produce more.” We will delete posts that don’t fit.
I want to take a short break today from food and talk about something I know many mamas out there use and many more are curious about…
Cloth diapers.
I’ve been cloth diapering Little Mama since she was 1 month old. After 8 months of diapering her in cloth, I can personally tell you, its been easy; for myself and my husband.
When it came to my older two, I wanted to cloth diaper them, but was fearful. I had many questions and no good resources to get me started. Sure, there was a lot of information on the internet, but so much so, that it was overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start and there were too many people on the opposing side telling me that diapering in cloth would be too much work, would cause leaks, and rashes.
I can kick myself that I didn’t do more research on my own at the time. It would have saved me so much money to have been able to build my cloth diaper stash and pass them down from child to child.
I can only move forward and am so happy that I decided to cloth diaper Little Mama. We’ve had none of those issues, have saved a lot of money, and I’m happy that her little bum is not exposed to any harmful toxins that can be lurking in regular diapers.
I had to learn all of this on my own and only wish my friend Erin from The Humbled Homemaker would have written her brand new ebook called, Confessions of a Cloth Diaper Convert, 6 years ago!
The time of researching and answering all of my questions in one place would have been invaluable. I’m still a newbie cloth diapering mama, and I’ve got to say I’m excited to have a copy of my own – I’m already learning how to keep my diapers fresh smelling and new.
I’m writing this post so that any mama out there considering cloth diapering and looking for great information in one place can get started.
For the launch of her new book, for this week only, Erin is offering her ebook for $9.95 – less than the cost of using disposable diapers for one week!
Here’s the best part…. the book comes bundled with amazing freebies!
It’s Simple Lives Thursday! My favorite day of the week where you share your tips and recipes for living a simple life. Whichever blog that you choose to link up your post, it will show up on all 4 sites! As a reminder, this blog hop is a way to share with many people your posts on what you are doing to live a simple life. Whether that’s gardening, raising urban chickens, homeschooling, sewing, making your own deodorant, or cleaning supplies… we want to know about it! If you’re into homeopathy, ways to save $ by conserving energy or other ways to live frugally… we want to know about it! If you bike, cook real food, homestead or farm… we want to know about it!
Your Hosts (for the time being, due to hosts taking breaks)
1. If linking real, traditional and simple recipes, please make sure all ingredients used are whole. Such as whole grains, vegetables, legumes, meats, even sugar. In order to keep the integrity of “nourishing” food, we will delete any recipes that utilize processed, boxed foods. We are definitely not going to be ingredient policeman, however, please note that this is a hop hosted by advocates of the real, local and sustainable food movements.
2. Please link your posts back to one of the hosting blogs. This is a common blog hop courtesy. This link helps build the Simple Lives Thursday community by sending your readers to all of the other participants posts. We all end up sharing and learning from each other.
3. No giveaway away or otherwise primarily advertising oriented posts. Keep your topics to fit our simple living theme of “consume less, produce more.” We will delete posts that don’t fit.
It’s the first day of Spring – be still my heart. It’s my favorite season of the year and I’m just dreaming about my gardens.
The boys and I have started our seeds indoors, mapped out our new garden plans, and are starting to think about which new breed of chickens we’d like to add to our flock this year.
It’s the season of life and although the temperatures are still frigid outdoors, knowing its officially Spring brings feelings of rejuvenation, hope, and happiness.
Let me tell ya, these are seriously the feelings you get after being indoors for so many months.
Knowing that it’s Spring time, I wanted to share with you my rich and flavorful, homemade vegetable broth recipe. It’s during this season of growth and into the summer that I tend to make more vegetable broth than chicken.
My family works very hard to grow our vegetables during the growing season. So, with a motto of waste not; the ends, bits, peels, and scraps of my vegetables, and herbs are saved for broth or go to my chickens and compost pile.
I’ve learned that many people are under the assumption that vegetable broth isn’t as flavorful or complex as chicken or beef broth. As you can tell from the picture above, the vegetable broth I make is rich and flavorful and turns out to a beautiful golden color typical of a long, and slow simmered chicken broth.
In order to get these flavors, my stock is started by sauteing onions, celery, and carrots then sweating them to the point of caramelization.
Thanks for stopping by My Humble Kitchen. I'm Diana, editor of this website. Here you'll find an encouraging community of like minded mothers, fathers, and everyone in between seeking to nourish our families with good, simple food. You'll find us in our gardens, foraging, canning, and preserving as we seek to be good stewards of our Earth and at the same time, economical.
