by Karen Bush | Oct 27, 2020 | Recipes, Sustenance
Although I work hard at preserving our harvest, chances are you won’t find much canning on my shelves. That’s because anything that requires sugar for preservation is on our “Do Not Eat” list. However, I do make one small exception. Because...
by Karen Bush | Apr 3, 2020 | Recipes, Sustenance
Roast duck. So decadent, right? Surprisingly, slow roasting a duck turns out to be easy and economical. For well over a year now, we’ve consistently been able to buy frozen young ducks at our local grocery store for $2 a pound. We look for the largest one we can...
by Karen Bush | Jan 6, 2020 | Recipes, Sufficiency
Sometimes a brilliantly simple solution presents itself for a problem you didn’t realize you had. We are a mostly dairy-free household and I never buy cow’s milk, except to combat mildew on the squash vines in August (but that’s a different story). I...
by Karen Bush | Sep 24, 2019 | Recipes, Sustenance
Cow’s milk has been gone from our diet so long that living without it is easy. If goat feta or chèvre is on hand, there’s nothing much to miss … mostly … except yogurt. Plain, live culture yogurt used to be one of my favourite foods, not to...
by Karen Bush | Jul 6, 2019 | Recipes
I’ve been eating purslane in smoothies, soups, and cooked dishes for years because it’s so nutritious, not to mention completely easy trouble-free to “grow” in the garden. This is my first purslane-based salad, a perfect sweet and sour...
by Karen Bush | Jan 5, 2019 | Recipes
I didn’t grow up with chutneys so this feels like an exotic food adventure. I like the idea of a spicy and savory sweet since, in our household, we are doing our best to avoid sugary foods. I also like yet another way to use pumpkin. These chutneys can be made...
by Karen Bush | Jan 5, 2019 | Recipes
Every summer we grow a variety of hot peppers and dry them for our gift-giving projects. This is a craft, not a business, which means it’s okay that no two years ever produce the same blends. Here are the finishing salts we created for 2018. BushFire Allium Hot...
by Karen Bush | Jan 5, 2019 | Recipes
For storage, we mostly dry or ferment our hot peppers. The dried ones go into salts, and the pureed, fermented peppers become this delicious condiment. Really hot peppers instantly give me hiccups. The first time I made this recipe, the puree on hand was Basket of...
by Karen Bush | Jan 3, 2019 | Natural Health, Recipes
In the past decade, there has been a rising tide of research and resultant knowledge about the human microbiome. Probiotics are becoming as commonly familiar as antibiotics have been in our lifetime. The good news is that probiotics are freely available and easy to...
by Karen Bush | Dec 21, 2018 | Foraging, Recipes
Delicious baking is a family tradition and a big part of any celebration. I come from a long line of creative bread, muffin, cookie and pie bakers. Sadly, my recipe file is bulging with heritage recipes that I love, but cannot use because I have to bake without...
by Karen Bush | Oct 27, 2018 | Recipes
How to Make Gluten-Free Biscuits If you’ve just found out you’re gluten-intolerant, it feels like the bottom fell out of your world. What will you eat? You wish there was some way you could still have biscuits … buns … bread. And if you...
by Karen Bush | Oct 12, 2018 | Natural Health, Recipes
Seasonal eating is a big part of how I manage our food supply, so now is the time for squash and pumpkins to take centre stage. As we move toward winter, the daylight hours wane and, in the Pacific Northwest, we also have a lot of cloud cover. Enter seasonal affective...
