Jill Winger

Thanks for the reply! I'm looking forward to checking out your cookbook. It's always fun to learn new perspectives and recipes. Have you considered bringing back the 'recipe box' into style and offering your cookbook in that format for the holidays? I have a feeling it could be a "thing" again.

Yes! I love recipe boxes too-- have been brainstorming a bit on how to incorporate them more-- love this idea!

Devin Lavign wrote:Looks like a good cook book, I will have to pick up a copy soon as I am designing a house around a kitchen.

Designing a house around a kitchen? Sounds like my kind of house, for sure!

We've been contemplating rigging up a smoker of some sort, and this sounds like it would be justification all on it's own. YUM!

I like to do the olive oil/fresh herb trick for salvaging some of the herb garden before a frost.

Also I use cube trays for fresh lemon/lime juice if I find a good deal on citrus.

Love all the fermentation happening here-- y'all are awesome!

I'm keeping it simple right now-- all my veggies are done since it's super snowy and cold here in WY.

Just my sourdough starter and continuous brew kombucha at the moment!

I like to keep it simple-- we mainly focus on lard and tallow.

I like to use a slow cooker on LOW so I don't scorch it. And the leaf fat (kidney fat) is my preferred option-- I find it much milder than random scraps of fat from other places on the animal.

Gail Jardin wrote:Hi Jill. What is your definition of "Heritage Cooking"? I know what heritage livestock is as well as traditional cooking. Is it cooking with only heritage livestock and heirloom vegetables, if so that sounds delicious!  I find this term interesting and would like to know more about it. Thanks.

Hi Gail!

Great question-- it can be a broad term, but for me, it heritage cooking is all about cooking from-scratch with simple, whole food ingredients-- like our grandparents would have before the advent of boxed cake mixes, cream of mushroom soup, and TV dinners.

My cookbook focused primarily on whole-food ingredients and old-fashioned techniques (like rendering lard, making sourdough, cooking with cast iron, etc) that I believe still have massive merit in our modern day and age.

And I love ingredients that can be grown at home, too.

I have a Blendtec, and it's a workhorse-- still going strong several years in, and we often use it multiple times per day.

It's comparable in price/functionality to a Vitamix, but I like the lower profile of it a bit better.

I do believe high-powered blenders are usually worth the investment, though. They do so much more than your standard models.

Those sound like a good idea. Do you find you need to bake cookies for a bit longer on these to account for the stone taking longer to heat up than a metal sheet? And does anything weird happen when you use a hot/warm stone from the oven to bake another batch on it right away?

Maybe a minute or two longer, but not much. They do a great job of NOT burning the bottoms of biscuits/cookies as well, which I greatly appreciate.

And there's usually not a problem using a warm stone again immediately for a next batch-- you may need to reduce the cook time by 1-3 minutes, but that's it.

Robin Katz wrote:Hi Jill,

Welcome to permies! I've been a fan of old recipes for a long time. I have a couple of cookbooks with "receipts" (not recipes) pre-1900. It's really been a learning experience for me to go through them. No oven temperatures given, measurements are not always the same - "saltspoon" is a common one used, etc.  Lots of fun.

Ah yes-- those are always fascinating to read-- always strikes me how much more intuitive the general public was with food back then.