On this week’s new YouTube video, we’re diving deep into how a week of sourdough baking actually looks in my kitchen. My hope was to show you that sourdough baking is actually versatile and contrary to popular belief, there’s a lot of wiggle room.  Because sourdough works slowly, did you know that you can often stretch proofing times by large amounts of time? More on this in the video… I love sourdough baking as much as the next, but the reality is I’m a homeschooling, homesteading, business-owner who has to answer to a lot of schedule demands. My sourdough starter is not ..read more

In this week’s new YouTube video, we’re talking about letting go of Miss Perfect. Perhaps you’ve met her? Let me tell you a story. I am currently reading through the murder-mystery The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers. In the first few chapters of the books, I struggled deeply to understand the nuanced vocabulary of early-twentieth-century Britain. The book is filled with jargon unfamiliar to me and I began to thoroughly dread reading through the pages as it rambled on with funky words and phrasing. Not one to give up, I took my concern to Stuart, who has read and taught on this book ..read more

Hello my friends, Frankly, I should be cleaning my house right now. There are needed and practical tasks that demand attention! Dusty bunnies gather in the corners as we speak. Yet the call of this little two and a half acre farm I love so much is louder – and this week is all about listening to those calls. This is the week that my desire of three years was finally realized – it finally happened. New creatures arrived at the farm… any guesses as to what new animal joined our homestead?  For the record, when I do decide to clean my house, I have most incredible cleaning concentr ..read more

It feels a bit obvious and unnecessary to say that it’s been cold here these past few days. Of course it has – it’s been cold everywhere. Still, this level of cold means that life on the farm has to look a bit different for us. It was -12° Farenheit when we had to spend five hours outside doing chores, clearing out new areas of the barn, moving animals (one of which broke loose from the pack, ran into my house, urinated, pooped, and then ran into my glass French doors), and thawing frozen water pipes.  The toilets stopped working.  The heaters couldn’t take the pressure.&n ..read more

I can’t pretend like this is a perfectly happy project to share with you. Truth be told, many words were screamed during the course of getting the greenhouse to this point. (Some holier than others).  We saved for our Planta greenhouse for a year, waited anxiously for its arrival, and were quickly forced to submit to the months and months it took us to put it together. Projects for homesteaders who run a business and homeschool four kids tend to take time – and the 80,000 pieces (yes, I’m exaggerating slightly) that this greenhouse arrived in meant this project took us a long, long t ..read more

Hello my friends! And Happy New Year! Though I wish I magically felt refreshed by the flipping of the calendar, I (quite pathetically) stumbled into January exhausted from the holiday season and with a small head cold as an added bonus. So while many spent the beginning days of January beginning new habits or deep cleaning their house, I happily curled up in front of the fire, spent lots of time writing for myself, practiced my Italian verbs, and snuggled new baby lambs. Yes! New lambs – can you believe it! Without sounding too precious about it, I really felt grateful for the still ..read more

I am happiest in my kitchen (and the garden, really, who am I kidding.) Perhaps the pleasure of being in the kitchen is enhanced by time spent in the garden as so much of our food is connected back to the summer soil that grew our harvest. Potatoes that are roasting now were, back in March, simply bolted potatoes from the previous year’s harvest. A bit more time and the potatoes would’ve continually sprouted and eventually completely dried up and died. Instead, all those months ago, the old potatoes were tucked deep (very deep) into soil and given care through the growing season. Those potato ..read more

It can be equally exciting and melancholy to look back over one’s life and ask the question “How did I get here?”. I often do. Though I’m not one typically who spends too much time looking backwards, I do appreciate the building blocks of life, experiences, and situations that forged me into a particular version of “Shaye”.  Perhaps I’ve never told you this, but it was an old boyfriend that introduced me to my first cow. His name was Benny (the cow, not the boyfriend). It was quite literally love at first sight (again, with the cow, not the boyfriend). Had I not been introduced to cows, w ..read more

For us, this season means days spent in the kitchen, plates of cookies, breakfast bakes, and often extra places set for company. It is a bustling and buzzing time of dishes, bowls of winter citrus, empty wine bottles – and did I mention dishes?  I’ve learned over the years that I function much better in the kitchen when there are certain safe-guards in place to keep the entire experience of cooking from-scratch from pulling me under (which it’s done plenty of times if I’m being honest). I’ve often fell victim to my kitchen, moping around that the family was hungry yet again ..read more

Hello my friends, As I was bent over the tomato plants, sweating in the insulting September heat, I reminded myself as I picked tomato after tomato to give thanks for the harvest at hand. I kept thinking “One doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth – and a gardener and home cook doesn’t complain about too many tomatoes.”  Thank you, Lord, for this HARVEST!  The San Marzano seeds we planted this year were a great choice for our gardens. And I’m not sure I should confess this, but I like the flavor slightly more than the Roma tomatoes that are also growing ..read more