intro

Hello.  My name is Emily.  I’m a wife, mom to an angel baby girl, dog mom, aspiring home cook, aspiring business owner, outdoor enthusiast, and so much more.  I’ve found myself on a journey to become better in the kitchen, better at managing my home, and together with my husband, regularly dream of how we can create a more fulfilling life by stripping it down to the most simple elements, experiencing things in their purest form.  For us, the experiences we’ve had that filled us the most were those in a natural setting, experiencing the wonder and sheer scale of the landscapes of the West.  From the jagged peaks of Washington’s Cascade Range to the endless wilderness and rolling mountains of Montana’s Rockies.  The rivers meandering steep canyons dotted with sage, cheat grass and smooth sumac in the Inland Northwest.  Pursuing game birds in the shrub steppe of Central Washington.  Fly-fishing the rivers of Washington and Montana.  Sunsets and sunrises, Montana’s big skies and vast horizons.  These are what fill our souls, recharge us, inspire creativity, dreaming, and vision for our life.  They ground us in what life is intended to be about.

In the creative process, when whittled down to the fundamentals, the outcome is usually the most valuable.  Crafts like timber framing, sourdough bread baking, cooking from ingredients in their most raw form, fly-fishing, hunting wild game, gathering, and so on.  All of these teach us about the natural world we live in.  Some may think this refinement process back to the fundamentals requires extra and unnecessary effort all for none.  But for us, the hard work brings fulfillment and enrichment to life and the outcome is incomparable.  In college, I read Yvon Chouinard’s Let My People Go Surfing and it influenced me a great deal, forming many of my views on consumption, work, adventure, and recreation.  I found that the person I wanted to become and respected the most was a person who was capable. Yvon inspired this thought in his book.

“The more you know, the less you need.”

Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing

This journey we’re just beginning will include a major transition for our lives.  We have a home in the suburbs of a larger city, and a piece of land outside of a small town in a mountainous area that most visit for recreation.  Our desire to slow down, to simplify, to create, to reflect, and to live according to the seasons is leading us to transition full time from the suburbs to the mountains.  This blog will reflect our journey through that transition.

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing

what to expect here

I’ll spend time storytelling.  I hope to provide some level of inspiration for those who resonate with the things I value most.  When I find a writer I resonate with and draw inspiration from, I find myself yearning for the context.  I love to understand what surrounds the decision to approach a problem a certain way, develop a particular recipe, and the feelings, memories, and environment that surround a subject.  One of the earliest influences in my home cooking journey was Bon Appetit circa 2007-2015.  I loved the magazine content.  There was a section dedicated to a specific piece of produce that was in season and multiple recipes to try involving the ingredient as the star.  Another section was written by a couple who loved food with a young child they were trying to introduce to foods beyond the basic highly processed, bland kid stuff.  Molly Wizenberg had a column that typically shared recipes from her childhood, along with the childhood story.  And even above all the great content, the editor would kick off the issue with CONTEXT.  I was drawn to read Adam Rappaport’s editor’s note as my first stop in every issue.  It set the stage for the season, the environment, the feel and thought behind the content in that issue.  It drew me in and I wanted to create the same feeling in my kitchen or on my backyard Weber kettle grill.  Rather than skimming through the issue for things that jumped out, I devoured all of the content because the stage had been set. It inspired me to try things I wouldn’t normally have been drawn to.

You may also see things that reflect where I live.  I spent a fair amount of time in my single years traveling abroad.  I studied in Florence for a summer during college.  There I met a dear friend who also had a desire travel.  She and I took many trips together visiting countries in Europe, South America, and Africa.  While I still long for Italy, and occasionally a beach in Hawaii, I find myself drawn to explore the nooks and crannies of wilderness areas in my backyard.  I long to really know an area – not from a tourist’s perspective hitting the highlights and moving on, but from an inhabitant’s perspective.  Seeing how seasons change an environment.  The 2^nd weekend of October, like clockwork, we spend duck hunting a particular wildlife area in Central Washington.  It’s a big area and is such a beautiful, unique landscape.  I feel like I really know the area – I can navigate it in the dark with a headlamp.  When I see certain hills or bodies of water, I see memories of taking or missing ducks.  Jump shooting, carrying heavy loads in and out, memories with my dog, my dad and brother, the day my now husband dropped to one knee and asked me to marry him, all of these come flooding in.  And while I have spent a weekend, or two or three there every fall and winter for 20+ years, I’ve spent 6 of 365 days a year there in the same season!  I actually know very little about that area.

In addition to storytelling, context, and a perspective of where I live, you can also expect a bit of a unique approach to a food blog.  This blog will be centered around cooking and recipes, for sure.  We all have to eat some version of three meals a day – so getting food on the table day in and day out requires a vast catalog of “go to” recipes that one can rely on to feed their family.  There are some great blogs out there that are my “go to’s”.  I hope to become one that you can rely on for great recipes.  That said, this blog has a broader aperture.  It’s about managing your kitchen (and often home) well.  So, I aspire to include posts spanning topics such as:

1. Sourcing ingredients and managing your kitchen inventory
2. Meal planning
3. Personal budgeting and what it’s unlocked for us, after years of ignoring
4. Kitchen equipment and tools
5. Recipes
6. Techniques
7. Getting organized in your kitchen and your home
8. Illustrations of foods you can riff on once you know the basic formula (salads, omelettes, bowls, etc.)
9. Series (i.e. “Best of,” “My Classics” (recipes that are so good, they’ll be things I cook until I’m gone), “Get it On the Table” (things you can always put on the table quickly if you keep a few basic ingredients), etc.)

what we cook & eat

Most of us have types of food we gravitate toward or certain things we focus on including and excluding from our diet.  We eat a very whole food and animal-based diet.  Oddly enough, one of my favorite blogs is centered around plant-based and vegan friendly ingredients.  I wouldn’t have thought it’d be a favorite, however the flavors, techniques, and recipe quality are so strong that I can adapt them to animal- based proteins.  All this to say, I want to provide some context of the types of recipes you can expect and also offer that you should look for the quality of the recipe first, and not necessarily how it’s adapted for protein.  You have my commitment that I will never post a recipe that I do not personally stand behind.  Every recipe you’ll find here will be one that we have tried, approved of, and keep in our recipe catalog to try again and again.  With that …

Food items or ingredients we limit or avoid altogether:

• Seed oils
• Processed or artificial versions of food
• Empty carbohydrates
• Store bought breads (personal challenge)
• Soy
• Premade foods
• Highly processed sugars & artificial sweeteners

Those we target:

• Nutrient rich foods (quality beef, wild game, wild caught fish, quality eggs, quality dairy)
• Whole foods (unprocessed, not made by machines – things found in nature)
• Protein-rich meals
• High quality ingredients, ideally that are a good value
• Making things from scratch

Cooking styles we like:

• Classics done very well (employing techniques or ingredients that uplevel taste, texture, etc.)
• Craft (sourdough bread making, pasta making, omelettes, cocktails, etc.)
• Soups, and how to elevate them beyond a sum of all the ingredients