Hi there! Welcome to my blog and thanks for visiting!
I grew up on a farm 7 miles outside a tiny town in North Dakota (LaMoure, population <1,000) and now live in the outer burbs of Philadelphia. My husband and I moved here for our first jobs after college on the West Coast thinking it was a short term experiment. That was over 20 years ago!
Being a Dakota girl, I'm still nice to strangers and sometimes even take the time to chat them up in the grocery store (apparently annoying to the natives here). I don't think I've changed much - I still 'carry the prairie' with me in my daily life.
I like to garden and watch green things grow, take care of my chickens, experiment with new recipes, and teach our 4 kids that 'get er done' attitude you learn growing up on a farm. I may get a little heated about calling pizza a vegetable for kid's school lunches and love to explore 'farm to table' topics.
Here are a few things I'll be writing about:
How to eat like I still live on a farm: I never appreciated it growing up but we ate like kings on our farm: the steak, burgers, and country sausage, the corn on the cob, fresh-out-of-the-dirt potatoes, all kinds of green veggies, and milk with probably close to 5% (!) cream from the Johnson dairy farm down the road. While I live within a quarter mile of a Whole Foods now, it's not the same as growing your own and the delight in eating from your own backyard. I hope to share information on gardening, finding local farm fare, and recipes to get your family eating more of the good stuff.
Recently, I've become a backyard beekeeper. I've had the best time geeking out learning about these amazing creatures and how to keep my hives healthy in order to enjoy the sweet rewards of their labor.
Recipes of my heritage: My people (on my father's side) were Germans from somewhere near Stuttgart that migrated to Odessa, Russia for a short while and then came to the Dakotas to farm.
My grandmother made many wonderful foods, and I'm still trying to master many of her recipes (most of which used a rough system of measurements involving a tin can). Add to that my mother's incredible bread-making skills, there's much to learn. Extra bonus my husband is from Germany (AND worked in a bakery) - he makes great desserts himself and is a good resource for my 'dough questions'. It's fun to compare notes on what's cooking across the pond and understand the history of where things came from.
Nutrition and health: By day, I'm a pharmacist working for a big drug company. Working with scientific experts, I write the content of that tiny print, twenty-times-folded accordion of paper that's attached to your medicine called the prescribing information. Reams of data summarized into key information.....you know, 'the most common adverse reactions (>5%) in clinical trials of 'bestdrugever' are nausea, dizziness, constipation, irritability, and muscle aches....' (which actually just sounds like pregnancy now that I think about it). Anyway, I love following amazing advances in nutrition, health, and science (3D pills? what what?), and I'm good at taking a lot of information and distilling it down into digestible bites.
Let's be curious together....