ROOTED IN A HOMESTEADER HEART

This cookbook has been on no ordinary journey.  It began with pioneer spirit, but is rooted in a homesteader heart.  

We're as American as wild horses and apple pie, yet inspiration for this cookbook began south of the border.  
​To realize how far we've drifted from healing foods, we had to leave our modern ways...

The journey began after selling most everything we had.  We planned to put property management and construction skills to work as we traveled.  We weren’t counting on cooking for others, but that just happens when you enjoy cooking together and meet folks in need of nourishment.  We found ourselves serving farm-to-table meals in unusual places, from an eco-community in Belize to a pioneer home turned B&B.

A desire to do some good led to building cook stoves in a Mayan village and teaching English near the border of Haiti.  But the more we learned along the way, the more I realized that few things were as important as preserving wisdom from the past for the health and strength of future generations.

And so I started gathering recipes and traditions from villages where tortilla masa was soaked and fermented, to American heritage sites where I admired colonial kitchens with their kitchen gardens, and pondered on the simplicity of drying food and clothes above mantles while pots simmered over fires.

We often ponder how well we ate on a cacao farm with no utilities, just an outdoor kitchen; while back in the ease of modern life, grocery store dependance challenges our health.  Even while living in a pioneer town, we learned it's hard to find recipes that existed before bleached white flour, Cream of Mushroom Soup and orange jello.

Always enamored by pioneers, we purchased a 1904 pioneer home turned B&B in scenic southern Utah.  We gardened and fed hikers from around the world, and our first cookbook was created for a town celebration.  Surrounded by pioneer spirit, ​I started posting “Light, Liberty & Mason Jars” or wisdom from the past that was surely discussed around the dinner tables of our ancestors. This theme can be found throughout the cookbooks.

​Though mine is a homesteader heart, our travels continue. We traded in the B&B for a very unusual RV Park where wild horses roam.  The new challenge is keeping them out of the gardens!  Soon we'll be printing the Wild Horse Edition, because our nation was built upon the backs of these magnificent creatures, after all.   You are invited to come hang out with our local herds on the banks of the Klamath River, at Lazy Horse RV Park, near the CA/OR border.

 Our cookbooks inspire families to return to the dinner table of the past, a place of nourishment and instruction, with “Food for Thought” to encourage cordial dinnertime discussion, happy memories, and the preservation of all that is good in America.  Do you have traditions to Preserve?  We welcome contributions from Homesteader Hearts like you and the opportunity to be involved with your custom cookbook project. 

RV Park

​​Light, Liberty & Mason Jars
Wild Horses & Apple Pie!
J.A.R.@HomesteaderHearts

Cookbook