#130 – Are We Ancestral Enough Yet? A Conversation with Jaycie of Hazy River Homestead & Ranch

How do you know if you are ancestral enough, and what really qualifies as “doing the thing”? Is there somebody out there with a list of ancestral things you need to be doing so you can “count” as being truly ancestral, or is it just a moving, non-linear line we are constantly progressing along with our intention and heart oriented the right way? It is this question, the always-haunting subject of imposter syndrome, and others that we are going to talk about today in this delightful interview with one of our podcast supporters and listeners, Jaycie, of Hazy River Homestead & Ranch in Idaho, USA.

Jaycie and Andrea both live off the grid with solar and generator power, and we had fun discussing some of the challenges that come with that lifestyle, as well as some of the benefits! You can see Jaycie’s beautiful farm at www.hazyriverhomestead.com. This was a very early-morning call before the crack of dawn and it was a heart-warming, encouraging delight, so grab a hot beverage and let’s settle in.

What we talk about:

• What was the last thing you ate?
• Imposter Syndrome and how to know if you are really doing the thing
• Time investment: Some rewards we only see after layers of foundational years’ work
• Eating out of our pantries – how this shapes the way we cook (and the recipes we need!)
• And more!

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

You can find Mason and Jaycie at www.hazyriverhomestead.com

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Good, welcome to ancestral kitchen podcast i am sitting with jc today hello jc, hello so nice to have you jc is a listener and also supporter that was how i met you jc was in the Discord, I guess. And then texting, and then o’clock in the morning, talking on Zooms.

Jaycie:
Here we are.

Andrea:
So, JC, you are north and east of me, I guess, over in Idaho, and do you want to tell everybody a little bit about your—you guys have a pretty cool situation and a really interesting—, At moments, farrowing story?

Jaycie:
I think we’re actually a little bit south of you. We’re in north central Idaho. But we are on a six acre off grid farm and we raise dairy goats and sheep and pigs and chickens and turkeys. And I’ve tried cows and all the other things. But yeah, that’s a little bit about us. I have three kids. Oldest will be five this year, and the youngest just turned one. So we’re pretty busy.

Andrea:
Tried cows. Do explain.

Jaycie:
Tried cows, yes. I had a milk cow briefly. She was not set up for intensive management the way that we needed on a small six-acre farm. I needed to be able to halter her and walk her out to the pasture, and she wasn’t having it. So she decided to start jumping fences and ramming people, and then she was really delicious.

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s about how that goes. It’s interesting, a cow like her could be one of the best cows in a dairy herd, where they’re walking into a flat barn and maybe getting milked in there. And then on a homestead that cow just doesn’t work like there’s such specific kind of trainings and uses and applications for all these different animals it’s really interesting.

Jaycie:
And that’s exactly where she came from like I met her at the dairy farm and she walked into the barn no problem and put herself in the stanchion but you put a halter on her and she’s not having it Yeah.

Andrea:
No, that’s, it’s kind of nice. I feel like for when we get our next dairy cow, maybe we could just start, um… The gal who bought our cow from us is really good with cows, and she is kind of like raising up and training up her own, you know, that’s her goal is to raise up and train up her own next cow. The cow that she bought from us is a very good cow, but how awesome to have a cow that you just have like from when she’s a little heifer and you can just have her fully conditioned to walking in the halter and doing what you say. Yeah, exactly. And you guys are off-grid, too, which is really fun.

Jaycie:
Yes.

Andrea:
And by fun, I mean expensive.

Jaycie:
Oh, but it was supposed to be the cheaper option.

Andrea:
That’s what I tell you. But it is interesting, the little brief discussions that we’ve had about batteries and power and stuff. And Gary is just reading all these books about power right now, and it’s kind of endless. If you want to have power on the property, there’s a lot to learn.

Jaycie:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Always something.

Andrea:
So what did you, have you eaten this morning? I mean, it is early, as I alluded to, because we both have little ones.

Jaycie:
As you mentioned. No. So our house is super small, and I sleep in the half that is not the kitchen, and then Mason sleeps in the other half with the loft and the older two kids. So the kitchen is currently off limits. But no last night so I’ll tell you what we had for dinner last night I had soaked some lentils overnight and fried up an onion and some celery I was out of carrots or I would have used some carrots I made something that was basically it was inspired by a vegan dish that we used to eat all the time which was like a lentil meatloaf but I just fried up the onions and carrots with some spices i used like cumin graham masala and thyme and then yeah it was really good, and threw the lentils in the pot to kind of toast them a little bit and then added some bone broth and salt and then covered and cooked that for a while oh i threw part of a cabbage in there because it was looking at me in the fridge do that so that cooked down and then i made some mashed potatoes with some sheet milk and ate that all together that.

Andrea:
Sounds so good, I had a cabbage reproaching me from the refrigerator yesterday, actually. So I was also compelled to use one last night for dinner. And you are practicing Lent right now, is that correct? Is that the way you would say it?

Jaycie:
Yes. Yeah, we’re new to orthodoxy, so we’re learning the Lenten ropes. So not everything is, we’re not keeping the strict Lent fast, like you won’t find bone broth in a strict Lent fast. But we’re eating mostly vegetarian at the moment.

Andrea:
So would a strict orthodox Lenten fast, I know it varies from place to place, but would that basically be no animal products for the duration of Lent?

Jaycie:
To my understanding, yes. I think the black and white rules are no meat, no dairy, no oil, no wine. It seems like it’s a little up for interpretation depending on where you are.

Andrea:
But the purpose is some sort of self abstainment or asceticism to some degree.

Jaycie:
Some sort of restriction. Yeah.

Andrea:
In a time of reflection and penance.

Jaycie:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
That’s really, really awesome. I know we have a fair number of Orthodox listeners, and that is a subject that, you know, finding the food that suits. Because a lot of people would say, well, just use a vegan cookbook, crack open a vegan cookbook, and you’ll be like, ah. Wait. A lot of those ingredients are coming in here.

Jaycie:
I’m not going to eat any of that. Yeah.

Andrea:
First of all, how do you make? Oh, man. Do you know, did you see the mention in Discord the other day to vegan lard? Yeah.

Jaycie:
Yes.

Andrea:
Is that Crisco? Like, I don’t even know.

Jaycie:
That’s all I can think of.

Andrea:
Why would you call it lard, though? That seems like it would be unappealing if, you know, if like you’re vegan.

Jaycie:
To a vegan.

Andrea:
If you’re just not eating meat for a while, then you might be like, oh, perfect. But I feel like if you’re actually vegan, it’d be like, look, why would you put that there?

Jaycie:
Yeah, I don’t know. That kind of feels to me like maybe some certain ancestral foods are buzzwords right now. And so they want to appeal to like, hey, other people are saying lard is healthy. So here’s your version that’s definitely not the same thing.

Andrea:
It’s a turnaround from time’s former.

Jaycie:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So you had a delicious lentils stew. How do your kids eat? Do they eat whatever you and Mason eat?

Jaycie:
Yes. Yeah. I don’t have enough energy or time to make second meals. Yeah. For the most part, they eat what we eat. We still do a lot of eggs right now. So that is most of our protein supplementation. implementation but that’s usually earlier in the day.

Andrea:
Nice nice well we’ve got some fun subjects today i was texting you yesterday and i was just thinking all the things that i just really want to talk to you about so i don’t even know if we’ll get through this list but let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and get started, Alright, the first thing that I want to talk about is something you said yesterday, I think when we were voxering, and I thought, yeah, this is something we should really address, which is imposter syndrome.

Andrea:
Um what do you do like let’s talk about that the i feel like when when we started the podcast, then you know allison presented the idea to me and what it would be and you know the type of food we’d be talking about and i thought well i i surely can’t be the one to talk about this because we aren’t there we haven’t achieved i’m not at the pinnacle you know who wants to hear what I have to say, but then I also considered, well, maybe people want to come along with and learn with, but at what point do I say, okay, I’m here now. I made it. I’m perfect. Oh no. Oh, what a great subject to discuss during Lent. So anyways, that is something that’s been on my mind a bit and i don’t know i just want to talk to talk with you about it in real time.

Jaycie:
Yeah, so this was probably the question after you sent it to me that I was thinking about the most. And I think what we had been talking about was I had made a sandwich a couple days ago and talking about sharing food on the Discord because there’s a whole thread for sharing what you’re eating. And so I had made the bread and I even made the cheddar cheese out of goat milk that I milked from a goat myself and I’m pretty sure I even used clobber culture so like there was no industrial anything in that cheese but I didn’t make the hummus and I didn’t sprout the sprouts, I did make the pickles but it’s like I feel like a lot of us feel like we have to do everything to feel like we are doing anything, or to feel like we are doing enough to say that. I don’t know, like, yeah, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say there. But I think a lot of us are first generation and learning how to cook and live this way because I feel this way with the homesteading too. Like, no one taught me how to care for livestock at all. So there’s a lot of, am I doing this right? Because there’s no one there teaching me.

Andrea:
Yeah, and not only first generation, but… Give me a slightly melodramatic word, but also in isolation. And by that, I mean, you know, there can be neighbors to the left and to the right of you, but none of them have any conception of what you’re doing, much less interest in trying it. You know, why would you make that cheddar cheese from the milk that you milked from a dairy animal yourself when you could just go to Costco? What are you thinking? You’re crazy. And so then you’re left with not only not being aided, you know, your neighbor doesn’t grow sprouts so you can swap cheese for sprouts or something. But there’s, you have to explain yourself at every corner, it feels like.

Jaycie:
Yeah, there’s a whole lot of why would you do that when you could just go buy it? Why make your life harder? And I don’t know that that’s something that we can really answer. That’s not something that I can answer directly. But I think it’s just so much more satisfying when I’ve seen something go from start to finish.

Andrea:
That is a question I do ponder a bit. Why do you make your life harder and doesn’t make your life harder? Because sometimes I think, well, how can you tolerate going to that store and then the fallout and then the suffering consequent of, the things we bought and the things we ate and then the trash and the, All the things that come with getting ultra-processed foods. Whose life is harder? It’s hard to tell, you know?

Jaycie:
Yeah. And that’s something I’ve heard other people talk about, too, is, well, you could save so much time if you didn’t have all the animals. And it’s like, well, yeah, but time for what? What else would I be doing? I’m having fun over here.

Andrea:
I’ve seen you butchering a goat on a porch with little kids scattered around you.

Jaycie:
Yeah, it’s hard work, but it’s good work. It feels way better than I used to have a desk job. And so I’d sit at a desk all day long and buy my groceries. And yeah, I had more time for fun things, but I don’t really remember having very much fun.

Andrea:
One thing I remember on the farm I got to work on in Virginia was doctors and people would pay to come out and do, classes or things with us out on the farm. Like they’re paying to have our fun. You know what I mean?

Jaycie:
Yes. Yeah. My brother-in-law lives in Portland and he’s come out to visit a couple of times. And one of the last times he spent, I don’t even know how long, probably a couple hours chopping firewood. And he said, if you had a cabin here, you could get people to pay you to come chop your firewood.

Andrea:
You know okay i’ve literally thought before because we do have people camp out here you know and i have thought you know we we could set up like a crossfit workout day and like you have to run down to the woods i need these hay bales moved into the barn split three rounds and then carry them got to pack them up the hill and stack up run back down you You know, pined as many rounds as possible, AMRAP. And by rounds, I mean rounds of wood. But that’s true. Yeah, and so do you, you know, sometimes the kids will say, oh, these friends are doing this or that. And I tell them, well, they have to pay to go to that, like, you know, activity because they’re trying to get movement into their day. And that is worthy cause if you’re in the city and that’s where life is and then you know by all means you must and you should pay and go participate in activities that get you moving, but if um you know like taking kids to classes and enrichment things and you know i think that’s all to the good but i was telling the kids but if you’re on a firm that already is your life, we don’t have to pay to go to the activity because that is how we live.

Jaycie:
And I think being on the farm lends itself really well to homeschooling, too. My oldest will be five in June, and I’ve had friends asking if I’m going to buy a preschool curriculum this year, and we’re just finding that he’s naturally interested in things and asking about things that I feel like he can’t read, but he’s far and beyond in his understanding for lots of other concepts about life and how things grow and develop. And then I was probably at a much older age than he is now.

Andrea:
What would your preschool curriculum be? A unit study on chickens or something? I mean, duh. First, buy a farm off grid.

Jaycie:
Biology. Let’s go cut open a goat.

Andrea:
Yeah. True story. How much biology happens on a farm every day? We can’t even. It’s amazing. so what then do you say to someone who’s doing half the thing you know they bought the hummus and they made the bread are they doing the thing are they not doing the thing.

Jaycie:
I feel like they’re doing the thing. And I think depending on the season of life, we’re always doing the best that we can with the knowledge that we have. So I have had to check myself a little bit over the last year. We’ve had lots of changes. We are back on the property that we bought in , but we had been, we took a break from October of to October of . So in that year, we moved three times and I was pregnant and had a new baby with two kids, four and under. So there were a lot of things that I just couldn’t do. And for part of that time, we were living in town in a house. And so I didn’t have the goats and the chickens and access to my own food. So we were buying raw milk from a friend and eggs from down the street, but there were just a lot of things that I didn’t have time or energy or space in my life to make. So I’m, In that instance, buying the best that you can and making what you can, I think as long as you’re still hanging on to the why of why you are eating the way that you are, you’re still doing it.

Andrea:
Yeah, I feel like it’s the spirit of the thing that you’re after. You know, does he do it with a willing heart or a grudging heart? It’s a big difference. and if you were there there are things where I had been there have been times especially right right when I was pregnant with Kenton and right after he was born when I felt like I was outsourcing so many things that I wanted to have back under my possession but I didn’t have the physical capacity to encompass and I was really grateful for the quality makers and people that we have around us that I was able to lean more heavily on those outsourced things. But, But it sure is nice to start bringing stuff back in-house, that feeling of, oh, look, good gracious, this came out of our own pantry or whatever. It’s a really good feeling.

Jaycie:
I think there are certain things that are okay to outsource to, depending on whether or not they fit in your life. And sometimes that just means that, hey, I don’t need to have hummus if I can’t make it. But with that example, there was a period of time where I wasn’t making bread, and I know what the bread at the store tastes like, and I’m not willing to eat that. So we just didn’t have bread for a while. I am not very good at making hummus, so I have an option that I’m okay with buying. So every now and then when we want hummus, we just buy hummus, and I don’t have to try to peel the skins off of all the garbanzo beans.

Andrea:
It must be that little indulgences. Yeah, my kids will tell you how long we went without bread when I was pregnant. And we only had bread if my mom brought it. And I thought it was kind of funny. You know, if you bring a loaf of bread into the house and the kids are like, well, it doesn’t take much to make them happy. But yeah, sometimes just do it.

Jaycie:
I felt that way. I felt that way about milk when we were buying it. Because I had been the milk lady for so long. I didn’t understand people would go home and like drink a gallon of milk like what’s that about it’s just milk and then we were the ones buying milk like it’s so good on milk day such.

Andrea:
A treat well this could have dovetails into another question I have for you so let’s take a quick break and then I’m gonna come back and ask you another question, So you were saying how you guys are back on your land, and I know you already had some stuff built, and you’re, of course, building more. One thing that I have been observing as we’ve passed, let’s see, I guess into our sixth year here now, this is now the longest we’ve lived anywhere, my husband and I, other than when we were children living in family homes. But the time, the layered time invested out here, it’s not that you don’t immediately reap rewards. Like you are immediately, you were putting your animals out and you’re reaping rewards off the land immediately. But there’s some kind of investment that starts to come back when you’ve been doing it for a minute. And I say a minute because I’ve only been here for a minute, you know, in the scope of things.

Jaycie:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
I was thinking and meditating on it, and I felt, in my mind, it was very much like a marriage where, you know, you immediately, you meet the land, you fall in love, you don’t ever want to be parted from it. Every minute is spent on the land, and you’re just trying to get to know the shape of it, the quirks of it, its moods, you know, how it responds to different inputs from you. And then you start to see like the year-over-year layers, and I felt like it just feels like a relationship that you make, and you can walk out to a piece of property, and you know how to butcher a chicken, and you know how to milk a cow, but do you know how to butcher a chicken here, and do you know how to milk a cow here? You know what I mean? Like, oh, this little dell is a nice place to bring them back to, or back around here is this works well to come up from here or that gets worn out quick because it’s low and it gets wet. So we’ve got to move them up high. It can only be down there for sure. But it’s just like all these little things that, you know, just start to, I don’t know, become ingrained into your day.

Andrea:
So I’ve been thinking a lot, and I thought about that with your sandwich because a sandwich literally is layers. But I was just thinking about how, you know, Your days rotate around and then your days start, that rotation starts to encompass making bread. And that day starts to encompass now milking a dairy animal and then making the cheese and then making it with clabber. And then it rotates around and, you know, maybe you don’t ever throw sprouts into that wheel. You know, maybe you just keep drawing them in. But just thinking about the land as like a marriage and a relationship is heavy on my mind as we’re starting to reap some of the overlapping rewards of a year-over-year existence in one place. And I wondered if it—I mean, you’re back on the land in just a year, but I was wondering if it was feeling if how that was hitting for you and also you being first-generation homesteaders as well and now coming back to your land with a lot of experience under your belt with the animals, and how that all feels to you.

Jaycie:
Yeah, I think the relationship with the land being a marriage is a good metaphor. And I think I remember when we first moved here and we came from, it was not a big city. It was a little university town, but it still felt like a city. We thought we were getting way out in the woods and turns out we’re only five minutes from town. But we kind of felt this urgency to like learn everything about being self-sufficient all at once. And.

Jaycie:
And I kind of do this with anything that I get into. I just want to be good at all of the parts of it all at once. And so I was that way when it came to cooking, too. And it does take a lot of time to develop that relationship because you’re taking it a step at a time. Like before you can make bread, you’ve got to learn how to keep the sourdough starter alive. And before I can make cheese from the goats, I’ve got to figure out how to keep the goats alive. And then I have to figure out how to milk the goats. And then just learning the whole milk handling process. So it’s layers upon layers and then you learn more all the time about things that you, even things that you’ve been doing for a long time. So there will never not be things that I am learning about cooking or on my land. And it just takes spending time doing those things. I don’t remember when the first year they popped up, but it was probably a couple years in on this property before we knew that there were morels that pop up around our cherry trees.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Jaycie:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Now you know, and now you’re looking for it.

Jaycie:
Now we know. So that’s another thing, being first-generation homesteaders and in the kitchen, because there is no one here to teach us like, hey, there’s morels down there. That’s something that it takes a little bit extra effort for us to find out. We’re not building upon generations of, like our family’s not been on this property for a hundred years, so we’re the first ones learning about it.

Andrea:
And even if somebody told you when you got there, by the way, there’s going to be more else, it still takes time to sort of integrate that into your bones. Like, yeah, I see that it’s getting cold out. I know that this is going to be happening, you know. I know we can tap those trees, and this is about when it will do it because of how it feels, you know. I think that this process was happening to me. I mean, it happens in other areas of life, obviously, but this process was happening to me very much in the kitchen long before we got out here. And then it was just a new type of relationship with the land that then had to happen again in this sense. But I think everybody probably experiences this in their ancestral kitchen. You know, Rebecca on the Discord, she has talked about how she’s developed this system for making sourdough bread while working full time. And just kind of watching that evolution and then the thought behind it. And like you said, she’s very much in the spirit of it. You know, she knows why she wants to make the bread. She does how the store bread tastes. She’s not willing to compromise. So she was willing to press in and figure out a solution.

Andrea:
Which I guess if you want to draw out the marriage metaphor, it reminds you of when somebody, you know, sometimes people say, well, actually, it turns out that it is really hard to live with another person all the time. And I think I’d rather not. So let’s just end this thing. But like, then what is the, sometimes you think, well, maybe it is hard, but like, what is the purpose of it? Maybe we should figure it out. And then that can help somebody understand why they might want to, put a little more time in.

Jaycie:
Um, it can be hard to live with another person, especially when they’re home all the time with you. But I think putting energy, you’re going to get what you put into a relationship back out of it. So if you’re putting effort in, there’s, there’s going to be a reward for that.

Andrea:
You know, I’ve heard people say about marriage, the seven-year itch. Have you ever heard that saying?

Jaycie:
I don’t know that I’ve heard seven years specifically, but I’ve heard a few times, like, different points in the marriage or, yeah, yeah, something like that.

Andrea:
It’s making me think of how Joel Salatin says that, like, a lot of people don’t like seven years is when they tap out, like, on the farm.

Jaycie:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
Which is, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m like, is this just a problem humans have with a relationship, generally? It’s like, you know what? Because I feel like something really magical is starting to happen. And it’s also very hard at this time for, like, on the land. You know, a lot is going to be asked of us this year, I know. And a lot of grit will be required. But I can tell that we’re starting to… Like Gary built garden boxes this past week. And that might not sound very significant. But when I tell you that the garden boxes were built from cedar that fell on the property and he milled from a mill that he built here on the property, now it feels different. Because it was that was years of things you know like years of learning and trying and finding and hunting and things not working and you know so now it’s like wow now i go out and look at those boxes i think man this happened here on the property because of the property before the.

Andrea:
So, now building on that, let’s talk about eating out of our pantries and keeping in mind that a lot of our listeners are not on farms. And you may not have a desire ever to be on a farm, but I don’t want them to think that this doesn’t include them. And because what we’re going to talk about, I was doing in town before we got out to the farm. It’s just different the way, you know, when you have to grow the food yourself, too. It’s got a little different flavor to it sometimes. But let’s talk about eating out of our pantries.

Jaycie:
Well, I had a lot of practice over that year that we were gone because we were closer to town. And we were focusing on getting a dairy business going, so we weren’t really doing the whole homestead thing. So I was eating out of our pantry a lot and not farming so much. I mean, we were milking the goats, but I wasn’t farming to feed us exactly. Right. But I think where I started at least was I needed a recipe and I didn’t exactly follow it to a T all the time. And which worked out great sometimes and sometimes not so much because I didn’t understand how different ingredients play with each other and what goes well together and what makes a well-rounded dish. So a lot of the times at the beginning, the recipes were really helpful to kind of give me a baseline. And I think maybe it was you talking about Jacob where he had his Redwall cookbook and he wanted to make the recipe as it’s written the first time and then decide how he wants to change it so I think if you if you follow it at least loosely the first time it can give you that okay this is how it’s supposed to work and then you can kind of understand um what you can swap out.

Jaycie:
Um but like with dinner last night i don’t even know where that recipe the original recipe for the lentil shepherd’s pie is because i just know that there were lentils and mashed potatoes and that sounds good so i’m gonna throw some other things in there, like.

Andrea:
It’s stormy here windy sounds like.

Jaycie:
It would hit.

Andrea:
Right yeah learning the like you said the interplay of recipe or ingredients and then the the food that you get from a farm stand or off a dairy farm is going to be a little different than the food described in a book which is going to assume you bought it very uniformly at a grocery store.

Jaycie:
Yes thinking.

Andrea:
About this the other day like have you ever seen a recipe that says two potatoes or something and you’re like okay but what does that mean that’s like a two pound difference at this point they could be dying a little potato.

Jaycie:
Or like a huge potato she want golf ball size yellow potatoes or are we talking russet baker potatoes yes yeah.

Andrea:
I i feel like a cookbook would be appropriate with, Like I sometimes write, like when Allison and I write recipes, I sometimes write it this way because it’s the way that it comes out of my head. And then I have to think, how can I turn it into something that other people can understand? But when I say, like if I said to you, okay, this recipe works perfectly, if you just don’t separate it, just kind of pour the cream and a bit of milk off the top of a jar, that mixture is like perfect. But I don’t have a heavy cream or a light cream or skim milk to tell you half and half it’s just kind of that amount you get when you pour it off the top is perfect, we use that to do those the cream biscuits which say you know use cream, I think in my cookbook but you just pour it off the top of the jar it’s not really separated it’s just kind of, However much cream you get.

Jaycie:
Yeah. Well, and that kind of gets into, like, how we don’t measure anything either. When you’ve been in the kitchen for a while, just like, I know about what grams of flour looks like, so I’ll just blob that into the bowl.

Andrea:
You know, I, yesterday, I was mixing up a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough for a church event. So i volunteered myself to do that you know i went and i bought the ingredients and they’re organic but they’re still not that like it’s not the type that we would usually have of stuff you know like flour and sugar and stuff and i was mixing it and i was like man this is so easy, this is like it was so slick you know i’m not having to get out a butter knife and hack the sugar apart or mill the flour or um nothing you just open the bags and scoop stuff in and, i was actually thinking what are people complaining about Why are they saying it’s so hard to cook? Because you have packaged ingredients from the store. You’re not trying to, like, jerry-rig up a system to figure out if you have enough butter or something or patch together, I don’t know, sucanut, molasses, honey, and try to get enough to make something sweet. Like, this is really easy. It’s so predictable. Every single, I made batches, and every single batch came out exactly the same. Wow. Easy.

Jaycie:
Yeah, none of my food ever comes out the same. Exactly.

Andrea:
Which is fine for, you know, I don’t even have a desire to change that. I don’t even want things to be predictable. It’s not a problem. I just found it kind of hilarious when I was making it. I was like, man, this is just, I can’t think of anything easier than this. Also, it made me realize why people are so fast. Because I’m really slow. But then I’m going out to the garage.

Jaycie:
I’ll spend a couple hours in the kitchen. And then I’m like, hmm, that’s what I have to show for this?

Andrea:
Oh, my gosh. The other night, we needed dinner. You know what I mean? Like, we needed dinner.

Jaycie:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
Was I prepared? No.

Jaycie:
No.

Andrea:
But I was kind of prepared. in that I’ve been saving back some eggs for a while because I wanted to hard boil them. And so I hard boiled the eggs and then the kids were like, are you making egg salad? And I thought, that’s a good idea. So then I got to make mayonnaise, you know, so I got to go out and get lard and I got to melt lard. By the time I was done…

Jaycie:
That’s our water pump, if you can hear that.

Andrea:
Oh, no, I can’t hear the water. Okay, good. But it was just his whole… I don’t know. It was a whole afternoon to make egg salad, and I made two loaves of gluten-free bread. And I was like, why did it take me so long? If you told someone I made egg salad sandwiches, you’d be like, that sounds like a nice quick meal. But it was such an investment, which is probably not an encouraging thing to say, but I should probably try to make it sound fast. But it wasn’t but you know i was like pulling together little bits of things from all over the place and.

Jaycie:
I’m just.

Andrea:
Trying to make do with what i had and and it took time i’ll be honest it took time.

Jaycie:
Yeah see but what else would you have spent your time doing because i’m sure you’d spent that time with your kids too yeah.

Andrea:
I mean they were certainly in there also i was listening to jane so you know.

Jaycie:
Yeah so it’s still time well spent um i feel like there’s this idea that everything that we do needs to be done quickly and easily and sometimes it’s okay if we don’t like we can take we can take time to do things um i i don’t know why i am this way but i’ve always kind of wanted to do things the longer and harder way. So I remember as a kid, my parents had a bread maker and literally all they had to do was dump ingredients in the bread maker. And then a couple hours later, there would be a loaf of bread. It was magical. And I wanted to know why we didn’t make bread every day. But I thought the bread maker was too easy and I wanted to knead the bread by hand and there’s just something more satisfying about the tactile experience of getting your hands in the dough and feeling a change even though it takes longer why.

Andrea:
Would you want to be inefficient.

Jaycie:
That’s a good question.

Andrea:
Maybe the better question is, why would you want to be efficient?

Jaycie:
Yeah, yeah, I do think that is the better question. Why are you, I don’t know that cutting corners is the right phrase, but why are you trying to take the experience away so that you can do something else? What else are you trying to get to that you need to cut time out in this area of your life?

Andrea:
Yeah, it’s like if you just ask the question, pull out one layer, ask the question, peel back another layer, and you say, okay, I don’t want to make the bread myself because it takes too long. Okay, then how are you going to get the bread? I’m going to buy the bread. And then where are you going to buy the bread? Where are you going to buy the bread? So that I have more time. Well, what’s the time going to be for? Well, I need to take my child to this thing where they’re going to learn something. But what if they just made the bread with you? But they need to go see an expert. An expert needs to show them something. Well, if you made the bread every day, you’d be an expert. But I don’t have the time because I need to… Yeah, I find myself doing that all the time. I’m like, why would I do this? And then, okay, but why, what is it that I am being, what is being asked of me? Am I being asked to… Live a more industrial lifestyle in order to support having enough time to get home frantically and put the fastest dinner together possible because of what? So I can get up the next day and wish away as quick as possible and do it.

Jaycie:
All over again.

Andrea:
Those questions get you in trouble, though.

Jaycie:
That’s true. That’s why we’re living in the woods.

Andrea:
Well, why do you want an off-grid? Let’s take a quick break and I’ll come back with another question. Okay, so off-grid, off-grid living is a little bit different with power resourcing and things like that. and you guys are in a small house. And so I kind of want to talk about or I want to ask you a little bit about, living in a tiny house, living off grid. Just tell me some of, Like, how does your lifestyle change being in a very small space? That’s, I think, what is on my mind. And by not having constant, endless amounts of power. I don’t entirely know what your battery system looks pretty good, so maybe you do have constant, endless power. We don’t. Talk about that a little bit, if you would.

Jaycie:
Well there’s definitely not constant endless power but i do feel like we are spoiled and actually the off-grid thing is one of those other things that i feel like i have some imposter syndrome in because i almost use whatever power i want and then if it’s too much for our solar panels to keep up then i just run the generator so i can run a blender or my washing machine or a fan or something I just might have to run the generator too and then I have to listen to that, so we I do try to be mindful of our power consumption and we have to think about, what happens on during the winter or during cloudy days when we don’t get as much sun we listen to the generator more so yeah that is just another another piece to think about but On the other hand, I don’t ever know when our neighbor’s power goes out until they call us and ask if they can use our well to get some water because their water doesn’t work because the power is out.

Andrea:
Are they on utilities?

Jaycie:
Yes, everyone around us is on the grid.

Andrea:
That’s interesting. So people around you are on the grid, but you’re not.

Jaycie:
Yes. Yeah. We’re the only ones off-grid here.

Andrea:
Oh, that is different. Okay. Well, you are weird then.

Jaycie:
We are the weirdos.

Andrea:
I mean, not that we didn’t already know that, but…

Jaycie:
Well, we’re actually… We didn’t exactly understand this when we bought our property, but we are in a little bit of a subdivision. So, everyone has five to ten acre lots. But coming from the quote unquote city that we did, we didn’t, like six acres is huge. So, yeah, everyone around us has like a nice house and all the utilities and just a big yard, basically. And we’re out here with goats yelling and pigs running down the street.

Andrea:
Are they not using their property at all?

Jaycie:
No, no. There’s a couple down the road that, I don’t know how much property they have, but they probably have four acres of grass that they mow.

Andrea:
Whoa. They just mow it? They’re not haying it, they’re just mowing it.

Jaycie:
Nope, they just mow it.

Andrea:
That’s a hobby.

Jaycie:
It is. Yep, that’s wild.

Andrea:
How wet is it where you are? Is there enough rain to sustain that grass?

Jaycie:
For most of the summer, it will die off towards the end.

Andrea:
Internal brown precipitation than i thought that is really interesting for a that is mind-blowing you know when you think about what you can do on a on a two acre one acre farm you know you can feed your family off of an acre, and if you have acres and you’re not doing anything with that’s just kind of crazy See. Okay, so you’re out in the middle of all these posh houses.

Jaycie:
Civilized people.

Andrea:
Civilized people. You’re out near the barbarians, outside the gates, and you’ve got your goats. Do people comment on it? Do they let you know?

Jaycie:
I think people think it’s funny, mostly. We don’t have—so the neighbor across the street from us, they don’t live there full-time, and then the neighbor next to us, they don’t live there full-time. And to the right of us there’s tribal land so that’s empty and then behind us is a hill and all of those neighbors are up at the top of the hill so we’re kind of in our we’re in a little bit of a secluded area we don’t have people right there seeing what we’re doing all the time.

Andrea:
Wait so there are they.

Jaycie:
Like people’s.

Andrea:
Cabins or something like you said they don’t.

Jaycie:
The one And the one across the street is a full house. Like, they just, yeah, it’s their vacation home. And then next to us, they’ve got a little fifth wheel. So they’re pretty much only here during the summer every few weeks.

Andrea:
Like I said, it explains it’d be a little hard to grow things if you weren’t living there full time.

Jaycie:
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:
Well, that is interesting. Okay, so you’ve got the power. Because you’ve got batteries. You’ve got the generator. How much sun do you guys get?

Jaycie:
Well, we are on the north-facing slope of a valley, so this is really not a good place to be trying to do solar, which we didn’t understand. We were just like, if you have property, you can put solar up, and then you have endless power. Yeah, so we get great sun during the summer and almost none during the winter.

Andrea:
Would you ever live like with no power just do everything by hand.

Jaycie:
Probably not. I wish I could say yes. But there’s just, I don’t know, there’s certain things that I am attached to still. And maybe I could get there. Maybe I could get to no power. It sounds fun to try, but I don’t know that I would want to commit to that for forever.

Andrea:
Yeah, I feel that. I feel like the longer we live out here, the less entranced I am by the power, you know? And then there’s times where I’m like, just want to plug a thing in. Just want to, yeah.

Jaycie:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Run the dishwasher when I run. Well, the fact that we even have a dishwasher tells you how far we’ve come, but I just want to.

Jaycie:
I am the dishwasher. sure uh when we first moved here um in the house we had basically an rv sized fridge and so we had that fridge and freezer and that was it and now we have two fridges and three freezers plugged in so i’m not sure how we would manage that part of our life with no power i think it probably just wouldn’t work with the business that we run, but, yeah.

Andrea:
I do think a lot about, I feel like I’m unraveling a little bit off of power in some ways. And then in other ways, it’s not like I’m detaching from it completely. It’s just that I’m isolating exactly where it needs to be at the minimum. But I already know that you’ve done a lot of those calculations in senses because of the size of your house. Like that, that’ll whittle things down for you real quick when you live in a small house. You’re like, does this need to happen inside? I actually don’t.

Jaycie:
Yeah. So half of our house is kitchen, which is necessary. It’s actually the best kitchen that I’ve ever had. So that’s really nice. But it means that our living space is really small and we have an outhouse instead of a bathroom in the house. And there are plans to build a bath house at some point, but right now we go and take showers at a friend’s because we just don’t have that here and there’s no space for it inside the house. But because the house is so small, it means even on bad weather days, we spend probably % of our time outside. If I’m not cooking, I’m outside. And it’s the same with the kids. Everest took Esme for a walk for like two hours yesterday and it was cold. It was like, why are you guys outside? I don’t want to be outside.

Andrea:
It’s years on Fahrenheit, so I bet it was colder for you.

Jaycie:
I think our temps are about the same. We’re in a river valley. We’re kind of low elevation. So we’re not, like if you’re thinking of North Idaho, four feet of snow, that’s not us.

Andrea:
Which is kind of nice to not be in the four feet of snow. It’s all fun and games until you have to milk an animal or eggs or something.

Jaycie:
Until it’s cold.

Andrea:
Yeah, I’m interested.

Jaycie:
And the eggs are frozen.

Andrea:
No. It’s okay. They thaw it fine and they work okay. The spending most of your time outside part, I really like that because I feel like when the house is big and spacious, which is our house, it is the biggest house I’ve ever lived in, in my life. It’s bigger than the house I grew up in, you know. And… There’s just so many reasons to be inside, you know what I mean? So many things you could be doing, so many things you could be cleaning. And instead of having to push yourself outside, you know, when you have a smaller house, you have to kind of push yourself to go inside because outside is more natural.

Jaycie:
Yeah. Yeah, I find on the days where I am spending more time inside because I’ve got to wash dishes or there’s something that takes a little bit longer to cook, we have big windows in almost every wall and it’s like the sunshine is looking at me. I just want to go outside.

Andrea:
It’s just trying to coax you back out the door again.

Jaycie:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
What do you envision it looking like if you start school with your oldest next year or whenever you guys do it?

Jaycie:
I don’t know that we will ever officially start school. We just teach him what he wants to learn when he asks questions, and we spend a lot of time reading. We like the charlotte mason philosophy i haven’t gotten gotten very far into it, um and i don’t feel like i’m qualified to speak on the principles but uh he loves reading he can sit there and listen to someone reading to him for literally hours and he’s starting to pick up his letters and numbers on his own so i don’t know there probably won’t ever be anything formal We’ll just teach him what he wants and needs to know as it comes up.

Andrea:
It’s a remarkable skill for a child to be able to sit and listen. You know, these days it’s not as common. So that’s going to help you out a lot. I mean, if you do end up traveling down kind of the Charlotte Mason philosophy education path, then… A lot of what she has you doing at his age would be reading books out loud to him, certain books, and he’ll learn in time to narrate them back to you. And I’m sure he already does that because I feel like, you know, when kids spend a lot of time around their parents, if you’re, I’m going to use the word conscious parenting, that’s not really what I mean. But like, if they’re with you because it’s a matter of the course of the day and not sort of just the time to move from A to Z, then they are kind of prattling away to you. And they’re learning, they’re practicing their narrations at that time, you know, and then one day you’re going to read to him the Aeneid or something and have him narrate a portion back to you and he will. And you’ll just be like, wow, amazing. He’s been practicing his whole life.

Jaycie:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I found that we’ve tried to practice some narration, and he’s just not interested if it’s focused, like, I’m going to read this book, and then you’re going to tell me what it’s about. But if I just read to him, oftentimes later in the day, or maybe a couple days later, he’ll start talking about whatever it was that we were reading about. Do you remember?

Andrea:
Like, I don’t. Please tell me. Yeah. In the Charlotte Mason philosophy, she wouldn’t even have him start doing like what you would call official narrations of like a reading until after six. Anyway, so he’s already ahead of the game. I feel like the philosophy that Charlotte Mason espouses works particularly well with ancestral food, probably better than any other education philosophy I’ve seen. Because, well, her philosophy is a philosophy of personhood, really, and education is just a part of being a person. It seems like a lot of people in our group are drawn to our work, which is interesting. And I love it. Obviously, I’m a fan. Did you see that we’re going to do like a read-along of a book? You should do it with us because it’ll kind of get you her home education. No, everyone’s going to read one of Karen Glass’s books about Charlotte Mason’s philosophy. I don’t know if I’m going to tell which one it was.

Jaycie:
I’ll have to look for that.

Andrea:
Yeah, I’ve only read Charlotte Mason’s books. I’ve not read, well, I’ve read some of Karen Andreola’s, but I’ve not read books about philosophy, so I’m interested to read this book with everybody. I know the other… Other moms have really enjoyed it. So, but it’s definitely, you know, I oftentimes hear people say, you know, my child isn’t old enough for school yet, so I’m not going to form a philosophy of education yet. And I’m like, hold on, you want to do that now? Actually better to start before they’re in school because I feel like that’s where.

Jaycie:
That’s where they get you with the curriculum. Yes, exactly.

Andrea:
I was going to say.

Jaycie:
You didn’t get ready.

Andrea:
You’re not ready. So now I’m going to tell you, this will make your child virtuous. Bye. Very expensive. But isn’t your child still worth it? And then all of us are like, oh, no, I guess so. Yeah, I do love my child. All prey to the curriculum.

Jaycie:
Yeah. So I guess we’re developing an education philosophy, but not a curriculum for preschool.

Andrea:
No, no, no. Don’t trigger me, J.C. No, not a curriculum. No need for that. Well, what else is on your mind? Anything else this early hour come to your thoughts?

Jaycie:
Back on the eating out of our pantries, I think a lot of times the less I have to work with, the easier my life is because it gives me fewer options. Men to that.

Andrea:
I’m behind this a thousand percent. Keep going.

Jaycie:
Sometimes a lot of options is nice and sometimes it’s not i’ve found an area that i really do not need a lot of options but i often think i do is in spices and herbs and there’s like i have a core, few that i use for different things and then i have i don’t even know how many others that i’ve bought for one recipe and maybe i didn’t even use it for that recipe it’s still in my cupboard You.

Andrea:
Ever buy something.

Jaycie:
And then by the time.

Andrea:
It gets here, you’re like, what was I going to do with it?

Jaycie:
What was this?

Andrea:
I can’t even remember why I got this.

Jaycie:
Yes. I always say when a box shows up at the mailbox, if we don’t know what that is, we probably didn’t need it.

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I feel like when a package shows up, I’m like, I know what it is. Get it on the table. Open it now. Ready for this. Yeah.

Jaycie:
I feel like I can make endless meals out of potatoes, carrots, onions, celery, and some meat.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah.

Jaycie:
But if I have more than that, then it’s too many choices. What goes together?

Andrea:
Well, that’s just it. I feel like I’ve often fallen prey to the idea that more is better or somehow more interesting or, yeah, more choices. Maybe being better. Like, well, if I have all the options available to me, then I’ll know what to do. But I think, I remember at one point when I was a kid going on trips, and I’d bring like books every time. Now, granted, I was a kid, I didn’t have a lot of responsibilities. I could read a lot of those on the trip. But at some point as an adult, I realized, if I just bring one book, I’ll actually finish the book instead of bringing different ones along with me to dip in and out of and carry around. Sometimes I feel that in the pantry. Like, if I have a million different things, like, the weirdest thing, like, doing this gluten-free stint that I’m on or whatever we want to play, I feel like it has been so liberating.

Jaycie:
In what way?

Andrea:
In crystallizing my thoughts almost. like realizing what i actually care about putting on the table i don’t feel entirely i can’t entirely explain it yet but i don’t know if you ever have felt this but i feel like i always have this vague, food insecurity feeling like food poverty feeling somehow like i need to put a bunch on the shelf and I can’t use the last one we gotta have that last one gotta save it, and it’s almost like going gluten free broke that, I don’t understand it myself yet, so it is hard to put it into words. I’ve been just rabidly trying to use up my pantry, and I’m on this long kick-up, like, don’t buy, don’t go to the grocery store, not even for those little conveniences. If you want it, make it, or find somebody around us that makes it.

Andrea:
And normally that would trigger off like a low-key sense of panic like oh i can’t use that last thing i don’t want to see that run out in the freezer not necessarily the grocery store things but maybe i’ll place an order from azure standard or something like that make sure i don’t run out of butter and now i’m just use it like use it up empty it out let’s see it go clear that space and I don’t know what happened. Maybe somebody understands that you can send us an email. Please tell me.

Jaycie:
I would love the answer also. That sounds very freeing. You’re Marie Kondo-ing your pantry.

Andrea:
I guess so. Kind of. Here’s the other weird thing. It seems like the more we eat, the shelves are getting fuller. I don’t know what is happening.

Jaycie:
Well you’ve had a couple of butchering days in the last little bit so i wonder if like not having to think about getting more food from somewhere else gives you the space to put more food away or something like that yeah.

Andrea:
Certainly the phrases are getting fuller.

Jaycie:
Put in.

Andrea:
Ducks roosters and sheep which neither of those was a particularly huge butchering necessarily, but a little bit here and there does add up quick.

Jaycie:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
I don’t know. I wish I could understand this because this is a sensation that I wish I could have given to myself a long time ago, but I couldn’t.

Jaycie:
Well, maybe I should try going gluten-free because I’m the same way.

Andrea:
We talked about this a while ago, didn’t we? About eating out of your pantry and not wanting to.

Jaycie:
Yeah, I had asked a question in the Discord. I think I just canned a bunch of something and then I took a picture and I was like, okay, how do I use this? Not like, I’m not afraid that it’s not safe. I just want to look at it now that it’s there.

Andrea:
Yeah. I don’t know. Gluten-free, I guess. I really don’t understand. I keep thinking about this and trying to put it into words in my head, but being unable to form it into some sort of a coherent shape.

Jaycie:
I think maybe for me, part of it is I feel like I’m still a beginner at putting up my own food. So for a lot of things, it’s my first or second or third time canning jam or pickles or whatever. So I’m not used to having them on the shelf. Like, that should just be part of a rotation where I’m doing that over and over again, but I haven’t had enough practice understanding how long jars is going to last me. So I feel like, well, if I use it, then I’m going to run out, but that shouldn’t be the way that it works.

Andrea:
I know. If I’m going to use it, it’ll be gone. And is that not the point? But yes, that’s exactly where I have gotten stuck. I don’t think that that was necessarily my problem because I’ve been canning for a long time to the extent that it’s like, okay, we do not need more jelly. Can we just eat some jelly already? And not eating out of the pantry or not ordering things or buying or whatever from as your standard at the grocery store. We make pancakes. Usually, if we run out of maple syrup, it’s not for long. And I’m like, well, I got to get more maple syrup. Well, now the maple syrup is long gone, and so we’re just tearing through the jars of jam. And normally that would make me feel kind of anxious, like, oh, no, we’re using up the jam. And now I’m just like, have another jar, eat it with a spoon. I don’t know. Out with the old and in with the new somehow. I don’t know what’s happening here. Well, here’s one thing about talking about food early in the morning when you haven’t eaten breakfast is it starts to make you hungry.

Jaycie:
Definitely, yes.

Andrea:
So you’re probably drawing near to time to have some kind of breakfast. I don’t know when you usually eat, but you said, didn’t you say you eat later in the morning or something? Now I can’t remember.

Jaycie:
Well, the kids probably won’t be up for another minutes or so. So, yeah. We usually eat first and then I drag my feet about getting out to go milk the goats. That’s the part that usually happens later in the morning.

Andrea:
Okay. Getting chores done on time. Maybe we can just visit this real quick before we get… Is this a first-generation thing? It’s a first-generation thing. It has to be.

Jaycie:
Yes.

Andrea:
Because it’s not, like, drilled into you. I have enough friends who are not first-generation farmers, and I go to their house at a.m., and they’ve already, like, changed everyone’s bedding, and I’m like… Oh, hold on, my phone’s time.

Jaycie:
I have had phases where I have been there, but I also have three little kids and I’ve had periods where I’m pregnant. And no, you’re not getting me out the door to go milk before daylight. It’s just not going to happen. So, yeah, there’s a lot more flexibility in our farm schedule than real farmers. That’s why I’m not a real farmer yet.

Andrea:
Back to the imposter syndrome. I feel like I’ve had seasons where I totally was nailing it. And then Gara will switch to nights or, like you said, I’ll get pregnant or something. We’ll just sort of veer us off course. And then I have to sort of reorganize and find again what works. I feel like having a cow was kind of helpful because there’s always this anchor point. Um that everything else kind of rotated around.

Jaycie:
Yeah i loosely milk, on either end of the day so i milk after breakfast and then after the kids go to bed so it’s usually within it’s like a it’s a roughly hour period but yeah there’s not a set time your goats get really anything noisy.

Andrea:
Like if you’re not out by a certain time or they kind of got like a mental window I expect to see you.

Jaycie:
Yes. Yeah, if I really push it late, then they sure let me know.

Andrea:
Like, excuse me, but you have a job, lady.

Jaycie:
I feel like more often than not they’re yelling about, hey, our feeder is empty.

Andrea:
Oh, they always have opinions about that. That is true. So do kids. come to let you know yes they will well miss jc i’m gonna i guess we’ll wrap up so you have a couple minutes before your children get up but is there anything else you wanted to mention or say on here oh.

Jaycie:
I don’t think so no it’s been nice chatting with you and working through some of the why we make things harder and what we get out.

Andrea:
Of it. A nice early morning chat exploring our inefficiencies. Well, it was amazing. JC, thank you for jumping on and visiting with us this morning. It was a delight.

Jaycie:
Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Andrea:
Have a good morning.

Jaycie:
You too. Bye. Yeah.

Jaycie:
Yeah, I’m the same way. I am curious to see how much fat comes off of these. So there’s lard pigs and there’s bacon or meat pigs. These are bacon and meat pigs. But the next ones that we have, they’re slower growing heritage. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to like the lard more off of them. Mm-hmm. www.ancestralkitchenpodcast.com, our review on Apple Podcasts. And if you know someone who would love our show, tell them about us. You are helping to bring ancestral food wisdom into modern kitchens, changing the world, one plate at a time.