Rain Country Homestead

Have you ever read the ingredients in store bought skin creams? Truly atrocious! Here are two general rules when it comes to ingredients in beauty products: 1). If you do not recognize what it is, it is most likely toxic and should be avoided. 2).   If you should not eat it, you should not be putting it on your skin. Whatever you put on your skin gets absorbed into your blood stream so you might as well be ingesting it. Some the common toxic ingredients found in most store bought skin creams regardless of the price, from budget creams to the high button shoe variety, are:   Parabens, Propylene Glycol,   Sodium Laurel Sulfate, Synthetic Fragrances, Triethanolamine (TEA)/Diethanolamine (DEA), Behentrimonium Chloride, Aluminum. Those are just a few of the long list and these things can cause a plethora of health issues such as rashes, kidney and liver damage, urinary tract and bladder infections, and cancer.   That is just a sampling of th...

If you are vegan or simply cannot have dairy for any reason and have never made your own nutmilk, it is time to start! Making your own means YOU have control over what goes in it and it is far less expensive than store bought.   Have you every really read the labels closely on that over priced container in the store?  Even in many of the so-called organic brands, there is carrageenan and other unhealthy and unsavory ingredients. It really only takes a two ingredients: a healthy water (we use filtered rain water) and whatever your choice of nut or seed you prefer.  You can choose to add your favorite organic sweetener and vanilla extract if you choose. It is incredibly easy and you will be wishing you had started doing this sooner. This batch of nut milk I am making is almond from organic, raw almonds that have not been chemically treated. I have also made coconut, cashew, brazil nut, and hemp seed milks.   How To Make Nut ...

Mr. Rain just loves chocolate syrup for his ice cream (the one splurge I allow from time to time) or for making chocolate milk from the raw goat's milk we get from a friend.  Just like with my organic chocolate pie recipe (another of his favorites) it took time to develop this recipe so that it could be organic and even mostly healthy.  Decadent treats and healthy do not have to be complete strangers! In this recipe you can use honey, coconut sugar, and/or organic cane sugar.  Though I like the honey, Mr. Rain did not care as much for that.  Coconut sugar is a great choice for its high mineral content, but using only that made for a disappointing flavor. I have found going half organic coconut sugar and half organic cane sugar gives the best taste while still allowing for those great minerals provided by the coconut sugar.  RECIPE: * 1 cup organic cane sugar , coconut sugar , or honey  * 1 cup organic whole milk 3/4 cup organic co...

I have not been big on applesauce and even said as much in one of my recent youtube videos.   That is until I pulled out a jar of my blackberry applesauce I had made last year as a last ditch effort to put up more of my abundant apple harvest after I had enough dried apples and apple butters to feed an army. Using the berries was certainly a game changer and gave me a new love for homemade applesauce. I still have bags and bags of raspberries and blueberries I froze up last year from our bushes, not to mention the ones I put up this year, so with my current affinity for berry applesauce, I decided it was time to make more space in my freezer and start canning up some of those berries with this year's apples in what I am realizing is a very versatile form. Here is a bowl of my homemade yogurt with flax , poppy , hemp , and chia seeds and a big dollop of raspberry applesauce. Such a healthy and scrumptious treat! One great thing about applesauce is that there ...

As our garden is nearing its end for the year, I am reflecting back on lessons learned over the past six years since I really started getting serious into growing our own food.   It really began many years earlier when I started growing tomatoes in the greenhouse for the sake of simply having my own for salsa and my Italian sauces.  At the time I knew nothing of starting my plants from seed, I simply went down to the nursery and picked up some tomato plants and transplanted them in the greenhouse and they always did quite well for me.  By 2012, a lot of changes occurred that had me thinking it was time to get serious and start learning how to grow more food of all kinds and to do so from seed.  Some of what led me to this was unexpected and difficult trials we had gone through, some of it was waking up to the realities of our food supply and seeing the direction things were going. This is when I began to expand outside the greenhouse by working up a sm...