Rain Country Homestead

Making your own cough, cold, and flu remedy is not only easy and frugal, it is actually healthy for you too.  It can even be taken daily when not ill as a preventive. To top it off, it is pretty tasty!  The exciting thing for me about this year's blend was using some of my own black elderberries plus the addition of homegrown marshmallow and echinacea leaves and flowers.   I will be writing articles down the road about the many health benefits of both marshmallow and echinacea but for now let me explain a few reasons why these are good choices to add to your cold and flu blend.   Marshmallow has mucilaginous properties making it great for soothing sore throats and calming coughs.  Marshmallow (Althaea officinalis)   Echinacea is an immune strengthener and will kill both bacterial and viral infections.  Both echinacea and marshmallow have analgesic properties making them useful in relieving pain. Echinac...

I have been making vinegar of all kinds for several years and am always experimenting with new fruits, herbs, and blends. Though vinegar is incredibly easy to make, the easiest one is raisin - which also happens to be my favorite because it seems the most versatile. Its smooth, rich flavor and aroma makes it go so well in sautes, salad dressings, making vinegar based extracts, adding to homemade breads, and much more. Newly started batch and a completed batch of raisin vinegar All you need to get started is just three ingredients:  *Water - filtered rain, spring, or well water, NOT city tap *Fruit (whole berries or raisins, sliced fruits, or even just the scraps like peels, cores, and pits from apples, peaches, pears, et cetera) * Organic cane sugar or honey (not needed with fruits that have a high sugar content like raisins). When making vinegar with berries or raisins, start with a half gallon jar and fill the bottom up to at least 1"-2" inch...

I had someone ask awhile ago if we were actually off grid or if we just explore with it. Well the answer is sort of both. We are still connected to public water and power, however, we live mostly off grid throughout the year.   Making beef jerky on the wood stove in the fall with the dehydrating rack Mr. Rain built Since we have an extensive solar power set up, summer is easiest for us to be pretty independent of the grid. We are not grid tied with our solar and we plan to keep it that way. We want what is ours to be ours. Period.  For a rather detailed explanation of our solar set up, here is a video Mr. Rain did on it: From spring through fall, I do all my canning in my All American Canner on a propane burner outside and much of my cooking in our Solavore Solar Oven and on our Stovetec Rocket Stove .  When cooking outside is not an option, or I am baking breads and pies, that is when I utilize the solar power to run my toaster oven and hot ...

Until recently, I had never had pickled eggs of any kind, not the modern way with vinegar nor the old fashioned fermented way.  I had no idea if I was going to like them but I do know I love hard boiled eggs and I had recently had someone ask me if my fermentation starter would work for this process so I had to do some experimenting to find out. The answer is, yes, the fruit based fermentation starter works very well though one can also use whey if they prefer. Since I do not always have whey on hand unless I am making a lot of cheese, I stick to my fermentation starter as it is always readily available for all my fermenting needs. Fermenting eggs is super easy and I was in love with them from my first try.  Since then, I have been experimenting with different spices and such to see what kind of flavors I can get. Pictured below are two of my fermentation starters on the top left: Apple- Honey and Blueberry.   Top right are simple salted eggs ...

To call it a "Latte" is a bit of a stretch since I rarely make up my own cup with milk, though the homemade coconut or almond milk is really good in it. Mr. likes his with some raw goat milk.  It all started in trying to come up with both a coffee replacement and a way to get more healing spices and roots into my daily diet to help with our thyroid since I had made the choice to take us both off our prescription thyroid medications.  The main focus in this  was both the Maca  root and Ashwagandha root.  These roots are adaptogens, meaning they help the body cope with stress of any kind, and both are very beneficial to thyroid and adrenal function.   Here is a snippet from an article on ashwagandha by Dr. Josh Axe:  Animal studies reveal ashwagandha has a thyroid hormone balancing effect.  In a 20 days study mice were give ashwagandha and their T3 and T4 levels were analyzed along with lipid peroxidation (anti-oxidant ...

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...