Winter giveaway: Kate Downham's 'A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen'
My dog-eared copy is a chief kitchen reference book.
It’s fitting that I first learned about the subject of this season’s giveaway through another… giveaway. That one was over at Permies.com, an online permaculture community where I spend a fair amount of time researching, reading, and contributing. I did not win that giveaway, but Kate Downham’s book A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen: Homestead Kitchen Skills and Real Food Recipes for Resilient Health caught my attention enough to warrant immediate purchase. I’ve been her fan ever since.
With A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen, Kate provides all this and more:
A time-saving, more efficient, and even healthier technique for baking with sourdough starter
Clear, no-nonsense instruction in vegetable fermentation
A stunning recipe—and helpful method—for making elderberry oxymel
A way of cooking with oatmeal that makes it easier to digest
Many delicious recipes, including one for carrot salad I’ve written about previously
A superior introduction to water-bath canning
While there are plenty of sources out there—you can watch endless sourdough-making videos on YouTube, take fermentation classes, and Google ‘elderberry recipes’ ‘til the cows come home—it’s the rare source that cuts through all the noise and delivers practical, time-tested techniques based on a real, honest-to-goodness life of homesteading. A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen is that rare source.
I’ll give you one example of how not all homesteading tips are the same: The conventional wisdom on making jellies and jams is to use copious amounts of white sugar and pectin. Kate’s method, on the other hand, sidesteps both, harkening back to a time before we instituted those modern crutches—at the expense of our health.
Kate and her family raise animals, grow fruits and vegetables, forage for edible flora, and preserve and prepare their bounty via an off-grid farm in Australia. She blogs about their experiences at The Nourishing Hearthfire.
Kate defines their chosen sustenance as “pretty much anything our great great great great grandparents would have recognized as food, long before the advent of supermarkets and factories.” Eschewing processed food and trendy ingredients, the Downhams eat a whole-foods omnivore diet. Besides the fruits and vegetables they grow organically using permaculture principles and the forage that is naturally pesticide-free, that includes meat from animals they’ve humanely raised themselves—and Kate’s book details how to use every last part. Their diet also includes healthy fat and fermented grains. All of this is prepared on a wooden cook stove, an essential component of their off-grid lifestyle.
Remember, though, that Anthony and I are homesteading here on just 1/4-acre in the suburbs. We’re entirely on-grid, cook on a gas stove (and no, we’re not keen to give that up), and yet Kate’s book has become our go-to in the kitchen. Her tips are absolutely applicable to any situation.
I highly recommend A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen and am excited to announce that once our series on Kate’s book wraps, we’ll choose a paid subscriber at random, and that person will receive a free paperback copy.
If you can’t wait for the giveaway, feel free to go ahead and buy your own copy, but we ask that you please use our affiliate link when you do. You’ll be helping us out, at least theoretically, as Brunette Gardens might earn a teeny, tiny commission at no extra cost to you. Yeah, that’s how it works, right?
Next week, I’ve invited Kate to tell you her homesteading story herself as a guest author. Later, I’ll delve into that nifty sourdough tweak I learned from her book.
I leave you with the official description for A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen. Happy suburban homesteading!
Learn the skills that helped our ancestors to thrive in harsh times...
When the panic buying, empty shelves, and restrictive rations hit in March 2020, it was not a problem for Kate Downham and her family, because she knew these skills, and knew how to feed her family without the supermarket system. With the help of this book, you can learn these skills too.
Learn traditional methods of preserving pork without electricity. Make your own cheese, butter, and other dairy essentials. Learn sourdough bread recipes that take only 5 minutes of hands-on time to make. Preserve fruit and vegetables in many ways—from failproof fermenting through to jams, chutneys, pickles, and water bath canning.
Learn one skill at a time while also finding recipe inspiration in seasonal local recipes that are designed to be cooked in everyday homestead life. These recipes have been tested in many different kitchens, and will work on wood stoves as well as conventional electric and gas cookers. Many variations and ingredient substitutions are included to help you make the recipes with whatever ingredients are on hand at the time, along with useful indexes to help make use of seasonal abundance.