There is something special about meals made from scratch. Meals made from ingredients collected on our land give me this warm, cozy feeling. With the seasons changing, what we eat is changing, as well. It’s time for some cold-weather meals.

With the pantry low on stock, I can’t say no to a basket of pears. A basket of pears showed up on my table, so I took them home to dry. I forgot them under my shelf for a week, so I set out to “quickly” chop them up.

Fall came quickly this year. Nights are getting chilly.

My afternoons are spent fixing the roof, but there are all the things that always need to get done. The usual chaos, so to say. I am getting better (and faster) at al of it. Slowly, I am adding more skills, as others become routine.

I was almost done with the first half of the roof. When I put it in, I realized the hut was a lot more off kilter than I’d thought. I’d have to do it all again.

We eat a lot of potatoes. But I had no clue just how many. I was sure, what I canned last time would last a while. I was wrong. So, I ordered more potatoes, and went back to work. This time, I’ll explain it all.

There are times when everything happens at once. You feel like you are always about to start or do something. You’ll “just quickly” do this and that before. At the end of the day, you haven’t started. But somehow, it all gets done in the end.

It is harvest season out there. While my own balcony still needs a few weeks (assuming any of them survive all the rain of the last weeks), much of nature is ready to harvest, the farmer’s in the area are overflowing with tomatoes, and my garden neighbor’s garden is so bountiful, I always go home with baskets or arms filled with fresh produce.

Preserving food is hard. Or rather, learning how to preserve food is hard. The last week’s were a fun trip through my early adventures in canning while the weather was too moody to work on the garden.

When working from home, weekends and weekdays can become blurred. But even in hectic times, I try to take two days a week off. It’s not always the actual weekend. Most weeks, thanks to the structure my husband’s office job provides, Saturday and Sunday tend to be the slow days of the week.

I am rarely home alone. My husband and I both work from our shared apartment. Last week, he was traveling for work, so I spent three days on my own schedule: cleaning the balcony garden, cooking, and visiting the chicken our eggs come from.