An ashram is nothing more than a house where we try to live in accordance with principles to sustain inner growth, inner evolution. Shri Rajagopalachari, (Salient Features 5, p. 20)

For years and years, I have secretly thought of our home as an ashram (a spiritual place of refuge from the modern material world). Perhaps more precisely, I think of it as a gurukulam (a spiritual place of learning and teaching) by day and an ashram by night. I find that thinking of my environment this way naturally orders my activities and conditions my behavior towards inner growth. My acting on this attitude benefits not only me but especially benefits my husband and children as a mother’s actions and attitudes pervade her home like a fragrance.

For a very long time, we have prayed as a family and then mulled over our prayer twice a day, morning and evening. With such young children involved, we have found that the timing of our meditative time together and the routines established for before and after our meditative time together can make or break the effectiveness of what we are trying to do. Also by establishing useful routines and timings, we are training our children towards a lifetime habit so care is required on our part.

Working out the details of our meditative time in the evening has been fairly straightforward (although you might be surprised with how orchestrated it all must be in order to have any chance of the children carrying their quieted conditions all the way upstairs to their beds!). However, I have puzzled and puzzled over finding the best place in the morning routine for family prayer. Should we do it right off the bat before we do anything else? No… it feels too on the fly with children in night clothes and hungry and the cows lowing to be milked. Should we do it after milking the cows but before breakfast? No… everyone is really hungry by then and we are kind of in the middle of flurried activity. It would be hard to fully turn our attention to prayer at that time. Should we gather in the living room after eating breakfast but before washing up from breakfast? After washing up from breakfast? We have to keep in mind that it is getting kind of “late” now compared to what we adults might otherwise think of as the meditating and praying times of the morning. Plus if it gets too late and outside of established routines for each person then everyone gets caught up in mundane daily activities, the children have to be pulled from play and so on in order to settle down and in. On the other hand, it feels right to sit together and think of Him in a place that is picked up and with everyone personally prepared. But, of course, we are supposed to be starting the day with meditative time not having it with brunch!

These might seem like small details of little import. However I can say from long experience that these seemingly small details reverberate throughout the day. The delicate dance of daily family/ ashram/gurukulam life performed to the music of high aspirations requires well thought out choreography in order to create beauty and future value. What is at stake also is training the children into good habits and living by the maxims. For instance, Maxim 1 tells us to be regular in our morning routine, have a special place for meditation/prayer and to pay particular attention to purity of mind and body. There is much here in just this one maxim to help direct family life, including the training of children and the establishing of routines.

A few days ago, I finally got around to assigning “zones” to each of the children to facilitate whole house clean up. I remind them that the more they do around the house that they are capable of doing, the more time I have to do for them that which they actually cannot do for themselves. This time after reminding them of this, I gave them each a zone of the house to be responsible for. We decided that zone assignments will rotate monthly so that eventually all of them will know how to maintain a house. I typed up their assignments so that we could all remember. Now, at what time of day should these zone clean-ups take place? Just before lessons in the morning? Just before dinner?

This morning another piece of the puzzle suddenly popped into my mind. From out of the blue right after breakfast, I remembered Lalaji’s Daily Routine for Satsanghis so I went directly and looked it up. Granted He wrote for a different time and place but still I figured his advice was more than worth consulting. In what order did He suggest the morning activities should go?

He advises the following: everyone gets up before sunrise; everyone cleans the house including sweeping and making beds, dusting and so forth; everyone then washes themselves up as needed; incense is burned in the specific place for meditation, clean mats are spread and clean clothes worn; worship or meditation is done together by family members; everyone exercises for 15 minutes and then a simple breakfast is eaten.

I think this is great. It exactly speaks to my current question so I share it with my husband who also agrees to make use of this list of suggestions. We have to tweak it some as we are in no way going to get the children up before sunrise! Plus we have to work the milking of cows into the schedule and deal with the effect of hunger on children’s ability to sit quietly. But this still, this list provides a great jumping off point.

In a series of posts I will talk about what we in our family call “Sahaj Sunday” but suffice it to say here that there is a special feeling in our home on Fridays and Saturdays because we are all preparing together for Sahaj Sunday. By the same token, following a morning routine grounded in our craving for inner evolution and drawn from the advice of the spiritual Masters, we can have a similar feeling every day as we are preparing ourselves and our home/ashram/gurukulam for morning prayer.

I quickly put the children through their zone clean up assignments during which time our seven year old washed the breakfast dishes. With the house and ourselves in readiness, we gathered in the peacefully clean living room and said the prayer and sat quietly. As we prayed, it started to rain. This felt like a special blessing on the morning. Rain under such circumstances is taken as auspicious anyway but as we are experiencing serious drought here, the rain was truly notable.

A very beautiful feeling or condition filled us and our place and carried us sweetly to the end of the day. I think we finally found our morning routine.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

During the nearly two years my family and I have been homesteading, we have often found that something we need is not available in the marketplace. It seems odd that in a time in history when we have more stuff than in any previous time, we have to search high and low for simple tools and systems for natural living and homesteading. Often even a thorough search turns up nothing so we end up having to invent or adapt something to meet our homesteading needs.

For many years, my wife has had a general idea about creating an “outdoor bamboo shower” where the wall are made of rustling bamboo and you can see the sky and feel the sun while you shower with a modest amount of solar heated warm water. When I recently discovered a source of free Yellow Groove bamboo, I set out to make her dream a reality. The project is now complete and it exceeds all of our expectations. After making a number of adjustments, we now have a fully functionally outdoor bamboo shower with a 50 gallon solar heated hot water tank. My first diary on the subject found here (with videos) was about digging up and transplanting a bamboo grove, harvesting a quantity of bamboo poles, and building the shower itself with lumber and the bamboo poles. This diary is about building the solar heated water tank. Embedded videos of the process are below.

We have a lot of pressing needs on our homestead right now including completing a strawbale milking barn and a strawbale chicken shed. Working on an outdoor shower at the end of the summer did not seem particularly critical but the project took on a life of its own. After posting about the first part of the project here, I received some helpful comments including this one.

During the summer, I have a black plastic trashcan that sits in the sunniest part of the yard and provides the perfect temps by the end of the day.

I use 64 OZ plastic bottles with handles and holes drilled in the lids for my “shower” both in summer and winter (in the winter, the shower is a black contractors cement mixing tub placed by the wood stove.). The plastic bottles are acquired by eating a lot of Pace Picante sauce and are also kept by the sink for hand and dish washing.

Using an easy to rinse off soap like Dr. Bronners, one can get completely clean with one 64 OZ bottle of water.

Since we have been using two black plastic trash cans for water storage for years, I was familiar with her idea. The idea came to me to put a valve in the bottom of one of our water storage trash cans and run some hose or PVC pipe from it to the shower. As it was already late August I thought I would shelve the idea until next year. As it turns out the idea’s time had come regardless of the calendar or any other priorities. When I went into a hardware store for something else, I decided to take a look at the hose attachment hardware just to have an idea of what was available. I found a nozzle that would screw onto the end of the hose that could also be caulked into the trash can quite easily. I bought it immediately and the project was back on.

The building process involved a few more adaptations that are progressively documented in the videos. For instance the silicone caulk turned out to be too weak. I went back to the hardware store and asked for something thing that had threads, a nut and some washers so that the weak and toxic caulking could be done away with altogether. One of the hardware store staff thought an outdoor faucet would work if paired with some 0 rings. He was right. It did. After installation, the water could be turned on and off right from the tank itself. This was a good improvement.

The next problem to solve was the water pressure at the “shower head” (which is a hose attachment for watering gardens). What followed was a good deal of experimentation with the height of the now water tank, its distance from the shower and the length of the hose between the two. After finding satisfactory heights, distances and lengths as well as building a simple platform for the tank and learning how to add a new hose end cap to the severed hose, we achieved enough water pressure to take a very pleasant shower.

Finally, I wanted to see how quickly we could bring up the temperature of the 50 gallons of water in the tank. After doing some research online, I found a website that sells clear plastic liners that float on the top of the water in hot tubs, pools and watering troughs for animals. The flexible type of Plexiglas they use lets the sun in and minimizes heat loss due to evaporation. I found an old piece of Plexiglas in one of our outbuildings and cut it to fit the top of the hot water tank. This Plexiglas is not flexible and does not float like the kind the web site offers but it does the trick. Our tank has reached temperatures over 100 degrees and that in mid September. So we now have a functional 50 gallon hot water tank for our outdoor bamboo shower for under $35 dollars and a couple of days’ work. Everyone in the family has used it from the 5 year old all the way up and everyone loves using this natural and refreshing shower. The shower also provides a wonderful object lesson in water conservation as the entire family can easily shower with about a gallon of water per person.

In the interest of getting multiple uses out of the same resources, we are planning on more uses for the tank in different seasons of the year. For instance, in the winter the livestock watering tanks can freeze over. The ice even here in Virginia can be a couple of inches thick in the morning. Cows need a lot of water to facilitate digestion and maintain their milk supply so we have had to break the ice every cold winter morning and remove it from the trough. The cows will drink much more water if it is warm so we have often been required to lug gallons of hot water from the house to the trough. Outdoor water faucets and hoses can freeze as well so again lugging hot water has sometimes been the only answer.

Since cows drink 10 to 15 gallons at a time and since power outages can last for days, having back up water reserves is essential. As simple winter time water storage, this 50 gallon solar hot water tank could prove to be very useful. If the tank holds any heat at all in the winter it could be used to give the cows slightly warmer water and will be a great back up for power outages. If nothing else, we will be drawing water from the bottom of the tank with the faucet so the water will be ice free. If the tank continues to stay 10 to 20 degrees above outside air temperature then I may well build a few more for winter use. I could even bank them with straw bales to help hold in heat.

A final note on bamboo: There was some interesting discussion about the merits of bamboo on my last post so I want to take a moment to add some positive information about this generous grass. Bamboo sends up new growth once a year, usually in the spring. The rhizome or root ball increases its mass all summer, fall and winter and by spring it has usually doubled in size. At that point it sends up shoots which usually double the size of the plant depending upon water and weather variables. The new shoots grow quickly - as much as a meter a day in some varieties - making bamboo the quickest growing plant in the world. The new culm or cane of the bamboo reaches its maximum height anywhere from a few days to a few months after sprouting depending upon the variety. After reaching its full height, the leaves unfold within a week or so and then that particular culm is done growing forever. The next year most of the new shoots will grow a little bit taller than the shoots from the previous year and this process will continue until new shoots reach the maximum height and density for that particular variety.

What makes bamboo such an incredible renewable resource is that the whole grove can be clear cut and the timber harvested and the rhizome will still continue to grow. The next year it will again send up new shoots. So this spreading root system that is often feared because of is unrestrained creative life force is in many ways actually a blessing as it is such a valuable renewable resource. The giant timber bamboos that reach diameters of 10 inches and heights above 80ft can supply wood for all purposes and reach that height in one growing season. It takes decades for trees to reach that height and most trees die after they have been “harvested”.

Bamboo cultivation is still in its infancy in the west but bamboo already has a wide variety of uses. Here are a few:

â—¬ Bamboo for lumber. Bamboo can be used for lumber and it is often harder and more durable than traditional hardwoods. Since bamboo is such a quick growing renewable resource, using bamboo instead for appropriate traditional lumber applications would save trees.

â—¬ Animal Forage. Bamboo is a grass and our cows, goats and donkey love it. There is research being done on bamboo as animal forage which I am watching. The potential for bamboo to act as “vertical pasture” is exciting, especially for small landholdings like ours.

â—¬ Bamboo can be used as a fiber for rugs, blinds, matting, fencing, thatch for roofs, baskets and even cloth. Right now the bamboo for cloth comes with an environmental price but again the uses for bamboo are still only now beginning to be fully developed and explored here in the west.

Here are links to the videos documenting how I built the solar heated water tank:

Bamboo Shower Project Update$35 50 Gallon Solar Hot Water Tank (Part 1)

Bamboo Shower Project Update$35 50 Gallon Solar Hot Water Tank (Part 2)

Bamboo Shower Project Update$35 50 Gallon Solar Hot Water Tank (Part 3)

All the best,

Paul

If it is always a mistake to underestimate the abilities of enthusiastic children, then how much greater a mistake is it to underestimate the abilities of a team of enthusiastic children?

Our cows spend their days in the pasture. Our milking barn is next to the pasture but outside of it in what would otherwise be known as the “yard”. So every morning we lead the cows out of the pasture, one by one, milk them and then lead them back into the pasture, one by one. Lately, though, we have been leaving the cows out in the yard to graze after milking. The grass there is still long and lush, even with the drought we have been experiencing. Getting Phoebe and Pezra to go back into the (rather lean) pasture from the (rather lush) yard can be very tricky, however. Getting two 1200 pound animals to do something they don’t particularly want to do is a serious undertaking.

This morning the cows were grazing in the yard when we decided to go back to Rocky Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway for Nature Study and a picnic. We had to get ready quickly to beat some of the mid-day heat. As I was making preparations inside, cows and children dashing by a window caught my attention. I ran outside to see how they were doing in their part of getting ready for a hike/picnic.

What I saw was four young children working like a well-oiled team to drive the family cows back into their pasture. Andrew, the five year old, manned the gate. This job takes some knowledge as the heifers and donkey have to be kept in the pasture while the gate is opened in the right direction and with the correct timing to encourage a reluctant (or briskly trotting, you never know) cow to go in. The other three children, armed with nothing more than cheerful determination, considerable experience and long bamboo rods worked together to drive first Phoebe and then Pezra to the gate. Anna is particularly good at anticipating what move an animal will make next and is fearless in responding appropriately to that move. Will is patient, cooperative and a fast runner. I am not sure what Faith’s particular expertise might be in this area of cow management but when I later asked Will if she were helpful with the getting the cows back into the pasture, he immediately replied with an, “Oh, yes!”

So there you go – another skill learned on the old homestead/homeschool and another weft in the beautiful fabric of family life.

And the hike and picnic were wonderful, by the way. Rocky Knob is a scenic area full of natural surprises and local history in which we all take a deep interest. The picnic featuring local bread, cheese and apples from Greens Garage was delicious and the children told each other stories about what they saw and heard while hiking all the way home.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

At this time of human intellectual and social development, we do almost everything with the so-called aid of technology. But perhaps we are a bit indiscriminate about applying technology to so many human activities of daily life? How often do we stop and assess whether or not using human power is sufficient or even preferable? Does the overlay of technology create an unwanted distance from natural life? Does the use of technology in any given activity weaken its user?

I have appreciated Amish culture for many, many years and have studied it a little as I can. People have a passing idea of what Amish life looks like and conclude that the Amish are anti-technology. This is a convenient misunderstanding. The reality is that the Amish are very discriminatory about which technologies they allow into their lives, families and societies. “Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?” is the question they thoroughly study with regard to each technological possibility. Their answers, innovations and adaptations in response to rigorously asking this question are instructive.

As a family, I think we focus more on the question “Does the use of any given technology weaken us or distance us from important natural experiences and information? Does it make us dependent upon the wrong thing?” One area where these questions are easy for us to answer is in the milking of our family cows.

Now there could be an argument for milking our cows by machine. For one thing, they both started out their milking careers being machine milked. For another, one of our cows is pretty hard to milk by hand as her teats are small (by cow standards!). I have been the only one who can effectively milk her (my husband’s hands are too big for her tight quarters and most of the children’s hands haven’t had the necessary strength) but I have inflammation in my left wrist and fingers that is significantly aggravated by the kind of daily milking this cow requires. However, her milk is very sweet and easy to digest so we want to do whatever it takes to get her milk.

These challenges notwithstanding, our answer to the important questions about creating weaknesses and unnecessary dependencies remains the same in this case. We don’t want them and we think milking by machine would create them in us. So hand milking it is!

It turns out that there are many wonderful advantages to milking the family cow(s) by hand. Here are a few from the sublime to the practical:

1. You sit down low next to your cow with your head right next to her flank when you hand milk. When you and she know each other well, you can rest your head against her while you work and breathe in her sweet aroma. It is amazing how enlivening this simple contact is.

2. You can hear your cow chewing the feed you give her which is a soothing and somehow reassuring sound.

3. Twice a day, you quietly join the rest of creation out in the weather and the great outdoors. Since the loudest sound you make while hand milking is the sound of the milk hitting the pail, you can easily hear the birds, the wind, the falling rain or whatever else your locale is brewing for the day.

4. Hand milking and the nature of dairy cows encourages you to sing with the rhythm of the milking. The cows give more milk when you do this nicely and as for the person singing in rhythm with their milking, “It is good for the body and the soul.” (as our children say).

5. Working with the early morning sky or the darkening winter sky, the birdsong and the breeze, the aroma and the sounds of the cow herself and the physical rhythm of hand milking and your own singing give you a fruitful time to think and get a measure of the day or night before you. You begin and end your days in connection with all that is yours both inside and out.

6. It takes at least two of us to easily handle all aspects of hand milking. This includes opening and closing gates, getting hay into the feed bucket, moving the cows back and forth as well as the actual washing and hand milking and carrying the milk into the house. Having an electrical set up plus all the infrastructure machine milking requires would make it easy for only one adult to handle the whole thing. This would be a loss for our children and for the family. We actually want plenty of daily tasks where our children’s abilities and cooperation are essential for success, where teamwork is a necessity. If we didn’t already have these opportunities built into our family life, we would have to invent them. We find that it is better in every way to come by these varied tasks honestly, naturally and spontaneously in the course of daily living.

7. Hand milking requires physical strength, a sense of rhythm, agility, quick reflexes, attention to detail, the ability to read the mood of another being, patience, perseverance, and inner quiet. In other words, it is a great builder of physical skills and noble character. It improves adults and seasons children just right. Furthermore with the earth facing such an uncertain future, having young people who know how to gentle a cow and get milk from her by hand could be a skill that would benefit everyone in their neighborhood. It is one of those skills from the past that will have a special place in the future.

8. Hand milking preserves the delicate sweetness of the milk. Milk needs to be handled gently to retain all of its flavor and nutrition. Milking machines bash the milk around a lot more to the detriment of the milk. Hand milking and hand processing keeps everything nice and easy all the way from the barn to the table.

9. When you can’t throw technology or money at a problem, you are forced to fall back on more inventive human-powered strategies. When I injured my knee last fall and couldn’t walk to the barn much less sit on a stool, my 15 year old daughter had to quickly find the strength to milk out the cow I always milk. Carolyn did find that strength to the betterment of us all. We discovered as a result that this cow loves Mozart. Plus Carolyn and my husband were close teammates for several weeks and Carolyn got to start her day early with a sense of accomplishment and contribution. Now a year later, two other children are coming on line to be able to hand milk. This brings us much more benefit and security than a milking machine ever could.

10. Too much infrastructure would be required for us to reasonably use an electric machine for milking. We prefer to keep our outbuildings simple and our expenses low. Besides, hand milking is portable. We can go milk them out in the field if we want to.

11. We aren’t dependent upon electricity now for getting milk from our cows and we surely don’t want to create any new dependencies in our lives if we can avoid it. We might as well stick with the simplicity and discipline of the hand milking to which we are already accustomed.

12. There are certainly times and places for machine milking. One of those times is if you have so many cows in milk at one time that your entire family as a team cannot reasonably milk them. If we found ourselves in that situation, however, then perhaps we would also find that we had gotten away from a human scale of endeavor. Perhaps feeling that a machine is suddenly necessary to do what human power has been doing perfectly well up to that point would be sign that the true capacity of the family had been exceeded and re-evaluation and scaling back would be in order. Perhaps more is not always better.

13. There is a tremendous amount of careful washing up required when working with milk anyway. Why add the tedious washing up of endless machine parts and milk lines if you don’t have to? I would rather use my hands to milk our cows directly than to wash ever more pieces of flotsam and jetsam.

14. Hand milking is free. Well, you need a stool and a pail. You have to buy the pail. You really do. But you can make the stool. My husband did and we love that handmade stool made from the wood of a tree on our property he cut down and we all worked hard to cut up into manageable pieces.

But that brings us to an entirely new discussion of working with wood by hand which we will save for another post some time in the future.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

A few years ago, I had to face facts. Preparing three meals a day plus generous snacks for 8 hungry homesteaders, learning how to make our daily bread and cheese with at least a little bit of variety, drawing intelligently from the nearly 100 cookbooks on my bookshelves and my modest little recipe box, and having to at least double every recipe in my head (while inevitably being frequently petitioned by the aforementioned homesteaders during these complex calculations) all the while I was slowly losing visual acuity and sharpness of memory was taking its toll. It was time to take action! I could no longer just take a cookbook off a shelf, flip open to a familiar recipe and smoothly and easily execute that recipe. Instead I was plagued by questions with each meal: Now which book did that come from? How many times do I have to increase this particular recipe in order to have leftovers? What was that thing I did last time to this that everybody liked so much? Didn’t we have this for a special occasion the first time we had it – when was that? What kind of cake do I always make for Faithy’s birthday?

I found a very simple solution that serves many functions and means these perplexing questions never have to come up. This solution is inexpensive, flexible and easily located. I am not dependent upon any pretty system or book that may or may not still be in print plus I have a valuable record for the future at my finger tips. In other words, I type up every recipe on my computer. Here is what I do in more detail:

1. I needed something easy to read at a glance from a distance. So I chose the Verdana font which is bold and easy to read. I type the titles in 14 pt. bold and the recipes themselves in 12 pt. bold. Very easy to read. Makes up for the fact that I am losing visual acuity and that bifocals are only a partial solution to this particular problem. I thought having a little color would be nice but everything still needed to be easy to read, so I finally chose “indigo” and all the recipes are printed in that dark blue color.

2. Extra information is great to have when cooking for many people for many years. Sometimes this extra info is cultural as in the cornmeal pudding we often have for breakfast is Brazilian. Sometimes the info is health related like a certain khichari is soothing for all doshas (this is Ayuvedic talk). In any case, any explanatory information about a recipe I type in italics at the top. Any information personal to our family I type in italics at the bottom. I may note on which occasion we first tried something and loved it. I can note who has what for their birthday. I definitely note ideas to try for next time. Serving ideas, accompanying dishes – anything I want – can be noted in italics at the bottom.

3. The main advantage to using this system is the following. I can learn through trial and error how much to expand a recipe and then re-calculate the recipe for that amount and write all of those numbers down! Oh, this is big. I no longer have to double this and that but remember to not so much double the turmeric for this recipe or more than double the salt for that one. It is all written down and all I have to do is follow what is printed on the page. How wonderful. I can also note how much to make to leave enough to freeze for another meal. On the other hand, there are some recipes where I might have a reason to make a single batch. Biscuits, for example, are something of which I may on rare occasion only need a few. In such cases, I write down the singular original amounts in parentheses at the bottom of the page.

4. I often have to amend the procedure of a recipe. For instance, I know from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook that you should always skim the foam off of beans or pulses after you first bring them to a boil. This removes impurities. Well most recipes do not include this step so I can easily include it when I type up my own version. This helps me to remember not to put in the spices with which the beans or pulses will be cooked until after I skim off the foam. Another example of a procedural change is in my Cabbage Vegetable Soup recipe. The original recipe upon which mine is based only added certain spices at the end of the cooking time in the conventional manner. However, I know from years of Indian cooking that a way to bring out the flavors of spices is to fry them quickly in hot oil and then pour them into the soup. Ah, the soup and the recipe are transformed and I don’t have to remember to do that. I can just read it on the printed page.

5. At the very bottom of each page, in 10 pt (not bold), I always add the origin of the recipe, book title, magazine title, page number and whatever. That way, should I ever need it, the information is there. Also I can go double check amounts easily or suggested accompanying dishes or whatever else may come up.

6. Finally I print out the perfected and annotated recipe and slip it into a heavy weight crystal clear sheet protector. My recipes are now impervious to spills and splatters but available to slip out and write on, if necessary. Turning the heavy clear pages is very satisfying as I flip through a binder, by the way.

7. I have about a half dozen ½” binders I use to hold all of these recipes. I really don’t want any one of the binders to be too big and cumbersome so I split recipes up between them. I have a nice blue one reserved for Indian food. I have several green ones used individually for breads, main dishes and other regular foods, and beans and lentils. The final green one holds directions, pamphlets, instructions for equipment and things like that. Finally I have an orange binder I use to hold cheese recipes. All of these binders are the type with plastic covers on the outside into which you can slip art work, contents of the binders or whatever you want. I still have to finish beautifying mine. Several of them have drawings by one of my son’s which makes them look nice and feel meaningful. All of these binders sit on my bookshelf with all of my cookbooks. They are easy to find and yet blend in nicely.

I have found that this common sense method for collecting our recipes serves many functions:

1. I don’t have to remember in which book or recipe box a recipe is located. It is in the appropriate binder.

2. I don’t have to remember whether or not to double or triple a recipe. This greatly reduces my stress.

3. I don’t have to recalculate doubled or tripled amounts every time I cook. Again, this greatly reduces my stress in the kitchen.

4. I don’t have to remember what I wanted to try with a recipe next time. I can write it down to wait there for me to find whenever I happen to prepare that dish next. My actual cookbooks can stay fairly pristine.

5. I can easily read my recipes now. No squinting at smallish, fancily printed cookbooks that won’t stay open on the counter.

6. Every page is protected from water and other potential kitchen accidents. If something really difficult were to happen, I could easily print out another copy.

7. I can decorate all of this (binders and recipe pages) to my heart’s content – or not. Whatever may strike me. I can also change the look or the organization at little cost.

8. Over time, I am casually building up a written list of traditions associated with food for my family. Reading notes and anecdotes attached to recipes is really fun and brings the dinner table to life. Stories associated with food are even fun to read when they are from someone else’s family and make for charming cookbooks. How much better when the stories you are reading are your own.

9. Finally, and this is very important to me and to the family’s future, I am gradually creating an entire set of recipes, instructions, anecdotes and family history all ready to pass on to each of my six children. All I have to do is print it all out and arrange it. There will be no laborious copying out of recipe cards or the filling of cutsey recipe books that run out of pages. When I type out methods and procedures for recipes which I actually already know how to do, I have my children in mind and know that I am typing all of that out for them. Some day they will be reading this method I am typing out right now (I think as I type madly away) and use it to feed their family (which will possibly even include my husband and me!). This motivates me to be careful and detailed when I otherwise might not take the time to be.

A tremendous amount of love, work and research is woven into these recipe binders. I am happy knowing that I have a way to easily pass the results on to my children. May they build upon the recipe sets they receive from me and go on to create even more expanded sets for their children. May the family’s knowledge of natural, simple, health building food preparation deepen and grow into the future.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie