Real Food Kitchen Tour: Artist Ruth Creative

Welcome to another edition of the Real Food Kitchen Tour. This week, we will be touring the kitchen of Ruth Hofer, author of Artist Ruth Creative.

What’s a Real Foodie?

A “real foodie” is someone who cooks “traditional” food. We cook stuff from scratch using real ingredients, like raw milk, grass-fed beef, eggs from chickens that run around outdoors, whole grains, sourdough and yogurt starters, mineral-rich sea salt, and natural sweeteners like honey and real maple syrup.

We don’t use modern foods that are either fake, super-refined, or denatured. This includes modern vegetable oils like Crisco and margarine, soy milk, meat from factory farms, pasteurized milk from cows eating corn and soybeans, refined white flour, factory-made sweeteners like HFCS or even refined white sugar, or commercial yeast.

We believe in eating wholesome, nutrient-dense foods that come from nature. So we shop at farmer’s markets or buy direct from the farmer, or we grow food in our own backyards.

This Week’s Real Food Kitchen Tour: Artist Ruth Creative

This week we travel all the way to Australia to tour the kitchen of Ruth Hofer, author of Artist Ruth Creative.

Ruth is also our newest Village Green Network blogger. We’re so excited to have her join the Village Green Network!

Blog Name: Artist Ruth Creative
Blog Authors: Ruth (artistruth). I am a professional visual artist but as stay-at-home 28 year old mama to three little girls I don’t have much time to devote to my art career. So I pour my creativity into my kitchen, turning the food I nourish my family with into an art. I’m also a yoga instructor and my husband is an Acupuncturist. I’ve been into health and real food for a long time now, but my journey started out as a vegan, then I got into raw foods (I used to blog for rawmom.com) and then I discovered the work of Weston Price. My dietary ideas have transitioned a lot since being a raw vegan (I regularly eat liver!) but still see the value of short term cleansing on such a diet.
How Long Blogging: I started my blog about a 2 years ago as a way of showcasing my art. For the last 8 months have started using it more as a blog: having an ongoing dialogue with the world from my little sunny corner of it.
Location: Living by the ocean in the Gold Coast region, semi tropical eastern Australia.
House or Apartment: Renting an apartment
Size of kitchen: About 13 x 10 feet
Things you love about your kitchen: The view! And having a dishwasher (we own it, as the apartment didn’t come with one). And while it isn’t actually a feature of the kitchen I love where we live as we have year round local and organic farmers markets nearby.
Things you would change: I would love a gas cooktop and a larger fridge
Favorite Tools and Gadgets: I have this little machine that turns zucchini and carrots and diakon radishes into noodles (which is awesome if you are a raw foodist or on GAPS) I think its called a spirilizer, a friend gave it to me and it doesn’t have a brand name on it so I’m not sure. I also love my high powered blender, and our slow juicer. I love cooking in terracotta clay pots and collect them from thrift stores. I also have a set of the glass/ceramic vision cookware pots, we transitioned away from cooking in metal pots and pans a few years ago (my husband loves the work of Hulda Clark) and you really do notice a difference in taste. After lots of use, the clay pots have the flavour of food infused into them.
Biggest Challenges Cooking Real Food: All the dishes to wash! And where to store all the glass jars you seem to accumulate. Another challenge is remembering to plan ahead: you know, soaking, fermenting, marinating etc. Other then that though it is fun! My hat goes off to mamas that work outside of the home and still created beautiful nourishing meals from scratch… I am blessed with some free time that all goes into the kitchen.
Current Family favorite Meal: It’s Spring here now, with all the fresh produce in season we are having a big bowl of Greek salad as a meal more then once a week. In Summer, Possion Cru is a weekly staple. I learnt how to make it when we lived in Tahiti, it’s basically raw fish marinated in lime juice tossed with fresh veggies and coconut milk. During the cooler months we have lots of soup and stew (we’ve done gaps intro twice now) and my favourite way to cook is to use a clay pot in the oven and cook slowly all afternoon. I make red wine stew, with lots of thyme, onions, garlic, osso bucco, and whatever root veges we have on hand. Also, slow cooked kangaroo curry- kangaroo meat, diced pumpkin, onions and coconut milk and lots of chai masala (a classic spice mix) it is so tender… I top it with a lots of chopped cilantro and ghee. We also love palak panner, which is a spinach and cheese curry. Miso with homemade zucchini noodles is a quick go to meal if there is broth in the fridge. We all like green juice, my favourite combo for spring is celery, green apple, grapefruit, lemongrass and lime, and superfood elixir smoothies too.
Favorite Cookbooks: My cookbook collection, and journey with health and real food, started about seven years ago with Healing with Whole Foods link]oods, a traditional Chinese medicine approach to food and healing (with a strong focus on a monastic, vegetarian diet) it is still a great resource to this day with its awesome appendix of most common fruits, vegetables and grains with their energetic properties listed. Next, the cover of Wild Fermentation caught my eye at the library one day. I was an immediate fermented foods addict and tracked down some kefir grains in my local area. Then some folks suggested Nourishing Traditions, my interest with piqued by the fermented foods section and all the interesting quotes and info in the sidebar, but I dismissed the book for a long time because of its meat focus. I now love it, but still really only use the fermented foods section, and lend it to anyone skeptical about raw milk. I love all of David Wolfe’s work, the best book of his for recipes would have to be Eating for Beauty.

View out front door

You can see the ocean from the kitchen

Serving food, wearing baby

Durand water filter in foreground

Unpacking from the farmers market

Over and countertop

Recipe books where the microwave is supposed to go

Pantry

Inside refrigerator

Helping make kimchi

Helping juice

Fresh Mangoes

Bath milk

Ferments above the fridge

Eating at the counter

Check Out the Previous Real Food Kitchen Tour Posts

Let Us Tour Your Kitchen

Are you a real foodie? Do you have a kitchen that you’d like to see featured on CHEESESLAVE?

Please email me at annmarie AT cheeseslave dot com. Either send me a link to a Flickr set or email me your photos (minimum of 5, but more is better). Note: Please send me LARGE photos. Minimum 610 width. If they’re too small, I can’t use them.

Oh, and please send the answers to the above questions (at the very top of this post).

As much as I’d love to include all the photos I receive, I can’t guarantee that I will use your photos in the series. I’m looking for creative, good quality photos.

Some ideas for photos:

Show us what’s in your fridge or what’s fermenting on your counter
Take some snaps of some of your favorite kitchen gadgets, or show us how you organize your spices
Got backyard chickens? Send some pics!
How about a lovely herb garden?
Kids or pets are always cute!
Try to include at least one photo of yourself, ideally in your kitchen

And no, you don’t have to have a blog to be included in the tour.

Photo credit: A warm welcome Project365(3) Day 10 by Keith Williamson, on Flickr and photos by Memories by Michelle