Real Food Kitchen Tour: The Promise Land Farm

Welcome to another edition of the Real Food Kitchen Tour. This week we’re featuring Rashel Harris, author of The Promise Land Farm.

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: The Promise Land Farm

This week we travel to East Texas to visit Rashel Harris and family and The Promise Land Farm.

This post is going to make you want to move to Texas and start a farm! What a beautiful kitchen and a beautiful family.

Our family: Rashel, Andrew and Isabella (6 Months)

Name: Rashel Harris
Website/blog: The Promise Land Farm — blogging since 2011.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThePromiselandFarm
Location: East Texas
House or Apartment: House
Size of Kitchen: 12′ x 15′ aprox.
Things You Love About Your Kitchen: The set up. The sink is located between the fridge, stove and dishwasher. It’s a practical kitchen to work in. My three favorite things are first the window over my sink, so I can watch our animals and see what I need to do in the garden, second the island with a solid granite top and third, my three deep freezers and two refrigerators! We live 2.5 hours from Dallas and to get nutrient dense food in season, you really need space to keep the food! Espeically, when you’re storing a whole pastured cow, pastured lambs, pastured whole chickens and turkey’s, wild caught fish, 150 lbs of pastured cultured butter, cured bacon, 50 pounds of tallow, and lots of soaked crispy nuts.
Things You Would Change: A gas stove instead of electric and solid granite on the counters instead of individual squares.
Favorite Tools & Gadgets: My cast iron skillet, enamel cast iron brasiers and covered pots, mesquite cutting board, dehydrator, fermentation crock, kombucha crock, knives, ice-cream maker, glass mason jars, blender, crock pots, glass bowels, grain mill, meat grinder and food processor. I love kitchen gadgets!
Biggest Challenges Cooking Real Food: How much time and preparation it takes to make a meal. I compensate for this by making a TON of food at one time. Enough food for at least two meal in the fridge and several portions to put in the freezer. I make “slow food” fast food by freezing leftovers 🙂
Current Family Favorite Meal: This week, our favorite is slow cooked pastured lamb (broth, S&P, garlic, onion, rosemary and vinegar) with fresh black eye peas (broth, S&P, and bacon) with our garden lettuce mix and tomatoes topped with homemade… yum-o! 🙂
Favorite Cookbooks: [easyazon-link asin=”0967089735″ locale=”us”]Nourishing Traditions[/easyazon-link] by Sally Fallon. It changed everything we put in our mouth… what we eat, how we eat, how we raise our animals and acquire food.

A view of my kitchen from the dining room

From left to right; Toaster oven, vitamix blender, stove, toaster, coffee maker, hot water maker, three bins (coffee grounds, animal scraps/compost and trash), dishwasher, fridge (I love the the fridge part is on top and the freezer is on the bottom).

Real Food Fridge

LEFT SIDE, FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: Plain whole milk yogurt, crispy pumpkin seeds, fermented garlic heads, bacon drippings, kefir, left over chilli, lemons, baby food in mason jars, raw jersey cream (for morning coffee), black eye peas, our garden kale in the salad spinner, our eggs (hardboiled), cured bacon, our salad in the spinner, fruit. In the bottom bins, organic veggies, turnips from the garden and organic potatoes.
RIGHT DOOR: Sherry, homemade fermented ketchup, Tamari, castor oil pack, homemade salad dressing, homemade fermented sour pickles (from our cucumbers), pastured cultured butter from cows on pasture, supplements and cheese cultures, dates, homemade sauerkraut w/ herbs, tallow, fermented beets, crispy mixed nuts, homemad feta in olive oil, four gallons of raw pastured jersey milk. Our Jersey cow is dry right now. So we drive for fresh milk 5 hour round trip. Our Jersey’s will calf in May and we’ll be ‘back in milk’! 🙂

Turkey head, feet and neck ready to freeze for broth

We process our heritage turkeys once a year around Thanksgiving time. We save our best birds for breeding stock the next year and the rest get put in the freezer for delicious meals. The heads, feet and necks are saved and frozen separately to pull out and put in the pot when I make broth with the left over carcass.

My kitchen

We replaced the microwave with a little toaster oven (love it!), Isabella (8 months) eating avocado and raw cheese, my vita mix, favorite pans, my wooden spoons, coconut oil, sucant, raw butter (not shown), olive oil and apple cider vinegar (not shown)

Our pastured turkey liver!

I blend turkey livers up and pour them in a freezer tray. Isabella (8 months) gets it for lunch! 🙂

My spice cabinet

I got tired of all different jars and how difficult it is to find them! Also, I’d accidentally buy duplicate jars and start using one when I still had some left in another jar… I solved this problem by using mason jars! 🙂 love them.

Kitchen nook

iPod speakers to listen to podcasts and WAPF conferences sessions, “Nourishing Healthy Baby’s: First Real Foods Chart” by Monica Corrado and my WAPF Magnet diet for pregnant and breast feeding mothers.

My Tea Collection

I recently switched to mostly loose leaf organic teas. I keep them in mason jars. It’s fun to mix and match the leaves for different tastes.

Baby Food

To make my life easier, I blend up Isabella’s food and freeze it in mason jars ahead of time. Then in the morning I pull out what she’ll eat for lunch and dinner. It’s easy and quick.

My cookbook collection

Pantry

One of our three freezers

TOP LEFT: pastured raw butter, homemade icrecream, wild caught fish, organic veggies and fruit, two freezer bowels for ice cream, LOTS of pastured raw butter, LOTS of pastured tallow, crispy nuts (soaked, salted and lightly toasted).
RIGHT DOOR: My “fast food” stash. Frozen meals!!! Love these!

Playing around

Isabella playing with fresh cut cabbage. Our chickens are enjoying the scraps!

Andrew and Isabella enjoying farm life

Sourdough pound cake with lots of butter and fresh cut strawberries dipped in chocolate

Beef Broth ingredients

The bones will go in the oven to brown and then into the stock pot with veggies and vinegar. I cook it for about two days. Until I think it’s done 🙂 and feel like messing with it again.

Sauerkraut

We’ve always try and keep several jars of finished Kraut in the fridge

Me holding freshly made butter from our beloved Jersey cows

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 realfoodmedia 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.