Real Food Kitchen Tour: The Well Fed Homestead

Welcome to another edition of the Real Food Kitchen Tour. This week we’re featuring Brenda Scott, author of The Well Fed Homestead.

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.

Brenda with her daughter, Ruby, on a baking day.

This Week’s Real Food Kitchen Tour: The Well Fed Homestead

How sweet is that picture of Brenda and her daughter, Ruby? Brenda and her husband have 7 children (2 of whom are adopted and 2 are foster children).

I love Brenda’s kitchen; it’s so homey and welcoming. I think it will inspire you!

Name: Brenda Scott
Blog: The Well Fed Homestead
Location: Molalla, Oregon
Size of Kitchen: 17 x 16
Things You Love About Your Kitchen: The large island (7×5)! It was half that size when we first bought the house, and my husband added on to the island and we had the whole thing painted blue. I love it! I also love our view! We came from a tiny neighborhood lot, and the view from our old kitchen window was of our neighbor’s driveway. We have 30 acres here, and I see green grass, and chickens, and trees, and I am so thankful! 🙂
Things You Would Change: I want to add an old-fashioned cook stove on the left side of our dishwasher (there is already a chimney there). It’s on our “someday” wishlist!!
Favorite Tools & Gadgets: I use my immersion blender a lot for pureed soups and batters. I also use my food processor and mini food processor quite a bit (like for making homemade mayonnaise and for grinding pumpkin seeds and shredding cheese). I got an Excalibur dehydrator for my Birthday this year and I LOVE it! My 2 crock pots get used all the time — at least one of them is in use most days.
Biggest Challenges Cooking Real Food: Living “way out in the boonies” and running out of real food ingredients. It’s a long drive for us to get to the stores and farms where the good stuff is! We really have to plan ahead and make sure we have everything in the house that we need. Thankfully, we’ve never starved. We’ve had to adjust our dinner plans when we didn’t have a particular ingredient, but we haven’t caved in & purchased local pizza or Chinese food. (We’re also on GAPS, so that wouldn’t exactly work for us!).
Current Family Favorite Meal: We always have “Fried Eggs on Friday,” and the kids love that tradition. A quick & easy dinner for us is Green Bean Spaghetti (spaghetti sauce, beef and/or pork, and green beans instead of noodles), and we enjoy stuffing squash with meat, fruit and veggies! We are chicken farmers, so we roast a lot of whole chickens and most of the time we have a croc kpot of broth going on the counter.
Favorite Cookbooks: I rarely ever use cookbooks, honestly! I search the internet! My laptop lives on my big island, functioning as the most expensive “cookbook” I’ve ever owned. I used The Joy of Cooking quite a bit when I was first married and didn’t know how to cook, but I haven’t opened it in a long time! This is me with my daughter Ruby, on a baking day. You can see that our counters are WELL USED!

Kitchen island

You can see where my husband added on to the island (the part with the vertical stripes was the original island). I love it!

Gorgeous!

Fruits, veggies and a huge jar of honey

We always have a lot of fruits and veggies on the counter, and a huge jar of honey (so that we don’t have to lift/store/accidentally drop the big, heavy, sticky jar!).

Stainless steel counter and sink

Our friend made this stainless steel counter and sink for us. It’s hard to keep stainless steel clean and shiny (as you can see in these photos!), but I love the functionality of it. No more ugly grout lines near the sink!

Spicing up the kitchen

I keep my spices up on these little racks from Ikea. The tiny jars that go with the racks are too small for some of my spices, so I was thankful to learn that I could fit some bigger jars on there.

I love the brick

I loved the brick when I first saw the photos of this house. There were other things I wasn’t crazy about (it was a remodel), but I know I could work with that brick! 🙂

Versatile cabinet

I love the versatility of this cabinet. At our old home, where we had a formal dining room, it was white with a floral background & it housed my fancy china. Now it’s a rustic country kitchen pantry! We keep jars of dried foods in here, like raisins. Every day after nap/quiet time, our kids (whoever stayed on their bed & was quiet) can fill up a little bowl with raisins for a snack. We keep the little bowls and the raisins in this cabinet, so it’s easy for the kids to self-serve!

Kitchen helpers

Our “big boys” (10, 9 8) are our kitchen helpers after every meal. Each kid in the house (except the 1 year old) is expected to clear their own spot, and then the big boys help wash the table and benches, sweep, load the dishwasher, and wipe off the counters. They work well together!

Fiesta ware

I love Fiestaware!! I love to display them in my kitchen; they’re a beautiful decoration.

I love Fiestware, too! Maybe I will have to start collecting it…

Our dining room

This is our dining room. We have 7 children (2 bio, 2 adopted, 3 foster), and we found that benches make for easier clean up after meals!

Chicken Farmer business

And this is our “outdoor kitchen”. This was last year, when we were newbies to this whole chicken farmer business. This year (since we added 3 foster kids to our home), we hired helpers, and I didn’t help with much of the butchering. We may live far away from our real food sources, but we’ve always got good chicken on hand!

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.