Cooking by Feel

In-source your ability to provide for your family

I’ve been working with a local Ancestral Healing practitioner through the process of witnessing healing to my cardinal ancestral lines, but what brought me to her was her offer of bringing spirituality into my business. In one of our discussions on the services that my journey has led me to offer, I mentioned to her that others often ask both my husband and I for “the recipe” when they eat our food. Now, aside from some of my sourdough recipes, we do not have recipes. I explained to her that we just cook by feel. Her eyes lit up when I said that and she asked, “Can you teach that?!” I then proceeded to relay the following story of my Cooking by Feel journey:

When I met my husband, all of the food I consumed was either out of a cereal box or from the brew pub I worked at. He had a culinary degree and swore off of beef and pork due to what he learned about the meat industry in culinary school. Beer was our common thread. He slowly opened up my taste buds and subsequently my entire world. For the first six years of our journey, we either ate out or he cooked us an amazing meal. We hosted a few guerrilla dinners, as we called them, to share our talents with others. He was the kitchen magic and I served it up.

Two sons later, we decided to move to a smaller town and open a food truck. We continued our theme and birthed Guerrilla Craft Eats featuring locally sourced meat and organic veg. I had convinced my husband that we needed bacon back in our lives and we began searching for meat that was raised with love and appreciation for the life being taken.

The food truck was very well received by the regulars we cultivated, but overall the small town we lived in was not ready to give up the convenience and affordability of bag-in-a-box food. We eventually shut the truck down and settled the opening debt that we never quite climbed out of. I'm still so grateful that we didn't open that million dollar brewery we had on paper. My husband is an excellent home brewer as well.

After the death of Guerrilla Craft Eats, I had an impulse to try baking sourdough. Our diet had been drastically cleaned up since creating a family, but bread was the weak link. We never were able to source an organic bread for our truck's burger and sandwiches and had to settle with simply local. Pragmatically, most of our food came out of the truck. We loved bread, but knew how the bread in the truck made us feel. I snagged the first bread book that I saw on kindle: Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish. His recommendation was to not start with sourdough. I read the whole book and started with sourdough. I've always been a bit of a scofflaw. My first loaf turned out amazing and the Strong Blonde of Strong Wife Sourdough was born. Strong Wife Sourdough was a business that never did touch red in the ledger. It did not make very much money, but it provided our needs. I thoroughly enjoyed baking and sharing it with others.

However, as most discover, once you start down the rabbit hole in search of clean food, you just keep falling. This began our desire to raise and grow our own so that we were the ones providing the love and appreciation for the lives taken, both plant and animal. This required more land and water than our budget could handle in Nevada, so we looked north. We explored both Montana and Idaho and oscillated between the two. Our last exploratory camping trip brought us and our now three sons through Montana first and ended through Idaho. Our oldest boys grumbled to return home at every stop, save one, and that is where we live today. We took their joy at Lake Pend Oreille as an omen that this was to be our new home.

It still took us another year to sell our home and make the move. My grandmother passed just months before and I lost my father the same day that we accepted an offer on our house. My mother subsequently moved to Texas and the umbilical cord to my birth state was cut. We set out in a bunkhouse travel trailer in search of our piece of earth to co-create with.

The next month was a whirlwind. The real estate market in North Idaho was beginning to heat up in a big way. We looked at several pieces of land and nothing felt quite right. Then the perfect thing popped up as a for-sale-by-owner. The pictures were rough, but the description of the land was exactly what we were seeking. The owner was only in town for two days for showings, and I made sure we were the first. My husband walked the entire perimeter with her and spoke of all the ways in which he would love and co-create with this land. She had multiple offers, but wanted us to have it. She countered our low-ball offer first to give us a chance and we accepted.

There were some buildings, but nothing livable, and the remaining bit of our budget was not realistically enough to build a house with, pushing us to work within the context that we purchased. We spent most of that summer exploring the land and designing our way out of the RV. When my husband began transforming one wing of the existing pole barn into our now 550sqft home while I was pregnant with our fourth son, I rapidly realized that I could no longer effectively lean on him for meals.

I had learned a lot about cooking since meeting my husband and running a food truck with him, but the pressure placed on this mama, that formerly could barely cook her way out of a macaroni and cheese box, was immense. I ordered food from a nearby restaurant on days that I hit a wall, but that was quickly depleting our cash reserves. There were many evenings in which I would run to my husband in a state of panic and ask him to save me with an idea for dinner. He always rescued me, but it put a lot of strain on him. This was my next death and rebirth in process.

The next two years were an emotional roller coaster for me. I knew that my husband needed me to step up into the role of homestead wife and mother at a level I never took the time to imagine if we were going to embrace this new life. I don't know if I can pinpoint the transition, but I now can look at what we have and plan our meals even in the lean times. My husband and I have fallen into a beautiful interdependence that flows seamlessly. I still occasionally ask him for a fresh idea, but I execute it, usually with my own twist. He had spent more than 10 years inspiring and teaching me to cook, but it took placing my back to the wall to embrace the innate skill of cooking by feel that I felt only belonged to him.

My intention with my contributions to the Guerrilla Provisions substack is to inspire other mamas to in-source their ability to provide for their families and unlock their ability to Cook by Feel.

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