A Peek Inside our Kitchen

People ask me all the time how we live: how we store food, how we cook, what we eat. I never want to come across as telling folks what to do, but I’m always happy to share what works for us. Especially since so many of our market and store customers are on their own clean food or homesteading journey, I thought it might be time to show a little more of how things run in our kitchen.

This post isn't a set of rules. It’s just a glimpse into our real daily life: what we keep on the counter, in the fridge, and in the freezer, and how we cook and store food without making it a big ordeal. Take what’s useful, leave what’s not.

Butter

We are a butter-on-the-counter household, no doubt about it. I have a butter dish that holds two pounds. We use salted butter and we’re a salt-heavy family in general. At any given time, there are three or four kinds of salt in the kitchen. (Yes, they all taste different. Yes, my favorite changes, but right now I think Kosher.)

What We Actually Cook With

A lot of people ask me what to do with beef tallow, especially as they start cutting seed oils out of their kitchens. That’s a big shift, but for us, tallow is just normal. We haven’t had vegetable oil, corn oil, or avocado oil in the house in ages. I can’t remember the last time I used olive oil either.

For daily cooking, we use either butter or tallow. Tallow has a high smoke point, so I feel totally fine deep frying with it. I usually keep a pound or so of tallow out at room temperature; it’s easy to grab and we go through it fast.

We used to be big on saving bacon grease. I still keep some, but we don’t use it nearly as much these days. There was a whole stretch of time where I’d drizzle bacon grease over buttered popcorn. That was a phase… but honestly, not a bad one.

Our Freezer Setup

We have a couple of upright freezers inside the house for personal use. In them, we keep a lamb, a deer, half a pig, and half a beef. That’s our normal. While we use uprights for space, I’ll tell you right now: chest freezers are the better appliance. They stay colder, and they’re more efficient. They’re just harder to organize unless you have a good system.

How We Thaw Our Beef

We cook our beef medium rare and sometimes rare. But it never goes from freezer to skillet. That’s a no-go in our house.

Most of the time, I defrost beef by keeping a gallon bucket in the fridge. We put a mix of cuts in there, and it slowly thaws over a few days. It keeps moisture off the fridge shelves and makes it easy to top off when it starts to run low.

If the day gets away from us (and it does), we use warm water to thaw dinner quickly. Still sealed in the vacuum bag, we’ll let it sit in a bowl of warm water. It’s fast and safe, and it means we’re never cooking meat that’s frozen in the middle.

Where Are the Eggs?

We keep our eggs on the counter. They’re unwashed, which keeps the bloom intact, and they store just fine at room temperature.

When we sell out of eggs on Saturday, we mean all the eggs. There have been plenty of Sunday mornings where Arlin’s had to make a run to the coop because there were none left inside!

So... What’s In the Fridge?

You might be wondering with the butter and eggs on the counter and most meat in the freezer what’s actually in our fridge?

Honestly, I wonder that too. It always feels full.

Here’s a snapshot: three types of salsa, three kinds of jam, condiments galore, leftovers from last night’s dinner, and always cheese.

That’s just a little window into how we eat and cook at home. We try to keep things simple, real, and rooted in what we raise and trust. I’ll share our favorite beef cuts in another post soon, but for now, I hope this helps answer some of the questions we get at the market and in the store.

If there's something specific you’ve been wondering about, feel free to ask! I might just write a post about it.