The farm kitchen is where much of the work at The Hitt Family Farm becomes something we can put on the table. Vegetables from the garden, eggs from our flock, and food we’ve preserved all find their way into everyday meals.
Lynda does much of the cooking, baking, and preserving, while Bill brings in the harvest and helps with the work that makes those meals possible. We’re learning how to make good use of what we grow and raise, one meal and one season at a time.
From the Garden to Supper
Sometimes the connection is as simple as a skillet of shakshuka: tomatoes and peppers from the garden, herbs, and eggs from our own chickens. Almost every bit of that dinner came from our farm.
Other days, the harvest becomes tomato soup, a pot of beans with dehydrated vegetables, or whatever supper makes sense with what’s ready and what we have on hand. The garden helps shape the menu, but we still buy groceries and work with a mixture of homegrown food and pantry staples.
Keeping Some of the Harvest
Canning, freezing, and dehydrating help us carry part of the growing season into the months that follow. Our kitchen work has included relish, bread-and-butter pickles, dried tomatoes, okra, and herbs, along with soups we can freeze for another day.
Preserving takes time, space, and attention. We’re learning how much we can manage, which foods we’ll actually use, and when a smaller batch makes more sense. Growing something well and making good use of it are two different skills, and we’re still working on both.
Recipes Worth Making Again
Some recipes earn a place in our regular rotation: everyday sandwich bread, buttermilk drop biscuits, skillet cornbread, garden shakshuka, tomato soup, and creamy chicken and bow-tie soup.
This part of the website will grow into a collection of our keeper recipes, with the notes that make them useful in our kitchen—pan sizes, changes we’ve tried, and what we’d do differently next time. A recipe isn’t finished just because we’ve written it down; sometimes the next batch teaches us something else.
The Kitchen We’re Working Toward
We plan to build a separate farm kitchen, and it will remain part of our plans even after we have a kitchen in the house. An outdoor kitchen building would give us dedicated room for canning, preserving, dehydrating, and handling the harvest, along with better storage than our containers currently provide.
For now, that building is a future project. The cooking and preserving are already happening, and those everyday experiences help us understand what the space will need.
Keeping the Kitchen Story
Our Homestead Journal will hold the dated stories behind the food: a harvest coming in, a recipe that worked, a batch that disappointed us, or a lesson we want to remember.
We want this page to reflect the kitchen as it really is—a place where we feed ourselves, try things, make adjustments, and gradually get better at using what the homestead provides.
