Hello everyone ! Welcome back ! It’s been such a long time… To be honest, it seems I needed far more time than expected to get mentally better after a few breakdowns. When I thought I was getting back on track and ready to work again fully on my blog and other creative things, boum ! there was another thing bumping onto me. It was a very vicious cercle from which I had trouble to get out. The only thing I could be focus on to get better was about homemaking and taking care of my home. It was a priority compared to the blog.

Indeed, over the last months, even years, we’ve been trying to get us as self-sufficient as possible, the less supermarket-dependent, the better. We’ve set new habits such as getting most of our vegetables (if not from our garden) from a local farm where you go harvest by yourself, or buying 5kg/10kg meat parcels from local farmers. It’s been about 2 or 3 years since we’ve not bought any beef meat in a supermarket, or even chicken since we make ours.

Right now, we could live without supermarket concerning veggies and meat, but what about the remaining things we still need to buy ?

There’s another thing we do eat a lot and that is bread. We were already greatly reducing the cost by making it ourselves with a bread making machine, but we still had to buy flour. So I’ve been on the hunt over the last 2 years for a solution to fix this problem. We needed to be able to make our own flour. So I’ve been looking for a small flour mill you can use on a daily basis in your kitchen.

And I found and purchased one a year ago. A Mockmill one. I would’nt recommend this brand actually since it’s not fit for begginers and quite tricky to get working. I did have some problems and at first it wasn’t working, it wouldn’t mill properly. I managed to get it repaired since it was defective, even though the brand didn’t want at first, arguing they could monitore me to repair the mill by myself on the phone …. This was a very bad client experience for me. Communication doesn’t seem to be Mockmill’s best skill. Anyway, it finally came back a week ago and even then I had trouble following their instructions to get it started. The manual wasn’t in my language (French) even though it did exist, they would only send me the English and German one. Even their explanatory video wasn’t clear at all, they were telling you to do certain things without any explanation and it was very confusing. I managed to get it right thanks to an American youtuber Vickie’s Country Home who did purchase it and made an unboxing and starting video on her channel. Watching her discovering the mill as a random customer not as some sort of engineer, did help a lot. They’re still some steps I make I don’t really know what they mean and what they’re supposed to do inside the mill. But know I’m able to do the basic and mill wheat, corn, rice and many others.

But the flourmill wasn’t the only investment we made over the last years.

Since I’ve gained experience and knowledge from my one year as a fishmonger, I’ve got to know how to prepare and smoke fish. Understanding the smoking process in a whole now can allow me to smoke almost anything, as long as I have the required material. So, you guess it, I bought a smoker. I’ve only been able to use it once since I need to modify a part of it to make it work better(the sawdust compartment isn’t like it should be to work properly). But that time was a success ! ( I made some smoked salmon and we’ve eaten all of it since then) Now I’m looking forward to smoke more things like meat, cheese, peppers and so on.

Lastly I’ve been gifted for my 27th birthday a food dehydrator. It’s so easy now to dry anything. All I have to do is to cut the fruits/veggies into pieces (large enough to fit into the trays of the dehydrator), trim the herbs and so on, place everything into the trays, plug in and select the neeeded temperature. Then I come back a few hours later to check. That was really a great gift and I use it as often as possible.

We’ve been making big steps in order to get more self-sufficient, more resourceful, but we’re very aware we still have a long way to go. Also it’ll be very different the day we’ll effectively have to cut ties from supermarket, since today we’re still kinda of relying on them for a many things. We still have the comfort of the laundry and dishwasher products, the toilet paper and so many other things we still cannot make by ourselves. Of course there’re ways, our ancestors perfectly managed during their time. And so would we. But still it’ll be a change of lifestyle and new habits to take.

I’ll make sure to share with you all as many things as possible, since maybe some of you also wish to get self-sufficient or simply cut off some habits from they lifestyle. I’m thinking of the best way to share the most, in the best way. Still working on it.

Anyway, that’ll be everything for today’s updates. I hope you’ve find it useful. Thank you for passing by and reading.

I’ll talk to you soon in a next post,

Until then, take care of yourself ❤

Ady ❤