Southern Style Celtic Stew

 We've had days of lovely spring-like weather this month. It's highly motivating, until the next front pushes through and reminds us that winter is still here. Our winter menus include a lot of soup for lunch and stews for dinner. It was a recent cold weather menu planning that prompted me to try a variation on one of my ancestral cuisine meals - Celtic Lamb Stew. 

The base recipe for that stew makes it really easy to adapt:

• 1 pound meat
• 1 cup legumes
• 1/4 pound chopped nuts
• 1/4 pound butter
• 1 cup onions
• 1 and 1/2 cups greens
• 3 cups liquid
• 1/2 tbsp salt
• 1/2 tbsp mustard seeds

For the original recipe, I offered two variations: a pre-Roman-invasion version and a post-Roman version. My southern style uses ingredients common to the region of the world I live in, the southeastern U.S.

Southern style Celtic stew and yeast-raised cornmeal rolls

Southern Style Celtic Stew

• 1 pound ground pork
• 1 cup cowpeas (I used homegrown Ozark Razorback)
• 1/4 pound chopped pecans (our premier southern tree nut)
• 1/4 pound butter
• 1 cup chopped onions
• 1 and 1/2 collard greens (from the greenhouse)
• 3 cups water
• 1/2 tbsp salt
• 1/2 tbsp mustard seeds

Soak the peas overnight. Next day, discard the soaking water and rinse the peas. Melt half butter in a stew pot and toast nuts. Add remaining butter and onions, and cook for 5 minutes. Add meat and mustard seeds. Brown meat. Add greens and soaked cowpeas, stir till greens are wilted. Add water. Simmer until the peas are tender, about 40 - 45 minutes.

Recipe notes

• Serves 4 as a main course. We got two meals out of it. Usually, I add any leftovers to the soup pot, but there were no leftovers. 
• The nuts add interesting flavor and a hearty texture without being crunchy. 

Yeast-raised Cornmeal Rolls

Skillet cornbread is typically southern, but I was curious to try a yeast-raised version for something different. The cornmeal is homegrown and home milled.

• 1 cup warm water, milk, or whey
• 2 tsp dried yeast
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 & 1/2 cup corn flour (finer than corn meal)
• 1 & 1/2 cup flour (I used unbleached)
• 1/4 cup softened butter
• 1/2 tbsp salt

I actually mixed the dough in my bread machine. To do it by hand, add the yeast and sugar to the warm liquid and let proof. Then stir in the flours, salt, and butter and mix. Knead well and let rise until doubled. 

Shape rolls and let rise again. Bake 400°F (200°C) for about 15 minutes or until golden brown. Serve plain or with butter.

Recipe notes

• The other thing that's typically southern about cornbread is to add so much sugar so that it tastes more like cake than bread. Most people love this, but I don't. Unless I'm eating it for dessert, I want my cornbread to taste like corn, especially because cornmeal from homegrown corn is exceptionally tasty. Eating chili or stew with cake doesn't appeal to me. My skillet cornbread contains no sugar, and for this recipe, I used only enough to feed the yeast. 
• This doesn't rise as much as wheat bread dough, but it rises well enough for a good texture.

With our temps gradually creeping upward, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be serving stews and soups. We haven't tired of them yet, but I am looking forward to daily fresh garden salads when growing season arrives.

What about you? Does your menu change with the seasons? Any favorites you'd care to share?

Southern Style Celtic Stew © 2026 by Leigh

at https://www.5acresandadream.com

Front Room: Unexpected Repair Job

In my last post, I promised to tell you about our unexpected problem. It was discovered while we were hanging the curtain rods. Dan's ladder suddenly lurched and to our dismay, we saw that the floor was separating from the wall where his ladder stood next to the front register. Yikes!

It isn't especially noticeable without the ladder + Dan's weight on it. But 
if it hadn't been for the ladder incident, we might not have discovered it.

Dan knew what the problem was. He explained that when the old oil heater / air conditioner unit was installed decades ago, the installer knocked out the foundation and then cut duct-shaped sections in the floor joists to make room for ductwork. So there was no support for the floor there. The ladder location plus Dan's weight exposed the problem. 

The logical approach to repair would be to crawl under the house and fix it from underneath. But that presented challenges. One being that the crawl space at the front of the house is quite low. Another is the way the ductwork was installed. It should have been installed with a main trunk down the center of the house and branches to each room. Instead, the installer made a huge loop of ductwork under the house, making it difficult to crawl around under there (especially considering the problem Dan has with his knees). 

The other option was to go through the front porch floor. This is where using my homestead blog as a journal is invaluable. We were able to look at the photos from my 2014 Tearing Into the Front Porch blog post and make a plan.

Dan cut out what will become a trap door to access the sagging floor. He was able to screw two lengths of 2x4 to the sill to support the floor. I don't have a photo of what it now looks like under the house, but here it is from the front room after the register was removed. 

There is a second register in the room under the side windows, but we don't use the HVAC anyway. When we got estimates for installing the new HVAC, every installer insisted that the ductwork would have to be redone. Technically they were correct, but we didn't have the money for all that so we finally found someone who was willing to just install the unit. 

For now, the old register covers the repair job. Maybe someday we can re-do the front room floor plus have new ductwork properly installed, but that's another future project. 

Front Room: Unexpected Repair Job © 2026

by Leigh at https://www.5acresandadream.com

Front Room (Almost Done): Window Coverings

The to-do list for finishing the front room is getting shorter and shorter. After the walls were painted and the window trims done, it was time for curtains. For this, I wanted to use two quilt-look bedspreads. I had them on the windows previously, but discovered that, being one piece, they are a bit inconvenient when it came to opening them for light. That was because standard curtain rods have a center support bracket, so I could only push the two edges of the quilt to the center. That just didn't work well for me. 

Dan suggested "the kind that open with a pulley cord." I remembered my mother had those when I was a kid with pinch pleat draperies, but I couldn't remember what they were called. A quick search with that description and Brave browser AI told me these are traverse rods. (And that's noteworthy because it's the extent of my AI usage. I like Brave AI because it documents its information sources). 

Traverse rods are quite updated compared to the ones my mother had. There's no longer a pull cord, rather the curtains are either opened by hand or with a "wand" (which looks like a mini blind wand). Of the wand models, one can choose left, right, or center draw. Hanging choices are ceiling mount or wall mount. Here's the link to the ones I bought for a close up view.

We went with the wall mount option to suit the size of the quilts. 

side window

I can easily push the quilt to either side to let in the light.

Now it's very easy to let in plenty of light for weaving.

front window

My next step ought to be putting the furniture back in place, except we ran into an unexpected problem! More on that next time. 

Front Room (Almost Done): Window Coverings

 © 2026 by Leigh at https://www.5acresandadream.com