Hello and welcome to Dirt & Dough! This is where you will find homemade recipes and how to bake with a sourdough starter. I love cooking with real, fresh ingredients and am convinced everything is better when it's homemade or homegrown.
A Little About Me
I am a wife, mom of two kids, home cook, bread baker, and gardener; who is powered by coffee most of the day! I love to workout, read and go camping with my family.
If I had to pick my number one hobby and passion it would be food. Growing, catching, and making just about anything I can. I enjoy learning a new skill in the kitchen and how to make something I have never tried.
We live in the Pacific Northwest where most of our free time is spent camping, hiking, paddle boarding, fishing, and just overall being outdoors and active.
I learned how to cook when I left my job to stay at home with my kids full-time. We needed a way to save money, develop healthier habits, and improve our overall quality of life.
I needed to desperately turn my health and fitness around after having my second child, and the kitchen is where it all began.
My blog Dirt & Dough is dedicated to my passion for making things at home from scratch. Here you will find recipes from my kitchen, growing produce, how to bake with a sourdough starter and so much more!
There is no way we could live the life we do without the right foods. Growing a garden, fishing, and most importantly cooking our meals from home is how we make that happen.
From My Kitchen to Yours
Sourdough
I started baking with souroudough back in 2019 when there were not a lot of resources and tutorials like there are now. I learned by trial and error. A lot of trial and error...
Sourdough started out as an extremely frustrating experience for me, but over time I developed the skills needed to become a successful bread baker.
All those failures really taught me what to look for and truly understand how a sourdough starter works and performs.
All this information I have taken in over the years has given me the ability to help others achieve perfect baking results as well. And I can help you too! If you struggle with sourdough, you are not alone.
My sourdough recipes are tried and tested over and over again in my kitchen so you don't have to test them yourself.
For example, my sourdough chocolate chip cookie recipe took years and a freezer full of "almost" batches to get it just right. I take them seriously.
I invested so much time, energy, and money learning how to bake with sourdough and I want to take all that headache away for you.
Here are just a few of my favorite go-to souroudgh recipes:
New to sourdough? Start here:
Homemade Recipes
With our active and busy lifestyle, there is only one way we can sustain it. Homemade food!
Fitness has always been a passion for my husband and myself and now our kids are following in our footsteps. Our family trains in Jiu Jitsu, track, lacrosse, crossfit and basketball. Good, filling and healthy homemade food is the only way we can sustain a busy training schedule.
Replacing commercial bread with sourdough is one way we make that happen, but providing good quality homemade meals is the other.
Not everything is 100% from scratch but we work hard to make sure we are feeding our family the best we can. And I'm sharing those recipes with you! They are easy to follow and have been tested over and over again in my own kitchen.
Family favorite recipes:
Seafood
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest my entire life. I spent my childhood fishing, crabbing and even clamming. This is something we still do today, and passing these traditions on to my kids has been a rewarding experience.
I love that I get the opportunity to teach my kids how to catch, clean, and harvest their own seafood. And they love it! just not the eating part, which leaves more for me and my husband to enjoy!
My 10-year-old daughter can take the shell off a crab and my 7-year-old can catch a fish on his own. It has been fun to watch them enjoy it.
Cooking with seafood can be intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. It needs to be fresh and therefore needs fresh ingredients. If you take away one thing about seafood, it's to keep it simple.
My seafood recipes are developed from a lifetime of catching, cleaning, and cooking. I know what works and what can go wrong. And I share all those tips and tricks.
My favorite seafood recipes:
If you want to hear more about my story with local seafood be sure to check out a podcast I did with David at Cook Local Eat Local. I share my story and all my tips for cooking with fresh seafood.
Why Dirt & Dough?
The name Dirt & Dough came to me on a day when I was preparing my garden for spring planting and came inside to wash the dirt out of my fingernails just to turn around and mix together a loaf of sourdough.
That dirt was washed out for scraps of dough and the name stuck.
I love taking simple things like dirt in the ground or dough made of just flour and water and turning it into a beautiful garden or the most spectacular loaf of sourdough bread.
Fresh homemade and homegrown food is something I live for and love to share.
If you need help getting started with cooking more from home, making a sourdough starter or your very first loaf of bread, feel free to leave a comment on any of the posts or send me an email.
