Monday mornings, I pour raw milk over kefir cultures.

Dehydrated Kale Chips (Pic | "Yum" by Christaface)

While eggs and oatmeal are boiling, I grind wheat and add it to a sourdough starter bubbling on the counter. While my daughter eats breakfast, I clean last week’s leftover vegetables and get them ready for pickling, freezing, or dehydrating.

Tuesday mornings, I start beans and rice soaking for that evening’s crock pot soup and bake sourdough bread. Wednesdays, I shop for the week’s produce and eggs. Every night, I soak oatmeal in whey for the next morning’s breakfast. Thursday through Sunday, my daughter and I eat what I prepared early in the week.

In the last few decades, the word “domestic” has become synonymous with “subordinate.” A modern thesaurus likens it to “trained” and “subdued.” But domestic’s original meaning is “of the home,” and when the home is a powerful place, domesticity is empowering.

The Radical Homemakers and Urban Homestead movements are working to redefine the domestic realm. My Virginia Beach townhome is somewhat of a suburban homestead: a place I have learned to honor. By learning how to produce and store food at home, I have learned how to be a part of my family.

Before my daughter was born, my home was a place for sleeping and painting. Since becoming a mother and homemaker, my home has transformed into a place that sustains connection and love and nourishment. The main element of this transformation has been food. A definition of Urban Homestead from UrbanHomestead.org is, “a suburban or city home in which residents practice self-sufficiency through home food production and storage.”

In this country, food is often defined by convenience. As if eating is a nuisance, we rush through it, often alone or while watching T.V. or working. We have forgotten the worth of the family meal and the joy of preparing nourishing dishes.

According to Dr. Mark Hyman in his article How Eating at Home can Save Your Life:

The ecology of eating — the importance of what you put on your fork — has never been more critical to our survival as a nation or as a species. Research shows that children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better grades, to healthier relationships, to staying out of trouble. They are 42 percent less likely to drink, 50 percent less likely to smoke and 66 percent less like to smoke marijuana. Regular family dinners protect girls from bulimia, anorexia, and diet pills. Family dinners also reduce the incidence of childhood obesity.

(Pic | "Sourdough Biscuits" by vigilant20)

Producing and eating food within the home also saves my family money because we buy in bulk and eat and preserve leftovers. Changing food habits also attempts to change the structure of our economy. The Ohio Beacon reported, “Hayes [author of Radical Homemakers] said radical homemaking is part of a quest for an economy that generates a living for everyone rather than a killing for a few.”

“The idea . . . is understanding what enough is,” she said in a phone interview from West Fulton, N.Y., where she and her husband are involved in running her family’s farm.

As a stay at home parent, I have a lot of time to dedicate to the preparation of food. Some weeks, I do spend a lot of my time making elaborate meals, but most of the time, the work is done for me. Other than canning and kneading bread, the other elements of food preparation take a few minutes a day: In order to make yogurt or kefir, I change out the milk in the morning, leave the kefir in a jar on the counter, and turn on the yogurt maker. Sourdough requires feeding, so for about ten seconds in the morning, I stir flour into the starter and cover it with a towel. I cook soup and chili and pasta sauce and meat in the crock pot. Freezing and dehydrating usually only requires washing and sometimes blanching the vegetables and fruit. Lacto-fermented vegetables are cleaned and chopped and left in a jar on the counter with the other ingredients until they ferment, and then they’re moved to the refrigerator.

The most difficult part is creating new habits and remembering, each morning, what needs to be done. For the first few months, I had a list taped to the wall, and each morning, I checked it off. Eventually, the morning’s “chores” became as routine as washing a bowl after using it.

(Pic | "Canned Veggie Broth" by vigilant20)

And, with the CSA season starting soon, the routine can be super helpful with preserving leftover produce. Last season, I composted quite a few bunches of greens in the beginning of the harvest season. This year, I’ll be dehydrating them into chips, shredding them and freezing them for lasagnas and casseroles, and pickling whatever’s left. I haven’t broached the realm of canning yet, but during next week’s Sustainable Living Fair, there will be a workshop on canning.

Also at the Sustainable Living Fair, workshops will be held on other urban homesteading practices including recycling, composting, pickling, beekeeping, raising chickens, and square foot gardening.

In the last year, I’ve completely reformed the way that I approach food. I have a lot to learn, so I’ll be at almost all of the urban homesteading workshops at the Sustainable Living Fair. Bringing back the family meal can seem daunting, but it isn’t: one change at a time, the changes became habits.