Who are we?

First things first… What’s an Alewyfe???

That’s a great question! It’s one of the first legitimate trades medieval free-townswomen were allowed to have: working as a brewster (making beer) and working as an inn or tavernkeeper. I homebrew (not often enough these days, but there’s always something fermenting in the kitchen, even if it’s probably kraut) and since 2016, we’ve been welcoming guests from all over the world to our AirBNB.

I have been cooking since I could reach the stove (standing on a chair stirring gravy roux for my Granny while she made biscuits, later helping my parents keep us all fed while they worked, and then cooking my way through a library of books). I studied liberal arts, art history, and photography for a few years at the University of Chicago, then transferred to get my B.A. in Culinary Arts from Kendall College.

I have cooked in restaurants and catering companies here in Chicago and for pop-ups, and now mostly just for friends and family. After years of culinary school and kitchen work, I can’t not cook for a crowd, and I’m never happier than when enough friends stop by to sample whatever I’m making (at least when there’s not a global pandemic). I’ve also taught city cycling and urban agriculture for summer youth programs, and kayaking, paddleboarding, and indoor climbing classes to adults and teens along with the cooking lessons, just to keep things interesting!

I just love sharing good food and creating a warm and inviting space for folks to gather, and teaching others how to do it too! 

Want to learn more about the early Alewyves? Read on:

• Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England – Women’s Work in a Changing World 1300-1600: Judith M. Bennett, a history professor who is an authority on medieval women’s history including Alewyves, 1996
• Misogyny, Popular Culture, and Women:  An early journal article by Judith M. Bennett, 1991
• Women and Work in the Middle Ages: Pat Knapp (“Monika von Zell”), SCA historian
• Alewife (trade): Wikipedia

Also, I was almost an actual beer baroness of sorts (or so I wish) but my great-grandparents on my mom’s side sold the brewery when I was just a wee-southern tyke, and moved from the PNW to sunny SoCal. Alas. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? 

(I know, I know. I weep for a time-machine every time I consider my alternate fate… if not to talk them out of it, at least to tell Fred & Nana that maybe Enron was not the best place to keep all their investments after they sold to Pabst, yes, even if it had always done well before. Psssst! Put it all in low cost index funds or at least diversify a little?

Oh well. I didn’t know any better at the time either, and since I was a kid and didn’t have any money, they probably wouldn’t have listened to me anyway… so I guess it’s get back to work for us, fellow proles!

At least I got some cool barware out of it, and a story, and someday, if I’m lucky, maybe some massive sylvan landscape paintings from the late 19th century? Although far less portable, art is a better inheritance than money anyway, because even if it’s not “worth” anything it’s still beautiful (a better worth by far). Although, I still wish I had been able to ask them more questions about running a brewery and life in Tumwater when they were around, because stories are gold and I don’t have enough…

I have similar regrets about not recording my Granny and Poppy’s stories about their journey to California and back to the Ozarks during the Great Depression, all piled in a Model A truck with their large extended family to go work as migrant farm labor, then coming back to Arkansas and running a truck farm of their own with vegetables, strawberries, beef cows, pigs, and poultry). 

Ok, enough with the history lessons. Where are we NOW?

Tune in for the story of citified southern country girl just trying to make it here in the Wild West Side of Chicago, while transforming the formerly barren front yard into a productive urban garden and micro-farm… and most of the time, life is pretty good over here!

I shared my home until 2018 with another southern transplant- a Georgia-born, third-hand, first-class Rottweiler named Zeus, and now with my partner K., an even fresher Southern transplant who shares my love of the outdoors, wild adventures, wild food, and topography (why are we in the Midwest again?).

And we have a new pup (with the same paint job)… Tormod, a black and tan Catahoula from Czechia, who is a fantastic farm dog and adventure buddy, the scourge of squirrel and rat, and our best friend. 

You’ll mostly hear from me, Alewyfe (Chef, farmer, photographer, editor, webmaster, teacher, sometimes kayak guide, soapmaker, agitator, biker, brewer, (bad) beekeeper, butcher, baker, doggie treat maker, and betty crocker punk rocker!)

(but maybe I can convince K. to write a bit too – he’s a history buff, a hunter, a doggedly hard worker but humble, and has a hell of a way with words, but he’s also pretty quiet, so not sure if he’ll do some guest posts).

Let’s find out how the sausage is made, together? By which I mean, we’re going to make sausage. And cheese. And yogurt. And (re)build a house or three. I know, crazy, right! But it’s fun, I promise! Mostly fun. But absolutely, never boring.

Now be a good neighbor, pour yourself a brew (coffee, herbal tea, beer, wine, we keep the cellar stocked), pull up a chair, and sit a spell with us… talk about the weather (right now it’s lousy, but our little nook is pretty cozy), the crops (such as they are), and which way the wind’s blowin’. Can you hear it?

Wind: (…head west, again…)

So, living where we do (or where I did before) on the west side, a few folks in the past (friends, strangers, the guys at the firehouse down the street from my old house) have called us “urban pioneers” (or sometimes just crazy) for being here… to which I’d shrug and shudder and think, “urban pioneers, huh?” I have to admit, as a white gal in a predominately black neighborhood, who is all-too-aware of what gentrification does to communities of color, and what the history of pioneering in this country has in common with that… I want no part of it (well, I suppose beyond the part our European settler ancestors already did- which we can’t erase but can acknowledge and attempt to repair). I like most of my neighbors, they’re all pretty fine folks. I know their names, and we all keep an eye out for each other.

On my old street, I could walk down the block and name the houses, nod at the folks sitting on the front porches, mostly elders of families that had moved to the neighborhood from the south during the Great Migration, looking for a better life for their families.  We’re not pioneers- that’s erasure of the community that is already here. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and many of those neighborhoods have been remade or resettled many times over, some slowly and some fast. Like most communities (and probably more than some, unfortunately), were problems on and around my old street and also in my new one, but people still mostly took pride in their homes, helped each other shovel out after a big snow, looked in on folks who were sick or needed help and try to look out for each other.

When my time in the old neighborhood was drawing to a close, I mourned the loss of the sense of community and place and belonging there as much as the relationship that went along with that (even though it was absolutely for the best, as neither were ultimately a good long-term fit). But each of these places, and the other neighborhoods where I lived before, is a small town in a big city, a city that has been my home for now just over half my life. We’ve had a real love-hate relationship, this city and I. She’s dirty and gray and rough around the edges and also alternately shimmering and astounding and occasionally brilliantly beautiful. 

But.

I don’t think this city is big enough to hold the two of us, for too long. We need bigger skies and mountains to climb and bigger public lands to roam, but first… there’s a 133 year old house to fix up, and a few more things to do… So.

Here, if you stick around and read along, you’ll find advice and ruminations on just good plain livin’- gardening, home cooking, bike commuting, outdoor adventures, homebrewing, canning and other food preservation skills,  soapmaking, small livestock, plant propagation, remodeling, re-use, and other forms of folky frugality. Doing stuff! Ask my partner, I have about 16 (or 106) different DIY projects going at any one time and they’re ALL SO NEAT.

Some of these skills we’ve taught ourselves, some we’ve learned from others, or were passed down from our parents and grandparents and the humble rural upbringings we both had (Arkansas Ozarks for me, Missouri Bootheel for K), but all of them are things you can learn if you want to, and I’m here to help!

It’s these old ways and the rhythm of the cycle of the year that are the “old ways” we mean for the new world that we live in, which seems to be changing at an ever advancing pace. We’re not anti-technology (that is, after all, how you’re reading this?) but the ready-made and pre-packaged lives many of us are leading (often by necessity, I get it) just aren’t ultimately sustainable, for the health of either people or our planet. We’re trying to build a life and skills that will stand the test of time, and hopefully share what we learn with others who want to do the same. 

I’ll be joined hopefully soon by some chickens (got ’em- I got my first birds in the old neighborhood back in 2011, and K and I raised a fresh batch of baby chicks at the start of the pandemic and built a new coop).. and rabbits (well, maybe later), and greenhouse aquaponics (did that for a living for awhile, but DEFINITELY a reach goal), and (another) dog, and hopefully maybe a pair of Nigerian Dwarf goat-gals, and some babydoll sheep and pigs and a pony and and and… but now I’m dreaming big and a lot of that’s crazy talk and wishful thinking (that will have to wait for at least a few acres in Montana or Michigan or more likely northern Minnesota, and at least a year or three or more)… one thing at a time, now!

I’m slowing my roll on those bigger farm dreams (other than the chickens and the permaculture garden) and focusing on remodeling the house to be more energy efficient, teaching myself some new valuable skills (like making this blog less fugly and more useful), and hopefully this winter, putting together the packraft kits I bought us this summer, and hand carving a couple traditional cedar Greenland kayak paddles!

Right after I finish Venetian plastering the foyer, airsealing and insulating the attic, building a bike storage rack for the basement, and painting and adding wheels to the work/potting bench… that’s the to-do list before warm weather hits and I go back to reglazing, priming, and repainting our vintage wooden windows.

Oh yeah, I also had a regular FT job while doing that… I don’t sleep. Enough. (ok, that’s a lie- I LOVE sleeping, but I also LOVE teaching myself how to do cool stuff. The struggle is real, but that’s what coffee is for?).

(2013 Update- the chickens have landed, right behind the bees, and ahead of the dog. Life is better shared, although who we share it with sometimes changes? That same life has thrown some curve balls my way lately, and I’m doing my best to hit those suckers out of the park. Look out.)

((2017: Post-post script… Zeus the Moose-dog and Gurl are (were) currently kickin’ it in East Oakland, which basically feels just like home but the citrus trees and jasmine don’t have to be brought indoors for the winter? Bay Area life is lovely, and the Inn and farm are in good hands back in Chicago, so still come book a visit with us!)