The Coop Episode #11: Cultivating a Beautiful Life: Homemaking, Homesteading & Travel w/ Shaye Elliott

Shaye Elliot:

When you build a beautiful life, it’s never going to be in isolation. It’s always going to involve other people. The mountaintop moments give the everyday life perspective, and the everyday life gives the mountaintop moments perspective. I think it’s important in the home steading lifestyle to remember your homestead is here to serve you. You are not here to serve your homestead.

Anna Sakawsky:

So hello everyone and welcome to episode 11 of The Coop, where we host educational and inspirational conversations with the incredible homesteaders that we feature in Homestead Living Magazine, the ones who are at the forefront of the modern home steading movement that we are all a part of. So my name is Anna Sakawsky and I am the editor in chief of Homestead Living Magazine. And I’m so excited to be here today with someone who has been a big inspiration to me on my own homestead journey, someone whose advice and encouragement regularly helps me see through the drudgery of life’s never ending to-do list, and whose example I’ve followed as I’ve evolved beyond simply growing food for sustenance and now dedicate part of my garden to growing flowers for beauty and growing food that I genuinely love to cook with. This person regularly reminds me that there is more to this life than just producing and preserving as much as possible simply for the sake of having a full pantry.

But before I introduce our guest, I do just want to take a moment to thank today’s sponsor, and that is the brand new Plain Values podcast hosted by Plain Values Magazine publisher Marlon Miller. The show features faith-based conversations with inspiring people, many of whom are also contributors to Homestead Living Magazine, who share their journeys, struggles and triumphs as they navigate life, living a life true to their Christian values and share stories, wisdom and advice we all need to hear from growing food to building strong families and communities to keeping the faith even in difficult times. This podcast covers it all. You can subscribe today for free and watch or listen by heading over to plainvalues.com/podcast. Again, that is plainvalues.com/podcast. Alright, so back to today’s guest. Shaye Elliot is a homesteader, homemaker wife, homeschooling mom of four, creator of the popular blog and YouTube channel, the Elliot Homestead and co-host of the Homemaker Chic podcast from her small farm in central Washington, she’s built a life and a following around the idea of cultivating the beautiful life, whether she’s arranging bouquets of flowers from her garden, cooking up a rustic meal that’s as visually appealing as it is delicious, or sharing her adventures abroad in Italy.

Shaye’s approach to home steading helps remind us that there is more to this lifestyle than the practical aspects we tend to think of. And then it’s also about creating warmth, beauty, and memorable maybe even magical moments in our everyday lives. So Shea, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join me for the second time, actually in almost as many months. The first time was for an interview for Homestead Living Magazine. Earlier this summer, we talked all about what it means to cultivate a beautiful life, why beauty matters as much as pragmatism and how you approach both home steading and homemaking in your own life. So this interview is actually available in the brand new November, December, 2025 issue of Homestead Living. But today I’d love to dive a little bit deeper and talk about more practical ways to integrate the art of homemaking with the more utilitarian aspects of home steading, how to bring beauty into your daily life without it feeling overwhelming and how to balance other passions like traveling with the realities of home steading, being very rooted at home. So Shay, welcome to the coop.

Shaye Elliot:

Thank you. Thank you. I loved all of those things you listed. I’m like, yes, let’s talk about that. That’s great.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, I’m so excited for this conversation because I find that your approach to home steading is so different and kind of dynamic and there’s so many elements that are a part of what you do and a part of your life that maybe aren’t what a lot of people think of when they think about home steading. So one of those being that you actually just got back from a trip to Italy, and obviously traveling is one of those things that can be really tough as a homesteader. So we will get into a little bit of that and some of the practical ways that you have managed to make traveling a part of your life with a full on working homestead. But I would love to just quickly know what were some of the highlights of your trip? I just love hearing travel stories. I traveled so much in my earlier days, but it’s a lot harder now that we are home steading ourselves. So I love living vicariously through other people. So what was the highlight for you?

Shaye Elliot:

Well, this was the first time I’ve been to Italy many times, but this was the first time that I’d ever hosted a group. So we took a group of 10 guests and then Stuart and I, and we had two helpers with us. So this was the first time I was ever in charge, and I think that was a highlight, even though it was stressful, it was not a restful beach vacation. We were up at dawn in bed way late. But to me the highlight was kind of repositioning. I don’t know if other homesteaders can relate to this, but I like to put effort into things. I like to work. That’s why I have gardens. If you don’t like to work, don’t have gardens. And so sometimes even things like vacation can be, or travel can be difficult for me because I want to sink my teeth into something. I don’t want to just eat out at restaurants. I want to get into some’s kitchen and make broth and make bread, those pieces of things that you miss when you’re traveling. So to me, a big highlight was just actually getting to do that. I went there, I had a kitchen, I cooked food for people, I served it to them, I made them drinks, I joined them in conversation. And so the highlight was getting to recreate that beauty, that piece of things that we love here somewhere else that we love. It was fantastic.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, that’s awesome. Yeah. It’s so funny because when I think back to where I first got into, I wouldn’t say it was home steading at the time, but it was really the seeds of home steading were planted when I was traveling. And that started with learning to cook from scratch. And that was because in our early days, my early twenties, we didn’t have a lot of money. And when you’re backpacking and everything, you have to find ways to make a dollar stretch. And so it was often cooking at the hostels or wherever we were living at the time it was preparing food at. And my husband and I actually both lived abroad together in Australia before we got married. And that was some of the things that we bonded over and discovered that we both had a passion for was really good food. And we didn’t want to eat poorly just because we didn’t have a lot of money. So we really got into how can we make a dollar stretch and create these beautiful meals? And that really did plant the seed. And then when we came home, we got really into cooking once we really had our own kitchen. And then that really evolved into eventually the whole homestead thing.

Shaye Elliot:

And I imagine if you were traveling and you were looking for food to cook, that sort of led you to markets and stores, and so you got to actually experience your travels there probably in a completely different way than just getting on the tourist street and hitting up the local restaurant. Did you find that?

Anna Sakawsky:

Absolutely. And we love that. I mean, first of all, we love going down the road less traveled. The last time we went away, we just went to Mexico and we kind of got off the beaten path and we wandered and wandered until we started seeing only locals and chickens roaming the streets. I’m like, that’s when you’re hitting the good stuff and all this little taco joint, and it was only locals and meat hanging in the window. I’m like, this is where we’re going.

Shaye Elliot:

That’s right.

Anna Sakawsky:

And we’re actually going away to Mexico again next year, and we’re actually, there’s going to be a chef and everything there, but there’s the optional opportunity to go to the market with them. I’m like, I am all in for that. I want to be part of it. I want to learn the dishes and cook alongside them. So yeah, I think food actually has been one of the biggest pieces of travel for me. I know other people who travel and just the food is like whatever. It’s for sustenance and it’s the other things, it’s the sightseeing and everything, and those are important, but for me, food is at the heart.

Shaye Elliot:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if you go to a grocery store, at least I have found this, even abroad, these different countries, you’re still getting this prepackaged, polished version of things at a supermarket. When you go to an actual market, that’s where you see the good stuff. That’s where you see the road less traveled, culinarily.

Anna Sakawsky:

Absolutely. Yeah. As soon as you start stumbling upon ingredients too that you don’t recognize or have never cooked with. Right. Yes. Awesome. Well, we’ll talk a little bit more about traveling a little bit later, but to start, I want to ask you a question that I have started asking everybody on the show or that I plan to continue asking, and that is just how you actually define home steading.

Shaye Elliot:

Oh, I hate this question, Anna. It’s so hard.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, yeah, and that’s why I want to, because I expect everybody’s definitions to be a little bit different. And when you actually look up what is the definition of home sitting, you still find dictionary definitions that reference the homestead act like we haven’t quite caught up with what this modern home sitting movement means. And it does mean something a little bit different to everyone. So yeah, I’d love to hear your take on

Shaye Elliot:

That. Yes, it is interesting because when you say the word homestead, people tend to know what you mean, but it’s not easy to define. In my mind, it is a shift, a shift towards an agrarian lifestyle. So I don’t think it’s about out having food saved up for years on end. I don’t think there’s no animal count that you hit that now, oh, now you qualify as a homesteader. I think it is a mental and a physical shift towards a connection, a particular type of connection with the agrarian world. So I have friends who live in the city, but they plant a little garden and they have a little tomato in a pot and they make their bread and they become more aware of ingredients, they become more aware of seasonal things, they become more aware of even the weather and the markets and all these sort of wonderful things.

And to me, that’s fine. I don’t like the way that it gets fenced off sometimes. And I say this because maybe you’ve experienced this as well, but we’ve been fenced out. So when we sold our dairy cow, we found out our daughter was intolerant to dairy. It doesn’t really make sense to have a cow when no one can have it. And we did receive sort of feedback from the homestead community. It was like, well, you’re not a real homestead anymore. I liked you better when you were a real homestead. And I think that has such a disservice to quote our movement because I started in a teeny little rental house with one little garden bed just starting to think about what kind of ingredients were in my food. That’s where it started. It was so simple and looking back silly. I mean, I looked for raw milk, I learned how to make bread. I learned how to cook a whole chicken, these very small things, but they were pieces that connected me back to the agrarian mindset. And so I guess that that’d be my best take at it. I don’t know.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, I love that. And that is something that I do find comes up a lot when you do ask people, they have different variations of their definition, but almost all of them mentioned that it’s about a mindset first and foremost. And same with, like I say, we weren’t homestead when we were traveling, we weren’t. Were just cooking. But that was still, I would really say that that was the beginning of the journey. And again, it’s just that reconnection to what nourishes us and where our food comes from and all of that. Has your definition changed or evolved at all over the years because your journey has changed a bit. What home steading looked like for you at first versus what it looks like today? Do you think your approach to it or your understanding of it has changed at all?

Shaye Elliot:

I think most things, when we start on a journey, we tend to go through what I call the cage stage. The cage stage is when you get really excited about something and you should be just kind of kept away from the general public for a while while you calm down, because you get so excited and enthusiastic that you just want to shove it down everybody’s throat. I think I definitely went through that when I first started. I was so excited. The first time I dehydrated tomatoes, I wrote this blog post and my husband read and he was like, you got to dial it back. Oh my word.

You cannot expect everybody to a love this as much as you do, but drop everything in their world and start to live now you think it’s this best way. And so I think when you start off on something like this, it comes with a lot of enthusiasm and probably a little bit too much dogma where you just draw these lines that really don’t need to be drawn, that aren’t helpful to be drawn at all. And so I would say maybe my definition hasn’t changed because I do think it was still that reverting back to being aware of the agrarian world. But I do think that when I started, I felt more valid the more I did. And I think that’s died away partly because just realistically, it’s really difficult to maintain a particular level when you’re also growing a family. So I think we talked about this the last time we chatted when the kids were little and I could just stick ’em in a wagon and take ’em with me wherever I wanted on the property to do anything. This lifestyle was a lot easier in a lot of ways. They were just excited to be out in the dirt. They didn’t, they’re their own people now. They’re teenagers now. They have their own lives, they’re doing driver’s ed. They’ve got time and things with friends. And so I’ve had to loosen my grip as it were, on what I think this is supposed to look like. And so definition, the same application, probably quite a bit gentler and kinder and more open for myself and for others as well.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, yeah. I actually listened to one of your recent podcast episodes where you read, there was a reader or a listener I guess, who had written in and said, oh, are you still home steading? I haven’t heard you talk about some of the particular home steading things that we tend to think of raising animals, gardens, that sort of thing in a while. And you had talked about this and how you are still doing some of those things and you’re still raising shape and you still have your gardens and all those things, but that you had got rid of the dairy cow and that your children are older and life looks different and that you don’t have the same capacity with running businesses, everything else you’re doing that you don’t have the same capacity that you did when you maybe first started. And again, and I hear this a lot, and I think this is a natural thing that happens to everyone. We grow and we evolve and we develop new passions and we enter different stages of life. And there is a little bit of dogma around lots of different things, but home steading in particular where, like you said, you almost get pushback when it’s like, well, you got rid of the dairy cow. You’re not really a home setter, or you have a smaller garden this year or whatever. What about you personally? Did you have any feel, any guilt or grief about letting go of any of these parts of it?

Shaye Elliot:

Oh, absolutely. Not guilt, but sadness. We used to keep breeding pigs and I loved them. And we just hit capacity. I don’t know how your capacity works, but it’s like we’re good, good, good, good. We are not good all of a sudden. And it’s usually at those times where it’s just something requires a change. Seasons change. So we decided to get rid of the pigs, and I just wept. I was so sad because we’d worked hard to get this breeding stock where we wanted them to be. I very much delighted in them. We’d put a lot of effort into setting up our property to be able to have them, but it wasn’t the right thing for us. And I think that is actually a really important point, saying no to things because you’re at capacity, because it’s not the right season doesn’t mean you don’t love those things.

It just means you’re saying no right now. And so even when we got rid of cc, that was a really tough one for me. We’d had her for 10 years. She went to a wonderful family that we could not be happier about, but I cried. I just wept openly. And at first it was this initial, I’m letting myself down, I’m letting her down. I’m letting these people down who a lot of people have a cow, because we had a cow and talked about how wonderful it is, and it is wonderful. But things change. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I feel like in a way, we’re like the trial group of people because I’m 15 years, I think a little over 15 years into this online homesteading thing. And you’re right over that course of that amount of time you change a lot. 15 years is a significant amount of time. So we shouldn’t expect anything other than that for ourselves or for other people. But at the same time, we also went through a poor stage in our early twenties, and I’ve gotten comments from people before. I liked your content better when you were poor. And I just thought, well, didn’t, I’m glad that you found that helpful, but that’s not where I want to stay.

Anna Sakawsky:

Thank

Shaye Elliot:

You. So it’s interesting. It is interesting to live it out too, in a place where people have opinions about it. Even if you make peace with it, that doesn’t mean your following has made

Anna Sakawsky:

Peace with it. Yeah, someone’s going to have a problem with it. I think we just hold on so tightly to our identities. We define ourselves by what we do. And it’s funny because when you’re talking about being sad about letting go of the pigs or the dairy cow or whatever, and back to traveling, I kind of felt that when we entered this lifestyle that was a previous life and it’s sad, but that door has closed and now we are homesteaders and I why your content is actually so powerful because you show that you can do this and that you can have elements like home sitting doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens along with real life. And there are other things as well. I mean, another big part of what you do, obviously, and a lot of the content that you do put out through the blog and through your podcast especially, is more kind focused on the home making aspect rather than homesteading. But I think that there’s a lot of crossover as well. I mean, they’re both obviously home centric. And I would love to know too, we talked about your definition of home steading. What would your definition of homemaking be? And if you were to imagine almost like as a Venn diagram, where are the similarities and where does homesteading and homemaking maybe differ?

Shaye Elliot:

Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, when I think about homemaking, I do think just about a focused effort, A focused effort at cultivating a home. Because we all know, we’ve all been in houses that are houses, they’re not homes.

And to me, the things that make a home is when people enter, they feel cared for, they feel loved, they feel safe. Now, whether or not that’s your biological children, adopted children, guests, family, sisters, it doesn’t matter anybody who crosses this threshold, I want this to be a place where they feel cared for, heard loved. That’s my goal. And so bread does that really well. Big pots of soup do that really well. A set table does that really well. There are things that say to people, there’s life here and you’re welcome. You’re welcome in. And so I think where they cross over is that homesteading, it is a home centric activity. You’re going to put your gardens in somewhere and you’re not really going to take them with you, right? You’re going to have livestock, or even if it’s just chickens or whatever it is, it’s going to stay in one spot. It’s going to be there. And so the nature of it is that all of those activities end up revolving around this particular place. In my mind, that would be the crossover. We can spend a day in our home just focusing on homemaking, where I’m just tending to things in the kitchen, mopping floors, washing clothes. I can also spend the day outside rebuilding fence, cleaning out the chicken coop, moving the sheep to different pasture, whatever it may be. So a physical space to me is where they cross over

Anna Sakawsky:

For sure. And then I guess, yeah, and I think that obviously there are many similarities, but it is also possible to do one or the other without the other element.

Shaye Elliot:

Absolutely. It’s

Anna Sakawsky:

Obviously possible to be a homemaker without doing all the home steading stuff, but it’s also possible to homestead and maybe not put that same effort into creating a beautiful space or a welcoming space. You’re really just doing it for the sustenance, that sort of thing. Yeah.

Shaye Elliot:

I studied beef production in college, animal science, beef production, and there were lots of springs spent calving in a cow calf operation where you’d just be living in a trailer and it was freezing cold, and you’d have to get up in the night and go check every few hours and see how everyone was doing, et cetera. That was not a home. That is falls into a different category. This, I call it cowboy culture. Cowboys we’re very much on the move. They follow the cattle, whether it’s to summer pasture, winter paddocks, whatever it is, that is a much different movement than a homestead. And so they are fundamentally different in the principles that kind of sit behind them.

Anna Sakawsky:

It almost makes me think of it as almost more of a spectrum. If you think about farming, and then there’s like hobby farming, a farmstead, a homestead, and then homemaking, right? And there’s just kind of small differences between each one. But then when you look on the spectrum, homemaking versus farming and ranching are, yes, much different part, but they’re just small variations to get there, depending

Shaye Elliot:

On much different. And the good news is that it doesn’t matter. Do whatever you want. Don’t let anybody else say, well, now this doesn’t classify as a farmstead anymore. Now it’s this. Now it’s that. Who cares? Who cares? I think that’s so unhelpful. Yeah.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, and so many people too, and I know a lot of our listeners and our readers, they don’t have acres upon acres. We are on just over a quarter acre. What are you guys on

Shaye Elliot:

A top? We’re on just two and a half.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah. So it doesn’t always have to be this, I would say the 10 acres in the milk cow, it doesn’t need, it can be, but it doesn’t need to be for you to be a home setter and certainly not a homemaker. I mean, anywhere that you rest your head and call your home, you can make it a nice space. And that is obviously something that you’re really focused on doing. Your approach to homemaking is about what you call cultivating the beautiful life. And so I would love to know, and again, we talked about this a little bit for the magazine earlier this summer, but for maybe anybody who hasn’t read that or doesn’t follow your content, can you explain what that means? What you actually mean by cultivating the beautiful life? What does that look like for you?

Shaye Elliot:

Well, what I love about this saying is that I didn’t actually pin it down until a couple of years ago. I was just doing my thing, just doing what I love to do. And then it sort of dawned on me like mission statements might seem a little cliche, but they can actually be really helpful when you’re making decisions even for a family. We have a family mission statement that we can revert back to when we face a question, is this good for us? Is this the right decision? Well, does it fit our family mission statement? And if it does, okay, so the thing about the beautiful life is that it takes on a lot of different forms. And it was really important to me to keep it broad because I want people who live in a city apartment to still feel like it’s worth tending to their home. Again, creating that safe, inviting, beautiful space for them and for other people. Because what that does is it builds community. When you build a beautiful life, it’s never going to be an, it’s always going to involve other people. So my hope in that was that it in a way pulls us out of ourselves,

Out of this culture of, my husband calls it navel gazing, where people are just so busy staring at their own navel that they sort of let the world around them pass them by. I believe that the beautiful life involves other people because it involves cultivating something that you want to share. Now, cultivating is an important word because it takes action. I think we’ve done multiple seasons now on my podcast called, it doesn’t just happen. You want it to, I want it to every day. Can’t this stuff just get done? Can’t things just be naturally beautiful? They just take care of themselves? No, I wish. But no. So it was important that it was an active verb, which means that you have to get up every day and you have to decide, I can microwave a hot pocket, and that might be what your day looks like that day. Or I can do this other thing. Either way, we’re doing something. And so it comes down to making these intentional decisions to say, this is what beautiful is, and this is what I’m going to strive for.

Anna Sakawsky:

And putting the effort into the upkeep, right? Because I mean, anybody who has a home, and especially if you have a family, children and everything, every time you turn around, it’s like, didn’t I just do the dishes? I just do lunch. I just cook a meal. But it’s the same thing with homestead gardening. I just muck out this pen. I just weed this garden. But it does take active upkeep and

Shaye Elliot:

And that in and of itself, labor in and of itself is really unmotivating to me. I find it laborsome. Now, if I am mucking out the chicken coop and I have some fun music on the speaker, and I’ve got my boys out there with me and we’re appreciating the sunset, we’re nibbling on something from the garden, whatever. That’s beautiful.

And so it takes these things that we have to do. Anyway, a great example of this is, I’m trying, I think I told you this earlier, this summer, we’re trying really hard to eat through everything in our root cellar that we’ve stored up over the years so that we can redo the shelving and take care of some things that need to be taken care of down there. And it gets a little boring when you’re like, oh, look, another jar of rhubarb curd, yay. Oh, look. And so what I’ve been doing is I’ve been going to a little local market. It’s a little bit out of the way, and all of the vegetables and some of the, they’re a little bit more per pound than I could get at my big grocery store, but the pleasure of shopping at that market is worth a few extra dollars to then come home. And I put out the few little inexpensive things I got, and that is enough to motivate me to be like, okay, let’s go get another thing of dried beans. Okay, let’s get through that rhubarb curd. Let’s use up those weird pieces of meat in the freezer. And so it’s not tricking yourself, but it’s finding beautiful ways to make the mundane or the everyday sorts of things enjoyable because the majority of our life is just those things. Yeah.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you kind of mentioned a few of the things that you do that bring beauty, and I like that your definition of beauty. I think people think of aesthetically something that’s beautiful and that can be part of it, but it’s more about the vibe, the atmosphere. It’s a vibe. So many things. It’s your perspective, it’s everything. What are those, some other maybe tangible things that you do on a regular basis to create beauty in your home, to go beyond just the basics of keeping up a house and keeping up homestead running that actually intentionally bring beauty to what you’re doing?

Shaye Elliot:

Yeah. Well, sometimes I do try to trick myself because we have five senses.

And so my mind may be in a bad way that particular day, because you’re right, you wash dishes and guess what? They’re going to come again. You clean the bathroom floor, somebody’s going to walk through with muddy muck boots. And that can be really, really stressful and frustrating. And so sometimes I just play tricks on myself and I say, okay, this sense, let’s say your visual stuff is overstimulated. You’re frustrated. So let’s do something with scent so that sense is happy. Let’s do something with sound so that that sense is happy. Let’s make a beautiful cup of tea. So that sense is happy. And so I focus on creating environment where my body can be like, yes, I got to do this thing, but this is good. And this can be so simple. I mean, I get happy all you young ladies listening. This is where your life is headed.

So just be warned. I get excited at a new sponge. Okay. I’m like, look, a fresh clean sponge, a fresh, clean sponge. Yay. I can’t wait to wash these dishes because look at this beautiful sponge. Even something like that, I keep a little tray by my kitchen sink. I put my dish soap into a little beautiful, sweet vintage enamel pitcher. I put a plant there. I put a little statue of a rooster that I find to be quite charming. I put my new sponge and I keep it all on this tray so that even something completely mundane and utilitarian like washing the dishes is an opportunity when I get done and I wipe off the counters and I water the plant and straighten everything up, it’s beautiful. And so that probably is going to look quite a bit different for each person. But I would just say hit the other senses.

I think truly one of the most powerful tools that the homemaker has in her pocket is sound, which is so funny to think about, but we all know what music can do, what type of music that you play in your home completely changes the atmosphere faster than anything else, faster than anything else. Yesterday I was outside just grilling up a ton of ground lamb kind of burger patties, just protein for the teenagers. I’m not at the Blackstone. I’m just doing this. It’s raining. I’m not really having that great of a time. I know the kitchen’s a reconciled, so I put on a new kind of blues rock southern album that I love. I put it on the speaker nice and loud. All of a sudden I’m having a good time.

I didn’t change anything about my circumstances. I just tricked myself. I fed into a different piece of myself that said, yeah, you have to do this thing. So maybe for the homemaker, what this could look like is having a different go-to album or playlist that they can pull up when they’re feeling a particular way. So sometimes when you need to clean the house, you need some energy. So I have a pretty great nineties playlist that’ll get me motivated. I think it’s so fun when I’m shooting, filming, or doing recipes, it’s always classical because I find that it conjures up creativity in my mind, nothing else. So that’s going to be individual. But to me, that’s one of the most tangible ways that we miss.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, I so agree with you. And actually, one of the things that I love to do is listen to podcasts actually while I’m doing my work, right? Because a little treat then and maker chic is one that I often listen to, well, genuinely. And I do find that it can change my mood completely. I can go from being like, oh, I have all these dishes to do, or I have whatever the work is in front of me. But then it kind of helps me to again, see beyond that drudgery and remember the bigger picture. And so that’s one thing that we do. But I definitely do similar to you, and I’ve probably taken a lot of the influence from you. We’ll put on some jazz with dinner or if the kids are just being crazy, we put on, we’ve got a little soundtracks called Peaceful Piano. Oh, there you go. Everything down a notch, right? So yeah, for sure.

Shaye Elliot:

I’ve also done the opposite, Anna, where I will put on just something ridiculous that I know that they’re going to dance to. And I’m like, you get 15 minutes and I just crank it, get it out, whatever it is, get it out, go crazy. And then the piano music’s coming on.

Anna Sakawsky:

So are there any other rituals maybe that you have or certain things that you try to, certain standards that you’re like, if nothing else, this needs to get done on a maybe daily basis just to avoid what you call sliding into the ditch or whatever. We just want to stay between the ditches on either side. So what are some kind of must do things or things that you are like, if everything else falls apart, I just want to maintain this level in my home.

Shaye Elliot:

If I had to boil it down, I always get ready in the morning always. I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I put on a little bit of makeup because I like it. I do my hair. It’s not fancy, but I get ready for the day. That is the biggest. I think we did a season on this too, on the podcast because I think it is so valuable because you’re saying so much to yourself when you do that. Even if I’m going to go gardening and I’m going to put on my Carhartt overalls and my muck boots and I know it’s just going to be a filthy day, I still get ready because then I feel ready to do the work ahead of me. And the second you don’t do that, that’s when one of your kids is going to have to go get stitches or something.

Totally. That’s where it starts. For me. The second thing that I try to do always, always, always is keep my bed, have clean sheets and keep my bed made. Because if I’ve had a day and we’ve all had them, and I come downstairs and there’s two loads of laundry that needs to be folded on an unmade bed with dirty sheets, it feels almost like a ditch you can’t get out of in that moment. And so it’s a real kindness to yourself, to the signal, to your body of saying, Hey, this is a safe space. You did good today. Did you get it all done? No, you didn’t. You’re never going to get it all done, but that’s okay. Just rest. Here’s a wonderful, safe, clean place to rest, and then we’ll get it tomorrow. The third thing would be, I always cook dinner,

And I know that this is just crazy in the modern world. Oh, we have families going everywhere. We’ve just made the decision. If it’s something that interferes with supper time, we’re most likely going to say no. Because to me, we have a very short window with our children. When I was pregnant with one of my kids, I went through this really crazy Pinterest freezer meal stage, and afterwards, after they sat in the freezer freeze, everybody goes through that. Every mother goes through, I know it’s just something you got to do. Years later, I pulled them out of my freezer and threw them all away. It was a complete waste of effort and ingredients because I realized that I really like the act of making dinner. And listen, sometimes it’s like popcorn and cheese and pickles or something. Sometimes it’s nothing to write home about. A lot of times it’s eggs.

But the act of stopping the day and saying, you know what? Productivity is done now. Work is done. Now you know this. You work at home. It’s very difficult to have delineated lines as a homeschooling work at home family. And so you have to create them fake. You have to fake create them in your head and say, look, it’s four 30. Email is done for the day. We’re clocking out. We’re lighting a candle, we’re making whatever we’re going to make for dinner. This is now home time, family time. And I would say those are kind of the three that those are like my ride or dies. They get off the tracks, they get real sloppy real fast.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And that’s so true. But the delineation, I’m the same as soon as I go out that door and walk into the kitchen at the end and it’s like, Hey, what are we doing for dinner? That marks the end of work and the beginning of home. Another one that you didn’t actually mention, but I know that you have talked about before to bookend. The getting ready at the beginning of the day is, and I don’t know, maybe this isn’t something that you’re still doing, but I think it is putting the kitchen to

Shaye Elliot:

Bed. Oh, yeah,

Anna Sakawsky:

You talk about that. That I find makes all the difference.

Shaye Elliot:

What blows my mind is I have talked to so many people who are like, oh, I don’t clean up after dinner. I do it the next morning. And I cannot, in my mind, even imagine trying to get up and get started and get going for the day at the pace that our family lives right now and having to deal with the dishes from the night before. It makes me crazy to think about. But yeah, putting the kitchen to bed, I don’t remember where that term originally came from. It’s been a part of our lexicon for a very long time. But it’s this idea that at the end of a meal, hopefully you’ve sat down and you’ve genuinely fellowshipped with the people at your table. You’ve talked about your days and asked good questions and engaged and eat some wonderful food and had a glass of wine and had a very restful, rejuvenating time. And then after that, you put your kitchen to bed, which means you do your dishes, you wipe off your counters, you put the food away, you put out a fresh towel, take out the trash so that when you come into the kitchen in the morning, it’s a new day. It’s a new day that’s clean and beautiful and possible. To me, it sets the homemaker up for success the next

Anna Sakawsky:

Day. I hear you, and I will fully admit it doesn’t always happen in our house, and it certainly doesn’t always happen where everything is a hundred percent put away. All the clean dishes are put away at that night, but at least they’re clean for the next morning. But I cannot go into the kitchen and cook a meal when the kitchen’s a mess. My husband’s like, I don’t understand. Just move it. Can you? I have to clean the kitchen first. And I hate that because again, when you want to cook, you’re feeling inspired. You want to just go in and do it. And when you have to clean first, it really takes the joy out of it. And same with home steading. I find if I’m going to be bringing in baskets of things from the garden and bringing in what will essentially cause a bit of a mess, I always tell my kids this. I’m like, it’s important to always clean up because life is messy. We’re going to create more messes. But if we’re creating mess on top of mess, that’s what it gets out of control. And mom loses her mind, but I can handle the revolving mess as long as it’s always getting cleaned up at the end.

Shaye Elliot:

That’s right. A joke. We have a joke in our family. It’s know thyself.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well,

Shaye Elliot:

It’s as easy as a mom. It’s easy as a homemaker to get overstimulated just to get overstimulated when there’s mess on top of mess task, on top of task, this looming thing, this looming thing. You’re just human. You’re not a robot. You can’t just be like, okay, well, don’t worry about any of it. No, that’s not the way that it works. So the only thing really that you can do is intentionally cultivate your day in a way that sets you up for as good of a day as possible, and it’s going to get derailed. Right now, my husband’s at the vet with our dog who swallowed a chicken bone last night. There’s always going to be these unexpected pieces of life. If it’s the chicken bone and the laundry’s piled and my bed’s unmade, and I’m in my yoga pants and I haven’t brushed my teeth yet today, and a kid is playing something annoying on the piano, it’s done. There’s no recovery at that point.

Anna Sakawsky:

Let’s talk about food for a minute, because obviously that’s a big part of what you do in your personal life, but also the content that you share. You have an online cooking community, and food is at the heart of home steading in so many ways, but there’s different approaches to food as well. There’s a lot of people out there that are just three, we’re getting three meals on the table, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t have to be fancy, simple, doesn’t have to look nice, whatever. And that is fine. And there is nothing wrong with that as long as everybody’s fed and happy. But your approach to food is a little bit more elevated, I guess. It’s kind of like everything that you do, you put more attention into wanting to plate it beautifully and use beautiful ingredients and all that stuff. How do you manage to get three meals on the table, or even if it’s just a dinner every day and elevate those meals without it making you crazy? And I know you’ve talked about just having simple things, but how do you stay inspired? What’s your kind of approach to meal planning, getting dinner on the table, creating beauty in what you’re doing?

Shaye Elliot:

I met this chef in Italy, and she instilled in me this idea of trying not to use more than five ingredients per recipe and to the American mind. I think that sounds pretty wild because we have access to everything. Think about how many condiments we have in our refrigerators. It’s almost endless. But I really took on this concept seriously, and it sounds overly simplistic because it’s not a big complicated, and here’s how to do it. I think we actually need to do less. We need to allow things to be simpler. So a few weeks ago on my YouTube channel, I shared this recipe that I’d eaten in Italy, and it was beans. Now these could be just good old Walmart bagged beans. They could be beautiful heirloom beans, but they were soaked in water, boiled in just water until they were tender. And then I doused them in olive oil and roasted them with bay leaves and rosemary and lemon salt.

And then I bake them really, really hot. So they go almost crispy, and that’s, it could not be simpler. There’s not skill involved, there’s not a lot of money involved, but something like that. And then you eat it and you realize, I’m tasting a bean. I’m tasting crispy rosemary. I’m tasting olive oil. That is what motivates me because you can, I love ranch dressing, by the way, but you can drizzle anything with ranch dressing or ketchup or soy sauce or any number of these things. And it will taste like that thing. It won’t taste like itself. So to me, what’s motivating is continuing to take back these recipes further and further and further into their almost like truist state. I think that’s really great news actually for the homesteader, because we put a lot of effort into growing food and beautiful varieties of tomatoes and cabbages and carrots, and then we don’t know how to cook them.

And that’s a ton of work to just kind of end up where you would’ve ended up anyway if you just bought it. So I think it does service to our efforts in order to do that. My cooking community has actually been an incredible inspiration for me. We’ve been doing it for seven years now, and in that time we’ve built up an archive of these whole food from scratch recipes. So I think there’s like 430 some recipes now. So that’s where I go. That’s how I actually function in my kitchen. I will open up the app and I will scrub through main dishes, and I’ll say, okay, I’m picking out these three and here’s what I’m going to make for breakfast. And here’s that bread recipe. And again, this is a pleasure point. Think about when you search for recipes online, there are ads, lots of video ads.

You can almost not even see the ingredients through all of the ads that takes something that’s supposed to be pleasurable and turns it into something very noisy. And so we have to create these pockets for ourselves, which is what we’ve tried to do in the cooking community. But there’s people in there who do things a lot differently than I do. People, people, there’s people who work full-time. There’s people who have no kids, there’s people who have a ton of kids, but everyone kind of shares their experiences. Here’s how I adapted this, or here’s what I did instead. There’s a lot of people who hunt, and so they’re substituting in wild game while I’m cooking lamb and beef, they’re cooking elk or venison. I find that to be incredibly encouraging because you’re trying to build an ethos. That’s what you’re going towards. It’s not just a paint by numbers, do this, do this, do this. So I find watching what other people do to be incredibly motivating. Also, I’ve learned by airing and falling into the ditch on the other side, I can only take menu planning three days at a time.

Life changes very quickly, circumstances changed. We cook a lot for YouTube and for our cooking community. So there’s food coming in at weird times right now, it’s Christmas in my kitchen because we’re preparing for the cooking community. So that’s tricky. And so again, I think when people think, oh, I’m going to cook from scratch, here’s my monthly menu plan. That’s hard. That’s heavy lifting. It’s a lot lighter to just think even a meal and a half right now with where we’re at in our week, I’m thinking a meal and a half a hit. Do I know what’s for dinner? Have I pulled meat out from the freezer? What’s going to be leftover that I can flush out for breakfast tomorrow as far as I’m going ahead? So my encouragement to people would be to keep it really, really simple, keep it really simple, and then don’t feel the need to build Rome in a day. It’s not going to happen. You’re just going to stress yourself out burnout and go get pizza for dinner.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, yeah. That’s so true. And I mean, I would imagine that doing what you’re doing with the home steading aspect as well, with growing food and obviously stocking certain ingredients on hand and eating through your root cellar and that sort of thing, you’re probably approaching a lot of your meals, not necessarily with like, okay, I want to cook this recipe. And then going out and finding the ingredients. It’s probably a little bit more reverse where you’re like, what do I have that’s in season? What do I have that needs to be used? And then building meals around that.

Shaye Elliot:

And what’s fun is some of these things, they’re not instant friends. So for example, for December, I’m teaching my cooking community to roast parsnips. And we’ve done parsnips a few different ways in the past, but parsnips aren’t. If you ask somebody what their favorite vegetable is, it’s not going to be parsnips. But what you find over time is that you’re going to bump into these ingredients over and over again. Even at the supermarket, you’re going to see pomegranates in winter, you’re going to see parsnips, you’re going to see radicchio, you’re going to see arugula. You’re going to see these things that you might just go for the iceberg and the apples and the bananas, but you’re going to bump into them. And some of them you can just become instant friends. With some of them. It comes over time. And I do think that ingredients have personalities. You’re right, it’s absolutely backwards. So when I go to the little market I mentioned before, I go and I see what they have, and if they have really beautiful radi, then I get it. And again, I just menu plan a few days out, not a ton. I try to go to the market twice a week so that I have fresh something. Even at the winter, a lot of times this is like microgreens or we have a really great mushroom farm here, these sorts of things. But just something that makes me want to get into the kitchen.

And I think most home cooks know this feeling like if you get a beautiful new bottle of olive oil or a flaked sea salt, you’re excited. I get excited about that kind of stuff. So you are working, you’re working backwards, you’re seeing something and then creating something from it.

Anna Sakawsky:

Do you do a lot of preserving in the summer with the ingredients that you guys are growing and raising? I

Shaye Elliot:

Do. I’ve learned a lot in what I like to preserve and what I don’t like to preserve. And I think this is an important lesson for anybody who wants to go to the effort, because preserving is a lot of work. Your community knows it’s a ton of work, which is so great in the dead of winter when you can go and pull a jar of apricot jam off your shelf, unless nobody in your home wants to eat apricot jam, then you’ve just wasted a ton of time and effort.

Ask me how I know. So what I like to do in the summertime is to prioritize preserving, because again, also things come up or seasons get busy. We had an incredibly busy season with work this last summer. So preserving time was really limited. So my top of my list always, always, always is tomato posada, like a homemade tomato sauce. That’s number one. Things I can’t buy are number two. So I make a tomato jam with onion and honey and spices can’t really buy it. So that’s number two. I’ve had to let go of the guilt, the homesteading guilt. If you have fruit trees or a really good bumper crop, sometimes you feed ’em to the chickens. And old Shea would’ve been just devastated at that idea because it was like every apricot, every carrot was going to make a difference unless they go moldy in your pantry and you end up throwing them away. So there’s a lot of preserving, tapered with a lot of experience now knowing what’s worth it to our family to preserve.

Anna Sakawsky:

And I think that’s part of the evolution that we talked about earlier is I think a lot of homesteaders start out with just when it comes to preserving, it’s like just preserve all the things. And I know when we started too, so much of what was coming out of our garden or food that we were bringing in, it was like, how do we preserve this? And we were preserving more than we were just enjoying fresh where it really should be like we’re preserving the excess. And so our mindset has shifted now too, where this year mostly it was about just cooking fresh with those ingredients. And if we had excess of something or there was something really specific that our family likes, I do a low sugar strawberry jam, and there’s certain things even throughout the year, I’ll can beef broth and chicken broth and that sort of thing because I like homemade and I like to just have it on hand and easy. But it’s taken a decade of, I’ve still got jams sitting on my shelf from five years ago that I’m like, I’m still trying to give them out to people or think, how am I going to use these? And at some point you just go, I’m just not going to, and that’s okay. I’d rather just get the jars back. Please take the shelf space back.

Shaye Elliot:

And I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s both. Two things can be true. We can hold two truths at the same time. Preserving is valuable, good, resourceful, economical. It’s also a true delight to just say, you know what I love? I love eggplant. Eggplant is my favorite vegetable, and I’ve preserved it in a lot of different ways. I freeze dried it, I’ve pickled it, I frozen it. Nobody really likes it preserved. We like it freshly grilled in the summertime next to some charred lamb on the grill, bas it with olive oil and fresh mint and all these wonderful things. That’s how we like it. So it’s okay to just enjoy that beautiful thing and that beautiful moment and let that be enough. That’s good too.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about your podcast and then we’ll kind of bring it back to travel before we wrap up. But so you again host the Homemaker Chic podcast with co-host Angela Reed of the Parisian Farm Girl blog and YouTube channel. And so I mentioned this is one of my personal favorite podcasts just because of, I love the content that you guys share, but I also just love the kind of conversational tone. And I think that from what I’ve heard, you get a lot of feedback on that, that people just love that you’re just having a conversation. It’s like hanging out with a couple girlfriends and it makes me feel like I’m right there with you. And I probably laugh out loud with you guys more than with any other podcast. Love that. But it is, I would say that it falls into the homesteading category because it does touch on those subjects. And you guys are both homesteading in your own. And probably a lot of your listeners are doing the homesteading thing as well. But again, it’s a little bit more focused on the homemaking aspect. So for anybody who maybe hasn’t had a chance to check out your podcast before, especially are listeners who are more focused on the home steading aspect, what can they expect to take away from the podcast and how might it compliment some of the work that they are doing?

Shaye Elliot:

The podcast was one of those things that we just started because we wanted to, and Angela and I have always kind of just done what we want. We don’t go into these things with business plans or goals or any of these kinds of things. We both are creators, so we both really delight in creating. And so the podcast has definitely gone through seasons where we’ve thought, how can we be the most helpful to homemakers and we’ve given tips, or here’s how to whatever, dry, clean your clothes at home. But what we find that we keep going back to becoming and being just a place for other people who value the things that we value to come and hang out, to come and just listen. And we might be telling a travel story or we might be sharing a recipe, or we might be lamenting over something that’s happened that week.

It could be any number of things. But our hope is that it’s just kind of a place where people can come and hang out and just be for an hour. I picture people listening while they’re vacuuming their floors and washing their dishes and ironing their tablecloths and these kinds of things. So the goal was to kind of revive this homemaking movement, which it seems a little silly now, but we started this six years ago, almost six years ago. And so homemaking, I think in general has experienced a resurgence where women are saying, no, I like doing this.

Anna Sakawsky:

I

Shaye Elliot:

Actually doing this stuff Six years ago, I think it was in a little bit of a different position, homemaking in general, the way it was seen. So our goal was to encourage women and say, look, you can be home making bread, raising children, working, doing all these things, and it can still be fun and beautiful. It doesn’t have to be this dreary, drab, oh, poor me. Sort of a situation. And so that’s sort of what we’ve continued to try to bring to the podcast is like a, you’re not alone. And just these encouragement. Angela has six kids. I have four kids. It’s loud and crazy life that we’re both living right now. But the point is you’re not alone. And we’ve discovered a lot of truths in our lives so far. It doesn’t just happen. We did an entire season on just getting up and making sure you make your bed. Just make your bed in the morning. That was the theme. Make your bed, deal with the stuff you got to deal with. You don’t like, it Doesn’t matter. You’ll like it tonight when it’s made. Yeah, totally. We kind of just try to become the hum in people’s ear of just reminding themselves like, Hey, okay, I can do hard things. Hey, homemaking is meant to be fun. Hey, if I just make my bed, I’ll be really glad I did that. These sorts of things.

Anna Sakawsky:

And again, so much of that crosses over into the home steading world as well. Not only are you guys talking about that as well, and you have all episodes where you talk about gardening and raising and that sort of thing,

Shaye Elliot:

But

Anna Sakawsky:

That again, when you’re so many years into it can feel like a bit of drudgery sometimes too, that I got to milk the cow again. I got to get up and do this and do the chores. But I like that your message is more that it is worth it. There’s a bigger reason. And with the homemaking too, it’s interesting. I think I heard somebody else say this on a YouTube video the other day that we’ve been told for so long that it’s not valuable what we do in the home. And I think that this, maybe she had mentioned that she thinks maybe it shifted when we started buying into a lot of more convenient stuff. So maybe women that were at home we’re now not cooking from scratch and not doing all these things that were the things that were adding value, and so then they couldn’t see what the value was.

If you’re just going to go out and purchase everything and have somebody else do everything for you, and you’re literally just home, then what is the value? And then I think we’ve lost, like you say, I think a lot of people, I’ll say mostly women probably, but people in general, we like that. And it’s okay to like that, and it’s okay to put your hand to those tasks and get back to that. So I think it’s nice that you encourage it, but also give people almost permission. Not only is this good, but it’s okay to like it. Yeah.

Shaye Elliot:

And do it and be fabulous Again, who cares? Who cares? It’s incredible how much of our life we decide to live on somebody else’s terms.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah. Well, and it reminds me of our last episode was with Joel Ton, and he was talking about homesteading and I think being kind about living a home centric life and that we are told nowadays that a home is just a place to kind of check in and rest your head at night and that life happens out there. That’s right. And so it’s really about bringing life back to your home. And I think again, that’s where home making and home steading really cross over. Yep. Creating life, your life at home. But of course, life does happen out there as well. And so that brings back to your traveling. And I love again that you share some of this on the podcast because again, and through your substack and your blog and everything, because it does give people then permission that like, Hey, it’s okay. I can be rooted at home.

I can be baking this Howard of bread and be a home baker, but hey, I can also have this passion for travel or for learning a new language, or whatever it is. Those things can coexist. So first of all, you just got back from Italy. Italy is a place that has now really captured your heart. And you’ve talked about how it not only has captured your heart in the sense that you love to visit Italy and the culture and learn the language and everything, but it has also influenced a lot of what you are doing in your home, whether it’s meals that you’re cooking, the ingredients, your stocking, your aesthetic, whatever. What is it about Italy specifically? Gosh.

Shaye Elliot:

I mean, I wish I could answer that question. I first went when I was 20 years old and I went backpacking through France and Italy and Spain, and there were wonderful things about each of those countries. But when I went to Italy, I didn’t know anything about anything. I didn’t know about gardening. I didn’t know about food. I didn’t know about my life or the kind of life I wanted to create. But I loved that place. I loved it aesthetically, I loved it. I loved the gardens that everybody kept. I loved the potted herbs and things that were on every single doorstep. I love the welcoming feeling that you had coming into a restaurant. I loved that they wanted to take care of you. I loved the food. I loved the simplicity of the food, the ethos of, and just the general vibration of the people, particularly in little rural communities. I felt for being a complete foreigner. I felt like it was a place that I should have been.

I’m glad. I live in the United States, by the way, and I love home. I live in the town that I was born in. I live near my family, but I go every single chance that I get, and I never come back the same again with that idea of holding two truths, it’s interesting. Again, when you live in the public eye, it’s incredible the things that people feel like they can say to you as if you’re not a human, right? If you’re home and you’re promoting these home centric things, they say you need to get out and see the world. You only think that because you haven’t left or whatever. They think you’re regressive or you’ve regressed somehow as a woman, if you want to be home and you want to be doing these things, then you go somewhere else and they just think, well, why aren’t you home?

Why aren’t you taking care of your things at home? I like you better. This is real. I like you better when you’re not cos playing Italian. And when you’re in your kitchen, it’s incredible. And so what you realize is you cannot live your life based on somebody else’s standards. You are going to love, you might not love Italy, but you might love something else. And two things can be true at the same time, we can love home and find ways to create beauty in that every day in that mundane, I’ll tell you what, you’re going to have a lot more mundane Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. Then you’re going to have what I call mountaintop moments. That moment when you’re on the pinnacle and you’re like, what? I’m in Italy and I’m drinking wine in this dungeon over a restaurant and eating prosciuttos, beautifully shaved off. Those are mountaintop moments. They’re rare. You have to climb to get there. You don’t get to stay up there. That’s not where you get to live. But they’re so wonderful to have and they give the mountaintop moments, give the everyday life perspective, and the everyday life gives the mountaintop moments perspective. So to me it’s both. It’s not either or. So I hold both very important in terms of just the human experience of truly appreciating both.

Anna Sakawsky:

So back to the practical aspects of everything, what are some maybe tips or advice you have to share with somebody else who’s maybe homestead very rooted at home, has all these functioning parts of a working homestead, maybe has animals, they’re raising gardens, they’re growing things that are constantly in motion at home and maybe want to travel. What are some ways that you’ve actually been able to do that?

Shaye Elliot:

Okay, we had another great podcast theme. If I do say so myself called, it doesn’t just happen. So if you’re waiting to have the money, have the time, have the space, have the capacity to go on a trip, to travel away from home, you have to plan for it. So when we took our family last spring, we started the process 18 months prior, and that looked functionally like saving squirreling away money every single month, getting the kids their passport and then intentionally not planting certain crops because we were going to be gone for a month. There was no way for us to take care of those things. So we delayed our delivery of chicks and we dried up the sheep and we went without a spring garden that year because for us, that was one season that’s already done and dusted. It’s gone. But we remember that trip.

Our kids remember that trip. It was really important that we pulled it off. So I think it’s important in the homestead lifestyle to remember, your homestead is here to serve you. You are not here to serve your homestead. If it ceases to serve you where you’re at as a family or as a person, it might be time to reassess. If you’re saying no to an opportunity because of your obligations, that could, there’s one sense in which that’s responsible in another, it’s good to check it. So for having a dairy animal, for example, we’ve always traveled, we’ve done this by milk sharing, calf sharing. So we would separate, we’d milk in the morning. So basically we always kept the calf on the cow, and this meant we could leave for the weekend. We could drive up and see Stew’s brother or fly down south to seek his family or go away to a cabin for the weekend. You got to be realistic because we’ve also done the other thing where we just burned ourselves down, milking, gardening, preserving everything, not letting an egg go to waste. And you burn out pretty quickly that way. So whether it’s finding a farm hand, whether it’s taking things back to a notch that you can just manage them, whether it’s steading things up in a way. So we have our sheep that go to a summer pasture. Other people keep their eye on them when we’re kind of second string for keeping an eye on them over the summer, whatever it is, finding a way so that this lifestyle continues to be a blessing to you.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It is funny because like I had mentioned earlier, we’re only on just over a quarter acre and I have dreams of having more land and having more animals and all the things, but at the same time, I’m like, when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. That’s

Shaye Elliot:

Right.

Anna Sakawsky:

And this is enough for us, quite honestly right now, where it still allows us to be able to do some of those other things. And I’m like, if we do get to the point where we take on more, then we’re saying no to being able to go on a road trip with our kids in the summer or whatever. And so I’m like, I don’t know that we’re in that state. Maybe we’ll be in that stage eventually, but right now I want to balance that with the freedom to be able to do other things.

Shaye Elliot:

And by the way, that changes that over and over and over and over again. So time changes

Anna Sakawsky:

Things. Yeah, absolutely. So when is your next trip to Italy and how can people find out more if this is something they’re interested in

Shaye Elliot:

Joining you? Our next trip’s going to be in April. We’re going to take another 10 people. So couples, we had a mother daughter come with us in October, which was really delightful. So we’ll be going again in October and you can learn more about it just@theelliothomestead.com. Everything that we do is linked there. That’d probably be the best way.

Anna Sakawsky:

Perfect. Okay. So before we wrap up, do you have any final words of wisdom you’d like to leave our listeners with? So maybe it’s a favorite quote or a piece of advice that stuck with you or just something that’s inspiring you in this season?

Shaye Elliot:

It’s interesting. As a family, we keep coming back to this idea of beauty. I think for whatever reason, this is just kind of the pond that we swim in. I think a lot of times we put a lot of effort into pursuing what’s good, and we put a lot of effort into pursuing what’s true. We put a lot less effort into pursuing what’s beautiful. But I think when those three things come together is really when we have a very balanced life and perspective. And so my encouragement, I think to people would be if they find themselves, if you’re running a tight ship, you’ve got your schedule down, you never miss a beat, that’s a really wonderful thing. I would say add some beauty. Make sure that you’re making time for all three of those things because this is what it means to be a human, to pursue what’s good, to pursue what’s true, but also to pursue what’s beautiful.

Anna Sakawsky:

Perfect.

I love that. What a great way to wrap up. Well, thank you so much for being here with me again. Always such a pleasure getting to talk with you. And I’m sure our listeners will walk away feeling inspired to create more beauty and purpose in their own lives. So for anybody who does want to check out what Shay’s doing, get maybe a peek at her beautiful home, see behind the scenes, but you can find her@theelliothomestead.com or on YouTube at the Elliot homestead or on Substack or cultivating the Beautiful Life, a Substack page, which I subscribe to now. Love it. Nice. So that’s shade substack.com.

Shaye Elliot:

And

Anna Sakawsky:

Then also, of course, if you haven’t had a chance to check out the Homemaker CH podcast, you can listen to that wherever you listen to podcasts. And of course, don’t forget to check out her full feature in the latest issue of Homestead Living. It’s called Cultivating a Beautiful Life. And again, that’s in the November December, 2025 issue of Homestead Living Magazine. So if you are not yet subscribed, you can visit homestead living.com/subscribe to learn more. So thank you Shay, so much for being

Shaye Elliot:

Here. Thanks for having me. It

Anna Sakawsky:

Was a delight. Next time on the Coop.