Hello, I'm Jana Dziak aka The Peasant's Daughter.
My passion is for real-food recipes made from scratch and raising and growing my own food on our small homestead.
I'm a wife and mother of two baby boys who left a chaotic city life for one of peace in the countryside as a homesteader.
I'll be sharing my favorite recipes with you. How I raise chickens, ducks, sheep and other animals. The best ways to grow fruits and vegetables and how preserve them. And you can also follow along as we restore our 1860's farmhouse cottage.
But my story starts long before that.
I grew up between two places.
The first place was my new city life in Toronto with all of its modern ways and conveniences. The second was in the dusty forgotten villages of my homeland where my family still lived a slow life very much forgotten by time.
I would go back there every summer and it was like going back in time. I would return to Canada, confused by who I was and my place in the world. In many ways my life stood in such stark contrast to my Canadian-born peers who ate differently and thought differently.
My family had fled the never ending political turmoil of the Balkans, escaped the communism and war of our Croatian homeland, to make a better life in Canada.
We have been fortunate beyond our wildest imaginings, but the path to get there took us through much hardship too and we lived in poverty for most of my childhood and adult life.
My mother was the youngest daughter of eight children, her parents the typical subsistence farmers eking out an existence in the inhospitable mountains of our troubled but beautiful homeland.
This is why I'm the "peasant's daughter" as the lessons my mother learned in her own time from her mother were passed onto me.
Valuable lessons. Many of which have been forgotten or cast away by our society.
This blog is a love letter to those traditions. That they may live on in a new generation of homesteaders, whether you have several acres in the country, a small suburban backyard, a community garden and a condo, or live off grid far from society.
There is a movement of people like us, a remembering of the old ways, a return to the simpler and quieter lives of our ancestors.
The Peasant's Daughter is a journey through the lives of the women that came before me.
You can read about how my husband and I found and bought our homestead here and read more about my personal life in the story where I discuss how I found and left veganism for my health.
Follow me on Instagram for more personal, behind the scenes stuff than what is on this blog.
I even have (a very ignored) YouTube channel.
