Vintage Home and Farm

Like many other families, we are foregoing the traditional Thanksgiving gathering this year to try to slow the spread of Covid. It's an understatement to say how incredibly hard this year has been on everyone.  Loneliness, fear, sadness, political division -- all common themes throughout 2020, and like you, we are so tired of it all.  We really do need to pause this year to look within for something positive.  In gratitude there is joy. Truly, we are blessed each and every day in all the little things that touch our lives.  To push away the sense of isolation and celebrate the little things, here are 14 things we are doing.  We're hoping by sharing these ideas we can help to inspire you and lift your spirits as well.  Take a walk, breathe in the fresh air, and notice nature all around Learn something new - a craft or skill, or explore a new idea Call loved ones on the phone and talk for an hour Visit with family and friends via Zoom; either separately or get everyone to join yo

When tied with a ribbon, golden bundles of wheat make a beautiful natural decoration for your home.  Last spring, when there was a shortage of flour in the grocery stores due to the pandemic, we decided we'd experiment with growing wheat.  We came up with the idea when we were cleaning out our pantry and realized we had a small package of Bob's Red Mill wheat berries.  I was curious whether wheat berries that had been processed and packaged as a food product would be viable for growing in the garden.   Turns out, the wheat berries were indeed viable and we had a nice little harvest of wheat in late summer.  But by then, flour was once again readily available in the stores, and in fact we have been enjoying baking with the inexpensive and enormous bags of organic Central Baking Company flour that is now available at Costco.  In learning how to process wheat into flour, we decided that the wear and tear it would put on our food processor wasn't worth it for the small amount o

I've been baking sourdough bread with starter for long enough now to have come across what I find to be the easiest, most consistent and tasty recipe. It's time to share! The recipe I'm using started as a dough for making cinnamon buns, which I found on the King Arthur Bread website. But then I altered it (of course!) to make it lactose free, replacing the milk with soy milk and the butter with canola oil.  Then I tried using the basic dough to make not only rolls but also bread, and it came out light, soft and incredibly yummy! In the bread version, I omitted the sugar from the recipe.  I've then used this recipe to make bread that has herbs in it as well as bread stuffed full of roasted garlic.  Then there was the sweet version of the bread that had a swirl of cinnamon, sugar and chopped walnuts rolled up into it.  One day I patted little balls of the dough into rounds and placed them into a greased muffin tin, brushed the tops with a little olive oil and garlic powde