Vintage Home and Farm

It's been a busy December so far, especially with our daughter in a local theatre performance, with every evening filled with practices and performances. We attended her first public performance last night, and it was fantastic! They will continue for the rest of the month. We also had a farm-related issue to take care of a couple days ago, which I have added to our Bee Journal . Most honeybee hives around here don't overwinter well, and in fact, I just talked to someone last night whose friend lost 5 out of 7 of their hives due to the cold weather we've been having. We still have two hives left. I'm hoping our remaining little bee friends can hang in there. Today, I made figgy buckwheat orange scones that I will be taking to a special "craft day" a friend is hosting. The scones came out very nice, especially considering how significantly I altered the recipe. I have been craving the figgy buckwheat scones that Kim Boyce of The Bake Shop in Portland makes. Her...

Last Christmas, my sister gave us three of these ceramic "The Original Apple Baker" dishes, one for each of us. I've been using the Basic Apple Recipe that's on the company's website. This is my favorite treat right now! The apples are so good baked this way. We bought two boxes of apples from Sunny Farms for pressing cider. I then hid about a dozen of the apples for making baked apples. The baked apples are really good with a scoop of ice cream. The ice cream begins to melt right away because the dish is still warm from the oven. In the middle of each Apple Baker dish is a post that you slide through the cored apple. The ceramic post's presence in the middle of the apple helps the apple bake evenly and keeps it warm as you enjoy eating your baked treat. Anyway, these dishes are so wonderful that I just had to share a note here about them. 

Decorating a gingerbread house at Christmas time has become a tradition in our home.  Normally we buy a kit with the gingerbread shapes already baked and ready for assembly.  This year, for the first time, we decided to make the entire gingerbread house from scratch! We were inspired by a book we came across in the library, A Year of Gingerbread Houses by Kristine Samuell. It wasn't nearly as difficult as we thought it might be to do the entire thing ourselves. The three main difficulties in making a gingerbread house from scratch are: 1) Finding inspiration for the design of the house; 2) Being patient enough to wait for the house to finish baking; and 3) Using caution when assembling the house, by allowing adequate drying time for each phase of assembly. As for the first challenge, our daughter Elizabeth provided the inspiration for the house.  We decided to create the design on the computer, using Microsoft Word to insert shapes (squares and triangles) to create the f...

Rich and decadent but a lot less sweet than other versions, this Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie will soon become one of your favorites to serve to family and friends for dessert! It's a quick, easy, and failproof pie that comes together so nicely.  How did we come up with this recipe?  Well, the original version of the recipe came from the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummand. However, her recipe calls for twice the amount of sugar, as well as a chocolate cookie crust, and it has no cocoa powder in it.  We tried her recipe but found it way too sweet for our liking.  We were also concerned about how many carbs it contained. It definitely wasn't glycemic index friendly.  I began to play around with her recipe, adjusting the sugar, adding in cocoa powder, replacing the cookie pie crust with a walnut version, and viola!  We've made this pie several times over the past year, and it now occurs to me that it is worth sharing our version with everyone. We hope you like it! Cho...

There are numerous old fruit trees on our property, including apple, pear, cherry and plum. The trees' enormous sizes and moss-covered, gnarled branches suggest they are likely at least 40 and maybe up to 70 years old.  Each year since moving here, we have been blessed with fruit from all of these old, beautiful trees.   Yesterday, it was time to harvest the apples and pears. A few of each had fallen to the ground to be consumed eagerly by the deer.  So I took our ladder out there with several buckets and began working my way around each tree, avoiding spider webs (there were several with enormous spiders on them), and using a fruit picker (one of those wire baskets on a broom  handle).  There were only 22 apples on the apple tree, but all were giant-sized.  The pear tree was loaded, however, and generously gave us about 75 pears this year.  I brought the fruit inside and put the two ginormous containers in our mudroom next to the buffet cabinet t...

Yesterday I decided to use up some bananas that I had put in the freezer. Homemade banana bread sounded good, but the recipe I've followed for years just wasn't exciting enough. So I added chocolate chips, ground flaxseed meal and chopped pecans. Yummy enough for dessert but also kind of healthy, right? Chocolate Chip Flax Banana Bread Ingredients: 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour (we use organic unbleached flour) 2 tablespoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons ground flaxseed meal 1/3 cup shortening 2/3 cup sugar 1 1/3 cups mashed banana (about 3 bananas) 2 eggs 3/4 cup chocolate chips (we used dark chocolate) For the Topping: 1 cup chocolate chips, melted with 1 tablespoon milk (we used soy milk) 3/4 cup chopped pecans (walnuts would also be good) Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease a standard-sized loaf pan (8-1/2 x 4-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches). Sift together flour, baking powder, soda and salt in medium bowl.  Stir in the ground flaxseed m...

Yesterday morning I made traditional sourdough bread without using a recipe. Feeling lazy and deciding to try winging it, I figured traditional sourdough only contains three ingredients and so how hard could it be to get it right without measuring? It's just flour, water and salt.  So I put a couple scoopfuls of flour into a big bowl, added a little bit of salt, dumped in some bottled spring water, and added the sourdough starter (which is actually made with only fermented flour and water).  Then I stirred it with a big spoon and continued to add more bottled water until the dough reached a really gooey consistency that I liked. I did not knead the dough. I literally spent less than 5 minutes making this dough. After the dough was well stirred, I put a lid on the bowl and placed it on my seedling heat mat ( here's the article that explains why I use this ), covered it with a pretty kitchen towel and tucked it into the corner on the kitchen counter.  Two hours later I came...

Who doesn't love the crunchy crust and soft interior of perfectly baked sourdough bread? Getting started with sourdough baking takes considerable gumption - it's no easy feat to get sourdough starter to come alive and begin working. But, when you bake your first loaf of sourdough and it rises beautifully, the sense of accomplishment is amazing! Today, I would like to share some sourdough love and give a shout-out to my sweet and brilliant sister, Cathy, for her recent accomplishments with sourdough.  Cathy started her sourdough from scratch and stuck with it until she achieved a beautiful, bubbly starter.  Then she began using her starter to bake the most lovely loaves of bread! Take a look at her sourdough creations: Above is a crunch loaf that she baked in a dutch oven.  She also recently made a loaf of sandwich bread, shown below. Below is her starter, which she keeps in a gallon-sized jar on the counter, where it's covered with a charming tea towel. If the tasty creat...

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 po...

If you love lemons, then you will surely enjoy this green tomato pie recipe. My mom and I came across the concept of green tomato pie back in the mid-1980s, when I began baking as a teenager and discovered a knack for pies. Who knew unripe tomatoes (also knows as green tomatoes) could be used in a sweet pie?  I was fascinated by the concept and have been evolving our recipe for green tomato pie ever since. Now that we have a garden every year and there's an abundance of tomatoes that will never ripen before the season ends, we're more determined than ever to find ways to use up green tomatoes.  Green tomato salsa (salsa verde) is another option.  But while there are unripe tomatoes, there must be a sweet green tomato pie on our table at some point in the fall. You can use any variety of unripe tomatoes that you have in the garden. The tomatoes that we grew this year were mostly Roma, and unfortunately they were rather small.  Also, any size of green tomatoes works ju...

My daughter made the most luscious, from-scratch birthday cake for me the other day. It was a white cake with lemon filling and lemon frosting. She even made a decoration for the top: the word "love" which she wrote on waxed paper with melted carob, and then refrigerated until it was hard. We enjoyed the cake so much that we thought we would share our alteration of the vintage Betty Crocker recipes.  We've altered the ingredients so that the cake would be dairy free. Dairy-Free Snowflake Cake Originally from the 1961 Betty Crocker Cookbook, altered to be lactose free 2 cups plus 2 Tbsp. all purpose flour 1 1/2 cups sugar 3 1/2 tsp. baking powder 1 tsp. salt 1/2 cup shortening 1 cup soy milk 1 tsp. vanilla 4 egg whites (1/2 to 2/3 cup) Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 9-inch layer pans. Using a whisk, thoroughly blend flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.  Add shortening, soy milk, and vanilla, and beat for 2 minutes, scraping bowl.  Add egg...

One of the greatest challenges I've had in baking with sourdough starter or commercial yeast is getting the dough to rise enough, especially in our chilly house.  Even in the summertime our house is on the cool side thanks to the insulation provided by our thick knotty pine walls.  One day as I was putting away a seedling heat mat after having started some garden plants indoors, it occurred to me that such a heat mat could have other purposes. How would it work on bread dough? We bought an extra seedling heat mat for using in the kitchen.  A few weeks ago I wrapped the mat around a bowl that had sourdough bread rising in it. The results were amazing.  I ended up with a beautiful loaf that had risen perfectly. The seedling heat mat works wonders on cinnamon rolls, too. I wrapped the mat around the bowl of dough during the proofing phase, and then once the rolls were in the pan I put the seedling heat mat under the pan as well.  Both times, I covered the doug...

The ingredients on this sheet pan were so colorful that I had a need to share it.  It's one of the easiest ways to make meals that incorporates fresh vegetables with herbs and olive oil.  Sheet pan suppers! Simply slice veggies into smaller sizes that will cook quickly, then rub olive oil on everything, spread it out across a pan, sprinkle with your favorite herbs and seasonings -- we enjoy rosemary, thyme, garlic powder, onion powder, pepper and only a little bit of salt -- and then bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes or so.   After 10 minutes in the oven, use a spatula to turn and mix the veggies a bit so that they can brown on both sides.  As soon as the veggies are tender and your meat is cooked through, remove and enjoy! Our latest version of the sheet pan supper included several salmon fillets (given to us by our neighbor, Brian, who is an avid fisherman).  I added potato spears, mushrooms, tri-colored sweet peppers, and believe it or not freshly ...

Homemade vanilla extract is incredibly easy to make, requiring just a couple of ingredients and only minutes to prepare. Until recently it never occurred to me how simple and enjoyable it is to infuse vanilla beans in alcohol in order to have my own pure, homemade vanilla extract.  Just before the Christmas holiday, I noticed that Costco had on its shelves organic Madagascar vanilla beans. You can also buy vanilla beans online, most likely at an even more affordable price and in greater bulk than what Costco carried. Seeing the vanilla beans readily available on the shelf at Costco finally prompted me to take the steps of making my own vanilla extract. You may be wondering why anyone would choose to infuse ingredients like vanilla beans and make their own extracts. The primary reason for me is the cost.  Real vanilla extract has gone way up in price over the past few years, and is currently about $20 an ounce for a store brand bottle.  For an organic brand the cost ...