Settling into a new house means settling into a new kitchen. They're not exaggerating when they say it's the heart of the home, right?
The place where we prepare, serve, nourish, and so much more.
I've shared here before about the kitchen in our previous home and the transformation we made to it. When completed, we had created a fabulous kitchen that would best serve us in that space. (You can see from the before photos, it had no cabinets--the owners had been too short to reach them, so never built any.)
I loved the snazzy appliances in that renovated kitchen--man, that oven could bake! It was super luxurious to cook with such brand new, shiny tools.
The kitchen we have now at our farmhouse doesn't have fancy appliances, though the ones it has work fine.
But what it lacks in sparkly tools, it more than makes up for in character.
Come on in:
I finished unpacking the kitchen just in time to discover a new favorite cookbook, The Little House Cookbook. Now I can combine two of my passions--reading and eating! Does it get any better?
The kids and I started reading the Little House on the Prairie series a few months ago. The physical books we're using were given to me by my grandparents for Christmas when I was ten-years-old.
Little House influenced me in many ways growing up--I remember stretching out on my bed happily reading and watching endless episodes of the TV show with my dad. Now to relive it all with my three little ones, while living in a red farmhouse (Just like Almanzo's, Mommy!), makes this pretty much the happiest time of my life.
When the kids and I complete one of the books, we cook a recipe from it to celebrate. A week after moving here, we finished Farmer Boy and it was time to get baking:
"At noontime everyone was allowed to move about the schoolroom and talk quietly. Eliza Jane opened the dinner pail on her desk. It held bread-and-butter and sausage, doughnuts and apples, and four delicious apple-turnovers, their plump crusts filled with melting slices of apple and spicy brown juice.
"After Almanzo had eaten every crumb of his turnover and licked his fingers, he took a drink of water from the pail with a dipper in it, on a bench in the corner. Then he put on his cap and coat and mittens and went out to play."
"Everything in moderation...including moderation." ~ Julia Child
Julia's quote is my mantra throughout the next week as we prepare for Thanksgiving. Tell me, what's cooking in the heart of your home these days?
