We Provice Recipes

My blog is called Farmersgirl Kitchen, and this is where I make the food that I show on this blog.

We need to do some work on the internal walls of our kitchen. There has been some water coming in from the outside wall (on the right) if you look closely you can see the marks. We have had this fixed outside, but all the plaster has to come off that wall and our joiner is going to line it with insulated plasterboard. We are also getting the wall behind the current units strapped and plasterboarded so we can have wall units, the existing wall just wouldnt support them. So....as my cooker (stove) is 25 years old and the kitchen units are about 23 years old, we decided that it was time to have a change.

I have a strange kitchen set up, being an old farmhouse kitchen there would have been no water plumbed into the building, so our sink is actually in the back kitchen or scullery, a brick built extension (in the 1950s) down three steps. I thought I would never get used to it, but you do get used to it and it would be such a major operation to bring a sink into the kitchen that we have never quite got round to it. So, the fridge, freezer, washing machine, dishwasher and sink are all in this back kitchen down three steps and the area we are renewing is the cooking, kettle type area.

I thought that as we were making this change, I wanted to make it different and I wanted to have more worktop space. Difficult challenge as there are many doors, windows and an inglenook fireplace with our oil stove to content with, I bought some magazines, as you do! And one of them had a breakfast bar that came out from the units at an angle, I was sold.

I found the kitchen shopping a bit of a challenge, the units I liked, didnt always do the things I wanted them to, but today, finally, I found some units I liked that did pretty much what I wanted AND I got to have solid oak worktops which is the bit that excites me most!

The illustration below is pretty much what it will be like, except the breakfast bar will have support at the end, not hanging in mid-air like it is - scary! And, those are not the handles that I am getting, the ones we will have are hammered steel and really cool (and expensive) but lovely.

I will give you step by step updates, its going to take a couple of weeks for the units to arrive and our joiner says he will be available in 2-3 weeks, but as long as it is done before DS1 gets married in May, I will be happy!

Oh and, by the way, I have taken 4 carrier bags of cookery books out of the book shelves, which is why there are some spaces! The bookshelves were created for me by our joiner and sized to my biggest book - he is a real craftsman, but I do like to challenge him!

Freshly frosted gluten-free pumpkin bars with a secret ingredient.

Turning, Turning, To Simple Gifts

Tuning in to the particular (and fleeting) pleasures of each changing season as we ride the wheel of the year may be my favorite spiritual practice. A practice that requires one simple thing. Attention. Which turns out to be not so simple, inevitably. Because life is anything but simple, with its whitewater rush of mind numbing distractions that demand less and less of our soul and more and more of our mental focus on exterior minutia. Micro decisions. Cleaning out our email in-box. Catching up with Facebook feeds and Twitter streams and Google+. Texting about grocery lists. Scanning streaming video options for one decent romantic comedy (I have- on too many occasions to count- spent a full hour gaping, borderline comatose, at an LCD screen, scrolling title after title, only to arrive at the sane conclusion that you know what? I'd rather read a book). Thousands (millions?) of choices may glitter and ooze their high definition glow but I find I am not feeling the abundance.

I am less and less enamored with more.

I know. It's showing. My age. My childhood brain was wired for mud and bird calls, blackberry thickets and butterscotch pine. Hours spent reading in a grove of birch trees dug their neural groove. The wild luxuries of inner connection, rather than social networking. And TIME. That plastic, misunderstood, precious commodity that shape-shifts experience from an endless afternoon of liquid daylight into a heart clutching warp speed tumble of confusion. Decades become tiny sandwiches of memory you can barely taste anymore.

Weeks blink by with alarming velocity.

And here we are again.

In pumpkin season.

And so. I stop. And notice the way the late day sun drops low and shimmers golden in the treeline. The crows are gathering earlier. Glossy black and strutting with authority. The smell of burnished leaves scuttling across a wet Cape sidewalk is the same smell I inhaled on a road trip in Vermont fifteen years ago, standing on a wooden bridge above a clear shallow creek while our sons balanced on the slick rocks below us, fishing for smooth round stones.

Do they remember this? Do they remember the same hours I do, in the sand on Skaket Beach? Do they ever have a sudden itch to feed their senses with the scents and sounds of a freshwater riverbed, a sun warmed tide pool? Do they crave a winding path through apple trees? Were their brains hardwired for this connection, too?

I ponder this as I stir a new pumpkin batter.

And breathe in the scents of ginger and cinnamon, listening to the leafy rustle of an almond flour bag as I fold up the cellophane and pinch it closed with a clothespin.


Read more + get the recipe >>

When I saw the LaCucina, Digital Scrapbook Kit by Amy Stoffel, was on offer at Scraporchard, I just had to get it. I have been feeling that my blog banner needed updating, can you see the cows through the window? This was such a lot of fun to make, I hope you enjoy it too.