by Christie Purifoy | Jan 18, 2014 | Books, children, Food, Uncategorized
Last weekend, on facebook, I promised you a peek at the bookshelves in my kitchen.
That’s right, I said, BOOKSHELVES IN MY KITCHEN.
Yes, I have all-caps feelings about the bookshelves in my kitchen. I don’t care all that much about granite countertops or stainlesss steel appliances, but I love having a built-in bookcase for my cookbooks.
Here are three of the books I reach for most often in that room … (p.s. you can see an actual glimpse of my kitchen bookshelves on instagram).
The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making
by Alana Chernila is my kind of cookbook. Lovely, big photographs, fun personal introductions before each recipe, everything tasty, nothing too hard.
Plus, it’s inspiring, never shaming. This isn’t a book to make you feel guilty for buying your sandwich bread. More a book that nudges you to say, “Why wouldn’t I at least try making this if it tastes so good and takes so little extra time?”
At least, that’s the voice I hear as I flip these pages.
Also, despite what you might imagine after reading the subtitle, these are not gimicky recipes. This is good, basic, family food: yes, there are recipes for chocolate peanut butter cups and toaster pastries, but there are also crackers, pasta sauce, and breads. You can learn how (and why) to make your own applesauce, yogurt, and canned tomatoes. I even adopted her granola recipe. Apparently, granola is better with lots of cinnamon and a dash of almond extract.
From the vanilla ice cream to the vanilla extract, this is one of my favorite cookbooks.
Fold down this page. You are going to want to come back to this recipe a lot. If you are going to ditch one packaged thing from your pantry, I suggest the cereal box. – Alana Chernila
One of the biggest changes my family has made in our eating in the past two years is to add fermented foods to our diets. And while stomach bugs and the flu and various colds run rampant through all our friends and neighbors, for two winters in a row, these bugs have mostly passed us by. I no longer spend my winters moving from sore throat to nasty cough and back again, and when my children do get sick, they almost always bounce back quickly.
Fermented foods have been a major part of the human diet around the world for thousands of years, but, in the past 50-100 years, we Americans have stopped consuming them almost entirely. There is growing evidence that we should rethink that.
And don’t let the word fermented frighten you off. I’m talking about yogurt, pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, and kombucha, the soda-like drink my kids can’t get enough of. So, nothing nasty, everything delicious and tangy.
Real Food Fermentation
by Alex Lewin is a good place to start. Again, great photographs, helpful explanations, easy step-by-steps. I used his guidelines for making pickles with last summer’s cucumbers, and we are still enjoying them.
Here’s another reason to check out this book: unless you can purchase raw pickled goods from your Amish neighbors (ahem), then you have to make this stuff on your own. The heat-treated pickles on the supermarket shelf have had all of their living, immune-enhancing ingredients cooked out of them in the name of food safety. One exception is kombucha. Buy it from Whole Foods to see if you like it, but one glance at the pricetag and you’ll understand why I make my own.
When we make our own food, we regain some control over our lives – especially at a time in history when many of us feel at the mercy of events, governments, corporations, and industrial food producers. – Alex Lewin
Here is a book to watch out for in the second-hand shops: The Fun of Cooking
by Jill Krementz. As a child, I checked this one out of the school library so many times, my parents finally bought me my own copy. I literally loved it to bits.
This is a book for kids by kids (from really little ones to teenagers). The recipes are good and diverse, but the real treat for me has always been the stories. This is a book with an urban/New York bent, and I loved imagining a world where kids my own age might hop on the subway to pick up ingredients for the dinner they’d make before Mom arrived home from work. So, pretty much the opposite of my life then.
It’s quite possible that my city-living dreams began with this book.
And dreams can be passed down. This year, my daughter made the teddy-bear bread for her teacher, just like I used to do.
Last year we had a baby-sitter named Jean Williams who taught me how to make teddy bear bread. I always make two of them so I can give one away to a friend. – Jessica, age ten
Tell me, do you keep books in the kitchen?
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 13, 2014 | Home, Joy, rest, Uncategorized
For one year, I have heard this one word: return.
It is a word for the exile. For the younger son. For the wanderer.
It means home. It means healing. It means a new beginning.
“Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere … sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan.”
Leviticus 25: 9-10
Stepping into this new year, I have been reluctant to let this word go. I have not wanted a new word, or a new anything, but only more. More of what has been given. More of what has begun.
But isn’t that an ugly word, more? A greedy, grasping word? I refused to embrace it, until all I could hear was more, more, more repeating like a drumbeat in my head.
I gave in. I agreed to claim it … silently. I wouldn’t speak it out loud. How could I admit that my word, my prayer, for this year is so ugly? So easily misunderstood?
Until this day. It was three parts hair-pulling crazy (because no one can buckle their own skates, and the baby was determined to hurl herself out of the sled to faceplant in the snow), but it was one part glorious. A frozen pond for skating only yards from our front porch. Three children with Christmas-gift ice skates. On a Saturday. While the sun shone.
It was one part perfection. One part pure glory.
And it ended as abruptly as a bubble bursts. The older boy fell. The baby really was determined. But as we trudged back toward the house, the younger boy crying that his boots were full of snow, all I could think was we will return. There will be more skating. Every year, there will be more. I pictured a day when every child could strap on their own skates. A day when even my husband and I could step into skates and glide along. This is only the beginning, I thought.
The return is never a dead-end. No one returns to God only to say, “Now what?”
Instead, we turn toward God and see a door. Walking through the doorway, we discover … more. There is always more. To use the words of C. S. Lewis, “Come further up, come further in!”
To return to God is a way of life. It is a turning back toward wholeness, toward peace. It is like finding a home and feeling yourself stretching out to meet the years to come. Like a tree planted by water, those roots growing deep and deeper.
This is our second year at Maplehurst, and my word is more.
It is a song of praise. It is a song of joy. It is the song of the wanderer who has found rest.
And I cry, more, more, more.
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 8, 2014 | Family, guest post, motherhood, prayer, Stories, Uncategorized
Are you visiting from Jennifer’s place today? You are welcome here.
I’m an English PhD who traded the university classroom
for an old farmhouse and a writing desk.
I write about dreams and desire, I write about family and faith.
I write to remember that life is magical.
//
Her smile is even more dazzling in person.
Which means she stands out in this family. For the most part, we Purifoys are deep thinkers and deep feelers. Quick to notice trouble and pain, more than a little inclined to grumpiness first thing in the morning.
But not this one. We all dote on her because she’s the smallest, the cutest, but I think we dote on her for another reason: she is, more often than not, the happiest. She is a candle, a bouquet of flowers, a breath of fresh, spring air. Our happy, smiley baby girl.
And there’s a story behind that. A prayer, too.
I tend to pray vague, intangible prayers. They are halting, more than a bit ragged. But I think they are my best prayers. They are so full of holes, of all I don’t know and cannot quite see, there is plenty of room for God to come and live in them.
I know this because I once prayed for happiness.
//
Sometimes we live with a story for quite a while before it occurs to us to share it. Sometimes we need a nudge. An invitation.
I am grateful to the writer and blogger Jennifer Dukes Lee for giving me that nudge. I am grateful for the invitation to share a story with her readers. Today, I’m sharing the story of this prayer. It was a surprising prayer with an even more unexpected answer.
I’d like to share this story with you, too.
Will you follow me here to read along?
//
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 4, 2014 | Books, Gardening, Uncategorized, Winter
I love winter. I love snow.
I love them for themselves, but, let’s be honest, I love that they give me more time for my books.
Is your driveway buried in as much snow as mine? Here are a few books perfect for snowy days.
Now, if only the library delivered …
(You can find all my Saturday book recommendations here and some explanation about my use of affiliate links.)
*
*
Lately, I’ve kept my nose buried in seed and plant catalogs rather than books. I open one up determined to find just the right cucumber for pickling and within minutes I am planning a quarter-acre rose garden. These catalogs are just a little dangerous for me.
Almost the only thing with the power to pull me away from the catalogs (and the daydreams) is a book by Louise Penny. Her Chief Inspector Gamache detective novels are my new favorite thing. One by one, I am devouring them. I’ve started treating them like chocolate. I am always greedy for more, but I’m desperately concerned I’ll run out.
Yes, they are that good.
You’ll want to begin with the first: Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache Mysteries, No. 1)
. Today, I’m reading # 6: Bury Your Dead: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel
. These books just keep getting better.
Number Six is perfect snow day reading. Inspector Gamache is wandering the snowy streets of old Quebec City, and it is Winter Carnival time. Everything that makes this series so special is present and accounted for: a charming and brave hero, tangled mysteries, delicious food and drink (I can’t read one of these books without craving fresh-baked croissants and creamy cafe au lait), history, spirituality, and a beautiful setting.
Have I mentioned I love these books?
Another book I love is Winter Solstice
by Rosamunde Pilcher. I’d never read this one before December, but, like one of my favorite book bloggers, I plan to reread it every December from now on.
This novel is beautifully written but easy to read. It is deeply thoughtful but light and fun. It is set in Scotland. There’s a snowstorm. The characters are wonderful.
And the ending? Beautiful.
Here is a book for the little skiers and sledders: It’s Snowing!
by Olivier Dunrea. This sweet little picture book captures the joy of a mama and her baby playing in the snow. It’s simple and lovely and quiet, and I love it very much.
I bought it while living in Florida and just about cried the first time I read it, but now? I read it with a smile on my face.
Tell me, which books keep you company in winter?
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 25, 2013 | Advent, Christmas, Family, Uncategorized
***
“Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”
Luke 2:14
***
***
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 24, 2013 | Advent, Christmas, Food, Uncategorized
When I picture in my mind this turn from Advent to Christmas, it looks like a stream of water becoming larger and faster until it pours itself out into a big, beautiful sea.
And, I do think it is like that. But, it is also like sitting next to a friend at the Christmas Eve church service. It is getting up and making the traditional Christmas morning cinnamon rolls. It is heading to the kitchen to prepare the turkey or ham or (in our case) the Beef Bourguignon soup. It is cleaning up the mess of wrapping paper. It is a big sandwich made with leftover everything and eaten in front of the fire.
In other words, Christmas is both extraordinary (like frosty starlight and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”) and beautifully ordinary (meals cooked and shared, phone calls made and received).
We all know this. We have all lived this. We have seen Christmas come and go, again and again. But I mention it because it is so easy, with the waiting and the longing, to forget that what we have been waiting for is mostly already with us. Not entirely, no, but more and more every year Christ is with us and his kingdom is more fully realized.
Perhaps, what we have been waiting for is not more of Jesus, necessarily, but eyes that are open more widely to the fact that he is always and already with us – in so many seemingly ordinary ways.
And so I wish you an ordinary Christmas. A Christmas of friendship and special food and thoughtful gifts. A Christmas of candlelight and carols and maybe a hand to hold or, if not that, a very good book.
I wish you a Merry Christmas.
