grace grits and gardening - ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Simple Pleasures #2

October 5, 2014 By Talya Tate Boerner

Week two living in Fayetteville…I feel more unpacked and settled in with more time to write. And that’s nice! Here are a few of last week’s simple pleasures.

Clouds. Monday night I joined a group of Northwest Arkansas Blogger friends for dinner at The Depot. Walking to meet them, I stopped to take a picture of this incredible cloud hovering over Dickson Street. It was a huge cloud—the only cloud in a clear sky. After I took the picture I decided it was in the shape of a razorback. Do you agree?

Birds. The birds found my bird feeder. After a week of no feathered visitors, I can’t tell you how excited this made me. Yesterday three fat cardinals fed at the same time. Of course I didn’t have time to get a picture of them, but this little guy posed for me. So cute.

New Friends. My sister-in-law and her friends, Stella and Barbara, have welcomed in right into their weekly dinner group, and it feels like I’ve been there all along. (I have been a regular visitor during the past year, but my attendance has been very sporadic.) Tuesday night Barbara made chicken pot pie and an assortment of appetizers and salads. Talk about comfort food… these ladies know how to do it up! I get to host in two weeks. Yay. What to cook?

Rain and Cooler Temperatures. We finally received much needed rain. The front brought cooler temperatures. Much cooler. Like a low of 38 degrees Saturday morning. Brrrrr!

Junkin & Pumpkins. I went junkin with my writer friend Laurie who blogs at Junque Rethunque and See Laurie Write. Such a fun day (more coming on this later). Even before I arrived at The Junk Ranch (really how can you not love that name?), I got a thrill simply driving past pumpkin patches in Prairie Grove. Those fat orange pumpkins sitting in the fields caught my eye, and I know the Great Pumpkin is waiting out there somewhere.

Prairie grove pumpkin patch - Simple pleasures

Can you see the pumpkins? I couldn’t get very close, but they are there!

What simple pleasures did you enjoy recently?

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Did you miss last week’s post?

Simple Pleasures #1

Keiser’s Kitchen – a foodie blast from the past

October 3, 2014 By Talya Tate Boerner

Fall in the part of the Delta where I grew up meant harvest, football and countdown to the Keiser Halloween Carnival. Friends, it was THE big event in our little town. I’ve written about my reign as Halloween Queen HERE if you’d like to get background information. The thing to know for purposes of this post is that the PTA mothers raised money for the school primarily so their kid and class representative could wear the coveted cardboard glittery crown.

A.BIG.DEAL.

Way back in Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Nine (gasp), the year I was nominated Queen of the second grade class, our most successful fundraiser was the Keiser cookbook, aptly named Keiser’s Kitchen.

This cookbook belongs in a museum showcasing middle twentieth century PTA Mom handiwork.

Way before computers and high speed copy machines and your choice of cool fonts, regular construction paper covers were cut to size, manually stapled and hand lettered using a Bic marker. Someone (probably Momma) collected and typed the recipes on a clunky manual typewriter before running them off on the mimeograph machine in the teacher’s lounge. And I’m sure there was sniffing. Sniffing the mimeograph paper was the reward at the end… (if you don’t know what I mean, you are showing your young age.)

What a labor intensive project compared to today’s technology.

Our copy of Keiser’s Kitchen is priceless.

During the upcoming fall weeks, I plan to recreate these dishes as presented (along with maybe a little story about the Keiser mom who originally submitted the recipe). There are over thirty recipes, so I won’t do all of them because really, how many Jell-o salads does one need? But I plan to make lots of them. I think we need to remember these recipes, taste this simple, basic food lovingly made by our mothers who saw to it that we gathered around the supper table every night for a family meal.

I’ll warn you now, there will be no salted caramel frosting or balsamic anything. But sometimes maybe that’s what we need.

Stay tuned!

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

How to arrange bookshelves…(or at least how I do it)

October 2, 2014 By Talya Tate Boerner

Today I’m ready to reveal our library and how I arranged our bookshelves. Since our recent move consisted of more books boxes than anything else, the fact that our new (to us) house has a library is a good thing. The room is not large, but there are two walls covered floor to ceiling with shelves. Plus the cabinets down below hide my crafty messy stuff.

OhBeStillMy❤❤❤

Look at the possibilities. I’ve always wanted a room devoted to books. And this one reminded me of the Beauty and the Beast library—on a much smaller scale.

naked shelves – before

In case you are curious, the paint color is Benjamin Moore HC-109, a historical color named Sussex Green. The shade is moody and restful and perfect for a library.

For a week, the room became a catch-all. We dumped everything in there.

We organized other rooms in the house before attempting the library. That space was a huge deal because a) I love my books and b) it’s where I will do lots of writing so I need the room to feel comfortable and inspirational.

Naturally, I turned to Pinterest and plowed through photos of bookshelf arrangements for examples. Let’s be clear. I am NOT a decorator or a designer, but I do enjoy organizing things. Even so, our bare shelves were somewhat intimidating at first.

I discovered there are various schools of thought about book organization beyond those library rules from my Keiser Elementary School days. Apparently it has become popular to turn books backwards to create a monochromatic look like this display by cline rose interior design.

Backwards books – via Design in Bloom by clinerose

Wha?

While I can appreciate this clean look as a backdrop for other art or collectibles, there’s no way this would work for us. First of all, we actually read our books. Book titles are somewhat key in the process of book selection. I keep staring at the picture above wondering which sad books have been turned backwards. (But I do love those wooden clothespins.)

Another popular organizational style touts displaying books by color. While this is an interesting idea and looks visually pleasing to the eye (I think?), this sort of arrangement would keep me awake at night because bottom line it seems odd. I simply don’t think of books in terms of color. Hmmm, now where did I put that book with the orange cover I read last summer? Oh yes, it’s in the orange section.

Nope. Not for me.

Books arranged by color – photo via Slate.com

I decided to loosely arrange our books according to genre. Traditional. Common sensical. Maybe boring to the rest of the hip world especially those who use books merely as props.

My process took several hours spread over two days.

First I made leaning towers of books, stacking books all over the room until genres were separated. It got worse before it got better.

Piles and piles of books.

I started with the top shelves and finished one shelf before moving on to the next. I varied the look of each shelf, placing some books horizontal, others vertical. Adding antique vases, pottery and family pictures provided interest, layers and memories. I left space to add more books because let’s be real, it will happen.

we are obviously missing a few of our hardback Harry Potters…hmmm.

While our books may not be as uncluttered and color coordinated as some, I can find what I need. We have a large section of fiction and a separate section for classics. Hemingway (and Hemingway related) has his own section as does Donald Harington. There’s a religious section that includes our collection of family Bibles and my mother-in-law’s Last Supper artwork.

Next to the Jesus section is Horror and Sci-Fi. I have a group of books about writing and poetry. There’s an entire shelf devoted to Arkansas books. I lumped Texas, westerns and history together. There are business related volumes and of course, a section on gardening. I even have a shelf of children’s classic and comic books, most vintage.