grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Lake Girls. Lake Time.

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Lake Girl, Lake Time

Lake Girls. Lake Trip.

This weekend marks our first lake trip of the year. Our first official trip of summer, not that summer is here yet (but you know what I mean). Now that Momma and Staci are both living in Fayetteville, we are much closer to Lake Norfork. And we can go for long weekends. That was practically impossible to do when we lived in Texas.

So we’ll kick off lake season the way we did when we were all living together on the farm, when Staci and I were kids, before college and marriage and family and careers. We’ll spend the weekend doing many of those same things we always do when we go to the lake. Lake girls are like that.Continue Reading

Cole Slaw in Vintage Pyrex (and other kitchen traditions)…

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kitchen

I love our kitchen. The longer we live in this house, the more deeply I believe it is one of my favorite places anywhere. I love it not only for its expansive windows that look out over our backyard (the space where we spend most of our free time), but also because it’s the room that holds so much tradition. If a house has a soul, its core is rooted in the kitchen.

Don’t you agree?

I thought about this recently as we prepared our Easter meal. We kept it simple this year, deciding on ribs with all the trimmings. Yes, it may have been more typical of a 4th of July picnic, but no one seemed to mind. Our kitchen comes with no rules, other than that one rule standard for all southern kitchens—we don’t want anyone to leave hungry.Continue Reading

Ho-Ho-Holiday Traditions

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Clementines

Yesterday I bought a big bag of clementines at Harps. The mere sight of all that orange fruit piled in the produce aisle where sweet cherries lived during summer nudged me into Christmas. As I dumped them into a bowl on the kitchen island, I thought about holiday traditions and how I do certain things because somewhere buried in my holiday memories, we’ve always done it that way.

Back when I was a kid, Momma bought tangerines. (Clementines are a rather recent U.S. phenomenon, initially shipped over from Spain one year when the Florida citrus crop suffered a particularly bad year.) In my bowl, they smell just like Christmas on the farm, and they help fill the summer watermelon void.Continue Reading

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

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