An Update

Hello again!  Did you think I'd dropped off the face of the earth?  : )  Well, I haven't, I'm still here and I thought I'd drop in and give you an update on what's been going on around The Farmhouse lately.

Last time I posted I told you Hubs and I had a trip to Florida coming up.

The trip went great and I survived being away from my kiddos for 7 days, but just barely.  I don't want to do that again anytime soon, I missed them far too much.

Hubs had two really good prospects for a job, he thinks one of them would have hired him on the spot if he had been done with school, so that was encouraging.  We didn't find a house.  We decided we can't buy right away because we just don't know the area well enough, and it's too soon to look for a rental, so....that part of it will have to wait a bit longer.

We did A LOT of exploring of the area, and lemme tell ya...it is horse country down there!  We saw farm after farm just loaded with them.  That's just fine by me.  I've been in love with horses for as long as I can remember.

I saw lots and lots of antique stores throughout the area, one little town had SIX of them in the space of about 1/4 mile!  Towards the end of the week I finally convinced Hubs to pull over and let me peruse a bit.

I snapped a few pictures of neat things I spotted, like this unique Apothecary style cabinet.

I thought this was a really neat industrial style piece, one I've never seen before.  It was a metal filing cabinet on casters, and along the side in raised lettering it said "Greeting Cards."

And the metal plate on the front said, "American Greetings."  I've never seen a filing cabinet made specifically for a greeting card company.  I would love to have such a unique piece, and I think the seller knew it would be a desirable piece since it was priced at $450!

This cabinet made from reclaimed wood caught my eye as well.  I might have to revisit this store later and see if it's still there.  :D

In other happenings around The Farmhouse, I've been making all of our bread for about 2 months now.  I came across a recipe for Amish White Bread and my family loved it, even Hubs who in the past had been kind of "meh" about my other homemade bread attempts.  

At the end of the week, if there's any slices left, I dry them out and run them through the food processor with a bit of Italian seasoning to make my own bread crumbs.

The bread recipe is very versatile and also make delicious cinnamon rolls!

As you can tell, the fam cleaned me out and were wishing for more!  

It also makes pretty decent dinner rolls.

Over the past two years we've slowly been making the transition away from so many processed foods full of preservatives and artificial ingredients and trying to go more homemade (thus the bread).  It's something that started out as just me making the effort, but here lately Hubs has come on board too and has given up his snack cakes, slowed down on the amount of soda he drinks, and drinks more water.  Trust me when I say this is HUGE for him!  The man was practically raised on frozen snacks and Mountain Dew.

My kids eat applesauce 2-3 times a week, so in the effort for more homemade items I tried my hand at making my own.  I used {this recipe}.

It turned out delicious!  The recipe calls for a lemon peel and lemon juice added to the apples, but next time I will probably just do one or the other.  It adds a nice extra layer of flavor, but was just a bit too tart and I had to add in a little extra Stevia to make up for it.

I also made my own peanut butter!  {recipe}

The texture is different than store bought, just a slight bit grittier and a tad more sticky, but it tastes oh so good!  I wasn't sure what the family would think but Boss Man declared he liked it a lot better than store bought!  (Again, huge people, huge!  This man has come a long way!)  : )

And last but not least, I had a really super duper exciting thing happen!  Earlier this week I got an email from the photo editor at the Chicago Tribune asking permission to use this photo of mine of a vintage Calumet baking powder tin!!  It was a product photo I had done for my Etsy shop months ago, and had already sold it but I guess the picture was still out there in Google Image land.  

They were doing an article about how these tins showed up in the movie The Shining and how, apparently, they'll be in an upcoming movie.  The article was being published the next day so I called him right away, got the details worked out, and the next day he emailed a PDF file of the page.

I know it's not huge, not like having a room featured in a magazine spread or anything, but it was still really fun and exciting to know that one of MY photos was published in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE!!

And did you notice, tucked in down there next to the can was my lil' ol' name.  I asked if I could include a website, but unfortunately I couldn't.  Just a name.  But that's okay, it was all still really neat.

So, there's a bit of what's been happening around here.  Pretty soon I'll be starting the process of getting the house packed up, I hope to have Munchkie's Kindergarten year finished up in about another month, and next up on the "homemade items to try" list are ketchup and Velveeta.  

(If you'd like to follow along with the recipes I come across join me over on my Pinterest boards.)