Housewife Scenes of the Season

Above: scene from my back door

Hello Ladies,

My European friend at Adventures in Housekeeping blog had a Housewife Newsletter yesterday and so today I want to follow her cue with my own news.

The first item of interest concerns this great looking apple pie baked by a reader in Pennsylvania. You know of course that state got its name from William Penn, one of the early settlers who became the first  governor. I recall he wrote a book called Plymouth Plantation.(Thanks to a readers comment: correction: William Bradford wrote Plimouth Plantation and was the first governor. The state of Pennsylvania was named for William Penn.)

Back to the pie.  My friend Lynn M. Who baked it has also chatted on the phone with me a time or two.  

She sent pictures of the old cookbook pages where she got the recipe. I am thinking it might have been her mother's cook book.  Some of us are noticing that the more messed up the pages with stains and rips and tape, the better the recipe will taste. The same goes with old recipe cards.  If the cards or paper aren't dog-eared it is not worth making the recipe. It means the recipe was a favorite and the page was open a lot.

Another friend in a northern state sent me this picture of a kind of court yard she discovered after pulling up a lot of brush and grass and cleaning up the area around the house she lives in. She had great plans to make a seating area there, where the roses are blooming.   

For myself, not much progress is being made here at all, since it has been raining and cold.  The day lily bloomed before I could get it out of the temporary pot I used a few months ago. The weather has been too icky to plant anything.

 Also, when Jan stopped by on Saturday she brought me these bedding plants. It is just what I needed to brighten my interest in getting the flower beds looking nice.   

Although I want to keep this as cheerful as possible I have to say how messed up my place has been for the last week. We thought someone was coming to put some flooring in a bedroom so I emptied the room of a thousand and one things, which are out on the dining and living room now.  We then had a change of plans and I am busy getting it all cleaned up and put back.  It sure is a lot slower to put things back! When you empty a room it doesn't matter where everything goes temporarily but when putting it back, it has to be done much more carefully.  I would post a "before" picture but it would depress you.

I heard cooing doves while I was working and scent of mint was everywhere, as this is a big mint-growing area. 

That's all the news I have for you, and I will try to have some more, later.