What's Cooking & "Ugly Dining Table Turned Cottage Coffee Table" Progress

You may remember a few weeks back I posted photos of the $10 dining room table I found at Goodwill. Though this particular table is a very nice, solid wood, solid as a rock table, we don't need a dining table, and if we did, this one would be way too small. But I thought it would make for a perfect oversized coffee table, which we do need. I sanded it within an inch of it's life, hubs cut the legs down to coffee table height, and then I primed it. Now, I just have to figure out which shade of white to paint it. I guess the exact color isn't too critical because I'll be applying a brown glaze then quickly wiping it off, so the color won't be a white, white anyway. I'm going for...you guessed it...an "aged" look.

And just to show that we are making some progress on the ceiling planks, here's a little photographic proof. Love that shine! Normally I'm not a fan of high gloss but I think on ceilings, it's lovely and and fresh and "clean" feeling. We are painting the first coat before we install and will paint the second coat after installation.


With the colder weather upon us now, I find myself again immersed in reading about the "old days". Specifically, old-timey cooking and pioneer living. I wanted to share with you a few books that I've picked up recently and that I've thoroughly enjoyed. I only wish my grandmother was alive still because she, too, was interested in such things and even once asked me to find her some old-time cookbooks online. She would have loved the ones I found a couple of weeks ago. Along with taking in a bit of old fashioned culinary knowledge, I've been discussing with the kids "the way things were" in the pioneer days and just how different our lives are today. I just find it fascinating and my two youngest kidlets do as well. I've been reading to them Little House in the Big Woods and have already bought Farmer Boy and Little House in the Prairie...I'll buy the other books in the Little House series one or two at a time. One of our favorite things to do is to sit by the fire and read about the old days. The books are very descriptive and I think they do wonders for a child's imagination. To help them learn even more about pioneer times, I also picked up If You Were a Pioneer on the Prairie. It's a fascinating full color illustration, question and answer book for children.

"This new addition to the popular question-and-answer history series invites readers to step back in time and see what it was like to grow up on the Great Plains more than 100 years ago.What kind of house would you live in? What kind of clothes would you wear? What would you do for fun? Would you go to school? The answers to these and 34 more questions give eight-to-ten-year-olds a vivid idea of a pioneer child's day-to-day life as well as the hardships the pioneering family faced as they attempted to settle in the vast and often forbidding prairie lands."

The cookbooks that I have are from Native Ground. Native Ground (as you'll see from their homepage) is a great place to visit and shop if you love everything about the way things use to be...from music to food to manners to folklore.

I picked up what they had available at our bookstore but I see they have many more books online. Just look at these titles! I'd love to have the whole collection! You may also be able to find some of these at Amazon.

The 1st American Cookie Lady
The Lost Art of Pie Making
Early American Cookery
Manners & Morals of Yesterday
Old-Time Farmhouse Cooking (Rural American Recipes, Wisdom, & Farmlore)
Mama's In The Kitchen (Weird & Wonderful Home Cookin' 1900-1950 ~)
Take Two & Butter 'Em While They're Hot! (Heirloom Recipes & Kitchen Wisdom)
*Children at the Hearth (19th Century Cooking, Manners & Games)
*Log Cabin Cooking (Pioneer Recipes & Food Lore)
*Secrets of the Great Old-Timey Cooks
Sing It Yourself! -12 Old-Time Sing Alongs

So, along with reading, I've also been cooking up yummy fall meals like Shepherds Pie, Potato Broccoli Soup, Cheesy Chick Corn Soup with Dumplings, and biscuits, of course! These are great stick to your bones meals (errr, or I should say... "stick to your hips" meals, lol!)