Our winter brings on the desire for warm ginger tea with lemon and wild honey.
I want to balance out posting my research and our daily life as we are only into our second week of living like 1944.
It has been a cold winter for us so far and this time of year where we live it is not normally cold for long spells but it has been this way and we had a few days of warm up but we are going right back to another cold spell.
The warm things I have been doing is knitting and canning.
We are sticking to our simple meals and starting to crave some of our routine food that we have been eating if we do not eat it for a few days. Sweet potatoes is one food we crave if we skip a few days. Our afternoon fruit as well.
Sweet potatoes have taken the place of our meat since we are eating small amounts of meat only three to 4 times a week. When we question what we want with our vegetables we will both say "Sweet Potatoes".
In the past people ate some of the same foods over and over. Stew seemed to be one of those foods eaten often and also the white potato. Potatoes have been a common food for a very long time.
This week we have been canning beef, chicken and beans to get the home canned foods topped off on the shelf. Very little beef though due to the ration points are high for beef.
We have been retiring to bed just after sunset since winter has been so cold and we nestle in the bed with a good book. We do not miss watching television and realize how much more we enjoy reading.
Before we lived like the past our utility bills were much higher. We kept the thermostat set higher in the winter and lower in the summer but now the house is much cooler this winter and we appreciate those handmade quilts from the past and the soapstone that I talked about in the last post.
Putting extra blankets on the bed instead of turning up the thermostat seems to be more sensible.
It also became very important to get those knitted house shoes made.
Our little draft dog is keeping the cold air from coming under the door. I am sure they did not have these in the past but it was a Christmas present.
I read that newspaper was often used during cold weather. People would put it around windows and places where cold air would be a problem.
I do remember using newspaper wadded up to put in drafty places in an old house that we lived. We also covered a north window with an old oil cloth tablecloth and blankets draped over the windows at night.
I find that I am in the kitchen a lot because we are not eating out and so I choose to embrace being in the kitchen. I don't like to dread things so I might as well just put my apron on and get in there and do it because the rewards are better health and a snuggly home that smells like a home that can only come from home cooking.
Any of us can make our home what it is that we want it to be. We first start with removing clutter from our house and our life. Then we can organize the things we keep and figure out what it is that we really want our home to become.
A coat of paint can change our home to something very beautiful, very warm or bright whatever it is that we like. We should make it the colors that make us feel good.
We should not go out and purchase things right away and give a lot of thought about what it is that we vision our home to be. We can consider making our curtains or adding touches to our pillow cases. We can make our own placemats and dinner napkins. We can make our own quilts and slippers and so many things.
In this time that we really live there are so many ways to learn how to do these things. Just look it up on youtube and learn how to do it. There are free directions all over the place.
It does take a lot of work to live an old fashioned life but the kind of work we do is very rewarding and worth every bit of it.
I am getting excited about my next several posts because I think you will find the research very interesting.
Now back to my knitting. Grandma Donna
