The Bakery....

 

My fondest memories of The Tri-State Bakery were when I was a little girl.  Every Valentine's Day I remember getting to walk to the bakery to buy an iced, heart-shaped sugar cookie with a red hot in the middle.  I remember nibbling around the sweet edges of the cookie until I got to the center and then cane tge cinnamon hotness of the red hot candy.  To this day, I make my own version of the iced sugar cookie, complete with red hot candies at home.  There were many, many other goodies that could be bought for a nickle or a dime from The Bakery. Their cinnamon rolls were out of this world!

With the arrival of grocery store bakeries, the need for a store that only served up baked goods became obsolete, and so The Tri-State Bakery closed its doors.  The charming building was all that remained until the townsfolk and countryfolk started to spy life there once again.  Annie and her husband bought it and turned it into their home and then turned it into a turn-key business in our small town.  Toady there's a new twist on The Bakery -- delicious fabrics!

A visit to The Bakery is always a yummy treat!  And as always, today's  visit was no exception.  Pom Pom asked me a few days ago if I might take some pictures of The Bakery and I thought, yes, it would be a fun bloggy post to do.  Only Daughter, and her daughter, Cupcake and I stopped in after we scored a sweet, old-timey chair at a garage sale.  It just begged for a new seat cover.  I had it in my mind that it should be a bright, cheery, laminated fabric, and I knew Annie at The Bakery would have just what I wanted.  And she did.  So come on in and see what's cookin'.

 

 

As you walk through the door, you'll see the display case where lots and lots of baked goodies once were shelved.  Now you'll find delicious goodies-by-the-yard!

 

After you walk through the front part of the store, you'll come to the back where all the cutting and rolling-out and measuring of the ingredients takes place.  Here's Paula (Annie's co-partner who runs the Bluestem Studios which joins The Bakery)  They help each other, and these two creative ladies make a great team.  Paula is cutting a laminated print for my new-old kitchen chair seat cover.  Bright and cheery, just like I wanted!

 

One of the old ovens is baking up some goodies for Halloween!

 

Here's where the children like to play.  There are some nice toys for them to play with or they can be mesmerized by the fishes swimming in the aquarium.

 

Way in the back by the ironing board, I spied an old, vintage quilt that I just love!

Here are all Bakery Trimmings where you can add some "sprinkles" to your sewing.

Now we move over to The Blue Stem Studio where Paula collects wonderful vintage pieces and antiques.  She also has some fabrics that have spilled over to her side.  Paula loves to sew handbags and aprons which she sells in her shop, and she also sells many locally-made goodies.

 

Uh oh, it's time for me to go.  Only Daughter and Cuppycake have come looking for me!  I hope you enjoyed a *taste* of The Bakery today!  If you want to know the latest, check out The Bakery Fabrics on Facebook.

Grandma's baked beans (in the crock pot)...

Do you ever get a hankerin' for foods that you remember from childhood?  My Grandma Schumacher was a wonderful cook who made all kinds of hearty, traditional foods.  One of those foods that she was well known for was baked beans.  She would bake them for hours in a large roaster until they were softened just right.  I know it breaks with tradition since baked beans are to be baked, not slow cooked in a crock pot, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to make Grandma's soft, creamy-brown baked beans without having to heat the oven all day?  My friend, Mert, recently shared this recipe with me that was just the ticket.  And was it ever delicious!


Boston Baked Beans (in the crock pot)
by Diane Unger-Mahoney (and Mert)

1 pound navy beans, soaked in cold water 8-12 hours
1/2 t. baking soda
2 bay leaves
4 oz. salt pork (I used ham or would use bacon)
1 medium onion, chopped
1/4 c. plus 2 T. molasses
1/4 c. packed brown sugar
2 c. boiling water
1 T. Dijon mustard
2 t. cider vinegar
salt & pepper to taste

Set slow cooker to high to preheat.  Drain soaked beans and transfer to a Dutch oven.  Add 8 cups water, baking soda, and bay leaves.  Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, and use a wide spoon to skim off any foam.  Boil 15 minutes.  Drain beans and transfer to crock pot.  Discard bay leaves. 

While beans are cooking in Dutch oven, fry the salt pork (bacon or ham) to render the fat and then add chopped onions and cook until lightly browned.  Transfer to the crock pot.  Stir in 1/4 c. molasses, brown sugar and the boiling water. 

Cover beans with a piece of aluminum foil, then cover slow cooker with the lid.  Set crock pot to low and cook until beans are tender and creamy, 10-12 hours.  (You may cook on high for 5-6 hours)

Turn off slow cooker and remove lid and foil.  Stir in remaining 2 T. molasses, mustard, and vinegar and season with salt & pepper to taste.  Cover slow cooker with lid and let beans sit until sauce has slightly thickened, 15-20 min.  Serves 4-6

*It is said that slow cookers are notorious for failing to soften baked beans so by placing a layer of foil over the beans, it helps to keep the heat at the bottom of the pot and in the beans rather than letting the heat rise to the lid.  This step shaves off hours of cooking time.

The result?  Just like Grandma's!  She used to serve her beans with malt vinegar.  Shake a little on.  MMMmmmm.

Do you know the poem?

Beans, beans the magical fruit,
The more you eat, the more you toot,
The more you toot, the better you feel
So why not have beans at every meal?

Old-school typing flashback ....

Yesterday two old long-time friends came to my house for our monthly tea party.  We've always called it "Tea Party" whether there was tea and crumpets or chips and dip, but the main thing about Tea Party has always been about taking time to get together, and for many, many years we have kept this appointment taking turns meeting at each others' homes.  It has truly become a celebration of friendship.  Tea Party always comes with many and varied topics of interest: how to get your son to stop dropping his pencil during lesson time,  the pros and cons of the epidural,  or reciting Halloween poems by heart.

This month's topics were every bit as interesting as the others.  One thing that came up this time was word processing.  School kids these days really think they are put upon when they must compose essays or reports or papers ON A COMPUTER with spell check and that green underline thing that tells us the sentence structure is a bit off.  Well, we older gals had something to say about that as we were explaining how we used to write papers to my DIL and the three school aged children  who were tea totalling with us.  First off, does anybody remember manual typewriters?   I was so thrilled to receive my very own Smith Corona portable (manual) typewriter as a high school graduation from my grandma.  It gave me freedom from having to always  find a typewriter on campus to write my papers.  With my portable, I could just sit in the  hullabaloo peace and quite of my dorm room and type as long or as late at night as I desired.  And it was pretty easy to press the keys down -- almost as easy as using the electric typewriters in the typing classroom!  (Remember the electric typewriter with the letter ball instead of the individual key arms that popped up at the strike of each letter?)  I'm not sure how fast I could type on that manual typewriter, but I got up to 80 wpm on the electric.  Yeah, I completed Typing II.  Straight A's.  But puh leeeease......don't make me text on a cell phone.  I'm all thumbs!  (pun!)  Now for a typing flashback.....Do you remember all those old typewriter terms?

70's Smith  Corona Typewriter (mine was tan, not groovy aqua like this)

Ten Typewriter Terms or Methods for People Over 45.
1.  Pica versus elite
2.  Backspace, insert correct-o-tape, type letter, backspace and type correct letter.
3. Wrists up.
4.  asdfjkl;
5. Everyone typing in sync as the drill sergeant teacher quipped, "Eyes on the book and....." fff (space) fff (space) f (space) f (space) fff (space), g (space) g (space) ggg (space)!"
6.  Someone getting off sync with the rest of the class.
7.   Five minute warm-ups. Hands at home position and..... type!  Count your words, divide by 5 to get your words per minute.

 8.  Centering a heading by first dividing the number of characters between the margins by 2 (to find the center point) and then backspacing once for every 2 characters in the heading.
9.  Changing the ribbon.
10.  Carriage return.

I can't leave the typewriter topic yet without mentioning my Grandma H.  She always, always wrote her letters to us on a typewriter with an italic font so for the longest time I had the impression that she had perfect penmanship.  She would change the ribbon now and then from black to green to a purple-blue color which furthered my hunch that she also wrote with varicolored pens.  What a surprise I had when our family went to visit her in Iowa and I discovered her sitting at the kitchen table typing letters and cards on her little portable typewriter.  How I loved to watch her fingers fly over the keys.

Back to Tea Party......
After discussing the evolution of typing into keyboarding, we talked about making copies.  Do you remember when everything was a Xerox?  "Please  make a xerox of this test.  Thirty copies."  But let's go back even further.  Can you?  Does the word mimeograph conjure up any old school memories?  I could remember back to grade school, somewhere around 4th or 5th grade, when teachers made mimeograph copies.  First the original had to be typed on some sort of paper that was similar to a carbon copy (another flash back) and then it was attached to the mimeograph machine where it was   If you could become the teacher's pet, you might even get to learn how to run the mimeograph machine and make copies for Teacher.  We old girls racked our brains trying to remember the name of that machine until at last our memory chips brought it up.  Here's an explanation of how the mimeograph machine worked, told much better than I could:

The image transfer medium is a stencil made from waxed mulberry paper. This flexible waxed sheet is backed by a sheet of stiff card stock, with the sheets bound at the top.
Once prepared, the stencil is wrapped around the ink-filled drum of the rotary machine. When a blank sheet of paper is drawn between the rotating drum and a pressure roller, ink is forced through the holes on the stencil onto the paper. Early flatbed machines used a kind of squeegee.

Didn't you just love the smell of a freshly mimeographed copy?  Oh, and the school newspaper was mimeographed too.  Do you have any old-school typing memories to share?  Please do.