Friday Favorites from Cindy Hattersley, A Bajillian Recipes, Budget Bytes, and More

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Good morning! How was your week? We are getting back to our routine after being lucky enough to have family for the last 3 weeks. I loved every minute of my time with my mother-in-law and my parents; the walks, talks, meals, shopping and adventures were all wonderful. Now I am settling in for the cosy season, the holidays and my favorite time of the year.

I hope that you enjoy my favorite finds this week.

Food

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One of my all time favorite things to eat in the Fall, Welsh Rarebit from Simply Delicious.

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Pasta with Creamy Pumpkin Sauce from Budget Bytes

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Buffalo Cauliflower Mac and Cheese from Choosing Chai

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Apple Cider Donut Muffins from A Bajillian Recipes

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The Ultimate Zucchini Bread from one of the greatest bloggers, Smitten Kitchen.

This Mummy Cake is cute and delicious. You can get the recipe for it and 4 other chocolate desserts here.

Articles

If you would like a few ideas for decorating your Fall mantle, check out Cindy Hattersleys’ blog and the 4 other bloggers who joined her this week to showcase their own mantles and talents.

Which Drink Is Best for Hydration? Hint, it isn’t water.

For a happier home life, is bigger always better?

This game allows you to plant trees around the world.

The Beauty of the Ordinary.

Books

Little Boy by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In this unapologetically unclassifiable work Lawrence Ferlinghetti lets loose an exhilarating rush of language to craft what might be termed a closing statement about his highly significant and productive 99 years on this planet. The “Little Boy” of the title is Ferlinghetti himself as a child, shuffled from his overburdened mother to his French aunt to foster childhood with a rich Bronxville family. Service in World War Two (including the D-Day landing), graduate work, and a scholar gypsy’s vagabond life in Paris followed. These biographical reminiscences are interweaved with Allen Ginsberg-esque high energy bursts of raw emotion, rumination, reflection, reminiscence and prognostication on what we may face as a species on Planet Earth in the future. Little Boy is a magical font of literary lore with allusions galore, a final repository of hard-earned and durable wisdom, a compositional high wire act without a net (or all that much punctuation) and just a gas and an inspiration to read.

The Printmaker’s Daughter by Katherine Govier

A lost voice of old Japan reclaims her rightful place inhistory in this breathtaking work of imagination and scholarship from award-winning and internationally acclaimedauthor Katherine Govier. In the evocative taleof 19th century Tokyo, The Printmaker’sDaughter delivers an enthrallingtale of one of the world’s great unknown artists: Oei,the mysterious daughter of master printmaker Hokusai, painter of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. In a novel that willresonate with readers of Tracy Chevalier’s Girlwith a Pearl Earring, Lisa See’s SnowFlower and the Secret Fan, and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,the sights and sensations of an exotic, bygone era form the richly captivatingbackdrop for an intimate, finely wrought story of daughterhood and duty, artand authorship, the immortality of creation and the anonymity of history.

Juliet’s Nurse by Lois Leveen

In Verona, a city ravaged by plague and political rivalries, a mother mourning the death of her day-old infant enters the household of the powerful Cappelletti family to become the wet-nurse to their newborn baby. As she serves her beloved Juliet over the next fourteen years, the nurse learns the Cappellettis’ darkest secrets. Those secrets—and the nurse’s deep personal grief—erupt across five momentous days of love and loss that destroy a daughter, and a family.

By turns sensual, tragic, and comic, Juliet’s Nurse gives voice to one of literature’s most memorable and distinctive characters, a woman who was both insider and outsider among Verona’s wealthy ruling class. Exploring the romance and intrigue of interwoven loyalties, rivalries, jealousies, and losses only hinted at in Shakespeare’s play, this is a never-before-heard tale of the deepest love in Verona—the love between a grieving woman and the precious child of her heart.

The Blackberry Farm Cookbook

If you are a fan of Blackberry Farm you will love this cookbook.

Nestled in the blue mists of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, the 10,000-acre bucolic refuge of Blackberry Farm houses a top-rated small inn with one of the premier farm-to-table restaurants in the country. This sumptuous cookbook offers a collection of recipes that are as inspired by the traditional rustic cooking of the mountainous south as they are by a fresh, contemporary, artistic sensibility. Some of the dishes are robust, others are astonishingly light, all are full of heart and surprise and flavor — and all are well within the reach of the home cook.

California has the French Laundry, Virginia has the Inn at Little Washington, and Tennessee has Blackberry Farm, where the indulgences of a luxury inn are woven together with odes to nature — fly-fishing, hiking, foraging, bird watching, and heirloom gardening — to create a new way of looking at the world, a way in which anything seems possible.

This is particularly true at the Inn’s table and in its award-winning wine cellar. To the farm’s master gardeners, food artisans and chefs, meals are an opportunity to express not only the earth and the culture of this remote spot, but also its spirit. On a spring day this might mean Rye Whiskey-Cured Trout with Fresh and Pickled Fennel, and the summer garden might inspire a Chilled Corn Soup with Garlic Custard, a papardelle of baby carrots, or a tomato terrine. In the cooler weather, game and traditionally preserved food — cider-basted venison, a shell-bean and gamebird cassoulet, a dried apple stack cake or Bourbon Apple Fried Pies — keep conversation in front of the fire lively. For all its artfulness, however, Blackberry Farm’s garden-to-table cooking tends to be an ode to a well-loved cast iron skillet, a backyard smoker or a wood-fired grill.

In the foothills, you don’t eat to eat, you eat to talk, to remember and to imagine what you will eat tomorrow. In this book, the stories of the people who practice the traditional mountain food arts — the bacon man, the heirloom gardener, the cheese maker and sausage man — are woven together with the recipes, lore and regional history to reflect the spirit of the cooking at Blackberry Farm. Breathtaking photographs capture the magical world that surrounds the table — the hills and rushing creeks, the lights and shadows of the forest, the moods and moments of the garden.

Finds

A great Cross-body bag from J.Crew,

Suede Boots Soludos

I had no idea Soludos made boots, I think this pair would make a great boot for Fall.

Banana Republic Skirt

Houndstooth Wrap Skirt from Banana Republic

Moravian Cookies are delicious, I cannot wait to get my tin of pumpkin spice flavored form Williams Sonoma. If you like Pumpkin Spice candy, food, and drinks, Williams Sonoma is having a sale for 20% off all pumpkin spice flavored items.

I hope that you have a great weekend. Please share your recipes, podcasts, book suggestions and whatever else you discovered this week.