I love chocolates & Coca-Cola, calico cats & corgis, antiques, cast iron cooking, and all things country!
Welcome to my Take Joy Farmhouse!
Absolutely Take Joy!
Some things just get better with age! It’s true! Like fine wine. You learn from your mistakes as you age and hopefully, like me, you learn to ultimately, in the end, to stop wrestling with stuff and finally, when all else fails, you Take Joy! And that’s what I do…eventually.
Recipes For Living
I like to write about memories of my farmgirl days right up to now being a “modern” country woman as my daughter describes me. What I like to share, is what I’ve learned along the way. Farm girl, country woman, life lessons all brought me to where I am today.
Did you know, I’m a true bon-a-fide farm girl? Yep! In 1962, Mother and Daddy packed up the station wagon, three kids, a boy and a girl, and a baby on the way and moved us from Loveland, Ohio––a suburb of Cincinnati ––to the rural farming community of Buford, Highland County, Ohio. It was way out there, an hours drive from civilization. But the beauty of it all was Daddy was now fulfilling his childhood dream of being a farmer.
We nestled in that first night in our small, story-and-a-half white, clapboard sided house situated on a one hundred acre parcel. The rolling green pastures were dotted with balck and white dairy caows. It was the biggest backyard I had ever seen.
I didn’t know it then––I couldn’t have since I was only four, but that move changed the course of my life forever. Right then and there, I became a farm girl and still am.
Now, all these decades later I’m writing about year gone by and those memories gleaned from those years. Lessons I learned along the way. . My antidotes, So Here’s the Thing…at the end of my childhood stories in my boo, some say, are endearing. And the stories I share they say, bring back fond memories of their own rural childhood. And mostly, they say, it brings them joy to read my stuff. But I say it brings me more joy to read their comments. Either way Take Joy!
Recipes For Your Farmhouse Table
In that same farmhouse of my youth, is where I began learning from Mother, how to do simple kitchen tasks. To me it was like a scientific experiment to make cookies and cakes and Easter eggs, and I loved it. One morning I finally mastered frying an over easy egg in a cast iron skillet without the crunchies. I was elated.
In my book, My Farmhouse Journal:Memories and Recipes, and in my blog,too, I share my family’s heirloom recipes— the ones I grew up learning to make and bake and the best part—to EAT!
Arent their some days we all wish to return to our youth? I just open my book, make one of my recipes, sip a cup of coffee and I remember. Right then and there I am transported to a simpler time and there I become overjoyed with Joy!
All my life, since I was nine years of age, I remember my first Laura Ingalls Wilder book it like it was yesterday. It was the first year we got to go to the library. When I read my first Laura Ingall Wilder book Little House in the Big Wood, I knew right then I wanted to write my farm girl stories like her, someday, too. But first I had to live them. All these many years later I finally did write down my stories, too.
At the time I finished this project, I was 58 and just getting to it. Better late than never, some say. But when visiting the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home in Mansfield, Missouri, I read she was 60 when she published her first book. Well, what do you know about that? Maybe I’m right on target.
I love it when readers message me, write me or catch up to me in the grocery store to say reading my book brings back so many pleasant memories for them. Simple, pleasurable childhood memories they had long since forgotten. And then I beam big and bright! If you don’t own a copy, I hope you will reward yourself with a copy. Read it then pass it on to one of your favorite farm girl friends.
Sherry Mitchell...My Farmhouse Journal 