Silver spoons

For my everyday flatware I use a combination of my grandmother's old set of silverware and a big set of hotel silver that I bought on eBay years ago. They fill up my silverware drawer.

My silverware drawer

My grandmother's set has been in the family forever and my mother gave it to me when I bought the house back in '97. It has a lovely floral pattern on the handles.

My grandmother's silverware pattern

The hotel set says "Dreier Hotels". I did some research online and found out that it was a relatively small hotel company from the 1930s and 40s that had hotels located in the Times Square area of New York City. They owned the Beverly, Cadillac, Forrest, Piccadilly, Plymouth, President, and Riverside Plaza hotels under the Dreier umbrella name. Funny to think of how many people must've used these utensils before me!

Lemon bars

A fresh batch from this weekend

One of my favorite desserts of all time has got to be lemon bars.
And my favorite version is Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa recipe from one of her early cookbooks.
You can get it here.
Not too sweet, not too tart, just the right texture, with a firm tasty crust to hold all that yellow sunshine flavor together.
I mad a batch this past weekend and it was a great way to kick off Spring. They were DELISH.

Rusticware

One of my prized collections is the grouping of various wooden bric-a-brac I've hunted for over the years that sits on my mantel in the living room, or as I call it, "the fireplace room".

The mantel grouping of 'rusticware'

I'm not totally sure what you call this stuff...I've seen it called "truveen" or sometimes "rusticware", possibly because there was a company back in the 1950's who marketed a line of wooden items like these, Ellwood Rusticware.

The Ellwood company made a lot of these pieces

You can find it on eBay and Etsy listed that way. They mostly made wooden nutcracker bowls, made to hold the nuts, the cracked shells, and the metal nutcrackers and picks. These nutcracker bowls are the most common forms I've seen. Both my grandmothers had them when I was growing up, they were very common back in the Mid-Century.

The classic nut bowl with slots for the nutcracker and picks

There were other kinds of items made out of the turned wood...vases, bowls, candlesticks, boxes, even sewing kits. I have a bit of all these types. Oftentimes they're stamped on one side with the name of a tourist site or a vacation camp or as a souvenir from a town or city. You'd find them at roadside places like Stuckey's, remember that place?

A tall vase for fireplace matches & a sewing box with spindles for spools of thread

A coin bank and two bowls

A covered bowl and a small vase

A candlestick and a wishing well(!)

I love the rough, yes rustic, quality of the unfinished surface, leaving the bark in tact. It works well in my cozy fireplace room with my big leather couch and wingback chair. My friend Ron even calls it "the rustic room". It's all a wink and a nod to the simpler time of my youth.

"The Rustic Room"