Antiques, Buying Used and Change the World Wednesday Challenge

This week Reduce Footprints has put out a challenge that I fully embrace.  Here's what she wrote"

"This week consider antique stores for household purchases. If you've never been in an antique store, visit one to see what items they offer. If you need a couch, table, tools, dishes, etc., check out an antique store before buying new."

This is something I love to do.  I love the challenge, the browsing and the hunt.  This sort of thing fits well with my eclectic taste as well.  My mom was also great at this and many of the items I have today she either found for me or I inherited from her.  Some came from my grandma and my Aunt, while others were special things I found on my own or with my husband.  One year we even did all our Christmas presents from antique or second hand stores.  One little item for each person wrapped in a scarf I had knit for them as well.  There was a broach for the MiL, cookie cutters for the SiL and so on, a hobby horse for a nephew.  It was so much fun, trying to find something that spoke of each person we were shopping for.  If I could I would do stuff like this far more often.  I thought that for this challenge I would share pictures of some of my treasures.  I hope you enjoy them and are inspired to find some of your own.

I'll start with my most prized antique, an Art Deco Secretary that my husband gave me for a wedding anniversary.

It has become my special place for displaying favorite things and where I love to store all my favorite stationary.  

Often there will be other second hand treasures sitting on top of it.  Like the blue pottery piece holding some Farmers Market flowers in the picture above.  And the cut glass bowl filled with shells and a tea light below.  The shells are mostly ones I collected from a beach shortly after my mom passed away and the bowl was one she gave me. 

My mom gave many beautiful antique dishes and my grandma gave me a few as well.  My absolute favorite is in the fridge right now holding something so there won't be a picture this time, but it's a yellow Fiesta-ware like bowl that gets used all the time.  Here are a few of my other favorites, but definitely not all of them! 

As a tea drinker and the daughter of a woman who loved teapots I have quite a collection.  Here are my two favorites. 

One winter when we were living in Olympia Washington there was a power outage that motivated me to buy this hand coffee grinder for my husband, that way he wouldn't have to look forlornly at the whole coffee beans in the cannister, ever again.  He took this to work where he made grinding his coffee by hand part of his French Press coffee break ritual.  Now it's at home with us since he no longer has his own office.  I think he hopes it will be joined by a French Press for at home - preferably one from a second hand store or a locally owned business.

Antiques and second hand finds are used in the everyday life of our home.  I'm not one for just having them sit around collecting dust.  Here are a few examples of where second hand finds have become essential to our homes organization, especially in the kitchen.

Two crocks sit next to our stove holding various cooking utensils including an antique bright yellow butter melter and plenty of my favorite kitchen utensil - wooden spoons!  The pink glass dish holds fair trade organic sugar while the orange glass holds a collection of chopsticks.  Both glass pieces came from my grandmother.  The crocks were finds by my mother and me and are one of the things I always want to buy more of when I'm in an antique store.  Below you can see that the table these all sit on is serving as extra counter space next to the stove and is an antique itself.  

Another antique find from Olympia was the spice rack below along with several of the spice jars  It was originally brown.  I sanded it and painted it the pale yellow it is today.  I also sanded a break in one of the drawer fronts to give it a curve instead of leaving it looking ragged.

One of my all time favorite things to look through at Antique store are the linens.  I'm constantly dreaming up ideas for vintage fabrics, from using them for what they were intended to letting my creativity loose and letting them become something new.  Here are just a few things in my collection.

I hope all this will inspire you to find the potential for antique and second hand stores in your life.  I haven't mentioned half the things that are second hand and antique in my life, but I was writing a blog post not a novel!   I'll leave you now with a picture of my favorite candle holder, a metal filigree thing that always has a beeswax candle in it waiting to provide a nice candle light ambiance.  

This and That

I'm sorry Reduce Footprints, I couldn't do it.  I was afraid this would happen.  I had a funny feeling when I read this weeks Change the World Wednesday Challenge that I wouldn't be able to pull it off.  Every time I went to the grocery store over the last couple weeks I would check and walk away sad when it wasn't there.  But today, it appeared and I could not resist - I mean I WRITE about vegetarian food so how could I keep from grabbing up the March copy of Vegetarian Times when first I laid eyes upon it?

You wouldn't expect that of me, right?  Am I forgiven?  Maybe the fact that on the same errand I stopped by the library to pick up a googgely-gob of cookbooks on all things raw.

So at least I fulfilled that part of the challenge.  You gotta meet me half way, OK?  OK.

The third part of my errands this afternoon was to pick up my CSA from Full Circle Farm.
It was LOADED with delicious fruits and veggies - lots of them.

Yes, two people really can eat that many fruits and vegetables - and then some, really!  This weeks share:

3 pounds Garnet Yams
1 head Cauliflower
1 bunch Carrots
1 Cucumber
3 Hass Avocados
.66 pound Snowpeas
.66 pound fresh Shitake Mushrooms
.66 pounds cut mixed Salad Greens
1 monster head Green Leaf Lettuce
6 Braeburn Apples
6 D'anjou Pears
6 Navel Oranges
1 Mango

Oh and if you look closely at the pictures above you'll see a special little something that we added to our order this week, Seattle's own Theo Chocolate Coffee Dark Chocolate Bar - YUM!

All those fruit and veggies were organic and only cost $37.05.  They would have cost significantly more at the local PCC where I regularly shop and I'm supporting a local farm directly by buying through them - as the local season progresses more and more of the produce will come from Full Circle itself.  I'll be able to drop the size of the box when my own p-patch starts producing and use their substitution options to make sure I don't get to much of any one thing or not enough of another.  I can put my order on hold altogether if I get inundated with too many veggies (is there such a thing?) or if I get a chance to go out of town for vacation or I decide to just shop the local farmer's market for a few weeks.  It's all good.  I love my Full Circle Farm.

Now I'm going to sit here and enjoy the view of pink blossoms and busy hummingbirds while I peruse my pile of cookbooks, my new magazine and attempt to not eat the whole chocolate bar before Mark gets home - I would be in SO much trouble!

Change the World Wednesday and Raw Foods

There's this great blog called Reduce Footprints and every Wednesday a new challenge goes out to encourage people to try and live a life a little lighter on the earth. And this week's challenge is all about food and borrowed from yet another blogger - What a Card. Here it is:

This week, "plan an oven- and stove-free day, and no cheating and going out to eat! Have sandwiches, cut up fruit, veggies with dip, leftovers from a previous dinner that you can heat in the microwave**. Plan ahead and make a pasta salad you can eat cold for a few days. Have hummus, feta cheese, and spinach on a pita or wrap. There are tons of healthy, delicious meals you can have without having to turn on the stove! As an added plus, many of the meals are quick and easy to prepare!"**I'd like to bump up What A Card's challenge ... how about including microwave-free, as well.

The day before I read this challenge I had been craving mass quantities of out of season vegis and I so gave in. My meal that night and my lunch the next day was nearly entirely Mexican - meaning most of those vegis travelled all the way from Mexico. In itself, that is hardly a "light on the earth" thing to do, but my body was saying it wanted lots of cooling raw yummy vegis. So that is what I gave it - and just happened to fulfill the Change the World Wednesday's challenge in the process.

The meal was simple vegi wrap. A soft whole wheat tortilla smothered with mayo and mustard and filled to the brim (it turned out more taco like than wrap because it was so full there wasn't enough wrap to go around all the goodies) with avocado, cucumber, several colors of bell pepper, sweet onion (from WA state!), tomato and alfalfa sprouts (also from WA state). Mark and I each ate two huge wraps (tacos) for dinner and loved every lip-smacking minute of our totally out of season no-cook meal.

As the week has progressed I got to thinking about how this no-cook meal challenge would be a perfect opportunity to try any number of raw food recipes out there. So I went searching for blogs on raw foods and found a few good ones loaded with mouth-watering recipes that I look forward to trying soon. Like the Raw Banana Cream Pie from Rawmazing or any one of these incredible salads from The Sunny Raw Kitchen. I could keep going, but I'll leave it at that and let you all explore further yourselves. As for me, well it's time to go get some dinner going and after all this thinking about, reading about and writing about food - I'm hungry!