Hot cider, slippers, fire crackling in the fireplace, a blanket, and a good book. When you look up “cozy” in the dictionary, this really should be the definition. Hot cider is a Christmastime essential. Whenever I visit my parents for the holidays, I like…
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Sometimes when we are having some friends over and they have kids in tow, I will slice up an apple while they wait for me to get dinner ready. I am usually astonished at how quickly the apple vanishes, and how soon they ask…
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Apple season at Weaver’s Orchard means the cider press is in full swing! In fact, since apples store so well during the winter months in our cold storage, we have a fresh supply of apples to keep the cider press running every year from…
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At a cooking class in June 2014, I heard Phoebe Canakis of Phoebe’s Pure Food describe fillo shells as “a nice cheat.” This kind of shortcut is a sanity saver when it comes to entertaining. When you’re throwing a big party and have to…
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My husband often talks about one of my most spectacular kitchen failures. But he speaks of it fondly, and almost dreamily, because sometimes even the messiest kitchen mistakes are still quite edible. Here’s what happened. I was trying to make apple dumplings. It’s a…
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“There never was, and never will be, such a remedy for the tired, overworked human body as the pure, fresh air of the country,” wrote an author known as Mrs. A. Sherman Hitchcock in an article published in 1911. Picnics were nothing new at the time,…
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Whoa?! Where did you get that? A museum? That’s the kind of reaction I get when I pull out my cell phone. It’s a heavy black Samsung flip phone, probably designed for people who are not in their 30s like I am. Such technological…
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Some of my favorite Christmas parties have involved white elephant gift exchanges. I have usually come back with gifts I love, but perhaps this only shows my capacity to be charmed by strange, low-budget gifts. At one white elephant party while my husband and…
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This year, Weaver’s celebrated its 85th anniversary. In 1932, Daniel Weaver started Weaver’s Orchard on the same site where I now love to shop and pick fruit. But what was this part of Pennsylvania like before 1932? How common were orchards in the early…
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In high school, some friends and I volunteered at the Hay Creek Valley Fall Festival at Joanna Furnace, around the corner from Weaver’s Orchard. The Hay Creek festival recreates early American arts, like blowing glass, pressing cider, and cooking over an open fire. It…
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