{A Fragrant Year is an ongoing series shared throughout 2024 highlighting twelve fragrant plants, trees, flowers, shrubs and herbs added to the New England garden landscape, month by month, surrounding a house built in 1750. This series was inspired by the 1967 garden book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. If you are new to the blog, catch up with our first introductory post here.} March blew into the kitchen in a flurry of raindrops, wind chills and the occasional threat of one more snowstorm. My favorite local nursery didn’t open for the season until mid-month, an ..read more

{Spoiler Alert: This is the final installment in a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost in 2008 and how it found its way home in 2024. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrives.} There’s a quote by an unknown writer that states… “What’s meant for you will never miss you, and that which misses you was never meant for you.” This quote sits on the shop’s recently sold page, acting as a sort of hopeful reassurance to any shopper who winds up there only to discover that an item that had originally caught their eye ..read more

Witch hazel illustration by Leonie Bell circa 1960s With a scent ranging from sweet yeasted bread to bubblegum, the centuries-old Hamamelis virginiana (aka the common witch hazel) kicks off Month #1 in this year’s Greenhouse Diaries series. In case you missed our introductory post last month, our theme for 2024 is a Fragrant Year, where we’ll be sharing twelve months of perfumed plants, flowers, and trees that have the power to add a calming, aromatic atmosphere to gardens big and small. Inspired by the 1967 book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell and their idea that ..read more

It’s just the start of 2024, but here in the Vintage Kitchen, there is a finish line coming into view. This year we will be wrapping up a five-year project that first started here on the blog in 2020. I’m so happy to say welcome back to The International Vintage Recipe Tour. What started out as an intended year-long project of cooking 50 recipes from 45 different countries in 2020 has now taken five years to complete just to the halfway mark. A pandemic, a tornado, a big cross-country move and 1750 House renovations have waylaid plans far more than ever anticipated, but this project has alwa ..read more

The Greenhouse Diaries are back with new inspirations and a whole new year of growing adventures to explore and discover. Like last year, these new diary entries center around what can be grown in a petite 4×6 greenhouse in our four-season New England climate, but starting this month there is a brand new theme, different from last year, that is guiding our gardening goals in 2024. Our mighty, mini greenhouse in 2023 Last year, our first year as greenhouse owners and New England residents, we focused on winter gardening from December through May and all the possibilities that a warm greenhouse ..read more

The view from seat 21A {Spoiler Alert: This is a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost over a decade ago and how it found its way home in 2024. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrives.} This part of the lost item story is about numbers. Not numbers relating to complex math or phones or registry digits, but numbers that have to do with time and distance. So far, with the unfolding of each chapter of this Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts, we have learned bits and pieces about the l ..read more

It’s been two years and five months since this story began unfolding on the blog. Back then, the blog series with the impossibly long title – A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts detailed, in installments, the story of a mysterious package that was sent by a random stranger to the Vintage Kitchen in the summer of 2021. Inside the package was a valuable 100-year-old item that had been found in a Southern city suburb by the random stranger in 2008. The item was connected to the Vintage Kitchen but did not belong to the Vintage Kitchen. In 2021, the story had been ro ..read more

Just in time, before we say goodbye to 2023, I didn’t want the year to leave without posting the annual recommended book list that has become a favorite here on the blog. This year’s selections center around nature, literary figures, artists, the art of collecting, and the curation of home in all the ways that make it personal and unique. As is the way every year, these books were randomly discovered while doing research for other projects. They popped up while uncovering origin stories for shop heirlooms, researching story snippets for the blog, or understanding context surrounding a vintage ..read more

The history behind Bar Hemingway’s Ritz 75 runs long. If a cocktail could talk this one would tell many stories. Included in its 100-year lifespan are snippets about several greats – Ernest Hemingway, a New York nightclub, a French hotel and the best bartender in the world. And those are just tips of the ice cube. Even more stories lay below the gin line. This cocktail’s core combination of ingredients – champagne, lemon juice, sugar and ice date back to the early 1900s when it was known as a French 75. Named after WWI field artillery, the drink was likened on first sip, to the quick jolt of ..read more

Undoubtedly the most well-known food to come out of Mystic, Connecticut is pizza, thanks to the 1988 movie Mystic Pizza starring Julia Roberts… The real-life pizza shop that inspired the film is still serving up hot pies every day in this beautiful, bustling, historic port city, but there’s a long-standing tradition of other delicious New England fare that has made Mystic, CT a go-to source for memorable cuisine too. The recipe featured here today might not be the star of a feature film but it definitely will be a star on your holiday table. Today’s post comes from The Mystic Seaport Cookboo ..read more