Weekends of Fresh Bread, Work, and Stan the Junkman

A few weekends ago we made the trek to my dads house up in Kingston NY to help him with some work around the house in preparation for the summer season. Mostly I worked on refreshing his planting beds and boxes with new soil for his upcoming bounties of fresh veggies, as well as in preparation for a lush bed of wildflowers to feed some new residents at his house: honeybees. I’m sure that I will have lots of new recipes as his fresh vegetables and honey become ready to harvest, but for now I will share with you some photos from our weekend trip, including a fresh loaf of bread he baked for us as a part of his thanks for helping him work.

I’ve always thought of my dad as an amazing cook, and a lot of my memories of him cooking are focused around the wood burning oven in his upstate house. We’ve made everything from burgers to pies in the wood burning oven, but one of my favorite foods to ever come out of it is a freshly baked loaf of bread. There’s just something about the smell of fresh bread that brings me right back to those childhood mornings, waking with that scent filling the house, or back to those winter afternoons of sledding in the yard that were capped off with a steaming slice of fresh, crusty bread slathered in butter. My dad has always had a bit of a magic tough when it comes to bread.  I’m not going to share with you the recipe for this specific loaf he baked us since, while incredibly delicious, it was a bit of an experiment (he used a few different types of flour). I will however share with you the promise of future bread baking experiment recipes, as well as the New York Times recipe for no knead bread, which has been a long time staple in my dad’s bread baking endeavors.

The last thing I want to share with you in this post are a few photos from a weekend outing to one of my favorite places to visit near my dads house upstate: Stan the Junkman.  The real name of Stan the junk mans store is Zaborski Emporium, (we call it Stan the junk man mostly because it has a better ring to it) and the store is just that; an emporium, a huge warehouse filled with every antique/piece of junk you could imagine, from boxes of crystal door knobs to old rusting tools to whole rooms filled with nothing but wood burning stoves or fireplace mantles or claw foot bathtubs. The store has been a favorite of my dad and uncles for years now not only because of their love for antiques, but also because of the fact that this warehouse contains pretty much any object or piece of furniture you could ever want for your home, no matter how rare or hard to find. And it’s been a favorite of mine for a while now because it’s the perfect place to find incredible photo opportunities, and I couldn’t help but share a few of those photos with you today.