Thrift Shop Day

Saturday morning, my cousin, Dustin, picked up Andy and I for a thrift shop day.  Sort of like hitting garage sales, I suppose, except involving less driving and the ability to use credit cards.  We started the day bright-eyed and bushy-tailed

(which might have something to do with that second pot of coffee, in all fairness....) and were at the first store shortly after it opened.  Thrift stores can be a great resource for all sorts of things, and we covered a lot of them.   We're all avid readers,

and I was delighted to find an inexpensive copy of the 1946 printing of The Joy of Cooking,

where I found a recipe for peanut butter and bacon canapes (toast rounds of bread on one side, spread the other side with peanut butter, then for inexplicable reasons, cover the peanut butter with thin strips of bacon and broil until bacon is crisp), which I suppose one might have served with a nice chilled sauerkraut cocktail (of  which there are two versions and both involve willingly drinking sauerkraut juice).  I shall try to remember that this was written for a nation that had suffered through 15 years of depression, war, and rationing....but I'm still not going to try such things.  I was also highly delighted to find this

which was written in 1933 and is a cookbook for Americans living in India, but has recipes for Chinese duck, Hawaiian chicken, brinjal, sauerbraten, as well as Boston baked beans, so I'm not exactly sure what the point of it is, and I hadn't known there were enough Americans living in India in the 1930s to justify an entire cookbook, but I did very much enjoy the chapter on how to hire male servants for my kitchen.  I'm sure Andy would be thrilled.  The other fun thing about this book is that the owner added to it,

recipes with the dates they were added, and even a few pressed plants in among the pages.  The added recipes date from 1942 to 1945, so maybe the book's owner was in India during WWII.

We also found a little cordial set and several little pots that will match a soup set a friend donated to Soup Night

candlesticks,

and a vase,

though we opted to pass on this

a Scottie dog purse!  Unfortunately, if there were matching shoes at one point, they weren't there.  I would have LOVED to have seen them.

The most interesting find of the day, however, belongs to Dustin:

An antique pitchfork, handmade from one piece of wood that was split into the tines, and is from Hungary, I believe they said.  While this is a bit of an unusual item, Dustin and I both grew up on our grandparents' cattle ranch, and it's really a very cool relic of a very long tradition.  And it will scare the daylights out of the neighbors--BONUS!