August is Eat Local Month and the kitchen garden at the Phoenix Mill House takes us back to the original eat local days, when a patch of dooryard was planted, tended, and harvested. In our kitchen garden, we are growing beets, carrots, parsnips, beans, potatoes, and culinary herbs. Our little kitchen garden is just beginning […]
This little garden outside the Phoenix Mill house is growing ingredients for our fall hearth cooking programs. Crops include onions, potatoes, celery, squash, and various herbs.
December 14th dawned cold with the first major storm of the year coming in the afternoon. John, Lorraine, Mary and I arrived dressed in warm layers prepared for a day of extreme hearth cooking. From the start, the temperature made for a very different day from our October and November Saturdays before the hearth. We […]
Each time we offer a Hearth Cooking Saturday, we try out some new recipes and techniques. At our November session, we experimented with a standing crust pie. Pies go back to ancient times but those ancient pies were different than the flaky crust, melt in your mouth pies that we make today. The pie crust […]
As you can see from the photo, we had a great day last Saturday cooking in the Phoenix Mill House. John Patterson (pictured in his 18th century duds) has become the caretaker of the mill house and graciously came in early that morning to get the fires going and to fire the bee hive oven. […]
This fall we are offering three Hearth Cooking Saturdays. On October 19, we will explore a harvest theme menu including chicken pottage, buttered onions, shrub, and classic apple pie. On November 16, we will be cooking items found at a 19th century Thanksgiving celebration including a pork pie in a standing crust, carrot puffs, applesauce […]
The smell of strawberries always brings to mind my grandmother and the hot humid day in June when she took me (a twelve year old recently transplanted from Southern California) to pick the wild strawberries that grew at the edge of the old hayfield on her Hancock farm. The strawberries were nothing like I had […]
The Phoenix Mill House was originally located near the north band of Nubanusit Brook, about 50 yards from where it now sits behind the main building of the Monadnock Center. Threatened with demolition, it was acquired by the Peterborough Historical Society. It serves both as an example of preservation, and also a demonstration of what […]
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