We've had our farm in the country for over four years now, but we don't feel any closer to moving there than we did when we first bought it. Thankfully we have wonderful people who rent from us and take great care of it, but it is difficult to spend much time there when we have little or no access to the house while it is occupied.
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Instead of visiting, we dream. One of my largest dreams for the farm is that someday we'll have an outdoor wood-fired bread and pizza oven, built near the barn and the outdoor piazza we hope to have. I've read many tales of the lovely breads that are baked in these outdoor beauties, heard stories of the
pizza farms that have cropped up near the Twin Cities, watched YouTube
tutorials and pored over the listings at the
North House Folk School in northern Minnesota for the class I long to take to figure out how to build our own.
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This weekend there was an inspiring
article in the Star Tribune about a minister who builit his own wood fired brick oven and decided that it was a great means of building community with his parishioners. Make sure to check out the photos... the one where they are pulling the hot bread out of the oven on a cold, winter day and the steam is rising... it is amazing.
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I noticed that the class at North House is full for the summer. Cheers to all the future back-yard pizza bakers. May our crust be crisp and our families' bellies be full!
We bought a huge bag of oranges recently at the local grocery store... maybe it was even 18 pounds. We all love oranges and have been eating them at every meal. After a while, however, we decided that no matter how good the orange might taste, 18 pounds of anything is too much!
The cool old-school juicers are from Mexico City, purchased outside "La Merced," the largest market in the country.
On Valentines Day I set the table with all kinds of hearts and red things, just like my own mom used to do for us. I hid behind the fridge to watch their faces when they saw the fun! 
