Time for the weekly blogroll.
AMISH BARN-RAISING: Diary of a Smart Chick posts some great photos from an Amish barn-raising in Holmes County, Ohio. Classic, iconic imagery if you've never seen such photos. There are the old-fashioned tools, the high-balancing people, fathers passing along carpentry knowledge to their sons...wonderful imagery. I will take exception to one of the blogger's points. The Mansfield News Journal which did a photo series about the barn-raising likely had permission to take photos. This is a newspaper that has had long-standing coverage in nearby Amish settlements so they know the "rules." There are more progressive settlements that don't disallow documentary type photos, which these clearly are. Click here to enjoy the whole collection, definitely worth checking out!
MENNONITE MUFFINS: Okay, these are actually called Cinnamon-Topped Oatmeal Muffins, but the blogger calls them Mennonite muffins because they came out of a Mennonite cookbook. I can go along with that! These sound and look delicious. Maybe a chance to eat something sweet without being overpoweringly sugary. Check out the recipe and photos here.
MENNONITE MEXICAN MEAL: Okay, I just wanted to post the woman's recipe which came from a Mennonite cookbook and aptly illustrates the Tex-Mex influence on Plain culture cooking. So if you want a delicious combination of plain and zing, click here for the recipe. I'll admit I got sucked down the rabbit hole of the internet reading other parts of her blog. She's brutally frank about her life, almost uncomfortably so.
ABANDONED CHURCH: Tom the Backroads Traveler catches up to an abandoned church on the backroads somewhere in New York. SIGH, such a pretty country church. Sad to see it in such disrepair, but there are structures like that all over the place, decaying, dying, rotting back into the earth from whence they came. There are memories of marriages, funerals, baptisms and potlucks there, I'm sure, all fading, slowly into the earthy bonds of earth. I'm glad Tom chronicles the backroads in such a way, allows us all to enjoy and preserve these important parts of our heritage.
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