 The evening of February 11th saw the fanfare of our drawing for the February Valentine’s Day Giveaway. And….drum roll please…we have a winner. Say “Congratulations” to reader Micheala Johanson of Ohio. She has won the basket of our handmade, Castile, goat milk soaps and has made her choice of our two minty ones: Eucalyptus/Tea Tree and Peppermint (with hand rolled oatmeal) and also a bar of Rosemary/Peppermint with real, rubbed sage grown right here at the Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ gardens. A scrubby is included and all is wrapped in shrink wrap packaging with a big, gingham bow. Micheala’s gift is already winging its way to Ohio and she will be soaking in a tub with lucious soaps soon! Thanks to all of you for entering and watch for the next giveaway coming up in March, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day!!   |
|
| |
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Archive for the ‘Giveaways!’ Category
We Have A Winner!
Wednesday, February 13th, 2013
Enter The Valentine’s Day Giveaway!!
Thursday, January 31st, 2013
|
It’s nearly February and time to start thinking about hearts and flowers and smelling good because you took a bath. It’s hard to have a Valentine if you aren’t clean and you don’t smell good. So I am going to help you out in that department. For our Valentine’s Day Giveaway, the winner will receive a heart decorated basket with a shower scrubby and choice of two 4oz Prairie Blessings soaps. Yep. The winner gets to choose whichever soaps desired. Of course, the winner can use this as a gift for his or her Valentine to make THEM smell good!! Our soaps are made right here by our hands (and with stainless pots and stuff) of hand rendered pure tallow, olive oil, coconut oil and infused with pure, steam-distilled essential oils, organic herbs and spices, fragrance oils and flower petals. Just leave a comment below and at any following posts until February 11th when the winner will be chosen. Good luck to everybody! (And if you don’t win, you can still purchase the soaps so you can smell good too.) |
|
| |
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We Have A Winner!!
Thursday, December 20th, 2012
 We had the drawing last night and our lucky winner is Kelly from Texas. Kelly has been notified and has responded and her package of short bread mix and cookie cutters will be heading her way. She even ordered soaps to throw into the box! Thank you, Kelly!! Oh!! And to make it even better, Kelly informed me that her birthday was yesterday – the day she won! So Happy Birthday too and Congratulations!! Couldn’t make it any more perfect a pick! And just a little announcement – The Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™, our Prairie Blessings soaps and our rolling pin covers have gone international! We can now ship these items to Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland and Austrlia. More countries will be added soon. So, for those of you who have inquired regarding international shipping, it is now available! Later this evening, I will be posting a new appetizer recipe so stay tuned! |
|
| |
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Christmas Giveaway!!
Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
|
OK!!! Time for a giveaway. Yes, it is. Tis the season to be jolly and that time to give stuff, right? Well, I think that you are going to really like this “stuff”! Leave a comment below or on any posts until December 19th and you will be entered to win a lovely set of cookie cutters that you can use to create the coolest cookie Christmas tree. But on top of that, you will also win a bag of our Aberdeen Shortbread Cookie Mix, which makes the most lucious and buttery shortbread and can be found at the shopping page. The drawing will be held on the 19th. So get to commenting and maybe you will be our lucky winner!!! Ho, ho, ho!! |
|
| |
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fall Giveaway
Monday, October 15th, 2012
|
It’s time for a new giveaway and since it is Fall, I guess we’ll call it our 2012 Fall Giveaway! And since Fall means cool nights, football games and food, I’m thinkin’ fresh, hot bread is the order of the day. So, comment here or on any other post until Novemeber 1 and you will be entered for two large packages of our Frontier Fixin’s bread mixes. These savory breads are great with spicy cheese spreads, meats or pestos or just plain ol’ butter. So enter as many times as you wish by commenting!! Good luck.  |
|
| |
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
New Giveaway!!
Thursday, August 2nd, 2012
|
First on the agenda – there is a glitch here at the blog and I am very aware of it. In fact, I’m kind of overwhelmed by it. When I started writing way back in 2009, I was green as a gourd and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The blog is powered by WordPress.org and is quite different from Blogger and other sites. I have to write much of the blog in HTML and when I post pictures, there has to be a host site for the photos with accompanying HTML to assign a spot for each picture. I know now that I can host my own photos at my own FTP site, but am just now trying to figure out how to do that. Soooo, way back then, after figuring out that “hosting” didn’t have anything to do with my penchant for laying a table of edibles for a party, I put the first two years of blog post photos at a site called ImageHost.org. Well, Imagehost is no more. It is gone. Finis. Kaput. And with its demise, so go my photos hosted. I still have the photos, but now I am going to have to go back one post by one post to reload pictures and retype HTML. It is gonna take awhile because we are talking some 400 photos, but it will get done. I got the first 5 posts done last night. It was kinda fun going back that far and reading what I was doing. My, my. How far we have come!! Anyway, if there is a particular post that you are needing and the pictures are gone, email me and I will hop over to that post and get it fixed first. Second order of business – it is high time for a giveaway!! And I am hoping you are REALLY gonna like this one. It will go until Labor Day and on that day, a winner’s name will be drawn. All you have to do is to leave a comment at any of the posts and your name and email address will be entered. The winner will receive this lovely marble rolling pin with stand, and a package of biscuit mix to roll out with the rolling pin!  So start commenting! And you can enter as many times as you wish. Good luck to everybody! Update: If you are having trouble posting, go to the very bottom of the post and click on the blue link that says, “Comments” with the number of comments in front of it. It appears that the link in the box is bad. |
|
| |
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Winner In The Mother’s Day Giveaway!
Monday, May 7th, 2012
 Surprise – surprise! As Mr. Fix-It was doing his due dilligence in drawing a name out of the bucket for the winner of our Mother’s Day Tea Party gift, I decided, on a lark, to give away TWO gift sets. Mr. Fix-It generously agreed to draw out a second name. And so, I am proud to announce that the winners of our May giveaway are Ryan Gott and Gayle Jones. Both will be receiving a box with the tea party gifts in the photo above, just in time for Mother’s Day. And for the rest of the month, in honor of Mother’s Day and Spring, our Apricot Orchard tea will be on sale at 15% off. A $4.25 tin of loose tea will be $3.60 through the month of May. This tea is just amazing and makes wonderful hot tea or iced tea, depending on your mood. |
|
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
The Strawberries Are In!
Saturday, April 28th, 2012
|
For those of you who don’t know, the website was down this past week because some icky person in the Ukraine decided to attack it. Nearly 800,000 hits overwhelmed the server and ‘kablam’ – it crashed. Thankfully, a very kind and humorous man at Fatcow.com, the company that hosts this site, spend hours on the phone with me and determined that we had experienced a DOS hit – that’s Denial Of Service for those of you who are computer illiterate. I can say that with a straight face because I’d never heard of it either!!! This man, Chris from Tempe, AZ, took me through a not-so-fascinating, and totally more than I ever wanted to know, trail of logs, files, websites and computerese to discover the IP address that was creating havoc. He was very excited when he found it. He admitted that it does not take much to thrill him. But he then mumbled to himself and me, over the phone, that he was going to look up his favorite website to see if he could trace the addess. While listening to him mumble, I could hear computer keys typing an then Chris said, “Oh no!! My favorite website is down.” “It must be catching,” I said. But Chris replied, “Not to worry! Every good nerd has a backup site!” This man is comfortable in his own skin! He took me to this backup site and, ‘voila’, we could see where the IP address had been given out – from a company in the Netherlands. I typed the address into their search engine and bingo!! The address had been given to somebody in the Ukraine. So, somebody in this far off country is not a nice person!  Be that as it may, I am getting on with normal and moving on to appreciate the more simple things in life, like my strawberries. What a bumper crop we are having! Not one, single deformed berry has appeared. No bug bites, no slug bites and no bird bites. This spring has been so awesome that the strawberries have really flourished. I love picking strawberries. They are so friendly! No stickers and no spines, they are just fun to pick. And as I pick, I am constantly thanking God for these amazing, beautiful little jewels. They are so red that it just amazes my artist eye. And as that artist, I realize that it is obvious that God knew what He was doing because he nestled these pretty ruby gems beneath deep, green leaves, knowing that these complimentary colors just bounce off of each other. As you can tell, I love my strawberries. Strawberry Jam will be in the works this afternoon!  By the way, does anybody know what kind of plant this is? It is in my flower bed and I love it. I would like to see if I can find some more, but have no clue what it is!! UPDATE: Thanks to reader, Cindy, for helping me identify this beautiful flower. It is a broadleaf Penstemon – Penstemon ovatus. The Penstemon is native to Oklahoma. Pretty neat. Thanks, Cindy!! |
|
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
Cooking from the 1930′s IV
Monday, April 16th, 2012
|
First order of business: It’s time for another Giveaway, don’t you think? Mother’s Day is coming soon and I’m thinkin’ some mother should get a tea package to celebrate her special day!! And so, starting today and through May 4th, leave a comment and your name will be thrown into the hat for a drawing on May 5th. The winner will receive the package pictured below: A Tea-For-Two teapot, a cute tin of one of our signature teas with tea infuser and a package of our wonderful Victorian House Scones. Sound good? Great! Start commenting on posts and enter early and often.  Second order of business: Patrice Lewis over at the Rural Revolution, who has so kindly linked to this blog, has produced a series of E-books on canning and country living that are handy indeed. Since they are only $1.50 each, they are so affordable and since they are around 20 pages each, are easy to print off to keep at your fingertips. You can order Patrice’s booklets here. OK, so for a past number of posts, I have been sharing handwritten recipes, from my grandmother, that are recorded in a 1931 edition of the Rumford Cookbook which was put out by the Rumford Baking Powder company. This week, I tried another one of those recipes and Mr. Fix-It gave a big thumbs up. As usual, my grandmother only wrote down the ingredients with a few mixing instructions, but this time she did give a baking time and the instructions to use a “moderate” oven. I figured that would be around 350º. My figuring was correct!  I have also been including some exerpts from a book that my father wrote, called Sailing Down The River Of Memories which is about his growing up years in the 1930′s and 1940′s. The following exerpt, I thought, would be fun for those of you with children. It seems that in today’s fast-paced, technology-permeated world, we’ve forgotten some of the simple games of the last century. And I will say that some of those games were pretty rough! “Flying Dutchman – Players held hands in a circle while one couple who was IT walked counterclockwise outside the circle. When they hit the joined hands of two players, both IT an the other couple then ran in opposite directions around the circle trying to be the first back to the opening in the circle. The losers became IT. When I was about seven, Treva Scott, who was older than I, and I were tagged. She got ahead of me as we ran and the heel of her shoe hit me in the mouth, knocking four front teeth loose. Fortunately, they were baby teeth. I’ve heard of a person “putting his foot in his mouth” but never of someone else doing it. Mumble Peg – A knife with a long and a short blade opened on one end was needed. The knife was opened with the short blade out straight and the long blade at a 90-degree angle. The player put the long blade touching the ground and fipped the knife into the air. The game was played two ways. In one, points were given when the short blade stuck into the ground, the long blade stuck or both blades stuck. In the other, the winner had to stick the knife all three ways – long blade into the ground, long and short blade into the ground and the short blade in with the base of the knife resting on the ground making a triangle. Sometimes, we flipped the knife off of our wrist or hand. Leap Frog-One boy leaned over with his hands on his knees while a second boy ran up and putting his hands on the bent back, vaulted over him. Sometimes several boys would line up about three feet apart and the jumper tried to jump all without stopping or breaking rhythm. The real challenge was to vault over two or three boys who leaned over one another. Indoor Games-We played many indoor party games such as “poor pussy”, “heavy, heavy hangs over your head,” “odd or even,” “I see something you don’t see” and “hot or cold”… Dropping Clothes Pins into the Milk Bottle-Milk came in long-necked quart milk bottles with the opening about one inch in diameter. We took three straight clothes pins, stood above the milk bottle and tried to drop the pins into the bottle. Just like Me-This game was popular with adults who liked to pull it on a young child. Interesting enough, some children liked to play it over and over again. Leader: You have to say, “Just like me” after anything I say. Ready? I went upstairs. Child: Just like me Leader: I walked down the hall Child: Just like me Leader: I came to a door Child: Just like me Leader: I went in the room Child: Just like me Leader: I looked in the mirror Child: Just like me Leader: I saw a monkey Child: Just like me No adults needed-I guess one thing that made our play “ours” was that it was something WE did. No adult was needed. We made a lot of the things we played with such as kites, boats, stilts, balls. When we wanted to play baseball, we got enough boys together, found a ball and bat and played. We didn’t need a coach to teach us how to hit or pitch. We learned by playing. No adult stood on the sideline shouting at us for making an error or for not hitting a home run. Playing with friends was the main thing. ” Update:I have to add a note that was sent to me from my cousin – daughter of my father’s sister. It was just too neat not to share: “I’ve enjoyed reading your take on Grandmother’s cookbook. I remember the recipe on back of the letter, but I never even thought of trying it-or the red devil’s food, even though I know Mom made it bunches of times. She said she started making it at age 12 and that became her specialty for Hightower family gatherings. Last night she said sometimes she would make it and a white cake, then marble the two batters in a tube pan. She said it was always a hit when she did that and that it made a very large cake! Your mention of the letter with the recipe on the back reminds me Mom said that when Granddad was self-employed or looking for employment, Grandmother would type his letters. She taught herself to type with an instruction book like Mom used in high school that she got from Aunt Helen. She always kept a dictionary handy because she was so concerned that she would misspell something. Our grandmother was a hard worker! I don’t know how old she was when the was cashier at Aunt Ruth’s store in Pittsburg but I know she wasn’t young. Mom said Grandmother worked wherever they moved. I do remember her working in a candy store in Indianapolis. That would be the one I would remember!! Also from your dad’s writing, the Just Like Me rhyme reminds me of her. I can still hear us laughing when she did it with me. Just last week, I was reading a nursery rhyme book to Ben and that was in there. So I played it with him the way our grandparents did with us, and we laughed ourselves silly. He wanted to do it over and over.” So, on to making cookies that would have satisfied that crew of busy boys! Grandmother T. only has “Refrigerator Cookies” written in the corner of the paper on which she recorded this recipe. The fun part is that it is on the back of a letter that my grandfather had written to some company, applying for a construction foreman’s postition. Back then, a resume was just a list of past postitions in a one page letter! I think that you will like these cookies and the only addition I can see making is chocolate chips! I know. With me, it’s always chocolate! But they really would be good in the cookies. 1 cup shortening (I used 1/2 cup shortening and 1/2 cup butter 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup granulated sugar 2 well-beaten eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 1/2 cup flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda 3 cus quick cooking oatmeal 1/2 cup choped nuts  Add shortening or shortening and butter to a large mixing bowl.  Add brown sugar  And the granulated sugar  Thoroughly cream shortening and sugars. Add beaten eggs.  And vanilla and mix well  Add flour and mix  Add oatmeal. We roll our own oats so I used that even though it calls for “quick cooking” oats. It worked great.  Add nuts. Of course, I had to use my grandmother’s nut chopper from her vintage kitchen!  Shape the dough into rolls. I made the dough into two rolls, but I suggest making three. The cookies were really, really big with the two rolls.  Wrap the rolls in wax paper and chill thoroughly or overnight.  Slice cookies about 1/4″ thick and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350º for 10 minutes.  Just a note: Leave LOTS of space between your cookies. Otherwise, you get a sheet of cookies!!  The second batch worked much better!! I used parchment paper on my cookie sheet and put plenty of space between the cookies. They came out perfect. Yummy! I’ll be adding the chocolate chips next time! |
|
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
Bread Pans Winner
Monday, March 19th, 2012
|
As promised, on St. Patty’s Day, we drew a name from 84 entries for the two, unique bread pans. Our cute, galvanized Coca Cola bucket served as the “hat” and it was pretty full!  Our winner is Tina Hoak of New York state! Tina will be receiving two pans made especially for baking French or Italian loaves and baguettes. She has been notified and responded back that she is excited because she has been teaching her sister how to make bread! Perfect!  So congratulations, Tina, and thank you for entering, everybody. There will be a new giveaway coming up in just a few weeks so stay tuned! |
|
|
Oklahoma Pastry Cloth™ Company on Facebook
|
|
|
|
|
For follow button place this after Click Here To Comment and above the
:
Cattle and Cupcakes
Constant Joy
Deborah Jean's Dandelion House
Enjoy Time Outdoors
Farmgirl Sisters
Historic Cooking School
Homestead Revival
Lady Lydia Speaks
Lazy J Bar C Farm
Like A Bubbling Brook
Little Homested in Boise
Mama To 4 Blessings
New Life on a Homestead
Paratus Familia
Pioneer Woman At Heart
Rural Revolution
Sharon's Place of Blessings
The Beehive Cottage
The Consumer Queen
The Pioneer Woman
The Prairie Homestead
The Prairie Maid