I was looking up a recipe for Cloverleaf Roll bread dough because i cannot find the box that has one of my favorite books in it, The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery. I found that she has a website but imagine my shock when i saw mention of her passing. She passed away on the day that I got back to CA, also my brother's birthday. I originally heard about Carla when I was living in Oregon and married. I had 7 acres and a mobile home that i shared with my hubby. We lived fairly remotely in the Winema National Forest. It was beautiful, we had a lot of tall majestic pine trees on the property and were about a quarter mile from a river. I was not working at the time, i had a 2-3 year hiatus and while home i learned to do many things from scratch and my homesteading bible was Country Living. My friend Sue up there introduced me to what she called "the Green Book" because her copy had a green cover as Carla has quite a story about the books beginnings and publishing and republishing. I borrowed her green book and fell in love with her writing and her knowledge. If you wanted to know anything about living in the country, anything, from digging an outhouse (ew, i wouldn't go that far), to raising farm animals for work or food, to growing a garden, to recipes. I learned to make bread from scratch from her. She had the best bread recipe that had milk and butter melted and a little sugar. This is an absolutely great book. There is a story in there about her and her family being in church and someone having gas....it made me cry, literally cry with laughter. I wrote to Carla, that was in the mid 90's and do you know that she took the time to write back to me! She was in Idaho at the time. When i moved back to CA in 97, i saw that she was touring and she was at a local farmers market. I HAD to go meet her and i did. Mom went with me, i introduced myself, she remembered me from writing to her and we had this great talk about divorce and moving on, it happened to her too. She was a wonderful woman, down to earth, caring, a wonderful mother. I am so sad that the world does not have Carla in it anymore.
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