Murphy's Landing

On Saturday we took a family field trip to Murphy's Landing. It is a historical village with actors living out life in Minnesota in the 1890's (I just typed 1980's at first. Now wouldn't that be a funny village to visit! Ha!) We had a great time. We're trying to take more 'local vacations' this summer...being a tourist in our own town. And this was a perfect day adventure.

Naturally we were most excited about the gardens and what they were planting and what was starting to come up. This is the doctor's medicinal garden.
A life-in-motion museum like this is so great for gaining perspective. We saw this bedroom that would sleep a mom and dad and 3-4 kids and suddenly, our two bedroom house seemed huge. For sure we could fit a few more kids of our own in our little home.

Ivar was a sport, as always.

In every house we visited, the women were baking something incredible. It was a terrible tease, actually, because they couldn't share. Strawberry pie in one house, cinnamon rolls in another and doughnuts in another. And something crazy happened. To watch these women bake using one bowl and one spoon in an oven heated by fire made us wonder why recipes have become so complicated. The woman making doughnuts made it look so, so easy. And so simple.

So after our yummy smelling journey in the 1890's, we drove to Rory's folks and googled "1800's donut recipe" and found a very simple, very basic doughnut recipe. And proceeded to find our roots.