About Us!

  Hi there, I'm Alana...welcome to my little country corner where I post recipes, snippets of our rural life or just about anything that happens to pop into my head that day! 

​

I grew up outside of a very small, close knit town north of Toronto, Ontario where my love of all things country blossomed.  My Mom and Dad were avid gardeners , so our property was their canvas for magnificent flower beds and an abundant vegetable garden. I was always my Mom's right hand while she happily worked away in her vegetable patch, showing me the difference between weeds and new sprouts...how to thin certain seedlings in order to promote hearty growth and my favourite, how to pickle and preserve the bountiful harvest. I was so eager to learn, that I even converted my sandbox into my very own little plot!

​

Aside from learning about the vegetables that we planted, my Mom took my brother and me on wild edible foraging excursions, where she taught us how to find leeks, asparagus and morel mushrooms in the spring, wild berries in the summer and wild apples and grapes that tangled their way through the tree lines in the fall that were just the thing to make tart jellies! When we weren't with my Mom, you could find us playing outside building forts, racing homemade boats down flooded ditches or riding bikes with our friends. Dad took us on Saturday morning dump runs, beer bottle hunting and off to the bush to cut wood. 

Homemade meals and fresh baked goods were a staple in our home and this is where my passion for food began... I was even the producer, director and lead role in many pretend cook shows outside with nothing more than a pot from the house, a garden hose and a handful of vegetables from Mom's garden to create many "interesting" dishes...my imaginary camera man "Bob" always caught the perfect angle!

​

Years later, while working at a store, I met my husband and was instantly smitten by the fact that he was ruggedly handsome, humble but most of all, he had cow manure on his boots...it was love at first smell!! Of course, I tried to dazzle my new beau with homemade delicacies and kitchen handiwork but I longed for someone to talk food with 24/7...and since he was more of the taste tester, he really didn't "get" my obsession with recipes...this is where my idea of starting a blog was born...a way for me to talk, teach and not drive him down a dirt road far, far away!! 

After my sweet baby girl Isabel was born, I decided that I definitely needed a place to keep my recipes...a digital diary if you will, for her (and others) to learn with the step by step photos...and since I always have my camera on hand, the "Country Life" and "Good stuff" pages are a perfect home for my ever growing arsenal of photographs. So, armed with tons of family favourites in my recipe box and lots of new ideas, this blog began and I became "the Rustic  wife"!

​

I hope you enjoy our rustic life and will stop by again!

​

Alana 

​

​

​

​

​