Definitely preferred Enid Blyton's Hollow Tree House for my children-living-off-the-grid fix. But they had the added bonus of 1) being British and 2) having a rich friend who could bring them ginger beer.

Perfect timing: just last night I switched my comforting bedtime re-read from Gaudy Night to The Railway Children.

Also, author Victoria Don? Might you be the Victoria who was at nerd camp with me at Skidmore College in, oh, 1999?
If so, I'm so glad you're writing! I still remember your story about a chain-smoking woman with cancer and glamorous head-scarves.

And if not, my bad! I'm still glad you're writing, Victoria who is Not from My Past, because we most definitely need a YA novel with Asian-American protagonists and magic.

AT MARKET AND WILLOW PASS ROAD

What! Brain exploding, worlds colliding. My parents go to your dad's church! (We actually like to think of him as Pastor Roger Sterling.) But now I know about the contents of his fridge!

!!!! That must be it! It's such a preposterous plot I thought for sure I made it up; turns out it's vaguely historical fiction! Thank you for finding it!

First of all this thread makes me happy: it exists because of the fortuitous ways books come into your life when you're a child and you'll pick up anything off the library shelf (the vital importance of libraries!), or some older cousin gives you all of their books, or you get something random at the Book Fair or win a raffle at the library. As an adult I almost never read something without having read all about it first and decided it's worth my time. Stumbling into books is such a wonderful thing -- but it makes them harder to remember later!

This hardly qualifies as a memory, just the vaguest of impressions that I can't even verbalize:
A group of brothers and sisters, possibly parentless, have adventuring related to war (WWII or else fictional) and there is a climactic scene in the snow, tobogganing, a secret treasure: hidden bars of gold in the snow.
(This doesn't make any sense and the memory is from when I was around 7, so I probably invented it.)

I totally remember this book! ... just not its name. Some Googling led me to "The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt" which sounds pretty close.