Red Cabbage and Apples

It’s been over two years since I wrote in this blog. Since that time, my siblings and I lost our mother, who was a great supporter and cheerleader for all of us and her grandchildren. It’s impossible to express what her death meant to all of us, and how inadequate to the task of honoring our parents’ legacy we all feel, but we soldier on. There have been other changes as well: our oldest is now living in Pittsburgh, and our youngest only recently moved a little farther away, to Indianapolis. My husband and I survived the COVID-19 pandemic so far, and have come to really appreciate our spacious, comfortable home after months of spending so much time in it.

And now that I’ve caught you up, as the weather turns cold and we are back inside once more, I’ve turned to the random collection of cookbooks in our kitchen and challenged myself to make a recipe from each one. The first cookbook is an unlikely choice; it’s a fundraiser cookbook for alumni of the now-closed Huron High School, where my mother taught over sixty years ago. (That’s her on the cover, third row, left.) One of the alumni presented the cookbook to my mother, who never liked to cook, and she gave it to me. 

Many of the recipes involve canned Campbell’s soup or frozen hash browns, but this recipe by Ella “Wilson” Inman for red cabbage and apples caught my eye, both because it called for no processed ingredients and because I can’t remember ever having eaten red cabbage (which I call purple cabbage).

We didn’t follow the recipe to the letter; my darling husband never does, but no new ingredients were added. We just changed the proportions a little. I’m happy to pronounce the results delicious. Seriously, we ate half a head of cabbage in fifteen minutes. I’m sure it’s also packed with nutrients. I had intended to serve it with roast chicken, but we had already stuffed ourselves with its purple goodness before the chicken was completely cooked. 

I highly recommend you try this, but be aware that purple cabbage is hard to find. I finally found it on my third trip to Walmart, where it was shelved not with the green cabbage, but with the cilantro. Whatever. Also do not hesitate to add more of any of the ingredients. We used four apples and a whole head of purple cabbage, plus dumped more brown sugar in as it cooked. I’m pretty sure this will be tasty no matter what you do to it. Enjoy.

An easy crocheted scrubbie pattern

We've enjoyed lots of family over the holidays, and I'm still not quite ready to let Christmas go. One of the small gifts I made several of this year is this crocheted scrubbie, enormously practical, free to make if you have any kind of acrylic yarn stash at all, and universally appreciated. My niece actually plans to use hers as a cat toy, so there's another idea. She also thought about hanging it on her tree. It takes about an hour to make. The only tricky thing is that when you crochet the back side, you will notice it starts to fold back in and at the end of the back you will be working with a very small number of stitches to form a tiny hole in the center.

Crochet scrubbie pattern

This scrubbie is so much better than a sponge—it resists getting that moldy smell, and you can throw it into your washer and dryer with your laundry and it comes out fresh. You can personalize it any way you want by using variegated yarn, making stripes of different yarns, or embroidering the front before you crochet the back. I chose to keep mine plain because I made a bunch of them from leftover yarn from my mom’s stash and gave them to family members as little Christmas gifts. Plus, it's a scrubbie--I didn't see much point in making it too pretty!

Materials: Use worsted weight or heavier acrylic yarn and a hook sized to give you a fairly tight crocheted fabric.

Front side of scrubbie:

Ch 4, join to form a ring.

Round 1: ch 1, 12 sc in ring, join.

Round 2 and all following rounds should be worked in the back loop to make a ridge on the front of the scrubbie that will help create friction to remove stuck-on food and stains.

Round 2: ch 1, (1 sc, 3 sc in next st) 6 times, join.

Round 3: ch 1, 2 sc, 3 sc in next st, (3 sc, 3 sc in next st) 5 times, 1 sc, join.

Round 4: ch 1, 3 sc, 3 sc in next st, (5 sc, 3 sc in next st) 5 times, 2 sc, join.

Round 5: ch 1, 4 sc, 3 sc in next st, (7 sc, 3 sc in next st) 5 times, 3 sc, join.

Round 6: ch 1, 5 sc, 3 sc in next st, (9 sc, 3 sc in next st) 5 times, 4 sc, join.

Round 7: ch 1, 6 sc, 3 sc in next st, (11 sc, 3 sc in next st) 5 times, 5 sc, join.

Back side of scrubbie:

Round 8: ch1, 6 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook, (11 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook) 5 times, 5 sc, join.

Round 9: ch1, 5 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook, (9 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook) 5 times, 4 sc, join.

Round 10: ch1, 4 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook, (7 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook) 5 times, 3 sc, join.

Round 11: ch1, 3 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook, (5 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook) 5 times, 2 sc, join.

Round 12: ch1, 2 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook, (3 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook) 5 times, 1 sc, join.

Round 13: ch1, 1 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook, (1 sc, pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook) 5 times, join.

Round 14: ch 1, (pull up a loop in each of next 3 sts, yo, pull through all 4 loops on hook), 4 times, join.

Cut thread and tie off. Use your hook to pull the thread end inside the scrubbie.

Hanging loop (optional):

Attach thread to one of the six corners of the hexagon, ch 8, attach both ends of the chain together and to the corner of the hexagon. Use your hook to pull the thread ends inside the scrubbie.

More Cat Mats

Since my last post, DD has moved twice. First she came home with her two kitties, Cleo and Gemini. Anticipating a long stay, DH and I cleared my two-room studio on the side of the jail and created an adorable apartment for her. Alas, it was not to be--within two weeks she had been hired by a mining company in Montana and she and I spent a fun weekend driving 24 hours to her new work location. DH and I are looking after Cleo and Gemini, and I'm happy to report that Mr. Fuzz and Gemini are thick as thieves. Mr. Fuzz has rediscovered cat toys and any number of energetic pursuits, thanks to his daily interaction with his younger cousin, or nephew, or whatever.

What lasted for me from our darling daughter's eight-month adventure in Wisconsin was an abiding interest in working up my mom's yarn stash into cat mats for the Angel's Wish Foundation (http://angelswish.org/about/). The first photo above is the last batch of cat mats turned over the day she left Wisconsin. The top one is kind of embarrassing; I was gleefully crocheting up a pattern, then discovered I didn't have enough yarn to finish it, and had to add completely different colors to finish it. DD calls this one "broken television." The pink one is made of a very soft chenille yarn that I should have stabilized before donating, but what can I say, I was in a hurry and distracted by the upheaval in our house.

The lower photograph is of a batch of mats that I hope to pack up and walk over to the post office today to send out. The top one is actually made from a sport weight yarn; my mom crocheted it in the hospital, just a couple of days after suffering a stroke a few years ago. I stitched a piece of leftover fleece to the bottom to stabilize it and added the fringe to help it lie flat. It really represents a triumph over adversity and I hope its future owner loves it.

I'm about to run out of rug yarn soon, so future mats will probably be made of double strands of worsted or sport weight yarn. There is a seemingly never-ending supply in my mom's house, so I'm looking forward to trying out some new stitch designs on those unsuspecting kitties. This project would be a real triumph if I could get my mom, the master crocheter, to start making them, too. (Are you reading this, Thelma?)

Cat mats for kitty rescue

DD lives near Madison,  Wisconsin,  where she works for a big software company and volunteers for Angel's Wish Foundation,  an organization that rescues cats and finds new homes for them. When a cat is adopted, the new owner can choose from a variety of handmade cat mats to take with the kitty to its forever home.

My mom has a lifetime supply of acrylic yarn, so when I heard there was a shortage of cat mats, I got right to work creating some from my mom's yarn. Some of the color combinations are a little bizarre, but I had a lot of fun making them and the cats won't mind.

Another freebie summer top

You may remember the summer I made seven tops without spending any money on fabric. Unfortunately,  most of those tops are now uncomfortably tight. While I work on my weight, I am enjoying wearing big tops that cover everything. 

Yesterday I discovered an old sarong that a dear friend sent me from India. I wore it as a swimsuit cover-up in Africa more than twenty years ago. It was a great big tube in the softest cotton with a cute elephant border. Check out the before and afters below.

I showed the finished project to DD, who loves elephants,  and she wants the top, so I think I'll send it to her and look for another promising garment to refashion.

Sheriff's House B&B Update

You may remember a post from about a year and a half ago in which I announced that I had finally convinced my darling husband to let me try opening a bed and breakfast. http://oldjailarts.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-princess-has-left-building.html He thought "Old Jail B&B" had a negative ring, so we ultimately decided to call it the "Sheriff's House." I had many poignant (weepy) moments going through our daughter's room and boxing up items that she had left behind. We called it the "Tower Room" and the room across the hall the "World Traveler Room." The third bedroom on the second floor, which houses our son's high school trophies and memorabilia, became the "Servants' Quarters," not a B&B room but a space where  I could keep cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and other things needed for the B&B rooms. Visiting relatives joke about being forced to sleep in the "Servants' Quarters."

I set up a simple snack station in the hall with DS's old dorm fridge and an end table. I contemplated buying a Keurig, but ultimately decided on a water kettle and various packets of instant beverages instead, having read scary things about difficult-to-clean disease-harboring tubes in the Keurig. I was also concerned about all the waste involved in the little K-cups, but having used a Keurig recently at the Howarth House B&B in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, I may be revisiting that decision. The coffee was delicious.

DH and I scoured the countryside for antique furniture and other pieces to make the rooms interesting, and I did a lot of "shopping" among the treasures we had collected from overseas as well. I spent a small fortune on bedding and towels, all white 100% cotton so they can be bleached (something I learned from watching "Hotel Impossible"). I created a "Management Handbook" with breakfast recipes, tax information, etc., cleaned the kitchen as it had never been cleaned before, got a food handler's certificate from the local health department, and we were ready.

I wanted to dip my toe in the business, so I started in November 2014 with two listings on the website airbnb.com: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/4033247?checkin=07%2F11%2F2016&checkout=07%2F12%2F2016&guests=1&s=_ZxOOA7v and https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/4235270?checkin=07%2F11%2F2016&checkout=07%2F12%2F2016&guests=1&s=z6_qY5O_

Within a couple of weeks we had our first guests, a very nice couple who were coming to the area for Parents' Weekend at IU. Since then we have welcomed many IU parents, as well as students, business travelers, wedding parties and an amiable fellow with a vintage Porsche he was taking to a car show at French Lick. All of our guests have been wonderful, and I feel very fortunate that things have gone so well. Thanks to airbnb, I never have to handle money, which makes things easy.

Some months we have no guests; other months we may be quite busy. I think in our busiest month we had 11 room nights, which for a B&B with no staff means that I am constantly washing sheets and towels. I have learned to "x" out the rooms on airbnb.com if I know I'm going to be busy or out of town.

I changed my website from oldjailarts.com to sheriffshouse.com, but immediately ran into an issue when I couldn't upload the photographs I had taken with my phone. I paid for that website to remain dormant for more than a year, thinking I would get someone to redo the photographs for me, before finally deciding to give it up last month. I'm still contemplating the benefits of having a website. 

All in all, though, the B&B experiment has been a success. Although I do all the cleaning and laundry involved, making the breakfast is a job for the two of us, and it's fun to get up early and go through the many steps to preparing healthful, delicious food and setting a pretty table.

There are some issues: Keeping the lawn respectable is difficult. DH is busy and really too tired after a long hard day fixing icemakers to run the lawn mower. This summer I finally started hiring someone to mow and weed-whack, but at $50 a visit, lawn care costs seriously cut into the very modest profits I make on what is still a part-time business. Another issue: the cotton comforter covers I bought are a real pain to put on and take off after every guest. While I agree with Anthony Melchiorri in principle that everyone should have a fresh, clean bed to sit on and not a spread that was last cleaned when George Bush was President, there has to be a better way. The 100% cotton bedding also wrinkles like nobody's business, which I hate, but there's no way I'm going to try to iron these huge sheets.

We've never put up a sign to indicate that we have a B&B; all our guests so far have found us through airbnb.com. We talk often about marketing a little more widely and hiring someone to help if needed, but I'm reluctant to go from B&B "Lite" to a full-time operation. We also talk about turning the third-floor tower room into another B&B room, but that is a subject for another post. There is still a ton of work to be done on the house, and now that we have so many more guests, and a little more money, hopefully we will be inspired to tackle more of it.

  

On the trail of writing women

My sister Dee and I recently spent five days traveling from Bedford, Indiana through southern New York and Massachusetts. The theme of our trip was "American Women Writers."

We visited Edith Wharton's beloved estate "The Mount" near Lenox, Massachusetts (www.edithwharton.org). I had wanted to visit the Mount for years, having closely studied Wharton's fiction in graduate school. The house and grounds are beautiful, and I confess to being inspired to copy the draperies and the leopard spotted stair runners for my own "castle." We had a nice lunch on the veranda, and at one point I could feel Edith right there next to me, dressed in rustling silks, looking out over her formal gardens and worrying about her husband Teddy, who became more and more mentally unstable during the couple's ten years at the Mount.  

Our next woman writer of interest was Emily Dickinson, and we were lucky to secure a wonderful tour of both her family home and the home of her brother Austin Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts (emilydickinsonmuseum.org). Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable, and, as there were no children in our group of five, she treated us to some shocking details from the diary of Austin Dickinson's mistress Mabel Todd, as well as recent scholarly speculation on whether or not Emily Dickinson had an affair when she claimed to be seeing an eye doctor in Boston. It was all quite delicious and completely at odds with the popular image of Emily Dickinson, virginal recluse. 

The last of the three women authors' houses was Orchard House, Louisa May Alcott's home in Concord, Massachusetts (www.louisamayalcott.org).  We had to race a bit by this time, as our rental car was due back that afternoon in Queens, New York, but once more we had a fantastically knowledgeable tour guide who made us feel that we knew the Alcott girls intimately. Our tour group this time included a family of children, which meant we spent more time thinking about the Alcott girls as children and no time at all speculating about their sex lives, which was just fine. One takeaway from this quick stop is that May Alcott, whom we all know as Amy March in Little Women, was an extremely talented classically-trained artist. Her works decorate every room of Orchard House, and it's hard not to feel that the world lost a great talent when she died at age 39, seven weeks after giving birth to her daughter Lulu.

We had only the vaguest of plans when we set out from Bedford. There were many spontaneous stops along the way (several of them involving food, most notably ice cream). We lodged in three equally wonderful, although very different locations: the Old Library B&B in Olean, New York (www.oldlibraryrestaurant.com), Polacce's Family Resort in Catskill, New York (funinthecatskills.com), and the Howarth House B&B in Fitchburg, Massachusetts (www.howarthhouse.com). We booked each one of these from our cell phones--whichever of us wasn't driving was seeking our night's lodging, and I think we both did a wonderful job of finding memorable locations to stay. We took long walks in the morning to explore each place and cement them into our memory. In Amherst we crashed at my niece's group house, which was empty except for a young man from Chicago and his dog. There we got to switch gears a little and fix up the bathroom for my niece's impending senior year at UMass Amherst.

Other noteworthy and serendipitous finds included the Golden Lamb Inn in Lebanon, Ohio (www.goldenlamb.com), where we had a scrumptious lunch and toured the old hotel, the Smuggler's Wharf in Erie, Pennsylvania (smugglerswharfinc.com), which offered a lovely view of Lake Erie and a chance for Dee to recharge her cell phone, and the colonial-era Benjamin Patterson Inn in Corning, New York (http://www.heritagevillagesfl.org/). We enjoyed the view at the Afton Golf Club (www.aftongolf.com), even though neither of us is a golfer. The food was predictable, but the portions were generous; my chicken Caesar salad served as both lunch and dinner. 

I flew back home from New York on Friday, feeling as if I had been gone for much longer than five days. Dee and I had so much fun on this trip we have already begun planning our next escape.