Hotel Charitone

When we first moved to Chariton, Lily fell in LOVE with the old, abandoned hotel on the corner of the square. We'd walk by it on our manners/shopping day and she would daydream aloud about buying it, restoring it, and adopting a bunch of orphans to keep it clean.....wait. No. Then we talked about child labour laws and chores at home have been a struggle ever since.

When she saw the dumpsters outside a few years ago, she was excited and broken hearted at the same time. Now where will the orphans live!? And again we talked about child labour laws and how she can't just adopt a bunch of kids to do her bidding and chores even if she puts a swimming pool in the basement for them.

But MOM, she told me, they'll fix it up WRONG.

This May the Hotel was brought back to life as apartments and a first floor restaurant, Hy-Vee put in a Market Grille. This is Hy-Vee's home town after all. I expected the food to be good, the interior to be the bare minimum, and I don't know what else. My years in historic preservation have jaded me. I too thought they would do it all wrong.

I am happy to report that I was the wrong one.

First, the wait staff is fantastic and attentive. I basically camp out at a table every week and order coffee and write. They are so nice about this. My coffee is kept hot, fresh, and served with real cream and not plastic cups of not really dairy yuck. Real. Cream. In a little glass pitcher.

The whole place as a very urban feel, open kitchen, lots of light, not too loud music, and all the staff is uniformed. There are hostesses. There is a bar tender who actually knows how to make fancy drinks. More than once the chef has come to my table to check on my food (the rare times I order anything.....). The managers know me by name and ask about what I am working on. The best of small town with a sophisticated feel.

And, be still my preservationists heart. The floors are original. The whole floor plan design, while updated and changed (it was a hotel before), also respects the few remaining features. The huge windows, the flooring, and the entrances are all restored or replicated to match what was originally intended. I love it. Many developer would have seen the stained tile by the wall and declared it all unfit, ripped it out, and put in new. This restoration pays tribute to the original artisans and to historic design principal. I'm impressed, at least with the grille. (I have not seen the apartments or the mechanicals, but to be fair, I'd be way more critical of those anyway).

Perhaps good coffee puts me in a generous mood, but I really love this place. Especially now that they added dessert to the menu......

Goals for this year?

This is my personal goal list from 2011, though it includes some farm stuff too.

1)Expand the apiary
2)Learn to play fiddle
3)Grow tomatoes
4)Bring strawberries to market
5)Harvest wild fruit and can it (I did get some this year but the major bounty of the farm has yet been untouched. We have gooseberries, black raspberries, morels, wild plum, rose hips, nettle, juniper, mulberries, elderberries, blackberries, crab apple, boysenberries, and who knows what else.)
6) plant 15 more trees, find cherries that I like
7) create a wall poster with the tree varieties we have planted for reference
8) mail the envelope back to NY (I've been saying this for 12 years now and really, it is too late, but the principle of the thing is bugging me.)
9) write the last chapter
10)sell the DM house
11) say thank you more often with both words and actions
12) take the kids (and grandpa) to ride the train in Boone
13) bake pie more often
14) read more books.



I did all of these except # 7. Well, and number 2 is still being worked on. :/ 

Why goals like this, lists like this, are important? The reflection back is hopeful. I got these things accomplished, though not all in 2011. In fact, many of them were checked off the list in 2013 and 2014.  Progress is still progress, in inches or in miles. I had to travel cross country on a bus and suffer severe sleep deprivation have dinner with the ghost of a drag queen in Savannah, Georgia, and track pigs on a wilderness island to get number 8 done.

Sometimes it takes a bunch of Jennifers to get me on the bus to begin with. Ha!

Completing these goals led me to new ones, new adventures, new connections, deeper connections with friends and family, all good things. It helps when you look back, to know what you were looking at, like an aerial landscape, you can see the watershed, the rivers, a clearer view of the options ahead. There are always variables, storms that happen, rerouting, delays, but adventure is still to be had. You can hide in a corner and wish for death or you can make a ridiculous video and make friends.

I have been thinking about what my new goals are. How my New Years goals are going, am I remembering not to Sabotage myself? No, but I have folks holding me accountable for that and it is often.

1) Finish my self designed/paced poetry course. I have about 7 unites left, stalled at writing a ghazal, not yet to Haiku.
2) Travel to Prague, hug my friend Adrienne, who needs a hug. Take a ton of pictures of buildings a sheep.
3) Finish the short story about Alice.
4) Finish the short story about the cat lady.
5) Write more poems. Revise twice as many.
6) Send all of them out and stop fretting about them being done enough.
7) Take Isaac to ride the trains in Boone, now that he is old enough to love trains and pay attention to it.
8) Submit more work to Literary Mama. Start writing essays.
9) Work on cookbook.
10) Take a photography class of some sort. I never have, y'all. Not one.
11) Send out all the thank you letters. Even ones that are long over due. My gratitude has not expired.
12) Be more patient.
13) Visit my aunt.
14) Get a self portrait done. One that is good for bio blurb. One that is sexy and cool.
15) Paint things. All the things. Except not the perfectly finished, pristine antique wooden things, that is a crime against history and humanity. Painting cheap crappy things is ok though. ;)
16) Host a dinner party and use the good dishes.
17) Recover the dining room chairs. 
18) Master baking cookies and making caramels.
19) Clean out my closet.
20) Feel pretty more often.

What are your goals? How do you stay on track?

Peach Crisp with Coconut (GF)

Filling: Peaches- three pints. Strain juice off and save for bonus recipe.

No extra sugar. No extra lemon juice. The peaches are canned in both and are plenty sweet on their own. Even if you are slicing and using fresh peaches, as long as they are in season Missouri peaches, you should be good to go with just good peaches.

Topping:
6 Tb of flour. I used all purpose GF flour.
1/2 cup of raw sugar
pinch of salt
pinch of nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
pinch of tumeric (optional)
5 Tb of butter
1/4 cup shredded coconut (or ground up nuts, but I was out)

Mix all the dry ingredients in, then cut the butter in with a pastry cutter or food processor.

Once it is the texture of cornmeal, add in 1/4 cup shredded coconut.

Dump and spread peaches into an 8x8 pan. Dump and spread topping over them.

Oven at 350 degrees F for about an hour. Check on it and take it out when the top is browned.

Serve with whip cream, ice cream, or sour cream. Really, any of those will work. I've even used plain Greek yogurt.

Ta Da.

Tour of a post pig pasture

Chad was asked to show what a pasture looks like when the pigs are done with it - this is a video of a pasture the day our pigs left it, and a discussion of how we rotate our animals and why.

You can follow us at https://www.facebook.com/stampsfamilyfarm

If you are interested in pigs specifically, I run a facebook group about that -
https://www.facebook.com/groups/pasturedpigs/

If you are interested in more general homesteading and permaculture topics, I have a group for that as well - https://www.facebook.com/groups/midwesthomestead/

Couple notes.

The pigs will not be on this spot again for a year. I'll probably have cows or sheep over this area once between now and then.

I call the milkweed 'butteryfly bush'. I misspoke, but hopefully the reason is evident. I've had butterflies and pollinators on my mind lately.

I mention Peter Allen - you can follow his farm at http://www.mastodonvalleyfarm.com/

I'm doing 2 week rotations this year. I'll reassess next spring - a week might be better, but it's at least partially dictated by my own time.

At this time I had not reseeded the pasture - that was completed about a day after they left. Ideally it would have been done a few days before they left so they could stomp the seed into the ground. I'll be doing that with the next paddock so I can show the difference later.