Snug Hollow: It's The Little Things

In my previous post on Snug Hollow I mentioned that there were tons of little details that made the place truly special. So I wanted to dedicate an entire post to them!

I've always wanted to own a B+B. It's one of those grandiose ideas that my entrepreneurial spirit just can't put to rest. And this weekend did nothing to discourage me, that's for sure! If anything it's made me want to start a little B+B fund after we have a house so that I can realize my dream after the kids are gone.

I love to cook. I love to serve other people. I love to make people feel welcome and at home. I honestly can't wait to have a legit second bedroom because I have an awesome idea of how to design it as a guest bedroom and make people feel super welcome.

And Barbara did all this in more, the second we walked through the door.

For example, this is what you see when you walk through the front door:

Swoon! I feel like everything here has been carefully chosen
to be familiar and make you feel at home immediately.

There were fresh flowers next to our bed, as well as several other places throughout the house. Always in unexpected little places, just in case someone happened to be spending time in that space.

On the tables on the porch where we ate.

On books in the library upstairs.

There were little things that seemed so artistic to me, but were probably just little things collected over time. OR, maybe that's the pure genius of Barbara--everything seems natural but is perhaps carefully chosen? :)

Behind my "morning" rocking chair. I also had a "sunroom" rocking
chair and a back porch swing that I rotated with.

In a kitchen window.

On a ledge in the screened-in porch.

Another lovely touch of Snug Hollow is Hillary:

A little Jane Russell Terrier! She was hilarious. So tiny!!

She and Brian were best buds by the end!

And now, what is, in my opinion, the Crown Jewel of Snug Hollow: The Pearl Room.

Click to make it bigger. So much to see.

The bed is in the middle of the room (BRILLIANT idea). There is so much light and sunshine in this room. High ceilings. Little antique, whimsical pieces of furniture. And a lovely covered porch across the entire back of the room that is accessible to only you! :) Our room was so nice and cozy, but I'm excited for a special stay in this room some day.

Are you sold YET? How many more wonderful things do I need to tell you about this place? Oh yeah, almost forgot: 

No cell phone service. 

No internet. 

No TV.

No central air (but she does have window units for the bedrooms now).

No central heat (a wood-burning stove does the trick in winter).

Water supplied by a deep spring that's abundant when it rains, and worrisome when it's droughty. 

SIMPLICITY. PEACE AND QUIET. *SIGH*

Homemade Applesauce

I've noticed that all the blogs I follow take the weekends off (probably because it's their "real" job, and this is clearly [unfortunately] not mine...) and I tend to ramp up the writing on the weekends. Anyways, I had 8 old apples sitting on the counter and considered throwing them out yesterday. Instead, I put them in the "ingredients" section on allrecipes.com to see what might come up (I was feeling in the mood for some kind of apple tart...) and APPLESAUCE came up. Brilliant! Make semi-mushy apples mushier and nobody will know how old they are! 


My lovely friend Katie who has a very funny cooking blog did this applesauce recipe last year, and I wish I would have remembered it in time! (Or at least the part about putting the peels in the oven sprinkled with brown sugar for crispy apple-chip type snacks before I pitched all my peels.) 


I'm thrilled to add applesauce to the list of things I'm never buying from the store again. That list is slowly getting longer! (In that blog post she talks about making her own ketchup...which I'm definitely now researching too). So, this applesauce is pretty spectacular. It ended up tasting a lot like apple pie filling! 

I kept wishing those were chunks of butter. 

So I looked up a bunch of recipes for this and then just kind of winged it. Here's measurements I used for sure. With the other ingredients you're on your own! Taste as you go--it's the way the real cooks do it. ;-) 


Homemade Applesauce
8 apples (I had golden delicious, fuji and some other reds on hand and used them all)
1 cup water
1/2 cup white sugar (will probably use less next time, and will probably try to substitute some maple   syrup and/or honey for some of that processed stuff too! see Katie's recipe)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp lemon juice (it just seemed like the right thing to do)
2 TBS butter (we got fancy butter from Jungle Jim's. Ingredients? Cream. Salt. Amazing)


I added in cinnamon (maybe 1-2 tsps? Little seems to go kind of a long way depending on how much of that flavor you like) and sprinkled some apple pie spice in there too. I also added light brown sugar (maybe 2-3 TBS, not too much). When all that stuff was added I turned the stove on med-med high and covered the 3-quart pot. 


After a little bit it started boiling so I reduced it to medium heat. About 20-25 minutes later the apples were soft enough to mush with my spatula spoon. 

Looks watery but it thickens when you stir it and let it sit.

I took a big fork and mashed it all up. Some big chunks of apple are still in there and I'm okay with that. 

Yes, please.

A quick note on the butter I added--It made this a very rich, more dessert-like applesauce. If you're looking for something a bit more like the store stuff, leaving out the butter is probably a good idea. But since I never miss an opportunity to use butter, it's staying in in the future! 


My first task for this tasty treat was to put it on some vanilla ice cream for dessert! 

All is right with the universe.

My future plans for the applesauce include mixing it with oatmeal for breakfast, and using it as a side with pork chops and sauerkraut for dinner tomorrow night (there will also be mashed potatoes and possibly a veggie, in case you were wondering). Happy eating!

Barbara Kingsolver = Self-sufficiency

Some of you are reading this because you're wondering who this woman is that deserves a blog post named after her. Others of you are reading this because you've read The Bean Trees or The Poisonwood Bible (a brilliant, wonderfully smart book I've been meaning to reread for about 7 years) and love her as an author. I'd like to introduce her to you as someone you may not know: one of the very main and most important inspirations for my personal self-sufficiency movement.

I think most anyone would find this book inspiring. (okay at the very least interesting!) 

The premise of this nonfiction book is that Barbara and her family are going to spend an entire year living/eating off of things they either raise/grow themselves, or come from within their county (I believe it was county. There could have been a mile radius. But you get the point). She has a garden, they raised turkeys (which is a hilarious adventure), have laying hens, bake bread and make their own cheese. I bake all our bread now and have been for about a year (right after I finished this book! Imagine that!).

We have not bought a single loaf in a year. That also means some weeks we don't have bread...

For our one-year wedding anniversary I almost drug Brian to the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania to a weekend cheese-making workshop to learn from the same woman who taught Barbara and her family cheese-making techniques. I have spent hours and hours on this site researching what kind of chicken coop I want to build in the future, and what it takes to house and raise chickens. (I've discussed the future chickens in depth here).


My new life philosophy is a mash-up (Yeah Glee fans--I said it!) of these two sentiments: 
1) If humanity did something for thousands of years in far worse conditions than those in which we now live, I am certainly capable of doing it myself with all the modern advances I do have access to. (This covers everything from baking bread to natural childbirth)
2) Why should I pay for something that is unhealthy and marked up because of packaging etc. when I can make a far tastier, cheaper version at home from scratch?! Believe me, once you've had homemade bread (and for over a year!) the thought of having to eat store-bought is seriously depressing.


I'll leave you with this quote I recently found that really made me excited. I haven't had time to find out who Bill Buford is, but the man is a genius and I love him: 

"Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season." 

Backyard Chickens

Many of you are reading that title and thinking, "I"m really tired of listening to Megan talk about her future chickens!" And then there's a lot of you going.... "Huh?" 


After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, one of the things I was most inspired to do was raise backyard chickens. My fascination with them did begin a bit earlier than this book, but Barbara was definitely the extra push I needed to cement in my mind the need for these lovely little creatures. I am not totally new to chickens--I worked with them for a summer while camp counseling at Long Branch Farm after freshman year at college. These were arguably the most tame chickens I'll probably ever come across after their many years of being handled by random kids. But I like the animal as a whole nonetheless. 

I'll take 6 please! This photo comes from a very interesting article on how much better their color vision is than ours if you're into learning about that kind of useless trivia knowledge. 

We spend over $3 a dozen on Eggland's Best organic eggs. 3 DOLLARS. WITH COUPONS!! I'd rather have all the eggs I need whenever I need them for much less than that! (And maybe dinner as well. Let's not rule out their other natural appeal) So over a year ago I stumbled upon this really addicting website: BackyardChickens.com. My absolute favorite feature is the gallery of chicken coop designs. And it's not just photos. Each coop comes with it's own personal triumph story of a proud owner/builder who made their chicken coop dreams come true. At the moment, this beautiful coop and funny tale of its creation is my most favorite. It doesn't even LOOK like a coop! 

Can I live in here? 

The site is really a community of pros and newbies figuring it all out together. I feel that as long as I have this site as a resource I'll do just fine in the future. And on that future note, our future realtor is going to HATE us. Because in addition to nailing down how many bedrooms we want, and if there is a full basement, she's going to need to find some land and know the local chicken laws!