The Final Four

 Good morning, my friends. Saturday turned out to be kind of a lackluster day. Mike spent the day painting. Kitties spent the day sleeping. I spent the day piecing. There seemed to be little alternative since we had snow in the morning. When I left you yesterday, ice crystals were falling from the sky. Within a few minutes the ice crystals turned to big fat snowflakes. It snowed hard for about an hour, and we had about half an inch of accumulation.

Sadie dearly wanted to go outside, but could only get as far as one paw lifted over the door sill. The thought of stepping out on that white stuff was more than she could bear. 

It was a good day for baking. I had a new stew recipe on last night's dinner menu. The suggested side dish was cornbread, and so I baked up another skillet of my friend Debi's delicious skillet cornbread recipe. 

The stew was something new to my kitchen. It was a Brunswick Stew made with chicken. We weren't wild about it. It was fine, but it was a five star effort for only about three star flavor. Anything that takes that much time and effort had better be delicious, or it doesn't return to my kitchen for a second try. Oh well. It was good, but not delicious.

My sewing day was spent almost entirely on paper-pieced crazy quilt blocks. 

There was no kitty help for this. Even kitties dislike paper-piecing. When I had 12 finished, I decided to sew the first row of eight together and sew them to the left side of the quilt top. For all I've whined about the paper-piecing, my sewing must be accurate because the borders and crazy quilt blocks have all fit together with no "easing in" required. 

It will probably take a good part of the day, but I'm optimistic that I can finish the final four, and then finish off this quilt top. This is my second oldest WIP. It was started in October of 2019. It will be good to get it to the final stage, and ready for quilting. And since I'm going to need to sandwich more quilts for quilting very soon, it's a good time to be finishing it off.

Today I'll be making another involved dinner in the form of stuffed cabbage rolls. I realized I had two quart-sized zip-lock bags of garden tomatoes in my freezer. I can turn those into tomato sauce by blending them up in my blender, and I'll use that for the sauce on the stuffed cabbage rolls. When Mike and I first moved to Oregon and after Erik was born, I often made stuffed cabbage rolls for the slow cooker. I was a stay-at-home mom and had time for that sort of thing, despite having a baby crawling around. 

When I returned to work, stuffed cabbage rolls fell off the menu for decades. Recently, I tried them again, and they were so tasty. Now I'm back to making them occasionally with a recipe I tried from Cook's Country. These are done in the oven, but I can make them ahead of time. And all of that to say I'll spend some time at that today too. They should be good with all that leftover cornbread. I've linked to the recipe back there, but if you can't open it, you can email me, and I'll be happy to send it to you.

Mike seems to have caught a bug of some kind. He tested for COVID this morning, and this first test was negative. He's supposed to test again 24 hours from now, so we'll see how that goes. Neither of us has had it. I've read that the new variant will most likely infect the so far uninfected. It's become a personal challenge for us to avoid it, but maybe our luck has run out. More on that later. 

For now, I'll do my slow-stitching. I should finish up the piece I'm working on today. If Mike feels up to pancakes, we'll start there.