Katherine Sharpe | a pilgrim’s blogress

Silent Night

When I get up to the seventh floor of the Hotel Fort Des Moines, I inhale and think, “grandma’s house.” Not my grandma, though not unlike my grandma—it’s the essence of grandparents: dark, out-of-date colors and most of all that smell, like baby powder, Neutrogena hand soap, and something else—is it aging wallpaper paste? It’s [...]

Hospitality

Thursday evening, 8:25 p.m.

A’s beau came up from Virginia for the weekend. He is a good guest.
Being a good guest is an underrated, or under-discussed, art in itself.
On the table: beer cocktails, in this case Guinness with cassis lambic. Not sure it was a brilliant combination, but it’s fun to sit around pouring and sipping [...]

Sweet, Peppery, Cabbagey, Wintry

Cabbage With Apples
~adapted from How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman

2 tablespoons butter
one small/medium green cabbage
two apples
dash of cloves
half a cup of stock or white wine
a teaspoon of cherry jam
s & p
fresh lemon juice
Chop the cabbage and the apples into pieces that you like.
Melt the butter, add the cabbage, apples, and cloves; cook, stirring, for [...]

Week 2: Meat, Wine, Wool, Music.

I keep forgetting to take pictures of my food. Maybe that means I am growing out of a ridiculous habit. Or maybe it only means that the food is more delicious, now, too delicious to stop and photograph.
There was lots of watercress left over from the tea party last week, so I made a creamy [...]

How To Cook (and Dress) A Wolf

These are the busiest weeks of the year, these couple before Christmas.
I sort of like it.
On Sunday, A— and I threw a clothing swap at our place. We had a dozen ladies over. She made cinnamon buns and I made tea sandwiches (Pernod-marinated fennel and green apple and minted radish, and lox and cream cheese [...]

Rhapsody in Gray

“Conducive to study” is what we’d have called a day like this back at Reed: tiny, pricking raindrops falling from the sky like cold needles, the whole outside a blanket of dampness and gray. It makes you want to go the the library, make a bright corner, keep dry with old books, and dose yourself [...]

Product Placement

My friend Anna, who works in the record industry, told me recently that hard economic times are traditionally thought to be good for record labels, because during recessions when people can’t buy large items, they indulge more in small ones, like records and CDs.
Maybe, then, I will start a regular series about tiny acts of [...]

Mug Woman, Mug Man

This morning, something happened to me that was straight out of a kicky ’90s music video.
Picture if you will: A brilliant fall morning. The young lady emerges from the door to her building, in her fall jacket, laptop bag clapping against one thigh, teacher-bag clapping against the other, and in her hands she’s balancing a [...]