Pure and Strange as What I See

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2012-01-02T12:14:00.001-08:00

black and blanco

New site!

2010-10-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to announce that I have a new site: StephanieKlose.com. I've been posting new content over there as well as here for a couple of weeks, since it's terribly dreary to be sent to someone's new site and find nothing but a test post. So, please take a look, update your bookmarks or RSS, and thanks so much for reading!

Quick announcement

2010-10-15T13:48:00.000-07:00

I just listed quite a lot of knitting magazines on ebay. There are back issues of Interweave Knits, Rowan and Vogue Knitting, some going back to the 80s and early 90s. I would love to make some money on them, but mostly I want them out of my apartment, so I set the prices wicked low (nothing over $5.00).

Take a look.

Bonus incentive: If you end up buying some of these and let me know you came from the blog, I'll pay shipping.

Thanks!

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

2010-10-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

I am a lucky, lucky girl. Earlier this summer, my friend Jenn emailed me and asked if I would be willing to let her measure me, make a sweater to my measurements, take some pictures of me wearing it and then give it to me. I said that seemed like a perfectly satisfactory arrangement, which is how I ended up with Yoshimi.

The yarn is delicious, Lorna's Laces's Honor (alpaca/silk) in the excellently titled colorway Robot Overlords. I tend to shy away from wildly multicolored yarns, since they're so unpredictable when they're knit, but simple texture pattern she uses here highlights the different colors very effectively. The fairly fine gauge (6 st = 1") and deep, open neckline make what could have been an overly warm sweater perfectly wearable indoors. It's a great, classic silhouette and I'm really looking forward to wearing it now that the weather is cooling down.

Late summer at the BBG

2010-09-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

There was actually less tornado damage than I was expecting, other than these guys:

But there were all manner of odd and spiky plants towering and lurching and flailing all over the garden.

This thing, for example, was wider than my wingspan.

I never knew that thistles blew out like this at the end of the season. Amazing.

Fine, universe. FINE.

2010-09-30T12:10:00.000-07:00

Today's horoscope:

Do you have big plans for the future? If yes, it's time to start laying the framework so you can make those plans come to fruition with a minimum of frustration. This might include some organizational type stuff, like getting your files up to date, or some big picture work, as you brainstorm what you want your life to look like. If you don't have big plans for the future, now's the time to start thinking about some, ASAP!

Minimalist-ish dal

2010-09-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

I saw this post on stonesoup the other day and was immediately drawn to it. I'd had a couple of weeks of not really eating as well as I should be for optimal feeling good-ness (and, to be frank, pants-fitting-well-ness), and have been trying to get back on track (good breakfast, fruit/vegetables for snacks, bringing a home-cooked, healthful lunch to work every day). This very simple lentil dish seemed like just the ticket, especially since I already had everything I needed at home.

With such a non-fancy dish, I decided to take the opportunity to try out this fancy rice mix I'd gotten at Trader Joe's. It's completely awesome. The black barley and daikon seeds pop when you chew them and it's really tasty.
I was a little less pleased with the lentils. They were kind of both harsh and flat tasting. I don't know if it's because I used (homemade) vegetable stock instead of water or if I so rarely eat lentils that have so few other ingredients involved that I don't even know what they taste like plain, but a big spoonful of yogurt and some chopped tomato added after I took the picture helped a lot. I had it for dinner last night and lunch today and there's definitely enough for lunch tomorrow, maybe even one more serving over the weekend. Even with the fancy rice, I'd be amazed if this went over $1/serving. With plain rice, I'm sure it would be under a quarter.

Tomatoes and dates

2010-09-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

Faced with a tomato-heavy CSA share a few days before I went out of town, I figured it was time to give these slow-roasted tomatoes a try. I halved the cherry and plum tomatoes, keeping the grape tomatoes to eat out of hand and the big ones to use for other stuff, drizzled them with oil and popped them in a 300* degree oven for two hours.
They came out concentrated and sweet, still juicy and a little chewy. The little ones that I didn't eat straight out of the pan were tossed into a batch of Annie's mac and cheese, but the bigger ones are still in my fridge. I'm going to make a batch of this minimalist dal tonight with some red lentils; the tomatoes may be good chopped up and thrown in with that.

Also of note: I came across fresh dates recently and since I'd never had them, picked up a small branch's worth to try. They're ready when brown and wrinkly and kind of gross-looking.
Eating them gave me the completely weird experience of bringing back a vivid childhood memory of something I'd never actually tasted: in one of the Chronicles of Narnia, someone plants a piece of toffee in the wildly fertile soil of a new world and a tree grows on the spot that bears a kind of toffee fruit that's juicy and sticky and soft. Ripe fresh dates taste exactly the way wee Stephanie imagined that toffee fruit tasting, i.e., awesome.

Sweet Home Chicago

2010-09-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

Screw this summer crap.

2010-09-09T09:36:00.000-07:00

Fall is the air! My interest in life and the world around me is returning!

I can get excited about cooking without deeply resenting the fact that I'd have to turn on the stove or oven and I can get excited about eating rich, delicious food without getting cranky that it's too hot to go work it off and I can get excited about reading about food now that the focus is shifting away from stupid grilling and back to normal kitchen-cooking. I don't have a grill, don't know anyone who has a grill, and am afraid of my broiler. Plus, I don't really like big pieces of meat. I only really like meat when it's cured or cooked slowly and in some sort of soup or stew or saucy concoction that one eats over grains.

Things I'm dreaming about eating (looking over this list, maybe I need more protein?):
Carbonnade
Mushroom bourguinon
Roasted squash and sweet potatoes
Brussels sprouts with caramelized tofu
Chicken soup
From-scratch macaroni and cheese
Lamb and prune meatballs with Moroccan tomato sauce
Regular meatballs with regular tomato sauce
Big batches of curry
Figs wrapped in bacon
Shepherd's pie
Short rib soup with leeks and barley
Minestrone
Butternut squash and hazelnut lasagne
Mulled cider, with or without a tot of something

Food goals for the fall:
-finally making decent gnocchi
-recreating my mom's potato soup with kielbasa and serving it to friends with dark, sour bread, a pickle plate, and baked apples for dessert
-something I haven't made before, maybe palak paneer?

I have been knitting all summer, but it's a lot more satisfying to do it when it's cool enough to wear something warm. Or even just cool enough that I don't want to rip my very skin off every single minute. I managed to finish the back and fronts of the Twenty Ten cardigan. It just needs the collar finished and a couple of sleeves.
And I started a new sweater last weekend. I went up to the Berkshires for a friend's wedding (Hi Zoe! You looked ridiculously beautiful!) and knew I'd have hours of being in a car (Hi Martha! Thanks again!) and on a bus (Hi Deb! Great to have company on the ride! Start your blog already!) and possibly hanging around a hotel where I could be knitting but wouldn't really be able to work on anything that took focus on a pattern or the project itself. I didn't have anything underway that fit the bill, so I started a simple stockinette pullover. It has hemmed edges and lots of waist shaping and is knit in some gorgeous cashmere/silk that I rescued from another sweater last year. It's zipping along satisfyingly quickly, so I should be able to wear it this fall.
The sweater that I ripped out was double-stranded and so warm that I could only wear it on the few Arctic-cold days we get each winter. I'm not 100% sure I love the black and pink tweed, but I'll see how I feel when it's done. I can always overdye it in navy or burgandy later. I wouldn't normally dye whole garments, but don't think unevenness would really matter in this case.

What I Did This Summer

2010-09-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

This. I did this, over and over:

(from here, the place where awesome is born)

I do still knit.

2010-09-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

Proof!

One completed Just Enough Ruffles, in Malabrigo ... something. I want to say the color is called Pearl Ten? I love this pattern. It goes quickly and produces a scarf that frames the face in interesting, flattering ways. I'll do a modeled shot sometime when it isn't 97 degrees out. (WOE.) This was my first time knitting with Malabrigo and I completely get its rock-star status (knockout color range and super-soft), but I wouldn't want to knit anything larger than a scarf with it. Softly spun single-ply yarn = not long for this world. I require that my garments wear better than that. That said, I should have enough of the second ball left for a hat, which will be nice.

I got up to the armholes on the Twenty Ten Cardigan and divided for the fronts and back. So far, so good. I want to have it done to wear this fall, so I'm trying to crank it out. I'm knitting it exactly as written, except for frankensteining the sizing a bit: the lower part is the third size, but I'm doing extra decreases on the top and following directions for the second size for a closer fit through the upper back and shoulders, which will be a lot more flattering for me. If I'd been thinking ahead I would have done more side decreases on the body, but I didn't.

And a sneak peek at a secret project I should be in a position to reveal in a month or so:

Flashlight Worthy

2010-08-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

It's rare that I come across a book-review or -recommendation site that fills me with joy, but Flashlight Worthy absolutely does. Their choices are thoughtful and interesting and the lists into which they're grouped are useful and fun.
A few that jumped out at me:
Great Books About Magicians and Circuses
Culinary Memoirs That Make Perfect Beach Reads
Favorite Reissues of Neglected Books
Creepy Houses That Must Be Explored
The Chocolate and Peanut Butter of Noir and Speculative Fiction
A Practical Fiction List for Surviving After the Apocalypse
The Queens' P.O.V.: Books About How Henry VIII Got Past First Base

Their twitter feed looks like a gem too. Now I'm triple-craving a week by myself in a cabin on an island in the middle of a lake with towering piles of books and firewood.

I don't even know what to call this post.

2010-08-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

I spent this past weekend out of town with friends and in addition to performing a dramatic reading of the crazypants religious material left on our car at Wegman's — the gentleman, whose photo clearly indicated that it had been taken in 1986 and whose bio read, in total, "Tony Alamo is probably the greatest patriot the world has ever known," put forth the idea that Satan-via-the-Vatican-controlled politicians are trying to make humanity extinct, which is why they so shamelessly flaunt God's will that girls marry at puberty — which, um, is considerably less funny since I googled him after typing that second em dash and learned that he quite literally practiced what he preached,* I also had reason to start a sentence with "when I had bedbugs..."

I don't know if I've ever publicly said that I had bedbugs, now that I think about it. I did. It was three years and four apartments ago and I'm not exaggerating even a little bit when I say that it was one of the lowest points in a life containing at least the standard amount of loss and heartbreak and that one time I knocked a car window out with my head. (If you don't know much about the bedbug explosion that currently has New York in its thrall, this is a short piece that will bring you up to speed.)

My experience with them was pretty typical, I think, with two exceptions:
1) I was super-sensitive to the bites. Some people don't have much more than mosquito bites, but on me, they were the size of nickels, dark enough that they looked more like blood blisters than bug bites and both hot and hard to the touch, like I had m+ms under my skin. And crazy itchy.
2) I had them for an entire year because I kept getting my apartment treated, but there were people in the building who refused,** so they kept coming back. I cried a lot that year.

Since I didn't know the friends I was with this weekend back then, I got to explain that while having bedbugs was a terrible awful genuinely bad bad bad experience, it did lead to the events that have become one of my favorite New York stories.
Salient point the first: Bedbug treatment involves exterminators coming to your home every three weeks, turning all of your furniture upside down and spraying everything with poison. It's very traumatic, but, luckily, exterminators — and I met a lot of 'em — are almost universally kind people who will tell you all kinds of disgusting stories about horrible infestations if you're the kind of person who finds that fascinating and/or comforting and then, when they notice that you're a woman living alone, will turn your heavy furniture right side up again even though they don't have to.
Salient point the second: During that year, I interviewed for a job at Penthouse.

So. A couple of months into My Year of Demoralization and Despair, I was getting my apartment sprayed for bedbugs. Again. At this point, the process was familiar: the guy or guys would show up, I'd ask them about their most disgusting exterminating experiences while they sprayed, then we'd all leave together and I'd go to the movies to avoid being poisoned to death. That morning, it was a team of two African-American men, one probably in his fifties, the other in his mid-twenties. They were extremely polite, almost deferential in a way that tends to make me very uncomfortable. The older man went into my bedroom, while the younger guy got started on the living room. He didn't seem inclined to chat, so I was awkwardly sort of straightening things on the other side of the room when he started laughing. I look over, he's holding up the two issues of Penthouse that I had bought to prepare for my interview, then stuck in the drawer of my coffee table and forgot about.

So, I'm like, oh, yeah, I had a job interview there. He gives me kind of a strange look, so I realize he thinks I meant as a naked lady, which is pretty clearly not what I'm all about, so I'm laughing at that. Then the older man comes out to find out what we're laughing about, sees the magazines and is all, "Eh, they used to be good but there's nothing good in there anymore." I tell them what I learned at the interview (the letters are all real! really!) and the older man is teasing the younger guy about being so green that he's still satisfied with the relatively vanilla pornstuffs and somewhere in there, something shifts. Proof: a few minutes after that, the older guy asked if he could use my bathroom because he'd had a huge sandwich earlier and was feeling pretty uncomfortable. I don't want to say that we transcended all kinds of societal barriers and responded to each other's essential humanity thanks to the magic of porn, but he did go from calling me ma'am to telling me about his poop in five minutes flat.

Epilogue: I didn't actually want to edit Penthouse, but couldn't resist applying when I saw the listing. I was not offered the job.

*Whoa: I just googled him right now to see if he had an active ministry and it turns out (not surprisingly, really) that he's a convicted sex offender. The wikipedia entry outlines a very dramatic life story involving a religious compound in Arkansas, polygamy, prison, sequined denim jackets and the spectacularly named Birgetta Oyllenhammer. It also includes a photo of one of his pamphlets on the windshield of a car, exactly what happened to us.

**I know, I know. Shock and dismay. This part of the story always trips people up. I just think that there were people in that building who didn't feel like they were in a position to make waves. I was locked into a lease and the management company did what they were required to do, so I didn't have a legal way out. Once the lease was up, I got out of Dodge. But moving is really expensive and generally requires a kind of scrutiny to which not everyone is in a position to expose themselves. Or they could have just been lazy assholes who didn't want to have to do the work. And it's a lot of work. Curious? Enjoy this write-up (continued here) on how to prepare for/carry on during bedbug treatment and keep in mind that that's how I lived for a year.

Sumac-ade

2010-08-23T10:56:00.001-07:00

I took another foraging course with Leda Meredith in Prospect Park this weekend. There was a fair bit of overlap between what we found this week with the plants we talked about in June, but some new stuff too. Like sumac, the berries of which are covered with a water-soluble, deliciously acidic substance. When Leda did her 250-mile challenge, she used sumac as a substitute for lemon.

I wasn't sure what kind of proportion to go for, so I put my handful of berries into a cereal bowl of cool water and swished and rubbed them until the berries were tasteless.
There was a fair bit of leaf matter and whatnot along for the ride, so I strained it through cheesecloth into a glass.
It tasted like water with the juice of about half a lemon added, roughly that degree of tartness. The flavor was pretty comparable, actually. I don't know that I would have questioned it if you had told me that's what it was, but since I did know, I'd say that the flavor was ever so slightly darker than lemon. A teeny bit musky. Not quite as sunshiney. Delicious. I liked it unsweetened, but I can see where adding a little honey or maple syrup would be swell. And there are a lot of interesting cocktail possibilities.

That's one thing I really like about playing with wild foods: getting to try things that aren't commercially available. We were talking about that on Saturday, in the context that acorn flour is so fantastically time-consuming to make happen that it will pretty much never be available for purchase, so if you want to know what it tastes like, you have to do the multiple boils with many changes of water and peeling and grinding and drying yourself. I *do* want to know what it tastes like, though word is that this summer has been too dry for a good acorn harvest. I'm thinking acorn crepes when I get around to this someday; you only need a cup of flour and don't have to worry about them not rising. In the meantime, I am super psyched for the October session: mushrooms and nuts.

I love 'community oversoul.'

2010-08-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

For all the alienation, the guarded privacy we maintain in our public spaces, in a very basic existential way we each rely on the masses of people around us define ourselves. There is a kind of community oversoul, a species recognition that we will never acknowledge. The city as an idea may begin with the marketplace, the trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk with strangers.

And so each of the passersby on this corner, every scruffy, oversized, undersized, weird, fat or bony or limping or muttering or foreign-looking, green-haired, punk-strutting, threatening, crazy, angry person you see...is a New Yorker, which is to say as native to this Diaspora as you are, and who must be acknowledged as such if we are not to become, even as we live, silver gelatinous ghosts among the ruins of a lost civilization.

–E.L. Doctorow, from his introduction to Gotham Comes of Age: New York Through the Lens of the Byron Company, 1892-1942.

File under: who knew?

2010-08-19T10:41:00.001-07:00

One of my co-workers is wearing a pair of very adorable t-strap wedge sandals today and when we all exclaimed over them and asked where she got them — this is the kind of office where no detail passes without comment — she said the Bass outlet and that they cost next to nothing. And I was like, huh, I haven't thought about Bass shoes in a while.* Let's see what they're up to.

Turns out what they're up to is making some very cute shoes with perfectly reasonable price tags. Of course, I really like men's-style oxfords on women, the way they add some gravitas to what could be an overly girlie outfit or dress up a very casual ensemble, so their offerings suit my tastes. Plus, I walk at least three or four miles a day just getting to and from work, which means I need sturdy, comfortable, yet still somewhat professional-looking footwear for all seasons and weather. (This summer, I'm all about my black patent Birkenstock Gizehs. Not especially flattering, but tolerably jolie laide and perfect for walking.)

I think the first ones below are my favorites. Love the wingtip details, though I'd paint the grommets black so they're not so shouty. The white and gray ones are adorable, but too summery for the fall/winter, which is all I'm interested in right now. The heels are great, though I don't wear heels all that often these days, what with the lots of walking and all. They'd suit the kind of dresses I like though, and I do occasionally go places other than the office. I don't know if I'm going to be buying any shoes for a little while (I had a bit of an accident on the Doc Martens site yesterday), but I'm going to keep these in mind. The wingtips especially fit in exactly with the kind of style profile I'm thinking about for the fall, once the weather cools down and I'm willing to care about clothes/anything again.
*I spent the summer of 1997 working at a Bass outlet in Maine with my friend Karen, along with a bunch of guys who lived at something called The Opportunity Farm. Karen and I lived with a couple of hippie dudes I knew and a revolving population of Sierra Club employees and slept on the linoleum floor(!) of what might have been a large closet. Occasionally, one of the guys would bring home a paper bag filled with live lobsters. I sewed a quilt by hand that summer that I still use now. Good times.

Buttermilk farro salad

2010-08-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

I was very happy to see this recipe appear on 101 Cookbooks last week, since I had half a carton of buttermilk left over from my brief infatuation with cucumber/avocado soup and a small bag of farro I'd picked up to try. I knew I'd be getting some vegetables in my CSA pick-up that would work well, so held out until Tuesday night to make it. I used a small zucchini, sliced very thin, a handful of French breakfast radishes, also sliced very thin, and a head of lettuce, chopped. My share also included a small bunch of dill, which went into the dressing.

It turned out to be a perfectly serviceable, though not especially exciting, dish, full of whole grains and vegetables, well suited to bringing to work for lunch. (I'll eat anything if I bring it to work.) It missed the mark for a couple of reasons: This was my first time eating farro and I think I'd prefer it as one element in a mixed-grain dish, rather than on its own. It has a fairly aggressive texture that would be great when mixed with, say, brown rice, barley, and quinoa. It doesn't taste like wild rice, but I had the same reaction to it; a little goes a long way. Also, I substituted red wine vinegar, which I had, for the white wine vinegar, which I didn't, and it was a little vinegar-heavy even for me, who drinks vinegar for pleasure. And the very thin dressing worked well with the grains and crunchy vegetables, soaking in nicely, but left the lettuce limp and sad.

Still, I'm always happy to find new uses for buttermilk (oatmeal season is coming!) and this will be a good dish to keep in the make-ahead-and-eat-for-lunches rotation, as long as I tweak the dressing proportions and am savvier about the vegetables I use.

Simple hat

2010-08-18T13:56:00.000-07:00

I don't know if this happens to other people, but sometimes I start a project for myself and at some point in the execution, realize that it actually belongs to someone else. So I finish it and give it away. Like this hat:
I've had what looked like a hat-sized ball of this purple tweed wool/silk handspun kicking around for ages. I was tired of looking at it, so I cast on for a hat (80 sts, 3x1 rib, for a while, then 7x1) a couple of days ago and was knitting merrily away while catching up on The Guild (I don't know how I missed all of season 3, but I guess that's just the kind of high-flying, lightning-paced life I'm living). Then I suddenly realized that this hat, which is very soft and quite close-fitting, is obviously meant for my favorite cousin, who's been getting radiation treatments all summer for a large, cancerous brain tumor. She'll be starting chemo soon and losing her hair, so obviously she needs this hat. It's even her favorite color.

Done!

2010-08-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

The end is in sight.

2010-08-11T05:01:00.000-07:00

Left to do:
- three more stripes
- work in the ends
- edging

I'd love to be done by the end of this weekend, but we'll see. Those ends are going to be a bear.

Coffee "cake"

2010-08-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

I was intrigued by this recipe when I saw it last week. I've had coffee jello a few times and don't really love it; I find it a little harsh and too sweet, but I thought that it might be better tempered with the condensed milk layers. Plus: layers! Modern jello mold! Fun! I like stripes!

It came together easily, set up more quickly than I was expecting and looks great. Where it's lacking though: flavor and texture. I should have known better when I looked at the recipe in the first place: make regular-strength coffee then dilute it by half? I mean, I drink my coffee pretty strong, but even so, a robustly flavored dessert that does not make. What it does make is something that tastes overwhelmingly ... neutral. A couple spoonsful of instant espresso added with the hot water would have done wonders. Ditto the condensed milk layer. Cream instead of water and a splash of vanilla next time. Another problem was that the recipe called for the same amount of gelatin in each of the mixtures, despite them being different volumes. So the milk layer is so fully set up that it's almost chewy, when I want it to be meltier, more like panna cotta.

So: good idea, lousy recipe, but one worth revisiting.

(Something is afoot at any rate.)

2010-08-06T17:35:00.001-07:00

I've always liked books and movies where magic is happening just out of the corner of the protagonist's eye. Objects shift, creatures appear and melt back into the shadows, chaos reigns, then everything snaps back into order as soon as the character looks directly at it.

I'm pretty sure that's the kind of story I'm in, mostly because that's how I WANT to see the world, but more specifically because when I was walking home after work, I saw a bumper sticker on a car that read, 'I am not a nudist.'

'What an odd sentiment to espouse so publicly,' I thought, 'What kind of fascinating person is that worried about strangers making that particular mistake? Is he or she often nude but has ideological differences with the larger community of nudISTs? Or are they really super uptight?' I had a lot of questions. And some theories. But by the time I turned my head, the sticker had been replaced by one bearing the far more prosaic statement, 'I [heart] my bulldog.'

Obviously, magic is afoot.

New jewelry in the shop

2010-08-06T14:39:00.001-07:00

There's some new stuff in the shop this week, with more to come. I really like this batch, if I do say so myself. (in fact, there are a couple of necklaces I haven't been able to bring myself to list yet because I find the thought of sending them away a little hard to handle.) I wouldn't go so far as to call it a collection, but there's a cohesive spirit to the group. It's a little girlie, kind of quirky, casual but glam. I lucked into a stash of old chandelier pieces, which are rather fantastic. And I love the red chain that shows up in a few pieces.

Also, while I would love to sell out of these for my own selfish money-grubbing and ego-stroking reasons, I'm going to be donating 25% of the proceeds of sales from the shop until Sept. 12 to my friend and craft-industry superstar Kim Werker's fundraiser for pancreatic cancer research, which you can read about here, and would really, really love to send her as much money as possible.

The shop is here, and either does or soon will contain all of these things and more:

And then I want to tie a ribbon around his neck and call him Archie.

2010-08-06T13:51:00.001-07:00

This extremely tiny hippo is pretty much my favorite thing on the internet today.
It's MAGIC. Like, what kind of world IS this where hippos are so small? I want to go to there.

From here. (apparently the magical small-hippo world is Australia, which makes a certain amount of sense.)

Suffering succotash

2010-08-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

I have a secret, the kind of trashy, tawdry secret that could get my Certain Kind of Brooklynite membership card revoked.

I don't like being in a CSA.

It's true.

I've had CSA envy every summer for years now and still love the ethos of the thing, but now that I'm actually IN one: meh. Part of it is that I signed up for a half share, but the CSA I belong to has half-share people pick up a full share every other week instead of getting a smaller amount every week. I get it; it would be an organizational nightmare otherwise, but it means that I'm either overrun with produce and I have to gorge myself before it all spoils or the fridge is empty but I don't want to buy more because all I already prepaid a not-inconsequential amount of money for my June-through-October produce, goddammit.

I had gotten into a good rhythm over the winter of planning meals ahead of time, shopping for pantry items infrequently, picking up produce/dairy/eggs more often and just generally being efficient and thrifty, while also eating really, really well. It was a state of affairs that pleased me to no end. Not knowing what I'm getting — my CSA isn't one of the ones that lets members know what to expect ahead of time — and not being able to get and use it on my own schedule is driving me a little bananas.

I know that a lot of people like CSAs because it forces them to try foods that they wouldn't normally, but I actually do that all the time. I nerd out like crazy when I see a kind of apple I've never heard of or some dark, leafy greens that are new to me. And yes, the quality of the CSA produce is very high, but I also belong to the one of best food coops in the country, which carries loads of local, organic produce that's equally good.

So, I won't be rejoining this one, but if I move away from the coop and into a different CSA's territory, I'd reconsider.

I haven't been blogging much about cooking, partly out of CSA-related demoralization and partly because it's been too hot to cook anything, but I did make a succotash-ish dish Tuesday night that turned out pretty well. My distribution on Tuesday included five ears of corn, which is one of those foods I insist on eating immediately because refrigerating it destroys all of the good flavor chemicals and leaves it fit, basically, for cattle feed. (There. That should ensure that I don't lose my Entitled Brooklyn Asshole status for a while.) So I cut it all off the cobs and sauteed it in butter with green beans and a huge tomato, both chopped into manageable pieces. I cooked about a cup of orzo and added that too with some of the pasta water. Two changes I'd make next time: I would have preferred a pasta that was not the same size as the corn kernels for some additional textural contrast, but I didn't have anything else on hand except linguine, and would have finished the dish with a bit of cream, but mine had gone bad, so I used buttermilk instead, which tasted good, but didn't thicken up the way I wanted it to.

In which I learn about gin.

2010-08-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, I went to check out a new distillery in Brooklyn, just a couple of blocks from my last apartment. Started by a laid-off bond trader and his girlfriend, they're making gin from scratch, which is the kind of enterprise I can get behind.

They have gorgeous equipment:

One of the owners, talking about the wheat they buy from a farmer near Ithaca and how they process it into flour and turn that into a thin, fermented slurry that becomes the base spirit.
They were in the middle of a tour when we got there, so we tasted the product before learning anything about it. We tasted it at room temperature, chilled, and with tonic. I have to say that while I liked it as a spirit, it didn't taste like gin to me. The ginger and rosemary flavors had the strongest impact, followed by lemon peel. I didn't get much juniper flavor at all. On the tour, the guy mentioned that they refine the juniper berries so that they're only using the lighter, more aromatic notes. But the thing is, I *like* that heavy, pine-resin juniper taste and scent. That's what I want when I want gin. So I wouldn't buy this expecting it to fulfill my gin requirements. But if I were looking for something else that's aromatic and tasty and could be used in drinks that are either sweet or not, I would certainly not be averse to Breuckelen gin.

Salvage operation: deviled egg toast

2010-07-26T12:44:00.001-07:00

I've gotten in the habit of keeping hard-boiled eggs around. They're easy to make (eggs in pan, cold water to cover, bring to a boil, cover, let sit for 12 minutes, cool in a bowl of ice water) and handy for mid-afternoon protein boosts at work or when the occasional craving for deviled eggs hits, like it did last night. When I set about peeling a couple I had in the fridge, I realized that I had screwed up the timing with the most recent batch and had half a dozen gorgeous CSA eggs with yolks that were barely set and whites that were jellied and, truth be told, a little gooey.
I figured they'd still work for egg salad though and mashed them up with a big spoonful of grainy mustard, a handful of chopped cornichons, dollop of mayonnaise, paprika, and salt. Creamy and flavorful, spread on wheat toast and sprinkled with more paprika, it made a mighty fine light dinner, maybe even more delicious than a plate of deviled eggs would have been.

Easy apricot jam

2010-07-24T13:09:00.001-07:00

Quart of apricots, 2 c sugar, juice of a lemon, apply heat, spread on toast.

I feel like superwoman. :)

Photos excavated from a flash drive at the bottom of my purse

2010-07-23T13:43:00.000-07:00

The theme is: Things That Will Kill You.
I don't know what these are even called: fake body outline cutouts where you put your face there? It's one of those .... of DEATH.

Scary basement piano, ready to eat you

Dolls are scary generally, but lots of them in formation? AHHHHHHHHHH. If you installed this lamp in your home, it would inch closer and closer one night while you were sleeping and then they'd all KICK YOU TO DEATH WITH THEIR COLD, POINTY FEET.

"Ha ha," I said, when I saw this chocolate on my hotel bed. "The way they wrote 'good night' makes it sound like drugged chocolate that will put you to sleep." And we laughed.
And then I turned it over and OMG IT IS DRUGGED CHOCOLATE THAT WILL PUT YOU TO SLEEP.

Summer soup

2010-07-20T13:34:00.001-07:00

In a blender, combine a little garlic, a peeled and seeded cucumber, a chopped avocado, pinch of cayenne, juice of a lime, a few scoops of plain yogurt, dash of salt, and buttermilk to cover. Cool and creamy, with a gentle bite. It's my new favorite.

While I've been blog-absent...

2010-07-20T13:29:00.001-07:00

...I've been working on my ripple blanket and playing with fun camera apps.

"Go stand over there and I'll take your picture."

2010-07-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

That's something you hear a lot when you go anywhere with my dad.

Sol LeWitt show, MASS MoCA

My new favorite summer treat

2010-07-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

A little bit of sweetened heavy cream poured over a very tart granita.

DUDE.

It's one of those things that magically turns out to be far more than the sum of its parts. The granita is all crunchy crystals, but the cream settles around them and refreezes, softening the edges, while still maintaining the essential structure. And it tastes pretty fantastic.

You start by making a granita out of whatever juice you like. I've only tried it with the kind of thick, tart juices I wouldn't want to drink straight — black cherry, concord grape, some kind of blueberry/pomegranate concoction — but I bet something more mellow, like pear, would be good too. There are nice step-by-step directions here, though I don't add extra sugar to the juice. When it's frozen and you're ready to eat, pour a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream into a ramekin, add a teaspoon or so of sugar, and stir until the sugar dissolves. This should also thicken the cream a bit, though not to the point that it'll hold peaks. Pile some granita into a little dessert cup, pour the cream on top and give it a minute to merge. Magic.

Out of context, this photo would be totally gross.

Cajeta

2010-07-02T12:55:00.000-07:00

My supply of Fat Toad Farm goat's milk caramel is running low. It's splendid stuff, but at nearly $8 for that size jar (not that I begrudge them! they have goat maintenance to pay for!), I figured it was something worth trying to make for myself. I've made not-very-exciting dulce de leche in the past, but thought that it was worth having a go at a goat's milk version.

I used this recipe, though I halved it (except for the vanilla. because in all the excitement of looking to see if I had any vanilla beans left and realizing I didn't, I forgot and threw in a whole tablespoon of extract. lord knows that keeping track of four whole ingredients is awfully taxing) and added a cinnamon stick while it cooked. And it turned out pretty well! It took a lot less time than that experiment last year, just about an hour and a half. The color is pretty close to the Fat Toad stuff and while it's a little bit thinner, I noticed that they list cornstarch in their ingredients so they're helping things along a bit. I think it would have been better with half the vanilla, but it's a minor quibble and easily corrected next time.

Ripple blanket

2010-06-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

Oddly enough, I was motivated to pull out the long-dormant ripple blanket during the recent heatwave, almost entirely because I could plonk the whole thing on the table and barely touch it while I worked on it. Still liking the looks of it, still convinced it's going to be heavy enough to use as a restraining device when it's done.

Church

2010-06-28T13:28:00.001-07:00

I like storefront churches in general, but this one is my favorite.

Wild food upstate

2010-06-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

When I was upstate a couple of weeks ago, I took my mom out foraging one morning. I was mostly looking for milkweed florets, but we also found some ripe blackcaps in a few sunny spots, as well as enough unripe ones to keep her in berries for weeks as they ripened.
We picked close to two pounds of milkweed florets, and that was only taking one or two from each plant. Lots of milkweed near her place, is what I'm saying. Much of it was on a hillside that it shared with densely growing thistles, but that's what long pants and hiking shoes and slow, deliberate movements are for.
I was surprised and pleased to find a big elderberry bush in full flower too, so we picked a bunch for elderflower fritters and for my mom to try her hand at putting up some elderflower champagne.
I sauteed about half of the milkweed to have with dinner and left the rest for her to have later. It was nice to have enough to eat my fill, rather than just having a taste. I decided that it tastes more like asparagus than anything else. Good stuff.

The elderflower fritters were ... less uniquely delicious. I read a couple a recipes and made a simple batter of flour, egg, milk and a little lemon juice. I dipped the flower heads in the batter and fried them in canola oil until they were brown.
They just tasted like fried dough. Neither of us could distinguish any flavor at all from the flowers, so we scrapped them and ate strawberries instead.

More scenes from a commute

2010-06-24T07:42:00.000-07:00

Abandon hope, all ye who enter this airshaft

2010-06-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

While I was taking this picture just down the block from my office, someone walking by told me the text on the walls was from Dante's Inferno.

This makes me want to learn origami

2010-06-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

from here

Scenes from a commute

2010-06-17T07:16:00.000-07:00

The spoils of foraging

2010-06-16T05:56:00.001-07:00

Breakfast today: granola with yogurt and freshly picked juneberries

Switchel

2010-06-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

I have a feeling this is going to be a post about something that nobody likes but me, but I'm okay with that. It starts, as so many things do, with me reading Laura Ingalls as a kid. I remember being mildly intrigued by this line from The Long Winter:
"Ma had sent them ginger-water. She had sweetened the cool well-water with sugar, flavored it with vinegar, and put in plenty of ginger to warm their stomachs so they could drink till they were not thirsty. Ginger-water would not make them sick, as plain cold water would when they were so hot."

Somewhere in the intervening years, I read about switchel, the "haymakers' punch" of sweetened vinegar water, and when I spied that bottle of Bragg's vinegar drink at a fancy bodega last weekend, I snatched it up. I loved it, though I think it's fair to say that Jenn was grossed out — willing to give it a try until she smelled it. The only listed ingredients were water, cider vinegar, and honey, all things I had on hand at home, so I've been playing around with it all week and finally hit on the proportions that taste good to me. I like the flavor of honey, but have been using maple syrup simply because it's easier to stir into cold water.

The ginger tea I mention here is something I make a batch of weekly-ish. I make it strong enough that I can't drink it on its own, so it's more like ginger concentrate. It's good mixed with water or seltzer or heated up with honey and lemon. Just slice a large piece of ginger fairly thinly into a saucepan, fill the pan with water, bring it to a boil, cover and let it cool to room temperature, then strain into clean bottles and store in the fridge. My current favorite cooking/drinking white wine that I can get close to home for under $10 (it's a Chilean sauvingnon blanc with a greenish label and is on the bottom shelf of the wine store; that's all I know about it) comes in screw-top bottles, which are really handy for this kind of thing.

Switchel
2 T. maple syrup
4 T. Bragg's cider vinegar
very strong ginger tea
water
Mix the maple syrup and vinegar in a pint glass. Fill glass roughly halfway with ginger tea and the rest of the way with water. Stir.

Prospect Park foraging

2010-06-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I took a fantastic foraging tour of Prospect Park with Leda Meredith. She shares information in a very low-key, effective manner that's more like taking a walk with a very knowledgeable friend than the spectacle of shtick that another (also knowledgeable, harder to take) local foraging educator puts on. Plus, in a move I was extremely charmed by, she brought a snack for everyone to share at the end of the tour that used some of the plants we'd just talked about, a dip with daylilies and peppergrass. I'd highly recommend one of her future tours if you can make it, or either of her books.
Here she is, showing off some wood sorrel. This is a plant I have a soft spot for, since I used to pull it out of our lawn to munch on when I was a kid. (How I knew to do this, I have genuinely no idea.)
I have several pages of notes in the back of my Moleskine of the dozens of plants we found and talked about, but the highlights for me were:

Goutweed, the leaves of which have an appealing herbal-celery scent and flavor. I can see myself throwing a handful in the pot when I make stock.

Sassafrass, the roots of which I've used to experiment with making homemade root beer (medium success; the flavor was right, but I didn't brew it strong enough). I didn't realize that the leaves, dried and blitzed in a coffee grinder, make filé powder, the traditional thickener for gumbo. I've never made gumbo, but that's not to say I never will.

Elderflower blossoms. I have a real fondness for St. Germain and most elderflower-scented and -flavored things, so being able to identify and collect it for myself is splendid. I started a batch of Leda's elderflower champagne that night and want to make a few bottles of elderflower-infused simple syrup for using in summer cocktails.

Mugwort, which can be used as a seasoning or tea. Or, since it has muscle relaxing properties, steeped into a bath. I made a cup of mugwort tea Saturday night that was ... vaguely palatable, especially once I added some honey. I like the way the raw plant smells, but once it sat in the hot water for a few minutes, it had a hint of a slimy-greens-left-too-long-in-the-crisper scent that I find off-putting. It's an invasive weed and Leda said that the roots exude a substance that discourages other plants from growing nearby, which is fascinating from an evolutionary standpoint, but kind of terrifying, especially since once I knew to look for it, I saw it freaking everywhere in the park.

Juneberries, which were one of my favorite discoveries of the day. They're delicious, like slightly milder blueberries, and have seeds that taste like almonds. And holy! crap! I just googled "juneberry cyanide" to see if that's where the flavor comes from (it is, but not enough to be an issue) and learned that juneberries are the same as saskatoon berries, which I've read about as being a great delicacy in, um, places closer to Saskatoon than I currently am and had filed them away on the list of Things I Must Eat Someday But Which I Cannot Get in New York, Like Mangosteens.And here they are, literally right in what might as well be my backyard. Color me gobsmacked.

Chokecherries, which are awfully pretty, all glossy and blue-black. I really like the flavor too, sort of a cross between cherry and grapefruit, though you might need an affinity for sour things to eat more than one out of hand.

I do have an affinity for sour things, but I wanted to play with them a little more. I made a syrup with these by boiling a cup of the fruit with a cup of water and 3 T sugar for probably longer than I should have — kept waiting for them to burst like cranberries, but they never did — then pushing as much liquid as possible through a fine sieve. It was a fair bit of effort for not much syrup, but it was tasty mixed into some seltzer and drizzled over a bit of ice cream. Very similar in flavor and consistency to pomegranate molasses, which I love. I also happen to have a large bottle of it in my kitchen already, but this would make a handy locavore substitution, if one was looking for that.

I think the most amazing thing for me though (up until a few minutes ago — high five saskatoon berries!) was learning that many parts of the milkweed plant are edible. I grew up with milkweed plants everywhere. We made Christmas ornaments out of the dried-out pods in elementary school. I remember trying to make glue out of the sticky sap. When I learned to spin, I embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful milkweed-floss-spinning endeavor (I have enough experience at this point to know that the problem was that I was trying to spin it on the wheel like wool; treating it like cotton might work, especially with an ultralight spindle). Learning that I could have been eating it all along blew. my. mind. There weren't very many of them that hadn't flowered yet, at least in the part of the park where I was, and I didn't want to take more than one bud cluster from each, so I just brought a few home with me to test out.

Leda had said to treat them like broccoli, so I browned them in a little butter and sprinkled them with salt and enjoyed every bite. I described them to a friend earlier today as a bit muskier tasting than broccoli, almost like a cross between broccoli and an artichoke.

Seriously delicious. And by happy coincidence, I'm heading upstate this weekend, far enough north that they're a little behind Brooklyn in the growing cycle. There's a fair bit of marshy wetland near where my mom lives and I have a sneaking suspicion that she'll get as much of a kick out of eating milkweed as I did.

Caramelized onion and kale pizza

2010-06-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

Since it's finally cooled down enough for me to be willing to turn on the oven and I had a friend coming over for dinner last night, I made a stuff-in-the-fridge-that-needs-to-be-used pizza that, happily, turned out really, really well.

I started with some really good whole wheat dough that they're carrying at the Coop. I've made my own dough in the past, but have never been happy with it — usually it's been a pain to stretch out, always wanting to slither back into a safe little ball, which results in a thicker crust than I like. This stuff was really easy to work with and delicious. I caramelized two onions that I had halved and then sliced as thinly as possible and spread them over the dough to serve as the sauce-ish (and saucy!) component. If I'd been thinking, I would have sprinkled some crushed red pepper flakes over them.
After I'd taken the onions out of the pan, I filled it with some of the cleaned, chopped kale and mustard greens I had ready to go. Not sure of the quantity, maybe four or five cups uncooked? There was enough oil left in the pan from the onions that I just gave them a quick drizzle and moved them around with tongs until they were, um, not cooked exactly, but flexible. I piled them on top of the onions.
Then I dotted the greens with some gorgonzola that needed to be eaten soon. I could have skipped it though or should have used more since I couldn't really taste it.
Then I sliced up about half of a small ball of fresh mozzarella and distributed that as evenly as I could.
450F for about 20 minutes and done.
To go with it, I cut up a medium-sized jicama and a bunch of carrots and some extremely pretty radishes, filled a cereal bowl with each and put everything on the table to pick at while we caught up over a bottle of wine. I really like this kind of flatbread/pizza preparation. I have a feeling I'll be making a lot more of them in the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed that the heat holds off for long enough for me to get sick of them...

Surprise!

2010-06-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

I was walking home last night when something caught my eye:
This is the back of a billboard that faces out onto Flatbush Avenue, which for some reason is covered with an illustration of what I'm pretty sure is New York Harbor in what I'm randomly guess-stabbing is the 18th century. I would love to see it more clearly, but since it's on the back of a billboard that can only be seen from part of the block of Park Place between 6th and 7th Avenues, I'm not sure I'll be able to get a better look.

Needless to say, I was *delighted* by my discovery and very, very curious about the story behind it. Who? Why? When? How? Anyone know?

To which I can only say amen

2010-06-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

My girlcrush and birthday twin Maureen Johnson posted the following manifesto on her blog today. Or possibly last night. Either way, even though she devised the manifesto in reaction to people who use the internet only for person promotion, she might as well have titled it Why Stephanie Blogs.

"The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone. Don’t just hammer away and repeat and talk at people—talk TO people. It’s organic. Make stuff for the internet that matters to you, even if it seems stupid. Do it because it’s good and feels important. Put up more cat pictures. Make more songs. Show your doodles. Give things away and take things that are free. Look at what other people are doing, not to compete, imitate, or compare . . . but because you enjoy looking at the things other people make. Don’t shove yourself into that tiny, airless box called a brand—tiny, airless boxes are for trinkets and dead people."

Now go here and read the whole post.

Speaking of draping...

2010-06-04T12:31:00.001-07:00

This is fantastic.

from here

Egg, meet face

2010-06-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

Earlier this morning, I was responding to a comment from yesterday and noticed that the 'to' field was something like noreply-comment@...

'Huh,' I thought, 'that's weird.' And as I typed, I got to wondering if the program was protecting the commenter's identity but would pass the message along or if my response — and ZOMG all of the comments EVER — were just being shunted off to the virtual equivalent of a dead-letter office. Since the commenter is a real-life friend, I gchatted her and asked her to let me know when my response showed up. And it never did.

So, since it seems possible that no one who has commented here in the past has ever gotten my responses, please accept my heartfelt apologies. I love your comments! I love responding to your comments! I never thought it was weird that no one ever responded to my responses!

I'm going to go poke around the settings and the help section and see if I can figure out a way to fix this, but in the meantime I'm terribly sorry for my inadvertently appalling blog manners. And if anyone ever *did* get a response from my on a comment here, would you let me know? Thanks!

The hard part is getting it out of my brain.

2010-06-03T13:58:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, while I was walking home, an extraordinarily vivid and crystal-clear idea for a sweater leaped fully formed out of the murky, roiling depths of my subconscious and into the front of my brain where I could see it. There were crossed fronts and draping and pleating with a high armscye, well-fitted shoulders, and narrow sleeves to keep the whole thing from sliding into schmatte territory. But even though I could see the finished garment as clearly as if it had materialized in front of me, I couldn’t quite figure out what the pieces would have to look like to get that effect.

So when I got home, I took out some scraps of jersey fabric and cut out little sweater pieces to play with.* I never quite achieved the shining grail-shaped beacon of knitwear as it exists in my mind, but I’ll get there. Or not. Definitely one of the two.

*I have a feeling that this is the kind of thing that seems totally normal and just plain sensible to me, like making scale models of my apartment and all of my furniture whenever I move so I know that everything will fit in the new place,** but not to other people.
**I told my mom about it the first time I thought to do this, and she told me that when she first moved into the house I grew up in, she made scale models of of all of her cabinets and everything that would go in the cabinets. I assume, though I didn’t ask, that she meant dishes and her mixer and that sort of thing, not, like, cans of soup. Regardless, in both our cases, we’re talking about 2D models. 3D models would be a completely different level of The Awesome.

I've had this song stuck in my head all day.

2010-06-02T15:21:00.000-07:00

Not that I'm complaining.

In lieu of knitting, a cat. Plus, ice cream.

2010-06-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

I did a fair bit of knitting this weekend, though I've decided to keep the particulars under wraps for now, since it's something I'm designing and I haven't decided what I'm going to do with the pattern once I'm done.

HOWEVER, as a ploy to distract you from how genuinely annoying my smug secret-keeping really is—I could have just not mentioned it—here is a CAT:

And a recipe for very, very good chocolate ice cream.
Very, Very Good Chocolate Ice Cream
adapted from Nigella Lawson in one of her books, possibly the domestic goddess one

2 egg yolks
1 egg
2/3 c. plus 2 T sugar
1/4 c. cocoa
2 c. milk
3 1/2 oz. semisweet chocolate, melted

Whisk the eggs and 2/3 c. of sugar in a bowl until thick and creamy. Whisk in cocoa. Bring the milk to a boil and add to the egg mixture, pouring slowly and beating all the while. Whisk the melted chocolate into the eggs and milk. Set the bowl over a pan of simmering water and stir until everything is smooth and amalgamated and beginning to thicken.

Put the remaining 2 T sugar into a saucepan and turn the heat to high. Heat until it's dark brown and molten, then whisk into the chocolate custard. Cool and thoroughly chill the mixture, then freeze in an ice cream maker.

Fellini goes to the bank

2010-05-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

This morning, I had to get blood drawn for my annual checking-in-on-myself and since part of that is a cholesterol test, I couldn't have anything to eat or drink beforehand. So I left the house pretty early for me and went to a lab where they take my insurance, did the whole thing, this isn't the interesting part of the story. It's just to explain why I was wandering around downtown Brooklyn, uncaffeinated and unbreakfasted, in a vulnerable and easily confused state after having my blood harvested before 9 a.m.

I went into an unfamiliar branch of my bank afterward, but there weren't any tellers in their little cage. I was clearly looking a little confused because some dude in a suit asked if I needed help. I said I just needed to deposit a check, he said he could help me, and then everything went ... weird. He took me through a rabbit warren of cubicles and sat me down at a desk and we embarked on a completely bizarre conversation I could not hope to replicate, but know this: at one point he drew a diagram for me about how a debit card works. Except that he just wrote $100-$50=$50, which is the part of the whole system that I am pretty clear on. When he had asked if I knew how debit cards work, I said um, maybe because I thought there was going to be a lot more to the answer. It was exactly like someone asking you if you know how electricity works and you said um, maybe because you know that there are currents involved and sometimes hamsters running on wheels but then the person who asked you VERY SERIOUSLY AND NOT UNKINDLY showed you how to plug in a lamp.

BBG

2010-05-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

There's something that feels just a smidge pathetic about reporting on a weekend when you're much closer to the next weekend than the one being reported, but here we are anyway. This past weekend at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, I took a little detour into the native flora section, with cool stuff like tree-sized rhododendrons:
and weird, spiky grasses.
But the main draw was the rose garden, which was full to bursting with roses at their peak. Going back through my photos, I learned that I really like somewhat unusually shaped blossoms...

...and anything either multi-colored or orange. The orange was a surprise, I have to say. Not a huge fan generally, but I do love orange roses.

And anytime there's a bee on a flower, it's an automatic win as far as I'm concerned.

On the needles

2010-05-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

So in the course of about a week, I got this much knit on Shannon Okey's lovely Rivulet cardigan.
Then I realized I wouldn't have enough yarn to finish it — it's my handspun, spun from some 50 wool/50 mohair I got ... somewhere ... at some time, so not possible to track down more — and ripped it out.

Then I cast on for another cardigan, this time one that's shorter and simpler, with no flare-y bits. It'll have a stockinette body with garter edges, some princess shaping and maybe a textured yoke.

But then I was going through the backlog in my Google Reader yesterday and saw Julia's post about what might be the cutest, summer-casual-but-still-good-for-work-and-also-in-the-fall-with-tights skirt ever. I bought the pattern immediately and went to the yarn store at lunch, where I picked out some Cotton Fine in Candy Apple. And then I went home and swatched and had to recalculate the pattern since I was getting 7.5 stitches to the inch instead of 6.5.
This is not going to be a rapidly completed project, but it will be a splendid, twirly creature when it's done. And it's lot of plain stockinette, which will be perfect for the four and half hours of Lost finale watching going on Sunday night.

Oh, right. THIS happened.

2010-05-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

By the greening of my thumb...

2010-05-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

Last week, I noticed that one of the sweet potatoes I'd had hanging around the kitchen for a while had sprouted. I had an extra flowerpot with soil in it already, so figured I had nothing to lose by planting it. It was the work of about a minute to lop off the sproutiest part, scoop out a cavity in the soil, and cover it up again. This is what it looked like last Wednesday, all purple stalks and tiny, pretty leaves.

And this is what it looked like this morning before I left for work, after a single week:

I, for one, welcome my new plant overlords.

Monday flowers

2010-05-10T14:41:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure I was going to make it to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden this weekend because it was supposed to rain pretty heavily Saturday morning during their free hours. I was bummed since I had missed it last weekend (out of town for work) and will miss it again this weekend (going to visit my parents), and I knew the bluebells were blooming and I'm crazy about them. Happily, I did end up taking a quick walk through because it actually did cut off a corner to walk through the garden from Eastern Parkway over to Washington Ave. and was not disappointed.

I love the bluebells.

But there was plenty of other good stuff to see too, like this gorgeous, all-over-the-place, cottage-garden-type arrangement of rich purple and pink and white.

It started raining while I was in there, so I had the pleasure of seeing these sodden peonies and roses, sparkling with raindrops and especially fragrant in the cool, damp air.

Oatmeal not-raisin cookies

2010-05-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

I was walking through the greenmarket on Saturday with a friend who raved about the chocolate chip oatmeal cookies from one of the stalls. They were sturdier than I like my chocolate chip cookies — I fall on the barely-holding-together-globs-of-dough end of the spectrum — but also ... nice. There was something almost wholesome about them, and they got me thinking about sturdy, wholesome cookies, something that would fall between a cookie and a homemade energy bar, kind of decadent but in a good-for-you kind of way. I started with Mark Bittman's oatmeal cookie recipe and added all sorts of stuff, with the notable exception of raisins. I hate those little bastards. People are always adding them to stuff and ruining everything. They're sticky and gross and taste like the bottomless pit of despair that comes of being the kid at school with the lamest snack at snacktime.

The cookies, however, worked out pretty well and have been called into service as both breakfast and the kind of snack any little anklebiter would trade their Twinkies for. Oddly, as I've been eating my way through the batch I keep wanting them to have sesame seeds and coconut too. Next time...

Oatmeal not-raisin cookies
adapted from How to Cook Everything

1 stick butter, softened
½ c. white sugar
½ c. brown sugar
2 eggs
1 c. all-purpose flour
½ c. whole wheat flour
2 c. rolled oats
½ c. oat bran
3 T. ground flax seeds
½ t. cinnamon
pinch salt
2 t. baking powder
½ c. milk
½. t. almond extract
½ t. vanilla
½ c. dried cherries
½ c. ground walnuts
½ c. dried apricots, chopped

Preheat the oven to 375F. Cream the butter and sugars; add the eggs one at a time and mix until well blended.

Combine the dry ingredients except nuts and fruit in a separate bowl. Add the vanilla and almond extract to the milk. Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the milk, stirring by hand after each addition. Add the nuts and fruit.

Drop by teaspoons or tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheets and bake until lightly browned, about 10 min. Cool for about 2 minutes on the sheets before transferring to a rack to finish cooling. Store in an airtight container.

Meyer lemon curd: best thing ever

2010-04-26T12:50:00.000-07:00

Meyer lemon curd
via Epicurious

3 to 4 Meyer lemons (about 1 pound)
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 stick unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces

Finely grate enough zest from lemons to measure 2 teaspoons and squeeze enough juice to measure 1/2 cup. Whisk together zest, juice, sugar, and eggs in a metal or pyrex bowl and add butter. Set bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and cook, whisking, until thickened and smooth. Force curd through a fine sieve set into another bowl. Serve warm or cover surface of curd with wax paper and cool completely.

I was a little skeptical of the fact that this recipe used whole eggs and only two of them at that, considering that most of the other recipes I looked at contained six or even eight egg yolks, but it had rave reviews on epicurious and I figured it was worth a shot. And holy crap, this might well be my go-to curd formula going forward. The flavor was outstanding and it's lighter and somehow creamier in texture than other lemon curds I've made. Plus, I didn't have to do the thing where I freeze all the whites out of guilt and never do anything with them. Not to mention that that little jar is going to make the friend who's feeding the cat when I'm gone this week awfully happy. Everyone wins!

Oops

2010-04-26T12:27:00.000-07:00

So, I'd gotten a good ways into my twentyten cardigan over the weekend and laid it out on the table to check my progress. I folded it over to see how tidily the button band was slanting across the front when I noticed something odd:

The case of the vanishing pocket!

Yeah, I'd put the pocket in the wrong place. The directions call for putting markers at the points that will be the dividing points for the fronts and back, which I did, and each of the button bands, which I didn't do because I find slipping markers to be an unnecessary aggravation and I can count to seven, which is the number of stitches in the band. So when the directions called for starting the pocket "after the second marker," I didn't use the right second marker as the placement point. And it bit me in the ass.

I spent a few minutes trying to convince myself that a pocket on the back of the cardigan was fun! It's cheeky! And modern! But that was all just a crock of ridiculous nonsense and I ripped back to where I went wrong and am back on track now.

Monday flower report

2010-04-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

I have a feeling this is going to be a regular thing around here, this posting of photos on Monday of what I saw at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden over the weekend. I went Saturday morning hoping for lilacs and was not disappointed.

Screw Disneyworld. This is the happiest place on Earth.

But I hadn't realized the peonies, which I adored, would be blooming too.

Nor that the tulip garden had such a varied and stunning range of blooms (and fans).

I crossed a part of the lawn I hadn't been on before and saw this set-up from a distance. The part of my subconscious mind that believes in magic was all, 'oh, that must be the mailbox for whoever lives in that tree,' before my rational mind caught up and was like, 'DUH, brain. They would just leave the mail at the front gate.'
(The actual purpose that little stump-on-a-post serves is so prosaic and antithetical to anything approaching magic that I can't even bring myself to type it out.)

Casting on

2010-04-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

I never thought I would become a devotee of short-sleeved woolens, but considering how much I adore my raglan wrap and the fact that I recently cast on for the very charming twentyten cardigan, I think I might be. I think they're particularly suited for transitional weather, like an infinitely chicer down vest.

Lowly wurm

2010-04-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

In my (possibly unblogged) effort to knit winter accessories out of season so I'm READY when it cools down again, I knit a Wurm. I'm not entirely sure that the slouchiness really suits me, but I like the color and tidy hem, it's comfortable, and seems like it'll be warm.
It looks fine from the front...

...but decidedly odd laid out flat.
If I knit another of these at some point, I want to add another decrease round or two before fastening off. I think there are too many stitches cinched up at the end, making the top of the hat both more ruffly and — apologies — sphincter-evoking than it would be if I had my druthers.

Rhubarb upside-down cake

2010-04-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

I made this last weekend, took this photo on my phone, devoured the cake with a friend (the same night we ate the mushroom tarts, as a matter of fact), and completely forgot about it until right now, though I'm not sure how that happened. It's really good. I used this recipe as a jumping-off point, which has a great, roughly 1:1 fruit:cake ratio, and tweaked it a bit to my taste. I like almond with tart fruit, so added some almond extract and switched out ground almonds for some of the flour, used lemon instead of orange, and cardamom instead of mace.

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake
adapted from Recipezaar

Base
2 T. butter, melted
1/2 c. sugar
juice of one lemon
4 stalks rhubarb, chopped

Cake
3/4 c. flour
1/4 c. ground almonds
1/2 t. baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 t. cardamom
1/4 c. butter
1/2 c. sugar
1 egg
zest of one lemon
1 t. almond extract
2/3 c. plain yogurt

Preheat oven to 350F. Combine the base ingredients in an 8" square pan, making sure all of the rhubarb pieces are coated, and set aside.
Combine dry ingredients.
Cream butter and sugar until fluffy, beat in egg, almond extract, and rind.
Mix in the flour mixture alternately with the yogurt, making three additions of each.
Spoon batter over rhubarb, spreading right to the edge of the pan, and bake for 35–40 minutes, until top springs back when lightly pressed.
Let cool for 15 minutes, then run a butter knife around the edge to loosen and invert onto a plate or platter.

Book club salad

2010-04-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

My book club met at place last night and earlier this week, it had occurred to me that I needed to come up with something to feed those bitc— I mean, the ladies. Somehow or other, I landed on this recipe, which sounded springy and delicious, especially since I already had most of the more obscure ingredients — Meyer lemons, Trader Joe's Harvest Grain blend, walnut oil — in the house. I tweaked it a bit, mostly by adding things, and I fully admit that there are a lot of components that need to be dealt with separately and then mixed together, but it's worth it. This was really, really good. I was planning to hew more closely to the recipe, but I didn't realize that it called for 8 oz. of the Harvest Grains blend but that the bag is 16 oz. until I'd already cooked it all. The asparagus was a little lost in all that grainage, so I rounded it out with some baby spinach and tofu.

I've written the recipe as though you were doing it all at once, but for this batch the process was made slightly less onerous by putting it together over a couple of evenings: cooking the grains, tofu and asparagus and making the dressing the first night, then toasting the almonds, chopping the spinach and adding the cheese right before I served it. (Speaking of the cheese, the Hungarian feta that they've started carrying at Sahadi's is pretty much the best thing ever, super creamy and really strong and sheepy and salty AND under $4/lb. ) Originally I was annoyed that I hadn't added the spinach while the grains were warm, so that it would wilt some, but I really like it as is, crunchy and lively and more salad-y.

Book Club Salad
adapted from The Kitchn

1 c. barley
16 oz. Trader Joe's Harvest Grains blend OR 12 oz. Israeli couscous (or, as my friend Katherine calls it, "big couscous") and 4 oz. quinoa
1 c. sliced almonds
1 lb. asparagus, trimmed and chopped into 1–2" lengths
1 pkg. extra-firm tofu, drained and cut into 1" cubes
1 T or so soy sauce
5 oz. baby spinach, roughly chiffonaded
2 Meyer (or regular) lemons, zested and juiced
1 T walnut oil
olive oil
1 c. feta cheese, crumbled

Cook barley in salted water until al dente, drain and add to large mixing bowl. Cook other grains according to package directions (for the TJ's blend, I always have to add more water and cook longer). Add to barley in bowl and mix together, adding a bit of olive oil to keep it from sticking together.
Toast almonds in a dry skillet until fragrant. Add to grains. Heat a bit of olive oil in the same pan and cook asparagus until crisp-tender, just a minute or two. Add to the grains. Add more oil to the pan if necessary and brown the tofu cubes, adding the soy sauce at the end. When it's been absorbed, add it to the grains mixture.
Add the lemon zest to the salad. Mix the juice with the walnut oil, drizzling olive oil into the mixture and whisking, tasting occasionally, until it tastes balanced to you. Add the dressing to the salad and mix well. Stir in the feta.

This is what lunch at my desk looks like.

2010-04-14T10:52:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get myself in the habit of eating salads, mainly because the CSA I joined is going to have mesclun greens all summer and I don't necessarily want to give it ALL away, but until I saw this post from the inimitable Pink of Perfection, I wasn't really sure how I was going to go about it. It turns out that as a plain accompaniment to a filling, flavorful, not-loaded-with-icky-mayonnaise curried leftover-foot-chicken salad, lettuce wins. For now.

Curried Chicken Salad
adapted from Pink of Perfection

1 c. plain yogurt
2 T. mayonnaise
1 T. garam masala
2 T. curry powder
1 apple, chopped finely
half an onion, minced
1/2 c. chopped walnuts
leftover chopped/shredded chicken

Mix the yogurt, mayo, and spices in a bowl, then add the apple, onion, and walnuts. Finally, fold in the chicken.

Button, button, who's got the button?

2010-04-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to poking through my vintage button supply and sewing some on my raglan wrap (rav link), finished just before Thanksgiving and previously blogged about here and here. I didn't have enough of the ones I liked best, but I'm perfectly happy with the plastic sunburst ones I ended up using. I still didn't have quite enough of those either, to be honest, but snuck in a plain one at the top where it's hidden by the collar.

The only problem was that the shanks on a couple of them were worn through.

Two coats of superglue gel over the break left them as good as new though.

And I love, love, love the finished product, with the front worn either open...

or closed. I wore it to work three days this week over long-sleeve t-shirts and would have been perfectly happy to wear it every single day.

Mushroom tarts

2010-04-13T14:50:00.000-07:00

These were a riff on one of my favorite Deborah Madison recipes for tomato/olive/rosemary tarts. Since I had to miss an Easter brunch to which I was supposed to bring stuffed mushrooms for nine people, I had kind of a lot of mushrooms to use up. I'd always meant to play around with other fillings for this dough and I had a friend coming over for dinner last Saturday, so I put these together. I use all all-purpose flour when making the tomato variation, but thought that the strong, earthy mushroom flavors would benefit from some whole wheat flour in the crust. They were fantastic both hot out of the oven and at room temperature for lunch at work and they kept pretty well. I made them on Saturday and just ate the last one today, Thursday.
I don't really have a recipe for the filling, but what I did, more or less, was: brown an onion in butter, then saute about a pound and a half of finely chopped mushrooms with a splash of wine and some thyme, then stir in a spoonful or two of sour cream to bind it together and salt to taste. I happened to have some olives around and chopped up about 1/3 c. to put on top.

Galette dough
1 c. whole wheat flour
1 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 t. salt
12 T cold, unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1/3–1/2 c. ice water

Preheat the oven to 425F. Mix flour and salt together. Cut in the butter with a pastry cutter, two knives, or your hands, leaving some pea-sized pieces. Sprinkle the ice water over by the tablespoonful and toss until you can bring the dough together into a ball. Press it into a disc and refrigerate for 15 minutes.

Divide the dough into 6 equal parts and roll or pat into a circle roughly 8" in diameter. Spoon 1/6th of the filling into the center and spread out to about an inch from the edge. Sprinkle chopped olives on top of the mushrooms and drizzle with walnut or olive oil. Fold the edges of the dough over the mushrooms, creasing every inch or so. Bake until crust is golden, about 20–25 minutes.

2010-04-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Saturday morning, mostly because I was hoping that their lilacs would be blooming (and also because it's free admission from 10–12). They weren't, but plenty of other stuff was.

I was particularly intrigued by the variety of green flowers in bloom:

I liked that this tree looks like it's draped in cobwebs. This is the tree Miss Havisham would picnic under.

These seem to be the only cherry blossom-related photos I took. Because I'm, like, so dark.

Pretty color! And in focus!

Going out and looking at things without a particular agenda is one of my favorite things to do. It refills my creative coffers in a way that nothing else quite does; I actually figured out a way around a problem in one of my writing projects while I was walking around. And if I hadn't been there, I would have missed the way the sun was hitting these blossoms. And that would have been a pity.

Rais(ing vegetables on) the roof

2010-04-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as part of a Crop Mob, I spent four hours doing some work at Eagle St. Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint. It's exactly what it sounds like — a farm on the roof of a warehouse in an industrial corner of Brooklyn, right on the East River. The soil is 4–7" deep up there and they're growing pretty much everything, plus introducing chickens and bees in the next few weeks. I used to live about a block and a half away and moved just before they started getting a lot of publicity last summer. I've been paying attention in a vague kind of way since then and was pretty excited to have an opportunity to get up there and see the operation for myself.
There were a lot of volunteers, maybe 25 or so, so we split into small groups and I started off sorting through rubble at an empty lot next door to find whole bricks that they were going to use for something (planters, rumor had it). I didn't have my camera on me at that point, but it felt a bit like being in the opening scene of Law + Order, like we were about to unearth a body at any moment. No one I was working with thought that was funny.
Then we went up to the roof and planted a couple of rows of lettuce. The soil that they use on the roof is mixed with a fair bit of gravel and shale to keep it less dense and, therefore, less heavy, so we brushed the gravel off the surface and made it as level as possible before making the furrows and winnowing in the seeds. Then I went back downstairs and helped assemble trays for the beehives.
I've been having major garden envy lately, since half of the people I follow on twitter and/or whose blogs are read are in a planning/planting frenzy. I loved getting a look at the place and getting some dirt under my nails, and I left kind of in awe of Annie Novak, the farmer. She was doing a million things at once all day — herding volunteers, mixing seeds, teaching people how to do all kinds of things, checking on the people who were working with the compost, being gorgeous and warm and friendly, talking about why she had chosen the particular seeds she had and how she balances the plants that take nitrogen from the soil versus the ones that put it back in, and paying attention to and signing off on every stage of everything that happened. Completely amazing.

Mmmm, fleshy petioles....

2010-04-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

I love rhubarb. I've loved rhubarb since I was a wee Stephanie who used to sit at our kitchen table every spring, dipping the end of a stalk from our backyard rhubarb patch in a little dish of sugar, gnawing on it, dipping again, and working my way up. I was utterly fascinated — still am, really, if I take the time to think about it — by the fact that the very same plant is both poisonous and delicious. My adult self loves the very strict seasonality of it, that it's not really popular enough for anyone to bother making it available year-round, and so its scarcity makes me appreciate it more fully. I also love the flavor; even more than a sweet or salt tooth, I have a pretty serious taste for all things tart and sour. I even like it raw, a few thin slices to whet my appetite if I'm chopping some up for another purpose.

Michelle and I had a bit of a get-out-of-my-head moment last week when she emailed to say that she was thinking about infusing some vodka with rhubarb and I had been thinking about the same thing. I didn't have any vodka at home and wasn't going to be anywhere where I could get the really cheap stuff — plastic jug and all — and I found this recipe for rhubarb syrup that I thought would be nice to have on hand for mixing with seltzer or making whatever the rhubarb equivalent of a kir royale is.

Also, it really couldn't be easier: boil some rhubarb with sugar and water for 20 minutes, then strain.
The solids that are left behind after straining were a little flat-tasting, I thought, though a splash of vanilla and the juice of half a lemon fixed that easily enough. You could use it anywhere you'd use jam or fruit butter, but I can't really imagine doing anything but pairing it with the rest of the ricotta ice cream in my freezer, because HOLY HAMMER OF THOR THIS WAS GOOD.
I haven't tried the syrup in anything yet (no seltzer in the house last night), so I can't really say anything about it other than it's super sweet and I'd probably halve the sugar next time, but look how gorgeous it is:

Fun with math

2010-04-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

Best to-do list ever.

2010-04-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

A little ambitious, sure.

I knew I was going to be spending most of the weekend inside, working on a freelance editing project, and that I wouldn't have much time to do anything else, but I cooking actually works really well with this kind of project. I need to get up regularly to stretch and make sure I'm focusing my eyes on things that are more than 18" in front of my face, so checking on something in the oven or mixing up a quick batch of proto-ice cream is the perfect thing to get me out of the chair. Plus, I wanted to make sure I had plenty of good things to eat to make up for working all weekend.

The ricotta ice cream came about because of a conversation with some friends over Michelle's outstanding homemade strawberry ice cream. We were talking about our favorite places in the city to get ice cream (fwiw, Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory and Il Laboratorio del Gelato are mine) and I mentioned that I had heard about a combination dry cleaners/gelato place in Bensonhurst that was supposed to be amazing. It turned out that it was actually a tanning salon/gelato place and that it's now closed, but my friend Rose's response to that post ("Ricotta ice cream! OMG") got me thinking. And then it got me googling. And then it got me, well, stirring and whisking; there's no actual cooking involved.
Ricotta Ice Cream
adapted from The Traveler's Lunchbox

1 c. heavy cream
7–9 T sugar
1 lb-ish container of the best ricotta you can find (the stuff I got at Sahadi's was a little under a pound, made somewhere nearby, and listed as its ingredients 'whole milk, starter, trace of salt')
1 c. milk
zest from 1 lemon
1/3 c. honey
1/4 t. cinnamon (you could increase this, even double it; I didn't want it to overwhelm the ricotta, but I couldn't even taste it)

Whisk the cream until soft peaks form, adding sugar gradually. In a separate bowl, whisk the other ingredients together, then fold the cream into the ricotta mixture gently. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight. In the morning, stir gently if the cream has risen to the top, and run through your ice cream maker.

I was really, really happy with how this turned out. And the couple of people who stopped by over the course of the weekend who tasted it were also pretty pleased. It tastes like a frozen Italian cheesecake. The ricotta is pleasantly grainy on the tongue, the honey is a gentle, earthy-sweet undertone, and the little bits of lemon brighten it right the hell up.

Saturday afternoon, I roasted a chicken, which is something I've never managed to do well — until now. I was always so paranoid about cooking it all the way though that it ended up drying out. I followed Deb's directions for the Zuni Cafe chicken and even though the skin totally ripped both times I had to flip the bird over, it was easily the best chicken I'd ever made, all burnished skin and succulent, rosemary-scented meat. A friend stopped by for a late lunch after her shift at the Coop and we did a pretty good job of ripping the carcass to pieces after I snapped a quick photo.
Later in the evening, I took the remaining meat off the bones and made stock, which, honestly, is one of the homiest, coziest, making-love-out-of-nothing-at-all activities I know of. I've never thought my homemade stock was anything special when I've done it in the past (bone-to-water ratio off, maybe?), but this batch was kind of out of this world. I'm putting it in the freezer for now, but I think there's going to be some Very Serious Risotto in my near future.

I didn't make the stuffed mushrooms, since they were going to be my contribution to an Easter brunch I had to miss because I was still working on Sunday, but book club is meeting at my place this week, so I'll make them then. Ditto the rhubarb upside-down cake. I did make the hibiscus lemonade though, sort of. I had picked up some dried hibiscus at Sahadi's and brewed some strong tea from it (1/2 c. hibiscus to 3 c. water), added 2/3 c. lemon juice (three lemons' worth), 1/4 c. sugar and filled the rest of the pitcher with water. It's more just like lemony hibiscus tea, but very tasty and somewhere between neutral and very good for you. I didn't take a dedicated picture of it, but you can see it in the photo of my workspace here:

In addition to chicken and ice cream, I like beverages and tidy piles of paper.

Off the wheel

2010-03-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

The initial spinning of these three lovelies happened more than a decade ago and the skeined singles, two of the blackberry wool/mohair and one of that lovely, shiny Lincoln, had been hanging out in my stash since before I moved to New York. I had always sort of vaguely planned to use them for lace, but had no idea what kind of yardage I had and don't love working with single-ply yarns, mostly for durability reasons, but also because they can be kind of unpredictable, biasing and torquing at the slightest provocation.

I finally got around to plying them a few weeks ago and they're back in the stash now, sportweight/dk instead of lace/fingering, and with yardage calculated (280 for the blackberry, 192 for the Lincoln). I'm thinking mittens possibly, or a small scarf.

Two good things.

2010-03-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

1. Cleaning out the fridge made delicious: two slices of bacon, chopped and cooked until crisp. Leftover roasted potatoes and garlic heated through in the grease, then shredded brussels sprouts added and cooked until barely tender.

2. A new sweater for spring. Loosely based on this pattern, but with a few changes to make it a little less sporty: cabled ribbing and different patterning when I get to the yoke (probably a simple lace). It's an unusual color for me, this orangey pink, but I like it.

This morning

2010-03-28T07:15:00.001-07:00

-eating steel-cut oats cooked with dried cherries and blueberries
-reading Sophie Hannah's excellent The Dead Lie Down
-waiting for someone to pick up four bags of yarn I don't need/want
-getting ready for a haircut, so my ponytail quits following me around like a sad, possibly unhealthy creature I just can't shake
-thinking about an old friend whose mother's funeral is this afternoon

This weekend

2010-03-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

I'll be:

—eating this particular dish as often as possible: soba noodles, sauteed greens with crushed red pepper, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and sesame oil, and a runny egg on top.
—going through my yarn stash, getting rid of anything I don't love passionately and/or have a specific and immediate plan for. I listed several large bags of yarn on the Materials for the Arts site, which maintains a database of art supplies and other items people want to donate. Nonprofits can browse the list and get in touch with the donors directly. Within a couple of days I was contacted by a very lovely woman who runs an after-school program in East Harlem and is going to come take it all away on Sunday. My donation includes all of the Cotton Classic I was using for that lace skirt I posted a few days ago. I got to the waistband last night, tried it on, and immediately starting unraveling it. It wasn't flattering at all and wouldn't have been comfortable in hot weather, the fabric was too heavy and thick. So: gone.

—working on another Just Enough Ruffles scarf for a friend's birthday. This is some laceweight mohair I've had for at least a decade. It's nice stuff, but needs to either be used or disposed of. The color isn't especially flattering on me, but it'll be gorgeous on the brown-eyed brunette it's bound for. Sadly, when I just went to find a website for the company that made the yarn, British Mohair Spinners, one of the top hits was for a site called Derelict Places on which some dude recounts being chased out of their abandoned mill by junkies.
—reading. My TBR pile has gotten really out of hand lately, but there's nothing on the table there that I *don't* want to read. I've just started listing books on Goodreads again after ignoring it for at least a year, so feel free to friend me if you're active there.

Argh. Just...argh.

2010-03-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

This morning, I picked up Kilronan to do a few rows while I had my coffee and found this rassin' frassin' miscrossed cable:
Then I looked at the matching cable on the other side of the center panel and that one was screwed up too — and differently, to boot.
Dagnabbit.

"And I was just sitting there. With my lentils."

2010-03-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

That was the last line of a self-deprecating story I was telling at a friend's birthday party over the weekend about going to a park near my office on one of the warm, sunny days last week and being literally the only person there without an accompanying stroller and the pointed looks I was getting from everyone. The experience at least reaffirmed my belief that I don't have to worry about becoming a pedophile because, among plenty of other reasons, it turns out that I feel really super self-conscious and weird being alone when surrounded by strangers and their children even when I'm in a public place I have every right to be in.

But, unlike judgey looks from the wives of hedge-fund whatever-people-who-work-with-hedge-funds-are-called (managers? traders? executors?), I like lentils a great deal. They're cheap and they're good for you and they turn nitrogen from the air into protein, which is practically magic and therefore awesome. And they can be delicious when prepared with even a modicum of attention. Lentils combine with all sorts of things in interesting ways, providing endless variations on the kind of one-bowl dishes I like to eat for lunch and useful ways to do something with those herbs that are about to die or the last little bit of cheese left over from something. I cook all of the components separately, which sounds fussy (and is a bit, if I'm being honest here), but is worth it to have a variety of textures. I've gotten in the habit of cooking late Sunday afternoon/early Sunday evening and none of the elements really take that much attention, so it's easy enough to watch some Battlestar Galactica at the same time.
Lentil-based lunch dish #54
1 1/2 c. lentils, rinsed and picked over -- I used dark green French lentils because they have a peppery flavor I like and hold their shape when cooked
rosemary sprig
1 1/2 c. barley
2 handfuls chopped walnuts
olive oil
2 onions, halved lengthwise and sliced thinly
lots of chopped greens -- 4 c.? more? I used a mixture of kale and broccoli raab and kept throwing it in the pan until no more would fit
a few ounces of sharp, salty cheese, crumbled -- I used ricotta salata here because the feta at the coop is weirdly bland

Put the lentils and rosemary in a saucepan with plenty of water, at least 6 cups. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer until lentils are tender. Drain them and put them in a large bowl. I don't bother washing the pan here and put it right back on the stove to cook the barley in at least 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer until tender. Drain and add to the lentils in the bowl. Drizzle with a bit of olive oil and salt liberally. It will need it.

Toast the walnuts in a dry skillet until they're fragrant. Set them aside. Add olive oil to the skillet, then the onions and some salt. Cook on low heat, stirring occasionally, until they're brown and jammy. Don't rush this; the caramelized onions add a ton of flavor. Take the onions out with tongs, leaving as much oil in the pan as possible, and add to the lentils and barley. Add the greens to the skillet, stirring to coat with the oil and cooking until tender. Add to the lentils/barley/onions mixture, stirring to combine.

Divide the mixture into five containers and top each with walnuts and crumbled cheese.

Urban foraging

2010-03-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I had the pleasure of taking an urban foraging tour with Wildman Steve Brill, which is something that I've been meaning to do for years now. We met in Forest Park, in Queens, which is a part of town I'd never been to before (it's nice), and walked around for a couple of hours as he pointed out stuff we could eat and we tasted things and took samples and talked about what to make with all of this stuff and what the plants we were tasting would look like in a few months' time and why the Parks Department's official position on foraging is firmly opposed (lawsuits. duh.). It was grand. Since the edible foodstuffs available in city parks changes so much throughout the growing season, I'm going to do a few more tours at different places in the city as the spring and summer go on, both with Steve and with Leda Meredith, who I met a week or so ago at a mutual friend's and liked tremendously.
The spoils, from the left:
1. Black birch. The pulpy layer under the bark contains oil of wintergreen and you can make a nice minty tea by steeping a handful of twigs for 20 minutes. Mine was pretty weak, but I think that I just have no sense of what a quart of water looks like. When Steve was passing around a piece for everyone to smell, he asked if anyone recognized the scent. I blurted out, "Necco wafers!" which is both true and kind of embarrassing when you're surrounded by natural-foods evangelists.
2. Field garlic. Looks like chives, tastes onion/garlic-y. This time of the year, the root (not pictures) is mild, like a scallion, but develops a stronger flavor as it grows.
3. Spice bush. It smells really lovely and can be steeped for tea. Once the berries ripen, they can be ground and used like allspice, presumably after being dried. I have a note here that the tea is good for fevers.
4. Garlic mustard. The leaves are spicy and bitter, the root tastes like horseradish.
5. Sassafras, the root of which is used to make root beer. I didn't get to Prospect Park yesterday because I was busy doing laundry and reading an entire book start to finish and taking a spectacular nap, but I want to grab some more and try infusing vodka with it. It's very strong; Steve said the size piece I have up there could be used over and over to make tea or a base for root beer. 'Sassafras' also happens to be tremendous fun to say and, after I told her all about my foraging adventures this weekend, possibly the name of my friend Karen's new cat.
6. Sweet cicely, the root of which is good raw or cooked and has a nice anise flavor. Steve swore up and down that it's delicious in oatmeal.
We also found plenty of young dandelion leaves, but I didn't bother taking a sample of those because I eat those all the time anyway, anywhere I'd use spinach.

Second brunch at home

2010-03-21T11:34:00.001-07:00

Sauteed Brussels sprouts with an over-medium egg on top.

Brunch at home

2010-03-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

Steel-cut oats with caramelized pears

What I've been reading...

2010-03-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

[edited to add: Blogger wouldn't publish the post with links -- kept giving me weird html error messages. You're on your own to find them now, but I trust that you'll be fine.]

Going Bovine, Libba Bray. They announced that she won the Printz Award while I was in the middle of it, so I had some external validation for my enjoyment of the book, not that that matters overmuch. (I just like being right.) It’s a quest story, a twist on Don Quixote, that's both bittersweet and wacky: teenage guy gets diagnosed with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, has a visitation from a punk angel while he’s in the hospital, then busts out and goes on a road trip with a dwarf and a sentient yard gnome on a mission to save the world from (I think) getting sucked into a black hole.

A Bad Day for Sorry, Sophie Littlefield. Stella Hardesty is in her 50s, lives in rural Missouri, and killed her abusive husband several years before the book opens. She now has a business where she basically beats up other women’s abusive husbands and boyfriends for them. Also, she runs a sewing machine shop. Littlefield manages to write a book that's quirky-charming without ever veering into quirky-contrived and writes a heroine who is one of my favorite things, a salty broad.

In the Garden of Iden, Kage Baker. Time-traveling cyborgs. Forbidden love. The Spanish Inquisition. An extraordinary narrative voice. Botany. For the love of all that’s holy, read this book.

Faithful Place, Tana French. The third in her phenomenal Dublin-set crime series, this time written from the perspective of Frank, the undercover detective. I actually found this the least compelling of the three, partly because he’s dealing with a cold case and partly because he’s a more closely guarded character than the other two narrators and I felt held at arm’s length a bit. But even the least compelling of her three books is still better than 98% of what I read.
This seems like as good a time as any to mention that I finish less than a quarter of the books I start, maybe less than a tenth. Life’s too short.

In the Land of White Death, Valerian Albanov. I’m indulging a fancy for stories about polar exploration; this is the first I’ve finished. It’s a first-person account of a doomed 1912 Arctic expedition out of Russia, based on Albanov’s diaries. Their ship was locked in ice for more than a year, so he took 12 people with him and decides to walk/kayak back to civilization. Two of them survived, the ship was never seen again.

Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi. Awesome post-apocalyptic fantasy. World without oil, protagonist is a young teen boy, Nailer, who works on a salvage crew, crawling through the ductwork of abandoned oil tankers to collect copper wire and the staples affixing it to the sides of the ducts. He also has a terrible father who is a criminal and a drug addict and manipulative and MEAN. After a storm, Nailer finds a wreck with a girl alive on it and has to decide if he should kill her and keep all of her stuff, becoming the wealthiest person around, or go on the run with her, being chased lots of people who want to kill them, including his father. Outstanding world-building and pacing and intense action scenes. There were parts where I caught myself quite literally holding my breath and had to remind myself that it was a first-person YA story – the narrator would come out okay.

The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin. This book deserves its own post when I’m feeling more eloquent, but for now: She’s a genius.

In which I mostly talk in math

2010-03-16T13:21:00.001-07:00

I felt like knitting some elaborate lace two weeks or so ago and have always loved the Peri's Parasol pattern from the second(?) Barbara Walker treasury — the red one. I like the way it naturally scallops at the bottom and just looks, in general, fancy. Since shaping within complicated lace patterning wasn't something I had a particular hankering for and I didn't really want to knit a scarf and I've been thinking ahead to what I'll be wearing this summer AND I had a bag full of Cotton Classic that hasn't worked for any sweater project I've tried it for, I decided on a skirt.

Technicalish knit-babble: I took my hip measurement, added a few inches for ease, multiplied that number (42) times my gauge (5 stitches = 1") and got an initial number: 210. The lace pattern had a repeat of 22 stitches +1, so I scaled up and cast on 221. Normally, I would have worked in the round since I was making a tube, but this pattern is, um, patterned on both sides, which is a lot harder to translate from working flat and, frankly, I didn't want to do the work. So I cast my 221 stitches onto a #8 needle, which was a size larger than I knew I was going to use for the solid part of the skirt. The larger needle will make the lower portion fuller enough to give the piece some shape, again, without me doing any further calculation or interrupting the pattern. After five repeats, which is enough to bring the lace part of what I'm intending to be a knee-length skirt up to about mid-thigh, I switched to 10x1 rib, #7 needles, and working in the round, knitting two together at the join on the first round. I knit 2" even after changing patterns.

Then I starting decreasing for the waist. I have about a 12" difference between my hips and waist, but decided to reduce by 11" so it would sit slightly below my natural waist. I was looking to get rid of 55 sts, but made it 54 so that it would be divisible by the four decrease points of the darts, so nine decrease rounds. Since I had about 8" of skirt that I wanted to happen while I was decreasing and my row gauge was 7 rows to the inch (so 56 rows total), the math worked out to decrease every 4 rows. Once I finish all of that, I'll knit a casing at the top and insert elastic.

Crepes

2010-03-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

I've been on a bit of a crepe kick lately, making them three times in the last week. One of those times, I forgot to add the egg until I was halfway through eating them and I can say that they're definitely better with the egg, but I was kind of amazed how not-bad they were without it. This is the recipe I use for myself, which is halved from the one in How to Cook Everything. I actually can put away a whole recipe's worth without a tremendous amount of difficulty, but then I pretty much have to lay around on the floor for about four hours after I'm done, and which gets awfully boring. A nonstick pan is worth its weight in gold in this case, though not required. If you're using a regular pan, you'll have to butter it pretty heavily between each crepe.

Crepes
makes 7-10

1/2 c. flour
pinch of salt
just over 1/2 c. milk (original recipe called for 1 1/4 c.)
1 egg
1 T. butter, melted and cooled
Whisk the flour and salt together, then whisk in the milk, egg, and butter, separately and in succession. Using a 1/4 c. measuring cup to mete out the batter, make crepes in a nonstick frying pan, turning each crepe over when the top appears dry.

I am a devotee of The One True Filling: sour cream with either strawberry or apricot jam, but I understand that other people occasionally like to branch out, to which I can only say, knock yourselves out, suckers!

2010-03-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

I have to confess, I haven't been feeling particularly inspired lately, but I know that one thing that tends to perk me up when I'm feeling doldrum-y and lackluster is to revisit topics and projects that I would usually get excited about, like...

...Naturalism
I love the natural history of the Victorian era, that attitude of exploration and sense of wonder at just what the hell is out there in the world. And I love the cabinet of curiosity-style quasi-organization — sea urchins spines next to volcano dust! — exhibited in this collection of microscope slides.

I love natural history in general, learning about something in the world I never knew existed, like this totally bananas Stone Forest in Madagascar. (sidenote: why am I not going on scientific expeditions to Madagascar? as always, I blame you.)
And I am completely head over heels for regions of the world no one knows much about, where new species are discovered all the time (I'm looking at you, Greater Mekong region of southeast Asia!), so reading about the lemurs and geckos and insects that have adapted to live in this landscape really gets my nerd on.

{smooch}

...Food
Plain frozen yogurt (a container of drained tart yogurt, 1/4 c. sugar, slug of vanilla, run through ice cream maker), shown here drizzled with pomegranate molasses

Smitten Kitchen's mushroom bourguinon over egg noodles, which was really delicious. This might be my new go-to dinner during cool weather for non-fancy company who don't eat a ton of meat but are okay with beef broth. Actually, that description could work for pretty much anyone I ever cook for, but I'm already planning to make this in early April for a good friend who will be coming back to New York after having been in Bangladesh for a couple of months (presumably) not eating delicious French-style mushroom stew. I think the only change I made to Deb's recipe was to use a mixture of portobello and crimini mushrooms and to add the pearl onions right at the beginning so they braised in the wine/broth mixture. Also, I didn't reserve the mushroom stems for another use; I chopped 'em up fine and tossed 'em in with the carrots. And I used about twice as much broth as the recipe called for because I like a lot of broth, so it doesn't sit on top of the noodles the way hers did. This is what passes for following recipes exactly where I come from.

These outstanding glazed maple cookies. I'm amazed that I didn't eat all of the dough before I got any of them baked, since I kept pinching off a bit every time I glanced at the bowl. I actually did follow this recipe exactly, other than flattening the cookie balls with my palm instead of a glass. Edited to add: The second time I made these, I made a couple of changes that worked really well. First, I baked them for 9 minutes instead of 12-14, at which point they still looked raw on top, but were golden on the bottom and perfect once they cooled. Also, when reducing the syrup for the glaze, I added a bit of heavy cream (maybe a few tablespoons?) and cooked it until it was the consistency of honey. It ended up being much more like caramel, texture-wise — smooth and glossy and, well, creamy — instead of the original, thinner glaze. It was less than ideal for transporting them, since so much of the glaze came off on the parchment paper between layers, but no one seemed to mind.

Fresh sauerkraut
I'm using the directions from here, as well as the advice of a recent acquaintance who's a preservation and fermentation expert, and experimenting with fermenting my own sauerkraut. It's been going for about a week now. I tasted it a few days ago and it had started getting a little tangy already. I don't like dill, so I have caraway seeds, cloves and junipers berries in there.

I didn't make it myself, but this bowl of cheddar grits with roasted root vegetables and a deep-fried soft-cooked egg deserves a moment in the sun. (from Bark)

...Making Stuff
I finally finished those damn gloves. They're gorgeous, but the knitting was so fiddly and annoying that I don't think I'll be able to full embrace them until next year.

I finished the Cardigan of My Dreams, but it needs a belt, so am holding off on taking a modeled photo until I finish that. I'm pretty happy with it, especially with the fit through the shoulders and back. I need to remember to be careful about the width of the upper back going forward — narrowing it by a few inches did wonders for getting a good fit.

Late winter/early spring is the time of year when I always start thinking about sewing and bemoaning my lack of skill and making half-assed attempts and getting frustrated, but I really do think I may make some progress this time. I attempted a muslin of this Built by Wendy dress, but it didn't fit (good through the waist, but too tight at the hips and shoulders), so I traced off the pattern again, combining two sizes. I have a couple of Betsy Ross skirt patterns that I would actually feel fine working up without a muslin — I'm perfectly comfortable with darts and interfacing — but I will have to conquer my nemesis the zipper [shakes fist]. And my other nemesis, being different sizes in my different parts.

Some things never change

2010-02-28T20:13:00.001-08:00

I went through a phase when I was a kid where every night before I went to sleep, I would get ready in case my bed turned into a spaceship. So I would carefully arrange the following items under the covers before I climbed in: a hairbrush, a couple of stuffed animals, several pairs of underwear and a pile of books. I knew I probably wouldn't end up needing it all; it just comforted me to know that should I be unmoored, I'd at least have clean undies and something to read.

So it just seems natural to me to bring three books and a blogging-enabled phone to bed for what will likely be less than an hour of reading. It's all there if I need it.

In which I catch up a bit, with fewer photos than would have been ideal

2010-02-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

Recent kitchen successes:

Lamb and prune meatballs with Moroccan tomato sauce from Pink of Perfection. I loved everything about this dish. It's both familiar and exotic, takes a lot less time start to finish than you might think, and perfumes your kitchen in spectacular fashion. Other than leaving out the cilantro, I made it exactly as written. I don't love couscous, so ate it over orzo and wished I'd made twice as much sauce.

Caramelized tofu from 101 Cookbooks. I've probably made close to a dozen batches since she posted the recipe. The version I've settled on varies slightly from Heidi's; I start by sauteing garlic and red pepper flakes in olive oil, add some sliced tofu (for a single serving, I use about a third of a package of extra-firm tofu, sliced pretty thin) and brown it on both sides. Then I throw three spoonfuls of dark brown sugar into the pan, let it melt, stir it around to coat the tofu, and scoop the solids (tofu and garlic) into a bowl, leaving as much sauce in the pan as I can. Then I throw several tongs-ful of chopped greens into the pan, stir to coat and cook them for a few minutes, then eat with the tofu on top.

I've started keeping a big container of cleaned, chopped leafy greens in the fridge for quick meals — at the moment, there are brussels sprouts, baby bok choy and spinach in there. It just takes a few minutes to saute some, drizzle a little soy sauce and spicy sesame oil over and throw an egg on top. I've never really liked lettuce salads, especially as a meal, but darker, cooked greens are one of my favorite things.

Recent crafty endeavors:

I finally picked up the second glove of the pair I started back in November(?). I don't like knitting gloves, with their stupid, fiddly little fingers — TEN OF THEM! — but I do want to wear them, so I've been forcing myself to work on it for at least 15 minutes each morning. I should be able to finish this weekend, since I just have half a pinkie and a thumb left to go.

I bought a set of the cryptozoology connect-the-dot embroidery sets from Leethal a month or two ago, and have been having fun playing around with them. I'm doing all of the outlines first, then will go back and figure out how I want to embellish them, which will likely involve learning new stitches, since I really only know the basics. This turned out to be Cthulhu:

I finally got around to buying cosmicpluto's Just Enough Ruffles scarf pattern when Ravelry was in the throes of Haiti-relief donation and am kicking myself for having taken so long. It's a great pattern, firmly in the "modern wearables" camp, and quick and fun to knit to boot. I made this one out of some handspun, hand-dyed Romney yarn that I spun and dyed when I was unemployed a few years ago and just got around to plying a month or so ago. I started it for myself, but as I worked on it, I realized it would look better on my friend Zoe and, as it turned out, I was right.

I knit this Pimlico Shrug (link to Dr. Steph's blog, with photos of it both flat and on a body with front and back views) at least a year ago, but never wore it because I did such a bad job of sewing the sleeves in; the seam was much too tight and cut into my forearms. So I finally got around to removing the sleeves, unraveling them, picking up stitches around the armholes and knitting the sleeves down to the cuffs. Completely flexible join, infinitely more wearable (except that the construction means it won't fit under a coat and, since it's made from my handspun wool/mohair, it's too warm a garment to wear for most non-coat weather. Still, it is READY for cool spring days).

In which I talk briefly about clothes

2010-02-19T10:39:00.000-08:00

I adore these outfits from the Leanne Marshall runway show. The fanciful skirt/no-nonsense top combination is one that I really love, but am always a little afraid of cocking up when attempting a real-world execution.

Walking through Brooklyn on a snowy evening

2010-02-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

I had to go to work yesterday, despite Having Weather, but it did afford me the chance to take some pictures on my way home.

Faceless Snowman of Nihilism and Despair, Gowanus:

We're-Zoned-For-the-Good-Schools Snowman, Park Slope brownstone
Anti-gravity at work:

snow!

2010-02-10T07:49:00.000-08:00

Cardigan of my dreams

2010-01-26T12:19:00.000-08:00

I can't tell you how often I'm getting dressed or thinking about what I'm going to wear to some event and reach for my fingertip-length, shawl-collared, wraparound black cardigan — only to realize that I don't own one. I'd been looking for the exact right pattern for months and finally decided to suck it up and spec it out. The schematics from this pattern came in handy to avoid having to reinvent the wheel, since I liked the general silhouette and fit. I narrowed the upper back by several inches and adjusted the fronts so they'd overlap even without the ribbing.
For the sleeves, I'm employing one of my favorite tricksy knitting techniques: Barbara Walker's seamless, set-in sleeve caps from the top down. It's spelled out in Knitting From the Top and is GENIUS for perfectly fitted set-in sleeves. Basically, you pick up stitches around the armhole (she tells you to figure out how many you need and pick up exactly that many. I pick up 3 out of every 4 stitches and then work a round to adjust the number — less crazy-making, less chance of gaps or bulges) and then work short rows. Sounds complicated, but isn't. Granted, even with some interesting techniques thrown in, black stockinette isn't the most thrilling knitting experience a girl can have, but I want this damn sweater — this exact one — and I will have it. The end.

The most important something of the something

2010-01-19T14:29:00.000-08:00

I'm not a breakfast person. I need to be up for a couple of hours before I'm interested in anything but coffee. Just. Not. Hungry. That said, I'm aware of the health benefits that come from starting the day with something nutritionally sound. So, I've compromised by making myself a smoothie before I leave the house every day. All the advantages of breakfast, with all the not-breakfast-ness of a beverage.

I start with frozen fruit, the same amount of each every day:
Then some ground flax seed and yogurt. I've started making my own yogurt, which sounds all time-consuming and hippie-ish, but it's really not any more taxing than making a cup of tea.
Cover it all with calcium-enriched orange juice:
Blend, and take it into a room with natural light:

Smoothie
1 banana, fresh or frozen
6 frozen strawberries
6 frozen mango chunks
2 handfuls of frozen blueberries
2 T flaxmeal
1/2 c or so of yogurt
orange juice to cover.

Blend. Drink. Feel smug about how awesome and health-supporting your habits are.

Homemade Yogurt
2 1/2 c. milk (any fat level works. as always, I'm a 1% girl.)
1 T. yogurt (the best you can buy for your first round. after that, just use some of your previous batch)

Bring the milk to a boil, then let it cool until you can hold your finger in it for 10 seconds (aka 110F). Put the yogurt in a small bowl and whisk in a little of the hot milk. Add the yogurt slurry to the rest of the milk and whisk. Pour it all into a glass jar, wrap it in a towel or old sweater and put it somewhere warm overnight. In the morning, stick it in the fridge. By afternoon, you'll have a jar full of incredibly fresh, perfectly perfect yogurt.

I've also been making large batches of steel-cut oats and portioning them out for the week, then bringing one to work every day and heating it up in the late morning. Even though I love it the regular way with maple syrup or brown sugar, a bit of butter and milk, I've gotten kind of addicted to this recipe from The Kitchn for oatmeal with dried apricots and buttermilk. I just do it on the stovetop though instead of in a CrockPot, and even though the write-up thinks it's too sour, I love the (pretty mild, really) tanginess of the buttermilk. As a matter of fact, I eat it with extra buttermilk on top. And I add some ground flax seeds, since I seem to do that to everything I eat these days. I love it with the apricots, which swell into jammy, juicy little nuggets when cooked, but I'm looking forward to trying other fruit too -- picked up some dried cherries and blueberries yesterday just for this. Ground or chopped nuts would be nice too.
Oatmeal with Apricots and Buttermilk
1 cup steel-cut oats
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup dried apricots, snipped into small pieces
3 1/2 cups water
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons wheat bran (optional)
2 T flaxmeal

Bring 3 cups of water to a boil. Add all of the dry ingredients and stir. Pour in the buttermilk and vanilla, then another half cup of water (gets every drop of buttermilk out of the measuring cup). Turn the heat down and cook for 30 minutes. Serve with extra buttermilk and sugar.

Finally, a weekend at home

2010-01-18T12:02:00.000-08:00

I hadn't had an unstructured weekend by myself like this in a while, and I really needed it. I kicked things off by going out for Thai food in Queens with some friends Friday night. They ordered for the table before I got there, so I'm not entirely sure what we had (range of appetizers, at least a couple of curries, several vegetable dishes, desserts) but there was a ton of food and everything was fantastic.

I finally got around to weaving in the ends on this handspun sweater. (I sewed and cut the steek too, but that deserves a post of its own.)

I made my new favorite lunch, 101 Cookbooks' caramelized tofu on shredded brussels sprouts. I left out the pecans and cilantro and added some crushed red pepper. One pan, a handful of ingredients, crispy, sweet-spicy-sprouty deliciousness.

And a big batch of spaghetti carbonara for dinner on Saturday. No real recipe: while the pasta cooks, crisp up some bacon, add some garlic and white wine. In a bowl, beat a couple of eggs and some parmesan together. Drain the pasta, mix the hot bacon/wine into it, then add the egg mixture and stir very briskly until the heat of the pasta cooks the eggs into the silkiest, dreamiest sauce imaginable. I threw some frozen peas in with the pasta when it was almost done for a little extra flavor and texture.

Not pictured: a batch of sadly but truly inedible bread (too much other stuff — wheat germ, bran, flaxmeal, ground oats — not enough flour). I didn't actually try to hammer a nail with it, but I bet I could have. And I made a big batch of oatmeal to bring to work for breakfast all week, and a big batch of lentil/barley soup with all of the vegetables that were circling the drain in the fridge (carrots, red cabbage, fennel, spinach, mushrooms) that I portioned out for lunches.

It had been a while since I had taken a long walk with a camera and since I needed ("needed;" I always wince internally when I use that word in this context) some things from Ikea, I burned some shoe leather trekking over to Red Hook on Sunday.

And back at the home front, I haz a cat now. She came with the new apartment (long story).
Internet, meet Luz. She is in no small part evil and sometimes tries to steal my soul when I'm falling asleep, but I like her awfully.

Creative destruction

2010-01-13T11:20:00.000-08:00

As I was packing and unpacking around this last move, I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I had a lot of handknit sweaters I never wear. Some didn't fit my person, some didn't fit my lifestyle (mostly by being too warm), and some I just plain didn't like anymore. I gave a couple to a church-basement thrift shop in the neighborhood, but a few were worth salvaging for the yarn, which is how I went from this (double-stranded cashmere/silk, hot as blazes):
to this:
And from this (weird poochiness at the chest/neck, no matter how many times I steamed or blocked it):
to this (Karabella Magritte, their dk cashmere/merino):And from this (handspun alpaca/silk, not wholly comfortable next to the skin, plus I knit this back before I knew much about the finer points of fit, so the neck wasn't shaped at all and I was always pulling at it):
to this:I know it's not for everyone, but I find ripping out something that didn't work — even years after the fact — to be incredibly satisfying. Fresh starts are my favorite.

Quinoa is my new favorite.

2010-01-07T08:32:00.000-08:00

Absolutely simple and adaptable veggies and quinoa

1 onion, chopped
olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 t. coriander
1 t. tumeric
2 t. cumin
1 med. sweet potato, peeled and chopped into roughly 1" pieces
half a head of cauliflower, chopped
juice of one lemon

1 c. quinoa
2 c. water

Brown the onion in olive oil, then add garlic and spices and stir for 30 seconds or so, until fragrant. Add the sweet potato to the pan and cook until about half done. Add the caulifower and half a cup of water or so. Cover and let cook until vegetables are done to your taste.

In the meantime, put the water on to boil, add the quinoa and simmer for 15 minutes. Add to the vegetables, squeeze a lemon over, and mix it all into a glorious, healthful mess.

This was enough for me for dinner last night and two lunch portions. Since quinoa has a a lot of protein on its own, I didn't add anything else, but if I were using a different grain, I would have thrown a can of garbanzo beans or black-eyed peas in at some point.

Sunday scarf

2010-01-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

I finished the sunday scarf (on Saturday, inappropriately enough) and would call myself medium-pleased with it.
A lot of the drapey and ruffly qualities were lost when I washed it (in the pattern, she warns not to block it, but it desperately needed to be washed and I didn't do anything more strenuous than soak, blot dry and lay out flat) The shape is on the long and narrow end of the spectrum even though I increased to 49 stitches instead of 36. I prefer my scarves to be wider and less long, but it's still very nice and comes to a fetching little point at the back.

I did happen to finish another scarf project on Sunday, which still needs to be blocked, but has been such a long-term off-again-on-again project (at least a year, likely closer to two) that I'm just thrilled to have it off the needles. Modified North Sea Shawl in Knitpicks Gloss.

Test

2009-12-29T13:58:00.001-08:00

Testing photo blog post from phone

My contacts seem to be reflecting the flash. This is how I'd look if I were eeeeeeeevil.