End of the Week and Other Tales
Bleeuurgghhh. I think that effectively describes yesterday and today. I don’t think I’ve gotten the flu, but I have certainly not been 100%. Yesterday I was pretty much a waste of humanity between the migraine, sinus headache (both at once, how lucky am I?) and accompanying aversions to light and food, and today I haven’t felt much better.
Today my lovely husband and I decided to do our taxes and clean out our filing cabinet. While we did decide to make the experience more palatable with the purchase of a shredder. It’s been kind of a walk down memory lane. We found our agreement with the broker who found us our first apartment in New York - she did a thorough job of ripping us virgin Manhattanites off. Our residency in that apartment lasted a whole four months.
Between that and saying goodbye to a friend over dinner the other night, my crafting has been at zero. Except if you count cooking. I decided to take Valentine’s Day as an excuse to cook something super gourmet and super bad for us, preferably something involving a lot of butter. Every holiday is required to be good for something, right?
Shallot-porcini mushroom-thyme-butter-wine mixture.
I decided Italian was the way to go, in this case Champagne Risotto with asparagus and proscuitto and a nice filet mignon with gorgonzola and porcini mushroom sauce. They’re Giada de Laurentiis’ recipes, and I really don’t see how the woman stays that thin making food like this. I’m pretty sure this food was illegal in several states, it was so good. Seriously rich. Oh, and did you know you can reconstitute dried porcinis in part balsamic vinegar? Nice.
Super ridiculously tasty food.
Since I’m on the topic of food, I also made some nice quinoa with sausage Tuesday. I’ve been experimenting with quinoa a lot lately. I like new grains. I’m also a fan of the grain in Ethiopian injera bread, but teff flour is hard to find. Too bad, too. Ethiopian food is my favorite kind of food. No jokes, please. I’ve heard them all.
I like how you can cook quinoa it in any kind of liquid and it soaks up flavor so well. I’ve tried combinations of white wine, sherry, apple cider vinegar, vegetable broth and chicken broth, and I haven’t been disappointed yet. If you have a Costco near you, they have this chicken sausage with fontina and spinach, which went really well with this recipe when sliced and baked.
This particular recipe is something I found at our local grocery, Central Market. They have awesome recipes. If you’re outside Texas, it’s a nice grocery store along the lines of Whole Foods, but I find it a lot more palatable. I live near the original Whole Foods, and while the store is nice, the atmosphere is not my favorite and it’s always really crowded.
If you haven’t tried quinoa before, I recommend it, it’s sort of a rice-ish grain, nutty in flavor. This recipe (after the break) is a good start, and can be made into a satisfying vegetarian meal easily. It does include a specialty sauce, but I’m okay with that because it’s of a brand I particularly like.
Give me some love!
Happy Valentine’s Day! It might be a made-up holiday, but can you really go wrong with a face like this? This is my best valentine, the most loving little creature ever.
How to Slip Stitch
So I just saved this tutorial from Bella Dia about how to make a slip knot.
It’s not that I haven’t made a slip knot before. It’s that I only do it once per project most of the time, so I forget, because I rarely bother to remember details I use infrequently. The solution is practice, but I’m certainly not going to bore myself to tears making umpteen slip knots to practice. I’d quit crochet if I had to do that.
I have a memory trick, one that makes me able to sort through large amounts of data quickly and recognize patterns. It’s how I read over 100 pages an hour. Fine detail passes quickly through short term memory, long enought to process, but it bypasses the long term memory stop. I can memorize a credit card in a glance and repeat without error, but 15 seconds later all but certain salient pattern-recognition details (first 2 digits & type) are gone. It’s hard to explain. It’s like a savant version of photographic memory.
It’s why I love the internet for crafting. Somebody always has a tutorial about how to do whatever I forget. It’s like a brain online.
My refusal/inability to remember details like this is ONE reason of several why I quit knitting (and Latin). Practicing casting on made me furious and irritable, really quite batty and occasionally tearful. I tried. It was painful and without joy, and I craft only for fun. Practicing preparing to knit and not really getting to knit ever was too much. I felt like I was back learning scales on the piano when I was 5 (I hated that too). But you can’t very well start a project without knowing how to cast on. So I’d forget how, have to relearn, forget, relearn … QUIT.
I only succeeded with crochet because my first project involved no chains or slip knots whatsoever. Win some, lose some.
