Adding another few inches
Work is doing a bit of eating my lunch at the moment, but I have made time for a bit of craft anyway. I know better than to abandon it totally. I will never be an all work and no play sort of person. So in the evenings I have been putting brown borders on my flower and circle granny squares. Just two sides for now, I have another plan for the other two sides.
Oh! I forgot to mention that all the squares are done now! I thought about not doing borders for the squares, but the serve so much to stabilize them and make all the squares uniform in number of stitches, that I am persevering anyway.
I can’t wait to see what the finished blanket will be like. Will it be what I imagine?
Moodiness, Music and Food
Yesterday afternoon (Sunday) I was feeling sort of moody: disconnected and blue. Sometimes I get that way, when the imminent end of the weekend sneaks up on me. Makes me sad. There’s never enough weekend, between the fun stuff I want to do, the other stuff I wanted to do, the stuff I’ve been promising myself I’ll get to sometime soon, and the stuff I just have to do to keep the house from being a wreck and clean clothing in the closet.
My solution to this malaise is cooking for at least 2 hours. I often try to cook enough for about 5 nights of food. When it’s done I feel better from the soothing activity of puttering in the kitchen, and I’ve accomplished something very real that will make my life easier for several days. Plus I get to see a smile on Jeff’s face when he tastes what I’ve come up with and spend time with Audrey and Callie, both of whom camp out to see what I might do and if there’s anything for them.
I have a pattern.
- Long playlist of music and my kitchen speakers. I fire up an iTunes Genius playlist, perhaps centered on a Kings of Convenience song or one of the Frequent Flyer compilations, maybe Barcelona.
- My folder of recipes to be tried. In a vain attempt to actually corral my recipe collection, I keep a folder of stuff that I’d like to try, or things I’d like to make a vegetarian version of.
- These shoes. These are very silly-looking, but Mario Batali is right about Crocs: excellent for cooking. I used to need to curtail my cooking to about 45 minutes, but my Croc knockoffs ($12!) mean I can be on my feet for 2 1/2 hours and just be a little footsore. Lovely!
Yesterday’s menu:
- New recipe: Warm Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad with Lemon-Tahini Dressing. This is a wonderful, happy, delicious recipe I procured from the Smitten Kitchen site. I was lucky enough to have a Meyer lemon for the dressing. But even if I hadn’t, this is a winner of a recipe. It is so delicious, I can’t explain, but if you come to my house I’ll make it for you and you can see for yourself.
- Old Standby: White Chili and mexican cornbread. A simple staple I’ve talked about before, but now made vegetarian. I’m so familiar with chili varieties that I find it to be something I can easily throw in a pot without thinking. This kind has black beans and white beans of some sort and is flavored with chipotle and hatch chilis. I think chili is best when it cleans out your sinuses and makes you sweat. I threw it together and put it in the refrigerator for slow-cooking today. It was MMM!
- New recipe: Cheesy sweet potato pancakes. Epicurious calls them “crisps” but I didn’t flatten them that much, and next time I’ll just make them into regular latkes and add a bit more flavoring and more interesting cheese. They’re pretty good. I think sweet potatoes are an overly-maligned starch, unfortunately associated with that eminently-Southern-but-disgusting marshmallow recipe that no one actually seems to like (forgive me if you’re that person).
- New recipe: So I went completely overboard while shredding sweet potatoes. My Christmas brought a mandoline and a food processor to me (score!), both of which I’m being VERY careful with so as not to damage myself. Thing is, that 14-cup processor can shred five large sweet potatoes in under five minutes, and did. I didn’t want that many latkes. So I found another creative idea with Sweet Potato and Goat Cheese Muffins to use the rest of my shreds. Nice!
Do I have many pictures? Nope. I was just cookin’. And tastin’. Cooking is the best.
A miscellany
First, I’m going to say hi to my grandparents, which I’ve long been trying to remember to do. They get my blog via email now. That’s them! –>
My grandma, who I take after in many ways, is a crafter also, an acknowledged Master Sewer, the original baker of all the cookies I ever mention on here, a cook, gardener, and general inspiration for many of the things I try to do with my hands. Hi Grandma! My grandpa was a farmer of various things – corn, soybeans, cattle – and provided me with my first summer cat and the youthfully fascinating opportunities of feeding cows, mowing grass and weeding fields. No, seriously, to a suburban kid, that stuff was the Best Thing Ever. Hi Grandpa!
Grandma may be chagrined that the picture of the farmstead on the wall behind her is crooked in this pic, but that’s the beloved Iowa farm of which I often speak, the place about which I have more fond and influential memories than anywhere else. You can’t see the farmhouse, it’s behind my grandma.
Second, I am going to show you what happens when I try to crochet on the couch. I usually have a basket with a project next to me. You can’t see it, but my flower afghan project, extra yarn, scissors (they’re closed), crochet hooks and all are under Callie. Looks comfy, doesn’t it? Good job, cat.
Speaking of rascally animals, a friend pointed out the Daily Coyote blog to me, which has eaten a lot of my time in the past couple of days between the story and the beautiful photography. A woman in Wyoming had an infant coyote brought to her. She named it Charlie and chose to keep it rather than let it be drowned. That was about maybe 2 years ago. The coyote and her cat, Eli, are silly and cute, and the glimpses into this woman’s interesting life are fun. My favorite so far has been the story of the coyote (full grown at 30 pounds) getting up onto her kitchen counters, taking out the contents and piling them neatly in the middle of the floor, and turning on the water faucets. Well, it is true that Native American mythology often portray the coyote as a trickster!
Ta for now!
