I got a real name tag.

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Over the years, I have acquired a small collection of various name tags from different events I’ve attended.  By various, I mean, the names are various.  You see, I don’t always let a proper invite keep me from a party and some of the events I’ve attended over the years have had everyone’s name tags printed and laid out ahead of time, not allowing you to walk up to the door and get in if you haven’t made plans in advance. Which means if you are spontaneous like myself, you find yourself picking out a name and going with it.  Only once have I ever had anyone actually question the fact that I was not who my nametag said I was, because they knew the real ‘me’ and I was 20 years younger, several inches taller, noticeably thinner and a completely different race than the other version they knew that went with that name.  I found that telling the gentleman I was undercover for a very important investigation and that I would appreciate his cooperation, as it may or may not have to do with national security, I was not free to divulge anything further than that, in fact I may have said too much, helped quiet him.

In crashing parties, one must act with complete confidence and authority. 

Last Thursday evening was the holiday party for the local weekly that I’ve done some projects for this past year. Despite the fact that I’d been up & down all week with the upper respiratory bug going around town, I felt we should go and make an appearance.  Besides, I was feeling better that day, surely I was on the mend. (When they say that bug is a 10 day to 2 week bug, they aren’t joking, btw.  I was most definitely not on the mend, but that’s a completely different tale.)

As we walked in, there was a table with a guest list at which you were supposed to check in.  There was also a small collection of name tags which were clearly for people who are affiliated with the publication throwing the party.  Among the name tags was one for me, with my real name on it.   Even better was a title – “Green Expert”, a nod to the fact that I wrote (and partially photographed) their Green Homes and Living special edition this past fall, although in no way do I consider myself an ‘expert’ in being ‘green’.  Honestly, of the 18 pieces in that, 8 of them are some of sort of interest or project of ours around the house.  All I really did was write about us and just tried to make it not sound as personal as I do in this space.

I’ve had a good bit of encouragement lately from friends and family telling me I should just write a book already.  On what I ask and they all say, on just being me.  From what I’ve gathered, one should have a certain niche, a focus if they are going to pitch anything that’s going to be published.  If this blog is any indication, I’m all over the place – baking one day, canning the next with mentions of knitting fail, dinner fail and girl scout troop craft fail.  I’m more of a B+ personality than I am a type A.  I’m the underachiever of the overachievers, the overachiever of the slackers, not excelling at any one thing, but rather, doing a few things pretty okay.  Sometimes making everything perfect, staying on top of every little detail is just way too much energy that could be better used doing something else, like having a glass of wine with a friend or better yet, curled up with a book.  How does one go about putting that into a proposal for anything published? 

Not quite eighteen months ago, I was laid off and pretty quickly decided that I was going to just figure out a way to make a living out of being me.  Since making that decision, I’ve been much happier with my every day life, although cash flow can be a bitch.  I’ve made some things happen, I’ve had some things land in my lap.  It seems that in casting a wide net, I’ve caught a number of things that I’m pretty okay at – writing, teaching, cooking at the top of that list. 

When I started this post, I had every intention of talking about the party last week, how I danced with the guy dressed like a Christmas tree, because really, when there’s a guy dressed like a Christmas tree, you need to do something with him, right? Instead I had this moment where I realized that there was some link between the fact that I have a collection of fake name tags to the fact that I had a real name tag with a title that I found amusing to the fact that I am still very much trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.  That this idea I keep hearing from people as something I should do – write a book – somehow needs to come to life.  And somewhere, in that link, is the theme.

Making Mincemeat.

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During some conversation with my friend Leni at some point either this past fall or summer, the topic of mincemeat came up.  Leni having recently retired this past year as the African-American Historian at Monticello,  I knew that our exercise in mincemeat was going to entail historically accurate recipes, at least one of which would probably be from Mary Randolph’s  The Virginia Housewife cookbook.  First published in 1824, it’s considered one of the first American Southern cookbooks and a fairly decent record of how food at Monticello was probably prepared. The conversation had sprung out of discussions of what she was going to do with the all the various parts of the pigs she was then raising.  I was slightly curious to get a pig’s foot or two to try (what else) pickling them while she was more interested in boiling them down and making mincemeat out of them.
 
Yesterday was mincemeat making day.  It seems the Mary Randolph version calls for venison, which Jackson supplied, as well as some bear, which was used to make an 1839 Kentucky Housewife by Lettice Bryan version of mincemeat.  
 
One of the things I like about heading out to gatherings at Leni’s is that you never know who you’re going to meet there.  A few years ago, I’d heard of Jackson’s classes in which students learned to hunt, dress and cook their catch.  I loved the idea of it, would love to actually take it one day, only it seems (to me) that hunting requires patience (that whole sit in the woods thing – I cannot possibly sit still that long) one of those things I’m convinced is an over-rated virtue, mainly because I lack it.  Ideally, I’d rather skip to the butchering and cooking part, getting someone else to do the hunting for me.  
The meat Jackson brought technically was roadkill – the car in front of him hit the deer and I missed part of the story on the bear, catching only the tail end of the tale where he actually completed the killing of the bear. So it wasn’t like either animal was sitting by the side of the road for who knows how long.  I share this because I really just like bragging that I’ve eaten roadkill.  (Although as I typed that, I realized it’s not the first time I’ve had roadkill.  Hey, it’s free, grass fed, organic meat.)
In addition to Jackson, there was his girlfriend Helenah, Jenny, Jessica, two of Leni’s sons, her granddaughters, my Edie and lots of cameras.  We jumped in, with the venison version of mincemeat on one burner, the bear version on another, Leni’s pork version on a third, with a fourth burner being devoted to creating the filling of pelmeni – a Siberian dumpling made with bear.
As I was heading out yesterday, Pat asked if I even liked mincemeat, reminding me that it had been served at various family gatherings over the years to much avoidance on my part.  To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure I would like it.  I find that cooking meat well is an art, one that many members of my family lack, so I tend to avoid anything they made with meat it in over the years as a self-preservation technique.  Trust me, if you had grown up eating some of the meat I was served on a regular basis, you’d avoid it too.  I’m always willing to try something though, especially if it’s prepared by someone I know is a good cook.  Considering Leni has not only raised, but prepared some of the best pork I’ve ever had, I knew I was in good hands here.
There was much similarity in the recipes Leni had us using.  I was surprised (and delighted) to find that each one called for large amounts of fruit, generally in equal amounts or more to the meat and suet, of fruit in the form of apples, raisins and currants.  Brandy, cider, sugar and spices were also added, then the mixtures bubbled on the stove top for a few hours.
While they cooked, we feasted on some tasty smoked pork that Leni had prepared and then I learned how to make the pelmeni, which essentially is a pirogi.  I’ve always wanted to try making them but have been slightly intimidated.  Thanks to Jenny telling me I could just get going on the next batch and not wanting to appear like I had no idea what I was doing,  I just did what I was told, grabbing a dough ball, rolling it out and jumping into the process.  It certainly helped that the dough was positively dreamy to roll out, which immediately took a huge chunk of intimidation away.  (You know I walked out of there with that recipe too.  Because that is what I do when I stumble upon something like that.)
The pelmeni filling was finely chopped onions, cabbage and bear meat, which was cooked before being rolled and then boiled in broth for a few minutes before being served with fresh dill and sour cream.  
Leni thought that mince tarts would be a better way to serve the mincemeat rather than one large pie.  To differentiate between the venison and the bear mince tarts, the venison tarts had a dot of dough on top. As it was a savory filling, she used lard in the crust, making them incredibly flaky and savory themselves.  A perfect pairing.  
Verdict?  I liked the mincemeat.  There was so much fruit in the mix that the meat added texture more than anything else.  There was a nice savoriness about the tarts. The venison version, which was based on the Mary Randolph recipe was a touch more savory than the bear.  I had prepared the bear version, following the Kentucky Housewife recipe, substituting allspice for cloves that were MIA as I was putting it together.  By the time the cloves had appeared, I hesitated on adding them to the allspice, so I skipped it.   As the pork version needed more time, we did not sample it, although Leni assured us all she’d get a jar to us in the near future.  I came home with a pack of pelmini for the freezer, as well as two pint jars of bear mincemeat filling that I look forward to making into tarts over the next few weeks.
Yesterday was a learning experience on several levels – I love cooking with other great cooks because I never fail to learn something new from them. There was history, specifically food history – did you know that historically most wild game was referred to as venison?  I did not.  There was the typical small town connections made that make me love Charlottesville, where it seems everyone sort of knows everyone else somehow, even if you’ve never actually met before.  I listened in on and had some inspirational and informative conversations.  As I’m still getting over this nasty upper respiratory bug, I was not entirely my enthusiastic self, but it was a fantastic memorable day nonetheless, one that I shall be mulling over for some time.  Thank you Leni for hosting, introducing me to mincemeat as well as everything and everyone else I got to know yesterday. What a treat of a day.

The Oatmeal Post.

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It seems every blogger in Charlottesville has at least one blog post on the subject of oatmeal.  This one is mine.

Oatmeal has been my go-to winter breakfast as long as I can remember.  It’s evolved from those instant packets that you just add hot water to, to cooking it on the stove in a pot to my current daily microwave version. 

I know, there are so many great ways I should try oatmeal.  I’m sure everyone has one they want me to try and while I’m quite sure they are lovely, my daily oatmeal is yet another one of those habits I have had my entire life and I do not feel the urge to mix up something that still works quite well for me.  That whole idea behind not fixing what’s not broken.  After all, I am the gal who’s worn the same thing since college – black tshirt, demin, boots (or clogs).  I am a creature of certain habits.

I like my oatmeal with raisins, cinnamon and brown sugar.  I eyeball the amounts every morning, a sprinkle of this, a pinch of that, and it tastes the same every day.  Well, except for the day I confused the jar of ground cayenne with the ground cinnamon.

I like quick oats – they cook faster.  Plop them in a bowl with the toppings, add water, and microwave for 2 minutes.  Stir and eat.  I actually have tried variances on this, but I always go back to what’s quick and what works. After all, I was a devoted instant oatmeal gal for the first 20 years of my life.  I want fast and easy in the morning.  I am capable of making other forms of oatmeal – the wee one in our house finds my go-to version boring, so on her behalf, I have mixed it up, getting so jiggy with it, I’ve used fruit butters in the mix.

I found myself without raisins the other morning. Vaguely remembering my mother, not being able to find my preferred raisin cinnamon spice packets once upon a time, handing me an packet that featured dried apples with my preferred spices, telling me to try it, that I should branch out. It was a good substitute, but I prefer to eat my apple every afternoon as a snack, not in my morning oatmeal.  However, there I stood the other morning, with no raisins on hand.  Desperate times.  I reached into the fridge and grabbed an apple.  I chopped it up and threw it in the bowl in lieu of raisins.  I cooked it.  I ate it.  It was a good substitute.  I branched out.  I actually ate it that way two mornings in a row this week. And now that I have raisins on hand again, I might try combining the two.  Talk about getting jiggy with it….

Why good cooking is dangerous.

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My go-to dish when we eat at any Mexican restaurant is Chili Rellenos.   I had them somewhere once upon a time stuffed with a blend of cheese and potatoes, which made my little Irish potato loving self think that was quite possibly the best version ever.  I’ve tried my hand at making them myself a few times over the years with poblanos I grew myself, with mixed success.  They are a little bit of work and while I do many things from scratch, I bake my own bread, I can, I pickle and all that jazz, I really not-so-secretly prefer one pot, one paragraph dinner recipes.  Chili Rellenos is not one of them.  You have to roast the peppers, you have to peel the peppers, if you are stuffing them with anything but cheese you have to precook that. There is the sauce to go on top and something to round out the entire meal.  Really, much easier to just go out and order it from your favorite Mexican restaurant.  

Because I spend so much time putting up produce from about May through now, I just happened to have some pre-roasted and peeled peppers in my freezer, ready to go.  I pulled them out the other night and while they were thawing, I threw some sweet potatoes in the oven and baked them.

When I was at city market a few weeks ago, there was a farmer selling sweet potatoes by the bucket.  Of course I had to get some and now have a glut of them.  I also had some goat cheese hanging out in the fridge and the idea of a goat cheese sweet potato version of chili rellenos struck me as a really great idea and one I could just taste.

I served them up on a bed of grits and man, they were good. They were even better than I thought they would be.  As I cooked up the sauce to go with them, I realized it was basically the same sauce as the one I make for enchiladas.  There was a bit of a kick from the chilis I used in the sauce, as well as from the fact that I did not remove all the seeds from the peppers I stuffed.  It was fine for me & Pat and Edie was a trooper about it, so it turned out okay.  I think I have a few more whole roasted peppers in the freezer which are definitely going to be made in this version of chili rellenos.  I don’t think any Mexican joint is going to come close to touching how good these were.  I hate when I spoil it for myself, especially something like this.  The down side of cooking, definitely.  Sometimes you really should stick to take out.  Yes, I said that.
 

My experiments in bread baking have achieved a new level of goodness as well.  The last few batches I’ve made of both extra tangy sourdough bread as well as sourdough baguettes have been scrumptious. I’ve used whole grain flours in them and have given them extra time to rise.  A few years ago, I assisted in a bread baking class at the cooking school taught by Gerry over at Albemarle Baking Company, who makes the best baguettes this side of the Atlantic, hands down.  Among the tips he shared for baking good bread was letting the dough have plenty of time to rise and let the yeast do it’s thing.  Admittedly, it had not clicked with me to try this with bread recipes other than his, but in making recent batches of bread dough, I’ve realized that these have sat longer than called for, to spectacular results. Turns out that guy might know actually know something about baking after all.  I’ve also been experimenting with adding extra gluten as well as water when using whole grain flours.  The last baguette batch I think I used whole wheat pastry flour combined with regular whole wheat flour as well as bread flour.  I had a jar of unlabeled mystery flour, it could have been whole wheat pastry flour, it could have been high gluten flour I keep on hand for pizza dough or it could have been some rye flour.  Not really sure. It was also way too sticky for me to knead it long enough and somehow,  despite all that, that bread was light and airy and delish. Another eureka moment I recently had was to make the entire recipe, even when it results in 2 loaves or 6 loaves, and before the second rise, pop the extra dough into the freezer.  That way, the next time I’m feeling like a loaf of fresh baked bread, I don’t need to start first thing in the morning.   This has been met with much applause by the waistband of my jeans, because as you can tell by the photo above, I cannot stop eating the glorious fruits of my labor long enough to take a picture of a full loaf of bread, which is dangerous when you just pulled 6 loaves out of the oven.

By the way, that was a foot long baguette when it first landed on that cutting board.

It grew.

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Last year, my Girl Scout troop helped put together a little food drive at their school.  I was exceptionally proud of them and blogged about it.  Yesterday,  we went back to their old elementary school and helped out with this year’s drive.
We partnered with the same troop as last year, with their troop taking the lead this time around.  They made the posters and morning announcements reminding their schoolmates to bring in donations.  This year we had a third troop join us in the job of sorting and packing the donations.
I love that as each one of the girls walked in that cafeteria yesterday, the first thing each one of them said was “What can I do?”.  Give them a little bit of direction and every last one of them was off and running.  They worked together well and it’s oh, so good to watch that in action.
Just like last year, the recipients of the drive are families within that elementary school community. This year though, I think my girls had a little bit better understanding of exactly what that meant.
The best part though was seeing an idea I had summer before last take root and grow.  I might be the slackest Girl Scout troop leader out there – I’ve been told by our local Girl Scout council that I’m “robbing the girls of the true Girl Scout experience” because we don’t sell cookies.  We also don’t do a whole lot of crafts, we’ve never been camping (we do have plans to do that this year though, maybe), heck, from about March through the end of the school year every year those girls campaign to throw out whatever the plan is and just go run around and play on the playground outside and I let them.  Slacker or not, I came up with a pretty kick ass service project that other troops have not only joined in, but continued with.  It grew. 
I’m damn proud of that.

Pecan Pie.

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Being the slack food blogger that I am, I have no step-by-step shots of how I prepared my pecan pie last week.  Then again, the fact that I am sharing my pecan pie recipe the week after Thanksgiving is telling too, isn’t it?  It’s still good for Christmas though, right?  I mean, certain members of our household have asked if we can have another one sometime soon. 
I did not grow up eating pecan pie.  I’m not a big fan of cooking with nuts, so the idea of a pie devoted to them left me scratching my head.  It wasn’t until I met my better half that I realized that pecan pie is more about butter and sugar than nuts.  And certainly I can get behind anything that combines butter and sugar. 
The recipe I make is one that I got from a friend of Pat’s folks.  It’s pretty much the best damn pecan pie recipe in the world and the only one you will ever need to make. 
I’m such a slack food blogger that I didn’t even get a decent shot of my finished pie – this one is one Edie took with her father’s iphone, a little after the fact.  I tried making the crust edges all fancy, showing off the skills I picked up when I assisted in that pie baking class last summer, only to realize as I was pouring the filling into the pie crust that I had prepared a filling for a much bigger pie plate than I was using.  Whoops! I managed to fix it somewhat, but it wasn’t entirely pretty.  I ended up pouring what was left of the filling into a ramekin, baking that and we ate that hot out of the oven, giving us that pecan pie fix the night before Thanksgiving.
Enough with my issues, here’s the recipe.  Make it.  You’ll like it. 
Pecan Pie
1 stick butter
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup White Karo syrup
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups pecans
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon salt
Combine first three ingredients in a pot and bring to a boil.
Beat eggs in a separate bowl.  Pour a small amount of hot liquid into the eggs, beat and then add the remaining hot mixture.  Stir in the remaining ingredients and pour into prepared pie plate.  Bake at 375 for 30-40 minutes.

Gratitude.

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So I’ve been kicking around the idea of some lovely gratitude post in honor of Thanksgiving this week and while I can think of many things that I’m grateful for, getting it all written down and not sounding utterly cheesy and sentimental is another thing all together.

In the last month, two different friends have been diagnosed with cancer. We have at least three friends whose parents have been diagnosed within the last few months as well.   Another has been posting about the unexpected adventure her family is having while she’s on book sabbatical in Jerusalem.  These things remind us not only what’s important, it’s that we should be grateful for all the little things that make our happy little lives exactly that.

In our house, every day is a day where we are vocal with our gratitude.  Before we eat dinner, everyone at the table takes a turn sharing what they are thankful for.  Some days it’s rain, some days it’s sunshine.  For years, Edie was grateful each and every day for “Daddy coming home from Friday” regardless of the day or the last time he’d actually been away.  Some days we’re grateful to be getting over a cold, other days it’s having had an exceptionally good day, others it’s just be to sitting at the table with each other.  Some days we’re not even sitting at the table, we’re in the den, curled up on the futon, plates in our laps, with “Jeopardy” on mute while we finish saying Thanks. Someone is always grateful for “Jeopardy” on those nights.

I am thankful for everything I have – my family, our friends, our neighborhood, our house.  I’m thankful for our health, I’m thankful the car is running well this week, I’m thankful Edie is having a sleepover tonight with her bff  that she’s known her entire life who lives on the other end of our street that I’m pretty sure we made snort at dinner with our very politically incorrect tales of what it was like to go shopping at two different grocery stores Sunday in the pre-Thanksgiving madness with everyone taking their grandmother there and just parking them in the middle of an aisle and how Edie got run over by the same woman more than once while at Whole Foods.   I’m thankful that if Whole Foods is going to be the closest grocery store to our house, that it has the best price on a gallon of milk around.  I’m thankful that all of Edie’s activities but piano lessons and Saturday morning soccer games all take place at her school, two blocks up the street and that she is capable of walking herself there and back.  I’m thankful she was given an electric piano upon which she practices and I’m thankful that she puts it on the organ setting when she wants to mix it up.  Nothing makes your day more than that, I assure you.   I am thankful for my husband, who can fix just about anything, saves the world for a living, puts up with me AND is good looking to boot, even if he does turn on the most horrid country station and then walks out of the room, made better when said station plays Johnny Cash doing “Sunday Morning Coming Down”.  I’m grateful he walked out of the room to go put a movie on for the girls and when he came back in it was with a bottle of wine in hand, to pour me another glass.  I’m thankful for all of you that read my babble and tell me you like it.  Happy Thanksgiving to each and every one of you. 

Brunch (not entirely) fail.

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You might not realize this, but in addition to pickling everything in sight, I’m also a big fan of turning things in fritters – you know, shred it, add flour, baking powder, seasonings, egg & milk and fry it up in a nice little patty presentation.
Latkes are essentially fritters. Squash are excellent fritters and we eat corn fritters weekly during the summer, when I buy corn on the cob by the gallon. You can make a meal of corn fritters, adding some cheese and bacon bits to them….
I’ve been experimenting with spaghetti squash lately. I like it, but serving it in lieu of pasta with some sauce, especially a red one which is supposed to be healthier than say, a cream sauce, gets kinda old kinda quick to me. (That may be my next experiment with it now that I think of it – a spaghetti squash alfredo dish, because I like to mix my healthy with my not so healthy, everything in moderation you know, including moderation.)  I made a wonderful little casserole with spaghetti squash a few weeks ago, combining it with ricotta and spinach that went over well.  I had a squash in the fridge I needed to use up, so I threw it in the oven Saturday evening.  As it cooked, I thought how it might be very well suited for fritters – after all, it’s naturally shredded.  I mean, hello, it’s just asking to be frittered, yes?
For various reasons, the spaghetti squash fritters got bumped to brunch Sunday morning.  I added about half a finely diced onion, a few minced garlic cloves, finely chopped parsley, salt, pepper, baking powder, flour, beaten eggs and milk. 
I wish I had photos of lovely golden brown fritters to show you, but for the most part, they turned out looking exactly like that batter there.  No matter how much flour I added to absorb the liquid, the batter remained exactly that liquidy until cooked. Honestly, all that liquid did in the frying pan was turn solid.  They were edible – I think the spices is what made that so – but they didn’t look pretty.  I may have added one too many eggs.  I may have added too much milk.  I may have not fried them in enough oil. It may have been A, B, C or D: All of the above.   At any rate, my grand inspiration to share a delightful new way to enjoy spaghetti squash was most certainly not realized. Sigh.
That’s the thing with experimenting in the kitchen – even the best cooks have failures. Sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.  Or the fritter fries….

In progress.

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Now that the canning season is winding down, I’ve been able to move out of the kitchen somewhat and onto other projects.  First up, a check on the progress of Pat’s sweater.

 From that angle, it doesn’t appear as if much progress has been made, but really, it has.

 See?  That’s a few inches there.  There’s 360 stitches per row.  The first few rows took me about an hour each, but I’ve managed to pick up some speed and can now do a row in 30-45 minutes.  I’ve completed the armpits and am now starting to shape it, heading up to the shoulders. I had Edie help me with the math and I think I have about 60 rows or so until I can start the collar.  If I sat and did nothing else for an entire work week, I might get it done by Christmas.  I think I’ll shoot for his birthday towards the end of January.  That seems do-able as well as gives me a project for those lazy days after Christmas when I like to sit around, watch tv and eat cake.

I also went ahead and bought another cone of yarn, ensuring that the last of the two cones I had on hand for this will be enough. Whenever I get nervous and go out and buy more yarn to finish a project, I ensure myself leftovers.  I haven’t decided what I’m doing with the leftovers yet.  Thoughts?

I’m also whipping up a pair of fingerless gloves for the lucky coworker that my husband drew in his office holiday gift exchange.  She had fingerless gloves on her list of suggested gifts.  I’m using some merino from the stash that I inherited when the university students moved out last spring.  Someone left two large boxes of yarn out by the curb that my friend Eddie found and dropped off here.  There was a mix of acrylic and really nice stuff (like this merino), but most of the nice stuff was in some weird colorways.  I kept some for myself and shared some, just for projects like this.  This yarn is from a local farm and is dreamy to work with.  The pattern is a slightly altered one from Knitty called Fetching– they are quick and easy.  I knit the left handed one seen there in a night’s worth of television watching. 

 Also on my needles is a poncho for Edie.  I’m trying to surprise her at Christmas, which means working on this when she’s not around.  Which means outlasting her at bedtime.  Thankfully she’s got a sleepover this weekend, so I’m hoping to make some real progress, because outlasting her at bedtime is really hard.
  I’m basing her poncho on the poncho I knit for myself several years ago that was only slightly based on a pattern.  Her poncho involves a good bit of counting stitches, looking at my poncho and math.  Oh math.  How I don’t like you.
The yarn for Edie’s poncho is also from the stash, some of it from the discarded stash Eddie dropped off.  I’m hoping I have enough and am resisting going out to buy more until I really have to. Really.
This last project is something for me.  I found this yarn (which I can assure you does not glow like this in real life) for $2/ball at the Fiber Festival last month.  I had gone telling myself I was not going to buy myself anything unless of course, I found a deal too good to pass up and especially if it involved orange yarn.  Clearly the yarn gods were listening.  I want to do a lacy scarf with this, but I’ve had the hardest time finding a pattern I can work without having to rip it out and restart it 4 times.  These two have passed the test, but I’m not sure about committing to either one.
Yes, this one is lovely and open, not to mention knits up incredibly fast and easy,  but I just knit myself an orange zig-zag scarf last fall.
 
 
 And while one can have multiple black velvet pants, black wool pleated skirts and black cardigans, how many orange zig zag scarves can one really have?
And while I like this pattern, something about it says Old Lady Acrylic Sweater to me.   I like it, but I’m not sure I want to commit to it.  I’m starting to think that maybe I should knit a cowl out of the orange yarn but I’ve yet to find a pattern I really like, so I’ve started pondering the idea of maybe just making one up.  I know, it’s a huge, HUGE step for me, poncho not withstanding.  For what I have in mind and from what I’ve read, I think I can do it.  I am starting to see the appeal of a cowl, and I want something new & orange to go around my neck, so why not?
I have not completely abandoned the kitchen though.  Currently sitting on my counter are two hot pepper ferments:
On the left is a roasted poblano ferment.  My friend Kathy brought some to last Sunday’s swap and it was quite tasty.  I swapped her for a jar of it, in addition to her recipe, as I still had a few gallon bags of poblanos sitting in my fridge, waiting to be dealt with. (Also, it was soooo good, I wanted to make sure I had a supply before eating it all!)  I had a goal of getting a few more jars of pickled peppers, another batch of fermented peppers and at least one batch of chili rellenos out of what I had grown this year.  I can report complete success – I got two more pints of pickled peppers, a batch of Kathy’s roasted ferment AND I have exactly enough good sized peppers to make chili rellenos for the fam for dinner soon.
The ferment on the right is a mix of chili peppers from my friend Cynthia, some of Grandpa Jack’s habaneros and my jalapenos.  They’ve been sitting there about a month or so now.  I’m not exactly sure what my next step with them is going to be, as it’s an experiment, but I can tell you that when you open the jar, your sinuses totally open up.  I read that fermenting chilis was the key to a good flavorful hot sauce (Tabasco is fermented), so in my quest to make a good hot sauce, I thought I’d try it.
I haven’t totally stopped canning, but it has been winding down.  I did several batches of applesauce and apple butter from a few bushels of apples I got out at Henley’s orchard. I came to the realization that I could make a batch of applesauce in my stock pot in a fraction of the time (45 minutes) it took me to make it in the crock pot (about 4 hours), although with the crock pot, I can come & go and not have to keep an eye on it.  I also get nervous about burning the bottom of my pot, as I’ve done with things in the past.  So far so good, I even did a batch of cranapple butter on the stovetop, which took less than 2 hours on low (vs. overnight on low in the crockpot).  I’m not totally giving up the crockpot, as it makes far less of a mess than doing it on the stove and I can leave it unattended, but it’s nice to know I can put up a bushel or two of apples in no time flat on my stove top.
 The cranapple butter came out tasting like cranapple juice –  you mostly taste the cranberries, but they are sweet thanks to the apples. I threw some cranberries and a bit of water in a pan, cooked it for about 10 minutes, then threw it in with the applesauce, about a half cup of sugar and cooked it down until it was the right consistency. Edie has a big thing for cranberries and claims to be ‘over’ apple butter, so I thought she’d like this.  The freezers got a few apple pies while I was at it.  My two basement chest freezers are now at capacity, I’m out of half pint jars and down to my last half case of pint jars.  I might try a small batch of pickled cranberries before I completely call it a season until strawberries come back around, but as you can see, I have some knitting to knock out in the next few weeks.

Just to say.

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My friend Kristin lost her son not quite three years ago and started a foundation in his honor.  Our hometown paper did a beautiful story on her that you can read here. 

And then go the website for the Jedediah Thomas Smith Foundation and pre-order the forthcoming foundation cookbook.  It will make fantastic holiday gifts for the cooks in your life, it helps a good cause  AND includes a recipe from me – my Aunt Loretta’s Mrs. Van Popple Cheesecake.  All proceeds go to the foundation, which gives assistance to families battling childhood cancer.

I still carry a picture of Jed in my wallet.  It reminds me that each day is a gift, to not take anything for granted.  And to remember a very special little boy who’s short life has left a long lasting legacy.