DIY Sock club

I've been knitting for a couple of years now, and the obsession has perhaps waned a bit. I still love it lots and lots, but have been doing more baking as creative expression.

However there's a thing called Sock Club which I think is way cool. Some clever knitters dreamed it up - usually you join a sock club that is offered by a yarn company, such as the outstanding Blue Moon Fiber Arts. You pay them money (the one at Blue Moon runs about $250), and they send you patterns and yarn on a regular basis. You can blog and email with other sock club members, and all in all it's pretty awesome.

I've been stashing more and more yarn, and decided to lay out a plan for using some of this stuff - a sock club of my own! Here's what's on tap for 2010, in no particular order:

 

Smoosh Angee. The pattern: Angee.
The yarn: Dream in Color Smooshy, color: Deep Sea Flower.

 

The Sanguine Snake. The pattern: Snake River Socks.
The yarn: The Sanguine Gryphon Kypria, color: Thetis.

 

Pool Diversion. The pattern: Diversion (my fourth attempt! more on that later).
The yarn: Schachenmayr nomotta Regia Design Line Kaffe Fassett - color Exotic Pool.

 

Sleepy Tosh. The pattern: Sleepy Hollow.
The yarn: Tosh Sock, color: terrarium.

 

Sleepy Vanilla Sox. The pattern: plain vanilla sock pattern + the heel from Sleepy Hollow Socks.
The yarn: Berrocco Sox, color Kingston.

Right now I'm doing a scarf for a friend, a hat for a baby, and have ends to work in on a sweater & a scarf. I figure I'll get started on the sock club sometime later this month. I might bring the plain vanilla one on my trip to RI later this month. We'll see - should be fun. Stay tuned!

Recipe: Rosemary shortbread cookies

Allow me a moment of immodesty: these cookies were amazing! I'm particularly pleased because the recipe is an amalgam of several, including (but perhaps not limited to) Cooks' Illustrated, 101 Cookbooks, and Tartelette. So I was quite pleased when my recipe came out great!

Ingredients:
2 sticks butter (room temperature)
1/4 tsp salt (only if using unsalted butter)
1/2 c sugar (or even less - somewhere between 1/3 c and 1/2)
1 3/4 c all purpose flour
1/4 c corn starch
2 T snipped fresh rosemary

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350

Cream together the butter, salt, and sugar.
Stir in the flour, corn starch, and rosemary.

Refrigerate the dough for about 20 minutes. Break off about 1/4 of it and roll it out on a floured surface. Cut out and transfer to a cookie sheet (I love using parchment paper on the cookie sheet - it makes it SO easy to get the cookies off), and bake for about 10 minutes. Remove from the oven while the cookies are still pale.


Hint: they're amazing with lemon curd. 

Calendar: Two Thousand Ten - February

This is the third year in which I've created a calendar of my photos to share with family and a couple of friends. I decided to use the calendar as blog-fodder; once a month I'll be able to write about the calendar picture. (For all pictures, click to see a bigger version!)

February's photo is from The Burren, in Ireland. It's a wind-swept, rocky place, rather hilly. I drove there with my friends Sue and Deirdre from "our" cottage in County Clare (Sue's cousin's, really, but who's counting?).

Driving there was quite exciting, an hour's drive on the teeniest country roads you've ever seen - and on the wrong side, of course! It takes a LOT of concentration to drive down a steep road with hairpin curves AND stay in the leftish lane.

We parked near a farm, barely able to squeeze off the road, and then hiked up up up the hill to the top of the world.  Our car is down by that farmhouse in the center of the picture:

I loved the stone walls that served a dual purpose: they cleared the fields of rocks, and penned in any cattle that might be grazing in the now-cleared fields. The walls were rather porous, a fact I illustrated in the top photo (which wound up being February), and here, in a close-up:

Some of the walls clearly didn't serve any real purpose any more (if ever they had):

Except maybe to provide safe nooks for flowers to grow:

Above: Common Dog-violet; below: Early-purple Orchid. Both were SO small.

 

It felt like were were on the top of the world. It was great!

mostly pictures, some text

Here's an overhead shot of the beds in the garden. They're empty for now - I need to figure out drainage (gravel?) then we have to get soil, then we have to figure out planting. Sigh. But it's going forward!
They are beautiful, made of redwood, and measure about 4x4 and 18 inches deep. They're going to produce a LOT of awesomeness. I hope!

 

Also, my knitting is coming along. I started this sweater last March, put it down in April, and will have it finished sometime in February. (I was hoping for January, but.. that's today, so, I don't think I'll make it.)

  

  

I've got some Meyer lemons, mandarin oranges, and fresh rosemary from some coworkers' yard. I'm going to make lemon OR citrus curd, and rosemary shortbread. But I'd better get cracking: it's just past noon.

Garden project update!

It's been a few months since I posted about the garden project. Truthfully, it's been a while since there's been anything worth writing! But we're finally making steps in the right direction. The building manager finally got us some wood (actually completely unexpected, but the building owners gave it the okay). As a reminder of the situation, here's an overhead shot taken out my window in September:

Last September

The middle area clearly used to be a pool at some point. We're going to take over the dirt-filled part of the pool, and built beds to cover the first third of it - the part in the middle of the pic closest to the table & chairs. That area gets a TON of sunshine in the summer, and even in the winter gets a few hours per day, so it's going to do really well. Here's T preparing the area (note the dual-purpose rain/garden boots!):

 

Here are the beds being built upside down - the legs got buried in the ground to anchor the bed:

And here's the thing of beauty ready to be installed:

We have two 4x4 beds side by side. It started raining pretty much right after they were installed and hasn't stopped for a couple of weeks, but I'm hoping to get a picture this weekend if it stays dry.

Here's some of us weeding the beds (at the top of the picture taken from my apartment) - note the lemon tree putting out a ton of fruit just behind us.

And look! A tiny harvest!

Recipe Review: Chickpea Cashew Curry

Did I mention I got a food processor? And a Dutch oven? See, it's been so long since I blogged I can't remember. Plus, my head is a sieve.

Anyway, if I didn't: I did! I've wanted both items for a year and decided it is TIME, past time, to buy something I want, can afford, will use, and won't get from anyone else. I preach fiscal conservatism, but not ongoing self-denial.

So, new gadgets made me look for recipes that would require lots of chopping & cooking, and boy did I find one. Two, in fact! The Oyster Evangelist's post about Chickpea Cashew Curry caught my eye. She based her recipe on Pithy and Cleaver's Chana Masala. So what did I do? I made both. And no, reader, I did not cut either of them in half or thirds. I now have chana masala in the freezer, have eaten it for a number of meals, fed it to my lunch group, and STILL have some in the fridge. Do you think I'll ever learn?? (Side note, not sure it'll thaw okay, but one friend pointed out I could just puree it and use it as a dip if the texture is less-than-pleasing.)

So anyway, the recipe. I'll just paraphrase to save time. Follow the links above to actually recreate these.
1. Get some really cool spices. Put them in oil and heat on low to infuse the oil with the spices. For future reference, I'd use a smaller pot - my spices weren't fully immersed so I don't think I got all their goodness into the oil.

2. Shred a metric ton of onions. Squee with delight when your shiny new toy chews through them in seconds. Brush from your consciousness that you nearly fill a 12-cup food processor TWICE. Nah, that's not too many onions for one person.

3. Put the onions into the spice-infused oil (having removed the spices!) and cook on low for hours. No, I'm not kidding. Again ignore the evidence that maybe you're going a wee bit overboard.

4a & b Some of the onions are carmelized with spices (for the chickpea cashew curry); some are not (for the chana masala):

5. Follow the directions for the recipes and enjoy the results. Here's the chickpea cashew curry:

Marvel over your genius. Realize you went way the hell over the top. Hope fervently you can bring yourself to make & eat these recipes again someday. For the record, they were both excellent and totally worth the effort. I had a slight preference for the chickpea cashew curry.

Recipe Review: my Gingerbread Flan

so, I invented a recipe for gingerbread flan. I brought it to a dinner party on Friday night, where it was enthusiastically received. Even the two who don't usually like flan said they really liked this one, so yay! (edited to add: the flavor was good, but more pumpkin pie-like than gingerbready. I think less cinnamon, more cloves, maybe some ground pepper next time.)

However, there's room for improvement. The carmelized sugar mostly stayed inside the ramekin, rather than puddling luciously onto the custard when I overturned it onto a plate. Sigh. I suspect that if I make the topping from the post on the Pioneer Woman's blog, it may work better - the carmel I made was just sugar & water; the other one is sugar, water, corn syrup, and some acid, so I expect the texture is a lot less solid.

Here's my sample that I tested the night before I served it:

Note all the goodness still stuck in the ramekin. Sigh.