Why Haven't I Made This Before?

Vanilla roasted pears in their own caramel sauce served with goat cheese and walnuts....

This was delicious! I'm sorry for the glare on the picture, but seriously, I just wanted to hurry up and taste it!

As DH pointed out, this would make a light meal with some salad greens, a very nice start to a meal, and yes, a great dessert, as served. He was thinking ice cream, I am thinking about tomorrow morning's bowl of steel cut oats. The recipe is here, and you could absolutely do it without the vanilla bean, although your house won't smell like mine does right now! You're all going to thank me.

I'm going to try a balsamic roasted pear with honey and pepper next time, but I'll definitely repeat this.

Lots. Of. Painting.

It starts so innocently, so offhandedly, so inexpensively.

The carpet on the stairs needs replaced. Easy.

No.

Because what we really want is a hardwood staircase, just like the first floor of the house. So we're going to rebuild the staircase, replace the wooden balusters with iron because, well, what the heck -  there we are with a dismantled staircase - and remove some (really unattractive) trim on the woodwork.

But that all comes later. Later because first we are going to rip up the carpeting in all the bedrooms and the hallway and put a wood floor down. But first first, since the bedrooms are emptied one at a time for the floor work, we're painting the rooms because, well, what the heck - there we are with a dismantled bedroom.

So my daughter's beautiful & bold room of about eight years is transformed. The three colors we used then: a warm tomato-pumpkin on one wall, and a pea-lime and bright blue on either side of the chair rail on the other three. Trust me, it was a great look and suited her style and decor when she was...14.
Now she chose the sophisticated and mysteriously-changing shade "northern cliffs" from Benjamin Moore:

It's grey, it's green (really), it's mauve, it's putty. It's quite lovely with the white woodwork and the new floor. I'd like to thank Benjamin Moore for coming up with their line of Aura paint, which actually did cover those deep colors in one coat, although I applied two.

DS2 has finally decided to move into his older brother's room, said brother only needing a bedroom in the house for a handful of weeks each year. After much deliberation, his choice of "evening dove" and "silvery moon" is stunning:

The dark and stormy blue is gorgeous. DH just painted one wall with it - one coat of Aura - in a flat finish and it is fantastic. My job is to do the other three walls in the silvery grey - what a nice room this will be, especially once we come up with windows and bedding.

For the third room, I am going to take the extra gallon of "northern cliffs" back to the store and have them take it to a darker shade, just to make it a little different from DD's. All of the traipsing around for paint swatches has given me yet another opportunity to tell my family that buying a Benjamin Moore deck of swatches is an easy and great gift idea....

Organized Yarn

BTW, this is The End of the yarn stash organizing...

There are 12 bins stacked on shelves in one half of a closet. Some of the bins, like the one in the top picture, have project names while others are grouped according to fiber. They look spectacularly boring and cloudy in every photograph, so use your imagination. I have two UFO containers; for those who are unfamiliar with the technical terminology of knitting, that would be two containers of UnFinished Objects.

Warning...

If you watch this, you are going to want to do it...

iPads, Kindles, Peace

Yesterday I read this article in the New York Times Magazine and it struck a chord. I'd already read about Kindle Singles but that's not what grabbed me here. The writer's points (and the printed version may be different from the online) about the commercialism of the web and the attendant "noise" are spot-on.

Read it and see what you think. Kindle Singles are welcome here in an age of USA Today and short news blurbs; apps for my iPad that present my RSS feeds, FB, magazine content, videos, and news subscriptions without flashing peripheral ads every few seconds are fantastic.

So basically, I think this defends my position of being (possibly unhealthily) involved with my iPad and Kindle.

Ha. 

AeroGarden Happiness

I love this!

I started the herbs in this AeroGarden on January 15 and in the last few weeks have been judiciously harvesting here and there, but  today...look!

They are big - perhaps as much as 8 or 9 inches for the tallest.

I generally enjoy something about every season (except the Season of Humidity, but even then I try to be grateful for "indoor project" time.) but I really miss gardening and fresh herbs. I grow many herbs in pots right outside the kitchen door and find the lack of herbs-at-hand during the winter distressing. While this can't count as gardening, it certainly is delightful to have something edible growing right in the dining room. (I think this is why I sprout seeds and legumes, too.) I will pay the price for herbs in the winter market but can't always have exactly what I want on hand in the kitchen. There comes a time, too, when there aren't big bunches of herbs in the stores but sad little stems in plastic boxes. No.

This herb garden has three kinds of basil as well as thyme, dill, mint, and oregano. The whole hydroponics setup is neat, and when researching whether or not to buy one I found that people have multiples of them set up over the winter. Some people, of course, build their own hydroponic systems because they are clever & handy people who have figure it all out, but I have not. All I have to do is add water when the indicator light is on, and add liquid nutrients when the other light tells me to. Next fall, around the beginning of October, I will start another set of herbs that will be ready by the time a freeze really really takes my herbs. 

I ordered mine from Amazon and found that they are not nearly as expensive as when they first appeared on the market. After this initial set of herbs that were included, I'll buy ala carte and choose the ones I want.

Fun, and it smells like summer in the dining room. 

Prayin' and Knittin'

While emptying all the bags and baskets I found many items, which I tossed into a basket until the yarn was put away. Here's a picture of most of them. Look closely and you'll see stitch markers, mini emery boards, a Pinocchio measuring tape, a change purse, a nostepinne, and...wait...is that a rosary?

Yes.

Apparently it was a really hard pattern.

UFOs, Bins, and Plans

After collecting, untangling, (and let's not downplay the "untangling" part of the job) and sorting the yarn with its mates, my kitchen table looked like a sale display in a shop. A shop that has a really cute table in the middle of the floor.

(By the way, take a look at the pretty bag hanging from the chair. I just made that for a sale next month and love the way it turned out.)

I had to add this picture of the opposite view. I'm hoping it will serve as a visual reminder when I'm planning projects!

I found several UFOs (UnFinished Objects) in various stages of completion that had been abandoned for whatever reason. I ripped out a few of them that were just tragic ideas right from the start and salvaged the yarn, but packed these into a box for another day:

Crazy. Some of these are just minutes away from completion. Not that yoga bag, though. It's been around for years; it needs to be HUGE in order to felt to the size needed.

In a move that clearly proves I had no idea how much yarn I was facing, I had a stack of six plastic bins ready to be filled. Six. Not giant ones, but boot-sized ones. My son, realizing he'd never have a meal on that table if he didn't take action, went out and bought six more.

The filling part was fun, grouping things like wools, alpacas, cottons, sock yarns, and felting wools together. I like how this box looks, because I love what's in it:

Clockwise from the top, I plan to make a vest with the two big skeins of merino, a hat for DS2 with the multicolored Noro, a scarf that is trying to design itself in my mind with the three wool lace colors, and then! See that color changing cotton? A present from my fantastic future daughter-in-law (who also knits) and son, it will be a shawl of some sort. (Check out the coloring changing cotton at Wolle's on Etsy. I've seen several items made with it and it's gorgeous.)

See. I have a plan.

Yarn, Yarn, Yarn

It's been such a long time since I posted, and I LOVE my blog, so that's bad. I think I should focus more on this and less on FB sharing!

At any rate, yesterday I started a project that has had vast, domino-like consequences. I decided to go around the house and gather up all my yarn into one big pile, sort it, organize it, and put it away in the bedroom we use for such things. Since my oldest son is in grad school in Virginia along with his fiancée, his room is in use a few months of the year and has become the place to put coats, yarn, files, projects, spare bedding, and other things that are tough to relocate when the poor kid does come home and wants his room for a few weeks!

The goals of this project, and I am still in the middle of it, are:

• Get a grip on what I have for yarn and organize it.
• Give my daughter half of the closet in her brother's room.
• Box up the papers and items DS1 left in the desk and shelves and put them away so we can use the desk.
• Reorganize our files and records.
• Bonus job: Find every last cd in this house, toss any remaining jewel cases, and find some way to store them in the cabinet that was previously occupied by the files and records that are being moved upstairs.

Crap.

Okay, here's what you came for, pictures of yarn. Because first one has to find all the yarn in its hiding places...and I missed a few until today.

I gathered all the obvious tote bags and baskets from DS1's room.

I pulled all the baskets from this little invisible spot next to a cabinet.

I remembered that inside the cabinet there were a few more items like the one above, and the skein below that was tucked in all by itself.

Today I found two other bits. There was some beautiful fingering-weight in a magazine basket, and some odd sock yarn in a small zippered bag. In my defense, before the next blog post reveals the full extent of the yarn consumption in this house, I must point out that I don't stash yarn I really only buy yarn for specific projects I have no idea how I have so much yarn.

Until tomorrow, here is a preview what my kitchen table looked like:

I'm very happy that my husband doesn't read my blog.

Subway Art

The day before Christmas Eve, I guess it's Christmas Eve Eve, is usually the frantic one. We turn into elves running around cleaning, finishing wrapping, baking cookies, framing prints, and anything else that will feed our delusions of a picture-perfect stretch of days.

I had forgotten about this, however, and although I wish I had framed it earlier I am really happy I remembered to do it today! Need a present right now? Want to hang this in a corner somewhere, as I just did in my kitchen?

Thanks to the amazing women at the eighteen25 blog you can download the jpeg here of this 16 x 20 subway art print. Then:
1. Copy it to your flash drive
2. Run over to Kinkos/Costco/the copy room of your office and print it out.
3. Stop at Joann Fabrics/Michaels/AC Moore/anywhere for a frame and voila!
Gorgeous.
You're welcome.

A Different Christmas

I've made good use of this longest night by spending it in my kitchen since the sun went down many hours ago. I am having two dinners, for both sides of our family, but it's a different Christmas this year. A young man we've known a long time, just a freshman in college, lies in a coma after a car accident 10 days or so ago. My mother's sister lost a cruel battle yesterday and left us much too soon. I cannot attend her funeral, at the other end of the state, because one of my children is under a careful health watch this week. So I spent this solstice evening baking and thinking about my friend's son, and my aunt, and what to make for dinner(s), and acknowledging that we have moved into winter. 

 But mostly, I baked. DD made her favorite chewy chocolate cookies from this Martha Stewart recipe. I made peanut butter tastycakes, a family favorite (and the second batch of the season) and molasses cookies. The shortbread turned out, as always, to be something that should be locked in a vault. The dough for piparkakut, which sounded delicious in a New York Times cookie article, is resting in in the fridge until tomorrow, along with a batch of good old sugar cookies. I ground whole cardamom for the first time tonight and the scent brought people into the kitchen from all parts of the house.

This, my friends, is a purely gratuitous picture of chunks of chocolate about to be melted.

Peanut butter tastycakes. Can't beat 'em. They are the disappearing treat around here.

Everyone will be happy about the shortbread, which was just scored here, before being returned to the oven for a long bake.  Hopefully I will have another baking session in the next few days, but if not I will bake some other things next week. 

The things that are unfolding around me are way beyond my control. The sadness of a death, the uncertainty of an injury, and the concern over a puzzling illness are realities on this longest night of the year. I have prayed, and helped, and nursed, and planned, and administered, and cried, and remembered...and then I baked. I took comfort in the peace and calm of the kitchen. I would have gathered everyone into it, if I could have.

Sew many pics!

I know, I know, that was lame.

As promised, here are images of some of the items DD and I made for the sale last week at Wyndcroft. It was a fun day!

A cute watermelon-y tote

Handy little jars of clothing repair essentials

Key fobs

A big tote with a matching key fob

Headbands

Super cute apron fabric with yards of binding that DD did not enjoy making.

Zippered pencil bags

Pleated handbag

Mini handbag

Lined drawstring backpack

More backpacks

Shopping bag

I have yet to clean up the gigantic mess that used to be my sewing room, but I'm looking forward to it!

Stitches East, 2010

First, some yarn highlights:

Are those colors fantastic? It is a silk/wool yarn, hand dyed, with a matching silk scarf to incorporate into the knitted one. Absolutely gorgeous. 

These olives will become a new version of my "Wrap Me Up" shawl - which, come to think of it, needs a picture here.

I know, this merino looks blue/silver but it's not. It's a grey going to black, and will make a nice (and fast) vest.

This lace weight alpaca is so  lovely, and the colors are a bit softer than what is here - in particular the red and the blue are really more of a watermelon and dusty blue. Last night DS2 patiently helped me divvy each skein into three, and then to wind the three skeins into one for an idea I have. I want to do a color-blocked scarf with three strands held together. Yep, I could have bought a heavier yarn of the same colors. Nope, didn't want to.

Stitches was great fun, as always - - traveled with two of my friends, met lots of new friends, my favorite felted bag made lots of new friends of its own, joked around with the (unknown to us at the time) mayor of Hartford about Bill Clinton and the fact that knit happens, took a super class from Leslye Solomon of Woolstock, and already can't wait until next year. 

I hate that my poor blog has sat idle for so long. Facebook is a blog killer, I think, and I have been much busier than usual. That's not over, but it will be soon!

Craft Swap

Here are some photos of my handmade items for a recent swap with some friends. I actually still have two out to finish in some form or another and send off, but let's focus on celebrating this part, shall we?

These were for my friend Norma, and she loved them. I loved them! Love love love the yarn.

For  Martha Ann, this handbag. It is from a pattern with a few modifications. I wish I'd taken a picture of the bag feet - she was surprised to discover them well after she received the bag. Love love love the fabric.

The inside, with my little label.

Ann's knitted and felted bag. This bag is GIGANTIC. It's a tote, with a commercial base that happened to fit perfectly inside the bottom of the bag, and a beautiful silk dupioni lining. Although this bag borrows a technique I learned from a commercial pattern (applied icord around the rim) I didn't use a pattern for this one. I've made so many knitted bags by now I just kind of start knitting! The colors are perfect for Ann, and I love love love the lining fabric.

The lining, with one pleated pocket.

I have a set of spherical, heavy, fabulous bag feet that I would have loved to use here, but they didn't match. I got creative and used some well-shaped buttons instead, which I think works fine.

Maysies, Part Three

Ah, CSA day. I've posted Maysies in other years, and this one has some beautiful pictures of and August harvest. At Maysies most of the food is already picked and waiting inside the barn. There is a whiteboard listing what each share is worth - how many carrots, bunches of greens, heads of cabbage, etc. - to take. (We use one family share but if you are a larger family you can buy more shares.)

The big board on the left is detailing the week's food, and there's a sign-in sheet on the table. There are two pickups per week (you choose which day you want) and enough food is picked throughout the day to account for the number of shares expected.  

Below, the board on the left is listing which herbs are available to pick and where they are - in the Hoope House, between the barn doors, at the rock pile, or in a bed. The middle board is a map of the farm with numbered/named beds. The last board has notices of relevant events or workshops at the farm or in the area.

Up first, Chinese cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, and beets.

We are also able to order from a variety of local producers for items like chickens, dairy, eggs, coffee, and bread. (Of course the coffee is not grown here but sourced responsibly and roasted here. I figured I'd qualify that before someone called me on it!) Keep in mind, the word dairy, for example covers ice cream and milk, and bread can mean amazing granola, whole grain bread, or cookies. Some items must be ordered a week ahead, and others are available for impulse purchasing.

CSA's are a good idea all the way around, from supporting local industry and protecting the land to providing all of us with just-picked healthy food for our families. Yes, my family has learned to eat, or at least try, some unfamiliar vegetables but let's face it, it's a vegetable. There are differences in each CSA, they have varying levels of involvement (read: working in the beds), may or may not be organic, may have an orchard, or may partner with other farms to offer even greater variety. 

A google search will result in lots of information, but Local Harvest is a good place to start. There's a CSA search by zip and a lot of good information. If you are local, you've probably seen the pretty Buy Fresh Buy Local logo on bumper stickers and store windows. Their website lists "1555 (and counting) places to find local food" and is a good source of restaurants, farmer's markets, grocery stores, csa's,etc. If you can get your hands on a bumper sticker they really are gorgeous.

Writing this post reminds me that I have added a few good vegetable books to my cookbook shelves, and I will review them soon. In the meantime, I'll share a greens suggestion. The "green leafy vegetables" referred to everywhere actually mean big leafy greens like kale or chard, and not a salad of Iceberg lettuce. (Sorry.) Having the greens in the fridge does not guarantee their consumption, but I have found that having a container of cooked greens does. 

For this you will need:

A large skillet with a lid
Onions, garlic, olive oil (or other, as you like)
A couple of bunches of greens

• Wash and tear as many greens as you have on hand. I combine the longer cooking ones (collards, spinach, and kale, for example) or the more tender ones (Swiss chard and beet greens) into one batch. It is a good idea to fill a large bowl or the sink with cool water, soak and swish the greens, then let everything settle before lifting them gently from the water. There's no need to spin them or blot much before cooking, just shake them over the water and make a lovely pile on a clean towel.
• Depending on your taste, either start an onion/garlic/olive oil saute, or soften an onion/garlic mixture in a half cup of water and a splash of olive oil by simmering for a few minutes. The saute will produce a stronger taste while the simmer will take the bite out of the garlic. Try both and you may find that one method suits a bitter green, and one a milder type. 
• Add the damp greens, a handful or two at a time, and stir. They will quickly reduce in volume, allowing you to keep adding the rest of your pile. 
• Cover the pan and simmer for anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, depending on the greens. Your goal is a forkful of tender greens. Add water to the pan as needed, and be careful to keep them from burning. 
• When they are finished add salt and a lot of freshly ground pepper. A splash of balsamic vinegar is nice if you want to serve them right away, otherwise, store them covered in the fridge.

 Over the next several days you can use them in sandwiches, add some to eggs, toss in with pasta, top a pile of mashed potatoes or vegetables...all you have to do is remember that they are in there, waiting to be used.