Ribs not Ribz

Last night we had BBQ Seitan Ribs. I say 'ribs' not ribz per this post. I pretty much agree about just using regular words and not trying to have all these alternate spellings. I do still want to differentiate, however, so I guess that just means more adjectives.

Here is the seitan before it went into the oven.

Anyway, they were good! We actually grilled them! And we ate virtually the same thing that Susan did!

I watched the video (link on Susan's page), which was helpful, and then later, once we had them on the grill, I was looking for how many minutes to grill them. I thought I'd remembered 15 from the video, so I watched it again to get to the point where she says 15m on the grill. I don't think we did them for that long, but they were still good. My husband's recommendation was to put the BBQ sauce right into the seitan dough next time! Maybe I'll try 1/2 C water and 1/4 C BBQ sauce next time. I also used the blender to blend the water and peanut butter and liquid smoke and soy sauce. You can also bake them at 350 for just 20 minutes and then coat with sauce and bake for another 15m.

















I Googled how to microwave a potato and decided on 5m, then flip, then another 5 (this was with all three in the microwave) and it got them ready really nicely. Then we just put them on the back of the grill like Susan suggests and they were nice and hot and done when the seitan was.

In other news, I emailed my friend who is test knitting the mitts and was like "Ack, ack, plz don't knit these!" and then worked all day in bursts to rewrite the pattern. So far I have triumphed over the right hand mitt, onward to rehabilitating the left. Supposedly the left will be easier because ?I think? that I actually had a good pattern for that one, but now I have to check, plus apply some eureka ideas I got when working on fixing the right hand mitt.

I did this Invisible (Provisional) Cast on (scroll down) but I didn't use a very thick yarn and so my live stitches were incredibly tight!! So last night at about 10pm I was staring at the last 6 sts or so I couldn't get off one needle onto another. I'm sure it will make my seam real pretty, but I don't want to knit the thing again right now, I just want to try it on to see if it fits.

Still hacking through that book, fantasizing about a library trip, starting to gather ideas for books to get.

That is all.

Gimme Mah Corn Syrup

Yesterday I met my friend at the library and she gave me a recipe for Honey Baked Lentils, and I tried it last night! It was good! I served it with my flatbread that is an amalgam of a few different recipes...

Baked Lentils
1 C lentils
2 C water
2 T corn syrup
2 T soy sauce
2 T olive oil
1/2 t grated ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small onion, roughly chopped


Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix everything together except the water, then add water, then dump into an ovensafe dish and bake 90m.

Easy flatbread

1 1/2 C whole wheat flour
1 1/2 C all purpose flour
1 T brown sugar
1/4 C + 2 T oil
1 t salt

Mix all ingredients in mixer, then add up to 1 C of water slowly, 1 T at a time until a ball forms.
Roll out into a 'snake' and divide into 12. Roll each out into roughly 4" diameter.
Heat skillet and cook first side until bubbles begin to form (up to 2m), then flip and cook other side 1m (should take less time than the first side did).

This is tedious- multiply 12 by roughly 3 minutes= half an hour of flatbread making- just the cooking part. But it works well for a recipe like the lentils because you're not working on anything else.

The book is going good- I teared up at a part of it yesterday, so I guess that's good...

I sent off my mitt pattern to be tested, and then last night started knitting the right hand mitt again and realized I was doing it wrong 2 ways. Blah. I think I've figured it out. Emailed friend to ask her to start with the LH mitt. Bah. Will triumph.

Orange, much?

Hey there folks,
Well, last night was a pretty easy supper- I had some bottled marinade that I poured over some chicken strips and a bag of stir fry veggies and then (to do penance for using all prepackaged stuff) I made some brown rice.

Still plugging away on the McKinley book- nothing's happening, wah! Maybe I have McKinley fatigue.

I am trying to find someone to test knit my mitt pattern. We'll see how that goes... I should probably just knit them one more time myself nicely. I think I'll use Brown Sheep Nature Spun Sport.

Well, that's it.

A Leeeetle Bit Spicy

Well, yesterday was the picnic/potluck for E.'s preschool, and I took 16, !16! pitas, hummus, carrots, bread and peanut butter and jelly. It was so fun to see her running around with all her friends, at her favorite park, she must have been in heaven. She was so sad to go.

Let me share with you the pita recipe; it was excellent. I found it here and it was much like my already tried and true recipe I had gotten from my friend, which was maybe from the Joy of Cooking?, except the sugar, salt and olive oil are doubled. Oh, and instead of throwing the pitas right onto the racks, willy nilly, as I had been, I tried the foil method and it worked SO MUCH BETTER! Did you know that you can grab the little corners of the tinfoil to pick up the squares right out of a 500 degree oven?!? Now my pitas won't be all bent into heck.

2 1/2 C flour (I used 1 C whole wheat flour and the rest All-Purpose)
1/4 C vital wheat gluten (this ups the protein and elasticity and obviously the gluten. If you don't have this, then use bread flour)
1 T sugar
2 t salt
2 t yeast
2 T olive oil
1 C warm water

In mixer, mix the cup of whole wheat flour, vital wheat gluten, salt, sugar and yeast. Add the oil and water and beat until smooth approx. 3m.

Stir in the rest of the flour 1/2 C at a time until the dough is a rough, shaggy mass that cleans the sides of the bowl.

Change to dough hook and 'knead' for approx. 3m.

Take the dough out and on a floured counter, divide into 8 and roll each into a ball. Coat each lightly with flour and cover with a damp towel to rest 20-30m.

Preheat oven to 500 degrees.

Flatten and roll out to 6" diameter (yes I was a geek and actually measured this for the first few). The thickness should be roughly that of a yardstick (not the longways, smarta**).

Place on foil (I just ripped off a sheet at 8" or so and fit 2 on each rectangle) and place directly on rack. Bake 5-8m until puffed and brown. Stack and wrap in foil.

Doubles well, can freeze (thaw 5m, reheat, stacked in foil, in 375 degree oven for 10-15m).

In other news, I read that you don't have to double space after a period because something fonts something something size of letters in relation to others something blah blah... it made sense at the time, I swear! so I am going to try to break myself of that habit. Onward!

Here is my hummus recipe, basically this one from vegweb but doubled. And cumin. And oil.

2 cans chickpeas, drained
1/2 C tahini
2 t lemon juice (2 capfuls of the bottled stuff)
2 + cloves garlic
1 t salt
1 T cumin
2 T olive oil
1/2 C water

In a food processor, add all ingredients except water. Process, adding water gradually until hummus is creamy. Serve with pitas and veggies.

A note on the garlic, one time, I made this, using 3 cloves of garlic, but it was this new purple kind from the coop and I just thought the cloves were bigger, like elephant garlic and so milder, but they weren't. It was, in the immortal words of my daughter, 'spicy'. We're garlic lovers, but it was even almost too much for us. Whoah.

Also, progress on the mitts! I now have a finalized pattern, I just have to find 'the perfect yarn'. And have someone test knit it.

I read a little yesterday. It was a busy day.

Girl Gets Garter Grafting

Here's what we saw this weekend... actually, I didn't get to see the sheep shearing this weekend- I was shopping.

Well, yesterday I somehow managed to make bread despite all the craziness around here! This Basic White Bread recipe is what I use. Lately I've been using 2 C King Arthur's White Whole Wheat Flour and the rest (3) regular AP. Plus I usually add 1/4 C of vital wheat gluten and I've subbed canola oil for the Earth Balance, too. I'll be taking one loaf of the bread to the picnic tomorrow with peanut butter and jelly so the kids have something to eat.

I also made Red Lentil Soup which is my attempt at Niskena, a recipe from a local Kurdish restaurant, Babani's. It's pretty simple, but it turns out well.
2 C red lentils
6 C water (plus more if needed, more for blending)
2 1/2 t salt
2-3 onions, roughly chopped
5 large cloves garlic, minced
1/4 C olive oil
1 T cumin

Saute onion until browned. Saute garlic. Mix in salt and cumin. Rinse lentils and stir in. Add water, cover and simmer on low (20+ min). Remove in batches to blender, adding water if necessary to help blend well. Alternately use immersion blender. Serve with bread.

I started The Blue Sword and it's pretty different from The Hero's Crown. Pretty impressive range of writing styles- I guess I'm used to an author picking a story and style and then flogging it and the characters to death through a progression of neverending books.

I'd better get to the library and get some more books soon, or I won't have any.

Hey, guess what? When they say "Keep the working yarn UNDERNEATH the needles" when you're grafting, they mean it!! Like literally, underneath! Man, when that seam started coming together and I flipped it over and the backside looked like garter stitch too, I was so pleased. I figured out what I was doing wrong- yippee!

Enchantment, Broken!

Today I am going to attempt to make 3, !3! batches of pitas... potluck, much?

I have made progress on the mitts!!!!! The enchantment is almost broken. Now all I have to do is figure out what I'm doing wrong with my garter stitch graft that's making it look all wonky. Whenever I get a nice long stretch of time- ha! I will sit down with my Vogue quick reference and try to hack it out. I tried with a tutorial I found online, and then with EZ's version in Knitting Workshop but alas...

Last night we had leftovers. The night before we had lemony chick'n and pasta with broccoli.
It goes like this; (can't remember where I got the recipe from, sorry, probably somewhere online)-

Lemony Chick'n and Pasta

8oz pasta (half a box, usually, I used shells)
6oz bag baby spinach/half bunch kale/bag frozen broccoli, thawed
pkg Morningstar Farms chick'n strips
1 T soy sauce
1 T lemon juice
2 t cornstarch
1 t lemon herb seasoning
1 T olive oil
1/4 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic

In a large Ziplock bag (or right in the Morningstar Farms chick'n strips bag) mix 1 T soy sauce, 1 T lemon juice, 2 t cornstarch and 1 t lemon herb seasoning. Let chick'n marinate 30m or while pasta is boiling and you start the next part...
Boil up some pasta.
Meanwhile, saute onion, then garlic in a large skillet or pot. Add marinated chick'n. Brown.
Add veg. and stir until heated through and coated with sauce.
Serve over pasta.

I finished The Hero and the Crown by McKinley, sorry, I'm on a McKinley binge here... it was good, started a little rough but I persevered and it got way better. It's like she changed from halting young adult fantasy to kick-a** fantasy halfway through. Even her main character transformed. Fortunately, she is a talented author and she brought it all together convincingly at the end. I ?think? this one comes chronologically before the one I'm going to read next which is The Blue Sword. Rant rant. Maybe I'm just dense.

'K, that's it.

Log, blogged.

So last night we had the last of the 'chick'n' log. I cut it up into leetle tiny pieces and put it in a stew. This was a one pot meal as I was short on time after getting back from the fiber festival and winding my wool into centrepullballs (which is one of my favorite things to do) takes a while. I was filled with glee!

So I took 1 T of olive oil in a big ol' enameled cast iron pot (the bialetti one from Target) (the red one) and then minced up our !last clove of garlic! (whoop! whoop! whoop! danger will robinson!) and sauteed that (don't you love how saute sounds so much fancier than just plain old frying?). Then I added my fancypants can of cannelini beans (which I could not find anywhere except at the coop in dried, bulk form but I finally got some at Trader Joe's- remind me to tell you about our trip to Trader Joe's sometime). And I didn't even rinse or drain them!!
While this was all going on, I nuked some frozen spinach in the microwave for 7 m. And I added a heaping t of poultry seasoning and 1/2 t salt which I should have added before I added the beans because it would have mixed in better. So- garlic, spices, beans, chick'n, spinach and... one cup of Minute rice. Add about another 2 C water and simmer til done. Voila!

It was pretty good for a one pot meal. I served Ritz crackers with it to be ritzy.

I finished reading Rose Daughter and really enjoyed it. I tried putting it down for a bit to work on the mitts and got as far as to realize that I need some chunk of time and clearheadedness to make some changes which I wasn't willing to do at that time. But I am hacking away at this problem. After reading these McKinley books I have decided to consider them enchanted and so each time I pick them up it may seem like nothing is happening, but all of a sudden at some point in the (I hope, I hope) near future BLAM they will be magnificent.

Now I am reading McKinley's Hero and the Crown. Did I mention I'm glad I grabbed all those books by her?

Cheaze please

Thursday night we had Golden Cheaze Sauce which you can see in the pic above, green beans with lemon herb seasoning and an amalgam of Seitan O'Greatness and Chickpea Cutlets and Loaf

based off of this post...
Preheat oven to 425.
basically I just whipped up 1 can of chickpeas and 1/4 C olive oil and 2 cloves garlic in the food processor until it looked like hummus, then in the mixer mixed that, plus 1 C bread crumbs, 1 C vital wheat gluten, 1/2 t salt, 1 heaping T chicken flavoring and 1 t oregano and then slowly added water until it held together and looked 'doughy' (I scantly filled up a cup measure and then used almost all of it)
Roll into a 'log', wrap in foil and bake 1 hour.

The cheaze (I cannot stand that spelling) was good, my husband really liked it (he's probably sick to death of Dragonfly's Bulk Dry Uncheese Mix) and said it reminded him of something his mom used to make with ?Chicken gumbo? with ground beef poured over rice- "Saturday Night Special". Who knew pimento was the secret spice ingredient in chicken gumbo soup?

Last night we had Morningstar farms crumbles simmered in the leftover cheaze sauce (they said it made 6 1/2 C servings but I got just under 2 C). and salsa and corn in flour tortillas.

Today we're off to the fiber festival for Mother's Day- Woo! Yarn! I do not even care that it will rain- that'll drive off all the weaklings hah.

I finished Spindle's End by Robin McKinley and I think I have a new favorite author!!!! She reworks fairy tales and now I'm reading Rose Daughter (I was looking for her book, Beauty, at the library but couldn't find it, so I grabbed a bunch of her other stuff and was like, gee, I hope she's good- now I'm glad I did!).

No knitting, started to try to do the thumb and decided that I could work the left hand thumb the same as the right (how can this be, part of me is suspicious) but some crisis warranted my attention and everything had to be put away.

Gotta go work out the yardage of yarn I need for my hood pattern so I can buy some luscious alpaca today.

Let's Make Contact!

Just a short one today...

Last night we had veggie 'wraps' from our coop that turned out to be sandwiches because they were all out of wraps. Last time we got wraps there, they were disintegrating due to, apparently, the new flour they were using. But anyway, they were good and it was a sort of nice Mother's day in advance kind of thing.

No progress on the mitts. I hope to find some cool yarn at the fiber fair this weekend.

I read Betsy-Tacy which definitely is a children's book. It was nice, innocuous and kind of boring after a while. Set in Minnesota which I love!

Now I have started Spindle's End by Robin McKinley and I have been really enjoying it! So great to find some good fairytale fiction. She is a good storyteller.

Well, I guess that's it for now. Gotta go put in my new contacts from the eye doctor.

Fingerzzzzz

Here is a picture for you... do you think N. slept hard?

Well, last night we had Crockpot Pea Soup and homemade wheat bread. Yum!

Okay, I just looked on Vegweb where I thought I got the Pea Soup recipe, but I don't seem to be able to find it. The recipe sort of makes me feel all tricksy when I make it because basically you add tsp or T of every spice in your cupboard and voila! A tasty soup is born. Seriously, it has cumin, oregano, basil, tarragon, thyme, dill, celery powder, onion and garlic powder, parsley, mustard... and those are just what I can remember off the top of my head. Soon I will start posting recipes.

The cheeze sauce I use is here

Yesterday after reading the reviews on Amazon about how, yes, indeed, Sword of Shannara sucks, and how closely it parallels LOTR I said to myself, self, if they go into that mountain and the Gandalf clone struggles with the enemy and they fall into a pit clutching one another, I'm going to quit. Well, guess what happened?

So I started to read Ella, Enchanted and finished it last night. Yes it was in the children's section, and yes I do feel rather odd getting books there, but I console myself with the idea that I'm 'researching' good books for the girls when they get older. Ella, Enchanted was good! The ending was a little weird but maybe that's because I am so conditioned to Hollywood/Disney type endings- which I wish I weren't. I liked how she brought together all the little details at the end. Okay, I'm not writing a book report here, and that's how it's sounding, so suffice it to say, it was good.

No progress on the mitts, I almost started mentally trying to work out how I'd place the thumb but I must have been too foggy/interrupted by a teething child to get very far.

Powned!

Last night we had a fast supper, as we had driven all day to get back from Grandma and Grandpa's... we had pasta shells, Morningstar chick'n strips, Dragonfly's Bulk Dry Cheeze sauce and steam in the bag broccoli from Target. It was good to eat at home again!

Right now I am just plodding along with Sword of Shannara... it sucks. Read the reviews at Amazon. Really, I don't know if I'm going to make it... and I have a lot of tolerance for bad fantasy! Such a blatant LOTR rip off!!! The mind boggles!!! And so poorly done!!! I have not enough exclamation points to continue.

Finally, I am working on my short row mitts. I am struggling with figuring out how to reverse the instructions so that I can make a left hand version. I would really like some Koigu KPPPM to make these, but the nearest store that carries it is 45 m away! I should just order some online, but I hate paying shipping.

Ah well.

In other news, Scholastic finally owned me. I succumbed to their ways finally and broke down and bought a set of Bob books for my almost 4 year old daughter. I resisted all through, but the pervasive Scholastic book order people will not be denied!

This morning I woke up and all I could remember from my dream were cthullu and parachutes.
So I give you my pseudo-haiku;

Cthullu,
I ask you,
What color is,
YOUR parachute?

I am here for your rhyming needs.

Oh yeah, a linky link for you- dontclick.it

I love this pot! And when my friend gave me the little ceramic one for Christmas, I just thought it was the coolest coincidence.

The burst of red is so lovely, it makes me happy to serve meals out of it. Tonight we are having Dirty Rice- my husband hates tomatoes, but ah well...

I guess I don't have much to say. I was thinking about the impermanence of life today. Here I am, driving my daughter to preschool and I'm looking at all the people in their cars or walking up to the Post Office and I'm like "Man, everybody dies in the end!". I guess it's because it's been a long winter, plus my Uncle Wally died and so that's getting me thinking.

He was a simple man. Like, literally, simple. In the old sense of the word. But I think it's cool that he lived and was married and had his moments, I'm sure. Just that he existed. But it's got me thinking about what my contribution will be. It's nice to think about leaving something behind. But I've also been thinking about how MANY people there are. Ravelry has brought this home to me, oddly enough. I mean, not even all the small population of what knitters there are are on there, and then you see how many many people are knitting the same things, it just boggles the mind. I guess I'm having a craving for offering something unique.

Okay, here are a few links for you;
- Trent Reznor has offered one of his four disc release "Ghosts" for FREE.
- a You Tube video of Five Minute Artisan Bread. I think I'll try this out, but the keeping it in the fridge part will squigg out my husband...

p.s. did I ever tell you about the time I said I was going to Homecoming but then we went to see NIN? ooooh, I was a sneaky one...

um... is this thing on?

Man, it's been a long time...
I recently found out that you can raise/have miniature sheep! http://www.agrisupportonline.com/minisheep.htm

Don't they look cute! I wonder what kind of bizarre health problems they have, though.

I've started working at a yarn shop and I'm starting to wonder if it will sap all desire to knit. At least I'm building a great stash for when I leave the Cities to live up North in the Nort' Woods, ya der hey.

Now you too can have a barcode!Barcode Yourself - Scott Blake

Hey, check it out!! You can adopt a rare breed Cotswold sheep and at the end of the year you get it's fleece! What a good idea!Mountain-Shadow-Ranch

Mmmmmmm. Fiber

Oh, and for you spinners out there, Bellwether offers fleece and rovings too! Bellwether .

If you go here and click on Gallery you can see lots of the beautiful projects sent in by people made from wool from their (or others) rare breed sheep.