Hedera Socks

After I finished March's sock club socks, I had some time before May's arrived. I decided to pull some everyday yarn out of the stash and use a pattern I haven't used before.

This is a Cookie A pattern, and she's startlingly brilliant. This sock is supposed to be an introduction into both lace and sock-ity* patterns, so it's a pretty simple four-row lace repeat. It looks much more complicated than it is, and I love that. It also looks great in a solid colorway; I think a variegated colorway would have detracted from the pattern.

Hedera pattern, KnitPicks Stroll yarn in Grass colorway

I have considered that my pictures would look better if they weren't taken a) late at night, and b) on my bathroom floor. I haven't decided how much I care though.

When I tried on these socks, I told Andrew that I felt like one was slightly smaller than the other. This happens to me a lot, and it makes me nutty. It's not a huge problem, and the difference isn't noticeable once they've been washed and blocked, but I always feel disappointed by it. It seems to always be true that the second sock is slightly smaller than the first sock knitted, which makes me think I just get impatient and want to be finished sooner than I should. ** Andrew looked at me and said, "Do you think it's possible one foot is slightly larger than the other?"

Blink, blink.

Yes, that is a possibility. I had never considered it. It wouldn't have to be a big difference--a quarter of an inch might be noticeable if you're as OCD as I am. Now I have to decide which I choose to believe, that my feet are mismatched or that I can't knit socks the same size. I haven't decided yet.

*Yes, it's a made up word. But I bet Merriam-Webster will love it. It's much catchier than sockness, which I also considered.

**Most sock patterns won't have row-by-row directions for the entire foot. They'll just say something like, "Continue in pattern until sock is 2" shorter than you want it to ultimately be. Then begin toe."

Wordless Wednesday

Recipe #21: Chimichangas

Recipe #21 is vegetarian chimichangas from Vegetarian Times. I used bell pepper strips instead of onion and plain jalapeños instead of roasted, but the rest of the recipe is the same.

The filling is bell peppers, soy crumbles, chili powder, cumin, jalapeños, and diced tomatoes. While that cooks, the tortillas are wrapped in aluminum foil and baked in the oven to make them pliable. The tortillas are filled, rolled, and baked for half an hour.

This recipe was... fine. I have never had chimichangas in a cheeseless, non-fried form. I like cheese and friedness. Since I also like fitting into my pants, I'm trying to lower my standards.

I recognize that I'm too hard on my own cooking. It's a flaw. Andrew said this had nice flavor, and he's right. It was spicy, and the tortillas had a nice texture out of the oven.

But all I could think was, "It tastes like home cooking." This is not a compliment for me. Even when I ate meat, I never wanted to eat meatloaf, sloppy joes, green beans with bacon, mashed potatoes, or anything with gravy. I do enjoy biscuits and macaroni & cheese, so I'm not sure what the factor(s) is (are) that impacts whether I like something or not.

Sigh. This resolution is not working out as I had hoped, and I admit to being discouraged. I didn't sleep well last night, so perhaps that is impacting my outlook.

I'm going to go eat dark chocolate-covered espresso beans now.

Nocturne

After chatting about Dexter, I wanted you to meet Nocturne. (Well, meet her in a nondrugged state, unlike here.)

This is sober, honest.

Andrew is a cat person, and I am a dog person. Luckily, we both like both species, we just tend to gravitate toward different ones. I don't despise cats. I actually enjoy them quite a lot. Given the choice, however, I'm always going to pick a dog, and Andrew will always pick a cat.

Dexter is a little crazy, as I've mentioned, so we were nervous about how he'd react when we adopted a cat. We shouldn't have worried. They play together. Nocturne still has her claws--read about what declawing really is and it will change the way you view it--and she's never used them on him. When she gets tired of playing, she goes into the utility room where Dexter cannot follow and takes a break.

She's been known to wait at the bottom of the stairs and pounce on Dexter as he comes down. They also tear around the house after one another, Dexter lunging at her tummy while she bats him around with her front paws.

What are you looking at?

Nocturne was a year old when we adopted her, so she's spent most of her life with Dexter as her only non-human companionship. Andrew thinks she sometimes acts more like a dog than a cat. She'll sit at the window and bark at the birds. When we get home, she'll walk in front of us, then throw herself down with her paws in the air so we'll rub her tummy.

She's also a princess. She will wait until we walk into the door to use the litter box. She'll wait until we clean it, and then use it again. If we didn't come home, she'd probably explode. She drinks out of the back of the fish tank despite the availability of fresh, albeit non-fish-flavored water. She walks across our kitchen table even though she knows she's not supposed to and will get squirted with water.

It's difficult to stay mad at someone so cute though.

I am really grateful for our little family of Andrew, me, Dexter, and Nocturne. Sure, our house is covered in pet hair and we spend as much on their medical care and grooming as our own. It's absolutely worth it. Adopt a pet. Adopt two.

Recipe #20: No Knead Bread

While working on recipe #20, I also made a new coffee drink:


I've decided it doesn't count as a new recipe since the point of this resolution is to make things I can eat for dinner. Although coffee is a necessary part of my life, it doesn't fit the spirit of the challenge.


It was pretty tasty, and I'm already thinking of ways to make it better. It involves a blender.


Recipe #20 was no knead bread. Apparently this took the cooking world by storm a few years ago, but since I'm not plugged into the cooking world I did not know. I read about it first in Cathy Erway's book The Art of Eating In.


I used this recipe. I have a standard bread recipe, and it uses a packet of active dry yeast for one loaf. This recipe calls for one-fourth of a teaspoon. A packet of yeast has about two and a half teaspoons. I was so stunned I looked up another recipe to make sure it wasn't a typo.


I mixed water, salt, flour (I used half bread flour and half whole wheat flour), and yeast, covered with plastic wrap and let it sit on my counter to ferment. Because of my schedule, I was forced to leave it on my counter for nearly two days, but from what I read in that book, I'm not the first to do this and nobody died.


Here's what it looked like after being mixed:


And here's what it looked like after sitting around for a couple of days:

It rests for 15 minutes, then I shaped it into a ball and stuck it between floured kitchen towels (non-fuzzy types) to rise. The rising didn't go as well as I expected. I waited around three hours, and the last half an hour I put it in a slightly warm oven to try to encourage it. I don't know how it's supposed to look, but I was expecting it to be taller.


The bread is baked in a very, very hot oven inside a cast iron dutch oven that has been preheated as well. The dutch oven ensures that it gets a good crust on the loaf. It cooks for a total of 45 minutes.

This is the texture of the interior:

It's... much more yeasty than I expected. It's not bad, but it's different than any other bread I've made. If anyone has any experience with this kind of recipe, I'd greatly appreciate advice. Did I do this right? Is this how it's supposed to look? How should it taste?

This was an interesting experiment. I'm a bit relieved I didn't fall in love with it. It would be dangerous to have freshly-baked bread around the house all the time!

Two Days Left

My modified VT challenge ends tomorrow. I have two more lunches to eat in, two more days with scheduled meditation, and two more days of doing something active at least 30 minutes a day.

Yesterday Dexter and I walked for about 45 minutes after I got home from work.

What? You haven't met Dexter? Sorry about that.

Blog, meet Dexter.

That picture is from his very first day at our house. He's much less shaggy now, and he weighs about seven pounds less. Borrowing from an episode of As Time Goes By, I like to say that Dexter's breed is a secret known only to his mother and father. The vet says he's spaniel with a bit of chow (black tongue, long swoopy tail). I think he's perfect.*

We adopted Dexter in 2006. We think he was five years old then, but that's based on cobbled-together information and guesswork. I pretend he was born in August 2001, and perhaps that is true.

We think he was abused, and he's got a little bit of crazy.

Also, stuffed toys are not safe around him. His favorite place to be is on my lap, which is convenient as that is my favorite place for him to be as well.

I adore my dog.

WAIT! You have met Dexter.

Anyway, Dexter and I went for a walk yesterday. It was humid, but breezy. I was sweating when I got home, but it wasn't horrible at all. I am a delicate flower when it comes to... well, many things, but especially when it comes to temperature. I keep threatening to move to Maine to live beside Jessica Fletcher; in my mind Maine is not humid and is full of interesting characters. I blame the Hallmark Channel.

I've been kicking around a few thoughts with regard to this challenge.

• It's been good to save a bit of money by eating lunch at work every day instead of going out once a week... although spending under $5.50 at Subway doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
• Meditating hasn't taken hold of me as I had hoped. This is a bummer.
• Requiring myself to do something active for 30 minutes each work day has been very good. Last night, I would have plunked myself onto the couch if I didn't have this goal. Walking is good for lowering my stress.

Most interestingly:

• I think I'm getting tired of setting goals.

I'm not sure what to make of that.

Tune in tomorrow for Recipe #20! It's fermenting on my counter as I type. For real.

*Insert plug for adopting pets from rescues here.

It's Little, But It's All Mine...

Last week, I lamented that recipes I'd printed were a pocket of chaos in my life. Saturday was a quiet day at home, and while Andrew worked on his comic collection, I decided to tackle the recipes.

I started by putting in season one of Clatterford that I'd checked out of the library. Proper mood is important.

Then I gathered plastic sheet protectors and the pile of recipes and spread out on the floor. I put all the recipes I thought I might use in a sheet protector... and then I ran out of sheet protectors.

Many of the recipes are only 1 side of a page, so I knew I could double up on a lot of the sheet protectors. That meant that I had to figure out how to organize them so I didn't have a spicy black bean salad in the same sheet protector as a fruit trifle recipe.*

I made a few piles, became overwhelmed, left the mess all over the floor and enjoyed Clatterford for awhile from the couch. This process repeated itself a few times. It's tricky to organize recipes, perhaps especially so when they're all vegetarian.** Is poached pears a side dish or a dessert? Is fake chicken salad a salad or a sandwich? I found that nearly everything was an entree in my mind. I don't cook that often, and I certainly don't make cohesive meals. If I make a new recipe, it gets the place of honor (perhaps beside something we pulled out of the freezer) regardless of what it is.

In the end, I decided that having them stuck in binders made them easily flippable, and two 1.5" binders were manageable even if the organization within them was imperfect. I have them roughly divided: salads, soups, sandwiches, desserts, entrees.

My hope is that I will flip through these to admire their tidiness and be inspired to make something that I thought looked good enough that I bothered to print it off in the first place.

If not, at least they're organized.

*Those of you who know me know that this is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

**I asked Andrew if he wanted to go through the recipes I was planning to throw away, and I would add any he thought he might make. He declined, and as I am slowly beginning to accept that he has even less interest in cooking than I do, I threw meat recipes away unless I was particularly interested in making them vegetarian. (There were two of those, I think.) I decided if it had meat in it, I would never make it and it didn't earn a sheet protector.