Lace Ribbon Scarf and Matching Knucks

I had a great holiday weekend. Among other merriments, I finished these:

Knucks pattern, Knitpicks Imagination yarn, Mermaid Lagoon colorway

I also completed the matching scarf:

Lace Ribbon pattern

These are for Brandy's birthday. I love the way this scarf blocks. It's pretty before it's blocked, but afterward? Beautiful. It's a pretty simple pattern, and I can knit it without looking at the pattern, which makes for easier knitting. I'm pleased with both and have now cast on for a pair of socks!

I hope you all had lovely Memorial Day weekends as well.

Recipes #18 and #19: Veggie Lasagna and Fruit Kabobs

Emily and Dan came over for dinner, and we ate recipes #18 and #19 with salad and grilled multigrain bread.

Recipe #18 is noodle-free vegetable lasagna. It has eggplant, zucchini, and portobello mushrooms layered with a spinach/egg/ricotta cheese mixture. In the middle is fake sausage crumbles, and there's tomato sauce on the bottom and top of the whole thing. Once assembled, it's covered with mozzarella cheese and baked.

I put it together the night before and then baked it for 30 minutes when I got home from work.


I'm not gonna lie; it was delicious. DELICIOUS. Plus, a serving is one-fourth of a 8" square pan, which I love. We've decided that next time I can roast all the vegetables at one time instead of messing with cooking small batches in a skillet.

Dessert was a Weight Watchers recipe, strawberries and bananas grilled for a few minutes and then drizzled with chocolate sauce.

Fruit kabobs (chocolate sauce not pictured)

The fruit was yummy. I can add these two as grillable fruit along with pineapple and pears. The chocolate sauce tasted very good, but it was runny. Perhaps next time I'll refrigerate it a bit before serving. I loved the taste of chocolate, coffee, and cinnamon.

Actually, I've just named four of my favorite things: strawberries, chocolate, coffee and cinnamon. Brilliant foods.

I added the remainder of the pudding powder and some additional milk and plan to eat it as pudding for leftovers. I have a sneaking suspicion that my chocolate pudding will always have instant coffee and cinnamon thrown in from now on.

I'm super pleased with both these recipes. It feels good to have a couple more wins.

Life Continues Apace

Here's a quick update:

1. The next recipe is in the fridge and will be baked tonight. I also have plans to make a new dessert tonight. Perhaps tomorrow there will be photos. Perhaps there will not and we will pretend I never said anything.

2. I'm working on a scarf that is long and knit on small needles with fingering weight yarn. I've made it through two skeins and have now switched to the matching fingerless gloves so I can be sure I'll have enough yarn for both. Progress is being made, but it's slow. That's the way knitting is.

3. We took Grandfather his upside-down tomato plant on Tuesday night. Now that the hook it was occupying is free, there's no excuse not to plant the impatiens. I planted the ball of impatiens last night. I watered it again this morning and have the watering can beside the front door in a (probably futile) attempt to remember to water it every day. I'm trying not to resent the fact that watering it requires me to get the stepladder out of the utility room. Transporting the stepladder is a small price to pay for flowers' lives, right? Right.

4. Changes are afoot in the garden. The squash seeds are beginning to pop up. The tomato seedlings still look terrible, and I fear I transplanted them before they were big enough to handle the scary move. I am trying not to be sad about this. I'm going to give them some more time, and if they die I will go to the garden center, buy some tomato plants, and vow to try the seeds again next year. The pepper seedlings look pretty strong, albeit tiny.

5. The modified VT challenge is going well. I have been able to do the exercise and meditation piece every day thus far, and the only lunch hiccup could be counted as screwing up the challenge or not, so I choose not. Today I walked before work, and even the leisurely 30-minute walk made me so hungry I wanted to eat my desk by 10:00. I was glad I had the challenge to keep me from going out to eat because Panera's mac & cheese sounded very tempting.

I believe this is just a period during which life continues apace. Knitting and cooking and gardening and rubbing my dog's tummy and watching baseball and working continue. I feel busy and lucky and grateful.

Just not particularly interesting. Sorry.

Information Glut

Last night I was searching through recipes for a knockoff of Outback's steak seasoning that we've made to send to my sister. I remember the seasoning involved a mortar and pestle and a ridiculous amount of spices being measured out in 1/4 teaspoon increments, which seemed and still seems ridiculously small. I also remember Andrew getting attacked by it and spending a considerable amount of time in the kitchen sneezing. He did love the seasoning though.

I've already wandered off point. Let me turn the car around.

As I was searching through the stack of 8.5" x 11" sheets we keep on the recipe bookshelf, I realized some things:

a) I print a lot of recipes

b) I rarely actually MAKE these recipes

c) Bloody hell, these recipes need to be organized and put into a binder

I spend a significant portion of my life in close proximity to high-speed internet. I'm constantly trying to convince myself that I like cooking. These are two very combustible truths, which have apparently led to a fireball of papers on my kitchen bookshelf.

I love to organize. I could be a professional organizational expert if I didn't have to deal with people in order to do it. However, when I have tried to organize these recipes, I become overwhelmed.*

So, I'm going to try to organize these recipes. I'm going to try not to print more recipes--

Wait, that's just setting myself up for failure.

I'm going to try not to print very many more recipes until I've gone through what I have. Once they are organized it will be easier to look through them. Theoretically, that could lead to me using them more. Even if it doesn't, I'll be able to look at that bookshelf without thinking, "Good lord, I need to organize that."

Bring on the binders and plastic sleeves, and ward off the cooking websites.

*I do not have the same experience when I organize my knitting patterns. There seems to be no logic for this except that I like knitting way more than I like cooking.

Happy Birthday, Buddha

In all east Asian countries except Japan, the Buddha's birthday is celebrated on the 8th day of the 4th month in the Chinese lunar calendar. That date is May 21 in 2010.

Happy birthday, big guy.

Buddhism has Four Noble Truths:

1. Life is characterized by suffering.

2. Our suffering is a result of craving and desiring.

3. If we can stop our craving and desiring, we can stop our suffering.

4. The way to do this is the Eightfold Path: right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right awareness, right concentration, right thought, and right understanding.

The Eightfold Path is like spokes on a wheel. It doesn't matter which spoke you focus on because it all leads to the same center. The center is enlightenment. So, don't get freaked out by all the parts of the Eightfold Path. Just pick one and focus on that. That will make it easier for the others to fall into place.

Buddhism says that bad stuff happens. We can control how the bad stuff impacts us personally. Buddhism doesn't say that we'll never get crapped on if we meditate every day. Crap still happens. We're just better able to handle it. We see it for what it is, and then we let it go.

I'm not very good with letting go. I'm not very good with seeing things for what they are and not making them bigger. But I want to be.

There's nothing about Buddhism that precludes you from being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu. Buddhism is a path, a way of seeing the world; it's not a religion with a God to worship. The Buddha isn't God, and he never claimed to be.

I come to Buddhism as a liberal Protestant who majored in Religious Studies and interned at both an Islamic Center and a synagogue, who went to seminary and specialized in interfaith dialogue, who wrote her master's thesis on the subject of women in Buddhism, who used to work in a UU church and now works in a synagogue.

I go to church. I wear a Buddha necklace. There is no conflict there. God is bigger than the boxes we hold up to the sky.*

I believe that I will be a better person if I can learn to sit, to breathe, to fight my tendencies to intellectualize everything, to open myself up to whatever is there besides the squirrel-like chattering in my head. I have much work to do before I can sit for five minutes without looking at my watch, but Judaism helps me here: "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." (Pirke Avot)

Happy birthday, Buddha. Thanks for showing me a way to be. I'll keep working on it.

*God is also bigger than the bogeyman. I learned that from the VeggieTales.

Happy May 19!

Today has been on my calendar for weeks as Garden Day. In my part of the country, opinions differ as to the proper planting date for those plants that have to be planted after the last frost. Some say it's Mother's Day; other say it's May 15.

I had today off from work, so I decided May 19 would be the perfect day.

I took a picture of the garden when I was finished, but it looks suspiciously like this picture from when we got the new square foot garden placed in the yard. (The peas are bigger; that's about it.) Seeds and seedlings are not for those who need instant gratification.

Here is a picture of one of my seedlings, carefully tended inside for weeks and transplanted this afternoon:

I covered the space with netting that is supposed to keep birds away. I do not wish to grieve for my seedlings after they become bird food. I'm not convinced the netting will work, but I've tried my best to protect them.

I have a couple seedlings to give my cousin in exchange for a bell pepper seedling and some garlic chives she's growing for me. I have one empty square for the bell pepper, and the garlic chives will go in a pot since I have been warned that they will take over the world if not contained. I also have some seedlings I'm giving to a friend at work for her garden.

I planted a tomato plant in one of those upside-down hanging planters for Grandfather. Grandfather has expressed the opinion that there haven't been any good tomatoes since they started selling hybrids. I don't agree with him, but I bought him an heirloom tomato plant anyway. The planter is currently lying on the front porch as I try to figure out somewhere sturdy enough to hang it until I can get it delivered.

I bought some impatiens today to plant in a spherical hanging contraption. I haven't planted them yet because I think the tomato might end up on that hook. I play the impatien game every year. I plant them in a sphere in hopes they will become a Ball of Blooms as my container gardening book promises. Then I don't water it enough and they die. The next spring I vow to do better, buy the impatiens and begin again.

Everyone has her spring rituals.

There's something about planting for me. On one hand, I am filled with anxiety as I worry about these plants being left in the harsh outside world where I cannot protect them. On the other hand, carefully placing a seedling in the freshly-turned dirt and gently placing the soil around it to support it feels like... well, like praying.

Happy spring, everybody. If you need more gardening, go listen to this.

Challenge Update

I thought I'd give you an update about my slightly-altered Vegetarian Times challenge:

Challenges are much more fun in the beginning than they are several days in.

Last Friday was my only slip, and I count it as a sort of slip. I volunteered at an event at which the Dalai Lama was speaking. We met at work at 6:30 in the morning. I didn't bring lunch because I wasn't going inside the building and couldn't figure out what would survive in my car for hours. When we got back a little after noon, I didn't bother eating lunch because it seemed too hard and I didn't want to blow my challenge five days in.

I met Lynn after work--I get off at 3:00 on Fridays--and I went through a terrible drive-through on my way to meet her. I suppose that could count as lunch, but it wasn't until 3:30 and it wasn't at work.

I'm just going to say that I did my best and move on.

Today promises to be another tricky one to maneuver. It's Andrew's birthday, and we have plans for this evening. I had planned to walk for 30 minutes at lunch, but it's pouring. I can't honestly imagine myself walking for 30 minutes around and around the inside of the building, so I'm not sure what I'll do.

It's possible that I'm just going to have to be more flexible than I had originally anticipated. I still plan on trying as hard as I can to meet my goals, but I think there's an important lesson to be learned: I can continue to work toward something even after I am unable to complete it with a perfect record.

This has always been a tricky one for me--When I was in first grade, I cried and cried when I missed one word on a spelling test. That one word meant I couldn't get an A+ on my report card for spelling. My poor first-grade teacher had no idea what to do with this crazy, type A child. She eventually sent me to see my mother, who taught in the same school. If I remember correctly, Mom wasn't quite sure what to do with this crazy, type A child either.

So, maybe it's a blessing if I am unable to walk today.

Of course, it's now stopped raining...