So many hobbies!

Results of our craft weekend

My sisters and I went up to northern Michigan during the long 4th of July weekend.  My parents have a cottage up there.  The goal was to spend the weekend working on our various craft projects.  Most of my time I spent spinning up the first half of the gorgeous angora/Merino batt I've been working on.

After I finished the bobbin above, I made a pair of pillowcases.  This time I bought a flat sheet and cut it up for the body of the pillowcase:

Having slept on those pillowcases the last two nights, I've learned that I need to use a percale sheet for the body of the cases.  Just any white sheet from K-Mart will still wrinkle when slept on and percale sheets won't.

I also gave my crock pot a workout.  First I made chicken taco meat (1 1/2 lbs. of  chicken, 1 1/2 packets of taco seasoning, one jar of salsa - cook on low for 6-8 hrs. - shred with two forks).  Simple and really, really tasty.  It will be going into my rotation of recipes.  Then I tried a new recipe:  Monkey Bread in the crock pot.  You use refrigerator biscuits instead of making up a batch of bread.  It took longer than the recipe called for and I ended up turning it from low to high but they were good,  I'd try it again but the recipe will need some tweaking.  And finally, I tried another new recipe, making bread in the crock pot.  I didn't care for the taste of the bread - I'd use a different recipe - but cooking it in the crock pot worked pretty well.  If you try it, you'll probably have to tweak the recipe - mine was waaaayy too wet to form a loaf - but if you follow the directions for the cooking, you'll have a pretty decent loaf of bread.  Hey, Fun with Crockpots really is fun... and tasty.

Holiday plans

Well, the plan for the time between Christmas and New Year's.  Once again, I'll be finishing up as many UFOs as possible.  So far, the list is as follows:

1. The brown and salmon shawl started earlier this year.
2. The kid's quilt that needs to be tied and bound.
3. Finish spinning the batts I made a couple months ago.
4. Ply the aforementioned batts.
5. Finish organizing all my yarn, both commercial and handspun.
6. Finish the Halloween quilt started last year.
7. Hand-sew a hanging sleeve onto the back of the Houses quilt.
   

I'd like to start the new year UFO-free. 

This weekend is my baking and wrapping weekend.  Every year I make the fabulous Pumpkin-Cranberry bread, which can only be made with fresh cranberries.  I'm also making cookies to give to my co-workers.  I need to make the number of cookies made equal the number I need, plus one or two more, so I don't eat too many of them.  I'll be making Trisha Yearwood's White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies.  I'm still trying to decide between making the recipe as is or tweak it to make it a bit healthier.  I have minimal to no skills at tweaking recipes so the jury is still out on that one.  Hmm, I have enough to make two batches so maybe I'll make it the healthier way and see how they turn out.  If they're terrible, I'll make the recipe as written.  While the cookies and fruit bread are baking, I'll drag out a table and watch Christmas movies while wrapping all my gifts.  Seems like a pretty good weekend plan to me.

And so it begins...

The Holidays have officially started.  I'm waiting for the Christmas lists for my nieces and nephews to come rolling in, hopefully this week.  I'd like very much to get all my Christmas shopping done withing the next week. 

In an effort to eat/be more healthy, I bought tons of veggies today and my first raw meat since the beginning of the year.  Not buying raw meat wasn't really a conscious decision so much as the desire not to deal with raw meat.  It's messy and you have to be very careful to clean the heck out of anything that it touches.  It's just a pain.  Anyway, I cooked one of my favorite Cooking Light recipes (Curried Chicken with Couscous) along with a side of steamed baby carrots and brocolli.

The recipe says it serves 4 but I bought a little extra chicken and made 7 servings.  I bought chicken tenders and it worked out that each serving got 2 tenders each.  I found a long time ago, that I really love steamed carrots and brocolli.  Nothing on them, just a little salt, and they're really tasty.

In addition from a lot of napping (OK, a lot of napping), I filled one bobbin spinning up the batts I made last weekend.

The color changes are a bit more subtle in reality.

It seemed as if this long weekend just flew by.  I can't believe it's Sunday night already and we've got 4 or 5 weeks until Christmas.  How did that happen?  Last time I looked it was January and now it's Christmas.  My whole family is going to be at my parents' place this Christmas.  That hasn't happened in ages since two of my brothers live pretty far away.  I can't wait.

I cooked all day today

In an effort to not buy any food at work this week (except for Chinese Thursday!), I was in the kitchen almost all day today.  Cooking was interspersed with doing the dishes... over and over again.  At the end of the day, I have 4 servings of chili, 4 servings of Tuscan White Bean Soup, a batch of Morning Glory muffins for breakfasts and a batch of corn muffins to go with the chili.  I also made a batch of vegetable broth that went into the Tuscan soup.  Man, I am really tired.  And I still need to do a load of laundry before bed.  Hey, aren't weekends supposed to be for resting after the work week?

Granola

I started the year with homemade granola.  I'm not sure how much I like this recipe, which combines oil, molasses and brown sugar.  This concoction is heated until the sugar melts then poured over the oat mixture and mixed.  I may still be searching for the perfect granola recipe.  The stuff in the picture has rolled oats, sesame seeds, ground flax seed, sunflower seeds, chopped almonds and pistachios, dried cranberries and cherries and date bits.  I like the base ingredients, I'm just not sure about the molasses, which is add since I love molasses anything.  I take after my dad in that respect.

I was so productive over the holidays and now I've crashed and burned.  I slept badly last night so I have no drive to do much of anything except go to bed EARLY.  The cats, of course, just want to play.  This is mostly exhibited in the yarn they've used to string up the house.  Tyr is currently laying on some unfinished quilt squares and Galen is in the bathroom hoping I'll come and turn on the water.  This is the lull before the storm.  As soon as they find the aforementioned yarn I've wound up, again, they'll be at it again.  I'd been letting them sleep with me but I inevitably sleep badly when they do.  (No, they didn't sleep with me last night.)  Just about the only time I let them sleep with me now is on nights when I don't have to work the next day.

Everyone seems to make resolutions for the new year.  I've found that resolutions never last much past January.  I'm making some changes but I don't really know what to call them since they had better last more than 31 days.  We'll just leave it at that.  I'll tell you about them later once the habits have sunk in but I find if I talk about things I want/plan to do, I never actually do them.  Hey, something to look forward to!

Going to bed now...

I want my two dollars!*

I finally broke down and bought white miso paste to make my miso soup.  To make it more traditional, I also bought kelp to add to the soup.  It tasted fine but I think the yellow miso would have been much more flavorful.  I'm still searching for yellow miso.  Here's a shot of my mostly-yummy soup:

I also added shiitake mushrooms and tofu, just like in Japanese restaurants.  There were little bits of miso floating around so I don't think I disolved/mashed the miso quite enough. 

Sunday I exchanged gifts with my parents and opened the combined gift from both my sister and my grandparents.  When I blogged that I wanted one of these for Christmas, I honestly didn't believe I'd get one.  You know, it's like when you were 16 and you added a car to the Christmas list you gave your mom.  You didn't actually think you'd get a car.  Same thing here except this time it actually worked.  Behold:

The Stauch Petite.  Isn't it beautiful?!  I've even made my first bat, modeled here by the handsome Galen:

More carding will have to wait until after Christmas however.  Bummer.  I have a house to clean and a bit more baking to do before Friday.

I've been toying with the idea of finishing as many works-in-progress as possible.  I've got about 3 quilt tops to finish (the actual quilting will have to wait), some yarn to dye, and 4 or 5 bats to spin.  I guess you can say I'll be doing a Finish-a-thon.  Start the new year with the old year's projects done.  Join me?

 

*This will make sense if you've seen the movie "Better Off Dead."  It's hilarious.  Plus, it's an inside joke for my sister.

This and that

I made a very cool discovery yesterday:  I can knit without looking.  I haven't tried purling yet, I'm still impressed with myself that I can look out the window on the bus ride home and still keep knitting.  It's not complete muscle memory yet, meaning part of my concentration is always on the knitting.  I don't think I'll be taking socks to movies any time soon.

 

This was my dinner tonight.  The first of my fingerling potatoes cooked in a little butter, a couple of scrambled eggs added and then a little cheese.  Man, was it good!  I'll post a picture of my potato harvest on Sunday.  Mmm, home grown potatoes!

 

This is the binding for my wonky squares quilt.  I'm still hoping to have the quilt bound by the time I leave for Houston on 11/5.  My cousin is a quilter and I want to show off my quilted quilt.  All of my previous quilts were tied.  I'm starting to get more excited about the quilt show.  I've never been to one before and this is a big one.  I'm anticipating seeing some amazing quilts.  And hanging out with the cousins.  I can't wait!

Ginger, glorious ginger!

I know this may not look like much, but this, my friends, is a freshly baked gingerbread cake, with both ground and candied ginger.  Oh.  My.  Have you experienced that joy that is ginger?  If it's got ginger in it, I like it: Indian food, Chinese food, gingerbread, gingersnaps, ginger ale.  The original recipe for the cake comes from Cooking LIght magazine and called for blueberries in the cake and blueberry sauce on top.  Didn't like it with the blueberries so I leave them out and put whipped cream on top.  It's driving me nuts that I can't cut into it but this is our dessert Friday night when I hang out with the girls.  Now I just need the cake to cool so I can put it away and go to bed.  (Oh, and that's my new stove.)

Happy weekend people!
 

A nice relaxing Sunday

Once I finished my taxes that is.  After that, it was pretty low key.  There was a fair amount of snuggling and napping with Seli.  It was beautiful outside:  sunny with a clear blue sky.

Saturday I finished spinning the first cop of Targhee singles and wound them off onto my spindle Lazy Kate:

 

And then started the next cop.  My spindle box will be my constant companion for the rest of the week.  The white is finished and I've started the palest purple shade.

 

Even though I have way too much roving, I couldn't resist this one.  It's from Creatively Dyed Yarn purchased from The Loopy Ewe.  It's Merino and Seacell.  Isn't it gorgeous?!

 

I finally got around to the baking I wanted to do last weekend.  My hand of bananas was brown and shriveled and perfect for banana nut bread.  All I did was rip off one end and squeeze the banana out of the skin.  Easy peasy.  I want badly to slice off a piece but I'm saving it for my very lucky co-workers.  It makes Monday mornings a little bit easier.

The joy of the crock pot

Today was spent in the knowledge that dinner would be waiting for me when I got home.  I found this recipe while web surfing last week.  Man did the house smell good when I got home tonight.  Since I don't drink, I had to ask a few people if I could buy just one bottle of beer (the recipe calls for 1 cup - I added about a cup and a half) and bought a bottle of Bass.  Once it was done cooking, I pulled out the meat and pulled off all the visible fat.  The juices in the crock I poured into one of those measuring cups with the spout at the bottom, waited for the fat to rise to the top and poured all the good stuff back into the crock.  Then I put the meat back in and shredded it with two forks.  Dinner was served over pasta with some fresh-grated parmesan cheese sprinkled on top.  Yummy!

Did you know you can actually bake in a crock pot?!  Seriously.  You cook the same as you would for any other recipe except you stick a chopstick under the lid to let the steam out.  I'm going to try it this weekend. 

My iPod has been absolutely wonderful to have at work.  I have all my favorite music which ranges from Barenaked Ladies to Scott Joplin to Riverdance to Blue Oyster Cult.  It makes boring data entry a little more tolerable.  A couple of weeks ago I started uploading podcasts:  Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me; The Splendid Table and Sticks & Strings.  How did I ever manage without an MP3 player?