Shaker Stitch Baby Blanket

I was in my local yarn shop recently, Steven Be, and the utterly unforgettable and blindingly flamboyant Steven Be himself proclaimed to me that brioche is the stitch of 2015. I feel pretty trendy, since I started this blanket at least a year ago. On the other hand, it's technically not a brioche stitch. The pattern calls this stitch a shaker stitch. I can't be bothered to understand the difference. All I need to know is that I love this fluffy bouncy blanket!

I started the blanket without a recipient in mind, because I knew there would certainly be another baby in my life by the time I finished it. In the end, it felt a little wrong to give it to a baby when it wasn't knit with that baby in mind. Knitters know. There's a meditation or intention that goes into knitting something for a specific recipient. So I'm donating it to the church auction tonight. I hope it will be loved in its new home!

Grady's sweater vest modeled

Cuteness.

Amanda's Oven Baked Jalapeno Poppers

Amanda decided to come up with her own recipe for oven-baked jalapeño poppers today after we picked up a couple dozen jalapeños at the farmer's market this morning.  They were amazing.  The salty chewiness of the parmesan reminded me of bacon-wrapped poppers, but without all the grease!

 

 

 

Amanda’s oven-baked jalapeño poppers

 

10 jalapeño peppers
3 oz cream cheese (brought to room temp)
¼ cup grated parmesan cheese
Salt & pepper

Cut jalapeños in half lengthwise, stems left on.  Remove the membrane and seeds (or not, if you like them extra spicy!).

 

Mix cream cheese, dash salt and pepper.  Spread on jalapeños.  Sprinkle parmesan over top, pressing slightly down to hold it on. 

 

Line a baking sheet with foil and spray with non-stick cooking spray.  Arrange jalapeños on pan.  If they don’t lay upright, cut a thin slice off the bottom for stability. 

 

Bake 20-25 minutes at 375 degrees.
 

Savannah's sweater on the catwalk

Savannah's walking!  And her sweater finally fits!

Lace Lamp 2

The lace has dried.  My plan is to use this as a tabletop globe, lit by a small battery operated votive.  I don't have that yet, so here it is with a way-too-bright, way-too-blue/LED flashlight under it.

Lace Lamp

Sarah found this awesome variation of the 1970s string lamp on Pinterest.

 

 

I decided it would be cool to try and make one.  The photos above are from a website that is not published in English and as far as I can tell, didn't have instructions anyway.  So I found some string lamp instructions at instructables.com and adapted.

 

 

I picked up some lace curtains at Goodwill and some fabric stiffener at Michael's.  I cut some flower patterns out of the lace, soaked them in the fabric stiffener, and then wrapped them around my balloon.  I found out quickly that I hadn't cut my pieces small enough.  I went in with my scissors to do some trimming, and popped the balloon.  Fabric stiffener exploded across the whole room.

 

I blew up a second ballon and started over.  Even after trimming down some of the lace pieces, it still didn't lay very flat.  We'll see what happens as it dries.   

DGK's vest

There's a new Declan in my life, and he deserves a vest equally as cute as my nephew Declan's vest!  For DGK, I found a cute pattern on Ravelry called "Benedick and Beatrice Vest".  I don't usually pay for patterns, but it's tough to find cute free patterns for boys' clothes. 

Since DGK was born in October, I am making this vest in a 12 month size to make sure he can wear it next fall.  I added a bit of length to the pattern, since I know my knitting is usually short and squat.  Rather than the recommended 1.5 inches of ribbing around the waist, I ribbed a full two inches.  Rather than starting the arm and neck holes at 5.5 inches, I knitted until the full piece measured seven inches from the cast on edge.  From that point on, I followed the pattern as written.  The one exception:  I used size 6 instead of size 7 double pointed needles on the neck and arm ribbing, because I had them handy.  I'm using Caron Simply Soft worsted weight in Soft Blue and Grey Heather.

Here's the project, nearly complete.

Baby Blanket or King-Sized Comforter?

Several months ago I started a baby blanket for my expecting cousing Angela.  I had a lot of baby yarns leftover from a project I hadn't finished years ago, and some plain white worsted weight Red Heart yarn that I got from Mollie when she was cleaning out her stash, so I decided to combine the two and make a simple striped garter stitch baby blanket.  I bought a set of size 13 circulars and set to work. 

 

My first cast on seemed a little too small after I had knitted a couple rows, so I tore it out and added more stitches.  Now is where the lesson begins.  The lesson is this:  Even if you are an experienced knitter (and dare I say talented), you can still make stupid mistakes.  I realized after five or ten rows that I had started a pretty wide blanket.  I figured I'd just keep going.  It seemed like too much work to rip it out again.  After a few more rows it was becoming more and more clear that I'd added WAY too many stitches, but by then it really did feel too late to start over.  So I kept knitting.

 

Eventually I had gone through all of the skeins of baby yarn I had in the house, and I had a very wide, stout rectangle.  I had to buy more yarn.  And more of the white Red Heart.  And I kept knitting.  For months.

 

In the end, I gave myself a bump on my right index finger that I can only guess is a ganglion cyst.  And I had a blanket that, if rotated 90 degrees, could be a bedspread.  I bound off and called it good.

 

 

I hope baby Jaxon likes it.  My baby seems to.

 

Dividing Hostas

I took terrible photos, but I want to be sure to document that this was the first time I ever divided perennials.  We've got lovely rows of hostas along our front sidewalk, but there's one very large one that doesn't match the rest, and takes up a lot of the sidewalk by mid-summer. 

 

Since the area under the tree in the front yard is in pretty poor shape--weedy, with very sparse ferns and lilly of the valley--I thought it might be good to move the big hosta to that area.

 

 

I found out that it is really tough to dig up a hosta!  So I only took a few chunks, and I'll have to move the rest of it next year.  I'm not sure if it was the hosta roots or the tree roots that made the job so challenging, but it was a bear.

 

Here are the locations of the six babies I moved further back under the tree.  I'm not doing the best job of keeping them watered, but hopefully they'll survive the winter and we'll have a renewed landscape next year!

 

Canning Tomatoes

The next night, I decided to try canning the rest of the full-sized tomatoes.  This is my first attempt at canning tomatoes, and only my third attempt at canning, period.  Previous efforts with pickles and pear butter were somewhat disappointing.

 

I turned to the internet, and found some instructions that seemed reasonable from the National Center for Home Food Preservation.  I reviewed their instructions on Using Boiling Water Canners, along with the instructions at the beginning of my Ball Home Canning Basics book.  Then I followed their instructions for Canning Crushed Tomatoes.

 

The longest part of this whole process is getting the big canner full of water to boil.  Maybe next time I should try putting smaller pots of water on all four burners to boil, then combining them in the canner.  It took what seemed like hours to get that thing going. 

 

In the meantime, I started preparing tomatoes.  I had never blanched tomatoes before.  I thought it was kind of fun.  I used a fine mesh strainer to dip about five tomatoes at a time into boiling water for a minute or two, then into cold water with a few ice cubes for another minute.  Since I was doing them only five at a time, this was pretty time consuming, too.

 

 

Blanching was followed by peeling and quartering.  I wasn't sure if I should seed them, so I mostly left the seeds in, whenever they didn't just fall out.

 

 

At some point I had boiling water in the canner and all my tomatoes cut and ready.  I boiled my jars and lids for 10 minutes, and got the tomatoes started cooking on the stove.  When it was finally time to fill the jars, I took a few liberties.

 

First, I'm not 100% sure I had the exact correct amount of head space.  Here's hoping I got close enough.

 

Second, the folks at Ace Hardware up the street (where I had picked up my jars earlier that night) had assured me that I didn't need to add extra lemon juice or citric acid to get to the required level of acidity.  Since they didn't have these thngs and I didn't want to make an extra trip to a grocery store, I decided to believe them.  They told me the worst thing that could happen is that I'd smell that a jar had gone bad and have to throw it out--I was in no danger of accidentally eating botulism-laced tomatoes.

 

Finally, I processed the jars for 35 minutes according to the recipe.  I gave a few extra minutes for good measure.

 

Here's my final product.  Several hours of work, and what seemed like a massive bounty of tomatoes, cooked down to four and a half jars of crushed tomatoes and one freezer bag of oven-roasted cherry tomatoes.  (For the professionals among my readers, don't worry, that half-jar didn't get processed, it's sitting in my fridge to be used this week).

 

Oven-dried cherry tomatoes

With all this bounty at once, some preserving needed to be done.  I decided to oven-dry the cherries.  I've never had good luck oven-drying full-sized sliced tomatoes. I loosely followed some instructions on a blog called "Our Best Bites."  I didn't bother with any garlic, just sliced the tomatoes in half, tossed with some olive oil and a little salt, and placed them skin-side down in a non-stick foil-lined cookie sheet. 

I roasted them at 325 degrees for somewhere around two hours.  Some of the bigger ones were still pretty moist, but it was after 10pm and I needed to go to bed (also my excuse for no photos)!

I made the mistake of dumping all of the varieties together.  If I had kept them sorted by size and then roasted each size on a different cookie sheet, I could have removed each sheet from the oven at exactly the right level of dry but not charred.

I let them cool on the cookie sheet overnight, then dumped them into a freezer bag and froze them in the morning.

Garden Bounty

This summer was so hot and dry that even with regular watering, most of our garden was pretty pathetic.  Of the 20+ tomato plants we planted, maybe six of them produced.  It was a disappointing year, so we neglected the garden from about mid-July on. 

 

Last weekend, I finally went out to find a harvest that didn't disappoint.  I picked an entire bowl of miscellaneous cherry tomatoes (Indigo Rose and Jelly Bean were probably the most prolific, although neither were the most flavorful).  I also got a whole bowl of one of the roma-looking tomatoes.  It may be Viva Italia.  Then there were a variety of small-ish purples and yellows.  I can't be sure which variety these were.  Everything gets so tangled, whatever markers are left are hard to pair with actual fruits.

 

There were also a few tomatillos, but hardly enough to even make a batch of salsa with.  The red onions were kind of fun this year, but they were pretty small.  A few peppers have come in as well.

 

 

Recipe: Grandma Rita's Frozen Sweet Corn

12 cups corn, cut from cob (uncooked)

1/4 # (1 stick) margarine

1 T. sugar

1 tsp salt

1 cup water



Mix all together. Bring to a boil on high. Reduce heat and simmer for 5-8 minutes.  Cool on cookie sheets. Put into Zip-Loc freezer bags, removing all air from bag. Freeze bags flat on cookie sheets.

Nostalgic Summer: Putting up sweet corn

Maybe it's because Amanda and I have been to Iowa several times this summer, but I've been feeling very nostalgic lately.  I've been itching to take on a very nostalgic activity ever since Mom gave us two bags of fresh-from-the-farm sweet corn.  So today I took the plunge, and endeavored to put up the corn.  By myself.  (Poor Amanda's been so sick this week!)

I picked up a couple of extra ears of Minnesota-grown corn to supplement the bounty from the farm.  In all, I had 23 small ears from the farm and six bigger ears from the store.

First, shucking the corn.  Good idea to do this outside.  Side note: I had no idea when I decided to compost that it would give me such satisfaction to dump stuff like this in there!

Next I set up my cutting station inside.

After cutting the corn off one ear, I realized I better come up with a better plan for containing the mess.  I pulled all the extra chairs out of the way and threw an old sheet down to catch stray kernels and sprays.  This is such a messy job!

Come to think of it, in all my nostalgia, I remember a very specific occasion when I was pretty young.  My grandma, several aunts, and several cousins came to our house for a day of putting up corn.  I think there was an outside shucking station.  I was sitting at a picnic table in the garage cutting corn of the cob.  Then it would be sent inside, where Grandma Rita took the hot job of cooking it.  Mom was smart to put the cutting outside.  I wonder if she just hosed out the whole garage afterwards.  I kinda want to hose out my kitchen.

I distinctly remember my aunt Lori giving me lots of positive feedback.  "You're really good at that."  She was such a teaser.  She always used to tell me I was really good at chores that she wanted me to do.  Note to future self.  It works like a charm on kids.

Here's all the corn, before cooking.  I started with six large and 23 smaller ears. I got 20 cups of corn.  I wonder if my table will ever be not sticky again.

Corn on the stove.

After it's cooked, you spread the corn out on cookie sheets to cool.

It cools pretty fast.  Now I gotta figure out how to get it in the freezer bags with minimal mess.  I bet Grandma Rita or Mom could have given me a better plan than this.  Probably the best answer is four hands.

In the end, I got five quart-sized freezer bags full, plus I saved a couple of servings for us to eat tonight.  My taste test gives it an 8 out of 10.  It's a little chewy.  Not sure if that's because it was in the refrigerator for a few days before I cooked it? 

All done, and most of the dishes cleaned, too.  I'd love a cocktail, but I'll settle for a Diet Coke.  Still need to head outside for some garden work.  Cocktails later!

Instead of going to the Farmer's Market, we went to the Farmer

Amanda and I have a weekend tradition of going to the farmer's market and loading up on fresh veggies for the week.  This past weekend, we skipped the farmer's market and went straight to a farmer.

The photo above doesn't really do this garden justice.  It's massive.  And prolific.  I remember when this area was all hog lots.  I guess 30+ years of pig poop will leave some really fertile ground!

One highlight was the red potatoes.  My mom gardened when I was a little girl, and I vaguely remember learning about planting potatoes: cutting up a potato, planting the pieces eye-up.  By the time she had four children and a lot of for-money farming to do all day every day, she scrapped gardening for a couple of decades.  I'm glad semi-retirement has brought back the love of gardening!

Reagan and Adrian thought the potatoes were really cool, too.  I'm looking forward to trying to plant some next year.  I think I'm willing to give up zucchini and yellow squash to make room.  I grow them because I know they'll produce, but I get pretty bored of eating them.

Best of all, Mom's garden has no shortage of tomatoes.  They were a joy to behold, since our tomatoes have provided nothing but disappointment this year.  I think the hot hot summer has been hard on the garden overall, but the tomatoes are especially sad.  I've noticed more squirrels eating what few green tomatoes are there.  I'm told the squirrels are eating them for the moisture, since they are thirsty from the lack of rain.  Go figure.

Here's the awesome caprese salad we made tonight with Mom's tomatoes and our basil.  The other half of dinner was a beet salad with beets from last week's farmer's' market.  Delicious!