Catching up with Cooking

Like much of the world, I am staying in lockdown.  While I don't have any of the medical markers requiring self-quarantine, I am staying home to avoid dragging the virus around.  I go out of my neighborhood by car about once a week; I get mail at a post office, not at home, so I have to collect it.  This past week I went out on Thursday because I had a discount coupon for Walgreens that expired that day, and it turns out they didn't have anything I wanted, so I'll be back to a Saturday trip next week.

When the weather is good I try to go for a walk outside the neighborhood.  On Friday I put an out-of-office message reading "Following the recommendations of our leadership for self-care, etc., I have gone for a walk.  It's lovely out today and the weather this weekend is supposed to be drek.  I'll respond to email and review things when I return, which will be before sunset."  And indeed the weather this weekend is not conducive to walking:  From sunny and mid-60's(F) on Friday, it's been between freezing and low 40's(F) with waves of sleety rain alternating with heavy rain all weekend.  I was very glad I'd gone walking when I did.  I walked down to the reservoir and back, about three miles, and I saw a lot of cars parked on the north side of the road.  It seems they had decided enough people were there and they closed the reservoir and were turning away even people on foot.

The strangest thing to me about being at home All The Time is not having to constantly pack a suitcase or overnight bag for each week's travel.  It was odd enough before to have a week when I didn't travel, although I enjoyed being home to do local activities.  Now I've put away the suitcases into the closet, and I'm participating in some local activities that have moved online; SWAN DAY shifted to ten nights of online concerts from some of the performers.  It's fun to do even further away things that I might not get to see or hear, such as the Metropolitan Opera's daily stream, or Paris Opera, or touring museums, and going back in time with Playbill's weekly showing of a musical.  I'm hugely excited about some of the shows the National Theatre (of Britain) is going to show.

All of this does mean that my reading has slacked off considerably.  Oh, well.

Since I posted last, there have been several holidays for which I've done cooking.  First up was St. Patrick's Day, and since I don't do corned beef and cabbage, and I had to work with what I have in the house, and work was going NUTS because we had to figure out how to respond to the COVID-19 effects on our customers, I didn't have much time to do anything elaborate.  Of course, I did make soda bread:

Whole wheat flour, oatmeal, baking soda.

Stir in buttermilk, form.  One half had caraway seeds added,
then cut into quarters or "farls", the other dusted with oatmeal.

Finished!  Hot and buttered and YUMMY.

When I finally had time to prepare supper, I was too hungry to bother with pictures.  It was supposed to be a venison casserole, but I made it as a stew because I have ground beef.  So instead of flouring and browning chunks of meat, I browned the ground beef in some bacon fat, added onions (should be browned in the fat, but I'd missed getting fresh ones in the panic stockup people did so had to use dehydrated) and the rest of the ale from the Apicius cooking a few nights before, plus the seasonings: juniper berries, allspice berries, orange rind, ground pepper, cider vinegar, and a bit of stock.  The upside of ground meat is that it cooked fairly quickly this way.  I have a photo taken the next night, when I ate leftovers:

Stew on soda bread with roasted brussels sprouts,
because they look like miniature cabbages.

The last bit of pear and
blackberry pie for dessert.

I had a bit more time on St. Joseph's Day to make "Carpenter's Pasta".  It should be spaghetti or something similar, but I'm not fond of long noodles so used rotini, which I have on hand.

Step 1:  Brown breadcrumbs.
They are supposed to represent
a carpenter's sawdust.

Step 2:  Soften onions and
garlic until they are golden.

Step 3: Add chopped tomatoes,
basil, and oregano.

Pasta cooked, tomato sauce over, breadcrumbs on top.
Steamed asparagus and fresh figs, the latter of
which is also associated with St. Joseph.

It was easy and rather tasty.  I used soda bread crumbs, of course.  When the bread got a bit dry, as it does due to the lack of fat, I toasted slices and put butter or cheese on top.  Still rather yummy.

I've done some cooking since, but nothing very photogenic.  I tried making pumpkin waffles, to use up the pumpkin from the Ides, but my waffle iron is old and not cooperative.  So the batter became pancakes and I added the rest of my fresh blackberries:

As you can see, I was eating "at work".

Last night I made a Tuscan Stew using a packet of herbs I'd gotten some time ago.  The idea is that you follow the recipe using the premeasured amounts in the packet, and then keep the recipe (it's on a punch-out card) so you can remake it later.  I had everything on hand except chicken, so I used some extra-firm tofu that has been waiting in the refrigerator.  I also subbed frozen greens (put in the freezer last summer) for fresh spinach, and swapped half the beans with some potatoes that needed to be cooked and eaten.  Overall, the result is very good.  It does make a LOT of stew, so I have meals until well into the workweek.

On the first Monday of spring, we had a snowstorm:

       

It didn't daunt the crocus:

What it was in March to mid-April

Doing a bit of catch-up on the blog.  When I last wrote, the North Texas Irish Festival was just beginning, a weekend later than usual due to international cheerleader competitions that overtook the hotels and Fair Park on our usual (first) weekend in March.  This turned out to be a good thing as the previous weekend's weather was wet and cold and miserable, but the weather on the second weekend, especially Saturday, was spectacular - sunny, warm, and people came out by the thousands.

I didn't get back for the Volunteers Picnic but did get the jacket, which has the 35th year's "Texas Grown Irish Roots" design, and LOTS of pockets.

March was the end of my company's fiscal year, so LONG.  Skidded up to the end of it trying to get deals closed, while also balancing everything else, including my role starting a chapter of (ISC)² which is for cybersecurity professionals.  We're slow starting but determined!

Because I was out of town I missed all the St. Patrick's Day parades and such, but I did a bit of cooking.  Unlike make of my friends who did the Irish-American corned beef and cabbage, I did some traditional Irish dishes:

From the top, soda bread (whole wheat and barley) and butter, braised spinach, roasted onion, poached fish with brown butter and caper sauce, and roasted beetroot with a squeeze of lemon.

Below, my dessert - bread-and-butter pudding with dried fruit.

At the end of March, SWAN Day CT's annual event, featuring women artists of all kinds:  musicians, painters, crafters, performers, and women-led bands.  I love to attend it, and this year assisted BiCi Co.'s "Beyond Gender" group to staff an information table.  This group focuses on women, trans, and non-binary persons in the bicycling community to give them a supportive place to meet, learn how to DIY repairs and upgrades to their bikes, and participate in activities with a community.  Of course, I was able to do a little shopping and listen to a lot of music.

Then in early April was DFW Fiber Fest.  Fourteenth year, and they added a day of classes, and had 95(!!!) vendors.  I took classes and did a volunteer shift, and had fun seeing friends and learning things and tried to keep my shopping somewhat moderate.  Among my classes was a new way to do crocheted cables, how to design my own pi shawl, and how to design a top-down sweater to fit me, which makes me happy because I don't like sewing (I still have trouble getting sleeve caps to lie evenly) AND I am a nonstandard shape so most patterns don't fit me well.  Just learning how to deal with horizontal planes in a vertical fabric was worth the time and class fee.

One of my test things in the crochet cables class.

Yes, there can be a LOT of maths in knitting!  But I can make it shaped like ME.

Start of a pi shawl, pre-pattern.  Lace came next.

While there I went to Rover Dramawerks' 365 Women a Year Festival, which features short plays about women who may not have gotten their full due from history.

The schedule was in two parts, and luckily I could go on two nights (DFW Fiber Fest has a great event on Friday night, so I wasn't going to anything else that night!) and see all the plays.  Definitely interesting, although some of the performances were a bit less interesting than others, all the women featured gave you something to think about and maybe research to learn more about them.  My one complaint was that it wasn't always clear from the title and characters who the woman was, so I've suggested they add her name and birth/death dates at the least to next year's programs.

Four sweaters in two weeks

The timeperiod wasn't that short overall, but some serious procrastinating made it seem so.  I had two sweaters partially done, but the prospect of finishing all four in time was daunting.

Why did I have such a deadline?  There is a group called Mittens for Akkol that makes warm items for the children in orphanages from which a number of the women have adopted children.  The orphanages are in Kazahkstan, so it gets COLD there.  I have posted about knitting for this group before, and this year thought it would be easy to get four sweaters done and I could do some extra items.

Then I went overseas for a couple of weeks and wanted to take something smaller and more meaningful to work on whilst traveling (ditto DFW Fiber Fest, mostly a small item so that I could save space in luggage for yarn, of course!), and came back straight into a very intense play rehearsal and performance schedule, on top of which I was involved in a couple other events, such as SWAN DAY for which I wanted to make a number of items to sell (I sold one, which made me think it wasn't worth the time but others sold zero,and they will go into my Etsy shop), including helping to build the set items for Trashion Fashion 2014 which involved a couple near-allnighters.  The stuff looked really cool in the end.  But that brought me to midmonth and not much further ahead - two sweaters half-done.

It was clear that the only way I could get these done by the beginning-of-May deadline, although friends will tell you I am a fast knitter (one emailed that when I mentioned using a machine, he thought I was referring to the fact that I can knit without paying attention - plain knitting, anyway), was to pull out a knitting machine.  Mine is an older model and I used it last year when asked at almost the last minute whether I could do a replacement sweater for one that was promised and not made.  Which I did.

Could I do two, plus finish the ones that required handwork, and get them to Nanci before she travels so they can be packed, without having to take time off work and being able to get some sleep?

Apparently, with the help of the machine, and not a lot of sleep - yes.

Sweater for Dima - machine knit

Sweater for Sasha - hand-knit

Sweater for Ramil - machine knit

Sweater for Vlad - crocheted body

I waited to post until I was sure the second box arrived.  Forty minutes earlier and I would have sent it by Priority Mail, but I had to use UPS, which is slightly more trustworthy but cost about twice as much.  Oh, well, part of the penalty I paid for not working on these more diligently earlier.

As I said, to get the sweaters done, I did two on the machine. And I ended up doing the tweed sleeves on the machine - body crocheted, so I didn't need to put ribbing on the hem, with handknit ribbing on the sleeves and neckline.  Out of curiosity, I timed the making of the last sweater.  Here's how it went:

First, set up the machine.  I have five balls of black worsted-weight wool and three of light grey (Patons Classic Wool), plus a large ball of multicoloured cotton that is the waste yarn.  I used all five of the black wool and a bit less than two of the light grey.  The teens get to choose up to three colours for the items (sweater, hat, scarf, mittens, and two pairs of socks) they receive, and all four boys asked for black/white/light grey items.  Apologies that some of the colour levels are weird - black is a difficult colour to photograph, especially at night with limited indoor lights.

Ready to start.

Setting up for 96 stitches across.

Ready-to-knit, first with cotton waste yarn.

Changing to the black wool - and error!

You start by setting up the machine for a certain number of stitches per row - 96 in this case, because Ramil is a large guy.Chest 38.5" and neck-to-waist (so sweater has to be longer) is 26".

A few rows of the waste yarn, then I switched to the wool.  Every so often I had stitches "pop" as shown in the picture on the right, and I had to fix those manually or get holes in the knitting - or worse, it fell off the machine entirely!

It took me about 1h30 to knit the back and 1hr50 to do the front - I think I was more tired and not as careful about getting the tension correctly, as I had more manual repairs to do.  The back has about 16,320 stitches in it and the front about 14,400 because you shape the shoulders to allow for the collar to fit better.  I did this part - shaping and adding the collar after sewing the shoulders together - I did the manual knitting in about 2h30.

Taking the piece off the machine.

Shoulders and collar done by hand.

Next the sleeves get added.  Instead of waste yarn, you do the pickup directly into the sides of the sweater body.  This means rolling up the body around the weight - and re-rolling it when the sleeve gets long enough to reach the floor.  The sides are rectangles but the sleeves are more triangular, every few rows I decreased a stitch on each side.

Getting ready to knit the sleeve.

FUBAR!  Remember what I said about
dropping stitches?  FROG TIME.

The righthand picture shows what happened to the first sleeve.  I didn't check when I knit the first row, and as you can see a number of stitches were dropped, then picked up about two rows later.  Of course I frogged this (after using some of my extensive and multilingual vocabulary of bad words) and restarted it.  Later.

The sleeves took about 2h15 total, not counting the restart due to the holes.  So total machine knitting time was a little under six hours - more, of course, if you count the re-doing.

Going on a needle to handknit ribbing.

I matched stripes pretty well.

Once that was done, all I needed to do was sew the side seams and add the ribbing for cuffs and at the bottom of the sweater.  I was a big chuffed that I did such a neat job matching stripes, as seaming is NOT something I enjoy and one reason I tend to knit sweaters (such as Sasha's) in the round.  His is the icelandic-style (round yoke) one, with ridges of white alpaca separating the grey/black tweed from the black main body, and done at a somewhat chunky gauge for speed.  The final sewing-together and ribbing was another 2.5-3 hours, so the handknitting, although much less in terms of number of stitches, took as long as or longer than the machine knitting.

By the way, the stripes on Dima's and Ramil's sweaters are not just to make them more interesting.  They helped me to count how many rows were done so that I knew how many more to go for the length needed. I didn't want the sweaters to look exactly alike so I gave them different stripe patterns.

It felt very funny when these were all gone, and I didn't have knitting sitting right next to me.  I'd put all the in-progress projects away so I would not be distracted.  Time to get them out - you'd think I'd want some time without yarn in my hands, but it doesn't feel like me!

Things I did this past weekend

I have a friend who does "Movie Mondays" on her blog, and since I saw two movies (planned three, missed one because I got out of work too late) I thought about writing about it, then I realized I did some more interesting things this weekend, so here it is. A post without an agenda, for the most part. And not many pictures!

The movie I missed was "The General," which was being shown with piano accompaniment. I love classic movies, I like silent films, and it's fun to see them with live music. I've gone to "Metropolis" at Real Art Ways twice, where they have The Alloy Orchestra offering music and it's fascinating and fun.

Saturday started out semi-routine with physical therapy (usually I do yoga, but not until the knee improves) and then my Torah class, after which I went to Cinema Classics for "Strangers on a Train." I hadn't seen it before and it was typical fast-moving, tense Hitchcock. We all liked it. I couldn't go for lunch with the others afterwards because I had to get to the office and see how things were going on the deal we're trying to close - and which should at this stage be in proofreading, but of course, it's not........

Saturday night I went to SWAN DAY CT, which is a celebration of women artists. It was great, crowded, noisy, supportive.........I bought some jewelry, clothes, and artwork. I'm taking the picture to my office, it's bright and will add some colour to the dull walls. A friend was showing her photography and I told her I want to buy two prints for my office also. She didn't believe me, it's the first time she's shown her work, but I'm serious!

Sunday morning, I slept in. :) Then I worked in my stash storage, having decided it was high time to have another round of sales on eBay. Every time I mention this I get a suggestion from someone that I should use space bags and other things for added storage, but my idea is to weed out items that I am very sure I will not use, and send them to people who want to use them.

Another movie followed: "Jews and Baseball." OK, I am a baseball nut. I freely admit it! I played as a kid (who didn't?) and follow my beloved Cubbies through everything. They had two cinemas showing the movie (it's part of a film festival) and both were PACKED. Fun!

Afterwards, home, and back on the computer for work. Watched some of my usual Sunday night TV shows - "Chopped All-Stars" especially. Was very happy that the hot Aarón Sánchez won his round. But I am torn between him and Nate Appleman for the ultimate winner. I'll have to tune in next week - hopefully I'll be back in time from the foodie adventure my friend Judy has scheduled.