Category Archives: Cooking

Recipes and reviews of restaurants I’ve been to and slow food I’ve eaten

Okay, I am Very Stupid

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So I started my New Year’s Eve by saying, “Wouldn’t red beans and rice be a good dish for tomorrow?” and then chopping off a part of my little finger on my left hand while making it.

Sigh.

Good thing I got those very sharp Shun knives for Christmas from my husband. They are apparently made like samurai swords or something. Whatever. All I know is I was standing in the kitchen at about noon, slicing an onion for the beans and I was thinking to myself, “Man, these knives are sharp! This one cuts through the onion like butter.”

WHACK.

I didn’t feel it so much as know that I cut through a part of myself. I immediately put my finger in my mouth, went upstairs to my husband, who was just stepping out of the shower, and said, “I cuth off the tip of my finguh, I fink I need to go huh the hothpital.”

I was in shock. I was very calm, asked my husband, who was only slightly less calm, to help me out of my pjs and into my pants and to put some toothpaste on my toothbrush. I changed my underwear – MOM WOULD BE SO PROUD. Off we went to the ER.

First thought thru my head after the WHACK – “OMG, I just cut off my fingertip.” Second thought after the WHACK – “OMG, am I gonna be able to knit?” Not “am I going to be able to write,” which is how I earn my living. But “am I going to be able to knit?” No one can say I don’t have my priorities straight.

So. No stitches – there was nothing to stitch, they told me. I had cut off a piece of my finger and nail bed – smaller than a pea but bigger than a BB. I went home with Tylenol with codeine, a big ass bandage and a bad case of the “poor em’s.” We had to skip going to our friends Key and Helena’s fabulous New Year’s Eve party, which I was greatly looking forward to, as I was to be the designated drunk. Instead I slept most of the rest of the day, got up for a burger and then back in bed by ten.

See? I can still knit.

I’m over it now. I can still knit. I can still type. Tho right now I can do neither for too long without throbbing. I should be well by the end of the week.

And the next day I finished the red beans and rice and a pan of cornbread. When I had to chop the jalapeño, I used a fork to hold it down on the cutting board. And the food was exceptionally good – must have been that little extra ingredient!

Was it worth it?

Because I Wanna – Mendocino Sea Salt

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The whole purpose of a blog is to write about things ya wanna write about. I feel like writing about Mendocino Sea Salt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

About a year ago, I was up at The Sea Ranch with a group of fellow knitters and on the Saturday morning of our weekend we drove into

Ava's flowers

 

My wreath and its maker

Gualala to go to the farmers’ market. VERY cool farmer’s market – I got a beautiful, handmade wreath woven with dried purple flowers and seas shells that hangs over my dresser and reminds me of the trip every day. I also took this picture of this little girl selling flowers with her grandmother. I hope she made a small fortune.

Another thing we encountered there was a tent where two people – husband and wife – were selling salts, salt rubs and salt mixes they made themselves under the name Mendocino Sea Salt. If I remember correctly, the woman, whose name was Lora, told me that she and her husband, Bob, owned a salmon boat, but that with all the restrictions on salmon fishing, they had converted the boat and their business to collecting sea salt off the coast of Gualala and making these products.

Well! How cool is that, I thought. I tasted a bunch of the salts and bought the basic, Mendocino Sea Salt. I really liked its mineral tang – not so much an aftertaste, just a kind of knock on your tongue at the same time you taste the salt. To me, it really tasted like the Mendocino and Sonoma coast smells! It came in a little jar with a little wooden scoop. Over the next 9 months I doled that stuff out in my cooking and to my guests like it was gold. Remember the old episode of Seinfeld where Elaine has to decide if a guy is “sponge worthy”? I had to decide if my food and my guests were “salt worthy.” (Most of them were!) The salt sat on our Thanksgiving table.

Mendocino Sea Salt at the farmer's market

Then, alas, I ran out about a month ago. But no worries – we were off to Sea Ranch again in June and I’d go back to the farmer’s market. Two weeks before the trip, I saw MSS for sale in Boonville when we were up their for a pinot noir festival. But I thought it would be more fun to buy it from Lora again, so I held off.

NEVER HOLD OFF. EAT DESSERT FIRST. When we went to Sea Ranch two weeks later the weather on Saturday morning was DREADFUL and the farmers market was cancelled. No flowers. No veggies. No new wreath. AND NO SEA SALT.

Enter my fabulous husband. When I came home empty handed, he got online and ordered me not one but TWO jars. They came in the mail yesterday, with a great set of recipes I can use with my sea salt. Here’s one I wanna try this weekend:

Mendocino Sea Salt Pasta – Serves 2

1/2 lb spaghetti or any other pasta

1/2 C good quality extra virgin olive oil

2 fresh tomatoes or 2 C grape tomatoes

3 garlic cloves

1T Mendocino Sea salt

Basil or any fresh herb you have on hand – be generous

Start cooking pasta as directed. Place oil in large serving bowl. Chop whole tomatoes or cut grape tomatoes in half. Crush garlic and sea salt with mortar and pestle. Add garlic and sea salt and tomatoes to oil. Tear or chop basil and add to mixture. Add cooked pasta, toss and serve.

 

 

New Year, New Soup

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I got my blogging stats from WordPress the other day, but I did not look at them. I am afraid to. I let this blog drop away at the end of the year, just too overwhelmed and too discouraged, really, to write much of anything. When depression hits, or I feel pulled in too many directions at once, my “fun” writing – and this is fun, believe me – is the first to suffer.

But this is a new year, so I am rejuvenated and newly inspired. So I hope – I will not say I promise to or I resolve to, because I don’t wanna set myself up for failure! – to connect more with my friends on these pages.

So, what has inspired me? A lot of things, actually, over the holidays. The incredible creativity of friends (Sheri, Lisa, Janie Rose – you know who you are) and the generosity of friends and family, too.  I was lucky enough to receive some lovely and inspirational gifts for Christmas and they got my fingers itching to make things over the holiday “break”.

Among my favorite Christmas presents was The Essential New York Times Cookbook by Amanda Hesser that my youngest son, Chris, gave me. What a cookbook! It could also double as a doorstop or a panini press, it is so big! I LOOOOOOVE this cookbook. It has absolutely everything in it (mussel mayonnaise, anyone?) and is filled with all sorts of helpful and fun notes.  Each recipe is dated – some go back as far as the 1870s – and have suggestions for variatins and accompaniments. Everything sounds good.

Not long after Christmas dinner (spaghetti and meatballs cooked over 2 days, yum), I opened the book to a recipe for black bean soup – one of my favorites.

Hesser, a food writer for The New York Times, introduces the soup this way – “At the end of cooking this soup, you add lime juice, cayenne, cilantro, and cumin and it’s like shooting a current through the pot.” That was enough for me. Off to the store I went.

I stuck to the recipe very closely, with one exception. It calls for “1/2 pound smoked slab bacon with rind” that you are to separate from the rind, chop into small cubes and brown. I live in a very boring suburb and we only have megagrocery stores, and mine did not have slab bacon, let alone some with a rind. 50 different kinds of bacon, mind you, all factory produced and disgusting, but none in a slab or with a rind. Would this require a special trip to Berkeley? No. I remember that in my freezer I have been stowing away a one-pound slab of pancetta from Diavola in Geyserville about on my birthday last year. This, I decided, was the time to bring out this handmade delicacy crafted by the people who raised and slaughtered the pig.

Pot 'o bacon

It did not disappoint! The rind (yeah!) was peppered and seasoned and I soon had a sizzling pot ‘o bacon. Then you add the vegetables and then the spices and tomato paste, making a kind of roux. Then the broth, the beans, etc. Go in last. Cook the thing for 2.5 hours, uncovered, and watch the level of the liquid drop at the same time it darkens from a milk chocolate brown to a dark chocolate color.

Black bean soup

This is what we let simmer on the stove while I went to work on New Year’s Day. When I came home, we shot it up with the lime juice, cilantro, cayenne and cumin, popped a fine bottle of sparkling California wine my son Shawn and his girlfriend Cecilia gave us (and we failed to drink on New Year’s Eve because I was in bed by 10!!!). Yowza.

Yum!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE.

Wow. There. I wrote my first entry in a long time, and it was thoroughly wonderful.  Our next recipe from this cookbook – cabrito!

I Need a Wife

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And four hands. If I had a wife and four hands, I could clean house, bead and write at the same time. I could cook, knit and walk my dogs all at once.

But I don’t have four hands. Damn. But I did watch a TLC show last week about a man with three wives and I gotta tell ya it made a lot of sense to me – for the women, that is. They get to sleep alone two of three nights, they get shared childcare and shared household chores. Of course, they have no privacy. And too damn many kids – 13 at last count. I wrote about them this week for Religion News Service.

Blue topaz earrings

Okay, on to what’s on the needles, both knitting and beading needles. First, I finally got some stuff into my Etsy store. I have been so lax about it. It’s the pictures that hang me up – it takes me forever to get the right pictures, get them in focus and light enough and then to edit them, organize them and upload them. Again, if I had four hands or a wife . . . Anyway, about a week ago I went on an earring jag and made a whole bunch. Here are a few samples.

Another cool thing I did in the past week was go to yet another Friday Morning Knitting Group feast. This one was French-themed and was at Janie Rose‘s adorable house. It looks like a professional decorator did it. Hate her.

Dinnah is served

But loved the food! Here’s what we had – cheese platter, hummus platter, asparagus wrapped in dough, salad, tomato bisque soup, coq au vin, cassoulet, au gratin potatoes, madelines, pear cake, chocolate bread pudding, and wine, wine, wine. OMG.

The dinner fell just after Carolyn’s birthday, so we honored her with a toast and a giftie. It was a lot of fun.

Absolutely everything was restaurant grade excellent. I hope the women in the group will read this and send me their recipes so we can all share them. Here’s mine, for the tomato bisque soup:

YOU WILL NEED:

2 28 ounce cans whole or crushed plum tomatoes – the better quality, the better soup

1 32 ounce carton of chicken stockLots of goodies on the stove

1 C whipping cream

1 stick butter

1 onion, finely chopped

about 16 basil leaves

about 1 T garlic, chopped

sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

1. Melt butter in  heavy stock pot. Add onion and garlic and saute until onion is clear.

2. Add tomatoes and their juice, stock and basil. Use an immersion blender to break up tomatoes and basil till smooth (or pass them through food processor before adding to the pot). Bring to a steady simmer and cook for about 30 minutes (at least).

3. Add cream and salt and pepper to taste.  Scarf it down.

And here’s Carolyn’s, for Potatoes Anna (aka, au gratin potatoes, or as my kids used to call them, “all rotten potatoes”) . . .  from Clay Cookery and Carolyn’s kitchen:

“The charm of this classic French dish is in unmolding it perfectly into a crusty golden potate cake. However, if that sort of sleight-of-hand seems risky, these potatoes can be appreciated spooned directly from the clay cooker”…..which is what we did at our recent French dinner at Janie’s.

“Before baking, the potatoes should fill the cooker right to the brim, as they cook they shrink into a less formidable volume.”

Ingredients:

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

½ cp butter

6 large baking potatoes

Salt

White pepper

Carolyn adds garlic cloves to infuse the flavor.

1.      Soak top and bottom of 2-quart clay cooker in water about 15 minutes, drain. (If desired, you may line cooker with parchment paper cut to fit bottom to facilitate unmolding.)

2.      Melt butter in small saucepan. Pat dry and brush bottom and side of cooker generously with some of the butter. Arrange single layer of sliced potatoes over bottom and around sides of cooker, overlapping slices slightly. Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. Arrange remaining potatoes in horizontal layers, sprinkling each layer with salt, pepper and butter. Pour remaining butter over the top.

3.      Place covered cooker in cold oven. Set oven at 425 ◦. Bake until potatoes are tender in the center, crusty and crown, about 1 ½ hours. Remove cover, bake until top browns, 5-10 mins. Loosen edges with spatula, invert onto warm serving plate.

Pink lacy one

Now on to the needles . . . I have been absorbed with making moebius scarves lately. Some of us in the Friday group are hoping to get into the Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco this December selling our knitting wares, and these are what I have been working on. I am trying to dig only into my stash to do it, and so far pretty good. Thank you Karen, for teaching me how to do this. Here are some of the pictures of my items we took for our application.

Blue lacy one

Maid Marian Socks – Heel Flap

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Okay, everyone ready for the heel flap on the Maid Marian Socks? You slackers, go to yesterday’s post and catch up. Catch up, will ya??? Gaaaaa.

Vino

First, let me start by saying I have had a glass of wine.  Malbec. Today was my first day back at K2Tog this week and this is the week we move.  I was to work 10:30 to 2 and instead worked 10 to 5 – of my own choice. I have counted yarn, packed yarn, stacked yarn and I am sure before this is over I will gack yarn. So when I got home at 5:30 I opened a bottle of wine and started a pot of pappa alla pomodoro. I’m also gonna have a salad of butter lettuce, goat cheese and balsamic reduction. I am livin’ large. Terry will be home about 9 or even later, so me and the pooches is on our own. (They’re having dog food.)

What? No wine?

Heel flap. Started it during the nightly news and the first glass of wine. Here goes:

After completing round 4 of leg pattern, rearrange stitches on dpns (double point needles) in the following fashion: dpn 1 -16 sts ; dpn 2 – 19 sts; dpn 3 – 30 sts. THIS IS CRITICAL – the 1st stitch on dpn 1 and the last stitch on dpn2  should be purl stitches, and the first and last stitches on dpn 3 should be purl stitches. Remove marker for beginning of round. Okay? Okay.

We’ll work the heel flap across the stitches on dpn 3 only. Turn work and work these 30 stitches in this way:

RS of heel flap

Row 1 (WS) – Slip 1 stitch purlwise wyif (with yarn in front), purl to end of row.

Row 2 (RS) – Slip 1 pwise wyib (with yarn in back), *k1, slip 1 pwise;* repeat between * and *, ending with k1.

Repeat these two rows until there are 17 slipped stitches along ends of flap. End after Row 1.

Okay, that’s it for tonight. I am beat and it’s time to eat. I have the classical station on and am going to do my best to forget that I don’t have another day off until the first Sunday in June. Yikes. Need more wine.

WS of heel flap

Santa Croce from the Piazza

Let me wax tipsy about pappa alla pomodoro. I first had this Tuscan tomato and bread soup when we were in Italy last year, just about this time. My first bowl was in a restaurant called Boccadona seated outdoors in the piazza before  the Santa Croce church in Florence. I will never forget it. One thing I hate is soggy bread, but this was something of a different order. The bread and tomatoes became one rich, creamy substance – like cream of tomato soup with out the cream. Just lots of Parmesan cheese. Ah, well. It was wonderful. Mine is pale shadow of that, but there ya go. At least I try. The recipe I linked to above is close to the one I used, but I used 2 28 oz cans of Italian whole tomatoes instead of fresh. It’s May in the Bay Area so it feels like winter. Damn. Wish I was in Italy.

Dinner in Pinole

Okay back to knitting. Tomorrow – if I survive our last day open and our first day of inventory and packing – I’ll post turning the heel.

Italian Food Fest

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Last Saturday evening, my Friday morning knitting group, which has been meeting for at least 6 years, first at Skein

Around Karen's Table

Lane and now at Skein Lane Studio, carried the Friday morning festivities over into Saturday night for the first of what we hope will be a regular international food themed meeting complete with knitting and adult beverages. For our first gala, we met at the home of Karen King for a table-groaning array of Italian goodies.

I drank it before I could take the pic

We started with some drinkipoos – my favorite – with Merle mixing up some Campari cocktails. I had two (2!!!!!) of these beauties as I was making the marinara sauce and heating up the bolognese. Merle’s recipe is an equal mix of Campari, orange juice and sparkling water or club soda served on the rocks with a slice of lime. YUMMA. They were light and refreshing – never mind that Cameron thinks Campari tastes like chalk -  and made me think of Italy. Actually, everything makes me think of Italy these days as May will make it 1 year since Terry and I were there. I’d kill to go again. Thus, I think, I wanted to make Italian food for my friends.

While I was cooking, we opened up the appetizers folks brought. These were just delicious – very filling and could have

Sheri's Arancini

been a meal on their own just because of the quality, never mind the quantity. Sheri made a savory arancini – a ball of risotto filled with a dollop of melted mozzarella cheese. These were GREAT!!!! She also made a yummy plate of asparagus spears

asparagus

wrapped in prosciutto and baked in the oven – a really nice gesture from a vegetarian! They were also delicious. Hell wrap bacon around a pencil and I’d probably eat it. Janie Rose brought a plate of phylo dough stars with a spoonful of sundried tomato yumminess in the center. YEAH BABY. But as her

Janie Rose's phylos

husband made them (keep that guy, Janie), I don’t have the recipe. And Jean made a dish called “Deviled Shrimp” that several us felt was like a shrimp ceviche.

Jean's Deviled Shrimp

To make it, you will need:

2 lbs medium raw shrimp (Jean bought hers cooked at Tokyo Fish Market)

1 lemon, thinly sliced

1 medium red onion, thinly sliced

2 small cans black olives

2 T chopped pimiento

1/4 C vegetable oil

Merle and the drinkipoos

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 T dry mustard

1 T salt

1/2 C lemon juice

1 ! red wine vinegar

1 bay leaf, crumbled

dash of cayenne

chopped parsley

Shell and devein shrimp. Bring 1 qt salted water to a boil, add shrimp and cook for 3 minutes. Drain, rinse in cold water, drain and set aside. In bowl, combine lemon, onion, olives and pimiento and toss well. Combine oil, garlic, mustard, salt, lemon juice, vinegar, bay leaf, cayenne and parsley and add to bowl with lemon mixture. Arrange shrimp on a plate and pour marinade over. Cover and chill no longer than 3 hours.

I was responsible for the main course, a pasta bolognese and a smaller pot of marinara sauce for the 2 vegetarians in our group. Whatever! I made the bolognese 3 days ahead so its flavors could sit and meld and mingle, and I made the marinara at Karen’s house because I don’t think that gets better with age.  The marinara recipe came out of Lidia Cooks from the Heart Of Italy, a cookbook I got for Christmas last year.

The finished meal

Now, as for the bolognese. I combined two or three different recipes, taking things from each that I thought sounded good. Here is my best approximation of  what I made – and I doubled the amounts below.

Bolognese Sauca

1.5 lbs ground meat, preferably organic, grass-fed. Mine comes from Marin Sun Farms

1.5  lbs ground pork, preferably organic. Ditto above.

2 T olive oil

8 cloves garlic, preferably fresh

4 ounces pancetta, housemade if you can get it. Mine comes from A.G. Ferrari

2 C white wine

Sheri

1 yellow onion, finely chopped

1 celery stalk, finely chopped

2 carrots, finely chopped

2 28-ounce cans of whole Italian tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, passed through a food processor to crush

2 bay leaves

Drunkipoos

2 C red wine, preferably Chianti

1/2 C tomato paste

Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese rind

red pepper flakes

sea salt

pepper

1 C milk

fresh oregano

fresh basil

1. Combine meats and white wine. Cover and chill overnight.

2. Heat oil in Dutch oven or other large, deep pot. Add pancetta, garlic and veggies. Saute until onion is translucent

Sheri, Sarah, Janie Rose

and pancetta is browned.

3. Add meat. Cook until meat is browned and almost all liquid has evaporated. If there is a lot of liquid, you may drain it off.

4. Add tomato paste, tomatoes, red wine, cheese rind, red pepper flakes and bay leaves. Cook over low-medium heat for a good while – several hours if you can. Let the liquid reduce. It is good if you can store it in fridge overnight and heat up again the next day.

5. About an hour before serving, add in chopped fresh basil and oregano to taste. Add in milk and let cook. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over a good quality, meaty pasta. We used Rustichella d’Abruzzo pappardelle, which can be bought at The Pasta Shop or Andronico’s. YUM.

When we finally sat down to dinner we had two delicious, crisp salads provided by Carolyn and ????? YOUR NAME

Cheers

HERE! And Karen made – MADE – Italian bread. For me, this was incredibly good – even better than some from the excellent bakeries we have in the East Bay. Karen, too, has been non-responsive in sending the recipe, so I’ll kick her butt when I see her Friday and try and re-post.

About halfway thru dinner, we decided our nest food fest would be Mexican, would be in July, and would be at Cameron’s house (MARGARITAS!!!!). About then, Karen’s husband Chris came in and just stopped dead at the table,  aghast at the bounty before him . . .

We took pity and fed him

Sarah's Lemon Bars

The Ellen Vest

Just before dessert, Karen surprised Ellen with a birthday present – an original design called the Ellen Vest she had knit up for her. It is beautiful! As soon as Karen published it, I will post a link.

For dessert, we had lemon bars (Sarah), cream puffs (Jan) and chocolate hazelnut torte (Cameron). Everyone worried that their dessert had not set properly, or was too gooey – AS IF THAT COULD EVER BE A PROBLEM WITH DESSERT – and I think we all had a piece of each. Cameron did not make hers, so I can’t give you the recipe, but here’s a link to Jan’s (and a link to the vanilla custard she filled them with)  and here’s a copy of Sarah’s . . . .

Lemon Bars:

1 cup flour
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup butter

Mix together with hands until crumbly. Pack into 8"x8" glass pan. Bake at 350 for 20 min.

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
2 T lemon juice (or 3/4 T with 1/4 t lemon rind)
(I used more because I used meyer lemons and I did include some rind too).

Beat together for 5 min. Pour over baked bottom layer. Bake at 300-350 for 20-25 min until set.
Don't overbake. The topping puffs during baking and falls away upon cooking.
Sprinkle top with confectioner's sugar.




Jan's Cream Puff



 



Cameron's Torte

Wine Country with Mom

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My mom was here this past week and on Sunday she and I went to April in Carneros. This was something I did last year

Drinking wine at Folio

with Daniela, but she wasn’t up for it this year, so off I went with Mom, who was in town from Houston.

Basmati and Wild Rice Salad

We had a ball. I think we went to 6 or 8 wineries, and ate all kinds of yummy bits – sushi (Folio) , chicken enchiladas (Robledo Family Winery), salumi (Jacuzzi) and arancini (Homewood). But for my $40, the best bite was at Schug where winery chef Kristine Schug served up a tomato bisque to go with the reds and a basmati and wild rice salad to go with the whites. The rice salad was off the chart! It had these little surprising flashes of sweetness provided by the raisins and a nice citrusy finish. AND she’s shared the recipe on the winery website. GO MAKE IT.

Eat This and Knit That

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I am very behind in things I want to blog about, so I am gonna make a big post here.

First off, did anyone see the feature in the NY Times Dining section about people who take pictures of all the food they eat? Who knew I was part of a trend? I started taking pictures of memorable meals when we were in Italy last May, and those pictures can still bring me right back to the places we ate them. This is one of my favorites. . . . .

Vernazza lunch

This was a meal of locally-produced salumi, cheese, wine and bread we had on our hotel’s communal terrace in Vernazza overlooking the Ligurian Sea and the town of Manarola in the distance. It was hot, it was sunny, it was Italy. I’ll never forget it. And I am thrilled I took this picture. Thank you, God, for digital cameras.

So with food in mind, let me share a few recently tried and loved recipes. On Easter Sunday we did not do much. The weather was foul and I was coming off a long work week and so was Terry. So we hunkered down. Seemed like lamb was the thing to eat for Easter, so I took a boneless rack of lamb from our monthly meat box from Marin Sun Farms out of the freezer and looked for a way to prepare it among my cookbooks. I am not an expert at lamb, tho I love it.  I found this recipe in The Way To Cook by Julia Child, a cookbook given to me for Christmas several years ago by our youngest son, Chris. Both boys are out of the house now, so using this cook book to make this holiday meal felt really good. I miss them both.

Here’s the recipe:

2 cloves garlic

1/2 t salt

2 T Dijon mustard

1-1/2 fresh oregano

1 T lemon juice

1/4 c olive oil

You put all of this in a food processor and blend it until it is the consistency of homemade mayonnaise (like a light salad dressing). Then you coat the lamb with the marinade, throw it under the broiler at 500 degrees for 10 minutes, then 400 degrees for 20 minutes. I put the lamb and the marinade in a bag and put it in the fridge in the early afternoon and took it out enough time before dinner so it would return to room temp. It was FANTASTIC. Take a look . . .

Out of the oven

Being carved

It was delicious! Served with asparagus and salad and red wine. Yum!

Beaded Trellis Scarf

Okay, now let’s see. What’s on my needles these days? I am deeply wrapped up in a lace scarf I am making with Schaeffer Yarns “Audrey” in the color Pomegranate. I love this yarn! It is 50% merino, 50% silk and has a luscious hand-feel. I started out on my Hiya-Hiya needles, which felt great, but the pattern’s k7tog – knit 7 stitches together, yarn over, k7tog, yo, k7tog, yo – made for a bit of a struggle with them. So I switched to my Addi lace turbos and the resulting fan-like stitch is both easier and more fun to make. The pattern I am using is called “Trellis Scarf” and is by Evelyn A. Clark, one of my favorite lace designers. She adapted it from an Estonian lace pattern. It appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Interweave Knits. I am adding size 6 beads to the top of each diamond formed in the body of the scarf, and have added some to the border as well.  See the beads?

Detail

There are a few more things on  my needles, but I think I’ll save those for a later post. But I do want to share with you something my friend Susie completed recently and shared with us at our Wed. night knitting group. Take a look . . .

Susie's Shawl

Susie considers herself a beginning knitter. Right. She made this shawl from a free pattern on the Crystal Palace Yarns website - WHICH I CANNOT FIND RIGHT NOW – and made it with their Mini Mochi yarn. I think it looks fantastic. Here’s a close up . . .

Gorgeous!

All right. Enough blogging. I need to clean house and knit.

Go Horns Chili

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So tonight I am sitting here watching my school, the University of Texas, play the University of Alabama in the bowl game for the national championship. I have my chili, my chips, my salsa and, if Texas falls 2 touchdowns behind, I get to have margaritas (trying to cut back). As I write, it is the middle of the second quarter, Texas is down by 1 point, but our Heisman-finalist quarterback has been taking out of the game with a shoulder injury. In his place is a freshman. I hope for a miracle.

But I thought it would be a good time to share my chili recipe. I base this recipe on one I got out of an old issue of Food and Wine magazine, perhaps in the late 1990s. It is called “Rustic Chili” and is unusual (to me) in that it calls for cocoa powder! Here is my version:

GO HORNS CHILI

4T olive oil

2lbs ground meat (Iuse ground goat. Yes, I said ground goat)

4 cloves garlic

2 C chopped onion

14 ounces canned diced hot green chilis (less if you don’t like hot chili)

1/2 C chili powder

1 T ground red pepper (less if you don’t like hot chili; more if you really like hot chili)

2 T unsweetened cocoa powder

2 T cumin

1 t allspice

3 cans of pinto beans, drained

2 28-ounce cans of crushed tomatoes

Heat oil. Add meat and garlic and cook until brown. Add onions and next 6 ingredients. Saute until veggies soften. Add beans and tomatoes.  Cover and simmer for 30 minutes AT LEAST. This is better the next day. Add some salt if you like, top with cheddar cheese, jalapenos, chips, sour cream, whatever.

Okay, it is still the 2nd quarter and now my team is down, 14-6. If ‘Bama scores again, I have promised myself a marg. I better get it ready. Sigh.

Happy Fourth of July – even tho it is July 9

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Okay, okay, I’m behind. But I have a good excuse – it has four legs and fur and BIG, POINTY TEETH. And it hates it when Mommy doesn’t play with her. Sigh.

Respect my big, pointy teeth

Respect my big, pointy teeth

So let’s back up to the Fourth of July. On that day, Terry and I had some friends over for burgers and dogs on the grill. But I couldn’t stop there. So one of the things I made was a red velvet cake.

Two layers

Two layers

For those of you not familiar with red velvet cake, it is a southern specialty. I first came across it when I was living in Texas during my teenage years. I loved it right away. My stepfather’s mother makes a wicked good one, and my best girlfriend Becky (who I know reads this blog) made me a great one for my birthday one year. I can never see or think of red velvet cake without remembering that very special gift from her.

This one came to be as the result of a gift from another very special friend, Chris. I just visited Chris in Austin a couple of weeks ago and he gave me a beautifully boxed red velvet cake kit made by Sugar Cakes. I have tried Googling it, but cannot find the right place. The main listing is for a bakery in Marietta, Ga. of that name, but I do not think that is where the mix came from. Chris? Any help here?

Anyway, while visiting Chris, he and his cousin and I went for a red velvet cupcake at a place on Town Lake (now Lady Bird Lake) that was super yummy. But Chris wouldn’t let me make this cake for him, so home it came with me. And knowing it bakes up red, I thought hey, why not make it for the Fourth?

Frosting

Frosting

But how to make it red, white and blue? First, the red is easy. The recipe calls for two bottles of red food coloring. I just had to let the red show thru, so I decided not to frost the sides. Then the white – I made vanilla buttercream frosting. And the blue? Blueberries, of course:

Fourth of July Red Velvet Cake

Fourth of July Red Velvet Cake

And it was delicious! For those of you have never had it, RVC tastes red. Really. I don’t know how else to explain it. Some can taste like chocolate, but this one was kinda cherry flavored. It was a big hit and at the end of the night there was not a single piece left.

If you’re looking for a good recipe, this one from the NYTimes is pretty good. I made it once.