Murky Grey Mornings (how I love them)

I'm sure this is a product of having read Wuthering Heights so many times as a kid

(seriously, is that any kind of example a 12-year old should be getting for adult relationships?  apparently yes, since I've always been better off than Catherine.  read it lately?  whoa)

but I do love a murky grey morning in fall.  There are so many possibilities for the day, all of them layered - from rain clothes and boots to the many ingredients in the cookies you'll probably bake or the pages of the book you'll read since it's too crummy to go out gallivanting through the heather. 

No sun to make you squinty or too warm.

Leaves standing out but softly against the sky if they are still on their trees; the ones on the ground bright against the darkened pavements.

Air wet and chilly enough for a good strong sweater

A hot drink that much more comforting

A nap that much more enticing

and anything you actually accomplish so much more rewarding.

Also, I get to go out and hear music while knitting later, and then have supper in a restaurant with friends.  And I tracked down my favourite weird skirt to wear. So even if it was gorgeous and sunny and warm it'd still be a pretty fab day.  Yay!

The fine art of mailing it in

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow Canadians!

and aren't we lucky to have summery weather (at least in Southern Ontario) for it? of which I have been very much taking advantage, though mostly in my 'big organizational overhaul' way.

I have had time for that because back when people first started to let me cook the Big Holiday meals, I worked very hard to make them great, and now I cheat everywhere.

For example, a lot of people choose between turkey and ham for the main course.  Both are simple and require minimal intervention during the cooking stage.  But I've learned the hard way you can go crazy with brining a turkey before, and making turkey stock after.  So I go with spiral ham.  It's even pre-sliced!

Vegetables for this fall feast often include a delicious squash mashed up with maple syrup and butter, or potatoes mashed up with sour cream and butter, or better still scalloped potatoes and oh how I love those. Here is an amazing revelation though: if you slice up carrots and wrap them in tin foil with pats of butter and and some brown sugar, you get no-brainer candied carrots that pair nicely with cut potatoes roasted in olive oil on the otherwise unused bottom rack of the oven.  And nobody cares that nothing got mashed or sauced.  Unless they really hate mashed veg and cheese sauce, in which case they love you even more for not making them eat that.

Think about this one too: given the choice between fresh beans steamed on the stove (three pot pieces to wash plus cutting board and knife), or peas thawed and cooked in butter in a (solitary) saucepan, guess which gives you more green on your plate?

Oh, and let's not forget pumpkin pie.  Ever since the year I did everything but remember to put sugar into the filling, I send somebody out to buy one.

Hope your day is simple enough to do fun things with too!

A vest from a sweater

The other day I discovered I'd missed by 24 hours a small friend's birthday.

PANIC

Plus, she has everything.  Fortunately I have a cupboard full of more than everything.  Specifically, this previously-felted sweater:

Prior to the panic it was in one piece.  But it didn't magically burst into segments - I had to snip.

Today we will look at what came of the body part.  First, some blanket stitch:

Pretty pretty blanket stitch, will I ever tire of you?  Especially now that I know to turn in the raw edge and catch it with some of the stitches so you get a nice clean finish?  (had I but disovered this trick before the vest project...)

The blanket stitch is burgundy because nothing else looked better and because I also had these cute flower embellishments in the cupboard:

You may have to trust me on the beads being the exact same shade of burgundy.  Also on the flowers being a rich purple, not at all this weird blue that the camera interpreted.  I sewed on bar pins - more stash cupboard genius - so that Small Friend's Mum can remove them when washing the vest.

This is what they look like on.  Cute?

I deem the vest Cute.

I just hope nobody minds the pink angora fluffs that are gonna be all over whatever she wears it with.

Baking from a foreign cookbook

During the summer, Melissa wrote about cookbooks she likes called Ladies, A Plate.  The title refers to the tactful code at the bottom of a community event notice in New Zealand for attending ladies to bring along some baked goods to share. 

We know where this is going, right?  I had to have these books.  Or at least one of them.  For a start pretty much everything Melissa does or gets interested in is awesome, and also, the custom of catering en masse is traditional to the neighbourhood where I grew up, too.  Bonus: did you click on the Melissa link and look at the covers?  Please. 

Right away when my copy of the original book arrived I spotted the cuteness of the recipe titles - 'bumble bees', 'butterfly cakes', 'coffee cloud cake' - and in particular the presence of 'Nainoma Bars'.  This recipe is immediately recognizable as what is known in my circle as 'Nanaimo Bars', after a town in British Columbia, but also 'You Name It Brownies,' and even 'Johnny No-Name Bars' because they are known under so many different titles.  (graham/coconut/butter/cocoa crust, vanilla pudding-enriched icing for filling, melted chocolate poured over top.)

I love this book and have been making recipes from it, none of them yet keepers but all - and collectively too - fascinating.  Like, who knew you could have so many ginger-based recipes in one book and have them all be different?

And another cool thing: dissolving the baking powder in milk or water so it's part of the liquids added to the dry ingredients.  Where I live, the baking powder gets sifted in with the dry stuff.

Those are 'Friendly Road' buns, named after the depression-era radio show where the recipe was first shared.  By my local standards, they are not a bun but rather a tall satisfying cookie, sweetened noticeably with a little addition of Golden Syrup (sweeter than pure corn syrup and generally one of the most delicious things imaginable: try it on pancakes.)

These are Ginger Kiss halves, served without being sandwiched over icing because who has time? They poured out onto the cookie sheet like cake batter, but puffed up prettily into a soft but firmer-than-cake morsel.  I balked at the amount of ginger the recipe called for and halved it, but of course it came out very delicately-flavoured so another time I would make it as directed.

There are recipes in the book I would never bake, but which serve to point out how incredibly dedicated those New Zealand moms were about treating their families with special tarts and mini eclairs and elaborate cakes.  Actually I could never make any other recipes in the book and it would still have been worth buying it - the pictures are soooooo wonderful! and the introductions to where the recipe came from or how it was adapted by dozens of different bakes!  it's everything I like about social history. 

Try a copy yourself and see what I mean - and if you make something I haven't but should, let me know.

Sewing some snack bags

It occurred to me at the grocery store one day last year that I was buying a lot of plastic baggies for portable snacks, and I wasn't reusing them nearly enough.  I wondered whether I could possibly sew something for the job - and a very brief hunt online told me not only that I could, but that many, many others have done it already.

I decided on the fold-over-top technique advocated at Angry Chicken and started hunting for organic fabric, because I'd read that some fabrics are treated with things to preserve them from damage during transport that you do not want on your food.  Alewives to the rescue:

When this fabric arrived I worried that the half yard I'd bought of each might not be enough, so I stopped at Stitch in Jordan, Ontario during my next Niagara trip and found that Jocelyn stocks organic fabrics as well.  Hers are hand-dyed and hand-painted in India and have a very nice floppy quality that contrasts with Alewives' crispiness:

Don't you love how you can see where the artist adjusted the painting tool?

I bought three fat quarters that sort of coordinated, and dressed up some bags with contrasting fabric until I came to my senses (they are only for snacks, and I do not have unlimited time):

And then I got to work on my half-yards...

Which resulted in 27 bags, including the larger drawstring one, all stitched in double rows and the edges pinked because my old Singer has no zigzag function.

That's a lot of snacks.

This old chair

Over the weekend I got to see a chair I've been hearing about lately: my Grampa's chair.

It's seen better days, obviously.  In some of them, Grampa was enjoying supper with my mum and sister and brothers and their mum, then setting his head down to rest after a long day; this was during the Depression, when it was hard for carpenters for find work.  I wonder too whether the brain tumor that cut his life short was beginning to grow then, sapping his energy.

Another thing I'm wondering: creamy paint? turquoise paint? a clear varnish to protect both parts of its history?

Not wondering: whether I will be doing this myself.  My Grampa almost certainly got the chair from his, so I think it's safer in the hands of a professional, don't you?

Crop circles

I saw these at my uncle's cottage and had to have their picture:

They remind me of Miss Muffet's Tuffet... which reminds me, it's time for breakfast.