Scared to blog
I seem to have this syndrome where if I blog about a project I’m working on and hype it up, post pictures, etc., I lose interest in it and it sits in a corner for months.
So I’m NOT going to blog about my current project. Nope. Not going to mention that it might be themed around the culture of the place where I’m going to work this summer. Definitely not. Definitely doesn’t go on your head either. It isn’t knit in the round with some new Angora/Bamboo yarn from Patons, and it definitely doesn’t have any super-cool ultra-detailed specific charting. And it’s totally not original.
Yep, not knitting anything…nothing to read about here…probably won’t be a post about it in the near future with pattern links or anything…so you probably shouldn’t stop by.
(PLEASE COME BACK IN A LITTLE BIT FOR SOMETHING COOL)
Recipe of the week - Southern Chicken!
In my last post, I mentioned a new little something I’d like to bring to the blog - recipes! I really enjoy cooking and don’t get to do as much of it as I like. However, what I do cook is pretty tasty (if I do say so myself), and I love sharing. I hope you enjoy this recipe if you do decide to give it a try - it’s super easy and wonderfully delicious.
A quick note, though: this recipe (along with some others of mine) does not use precise measurements because I don’t really think they’re necessary. I am sorry if this causes any stress, should you decide to try it.
Here’s what you’ll need:
- Chicken Breast - uncooked, thawed (the amount is up to you - depends on how many people you’re feeding!)
- Taco seasoning, about 1/2 packet (or a jumble of spices that sounds tasty to you)
- Salsa - you pick your favorite!
- Optional: Sour cream.
- A plastic baggie big enough to hold your piece (s) of chicken breast.
- An oven-safe dish large enough to hold your chicken.
- Non-stick spray/spread.
1. Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees. Grease an oven-safe dish large enough to hold all of your chicken.
2. Put the chicken and some taco seasoning into the plastic baggie, close it, and give it a good shake. The idea here is to cover the chicken with some seasoning. It doesn’t have to be super thick - just try to get a little bit on every part.
3. Once the oven has reached 375 degrees, place the chicken in one layer in the dish. Place it in the oven for 25 minutes.
4. After 25 minutes, carefully put your desired amount of salsa on top of the chicken, and place it back in the oven for another 5.
5. After 5 minutes, remove your chicken from the oven. When it has cooled to a satisfactory temperature, you can add as much sour cream as you prefer, and eat!
The recipe creates a super-tender, wonderfully juicy chicken that is surprisingly low-fat (as long as you don’t load up on the sour cream). If you use a lot of seasoning - especially the store bought kind - the sodium content might be a little high. Go easy if you’re not sure.
I hope you enjoy this one! I can provide a PDF of this recipe if requested. Feel free to substitute anything for the salsa - I’ve always thought using beans and a little cheese would be yummy! If you make it, let me know what you think!
Just because I can knit doesn’t mean I can count.
I posted a long time ago from a galaxy far, far away about how I was knitting a beaded Koolhaas. I knit on it a lot over this weekend, did my repeats, added my beads and finished the crown shaping. It looks lovely, and like little snowflakes fall and disappear from it.
There’s just one problem.
It doesn’t fit.
When I started, I could not find my size 9 circular needle anywhere, so I shrugged and decided to knit the whole thing with size 5’s instead. No problem, I’d just add another repeat to the hat so that the length would be correct.
I forgot about that.
Instead, I went right from the pattern and knit my 4 repeats instead of five. Don’t you just love ripping? At least this time when I knit it, I’ll be able to wear it without a) looking like an idiot, and b) trying in vain to pull it down over my ears all day. Sigh.
I want to thank everyone who contributed to my little research project! You helped me a lot. I gathered a lot of great ideas, and I think I will compile all the objects into a poll to see what would be the best/silliest thing for me to try and knit. I had some great suggestions from some guy friends offline. Some less appropriate than others…but silly nonetheless.
Speaking of silly things, I was temporarily barred from leaving my boyfriend’s house this morning when I went out to my car to find disaster had struck overnight:
Nathan said something about not knowing how to use a chainsaw, so he hacked away at the thing with a hand saw and then an axe and then a different electric saw. Then he decided he did know how to use a chain saw, and we were free in seconds. Hooray!
On my way home from his house, I typically use the drive as excellent think-time. One thing I’ve been thinking a LOT about lately is making a little addition to the blog. You may or may not know this, but I LOVE food. Nathan tells me I am the weirdest person he has ever seen, because I actually get pleasure from eating. I think he’s weird because he doesn’t say “Mmmm, this is soooo good!” whenever he’s eating something yummy. But I digress. I love food, and I think it’s pretty and tasty.
I have lots of little recipes and foods that I love to make, and I always take pictures of them that I don’t post on the blog, but I’d really like to, because they make me hungry and they also make me want to cook tasty, healthy food. I think I’m going to choose a day of the week and do a post on a recipe. I love cooking and don’t have much time or money, so I think it could be a fun, great idea to share knowledge for everyone - especially those of us on a budget. I’ve already got my first recipe lined up, so make sure you’re ready for it next week!
I predict there will be a finished beaded Koolhaas in the near future…as well as the sad, sad story of my sweater design. We might need to have a video to accompany that story, so stay tuned! Have a happy day!
Project time!
Dear readers:
I am currently taking an online class called Art and Gender. We examine gender stereotypes in art, and the class requires a final project. There are several options for this, and one of them is the creation of an object. The objective here is to reverse a gender stereotype. My instructor has provided examples like: Martha Stewart provided instructions for how to make a Barbie cake (presumably for girls). What would a GI Joe cake look like? Then you would bake the cake, and describe the process, your thinking, etc.
The object must be something traditionally for one gender or the other. Like: imagine what a first person shooter video game would look like for girls.
Anyway, I was reading this description, and I thought it would be fun, enlightening, educational, and good for the blog to do something with knitting. Traditionally, knitting has been a craft associated mostly with the female population. Most patterns are created for women, and typically, women are the people who do the knitting. If men are involved, it’s usually just to wear the finished object (although that’s not to say there aren’t some fantastic male knitters out there!). I’m well aware that there are plenty of men who enjoy knitting and don’t want to leave them out of this.
My question to you (anyone who is reading this): if you were designing something for a man, what would it look like? What color would it be? Would it have many colors? Would there be specific design elements like cables? Would you ever consider putting lace on it? When I say “designing something for a man”, I mean anything. It doesn’t have to be a sweater or a hat. You might think of something completely off the wall, like a fishing pole cozy or something.
I’d like to get as much input as I possibly can for this project, and then make something integrating your ideas as well as the ideas of some non-knitter men. I want to know what they would do if they were asked about design elements and knitting.
I hope you’ll help me out! If nothing else, it will be a super fun thing to blog about, and quite an adventure. The thing is, I need to get started sooner rather than later, because I will have about a month from today to design, prepare, knit, mess up, rip, knit again, and finish the product before photographing it and sending a detailed description to my teacher.
Thanks for your input in advance; I wish I could offer a prize or something, but I am rather poor and cannot. That’ll have to be next time.
Go go go!
EDIT: Thank you, everyone for your responses! Certainly some things like using more earthy colors attracts the men, but I love the ideas you’ve all shared! Ani mentioned capes for her husband’s action figures, and Sarah mentioned knitting a star trek uniform for her baby daughter! Wonderful ideas. Many of you have shared your great ideas with regard to sweaters and colorwork. I’m thinking in terms of time and money for this project, so I may not be able to design and knit a whole sweater in a month’s time, but maybe I can make a miniature.
Keep your ideas coming, I really appreciate it and will do my best to dig up something I can offer as a prize to get some more responses. Thank you again!
5 steps to easy, tasty, no-knead bread!
I mentioned this bread recipe I found a little while ago, but I never followed up on the results. Turns out, the recipe makes a yummy bread with very little work. With a little imagination, you could turn this into a truly artisan masterpiece! Here’s how it went for me. If you like to bake or even just want to give bread a shot, you should try it out, and post a comment about your results!
First, the HUGE ingredient list:
- 3 cups all purpose flour (or flour of your choosing, I made it with whole wheat flour and it was still tasty, the flavor was just more grainy and hearty).
- 1/4 tsp instant yeast.
- 1 1/4 tsp salt.
- 1 5/8 cups of water (this is really just a little more than 1 1/2 cups of water and not quite 1 2/3 cups. I approximate on my measuring cups)
- Cornmeal.
(I was lying about the HUGE number of ingredients). This is really all you need to make a basic bread. I have added some spices to mine just for the sake of experimentation. Feel free to add some cloves of garlic to your dough, or whatever sounds tasty to you! My latest creation is a collaboration between Nathan and I, and we’ve ground up some basil and oregano to use in the dough.
1. Combine 3 cups flour, 1/4 tsp instant yeast, 1 1/4 tsp salt, and 1 5/8 cups of water in a large bowl. Stir together until the dough becomes “shaggy and sticky”.
Cover and let the dough rise for 12-18 hours at regular room temperature. I left one bowl of dough out in about a 52 degree room for one night, and it didn’t rise much, so I stuck it in a room with a heater for a few hours and it rose right up. Here is an “after” photo to give you an idea of what to look for:
I recommend sleeping, knitting, cooking, and eating as excellent methods to pass the time while waiting for your dough to rise.
2. After your waiting period, flour a work surface. It doesn’t need to be huge; just big enough that you can work with a melon-sized ball of dough. Put your dough on the surface, and fold it twice. Then, cover and do some more sleeping/knitting/cooking/eating for 15 minutes.
3. After 15 minutes, grab a cotton towel (this is supposed to be the ideal, but at a college boy’s house, there is a supreme shortage of nice towels, so I substituted paper towels for this step with no harm done). Sprinkle a thinnish layer of cornmeal on the towel and place your bread dough on it. Shape the dough into a ball (you may like to sprinkle some cornmeal on the top, too). If you want to add some spices, now would be the time to do it. Finish your ball and let it rest with the seam side of the bread facing down. In other words, make the side of the bread that has a big crack in it face down on your surface. Cover the dough with another towel, and frolic for another two hours*.
I swear, the hardest part about making this bread is the waiting. It practically cooks itself.
**Step 3.5: 30 minutes before your bread has finished its final rise (i.e., 1 hour and 30 minutes into this waiting period), turn your oven on and set it to 450 degrees. Place a large pot with a lid inside to warm up. I am severely lacking in oven-safe pots, so I used a casserole dish for one loaf. I have also used a large baking pan loosely covered with tin foil. These have both worked just fine.
Step 4: At the 2 hour mark, CAREFULLY remove your scalding hot pot/pan/casserole dish/whatever you used from the oven and remove the lid. Then CAREFULLY (without burning yourself!) put the dough into the dish with the seam side facing up. I usually pick it up by the corners of the towel and sort of dump-flip it into the pot.
If this does not make sense, I can attempt to make a video of this process. If it doesn’t land quite right in the pot, you can shake the pot a bit to fix things, or if you’re really paranoid, you can use a spatula or something to move it. Replace the pot in the oven with the bread in it (and the lid on) for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove your lid and let the bread cook for another 10-15 minutes. Just long enough for the top of the bread to become slightly browned.
Step 5: Remove from the oven once your bread has reached a satisfactory color and let it cool. Carefully remove it to a cutting board or other surface. It may crackle and give you great satisfaction. When you’re ready (and when it is safe to touch), cut into your bread and enjoy! Congratulations!
The resulting bread is usually slightly nutty tasting on the crust, but soft and wonderful on the inside. The crust is fairly…well, crusty! But that’s the kind of bread I like. I hope you enjoy eating your tasty new bread; this one was gone in a couple of hours!
Thanks, Dad
I got an email from my Dad this morning. Here’s the back story, in a nutshell:
Last week I finished and submitted an application to intern abroad over the summer in Tokyo, Japan. I would be working with the Run for the Cure Foundation to help promote awareness for breast cancer, and also help with event planning and fundraising. It’s going to be crazy if I get it!
Today, Dad sent me an email showing me yet another feature of Google’s that I was clueless about: the street view. There are select cities around the world that have a “street view”, which means you can essentially drive around roads, check out the buildings, the surrounding areas, etc. It’s so cool, and I could see myself losing days looking around Tokyo because it is so huge. If you want to try it, it’s here.
You have to click on the little yellow man in the map to make it go. Have fun!
My life, it doth consume me
As anyone who visits this site probably knows by now, I haven’t posted since I baked some bread at my house over the winter break. Just so you know, the bread turned out fabulously, and I’ve been baking more since I’ve been back at school the last month! I had some camera issues and felt that my posts were nothing without photos.
I hadn’t been knitting much either, but that is slowly and surely changing - I’m knitting a beaded Koolhaas…just at a rate of about 1 repeat per week.
It’s all because I just finished and submitted an application to intern abroad in Tokyo, Japan this summer with the Run for the Cure foundation. I had way too much on my plate, and now that that’s off I can focus on work and school and yoga and eating and sleeping. And hopefully documenting some knitting too! I love reading everyone else’s blogs, and I feel like mine has fallen to the wayside, but not for lack of interest, I promise. I’m trying a new thing with the blog - kind of in preparation for if I get this internship position. I will be responsible for regular updating via emails and blogs about my experience, so I figured I would get into it now! I have to get into a regular habit of blogging, because it’s really not that hard!
So yeah, that’s all for now, I’m on a mission! Here I go!
On a holiday rampage
I hope that everyone had a happy and healthy holiday season. Our family had a very simple celebration this year. Mom, Dad, my brother and I were responsible for writing down a story about our family - something we’d done. We decided to start a tradition of story telling. Our stories will be collected in a book for future generations to read about. It was very fun to reminisce!
Today I had a lazy morning. Nathan and I sat around and drank coffee and played video games. What a terrible life, right? After getting showered and dressed (at around 3 in the afternoon) Nathan brought me home where I lost. my. mind. Nathan headed out for a night with his guy friends, and I was giddy with the thought of staying home and baking enough cookies to feed a small army.
First came peanut butter chocolate chip. Very simple. All of my ingredients even fit into one picture!
I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves.
I forked them.
After that came the oatmeal cookies.
My last item came from a blog I found via stumbleupon. The Amateur Gourmet had a link and a description of what appeared to be a great recipe for no-knead bread. I decided to start step one tonight!
Beneath that plastic wrap is (hopefully) a future loaf of very tasty bread. Step 2 comes tomorrow after I’ve let the bread rise overnight.
Contrary to what all of these pictures may suggest, I have been knitting. Actually, a better word for what I’ve been doing might be surgery. An experimental surgery that might require amputation. In my last entry, I mentioned some waist shaping gone awry. Allow me to explain with a simple diagram:
In the bottom left is the top of the hip section. There’s ribbing below it that you can’t see, but that’s essentially the correct size for the hip area. I then “winged” my decreases for the waist shaping. As a result, I got the above. It puckers out and looks awful. I knew I needed to rip, but didn’t want to rip the whole thing immediately. Hence the “experimental surgery” comment. I ripped out the stitches where I had done my decreases all the way to the ribbing at the bottom of the sweater, and knit back up. I still need to fix some tension, but the result looks all right thus far, if a little bit squiggly (which I’m slowly but surely fixing):
It’s hard to see, but the purls on either side of the knit section in the middle are all decreased away to create a non-puffy waist decrease. Hooray! The only thing I still need to fix is this, the inside of that part of the sweater:
I have a lot of extra yarn because I worked the yarn differently this time around than I did the first time around. If it ends up I can’t fix this problem, I’ll just have to rip the whole sweater back and re-knit. I’m all right with that, but it doesn’t mean I really want to do it. I just really want this sweater to come out the way I have it pictured, and that means no cutting corners.
I had some ideas about crochet chains and weaving in things in order to solve my extra yarn issue, but I haven’t quite decided precisely how I want to fix the issue. If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them!
I hope I can continue my baking frenzy these next few days! It was a fun day. I hope everyone has an excellent new year if I don’t get a chance to post anything in the next few days!
Back from another adventure
As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I was scheduled to attend a memorial for my Pop this last weekend. The ceremony was wonderful and it was great to see so many people there. My Gram said the total was about 160 people present. Pop was certainly a popular guy. A former New York Knicks player was there, some friends of the family who were truly a rags-to-riches story, members of my mom’s side of the family…everything was great. He would have enjoyed things immensely.
One aspect I loved was our dwelling! Another friend of the family rented us her beach house for a few days. It’s a three story beach condo right on the beach. I was astonished when we arrived, and I made sure to take a few pictures. When I got up in the morning, I looked out the window to this:
I walked up to the top of that little dune (which I’m not supposed to do, I’m so bad) and saw this:
I just couldn’t believe it. It’s December. I’m not supposed to feel warm and beachy. I considered going out to do some yoga on the beach that morning, but quite a few people had come out to walk their dogs/take a stroll, and I felt self-conscious, so I opted to sit on the porch with a book and a cup of coffee. Oh, life is good.
I got a lot of knitting done on that sweater, but won’t show any pictures because I’m embarrassed by the thing at this point. I was working some decreases for the waist shaping, and just kind of winged it. I’m not afraid to rip back my errors, so I just tried something.
My waist shaping is now love-handle shaping. I have little bitty pockets for love handles (or so my brother says). I think I know how I’m going to fix it.
Anyway, now I’m back in the land of the ice and snow. And totally bizarre weather in general. Last night Nathan made me come outside to see this:
I know it’s a little blurry, but I have good reason. I took that picture at 12:43 AM last night. As in…past midnight. When it’s supposed to be dark. And there were no lights on. I just stood on the back patio going: “What the…” for a good five minutes.
I’ll see if I can fix my love-handle sweater and get a photo of it up in the next couple of days. If all goes as planned, I’ll have finished from the hips to the waist already! Yay! I also need to head home for Christmas, but the roads I have to drive are really bad, so I’m waiting for a break in the weather. Wish me luck there.
P.S. - I discovered stumbleupon 2 days ago, and it has taken over my life. Check it out. It’s very exciting.
I am so NOT a responsible knitter
On the plus side of things: I worked all weekend long and made a ton of money. The con, of course, is that I didn’t get to knit (or study much for finals, but I’m not super worried about them).
I spent the weekend at Nathan’s house and returned today to Eugene for my first final (which wasn’t bad at all) this evening. I’ve spent the last couple of hours working on that sweater I posted about last time. I’ve been baking cornbread and knitting and sitting in front of the fire and relaxing, and it has been wonderful!
I got up to get my camera for some pictures…and it appears I have left my camera at Nathan’s house. Le sigh.
I’ll be back there tomorrow night, I think. Then maybe I can find where I left my camera and get some updates going on this sweater project, because I’m already at a place where I could really use some feedback about a cable. I still can’t believe things are coming together mostly as I pictured them.
Now it’ll just look like I got a ton of work done on it when I can finally put pictures up, right?
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