Hobbits In Rivendell

Of COURSE he was born in SF. Aren’t all the great (hah!) knitters?

June 12, 2007

10:33 pm

2 Comments on Of COURSE he was born in SF. Aren’t all the great (hah!) knitters?

The Alaska Daily News carried a piece on the big public knit thingy this past weekend, and while they were discussing the fact that more and more guys are knitting, they mentioned one Kaffe Fassett, apparently a rather famous male knitter. I hadn’t ever heard of him, but always wanting to keep score with the boys, I looked him up.

Um, okay. Wow.

This sweater is gorgeous. Monsieur Fassett is excellentwhen it comes to textile designing – (Can you imagine doing this by hand? Can you imagine the HOURS!? Why am I assuming he did this by hand, though? I’m sure a knitting machine was involved, or else he did not finish for AGES…) – not to mention his needlework, mosaic, patchwork, and painting designs as well.

For the record, the article also points out “Rick Mondragon, editor of Knitter’s Magazine (can you believe they sponsor a knitter’s SUMMER CAMP!?); Brandon Mabley, author and designer with Rowan Yarns; Jack Lewis, creator of “Real Men Knit”; and Japan’s Knitting Prince, Mitsuharu Hirose,” (The site is all in Japanese, but you had to see the guy – he’s apparently quite the heartthrob in Japan, and partially responsible for this huge knitting renaissance. Hee!) as being among the many modern men who are more than making their mark with the art of knitting.

Though I am always knitting in public, this weekend is probably the one weekend I didn’t, being involved in a 48 Hour Book Challenge contest (which I accidentally won. Still not sure how that happened.), but I hope everyone else had fun. Cheers!

"And Love For All…"

by David T. Macknet

June 12, 2007

8:04 pm

2 Comments on "And Love For All…"

Miscellany

Love begets love, love knows no rules; this is the same for all. – Virgil

The reason for all the hearts today is that it’s a holiday. – Yes, Hallmark didn’t announce it, so you may not have known, but it is LO VING DAY – the day of a landmark anti-miscegenation case in which an ugly law was struck down in Virginia in 1967.

‘Virginia is for Lovers’ is what it says on all the tatty t-shirts and mugs. Well, maybe, but it wasn’t for Loving, for quite awhile. Ms. Mildred Jeter (an African American lady) and Mr. Richard Perry Loving (a Caucasian gentleman) were residents of Virginia who married in June of 1958 in Washington DC, leaving Virginia to evade a state law banning marriages between any white person and a non-white person. When they returned home, they were charged with violation of the ban, pleaded guilty, and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. They left… but they decided not to leave it at that. (If you want to play with an interactive map of American history, that lets you see dynamically when States became free to marry, check this out!) The über cool Chief Justice Warren‘s statement on the day that the Lovings won the legal right to marry has just the right tone:

“Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

And, that, boys and girls, is why today a few savvy people (you now among them!) celebrate the right to love anyone they choose.

There are some who labor under the misapprehension that Loving v. Virginia was the last anti-miscegenation case struck down. Not so, dear people. Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruling made it illegal to hold that law, the last anti-miscegenation law (and incidentally, that word is SO made up – as are all words are, yes, but we savvy American English speakers like to create new ones when the words we have don’t sound positive enough, pseudo-scientific enough, or negative enough. Think about it: carpet bombing. Soft plush fibers vs. many people anonymously dead. Whoever coined that one is probably rich.) was struck from the books in ALABAMA in the year 2000. (Yes, you heard me.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Alabama joined the 20th.

A lovely state, I’m sure, and no offense to anyone there. You’ll all just excuse me if I don’t ever visit.)

Some interracial couples and families are leery of the idea of another “fake holiday” (Heh, heh, Kwanzaa, anyone?), but the fact is, everything is made up and nothing springs organically intact from the Earth. Why not have a day to celebrate the right to love anyone, without the luridly hypersexed drama of the martyred Saint? On the day that the right to love anyone becomes REALLY true, in the GLBTQ community as well, there will be that much more to celebrate.

Coffee vs. Tea

by David T. Macknet

June 12, 2007

7:21 pm

6 Comments on Coffee vs. Tea

Food, Miscellany

It’s been two or three weeks now since I’ve had coffee. Yes, shocking, isn’t it? Me, of all people, with my deep love of French Press coffee, whole beans mail-ordered from Alaska. Coffee has a down side, though, if you’re one of the unlucky few. And I am one of those few. If you don’t have issues with cholesterol, then feel free to pass this post on by. Otherwise, well, you may need to take a look at your coffee drinking habit, and reconsider a bit.

For some people, cholesterol isn’t controllable by diet alone. My brother falls into that category … not that he’s tried controlling his with diet, mind you, but … well, he’s going to be one of those people, simply because he’s unwilling to change his diet. For me, though, I’ve made the changes. I don’t eat any saturated fats, except for the occasional bit of coconut. I eat a diet high in oat fiber, high in fiber overall, and pretty much vegan. The sole exceptions to that vegan-ness is that I like salmon every now and again, which should actually work in my favor, and that I’ll very rarely have some milk product (more rarely than salmon).

But, I drank coffee. Unfiltered coffee, specifically. If you drink Turkish coffee, French Press coffee, Espresso, or coffee which is “filtered” through one of those Gold filters, then you’re still getting all of the oils. Which are, pretty much, straight saturated fat. The only way you don’t get those oils is if you use paper filters for your coffee.

I switched to tea. After you’ve been on French Press coffee for awhile, filtered coffee is just brown water.

We’ll see where the numbers are in a few months. I’m certainly not at any risk of dying of this or anything, but it’s one of those things like brushing one’s teeth: if you ignore it for long enough, you’ve got issues.

The switch? It takes about two quarts of tea to drive the headaches away, and that’s one in the morning & one in the afternoon. Have I said that I liked coffee? If my 1 mug of coffee was the equivalent to 2 quarts of tea … and then some, ’cause I could skip a day when on coffee. Well, that’s strong coffee. I will miss it.

Strange Nature

by David T. Macknet

June 11, 2007

5:14 pm

Bagels 1.0

by David T. Macknet

June 10, 2007

4:35 am

6 Comments on Bagels 1.0

Food, Recipe

I don’t know what it is that led somebody to poke a hole in a perfectly good roll, boil it, then bake it … but they’re tasty, I’m told, despite the labor involved. I’m sure that our kitchen will recover from the spatters and splashes, and I’m sure that I’m sucker enough to try it again.

I started with the basic olive bread recipe (see “What Goes Into Bread”), but instead of putting diced onions I went with onion powder, and I backed off on the seeds a bit, so that the dough would be a bit more bread & a bit less … “stuff.” From there, it was a matter of forming things into little doughnut-esque things and letting them rise … and then beginning the insanity.

After you’ve got enough of a rise out of them, you boil each bagel (I worked in batches of 4) for 5 minutes, with at least one “turn-over” in that period. I used the handle of a wooden spoon along with a large “spider” (one of those things you use to fish stuff out of the deep-fry). After their requisite 5 minutes of boiling, you place them onto an oiled pan in the oven at 500°F. The oil is important, ladies and gentlemen. I used canola spray … starting with the second batch of 4, of course, ’cause … well, just ’cause I wasn’t really thinking about it.

After they go into the oven, they’ve got to bake for about 15 minutes. You could go 20 – and I did, on a few – but 15 seemed to do the trick for me, as I wanted them to be a bit soft. I figured that you can always toast them, but you can’t un-cook them, so it was better to go a little underdone. I’m sure that nobody’s out there complaining.

But wait. Did you see it, friends? Did you see the fatal flaw in this whole mess? Let me hint at a bit more: you boil for 5 minutes; you bake for 15 minutes. What happens to the third batch of bagels that you threw into the boiling water? Oh, you mean, you’re going to reach into the (very steamy) oven, pull out a tray of partially baked bagels, skooch them over so that you can fit four more on there, and then keep on doing the same thing for the next, oh, hour or so? And what, pray tell, happens when you end up with four batches going, all underdone, and another batch coming off of the boil? Because unless you’ve got an awesome oven, one rack is going to cook differently then the other, and with all the opening and closing, there’s no chance you’re going to get things to cook according to some mathematically-possible scheme. (I did the math … and then did the thinking to determine why the math sucked).

Suffice it to say that I need a larger oven & to do a bit of pre-planning on this next time. I believe that this is why some recipes say to dunk your bagels in cold water after you’ve boiled them. You could probably float them all in the cool water bath & then load them into the oven all at one time, if you were smart. Or if you thought about it. Or if you planned to try this more than once.

Next time. Next time, it will be different.

Garam Masala

by David T. Macknet

June 10, 2007

1:01 am

4 Comments on Garam Masala

Food, Recipe

Shown here is our first (photographed) effort at making Garam Masala. We generally use this mix in something we’ll call chai … but which is actually just hot soy-milk, this spice blend, & a little sweetener. The quantities shown are what we used in this latest mix; each spice is labeled on the Flickr site, if you follow the link. You can also use this Garam Masala as a spice for black tea, to give you that authentic chai flavor, but with ingredients that you trust.

Laying out the spices like this is actually kind of important, if you want to know what you did, so that you can either duplicate the mix or change it later. In this mix I’ve incorporated slightly more anise-flavored elements, to provide more natural sweetness, and also tried to balance out all of the different flavors, so that you’re not overwhelmed by the cassia / cinnamon.

If you’re using this in a savory dish, you could add onion powder & garlic powder, and perhaps some hot pepper / capsicum. I tend to like the option, though, so leave this powder “plain.” With this mix, I’ll run it through the coffee grinder & then through a fine sieve / strainer, repeating several times until I’m sick of trying to grind dust. I’ll then take the coarse (leftover) bits & put them in one container, and the fine goes into another. We’ll use the coarsely ground pieces in spiced apples or something, as it generally has more of the ginger / cinnamon / allspice bits, which don’t really like to break down.

Note: I tend to avoid using too much of the actual licorice root, because it closely resembles – and behaves like – the hormone aldosterone; aldosterone regulates the body’s salt levels, and playing with that system tends to raise your blood pressure.

Nest of Evil … or not.

by David T. Macknet

June 9, 2007

1:55 am

1 Comment on Nest of Evil … or not.

Critters

If you look very closely you’ll see a head, inside the mouth of the gourd. It almost looks like I spliced it in there, because her head’s turned sideways, looking … somewhere. But I didn’t, I promise! Finally, somebody has inhabited the gourd!

Of course it’s Pippi, with her evil nature, but I figure that someday she’ll get over herself a bit, and will possibly decide to lay some eggs in there. So, it’s a happy occasion. I’m just glad that she’s young enough to try new things, ’cause the others have been running in terror of the gourd for a couple of weeks now, while Pippi is just strange enough to bite everything, so she’s made herself a nest. Nobody shares it with her yet, which is fine, because this has the added benefit of making for a more peaceful cage, all around.

More PBS, Less Rachel Ray

by David T. Macknet

June 7, 2007

9:51 pm

4 Comments on More PBS, Less Rachel Ray

Food

I don’t know if anybody out there had noticed, but we tend to like to cook around here. We like to make things, to see how things are made, to understand the why behind things like the growth of yeast, the respiration of yeast, the reproduction of yeast. Because of this, I release this plea into the universe: More PBS Chefs, please!

To the rest of the world, who may not have been subjected to the likes of The Food Network, I give you Maureen Johnson’s post entitled Now We’re Cooking. Read it (or down a ways in it, where she starts off “Now let’s talk about Food Network” if you’re not interested in the fact that she’s written a book which has just come out, and that’s what allows her to provide you with this rant). Understand that the person she’s talking about there is about the worst that the Food Network has to offer, but also that she’s not so far off when it comes to the rest of the “chefs” there, either. True, there’s at least one (Alton Brown) who actually still continues to provide something meaningful in the way of television (when he can be bothered to produce a new episode, at least). The rest of them?

You know, everybody’s got channels on their televisions which don’t get watched, ever? I’m sure you know the one – the Military Channel, that weird channel that’s always got Kirk Cameron on it, or the one which always has somebody shark fishing or something? I’m not talking about the one that you occasionally watch merely for the sheer spectacle (e.g. Rural Farm Development channel), but those which you constantly wonder why you haven’t removed from the lineup, which you skip over until the next time you get to reprogramming your channel lineup (i.e. never)?

Food TV has just entered that list of channels – the first list, that is. I believe that I’ve watched every single episode of Good Eats there is, and they’ve stopped playing the real Iron Chef (not that damned knock-off with Bobby Flake). So, I skip the channel. And I skip the channel. And it truly irritates me, in a way that the Military Channel never did. Because it once had potential, but has now been subsumed by the “Reality” TV craze.

Jacques Pepin, Ming Tsai, Tommy Tang (‘though he should let his guests talk & should stop with the innuendo), and all the rest of the PBS Chefs: keep it up. You’re all that’s teaching anybody how to cook!

What does "race" mean?

by David T. Macknet

June 6, 2007

4:53 am

8 Comments on What does "race" mean?

Miscellany

I was reading an article in the Mythopoeic Society‘s journal, Mythlore, concerning the concept of “Northernness,” as found in the Chronicles of Narnia. In this article (Narnia and the North: The Symbolism of Northernness in the Fantasies of C.S. Lewis, by Nancy-Lou Patterson), the author states that “[w]e must remind ourselves that the British use the word ‘race’ to mean something like what North Americans mean by ‘nationality’ rather than in a strict genetic sense, and with the further suggestion of language as a determining factor.”

Not to become academic here whatsoever, but merely because it’s an … odd convergence in my life to have been reading this article & to happen upon this thought, while at the same time having had to provide my “race” to a web-site in the U.K. I found it highly amusing to go through the selections, and returned to the site today in order to collect the choices from the “Ethnic Origin” drop-down box:

WHITE – BRITISH
WHITE – IRISH
WHITE – SCOTTISH
IRISH TRAVELLER
OTHER WHITE BACKGROUND
BLACK-CARIBBEAN
BLACK-AFRICAN
OTHER BLACK BACKGROUND
INDIAN
PAKISTANI

BANGLADESHI
CHINESE
OTHER ASIAN
WHITE & BLACK CARRIBEAN
WHITE & BLACK AFRICAN
WHITE & ASIAN
OTHER MIXED BACKGROUND
OTHER
INFORMATION REFUSED

Now, I chose one, but … the U.K. is certainly a different world. It’s all clean, sterile, and scientific, here in the U.S., and it’s closer to the vision held by the Nazis than the vision held by the boys in Kilts. Funny, that’s all, that I’d never really considered that there might be a different way of looking at it. It is rather an arbitrary thing, I suppose, when it comes down to it. I’d just never considered it, that’s all, or at least not in this way. Odd.

And what’s an “Irish Traveller,” by the by? Is that a jab at the gypsies? Or are we talking about people who’re descended from Irish who relocated to the U.S. or something, and are now considering moving back to the homeland?

Three Steps to Vegetable Art

by David T. Macknet

June 5, 2007

10:02 pm

3 Comments on Three Steps to Vegetable Art

Artsy Things

‘Tis the season to think of summer camp, badly painted mugs, macaroni projects, string art and powdered tempura paint! Of course, as the wind fairly blusters, it may not seem like June, but it is, and it’s the time of year when back-porch crafts get started, since usually the only knitting and baking that can be done is that which requires the least warm discomfort.

But since it’s still windy – here’s one for the knitting gang. The über cool Loom Knitter’s Circle Magazine is up with their second edition, and I really do want that beaded bag! How people think of designs for loom knits is beyond me, but make sure and check out the loop stitch at the bottom of Keeping You In Stitches. Impressive!

My new project is actually kind of an old one. Last summer we planted Chinese birdhouse gourds. I would offer this as a great project for anyone with acreage to spare and isn’t troubled by a conquest-minded plant with stinking sap running rampant throughout all available space. We planted these lovely gourds and then regretted them almost daily once they fruited. We had to hack at them with machetes practically, and they ate the cucumbers. By the time the stalks dried and they were ready for harvest, the gardening season was long over. We left them in disgust on the ground through frosts and rain and finally pulled them up early this year… and left them in a pile, planning on burning them or something, since they were now coated in black mold.

Fortunately, when we got a look at the gourds before we turned over the garden, we realized they had… cured. Without any work on our part, they were dried and seasoned and ready to be sanded and painted. Granted, that was a big job, requiring face masks, eye protection and sandpaper, but we’re fairly pleased with what we ended up with – sturdy, clean, lightweight wooden vessels.

So far, this is what we’ve come up with. Here’s hoping some birds actually… use them?