Kitchens and Foodies and Thoughts, Oh My…

It’s been awhile since I’ve been here, and I can’t honestly say it’s for any reason other than the fact that lately I have been having Huge Food Issues, and I got that post-holiday guilt-thing kicking in, which made me avoid mirrors, closets and scales for a bit. (What I should have been avoiding was the bloody TV. Could we STOP with the Slimfast ads, for just a week or two? Sheesh.) Now that my brain is safely back inside my body (or hovering nearby), we rejoin my daily obsession already in progress…

My buddy Jackie got the new Joy of Cooking, and man, am I jealous. (Yes, I am a cookbook whore.) She shifts the recipes just a titch to make them workable for a vegan-veggie type, and has reminded me of something I adore: roasted chickpeas. I first had them in a Peruvian restaurant, mixed with roasted and salted hominy, and I’ve been striving to recapture that nutty, addictive tastiness ever since. The Peruvian folks probably fried their bar snacks instead of baking them, but I’m going to simply:

1.) Open and rinse a can of garbanzo beans,

2.) Turn them out onto a pan, and pat them a bit dry;

3.) Spritz them with a bit of olive oil, and sprinkle them with a tiny bit of salt, onion powder, curry powder, and turmeric,

4.) Oven roast them in a preheated, 400 degree oven for approximately (depending on your oven) thirty minutes, opening the oven to shake it about every ten minutes,

5.) Serve with chopped cilantro and lemon juice spritzed onto their crackly outsides, and inhale. Yum.

These chickpeas are tasty with the hominy (treated in the selfsame way) or mixed with raisins and dark chocolate chips as movie munchies. (Okay – if you like salt and sweet tastes together, this works. Otherwise, just ignore me.)

Been checking out some interesting blogs lately. Mac’s already remarked on the Post Punk People, and my find is Yeah, That Vegan Sh*t, a site about all things vegan, and Vegan Core, way fun because it has pretty pictures and plenty of recipes. I expect I’ll visit that one repeatedly; I’m always intrigued by people who test recipes and change them to suit. So much less work for me!

And speaking of less work – in my continuing quest to figure out what to do with that Vegemite, I’ve actually stuck my finger in it, and given it a taste. It’s really … not half bad. I’m still not up to it on toast (sorry, T&C), but it may have a future as more than just a soup base. My favorite use for it thus far? As a non powder form yeast in scrambled tofu. Here’s my updated take on it:

SCRAMBLED TOFU

1 lb. medium tofu (medium is better, for me – some prefer firm)

1 tbsp. oil, or use your sprayer as needed.

2 tbsp. snipped chives

1 tsp. onion powder, turmeric and curry powder

one crumbled sage leaf

1 tsp. Vegemite

After rinsing the tofu, I grab it in my fist and basically crumple it up. I toss the chunky bits into my lightly oiled pan and sprinkle heavily with onion powder and more lightly with turmeric and curry. The turmeric will give it a yellowy color that makes some people feel better about eating non-eggs. I then add the Vegemite, and let it soften in the heat before stirring it in. It adds both saltiness and a nice depth of flavor. Finish with the snipped chives and voilá!

Some people enjoy finely diced mushrooms in their scrambled tofu, grated carrots and other items. Imagine it as a chicken-egg omelet, and let your tastes be your guide. I prefer to keep it simple, unless I make this as a brunch item, then I really jazz it up, adding herbs and cheeses and Tofurky Italian sausages. I’ve heard chopped spinach and roasted sweet potato added to it is tasty… ah, to each their very own.

The remodel galumphs on… It’s definitely not galloping in any way, shape, or form. Still, it’s had its high points. We had a great little visit to KWW Kitchens & Baths in San Leandro, where we walked through Kitchen/Bath heaven, at least from the point of view of myriad cabinets, huge slabs of fabricated stone counter tops, slick modern fixtures, and more. It was well worth the trip down I-880, because it was really quite inexpensive. Most of the goods are likely from China, and we opted to go with real granite tiles on the counter instead of a fabricated slab, but it’s a definite check-it-out for Bay Area folks. (If you look at our remodel pics, you’ll see how it looks.) Of course, I feel quite scarred that we will not able to put an Aga range in our new kitchen, as Minty and Simon from Posh Nosh urged us to do. Alas, we ordinary mortals must make do without the hundred year old range that the fabulous Marchmont’s have at Crowe Hall, their house in Upper Berkshire which was built in 1685… sigh.

I think our builders over-estimated how easy this was going to be… now with tightly fitting cabinets (Mac is an EXACT mathematician; I think he has quite terrified the builders), ancient plumbing and cracked copper pipes, and the odd drooping ceiling, I believe they’re getting a little worried about the timetable. They thought they could fully gut and rebuild a tiny kitchen in just a week. Now we’re on to day five… two to go. They swear it’ll all be functioning on Monday. We’ll see. Meanwhile, the bamboo flooring is on order, and we expect it to be ready to go down on the floor by March. Hope springs eternal…

New Author … Maybe.

One of my fellow knitters-in-church wrote me to say that he’d like to have someplace to write about his knitting things:

I would like to try a herringbone stitch hat, and I’ve seen that Mongolian thing, but I don’t quite understand the stitch. In a couple of weeks can you show me, and possibly make a pattern for that greenish one you showed me when you were working on it. I like that, minus the frilly bottom. See you soon, and that Mongolian hat thingy is pretty cool. If you want me to post some pictures of things I have made, I could get pictures for them, it would look cool on your blog, having a kid do these projects. I finished one of those slippers I was working on over the weekend. Adios amigos, or what ever that is in spanish. =)

So, I’ve invited him to join our little society here (he’s not yet into baking, but there’s still time). We’ll see if he ends up doing the posts himself, or if we end up doing them for him, but I’m thinking he’s savvy enough to be able to manage. If so, welcome! He hasn’t chosen a screen name yet, so … we’ll wait and see how this works out.

He’s currently reading two books by Elizabeth Zimmerman (Knitting Without Tears and Knitters Almanac), knits without looking what he’s doing, and has finally taken to heart Elizabeth’s admonition to Knit Loosely! He still knits “English Style” but he’ll work on that at some point, too, as Elizabeth suggests.

* I added the links to the pieces he was talking about

More Scattered Thoughts

More errata today: Anna Nicole Smith dies. Yes, it’s important enough to mention, just because we’d been talking about her the other day. Please, before you judge us, hear me out.

We’d been discussing the ramifications of being able to stipulate where your junk goes when you die. In this case (literally “case,” as in “before the supreme court, being represented by Bush lawyers”) we’re talking about the fortune of $400 million left to her by some old dude … who enjoyed, we suppose, having a young wife. The idea that your family could be left out entirely because you decided that you didn’t like them? Well, that’s kind of a tough one for me to swallow. Not that the old guy’s kids needed much, I don’t think, but that it’s somehow absurd when you think about it. I mean, yes, it’s legally “right” … but in no way is inheritance law morally “right.” Not if it lets you abandon your responsibility in favor of someone or something else, even if it were a just cause: it simply shouldn’t be structured that way.

How should it be structured? Oh, I have only the barest concept, but I’m thinking that you’d have to get the permission of your children before you cut them off. Kind of like you’ve got to get your spouse’s notarized signature before you can cut them out of receiving any life insurance you might have. Make a bit more sense? Something to prevent absolute greedy toadishness would be good, methinks.

In other thoughts, staffers are almost fired for their personal blogs. Yep. Two of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards’ staff were targeted by the Catholic League because they’d written things prior to their joining the campaign, on their personal blogs, expressing disagreement with the Catholic Church’s views on such things as homosexuality, contraception, and abortion. Oh – and they used profanity.

Need I even express an opion here? If I do, and somebody, someday, chooses to penalize me for exercising my right to free speech … well, guess I’d better err on the side of caution, now that Big Brother … ummm … the Catholic League are listening.

Yellow Hat, Redux

Yellow.2.Knit.Side.2
Yellow.2.Knit.Side.2
More in the series: wishiwerebaking.

Another yellow hat. The first one was just right, except that I made the band too tight for an adult to wear, so I had to redo it … because, yes, this is for an adult. See the fringe? We wonder at her sanity.

The variation in this one was that I added a lace inset – just a simple “take the yarn around the needle twice” for a whole row. That made the break for where the “side” of the hat is, even though I continued to increase for another 4 rows or so, and then decreased the same number, so that there’re actually 10 little points along the side.

The fringe was done by knitting 2×2 rib, then by knitting through the front & back for the knit stitches, and just purling the purls, for two rows. This meant that each 2-stitch wide knit section turned into 8 stitches, while the purls remained 2 stitches wide. This worked out well, as now the fringe doesn’t want to curl inward when the hat’s worn with the knit side out. It gives some shape to the fringe, keeping it away from the face & head.

Apologies for the blurriness in these pictures – they were taken with my cheapy digital camera – a VuPoint something-or-other. Cost $40, and I’m getting what I paid for.

I really must follow TeaAndCakes‘ advice and get a Fuji Finepix F10. Some day. When the remodel’s done with.

Scattered Thoughts

Today I happened across The Home of Mathematical Knitting. Quite a fascinating site, really, if a bit … well, off-beat as far as the types of things I’d ordinarily see myself knitting. Interesting, though. More along my lines of interest (for immediate use) is the article over on Fleegle’s Blog on Charting Knit Patterns with Excel. Links there for downloading fonts for use in making patterns & all sorts of other goodies.

Also, I’ve been directed to go over to the Post Punk Kitchen, to check out “Vegetarian cooking & vegan baking with no attitude.” What’s the point if you can’t get all righteous about it, I ask? We’ll see. There’s a cook-book associated with the site, and there’re recipes there, of course. I’m actually glad that there’s not the attitude, as that’s what usually keeps me away from identifying as a vegetarian / almost-vegan … the attitude towards that “almost” is truly difficult to bear.

I was pointed to a cool online cartoon site called Married To The Sea. I must point the way towards two cartoons: I Hate Voting, and Keep Going.

There. Now that the scattered thoughts are out of my head and into the hive-mind, I can get back to the grind … after grinding some coffee, that is.

Kabocha Pasta

kabocha_pasta1
kabocha_pasta1
More in the series: wishiwerebaking.

Our lovely CSA (Riverdog Farm) had given us Kabocha squash several weeks in a row, so we had to do something with it. This is one of the reasons why we belong to a CSA, and one of the recurring challenges with our weekly produce box. Every Wednesday we pick up the box of produce, not knowing what’s in it, and every week we try to use it all up. Or, well, give it away, if it’s something particularly wrong, like that absolutely disgusting Romanesque Broccoli.

In any event, we’ve got all of this squash. So, we baked it, pureed it, and turned it into noodles. Basically, take semolina flour, give it a spin in the food processor with the cutting blade and your herbs (fresh rosemary, onion maybe), and then add your squash. When things have come together into a somewhat moist ball, pull it out and refrigerate overnight. (The resting step doesn’t have to go overnight, but it hydrates the flour quite well, and will make the noodling process easier.) Divide the dough into manageable bits, roll out, run through your pasta roller if you’ve got one, or simply roll as thinly as you can, and cut with a pizza cutter. You’re done, there, but we went the extra step of laying them out for our food dehydrator & running them overnight, so that they’d store well.

Nice, toothsome, thick noodles. Relatives took them all.

To find more about CSA’s, check out KQED’s Blog Entry about them.

Candied Walnuts

walnut7
walnut7
More in the series: wishiwerebaking.

Nuts are supposed to be good for you and all … and I suppose they don’t lose any of their virtue if they’re candied, right?

A friend gave us a large bag of walnuts, saying that they didn’t know what to do with them. So, we took them home and did some thinking. We thought that if we were to candy them then we’d be able to share. Yes. That’s what we thought. They never made it out of the house.

The “recipe” for candied walnuts isn’t really all that deep. The one thing which made the real difference in flavor? That’d be having blanched the walnuts in boiling water first, to remove the tannins from the skin of the meat. It turned the water a nasty brownish color, and the walnuts ended up quite pale in color. From there, it was a matter of letting them dry & mixing up some caramel.

For the caramel, we added some molasses (1/4 cup), sugar (2 cups), water (1/8 cup), and spices (cayenne pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, salt) to a pot and let it go until it was well above the Hard Ball stage, to 265 degrees Fahrenheit. Take it off the heat at this point and carefully add in about 1 tsp vanilla extract. Then just dump the sugar over the nuts in a large bowl, mix until coated, dump out on parchment, and wait. After a couple of hours the caramel will have sugared out a bit, leaving you with something almost the consistency of maple sugar coating the nuts.

Cayenne pepper makes them quite addictive. Don’t leave it out, and don’t be chicken about it, either. We think that it’s what kept these from being gifts … and we’re glad that we don’t get walnuts all that often!

Blue Felted Hat

blue_felt4
blue_felt4
More in the series: wishiwerebaking.

This is the first experiment in felting. It’s about 10 inches across, and I’ve blocked it to retain the points that came from doing regular increases (e.g., every 10 sts, knit a row, then every 11 sts, etc.). I’ve yet to finish it, ’cause I need to take it to the craft shop and find some nice satin ribbon or something to trim it out with.

It’s actually way fuzzier than I expected, and you can still see the stitches underneath. I don’t know if it’s supposed to go this way, but … oh well. I tried brushing it while wet, scrubbing it against itself, and all manner of things until my hands were rather raw. What worked best was just throwing it in the washer on hot & letting it go.

Sometimes you just don’t know…

You think you know somebody, and then something so odd, so strange, just leaps up at you, and you wonder. You wonder, “how is it that I never knew that about you?” Just now, I’ve been sitting here with TadMack as she’s finishing up a story, before we go out to look at more kitchen things (granite countertops, today), and she needed to write the word “über.” With the umlaut. Now, for me to write that? I’d have to pull up the character map (charmap.exe – you’ve got it if you’ve got Windows). For her? She holds down the Alt key and uses the number keypad to type 0252. Without looking. Without even thinking about it. Try it: press Alt+0252. You get:

ü

I’ll bet she knows all of the accented French ones, too, and probably the Spanish one (ñ). After all, how many times do you need the ü character, as opposed to the é or the ñ characters?

Photo Stream

Just a quick post to say that we’ve finally given in to the digital world. Yes, folks, we’ve got a Flickr account. I must say that I’ve been very leery of putting anything really out there in the world of the interweb. But, alas, leaving the pics up on my ISP and paying for them to host them is kind of painful, too. The upside there was that nobody could say they owned them … but I’m guessing that they won’t be terribly jazzed and want to steal them from Flickr either.

Or maybe they will, in which case, more power to them, I suppose. Paranoia takes energy to maintain … and having people be able to see my pictures is far better than being all paranoid. So. Pics are up there for people to see … and if you contact us we’ll add you to our list of Flickr contacts so that you can see ones with people in them. That’s got to be the one concession to paranoia: we’re letting anything with people in them be public. So there.

Now to hours and hours and hours of uploading and organizing all the pictures from the past years and years and years….