random catch-up

1. There has been a lot of good eats from Royal Irish Soda Bread with whiskey butter to risotto to cuban beans and rice.

2. I have been spending the last few Sundays at the Purple Purl. I may have bought some yarn and I definitely bought some blocking wires. I’ve also done quite a bit of knitting but don’t have a lot of pictures of said knitting.

3. Piper and I are enjoying the lovely weather this evening sitting on our balcony enjoying a delicious dinner of crackers, cheese and berries. There may be some beer included in that meal (but only for me).

4. Piper got a new toy. A Pak-o-bird which means she can now safely go on walks with me. Will post a picture as soon as I have Sean take a picture of me and Piper showing how it is used.

quick knits and chicken

The knitting has slowed a bit since we moved but it has not stopped. I am making good progress on the Leaving sweater’s front but I have a hole in my knitted garments that needs to be filled especially if the weather is going to be warming up a bit but not enough. I have decided to cast on a pair of fingerless mittens for those days where it is too warm for mittens but too cold to go without anything on the hands. It is the Dashing pattern and it is made with aran weight wool which means for a pretty quick knit. Perfect for a “I want to finish something quickly” mood.

Last night I decided to experiment with a new recipe from Cooks Illustrated for Peruvian Garlic-Lime Roast chicken. It turned out delicious. The skin was crispy and the meat including the chicken breasts were juicy and flavourful (the marinade is also rubbed onto under the skin of the chicken). The recipe recommends a vertical roaster (which I don’t have and have no intention of running out to buy) but the thing I am starting to like about Cooks Illustrated is they will usually give you a an alternative that you are likely to have in the kitchen. In this case it was a tall boy can of beer half empty.

The key to juicy meat and crispy skin is cooking it at two different temperatures (it’s what Cooks Illustrated told me and now that I’ve done it I believe it). The first bake is at 325F for almost an hour. You then take the chicken out of the oven and crank it up to 500F. Once the oven has finished pre-heating add a little water to your baking dish so the drippings don’t smoke and put it back in for about 20 minutes. Sean and I agree that this is going to become a popular favourite as it has a lot of flavour and a nice spicy kick! 

Today we are making some ciabatta as we are going to get back into making bread once a week (and by we I mean I will make it and Sean will eat a good portion of it). Hopefully I will remember to take a picture. I will leave you with picture of some lovely tulips Sean brought home his week.

Tree Day

Yesterday Sean and I went out to Oshawa with his parents to hunt down our tree’s. I of course forgot my camera. When we got back I went grocery shopping to pick up the ingredients for our Moroccan dinner, including the tagine to cook one of the dishes. We had carrot and cumin salad, spicy eggplant and tomato, roasted peppers with goat cheese, country bread and tagine chicken with preserved lemon, olives and thyme. Needless to say there are lots of delicious leftovers.

After we were stuffed like turkeys, I put the lights on the tree and added the decorations that Sean’s mom gave me (I think she heard about my tree last year with only the lights and a single decoration). Sean had asked his mom for his decorations and he used those to help decorate my tree (they are the majority of the decorations).

a brief knitting update

First things first, I finally have a picture of Sean’s 2009 xmas gift, which until now I have not had a picture of the finished product.

Last week Sean wanted to make a good tomato sauce with meatballs. This is the picture Sean took when we reheated the leftovers for a meal last weekend.

Dad’s second sock is coming along nicely. I just have to finish knitting the foot section and then move onto the toe.

I’ve also been working on the blanket which is getting just massive. From my estimations it is big enough for the edges of the blanket to just cover the width of a queen-sized bed. A little bigger and it should be time to cast-off.

I’ve also restarted working on my fiddlehead mittens. The almost complete one was finished sometime last winter. I’ve started on the second one and then once that is complete I pick up along the edges to knit the inside lining. These should be excellent winter mittens with all those layers.

Trick or Treat

Since there is nothing much new to show you in the knitting arena as I am still working on the same holiday knitting I have been working on for a while I will show you some of the food we have been eating since the last time I posted.

Last weekend was UFC so we made a Guinness chocolate cake to enjoy while watching it. It is an excellent recipe and makes for a very moist tasty cake with excellent cream cheese icing. The boys really enjoyed it.

Last night we made cranberry apple pie to use up the apples before the went too soft and the bag of fresh cranberries from Sean’s mom. Can you spot the happy face?

We also made gnocchi from scratch yesterday. We made some cream sauce with goat cheese and veggies and placed sliced turkey breast on top.

I spent this Halloween afternoon at the Purple Purl knitting and hanging out with the ladies. There were cupcakes to decorate and many of the ladies dressed up.

While I was at the Purl I picked up some yarn for Sean’s 2011 sweater. It is some Tanis Fibre Arts Green Label Aran Weight in the Midnight colourway and will be a nice simple sweater this time

Plugging away

It has been a very busy weekend. I made a pan of brownies on Saturday but of course forgot to take pictures. This new recipe I have tried is rich and fudge-y and does not stick around for long. We made stuffed peppers filled with orzo, vegetables and feta to go with our steaks before heading out to watch UFC with the boys.

Today I made mini-butter tarts for birthday celebrations at work and beer bread buns for lunch and dinners this week. We had samples of both and they are both excellent. The gorgeous colour of the bread comes from Guinness and not the choice of flour.

We are making pizza for dinner tonight. I was in charge of making the dough and Sean was in charge of the toppings. He had to get his fingers in the shot.

I have been concentrating on knitting a chemo cap for a friend of Sean’s family. His mother offered to buy the yarn if I would knit it.

I have also been knitting more on the hap blanket than I probably should but it is so nice and mindless while being incredibly soft. I’ve cast-off the garter stitch centre yesterday and then promptly picked up the stitches around the edges and started the lace edging. Sean wants this blanket to be nice and big and suggested that if we ran out of yarn before it was the proper size we could run to the yarn store and get some more, which is a pretty good idea. I’m afraid it won’t make for good photographs until it is cast-off now that it only resembles a giant blob.

Blocking

I finished knitting all five pieces of the sprossling sweater on Thursday so today I set out to block all the pieces before assembling and adding the edging for the collar and button bands.

Before I started I had some leftover pizza from last night with a homemade dipping sauce for my crusts. It was delicious.

I had these squares that supposedly form a child’s play mat (but really it’s huge and who can argue with under $30 when the “knitting” version is so much more expensive for the same square metreage) that I layed out on the floor. They are excellent because they are (a) not the floor and (b) can stick pins in them. Besides I barley even used half the blocks to lay out this sweater!

I covered the mat with a sheet just in case the mat colours may bleed. And then I pinned out the sweater pieces to the necessary dimensions.

This is the first lace sweater I have made and one of the few ones done in pieces. OH MY GOD. The amount of fiddly work necessary to get it all pinned out nearly drove me CRAZY. I loved knitting up this sweater but I can honestly say I hated the blocking part of it! Thank goodness I stopped by the LCBO on the way home and picked up a lovely bottle of wine since the bottle of my grandfathers wine (the bottle of Merlot in the picture below) that I popped open earlier this week was pretty much gone. It definitely made the blocking process much more tolerable.

Off topic: My lovely boyfriend brought me a gorgeous flowering plant yesterday and since it is so beautiful it deserves a picture on the blog. I love flowers!

Canada Day

We had a whole flock of Canadian geese on our cottage island that kept coming back periodically throughout the day. They were very people shy, most likely because they had quite a large number of  young ones with them. Their first appearance was around noon and they kept coming back periodically throughout the day.

At just after 4pm I decided it was time to make our first attempt into the lake. We both changed into our bathing suits, grabbed our towels and went to the little beach they have to the back of the cottage. It was very shallow and had a lot of little rocks that made it very difficult to walk out far enough so that there was enough depth to properly submerge oneself. We gave up and decided to jump into the hot tub instead of allowing our feet to be massacred. The hot tub was a very good choice and was enjoyed with a bottle of Innis & Gunn.

The Canadian geese made another appearance as we were warming up the BBQ for dinner. I made homemade burgers with havarti cheese, orange tomatoes, roasted orange pepper, grilled onions and lettuce. We used pitas as the buns and it worked out wonderfully except for the cheeky chipmunks who would jump on the table and pilfer them when my back was turned to flip the burgers. Sean had to come and stand guard after the second time.We of course enjoyed dinner with a Canadian Cask edition of Innis & Gunn. They appear to make one every year in honour of Canada Day and it seems to become Sean and I’s tradition to have one of these on this important day (this would be our second year of said tradition). Desert was grilled pineapple and nectarine. I was very glad I only cut up four slices of pineapple because even though we were full it was so good that we both would have likely kept on eating it until it was gone!

pictureless

We are on vacation at a cottage this week and don’t have the cable to attach the camera to the computer so I think we are out of luck in the picture department. We are at a very swanky cottage that has it’s own little one acre island. It also has satellite TV (which so far has been staying off), internet, a huge massive BBQ with three burners that make BBQ beer chicken fabulously easy and tasty, a well-equipped kitchen, a pontoon boat, a fire pit and the friendliest chipmunks in the world. (Pictures will follow when we are back home or if I find out Sean remembered the cable for his camera.)

The island is a bit small for nice walks, however it is great because we don’t really have any neighbours that would annoy us. It feels nice and isolated even though it really isn’t.

There has been lots of food and all of it good. Saturday night we had venison sausages, Sunday was steaks, Monday was BBQ beer chicken, Tuesday was pizza on the BBQ and today will probably be beef ribs unless we decide to go into town today. Tomorrow for Canada Day we will be having burgers.

I finished the back of Sean’s aran sweater in the car ride and the first night we spent here and have started on the front. I also brought the border for the Queen Ring Shawl and have finally completed 10 repeats (of the 208 that need to be completed). The pattern is starting to become intuitive to me so I’m not always looking at the chart and now when I make a mistake or drop stitches I can easily fix it without having to rip all the way back to my lifeline. The first five repeats were the hardest to do but now I can whip through a pattern repeat easily enough. Hopefully this means I will start making some progress but I’m sure all the Christmas knitting I need to do will slow me down on the shawl.

randomness

There is not too much going on knit-wise to show pictures of at the moment. The Bean’s sweater is getting close to completion. That will be a finished object to show off soon.

Not so long ago I bought myself a new knitting book about designing sweaters, Knitwear Design Workshop by Shirley Paden. I’m finding it excellent as it shows you how to do a lot of the math (which is good if you want to make patterns with multiple sizes). It also shows you how to design for different sweater body types, sleeves, necklines, collars etc as well as skirts and dressed amoung other things. It should be an excellent resource. One of my favorite things this book includes is all the measurements you should take and how exactly to take them. It also seems very well suited to my learning style which is both visual and very logical.

Dinner on Thursday was an experiment that turned out excellent! We had lamb chops that were soaked in red wine overnight and then patted in Madras seasoning for a crust and seared before being put in the oven. Since madras seasoning is spicy I made a nice cooling mango pineapple salsa with tomato, onion and fresh cilantro. The vegies were potatoes, carrots, onion and raisins with fennel, mustard and coriander seeds amoung other spices. The lamb was extremely tender.

The tomato plants are growing like weeds. I think it might be time to transplant them!

Some Piper cuteness. She insisted on keeping her “hat” on for the photo shoot.