Serious bad problem.
I can’t knit.
Because my hands look like this:
But feel like this:
And it doesn’t help that I’m currently so busy at my real-life job (as opposed to my fantasy job where I spend all day with a herd of puppies, knitting them sweaters while people throw money at me) that I have recently resorted to working from my laptop and desktop simultaneously in an effort to increase my productivity. TPS reports don’t write themselves, you know.
So that’s led to some minor wrist pain as well as some eyeball melting, face-stabbing, throat-punching lower arm pain which I’m pretty sure is the Return of Carpal Tunnel: The Tunneling, which means my life knitting life is on hold for a bit. I’ve got stretches and exercises to do, and horribly ugly little wrist braces that I have resigned myself to. Right now I’m typing this by tapping the keys with the pencil I’ve got stuck in my teeth. Not really. But I should probably do that. Instead I’m knitting in 15 minute bursts with 15 minute breaks, and occasionally shoving my hands into bags of frozen peas. And sewing, and forgetting to take pictures of what I make.
Here’s what I was able to eek out in between muscle spasms. It’s a Xeriscape scarf pattern by Mary-Heather Cogar and it’s just gorgeous. This is what it looks like when I use my dog as a model, because the first thing I do after finishing a lengthy project in fancy yarn is to wrap it around my dog. No, really, I do that.
And this is what it looks like on me when I’m all excited to go see David Sedaris.
It took me longer to finish than I’d planned (see above re: crippling hand pain). I used two skeins of Blue Sky Alpaca and Silk in crabapple that I got at the (sadly defunct) Spinster Yarn and Fibers in Baltimore last summer that I’d been saving for something special. This was it.
So, due to aforementioned hand-crippling, it looks like I won’t be doing many hand-knit Christmakkuh presents this year, but I bet I can squeak out a few. Sewing Goodness will be getting one, for sure, though (per a multi-year tradition that we both embrace) it might be in July.
links for 2010-09-22
Summer got mad at me for saying that it sucks and got revenge by being 90 degrees today, which is more like 105 degrees when you live in a Giant Swamp. So I got reverse-revenge by compiling an extending my list of other fall recipe plans.
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This is no exaggeration: it’s the best apple cake ever. But just *horrible* for you, healthy-wise. I replace the butter with unsweetened applesauce, left out one of the eggs and reduced the sugar by ½ cup. Couldn’t tell the difference in taste; not sure if it makes a massive difference in a dietary capacity, but at least I TRIED.
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If I had to chose between this and the apple cake, I’d punch whoever was making me chose in the face, steal both cakes and eat them by myself.
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The best part about being married to someone who hates squash is that you never have to share.
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If you have never had cinnamon ice cream on top of pumpkin pie, you have not lived your life to it’s full potential.
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mushrooms + cheese = auto-win.
Life Goal Added.
Via Middle Muse…
If I do nothing else in this life, I will knit an owl tuque. And find an owl to wear it.
links for 2010-09-21
See you in Hell, Summertime. FALL is here, and that means PUMPKINS. I love pumpkins. I love their color, I love their taste, I love their seeds. I’m not some crazy pumpkin lady with a house full of pumpkin gewgaws but I totally empathize with Yarn Harlot’s quest for the perfect orange. And hell yeah, I’ve had decorative gourds on my dining room table since July.
Here are some pumpkin-related plans of mine:
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Socktoberfest!
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Socktoberfest!
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I’m going to wear the crap out of these.
links for 2010-08-24
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I don’t know why I waited until the *end* of summer to do this, but I finally bought an ice cream maker. I think it has something to do with my distain for kitchen unitaskers. So at least now I can enjoy delicious cold homemade ice cream all winter long. Starting with this.
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I’m probably going to have to establish some house rule that requires 4 hours of gym time before any use of the ice cream maker is implemented.
links for 2010-08-23
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I like to do a lot of small jars of different jams, condiments, etc. for holiday gifts. Last year I made apple butter, but I think would be a nice change and now is the time to make use of the billions of blueberries at the farmer’s market.
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I pretty much just want to eat this straight from the pan with a giant spoon.
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Slightly more exotic than the traditional McCormick’s spiced nut recipe I usually make…
- Lemon Vanilla Jam – Canning Across America There isn’t a thing about this that doesn’t sound delicious. (tags: gifts recipes)
I made Lebanese White Bush Squash Pancakes for dinner. I win.
I buy a lot of my garden seedlings from a local, family-owned neighborhood nursery. I won’t name names, but even though it’s an awesome place, every one who works there is always stoned. Like, Cheech and Chong have nothing on these guys. Once, the cashier talked to me for 15 minutes about the soulfullness of soil. I’d asked for a tomato cage. Anyway, they are good people. Just living in the 60’s a little. I think it’s all quite cute.
But, sometimes you get special surprises. Like this zucchini plant that I bought which isn’t a zucchini plant. This isn’t the first time I’ve come home with a mislabeled plant. I didn’t realize it until a week or two ago, when I was all, “Those are some funny-colored zucchini.”
At first, I thought it might be a white eggplant, but it was too yellow. And the leaves were very “squash.” After an extreme amount of Googling (some of which made me want to claw my eyes out. People do wrong things with vegetables and there is evidence of that on the internet), I determined that it’s a Lebanese White Bush Squash.
I’ve never had one of those before. Never even heard of it, honestly. But summer squash is pretty much always summer squash no matter what color the skin is, and in most recipes it’s interchangeable. One of my favorite ways to use up squash is with pancakes. One the rowdy night when Mr. Begonia had to work late and I was on my own for dinner, I made myself a big batch of these. Seriously, they are so good that I sat down on the kitchen floor and ate them as they came out of the pan. Never even made it to the table.
I also drank most of a bottle of wine. Which explains why there aren’t many pictures here, and the pictures you do see are not my most awesome. Particularly this one: Apparently I decided to cook a couple of these heart-shaped because I loved them so much.
Sooo…
You don’t need to really top these with anything, but I had some homemade 3-pepper jam, so that kicked up the awesome. These are easily made vegan by using an egg substitute in place of the regular eggs.
Summer Squash Pancakes
Adapted from my mom and Ina Garten
Ingredients
- 2 medium or 1 large summer squash (about 1 pound or 3 cups grated).
- 1 medium shallot, chopped
- 2 large eggs, lightly beaten or equivalent amount of egg replacement
- 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1 clove garlic, mashed
- handful of fresh parsley, chopped (approximately 1/4 cup)
- vegetable oil
Directions
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees F.
Trim out seeds from the inside of the squash. Grate the squash using a box grater. Press out excess water in a colander. (NOTE: THIS IS IMPORTANT! If you don’t let the extra water drain out, your batter will be too runny. I usually let my grated squash sit in the colander for about 20 minutes, under a linen towel weighted with a heavy soup can. In 3 cups of grated squash, about 5 tablespoons of liquid will drain).
Stir in the onion and eggs or egg substitute. Stir in 1/3 cup flour, the baking powder, salt, and pepper. Add more a tablespoon or two of flour if the batter is extremely runny.You should have something slightly more fluid than regular pancake batter, but not watery.
Heat a 10 or 12-inch skillet over medium heat and heat 1 tablespoon oil in the pan. Lower the heat to medium-low and ladle 1/4 cup of batter into the pan. Cook the pancakes about 2-3 minutes on each side, until brown and crispy. Place the pancakes on a sheet pan and keep warm in the oven. Add another tablespoon of oil to the pan, if needed, and continue to fry the pancakes until all the batter is used. Serve hot.
Makes approximately 8 pancakes–enough to serve 2 or 3 people.
My cat doesn’t care if I get eaten by zombies, apparently.
This is Miss Kitty Fantastico. She’s a cat, as you can see, and she’s pretty much the center of my universe (Sorry, guy-I-married).
Kitty is most awesome cat ever and everything she does is perfect, except one little thing that may end up with me getting my brain eaten by an infected hoard. While she spends most of her time being adorable, Kitty does one thing that’s not awesome. She unlocks doors. Specifically, she unlocks our dining room door on a regular basis. It’s a sliding glass door and we use a heavy wooden dowel to block the slide-track and keep the door closed. Miss Kitty, who is a rubinesque 6 year old 22 lb. Maine Coon, is able to paw the dowel out of the track, leaving the door unsecured and us vulnerable to zombie attack.
Whenever we see her starting to fuss with the door, we chase her off and lecture her about the dangers of zombies.
Apparently I’ve taken this too far. I just finished this beautiful scarf and when I went outside to take this picture, she locked me out of the house. This left me vulnerable to the zombie hoard in an entirely different way.
Somehow she managed to push the dowel back into the track, blocking the door shut again.
My natural reaction was to run in a circle and scream for Mr. Begonia to come rescue me, because it was hot and sunny and I was without sunscreen and I am a delicate flower who will BURN in ten seconds. My instinct was not to walk 50 feet around to the house to the front door, which was totally unlocked.
My dog was trapped with me. Her reaction? To plop down in a sunny spot and take a nap while the crazy lady did her crazy dance.
Once we got inside, Miyagi solemnly congratulated me on surviving being in the sun for 3 whole minutes.
Now, a note on the scarf. It’s the Cocquille Shawl pattern from Knitty. It’s a really great pattern and it took me about 2 weeks of intermittent attention to finish it up. I did alter it, though, by adding a few extra gussets in each set and an extra set of garter repeats at each segment. I did this to use up as much of my yarn as I could. I think I had about 1200 yards, and this used up at least 800. So I should have enough left for some matching gloves.
The yarn? It’s a mystery. Because I lost the tag. The house has been torn apart in search, but alas: nada. I know I got it at the Bonita Knit and Sew in California last summer when Mr. Begonia and I were visiting his brother in San Diego. I remember this specifically because I almost accidentally drove into Mexico looking for the shop. But it looks like they have since closed. All I know is that it’s a light fingering weight, I’m pretty sure it’s alpaca, and it’s sinfully soft and smooshy. It wouldn’t protect me from zombies, though.
Today I want to hug the universe right in it’s stupid face.
A friend of mine has cancer. Cancer fucking sucks. Yeah, I know that’s not news to anyone. But it’s worth restating. Cancer. Fucking. Sucks. My friend is going to be OK, which is why I want to hug the universe in it’s stupid face instead of wanting to punch it. (For the moment.) But it reminds me that I have it really, really good. The worse thing that happened to me today was that I got bad cream in my coffee at the diner and I wasted 90 minutes watching a really crappy movie on Netflix streaming. If those are the worst things to happen today, I’ve got NOTHING to complain about.
There’s lots of stuff that the movies and TV doesn’t tell you about cancer and treatment because it’s not dramatically glamorous. Like your eyelashes fall out, your fingers and toes swell up until your nails fall off, that chemo damages your senses until all food tastes like dirt, or that your skin turns blue and green and you have to have ports and tubes surgically implanted and you can’t hug your kid until they get taken out. Like I said. Cancer. Fucking. Sucks.
People respond to stress and bad news in different ways, and of course friends want to help. And my friends is lucky to have lots of friends and family who love her into a million pieces and want to do everything they can. Unfortunately, when it comes to heavy stuff like cancer there’s not a lot you can do for someone else. Seriously, if I could be all like, “Hey, I’ll take this round of chemo for you. Go relax for a while. I got this,” I totally would do it. But it’s not like picking up the check at the diner. You gotta leave the tough stuff to the medical professionals and the even more tough stuff to the patient. But pretty much most of us just have to sit around and wait. And worry. And wait. And worry. And wait. And worry. And wait more even when time seems to have slowed down to 1/8th normal speed. And repeat.
So what can you do on the sidelines? While you’re doing all that waiting and fingers-crossing and positive-thoughts-sending? There’s always something to do. Better to keep busy than to sit around do all that idle worrying.
So, I knit a few chemo caps.
And baked cookies to eat in the waiting room at the hospital.
I knit this pair of Official Slipper-Socks For Kicking Cancer In The Face.
And sewed up a few headscarves for when the weather was too warm for a thick hat.
But when that’s done, then you go back to the worrying. And the waiting. Because all the worrying and waiting you’re doing? Your friend is waiting and worrying a whole hell of a lot more, times like a bajillion. So that’s important to remember.
That’s pretty much all I can do. It doesn’t make me feel any more in control of a universe that I’m pissed at for messing around with my friend. But if it makes an almost intolerably horrid situation slightly more tolerable to deal with for her, then I’m glad to do it.
What I did learn is that while Ravelry will hook up you with a ton of good, free chemo cap patterns to knit or crochet, there aren’t a lot of DIY options for sewn head scarves out there. Well, I mean there aren’t a lot of GOOD options out there. Googling “chemo scarf pattern” or any variation will bring up a lot of duds on websites last updated in 1997. Here are few of the ones that I used as baseline guides, with good results, though a plain hemmed 36” square seemed to work the best.
This turban was quick and simple, and the instructions are fairly clear.
The layout on this site makes the pattern a little hard to understand, but if you read through it a few times, you’ll glean how to make this doo-rag style cap.
This isn’t a pattern, per say, but if you’re an intermediate or above seamster, you can figure it out from the pictures.
So there you go; maybe those links will come in handy one day. All of them are easy enough and I ended up making 5 or 6 scarves in a few different styles in one afternoon. I really, really hope not, but reality is stupid sometimes. Yeah, this went to a more depressing place than I intended, so let me just end by saying friend is awesome and totally kicked Cancer in it’s stupid, ugly face and I’m so happy about it that I’m considering hiring a skywriter.
links for 2010-07-07
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I've never bought a cherry pitter because a) Alton Brown has trained me to possess an ingrained contempt for unitaskers, and b) I've never seen one for less than $12/pop, and the good ones seem to run closer to $25. That's just crazy talk, there. I like this version, which I can make from one of the myriad of unmatched thriftstore forks in the my utensil drawer for a cost of maybe $.25
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I love this adaptation of one of my favorite summer recipes. The sweltering Baltimore heat has caused my squash plants to drop their blossoms (that sounds so dirty, but I don't mean it that way. Really-I don't.) But I will salvage what I can to make these.
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It's too hot to bake bread. It's too hot to eat bread. It's too hot to do pretty much anything, except spend your lunch hour indoors, reading about baking bread on the internet in your Arcticly chilled office that you will NEVER COMPLAIN ABOUT AGAIN.
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I KNEW IT!
Cloud!
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- Today I painted the front door a non-HOA approved color, which is - pathetically -- the most rebellious thing you can do in the suburbs.
- Officially planned an all-girls roadtrip to Richmond to see @NekoCase. This story will end w/ shades of Thelma & Louise, no doubt.
- Neko Case is playing Baltimore (YAY!)...at Ramshead, the douchiest venue in town. BOO. I'm going anyway.
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