an ent knits

I’m still quite busy with work, and my evenings have been devoted to recovery from last week’s insanity, so I actually haven’t knit or spun in days. So…I’m following Norma’s lead, and I’ll tell you a bit about two things I’ve cooked lately.

First, the lentils. My cooking style is generally more “inspired by” than authentic, and I stop using recipes for a type of food once I get comfortable with it. (I should note, however, that as much as I love baking, I still use recipes for nearly all baked goods (but not bread). They’re just different from “regular” food.) Anyway, this means that my cooking is “vaguely Thai” or “vaguely Italian” or, in this case, “vaguely Indian”. I made this dish on Sunday, for a couple of my friends, and the response was positive enough that I thought I’d share an approximation of the recipe:

Cover the bottom of a pot with vegetable oil. Sprinkle about a teaspoon each of cumin seeds and brown mustard seeds in, and turn on the flame (to low-medium) until the seeds start to pop. Add a cup or a cup and a half of frozen corn and the same of frozen, chopped spinach and begin to sauté. Add ground cumin, ground coriander, turmeric, garam masala, some ground black pepper, and granulated garlic (to taste; start with around 1.5-2 t each) and continue to cook for just under a minute. Add 1/2 c dried mung beans and 1.5 c water. If you want it to be spicy, add a dried chile or two at this point. Bring to a boil and then lower the heat and simmer for ten minutes. Add 1.5 c red lentils and 3 c water. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and cook until the lentils and mung beans are no longer crunchy.

Garnish with crispy Indian snacks (such as spicy chick peas) if desired. Can be served as soup or over rice. Probably serves 6 (as a main dish).

As for the pancakes, I saw a post on bakingsheet about yeasted buckwheat pancakes. My standard pancakes, which I had an excuse to make a couple of weeks ago, are also yeasted, but more like the beginning of making normal bread. (Recipe in the extended entry.)

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I’m still quite busy with work, and my evenings have been devoted to recovery from last week’s insanity, so I actually haven’t knit or spun in days. So…I’m following Norma’s lead, and I’ll tell you a bit about two things I’ve cooked lately.

First, the lentils. My cooking style is generally more “inspired by” than authentic, and I stop using recipes for a type of food once I get comfortable with it. (I should note, however, that as much as I love baking, I still use recipes for nearly all baked goods (but not bread). They’re just different from “regular” food.) Anyway, this means that my cooking is “vaguely Thai” or “vaguely Italian” or, in this case, “vaguely Indian”. I made this dish on Sunday, for a couple of my friends, and the response was positive enough that I thought I’d share an approximation of the recipe:

Cover the bottom of a pot with vegetable oil. Sprinkle about a teaspoon each of cumin seeds and brown mustard seeds in, and turn on the flame (to low-medium) until the seeds start to pop. Add a cup or a cup and a half of frozen corn and the same of frozen, chopped spinach and begin to sauté. Add ground cumin, ground coriander, turmeric, garam masala, some ground black pepper, and granulated garlic (to taste; start with around 1.5-2 t each) and continue to cook for just under a minute. Add 1/2 c dried mung beans and 1.5 c water. If you want it to be spicy, add a dried chile or two at this point. Bring to a boil and then lower the heat and simmer for ten minutes. Add 1.5 c red lentils and 3 c water. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and cook until the lentils and mung beans are no longer crunchy.

Garnish with crispy Indian snacks (such as spicy chick peas) if desired. Can be served as soup or over rice. Probably serves 6 (as a main dish).

As for the pancakes, I saw a post on bakingsheet about yeasted buckwheat pancakes. My standard pancakes, which I had an excuse to make a couple of weeks ago, are also yeasted, but more like the beginning of making normal bread. (Recipe in the extended entry.)

(more…)

Woo! I got home before 11, largely by only leaving the house for some grocery shopping. I need to be asleep in a few minutes, so I’m still not going to write much, but I’ve got pictures.

Yup, I’ve finished two more hats for Dulaan and started a fourth (that last around midnight last night, while waiting for the trolley). Details later.

I got home about twenty minutes ago. The last time I got home before eleven pm was Tuesday, and I haven’t slept later than 9. (This morning, the small, fuzzy alarm clock decided that sometime between 7 and 7:30 was when I should get up and pay attention to him. I don’t think he gets the concept of weekends.) I’ve got plenty of stuff to talk about, whenever I get a chance to do so. Maybe Sunday (tomorrow/today) or Monday evening…

I’ve been busy in lab, and I’m getting sick, but I had a very nice evening once I got home. I don’t have time to write much, since I have to be up early and I need sleep to kick the sickness, but I present you with a pair of pictures.

Lace! I’ve wound all of the very red laceweight and started Mim’s Mountain Peaks Shawl with it. (Are there buttons for the knitalong? Maybe I should put one up.)

And I got green laceweight from Amy Boogie this afternoon:

Isn’t it pretty? I don’t think I mentioned it here, but I got my Fleece Artist yarn, and it really wasn’t the color I wanted (the problem with e-mail for someone as color-picky as I am with greens). Amy liked it, though, so we swapped, and I now have this lovely green yarn for a Peacock Feathers Shawl for whenever I finish the Mountain Peaks Shawl.

I have another, even more squeal-worthy announcement to make, but it’s going to wait until I’ve got pictures. And now it’s bedtime.

Well, I got some more kool-aid (and a very strange look from the cashier when I arrived at the cash register with eleven packets of drink mix and nothing else). Three and a half packets of cherry, one packet each of tropical punch and lemonade, and half a packet of ice blue raspberry lemonade later, I had this:

I’ve included a netflix envelope for color-balance confirmation and one of my favorite red t-shirts as a comparison for wearability. The yarn is now very, very red (a little more red and less orange than it looks on my laptop), but I like it. I think it’ll be fun.

And, unsurprisingly, I did some spinning this week, too:

about 150 yards of DKish yarn

This is more of my first wheel-spun singles plied with singles I spun from three colors of roving that came in multipacks with the black roving I bought to ply with the alien singles. I had fun switching between colors; I really like the bits with overlapping colors.

I feel silly, though, ’cause it’s yet another yarn that isn’t a color combination that I’m ever going to wear. Maybe I’m being overprotective of the rovings that I started spinning on my spindles and which I really like…I sort of don’t want to start spinning them on the wheel because they’ll probably come out differently. Which basically leaves me with the rovings I didn’t like as much. Well, the merino-silk wasn’t going to be a shawl project anyway, so maybe I’ll try that on the wheel…

Book meme:

I’ve changed this a bit, but the rules I used are as follows:
Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you’ve been meaning to read, cross out the ones you probably won’t read, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you’ve never even heard of. Books in plain text are things I haven’t read and feel neutral toward.

To answer Mim’s question: There are books I would only read if I were stranded someplace and didn’t have much choice of reading material, and there are books I probably still wouldn’t read (like horror stories) until I’d been stranded for a month. I figured I should make some sort of distinction among the books I have yet to read. Of course, I should also note that I might not have gotten around to reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I really liked, had I not been staying with friends for a month with only about three books of my own (one of which I finished on the train on the way there).

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1984 – George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
(The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold)
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
(The Secret History – Donna Tartt)
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
(Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell)
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
(Atonement – Ian McEwan)
(The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune – Frank Herbert

Yarn quiz in the extended entry.

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I spent part of the weekend running around like a crazy person, part of the weekend recovering from said craziness, and a small part of the weekend playing with fibery things.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with kool-aid dyeing, despite my less-than-perfect results. I was aiming for a good, strong, possibly dark orangey-red. I got this:

It reminds me of the “red” from the fluorescently colored labelling stickers or tape-flag-sized post-its. I think it’ll overdye okay, though, as soon as I get myself to a store that sells kool-aid. That was about 3.5 oz of yarn (my cheap kitchen scale said it was a little more than 3 oz…) with 3 packets of Cherry and two packets of Orange. I’m thinking…five more packets of cherry?

I’m also thinking I might try using this process to dye the natural brown corriedale roving that I liked at Maryland and haven’t liked since. A nice reddish brownish color should be good.

Not in the red family, though, I spun up some of the blue and green wool-mohair I got while visiting my parents in July.

This batch is a lot thicker* (and softer!) than what I spun on my spindle. Unfortunately, this one, too, seems to be underplied. I’m not sure why I have so much trouble getting enough ply twist into this fiber, since I haven’t noticed this kind of problem with anything without mohair…maybe it’s more sensitive? I rather like it anyway, though, and I think it’s going to become mittens, presuming that I can maintain this grist with the remaining fiber blob. Or maybe I can get small-person mittens out of about 135 yards.

I did learn one really useful thing from this batch of yarn, though: when spinning for 2-ply, make sure that there are three empty bobbins when you start. There should be one for each ply and one to ply onto. Plying onto a lace bobbin is doable, but not so much fun, since it won’t fit nearly as much as a regular bobbin. The plan: finish plying the blue & green mohair, spin some miscellaneous colored wool singles, and ply that with the rest of the natural wool singles so there’ll be more bobbins free for whatever I want to do after that.

*okay, that means fingering to DK rather than lace with bits of fingering, still not really thick yarn

A week, from roving to knitwear. It helps that it’s a baby hat, but still, I’m impressed and excited and proud. And now I have a baby hat for the Dulaan project, made out of my very own handspun.

modelled by Martín the marmoset

Project specs:
72 stitches on 5mm needles
about 80 yards of my handspun, from Amy Boogie’s roving

The other night, after leaving fiber night at Ella’s, Kirsten and I saw this:

flash version in the inset

We were highly amused.

Enticing though the spinning wheel is, the presence of all of that nicely skeined, very fresh yarn was too much to overcome. So I started knitting a hat.

The yarn, although great fun to spin, turned out to be colors that I’m really, really not going to wear. And I couldn’t think of anyone who likes bright pink and bright purple and bright yellow (any of you whom I know in real life who like that combination of colors, speak fast). So it’s going to be a couple of things for Dulaan.

This whole “spinning fast enough to go from roving to half a hat in less than a week” thing is really cool.

In and around the work I was doing this weekend, I got in some good time with Louie, Anj’s wheel. Just look!

That’s a little over 200 yards of two-ply, spun in barely over 24 hours. And I did other things, including work and sleep. The difference in speed from my drop spindles to the wheel is amazing. The resulting yarn feels like it might be denser than with the spindle, but I’m not entirely sure. Whatever the case, I now really, really, really want a wheel of my own. (Two months ’til May and Maryland!)