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Floaty-random

This weekend has been fun: I’ve been as focused as a giraffe’s fart.  I keep wandering into the next room and finding jobs I started a while ago and got distracted from.  I start things while waiting for something else to finish and the next thing I know I’ve got fourteen browser tabs either uploading or downloading and crippling our wireless, a pot of soup boiling over and a vague sense that I left bread dough rising in M’s study (see, I had this great idea that I could knead while using the exercise bike and…oh, it doesn’t matter).  Have to wait for the kettle to boil? No problem, I’ll fill in the time by scouring the oven…which lead to researching oven cleaners online and how bad they are for your eyes…which lead to looking at macro shots of eyes and tears and droplets…which made me thirsty, so hey, I should have a cup of tea.  Oven’s nice and clean, though. And I’ve scoped out some good home-made alternatives to oven cleaners, since they’re way bad, it turns out.

Some days I’m like to-do-list barracuda: I identify major tasks to be completed and slice slice slice through them with an intimidating laser-like focus and cold, dead eyes.  Actually, I think it’s happened only twice in my life and at least one of those as when I was jumped up on too much pickle brine and bicarb soda — this is just enough times to make me think I should be barracuda-like all the time, and puzzled about the exceptions.

Other days are pleasantly floaty and I’m more like a to-do-list sunfish, politely and calmly drifting through the big, happy ocean and enjoying watching all the other little fishes. I abandon the idea of a to-do list and instead adopt a wouldn’t-mind-doing list.  I exploit my inability to focus by doing things that are fine for stop-starting and forgetting about: I swatched for my next knitting project, which only required me to concentrate long enough to knit a st st square while reading the Internet, then washed it in this morning’s warm bath water and left it to dry in front of the heater all day.  I woke up my sourdough starter, Pongo — I just had to stay focused enough to feed him more flour and water and then not accidentally throw him away.  That’s a happy place to be: the feeling that you’re just going to do some stuff and even if you don’t, it’ll still be cool.  Some days I really just want to let go of the idea “your day is valuable only according to how much you get done”, but it can be a hard mindset to get out of. So I shut up that stupid little voice that says “why aren’t you [doing life-changing thing] right now, you lazy slug?” and, after I’ve had a bit of a cry about how mean my internal voices are to me, I knit something, cook something, write a letter or two to some chums, and the world cruises on.

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2010 07 29 bethini etc. Comments (0) Permalink

Un-knitting

Did you know: on Ravelry, there’s a whole group dedicated to untangling knots for you? It’s called “Knot a Problem”, (because everyone knows that if you start a Ravelry group without incorporating a pun into the title somehow, monsters eat your eyeballs out of their sockets while you sleep) and I can only tip my bonnet to them. I spent some time this afternoon pursuing the yarn ends in this baby — well-knit but a poor-fit, it’s going to be transformed:

Innocent and entire

And it turns out I’m a freaking yarn-end-weaving Ninja. I managed to get the first sleeve seam undone a couple of weeks ago, and then threw in the towel when I couldn’t find the second sleeve’s seam.  Some subtle hints from Mumini suggested she would like the transformation of her sweater to take place before winter (THIS winter) is over, so I hauled it out today and continued my pursuit. Oh, my. This starts to look a bit shocking.  This is the armpit hole that permitted me to find the sleeve seam’s woven-in end (don’t look if unravelled knitting upsets you):

It's normal to feel a little ill

Finding that yarn end was a dizzying high. The realisation I’m dorky enough to dance around the room upon finding it (the phrase “Who’s your daddy?” wasn’t actually used, but was definitely implied) was a crushing low. I unpicked the seam and started on the collar.

Thought you could escape destiny, yarn end?

Actually, I found unravelling the collar kinda depressing, because I did a fantastic job on it.  The picked up stitches were snug and tidy, the seam good, the cast-off perfect.  But what value is a collar on a sweater nobody wears? None, that’s what. I wiped my eyes in a brave and stalwart fashion and got out the ballwinder.

Tremble, wayward knitting projects

Spent the afternoon turning the above sweater into noodly yarn cakes.  And, what’s more, I did it right in front of my knits-in-progress bag so that my other knitting could see what happens to knits that don’t behave themselves.  Bad knits go on to become yarn cakes. Of noodles. Of yarn. Turns out to be a bit more of a time-suck than I anticipated, though: you sort of think that unravelling will just be (a) find end; (b) stick end of jumper into ball winder; (c) wheeee!; (d) yarn.  Instead, there’s heaps of sub-steps that involve thinking menacing thoughts about everything; hating the whole process and wishing you’d never agreed to it; begging your housemate for cups of tea; resenting the very existence of people who just love untangling stuff.  Then you feel kind of petty and embarrassed: and then there’s heaps of yarn! Huzzah!

Delicious yarn cakes!

At first I was a bit grouchy because I felt like I’d spent a whole afternoon unknitting when I could have, feasibly, been knitting — but I’ve decided to be Grown Up about it and accept that I’ve spent a whole afternoon producing yarn for my next project. So Zen! This sense of achievement will probably get me through the inevitable next step: smugly stashing the yarn and forgetting to actually cast on.

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2010 07 28 bethini knitting Comments (1) Permalink

Two finished

I need to talk about books again!  This week I finished two books I’ve never read before, and both, I am smugly proud to say, are from the “I Have Been Meaning To Read That” shelf. Yes, I know: take a moment to reflect on how great I am. I’ll take the same moment to indulge in some self-congratulatory masturbation, so take your time. It is a distant and hazy dream of mine to eradicate the phrase “I’ve been meaning to…” (or its analogues, “I’ve always wanted to…” and “I’ve often thought I’d like to…”) from my vocabulary.

The Magician’s Nephew

Two things.

First thing: fantasy readers abound in my family. My Mumini and both brotherinis are dead keen on fantasy, embracing those multi-volume shelf-creakers that require an iPhone App, a GPS, a supplementary dictionary and a pull-down map to really understand what’s going on.  That gene skipped me, in favour of the “eats raw carrots obsessively” gene. I lose track of characters and then when I come back after a break I can’t remember what was going on or why they were in league with shadowy dragons or whatever. Yep, not big on fantasy, this one. This did not prevent my older brotherini giving me a complete boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas a couple of years ago. I feel like I can’t pass given books on to charity without reading them first, so it’s nose to the bookcovers for me.

Second thing: I can handle allegories and I can handle didactic books, but I will never get over the shock of being told that the whole Narnia series is like one long “Children’s Introduction to the Bible”. (I know this is the topic of much debate, but honestly, when you notice the potential for that interpretation, you start feeling like you’re being pummeled with it.) This, more than anything else, has made me resistant to reading the Narnia series, even though I adored “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” as a child.

Right, that’s those out of the way. Anyway, I’ve just finished it. It was fun, although it’s not as satisfying as certain other “children’s” books I could name that are as gripping and exciting for me now as a grownup as they were as a mini-bethini. This one sets up the creation of Narnia, as well as the background to some of the events in the rest of the series, and some of the adventures the children protagonists go through are interesting and clever, and a lot of Lewis’ turns of phrase are really funny.  I found some of the moralistic stuff a bit hard going, and caught myself rolling my eyes at the moral decisions the child-aged protagonists are faced with, but then I remembered the whole series is aimed at children, so I stopped myself mid-eye-roll. I liked it and I’m going to push on and finish the rest of the series — but Hell’s bells, there’s still six books to go.

1984

Holy crap, why didn’t anyone TELL me? I’ve had so many people say “You haven’t read “1984″? Oh, you’ve got to!”, but every one of those people was remiss in not promptly thrusting a copy into my hands. Shame on them. I read it in…let’s see…four sittings.  Two of them on an exercise bike: total reading time, probably about three-and-a-half hours. It completely gripped me and this morning, after I finished it, I had to sit quietly for a while.  Winston’s character was as real to me as if I’d met him in person by the end of the first four pages; the atmosphere was strong and knifelike from the beginning, and the sense of building tension was electric.  [SPOILERS COMING RIGHT NOW] I was really shaken by the ending (not just the final line or anything, but the whole final quarter of the book), Winston’s fight and struggle, his determination to resist and challenge and question — and how that is ultimately stripped away from him, in a scene that will haunt me — are the stuff of epic, altering tragedy. No wonder people where so insistent about my reading it.  You should read it. Go! Now! Here, it’s even available online, free, so there’s no excuse.  What an incredible book: I feel like it’s one of those reads that stays in your mind, affects the way you see other writing, arts, and, well, the world in general. Challenging your perceptions is one of the most incredible — and valuable — things literature can do.  I love it.

Why both?

The reason I wanted to discuss both of these books in this post isn’t just because I finished them so close together. I wanted to bring to your attention this parallel: both are books with Something To Say. Look up tips on good writing and you’ll be inundated with recommendations about avoiding teaching your reader, that Action Is King (and, curiously, that Adverbs are the Enemy), and allegories and books with an axe to grind have been out of vogue for a while.  But. There is a lot of value to be found in books that have, on their sleeves, a point and a goal in mind. The Narnia books are illuminating, interesting and fun, and, at times, beautiful — I’m thinking, in relation to “The Magician’s Nephew”, of the scene with the silent Bell of Charn and the scene with Aslan singing Narnia to life, and both scenes, I think, resonate strongly with Lewis’ religious perspective.  But neither of them stirred me as much as the warning carried by “1984″, the simplicity with which oppression can emerge, and the high degree of tolerance that your average person actually has for sup-/re-/op- -pression.

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2010 07 24 bethini etc. Comments (0) Permalink

I may have crossed a line…

I always knew I was a hippy at heart. I guess it was just a matter of time until it became apparent to those that surrounded me.

Evidence!

(a) brown rice.

My parentinis, not hippies, used to say “Peace, Love, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Brown rice and Incense”. I knew I loved peace, love and rock ‘n’ roll from a pretty early age, and I used to like incense, too, until the cheap stuff started making me wheeze.  But I never knew until now: I love brown rice!  Wow. Chewier, nuttier, more flavoursome and generally more interesting and delicious than any white rice, brown rice is incredible! Gotta get me some more.  I’m yet to try wild rice, since that stuff is expensive around here, but I am doubly — nay, triply — keen after the satisfaction of brown rice.  Mmmmmm.

(b) home made everything.

Sometimes out of laziness, occasionally out of too-tipsy-to-drive-to-the-shops-ness, but mostly out of curiosity, I’ve gradually started making everything I can, especially food-wise. I think M and I have only bought two loaves of bread since we moved into our new house two months ago, preferring our own hand-kneaded loaves.  Similarly, I can’t remember when I last bought dried pasta or pre-made muesli.  My instincts have gradually shifted from “Must remember to try that next time I’m at the shops” to “I bet I can make that myself” and it’s awesome. As a knitter and sporadic sewer, this attitude was already in place for some things, so it was a pretty painless transition.

(c) home-made cosmeceuticals.

My skin went to, well, shit last week. Being both lazy and uninterested in shopping for cosmeceuticals (I love that word: unnecessarily cumbersome and I’m not 100% sure how to pronounce it), I did some enthusiastic Googling instead and found many a recipe for home-made skin care.  It only occurred to me later that mixing up your own skincare products based on some random website may result in scarring, staining or general blotchiness and boils. It turns out I have enough faith in the internet to just plunge straight in and slap any old home chemistry on my person. Whee! Most DIY skin care makes use of ground oats, avocado, honey and bananas, which sounds more like a delicious meal to me. Reluctant to waste beloved porridge oats on skin care, I decided on an aspirin-based scrub: a blend of plain aspirin, honey and just enough water to make a paste (which is very very little, I should warn you).  It was hard to apply, kinda crunchier than I thought it would be, and after about ten minutes or so most of the moisture had evaporated and I was beginning to shed granules of aspirin wherever I went — but after rinsing it off and patting my skin dry, it felt really nice.  I’ve done it twice now and both times have ended up with smoother, softer and less red skin, whether from the exfoliating crunchiness of the ground-up aspirin or through the presence of acetylsalicylic acid (which has some similarities to salicylic acid, commonly used in pimple-treating stuff), I’m not sure. I don’t do the skincare boogie very often, but it’s kinda cool to have a couple of DIY tricks up my sleeve for when the urge strikes.

I embrace this hippydom with a sense of peace and relief. Pass me my tofu, help me join the Greens Party and then get the hell out of my way: I’ve got a world to save and a mainstream lifestyle to reject.

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2010 07 21 bethini etc. Comments (0) Permalink

FO Report – Mossy Tendrils

I’m sure that, like me, you don’t really get to choose your knitting projects as they’re chosen for you.  Personally, mine selected by a team of zebras with a curiously high interest in all things sartorial and fibre-related. “This one.” They say, standing around me in a stripey ring of stern instruction. “Knit this one.” And the zebra standing next to the spokeszebra will flutter the printed pattern at me in a pointed fashion (which has explained the mystery behind why we go through printer ink so quickly and also why my pattern books are covered in hoof marks).

Sometimes the zebras choose a pattern based on how complex, challenging or curious it is: some serious obstacles, others real snoozey, when-will-it-end-knits. It all depends on what the zebras think will be funnier to watch. If they’re feeling a bit ashamed of fucking about with me, they’ll pick out socks or washcloths or something else soothing, but that’s just to keep me guessing. Sometimes they choose the pattern based on what they think my wardrobe is lacking.  They spend far too much time discussing the deficiencies of my wardrobe, to be honest.

Anyway, I finished Mossy Tendrils last night, and I think the zebras might be on to something. This is definitely something my wardrobe lacked and I was really eager to have it on me.

Tendrilly sleeve detail

Yarn: Bendigo Classic 8ply in Mallard (MALLARD!) – just shy of two 200g balls, so about 800m.

Pattern: Baby Cables and Big Ones Too (size S)

Mossy Tendrils and me, just hanging out at the table

Needles: 4.5mm all the way!  Want a quick insight into how petty the zebras are with knitting patterns? They really hate patterns that involve switching needle size after the hem or cuffs — they say I never remember to switch and end up with one smaller sleeve or something like that. They’re so judgmental.

I know everyone says that swatches lie, but I’m not sure mine did — I think I just ignored the truthful bits it was telling me.  I swatched — I’ve got evidence of it, because I leave my swatches attached to the ball until the end of the project, in case I need to harvest the yarn for seaming or whatever — and the swatch gave me gauge on 4.5mm needles.  But I had a little nagging voice, too small to be a zebra, that I should go down to 4mm needles, which completely ignored.  So the gauge is looser over the whole top, making it bigger than I wanted originally, but I think it still works.  I’m still in the honeymoon phase, so it may turn out that, in a week or so, I’m annoyed and fed up and itching to unravel it, but right now, I like it.  Nice pick, zebras: what have you got lined up for me next?

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2010 07 19 bethini knitting Comments (0) Permalink

Poetry to the rescue!

I have had a rough time at work lately. I realise ten-hour days and a workload like standing in front of a puke-spewing fire hose is the norm in some workplaces, but it took a coworker’s sudden illness to establish that situation for me, and I don’t like it much (although I guess now I can say so with the confidence of experience). Such circumstances are not conducive to reading solid blocks of narrative force, such as novels, so my reading appetite has had to be satisfied with small, self-contained nibbles: enter poetry.

I’ve just finished reading Sylvia Plath’s first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems.  I dabbled in Plath as per the requirements of a high school course when I was in Year 12, but never really got into her stuff: I didn’t mind her poetry, but The Bell Jar was too heavy for me at the time.  And I reached uni at a time where she was pretty unpopular, so any mention of her name usually elicited eye-rolling, which made it even easier to reject her stuff outright. But! Time does strange things to your head, I suppose, and I decided to give her another go.  And I’m really glad I did.  Colossus has been mind-blowing; the sharpness and forcefulness of the imagery is rocking my world, especially the contrast between images relating to nature — gardens (especially neglected gardens: The Burnt-Out Spa, The Manor Garden, Departure), animals (Sow, Blue Moles) and wilderness (coastlines, cliffs, rocks and boulders: Hardcastle Crags, Lorelei, Man in Black, A Winter Ship) — and images relating to buildings, people and constructions (Night Shift, Medallion, Snakecharmer, Suicide Off Egg Rock).

I found it really good to gently chip away at this book, taking in just one poem and thinking about it for a while, going back and forth over it until I really felt like I grokked it. Then I would move on to another one; I often found myself flicking back after reading a later poem and re-reading the earlier poems with the later poem in mind, giving me a different perspective.  As a result, despite approaching the collection as something I could nibble at between chaotic episodes at work, I got a really strong sense of cohesive themes, which it a ripe sense of unity and wholeness. I think it takes a lot of skill to work with a group of closely-related themes and image motifs in poetry and not have it come out sounding like a gift-shop collection. (Oh, you know the sort of thing: “A Posy of Poems for Gardeners” or “A Quilt of Poems for Patchworkers”. Gag me.

I suspect reading poetry is a slightly different skill to reading, say, fiction or essays or blog posts, and I’ve reached a stage where I want to develop that skill more.  Whenever I had to study poetry in high school or uni (and it was always “had to”), I could understand what the teacher wanted us to look for, and when they walked us through a poem, I could see the points they were trying to make — but poetry never really spoke to me and I’ve never really read it recreationally. But something in the grey pulp of my head seems to have clicked (or squelched) and it’s making more and more sense to me now.  And I want more!  I’ve been playing around the edges of the Poetry Foundation’s website, which is interesting and cool and, I think, a good gateway to finding other poets and poetry. I feel a bit like I’m dabbling in the shallows of a very big, very beautiful coral reef.

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2010 07 16 bethini chatter Comments (0) Permalink

The thick chewy sock leaps over the lazy dog

I don’t know what it means either. Let’s talk about socks!

sexy legs, right there.

It is wintertime and my chronically cold feet were protesting.  I love how warm my Doc Marten boots are, especially when coupled with handknit socks, but this winter the handknits didn’t seem to quite cut the mustard.  Enter the thick, chewy bootsock.

Mmmm, chewy.

I love them. They’re the footwear equivalent of udon noodle soup. Thick and soft and warm and chewy. Aran weight yarn makes super fast bootsocks, too: my record is currently a pair in two days. I’m up to my fourth pair, and these ones I’m thinking of doing something a bit fancier up the leg, like a wee cable or fisherman’s rib or something.

Our table gets chilly ankles.

I can’t believe how warm these babies are.  They’re soft, snug, fit perfectly into my boots, and did I mention fast to knit? The yarn is thick and comfy to handle; the pattern straightforward (it’s from ma haid!); and they’re scratching some probably-stress-related psychological itch, so they’re arguably medicinal. I’m totally hot for bootsocks right now. You should be, too.

Enigmatic, shy: the elusive bootsock.

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2010 07 10 bethini knitting Comments (0) Permalink

Restarting

A couple of years ago (sweet merciful French fries, years? Yes. Huh.) I made my Mumini a sweater.  It was in one of my (then) favourite yarns, Cleckheaton’s Merino Supreme, in olive green — and there is a whole rant up my well-cabled sleeve about that particular yarn, the heartbreaker; that callous, cruel, deceptive…focus, focus.  Having never seen her wear it, I approached the subject delicately: “Mumini,” I said, “would you like me to turn that olive green sweater I made you into something else?” and she said “Yes, please.” I’m grateful for the chance to put that yarn to better use, and it was good to have a close look at my work and figure out why the end product hadn’t seen the light of day — was my knitting terrible? Had I produced a disaster more burden than gift?  Luckily, close inspection/interrogation has since revealed that I made it well (hurrah) but fitted it badly (hooroop). Peep opportunity:

So innocent; it doesn't know the ball winder awaits.

I think it’s important to learn how to tell when your gifts are less awesome than you think they are: the amount of work you put into a knitted something for someone can distort your perception of how good a gift it is. Pragmatist that some part of my brain is, I’m deeply grateful that I’ve got the kind of relationship with Mumini that I can say “yo, that sweater: fly or die?” and she can be like “lol, no. Try again.” We tight.  For me, one of the big warning signs is (or should be, if I wasn’t too dumb to shut my ears to it) when I’m working backwards: I see a pattern and think “daayyyum, that would be a sweet knit! I wouldn’t wear it, though…who can I knit that for?” and the next thing I know, I’m watching eagerly as a nervous family member unwraps a bobbled monstrosity with cat-toys dangling from the sleeves.  ”You see? You just dance around and the cats can play with them! Isn’t it awesome? Check out the detail on the ferret!”  Suddenly, your family has a behind-the-back nickname for you, and nobody wants that. Self-criticism sounds bad, but when done properly, it is a treasured skill.

Anyway, I’ve begun the process of unravelling and restarting this sweater. But you remember how I said I made it well? One of the things I did really, really well was weave in the ends.  I’m having a bit of trouble finding the end of the yarn I used to seam the second sleeve. I’ll be an aardvark’s butthole if I’m about to cut anything, since one of the points of this whole exercise is to harvest and reuse yarn that is otherwise wasted and I’m going to squeeze every noodly inch out of this thing.  After an hour or two of finangling and cursing, I decided to take a break and have begun unwinding another sweater, one I started after this blogsite was born: Purple Olive. Time to kick myself in the pants and say “You haven’t got enough purple Merino Supreme for a top, ya dizzy broad!” I bought a ten-ball bag of Merino Supreme in eggplant some eight years ago and have tried to turn it into a sweater/top/cardigan on four separate projects. It. Is Not. Enough. Yarn. And I am sick of trying.  I started unravelling it, with a perhaps disproportionate sense of glee.

I think there must be some sort of psychological attachment to that quantity of yarn; I feel like I have an obligation to turn it into a sweater, or a vest, anything as long as it’s a unified garment. Sheesh, obligation to yarn? No sir. It is with surprisingly deep pleasure I announce the thick woolly sock project:



Aran weight socks. Yes please. I’m still unravelling the olive sweater, with the intention of making it into a vest, possibly something scoop-necked, possibly something shawl-collared.  Unsure at present time.

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2010 07 10 bethini knitting Comments (0) Permalink

Nestling: Part Two

I am on a nourish jag.  Moving house, the death of a friend and some rough slog at work has resulted in me being tired, fretful and not much fun to be around.  The cure? Nourish.  I keep chanting the word to myself like a soothing pulse: norrr-issh; norrr-issh; norrr-issh; and then M tells me to get a grip and I have to go into the other room to keep doing it.

These nourish jags come periodically: I think it’s they’re probably related to the the baking jags I go on from time to time.  When I have a baking jag, I make apple cakes, chocolate biscuits, lemon butter — and then promptly find people to give them away to, usually unsuspecting coworkers.  The baking jags are in no way related to wanting to eat, merely the impulse to cook. I think it stems from a need to be creative, but without having the mental energies to devote to being creative in a knitting/writing/musical way, but I could be overthinking the matter. I usually do.  A nourish jag is much more body-oriented: I seek ways to make myself feel nurtured and fed and nested, in a healthy and wholesome way.  (By curious coincidence, it tends to involve cooking things that are really hard to attractively photograph.)

Nourish Item One:

Yesterday I baked bran, carrot and sultana muffins, which are delicious, moist, chewy and not too sweet.  I like cakes that have a bit more oomphalo-boomph to them: nothing foamy and white-sugared for me, thankyou, I prefer nuts, fruit, vegetables and wholemeal flour.  (This makes me a delight at high tea, as you can imagine.)

Holy cow: my camera has a "food" setting!

Holy cow: my camera has a "food" setting!

This recipe rocks: you mix a cup of unprocessed bran, a cup of milk, a cup of brown sugar and a cup of your flavouring stuff (chopped dried fruit, chopped nuts, stewed fruit, mashed pumpkin, whatever) plus any spices you want and leave to sit for an hour or two to soften it all up.  Then stir in a cup of self-raising flour and you’re good to go: it makes a loaf or a dozen smallish muffins.  Bake at 180°C, an hour for a loaf or twenty minutes or so for muffins. Despite how easy this recipe is, circumstances demanded some alterations. I used only half a cup of sugar, and a cup of homemade yoghurt (about which more shortly) in place of milk, plus a little extra water: since I used sultanas, I knew they’d suck up a bit of the moisture that I wanted the bran to take on, so I compensated.  I also gave the mix a few hours more than it really needed, because we had to go out for a while, but I think that only makes it moister.  Mmmmm, muffins for breakfast.

Nourish Item Two:

The day before yesterday I rediscovered my yoghurt maker, with much greater success than previously, despite — or perhaps because of — losing the instructions and forgetting how to use it.  You’re supposed to scald the milk, then cool it and mix in some live-culture yoghurt and pop it in a jar and then pop the jar in the yoghurt maker to ferment.  Realising that (a) I had broken the jar; and (b) the yoghurt maker was the real hero here and the jar was just an extra, unnecessary layer; I filled the yoghurt maker with my proto-yoghurt and forgot about it for a day or so.  The result was quite thin and lacked the tang I like so much in yoghurt, but it was definitely a vast improvement over previous endeavours in this field which have yielded, uh, sour milk.  The yoghurt maker is basically a squat, glorified thermos flask, which maintains a nice warm, moist environment for the yoghurt culture to do its tangy thang.  The result was, as I say, not perfect, but it was ideal for the muffins I made and it encouraged me to keep trying.  The batch that is currently fermenting used some of the first batch for its starter culture: chain yoghurt making, yo!  That will be the real test: if this batch of yoghurt doesn’t ferment properly, it would suggest that the first batch didn’t really have enough live culture in it, which suggests I need to go back to yoghurt-making school (good grief).  I’m going to give it 24-hours no-touchy time before I check.  I am certainly not going to photograph it.  Imagine warm milk in a thermos and, well, there you go.  You could probably even have a look on Flickr and find something much better than I could come up with if I tried photographing what I’ve got happening.  Go on, I’ll wait.

Nourish Item Three:

Welcome back, Pongo. Pongo, my robust sourdough starter, is alive and well and has completely forgiven me for forgetting about him and leaving him to starve in the back of the fridge.  Even if your starter is in the fridge, sleepy and dormant, you’re still supposed to feed the poor blighter every so often, to keep it going. I’m not a good parent.  I got distracted by a soul-crushing quest to find the perfect pencil sharpener and forgot all about my funky little friend in the pickle jar at the back of the fridge.  I recalled him shortly before we moved house and, with a sense of foreboding, gave him a feed of flour and water and let him sit on the bench for a few hours.  Holy cow, that is one virile starter I’ve got in that pickle jar!  He began foaming up in an hour or two, clearly ready to go and ready to be breadmaking.  There’s a huge batch of 50/50 white/rye bread dough currently rising, fortified with Pongo, as I type.  Later today I’m going to try and transform this dough into some sandwich bread and lunch rolls.  Even though I’ve had a couple of dud batches come out (through no fault of Pongo’s, I emphasise, but my own), I love using sourdough starter.  I love the taste it imparts, but I am also not immune to the smugness that comes from making something completely from scratch.  It’s like magic!  Or maths, which is also magic.  [(flour + water = sourdough starter) + (flour + water + salt + yoghurt/milk/butter = dough)] + time + heat = bread! (Eventually.  This is slow magic.)

This is not an attractive photograph.

This is what my dough currently looks like.  Nourishing is not always a pretty process.

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2010 06 24 bethini foodin Comments (0) Permalink

Nestling: Part One

I have a new house!

Artist's depiction

(The capsicum bushes were a big selling point. Drawn in gimp.)

M and I have been nestling into our new territory by cooking.  On our first weekend, M made a gloriously tasty batch of croissants. Ooooh, croissants: you taste even better when you are made in celebration of a new oven.   He has been keeping us well-supplied with hand-made pasta, pizza doughs and many many loaves of rye bread.  (I have been in charge of making ice cubes.)  Cooking is such a soothing process, for both of us, and exploring the potentials of a new kitchen and workspace has been a very important part of establishing ourselves in our new context. I find moving a really challenging process, and after all the dust has settled I feel kind of…filleted. So cooking gives me a way of finding my feet. And, in some weird way, it lets me re-establish my context: it’s as though there’s part of my brain that says “aha, this must be home, because she’s cooked muffins”.

One of the first things I made was some long-missed chai syrup.  I was out of some of the usual ingredients — cloves, ginger and cinnamon being the big absentees — so I altered it a little.  In addition to the standard black tea base, I used a generous measure of Earl Grey leaves; then added some mandarin zest and a squirt of mandarin juice.  These two modifications gave a fantastic citrus twist.  I used a lot of allspice, nutmeg, some bay leaves, and a little bit of garam masala to add the required spiciness, then simmered it all for a while until it was thick and syrupy.  While it cooled, I stirred in plenty of honey and vanilla extract and left it to cool.  It’s beautiful: I love that chai is one of those things that you can play around with according to whim and circumstance. There’s a lot of scope for experimentation.

The smell of spices while cooking both soothes and excites me.  It calms me and makes me feel creative and alert and I love it.  So it is unsurprising that the next thing I made was spicy roast vegetable and lentil soup.  Aw, baby, this was a good one, albeit tricky to photograph.

Spicy and steamy

Two small potatoes, some wedges of pumpkin, two carrots, a purple onion and a brown one, all rubbed with olive oil, salt and some chilli powder and roasted in the oven; right at the end, add a few cloves of garlic and roast only briefly.  Meanwhile, finely chop some celery, carrot and shallots and quickly fry in some butter and salt.  Have a litre or so of vegetable stock on standby, with some bay leaves in it. Roughly chop the roasted vegetables and toss them into the pot with the celery/carrot/shallots, then lightly fry the whole lot.  Add your spice mix: mine had (from memory) tumeric, cumin, coriander seed, garam masala, cardamom, nutmeg, cayenne pepper (and plenty of it), white pepper and mustard powder, and I needed a lot more than I originally thought I would. Throw it in and stir the vegetables around in it, until they get dry and spicy and very aromatic; the smell of the frying spices will fill your kitchen and sinuses.  Pour in your stock, make sure it covers the vegetables, and then throw in some generous handfuls of dried red, yellow and green lentils.  I soaked my lentils for a little while before chucking them in, but if you don’t, make sure you keep a close eye on how much water they suck outta the soup. They’re thirsty little blighters. Taste the soup regularly to make sure it’s flavoursome enough: you may need to top up the salt levels as you go, especially if the lentils go in dry. Let it simmer.  Eventually everything will have merged into a glorious, spicy, hot pulp of vegetables and you can mash it roughly or puree it with a blender.

This soup was fantastic.  I miss it still. And it was wonderful to have such a spicy, hot, flavoursome thing to serve with M’s homemade rye bread when our erstwhile housemates came over for dinner.

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2010 06 20 bethini chatter
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