As I mentioned previously, if anyone can persuade me to rock the slow-rise bread, it’s Bertinet. Having let my lush, silken dough rise for 90 minutes, it was time for shaping. I took about two-thirds of the enormous dough the recipe produced and divided it into ten lumps. After a short rest, these lumps became noodles, all soft and squodgy:

Squidgy and snug

I’ll spare you the more phallic photos. You’re welcome. Then came another 90-minute rise. From kneading, these babies were rising for over three hours. You’d be amazed how quickly three hours flies past when you spend the whole time fantasising about how great your bread is going to be. (Also knitting and reading the Internet, but the fantasising made up a significant proportion.)

so patient...

After the second round of rising, it was in-the-oven time! This was a bit tricky: the shortage unique combination of trays in the house meant I had to come up with a way of getting ten baguettes into the oven, swiftly and without bending any of them, without being able to simply lay them out in neat distribution on flat trays. I managed, although I must admit, the ones on the bottom of the oven got a short, arresting lesson on the impact of oven racks on slow-rise dough (as did I). No matter.

Yes. YES.

See? No matter. These are the creme de la creme des baguettes: they rose, calm and uninterrupted, in a deep baking dish. Perfect. But I gotta tell ya: picking the best of this batch of baguettes was a bit academic. It was like trying to choose between…actually, I haven’t got a good metaphor for this. It was like trying to distinguish between 97.3% perfection and 97.5% perfection…except they were all perfect. Check out this crust:

Crust close up for your salivary stimulation

You see? That’s three baguettes, lined up. Could you pick one over the others? No, of course you couldn’t. I will say they could have done with deeper slashes: I sliced them all before putting them in the oven, but the razor is getting a bit dull and it’s hard to cut deep enough on the first slice. The result is that they bloom beautifully, but not quite enough and often burst out the sides as well (I have this problem with sandwich loaves, too):

Bursting through the crumb - bursting with WIN!

But so what? Don’t they look gorgeous?

Golden.

We just ate two baguettes for dinner (we had other stuff, too, but mostly the whole meal was built around the baguettes), and that picture still makes me hungry. I didn’t take a photo because I was busy stuffing my face, but the crumb is mega fine: the crust crunchy and light, the crumb soft and flavoursome. This is a fantastic dough.

Family photo! Everyone in! Bunch up!

Baguettes are beautiful. Baguettes are the new black. Baguettes are WIN. I’m so proud.

But the dough from Bertinet’s recipe doesn’t just make ten baguettes: it makes ten baguettes plus a loaf. Whatever happened to that guy? Stay tuned…

Well, faithful chums, M and I are off for a month to New Zealand. I can’t wait. We depart tomorrow morning, so consider this your official warning that this here blog is going to take a one-month hiatus while I prowl around the wilds of NZ, getting my boots muddy and sampling much of their fine wine. The finest wines available to humanity!

Hasta la vista, babies: I’ll see you come February.

Anyway!

The Ravelry group, NaKniSweMoDo (National Knit a Sweater in a Month Dodecathlon, I think) sets the worthy amibtion of twelve sweaters in twelve months.  The rules stipulate that by ‘sweater’, they mean ‘any adult-sized top’, including, but not limited to, vests, shrugs, cardies and tanks.  And just beause there are twelve sweaters and twelve months, you don’t have to knit (and complete) a different sweater in each month.  You can chop and change, and restart according to whim.  Sounds interesting!

I don’t think I’ll join the group, largely because I’m a chronic lurker and a little shy, but mostly because I don’t want to commit to knitting twelve sweaters in twelve months — I’m guaranteed to get huffy by March, and by April I’ll be flinging yarn about shouting “you’re not the boss of me!” and refusing to knit anything except toy snails.

But if I was going to knit twelve sweaters in the next twelve months, what would they be? I won’t tell you how long I stayed awake last night mulling that issue over: I found it remarkably posing.  Here’s my short list: I’ve divided it into ‘Challenging’ and ‘Less challenging’ patterns (calling them ‘Easy’ would just be asking for trouble), in the belief that, if I were to undertake the twelve-sweaters-in-twelve-months challenge, I would want a pretty balanced diet.

Challenging:

1. La Bella Paquita — Oh, Marnie MacLean, how your patterns taunt me.  This top is gorgeous, and the challenge comes from the construction, which is unique and completely brilliant.  The pattern isn’t so much written out as charted: you download the chart for each size, for the bodice, body, sleeves and neckline lace.  And then these are assembled using a combintion of voodoo and genius (I think).  The whole thing is knit in the round, and Marnie gives detailed instructions on her website about construction and assembling.  Once I took the time to read through and really grok what was happening, I realised she has applied an exceptionally logical approach.  Of course, the whole thing might fall apart as soon as I try to put it into practice, but we’ll see.
2. Corona — I am just in love with this hoodie.  It’s available as a Ravelry download, something I’m yet to try, and it’s just so funky and awesome.  There’s nothing I don’t love about this pattern, which is a double-negative way of saying I love everything about it.  I have listed it as challenging because of the honeycomb cables around the neckline/hood edge, and also because I can predict that sizing might be a problem for me: this is a design that really wants to be fitted close to the body, and that’s something I’m still learning how to do.
3. Vivian — Holy crap, how cool can you get?  This hoodie would take me anywhere.  If I can I pull it off: this is gorgeously fitted, but, as already mentioned, I’m a bit hesitant about fitting — I just can’t seem to get it just right, and when you don’t get fits right, you might as well give up.  And I suspect this isn’t a memorisable pattern, either: it would need to go everywhere with me that the in-progress project goes.

Less challenging

1. Valia — How the Hell does the Twist Collective do it?  One moment, I’m a normal knitter, lusting after a reasonable number of patterns; the next moment, I’m an obsessive. They have the most awesome patterns.  This is a gorgeous tunic with a rolled neck and some intricate but very effective cables down the front.  I’m pretty good with cables (she said optimistically, while waving a foil-wrapped golf club at the thuderstorm), so I think I’d get on top of these ones, as intricate and impressive as they are.  And there’s enough ease in this pattern that I think it will be fairly forgiving if I don’t get the sizing exactly right.
2. Gytha — Since I’m at the Twist Collective website anyway…I just love the shape of this sweater. I think it is perfectly casual and fun.  I probably wouldn’t do it in the colourway featured on the site, but maybe in a variation on black — black with purple and green colourwork down the bottom, or something like that.  Anyway, I estimate that this knit would be fairly straightforward, so it gets to go on the ‘Less challenging’ list.
3. Silken Scabbard — I really like the look of this Stitch Diva pattern.  I have a bit of a thing for tunic tops, and I really like the long lines reated by the cables along the sides, the sleeves and the raglans.  Really nice.  However: boat neck.  Not sure how it’s going to go. It looks like the neckline is really well designed, but I’m concerned that it’s just going to stand up, all stiff and weird looking around my neck, like an empty moat.  If that’s the case, though, I’m sure I can wrangle something (remind me I said that when I’m in the middle of a sea of horrors while I try and recalibrate the neckline without Ruining Everything).  Despite this concern, I think that sweater is going to be mine.  Oh yes.
4. Very Necessary Sweater — Ahh, a sweet vanilla sweater for all seasons.  Well, just Winter, actually. Maybe the tail end of Autumn.  But it’s a lovely, plain turtleneck.  Just what I need.
5. Tubey — The design of Tubey looks pretty appealing: knit a tube for the body, knit a tube for the sleeves, whammo.  Got time on your hands?  Go knit an Aran.  I’m not 100% sure the design will look good on me — something about the neckline is making me hesitant — but I’m willing to give it a go.

Okay, I’m going to stop there.  I’ve only listed eight tops, but I’m up to around 1,000 words. There aren’t even any pictures in this post, for God’s sake.

Things I Have Been Doing:

Finished reading the Harry Potter series.  When I was in Year 12, I worked briefly in a bookshop, just when Harry Potter was ascending in popularity.  I started reading it then, and loved it.  Putting aside all the fans, the movies, the merchandise, the clubs, the hype and the slash fiction that has emerged in the wake of this wave, the Harry Potter books are really good.  The author doesn’t waste her words (which is a fair claim when you’re talking about a 600-page book) and the characters are all pretty interesting.  Some of the Big Twists at the end of the second-last and last book are already starting to trickle through the Internet, so I wanted to read them myself before the whole plot was completely revealed.  Anyway, that was really enjoyable.   I had forgotten how much I liked these books, since when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (number 5) came out, I was in the queue when the bookshop opened, and read the whole thing in two days.  That, combined with all the hype that surrounded the book over the subsequent weeks, meant that I was utterly, completely sick to death of the whole mythos.   Until now!
Read “Catch Me If You Can” by Stephen Redding and Frank W. Abagnale — the biography of the latter, which served as the basis for the Leonardo DiCaprio/Tom Hanks vehicle of the same name.  (I haven’t seen the film.)  My God!  That man had some cajones, if I may borrow his expression.  The first couple of sentences struck me as a little glib, and I wondered if I was going to enjoy the book or not: I suspected it might be a boasting, swaggering kind of book.  But it is awesome, and I’m glad I bought it.  The voice that comes through in the book feels like it must Abagnale’s, and it makes the stories that much more believable, as if you were listening to him tell you face-to-face.  I still can’t get over some of the things thathe got away with, and I am astounded at the fortitude of the man’s spine, guts and balls.  He must be a charismatic chap.

Took a long, hard look at my knitting.  As alert readers may have noticed, I haven’t said much about the Purple Olive hoodie lately.  That’s because I sat down with my yarn, my scales, and the hoodie-so-far and did some maths.  It’s not looking good.  Maths doesn’t lie to me; numbers and I are pretty much on the level, if you see what I’m saying.  And I discovered that I don’t have enough yarn to finish it.  Not by a long, long way.  I can’t even cheat and do the cuffs and trim in a contrast yarn.  Once again, the divine buttery springiness that is Cleckheaton’s Merino Supreme has broken my heart with its painfully low yardage.  In order to prevent such heartbreak happening again, I recently bought 30 balls of the stuff on special, in a delicious inky black.  I’m making M a sweater out of it, which I suspect will use nearly all of it (he likes his sweaters big). But if there’s enough left, maybe, just maybe…

Finally: tiny knits!  Most of the things I have been knitting lately have been around Aran-weight, mostly on 5 or 6mm needles.  After doing a bit of a rummage through my works-in-progress shelf, I discovered a half-finished sock that I had, mysteriously, given up on.  I think the colourway got to me after a while (I’ll upload pictures shortly and you can see what I mean), because there are absolutely no problems with this sock.  I cast it on in the car on the way to Sydney last December, just before flying to Europe.  This sock has pottered about Europe with me, and I worked diligently on it when we were on trains all over Europe until I lost a needle, and then had to delegate it to the bottom of my pack.  Now I’m thinking it might be a head-start on this year’s Christmas knits.

There’s more going down Chez Cutlery Drawer, but it’s time we headed out into the rain for the first barbecue of the season!  Spring is just around the corner, and we’re off to christen a friend’s new barbie.  Cheers!

Oh, you know the sort of thing I mean: the ones where you have to say whether you think you’re introverted or extroverted, or if you prefer logic or intuition when it comes to decision-making.  “A friend of yours says you’re too shy and need to speak up more.  Do you (a) strongly agree, (b) agree, (c) neither agree nor disagree, (d) disagree, or (e) strongly disagree?”

These are a distant cousin to the “Are you a Dumb Slut?”-type quizzes you’ll find in Cosmopolitan magazines; equally polarising and reductive, but far more insidious because they purport to genuinely diagnose certain personality characteristics.  The ones used in training courses are all the more potent because you often have to publicise your results to the rest of the class, and certain exercises or tasks will be distributed accordingly. (We pause here for a brief flashback into my experiences at training courses: “bethini, you’re a hands-on learner, so you’d love to do a team-based exercise, right?” “Nope, I’d rather eat glass.”)  In those situations, there’s an implicit assumption that we will take our test results seriously and at face value, as if certain inner truths can be revealed over the course of the 20 minutes or so allocated for taking and marking the tests.

I think the thing I hated most about these tests, especially in high school, was the fact that there was an implicit value judgment with regard to extroverts and introverts.  In high school, extroverts were good, introverts were losers.  If you preferred, oh, picking any old example out of the air, reading a book at home over partying wildly, then you were probably a freak or a loser or malformed or something.  And if your answer to the false dichotomy of introverted/extroverted varied according to mood, circumstance, society and phase of the moon, you could just piss right off.  There’s no room on the quiz to write that stuff down.

I must admit, at the time, I assumed it was just a high school thing.  I assumed that extroversion was a merit only among the cool-acracy of teenagers.  But I’ve realised that’s not the case at all.  It’s still an expected norm that ‘relaxing’ means ‘socialising’ and that ‘lots of friends’ is a universal indicator of someone who is not only functional but admirable.  If you were to describe someone as having “not very many friends”, there’s a whole universe of implicit values that accompany that phrase — surely there must be something wrong with them, why don’t people like them, why don’t they like people, etc. etc.  It isn’t considered, however briefly, that the person could have a few, intensely dear friends, or that their family is the core of their social lives, or even that they are perfectly happy and well-adjusted, but find people exhausting.

I think it stems from the overly-simplistic, but easily-digested theory that loneliness=solitude and vice versa.  Of course, anyone who thinks about it even for a moment will tell you that those two qualities are not bound to each other at all: that it is perfectly possible to be surrounded by friends and yet feel lonely, or to be completely isolated and still feel calm and not at all lonesome.  The notion of one or the other, extrovert or introvert, seems hopelessly over-simplified.

In light of these concerns, I have decided that the only personal analysis I shall undergo is through the quizzes available on Blogthings and similar sites.  It is only through these that I expect to truly understand my inner self or selves.  You will be interested to know that I am a Club Sandwich, I am 65% real, I am Lilac (the shade, not the flower) and I am Table Tennis.  And if that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about me, then I don’t know what else to say.

Winter scenery never ceases to enchant me.

Photographing my knitting generally involves me saying “I’ll do it when the sun’s out, maybe before work tomorrow”, and then completely forgetting to do so.  Then, after the sun has already gone down again and I remember I wanted to photograph my knitting, I get every lamp in the house (or, if I’m lazy, in the room) and point it at the knitting, taking half a dozen or so shots before the knitting starts to smoulder under the heat of all the lamps.  Mostly this works out okay.  If, through some sort of brainfart, I actually remember to take photos of my knitting while the sun is out, I usually drape said knitting over a convenient bush and snap away. Completely unoriginal, I accept.  But you don’t come to this blog to look at my exquisite photos, thank Christ.

For cooking, I’ll hurriedly push everything that I don’t want in the photo out of view; this includes mess, utensils, embarrassingly huge glasses of liquor and anything whose colours clash with the food I’m trying to photograph.  Usually, these things are only a few milimetres out of sight.  If things are really bad, I’ll drape a brightly coloured tea towel over the background and go for a rustic look.  Sneaky, eh?  I jump through a lot of hoops for my beloved public (hi Mum!).

I really don’t think I’m very good at photographing food effectively, but I’m not sure it’s entirely my fault.  This shit ain’t easy.  I’m sure you’ve heard tales of deviant behaviours from food photographers in magazines and cookbooks (such as substituting ice cream for mashed potato, because it’s so perfectly airy and fluffy-looking, or substituting beetroot juice for raspberry coulis, that sort of thing), and I’m beginning to see why.  Take a look at this.   This dish was fantastic.  That’s chopped leeks, sauteed in garlic butter and white wine, then simmered with a little wholegrain mustard sauce, served over a bed of gruyere mashed potaotes.  Unbelievably delicious.  But then you see this photo: and you think ‘euw, I bet that’s cold and clammy and tastes of old cabbages’.  And I couldn’t blame you.

I was going to blog about M’s Crepes Suzettes, too, but the photos really are atrocious (it was late and we were drinking).  These Crepes were fantastic: light and crisp, with caramelised brown sugar stuck to the edges, with the strong taste of the brandy and Cointreau we had used to flambe them.

And this is what my photo looks like:

Appealing, huh?  Yeah.  Man, that’s frustrating.  To know that I was enjoying piping hot Crepes Suzette and unable to convey their magnitude to you through my blog? Well, I guess I’ll get over it.

I’ve been enjoying this glorious weather, by lying around at home and feeling dreadful all week. Isn’t that just wonderful? No. No, it isn’t. I hate being sick. Whenever I’m feeling particularly robust, I always wish I could get a cold or something so I can have some time off to just knit and chill at home — but when I’m actually sick, I hate every sodding minute of it. I hate the feebleness, the weakness, the symptoms (of course). Urgh, everything. But the thing I hate most is the limitation: I hate wanting to do something, planning something out, only to be limited by my suddenly feeble and useless body. It doesn’t take much to take me out of action, either. This week has been ruined by crippling low blood pressure — a ridiculous sentence for me to type, but all week I haven’t been able to stand or walk, or even sit for too long, without everything going sparkly and grey. I can’t do a damn thing. I felt good yesterday afternoon, so I bounded about (with moderate rests in between the bounding) and optimistically packed my bags for work.

No way. I couldn’t even sit up this morning, without the world going grey and me beginning to tilt. So I dragged my pathetic arse to the drop-in clinic. Boy, that sucked. We waited for about 90 minutes before the GP even got to see me. During waiting time, we were surrounded by an assortment of walk-ins, some looking almost crippled with misery (such as myself), others chattering and gossiping and laughing away. I envied them bitterly. Ellen was playing on the TV and many people chuckled at it, which lightened the atmosphere. After seeing the GP — who I didn’t feel was really listening, and who can blame him with a turnover of patients like that? — we learned my blood pressure was around 95/60 (pretty low, even for me) and my heartrate was about 160. And so I was stuck into another queue for the pathology lab for generic blood tests. Awful. They couldn’t even get any blood out of me, so we gave up and I’m going back tomorrow. The whole thing sucks and I’d be willing to bet a bottle of red that they find nothing except a low iron count. And I’m suspecting very low.

Boy, does this whole thing suck. The only plus is that the doctor said I need to eat more salt to retain more water. I loooove salt. Mmm. It’s going to be great. As I type this, I’m stuffing my craw with pretzels. Ooh baby.