Randomday

Well, I am averaging about two blog posts a month so far in 2019, which is better than last year.

Since last posting I finished the Epitome of Me socks, originally begun in the Lots of Socks knitalong.

I would add the photo, but I have been using my i-phone for all my photos, which means that I must download them onto my laptop from my i-cloud before I can crunch them in Photoscape and add them to my blog. But they have recently started compressing them into a zip file when I download, and then when I tried to move the zip files to my to-be-crunched folder, it tells me it will be about 3 hours before the files are transferred. Thanks, Apple, you are supposed to make my life easier, but this is not it!

Okay, it is downloading photos at the rate of about one every 10 minutes, (still about 3 hours left to go) and this is the finished pair of socks. I gave them to Quarta, and I gave the Flower Shock socks to Emma. I am currently knitting on the first of the "Sara Elin" socks in Malabrigo purple yarn. I am just about ready, finally, to begin the ribbing.

That will be it for the photos this post. We have been busy with Steve traveling, Quarta requiring doctor visits for her dislocated knee (she has had two braces so far and will begin PT next week), Quarta's school play (she was Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, and fortunately the long dress hid her knee brace), a little bit of gardening, and the usual amount of adulting.

I finished one of my two baby quilts, and have started quilting the other. I'm using my regular machine; I've still not gotten back into using the Megaquilter.

This means I have fallen way behind on my UFO goals for the year. The May number is 4: that means (runs to check journal) the Manu cardigan, and a machine quilting finish. (That would be Celtic Solstice, still on the Megaquilter since a long time ago).

A nice lady in our neighborhood is downsizing her fabric stash and I have twice visited her sale in the last two weeks. I am still working on sorting, pre-cutting and organizing my scrap fabrics, so this just prolongs the mess and the fun.

Oh yes, a quick recipe before I go: Lovage Pesto is where I started, having made it once before with hemp seeds and a bit of bought basil pesto, and I changed it up a bit. I'm planning on cooking some pasta to put it over and bringing it to fellowship meal tomorrow.

Lovage and Rosemary Pesto

3 C Lovage leaves, chopped, parboiled for 3 minutes, cooled in cold water bath and squeezed dry
about 3/4 C Rosemary leaves, all stem bits removed and chopped roughly
a little parsley (we don't have much in our garden this year)
a little thyme, just one sprig
many garlic cloves, maybe 12
about 1 t kosher salt
several grinds of black pepper
about 1 C walnuts, toasted for 10 min at 350

Chop/pulse in food processor; add about 1/2 C olive oil or as much as it needs to become smooth.

I sampled this on wheat thins and everyone approved. The food processor is the $25 mini they sell at Costco; I never had one before so this is a marvelous new to me technology. I'm going to experiment with all kinds of pesto now.

I have Latin translation lessons to do, so I should sign off now. Maybe I can do a photo sharing post in the next few days, after downloading and processing all those zipped photos. I'll try for an average of more than 2 posts in May.

Potato Leek Soup with Lovage, Rosemary and Bacon

Last week there was a fellowship dinner at church and I didn't really want to stress too much with the preparation, because we had a lot planned to coordinate. Quarta returned from Mexico very early Sunday morning (and with a knee injury which we didn't know about until then), Steve was going to need to pick up Steve's mom and take her and Quarta in one car to the service only while Tertia and I went earlier for Sunday school. Anyway, this soup fit the bill.

If you haven't tried lovage, it's an herb that is in the celery/parsley family, is an easy to grow perennial, and is abundant this time of year. It's a strong flavor, kind of like celery on steroids... a little bitter even, but it mellows with cooking. It is growing very well in our garden at the moment, and was used quite a bit by the ancient Romans - so it has that historical appeal going for it as well. Anyway, this soup turned out very well and I'm only sad there were no leftovers.

1 large leek, cleaned, cut in half lengthwise and chopped (including the green tops if they are tender enough)
1 large onion, chopped

Saute in about 3 T butter or olive oil, or a mix of both. Add

1-2 stalks celery, chopped
2 stalks fresh lovage with leaves, chopped finely
2 sprigs rosemary, leaves removed from stems and finely chopped (about 1 T)

When soft, add

4-6 C water
1 T vegetable soup base
4-5 peeled, diced potatoes

Cook until tender (above picture). Soup can then rest in fridge overnight until ready to finish, or you can transfer it to a crock pot for the rest of the steps.

Add:

about 2 C milk
about 1/2 C heavy cream
1-2 handfuls of crumbled bacon bits (Costco sells these in bags, and we always have one in the freezer)
salt and pepper to taste

Cook on low (whether in the crock pot or on the stove) until thoroughly heated but avoid letting it boil. I kept the crock pot on low during Sunday school and turned it to "warm" during the church hour.

I can't decide if it's the lovage or the rosemary, or both, that make this potato soup a cut above the average. Definitely the bacon helps too.

That Soup Recipe from Sunday

Full disclosure, this is NOT a picture  of the soup I made for Sunday's fellowship dinner. I never thought to take a picture of that until it was all gone and people were asking for the recipe. This is a picture of a Pumpkin and Mustard Greens Colcannon Soup I made five years ago, and it looks similar to what I made Sunday. So I guess you would call this picture a... wait for it... stock photo (soup chef's pun there).

Let's call this one "October 2 Soup" or "Fall Vegetable Potage" or just "That Soup." I'm just not getting the clever naming vibe today. It was the result of a need to make a soup for the church dinner and the knowledge of what I had a lot of in the freezer and the vegetable bin. Here's my recipe. All information is approximate and from memory.

2-3 T butter
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 T minced rosemary
1 clunk chicken stock (about 1 quart)
3-4 C pumpkin puree (mine was frozen in a quart bag)
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
2 turnips, peeled and diced
2-3 C cauliflower, chopped
3-4 C frozen chopped mixed greens (or 6-8 C fresh)
water
milk
salt
pepper
cayenne


Saute onions and garlic in butter; add rosemary. Add the stock (Peter invented the term "clunk" in his preschool recipe book for Mother's day, I presume because of the sound a container of frozen stock makes when it falls into the pan... and by the way, Peter's recipe for Potato Soup was actually pretty good, even at age 4) and then pumpkin, potatoes, turnips and cauliflower. Simmer until all vegetables are tender, then puree, either with an immersion blender or in batches in the blender. Add mixed greens (mine were probably beet, turnip, mustard, and Swiss chard, and I used kitchen shears to snip them down to more bite-size).  Transfer to crockpot. Add liquid to reach soup consistency, if needed (I had to add about 1 C water and then I added about 2 C milk. You could certainly use cream if you wanted it richer). Season to taste and cook on low until hot and ready to serve.

Davy's Delight

Davy's Delight - my Grandma Bogue's recipe.  One of her quintessential, Midwest, good-stuff-in-the-icebox recipes.  I had a request for it and thought I'd post it on the blog rather than just email it.  That way, the world can have it.  It's very similar to other versions floating around under different names, and I haven't made it recently so I don't have a picture.  It's still really, really good.

Davy's Delight

1 C flour

1 stick margarine or butter

1/2 C chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans)

2 T sugar

8 oz. cream cheese, softened

1 C powdered sugar

1 C Cool Whip, plus additional for topping.

2 small or 1 large pkg. of instant chocolate pudding mix (it is possible to vary the recipe using other flavors)

3 C milk

Melt butter or margarine and mix with flour, nuts and 2 T sugar.  Press into bottom of 9x13" pan and bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

Mix cream cheese, powdered sugar, Cool Whip in mixer for second layer and spread over cooled first layer.

Mix pudding and milk for 3rd layer and spread over second layer.

Cover with more Cool Whip (whatever's left in the tub) and refrigerate for a few hours until serving.  May top with more chopped nuts.

Randomday

Tertia, Quarta and I went to the Down Syndrome Buddy Walk today.  It had to be held mostly indoors because of rain, but it was a nice time.  You'll have to take my word for it, because I didn't take the camera and my cell phone camera hasn't been working for nearly 2 years.

I did take a picture of the Lovage, Caramelized Onion and Potato Frittata I made yesterday for dinner.  It was quite nice.  Lovage is an interesting herb/vegetable.  It tastes like very strong celery, but it looks more like parsley.  I followed the linked recipe except I made it a little bigger and added about half a bunch of chopped mustard greens and kale.

Rain.  We've had a more than usually rainy September and August.  Everyone thinks it rains all the time in the Northwest, but we can usually count on a sunny and dry second half of the summer and a nice Indian summer.  But not this year.  It makes us a bit grumpy.  Some of us, anyway.  I'm personally also grumpy because I don't get enough sleep, I can't keep the house clean, and I don't get enough time to knit and quilt.

Randomday - Plum Ennui

Lately I have been feeling thin, sort of stretched.  Like plum butter that has been scraped over too much bread.  I am ready for plum season to be over.  However, I am not ready to go back to school.  I have an uneasy feeling that the one will inevitably lead to the other, and I don't like it.

Pflaumenmus

I started with about a gallon of halved, pitted plums.  It's approximately the same as it takes to fill a dehydrator or make a recipe of plum chutney.  My thumb has a sore spot on it from pitting the plums.  I diverged from online recipes by using my crock pot for the major part of the cooking.

4 quarts halved plums, pits removed
5 cups sugar (adjust to taste)
2 cinnamon sticks
1 T ground cinnamon
sprig or bundle of thyme (optional)
10 cloves
1 1/2 t. ground nutmeg

Place all ingredients in stockpot, bring to boil and simmer slowly, uncovered, for 1 1/2 - 2 hours, stirring frequently.  Let cool slightly, remove cinnamon sticks and thyme sprig, and press through a food mill into a large crock pot.  Set heat setting to low and leave cover off while mixture slowly cooks down, 8 - 10 hours.  You can stir every hour or so if you like.  I let mine go overnight, and woke up once at about 3:30 to the aroma of spicy plum butter and went down to stir it then.  After the final stir-down, it's nice to give it a final puree with an immersion blender to even out the texture.  Can in 1/2 pint or 1-pint jars in a boiling water canner for 10 minutes.

That recipe went better than my attempt to make a double batch of Cinnamon Plum Jam.  Unfortunately, my stockpot was not big enough for 14 cups of sugar and the plums that went with them, and when I added the pectin, I had a boilover.  I couldn't cook the mixture at the full rolling boil required to activate the pectin and so my plum jam is runny.  I think it will thicken up if I boil the contents of each jar individually after I open it up and then put it back in its jar, but it essentially spoils any chance of giving the jars away as gifts.  And the surface of my glass cooktop bears the pitting scars from when burnt sugar gets crusted on.

My endurance for plum season may not last much longer.  I might have one dehydrator load and a few quarts of frozen plums in me still.  I made another pflaumenkuchen recipe today.  I would kind of like to try plum preserves, or basically, whole plums in syrup.

The children have been rediscovering the cedar tree.  That's Secundus, way up there.  Daniel and Quarta wanted their turn too, almost as high.

Secundus is working at the fair, cleaning bathrooms.  Daniel is attending a weekend conference in Oregon.  Quarta attended a 4-day tennis camp this last week.  Tertia is not doing much of anything and seems to like it that way.

We went to the fair yesterday morning.  My knitting all won blue ribbons; my quilts and yarn won red ribbons.  Quarta's pillow got a red, and her zucchini got a blue.

We took the girls to the farmer's market this morning and bought the ingredients for a dandy fruit salad for supper.  Also some basil and lovage to plant, from Grace's Garden.  And kolaches, because Steve can't resist them.

And I found the perfect quote for Steve the other day while playing cryptograms:

"I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days."

— Daniel Boone

Randomday: Plum Wrangling and Recipe Round-up

 So, the last few days have consisted largely of wrangling with the plum tree.  It has assumed a character of gargantuan importance in our -- well, my -- domestic life.

I worked first on the branches that had broken or bent down to ground level.  Literally I could break off a 12" twig with one hand and there would be 10 plums on it.  I pruned as I picked.  Many of these plums were not fully ripe and sweet and plump, but still they work well for jam.  Many friends have come and picked up some of our plum bounty for their own purposes.  Others have expressed interest but not shown up.  I will soon send the boys with bags of plums to leave on their doorsteps.

We did host a birthday party yesterday at the Jim Parsley Center for Quarta, Tertia and 8 friends.  Swimming for 2 hours, then pizza, cupcakes and silly-face pictures.

Daniel begins his experiment with wine-making.  Plum wine, of course.  We went to the fascinating Bader's shop Thursday to get supplies.  This is more chemistry than I really want to master but he's interested in the process.  And by the time the wine is ready, he might even be old enough to drink it.

Plum recipe roundup:
I have dehydrated 2 loads of plums so far: they are good for tart, chewy snacks and for school lunches.

I like to cut plums in half and remove the pits, then freeze the halves in quart bags.  They are then great for making pies, cobblers, and many different variations on plum cake or pflaumenkuchen.  I have several recipes pinned on Pinterest and several more in my file, but you can hardly go wrong with these plums, especially if you add cinnamon and enough sugar to overcome the natural tartness. This plum torte recipe is amazing.  Plum cake recipes with sour cream or buttermilk in the batter are nice to complement the tart-sweet flavor of the plums, and give it extra richness.  This rhubarb cake recipe is similar to one I have on file and use a lot with plums instead of rhubarb.  Plums also combine well with blackberries, which are ripe around the same time.

Today I made a batch of plum-orange jam (recipe from the Ball Blue Book).  I added the juice of the orange as well as the grated peel and was generous with the plums (because we have so many).  It made nearly 8 cups.

This afternoon I chopped an entire gallon of plums and made Plum Chutney.  I began with the recipe in the Ball Blue Book but changed and added a few things inspired by this recipe.  It smells like essence of autumn with all the spices, and is good with chicken or pork.  It better be, anyway.  It made 7 1/2 pints.

Plum Chutney

4 quarts pitted, chopped plums
3 large chopped onions (more than called for)
2 C raisins
4 C brown sugar (more than called for because my plums were tart)
2 T brown mustard seed
2 T fresh finely minced ginger
1 T salt
3 C apple cider vinegar
1 T cinnamon
1 t. cloves
1/4 t. cayenne
1/2 t. black pepper
grated rind of 1 lemon

Bring to boil in large stockpot.  Simmer for 1 - 1.5 hours until slightly thickened.  Ladle into pint jars and process 10 minutes in boiling-water canner.

I still have plans for making plum cake of some sort with the fresh plums, and at least one more batch of plum jam, either ordinary plum jam or something like the pflaumenmus I've been hearing about.  Or maybe this one.  Or maybe both! My knitting friend Ilse has convinced me that Germans know some good things about how to use plums.

In between all the plumminess I took the girls and Daniel to the library, and suddenly remembered the estate sale I hadn't had the chance to go to earlier, and ended up buying 20.5 yards of quilting fabric at $2 a yard and made an offer on a bin full of scraps for $5.  And the library was fun, too.

 

Randomday, with recipes

 The plum tree is going to have one of those years, it looks like.  You can't tell until you get right up close...

 but there are a whole lot of plums on it.  By the end of the month we'll need to have a plan.

The zucchini plants at the end of the driveway are looking very healthy, as are the volunteer potato plants.

 Quarta was supposed to help Steve cart away some of the weeds.

I made this salad - fava bean and fennel - to go with supper.  Although I had never had much of either one of these vegetables before this summer, it's very good.  I left out the parmesan cheese.  Supper was Steve Special - mac and cheese from the box, tuna, peas, and olives. 

I had plums from 2009 in the freezer, which was maybe the last year the plum tree was this productive.  So I made my version of this recipe - Cornmeal Buckle with Plums - for fellowship dinner after church tomorrow.  This was a recipe I clipped several years back and my adaptation is as follows:

Cornmeal/Plum Buckle for a Crowd

Preheat oven to 350.  Grease a 9x13" pan.

Topping:

1/2 cup sugar
6 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, cut into 1-tablespoon pieces
Cut butter into dry ingredients in a small bowl; set aside.  (This is the same amount as called for in the original recipe)

Buckle:

1 stick (1/2 C) butter, softened
3 cups flour
1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 C sugar
2 eggs
1 cup milk
2 qt. size freezer bags of halved plums, defrosted and excess juice drained
In a large bowl, sift together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder and salt. In another large bowl, beat the butter with the sugar and eggs until it is fairly light and fluffy. Add half of the milk and beat until smooth. Gradually add the remaining milk while beating.

Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients just until well moistened. It will be the texture of cake batter. Fold in the plum pieces. Pour the batter into the baking pan and spread evenly. Scatter the topping mixture evenly over the top. Bake until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 1 hour.

I double the recipe for the buckle itself but leave the same amount for the topping, and I bake it in a 9x13" pan for a little longer than the original recipe calls for.  I did have some spillover - I could probably have just used one package of plums, but I wanted to clear out the freezer.  I'll clean the oven next week.

The Tour de Fleece continues.  Last night I spun while Steve and I watched Snow White and the Huntsman.  Tonight we may watch some Wallace and Gromit while the boys play board games with friends.

Today I finished all the blocks needed for my Country Stars quilt.  Whee!  Now begins the fun of seaming them together with the sashing.  I think I have the layout the way I want the star blocks to be, but I need to have another look to see if there's something that jumps out at me as being too much of one thing in one place.  I have blocks pinned to other blocks because my design wall isn't quite big enough for a queen-sized quilt.

"Education is about the only thing lying around loose in the world, and it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away."
— George Horace Lorimer

Lovage and Authenticity

I had to cook dinner the other night, which is nothing new.  I usually have to cook dinner.  It's just harder when one family member has braces and doesn't want to eat anything crunchy, one has recently become a vegetarian, and two of them rotate around whether they will eat vegetables or not.  And two of them have probably depleted the fridge of the ingredients that I was counting on.  My sympathy levels are not great for the ones who are old enough to fend for themselves, and they are all over 10 so are theoretically able to help at least a little.  Anyway, that's the dinner situation at our house lately.  Coming up tonight, I think I'm going to cash in my gift card for Papa Murphy's, and make Quarta make a fruit salad.

We had a bunch of lovage from our Grace's Garden share.  Lovage looks like a cross between celery and parsley; it's got larger leaves than parsley, and it doesn't have thick stalks like celery; its flavor is a little like celery but much, much stronger.  So strong that after nibbling a leaf, I decided it would need to be cooked, not used in salads.  It has a little of that "if I eat too much of this it will give me a headache" taste, if that makes any sense.  I also remembered reading something about lovage at my new favorite Ancient Roman food blog, Pass the Garum.  So I went there and did a search.  Apparently the Ancient Romans loved lovage, especially the seed, and used it frequently.  I found two recipes that call for lovage seed, not the green herb, and I decided to freely adapt them for Tuesday night dinner.

Sautéed Cabbage with Lovage a la Apicius - inspired by Sweet Cabbage

I may be very deferential to the ancients when I teach Latin, but I'm not going to give up my modern cooking equipment, techniques, and certain prejudices -- like you don't boil cabbage.   You just don't.  So I decided to sauté my 1/3 of a chopped cabbage in a little olive oil, along with chopped onion, ground pepper, and chopped lovage.  It gave off a mysterious, dusky, old-world kind of smell when the lovage was added.  Once the vegetables were crisp-tender, I added a teaspoon of Thai fish sauce (the nearest equivalent to liquamen).  And because I don't have any raisin wine handy, I put in a few tablespoons of honey and a splash of balsamic vinegar.  It was a very nice way to prepare cabbage, and you tasted the exotic flavor of the lovage without it being overpowering.  Just don't expect cabbage to cure all diseases.

Baked Chicken with vaguely Roman seasonings - inspired by Parthian Chicken

You can tell that I do not pride myself on my food photography, and that I can't really follow a recipe at all.  I still want to try the real Parthian Chicken recipe, but on a weeknight when I was tired to begin with, this was quite successful.  Except with Secundus, the vegetarian.  I had chicken breasts defrosted and ready to bake; I just decided to use some Roman-esque seasonings on them at the last minute.  I drizzled them with olive oil, then the juice of half a lime, then chopped garlic and fennel and lovage and a little cilantro, plenty of pepper, and finally some caraway seed, ground in my mortar and pestle.  Bake at 350 until it's done, and it's good.  Better than the picture.

So there you go - two Roman-inspired dishes featuring lovage, prepared in an American kitchen by a tired mom.  Enjoy!

Emperor's Day Treats

Every year, Cedar Tree has a Latin Emperor's contest for grades 3-6.  It's elimination, in the style of a spelling bee.  We toga 4 emperors, one for each grade, and all elementary grade students watch with great interest and partake in the Roman Feast at lunchtime.  I forgot to take my camera this morning so I have no shots of my 6th graders competing (it was a good contest, I had to come up with extra words and sentences than I had planned).  But I did document the preparation of what I believe are relatively authentic treats yesterday, treats which were consumed by students while reclining on the quad on a glorious early June day.

I have made Roman Honey Cakes before, and I decided to try for a little more authenticity this year.  There were 15 eggs, whipped in my stand mixer until they were thickened.  Then I drizzled in about 1 1/2 cups honey and was about to add 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour when I stopped, and realized that I should probably use spelt instead, since it's more typical of the grain the ancients would have used.

I do not have an authentic quern, so I used the completely modern K-tec kitchen mill.  I don't have a staff of kitchen slaves, so this is the next best thing:

It makes a lot of noise, but it does make a nicely ground flour.  I added it to the eggy batter and then I selected some spices:

I do have a relatively authentic mortar and pestle.  Doesn't everybody?  Seriously, I use mine a fair amount even when I'm not trying to be authentically Roman.  Although I did try to get the coriander down to a finer grind with the blender, but that didn't work all that well for such a small amount.  Coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, and a fairly large knob of fresh ginger.

I baked them at 350 for about 20 minutes, using muffin tins and nonstick mini-donut pans.  It's best to grease the tins well, and don't expect a light, airy cupcake texture.  These are like a cross between a sponge cake and a muffin.  They are nice to munch on.  I don't know how terribly realistic it would be for the ancient Romans to be able to beat eggs to the degree that a modern stand mixer can do though.

If you're going for authentic Roman food, you really need to check out the Pass the Garum blog, where I got the following recipe for Dulciaria (pepper and pine-nut stuffed honeyed dates).  It's quite delish.

Yes, I used my mortar and pestle twice in one day!  This time, it was to grind pepper the old fashioned way.  I mixed that with pine nuts (which are $26 a pound, so I only bought a small amount).  Then I stuffed the peppery pine nuts into the pitted dates.

Add a dusting of salt to the sticky dates, then make them even stickier by coating them with hot honey (about 1/4 cup simmered in a small saucepan; use a skewer to dip and a small fork to push the date off the skewer after dipping).  They were extremely sticky after sitting in the fridge all night.  The pine nuts have a slight vanilla flavor - I had never noticed that before, probably because they cost $26 a pound and I don't buy them.  The salt and pepper give a nice, grown-up flavor to this authentic Roman treat.

Yum! I'll definitely make these again.

Gumbo Afternoon

Silva Rhetoricae made the live auction!  This means it will probably sell for more than the actual material + labor I put into it, which is nice for me and for the school.

I spent most of the afternoon chopping veggies for Gumbo Zeb.  Yesterday our first basket came from Grace's Garden, so it seemed a good time to make a big batch of the Gumbo Base for the freezer.  I follow the recipe in Crescent Dragonwagon's Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread cookbook, which may just be my favorite cookbook of all time.  But, like my quilts, gumbo turns out to be a little improvisational.  Making gumbo is an all-afternoon job, and I'm tired and looking forward to eating it for dinner, and taking it to the fellowship meal Sunday.

 You have to do a roux.  That's the brown mixture on the left: flour and oil cooked together and stirred frequently over a medium heat until the flour browns.  It will thicken the gumbo and add a nutty, brown flavor.  On the right is a sauté of 2 1/2 bell peppers, 2 1/2 onions, and a whole bunch of celery in a whole stick of butter, with a whole bunch of chopped chives added at the end.

The cool thing about Gumbo Zeb is it uses all those greens that you are supposed to eat more of but most people don't.  I put in about 2 large bunches of mustard greens from our yard, beet tops, radish tops, Swiss chard, bok choy, spinach, and parsley from the veggie basket.  And I decided to branch out and put a small bunch of lemon balm in it, because it's a green leafy vegetable/herb, and it grows in abundance in our yard.  I did check my herb book to see if lemon balm could be toxic in larger quantities and it looks like it has been used happily for at least three thousand years with no reports of negative effects whatsoever.  So in it went.  When it was all done simmering I added the roux and the vegetable sauté and the seasoning blend -- 1/4 cup of Worcestershire sauce, 1 T of Tabasco sauce, and 8 cloves of garlic were some of the key ingredients, with spices and herbs galore and plenty of tomato sauce and tomato paste.  It fills my stockpot almost to the brim.

So for dinner I cooked a pot of rice, mixed about 4 cups of the gumbo base with equal amount of chicken stock, browned some Andouille sausage and we're good to go.  The rest of the base will cool and then be packaged up for future gumbo feasts.

Yum!

WIP Wednesday and Yarn-along

There are very few days to "do stuff" before Christmas; Daniel is in Chicago waiting for his delayed flight to Denver and hoping to get to PDX late tonight; the other kids are bored with their vacation already, sniping at me and each other, and lobbying for screen time and shopping trips.  I spent over $270 on groceries at Winco this morning (that includes the Christmas ham, the New Years' steak, and a $30 bag of cat food, so it's not a bad as you'd think.  But still.)  This afternoon I cooked some ground beef for Sloppy Joes tonight, baked up a batch of homemade granola, and started a batch of Filled Raisin Cookies.  I was going to make Grandma's Fudge recipe, but I don't have marshmallow creme.  Looks like I'll have to go back to the store before long.

Not a lot of sewing has been done today.  None at all, actually.  But yesterday I loaded Barney onto the Megaquilter and began quilting:

Quarta likes nonstop meander quilting.  She says when she's bored she likes to run her finger along the line to try to find the beginning.  Ideally, there will only be 2 ends to this one continuous line, and if I have ANY time today I might even finish it.

I'm slogging along binding Jack's Chain.  About halfway there now.

Still enjoying the Easy Street mystery quilt, but I have to wait until Friday for the next clue.

Socks for Steve -- almost ready to begin the gusset.  They will not be finished by Christmas.

Source: google.com via Katherine on Pinterest

This is the book I most recently finished, and I quite enjoyed it.  Jane Austen fanfiction is always entertaining but this was a cut above most that I've read.  I really feel the author successfully got inside Mr. Darcy's head and told a story that merges and diverges from Pride and Prejudice in a totally believable way.  It will make you want to reread the original just to see which scenes are changed and how.

I took some time to make this collage of the 12 shawls in 2012 project I completed.  I was going to save it for another post but I may want to take some blog vacation time over the next week, so I might as well share it now.  They're in sequential order, clockwise from top left, with the center photo a closeup of the bottom right shawl.  Of the 12, they all used stash yarn (or handspun from stash fiber) since I did not buy any yarn this year.  Shawls #2, 3, 9, 10, and 12 were from handspun.  Shawls #5, 6, 7, and 9 used more than 500 yards (they make a big deal about that in the Ravelry group).  Shawl #7 "Black Roses/ Lady MacBeth" was more like 1000 yards of cobweb-weight cashmere, reclaimed from a thrift store sweater and dyed with Wilton's, and I beaded that one.  So it was definitely my agony-and-ecstasy project for the year.

Now that I know how to make collages with Photoscape, I'll have to do a retrospective for my 2012 quilts and the ufo's from this year.

Pflaumenkuchen

Inspired by the description of a German lady I know from my knitting group, and a box full of Italian plums from Costco, I browsed the web for some Pflaumenkuchen recipes recently.  Above is an interesting, yeast-leavened plum cake.  Recipe here.  It was good.  The yeast dough gives it a totally different texture and a less-sweet taste.

This one is a little closer to some other recipes I've tried... very nice.  We tried half the plums face up and half face down. 

I want to do another try with this recipe before the rest of the plums go bad.  In the meantime, just saying "pflaumenkuchen" is fun!

Summer tomato salad

I'm participating in the 31 for 21 challenge, but they say you don't have to blog about Down syndrome every day and today is one of those busy days and yesterday's post took a long time and I've been waiting to share this photo for a week, so here goes:

I can never have enough of this salad.  When the tomatoes are finally ripe, I cut some of them up, together with about an equal amount of peeled cucumbers.  Red onion is nice, but I had a leek so I used it here.  And sweet basil leaves are a must... although I usually chop them.  Drizzle with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and sprinkle with salt and maybe a little freshly ground pepper.  The only problem is it was too big for the bowl.

It was a busy day today and we finally redeemed our coupons for the Mexican restaurant that we got at the auction last May.  I'll relate one little cute story about Tertia* before signing off... we were ushered in and asked if we would need any kids' menus.  She stated, "I'm 13 now," and that was the end of kids' menus for her!  She ordered a taco salad.  And said "Gracias!" every time the waiter came to our table.  She knows how it should be done!



* blogname for my 3rd daughter, the one with Down syndrome.

Randomday - Wat's in the Crockpot

You never know wat you're going to get on Randomday! 

Wat's in the crockpot?  Wat's in the crockpot!  (Wat was in the crockpot earlier in the week, actually, I'm just blogging about it today.)

This one's for you, Dad.  I used a recipe from Stephanie O'Dea's latest book, but it's also on her website A Year of Slow Cooking.   Ethiopian Chicken Stew, also known as Doro Wat.  My mom always made it with beef and served it with pancakes, to replicate the injeera bread that is the authentic way to serve it.  It was always too spicy for us kids to eat, so we had a pancake supper!  But we might venture to eat one of the hard-boiled eggs that had absorbed some of the sauce, just enough enough to know what Wat tastes like.

I tinkered with this recipe a bit... I added chopped kale since I had it and I like greens cooked along with my meat.  I didn't have enough hard-boiled eggs, but that worked out okay.  And I didn't add water since I remember our family Wat being a very thick stew.

1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes
5-6 boneless skinless chicken thighs, frozen
Juice of half a lemon
1 T butter
2 diced onions
1 t. ginger
1 T. paprika
1 t. cayenne pepper (more if you're my Dad)
1/2 t. black pepper
1 t. turmeric
1 bunch kale or other greens, chopped
1 hardboiled egg for each diner, peeled, to add later

Add everything to the crockpot except the eggs.  Add water if desired, up to 2 cups if you want a more soup-like stew.  Cook on low for 6-8 hours, or high for 4-5.  Stir once or twice during cooking.  Add the eggs about 15 minutes before serving.

I served this with rice in the time-honored Bogue tradition.  It was very good, although I think the Wat spices blend that came from Ethiopia propbably had a few secret ingredients in it that I don't have in this recipe.  And as good as it was, I had a bit of an upset stomach for a few days afterwards... so go cautiously with that cayenne.  This is 1-handkerchief Wat, Dad.  You would probably like a full tablespoon of cayenne!

Hachee in the Crock Pot

It's summer, you say.  Too hot for heavy meat and potato dishes?  Not hardly if you have my family to feed.  I'm going to share with you my all-time favorite meat-and-potato dish, known to my side of the family as Haichee.  But I looked it up and the official, Wikipedia-recognized spelling is Hachee.  It's a recipe common in the South of Holland, where I was born, and my mom got the recipe from friends we visited while we were there when I was 7.  It was a very common Sunday dinner meal in our house ever afterwards, and Mom always served it with boiled potatoes that you could mash up yourself with your fork to your own preferred degree of ... mashedness.  In the summer it's great with cottage cheese on the side, along with sliced fresh tomatoes and a big tossed salad.  The changes I made to this dish last Sunday were cooking it in a crock pot instead of stovetop, and adding chopped Swiss chard (because I love greens cooked with meat and I'm sneaky about using them up like that).  Other than browning the meat first, which you can skip if you like, it's a very easy dish to throw together.  And the beef becomes falling-apart tender, and the vinegar and bay gives it such a homey yet exotic flavor that you'll love it as much as we do.  So here goes...

Haichee/ Hachee

2 pounds beef, cut into chunks for stew
3 pounds onions, chopped (I used 2 large onions but 3 would have been better)
3 or more bay leaves
butter
about 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
salt
pepper
optional: chopped greens, carrots, other seasonings such as curry powder or cayenne pepper

Brown the beef in a few tablespoons of butter in a frying pan.  When meat is browned on all sides, add onions and brown them slightly too.  Transfer to crock pot.  Add bay leaves, some glugs of vinegar and other vegetables or seasonings as desired.  Cook on low for 5-6 hours.  Serve with boiled or mashed potatoes. 

Note to self: 2 pounds of meat is not enough anymore.

Spinach Salad, and a Gaffe of Olympic Proportions

I made this recipe: Spinach and Radish Slaw with Crispy Chiles and Pepitas.  It's a bit of a production, and it makes a LOT.  I substituted red wine vinegar with a dash of sherry for the sherry wine vinegar called for.  And the only dried chiles I could find were "chiles negros" which I think had already been roasted before I stir-fried them.  The Pepitas are pumpkin seeds, which I had left over from my last batch of homemade granola.  This is a great salad, although rather soggy after the first day.  I'd make it for a potluck or cut it in half next time.

_____________________________________________________

Have you seen the Ravelry tempest in a teapot?  Seems the U.S. Olympic Committee has sent a cease-and-desist order to Ravelry claiming trademark infringement, because of the Ravelympics.  (The Ravelympics are a completely volunteer effort, in which individual crafters challenge themselves to complete a knitted or crocheted item during the duration of the sporting event the USOC thinks it is promoting).  To add insult to injury, the letter claimed knitting somehow "denigrates" the hard work and competitive spirit of the U.S. athletes (but only the U.S. athletes... I guess the international competitors aren't going to feel threatened by the sweater sprint).  Hoo boy.  They probably know, now that it's gone viral, that it was a mistake to do this.  Here's Mason-Dixon Knitting's take on it.  Although I'm not a huge fan of Stephen Colbert, I can see him having fun with this and would stand behind him, just this once.  The USOC has issued a semi-apology and suggested that knitters might like to knit items and donate them in honor of the games.  I don't think this is going to happen, at least not as the payoff the USOC seems to hint at.  They have proved themselves decidedly un-knitworthy.  Even after the second apology.

Ravelry, much as I love it, can be a rough crowd.  Rough as in "don't let your underage daughter go unsupervised here."  Some boards are as innocuous and friendly as you would expect from a knitting forum.  Some, despite vigilant moderation, are so overpopulated that threads degenerate and get locked quickly, but not too quickly for feelings to be hurt.  And some are actually set up to be a kind of verbal cage-fighting; no-holds-barred, no feelings spared, mob psychology and snark in full force.  I suspect that the denizens of the latter groups will not be called off easily.  Knitters have not been this vengeful since Madame Defarge.  I'm just as glad it's corporate America in the form of the USOC rather than political and religious conservatives they're targeting, this time.

As for me, I've (mostly) given up on the contentious groups and avoid the overpopulated ones as much as possible.  I will be knitting my Ravelympics project and calling it just that on this blog no matter whether they change the official name or not.  And somehow, I think I will be doing my part to work the words "Olympics" and "Olympian" into my blog as much as possible, but not in reference to the international summer games located in the capital city of the U.K.  Those shall remain nameless, since I wouldn't want to infringe on the rights of an American company to think it has a monopoly on the use of the word that refers to them.  Or denigrate the efforts of soulless fat cats to prove themselves pompous jerks.

Randomday, belated (also Emperor's Day)

Here are the Roman Honey Cakes I made for Emperor's Day today.  12 eggs, beaten in a stand mixer until thick, then honey (about 1 cup) drizzled in, then about 2 1/4 cups flour and some coriander.  Baked in a 350 oven for about 20 minutes.  The muffin-shaped ones have almonds on them, the square ones are plain, and the mini donut shaped ones are stuffed with dates.  They are now gone.

6th graders right before the competition began.

I teach some of the goofiest kids on the planet.

The assembled throngs of onlookers.  I provided togas for the coronation of 2 of the 4 emperors but was unable to take a picture because of scheduling issues.  Sniff.

Kathy H. has been working hard with the 5th-graders on verb forms.  They could probably beat my 8th graders at 4 principal parts.
I missed Randomday on Saturday.  I have quite a bit of random stuff saved up though, so I'm declaring belated Randomday today.

My son was in the newspaper today.  Next to the obituaries, because I think they left him out when they were doing valedictorian pictures of all the big schools yesterday.  (Kind of like that episode of the Middle where poor Sue Heck was listed in the yearbook under "in memoriam."  My life is so much like an episode of The Middle, it depresses me to watch the show). But the online version is quite nice.  And I actually took that picture of him.

I watched every televised minute of the Spelling Bee over the weekend, and wrote down all the words, because I am a total Spelling Bee geek.  Here they are:

Round 4:

• cancrivorous
• ditokous
• polyptych
• mumpsimus
• carpophore
• attermine
• ergastulum
• sylloge (that means someone went out on this word).
• pidan
• tendenz
• sciophyte
• toxophilite
• frore
• caryatid
• exergue
• douceur
• mephitis (this is an Oscan-derived word.  I can't tell you how much this excited me).
• stannum (in case you were wondering why tin has the chemical symbol it does).
• pratincolous
• bacitracin
• monocotyledon
• victorine
• cataphract
• enthymeme
• survigrous
• catallactics
• phlogistic
• tondino
• cochineal (I knew this because of my fiber arts hobby).
• pleurodynia
• podilegous
• dysthymia
• habendum (This is a gerundive!  I'm adding it to my gerundive hunt list).

Round 5

• hortulan
• psychrophyte
• compas
• Liederkranz
• lymphopoiesis
• macropodid
• cannelon
• quinquennalia
• athanor
• rhabdolith
• calo
• fjeld
• storis
• cisele
• aoristic (I love a word derived from a verb tense name!)
• oecus
• Gotterdammerung
• tocopherol
• mascalage
• schwyzer
• chamaephyte
• atopen
• perleche
• trophobiosis
• souterrain
• bombycine
• thysanopterist
• maquillage
• gimbaled
• rhipidate
• polos
• theophylline
• cabochon
• araphorostic
• resveratrol
• contrecoup
• soboliferous
• patas
• nudibranch (I was surprised to hear that the "ch" is hard, never having heard it pronounced)
• allothogenic
• Grundriss

Round 6:

• quatuor
• rhonchus
• vellon
• guilloche
• polynee
• capharnaum
• cheyney
• rapparee
• bisbigliando
• Gleichschaltung
• pejerrey
• ammocoetes
• heian
• kahikatea
• ouabain
• tirthankara
• phrontistery
• kanaima
• cholecystitis
• himation (totally knew this one too!  Greco-Roman culture again!)
• pissaladiere

Round 7 (finals)

• psammon (an E. Nesbit story helped with this one)
• dedans
• sahel
• harengiform
• canities
• ridotto
• maieutic
• turnverein
• otosteon

Round 8

• ajimez
• porwigle
• melopoeia
• phthisiology
• distelfink
• rouille
• yttriferous

Round 9

• luteovirescent (I love Latin.  It makes me feel so smart!)
• chatoyant
• ericeticolous
• quattrocento
• vetiver
• geistlich

Round 10

• saccharolytic
• prolegomenon
• schwannoma

Round 11

• admittatur (I will just say that this is one word where the English pronunciation of a word could steer you wrong, because they pronounce that second a as in "say", not "father".  We have something called the Great Vowel Shift that changed the pronunciation of vowels in English.  I was tempted to spell it "admittetur" because that would be how it would be pronounced in Latin.  But I knew it came from the verb "mitto," which is 3rd conjugation, and it was subjunctive (let him be admitted), so the weird vowel was called for.  Which is "a" for the 3rd conjugation.  So Latin teacher logic would have saved me on this word.  But the contestants probably just had studied the word from a list.)
• chionablepsia

Round 12

• arondissement (easy for someone who took college French)
• schwarmerei (German.  not so much)

and the winning word:

• guetapens (no, I hadn't heard it before)

Well, that was fun.  It's the only time of year I watch ESPN.  How about you?  Are you smarter than an 8th grader?

Steve is watching coverage of the Queen's diamond jubilee taped from BBC.  Yesterday it was the boat parade on the Thames.  Cool stuff.

On, Wisconsin!