The One Year Old is Coming!

Only 19 days!!


Oh, my gosh, I need to batten down the hatches!

The feast was at our house

The trouble with not blogging for a while is it’s hard to get going again. It’s been a nice break and I’ve gotten a lot of knitting done. I’ll tell you all about that soon (maybe). But today I want to tell you about our Thanksgiving meal. I had 9 people over for the meal and several people remarked that I looked so calm when I said yes I was having Thanksgiving at our house this year. But remember that I retired from a job where I was responsible to feed hundreds of children (can you say picky?) every day. Granted I had staff but really 9 vs. 500. No contest. And the Compadre counts as staff right? And besides my daughter brought the green bean casserole and my sister brought cranberries (the scratch kind and the kind in the can – we have lovers of both kinds in the family), pies, pickles and olives, and pop (that’s soda for those of you not from Minnesota). So I was responsible for the turkey, dressing, bread, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and gravy, ice cream for the pie, sparkling juices and wine. Whew, we were full after dinner! This is all traditional food for our family – don’t dare tamper with our menu! But I did alter the bread – I made the dilly bread recipe from the Mason Dixon blog on November 24 and it was good!! We’ll do this one again (right family?). The Compadre and I liked it a lot.

This year the dressing turned out the way I like it. I polled some of my friends to see how they make it and used a suggestion from Kelly that was great. We stuffed the bird with as much as could go in without packing it and put the rest in a casserole dish. Then when the turkey came out to rest I put about ½ cup of chicken broth in the dressing in the dish and popped it in the oven. When the Compadre cut up the turkey he scooped out the dressing from the bird and added it to the casserole dish. The two dressings were mixed together and it all tasted like it came from the bird and was more than enough for us with leftovers to boot. Thanks Kelly for the great suggestion! Here is my recipe – it’s just your basic sage dressing.

Sage Stuffing

3 qt. bread cubes

1 cup melted butter

1 large onion, diced

2 tsp. powdered sage (more if you like)

1 tsp. pepper

2 stalks celery, diced

Cube the bread – we usually use the cheapest kind of store bought bread available. If you use dried bread cubes you’ll need to add about a cup of chicken broth to it. Add the onion, celery, and spices and mix. Drizzle the butter as you mix it up. Stuff the bird lightly with as much of the stuffing as fits. Put the rest in an oven proof dish, add ½ c. of chicken broth to it if it needs it and bake it for about 20 minutes right before serving time. Mix the stuffing from the bird with the stuffing from the oven and serve.

When I cook turkey I don’t do it right according to my Mom. Actually I don’t really roast the turkey because I cover the roaster. I don’t like dried out white meat. Actually I like the dark meat better than the white but I especially don’t the white meat when it’s dried out from being over roasted. My solution is to put the turkey in the roasting pan with the breast side down (no rack) add a little bit of water and then cover the roaster. The turkey is usually done before the recommended time and it just falls off the bone. Mom raved about how good the turkey was this year. I didn’t tell her how I made it – no need for her to know!

I had the Compadre mash the sweet potatoes and caught him trying to be too healthy by serving them up plain. Good thing I made him put them back in the pan and add some butter, cream and brown sugar to them. Wouldn’t want to have healthy food on Thanksgiving would we! My nephew, Peter, was recovering from having all four wisdom teeth out and so we deviated from the usual candied sweet potatoes. They were good – we might do this again!

I wish I had taken a picture of the feast before we dug in or even the aftermath but we were having too good a time to think of it. I’ll show you a picture of my table decorations though. These quilted leaves were made by my friend Jeanice. They provided entertainment for my guests because they are different on each side and so some people enjoyed flipping them over and making different combinations. Hi Dave!

I love having the feast at our house. It’s a lot of fun and I really don’t mind cooking for everyone. And the guys helped with the clean up so the house didn’t look too bad this morning! One more load of dishes in the dishwasher and shrink the table back to normal size and you’d never know we had a big party here yesterday. Now, on to the Christmas preparations!!

Guest post from John

This is a post from my son John. He's a bachelor and he's not afraid to cook! He reported later that the meal was great and it fed him for several days.

----------

My mom gave me a slab of beef with no instructions on how to cook it. I've never cooked a roast or anything, but I'm willing to try new foods.

I went over my small cook book library on the phone with Mom, and confirmed the decision I had already made: find a recipe and try it. I chose a recipe from "Six Ingredients or Less Slow Cooker" by Carlean Johnson (CJ Books, Gig Harbor, WA -- www.sixingredientsorless.com).



Easy Beef Dinner

2 to 2 1/2 pound round steak (whatever that is)
4 medium potatoes, peeled and halved
4 carrots, cut crosswise into fourths (whatever that means)
1 can (10 3/4-ounces) condensed French Onion soup

Trim fat from meat and cut into serving size pieces.

Place potatoes and carrots in slow cooker. Arrange meat over the vegetables. Pour soup over meat. Cover and cook on LOW 7 to 8 hours or until meat and vegetables are tender. Makes 4 to 5 servings.

Well I don't have a kitchen scale and I don't know how big a pound of beef is, so I'll step on my bathroom scale and then step on it holding the ziploc with the beef. Hmm, looks like 2 or 3 pounds I guess. Sounds about right. How big is a serving of uncooked meat? The recipe says 4-5 servings so I'll cut it into 5 pieces.

Looks like I only have one carrot. I'll just use more potatoes then. I like potatoes. 4 medium potatoes, 3 small potatoes, and one carrot -- same number of vegetables, should work. What does "crosswise" mean? I'll just cut it up.

Hmm, I have a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup. It's even 10 3/4 oz. I don't know of anything magical about "french onion."

So hey, I have the right ingredients, sort of. In 8 hours I'll see if "sort of" tastes good.

(Side note: I think I'll add "better potato peeler" to my Christmas wish list.)
Ed. This is John's cat, Abby. Anncrafts has no pets but her children make up for that.

I Have a Lot to Do

I’ve been feeling vaguely guilty about all the projects that I have started and not finished in all my different crafty pursuits. I went so far as to make a list this morning. Oh. My. Gosh.

Then there are all the things that I really, really, want to start! I started making a list….

I’m going to take some advice I got this weekend. I can’t remember which friend told me about her friend that has a rule that she has to finish two things on the UFO list before starting another one. I had been rashly considering not starting anything until my unfinished object list was worked way down. But I think I can do the two out one in thing. Yes, I know that the Compadre is reading this and he’ll be sure to try to keep my in line. Good luck, Compadre!


So here is one completed object. It’s a red scarf for the Red Scarf Project. Made out of Merino 5 by Crystal Palace Yarns. The pattern is the Cartridge Belt Rib from Barbara Walker’s 2nd Treasury of Knitting Patterns on page 21, a mindless reversible pattern perfect for scarves. It’s soft and squishy and I hope the former foster kid/now college student that gets it will love it as much as I do. My mother in law’s rule about gifts is that the best gifts are the ones you want to keep yourself – and this one I do want to keep, but give it I will. The red scarf project has extended their deadline until December 15 so I should have enough time to finish another. This is a UFO that has been on the needles since last year when I started it for the same cause- and didn’t finish in time. This one is the same pattern but I’m knitting it in sport weight yarn so it will be many more stitches before it’s done.

I’m also working on another scarf (must be a scarf phase of the moon right?). This one is for my sister. She commissioned this one a long time ago – last winter some time when we were at a yarn store together. She doesn’t knit. Hmmm, Mary, maybe you should learn some day. Anyway, this is a fun pattern to knit. It’s a free pattern that I got at Stitches with Style in Delaware called, “Not a Celebrity Scarf”, and it is really the same as the Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf but with K2 tog’s instead of SSK’s. I’m using Universal Yarn’s Classic Worsted LP. I’m loving it – it’s a fast knit because you just want to get to the next triangle and then when you do you have to start it and so on… Looks cool in a long stripe like this yarn is too.

So it’s a race – which scarf will be done first! And will I start any more projects before I finish. Stay tuned!


And here is a picture of Abigail in her Halloween outfit, just because I'm her Grandma and I think she's sooo cute.

A Peck of Tomatoes

At least I think it was a peck, it certainly wasn’t a bushel – I’ve dealt with bushels of tomatoes before and this was a smaller basket than that. I remember back in the day when my kids were little going to the “you pick it farm” and picking bushels of tomatoes to can. My son John was little and was wandering around the field – there was a muddy place and he wandered into it and got stuck. What a mess! One of my friends went into the mud and rescued him and his shoe that came off when she pulled him out. Hey, Callie, are you reading this blog? Ahh, memories.

Anyway, the peck of tomatoes. They certainly weren’t grown in my own yard – despite planting 7 tomato plants this spring. My meager crop was two medium tomatoes and two cherry tomatoes. You see the wildlife has discovered our yard. I think I’ve told you about the juvenile delinquent deer that hang out in our yard but we also have other marauders – I’ve seen raccoons, I see the squirrels carry off apples and I am sure they did that with the tomatoes too, and then there are the chipmunks. All of them were very well fed off of my garden this year. Nice of me to plant it for them wasn’t it. Soo, I went to the farmer’s market every Friday and last Friday I bought my peck of tomatoes. We’ve had a freeze here so I wasn’t hopeful of getting any but I did and for a good price too – as long as I was willing to deal with imperfect and “have to use Now” tomatoes. I’m experienced at using stuff that isn’t perfect. We grow apples and prefer not to use very much insecticide but that’s another blog post. By the way, you can cut off the bad parts of both tomatoes and apples and the rest is good. Don’t try this with citrus fruits though, they are bad through and through when one part is bad.

I thought I was getting enough tomatoes for a batch of salsa but I was wrong. I had enough tomatoes for salsa and then some. So I went searching and found a tomato soup recipe on the internet. I had had some wonderful homemade tomato soup when we visited RyKy and so I was looking for something similar. Should have written down the recipe when I was there but I didn’t.

The soup involved cooking 4 cups of chopped tomatoes, a slice of onion, 4 cloves, and 2 cups of chicken broth for about 20 minutes. Then the mixture is run through a food mill or in my case my handy dandy food presser outer. I have no idea what it’s called but it works like a charm, and I got it for a song at a garage sale. (Don’t you just hate it when people tell you all about the wonderful things they got for a song at a garage sale?) I’ve used it for many, many years and discovered that I have a couple of bowls that fit exactly underneath it. It’s one of the precious items in my kitchen. I’m easily charmed I guess. Oh, by the way, throw away the stuff left behind after you've pressed all the good stuff through.

After the tomato mixture is pressed out or milled or whatever, you melt 2 tablespoons of butter in the pan you used for the tomatoes and then mix 2 tablespoons of flour into it. This is called a roux. Cook the roux for a few minutes until it turns medium brown and then whisk a little of the tomato into it so that it doesn’t lump up. Then add all the rest of the tomato to it. Season it with salt if needed and sugar if you want. I tasted mine and it was bland, bland, bland. So I added some of our homemade curry to it. And that you’ll have to wait for another blog post to learn more about too.

I served it to the Compadre and asked him what he thought about it. I had already decided that I liked it. A lot. Well, the Compadre hesitated, I’ve been married long enough to be able to see the wheels turning in his head, he was thinking about a way to gently, diplomatically, say what he needed to say. I preempted him and said “you don’t really like it do you”? He agreed. Proof that the Compadre doesn’t always like what I make. So we agreed that I would eat the double batch of soup that I really liked for my lunches and he would eat something else for his lunches. I think that he just expected Campbell’s tomato soup when he sat down. This was soup with tomato in it but it also had that spicy taste and the chicken broth in it. He knows that one should always keep the cook happy if one wants her to keep cooking so he was very, very careful about what he said J. I was in a group recently and one of the women said that she doesn’t cook anymore because her husband always complains and doesn’t like anything that she makes. Foolish man. The Compadre is much wiser than him. Abe Lincoln said “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt”.

The rest of the tomatoes went into salsa. I got this recipe from Bernie, one of the other cook manager’s at the school district where I worked. I’ve used this recipe for years and we love it. I always have trouble judging how hot to make it. The recipe calls for 2 cups of hot peppers!! That, I know is too much, but peppers vary in how hot they are and so this time I had the Compadre taste one of my peppers and he decided that they weren’t too terribly hot. Big mistake. His definition of hot and mine are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. I was hoping to aim for the middle. Nope. I put in 1 cup of these peppers (the wildlife left these alone in garden – I wonder why?) And I included the seeds. Wow! We’ve got fiery salsa here. But I know people who like it that way so it won’t get wasted – I just won’t eat any of it!

BERNIE’S SALSA

9 cups chopped tomatoes (Roma’s work best but use whatever you have)

1 large onion, chopped (1 cup or more)

1 T. of salt (or to taste)

1 cup vinegar

4 cloves of garlic

4 cups chopped bell pepper

2 cups hot pepper (use your judgment here!!)

¼ cup sugar (I never add this)

1 can tomato paste

Cook everything but the sugar and tomato paste until the peppers and onion look slightly done. Add the tomato paste and the sugar if desired and cook for another 5 minutes. Taste it to see if it needs more cooking or sugar or salt. Then process in a water bath canner for 10 minutes. Makes 7-8 pints. Enjoy!

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Today we spent a wonderful fall day watching the Michigan Tech rowing team (with my nephew Peter) as they competed on the Mississippi river. It was an education for me - I've never seen this sport before and we were able to get up close and personal. We hung out with the team afterward and watched them put away the very, very long boats and also all the chili that my sister Mary brought for the team to eat! Peter is the 3rd one from the back on this boat. They won 3rd place in their race and Peter (and all the guys rowing with him) got a medal. Cool. Sure looks like a lot of work! They did look like they all had fun though.

CiD Hanscom at Open Knitting

I try to make it to open knitting at Double Ewe on Friday afternoons whenever I can. Last Friday I was sooo glad that I was able to go – Kelly e-mailed me to tell me that CiD Hanscom, the designer of Felted Rudy and many other cool patterns was bringing her trunk show and would stay and knit with us for a while. Squeee! Having knit Felted Rudy I was so impressed with her pattern writing skills and I was glad that I’d be able to meet her and talk to her. (You have to understand that I’m really shy about meeting new people so this is a measure of how much I wanted to meet her.) I did have a few worries that she’d be all stuck up – you know – being a famous designer and all, but she was gracious and funny and nice of course! She brought in samples of all her fabulous cleverly designed critters and she also has some accessories and bags too. I asked her about the design process and she told me she’s only been knitting for four years and she just wings it. She did design crochet patterns before she started knitting and she said that helps. Apparently crochet people don’t buy patterns like knitting people do. So now we knitters get the benefit of her skills! She has a background in graphic design and obviously has great ability to think in 3-D. She also said that her patterns are written just the way that you would knit the pattern and not necessarily like someone who has been knitting (and following patterns) would do it. After all she’s only been knitting for four years. Her advice about using her patterns is to just trust the pattern and keep going, it will work out. I found that out myself when knitting Rudy. There were a couple of places that didn’t seem intuitive to me but I just blindly followed and it all worked in the end.

CiD also did an impromptu demo of how to wear a scarf. She was wearing a scarf that she designed and showed us several ways to wear it. Of course now I want to make a long scarf for me. I’m thinking that I could wear it around the house and look glamorous and all (while wearing my sweats) and also keep the heat lower during the winter. Ha! How’s that for justification of knitting! As if I need any excuses to knit (and do all the other crafts that I do).

I love Cid's patterns. I've made two of them so far - the Change your Socks Purse and Felted Rudy. I'm going to make the mouse next (Thora Lee). Cid told me about a gal that made Thora Lee, named him Luke and went on a trip around the world. She has a blog that tells of Luke's adventures. I'm not going to take my mouse (whatever I name it) on a trip around the world but I'll sure enjoy making it! And then I want to make the wristers pattern and the snowman and......