Rosemary Bread

Before we head in to the weekend I wanted to squeeze in one more post, and I realized I haven't posted a recipe for bread in a while!  I baked this loaf up earlier in the week and am glad I did!  I've made this recipe once before but didn't get to taste it - I traded it to a friend in exchange for bourbon brownies.  Speaking of which - I ought to make her more bread...

But for now, this one is mine!

For a 1.5 pound loaf, put in your machine:
1 and 1/4 cup milk
4 tsp olive oil
a dash (or more) of hot sauce
3 cups bread flour
3 tbsp cornmeal
1tbsp sugar
1.5 tsp snipped fresh rosemary (half as much if using dried)
3/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground pepper
1 tsp active dry yeast

This goes through the white bread cycle and a few hours later, you get this pretty loaf!

I thought the cornmeal in this bread made it really interesting.  Commonly you may see cornmeal on the bottom of a loaf that you bake on a baking sheet or oven stone - that helps keep the bread from sticking to whatever you're baking it on.  In this recipe, by mixing the cornmeal through out the bread, you get a nice toothy crunch in even the soft parts of the bread.  It gives it a sort of "rustic" texture that is so perfect for sopping up sauces or soups or a little bit of olive oil.

Hmm, I wonder how it would work as a sourdough...

Day of Pigeonroof!

Pigeonroof Studios is one of my absolute favorite dyers right now.  She does amazing things with color, it's not too often that you can see a very multicolored skein and think that it's not overboard, but those are the skeins of hers that I drool over the most.

Remember how I said I still had one last sweater quantity coming?  Well, check THIS out!  1000 yards of Superwash DK in Saffron.  It's a gorgeous warm golden color and will make for a lovely cardigan.  I haven't made too many sweaters, but of the ones I have made I've decided that DK weight is my favorite.  DK is heavy enough that it knits up quickly (since so much of what I do is in fingering weight), but light enough that it's perfect even on a warmer day.  I can't wait to find the perfect pattern for this and wear this beautiful color, and this will be my last sweater quantity in a LONG while!  (I've shaken the bug out now, promise!)

Finally, I am so excited about THIS:

You might laugh, but I don't actually know how to spin yarn.  I once tried, and while I did ok, I got distracted by yarn that was already made and skipped off to knit.  But these colors are so bright, so vibrant, that I stalked her update for the sole purpose of acquiring this roving!  At the very least, there are shops on Etsy now that will spin your roving for you for a small fee (I know they do this at Plied Together, there may be others as well), so that's something I am considering looking in to.

Funny enough, I didn't even think I had managed to get this roving!  The checkout process that seemed to work at Paypal then failed at Etsy, and even now doesn't show as a purchase (though the Paypal did go through).  I about fell over when I took this out of the package today.  It's really beautiful and I can't even picture how amazing it will be first as yarn and then as a project!

I'm so happy with my Pigeonroof day!

Insanity with Photoshop!

Amber photoshopped another one of my pictures.  It is entitled "Jaws Theme".

First I screamed with laughter, then I think I identified a running theme with her photoshop work.  XD

(and yes, I realize that by posting this, I am encouraging her further)

Twitter State of Mind

I don't have a Twitter account.

I think Twitter is absurd.  Tell me what you're doing in 160 characters or less!  So people Tweet things like "I'm eating eggs for breakfast LOL", "Getting job review right now LOL, boss is all liek 'WTF'!", or "I like tomatoes".  These things are not relevant to my interests.  If we are having a conversation, I might engage, and say "oh, I also like tomatoes!  Do you you ever try to grow them?  I've tried but haven't had good luck."  But I don't see Twitter as a conversation.  I picture someone running in to the room after punching (YES PUNCHING) open the door, and yelling "ILIKETOMATOES" and then turning tail and running away a la Napoleon Dynamite.  Which, I admit, is a fun mental image.  Picture it.  Fun, yes?

However...(OMG there's always a "however" with me, isn't there?!)

HOWEVER, I have come to realize, my brain works in Tweets.  It will spit out some random, crazy, sentence-length nonsense, and then go about its day.  I honestly don't know if it's normal to think "I should buy a drumset!" and then continue driving to work as though nothing has happened.  I honestly don't.

I don't have a Twitter account with which to share my random madness, but I have a BLOG.  So now, I present to you, random irrelevant thoughts I've had over the past few days and beyond.

"How did we EVER find ANYTHING without the internet and smartphones?!"

"Being a secret roller derby girl by night, HR person by day would be EPIC!  MUST LEARN TO ROLLER SKATE."  (YES I thought of this BEFORE the Ellen Page movie came out!)

"WHY THE #^%& IS JUSTIN BIEBER FAMOUS???!"

"Being a rock star seems like it would be kind of fun, except for the partying-all-night part.  That would maybe be fun twice.  I like sleeping too much."

"It's a shame the occupation: 'Fly Girl' has become obsolete.  I think 2011 would benefit from such a profession."

"I once lived in a time before the internet existed, and I cannot believe there was ever a time before the internet existed."

"I'm actually surprised that Kanye West didn't declare one of his own videos "the best video of all time".  How selfless.  I think he's grown."

When Stash Expires

We've all had it happen.  We buy the perfect skein of yarn, saying we'll get to it when we deal with some other yarn, then we deal with that yarn and by then we have more, and before we know it, we've had some skeins for months (or even YEARS!) and decide we just don't love it like we used to, that it's time for it to find a new home where it can be appreciated and turned in to its own project.

That's how I got these beautiful skeins!  My friend Kate (who has podcasts now!) was working on decreasing her stash, and organized a mini-swap amongst several friends.  We put up yarn that we no longer had to have, and another person needed to only say they wanted the yarn, and what project they would use it for (to prevent it from just becoming another project-less stash entry).  I leapt on these 2 skeins from Colharbour Mill that are incredibly difficult to photograph (they're actually a heathered purple, blue, and red, which barely comes through in my picture) and declared that they would be socks - as close to knee highs as I could make them!  I've also realized I've acquired this yarn a couple months ago now, so I should really cast on in the spirit of our swap - no creating more stash!  Time to wind my yarn and narrow down my pattern choices!

Sourdough! I Feel So Advanced!

OK, so it's not the prettiest loaf in the world (the slashes on the top were centered when I cut them, obviously in the oven there was some weird growth pattern that occurred), but it's cool because it's sourdough!  I had resisted sourdough for a while, because a) I usually wanted sourdough TODAY but the starter wouldn't be ready until at least a week from now, and then instead of starting the starter for the next time I wanted sourdough, I got lazy, and b) the thought of creating something that had to ferment and grow and be alive just seemed...intimidating!  But finally I took the plunge and I'm glad I did, sourdough has been a very welcome addition to my life!  :D

The starter was simple enough.  Flour, sugar, water, and yeast in a bowl, sitting on the counter for days.  I later read that adding yeast to the starter was actually quite blasphemous when dealing with sourdough pros, but I am no sourdough pro so I was willing to take that risk.  Even if it has started out as just a continued strain of my commercial , Red Star yeast, I'm sure that with time it will evolve and pick up other strains from the air and my kitchen (that's what I've read it's supposed to do, anyway).

Alive and Well

I followed the directions for caring for my young starter, and stirred it 2 or 3 times a day for 5 days.  It had usually separated out in to a hunk of wet dough submerged in a yellow liquid, but the stirring always brought it back together until the next time.  Until the 6th day, when I COMPLETELY forgot and didn't stir or even look at my starter for the entire day.  When I remembered on day 7, I was greeted not by my familiar submerged lump of dough, but what seemed like a wet pancake batter.  Is this right?  DID I BREAK IT?!  Do I have to start all over??  I scoured the net for resources on what the heck my sourdough starter should look like (since my book only told me "use when it's ready" - what does "ready" look like?) and found this very cool article which was so helpful, and that even talked about strains of starter that have been around since the 1840s!  Somehow it didn't even occur to me that you could just keep replenishing it for so long and keep it alive!  I've bookmarked it for future sourdough reference.

As you can see from the starting picture, the starter worked!  My bread was (sorta) beautiful, and had that slightly sour taste that I love so much.  I've heard that you can get sourdough starter from other places to use, not least of all from San Francisco (very well known for their sourdough prowess), so that's something I will have to try and see how it compares to my starter.  Interestingly enough, starter from other places only maintains that place's character for a short period of time, before it takes on the yeast in the air from whatever new place it's in.  So sourdough starter from the same batch that now live on opposite ends of the country could be entirely different in a year or so.

Obviously I'm fascinated by this, since it makes me feel a bit like a mad scientist, so as I play with this bread more, expect future posts with sourdough recipes and general madness!

Pre-Sweaters

I've been getting new goodies in the mail this week!

It all started with an ill-advised cold-turkey yarn diet.  My friends and family have come to know that when I declare "I'm not buying any yarn right now!", I literally mean that right now, at this very moment, I am not in the middle of the purchasing process for buying yarn.  In my mind I mean that I'm not increasing my stash at all until I knit the whole thing, but history has shown us that this hasn't happened even once, and the stash acquisition continues, usually in spectacular form after a drought.

I was doing very well, having not purchased any yarn since my visit to Stitches West in February, but suddenly the beast needed to be fed, and here I am showing you

SWEATER QUANTITIES!

This is slightly out of the ordinary for me!  If you go back to my Stitches post, you see what is my normal - single skeins of sock yarn or lace, perhaps 2 for a larger project or colorwork.  In fact, looking at my bank account this week, that would have been cheaper.  XD  But I'm excited about doing something a little different!

It started with a post on another blog, written by my friend Darcy.  Funny enough, I had been pondering the exact same thing that day, and had considered writing a post about it here, but she had beaten me to it (without us discussing it or anything)!  While I've made sweaters in the past, lately I've been sticking to projects that don't necessarily need to "fit" - mitts, shawlettes, etc.  I'm not at a weight that I'm particularly happy with, and thought of all the excuses to not make a sweater - I would lose weight and all that work would go to waste, it would look so much cuter on someone smaller than me, what if it doesn't fit, on and on.  But reading Darcy's post helped open my eyes that we all have excuses not to make a sweater, even though we all deserve one (yes, DESERVE).  So after starting a KAL/CAL called "You deserve a..." in our awesome little group on Ravelry, I decided that I would finally take the plunge on the Spring Garden Tee by Alana Dakos.  My friend Kate gave me this pattern last year for my birthday, and as we go in to Spring I think it's finally time I jump in!  I purchased some DK weight 100% silk in the colorway "Copper Penny" from Argosy Luxury Yarns, which is a color I have coveted for years.  So this "I deserve" moment was particularly indulgent and for the first time in a while, I'm actually really excited about casting on for a new sweater!

My other yarn comes to me by way of my friend Amber, who sadly recently discovered that she is allergic to alpaca.  It was one of those "sudden onset" type of things, so the alpaca she had been stashing for quite some time was suddenly a problem!  After properly sympathizing - "What?  Allergic to ALPACA??!  Oh noooooo, that's hoooooooorrible!" I later came back with "soooooo, whatcha gonna do with all that alpaca?"  Fortunately she accepted my offer of assistance, and I scored a sweater quantity of Ultra Alpaca in 3 shades of blue!  I have my mind on a stripey raglan pullover, we'll see if I can get that to work with the 3 colors I snagged.  I've worked with this yarn once before, making a cabled scarf.  I can be very picky about what yarn goes near my neck (it needs to be SOFT), and Ultra Alpaca fits that bill!

I uh, I may have one other sweater quantity coming in the mail, too.  Future me, if you're reading this: remember what yarn diets do to you!