England

I recently bought "Eat the little book of fast food" by Nigel Slater.  I picked it up from the library first and was quite taken with it.  Further to this project, and in general, I want to get more interesting in my cooking especially during the week and this book has already helped me cook outside the box.

While flipping through yesterday for ideas, I saw a recipe for chicken with bread sauce.  I've never heard of bread sauce.  My husband, who lived in England for 5 years, has never heard of bread sauce (but being the type that has never been huge on food, I'm not going to take him as an expert).  But it sounded tasty, Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver both describe bread sauce as an English concoction, I really like Nigel Slater so I was inspired.  My next International night would be England.  No dinner party, just my husband and I, but away we go!  Now, the State Department website lists Great Britain and not the countries within so I've just expanded my list of countries, meaning that instead of the 20 years to complete the countries in my original estimate, I'm now up to 20.5 years!!

With the bread in the sauce, I was on track with my goal of including bread in these international meals.  Along with the chicken, I wanted some vegetables other than the potatoes in the recipe.  Since I was already reading Jamie Oliver regarding bread sauce, I decided to look for a salad in his British recipes section and came up with Root Vegetable Salad - a mix of vegetables I either don't usually eat (radishes and celery) or don't usually eat raw (beets and fennel).  Then there was mint, which is one of my favourite tea and chocolate flavours but not, for some reason a favourite in the cooking department.  And, in my mind, a very English herb.  I think this relates to the lamb and mint sauce stereotype but whatever works.

While bouncing around on Jamie Oliver's site, I noted a crumble/crisp in the British recipes section.  Hah - I thought that was a North American thing but apparently it is British in origin - this according to Jamie Oliver and Wikipedia.  And it is my favourite dessert in the entire world (no exaggeration and not likely to change no matter how many desserts I try during this project).  The menu was done.  Forget the cookies (Jaffa cakes would have been fun to make) but crisp it is.  This is a bit of a cheat because I make it all the time but who cares.  It's my project so I can make the rules!

All was good.  I love the salad (which is good because it makes enough for a large dinner party and we'll be eating it for a few days yet) and the bread sauce was also really tasty.  All in all, a really good dinner and not what I would have expected for the English portion of the project, which made it even more fun.

Morocco

In an effort to reenergize my cooking, get together with friends more regularly and reenergize my interest in blogging, I've copied an idea I first heard about on a podcast which referenced Global Table Adventure.  The idea is to cook food from every country in the world over a certain period of time.  On Global Table Adventure, Sasha cooked a different country every week.  Since I'm not that ambitious, and we're getting into the time of year where curling takes over most of our spare minutes, I'm going to aim for once a month.  Twice if I'm really lucky.  This means it will take me about 20 years to complete this project.  We'll see if I can stick with it!

The other thing Sasha did was cook the countries in order.  This was my original plan.  I went to the US State Department website and picked up the list of countries and started to comb my cookbooks for ideas.  I was all set to start with Afghanistan until I thumbed through The Slanted Door cookbook I had in the house from the library and decided that I don't really want to wait 19 years for the Vietnamese dinner!  So I've decided to wing it, crossing off countries as I randomly journey the globe.

The other thing I want to do is use recipes I already have stockpiled.  This may mean some issues with complete authenticity but I'm not sure randomly selected web recipes (which I will also use as a source) offer a complete guarantee either.  So here goes.

First up, Morocco.  Why Morocco?  We were in the car when we set up a dinner date via text message with my in-laws.  So my first thought was, why not take advantage of this opportunity to kick off my project.  And Morocco is quite straight-forward.  I have a tagine, I've made Moroccan food before and it doesn't require a full day in the kitchen.  Since I had less than a full afternoon, this seemed to make sense.  So, I searched Eat Your Books, Pinterest and Paprkia and came up with a decent menu.  

As an aside, I'm going to try for two common themes as I cook around the world.  Bread and cookies.  I am guessing all countries make some sort of bread (I'm counting rice paper wrappers in the case of Vietnam).  And I'm hoping most also make cookies.  This is a selfish hope because I really think the cookie is the perfect dessert.

The cookies for this meal, called Moroccan Sugar Cookies by food.com were simple to make.  I did run out of vegetable oil so combined it with another oil that made the cookies taste a little grassy.  Lesson learned but they did taste really good with the North African Mint tea we enjoyed with them after dinner.

The bread, ksra, or Moroccan Anise Bread is from Flatbreads & Flavours, a cookbook I've had since 1995 and rarely cooked from.  It was delicious.  The book has really interesting essays and stories about the food too.  One item I found interesting is that people often take their homemade breads to the bakery for baking, covered in a distinctive cloth so that they can tell which bread is theirs when they go back to pick it up.

In terms of the rest of the meal, I made Moroccan Carrot and Red Lentil Soup from A Cedar Spoon, which had a very nice blend of flavours.  The last minute addition of lemon juice and a fresh coriander garnish gave the soup a hint of freshness.

The tagine was from a go-to winter book, All About Braising and was quite similar to a few other recipes I found.  Chicken, olives, moroccan spices and preserved lemons combined to make a warming, flavourful dish.  Along with couscous (with some sautéed onions and pistachios), this was really satisfying and the chicken was fall-off-the-bone delicious.

So, off to a good start.  Next stop might be Vietnam.  Or maybe something from the Southern Africa cookbook we got when we were in Botswana and Namibia a few years ago.  Decisions, decisions.  All I know is that the plan will include bread and cookies!

Free to decide

I was half-heartedly thinking about riding in a Mountain Equipment Coop ride this morning but the Knitter's Fair is on.  What to do?  What to do?

The first would have been good exercise and a nice bike ride.  The second, a reward for the big bike ride last weekend and a morning surrounded by yarn.

In the end, it was not hard to choose.  The sudden cold weather and rainy skies, combined with the lure of all things knitting, made the decision even easier.  And now my yarn-buying diet is over.  Although, given that I had to travel an hour to get to Kitchener, could I lump the purchase under the category of travel yarn buying?  A bit of a stretch.

I didn't go too crazy.  Just a few skeins, one sweater quantity, a couple of sets of needles and two really nice bags from Alison Ruth Designs.  And I prevented myself from buying more than four balls of Silk Garden.

I was able to show Rae from Stix & Stones my Foolproof from her knit-a-long.  And hi to Gail and Susan who I saw in line at opening and then never again.  Hopefully they had as much fun as I did.  What am I saying, of course they had as much fun as I did.  Who wouldn't?

Escarpment Blues ...

… and greens and grey, grey, grey roads.  And lots and lots of hills.  Yesterday I participated in the Halton Epic Tour.  It is a bike ride through parts of the escarpment in Southern Ontario.  I rode 80km, at times wondering why I signed up for this.  It is not something I normally do … sign up for these things.  I prefer to hop on my bike and go for a ride from my house.  For as long or as short as the mood governs.  On nice flat roads.

I should also say that I've never been the sporty sort.  I realize the benefits of exercise for the heart so, like taking a medicine, I exercise most days.  But this summer, after really enjoying the Ride for Heart on the Don Valley Parkway in June, my usual summer enjoyment of cycling took on a more obsessive flavour.  I have been riding at least once and usually twice every weekend.  I rode before work until the recent shorter days put an end to that.  I rode a bunch on our vacation.  I have even ridden in the rain!  And I signed up for the Epic Tour.

So off I went yesterday morning and made it through my chosen distance.  I won't say it was easy.  It wasn't impossible, because I have been riding a lot but it was difficult because I live by the lake and there aren't hills readily available to ride.  You have to seek them out.  Which I have done to a certain extent.  But not to an 80km hilly ride extent.

I really only felt like packing it in once.  It was at the top of one of the lesser inclines and I stopped to get a breather and a drink of water.  One of the girls doing the same thing mentioned the upcoming big decline.  If I had the choice between a steep uphill and a steep downhill, I would choose the uphill.  I associate this with a childhood arm break during a flying downhill attempt.  Given I was 9 at the time, I really should have overcome this but, not being the sporty sort and a big chicken, this still hasn't happened.  So after I confirmed that the downhill was worse than the switchback one at the beginning of the ride, I felt like crying and quitting.  I think the only thing that saved me was the check of the GPS that said that there were only 13km to go.  I had to finish.  So off I went, riding both brakes all the way down the big hill.

I automatically assume people that go in these things are the athletes, fitter than fit.  But I realized that there were more people like me than the others.  This became really clear on the: dreaded-the-entire-ride-by-everyone second last hill.  When approximately 75% of the riders were walking it, I knew I wasn't alone.  And it felt good.  And I could cheer the people who were riding it without feeling like I was a failure for not being able to do it myself.

Once at the top, a drink of water taken, I hopped on my bike again and continued, up some more hills, to the finish line.  Happy to be done.  Happy that my husband was waiting at the finish line cheering me on.

I told myself a couple of times on the ride that if I finished, I could go to the Kitchener Waterloo Knitters Fair next Saturday.  It conflicts with a Mountain Equipment Coop Ride in Burlington.  Which one should I choose?  At this point, it will be the knitting but we'll see what next Saturday brings.

Whiskey in the Jar

It never fails that my biggest harvests are ready on the hottest day of the year.  So yesterday, I contributed to the unnecessary burning of fossil fuels by:

1. Decreasing my pile of tomatoes to make my most favourite savoury relish … tomato jam from Food in Jars.  After 5 pounds of tomatoes, I still have a good number for munching. And this jam in January is like a ray of sunshine on your tongue. 
2. Justifying the extra peaches I picked up at the Farmers' Market on Saturday, I whipped up Peach Barbecue Sauce from Williams-Sonoma.  Any recipe that includes a half cup of bourbon can't be wrong.  And peaches and whiskey just seem to make sense.  I was a bit hesitant about the called-for cupful of Worcestershire sauce.  It sounded like it would be overwhelming but it blended in really well with the peaches and bourbon.  We had the sauce on barbecued chicken and it doesn't have an overpowering flavour but instead enhanced the flavour of the chicken.  Yummy.  And four jars on the shelf for another winter pick-me-up.
3. Using some sour cherry rhubarb jam from last summer that I boiled too far, making it relatively unspreadable on top of my peanut butter toast, I used Eat Your Books to locate the recipe for Rye Crumble Bars from Molly Wizenberg's blog Orangette. These are fantastic.  The jam provides a perfect contrast to the shortbread crust and oatmeal topping.  I can't remember how many jars of this jam I made but I'll be watching out for them in the jam cupboard to make this again soon.
4. Further decreasing the pile of tomatoes, since the oven was on anyway, for lunch I made the Sweet Cherry Tomato and Sausage bake from Jamie Oliver's Jamie at Home book.  This recipe was also found through Eat Your Books, my favourite cooking website.  I am exploring so many recipes that I just wouldn't have found the old fashioned way.  This was a tasty wrap to a very satisfying morning of cooking.

Chicago

My New Year's resolution was not to buy any more yarn unless I was travelling. And here I am in Chicago, not too far from Loopy Yarns. Since the store was (sort of) directly on my way to see the bean, I thought, how could I not go?  What a lovely store. There were so many yarns I could have purchased but I decided I could only buy if I found something I hadn't seen before or that was truly different. This yarn which might be cascade cascadia(??) was it. The name on the ball band is covered by the price tag and I don't remember the name for sure. I will sort it out when I get back to the land of wireless intermet. The hotel has it in the lobby. Otherwise you have to pay some ridiculous amount in the rooms so I have had to be creative with my internet usage. I bought a roaming plan but am going to NJ next month so need to be careful not to use it all in the 2 days I'm in Chicago. 

I'm here for a conference so haven't done heaps of sightseeing but did get a bit done this afternoon.  The bean, the fountain, a river cruise. It was all good but I brought the wrong shoes despite the little voice in my head telling me to be smarter and I came back to the hotel with a couple of blisters. Oh well, they will heal. 

Surprising Me

Several years ago, I worked at Bay and Bloor and they opened a Williams Sonoma store across the street.  A big Williams Sonoma store that I still love visiting.  I am pretty well stocked in the pots and pans department but, as mentioned time after time, I love cookbooks.  And I was enticed by the small Williams Sonoma cookbooks that are built around a theme.  My favourite Whole Wheat bread recipe comes from the Bread book.  There are others for Pasta, Salads, Steak and Chop and so on.  I have at least a dozen because they sold them in boxes of 4 which built the collection pretty quickly.  Add to that, Costco sold them later on too so I picked up some there too.

Anyway, I bought some (sustainable) sea bass from my local Longo's the other day and was looking for something to do with it from my cookbooks through my new favourite website, Eat Your Books, and stumbled across a recipe from the Seafood book that I don't think I realized I owned.  Obviously, I realized it long enough to enter the book into Eat Your Books as I was building my library but when I pulled all of that together, I was hardly paying close attention.  Anyway, the recipe was Sea Bass on a bed of Fennel and it was excellent.  Fennel is one of my favourite veggies and roasting is my favourite way of preparing it.  The recipe has you roast the fennel for 20 minutes (next time I would go longer) at 400 and then putting the fish in the pan for 10 minutes to finish.  While the fennel is cooking, the fish marinates in a lemon juice honey mixture to give it some extra flavour.

A very tasty result and another cookbook found.

Everyday is Like Sunday … or I wish it were

I decided to stop blogging.  And then Natalie said that reading this is the best way to keep up with what is going on with me since we rarely see each other.  So here goes.  We'll see how long it lasts.

I discovered a new, and totally meant for me website, thanks to Chocolate & Zucchini.  It is Eat Your Books and is exactly what I need.  Before I explain it, I should say that I have 181 cookbooks.  And I have saved hundreds of recipes from magazines on my Paprika app.

On Eat Your Books, you enter all of your cookbooks by name and when they have been indexed in the website, you have a searchable inventory of all of your recipes by ingredient.  It is awesome.  The only, rather large issue … they are pretty terrible at having indexes for Canadian cookbooks.  The good part, members can index books.  I am going to contribute to this but it will take time.  I started indexing a book a couple of weeks ago and am only about 1/4 of the way through.  So eventually.

Anyway, ever in search of a theme, I decided to write a blog about tonight's dinner, sourced from my cookbook collection, courtesy of the Eat Your Books index, partly.

Since it has been a fabulous weekend, barbecue was in the air.  We had Honey Whiskey Glazed Chicken from Lynn Crawford at Home (not a book indexed in the website), Freekeh Pilaf from Plenty by Ottolenghi and Roasted Cauliflower from the Gourmet cookbook.  I improvised a little in all.  Everything was great.  I pretty much improvised a bit on everything.  This is how I made the Freekeh Pilaf:

1 medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup freekeh
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground allspice
1 cup chicken stock
salt and black pepper
chopped beet greens
a handful of chopped mint, parsley, basil and chives

Saute the butter, olive oil and onions over medium heat for 10 minutes until onion is soft.

Soak freekeh in cold water for 5 minutes.  Drain in a sieve and rinse well under cold water.  Drain well.

Add the freekeh, cinnamon and allspice to the onions, add the stock and salt and pepper.  Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to low and cook for 15-20 minutes.  Throw the beet greens into the pot and put the lid back on the pot.  Remove from heat and leave covered for 5 minutes.

Stir herbs into the warm pilaf.

Enjoy.

Ottolenghi adds some pine nuts and uses a lemon flavoured yogurt to serve.  Both would be good but I forgot the pine nuts and didn't have any yogurt.  It was all very tasty without.

O Canada!!!

And the mens hockey team wins again!  The gold medal game was excellent but I have to comment on the press and their flip-flopping.  A few days ago, before the Canada US game, the commentators were saying:  the US is the team to beat, Canada can't score, didn't bring the right players, etc.  Today they are saying that the Canadian team is the best team ever assembled.  Geesh (but in a good way).

Do it again

I can't resist the Tulip sweater.  I have made 3 for baby, one for a slightly older girl and the boy version, Rocketry.  I don't often want to knit the same thing twice, let alone several times.  But it is such a fun knit and I have tons of Dream in Color Classy to finish up in the stash so it was a perfect time to make another.

This is technically an olympic project by I'm not really finding myself compelled to get involved too much.  I am enjoying the olympics, particularly moguls, curling and hockey, and knitting while watching.  That's good enough for me.

I'll be up early tomorrow cheering for the Canadians in mens hockey.  Go Canada Go!!!

Reading in bed

Am getting caught up on old RSS feeds from my favourite blogs.  Squawkfox comes through again with a great tip and has introduced me to free magazines through a combination of my local library and Zinio.  She gives detailed instructions on what to do to get free access to a big selection of magazines here.  I downloaded about 1/2 a dozen just now and am getting to read as I take a nap after an intense weekend of curling (which we won - regions here we come!!!!).

The great exhale

Some weeks are challenging to get through.  This week, it is for no good reason other than it is f*(&ing cold outside.  Don't get me wrong.  I actually like winter.  To qualify, I like southern Ontario winter which generally is not too cold (my first winter here I wore a raincoat with a liner the entire season quite comfortably).  But this month-long cold snap is really getting to me.  Leaving the house involves about 17 extra clothing items and 15 minutes of prep time.

Anyway, I had to take my car in to the garage this morning (my car has been in the shop more in 2014 than I've been driving it but that is another very annoying story) and needed to get home from the train without the benefit of my in-house taxi service so, took the bus to, admittedly, not that far from my house, but was never-the-less very glad for my parka, hood, knitted hat, cowl and mitts.  When I got home, I was strongly motivated to order pizza.  Then I remembered that I don't have any cash, don't like using a credit card when ordering food, the aforementioned in house taxi service wasn't home yet and we still have good food in the fridge so … I decided to make some pizza.

The pizza dough comes from Fine Cooking magazine, a very quick, limited rise time dough and a bunch of yummy ingredients from the fridge (mushrooms, red peppers, pancetta, mozzarella, beet greens and goat cheese).  Combined with a nice bottle of Peller Estates Merlot and I'm feeling the relaxing effects of the great exhale.

Rise up

It is rather cruel that when you spend a couple of days and a few hours making bread that you aren't supposed to taste it until it cools for an hour.  Fortunately, I have a braise in the oven and the bread will go very well with it so I'm not too upset.  And the little bit of crust that stuck to the pan when I popped the bread out onto the rack was enough to tide me over for a little bit longer.  We'll have to see if I can hold out all the way to dinner.

About the bread itself … I have two of Peter Reinhart's bread cookbooks and I can't decide whether I like them or not.  I regularly and successfully make a really nice loaf from a fairly simple recipe.  Then I crack open one of Reinhart's books and the bread takes at least two days to produce.  The recipes require pre-mixing of certain parts of the dough the day before the double rising process.  And instead of the standard two loaf recipe, his recipes make one.  And I can't say that I have thought Reinhart's breads were so awesome that they were worth the extra time.  But I have had very good success with bread lately, and I'm giving the proofing feature on my new oven credit for that, so thought I would try again.  More to come after the official tasting later today.

And speaking of braising, I'm back into Molly Stevens' All About Braising book.  Yesterday I made a delicious braised tuna with chickpeas and radicchio.  It is a fairly quick recipe; a maximum of an hour from start to plate.

Today a little more involved braised oxtails is in the oven.  I have no idea if I like oxtails or not but I see them every time I go to my local butcher and decided to take the plunge.  If I don't like them, I can always have another slice of bread!
 

The sunny side of the street

We had quite a bit of snow with a quite a bit of blowing today.  The hood fan outlet has been banging away all night and much of today.  I just finished my second shovel of the driveway.  It is alway interesting how well my husband's curling schedule lines up to allow him to leave me with maximum shovelling duties.  Good thing I like doing it most of the time.

For now the snow has stopped and the sun is shining brightly.  One of the things I like about winter is the way the combination of sun and snow makes the world simply shine.  And it gives you that sense (as I look out the window anyway) that things will get warmer again.

I finished another project yesterday.  These mitts, which go with my new cowl are from the same Norah Gaughan book and are called Rosina.  These are not mitts I would have picked out to knit if I wasn't marching toward a goal.  But I'm glad I made them.  They look really nice and I feel so coordinated with my knitwear for the first time ever.

Almost

Yesterday, after writing about darning socks, I got the urge to keep going.  Nine pairs later and I now have an overflowing sock drawer again.  Yay!  The crazy thing, I can only say that I'm almost done.  I still have 2 or 3 pairs in the sock repair bin. I do like knitting, and wearing, socks.

Warm love

I really should try to take better pictures.  This one doesn't do the project justice.  But anyway, I have finished my second January goal project.  It is the nyx cowl by Norah Gaughan.  It used 2 skeins of Manos del Uruguay Maxima that I bought using a Groupon from Spun a few years ago.  I have looked at it many times and couldn't decide what I wanted to make that would maximize its coziness.  I think I chose the right project.  I love it.

I now have mittens on the needles with the third and last skein of this yarn from the stash and am really looking forward to having matching winter wear for the first time ever!  And with a goal of January 31 completion, I'll get to wear it all this winter!

I feel it all

These are the first pair of "fat socks" I made.  So called because they are made with Hello Yarn's Fat Sock Yarn, a sport weight yarn that I quite enjoyed knitting socks with.  I had three different colour ways that made three pairs of very comfortable socks.  I like wearing them around the house when I have no plans to venture too far in shoes that are too small to fit the socks.

I made these socks several years ago and have worn them quite often.  As a result, they have popped a few holes.  The heel and a good part of the toe are both made up of replacement parts (aka leftover yarn).  They are now quite a bumpy walking experience but I still can't bring myself to throw them out.  I guess as long as the darning is on the bottom of the sock, I'm the only one who is going to know about it and until feeling the little bumps from the darning starts to bug me, I'll keep fixing them up.

I have a box of other socks with holes in them that I've started fixing gradually.  If I have a few moments when getting dressed, I'll darn a pair to wear for the day instead of pulling a pair out of the sock drawer. This might get them finished in time to start popping holes in my newer socks.

A nice side effect of my sock knitting hobby and reluctance to part with any of the socks … I get to link with the past by using my grandmother's darning eggs.

Howl

For the last several nights between 9 and 10 pm, we hear cats howling in our front yard.  Last night, it happened again.  This time, it sounded like one of the little monsters was in our house he was so loud.  So we went to investigate.  Now, I thought I knew all of the cats that hang out in the neighbourhood.  But when I opened the front door to a pale coloured fluffy fellow sitting on the porch, he was a new one to me.  His rival, one of the black cats that hangs around was on the driveway.  They were in full standoff mode and didn't immediately react to my clapping my hands at them to get going on their way.  The black cat (who I have a soft spot for, loving black cats as I do), took off quite quickly after the first period of resistance.  And the other guy went the other way.

All of this got me to wonder about the other guy.  Has he been hanging out in our yard because he has nowhere else to go?  Is he just trying out a new territory and has heard through the cat grapevine that our yard is a good place to hang out?  Maybe he lives with the new people a few houses down.  I may never know but am sure the nights of serenading aren't over yet.  Some territory still needs to be sorted out.

Little Creatures

A co-worker who suspects that I might knit socks while on conference calls is having a baby.  So I decided I would achieve two objectives in one go.  I made some socks for the new baby and amended and PDF'd the pattern for a baby sock I wrote about in this blog ages ago.  I think they are so cute.  And at 25 grams of yarn, they make a decent dent in amounts left over from adult socks.

Purple Haze

Another batch of hats are going in the mail to Warm Hands network today.  I like the idea of someone in a colder climate than mine having something nice and cozy for their head.

I guess I could have used all of the purple Merino Aran for something else but it makes such a nice hat and I don't have as many babies to knit for as I did when I bought it so it was languishing in the stash.  It's nice to put it to good use.

The only hat of the bunch I have been tempted to keep is the multi-coloured one but, as I've said before, hats aren't my best look and I have a couple that don't squash my hair too much so I'll stick with wearing those when necessary.

I drafted a pattern for mittens that I'll use the striped approach for and those won't sit in a pile in the closet never to be worn.  I've drafted the pattern as mittens but have been thinking of these future items as fingerless mitts.  I'll see what I'm feeling when I get there.  They just need to get on the needles which I should try to make happen for the January striped challenge the Knotty Girls are running.  There's still lots of time, right?

Baby, It's Cold Outside

We were in Northern Ontario for a few days over the holidays and it was cold.  Minus 25 before the wind and I kept thinking … I'm so glad I don't live here anymore.  Then I came back down south to the Polar votex or whatever they are calling it and all I can say is, at least I became acclimatized while I was away.  And I have a nice parka … not a Canada Goose, Kerry … but a $100 generic special picked up when a local store was going out of business.  And of course, lots of nice wool items to keep my head and hands warm.  Now if only they would put a bit of sand or salt on our street, I could actually go for a walk and really test out the cold resistance of the outfit.

The projects are progressing and now I'm trying to decide on my olympic-viewing projects.  I'm thinking a finishing-based objective might be a good one but I'm still undecided.

All the Small Things

1.  My first stash busting challenge is done!  It is the 76 Stitches hat made from bits of yarn.  The Debbie Bliss Merino Aran in purple that I've been making a bunch of hats from is, once again, featured here but the colour changes break the monotony of using the same yarn over and over and over again.  In my mind I'm seeing fingerless gloves in a similar colour pattern so think I'll cast on for those too.  That will likely use up most (hopefully all) of the little pile of yarn I started with.

2.  I've made good progress on the Nora Gaughan orange cowl this week.  I'm about half way through the first skein and have acquired the rhythm of the pattern so think things should move faster from here.  I managed about 4 rows on the sweater, had to take them out because I missed one set of cables so gained no ground.  I'll try to get some traction there today.

3.  I have been semi-following the Bon Appetit Food Lovers Cleanse again this year.  I learned from the last time I tried it that I can't keep up with everything and I'm not making two different meals for dinner.  I might be able to trick the husband into eating a vegetarian dinner once in a while but never if it features beets!  So I've made some of the recipes and kept with the spirit of the menus where I haven't followed them to the letter.  After a month that involved a lot more eating out than normal, rich food over the holidays and altogether too much wine and cookies, it feels good to be eating healthy food again.  This plan is less of a diet and more of a launching pad back into eating good stuff again.  I am expecting a bit of a reduction in weight as a nice side effect.

4.  I deleted that annoying Tetris Blitz game and have been getting things done during times I would otherwise have been playing the game.  I did go down a solitaire rabbit hole last night but have now won the Forty Thieves game that was distracting me so can now move on with my life.  I am really glad we never got into PS3 and the like.  I would be toast.

Happy New Year!

The stash diet officially starts today.  In addition to the project objectives I defined using the Stash and Burn challenges, I've also decided on a Knotty Girls challenge.  This one is a challenge to use up partial balls to "stripe it up".  I'm going to make a hat that I've planned to start for a few months but hadn't managed to get to yet.  It is called the 76-stitches hat and is from Interweave fall 2004.  So two objectives met:  stash reduction and using a pattern in my collection.  Perfect.  And the next mail-in deadline for Warm Hands is January 31 so I'll be motivated to finish and get it in the mailing for this month.

I finished this hat yesterday.  It is a free pattern called Barley from Tin Can knits and I really like it.  A quick knit but with a little bit of design that makes it more interesting than a basic hat.

I also realized that I hadn't inventoried my sock yarn collection so I did that today.  I have so much yarn it is frightening.