Do the Shuffle

Yesterday afternoon, for no apparent reason, I got a total bug up my butt.  I decided that I had...simply had to rearrange all the books in my office.  I've got five tall bookshelves in there.  Until yesterday, four of them had history books, and the knitting stuff was smushed into only one.  This was a hold over from when I was a history grad student and thought this knitting thing was a side gig, something I did to keep me from roaming the streets in my spare time.  Well, that's not quite how my life is working out, and it [...]

November 25, 2013|

A House Divided

The Boy and I are lucky enough to agree about all the important things in life.  We differ only on the small matters.  Small matters such as how hot chocolate ought to be prepared.  He feels it should be so dark as to be nearly bitter and so thick as to be flirting with the title of pudding.  I feel it should be delicately sweet and deliciously creamy.  He is, clearly, terribly misguided.  But I, being the clever and accommodating (and apparently terribly modest) soul that I am, have devised a perfect solution. It's such a perfect solution to a [...]

November 18, 2013|

I’ll Take It

I'm not the craigslist type.  The lack of apostrophe bugs the ever-living crap out of me.  More importantly, I am working hard to pare down what I own (someday I will have a tiny house), and shopping for new things doesn't quite fit with that plan.  So it was rather out of character when I found myself there early this month.  I'd seen some mention of someone finding something nifty on there and wondered it it ever really happened.  I headed over, and what did I see, shining out from among the slag heap of 70s particleboard atrocities, but a [...]

October 24, 2013|

Let Them Eat Cake

This is the recipe from the towels shown in the post from last week.  I'm not typing it up all proper and presentable, because that would rather go against the spirit of the thing now wouldn't it.  The handwriting (oh and that monkey) are half the fun. Now to be honest, I don't ever use crisco (because I never actually have it on hand) and instead use all butter.  I also tend to use cake flour and not bother with sifting.  Oh, and I've been known to make it with buttermilk instead of regular milk and to up the coco [...]

October 21, 2013|

Printing…not on paper

I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a very good chance that most everyone in your life has a birthday more or less every year.  I, personally, find this super irritating.  I've decided I'm just about as old as I need to be, and most folks I know (at least most over the age of 25 or so) feel the same.  Alas, it's not in my power to change. So given that pesky reality, I occasionally find myself in need of birthday presents.  I ran out of ideas for these things long long ago, so I've taken to blatantly [...]

October 16, 2013|

Shrub, Part III

If you've been following along for the last few weeks, you might remember I started a shrub a little while ago.  I reported on step one (in which we chop and sugar), and step two (in which much vinegar is used).  Step three was waiting.  Days and days and days of waiting.  Patient waiting while our friendly microbes do their magic.  You can guess how much fun that is.  I didn't feel that required much of an update. But now, now we're on step four.  Step four is putting the delicious syrup into some sort of long term storage vessel [...]

October 13, 2013|

Shrub, Part II

When last we left our bowls of fruit, they were dry and covered in a heavy coating of sugar.  A day and a half on the counter, and they'd thrown off huge amounts of juice.  Nearly unbelievable amounts of juice.  Let's compare. Plums, yesterday: Plums today: Pears yesterday: Pears today: That's good though, that's exactly what we want them to do.  I'm not quite sure how that works (if forced to guess I'd say something about osmotic pressure and sugar and cell walls, but chemistry was a long time ago and was shamefully lacking in plums). Now, the stuff in [...]

September 25, 2013|

Shrub, Part I

The internet is a dangerous place.  On the internet, you can be going along, minding your own business, when suddenly you stumble across a recipe for a plum shrub cocktail.  That's going to change the course of your day right there.  Especially if you then find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of shrub theory and practice and are the type to conduct the occasional science experiment in your kitchen. So the gist, for those of you new to shrubs, is that they're a fruit syrup vinegar concoction.  They go in drinks (alcoholic or not) and have a delicious fruity/sweet/tart [...]

September 24, 2013|

Chop chop chop

I took a chunk of the celebratory day off (the reward for getting the next mini book off to the printer) and spent it making herb salts.  You see, the herb garden is a bit overgrown.  This is because we take a hands off (read 'deeply lazy') approach to our gardening.  After we stick plants in the ground, we let them fend for themselves, save the occasional splash of water if it's really dry.  This year, the herbs rather took to this treatment, and it's a bit of a jungle out there.  We can't eat that much fresh, something had [...]

August 7, 2013|
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