My Spare Time

I know it’s not a new decade, but I’m going to pretend it is, because 2010 is such a nice, round, happy number, and it’s a good time for a fresh start. I’m not a big fan of resolutions, because every day is an effort to be better, isn’t it? I’m not trying to be cheesy or coy, but I really think each day is a fresh start.

That being said, here are my resolutions:

1. Get less fat! I really need to lose weight. I miss my pretty clothes. Eat more healthfully, go to the gym more often. I’m going to survive the January gym rush, as I have the last two years.

2. Reduce my carbon and trash footprint. We recycle, but we could really be better about buying less, and also buying items that generate less trash overall.

3. Knit more, buy less yarn.

4. Spend less overall.

5. Complain less about work, even as my anxiety level has increased, and my workload has multiplied.

6. Be nicer to the boy. I mean, really. Stress yelling AT him is unacceptable. But it’s awesome that he understands.

7. Call the parents more.

I think that’s a good place to start…and fail!

Based on the advice of a friend, I signed up for the Shared Harvest CSA, a three month winter CSA. You get three deliveries, once each month for October, November and December. We got our first share last weekend. It was quite some feat getting about 40 pounds of vegetables into our modest condo and modest condo-sized refrigerator.

Here are photos of the share, minus the 10 pounds of apples:

You can find the original pictures, with descriptive notes, at my flickr.

I visited the farmer’s market not too long before our first pick-up, so we haven’t made great use of our share.  However, yesterday, with what energy I had leftover from fighting this cold, I made a cheesy casserole with the broccoli and cauliflower, based on this “recipe.”  I’ll update this post with pics once I finish the dish.  It’s waiting to be baked.

Please don’t hate me, blog.

Back in hot, steamy July, I had the good fortune to travel to Vermont, and spend the weekend with a bunch of lovely ladies.  Those women included none other than Heather Ross, of Weekend Sewing, et al. fame, and Liesl Gibson, of Oliver & S, et al. fame.  Sure, I paid a pretty penny, but I got to sew under the tutelage of incredibly gifted and talented women, eat unlimited chocolate chip cookies, bask in the glory of Vermont in the summer (buggy!), and swim in a clear, cool lake.  The setting was The Blueberry Hill Inn.  I don’t miss heat and humidity and bug spray, but I miss that part of the summer.

Stupidly, I brought a commercial pattern to work on, specifically, a men’s tropical shirt for Roomate.*  So, so stupid.  I could have had Heather Ross herself draping fabric on me and fitting me according to what she imagined for her own patterns.  But, no, the stupid shirt it was.  And let’s not talk about how it’s draped on the back of my dining room chair, waiting for buttons and some finishing touches.  No, let’s not.

A few weeks ago, Heather Ross also posted on her blog that she was having a garage sale of sorts.  Select a package size, and submit some requests, and she would do her best to fulfill them with stuff from the boxes of, well, stuff, she’s accumulated over the years.  I opted for the middle size, and asked for a few crocheted lobsters.  I got no lobsters, but I did get amaaaaaazing sushi fabric.  Amaaaazing!

Here are some pics from the weekend.  I will get around to posting pics of the misc. sale goodies when, well, hopefully before I get around to finishing that shirt…

Blueberry Hill Inn

Not Sewing

Silver Lake

You can find the rest of my pics on Flickr here and HR’s own post on the weekend here.  HR hosted another weekend in August, with Denyse Schmidt as the co-leader.  Here is HR’s post.  I am somewhat flummoxed by the cardigans and jeans.

*In other lives, err, blogs, I used to call him “the Boy”; I’m pretty sure at one point, he even became “the BF”.  I believe his current name aptly describes our situation.  As does “PITA”.

I haven’t been stashing yarn and fabric for that long, but I stumbled across a very compelling project on one of the blogs I read, Pink Chalk Studio, who also runs a fabulous online fabric shop, btw. It’s called Iraqi Bundles of Love. In short, the idea is to gather raw sewing and knitting supplies and notions and send them off with IBOL guy to distribute to local people where he’s stationed. I think it’s awesome. Time to de-stash!!

Book club for Thunderbolt Kid was canceled at the last minute, and I missed today’s meeting on The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society because our trip to the Nashoba Valley Winery ran longer than expected. We went to the winery to partake of the beer, pretzel and mustard pairings, but by the time we got there, three hours into the event, the pretzels were long gone. When I made a comment to an employee there, she said, “Oh, they were to die for!” Thanks, helpful employee, for making me feel even worse that I had missed it. It’s not like we were offered a discount for having to eat stale potato chips instead of delicious homemade soft pretzels, but that’s ok, just rub it in.

Anyway, in other book news, my friend loaned me Heat, by Bill Buford. Oh man, that book made me want to drop everything and travel to Italy and eat pasta until I have to be rolled home on a barge. The more responsible alternative is to cook more pasta at home, I suppose. Here is a recipe for linguine with clams from the book that I want to try. I put it here mainly for my own reference. Diana, make this. Soon.

My advice: ignore the Babbo cookbook and begin by roasting small pinches of garlic and chili flakes and medium pinches of the onion and pancetta in a hot pan with olive oil. Hot oil accelerates the cooking process, and the moment everything gets soft you pour it away (holding back the contents with your tongs) and add a slap of butter and a splash of white wine, which stops the cooking. This is Stage One . . . In Stage Two, you drop the pasta in boiling water and take your messy buttery pan and fill it with a big handful of clams and put it on the highest possible flame. The objective is to cook them fast – they’ll start opening after three or four minutes, when you give the pan a swirl, mixing the shellfish juice with the buttery porky white wine emulsion. At six minutes and thirty seconds, you use your tongs to pull your noodles out and drop them into your pan – all that starchy pasta water slopping in with them is still a good thing; give the pan another swirl; flip it; swirl it again to ensure that the pasta is covered by the sauce. If it looks dry, add another splash of pasta water; if too wet, pour some out. You can let the thing cook away for another half minute or so, swirling, swirling, until the sauce streaks across the bottom of the pan, splash it with olive oil and sprinkle it with parsley: dinner. (pp 130-131)

One day, I will make it and take pictures and show you. Until then, I will just have to enjoy the lobster dinners ($4.88 a pound for lobster?! Hello!!) and vanilla cupcakes I’ve been making and that are being made for me. The cupcakes currently are cooling and waiting to be iced.

I know this blog has been neglected, but I am going to try and post at least once a week. I’ve got a few blogs brewing, as I’ve been up to some fairly interesting and fun stuff. At least to me.

One final note: on the knitting needles, I recently cast on . It’s probably going to be finished just in time for next spring, but it will be beautiful!

Photos will be uploaded at a later date, but I would like to take this opportunity to memorialize the several plants that have died on me. English thyme, a pepper plant that was gnawed off at the base and hauled away by what could only have been a mini-beaver, the basil plant that was in full glory only to shrivel away one weekend, etc. Part of the problem is his awful infestation of what I believe are fungus gnats. I really wanted to know nothing about them, as I hate things that swarm, and have the boy take care of them, but that did not happen. And away I googled. Bleh.

I tried the potato trick, where you cut a piece of potato and put it on the soil. It attracts the larvae. The problem is, when you pick up the potato, all the little larvae thingies are like swarming around underneath and you can watch them go back into the dirt. Eew. I tried to use organocide, but that smelled like fish (being made of fish oil, natch) and killed my thyme and lettuces. The yellow stickers only work on the adults and leave enough behind to sprout what must be thousands of offspring. I tried the dish soap and water, but I think my problem and my container garden set-up was too great for this little trick. Same with the fan.

My last resort is Knock-Out Gnats(tm) Granules. It looks like yeast, you put it in water, and you water your plants. It’s basically bacteria that attack the larvae. Fingers crossed that I don’t come back from my weekend camping trip and come home to a bunch of dead plants. Tear.

Oh, and yes, I’m going camping this weekend. Hopefully lovely pictures will follow.

I’m getting a little lucky, it seems. I haven’t won things since I won that 5 lb. chocolate bar and a Michael Jackson coloring book in third grade or something. (My mom took the chocolate bar away because I was fat. Have you seen Weeds?…Anyway, off topic.) But in the last few months, I have won two, count ‘em TWO, giveaways.

The first was through the Sew, Mama, Sew May Day Giveaway. I won foofanagle’s Carrot Cake quilt and Gold Seeds fabric.

And just tonight, I found out that I won the Target eco-friendly giveaway at shelterrific. I’m not sure if I should reveal that just yet, but no one reads this, so there you go. So excited!

Now, if only I would win one of the AMAZING giveaways over at The Pioneer Woman. I’m talking, DSLRs!

Do you love fabric? Do you love free? I don’t have many (any?) followers, but one day, I might, and one day, you might want to know about this great fabric website called The Fabric Shopper. They’re giving away the pretty ditty apron and fabric for it, via Phat Fabric!

While I have been blogging in one form or another since about 2002, I started this blog because I wanted to participate in this online community of of bloggers who, in my opinion, relish the simple things, things that some may consider retro.  Making things by hand, either through knitting, sewing, and cooking.  I’m not sure why this is going on.  Maybe people are tired of the overconsumerism, the cumulative impact on the earth, what it’s doing our relationships with each other.  I’m not sure.  I just noticed that it’s going on, and that I wanted to document my participation in it.  There is a wee bit of nesting syndrome involved, but maybe I’ll save that topic for another day.

One blog I really enjoy reading, which happens to be food-related, is Serious Eats. This entry inspired my dinner tonight.

I had no garlic, and I had only frozen kale from a different recipe, but despite these shortcomings, this is exactly the type of dish I cook when I eat alone. Simple but hearty, with easily substitutable ingredients. No kale? What about chard? No garlic? It’s ok, you don’t have to impress anyone. A glass of wine rounds out any missing ingredients.

I followed the suggestions in the recipe and added both bacon AND wheat pasta. The wheat pasta doesn’t create a starchy water like regular pasta does, but it is way less guilt-inducing, so I used romano cheese (what I had in the fridge, natch) to bind the dish together. Probably more calories than necessary, but hey, I got my ass kicked in spin class this morning, so it’s ok.

Some lovely ladies I know started a book club. Unfortunately, it seems to meet on every weekend that I’m out of town, so I’ve only made about two meetings. This weekend, we are meeting again, and I will be in town! Also, I’ve already read the book. It’s Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Hilarity! I love Bill Bryson. This book, about his childhood, is not as good as his travel books, particularly In a Sunburned Country and A Walk in the Woods. Those books were laugh out loud, embarrassingly so, funny. Can’t wait!