This blog originated as a knitting blog, exclusively. But as a very busy person, with limited knitting time, weeks might pass without something knitting-related to say, so I started filling in with other things. Now, even though it has a knitting-themed title, and I do try to focus on handwork whenever possible, it has a bit of everything…..and I like it that way. I hope you do too.

The only exception to “everything” is that I decided to reanimate my old food blog, Luscious. I wrote a post about this a couple of weeks ago. I don’t post on Luscious as often as I post here, on Thrums, but whenever I do, oh how I want you to see it! This morning, for instance, my husband made a big batch of pickles for me, as he does every summer, and so I posted it on Luscious. I put a little widget in the sidebar – take a look:

1. At the top is a counter – remember, the person who leaves the 500th comment will win a skein of Noro, brought directly from Tokyo. (I hope it’s you!)
2. Next down is the little “welcome to my blog” widget
3. And underneath that is an RSS feed for my food blog. And right there, the top link is to the pickles post. I’m excited about that one because (1) I adore pickles, (2) especially homemade pickles, (3) the photographs are great simply because how could they not be, given the dark green of the cucumbers and the bright red of the hot cherry peppers, and (4) it’s so easy to make pickles, and they’re so incredibly wonderful, I want to encourage you to make them too.

So anyway, this post is a long, roundabout way of saying that I hope you glance over at that little widget now and then, and head over to Luscious if the subject of a link is interesting. My husband is such an incredible cook, and I bake a lot, so you’ll find some mighty fine eating.

AND! The wedding dress arrived safely in Chicago, and *wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles* the dress fits Marnie beautifully, and she looks absolutely amazing in it. I don’t want to post the quickie photo that she sent, for any of a million reasons, but I will post a photo after the wedding. I was really sweating bullets over the fit of the dress, so what a relief.

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Lots of good food, some nice photos, and a few recipes. Good stuff. I’m trying to put the feed in my sidebar, but nothing is cooperating this morning.

Anyway. Off to such mundane tasks as laundry and making pizza dough for our dinner. Hope your Memorial Day is wonderful!

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Ingredients:
4 cups of cooked black-eyed peas (or 2 16-oz cans), drained and rinsed of all juice
1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced (i use the green and white parts)
1 tablespoon fresh oregano
1 tablespoon Tabasco sauce
1 tablespoon Worchestershire sauce
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped
3 canned or fresh jalapeño chiles, chopped (or more, add a habanero if you really like heat)
1 can Rotel tomatoes or 1 ripe, chopped tomato
3/4 cup olive oil
Juice from one lime
1 yellow bell pepper, finely chopped (red bell peppers are good too)
3 cloves fresh garlic, pressed or minced (or more….I usually use 6)

Mix everything together, and taste and adjust as you wish. Chill for four hours. Serve at room temperature with tortilla or corn chips.

It’s really, really, really good. Do you have a go-to dish like this, one that’s cheap and easy to throw together, that everyone always loves?

and p.s. If you want to print out the recipe, look down at the bottom of the post, where all the social bookmarking icons are. The second one opens the post in a new window in a print-friendly way. It allows you to remove any parts you don’t want to print, such as the photo, or the post title. It’s pretty cool!

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greek salad

blue skies and white clouds

breezy curtains, birthday flowers, and cake cooling near the window

the annual AIDS walk, too bad we still need it

the GMHC, 25 years old

I hope your weekend was great too!

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He’s a big foodie. He’s just a wonderful and intuitive cook. He tastes, gazes upward, stirs again, tastes, and at the end he’s made us something delicious for dinner. He never makes the same thing twice, even when he’s trying. That’s fun, but sometimes I really want that orange shrimp he made me 5 years ago!

One thing he doesn’t do is bake, so luckily that’s what I love to do. For his birthday breakfast, he wanted sour cream pecan biscuits – a Dorie Greenspan recipe, from her book Baking: From My Home To Yours. It’s a fantastic book, and spawned the wonderful group project called Tuesdays With Dorie. I participated for several months, and it was loads of fun. So here is a picture of the biscuits, to tempt you. They have brown sugar and chopped pecans in them, so they’re slightly crunchy and slightly sweet, and quite luscious with honey drizzled inside:

cooling biscuits, just out of the oven

see the drizzle of honey oozing out? and the chopped pecans?

For his cake, he wants carrot cake, with orange cream cheese frosting. It’s hard to find a bad recipe for carrot cake, but this one is my very favorite. No pineapple – I never really understood the addition of pineapple – but it’s incredibly moist and rich, and the hint of orange in the frosting makes it special. Here’s one I made before:

carrot cake with orange cream cheese frosting

Apologies for the quality of the photo – I took it before I really knew what I was doing. So my day will involve a bit of fresh flower shopping, some Post-It Note posting….every year I put little Post-It notes everywhere around the apartment (on doors, in the fridge, in surprise places, in cabinets, hanging down from cabinets,  each with a little note of some kind) and they stay up all year long. So today I’ll take down the old ones and put up new ones. I’ll make that carrot cake, and he also wants me to make a batch of oatmeal cookies to have around. We’ll have pork tonkatsu for dinner – he’ll make that – and tomorrow we’ll go to Queens for dinner with our youngest daughter, to celebrate over a wonderful Greek dinner.

Happy birthday and many, many, many more.

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Tonight he made us lamb kabobs, with a side of roasted vegetables – zucchini, onions, bell peppers, mushrooms. The lamb chunks marinated all day in a mixture of olive oil, fresh lemon juice, garlic, thyme, oregano, onion, a bit of red pepper (but no yogurt, hence the ‘kosher’). The lamb was cooked perfectly – crunchy corners, gorgeous brown outside, just right on the inside…..and I’m not a huge fan of lamb! We had a bit of rice on the side, with pan drippings to drizzle over the rice. Here, I’ll show you:

it was so fragrant and so much steam from the rice, it took several pictures to get one that didn't steam the lens!

Even though my tummy is so full, seeing this pictures makes me want to eat more. The grilled zucchini was so sweet, the onions too; the mushrooms, yum. Unfortunately the veggies were so filling I got full pretty quickly.

Over dinner, he asked what I wanted for my Mother’s Day dinner. No hesitation: that amazing Greek salad, and I’ll make some good loaves of crunchy bread. Stay tuned, I’m sure I’ll have photos!

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festival!

#2. Tonight is Night of Knitting at the City Bakery Hot Chocolate Festival. Am I excited?! I’m restraining myself from rampant and later-embarrassing overuse of exclamation points. I’m a very shy person who rarely leaves home, except to go to work, but I’m looking forward to being in this place tonight, full of strangers who also knit and love hot chocolate. For $30, City Bakery provides a full (and sumptuous, I’m sure) dinner, plus dessert, and unlimited wine, beer, coffee, and 10 kinds of hot chocolate. Plus, knitting workshops galore, local yarn shops representing, and a spinning workshop. The event sold out weeks ago, so I’m glad I hopped on it as soon as it was announced. I don’t know a soul (unless I don’t know that I know you through rav), but I cannot wait.

#3. Very sadly, since there’s just not enough time in the day/week, I don’t get to read nearly as much as I’d like. I belong to a book club that meets once a month, and it takes me the entire month to get the book read. Some months I can’t even accomplish that. Last month’s book was just wonderful – Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri, as was this month’s book – The Partisan’s Daughter, by Louis de Bernieres. It’s not always the case that I like (or can even bear to read) our group’s selections, so it was great having two in a row that were rich and wonderful. I even finished The Partisan’s Daughter a few days early, so I flipped to the menu on my Kindle en route to work this morning and started reading The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life, by Twyla Tharp. It’s written with an easy tone, as if she’s just talking to you, and so far it’s good – about the discipline and routine that feed creativity. I am a creative person, but in the realm of craft, not art. I have loved books and words with great intensity, my whole life. My mind spontaneously produces wonderful images and metaphors. A couple of weeks ago, I described a feeling of being a hollow shell full of birds. Wow! Evocative, powerful, and apt. But when I sit down to write, everything flattens. All psychological depth disappears and I write “and then she blah blah blah, and then he blah blah blah. And then they blah blah blah.” BO-RING.

Like many people, I have a sense that if I could just let go, I could be more creative. Of course, that’s easy to say! But when you sit at your desk, how do you “let go?” I do like the idea of discipline and routine as an entry to a creative process, so maybe I’ll try that. Anyway, the book is good, applicable to anyone who is (or wants to be) creative in any way, and not at all New Age-y or mysterious. You might be touched by God, as Mozart was said to be, but he also worked harder than anyone else, and was much more disciplined than the movie Amadeus suggested, so his gift worked because he worked it.

And, it’s Thursday – halle-flippin-lujah!

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So, WOTN! Item #1, the wedding shawl. Nupps are “fun.” I won’t show the shawl in its entirety, to preserve the surprise, but little bits here and there seem ok. Case in point: nupps.

nupps (unblocked, of course)

Next up on the needles: socks for my youngest daughter (nonrav link), whose dorm floors are very cold. I want to finish them by the time she comes home for spring break in a couple of weeks, so I’m alternating these with the shawl. (Doesn’t that gusset look mighty huge to you? It does to me.)

A's socks

While not technically on the needles, these are destined to be on the needles very soon – sock yarns chosen by my oldest daughter. Katie, which one do you want me to use first?

Lorna's Lace Shepherd Sock: Beverly

Knit One Crochet Too: Meadow

When I showed my husband this photo of his blueberry coffee cake, he said “I want some now.” Me too honey, me too….but we’re back on our diets. Too bad:

I. want. some. now.

And finally, in this brief period between snows, we walked over to Riverside Park – our back yard, kind of – and I took a picture I take over and over, in all seasons. Here it is today:

winter view

And here it is a few months ago, and a few before that:

November

May

Seeing the park blanketed with snow, and ice in the Hudson River, made me think about Lent. I didn’t grow up in a church that focused on Lent (ours focused on the fun combination of both fire and brimstone), and I’m not religious in that way, but the idea of it struck me. There’s a longing for life to come – the life that’s pent up in the trees and plant life buried under the snow. The wheel turns, it’s bleak now, but rejuvenation is coming. It’s coming. The world will begin again, as it always does.

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On the knitting front, I made it through the entire part of the shawl chart with the big set of nupps. And they were fun! I definitely learned how to do them better by the last row of them, but I was happy enough. Then, knitting the last set of lace rows to complete the chart, and *clunk*. Something was way wrong. After each row – partly due to overweening pride – I’d stopped, stretched out the lace, admired it, looked for problems, found none. After each pattern repeat, I rechecked the stitches. If each pattern repeat was correct, and each row was correct, I’d be in good shape, right? And yet I’d really screwed up something, somewhere. How hadn’t I seen it in all my looking?! Too much pride, too much “look, isn’t that cool what I did?” I guess. And so I had to pull that whole section out. Had I put in a lifeline? NO.

So I held my breath, got out a small tapestry needle and a roll of dental floss, and tried to put one in, below the nupps chart. A tiny little stitch at a time, through the cobweb-weight lace. plink. plink. plink. plink. plink. Across the row…..and then pull pull pull pull, unknitting. It worked, and so now I begin again. At least this time I’ll do the nupps pretty well from the very first row. So with the shawl too, I’m back where I started.

My sweetheart and I have been dieting – him on Atkins, me on low-cal – but here it is, Valentine’s Day (tomorrow). We’re going out for dinner at our favorite Ethiopian restaurant, Awash, and then we’ll come home for something sweet. He really loves blueberry coffee cake, so I just popped one in the oven. Photos of a slice tomorrow, but for now, The Making of the Coffee Cake, followed by its recipe.

rich batter chock-full of blueberries

sprinkled with a yummy streusel topping, ready to bake

Want to make it yourself? Here’s how:

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