The Last Few Days...In List Form

Dear Sweet Blog, Oh summer has been so fun, and there is so much to share, but I've been so busy enjoying it all that I haven't been able to give all of these topics proper posts! So here it is, in bite-sized list form...Cheers, Sarah.



1) I'm working on my first garment for myself, the Juliet from Zephyr Style. Knitting this with Knit Picks Andean Silk in Barn Red. This yarn is heaven! So far, so good.



2) Our 2nd Wedding Anniversary was this past Tuesday! It involved: Sleeping late, breakfast at Betty's Kitchen, bathing suit shopping (ugh), new CDs, Duffy and She and Him, (Verdict: The latter is better than the former, but I knew that before I purchased them), gourmet chocolatey, marshmallowy, caramelly goodness, Boylan's soda, amazing new vintage store in Portsmouth, (more on this later), Somerville, getting lost, arriving at Magpie just as it closed, Diesel Cafe, old school photobooth, crepes, kisses and one more day of love love loving this awesome man that is my husband!



3) Enjoying, and sharing, the taste of good, *mostly* local food: Amazing hot milk sponge cake with strawberries and whipped cream, finished off the frozen corn from last year in a smoked salmon corn chowder, Amy's Mail Order Banana Bread recipe, fresh peas and did I mention the strawberries? I can't get enough.



4) Dim photos here, it's been rainy in New England, rubbish for blogging! Thrift scores: All the Fire King was bought at a yard sale across the street from my house for the grand total of a dollar. I couldn't believe it! The bake ware pattern is "Blue Heaven." The type case I picked up on the curb, also down the street. A little wash and a few staples to the back and it will be good as new. It will be gussied up a la Ali Edwards soon.

5) I have a bicycle! Which I haven't been able to photograph/ride because of all this darn rain! She's a beauty! Vintage, blue, basket on the front, headlight, larger basket rack on the back. I'm in love! And also a little wonky with my riding skills! I've been pining for a bicycle, specifically a Cape Cod Blue Amsterdam. I'm so close to the grocery store, bank, post office, etc, that it is ridiculous to take the car to those places, especially with the ever rising price of gas! If I get a ton of use out of this bike, then I'd consider looking into an upgrade, but this was a much more affordable starter bike. Pictures soon - so cute!

That is all for now...except if everyone could send me some good job karma that would be awesome. Figuring out my employment situation beyond this summer has not been going so well. I'm off for a little more knitting therapy!

One Local Summer :: Week #3

Something local...and something not quite local



My 100% local entry is simple this week, folks, sausage and eggs.

Local Ingredients:

Sausage - Kellie Brook Farm
Eggs - Lasting Legacy Farm

However, I did make another dish, that was not quite challenge worthy, but might be of interest to my fellow New England locavores.

Fusilli with Pak Choi and Sausage - my take on a recipe from Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food, (I don't work for Chez Panisse, I swear)!

Local ingredients:

A large bunch of pak choi aka bok choy, rinsed and chopped
1/2 lb of Italian sausage, casings removed
1 large onion, chopped

Non-local ingredients:

2 tbsp olive oil
Salt
Black pepper
Pinch of chile flakes
1 lb of fusilli

Add olive oil to pan. Form the sausage into small patties and cook over medium heat, until cooked through. Remove sausage and cook onion and pak choi. Add about 3/4 cup of water to cook greens. Season with salt, pepper, chile flakes. Cook until greens are tender. Add sausage back into pan and break up into small pieces, if you wish.

Cook pasta according to instructions and serve with greens/sausage over the top.

This was so delicious that my husband cleared about 3/4 lb of pasta in one day. I *think* he liked it!

Happy cookin'!

One Local Summer :: Week #2

This is my second post for the One Local Summer Challenge. The premise is to make one meal per week out of entirely local ingredients, except for salt, pepper, spices and oil.

Oh Alice Waters, you make my life and my kitchen better every day!

My entry for week two of the One Local Summer Challenge is from the pages of Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food. My husband bought me this cookbook for Christmas, and I absolutely love it. Within the next few days I'll be modifying a recipe from the book to make (local) sausage and pak choi over (non-local) fusilli pasta. YUM! On today's menu we have Turnip and Turnip Greens Soup:



Local ingredients:

Turnips and greens from Wake Robin Farm
Kate's butter
Onion...hmm don't remember!
My own thyme
Home-made chicken broth from a Lasting Legacy Farm chicken

Non-local ingredients:

Bay Leaf
Salt

In Ze Kitchen du Cost - Local-Ish Recipes

I've been cooking up a few new local-ish recipes that I thought I would share with you here.

beet greens, shallots, sun dried tomatoes and garlic waiting to go in the pan...


The first has become a delicious new favorite in our kitchen Beet Greens over Polenta by Matt Armendariz via Design Sponge. I substituted the pancetta with bacon, which I could probably seek out locally, but I didn't in this case. I bought the beet greens, garlic and shallots at my farmer's market from Wake Robin Farm. I highly recommend this recipe if you're looking to add a little more leafy greens to your diet. It is simple and tasty.

sip this with a straw and it will be gone, lickety split!


This recipe for Rhubarb Citrus Soda is from my newly acquired copy of Cooking with Shelburne Farms. (If you click on that link, it's currently available new and used from $2.95 - I got my copy a few weeks ago for .99 cents!) This is definitely one of my new favorite cookbooks. Not only does it contain recipes, but it's interspersed with stories of local people who work in and around the Vermont farm. The format of the book is interesting as well. It's broken up into sections by nine ingredients that are indigenous to Vermont; milk and cheese, maple, greens, lamb, mushrooms, game and fish, pork, root-cellar vegetables and apples. These sections make the recipes very applicable here in New Hampshire, as our local food economy depends on many of the same products. The tasty looking recipes combined with the insightful stories really make me want to go visit Shelburne Farms! I don't want to infringe on any copyrights by posting the full recipe here, but if you've made natural sodas before, you could the ingredients are rhubarb, water, orange juice, lemon juice, honey and seltzer, plus I garnished the finished tonic with my orange mint and the first strawberries of the season!

Tonight is Stitch n' Bitch and tomorrow I'm going rock climbing at Pawtuckaway with the hubby and best bud, Allison. Cheers everyone!

Bits and Bobs of Random Goodness

Let's catch up, shall we...

:: Knitting ::

Knitting is definitely my gateway drug *cough* craft addiction which has opened my world to all of the crafty goodness that currently occupies my life...and the majority of my apartment! I have recently re-fallen in love with knitting because of the amazingly awesome, though slightly sinister time-killing, Ravelry. I'm a little obsessed...

I finished the Broadripple Socks,



And last night I started the Umbilical Cord Hat from the first SnB book at 11:00pm...and finished in a crazed knitting stupor roughly around 3:00am!



The hat is one of a few I'll be making for the upcoming baby showers in my life. I'm might do a little embroidery embellishment on them, we'll see.

:: Christmas Gifts ::

Speaking of baby gifts, I finished another teddy bear! Two down, one to go! This one is wonky and a little asymmetrical. I like him - Matt thinks he's ungiftable. I think Matt's silly! What do you think?



:: Shopping ::

I've made some fun Etsy purchases in the last few days. First off, I bought a golfer window decal for my dad for Father's Day. Secondly, and not to be missed, my sensational artist blog friend, Flossy-P, has made some of her works available in form of a super affordable post card! I was able to purchase two of my all time favorites, String Theory and the set Looking for Love/Sometime Soon. Very exciting, indeed.

:: Cooking ::

Still with me? I made the Asparagus and Morel Bread Pudding sans the morels from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Very tasty, and it made a TON! Oh my, has it been more than a week since I've sung the praises of this book?! If you haven't read it, please do. It will likely change your life, give the warm fuzzies, make you feel like you can change the fate of the planet by doing your little bit.

Made the Rhubarb Crisp from Slow Food by Alice Waters again. Came out scrumptious, again. **EDIT** I just popped over to my mum's blog and she's posted a delicious looking recipe for Rhubarb Bread. I'll have to give that one a go!

So that's what I've been up to - how about all of you? Having a productive week?

Until next time, cheers!

Broadripple Socks :: WIP

These are knit from the glorious aforementioned Tashi that we picked up at the NH Sheep and Wool Festival. They are shaping up to be much, much easier than my first socks, and it leaves me hopeful that I can whip up a dozen pairs of hand made socks in less than a decade.



The pattern I'm using is Broadripple Socks from the summer Knitty, 2003. I messed up the cuff on the first sock, but it's a mistake I celebrate, because I actually like it better than what the pattern calls for. Instead of purling between the cuff rows, I continued to do the pattern over and over and it created a cute wavy edge.



I managed to do the kitchener's stitch for the first time ever, to finish off the toe, and I'm in love with how neat and clean it is!



Now I have to not let the second sock syndrome take over so that I can sport these around town!

P.S. If you are visiting my blog, you'll notice that I've decided to display only one post up per day on the main page. This is so my mom won't go crazy trying to read my blog and avoid seeing her Christmas present at the same time! Mom: If you missed a few older posts, just look at the sidebar to the right and you'll see my previous post titles and archives. You know which one not to look at ;)

Cooking Notes on Rhubarb Crisp

I bought some rhubarb at the farmer's market last weekend. I had never cooked with it before, so I went to one of my new favorite cookbooks, The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, for some inspiration.

I only bought three stalks of rhubarb, so my recipe was considerably smaller than the crisp recipe in the book (it asked for 4lbs of fruit). I made about three cups of the crisp topping, used it as needed and froze the rest for later. Waters doesn't give specific measurements for adding sugar to your crisp fruit, although she states that rhubarb needs "a lot." I added a tablespoon at a time until the tartness didn't quite turn my face inside out, and ended up added a little less than 3/4 of a cup for 3ish cups of fruit. Not for the faint of heart when it comes to sugar!

I baked this at 375F for about 45 minutes, and it's absolutely delicious. After it settled in the refrigerator for awhile, and I reheated it, it almost tastes like peaches! So tasty! Now that I'm not scared of cooking rhubarb anymore, I'm hoping that there will still be some at the market this week, so that I can buy bunches and can it for later.

Cheers, S

NH Sheep and Wool Festival 2008 aka a Fiber-Lovers Extravaganza

Warning :: This post my cause you to suffer from fiber sensory overload.

Oh. my. gosh. If you love, knitting, crocheting, spinning, weaving, the NH Sheep and Wool Festival is possibly the greatest event ever! I don't even know where to begin...

I guess I'll start with my purchases. I had limited funds for the day, but I managed to score some great things.

* The Official Vermont Maple Cookbook purchased from Sweet Maple Alpacas - at $2.25, how could I resist, really?!



* 100% Romney/Border Leicester Roving, hand-dyed, 4oz for $8, purchase from Brimstone Hollow Farm, (no website, 603.525.3070). I plan to use these in another round of thrummed mittens to go into my shop for next winter. The deep red is going to go nicely with the chocolatey brown wool I use to knit those up!



* Tashi, oh, tashi! This was one of the first yarns that we saw during the day, and I thought about passing it by ALL DAY, so we had to return to Ball and Skein's booth before we left. This is to be shared with mum, because at $20 per 195 yards I would have never been able to take this home! It's so soft!!! It's 65% Merino/20% Bamboo/15% Silk and Hand-Dyed, so gorgeous, I could gush on and on about this yarn. Mum and I are going to combine the colors to make shorty anklet socks for summer. I didn't catch her first name, but the owner of Ball and Skein has a blog called Smatterings where she records her spinning and knitting adventures. Smatterings shared her booth with Leslie Wind, a talented jewelry maker who makes shawl pins. She blogs at Folly Cove Fiber Freaks. They were both super nice people, nice chatting with you ladies!

That was it for me on purchases, but I saw so much more that I wished I could've scooped up and taken home with me.

Don't you just want to dive into this hammock of roving from Riverslea Farm?



This yarn from Buckwheat Bridge Angoras was deliciously soft, and I loved the vibrant colors!




I learned tons of fun things too! I was amazed by watching the ladies of the NH Weavers Guild in action. Their work was mind, numbingly over my crafting head!





Another weaver created this ingenious first prize loom out of drinking straws - now that's what I call rock n' roll!



Then there was Dilys Morris (no website, 603.744.3047), who sells ancient beads for support spindles from every continent. She was kind enough to give us a spinning demonstration.





I know this is turning into a fiber love-fest novel, but this post wouldn't be complete without mention of the many cutie animals that I saw...

Like these guys:



Look at that punim!



This fluff ball is an angora bunny:



Oh there was food too - frozen apple cider, cobbler straight out of the oven and a fair staple, fried dough - yum!



Are you still with me? Here are links to more fibery/crafty goodness.

* Cheryl Kumiski - beautiful, art glass jewelry and buttons

* Ewe and I Farm

* Foxfire Fiber and Designs - this booth had some fun knitting patterns such as the bird in the hand mittens and the wintergreen mittens.

* Maple Creek Farm

* Melissa Jean Handknit Design - original patterns and AMAZING handmade buttons

* Thyme and Ewe Farm -my mom bought a ton of preserves and jams from this booth.