Adirondacks

When life deals you lemons…

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Make lemonade. Or in my case, when the sweater you made your son six years ago is too big, it’s been felted and is still too big, repurpose it. The body of the sweater has become a cat bed, it just awaits some sort of pillow stuffing. I cut off the sleeves and lo and behold they make nice legwarmers, especially since it was 3 degrees F this morning.

Repurposed sleeve

In the case of the CSA,when the farm deals you kale, make kale chips. It’s our new, favorite snack food thanks to a suggestion from a friend. Rip it into little pieces, spray it with oil, salt it and roast it in a 400 F oven until crisp. Delish!

Baby sweater

And I needed to make a few baby sweaters and found some baby yarn in my stash.

Hopping along

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For those of you who have never needed crutches, I hope you stay that way. Whenever I meet someone who has already used them we are instantly bound by a common ground of resourcefulness. Everyone remembers how hard it is to carry a drink from one place to another. People have devised various bags and even carts to help them along. Ice is treacherous. I grow tired of being dependent so I am trying to do more and more on my own. I even went back to work yesterday for a day.

There’s an advantage to a small kitchen. I can cook by keeping a chair in the middle of the work area to rest ingredients or myself on, while I hop around using the counters on the perimeter as support. Oddly enough, I can’t clean up! So far I have tried two batches of mozzarella cheese, much easier than expected. The night nurse in the hospital shared his fascination with it and I found an easy recipe on the internet. Ingredients are simple: a gallon of milk; two teaspoons of citric acid; and a rennet tablet. You also need a thermometer and the whole process only takes about 90 minutes. Somehow both batches were eaten or used before I took a final picture, but the last step is magical. You heat and knead the lumpy mess a few times and it becomes silky, stretchy delicious mozzarella cheese. One gallon of milk makes about a softball size ball of cheese.

Mozzarella 1

Mozzarella 2

Mozzarella 2

My view from the house has improved because Tim’s project to remove the overhead wires was completed this week. The wires are down, we still have phone service and electricity and all went well. I have a video of a very cool piece of machinery yanking the pole out of the ground and may include it at some point.

Getting ready to take down the pole

Our unobstructed view of Jay Mountain today. I hope the birds don’t mind in the spring.

We continue to eat well and colorfully. A couple of days ago, I made a batch of mashed potatoes from blue potatoes from the farm. They were very an interesting shade of blue but not as creamy as the white ones.

Blue potatoes

Tonight I made a chicken pot pie entirely with farm ingredients. This is the way to eat.

Chicken pot pie

Pot pie minus one

I’m knitting and weaving and plan a big adventure tonight – I’m going to go downstairs for the first time in almost a month to be near the wood stove, my weaving and quilting. The temperature is going to go below 0 degrees F tonight and it should be cozy there. If it wasn’t for the kitchen, I might never come back upstairs.

A trip to the other side and lots of knitting and cooking

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Which means I don’t have a lot to say about quilting or weaving. I traveled to the other side of Lake Champlain along the eastern shore and saw a different view of the High Peaks.

High Peaks from the other side

My needles are busily clacking away. Well quietly tapping, in this case, on wooden double pointed needles working on a pair of double knit mittens. This is an old standby pattern, Reversible Twice as Warm mittens. You basically knit two layers at once, inner and outer, which traps a layer of air between them and creates great insulation for cold weather. My son found an old pair of his, which he initially thought were oven mitts when he unwrapped them. Sometimes I have a problem with gauge. Or maybe I never used to check it.

Double knit mittens

In between knitting, I’ve been stretching my cooking skills as I learn new recipes to work with the fresh ingredients we get from the local farm each week. We’re eating lots of cold weather crops: potatoes, kohlrabi, kale, beets, celeriac, cabbage and brussel sprouts to name a few. Time to shake them up a bit. A friend suggested colcannon, which is a dish comprised of mashed potatoes with other cooked veggies stirred in. I mixed it with kale and served it with venison sausage. Tasty!

Colcannon revised

Pignoli cookies are an enigma. This recipe has worked for me in the past but something changed and the cookies always fell flat. This time I added cream of tartar to stabilize the egg whites and they seemed to hold up to the test.

Pignoli cookies

I have wanted to knit these mittens for a couple of years and now my daughter and her friends (well actually my daughter, on behalf of her friends) has requested knitwear. Here’s one of two Fiddlehead mittens, knit but not blocked or lined. Great pattern. I’ve tried to design my own colorwork pieces before but didn’t pay enough attention to the details of what happened when the thumb grew or the mitten decreased. Plus I have a better idea of the right yarn for projects, DK or light worsted, my heavier handspun is homey but not as pretty. And now, I always check gauge.

Fiddlehead mittens

I cut up a whole bunch of veggies, sauteed them and made empanadas with them. It reminded me of the meat pies we ate in New Zealand and has given me lots of ideas for the long winter months ahead.

Celeriac, squash, kohlrabi medley

We had a dusting of snow the other day and carved our own celtic cross pattern on the driveway.

Driveway celtic cross

I am a woman obsessed

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I am obsessed with many things, all habit forming, but with good intentions. My latest kick is geomagnetic storms and the number of near asteroid collisions every day as reported on Spaceweather.com. For instance, “On December 2, 2011 there were 1272 potentially hazardous asteroids”! There was a 40% chance we could see the aurora borealis earlier this week but no luck. But I guess that’s OK since we didn’t get annihilated by an asteroid either. So I photograph clouds instead.

Not Northern Lights

I’ve reassembled my new loom and started my first project yesterday. Through the kindness of a weaving friend, I was gifted an essential tool and some lovely yarn. I’ve decided to use my world as a warping board, where the yarn is stretched out in preparation of putting it on the loom. We have a long railing upstairs so with 2 C-clamps and pegs, I organized enough yarn for 2 scarves. Plus I am counting the process as exercise since I had to walk the 10 yards from one peg to the other.

My world is a warping board

As with religion, the cross is a holy symbol in weaving. It’s how one keeps the yarn from getting all twisted around itself. This ingenious peg board made it “too easy”. Note the cross formed between the middle pegs.

The cross

And after a mere 3 hours, here it is, my first project, 2-3 inches complete. Easy peasy, just put the yarn on the loom, try to prevent it from becoming a tangled curly mess, put it through the right heddles and dents, tie it onto two beams, and tie up the treadles. I even learned how to repair broken warp threads and why the method I used is not the best way to warp “sticky” yarn.

First draft

Now that the days are getting shorter, I have more of a chance of catching the sunrise colors. We don’t actually see the sun rise because it’s behind a mountain but we get the indirect effect.

Sunrise clouds

Biannual winter

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The weather cooperated with the forecast, about 7 inches of snow overnight and today. Our first snow in almost two years since we went from US fall to Australian Spring and Summer back to US Spring, Fall… The first snow is a novelty. Especially since I didn’t do any shoveling. My elbow still remembers the snow of February 2010 when I got tennis, or snow shoveling, elbow. It’s all better now and I intend to keep it that way.

I was able to put together the floor loom with no extra pieces and finish one weaving from my rigid heddle loom. Photos tomorrow. I finally got outside before the sun set, barely.

The mighty Boquet is quiet today, too frozen to flow under the bridge it knocked out in August.

Santa Claus flies planes not reindeers

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I spent a few days in Washington, DC visiting my daughter and friends. I enjoyed walking the streets and looking at the buildings and sculptures. I saw this on my first day. It drew me in from across the street by the sheer anguish. I now know it is Andrew Sakharov, a Russian physicist who worked to develop a nuclear bomb and later became a human rights activist exiled in Russia awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

What a day!

I walked the alphabet streets from T-U and saw this along my way.

Lawn art

Loads of people were riding these bikes. They are available for rent at over 100 sites around Washington, DC. They are in metered bike racks and after signing up, you can use them for 30 minutes for free and then there’s a charge after that. What a great system. The bikes even have a cute little basket in front.

Capital bikeshare

After several days in the city, I was ready to get back to my sanctuary in the North Country where my town doesn’t even have a traffic light. As much as I like the energy and all that a city offers, I grow tired of the need to protect my “space”. I’m that bumbling tourist who doesn’t understand the metro system and who stops to look up at the buildings. On my flight home, I had a chance to observe the kindness of strangers. An elderly woman in a wheel chair was brought on board what became a full flight. Late in the boarding, a large, white haired and bearded man came aboard and took the middle seat next to her telling her, “Don’t worry young lady, you don’t have to get up”. I heard him tell her before we took off that although he was a retired fighter pilot, he now enjoyed working as Santa Claus during the holidays. When the flight attendants gave their safety talk about the oxygen masks, he told her not to worry because if anything happened to the plane during the flight, he would take care of her. I shed a tear in the seat behind them.

Exterior decorator

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Travel makes me appreciate home. I am heading out this week and next to visit my kids in DC and Brooklyn. Both trips include mini reunions with friends from elementary school.

We embellished our house plaque with a skull I found on the property. It probably lost it’s horns but I made replacements from birch bark.

Sent ffom my Palm

Something strange is afoot

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The first photo is very shady because I didn’t even take the screen out of the window to shoot it but something strange is going on. We awaken to various crop circles. This was the first and the pattern gets lost behind the screen. it suggests something either skulked around in random circles or it was dragged.

First evidence

Today’s message is a little clearer and I even went outside to shoot this picture. I’m sure it is meant to be the numeral 2. What can it mean?

Crop circles

Transformations

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I’m still standing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s still better than sitting while my back slowly heals. I’ve spent the time causing many transformations from a vertical position. Most of the work is based upon the raw ingredients we pick up from the farm each week with a little wool thrown in.

This kohlrabi is huge, bigger than a grapefruit, smaller than a breadbox. Apparently you just carve a little off as needed. i’ve made a slaw with apples and craisins two nights and have hardly made a dent in it.

Giant winter kohlrabi

I finished knitting the second clog, felted them and gave them to their recipient, who proceeded to wear them while wet to form them to her feet. What a trooper.

Clogs before and after

Felted

For a bread variation, I made rolls to go with pulled pork. Yummmmm. I just made my basic bread recipe, formed half of it into one inch round balls and threw three in each compartment of the muffin tin. Bread flour from the farm.

Hard rolls

Rye flour became rye bread in the bread machine with both yeast and beer as the leavening. It’s a coarse bread, great with lots of butter and probably a beer. So much for the diet. It was fun while it lasted.

Rye bread