1000+ page views!

How cool is that!?  With the new Google Analytics, I can tell that they are not all me.  I just asked the farmer what I could give away to celebrate.  He immediately said: "A cat." and held up Ella.

No, we will not be giving away Ella.  But what?  The only ideas I have are soap (done that) or something small(ish) that I knit.  Maybe, a pair of bed socks.  None of the stuff I cook would transit well.  Could you imagine what the US Post would do if a big jar of tomato sauce broke in transit?  I was thinking about homemade granola, but I haven't even made it yet.  I'm going to and it's gonna be great.  I hope.  Stay tuned.

Anyway, I still want to celebrate with a giveaway.

What would you like better: soap, a pair of warm fuzzy socks that won't fit in your shoes, or what?

Leave me a comment about what you would like and why.  I'm also open to ideas for future giveaways.  The little kid will draw a name next Saturday (9/18) and I will either package up some soap (Scrappy, Summer Vacation, Honey Wheat Beer, and  Tea Tree & Aloe) or warm up the needles for a pair of socks.  I will even ship internationally.

Good luck!

Carnival squash

Photo from: whatscookingamerica.net

Okay, we did not get that many in the box.  We just got one.  It was very pretty, but what to do with it?  Google is my friend and I started researching recipes.  What is it with adding sugar to carnival squash?

At first I was really interested in the stuffed squash with quinoa recipes, but they all added raisins and honey or maple syrup.  I want savory not sweet.  Then we found: Aggies Kitchen.  The stuffing in their recipe has a lot of similarities to our Utica Greens.  Guess what?   Chard and miziua came in the box this week, so we had Utica Greens on Tuesday.  On Wednesday we had quinoa with the curried mustard greens.  We mixed the leftover Utica Greens with the leftover quinoa and stuffed the squash with it.  We topped it with leftover grated Red Meck cheese from the Pesto Pizza this weekend.  It was great and it cleaned out the fridge.  Love that.

Mustard greens

More weird greens.  Mustard greens this week.  Most of the recipes for mustard greens basically braise them. We wanted to do something different.  This is the recipe we found: Curried Mustard Greens from All Recipes.

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You should have seen the dirt in the bottom of the sink after we washed the greens.  I wish I had taken a picture. The get really bright green when you boil them.  Boiling something that resembles lettuce seems odd.

The recipe goes together really quickly.  We served it over quinoa instead of rice.  The farmer roasted the quinoa in a pan first and then cooked in our very own chicken stock.  It was really good.

The Curried Greens were okay.  They seemed pretty soupy in the pan but the quinoa soaked a lot up.  Next time we will cut the greens up a bit.  They turned into long stringy things.  I spun them around the fork like pasta.  This recipe will not be going in the "favorites" box but the flavor was good and it was a nice dinner for a cool, late summer evening. 

Cotton Washcloth

I make soap.  I knit.  Why has it never occurred to me to make a washcloth?


I am giving soap to someone for Christmas.  So tonight while trying to decide what to knit next, I decided to try my hand at a lace cotton washcloth.  I have beautifully soft pima cotton left over form the Moderne Baby Blanket project.  Woo Hoo!  Free present!  How hard can it be?


Schicke Hakelei has a wonderful blog with patterns.  Check it out.  I picked her Flying Blocks Dishcloth.

Day 1:  Knit rows 1-15.  Somehow lost count on Row 12, but no one will ever know but me.
Day 2: Knit two of the repeats.  Kept loosing track of where I was in the pattern.  It looks fudged.  Boo.
Day 3: I kept making mistakes.  Ripped it out.


Copied the pattern in size 18 font.  Shaded the alternate rows so it would be easier to see and follow.

I finally got through this pattern.  I would cheer each time I got through the even rows with the right number of stitches.  Still made a mistake in the middle.  Who knew that a washcloth pattern would kick my ass?

I got brave and made a second one.  Had to rip that one out once too.  Started using a lifeline....

Made a third one as a dishcloth.  The pattern is starting to make sense to me and I can "see" what needs to happen as I go.   Unfortunately, having started this sucker 5 times, I'm sick of it.  I can now knit it perfectly, but I don't want to.  *sigh*

Summer Vacation Soap

We spent a week on Lake Edwards in the Adirondacks.  I brought home lake water to make into soap (my Dad thinks that's nuts).  I have Pine Forest scent from Brambleberry.  I thought that would make a good soap with a memory of a good time.  

Sunday, we did a day trip to Ithaca and I saw Mrs. Meyer's Basil Soap at  Oasis Grocery.  We have basil oil that needs to be used up.  I think that basil and pine scents could work well together and basil is a very summery scent to me.  Basil supposedly has antioxidant and antimicrobial properties, as well as a calming effect and maybe even anti-acne potential. I'm not making medicinal claims, God only knows what lye will to to it.

I used the basic: olive oil, coconut oil, and lard recipe from the Everything Soapmaking Book by Alicia Grosso.  A 4# batch fits my wooden soap mold perfectly.  This is my first time using her recipes, mostly because I cannot find my Essentially Soap book.  I was crafting my own recipes with the Magestic Mountain Sage Lye Calculator but I was getting too adventurous and not really happy with the results.  So for a bit I am going back to tried and true recipes.  I'm also finding that you can get really great soap from recipes with a dozen fancy ingredients and you can get really great soap from really simple recipes with 3 ingredients that you can get off the shelf at a decent grocery store.

It went through gel phase but for a while it seemed really soft.  The color is a translucent yellow-beige and I like it.

I cut it tonight.  15 bars and scrap.  It is like waxy firm cheese.  It smells great and my hands lathered when I washed them after wards.  Interestingly, there is no ash.

The farmer says that it smells like the Adirondacks.  Works for me.

Pesto Pizza

I know, I know.  Another pizza post.  Pizza is good.

I have been putting up a lot of basil and decided that a pesto pizza would be a good thing. 

We decided to get the cheese for our pizza at the Ithaca Farmer's Market on Sunday.  We sampled a few cheeses and settled on a really nice cheese from Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese.  It had good flavor and melted nicely.

Our pizza had basil pesto, chicken, a roma tomato and the wonderful Red Meck cheese.  It got put together in a snap and was a very tasty dinner.  Especially when paired with a bottle of hard cider that we also picked up at the market.

Make this pizza.  Trust me on this one.  You get bonus points of you serve it with really good hard cider.

Sourdough Bread Round 2

I'm stubborn.
 

Audrey spent the last week in the fridge.  Last night I took her out and proofed her.  She did not do much overnight.  Maybe the wild yeast has not hit its stride and the starter was too cool. So once again I cheated and added a packet of Fleishman's yeast. 

Rise #1 went well.  Rise #2 was bad...  It started as a perfect ball of dough and wound up as the  puddle of bubbly goo you see above. 

I dumped it out into a big pile of flour and kneaded crud out of it to get out some of my frustration.  I wound up kneading in a bunch of flour.  Divided it into loaf pans and let it rise a third time for about 45 min.  Better.

The loaves are small and the difference in color accounts for the one one the right baking in a metal pan and the one on the left baking in a silicone pan.  Maybe they would have gotten bigger if I had left it to rise some more.

Eventually I will get this right.