pepperknit

Fresh Direct screwed something up in our last order, and they sent us two massive bunches of bananas. We’ve been making Bananas Foster practically daily, but we’ve reached the point where the bananas are nearly molten and it’s time to bake them into something. I was all set to make a recipe I’d found online from a trusted source, but the moment I started in on prep and I started to mash banana flesh, the scent transported me to another time and place.

Sixth grade, Taipei American School, Taiwan. I was on the yearbook staff—it was an after-school activity. We had three faculty sponsors who helped make the yearbook, but the only one I remember is Ms. Patterson, the Home Ec teacher. (Random sidenote: on a family vacation to Bali in 6th grade, Ms. Patterson was staying at the same resort as us. I can only imagine now how annoying it would be to run into a student while on vacation! I promise I didn’t harrass her overly much.)

As a fundraiser for the yearbook, we all took over the Home Ec kitchens and baked banana bread. Then at the annual Food Fair, we sold our wares. The Food Fair was an awesome yearly event on campus where different groups (and maybe restaurants? I don’t know.) would set up tables with food from around the world to buy and taste. It’s where I had satay for the first time—I definitely remember that. And it was also a place where the parents and kids could come, and the parents could socialize and eat while the kids ran around the place with abandon.

Anyway, I remember making this banana bread for the Fair, then getting the recipe from Ms. Patterson, because my family loved it so much. Thankfully, when I started living on my own my mom made me a recipe book of family favorites, so I had the recipe handy. I promptly abandoned the other banana bread for this one.

Licking the bowl after making the batter was transportive. I was 11 years old again, baking banana bread with my friends after school. I was carrying a tray of banana bread slices to offer as free samples to entice people to come buy the bread (that was my friend Beth’s idea).

TAS Banana Bread (as my mom noted in the recipe “TAS Food Fair”)
2 sticks butter, softened
¾ cup sugar
2 large eggs, room temp
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
3 ripe bananas, mashed
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup chopped nuts

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Cream butter and sugar together until very light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. In a separate bowl, mix the flours, baking soda, and salt together. Add the flour mixture to the butter. Mix the vanilla into the bananas and fold this into the batter. Stir in the nuts.

Pour into a greased + floured loaf pan and bake for approximately 50 minutes or until a tester comes out clean.

And oh boy does it taste so good, even when it’s not tied up in memories. The wheat flour gives it a bite and a quality that other banana breads lack, in my opinion. This one calls for no spices, but there’s no reason not to tuck some in. I think nuts are crucial, personally—in fact, I believe all baked goods for which nuts are optional are better with them (cookies, brownies). If you were one of those people who like chocolate chips in your banana bread (I am not one of these people), I’m sure the batter would hold up to their melty gooeyness.

You just can’t go wrong with this banana bread.

The Potholder Swap 2010 is in full swing—what fun potholders are you making? I can’t wait to receive mine from the swap, and making the ones I’ll contribute has been a lot of fun, too. I have even tried my pattern out, and they function pretty darn well!

I took the opportunity to look through some crochet technique and pattern books to try something new just for this swap. The moment I found directions for a 4-color spiral, I knew it was the technique for me! The source where I read about it made only a tiny spiral, and it didn’t even lay quite flat, so I had to work out how to do the increases to keep it flat, as well as devise a method to taper off each of the spirals to maintain a circle but not make it feel as if each color just “stopped.”

It wasn’t overly challenging, but it was a fun little crochet puzzle. I am loving the structural, physics-like way I can approach crochet. (Knitting is more garment design, crochet is more product design—the way I approach them.) With 4 colors at play in each potholder, the color combinations seemed endless, all of them fun and kitcheny.

If you’re interested, my pattern for the Stir Me Up Potholders is available free via Ravelry, so you can download now and have a finished potholder in no time (each one takes me about 2.5 hours total—one hour each for the front and back, and half an hour to do the edging). That’s just one day of commuting, plus some time while I unwind at the end of the day.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to stop at the 5 required for the swap. I have more worsted-weight cotton yarn to use up! I have more color combinations I want to see realized! I’m sure everyone I know needs even MORE potholders, right? Despite the fact that so many of my friends are already doing the swap?

Someone described the spirals as being like candy—and perhaps that’s what making them feels like to me. Just a sweet diversion with happy-making results.

How can you resist?

I totally get all the cynicism around Valentine’s Day. I get it. Believe me, I hate Hallmark with a firey passion (in fact, I’ve not stepped foot in a Hallmark store since I worked on a book with them 10 years ago), and I don’t even like much chocolate or candy.

Mostly I think Valentine’s Day is funny. Its primary colors are pink and red—and I don’t even like the color pink. But because it’s so singular in its focus, and so completely absurd, I adore it. I always use it as a time to remind my friends and family that I love them—sure, I tell them a lot on a regular basis, but it’s more special today.

So with that, I wish you all lots of love from the bottom of my heart.

And because I’m no scrooge for sweets on Valentine’s day, I made strawberry ice cream for my sweetie, whose favorite ice cream is strawberry. I made this last year and it was so phenomenal, I’ve declared it a tradition that must not be broken.

Ben & Jerry’s Strawberry Ice Cream

1 pint fresh strawberries, hulled and sliced
1/3 cup plus 3/4 cup sugar
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 large eggs
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk

Combine strawberries, 1/3 cup sugar, and lemon juice in a mixing bowl. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs in a separate bowl until light and fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the 3/4 cup sugar a little at a time, then whisk one minute more until completely blended. Pour in the cream and milk and whisk to blend.

Puree the strawberries and add to the cream mixture. Transfer to ice cream maker and freeze according to manufacturer’s directions (generally about 20 minutes in the machine, then transfer to a container and freeze thoroughly).

Enjoy!

It’s no secret ’round these parts how much I adore Valentine’s Day. It’s a weird thing—I guess about 10 or so years ago, I just decided to embrace the holiday and make it mine. I mean, sure, it’s overcommercialized and generally a disgusting thing that Hallmark has thrust upon us, but it’s also so cheesy and stupid and can be a lot of fun. I take it as a holiday to tell my friends and family how much I love them—and I usually do it with sugar.

This year, you can celebrate with a completely calorie-free heart to give to someone you love. The pattern I designed for Crochet Today is for a set of coasters, but there’s no reason one can’t simply be slipped in a card, or hung from a doorknob. Make two and sew them together with a little bit of stuffing to make a three-dimensional heart!

You have plenty of time before Feb 14 to make them if you start now! It’s in the Jan/Feb issue.

Be Mine Coasters

Every girl needs her own army of meek adorable robots, don’t you think?

These guys are particularly polite and sweet, and they’re going to live with Specs, a polite and sweet friend who didn’t even bellyache one bit that I delayed more than six months to hold up my end of a swap. See, she was exploring paper cutting, and I eagerly said, “you make me something like that and I’ll . . . yeah, I’ll make you something in return. Sure. Sometime.”

So she awesomely worked this up for me—featuring an owl, no less, the mascot of my alma mater. And then I got all excited to make her something in return, sewing some things, looking at books, even crocheting the start of a Mechanobot . . .

But I just couldn’t commit! It was too hard! What would she really want? What could I possibly make her that she’d like?

Until Chawne recently got a copy of Crobots, too. And she didn’t dilly-dally like I did. In fact, within a day of receiving the book, she’d whipped up a robot she named Dexter. And Specs’s response to Chawne’s robot was so good, I knew I had to recommit. And so Sangamo was born.

Sangamo follows the pattern (Mechanobot, available free online!) pretty much to a T. I even had almost identical hardware to adorn her with. The only difference is I used screws with a flat head for her legs, and if you set her down juuuust right, she can stand on her own. Soon after, Sangamo’s cousin Miss Gloria rolled up.

Miss Gloria was based on the Wheely pattern, but modified—she’s larger than the written directions, because the scale between her and Sangamo was going to be too far off. The wheels are the size specified in the direx, though. Her adornments are more fancy—glass beads and sequins—because she’s a fussy, girlie robot. She works hard to keep her wheels in perfect condition. Her pet robot, Yuri, completes the trio.

Specs and her boyfriend have two cats, Dimitri and Otto, so I chose a name in keeping with the theme. Yuri also deviates from the written Catbot pattern, especially with respect to the hardware. I decided that to look more like a robot (I mean, really, it’s just a cat otherwise), brass screws and brass hardware would complete the look. Oh, and I added a tail, which shockingly the pattern does not entail.

I’m on a bit of a robot craze as a result, though my love is only for Mechanobot at this point. I think you’ll be seeing more of him around these parts.

Some eat to live; I’ve always lived to eat. I cook a lot, and I take photos of the majority of what I make—I take photos of the majority of what I eat, whether I cooked it or not. Looking back at the pictures, I can relive every bite.

Like these pickles, that I made sort of on the spur of the moment because of a book I was editing. I am a freelancer, and I was giving Alton Brown’s latest cookbook a proofread. Which meant I was scheming to make nearly everything in it. But refrigerator pickles just hit me as the thing I had to have—and one night, probably between page 213 and 214, I set the book aside to make a batch. I’d never done something like this before, and though I realize that refrigerator pickling is not nearly as impressive as actual pickling, I was thrilled with the results. The onions are my favorite part, actually.

This year I finally mastered the art of poaching an egg, after years of perfectly edible but completely ugly attempts. It’s all thanks to Lauren, who shared a video of how she does it, and now I just channel her on Sunday mornings. I even got myself an electric kettle, which is what she uses to get her water hot but still, and now the process is even easier.

To enhance my sandwich obsession, I finally made mayonnaise from scratch for the first time. I’m not sure if I’d been intimidated by it or just lazy, but I found that it is neither scary nor time consuming. I think the worst part is cleaning the food processor, and I can handle that. (Or, um, if Jason’s around he’ll do it for me.) It makes BLTs with avocado just that much better, let me tell you.

This year I also became a master deep-fryer. I’d always been terrified of embarking on deep-fried endeavors, but this year I just filled pans with oil and let loose. In 2010 I’ll make donuts for the first time.

For instance, I deep-fried poached eggs (with Lindsay):

And Jason and I made tempura veggies and deep-fried spring rolls (twice!):

It wasn’t all savory, either. Reid, my chocoholic friend, turned 30, so I made him these chocolate cookies, which received rave reviews at the party. (I still happily remember when Reid, tipsy with birthday drinks, came over to me and said “someone asked if you are a GOURMET CHEF. and I SAID YES.”)

And I also was in Norway with my parents for Christmas this year, where we got snowed in for days, and mom and I baked Christmas cookies together for the first time in years!

I could go on and on. The year, as with past years, sure was tasty. I’m eager to try more new techniques and recipes—Steph recently loaned me her slow cooker slow cooker, so I’m looking for great recipes for that this winter. And if the year to come is even half as flavorful and perfectly cooked as our New Year’s Eve dinner, I’ll be doing okay.

Let’s start with the knitting—this is, at its core, a knitting blog after all.

The total here might look paltry . . . and, well, it is! Seven? That’s it? Really? Did I forget to tag something and put it in the set? Hm . . . I know that the scarf took me no more than a week, the cowl something like 2 days. . . . What was I doing with my time?

Oh, that’s right: “secret” projects. More on those in a bit.

Probably the most satisfying thing I did this year was really invest my time in crocheting. I’ve always known how to crochet, but I mostly ignored the craft—sure, in 08 I made Dhoby, the monkey, but that felt like an exception, not the rule. But this year I started working at Crochet Today part time, and it only made sense that I would suddenly want only to crochet, being surrounded by it all day long. Still mostly just small projects, but fun ones!

But this mosaic doesn’t even address all the things I crocheted this year . . . yes, more secrets. (Revealed below.)

I sewed this year too—seems I average one sewn project a year these days, though I buy more fabric than gets used. I foresee more sewing in 2010, definitely.

oh, and

But one major reason my productivity is seemingly small is that I was involved in quite a few projects I kept secret. Two projects went to Caro and Stitchy for their “bookbookbook.” Several others are my own designs-in-progress, which need some srs TLC in the coming year.

Three were patterns for Crochet Today (under my real name; still working to figure out how to best link that to Minty). But only 2 are out yet:

And the coolest secret project I worked on was to make the white backgrounds for this video demonstrating the tabs function in Google Chrome OS! I didn’t make the first white bg you see, but I did the second and third—and I did them both in one painful, RSI-inducing day. I’m still not clear who of my readers suggested me to the production company, but a big “thank you!” because that was one of the more fun things I’ve been involved with.

So in some ways it doesn’t look like much, but in others this year was a big one for me, craft wise. I’ve got lots of creative mojo gearing up for 2010: I think it’s going to be great!

Back in Vestvember, I got very zealous and started three vests. Two I finished during the month of November, but as the third was a Christmas present for Dad, I moved a bit slower on it. I brought it with me to Norway and worked on it in plain sight of the recipient :)

I finished up the knitting on Wednesday in the evening and eagerly soaked it to get it fully blocked. Since I was using yarn reclaimed from an old WIP, it was all blumpy and messy looking. I was anxious to get it dry right away, so I ran it through mom’s dryer on “no heat” for 30 minutes. But after 30 minutes nothing was happening, so we changed the cycle to “warm” for 20. The yarn was Cascade 220 Superwash bought a long time ago, so I figured it would do it good—superwash always grows so much and often benefits from some dryer time, right?

NO.

The damn thing felted up. Not, perhaps, as much as it could have—there’s still the lovely cable pattern visible—but it felted nonetheless. I shrieked and cried, and mom and i each grabbed one side of the sweater and pulled and pulled and pulled. We got it a bit longer.

I told dad he’d be squeezing into it come the 25th no matter what, though, and he did! We even got some tiny snowflakes falling for our photo shoot on the deck.

Dr. G’s Memory Vest (rav | pattern)
Yarn: Cascade 220 Superwash (though perhaps that is debatable)
Needles: US 8
Started: November 11
Finished: December 23
Notes: I only worked the pattern on the front, so I worked the back as a size x-small and the front as a size small. Honestly, the gauge was a bit open on 8s with this yarn (since Cascade isn’t really a true worsted weight), so the felting has resulted in a really great looking sweater. If only it fit better!

It’s a bit tight to get on and off at the neck, and the armholes are on the tight side; we may just cut them open to allow for some room. It’s snugger than intended but the fact that it still fits has me concerned that the unfelted version might have been big anyway! Honestly, given how nice the fabric looks I’d recommend making a size or two larger and felting it intentionally.

It’s best reserved for only the coldest of winter days here in Norway, anyway. But I think that’s every day.

Merry Christmas all! I’m here in Norway celebrating with my parents. It’s been freezing and snowy pretty much every day. But I suppose that’s a lot more Christmassy feeling than what we had the last time we were together for the holiday.

Merry Christmas!

I’m not sure if I believed that it was going to work, despite all assurances that it would.

When people told me it was no sweat—really—to take scissors to my knitting, I nodded and shrugged like I was well versed in this technique and had no concern.

But the truth is, I’d done a whole lot of reading about steeking, understood the theory and concept thoroughly, and seen loads of friends do it, but I hadn’t yet done it, I was scared out of my mind.

But I dove into the Deep-V Argyle Vest anyway.

And guys, it is no sweat—really—to take scissors to your very feltable 100% wool sweater.

I’m lucky, though: JulieFrick let me give it a whirl first on the adorable Grows Like a Weeds that she knit for her boys.

But back to my knitting—that’s why you’re here, right? My totally perfect argyle vest? The one that’s super warm and yet still comfortable and I am totally in love with?

Deep-V Argyle Vest (pattern | my rav page)
Yarn: Ella Rae Classic, in blue and gray (3 balls of blue and 2 of gray)
Needles: US Size 4. I bought Hiya Hiya steels, and they were nice! Cheap, and they come with a cute locking stitch marker
Started: November 9 (swatching), started knitting for reals on November 12
Finished: The knitting was done on November 18. This is the first time I’ve taken notice of the fact that I actually knit the colorwork part in just 6 days. Dang. I finally got around to steeking on November 21, and it was blocked and dry on November 29. (Basically, I took forever to finish the finishing.)

Notes: So, the pattern is the Deep-V Argyle but I honestly think a super-deep-v looks, well, silly on most people, especially those like me who are not overly well endowed. But what’s great about this pattern is that the entire thing is charted, so you can just redraw your own outline and go from there. So that’s what I did, and in the end I probably did something that was closest to the 36″ size, but I cut the number of rows below the waist shaping and cut out rows in the armholes, too (my row gauge was slightly off). In some ways I didn’t knit the pattern at all—it’s as if I took the argyle chart and just drew my own sweater on it! The detailed and reassuring information in the pattern about steeking was really helpful, though.

And it was no sweat, I swear.