AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

an exercise in cooking

Cherry Cheesecake Ice Cream.  I used the recipe in the Perfect Scoop for Cheesecake ice cream as the base for this tasty treat.  After I finished the ice cream I pureed my cherry mixture and layered it in a tupperware with graham crumbs (I used the teddy grahams, because they were super easy to crush and on sale).

The cherry mixture was:
1-2 pounds of cherries, pitted and cut into 8ths
1/4 cup brandy
1/4 sugar (ish)

The cherries I didn't bother weighing and I didn't use all of them that I had.  I just chopped and pitted for about 30 minutes or until I got bored.  I let them macerate overnight in the fridge.  In the morning when I made my ice cream, I pureed approximately a half cup to a cup of the mixture so I wouldn't have any really big cold chunks.

It worked really well, with the only flaw being a bit of iciness in the cherry swirl.  Still tasty, and better yet for the summer, cold and did not require either the stovetop or the oven.  Yum!

One of my friends earlier this week posted an article from the NYT about cooking and the lack thereof in the U.S.  Here is my favorite quote from "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch."

It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates of our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing: up to six hours a day. (That’s nearly as much time as Guy Fieri devotes to the activity.)

I don't really do that much cooking in the average week, so this article really hit home.  In the last week, I've made black beans and rice (with a pan fried tofu), homemade spicy french fries, and ice cream.  If I did any other real cooking this week, I have forgotten it all.  This weekend I want to make the plum kuchen from Smitten Kitchen.  I even got plums from the farmer's market for it.  We'll see how it goes.  I usually have bigger plans than I can get done in my 27 minutes of kitchen time a day.

Do you remember Garbage Pail Kids?

Well, I was going to write something not witty and potentially obnoxious about the latest Vogue Knitting, which I got last night.  However, my email provided me something much more obnoxious to write about instead.  VK can just wait until tomorrow after all.

Garbage Pail Kids in Politics?

I remember Garbage Pail Kids fondly growing up.  They were sick little creations, and it was fun to see what I got in my latest pack.  Later this expanded to collecting other cards.  Nothing as worthwhile as baseball cards, but at one point (and I still might) I had a complete set of Sailor Moon cards.  Card collecting is not something I really do anymore, though I still have a lot of Magic: the Gathering, INWO, Mythos and other collectible card games.  They tend to be a little difficult to get rid of, and they are full of a strange bit of nostalgia.  Evenings playing cards, not bridge or pinochle, pretending to be crack investigators looking for the strange and tentacly throughout Arkham. 

Garbage Pail Kids were similar, though I didn't play games with them.  My brother and I would spread them out on the floor like a carpet.  I'm sure we were putting them in order (probably alphabetical, but it could have been anything), placing our treasures in rows upon rows.  Now, of course, I'd probably be mostly disgusted or amused at my younger self.  Maybe not.  I'd have to open a pack of them to find out.

Living her dreams

One of my friends has been trying to break into the comics business.  Web comics, that is.  She is working on a sweet story called Autumnside that she is publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Please go take a look and if you like the story or the art, please vote for Autumnside.  There are two little voting buttons under the comic.

Someday I hope to live my dreams as vividly and actively as she is (though I guess I still need to figure out what they actually are first)!

Found: something really cool

I read Circuits every week.  I like reading David Pogue's article even though I haven't bothered to get the NY Times to see his other articles.  This week's article and the CBS Sunday news (at 9 a.m. EST) feature - or are supposed to feature - the Solar Decathlon.

I've always been a science geek and even though it isn't my life anymore there are certain things I definitely follow.  Clean energy, renewable resources are two of my big topics.  I don't talk about them often, but I like to read about them.

The site has all of these houses that are made to be 100% energy efficient, so they don't need to rely on the power grid.  They reuse materials, use solar power (hence the name) and while some of them might be a little out there on the inside, most of the indoor pictures feature kitchens that I would happily live in.  A gorgeous, large kitchen is definitely something I miss most living in our condo.

The houses are small for the competition (800 square feet, though that is palatial in some regions), but with only about 300 additional square feet they could easily be my dream house.  Beauty and function all in one space.  Wonderful!

Beauties

Foldings
This is amazingly beautiful works.  When my husband sent me the link, I didn't really say anything to him about it (and honestly, didn't click on it right away).  Then I clicked and stared.  I'm not really any good at origami.  I love paper, but it is a back drop or a tool.  I don't really do folding and have never done much beyond the cranes.  When I worked at Sasuga, I would scan book covers for the website and the newsletter.  I loved the different books for dinosaurs or boxes made out of pieces of folded paper.  I even bought a few older books from eBay, even though I never got around to trying it out.  Just a crane here or a tulip there.  Basic folds that even an indifferent beginner could work their way around.

But these?  These are art. 

...

I'm sure that some people are tired of hearing about Ravelry (well, except my husband, who has probably heard about it for the first time just now).  A few weeks ago I signed up, having seen a few reviews (read: raves) about the website and how neat and useful it all was.  I didn't expect an invite.  I didn't know if it was a strict date-wise beta or only the cool kids are doing it or anything.

Umm, I got my invite.

I haven't played with it much, because I had work and then a meeting with friends, but I love that I can put in my books super easy.  If I bothered to tag my knitting books in Library Thing it would have been even easier!  I've been exploring the different patterns that are out there... mostly trying to find something to do with my single skein of Sea Silk.

My only problem is I'm not much of a photographer.  I love blogs with photos, so I want my blog to have pictures too.  I usually make my husband take the pictures, but it seems unfair to make him take tons of pictures of yarn (rather than finished or partially finished objects) even if I bribe him with homemade ice cream (I'm making chocolate ice cream right now with a Lactaid Milk base... I love knowing that my lactose intolerant friends can eat it). 

I also don't have a Flickr account (needed for the pictures).  Does anyone know if there is a way to make Flickr import all of your pictures straight from Typepad?  I can pull them all from my thumb drive, but it would be faster to just pull from my already uploaded pictures.

Things I love:
Seeing finished and in progress pictures in so many different yarns!
The queue - I love being able to tag the patterns I'm interested in (which at this point reminds me that I have bought yarn for some things nearly a year ago...)
Lace - I'm a huge lace fanatic, so seeing so much lace (even more than the finished and in progress pictures) is completely thrilling!

Things that frighten me:
Do I really want to know how much yarn I have and when I bought it?
How many projects do I have all of the yarn for?
Do I really need a Flickr account, a blog, and... and... and... (see the pattern)?
My pictures completely stink!  These are all so pretty!

Mostly stupid insecurities that I don't truly have time enough to think about (welcome to my month of June is being booked for me all over the place, so there is no relaxation time for knitting and Ravelry any more than there is for the birthday present I requested - a nap) anything other than adding more parentheses to things, because that is what I do when I write with stream of consciousness.

In a knitting-free world

Supreme Court Patent Case

I love working in a law firm.  I'm not an attorney or a paralegal, but I love reading about how our system (in the United States) works.  A recent case came up in the US Supreme Court about the validity of the Patent test (aka, how the court system decides something is innovative enough to patentable).  I imagine that no matter what the courts do this will be a sticky subject.  How do you legislate creativity and ingenuity? 

While the case is different from copyright, in some ways it makes me feel the same things.  How can we copyright a particular cable pattern.  If you make something based off of someone else's pattern, how much innovation do you need to use before you can consider it different enough to market or sell as your own.  When is the line of old hat to new crossed?  With everything being produced on individual blogs, crafster, and other sites like knitty.com, what is new in the world of knitting?  I love some of the patterns I find, but sometimes I just look at them and think I could have done that.  Is the point simply then that I didn't?

Knitting Fool

I love KnittingFool.  I make a lot of random scarves (and I am actually going to get off my butt and take pictures of them this weekend), but I get bored easily.  I usually take a cable pattern from a sweater that looks complicated and try it out first on a scarf.  Most of my scarves were based on The Pleasures of Knitting, because most of the cabled sweaters looked really busy and I just wanted to try them before committing to something with sleeves (because I really don't finish things very often).

For the past few months I have been looking for stitch patterns that were interesting, but easy on KnittingFool.  I recently made a scarf out of Baby Alpaca Brush, which is incredibly soft and furs all over everything.  But I did a waving rib, which looks nice and provides visual interest on both the right and wrong sides (they both look good enough to use as a right side).