AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

I'm Smitten!

Last night I went to see Deb Perelman, the person behind smittenkitchen.com and her new mostly self titled cookbook, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. Like many people I had neglected to acquire tickets in advance to a sold out event, but thankfully one woman in the ticket line had extra tickets so I was able to get in without the drama of the standby line.

It was a bit of a cold wait with my cookbooks, my knitting, and the cookies I made Tuesday night, knowing that I wanted to offer something that she could enjoy when she was in a hotel after the signing. I was the proverbial bag lady.

Deb is as full of warm, self-deprecating humor in person as she is online. Affable, and friendly, she gave maybe a 20 minute talk and then turned it over to questions, which ran the gamut. Where did she get her dress (something from 2007 or so that she got altered), to how does she write her recipes (type it up, and then make notes, alter and repeat until perfect), to how many hits does she get on her site (about 10M a month). (Oh, and for the blurry pictures, you have my apologies.)

After the talk, we all trooped over to the Brookline Booksmith to stand in what might have been an interminable line except for making new friends. The woman ahead of me, Elizabeth, was a recent transplant from New York, so we talked about her family, law, books, food, etc. Pretty much everything under the sun as we made our way through the line that snaked through the store.

Sometime after 10 we finally made it to the front of the line (our fault: those closest to the front of the theater were definitely in the back end of the line). One of the women ahead of us brought her yellow KitchenAid stand mixer to be signed. An awesome idea, and if I didn't go to work and had a rolling suitcase, and if my KitchenAid was spotless from the last batch of cookies... well, I might have done the same thing!

I loved meeting with Deb. I was pretty wiped, so I feel like I kind of stumbled over my words and probably came across as a bit fannish (and not in the good way. More like in the 12 year old boy with a crush way. *sigh*). And I gave her the cookies. Which I made from her site, modified of course.

Our Favorite Chocolate Chip cookies, lightly modified

The original cookies are mix of finely chopped and toasted nuts (pecans), and chocolate bound together in the smallest amount of dough possible. It makes for cookies that don't spread too much, and have a delicious treat in every bite. Mine are much the same, except a few lazing tricks. Now I did everything with the digital scale, so no actual cup measurements (though you can go to the original recipe for the cup versions).

Ingredients
100g granulated sugar
120g light brown sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, brought to room temperature
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking soda
175g all purpose flour
130g almond flour
1/2 tsp smoked sea salt
205g peppermint bark, chopped (mine comes from Au Chocolat, an awesome store in DT Boston)

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Line your baking pans with parchment paper or Silpats. I could have gotten away with 2 pans, but I did end up using Deb's recommended 3 pans (2 cookie sheets and a pizza pan).

Cream the granulated sugar, brown sugar and butter until it is light and fluffy. Scrape it down and add the egg and vanilla extract.

In a separate bowl measure out the baking soda, all purpose flour, almond flour and sea salt. Add to the egg mixture and stir till well combined. Add the chopped peppermint bark.

Pull out an ice cream scoop, and make flat scoops of dough (aka, even with the top of the scoop). I put 6 per cookie sheet approximately 4 finger widths apart. Plop them in the oven for 30 minutes (start checking them at 25 minutes). When they indent but don't sink when touched, they are done. They should be golden brown. Maybe my awesome husband will take a picture of one of the cookies when he gets home... just a little hint! I got 14 cookies out of this dough by making some of the cookies just a smidge smaller.

A little note: I could have easily used the entire package of peppermint bark. Because I used almond flour rather than chopped nuts, it is more of a dough component rather than a dough and add-in component and offers more room for chocolate! The entire package of peppermint bark would have been about 350 grams at my best estimate. But hey, we ate the rest of the bark!

Take this class (when in your area)

Last weekend I took a class with Ann Weaver at Gather Here on desiging your own triangular shawl. Our class was small and oh so awesome!

Now, I will admit that I am definitely a fan of Ann Weaver's designs. Tempest has been in my queue for a long time and I have had yarn set aside for a year. Last year I made Oranje. I have some her hat designs and books (and still plan to make this one). Her designs are not overly ornate, which makes most of them (Oranje is a bit of an outlier actually) very wearable. It is easy for designs to get so ornate that they are hard to wear, which makes it awesome to have a few designers who specialize in clean beautiful design.

We initially went over standard triangular shawls, and how that goes into making a shapes other than standard triangles. We started with a top down (tab construction!) and we each had a different elements. I loved one of my classmates. He did something different from the edging. Mine was the more standard garter stitch.

Ann is a very enthusiastic teacher, which made this class both a great learning experience and like a little stitch and bitch between three friends.

Of course, I have an idea of how i want to finish the shawl, but I have way too much I am trying to get done between now and the end of the month. I am hoping to get to this at the beginning of 2013. I certainly won't find any time for it before then!

[10 Tuesday] Giving Thanks

It's almost Thanksgiving, the best holiday of the year. What? I like to cook, and for home cooks this might be the best day of the year despite the excesses I go through for ice cream each July.

Of course, liking to cook doesn't mean that I get to ignore the actual meanings behind Thanksgiving. So, here is a short list of the things I am thankful for at this moment.

1. Bread. Well, mostly this bread. I have made it almost a dozen times since I saw the recipe in February, and with herbs or without, with spicy oil or without, it is a glorious loaf of bready love. Which is good, because I'm making it again this week.

2. My husband, Chris, who has put up with a lot of grumpiness for what feels like forever. Medications, lack of sleep, changes (I'd say in what parts of my life, but really changes anywhere tend to lead towards grumpiness) and the cold all have me feeling a bit of out of sorts.

3. My friends, but mostly Erika. We work together, which does tend to lead to some occasional tiffs as we are both too tired and too close to each other sometimes to realize that we are being insensitive or unfair, but without her work would be far more boring and, well, the rest of the time would be probably spent in a lot more staring off into space. She's doing Pirates. Locals should go see it!

4. Gather Here. Virginia, Noah and Maggie (and the rest of the gang) are wonderful about making such an inviting space and building a real community between their walls. I love them and the shop more every time I visit, and I do visit an awful lot.

5. A working oven. We're visiting family for the holiday, and rather than take up their stoves and ovens, I'm doing my cooking early Thursday morning before we leave. I'm still debating what dessert I'm making. It keeps changing, because I don't have a 24-cavity minicupcake pan. I'm thinking cake at the moment.

6. We recently went on a trip to Lexington. I'm grateful that Lexington is nicer than I thought it might be. Part of me still wishes it had been either horrible or stupendously awesome. It was definitely more in the middle, but it was still a nice place that wasn't too warm or cold and had plenty of nice people, food, things to do, etc. I still intend to write more on this, but I've been slowly processing.

Cream Bourbon - Apparently tastes like dessert. 

7. Yarn. I have plenty of it, and even though I still buy more (it is as much habit as wanting to support my local shops, dyers and designers). It feels good to know that I could be completely out of cash and still have plenty of crafting supplies to keep me busy (or even to sell off to pay for food and shelter). Of course, this doesn't stop me from wanting more yarn. Maybe it is like an addiction.

8. My job. I have one, which I cannot say about everyone I know. I like my job, and it has lots of different things to do which helps keep me from getting bored.

9. 401(k). This is kind of weird, but I'm grateful that my 101(k) has recovered enough from the recession to be a 401(k) again. Even better, I'm glad that I was able to obtain a loan to pay off my college debt.

10. I am grateful that I might be able to finish my degree in the next few years. I've been putting it off, because I couldn't obtain a transcript. Now that I can, it is time to finish my degree so I can do more of the things I am interested in.

And a bonus 11.

You. I don't post as often as I want to (or read as many other posts as I'm interested in), but I am glad that all of you exist out there.

[10 Tuesday] thinking much?

Today's 10 for Tuesday is 10 things on your mind, and I've been full of thoughts that are just not so great for blogging, which has greatly lowered my participation in 10 for Tuesday and, well, in blogging in general.

Let's at least start with the lighter ones and see if I can work my way up to any of the harder ones, eh?

1. Knitted gifts. I've sort of come to the conclusion that I have too many items I want to make and that includes items for Loopy's Quarterly challenge, gifts, projects I started more than 3 years ago, and well, everything in between. I am multicraftual for lack of a better word and many of my other crafts are even slower than knitting. Time is at a premium.

2. Paying off school. I finally paid off college debt, which means I can finally consider getting my transcript to finish my degree somewhere else. In college (back in the 90s), I was studying biochemistry, but I wasn't truly interested in research. Now I would most likely go back for computer science.

3. If I didn't decide on culinary school instead and turn my husband into the biggest sphere ever from bringing home pastries after every class. Yeah, culinary school just for sweets.

4. Because I would love to open an ice cream shop someday. Right now my husband benefits the most from things like my whoopie pie ice cream, but I could share it out a bit more than that. Of course, I still have some failures. The taro ice cream I made this year was just bad. Too thick and hard to scoop, but that just means that I need to try again.

5. Thanksgiving. This is my favorite holiday as a food-cooking individual. I don't know what we're going yet, though I'm pretty sure that we are going to enjoy time with my relatives. I will probably make mashed potatoes. It's a food that I appear to like too much. Though going to Maine for Thanksgiving will put a serious crimp into my ability to make more desserts than there are people (no seriously, I have had Thanksgiving days where there were more desserts than people, and not because it was just my husband and I).

6. The Election. Results are going to be coming in today, and my stomach is churning unhappily just thinking about it. I believe it matters who we elect, but the differences of opinion are extreme between the two sides. Our news system is so polarized that there are plenty of people who never even see a differing view, because they are looking at either conservative-biased media or liberal-biased media (like Huffington Post). I don't think that the election is going to convince hardly anyone on the losing side that maybe there was something honestly bad about their candidate that made them unfit for office. Instead, those people (on either side no matter who wins) will either blame people for being stupid or ignore any responsibility the political campaign and process had on the election.

Umm, yeah, soapbox over.

7. Work. I might have an opportunity to increase my work responsibility, which could be a great thing. However, like a Facebook status, it's complicated. Meanwhile, I apparently have managed to have due to a combination of factors way more time off in a single month than I'm truly comfortable with, but some of that is needed vacation time!

8. Like my staycation next week. I'd love to say that we're going to do fun things on our staycation, but truthfully we got home from work tonight and the first thing I noticed was the leaves in the front yard. You would never know by looking at them that any raking was done on Sunday despite the more than 20 bags in the front yard. Part of me wishes that we had decided against our huge yard with all of the overhanging trees, because raking takes forever!

9. Perfecting the Chicago-style stuffed pizza for my husband's birthday. I need to make another attempt, because while the crust was pretty good I need a better balance of filling and to make the pizza in a bigger cake pan to make the crust more in proportion. The last go round involved a pizza that was a little too bready in the corner.

10. Umm, baby knits? I have friends and relatives who are expecting and I haven't even started thinking about what to make. Well, that's not completely true. I want to make a baby cardigan possibly for one, but I didn't see an appropriate pattern on Ravelry, so I need to design my own. I'm not really confident of my ability to do that despite knitting for so long.

And those are the things that I am comfortable mentioning in the blog. There are a ton of other things that have been going on some good and some bad that have kept me away from the blog, but here is hoping that things even out soon. I've felt weird for weeks.

Now to pinball and my honey cowl.

(And expect a picture of leaves eventually in this space if I can get the camera in the morning when there is light.)