In a vast improvement over Saturday, I made it out to Flying Monkey–on my bike–in a decent amount of time and with my wallet! Now, I am squared away with some scrumptious tea and all the notes I need to get some this paper work out of the way.
It’s a lovely day outside, the music is good inside, and I have had a productive morning so far.
For the giveaway folks, here’s a look at the yarns I posted to the shop this morning.
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Juniper Moon Farm has a fairly extensive cookbook library and guests who stay for more than a few days invariably end up curled up on the couch surrounded by a towering stack of books.
For me, cookbooks are for reading, not just using as reference books. My favorites have a spot on my bedside table, to be read on sleepless nights again and again. The very best of these is Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, a book that I would absolutely put on my desert island list.
These are some of my latest favs:
Home Made by Yvette Van Boven is my absolute favorite of the moment. This is a peach of a book! It’s filled with lovely recipes, but more importantly, it’s packed with techniques that will allow cooks of all skill levels to go off-recipe and create their own special recipes. And, on top of everything else, it’s packed with gorgeous photos and charming illustrations. Trust me- you need this book.
Seasons by Donna Hay is a compilation of recipes from Donna Hay Magazine, one of my very favorites. Donna Hay is out of Australia and the magazine is fairly expensive on the newsstands, but I can never resist it’s allure. Simply put, Donna Hay’s food styling and photography are the very best in the business and her food is very original. This book is definitely worth owning if you can find it. I got my copy at Anthropologie and I am very glad I did, as Amazon is sold out. If you see this book, buy it! If it turns out it’s not for you, there will be a line of people waiting to take it off your hands.
Cook Italy by Katie Caldesi. If you only own one Italian cookbook, it should be this one. It’s full of authentic, regional Italian recipes and lots of photo tutorials.
My Nepenthe by Romney Steele. My friend Kris has a mountain house named Nepenthe and I first came across this book there. Nepenthe is a medicine for sorrow, literally an anti-depressant – a “drug of forgetfulness” mentioned in ancient Greek literature and Greek mythology, depicted as originating in Egypt, according to wikipedia. It’s also a restaurant in Big Sur, where movie stars and the intelligentsia met in the 1950s and 60s for good food and conversation.
Although I haven’t yet tried any of the recipes in this book, the old photographs and stories from back in the day make it a worth buying.
Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi was another Kris recommendation and it’s a winner. Jam-packed with interesting and delicious recipes that just happen to also be vegetarian, Plenty showed me that giving up meat doesn’t mean giving up innovative food. A must-have for anyone who hosts vegetarian guests.
The Cheesemonger’s Kitchen by Chester Hastings. This is a great book for everyone who loves cheese but is also sort of intimidated by it. Like wine, the world of cheeses can be overwhelming to the uninitiated and it sometimes seems as if you need to know the secret handshake before approaching the cheese counter. The Cheesemonger’s Kitchen will help you overcome those fears and dive into this glorious world. (FYI, I am working on a post on how to put together a cheese board for company. Coming soon!)
What are your favorite cookbooks? Do you have old favorites that you return to again and again? Share them with us.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?
I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.
Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.
You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Starting today, my lovely new friend Sara is hosting a giveaway of Tiny Dino Studios yarn on her blog, Tangled Happy. She finds (and designs) some of the cutest crochet patterns, it makes me want to learn to crochet. (And I will one of these days, I swear.)
See Tangled Happy to find out how to enter to win two skeins of my Pteranodon Yarn (100% Worsted Weight Merino).
You can pick any two skeins out of what’s in the shop. (And there are more colors going up this morning, which totally count.) Here’s a quick look at what’s available.
Thanks to every one for stopping by!
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Tagged Flarkin adventures
Shani and I got together yesterday for our semi-monthly canning day, joined by Miss Hannah. Since we’ve done about all we care to with citrus fruit, we decided we would work on some pickled vegetables and a trial batch of making our own mustard.
Our morning was spent hitting three different stores in search of our ingredients, during which we committed the grave error of walking into Whole Foods hungry (and walking out with $50 worth of bread, cheese and olives for lunch as our penance) and never found the daikon we wanted for one recipe.
Prepping the vegetables and processing them took the entire afternoon, but for the first time ever, we were finished before midnight! We were even finished before (an admittedly late) dinner. Hannah was great as our measurer of spices, as these recipes wanted you to measure your spice into each jar instead of mixing them in with the brine. Undoubtedly this makes it a lot easy to make sure the spices are evenly distributed, but it also makes prepping the jars a more complicated process.
We found the pickling to be far faster and easier work than jam making, and got nearly the same amounts of yield in nearly half the time. In the end, we had about 20 pints of cauliflower, 7 pints of asian spicy carrots, 5 half pints of baby corn, 4 half pints of bread and butter jalapeños, and 2 half pints of Oktoberfest Beer mustard, plus a couple of wee sharing jars of peppers and mustard.
Carrots, baby corn, cauliflower, peppers on top. Are they not beautiful?
We had recipes that called for brown rice vinegar – which we did find at Whole Foods, but which was quite expensive. We bought one bottle of it, which was not nearly enough for our plans. But it did allow us to do a taste comparison so that we could figure out reasonable substitutions. We knew that the kind of vinegar we used wouldn’t matter, as long as they were equally or more acidic than what the recipe calls for, but we wanted to keep our flavor profiles as close as we could. Imagine, if you will, the three of us standing in the kitchen, with spoons, taking wee sips of all the vinegars we had on hand, trying to find the right combination. We found that the brown rice vinegar had a very malty flavor, and that a combination of apple cider and malt vinegar was likely close enough to get us what we wanted.
The mustard proved to be incredibly easy, and if it tastes anywhere near as good as it smells, I may never buy mustard again. It still astounds me how easy some of this stuff is to make for myself.
Now, we wait a week or so to let the flavors really settle in before cracking open the jars and trying them. The jury is still out whether I will make it that long.
Recipes: Bread and butter jalapeños came from a local restaurant, Octoberfest Beer mustard can from the Ball preserving book, and the cauliflower and carrot recipes came from Tart and Sweet. We did the corn in the same brine as the cauliflower recipe.
As promised in my last post, here is the NY Public Library on 5th Ave.
The cornerstone was laid in May 1902. It was completed in 1910 but it took another year for all the books to be moved in. The library was officially opened at a dedication ceremony in May 1911.
Click here to read the history of the library.
Let’s enter …
(You can click on pictures to enlarge)
The reason Deb and I were at the library in the first place was to see a small exhibit they had on the wonderful PBS Masterpiece series ‘Downton Abbey.’ Turns out the exhibit was across the street but had we known that we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of exploring this beautiful building.
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Tagged architecture, art, history, New York, Photographs
We got a few prints framed that had been lounging on the walls still in their plastic bag sleeves. The walls are looking ever so much nicer now! There’s one last print at the framing shop and then the living room framing will be all caught up.
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Tagged Daily Happenings, framing, Home, pictures
(Click on picture to enlarge)
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Tagged architecture, food, water
