Boffcat

Surprise!

2010-01-10T02:54:00.004Z

I'm alive! And healthy and everything! (Unless the benefits officer's reading this, in which case I'm still severely incapacitated with no hope of improvement in the foreseeable future.) Have I beaten my own record for number of months without so much as a whisper? Sorry about that: life - in the form of final exams, job panic, and general lack of organisational skills - got in the way for a bit. I'll be back at some point to give boffcat.co.uk the TLC it could so badly do with, but for now I'm over here at boffcat.com (I know, however did I come up with that one?). If anyone's still out there, come and say hello!

"Mummy, what's that strange lady taking pictures for?"

2009-04-13T13:14:00.011+01:00

I'm slightly in awe of the bloggers who photograph their meals in restaurants without so much as a pang of self-consciousness - sometimes I can't even take pictures in my flat without feeling like a prime idiot. Yesterday's Easter-lunch-for-six was a case in point: I'd sort of forgotten that not everyone takes photos of their food before eating it, and that the explanation of "it's for a blog" doesn't necessarily enlighten much. To minimise my embarrassment I took a hurried two photos of each dish rather than my usual eleventy-nine, hence the even lower in-focus rate than usual.

41. Zucchini Crostini (Fast Food)

Mike had been drooling over the picture of these for a while (which might seem mystifying if you've only got my photo to go on, but trust me, the shot in the book is mouth-watering), and when I asked him to pick a starter this is what he plumped for. Isn't "to plump for" a funny phrase? But anyway - the recipe's basically an assembly job: sourdough crostini brushed with olive oil and topped with prosciutto, furls of blanched courgette tossed in lemon zest and seasoning, and a poached egg perched on top. All of which sounds straightforward enough, but the 'Fast Food' label is nonetheless a bit of a misnomer - preparing the courgettes actually takes a fair amount of time. More troublesomely, I couldn't find sourdough bread anywhere. Admittedly by 'anywhere' I just mean Sainsbury's and Waitrose, but still! I ended up getting a ciabatta instead, mainly because I thought ciabatta was a type of sourdough bread, but Wikipedia appears to disagree with me on that one.

These are much tastier than that photo might lead you to believe - Mike and I both thought they were the best part of the whole meal. And Jill's method for poaching eggs is fantastic. If you're thinking "you need a method to poach eggs?" you have clearly never been subjected to my previous attempts - recently I've been using these, which my mum gave me, but although they're fairly idiot-proof (well, if Mike's on hand to upend them for you) there's something almost too plasticy-perfect about the resulting eggs. The Lighten Up approach doesn't involve special equipment, swirling water or 'champagne bubbles' (that's what one of my ex-flatmates used to swear by...): all you do is bring 5cm of water to a simmer in a deep-ish frying pan, add a splash of vinegar, slide in the eggs and leave them for about three minutes. I can only assume that the shallowness of the water is the crucial element - it can't be the vinegar, anyway, as that was always involved in my unlovely specimins of yore - but whatever it is the eggs end up perfectly imperfect.

Mike says: "COURGETTE! These looked exactly like the picture (down to my parma ham arranging skills), good and quick and went down well, way too much courgette though, had to eat it seperately. It is weird eating a lot of courgette on its own."

42. Lamb Tagliata with Oven-Roast Tomatoes (Fast Food)

This recipe pretty much chose itself, lamb and Easter being so inextricably linked (in Britain, at least - come to think of it what do Antipodeans eat at Easter, given that lamb presumably isn't in season? A quick google turned up "for people in Australia no Easter is complete without a bilby or rabbit-eared bandicoot", but I like to think that's not referring to food...). Happily it's a doddle to make: you just press rump steak into a mixture of salt, pepper and finely chopped rosemary, then brown in a pan and finish off in the oven for ten minutes alongside cherry tomatoes on the vine - the meat should still be quite pink inside. Once the lamb's been rested and sliced you squish over the juice of a couple of the tomatoes, then strew with some rocket (quite a lot actually; my lamb looked more drowned than strewn) and the remaining tomatoes and drizzle over some olive oil.

There is lamb in there somewhere if you look hard enough.

I thought this was really nice, and would make a good Summer lunch - the lamb had a thick layer of fat on it though, which in retrospect I should probably have removed after cooking, or at least pared down a bit before. (Jill doesn't say anything about removing fat, you see, and, slavish recipe-follower that I am, it didn't occur to me to jetison it.) Still, the flavours were fresh and the meat was tender, and it all got finished which either means that it was popular or that portions were stingy, take your pick. Incidentally, the recipe's available here.

Mike says: "This one looked very pretty and the lamp was very tasty but very fatty. But it was the lamb's bottom so I guess it is good it was fatty, I wouldn't want my lambs without a padded rear. It also cooled really quick so maybe eat it somewhere hot, like a desert or possibly in a fire."

43. Pineapple and Coconut Soufflés (Special Food)

I'd never made soufflé before (I generally consider life too short to self-induce raised blood pressure), but remembered Sarah making these a while back and finding them inedibly sweet, so I used less than half the sugar called for by the recipe. You start off by popping some desiccated coconut in the oven to toast, completely forgetting about it and burning it an unappetising shade of greige. Once this entirely necessary step is out of the way you toast a fresh batch of coconut, beat some egg yolks, sugar and crushed pineappple together and stir in most of the coconut. Next you whisk egg whites to firm peaks with some more sugar and fold this into the pineapple mixture before spooning the whole thing into heavily buttered 250 ml soufflé dishes. Now, I've been accused of stockpiling more kitchen equipment than your average branch of Lakeland, but even my cupboards don't stretch to individual soufflé dishes, so I just used mugs with the same capacity. You're supposed to fill them to the brim, but there wasn't enough mixture for that - I'd guesstimate mine were only about two thirds full. You're also meant to smooth the tops, but as you can tell from the picture I didn't make quiiite as good a job of that as I could have done:

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder then I can only hope that all beholders are as short-sighted as me - the finishing touches of icing sugar and more toasted coconut didn't do much to obscure the lack of artistry. On the bright side they rose better than I'd dared hoped - they'd all sunk slightly by the time the picture was taken, but still towered above their pre-oven heights.

I was fairly indifferent to these - they were incredibly light, but almost too 'fluffy', and I couldn't really taste the pineapple (then again I did have a horrible cold, so that might not be saying much). They seemed more popular with other people though, and I'd definitely use the method again to make differently flavoured soufflés, though possibly in a parallel life where I'm the kind of person who actually owns soufflé dishes.

Mike says: "I am always against H halving sugar in recipes because she finds them too sweet. Especially when she complains at me for not following recipes and putting in 400g of turmeric thinking it is curry paste. These mug-contained fluffy things were create [?] though, and I really like bountys so win-win all round really."

2009-04-12T09:18:00.006+01:00

40. Spicy Tofu (Tofu x 4)

Tofu again! I know this looks suspiciously like the mapu dofu I made last month, but it's an entirely different dish, honest. This one's made with fresh firm tofu, which is less susceptible to disintegrating the moment you come anywhere near it with a spatula. The sauce is a mixture of oyster sauce, soy, rice wine, sesame oil, chicken stock, garlic, red chilli, spring onion and ginger, bubbled together for a few minutes before the blocks of tofu are added and briefly simmered. Easy peasy! And you really appreciate the firmness of the tofu when the time comes to remove it from the pan and cut it into cubes.

There's not a lot to say, really - no surprises, but very tasty nonetheless. And that dizzyingly in-depth analysis may be the most comprehensive for a while, as I've now got a cold which leaves me incapable of smelling anything much. Happy Easter, though!

Mike says: "Tofu tofu tofu, and spicy, of course if you like tofu this is going to be good; if you don't like tofu eat it anyway and stop complaining."

In the miso soup

2009-04-10T11:34:00.008+01:00

Miso soup is one of those things I wish I liked more - some versions hit the spot but others leave me a bit cold. I probably shouldn't be confessing this, but the nicest I've ever had was actually from one of those instant powdered sachets; sadly I have no idea what the brand was so that particular culinary transgression can't be repeated. Anyway, come yesterday the Lighten Up take on miso soup had already been on the cards for a couple of days and the spinach was starting to look rather sorry for itself, so I cruelly insisted on inflicting it on Mike for dinner even though we were both a bit salted-out following a cinema popcorn-fest.

39. Simple Tofu Soup (Tofu x 4)

The recipe's nothing revolutionary - you stir some red miso into a base of dashi, mirin and soy, then add cubed silken tofu and ready-cooked udon noodles and warm through. Finally you throw in a handful of baby spinach leaves, and sprinkle over a smattering of sesame seeds. I played fast and loose with the quantities of added ingredients (by which I mean I increased the amount of noodles and tofu by at least threefold, but then again we were eating this as a meal in its entirety rather than as an accompaniment to sushi, which is what Jill intends it to be). The whole thing takes about five minutes, which is always a plus.

Oishii! As miso soups go, this one was pretty darn good. I'm more or less guaranteed to like anything containing udon noodles - I love their fat unctuousness - but it wasn't just that; the base itself had a much more delicate flavour than those I've made in the past, which I guess is mostly the work of the miso (I used the Hikari brand, which is a reassuringly natural-looking beige colour - the stuff I used last time round was lurid red, so I don't know what I was expecting, really...).

Mike says: "Ah tofu again, my little cubed jellyish veggie friend. I am now quite a fan because of this book, this was a good miso soup, and udon noodles make eating like a game, so thumbs up for this one."

Curry in a hurry

2009-04-09T18:35:00.005+01:00

Yesterday's lunch was meant to be a miso soup, but, in a development which surprised no-one, I didn't get round to picking up any miso in time, so hurridly cast around for an alternative and came up with:

38. Spicy Okra Curry (Spicy Food)

I'd probably cooked okra a grand total of once before yesterday - when I asked Mike to get some in Sainsbury's he came back proudly bearing pak choi, which says it all, really. It's not that I have anything against it, it's just not a vegetable I'd ever really think of cooking in the normal course of things. Still, cutting loose from the 'normal course of things' is largely what the project's about, and as curries go this one was pretty quick to put together: the okra's just simmered for twenty minutes in a tomato-based sauce spiced with fennel seed, ground coriander, cumin chilli and turmeric. Although I halved the amount of okra I left the sauce ingredients in their original quantities for the usual 'arrgg-no-half-onions-please' reasons, and the finished dish wasn't saucy at all - if anything it was quite a dry curry - so I wouldn't have any qualms about doing the same again.

Mike's off the hook for this photo, so I'm going to attempt to blame the steam instead! Though it wasn't really the most photogenic of meals to start with. And not the tastiest either, to be honest - I didn't much care for the aniseed-y flavour which the fennel imparted, and though the dish overall was fine it didn't have anything special going for it.

Incidentally, just in case the recent dearth of Mike's contributions has caused anyone to fear for his well-being, rest assured that I only keep him in the cupboard under the sink between meals, and he's managed to chink away at the door a bit to let some natural daylight in.

Mike, following his spectacular cupboard break-out, says: "Okra is weird, I am not sure if I have had it before this, but it is weird, kind of like eating furry slugs, but in a good way. The fennel is what you could taste mainly in this one. So if you like the taste of fennel then you will probably like this."

If a picture speaks a thousand words...

2009-04-08T08:56:00.019+01:00

...then this post is already 5,000 figurative words long before I've so much as opened my mouth, which is handy as I'm a bit short on time. Away we go!

34. Spice-Grilled Mackerel (Spicy Food)

I'd actually made this last November but that was before the start of the project, and as mackerel were half price at Sainsbury's (£1.54 for four! Though admittedly on closer inspection at home one of them turned out to be the size of an emaciated sardine) and I had people coming round for dinner (nothing says hospitality like thrift...) the time seemed ripe for a re-make. The recipe couldn't be much easier: you slash the flesh of each fish, rub a mixture of Thai red curry paste, coconut milk and sugar into the skin and grill for ten minutes. I was going to make some coconut mashed potato to go alongside, but luckily remembered in the nick of time that I don't actually like mashed potato, and revisited the Togarashi oven chips instead. The mackerel recipe also includes directions for a very simple salad, which you can see in the background below.

The only explanation I can offer for the poorness of this photo is that Mike, who took it, hadn't slept in over 36 hours. Usually I'm such a control freak that, after plating up, I wrest the camera from him and take a couple of pictures too (not that there as yet appears to be a correlation between this control-freakishness and actual photographic ability, but I live in hope), but I didn't get round to it that night. And thanks to that tangent I almost forgot to say - the mackerel's scumptious! Delicious payoff for minimal effort.

Mike says: "Although puny in size, fish is always fun to eat when it's served with head and all. I can't remember too much about this one as I had been up for a couple of days trying to hit some deadline or other, but I'm sure it was good and had nothing to do with my three day migraine to follow the day after."

35. Little Fruity Puddings (Steamy Food)

These are little steamed puddings crammed with sultanas and currants - think fruit cake mixed with Spotted Dick and you'll get the idea. Again, I'd made the recipe pre-project, but back then I: a) made one large pudding rather than six mini ones, and b) - somewhat more crucially - completely forgot to put the butter in. It actually tasted fine despite this glaring omission, so in an attempt to suck up to my arteries I didn't use the full amount of butter this time round, making up some of the difference with a fruity olive oil. As another healthy bonus, there isn't any sugar in the recipe - instead the puddings are sweetened with honey, which I'm convinced is a gazillion times better for you than sugar, so please don't disillusion me.

The best sleep-deprived-Mike photo of the night! He raises his game a bit when it comes to pudding

I love a good steamed pudding, and these are indeed gooood. It looks a bit plain here - the suggested accompaniment is mostarda di frutta, but I didn't really need another half-empty condiment jar hogging valuable fridge space, so just used up the rest of some double cream we had instead. I tell you what would be perfect with them though - custard! And that's coming from someone who isn't really a custard person (I do quite like fresh custard, but I know Custard People and they would not recognise me as one of their number).

Mike says: "I was actually allowed to eat these even though I was still on my forty day Lent sweet things fast. The reason being that they were only sweetened with sugar, woot. Really tasty these little things, would be good with custard, and in multiples of six."

36. Lemon Yoghurt Cupcakes (Fruity Food)

I made these to take along to a band practice (what do you mean, rock & roll and cupcakes aren't a natural pairing?), not least because I had most of the ingredients to hand. It's a fairly straightforward cake mix, except that in addition to the usual culprits (plus lemon, in this case) it contains a hefty amount of yoghurt, and rather than being simply beaten in the eggs are seperated and the whites whisked to firm peaks. Except - for reasons that I'm itching to go into in a desperate attempt to justify myself, but in order to maintain a semi-sane appearance I will refrain - for the first time ever I overwhisked. (You know how instructions sometimes say things like "if the mixture resembles snow you have gone too far?" I never used to be able to picture what they meant, but guess what? Overwhisked whites really do look exactly like snow! Who'd've thunk?)

The other thing which floored me was the word 'cupcake'. I mean, I know what a cupcake is, obviously, but...well, OK, maybe I don't. I always assumed it was a miniature cake; the kind of
thing you'd bake in a mince pie tray (I realise 'mince pie tray' isn't the technical term, but why on earth are they called bun trays? Have you ever seen a bun that size or shape?). I thought Ms Dupleix and I were in agreement on this - hers look exactly like my idea of cupcakes in the book photo, and I've seen the same recipe in a newspaper supplement where she explained that they were relatively healthy because their diminutive size served as potion control, which you wouldn't really say of a something larger like, say, a muffin. But just two lines into the instructions you're told to "set ten paper muffin cases in a large muffin tray". A muffin tray? A large muffin tray? Is that a tray for making large muffins, or a large tray for making mini muffins? A glance at the sidebar shows that the recipe puports to make only ten cupcakes, so presumably we're not talking mini muffins. But then why doesn't Jill just call them muffins and be done with it? And why do the pictured cakes look nothing like muffins? At this point in my thought process I went "screw it", and spooned half the mix into six (large) muffin moulds and the other half into twelve paper cases lining a mince pie tray.

As it turned out, the difference in size between the 'muffins' and the 'cupcakes' was fairly negligible, but this might be chiefly because the poor things all sank! I imagine my overwhisked egg whites had something to do with it, but our spectacularly useless oven (complete with surprise-opening door) probably didn't help either. Fresh out of the oven the cakes tasted lovely (and incidentally the raw mix was pretty divine, too - sort of like lemon sherbert, but without the tooth-aching sweetness), but as they cooled and sank further they became overly dense - they were still OK, but not nearly as special.

Mike says: "It has been said that I have a sweet tooth, and perhaps over-indulge in sweet things. Rubbish I say, but to prove a point I gave up eating sweet things for lent, and then, to spite me, H goes and makes these, so I wasn't able to savour them, but I am pretty sure that they were absolutely disgusting, and everyone who enjoyed them when I couldn't should admit their foulness. "

37. Nutty Quinoa with Greens (Veggo Food)

I hadn't had quinoa since its first flush of fashionability back in 2004 or so, and I remember never being sure when it was actually cooked. Helpfully, though, Jill tells you that white tails appear on the grains when they're ready (which, in case you're a fellow perennial quinoa-overcooker, took mine just under ten minutes). Anyway, for this recipe , which is essentially a salad along vaguely similar lines to tabbouleh, you take cooled, cooked quinoa and mix it with baby spinach, halved cherry tomatoes, pistachios, sultanas, mint and parsley, then toss through a dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, cumin and fennel seeds. (I used lime juice and carraway seeds as I was out of lemons and fennel, and the culinary gods didn't smite me.)

This was nice, and more flavoursome than I expected, though I'd probably up the quantities of sultanas and pistachios a bit next time. I imagine it'd make an excellent lunchbox food, too.

Mike says: "This salad is definitely unique, and if you have had never had quinoa before then it might feel like eating frogspawn, but it was good, enough said."

And that's all for now, folks!

Ladies (and gents) who lunch

2009-04-01T16:01:00.013+01:00

(Think that's bad? You should have seen my original choice of title.)

Mike and I have recently started trying to cut back financially (only, ooh, five months behind the rest of the world? We're a bit slow on the uptake), and the latest casualty has been Mike's deli lunches: given that his office is a grand total of 64 metres away from the flat it seems a bit ridiculous not to have lunch at home. The only thing is that, left to my own devices, I don't really eat lunch. That sounds more abstemious than it actually is, given that I stuff myself with an enormous bowl of porridge every morning and then snack all day until dinner, but the basic point remains: homemade lunches are relatively unchartered territory chez nous. This next recipe looked like a good place to start though - nice and light and (I thought) quick (ha!). It's suggested as a starter or canapé, so I thought the four-person quantities would be a good-ish amount for lunch for two.

33. Som Tum Rice Paper Rolls (Spicy Food)

Note to self: anything involving julienning vegetables is always going to take a long, looong time: a good hour elapsed between the first shallot being sliced and the last finished roll being plated up. As well as julienned cucumber and underripe mango (you can use papaya instead, but I know from sticky experience that even the least ripe papaya dissolves into a fleshy mess as soon as you get anywhere near the seeds) the filling contains quartered cherry tomatoes, sliced shallots, a sliced chilli, mint leaves, lime juice, fish sauce and a spoonful of sugar. You squelch all of this together (hurrah for gratifyingly onomatopoeic instructions!), then divide between softened rice paper rounds and roll up. This is where I came unstuck a bit - in order to soften the rice paper you dip it in hot water, and I couldn't manage this seemingly unchallenging feat without the damned things springing enormous holes. Luckily Mike stepped in before my frustration compelled me to do regrettable things with various kitchen implements, and the rolls you see above are his handiwork. You're told to slice them in half, but they were pretty delicate so we only risked it with one. Actually, though, whole rolls proved a bit unwieldy, so cutting's probably the way to go. Oh, and we got eight rolls from the recipe rather than the six stipulated. As per suggestion we ate them with sweet chilli sauce scattered with roasted cashews - I did take a photo but won't subject you to it, out of respect for your artistic sensibilities.

Yum yum! (Though come to think of it that's probably an actual sentence in Vietnamese which means something entirely different.) These were very tasty indeed, and - I think I'm right in saying - the first recipe from the 'Spicy Food' chapter to really have a kick to it. Plus it made the perfect amount for a light-ish lunch for the two of us. Success!

Mike says: "I came back to a stressed-out H, swearing at these rice paper thingies trying to soak them and then wrap things in them. After watching her fumbling attempts and feeling the temperature of the room rise a few degrees with angered sweary heat I had a crack at it myself, and voilà, Mike, god of all things good, created perfectly mastered rolls, which look, if I do say so myself, exactly like the ones in the recipe book. When it came to eating them they were also very good and weirdly thirst quenching. Very refreshing, a perfect snack or accompaniment, but maybe not right for a full meal. Warning, high faff rating for preparation."

2009-03-31T16:32:00.008+01:00

32. Fast Roast Fish with Anchovies (Fast Food)

My mum made this a couple of weeks ago and gave it the thumbs up, so I was looking forward to trying it. It's nice and easy to throw together - you toss some red onion, cherry tomatoes, mixed olives and lemon wedges in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then roast for a quarter of an hour before topping with your choice of white fish and a couple of anchovies and cooking for another ten minutes. Finding myself tomato-less (do you see a theme emerging of late?) I stuck the onions and lemon in the oven by themselves, dashed out to buy cherry tomatoes, then frantically grilled them to soften them a bit and added them to the tray when the fish went in. (Extremely minor) disaster averted! The oven did make disturbing banging sounds at regular intervals, but all things considered that's an improvement on its usual habit of springing open at random moments. Once time's up you finish the dish off with a grind of black pepper, a scattering of parsely and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. And, if you're hungry like us, you serve it up alongside a mound of golden cubes of baked polenta.

Tasty indeed! I used cheap anchovies, which were a little bit tough, but other than that everything worked really well together to create a flavoursome dish. And the polenta was, in my intermittently humble opinion, a perfect foil for the fish and vegetables.

Mike says: "Doesn't this one look like a good plate of grub? I remember my favorite part being the polenta which wasn't actually in the recipe, but it did complement the fish really well. The anchovies were the secret to this one, I can't remember what the white fish actually was but then white fish has a tendency to taste of not all that much, so the anchovies added back some taste tingle."

2009-03-30T11:00:00.008+01:00

My dissertation's done! The weather's getting tantalisingly spring-like! And if I keep ending sentences with exclamation marks it will camouflage the fact that Mike and I were unable to go on our holiday yesterday because I lost my passport! Ahem.

30. Sweet Chilli Tofu (Tofu x 4) was the last B.D. (Before Deadline) meal I made - I picked it because it looked like it would take all of about ten minutes to make, and I wasn't far off. Really the recipe's just for a sauce, which you make by heating together fish sauce, soy sauce, sweet chilli sauce, tomato purée, a chopped tomato, garlic, star anise, sugar and water. I didn't have a tomato to hand so I just upped the purée a bit, handily making this a storecupboard meal. Anyway, once that's taken care of you just fry tofu 'steaks' until golden on both sides, and pour over the sauce to serve. I'd cooked some rice, too, because my appetite's not quite as minimalst as Jill's sometimes seems to be.

Full points for speed and ease, and pretty damned good marks for taste, too. I might use a liittle bit less tomato purée less time, but then again I did boost the quantities of that to make up for my lack of fresh tomato; keeping to the specified amount would probably have been better. Oh, and I made a full batch of the sauce even though I only used about 2/3 of the tofu specified - as you can see the amount of sauce still wasn't over generous, so I'd stick with full quantities in the future.

Mike says: "As some of you more regular readers may remember, I actually used to be a bit of tofu. So I have a certain fondness for it. This is definitely a superb way to get a bit of a tofu fix, even if you are a die hard 'I don't eat anything but meat' bastard."

31. Tuscan Bean Soup (Soupy Food) was the first A.D.L. meal (Anno Dissertation Liberatus - In the Year of Dissertation Freedom. Admittedly this is a form of Latin which exists only in my head). You chop, slice or shred a lot (and I really do mean a lot - even using the food processor, chopping stupor began to set in) of vegetables, add some stock, bay leaves and tomato purée, and finally stir through some white beans, some of which you've mashed to a paste. I had a hazy idea that 'white beans' were a specific variety, but - the selection at Sainsbury's having disagreed with me - I decided it must just mean any old beans that were white, and went for cannellini.

Meh. (With such articulateness at my fingertips how can my dissertation possibly fail to impress?) I was hoping for something along the lines of the flavoursome Winter Greens with Chicken and Beans as many of the ingredients were similar, but this was quite nothing-y. At the time I couldn't think what would elevate it, but now I'm leaning towards slithers of bacon or cured meat to add intensity of flavour and a salty savouriness. Also, I misjudged quantities - having become a bit wary of portion sizes in Lighten Up, and thinking "hey, it's only soup after all, how filling can it be?", I stuck with the original four-person amounts, and even after Mike and I had had two generous servings each there was still plenty left.

Still, hopefully tastier things are just around the corner! I think my subconscious must have been feeling culinarily deprived over the last couple of weeks - the other night I dreamt that I was at Nigella Lawson's for tea, and she was serving us Fox's packet biscuits and a cake from the Co-op. My subconscious is apparently much more tolerant than my waking self, because instead of thinking "what a swiz!" I decided she was being amusingly ironic.

Mike says: "This one could have done with some more colour in it, perhaps cherries? Na, that would be disgusting. Thought it was a bit bland actually, but it had Tuscan beans in which sound cool."

Tales from a neglected kitchen

2009-03-24T18:29:00.012Z

I’m still alive! I even cook things occasionally, not that you can tell from this blog at the moment.

25. Raw Slaw (Raw Food)

I made this for a pot luck meal in aid of Comic Relief (well, I say “in aid of” but we didn’t actually raise any money for them. My conscience is blushing now). My cunning line of thought was that making a beetroot-heavy recipe as part of a spread for a group of people would dilute its impact, rather than Mike and I having to plough through the whole thing ourselves. Soooo, the recipe’s a mix of beetroot and red cabbage, which you toss with a spicy dressing which includes, among other things, copious amounts of mustard. On a side note, raw beetroot is possibly the ugliest vegetable I’ve ever seen.

I thought this was…OK. Just. Other people were more positive, but tellingly the plate (well, bowl) didn’t get cleared, and the leftovers sat around in the fridge for almost a week before I accepted that even Mike wasn’t going to eat them.

Mike says: “I like beetroot therefore I liked this. I was surprised to see that raw beetroot is exactly the same colour as pickled beetroot, surprised in a nice way. Refreshing I thought; more people should eat beetroot.”

26. Carrot and Cashew Nut Rice (Steamy Food)

In the introduction to this recipe Jill says that “electric rice cookers are brilliant, but I still think the best way of cooking rice is simply steaming it in a lidded saucepan – mainly because you can throw in all sorts of things and turn it into a complete meal”. Now, I have two niggles with that – firstly, you can throw all sorts of things into an electric rice cooker, too (maybe Jill’s more obedient of instruction manuals than I am, but trust me, you can cook just about anything in those suckers), and secondly I really don’t think this dish constitutes a complete meal. Let us consider: you stir finely diced onion, grated carrot and spices through rice, cook, and top with cashews and parsley. Now, I have nothing against vegetarian food, but when you’re tucking into a big bowl of what is essentially rice flecked with carrot you can’t help but feel that it’s more of a side dish. I kept thinking that if I just kept going I was bound to find a juicy hunk of chicken or suchlike burried in there. The flavours were fine, though possibly a bit over-turmeric-y, but the dish overall just wasn’t exciting enough to be a meal in its own right.

Mike says: “I felt that this was missing a nice curry sauce spooned on top. It was a nice way to do some rice but it was only half a meal. Mmm curry.”

27. Salmon with Rocket and Tagliatelle (Special Food)

I notice that my annotation for this recipe simply reads “not special”, which is a bit of a downer for something from the ‘Special Food’ chapter. I expect it to have an existential crisis any moment now. Nothing fancy or complicated – while the pasta’s cooking away you lightly cook some salmon, lemon zest, capers and seasoning, then add tomatoes, rocket and lemon juice before tossing with the tagliatelle. It was perfectly nice, and lent a healthy glow of virtue, but a bit on the bland side.

Mike says: “I felt good eating this, I think it will extend my lifespan by a couple of years. But a little bland.”

28. Spice-Crusted Venison with Glazed Beetroot (Special Food)

You might remember my abortive attempt to make this last month – getting hold of venison steaks proved trickier than I thought, but I eventually managed to reserve a couple of sirloin steaks from a stall at the farmers’ market. Once you’ve tracked them down, all you have to do is brush them with oil and press one side into a spice rub (made up of black peppercorns, juniper berries, caraway seeds and salt), then sear spice-side down for two minutes before turning and cooking the other side briefly. Instead of scattering all over the frying pan, as per my pessimistic prediction, the spice crust gets pressed firmly into the meat. While the venison’s resting you add some diced cooked beetroot, redcurrant jelly and red wine to the pan, and cook until syrupy. Slice the venison, serve up the beetroot, strew everything artistically with watercress and – tadaaa! – you’re done.

We’ve already established that I don’t much like beetroot, so all I’ll say about it is that the flavourings were pleasant and I imagine this would be a nice way of eating the stuff, if you’re that way inclined. The venison was another matter though – deeeeelicious! And ridiculously quick and easy to boot.

Mike says: “This was amazing, one of my favourites. The spice crust on the venison was immense and I thought the beetroot set it off really nicely. Deer are so damned tasty.”

29. Breakfast Burritos (Morning Food)

I made this for our second supper (hey, don’t judge) on Sunday – it’s reasonably quick to throw together, with a manageable amount of chopping. (I hate chopping. I’ve been known to go without proper meals for weeks on end rather than go to the bother of dicing a vegetable. You’re still not judging, right?) Basically you top warm tortillas with smoked salmon, rocket, tomato and avocado chunks, red onion, lime juice, coriander leaves and Tabasco. I expected the finished product to be nice and refreshing but a little dull, but these were actually pretty damned good, and would make an excellent weekend brunch.

Mike says: “The flavours of this worked really well. It tasted almost like a packet of bacon crisps (in a good way). Would make a really good brunch. I’d like two whole tortillas to myself, though, for a good portion.”

Normal programming will resume once the dreaded dissertation's out of the way...

Third time lucky

2009-03-10T23:34:00.012Z

Errk, is it really Tuesday already? Sorry about the paucity and brevity of updates recently; things'll improve once my dissertation's out of the way. (Incidentally, if either of my parents is reading this, my dissertation is going amazingly well. I rise at six every morning to start work on it, pausing only to escort elderly ladies across the road and help golden haired children in distress.)

Anyway, as Mike alluded to in one of his recent comments, we hacked a chicken into its constituent parts at the weekend (it was about as dignified as that makes it sound; my knife skills could charitably be described as "improving"), so expect to see various bits of its anatomy cropping up over the next couple of weeks. One of its breasts went towards:

22. Chicken Tortilla Soup with Avocado (Soupy Food)

A quick, light, tomato-y soup with finely sliced chicken, topped with avocado slices, red onion rings, tortilla chips and all the coriander I could salvage from my rapidly dying plant (I have a theory that they put something in the soil to ensure that potted herbs give up the ghost within two hours of leaving the supermarket. Even my horticultural instincts can't be that bad).

This was nice in an ordinary sort of way. I should probably elaborate on that if only to pad things out a bit, but I made this on Sunday which is sufficiently long ago that my ageing brain cells can't dredge up much more - it was pleasant but not all that memorable. (Clearly.)

23. Kheema with Peas (Easy Food)

Fittingly for something from the 'Easy Food' chapter, this is a very straightforward sort of recipe - you just fry onion, ginger, garlic and spices, brown some mince (the recipe calls for lean lamb or beef; I went for beef as I couldn't find lean lamb), add stock and tomato puree, and simmer for a bit. Simple! Except it turned out I didn't actually have any fresh ginger, so I ended up rinsing off a globe of preserved ginger and using that instead. (Ingenious, no? It's all that Brownie training at a formitive age.) Towards the end of the cooking time you stir in a handful of frozen peas and some garam masala - you're also supposed to scatter with coriander leaves to serve, but having dealt a mortal blow to my plant the day before I made do without.

Again, I thought this was just OK - nice enough but not really special. Mike seemed to like it though, and guzzled his down at impressive speed even for him. Ohh, and the portions were pretty good, even though I commited the Mike-Crime of halving the recipe.

Things really started looking up today though:

24. Smoked Trout Choucroute (Fast Food)

This had been on my 'to make' list for a couple of weeks (indeed it's been bouncing around for long enough to earn its own politically incorrect nickname in our flat: "Kraut trout"), but I had trouble getting hold of smoked trout fillets. Farmers' market to the rescue! Turns out there's a stall which more or less only sells smoked trout; I wonder what business is like.

But anyway! According to Jeffrey Steingarten, whoever he may be, all traditional choucroute recipes include black peppercorns, cloves, garlic, juniper berries, onions and potatoes, which would make the Lighten Up version cheerfully non-traditional as it only ticks three out of six boxes. Here the onion and sauerkraut mixture is flavoured with juniper berries (tick!), cumin and caraway, with some Riesling in there for good measure. Once this has been simmering away for fifteen minutes you add thickly sliced cooked potatoes and season, then lay the trout fillets on top of everything and cook for long enough to heat the fish through. Jill suggests mustard on the side (I'm beginning to suspect that she may be inordinately fond of mustard; it pops up a surprising amount).

Lecker! Don't let the name fool you; choucroute is staunchly Alsatian, i.e. essentially Germanic. But then the sauerkraut might have tipped you off to that. I know the thought of German food doesn't fill most people with glee, but just trust me, this recipe is lovely. And if getting your hands on smoked trout looks to be a problem you could always go down the more conventional route of sausages instead. Even plain old bacon would be delicious - just think of Bratkartoffeln with Sauerkraut and you'll get the idea. (Admittedly one of the commenters on that photo says the combination's an acquired taste, but shhh, ignore her!)

Mike on the soup: "I think tortillas should be left to finger food and dipping and not really put in soup, they were a bit awkward to eat with a spoon. The soup was, as far I remember, just tomato."

Mike on the kheema: "Mmmm comfort food, although not the most attractive of things, it was good and warming and a nice twist on mince and peas."

(Mike's opinion on the smoked trout will have to remain shrouded in mystery, as he hasn't chosen to share it with us.)

2009-03-07T22:13:00.006Z

'Lo again! This is a whirlwind update on today and last night to bring things up to date:

21. Fish Saltimbocca (Easy Food)

The literal translation of saltimbocca is, according to good old Wikipedia*, "jumps in the mouth", but to you and me it means "wrapped in prosciutto". And there you have the recipe, really - halve white fish fillets (I used cod), wrap each half in prosciutto, top with a sage leaf and fry. I assumed the sage would fall off during the cooking, but actually it fused to the prosciutto in a gratifyingly artistic way. Once the fish is cooked and the prosciutto's crispy you're meant to arrange them on a bed of boiled peas and asparagus, though I actually chose to roast the asparagus and, as there was quite a lot of it, forgo the peas altogether.

Ahh, if only it weren't for that errant flake of fish!

This was a really satisfying meal - the crisp saltiness of the prosciutto was a perfect contrast to the mild and tender fish, and the asparagus rounded everything off nicely. Better yet, the whole thing took less than fifteen minutes from start to finish, and it would be quicker still if you boiled the asparagus as per instructions rather than roasting it. Even without any carbs I was actually pretty full after this, too.

Mike says: "Flaky fishy loveliness, and the ham makes it."

Next!

22. Winter Greens with Chicken and Beans (Slow Food)

Doesn't that rhyme nicely? Despite this recipe's inclusion in the 'Slow Food' chapter it's really not that time consuming to put together - you just brown some chicken pieces, soften some onion and garlic, then add borlotti beans, stock, thyme and seasoning and let the whole thing simmer away for half an hour while you doodle moustaches on your kneecaps, or whatever takes your fancy. When time's up you stir in some green leafy vegetables - I went for kale, but plenty of other things would work, too - heat through and plate up.

I have to confess that I was expecting this to be worthy rather than particularly tasty, but I was pleasantly surprised - the chicken was juicy, the beans were tender and flavoursome, and everything had absorbed the hearty savouryness of the stock and thyme. As a bonus it's impossible to eat that much kale without feeling a glow of virtue.

Mike says: "One of my favourites - the seaweed-y stuff soaked up the sauce nicely and the chicken was lovely and moist, hand-chopped by me. And I've heard beans are good for you also. But not jelly beans, apart from the green ones."

* Wikipedia has risen in my estimation since I stumbled across its article on the oboe earlier in the week which stated that the instrument, "has a clear and penetrating voice which if listened to very closely will sound like a rabid sloth". (It's been changed now, but I wonder how many schoolchildren copied it down dutifully while it was up?)

East meets West

2009-03-07T10:19:00.008Z

How about that - Jill Dupleix commented on my last post! (Well, I suppose it might just be someone pretending to be Jill, Blogger lacking sophisticated retina-scanning technology, but I'm a trusting soul.) The ultimate gratification for a cookbook geek! I felt a bit guilty that she happened to visit just after one of my more negative posts, though - in fact, I'll come clean: I was mortified. At least two very enthusiastic write-ups are coming your way though, starting with a quick rewind to Thursday evening:

19. Fresh Salmon Burgers (Easy Food)
20. Togarashi Oven Chips (Spicy Food)

I don't suppose you need me to tell you how to make a salmon burger - for these ones you mulch together (what's not to like about a recipe containing the instruction 'mulch'?) some salmon, shallot, capers, lemon zest, parsley, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, Dijon mustard, seasoning and an egg white (or in my case half an egg white, because - contain your disbelief as best you can - I halved a recipe for the second time in a row). The thing I found hardest was actually finely chopping the salmon; maybe a better knife would help? Once I'd formed the burgers into patties they seemed very gloopy and I was worried they'd fall apart in the pan (the fate that befalls most of my home-made burgers), but after firming up in the fridge for a bit they were absolutely fine.

The chips, with their Asian spicing, might not seem the most natural partners for the Northern-European favoured burgers, but the serving suggestions did include "pan-fried fish" and "home-made burgers", so I thought home-made pan-fried fish burgers should be a shoo-in. Togarashi pepper, from which the recipe takes its name, crops up a few times in Lighten Up and I'd spent a while brooding on how I was going to get hold of this obscure-sounding ingredient, only to google it and find that it's the same as shichimi, which I'd had in the cupboard all along. D'oh! Anyway, you make the chips by cutting some potatoes into, um, chips (with me so far?), tossing them with a little oil and baking till golden and tender. Once they're done you toss them in the spice mix, which is a combination of togarashi, black pepper, sugar and salt.

The burgers were good - the suggested accompaniment is gherkins, which went extremely well with them (and made Mike deliriously happy; he considers pickles to be one of the major food groups). But the chips - oh the chips! - were bloody fantastic. The black pepper, togarashi and sugar worked brilliantly together, and gave the potatoes a rich, warming, complex spiciness. Actually I sort of cheated and knew in advance that these were going to be amazing - the spice mix makes more than you need, you see, so I'd made it up earlier in the day and had the rest on roasted butternut squash for lunch. I think it'd work well with a huge number of things though; I can see myself sprinkling it on anything that comes within arm's reach of me for a while yet.

Mike says: "The chips were immense, I could have eaten a bucket of them. The salmon burgers were like salmon cakes, but nice and refreshing."

"You're as pretty as a flower - a cauliflower!"

2009-03-05T11:47:00.014Z

(Title courtesy of a Rainbow Christmas pantomime circa 1988. Children's TV was like one long stand-up comedy routine in those days, I tell you.)

I seem to have fallen behind a bit on my blogging duties, so today's is a double bill:

17. Barley Risotto with Cauliflower (Slow Food)

Having virtuously put it on my 'to do' list (fuelled by the fear that if I cherry pick all the tempting-sounding meals now I'll be left with a whole batch of dubuious-sounding ones to plough through at the end) I spent most of last week cunningly avoiding actually making this recipe, but on Monday it finally caught up with me. A cauliflower and barley risotto might sound innocuous enough to you, but for someone who doesn't like cauliflower and is unconvinced by the merits of pearl barley it's a bit of a stretch to approach it with much enthusiasm. I nonetheless made full quantities, not because I'm a masochist or because my greed extends even to things I don't much like, but simply because I didn't want to be stuck with half a cauliflower, carrot and onion.

The recipe's a bit time consuming but not too much bother - all you do is fry diced onion, carrot and cauliflower stalks in some olive oil, add the pearl barley, pour in some white wine and reduce and then add the cauliflower florets along with stock and simmer for about 35 minutes. Right at the end you stir through some butter (and parmesan, if you're that way inclined), season, then top with parsley and toasted walnuts to serve.

Did I mention that I don't really like cauliflower? I have a feeling that liking it might be sort of a pre-requisite for enjoying this recipe. The pearl barley had a nutty bite which was pleasant enough, and anything which only costs 35 pence for half a kilo at least wins my grudging admiration, but I'm not convinced by its credentials as a base for risotti - Jill enthuses that it's perfect for the job as it doesn't need soaking, but, erm, neither does rice. And the barley gave none of the yielding creaminess you get from risotto rice. In fairness I should probably mention that Mike, who isn't a big fan of normal risotti, thought this was a decent alternative. I soldiered on for a while but eventually admitted defeat and passed my bowl over to him, and once he'd polished off both our servings he proceeded to finish the leftovers from the pan, too. Eating quantities intended for three-and-a-half people may not have agreed with him:

However, he bounced back in time for Tuesday's dinner:

18. Roast Chicken, Walnut and Tarragon Salad (Salad Food)

While I'm not sure I'd agree with Jill's claim that this is "fast", it's certainly easy - you just chop up some pumpkin or butternut squash and throw it in a roasting tray with a couple of chicken quarters, drizzle with oive oil and roast the whole thing for about forty minutes. Note that I said "a couple" of chicken quarters, because - wonders will never cease - I actually halved this recipe! That must be the first time since, oohh...mid-February? Anyway, once that's ready you tear the chicken off the bone and toss it and the squash with some curly endive, toasted walnuts, tarragon leaves and dressing. Except I foolishly forgot to buy any tarragon so used thyme instead (that being the only herb I had that wasn't dead). The dressing - which, in a Blue Peter moment, you should have made earlier - comprises olive oil, red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, white wine and seasoning. I actually dreamt about Dijon mustard the night after making this; read into that what you will.

As you can see the ratio of curly endive to everything else is quite high, but maybe that's so that you fill up on the healthiest bits. All in all it was unspectacular but definitely tasty, and a good way to get yourself eating salad-y things in the Winter months. I somewhat surprised myself by feeling full afterwards, too.

Mike says: "What do you get when you combine roast chicken with a salad? Answer: Roast Chicken Salad. This was nice in the same way a roast chicken is nice. There was nothing surprising about it although the chicken was lovely and moist. I did feel a little unsatisfied afterwards, maybe someone should invent a roast potato salad to go alongside it."

Next time: I discover the macro button on my camera, to no discernable effect.

To bean or not to bean

2009-03-02T19:10:00.010Z

Guess what - my mum bought herself a copy of Lighten Up! I've inspired someone to get the book! Admittedly that person is a) my own mother, and b) the person who gave me my copy in the first place, but still.

Our kitchen didn't see much action over the weekend - we grabbed a snacky Saturday lunch at the farmers' market, then had dinner at Alana's (who, in a feat of co-ordination which leaves me feeling vaguely inadequate, made six separate dishes. Six! Some days I don't even remember to cook vegetables). Sunday evening Mike was away so I reached for my usual eating-alone fall-back dinner: porridge. (Just for the record this is also my fall-back lunch, elevenses and afternoon tea. On occasion I've even be known to eat it for breakfast.) All of which just left Sunday lunch, which, for reasons of complicated timetabling, we ended up eating at 3.30 in the afternoon.

16. Chilli Bean Tofu ('Veggo Food')

I hadn't actually planned on making this on Sunday (do other people make detailed lists plotting out what they're going to cook each day, or is this symptomatic of an unhealthily obsessive relationship with food?), but it was just about the only recipe on the week's "to do" list which didn't rely on crucial components that were frozen solid. I had everything to hand except the chilli bean sauce, and I didn't think getting hold of it at short notice would be a problem because we live round the corner from the aptly named 'World's Finest Foods'. Seriously, this place sells everything - if you have a chickpea flour emergency or a sudden craving for truffle salt, World's Finest Foods will come to your rescue. Unfortunately, though, of the twenty-five different types of chilli sauce they sell (yup, I counted; and that doesn't include stir-fry sauces), not one of them is chilli bean sauce. Foiled! It being a Sunday the local Chinese supermarkets were closed, too, so I ended up just getting minced chillies. Is it still chilli bean tofu if it doesn't actually contain beans?

Ingredients-sourcing sob-story behind me I got on with the recipe, which, in true stir-frying tradition, mostly involves chopping things up. By 'things' I mean one aubergine (which you've previously roasted whole for 40 minutes so it's delectably squishy), a block of tofu, some ginger, garlic and spring onions. I decided to three-quarters the (four person) recipe for the highly scientific reason that my tofu happened to come in a 350g pack rather than a 500g one, and (not to spoil the ending or anything) it was a good-ish amount for the two of us.

The cooking itself is just a question of stir-frying the ginger and garlic, adding the aubergine, chilli bean sauce (or minced chilli, in my case), some sugar, rice wine, soy sauce and a bit of water, then simmering for ten minutes before adding the cubed tofu and simmering for another five - I ended up giving mine a little less as the sauce thickened up pretty quickly. Sprinkle in some Sichuan pepper if you like an extra zing, scatter over the spring onion, then serve ladled over rice and curse tofu for being so woefully unphotogenic:

Oh well, it tasted good! I was quite impressed, actually - I've tried heaps of versions of mapu dofu (including a very tasty one as part of Alana's smorgasbord the night before), and this one had a good kick to it as well as being a great partnering of textures. Pre-roasting the aubergine was a stroke of genius - you get the same gorgeous squidginess which deep-frying gives you (seriously, if you've never had deep-fried aubergine, get thyself to a deep fat fryer! Your arteries will forgive you just this once) but without the fat. The only change I might make next time would be to keep things a bit saucier so that there was more liquid for the rice to absorb. Oh, and I imagine the dish'd be even better made with chilli bean sauce (duh!) to give it extra depth.

Mike says: "I have not told many people this, but I was in fact born a piece of tofu, so when asked to eat some avec chili bean sauce I felt bad. This soon passed and I was overcome with nice flavours. It made me happy about my decision to become human. Yum."

¡Viva Mexico!

2009-02-27T18:13:00.021Z

Gaaaah, damned Blogger! WYS is most definitely not WYG - you'll just have to trust me that the photos are beautifully aligned on my screen. And, while I'm at it, that they're of professional quality and display familiarity with concepts such as lighting. Hey, it's worth a try...

15. Kickass Chilli Bean Tacos

I'd only glanced very briefly at this recipe before making it and assumed it was going to be a standard vege-chilli, but actually there's not a tinned tomato in sight: the filling's just made from onion, kidney beans, garlic, cayenne pepper, cumin and seasoning, which you simmer with some water for ten minutes and then roughly mash. Meanwhile your beautiful assistant (well, Mike) is tossing together a salsa of finely diced tomatoes, green pepper, lime juice, coriander leaves and seasoning. When it's all done you just spoon into warmed taco shells along with some shredded lettuce and pickled jalapeños, and dinner is served!

Admittedly the kidney bean filling isn't going to win any beauty contests, but it was hearty and pretty tasty. Having grown a bit wary of the spice quotient in the so-called 'Spicy Food' chapter I upped the cayenne by quite a lot, but even so it benefited from the jalapeños to give it a real kick. The salsa was plain but refreshing and went well with everything else. A word of caution about potion sizes though - I know Mike and I are greedy gutses (that being the newly-coined plural of greedy guts), but if I'd halved this recipe we'd definitely have gone hungry - it might be enough for a light lunch, but 'light''s a bit of an unfamiliar concept chez nous.

Mike says: "This was fun to eat, and I find it childishly exciting making your own tacos. The beany stuff was the main part of the meal and although it was nice I dont think it really lived up to the roll of main filling. It felt to me that some classic parts were missing from this recipe that would have given it the extra zing, such as sour cream, guacamole and perhaps, although not necessary, meat. It is recommended that you have your tacos with jalapeno peppers and perhaps add a few extra fillings of your own. End x."

Have I ever mentioned that whenever I make a vegetarian meal Mike's response is, "you know what this would be good with? Meat"?

Q. What do you get if you cross salad dressing with lamb tagine?

2009-02-26T10:01:00.022Z

A. Today's post! Fear not, this isn't some sort of ill-advised foray into fusion cuisine; I'm just lumping the recipes together for reasons of laziness. The dressing was made while I was still at my parents' on Sunday and my mum needed something to liven up some lettuce leaves. Or at least, she said she did - she might just have been humouring my unsubtle desire to tick another recipe off. You never can tell with mums.

13. House Dressing

Like the last post's ajvar, this comes from the "Extras" section at the back of Lighten Up, which is a collection of quick suggestions for stocks, condiments and accompaniments. The salad dressing recipe's nothing revolutionary: you just whisk together some red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, olive oil, salt and pepper, then finish off by thinning it out with mirin, white wine, yoghurt, apple juice, water or the juice of a tomato. I went for mirin as that's what we had to hand - I was a bit worried that it might make the dressing taste overly Asian (not ideal when you're eating moules marinières), but it was fine; a perfectly nice, basic vinaigrette.

I know you don't really need to see a picture of salad dressing, but I'm a completist.

14. Lamb Tagine with Dates

Just before I left Edinburgh I was a bit all over the place (entirely uncharacteristically, I might add. Ahem), and when Mike offered to step in and do the supermarket shop I didn't have time to put together a full list, so dispatched him with Lighten Up and instructions to get the ingredients for a recipe of his choice. Surprise surprise, he went for the tagine! Moroccan is Mike's favourite cuisine, so I'd been planning on saving the tagine for a semi-special occasion, but with a kilo of lamb in the freezer the die was cast. (A kilo because Mike bought quantities for the full four person recipe, but then I didn't need to tell you that, did I? Though by the time I'd savagely hacked all the visible fat off it I expect it weighed closer to 700 grammes.)

So. You cube the lamb, quarter some carrot lengths and finely slice an onion before you get on with the cooking. Jill just says to use a large, heavy based pan, but having received not one but two tagines for Christmas (...I'm not going to attempt to explain that) I thought it seemed a good opportunity to use one of them - I went for the heavy-duty-but-not-particularly-photogenic glazed terracotta as I haven't seasoned the more decorative one yet. But anyway! Having heated up some olive oil in your cooking dish (and be warned, in a tagine used with a heat diffuser this takes a long, looong time) you cook the onion briefly, then add the lamb, carrots, some cayenne pepper, saffron (I only just noticed that you're actually meant to use ground saffron, which I've never come across - I went for pistons), ginger, turmeric, a couple of cinnamon sticks, and enough water to cover the lamb. You're then supposed to stir through some tomato purée, but having gone to all the trouble of arranging the rest of the ingredients in concentric circles (whatever you're thinking, don't say it) I wasn't about to mess it all up by stirring something in, so I dissolved the purée in the water before pouring that over. Then everything can simmer away happily for an hour and twenty minutes (it is from the "Slow Food" chapter after all) - I gave mine an extra hour, partly to allow for everything to take longer in a tagine than in a conventional pan, and partly to ensure really meltingly tender lamb. When the time's up you add some dried apricots, honey, orange flower water (I misread the recipe and used way too much, whoops) and seasoning, simmer a bit more, add a few Medjool dates, simmer for another five minutes, and then - phew! - you're done.

And mmmmmm, it was worth the wait! I was a bit dubious about adding cayenne pepper but it really worked, giving the dish a lovely warmth and heat. The other spices were more conventional and produced a great, classic flavour - a rich, mellow, authentic-tasting tagine. And on that note of authenticity, am I allowed one quick rant? The serving suggestion is "with couscous". The serving suggestion given for tagines is always "with couscous". I get a bit twitchy about this, because although I have nothing against couscous per se, an accompaniment for a tagine it ain't. I think the desire to stick them together stems from the misconception that "tagine with couscous" is the national dish of Morocco, but in fact they're each stand-alone courses. Use bread to mop up your tagines, my friends! As you might be able to make out from the picture I slightly undermined this drive for authenticity by using naan bread and wholemeal pitta, but Moroccan bread's hard to come by in Edinburgh, mmkay?

Just in case anyone was concerned for our collective waistlines, we didn't get through the whole thing; I polished off the leftovers for breakfast this morning. (If you have strong views on what constitutes appropriate breakfast food, this may not be the blog for you.) Oohh, and I almost forgot - the tagine recipe appears in this month's Sainsbury's Magazine, which can be yours for the bargainous price of £1.40! There are three other Lighten Up recipes in there, too.

Mike says: "If I had to say I had a favourite type of food then I would say Moroccan, if I was being more specific I would say a tagine. This dish definitely lived up to my preferences but it was nothing original, it is the classic tagine recipe with apricots, dates and lamb, but it is mighty tasty. Later my peeps."

"Zees 'uge sausage ees very suspicious!"

2009-02-25T08:56:00.013Z

The week of gaping silence is due to me having spent most of that time in the bosom of my loving family (standard greeting from my brother: "What are you doing here?"). Fresh blood for my culinary experiments! My mum picked out "Spiced Cevapcici" for me to make on Saturday evening, presumably because it looked like one of the 0.06% of Lighten Up recipes which aforementioned brother might contemplate eating. As it turned out the little blighter slunk off with some friends and didn't make a reappearance till the next day, but hey ho.

11. Spiced Cevapcici

12. Ajvar Relish

Cevapcici (or ćevapčići, if you're feeling lavish with accents) are sausage-like patties popular in the Balkans. Jill's comprise beef, lamb or pork (I used lamb, though having googled around a bit I think pork might be more usual), garlic, allspice or nutmeg, cloves, paprika, cayenne pepper, salt and black pepper. Basically you just mulch everything together (isn't "mulch" a satisfying word?), then form into small, flattened sausage shapes. Or at least, that's the idea - I found that to end up with the number specified I had to make fairly large sausages; super-cevapcici, if you will. When you're ready to cook you just brush them with olive oil and grill or barbeque them - my mum actually has a barbeque built into her hob, so out came the skewers:

Cevapcici being barbequed, minus the giant flames which periodically englufed them.

The traditional accompaniment to cevapcici is apparently a red pepper and aubergine relish called ajvar. Nope, I hadn't heard of it either, but handily Lighten Up includes a recipe for that, too (it's in the "Extras" section at the back). It's easy stuff - all you have to do is roast the vegetables for half an hour, skin them (admittedly the instructions don't actually say to do this, but trust me, you need to), then add the chopped flesh to a food processor along with some olive oil, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and seasoning, and blend to a coarse purée.

My sister's boyfriend eyed this particularly suspiciously.

I made plain rice to go alongside as I had a vague (and possibly entirely inaccurate) idea that it was somehow in keeping with the Eastern European character of the meal, but actually we felt that both the cevapcici and avjar tasted more Middle Eastern, and I'd probably go for flatbread or couscous next time. I'd also make at least one of the components a whole lot spicier - considering that the cevapcici come from the 'Spicy Food' chapter, and that the relish is described as being "devilishly spicy", they were a bit of a let-down on the heat front (and that's despite me being very heavy-handed with the cayenne). Plus, having seen other pictures of ajvar floating around on the internet, all of which are day-glo orange, I have a feeling that the peppers to aubergine ratio is meant to be a lot higher: the Lighten Up recipe uses equal numbers of each, whereas others I came across tended to go for three peppers per aubergine, which might up the tanginess a bit. Don't get me wrong, the meal was still tasty, but pepped up a notch it would be even tastier.

I tried to get my family to step into Mike's shoes and offer up gripping, insightful comments, but with limited success.

Me: "I need you to say something pithy and succinct to describe those kebab things I made the other day."

Dad: "Kebaby."

And this from a man remowned for his erudition...

Something fishy

2009-02-18T23:14:00.014Z

Evening! I hope you all had nicer dinners than we did:

10. Fish in a Bag with Fennel and Orange

Not the most glamorous title in the world; as an evocative phrase "in a bag" lacks a certain something. Still, it does what it says on the tin: you take squares of foil, strew with finely shaved fennel (use a food processor, otherwise you'll still be there half an hour later, laughing hollowly at the recipe's inclusion in the 'Fast Food' chapter); top with seasoned white fish (I used whiting) and arrange orange slices, bay leaves and black olives over the top. After drizzling with a bit of olive oil and some orange juice you seal the foil parcel and pop the fish in a hot oven for ten to fifteen minutes, and you're done! Unless, that is, you're me, and realise only at the eleventh hour that a) you don't have any foil, and b) despite a day in the fridge your fish is still mostly frozen. Am I a paradigm of domestic efficiency or what? I got round the foil problem by using some strangely enormous oven-safe plastic roasting bags, and got round the frozen problem by cunningly ignoring it. (This is my back-up plan for most kitchen dilemas. Indeed, for most life dilemas.) Neither of these culinary hiccoughs appeared to have an adverse impact on the finished dish, although going by the photo you'd be forgiven for thinking that I'd forgotten to include the fish - it's under there somewhere, promise.

I'm beginning to see why there isn't a photo of this recipe in the book...

I think the word I'm looking for is "meh". I mean, there was nothing wrong with it - it wasn't actively unpleasant or anything - but there wasn't an awful lot to say in its favour either. The flavours were fairly insipid, except on the rare ocassions when you came up against a black olive, and the fennel was especially disappointing. If I were to combine these particular ingredients again I'd cook the fennel down to a gorgeous caramelised mush, then top with fried fish (thus abandoning all pretentions of healthiness) and be much heavier-handed with the olives. Mmmm...

In fairness, Mike wasn't as negative about the meal as I was - I wouldn't go so far as to say that he found it wildly exciting, but he did think it was quite nice and even ranked it above two of the other Lighten Up recipies. (The Greek meatballs I can understand, but to place it higher than the delectable chicken satay? Sacrilege!)

Mike says: "I gave this points for freshness and healthiness, but on reflection - having conversed with H - I agree that it lacked punch. An extra twang might be given by substituting pink grapefruit for the orange. Genius."

2009-02-17T10:21:00.008Z

9. Spinach Chana Dal

Now, I make dahl a lot - probably more than anything else - but mine tend to be thick and almost curry-ish rather than light and soupy, and I usually use red lentils. The Lighten Up recipe (from the 'Soupy Food' chapter) uses yellow split peas - or at least I thought it did until I actually read the ingredients list properly two minutes ago and realised I was meant to use split chickpeas. Gaaah! I suppose 'chana' should have been a bit of a clue, but I must have just honed in on the words "yellow split pulse" and assumed they meant split peas. (Which, I was very excited to read on the packet, count as one of your fruit and veg portions! Maybe that shouldn't come as a surprise, what with them being peas and all, but for some reason I've always thought of them as a lentil. )

Anyway, now that I've revealed myself to have the reading skills of a particularly unobservant three-year-old, on with the recipe! You soak the dal for half an hour (come to think of it I remember being surprised that the split pea packet didn't say anything about needing to soak...), then place in a saucepan with water and simmer for twenty minutes. Meanwhile you fry a finely sliced onion with some ginger and cumin seeds, stir through some tinned tomatoes, a sliced mild green chilli, turmeric, cayenne pepper and ground coriander, then tip the mixture into the pan with the dal and cook for another twenty minutes. Mine needed a little bit longer than that, possibly because it was the wrong sodding pulse. Ahem! To finish the soup off you whisk in some garam masala (is it just me or does whisking seem a slightly curious way to incorporate a spice?) and push mounds of spinach into the pan until they're just wilted.
Well, it was tasty (I made the whole recipe for the two of us, and although that did give us seconds I think portions would have been a bit on the mean side if stretching to four). I probably won't cook it again simply because dahl isn't the kind of thing I want a recipe for, but as a one-off change it was very nice indeed. And who knows, maybe it's even better with chickpeas...

Mike says: "Daal is always gooood, and this is basically daal soup with spinach, which is still goood but also perhaps feels more like a meal in its own right over just eating daal. Woot."

The best-laid plans

2009-02-16T18:17:00.012Z

Well, I think it's fair to say that the Valentine's Day meal didn't go quiiite according to plan. Our repas pour deux was supposed to comprise balsamic pears wrapped in prosciutto, followed by spice-crusted venison with glazed beetroot (because nothing says romance like beetroot), with steamed berry puddings to round things off. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't get any bleeping venison! Two game stalls at the farmers' market and my back-up, Marks and Spencer, all let me down. (One of the stallholders did offer me venison heart, which I suppose would have been appropriate for Valentine's Day in a macabre sort of way...). With my main course languishing in ruins, I ducked into Waterstone's to sneak a look at a copy of the book and pick an alternative recipe. Not only did Marks not have the stuff I needed for said alternative recipe, they didn't even have the ingredients for my alternative alternative recipe! So I did what I'm sure Delia Smith does on these occasions, and retired to the pub. (Several hours and a couple of bottles of champagne later I found myself throwing together a random dinner for four, but that's another story.)

Back to the abortive meal: we ended up eating a truncated version - that is, just the starter and dessert - as a light lunch the next day. Arguably it would have been lighter still if we hadn't supplemented it with conspicuous quantities of Pringles between courses, but hey.

7. Balsamic Pears with Prosciutto
8. Very Berry Puds

The pears come from the 'Special Food' section, and are one of the very few recipes in Lighten Up intended as a starter. Basically you make a poaching syrup from water, sugar, balsamic vinegar, bay leaves and black peppercorns, and simmer the peeled pears in this for ten minutes until they're just tender. After leaving them to cool (Jill doesn't specify for how long - I took it to mean waiting until they could comfortably be handled, but I don't see why you couldn't prepare them further in advance for a dinner party, say) you stand them on a baking tray (having cut a slice from the bases to make sure they stand up nicely) and wrap each in a furl of prosciutto. Then all you have to do is bake them till the prosciutto's crisp - according to the book this should just take three or four minutes, but mine still weren't properly crisp after six; I'd probably give them longer next time. As a final touch, if you're feeling creative, you strew your plates artistically with pine nuts and micro leaves, and finish off with a drizzle of oil and vinegar. Except I sort of forgot that my balsamic vinegar doesn't come in the kind of bottle that drizzles but rather one that pours, and consequently I ended up with a mini vinegary flood. Also, what the bejeezus are micro leaves? The glossary helpfully says that they have "higher concentrations of phyto-chemicals than in their adult form" (yum, phyto-chemicals, my favourite), but that didn't enlighten me much when looking for them in my local Sainsbury's.

Ta-daaa! Impressive, no? If you look closely you can see faint traces of the aforementioned flood, but I'm sure you're all much too polite to do that. The pears were really good - nice texture, delicate but unusual flavour, and the salty, savoury prosciutto went very well with the sweetness of the fruit. The only thing I might change in future is the ratio of ham to pear - they complemented one another so well that it seems a shame only to get to enjoy the combination until the prosciutto runs out; perhaps smaller pears would balance it out a bit.

On to dessert! I can't say I'm entirely sure what this recipe (from the 'Fruity Food' chapter) is doing in a book purportedly about healthy eating, as it contains not insignificant amounts of both butter and sugar, but ours not to reason why. To make delectably cute mini-puddings you need - logically enough - mini-pudding basins, and I made a bit of a blooper by buying plastic ones before actually reading the recipe and realising that they needed to go in the oven. Ooops. Luckily I'm the kind of person who considers a return trip to Lakeland a treat (as evidenced by that fact that that was Mike's suggestion for a Valentine's Day activity). Anyway, once you're pudding-basined-up you proceed as follows: cream together butter and sugar (my heart always sinks at that instruction; it presuposes the existance of muscles in places I'm fairly sure I don't have any); beat in eggs and fold in flour, baking powder and milk. Then you arrange some berries in the bases of your basins (I used blackberries and raspberries, as per Jill's suggestion) and spoon the batter over them until the basins are 3/4 full. Annoyingly, halving the recipe gave me enough for two and a half puddings, though I suppose it depends on how large your basins are. Once they're filled you tie foil over the tops with string, then stand the puddings on an oven tray, pour boiling water into the tray so that it comes about halfway up the sides of the basins, and bake for 35-40 minutes. Meanwhile you whip up a sauce by briefly heating some more berries with port and a bit of sugar, and that's it! When the puddings have had their time you simply upturn them onto a plate and pour over the sauce.

Mmmmmmmmmm! (My eloquence strikes again!) These were scrumptious - very light and airy in texture, but somehow hearty and satisfying at the same time. I'd put out some crème fraîche to serve with them but neither of us touched it; the puddings were delicious just as they were.

And now for the wise words of Mike:

Mike on the pears: "Surprisingly nice combo, thought it would be too sweet for a starter but really nice flavors. Pear was too big and there was not enough ham to go with it. Also it is quite hard to eat a whole pear with a spoon. Perhaps someone should breed mini pears just for this recipe then you could have three per plate. Peace x."

Mike on the pudding: "Although this pudding is lacking chocolate, which is normally one of my requirements for a good pudding, it is still one of my favorites. It wins points for looks and tastes like a lovely steamed pud with sweet fruit, yum yum. Could have eaten double but I guess it is a decent portion if you have a main also."

I would like the record to show that attempting to eat his pear with a spoon was entirely Mike's own decision and not the result of a chronic cutlery shortage.

Walk on the mild side

2009-02-13T21:29:00.012Z

6. Greek Meatballs with Tomato Sauce

I was slightly dubious about trying this one - Jill boasts that it results in "big, light, bouncy meatballs," which is all very well but I'm not sure that I want my meatballs big, light and bouncy. (Is bouncy a desirable quality in food? Have you ever complimented a meal with an enthusiastic, "mmmmm, bouncy!"?) But moving on! Despite its inclusion in the 'Slow Food' chapter the recipe isn't actually all that time-consuming; it took me maybe 45 minutes from start to finish, and that included a fair amount of thumb-twiddling. The meatballs (beef mince, wine-soaked bread, onion, garlic, cinnamon, cumin, parsley, seasoning and a little egg to bind) are first baked and then simmered in the tomato sauce (passata, red wine, ketchup, tomato purée, olive oil, garlic, bay leaves and a pinch of sugar. Yup, that's three different types of liquidised tomato). I made the full amount of sauce (which is meant to serve four), as I thought I remembered Sarah tring the recipe and saying she'd found the sauce a bit on the stingy side. That might have happened only in my head though, as I can't find a mention of it anywhere on her blog, and as for the sauce quantities, see for yourselves...

And this one was positively restrained compared to Mike's (there is rice somewhere under there, honest).

Erm, yes, if I were to make this again I'd probably halve the sauce along with the rest of the recipe. It's pretty unlikely that I will make it again, though, as it was a little bit disappointing. Perfectly nice but a bit...bland. The meatballs were indeed light and bouncy (and I remain unconvinced that these are traits I'm after in a meatball), but somehow not all that meaty-tasting, and the sauce wasn't wildly exciting either. Hmmph! Oh well, hopefully tomorrow's dinner will be more memorable - stay tuned for a three-course Valentine's extravaganza!

Mike says: "Was excited at the portion sizes, but the meatballs were bland and not meaty enough for my tastes, though saying that I'm sure some people like light fluffy meatballs. I think pasta would be a nicer accompaniment than rice. Until next time gentle readers. xx"

Q: What has four breasts and no legs? A: The chicken we've been eating this week.

2009-02-11T12:49:00.017Z

I had a presentation to give this morning on the Berlin smoking ban (don't worry, I'll spare you the details), so naturally I managed to make the preparation of last night's meal stretch out for a good three hours, thus rendering working on said presentation impossible. It's a gift, I tell you.

5. Chicken Satay with Cucumber

So, this recipe, which comes courtesy of the 'Spicy Food' chapter, comprises three parts: a bed of cucumber ribbons, grilled marinated chicken strips, and a satay sauce. I made the sauce first (in full quantities even though I was halving the rest of the recipe, as the amount didn't look over generous) which just involves stirring together oyster sauce, peanut butter (you're meant to use crunchy but I only had smooth) and sweet chilli sauce, with a dash of lime juice to taste.

Next up, the chicken: you cut your chicken breasts into strips and give them a good whack to flatten them (disturbingly satisfying), then marinate them in a mixture of soy sauce, lime juice, vegetable oil, cumin, coriander, garlic and cayenne pepper. I missed out the salt, because...soy sauce plus salt? Finally, the cucumber's pretty self-explanatory; you simply use a vegetable peeler to slice it into ribbons and arrange on a plate. Then it's just a question of threading the chicken onto skewers and grilling - gratifyingly quick thanks to all the theraputic bashing - before piling the skewers onto the bed of cucumber.

Yum yum! (Marvel at my eloquence! And reconsider the intellectual benefits of a university education.) I thought this was delicious - the chicken was beautifully tender and the sauce complemented it perfectly. I'd cooked some noodles to flesh out the meal a bit and tossed them with tori kara age sauce, which went well enough with everything else but was waaay too salty (this is a recurring theme with sauces from the Wagamama cookbooks, approach with caution!).

Mike says: "Good party food, but perhaps not filling enough to constitute a meal. The thin cucumber was really nice against the spiciness of the satay."

Ahhh, Mikeland, that place where a chicken breast plus a bowlful of noodles per person constitutes a canapé...

I will not make a cheap joke about the name of this dish, I will not make a cheap joke about the name of this dish...

2009-02-10T15:09:00.015Z

Apparently your typical Brit has pasta once a week, but Mike and I must be dragging the national average down a bit as I make it about twice a year. I think I just never find it particularly inspiring - in my first year of university I did the usual student thing of buying it by the bagful as I was constantly being told what great value it was, and then never got much beyond eating it unkooked for breakfast. (Yes, I am too impatient to wait for water to boil. On the bright side, I can report that those rumours about dried pasta expanding in your stomach and causing it to explode are spurious.)

There only are two pasta recipes in Lighten Up, so this project isn't going to up my average all that much, but I ticked one of them off last night in the form of:

4. Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

Just in case you're not up to scratch on your underworld Italian, the name of this dish translates as "spaghetti the way a whore would make it". According to Dupleix this is because it was quick enough for prostitutes to throw together between clients, though another school of thought holds that the name refers to the pungent smell. (Well if that doesn't whet your appetite...) The recipe's from the 'Easy Food' chapter but it'd fit happily into 'Fast Food' too, which is just as well as Mike was off at a wood carving course for most of the evening and I didn't start cooking till almost 10 o'clock. All you have to do is put your spaghetti on to cook, and while it's simmering away you soften some garlic and anchovies in a pan, then throw in the rest of the ingredients (tinned cherry tomatoes, black olives, dried chilli, capers and dried oregano) and cook for five minutes. I know anchovies fall into the love-'em-or-hate-'em camp, but even if you can't normally stand them you might be OK here as they melt into the sauce. Besides, as we all know, anchovy oil is the most effective robot lubricant. But anyway! To finish off you stir in a splash of the pasta cooking water, some chopped parsely and black pepper (Jill actually says to add salt as well, but who wants extra salt in a sauce containing both anchovies and capers?), then drain the spaghetti and toss it all together.

Not the most exciting-looking meal in the world, but it's incredibly flavoursome, and so quick to put together that it might even overcome my pasta inertia. Maybe.

Mike says: "Tasty tasty tasty, I always fancied myself as a prostitute and if I get to eat this dish as part of being in the profession then win-win. The quickness was amazing, so quick that when I requested seconds H made me some. Brilliant. Really nice rich flavours, I think this is what Italians must eat normally."

Chick chick chick chick chicken!

2009-02-09T09:49:00.014Z

3. Grilled Chicken with Salsa Verde

I was planning on making this for dinner on Saturday, but have you tried finding skin-on chicken breasts recently? Faith n' Begorrah! We eventually tracked some down at the butcher's counter in a big Sainsbury's, though technically they were breast supremes, which include a bit of the wing. Once you've tracked down your chicken all you have to do is brush it with olive oil and grill it for 15 minutes or so, while you get on with making the salsa verde to serve with it. This just involves whizzing parsley and basil together (Jill says you can use coriander instead of the basil, which seems a bit peculiar for an Italianate sauce), and then adding garlic, capers, red wine vinegar, black pepper, olive oil and a little water to thin the whole thing to a pouring consistency. When the chicken's ready you slice it and arrange on top of a pile of green beans, then drizzle over the salsa verde. Like lots of the recipes in Lighten Up this one doesn't include any carbs, so I roasted some chunks of polenta and piled them up beside the chicken.
Now, Dupleix describes the sauce as one flavoursome enough to make "anything taste interesting - even an uninspiring chicken breast," which might not sound like the hardest sell, but is actually one of the reasons I wanted to try the recipe. You see, I never cook plain ol' chicken breasts - we don't actually eat all that much chicken, and when we do it's generally camouflaged by strong East Asian flavourings, so I thought this'd be a refreshing change. And it certainly tasted good, probably helped by the fact that the chicken I got was free range and corn-fed, which always makes for more delectably moist meat. The polenta went fantastically with it, too, though I might cut it into smaller cubes next time. In fact, my only criticism would be that for something in the 'Fast Food' section it's a bit of a faff to make - it doesn't take all that long, but you're required to be doing something for most of the cooking time. Moving on, though, to the bit you've been waiting for:

Mike says: "The sauce was a goody and made the dish. Without the sauce it would have been just a cooked chicken breast. Perhaps wrapping the chicken in parma ham or stuffing it with something would make it more interesting. The polenta went well as an accompaniment and also made the plate look pretty. Being in charge of trying to find chicken breasts with the skin on is like the hunt for Osama, I failed in the end and H got them from the butchers counter at Sainsbury's. Maybe forget the skin if you want to do it from your local shop."

The eyeballs have spoken!

Shepherdless Pie

2009-02-08T11:45:00.013Z

I actually made this almost a week ago, and am only getting round to posting it now because I have the organisational skills of a flip-flop. So, rewinding back to Monday: it was freezing, windy and blanketed with snow (incidentally, if you're from somewhere where it snows more than once biannually, feel free to laugh indulgently at the absurdity of our unpreparedness - public transport ground to a halt, and apparently we're now running out of grit. Who'd have thought grit was even something you could run out of? Doesn't it sound like something there should be a limitless supply of, like dirt?). Anyway, I'm rambling - the point is, comfort food was in order, so step forward:

2. Sweet Potato and Lentil Pie

Yes, we ate spinach two days in a row! We truly are gods among men

This one's in the "Slow Food" chapter, and bloody hell, she wasn't kidding - we didn't sit down to eat till half eleven at night. OK, this might be partly due to the fact that I didn't actually start cooking till 9:45, and then lost a good twenty minutes when the oven decided to switch itself off (our oven seems curiously indifferent to its supposed purpose in life), but still! It's not difficult to make, but there are a couple of stages: you make a soffrito of onions, celery carrots and garlic, then add tomatoes, bay leaves, paprika, Puy lentils and some water, and simmer it all together for a good half hour. I'd never used Puy lentils before - I actually thought they were the same as green lentils before I went to buy them - and I wasn't sure how tender they were supposed to get, so gave them an extra ten minutes or so cooking time. The pie topping's basically a sweet potato mash, jazzed up a bit with nutmeg, and parmesan too if you're not cheese-phobic like me. The whole thing goes in the oven for twenty minutes and then - ta daaa! - dinner is served:

Your eyes do not deceive you, it really was that orange

I'm not going to try to defend this meal aesthetically - for a start I'm an exceptionally lazy masher and the topping looked suspiciously lumpy in places, but luckily it's nigh on impossible to make sweet potato taste bad so it didn't really matter. As you can see, though, there wasn't quite enough mash to cover the whole pie, so I might up the quantities a bit next time. I'd made the full recipe, which is meant to serve four, even though it was just the two of us eating - I think I had a vague idea that it wouldn't be all that filling and there were unlikely to be any leftovers. Ha! The pie was enoooormous - it could easily have served six, and though we valiantly went back for seconds and thirds we eventually had to admit defeat.

And how did it taste? Surprisingly good, actually - I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but it was very savoury and satisfying, and the nutmeg in the sweet potato really made a difference. It worked well with ketchup, too, which is Dupleix's suggested accompaniment. As for Mike, he's specially requested a 'Mike says' slot, so voici:

Mike says: "Good portions and feels do-goody, the addition of excessive ketchup makes you forget about the lack of meat and makes it amazing. Great re-heated the next day."

I bet he's wishing he'd chosen his own photo now...

Ready, Steady, Cook!

2009-02-02T22:07:00.010Z

Well, the Lighten Up challenge is officially underway! Lunch yesterday was the inaugural meal, and my friend Alana came round and gamely submitted herself to culinary pot luck. Which turned out to be:

1. Singapore Chilli Prawns

This recipe's from the 'Spicy Food' chapter, and apparently uses the same sauce as the 'famous' Singaporean chilli crab, which neither of us had ever heard of. What can I say, Singaporean food isn't one of Scotland's major cuisines. Anyway, you just stir fry some ginger, chilli and garlic, add the prawns, and finally throw in some ketchup, sweet chilli sauce, a little bit of chicken stock, caster sugar and a spoonful of cornflour to thicken everything up. The whole thing takes about five minutes, though admittedly that doesn't include chopping up the chilli and ginger before you start, which would probably take a normal person about 30 seconds, but always seems to take me the better part of a lunar cycle. But I digress - behold the finished product!
It's a bit hard to get a sense of scale from the picture, but the prawns were huuuuge - certainly the biggest I've ever cooked, and possibly the biggest I've ever eaten. Come to think of it, it might have been the first time I'd cooked shell-on prawns at all - supposedly leaving the shells on helps to keep them moist and flavoursome, both of which they indeed were. As for the sauce, it was tasty though not particularly spicy, but then again we've both got pretty high spice tolerances; maybe (despite the chapter title) the recipe's aimed at less hardened palates. I cooked some rice to go alongside, and at the last minute realised that I'd sort of forgotten to make any kind of vegetable component, so stir-fried some spinach with garlic and sesame oil, too. (See, I am a responsible adult - I eat spinach! Which, it is well documented, entirely cancels out any penchant for champagne truffles one might have.)

Erm, anyway, I don't know what else I can say, really! It was scrumptious, quick and easy, and I'd certainly make it again, though possibly not all that often as the prawns cost a horrifying, cardiac-arrest-to-wallet-inducing amount. The next Lighten Up meal is not only worthily frugal but is in the oven even as I type, so stay tuned for how that one turns out!

A Change is Gonna Come

2009-01-22T09:41:00.008Z

I don't suppose anyone remembers back that far, but for the first couple of months of its existance this blog was about my (singularly unsucessful) attempts at budgeting. Well, I think the time has come for a similarly abrupt about-turn - I mean, there's only so much mileage you can get out of a knitting blog when you never actually knit anything (though I feel I've given the stretching-out-of-non-existant-content-to-full-length-posts approach a good shot). From a knitterly point of view, all I have to show for the last five months is a ribbed hat and an armless green thing, and much as I like to big up my own achievements I don't feel I've got an awful lot to work with there.

So! What am I going to write about instead, I hear you ask? OK, maybe not, but humour me. Anyway, one of my favourite blogs - in fact, probably my absolute favourite - is the encyclopaedic Sarah Discovers How to Eat, in which the eponymous Sarah (who you can also find over here) chronicles cooking her way through every recipe in Nigella Lawson's How to Eat within a single year. Admittedly said year was 2005-6, which means that not only am I geeky enough to go through the entire backlogs of blogs, but geeky enough to go through the entire backlogs of blogs which haven't been updated in over thirty months (a whole seperate category of geekdom, surely), but reading about someone you've never met moussaka-ing aubergines and beheading pheasants is strangely compelling. Which brings me - finally! - to what I'm going to do next: make every recipe in Jill Dupleix's Lighten Up. See, I love the idea of forcing yourself to cook every recipe in a book - being pushed out of your culinary comfort zone and having to try things you'd never otherwise have considered (and did you know that the average person only makes three recipes from each cookbook they own?) - but I can't quite face something as tome-like as How to Eat, and I'm not sure my cholesterol levels would recover from that kind of Nigella-onslaught. Besides, a lot of the recipes in How to Eat are geared towards entertaining, or at least towards feeding large groups of people, and, much as I love to cook for other people, most of the time it's just two of us. (And yes, I'm vaguely familiar with the concept of maths and realise that recipes can be scaled down, but quite a lot of the How to Eat ones aren't very scaling-down friendly, and...why am I justifying myself to a computer screen?)

Lighten Up, then, works a bit better with our lifestyle (lots of recipes aimed at two, and the rest are mostly for four but can generally be halved without too much difficulty), is more manageable than HtE (there are roughly 140 recipes, depending on how many of the stock/salad dressing extras at the end you count), will give my GP slightly less cause for concern, and will hopefully arm me with plenty of new ideas and techniques for healthy eating. There are a couple of snags though. Firstly, I don't like cheese. Really, really, really don't like it. This isn't as big an obstacle with Lighten Up as it would be with many other cookbooks - it's meant to be about eating healthily, after all, which cheese is a bit at odds with - and for those recipes which call for "2 tbsp parmesan" or whatever I'll do what I usually do and just miss it out. But I can see that "Sizzling Haloumi with Prawns" doesn't really work without the haloumi, and "Parmesan Crisps" without the parmesan would be similarly tricky to pull off. Jill Dupleix also seems to have an alarming fondness for beetroot, which crops up all over the place, and although my aversion to beetroot isn't as strong as my aversion to cheese, it still features fairly highly on my list of foods I'd be happy never to eat again. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the cheese/beetroot recipes - I feel I ought to make them in the spirit of the exercise ("cooking every recipe from a book" has more of a ring to it than "cooking every recipe from a book, except five or six"), but what exactly do I do - make them, but just for Mike? Make them and try a tiny bit? Get Mike to make them? Also, I still don't have a camera, so I'll have to see if my powers of persuasion are up to convincing Mike to act as photographer. (Gripping though reading about people beheading pheasants is, I do see that you need the accompanying visuals for full effect.)

Mike, as you've possibly guessed, is my boyfriend, and the only other person in the 'household', if that's not too grand a word for a flat with two people in it. He's gloriously unfussy - the only thing I've ever given him that he didn't like was a weird brand of MSG-free instant noodles, which did taste absolutely foul - but although he'll eat just about anything (and has been known to eat things like dog, which I attempt to discourage), he definitely appreciates good food, and has a slightly alarming taste for Michelin-starred establishments. Mike's chief complaint with my cooking is that I occassionally - the horror! - halve a recipe intended to serve four for the two of us - this is criminal in Mikeland, where recipe portion sizes are regarded with utmost suspicion (Nigella is the sole exception to this; her portions get the Mike stamp of approval).

Other than Mike, I cook for friends a fair bit (usually groups, but once in a while for individuals, too), and when I go to see my family (two parents, three siblings scattered around various parts of the country) I tend to inflict my cooking on them as well. Just in case you were trying to get your geographical bearings, Mike and I live in Edinburgh (a somewhat curious choice for someone as allergic to the cold as I am, but hey), and my family's based in a picturesque but out-of-the-way Kentish village, the kind of place which has five pubs but nowhere you can buy bread. (The last time Mike was down there he asked where the nearest cash machine was. I tried not to laugh.)

Anyway! That's probably a bit of an information overload for one day. I'm planning on starting on the 1st of February (tempting though it is to start right away, I've got three essay deadlines looming between now and then), and I haven't given myself a set timeframe for completing everything, but I'm thinking along the lines of six months - short enough to be challenging (allowing for holidays, and for cooking from other books once in a while), but long enough to encompass bits of most seasons and therefore allow me to cook most of the food at appropriate(ish) times of year. Incidentally, I've already made a few recipes from Lighten Up: Tuna Souvlaki with Tahini and Parsley; Salmon, Orange and Chickpea Salad; Spice-Grilled Mackerel; Aubergine Curry with Ginger and Chilli; Little Fruity Puddings and Zuppa di Pesce. The souvlaki, zuppa, mackerel and puddings were great, and the salmon and aubergine were fine but not very exciting - I'm going to be making them all again for the project, though, so they'll get a second chance. Oh, and if I do ever get round to knitting anything again I might just stick it in here anyway, as a random diversion.

See you in February!

She lives!

2008-12-08T13:24:00.008Z

Hello!

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this blog had died a typically anonymous Blogland death, but although it's taken a few blows we're talking flesh wounds rather than mortal injuries. Firstly my promised site-revamp, courtesy of Mike, didn't quiiite get off the ground in time for my birthday as planned (my birthday being in, ahem, early August), and secondly - and more of a direct impediment to blogging - I lost my camera. If, that is, "lost" encompasses "idiotically left on the back seat of a Hong Kong taxi". I've filed police reports and filled out insurance claims and the like, but a little pointlessly, really, considering that my particular camera is no longer produced and can therefore only be replaced pending the invention of time travel.

So in homage to my much-missed camera, and as a handy bit of filler until such time as I knit something photogenic enough to bother taking pictures with someone else's, I present a sample photo from its lifetime (well, two years; is that a lifetime in camera terms?) of faithful service. If memory serves it depicts an advert for some sort of pharmaceutical product (which is why I took a picture of it, obviously - I'm all about pharmaceutical advertising campaigns), and if you look carefully - or just zoom in a lot - you can see not only me, but also the departed camera itself. Nifty, no?

Anyway, till next time (which will be this side of the freezing over of Hell, cross my heart), and in the meantime Happy Advent!

See, this is why I don't post progress pictures very often

2008-08-02T09:49:00.017+01:00

There's only so much enthusiasm you can drum up for what is essentially a long, blue knitted worm.

When I was a kid I had a little gizmo called a knitting dolly, which is used for French knitting. French knitting is, as far as I can tell, the art of producing woollen worms. You wrap the yarn around the four pins protruding from the doll's head, in what at the time seemed like an incredibly complicated sequence (what can I say, I was an uncoordinated child), pull on the yarn end dangling from the doll's "foot", and voilà! An inordinately long time later, a worm is born! My interest in French knitting soon dwindled, there being a limited number of things you can do with knitted worms, but I was reminded of it a couple of days ago when making the I-cord drawstring for the Drawstring Chemise. At just shy of two metres long it's the longest worm I've ever produced; a proud achievement for any ex-French knitter. Even better, though, it actually has a purpose in life, which is more than I can say for any of my earlier invertebrate creations.

As you may have already deduced from the fact that I'm now fiddling around with details like I-cord, the chemise is creeping towards the finish line. I mean, it's seamed and everything! All I've still got to do is finish knitting the drawstring casing, attach it and work the underarm edgings. Knitting a separate casing isn't part of the original pattern, but rather the latest strategy in my never-ending struggle to marginally tone down my resemblance to a linebacker. It's a life's work, I tell you.

Anyway, I'll hopefully have something slightly more substantial than a worm to show you sometime next week! If not I'll come up with an excellent and incontrovertible excuse, to be fabricated closer to the time for maximum freshness.

Hell must have frozen over

2008-07-28T17:21:00.023+01:00

Because I have a finished object to show you! Unfortunately I have yet to think up a way of taking an action shot of a hat without my head being involved, so you'll just have to do your best to overlook it:

As Mike so kindly pointed out, I haven't quite mastered the "well-adjusted, non-manic human being" look. Also, contrary to appearances, I am not naked in these photos

Apologies for the blurriness, but it was 33 degrees when I took these and my enthusiasm for messing-around-with-camera-settings-while-wearing-a-woolly-hat was beginning to wane. (OK, I could spend all the time in the world fiddling with the settings and I still wouldn't be able to take an in-focus picture, but at least this way I have a pleasing excuse.)

Anyway! The pattern is Robin's Egg Blue Hat, and if the yarn looks familiar it's because it's leftover Lana Grossa Royal Tweed from the Textured Tunic I knit last year. The hat took exactly one ball, so if for some reason I can't yet think of I wanted two more identical hats, then lo, they could be mine! I think I'll change the button at some point though; I'd rather have something with four holes and a rim. As for why I suddenly felt inspired to make a Winter hat in, erm, July, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe next week we'll have freak snow storms and I'll finish the Drawstring Chemise.

O Summer, where art thou?

2008-07-20T11:58:00.032+01:00

Image from Leonidas Halkidis

I've always had it in for the Gulf Stream. In geography at school we learnt that the current was responsible for our "delightfully" mild maritime climate, and from then on I constantly fantasised that it would one day, in a fit of meteorological pique (because, you know, currents are always having those), re-root itself and usher in scorchingly hot Summers and picture-perfect crisp, snowy Winters. Never mind that I already complained whenever the days dropped below 19°C and got goose bumps at room temperature. In my imaginary Winters I'd somehow acquired the knack of getting fetchingly rosy cheeks without a red nose, my hair behaved itself beautifully in uncannily Heidi-like plaits, and the whole thing was topped off by charming knitted hats which miraculously didn't make me look like a juvenile delinquent.

When I announced my intention of going to university in Edinburgh it was met with general bafflement. "But it'll be...cold," my usually eloquent parents pointed out. They gently suggested that I consider somewhere a little further South, like, say, Spain. But I stood firm, for reasons much too embarrassing to confess to the internet, and my bemused parents duly drove me up, stocked my cupboard with Marmite and Heinz tomato soup, and drove off again. Two hours after they'd left I'd drunk all the soup and was wondering whether wearing a sleeping bag with head- and armholes cut into it would make me too conspicuous in lectures.

Anyway, you've probably got the idea: I don't really do cold. Which is why the current weather is particularly grump-inducing. After a gorgeous May and June, Summer seems to have decided it's done its bit for the year, and July's been a damp squib. Practically British, in fact, except (what with being in Berlin and all) I can't implicate the Gulf Stream in this one. (But it's not over yet, Gulf Stream! Victory will one day be miiine! Ahem.)

All of which is just an extreeemely long-winded way of saying that - you guessed it! - I've made pretty much no progress on the Drawstring Chemise. We're talking not-discernible-to-the-naked-eye progress. In fact, it might even have got shorter since I last posted. But when the forecast gloomily prophesises 18° cloudiness with the odd shower or two thrown in for good measure, finishing up a skimpy Summer top doesn't exactly seem pressing.

I wonder what the German view on sleeping bags as outerwear is?

The finer things in life

2008-07-09T08:16:00.015+01:00

Knit So Fine has had very mixed reviews on Amazon, so I thought I'd chip in my two (Euro) cents. First, the not-so-good: I found most of the (26 page long!) introduction supremely irritating. Maybe it's just that in my case the authors were preaching to the converted, but honestly, does anyone need to be told that, "thin yarns weigh less than thick ones", or require visual proof that, "a lace pattern looks better when knitted in a fine yarn"? Their definition of fine yarn seems a bit off to me anyway; they consider anything knitting up at more than 5 stitches per inch to be fine, which means that DK is, according to them, thin. Hmmm.

Some of the reasoning is a little wonky as well - at one point they provide a rather entertaining picture of a Barbie doll dressed first in a bulky knitted dress (3 stitches/inch) and then in a lightweight one (7 stitches/inch). "Even the fashion doll," they enthuse, "looks better in the clingy, thin, curve-hugging fine-guage yarn. If the difference in gauge makes a doll look better, imagine what it will do for real bodies!" Erm, surely it's the other way round? At three stitches per inch, each stitch is a very significant percentage of Barbie's itty-bitty measurements, and she'll look proportionally chunkier wearing a garment knit at this gauge than a human adult would. Or have I grossly misunderstood some basic principle of physics? (It wouldn't be the first time; I've occasionally counted on the laws of gravity charitably overlooking me.)

My final niggle with the introduction is that some of the advantages of fine yarns which the authors wax so lyrical about aren't represented in the patterns. Colour work, for example - zilch! Unless you consider stripes to be colour work, which I have been known to do in unambitious moments.

But, that grumble aside, on with the patterns! There are, I think it's fair to say, some exceptionally iffy ones, but I'm very taken with others. Three of the four in the mini collage above are already sitting impatiently in my Ravelry queue (the fourth - the Bohus jumper in the top left corner - looks gorgeous there but is, in fact, disappointingly frumpy when seen in full). I'm also smitten with the wrap dress, which I'll never have the patience to make, unless perhaps I resurrect my mum's knitting machine from wherever it's currently collecting dust. Or acquire a troupe of dexterous child slaves.

In other news, in the last three weeks I've knit exactly eleven rows of the Drawstring Chemise. A new slothfulness record! And to think that I was seriously toying with the idea of entering the Ravelympics...

Surprise!

2008-07-06T11:36:00.017+01:00

What's that I see in the distance there? Surely it can't be...but wait, it is! That most elusive of creatures, a finished Surplice Bodice Camisole!

Yes, yes, spoilsports, I know it's not an action shot, but do I at least get half points?

Did I mention that this was incredibly, comatose-state-inducingly dull to knit? If I ever start making "maybe-I'll-whip-up-another-one" noises, somebody please prod me reprovingly with a needle.

Pattern: Surplice Bodice Camisole from Knitting Lingerie Style. I don't seem to have kept any notes for this project (pretend to be amazed at this display of disorganisation), but if memory serves I was working at a tighter gauge than stipulated, so followed the instructions for a size 36" or 38" in order to end up with something coming in at just under 32". Which sounds tiny, but my fear of Cotton S-t-r-e-t-c-h Syndrome knows no bounds.

Yarn: 3 skeins of Classic Elite Provence in "Special Walnut". Unfortunately the colour's a bit washed-out in real life, which is a problem I keep running into with dark browns - they look chocolatey rich in the ball, but when knit up turn out to be disappointingly anaemic.

Needles: Presumably I did indeed use some, but my non-existent notes are understandably hazy on specifics.

Mods: Not enough! I tinkered with a couple of things to compensate for my guage and added an inch or two to the length, but I really should have made the whole thing even longer. And in the highly unlikely event that I were to make this again (see needle poking instructions, above) I'd use something other than 100% cotton, so I could knit the lace section in the round without worrying about the dreaded cotton stretch factor. (Plus I had the damndest time working out how to seam the lace, as there weren't any selvage stitches, so knitting in the round would also save much desperate grovelling on Ravelry.)

So there you have it! It's...OK. In order for me to really warm to it I'd need to dye it a darker, cooler shade of brown and add another inch or so to the lace. The chances of either of these things ever happening are about as good as the chances of me changing my name to Honoratia and setting up as a dog aromatherapist, but what's life without a cheering dose of self-delusion?

I think the word I'm looking for is "whoops"

2008-06-27T15:53:00.003+01:00

Sorry, I seem to have slipped off the radar for a bit there! But I'll be back with, among other things, the finished Surplice Bodice Camisole (yes, really!) in, ohh, about a week. But a week in Heather Time, obviously, which seems to bear very little relation to real time.

See you then!

Happy Birthday to me! (Well, sort of)

2008-06-08T19:31:00.008+01:00

In an act of random coincidence I just decided to read through my very first posts here, and discovered that this blog is one year old today! Other people mark their blogiversaries with exciting giveaways and competitions; I mark mine by posting pictures of out of focus blue things:

This particular out of focus blue thing is, of course, the Drawstring Chemise. Not much I can say about it, really - it seems to be coming along quite nicely; though I suppose now that I've said that I've almost certainly doomed it to some sort of horrible fate. (Possibly involving misplaced stitch markers. Most of my knitting disasters seem to involve misplaced stitch markers.) Tune in next week to find out!

And it's ohh soooo fii-ine

2008-06-03T21:21:00.010+01:00

You know that thing that sometimes happens when you accidentally put a knitting book in your Amazon basket? And then absent-mindedly enter your credit card details? (Why do I have the feeling that's not the first time I've typed those sentences?)

Guess I might have to revise my previously expressed views on sub-2.5mm needles...

Baby, it's hot outside

2008-06-01T15:50:00.007+01:00

So hot, in fact, that my Summer Interweave Knits melted yesterday. (Not the actual pages, obviously, but there's now a muddy-coloured swirl where the picture on the back cover used to be.) Believe it or not, though, I'm not going to use this as a feeble excuse for not having done any knitting - guckt mal!

This is the lace border for the Drawstring Chemise, which I finally cast on for again. I'm not crazy about the diamond mesh pattern, which is a bit geometric for my tastes, but it's certainly fun to knit. I'd never actually worked lace from a chart before, mainly because I have the spacial awareness of a lemming, but this might have won me over from written instructions.

Anyway! All's going well so far, but I still have no idea what I'm going to do once I get above the armholes. I suppose this isn't exactly pressing, given that I've knit precisely 7cm so far, but it's always nice to have a vague game plan. I can't leave it with spaghetti straps, as per the original pattern, because from behind I am regularly mistaken for a pro-wrestler (except, you know, without the arm muscles) and dainty I-cord wouldn't really be the best look. Instead I'm thinking of either leaving the straps off entirely (and relying on sheer willpower to keep the top up - that's bound to work, right?) or making the I-cord casing run all the way around, forming sort of off-shoulder straps. Or making little cap sleeves which, in a way I have yet to fathom, incorporate a casing which is continuous with that of the front and back. Genius! Or possibly overambitious and doomed to failure; I'm not all that good at spotting the difference...

How long do you think it'll be before someone notices that this blog has no actual knitting content?

2008-05-25T18:31:00.009+01:00

Hurrah - my knitting supplies have a new home! Or maybe just "have a home" would be more accurate, seeing as they never actually had an old one (I'm guessing a messy pile dumped unceremoniously on an overflowing desk tidy doesn't really count as a home).

I think it's meant to be a wash bag, hence all the handy pockets which are conveniently knitting-equipment sized. (Incidentally, what are those side pockets in wash bags actually meant to be for? I mean, they're flat. How many flat toiletries do you own?) I tried to take a picture of the interior for your oggling pleasure, but seeing as it's lined in something shiny and pink the photo came out looking disturbingly gynaecological. The outside, though, is a lovely sturdy cotton, and from a distance (admittedly not much of a distance, given my chronic short-sightedness) it looks like the vibrantly coloured leather bags you get in the Middle East. And - because I shallowly reduce everything to mercenary considerations - it only cost 4,90 €! This sounds much better if I persist in my steadfast denial of the current exchange rate.

As for the weekly attempt to scrape the barrel for knitting news, my Drawstring Chemise has been pulled off the needles within 12 hours of being cast on. The lace section was turning out to be huuuge (schoolboy error alert - always swatch for the lace pattern as well as the stocking stitch!), so it's off to the wool shop I go for some smaller needles. (These'll be 2.5mm. I sincerely hope that in my entire knitting career I never have call for anything smaller than that.) It's still fairing better than the Secret Project though, which has been entirely abandoned. From a knitterly perspective, anyway - it's been appropriated by the sewing side of my personality. (Trust me, this isn't a side of my personality you want to get to know.)

Um, so that's it, really! Unimpressive, I know, but just think how blank this page would be if I only ever posted when I had something worth writing about. Ohh, though speaking of things worth writing about, check out these shoes! I'd never heard of Birkis before, but I seem to have accidentally stolen one of their catalogues (well, they should have written 'Schutzgebühr' bigger! Besides, who charges 2,50 € for what is essentially an 80-page advert?). I'm particularly taken with these, not least because I can claim they have a tenuous link to knitting...

Wait, you mean a blog is for writing things in?

2008-05-22T15:39:00.010+01:00

Ah, my poor, neglected blog. You know I love you really, don't you? And I've been knitting, cross my heart! It's just that I'm far too lazy to take photographic evidence, and let's be honest - who's going to read page after page of my rambling without the odd pretty picture to distract them? (Well, "pretty" is highly doubtful, given my ineptitude behind the lens, but you get the point.) At the moment, for instance, I've just finished a huuuuuuge swatch for the Drawstring Chemise (I don't really have the patience to swatch, wash, measure and reswatch, so I've taken to combining swatches on different sized needles into a single Monster Swatch, thus getting it over all in one go). I didn't take a picture of it though because, well, it's a swatch. A stocking stitch rectangle. I bet David Bailey never takes photos of stocking stitch rectangles.

I'm also working on a mini Secret Project, and photographing it would sort of undermine the secrecy. The only thing I can think of to show you is my new yarn, which is goorrgeous! This is the stuff I ordered in for the chemise, Lang Fiorina in a scrumptious but sadly discontinued shade of blue. I spent an embarrassing amount of time dithering between the blue and a green, and eventually went for the former because I had a vague childhood recollection of my dad saying I looked good in blue. Though can the fashion advice of a man who wears convex-soled orthopaedic sandals really be trusted?

Nope, I still haven't befriended the macro button on my camera

Foiled Again!

2008-05-15T17:00:00.012+01:00

The cotton for my Drawstring Chemise now isn't expected in till Monday, which presumably is because God really, really wants me to cast on for the Union Square Market Pullover in the meantime. (Well, He's into creating things, isn't He? And I'm sure He had this very jumper in mind when He created Alpacas.) I bought the yarn for this a while ago but had been putting off starting it because of the weather; it's been so gorgeously sunny that the last thing you want on your lap is a pile of fuzzy warmth. But then yesterday I had my eureka moment - evening knitting! OK, it's not exactly on par with discovering Archimedes' Principle, but this is as close to a eureka moment as I'm ever going to get so humour me. Anyway, feeling highly pleased with myself I started swatching, only to find that I was going to need to go up a size to 3.25mm needles. Which might not sound like a big deal, but (as I found out today) you can't actually get 3.25mm needles in Germany. Bah! What's the point of having a swizzy metric system if you only use half of it? (Any smart Alec pointing out that Britain doesn't exactly make full use of the metric system will be sternly told to stop being such a clever clogs.)

So I've hit a bit of a stumbling block. I can order the needles online, but I have a vague feeling that we might be in the middle of a postal strike (note to self: pay attention the next time someone mentions the word "Streik" instead of letting eyes glaze over). And even if they did arrive OK, it wouldn't be before the yarn for the Chemise, thus rendering the whole "in the meantime" idea sort of redundant. Maybe God's having second thoughts about the jumper after all.

On the bright side, guess what - the Surplice Bodice Camisole, which I finally got round to blocking, actually fits! It could do with being a liiiiiiittle bit longer in the bust, but I've hung it up to promote downwards-stretching so hopefully that'll do the trick. I have no idea what it looks like on me because, as I've only just realised, I don't have a mirror! There's a crappy little headshot-only one in the bathroom, but other than that, zilch. This raises the alarming prospect that I might accidentally go out without wearing a crucial item of clothing, like, say, trousers. Anyway, I'd rather not inflict my self-timer efforts on you, so anyone with Camisole-curiosity will have to wait till my occasionally-resident photographer returns.

I wouldn't want you to go entirely without pictures, though, so: do you remember the Christmassy Ampelmann car? Well, look what I spotted not too long ago:

Yup, there's a Summer version! Wouldn't it be cool if the actual red and green men on traffic lights carried little surfboards? (I suppose it would send out a bit of a confusing message though; people might think you could surf across the roads. Not most people, obviously. But I did once absent-mindedly try to control a traffic light using my house keys, so what I'd do if faced with a surfing green man is anyone's guess.)

2008-05-09T22:06:00.013+01:00

Well, I did indeed finish the Surplice Bodice Camisole! (Actually, I still have to sew one of the side seams, but shhh.) And I have to say, 'twas the most boring thing I've ever knit in my life - annoyingly bitty, with approximately a gazillion picked up stitches, and pieces stopping and starting all over the place. I do like the look of it now that it's done, but I have a horrible feeling it's not going to sit right, because like a fool I forgot that I have a back the length of the Mississippi-Missouri and didn't make adjustments accordingly. Anyway, I'll have to wait a bit longer to see if the miracle that is blocking bails me out yet again, because my flat doesn't possess such high-tech gizmos as a washing machine, and so far I've been too lazy to venture forth and find a laundrette. (Also, is it just me or are laundrettes sort of scary? A bit like buses.) (People point and laugh when I attempt to use buses. Though in fairness they sometimes do this when I'm not using buses, too.)

Where was I? Ohhh yes - buoyed by that partial success I went straight out and ordered yarn for my next project! I'd found an ideal substitution for the Cotton Glace but none of the colours in my LYS were really doing it for me, so the lovely shop assistant took pity on me and pulled an enormous sample book out from behind the counter. This is going to make me sound like a knitting hillbilly, but oh my God, I had no idea there was so much choice out there! Seriously, every single yarn comes in just about every single colour! Dork that I am, I got my Colour Me Beautiful wallet out and started eagerly matching swatches up. Why did I not know that you could do this before?! Come to think of it maybe I should have noticed that it was a bit odd that all yarns online were available in a rainbow of shades whereas those stocked in shops came in about three...

Anyway! My order won't arrive till the end of next week, which is a bit lästig because I could really do with some more Summer tops asap. (Yes, I know I could buy a couple of t-shirts in H&M for about 5,- €, but where's the fun in that when you can knit your own for four times the cost and forty times the effort? Chuh, amateurs!) We seem to have skipped Spring and gone straight from eternal Winter to Summer, which has been most excellent for my mood but a bit unsettling for my wardrobe. (Actually, I think the sun might have really got to me, because I bought a white skirt today. On thinking it over, I am fairly sure that a white skirt is the most useless garment known to man, or at least to me. I might start a pool on how long it stays white for.)

Note to self: think of a devestatingly clever title

2008-05-05T08:10:00.014+01:00

OK, I misled you slightly about the knitting content of this post (and, as it turns out, the timing - oops!). I have a grand total of one knitting-related line to impart, namely: I finally, finally picked up the Surplice Bodice Camisole again! (What, you were expecting something more interesting? Ptth, you should know me better than that by now...)

I do have a couple of fairly watertight excuses for being such a knitterly slugabed, though. Firstly, I just moved flats (my definition of "just" being "recently enough that I have yet to unpack"), and secondly I disappeared to Munich for a week. I don't know why I bother to take knitting on holiday, seeing as I hardly ever give it so much as a glance while I'm there, but it turns out that I sliiightly underestimated the length of the train journey back to Berlin and the Camisole came to the rescue. Who knows, next time I might even have a finished object to show! (Which would make for a total of, what, three FOs this year? I should really start knitting socks or something.)

Anyway, in the meantime will you accept a couple of holiday pictures in lieu of knitting ones? First up, and possibly the blurriest photo ever to grace this blog (but I didn't take this one! As I suppose should be obvious from the fact that I'm in it):

Beeeer. With my head for scale.

This was in the Hofbräuhaus, apparently Munich's most popular attraction, where the standard measure of beer is a litre. The standard amount of beer I am capable of consuming is about 0.01 litres, so this one was returned to its rightful owner pretty promptly.

And this is Schloss Neuschwanstein, also known (by us, at least) as the fairytale castle. It's got everything you could want from a palace: breathtaking setting, elaborate decor, plastic cave between bedroom and sitting room... (Something must have got lost in the translation there; surely they didn't have plastic in 1869?)

I also managed to fit in a wool shop excursion or two, and can happily recommend both Geknöpft und Zugenäht (which is part of the Ludwig Beck department store) and Wollkorb, which has several branches around town (I went to the one off Sendlingerstr.). The only problem with both of them is that a lot of the stock is behind the counter, so you don't really feel you can browse freely. And in a tragic victory of financial self-preservation over lust, I left empty handed. (Financial self-preservation may not have won the war though - did I mention that my new flat is that little bit closer to La Laine?)

Finally - because I wouldn't want you to think that my television viewing consists solely of late-night boxing - I am now shamelessly addicted to Germany's Next Topmodel. No smirking, it's genius I tell you! Unlike in the virtually unwatchable American version, the contestants are a) capable of forming coherent sentences, and b) generally friendly and non-bitchy. Plus it's presented by Heidi Klum. Heidi Klum! I mean...I've actually heard of her! (No offense, Tyra, but...Heidi Klum!) Obviously my main reason for watching, though, is to improve my German. Ahem. (Incidentally, most used words on the programme: "hammer", "geil" and "aufgeregt". I may have exhausted the show's vocabulary-expanding potential.)

2008-05-03T23:02:00.010+01:00

It's five past midnight and I'm watching a dubbed boxing match on TV. Nope, I don't know why either. (In fact, I'm not even entirely sure it's boxing, such is my level of knowledge and interest in these things.) But tomorrow (well, today, I suppose), I'll be back with some knitting-related stuff! Because I do knit occasionally, honest.

P.S. Am I the only person who isn't really grabbed by anything in the new Interweave Knits?

P.P.S. Ohh, someone's won the random violent sport. Apparently God gave him strength. Who knew He was a boxing fan?

2008-04-20T19:32:00.004+01:00

Donnerwetter, we're getting new coins! Am I the only person who didn't know this?

Not meaning to be a killjoy or anything, but won't it be sort of hard to tell them apart? I mean, I know they're different shapes and sizes, and, um, colours...but still! Ohh, also, what about the £2 coin? (Erm, those still exist, right? I've been out of the loop for a while.)

Had we but world enough, and time, this slowness, Lady, were no crime *

2008-04-18T08:41:00.010+01:00

But two centimetres in as many weeks is a bit feeble by anyone's standards.

Interestingly, Photoshop felt the need to correct the red eye in this picture

It's probably just as well I hadn't got round to picking up stitches for the front lace panel, though, because my needles got confiscated at the airport! At least they didn't have any knitting on them. And despite claiming not to speak any German (ptth! Who do the Swiss think they're kidding?) the security guy was actually quite nice, and parcelled the needles up for me to collect from the luggage belt. I suspect his wife may be a knitter.

* In future I promise to try and restrain myself from butchering classics for knitting purposes.

2008-04-12T08:09:00.005+01:00

Um...bonjour! (This is the sum total of what I've retained from six years' worth of French lessons. Ah, the good old British education system...) I'm currently in Haute-Savoie with a dial-up internet connection (remember those?) and a mother who's displaying a previously undisclosed belief that champagne is the most suitable accompaniment for all meals. I haven't quite decided which of those factors I'm going to claim as the excuse for not showing you progress on the Surplice Bodice Camisole, so take your pick! The camisole and I will be back next week in slightly more presentable states.

The year that Spring forgot

2008-04-01T10:37:00.023+01:00

I don't know, where's global warming when you need it?

But anyway, I digress (not that I'd said anything to digress from yet, I suppose) - I finally got round to the taking-blurry-pictures stage of the Unpronounceable Shell!

And because no blurry photo shoot is complete without dodgy mirror photos:

Can you make out Elefante in the background?

Slightly dodgier than intended close up of the bodice and ribbon detail

I loved knitting this - with the possible exception of the back bodice there was always enough going on to keep my toddler-like attention span engaged. Dull technical stuff ahoy!

Pattern: Aleita Shell from Interweave Knits Spring 2008; size 32 ½" (it's meant to be worn with a couple of inches of negative ease)

Yarn: 3 ½ skeins of Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk in blueberry. My excessive love for this yarn is vaguely inappropriate and would no doubt be better expended on family members or something. But it feels luxuriously scrumptious! And it doesn't shed! And I have another 3 ½ skeins left! I originally bought it for my doomed Somewhat Cowl (ahh, my salad days, when I hadn't quite made the connection between swatching and things not turning out eleventy-seven sizes too big), so I feel all virtuous to be finally using some of it up.

Needles: You're actually meant to knit the bodice back and forth on matching circular needles, but - not possessing two 3.75mm circs, and being much too cheap to buy another pair - I worked the mostly knit rows with 3.75s (Boyle 29", if anyone actually cares) and the mostly purl rows on 3.5s (Lang 24"), my logic being that my purl stitches were probably a bit looser anyway.

Mods: Just two (are you impressed at my restraint?): I worked an extra waist decrease (and corresponding increase, obviously), and added the underbust eyelet row.

Anyway, hooray! As I'm sure all professional knittery types say when completing a project.

As for what's next, I decided to interpret your deafening silence as votes for the Surplice Bodice Camisole, which I cast on for a couple of weeks ago. My enthusiasm for it's sort of petered out though - after the lusciousness of the alpaca silk the cotton's a bit harsh and utilitarian to work with, not to mention tiring. Plus I keep casting a wary eye at the enormous "finishing" section of the pattern, which I swear is longer than the actual pattern itself. Hey ho; if I stumble across some surplus motivation lying around somewhere then I might have something to show next time. (Hint to the Weather Gods: there's a mysterious correlation between sunshine and motivation levels.)

2008-03-18T19:00:00.008Z

When a crochet hook is a less surprising thing to find in your bed than another person, your life may have gone ever so slightly skewy somewhere.

But to the point: the knitting on the Unpronounceable Shell is finished! All I need to do now is seam the shoulders, whip up a neckband, block, and take some ~~unintentionally~~ artistically out of focus pictures. I've held off casting on for the Drawstring Chemise, though, because my row gauge is so stratospherically off that my usual turning-a-blind-eye technique might not get me very far. As for the lovely Yosemite, in the end I decided to hold out until I can get (read "afford") some different coloured yarn, as I think the brown Provence would be a bit dull, and the red a bit hard to wear in that kind of top. (Do not attempt to probe too deeply into my logic on this one, as it may not stand up all that well.) So anyway, I'm currently without project! Any suggestions? Should I reinstate my beginning-to-curl-around-the-edges intention of making the Surplice Bodice Camisole? Plow ahead with the Drawstring Chemise, studiously ignoring any gauge issues? Or acknowledge the fact that it's snowed three days in a row and knitting summer tops in cotton might not be the brightest idea I've ever had?

2008-03-11T21:26:00.005Z

Spring Knitty is finally up (not that I've been obsessively checking or anything), and I challenge anyone to resist the general scrummyness that is Yosemite:
The best bit? It's 100% cotton! Which surely means that it's meant to be, given the vast quantities of Classic Elite Provence I have lying around. Of course, I had sort of already assigned most of it to other projects, but where would the fun in life be if you couldn't renege on your own decisions on a whim?

I probably won't have the internet for the next couple of weeks due to flat-juggling (though I might sneak in an internet cafe update or two, depending on how severe my withdrawal symptoms get), which will hopefully allow plenty of time for my capricious mind to commit itself to something before next time. Bis nachher!

I knew there was a flaw in this democracy business

2008-03-10T20:29:00.018Z

Skimming through my inbox this afternoon, I was somewhat surprised to find an email which started, "You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to facilitate the issuing of Biometric Visas in Mogilev in order to avoid the prohibative cost to charities of transporting children to Minsk". Now, normally I don't consider a day complete without signing a petition asking the Prime Minister to facilitate the issuing of biometric visas somewhere or other, but, you know, I've been busy, and I didn't immediately twig what it was going on about. Once I'd worked it out (and established a few pesky geographical details, like where Mogilev actually was), I thought I'd have an idle browse through other petitions to the Prime Minister's Office, which I heartily recommend if you've got a spare half hour and no vested interest in whether the British electorate is fit to vote. Just to give you a flavour of the pressing matters Gordon Brown is forced to deal with (and bear in mind that these all had to get at least 200 signatories to make it through):

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to:

"impose a maximum weight limit for women wearing stiletto heels"

"establish hedges on central reservations of motorways and dual carriageways"

"legalise gay incest"

"legalise otter clubbing"

"alter the earth’s orbit to compensate for global warming"

"do something about bonsai kittens"

"make cheese available free of charge"

"create a subsidy to make cheese cheaper" (obviously a key topical issue, this)

"ban gorgonzola" (not to mention a contentious one)

"slaughter every single badger within Great Britain and Northern Ireland, British Overseas Territories, and any Marine Badgers at large within UK territorial waters. Also, to not rule out strategic military strikes against rogue badger elements harboured by other states. (The curious may ask themselves exactly how a badger gives TB to a cow. The truth is unrepeatable on a governement website, but let me assure you the process is as perverse as it is cruel.)"

"force the Daily Express to admit that Diana, Princess of Wales, is dead"

"remove the green sweets from Starburst and to reinstate the Opal Fruits brand name"

"give free houses (near a beach) to people called Mike"

"seriously consider not allowing children, unless they have been suitably sedated, to travel on aeroplanes"

"invade France, and thus provide us with a war we can all get behind"

and, of course

"stop wasting tax money employing people to review online petition requests"

What I particularly like is the fact that the Prime Minister's Office has to give a reason for rejecting any given petition. Thus the official response to a request to "force terestrial television newsreaders to wear underpants on their heads" was, "it was outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government", whilst a plea to "ban pretty average European scramz from dragging down the quality of global screamo" was turned down because, "it contained wording that is impossible to understand". And just in case further proof were needed that the good ol' British nation is doomed, the third most popular petition on the entire site - with a whopping 46908 signatures - is a motion to make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister. Not meaning to jump to conclusions or anything, but somehow I doubt he'd have much to say about the issuing of biometric visas in Mogilev...

2008-03-10T10:55:00.006Z

Progress! It's not much to look at, but this is how far along I am with the Aleita Shell (henceforth to be referred to as the Unpronounceable Shell):
You can't tell from the picture (this seems to be a bit of a recurring theme with my photography), but I've added a row of eyelets at the top, just before dividing for the front, so that when it's finished I'll be able to weave through an underbust ribbon. Work's ground to a halt for now though, as I need to buy a smaller crochet hook for the next step. In the meantime I'm toying with the idea of casting on a modified version of this; modified because I have the shoulders of a quarterback and spaghetti straps make me look like an unconvincing drag queen.

And on that pleasant image I'm off to forage for food. Pip pip!

Finished objects come to those who wait a really, really long time

2008-03-07T09:11:00.016Z

In a vaguely improbable turn of events, I finally finished Mike's Christmas jumper! As I have yet to get a semi-decent picture of it (for which I choose to blame basement flats rather than my own questionable camera skills), you'll have to make do with this for now. (I rather like that "for now"; it misleadingly implies that at some point I might actually get round to taking another one):

Anyone making haircut-related comments will be asked to leave the room

There are lots of things I'm disproportionately proud of, most of which you can't really see in the photos: the rolled hems, raglan seams and neckline ribbing, the stitches for which took an ice-age to pick up evenly because I sort of forgot that the front had many more stitches than the back. The only thing I'm a bit dubious about is how loose the blocked fabric is - can you see the white shirt glowing fetchingly through the jumper?

As for the boring technical-ly bit:

Pattern: Jesse's Flames from Stitch 'n Bitch Nation, size medium

Yarn: 12 balls of Lana Grossa Cool Wool Big (I have my suspicion that a work experience kid with English as a second language comes up with these names) in petrol

Needles: Lang 4.5mm circulars, 80cm long. Have I waxed annoyingly lyrical about these yet? They're by far and away the best circulars I've ever used: the cord's super flexible and the points (which are made of brass) are incredibly light and smooth. Plus they're all metallic-coloured and high-tech looking, which, um, I'm sure aids the knitting process somehow. Lang needles are actually made by Addi, so I suppose they are in fact Addi Turbos in European disguise.

Mods: knit the lower body in 4 x 3 rib in the round; omitted the flames; replaced the contrast colour around the top of the ribbing with a garter stitch band; worked turned hems along the bottom and the cuffs.

If you haven't used up all your incredulity for the day, I actually have something new on the needles! Well, when I say "on the needles" I mean "about to be pulled straight back off the needles in a fit of frustration", because apparently I can't reliably count above about 30. The slightly uncooperative project in question is the Aleita Shell from the Spring 2008 issue of Interweave Knits, which arrived while I was back. Also in the post (because Amazon really shouldn't store your card details so conveniently) were The Knitter's Book of Yarn (some interesting stuff, but not worthy of the hyperbole dished out over at Amazon.com), a couple of cookbooks and, um, Jane Asher's Cakes for Fun. This one was a total mistake, I swear! But you never know when you might need to whip up a cactus cake or an edible pot plant at a moment's notice.

You mean posts are meant to have a point to them?

2008-02-15T21:21:00.017Z

Look what I saw on my way home today - an Ampelmann car!The Ampelmann, in case you haven't come across him, was the traffic light man of the GDR and is today a cult icon and general pinup for Ostalgie. There are entire shops (well, OK, only a couple, but he's got concessions in department stores too!) given over to selling everything from Ampelmann ice cube trays to stem vases, gummi sweets and flip flops. You can even, should you so wish (and who wouldn't?), buy an Ampelmann flag for your tricycle. (This sort of reminds me of a comedian I once saw going through the merchandise sold by the German political parties. You can get CSU bikinis! Do you think Angela Merkel wears them on holiday?)

Slightly more conventionally, you can still find the Ampelmann on traffic lights in East Berlin, and he's begun making inroads into the West too. As you can see, the staid West German guy just can't compete with the jaunty slant of the Ampelmännchen's hat.

And if you patiently stuck with this in the forlorn hope that there might be knitting news burried somewhere at the end - um, sorry! But tomorrow's the start of a two-and-a-bit week holiday, and I'm determined to have something to show for it by time time I get back...

In which I try to brazen out the fact that I haven't so much as touched a knitting needle in three weeks

2008-02-11T16:22:00.001Z

Back in the good old days when Mike and I actually lived in the same country (it's the little things that make all the difference to a relationship, don't you think?) we used to take it in turns to cook each other three course meals. Admittedly we had slightly different approaches (I believe in things like recipes and scales; he believes in things like Google and the remoter reaches of his imagination), but there's nothing quite like dispatching your other half to the sitting room with a glass of wine and orders to stay put while you set about dirtying every utensil you own, pausing only to call out things like "erm, you like carbon, right?".

Anyway, with a two-week trip to visit him just a few days away I've been ~~obsessively~~ diligently ploughing through recipes trying to put together the perfect menu, which has been a bit more of a challenge than usual because we'll only have a two-ring hob (electric at that - can you hear the violins?). No oven, no grill, and no separate eating area conveniently out of sight of the culinary devastation I generally leave in my wake. I think, though, that I might have managed it! Stay tuned to see if this confidence is justified, or, if you're anywhere near as impatient as me, snaffle a sneak preview.

Interweave Knits Spring has sprung!

2008-01-23T21:32:00.002Z

And it looks great! Of course, being a lowly European subscriber my issue presumably won't bowl up until sometime mid-September, but at the rate I'm going I won't be ready for a new project till then anyway. (The Surplice Bodice Camisole is on hold while I wait for the ministering angels at Ravelry to rescue me from the depths of tension despair.) In an unsubtle attempt to distract you from my lack of progress I present my find of the day:

Is it wrong to want children purely as cupcake-making justification?

Who ya gonna call? Stashbusters!

2008-01-21T09:18:00.001Z

The swatch for the Surplice Bodice Camisole is drying (by which I just mean that I've hung it up to dry - I highly doubt that it actually is drying, given the dismal damp), and I'm now twiddling my thumbs for want of a craftier use to put them to. Did I mention that I'm meant to be working on grammar exercises? So what better procrastination than a spot of mental stash-busting!

When I first started knitting I was sure I'd never accumulate a stash. Don't laugh! My logic was flawless: you buy yarn for a project, you use it for said project; you have, at most, a few odds and ends left over. But somehow things didn't quite pan out like that (yes, yes, hide your astonishment). Irresistible sales, abandoned projects and the odd gift or two have meant that, while I by no means have the kind of mammoth, threatening-to-engulf-entire-loft-extensions yarn collection that most of blog-land seems to, I've got enough to make me think twice about buying more. Most in-need-of-using-up are ten balls of Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk DK; seven skeins (or maybe hanks; is there a difference?) of Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk and three of Classic Elite Prov ence. I'm a bit stumped, to be honest: they all knit up to about 22 st/4", and for some reason very few of my patterns call for that sort of tension. I'm toying with a couple of ideas:

Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan from Fitted Knits

Laced-Front Sweater from Knitting Lingerie Style

...but nothing's really clamouring "knit meeeee!" I may have to put my designing cap on (does anyone else hear that ominous music in the background?).

The real trouble with mental stashbusting is that you come up against so many things you'd like to knit but don't have the right yarn for. Yet. Because as we all know, the simplest solution to not having the right yarn is to buy some! The reason I have a stash problem in the first place may be becoming clearer...

It's raining, it's pouring!

2008-01-19T17:51:00.002Z

I don't normally consider rain particularly blog-worthy, what with being British and all, but in the four months I've been in Berlin I've only needed my umbrella once (admittedly this may say more about how often I leave the flat than about the weather), so I think this counts as headline-grabbing stuff.

In knittier news, I've decided to place Mike's jumper in the hands of the blocking fates. I don't much fancy having eleven balls worth of wet wool sitting around in my room, though (our flat's experiencing a bit of a damp problem; add a sodden jumper into the mix and the atmosphere might no longer support human life), so I'm waiting until the imminent arrival of a dehumidifier before attempting it. In the meanwhile, I've started swatching for my next project - je vous présente the Surplice Bodice Camisole from Knitting Lingerie Style!
Isn't it sweet? I chose this example (courtesy of a Raveler named Vilma) because it's more or less the exact colour of the yarn I'm using; the chocolate brown Classic Elite Provence I showed a couple of posts ago. I don't think I've ever knit with pure cotton before, and I've been finding it a bit tiring on the hands. Plus I'm not entirely sure how much tighter you're meant to knit cotton than other fibres; the latest section of my swatch bears a startling resemblance to cardboard.

On a completely unrelated note, marvel at the cuteness of my aubergines!
Alright, that's actually a stock photo; I was too lazy to take a picture of mine. But they look exactly like that! In fact, the Chinese supermarket I got them from appears to have an entire refrigerator unit dedicated to unfamiliar aubergine varieties of varying cuteness, the most intriguing of which are these. I thought they were peppercorns until I read the label. Being a sucker for all things miniature (remind me not to go to Japan; my credit rating would never recover) I stocked up on a selection of baby vegetables, and now feel like a giant every time I open the fridge.

What's wrong with this picture?

2008-01-17T11:14:00.002Z

(Apart from the fact that I'm wearing pyjama bottoms at 11am on a Thursday.) Any guesses? How about if I told you that that's Mike's Secret Jumper I'm wearing? OK, the ribbed section's a bit big on me (I do have a waist somewhere in there, honest), and it does stretch out to more Mike-like proportions, but the top part fits me perfectly! If anything it's a bit snug around the armholes. Now, I have great faith in the miracle that is blocking (and am clinging desperately to the fact that my swatch grew when washed), but be honest with me - is there any chance that a me-sized sweater is going to blossom into a Mike-sized one? Should I keep the faith and plough on, or admit defeat and rip back? (Not that this should influence your decision, but in a fit of over complacency I may have already woven the ends in...)

Good job "better time management" wasn't one of my resolutions

2008-01-11T16:43:00.001Z

Oops, that was a slightly looser interpretation of "another day or two" than I'd intended. Still, without further ado I present the last, ooh, month or so of my life, condensed into handy paragraph-sized format:

First up, I finished my work placement at the Bundestag, and did so without leaving any sort of political mess in my wake! Then it was moreorless (whoops, I keeps forgetting that's not a word) straight off to Vienna for a quick pre-Christmas break. (Average daytime temperature during our trip: -1°C. Percentage of waking hours spent in coffeehouses huddled over assorted steaming beverages: 90. Sightseeing? What sightseeing?) Beautiful city, supremely tacky Christmas markets, scrumptious coffee (apricot liqueur, where have you been all my life?), unpleasantly smoky restaurants, great hotel, curious preponderance of sushi bars. Oh, and Sachertorte is the most overrated thing since, erm...sliced bread. Next, back to Britain! Highlights included the North London derby and the revival of Nicholas Nickleby at the Gielgud; lowlights included the annual ordeal that is Family Christmas (a misleading name, suggesting as it does that a) it takes place at Christmas and b) is a convivial affair. Instead, Family Christmas is a strictly segregated post-festivities hangover, with the "children" [aged 19 to 32] relegated to the kitchen, allowed to integrate with the "adults" only when saying hellos and goodbyes. I have a feeling that one day I'm going to need extremely expensive psychoanalysis for this). But I digress! Christmas itself was lovely. And I have knitting-related bounty!
Meet Elefante, who I found peering out of my stocking on Christmas morning (yes, I still get a stocking. What can I say; I don't keep my inner 6 year-old on a very tight rein). My mother was up till 3am on Christmas Day finishing him (well, I had to get my time management skills from somewhere...), and thinks I'm decidedly peculiar for being so smitten with him.

Yes, I only know how to do one thing in Photoshop

Next up, wool! Well, cotton, technically (Egyptian, no less!), which my mother picked up for me in New York. I see a couple of pretty summer tops in my future...Possibly from this gorgeous book, which was my grandmother's present to me. (My grandma is about to turn 91, and has no idea that she's given me a book with the word "lingerie" in the title. I reciprocated by giving her a DVD player which neither of us has the least idea how to use.) Or possibly from Interweave Knits, because yup, I am now the proud holder of a subscription! A pretty good haul for one year, oder?

Back in the present I'm in Berlin again, dividing my time judiciously between Ravelry and Frasier reruns while waiting for my language course to start. Hopefully I'll have some knitting progress to show at the weekend, when I have a more man-sized model at my disposal.

Happy ever-so-slightly-belated New Year!

2008-01-06T10:02:00.000Z

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas (nope, I'm not going to start listing myriad religious and ethnic alternatives - hands up anyone reading this who actually celebrates Kwanzaa?*) and that no-one's fallen off the resolution bandwagon yet! (Having said that, my New Year's resolution is remaining firmly under wraps, the better to avoid public humiliation when I inevitably fail miserably to stick to it.)

The pictures above give some indication of what I've been up to over the past couple of weeks, but, lazy so-and-so that I am, it might be another day or two before the accompanying words materialise. Till then!

* (Digging myself out of my politically incorrect hole) not that I have anything against Kwanzaa, but I'm damned if I'm going to start saying "happy winter holidays" any time soon just to cover all the bases. Though that does remind me of a story I had as a child about a family of Jewish badgers whose daughter... hmm, on second thoughts maybe that's one for another day .

2007-12-11T21:55:00.001Z

Just a quick post to share my sneaking suspicion that the Secret Jumper may be ever so slightly behind schedule. My boss's response to being told it was meant to be finished by Friday was, "oh...Is it for a baby?" Ah, if only! (Erm, if only the recipient were child-sized, I mean. Not if only I had a baby to knit for. Just clarifying.) Unfortunately all sorts of strangely pointless activities seem to be vying to eat into my remaining available knitting time - this evening I was frogmarched along to an exhibition opening (can you technically call ten pictures an exhibition?); tomorrow I'm getting up at the crack of dawn to go to a pre-work English lesson with a group of MPs (well you never know, I might learn something...I did catch myself putting a verb at the end of an English sentence the other day); and on Thursday my flatmate has decided that we need to go and look at dinosaur skeletons in a museum round the corner. Normally I'm all in favour of dinosaur skeletons, but inbetween making and decorating a fruitcake; panicking about not having thought of, let alone bought, a single solitary Christmas present; and knitting oodles and oodles of ribbing, admiring dinosaur skeletons has slipped down my "must do" list a bit.

Guess who's been good this year?

2007-12-09T21:00:00.001Z

Happy (belated) Nikolaus! (Note to self: next year polish shoes)

I've been a bit frazzled this week; time seems to be slipping away at an alarming rate. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not really cut out for the whole work-full-time-while-maintaining-semblance-of-a-life thing - sometimes I remind myself of the Nick Hornby character who muses, "life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts".

But I'm guessing you really don't want to know about my new-and-improved speed-hair-washing technique, so instead I present my progress on the Secret Jumper: a sleeve!Well, two sleeves actually, but I'm sure your imaginations are up to picturing the other one. Apologies for the terrible lighting - as far as I can make out my entire room is illuminated by a single 2 watt bulb. (And the edges aren't really wonky, honest; they're just curling under a bit.) Progress has ground to a halt, though, as I've realised I don't know Mike's chest size. (Have I just lost all credibility as a girlfriend? I do know his collar size, his inside leg measurement, even the circumference of his head [62cm, just in case anyone ever wants to make him a hat or buy him a motorcycle helmet], but for some reason my knowledge of his chest measurement has never gone beyond the 'M's and 'L's on the tags of his t-shirts.) After extensive poking around on men's clothing sites I've come to the hesitant conclusion that it's probably about 40", but when miles of ribbing are involved I don't much like words like "probably", so I've cunningly enlisted one of his sisters to do some snooping for me. In the meantime there's not a lot I can do on the knitting front, other than marvel at the luminescent scrumptiousness of the wool:

Proof that I do indeed swatch! I even washed this one; how domestic goddess-y is that?

What's the German for "lay another finger on me and you'll really wish you hadn't had that croissant for breakfast"?

2007-11-30T08:11:00.001Z

Hail! (Or maybe that should be Wassail, seeing as we're just a few hours away from Advent. Except I'm not entirely sure what Wassail means.) Apologies for the silence - it's mostly been due to not having the internet in the flat ("down for five days" my foot...), and partly simply because I don't have anything particularly cheery to report. Adam's hat (tragic victim of last post's over-zealous scissoring) finally made it back onto the needles, but (and I feel like the world's biggest idiot confessing this) history sort of, um, repeated itself. I have no adequate explanation to offer for this. However! I did manage to salvage a good 5" of Hat #2 (henceforth to be referred to as The Hat of Recurring Doom, for obvious reasons), so all is not lost.

On a less buoyant note, I've had the dubious pleasure of my first brush (ahh, the bad puns just keep on coming) with sexual harrassment (remember the slimy journalist? He's back, and slimier than ever before! Note to all would-be slimy journalists: you pretty much need my written permission for your hand to stray below my shoulders. Or, indeed, above my shoulders. And while I may be the Queen of Gullibility [hey, we're talking about someone who believed that treacle was mined in Russia... ] , even my internal alarm bells start ringing at the eleventieth "accidental" brushing). Luckily my boss, despite unfortunately being away, is an undercover knight in shining armour, and has promised to slay the slimy journalist with, erm, his superior grasp of German. Or something.

Ohh, and there's one good thing I almost forgot - the wool for the secret jumper! I picked it up on Monday (well, half of it on Monday and half yesterday, when I realised that I'd initially ordered enough to clad an anorexic Barbie doll rather than a burly male), and I've fallen head over heels in love with it. (Pictures to follow, so you can share in the adulation. They'll have to wait till my home internet access revives itself, though; I'm not sure what the protocoll on uploading knitting photos to government computers is. For now the best I can offer is this, swiped from an unsuspecting Raveller.) The plan is to make Mike a variation on Jesse's Flames for Christmas - he's been angling for a handknit jumper ever since I presented him with a rather wonky hat one Valentine's Day. (The hat was relegated to a tea cosy suspciously quickly, and has since dropped out of sight altogether. This may not bode particularly well for the jumper.)

P.S. I think I may actually love my boss. He's now enlisted the secretaries to form a protective barrier between me and the slimy journalist. Who do you think would win in a fight: three women armed with staplers and pot plants or a medium-sized man wielding camera equipment?

Knit 1, accidentally annihilate 1

2007-11-22T09:46:00.002Z

Normally I consider moderation to be overrated (excess just has a better ring to it, somehow), but when it comes to my Christmas knitting I have to concede that my list may have been a teeny bit overambitious. So it's been subject to a merciless cull, which only two hats and a jumper have survived (but shhhh! The jumper's a secret; more on that later). I cast on for the first hat the other night, and knit for an inch or so before finally admitting to myself that my stitches had been twisted when I joined, and I was now knitting a geometrically interesting but unfortunately unwearable object. Second time round (terrible pun unintended) everything went much better. So well, in fact, that three hours or so in it was finished. It even fit! (No mean feat, as my family all have excessively large heads, the better, I presume, to accommodate our equally large egos.) It looked ridiculous, obviously, as I'm unable to wear a hat without looking like a clown/mugger, but it's intended for my brother who can carry these things off with a bit more panache. Anyhow, the hat was pretty much perfect. The only niggle was that I didn't really like the way my cable cast-on looked with the ribbing. "No problem!" thought I. "I'll simply undo the cast-on edge and bind off in the rib pattern! What could be simpler?"

Oh dear.

I don't know if you've ever tried unpicking a cable cast-on, but let me tell you, it takes forever. Two dire German soap operas and half an episode of Super Nanny, to be precise. And once I'd finally reached the last stitch, the wool got sort of...stuck. I tugged and it didn't budge. Never having been one to recognise a doomed strategy, I tugged harder. Nothing. Frustrated, I cut the wool and pulled at the new end. Still nothing. I made a second cut. And a third. And...well, to cut (oops, there goes another accidental pun) a long story short, I, erm, somehow ended up hacking the entire hat to pieces with a pair of scissors. It is now an ex-hat.

Still, all is not doom and gloom. As I was knitting (from this pattern, not that you really need one), I couldn't help thinking that an asymetrical rib might be a bit more interesting, and make the resulting hat look slightly less like something that had escaped from Grange Hill (an inherrent risk in anything knit in grey). So I suppose now I have the opportunity to try that out - as soon as I figure out a damned ribbed cast-on, that is. The other positive thing is that I've been given permission to knit at work! Hurrah! (As you may deduce from that, assignments are a bit thin on the ground at present.) Oh, and I should be able to collect my wool for the Secret Jumper tomorrow, so hopefully more on that next time...

Vorsprung durch Koffein

2007-11-17T19:57:00.001Z

Hallöchen! Neglecting the blog wasn't some sort of cunning anticipation-building strategy (tempting though it is to try and pass it off as such), but rather a side-effect of the work placement I started last Monday, which has turned things like "free time" and "sleep" into fond but distant memories. I'm working at the Bundestag, in the office of a politician called Manfred Grund (nope, no one here's heard of him either), and - to cover up my complete lack of knitting news - I thought I'd give you a glimpse or two behind the scenes at the Bundesregierung. This will double up as a handy cure for insomnia for anyone who happens to be in need of one.

Firstly - I have my own office! The most work space I've ever staked a claim to before is half of a double desk at primary school, so this is a rather exciting development. The office is in Jakob Kaiser Haus, opposite the Reichstag on the map above, and if I tell you that this is an entirely typical picture of the interior you may understand why I get lost every time I venture more than a couple of metres in any direction. What's more, the government buildings in the immediate area are linked together in all sorts of baffling ways (every now and then you find yourself following painted arrows through an underground car park), and I have a curious habit of ending up in the right building but on the wrong side of the street. There are some welcome distractions among the labyrinthine corridors, though - the riverside canteen's lovely (though I'm not sure 'canteen' is an appropriate word for somewhere where you can choose from a dozen flavoured oils and vinegars to drizzle over your roast pepper salad [or, in my case, over your skirt] ), and the library's very soothing. My enjoyment of both has unfortunately been slightly hampered by the constant company of an over-friendly journalist (he calls me by my first name, which is pretty much second wedding anniversary territory for most Germans. Though it might be a bit less galling if he could actually pronounce it correctly. He also looks exactly like Ricky Gervais, or at least like Ricky Gervais would look if he wore a waistcoat.)

But I digress! The most exciting thing about this placement is really the little bit of laminated plastic I have to wear around my neck, which grants me access to all sorts of places I really shouldn't be allowed. Like, say, the Plenarsaal, which is essentially the German equivalent of the House of Commons. Although it's not clear from the picture, the blue seats are all in fact swivel chairs, and throughout one another's impassioned speeches the politicians rock back and forth, spin themselves around, wander off to talk to people on the other side of the room and even just amble out entirely when they feel like it. The one innocuously formal touch is the butlers in frock coats who bring round glasses of water. (Well, glasses of clear liquid; I've been giving them the benefit of the doubt.) Interestingly, whenever a vote is taken a fire alarm goes off throughout the entire government complex. No one else seems to consider this odd.

Over the course of the week I've also somehow ended up at a press conference (which, due to my mistranslation of the key word, went completely over my head, but hey, there was free champagne), and a Central Asian ambassadorial-type meeting (more free champagne! As well as cakes, biscuits and chocolates. Diplomats seem to be sweet-toothed), complete with half-hearted simultaneous interpretation and the distribution of "traditional" gifts from Kazakhstan (I bet they picked them up at the airport. One of them was a camel cuddly toy). This all makes a typical day sound much more glamorous than it really is - yes, there are exhilarating parts, but most of my time is spent staring in panic at letters from constituents and wondering what the hell 'Lastenausgleich' means. Still, I suppose placements are always useful to help narrow down what you're looking for in a job, and this one has confirmed what I always secretly suspected: that I like to swish through doors in a suit and heels, clutching reams of important-looking paperwork and frowning intelligently (can you frown intelligently? I'd give it my best shot) when people speak. Unfortunately my physical coordination isn't up to at least two of these.

If I can smuggle my camera past the security team, a proper picture or two might be forthcoming. For now, though, I leave you with this gripping dispatch from Mr Grund! If that doesn't knock your insomnia on the head once and for all, fear not; there are another thirteen in the series...

2007-11-10T13:57:00.001Z

It's snowing! (According to me, at least. According to Mike it's sleeting. I much prefer my version of events.) The finished Textured Tunic was going to have its photo shoot this afternoon, but I may need to rethink that a bit. To be updated...

Edit: Hurrah! It is now definitely, unequivecoally, Mike-satisfyingly snowing! The Textured Tunic was forced to retreat indoors, where dodgy lighting and puzzled passers-by were the order of the day. You can't tell an awful lot about it from this picture, beyond the fact that it does indeed exist, but as my semi-resident photographer appears to be asleep it's the best I can do for now:

When not standing in front of mildewed walls, I like to hang out with cardboard cutouts

I'm ridiculously proud of myself - it fits perfectly, is wonderfully soft and cosy, and was a doddle to make. (Though I hadn't got round to sewing on the button when this was taken - no prizes for guessing what the shoulder's held together with in the photo.) My only complaint is that the pattern called for eight balls of wool, so as I was planning to lengthen the sleeves I bought nine, but still have three left. Harumph - 12 €, wasted! Maybe I could make a matching top for an exceedingly small child.

Pattern: Textured Tunic from Stefanie Japel's Fitted Knits. The pattern seems to run a little large - I knit the 34 1/2" size at a slightly tighter tension than stated to get a good fit.

Yarn: 6 balls (bah! etc) of Lana Grossa Royal Tweed in colour 005

Needles: 6mm and 6.5mm 29" circulars (I'm never quite sure why people include this bit in their FO summaries - what are the odds that anyone's remotely interested in my needles? It might up the chances a bit if I told you that said needles are rather fetching shades of green and blue.)

Notes and modifications: Hmm, where to start? I'll take the "notes" bit first, and say that the photo of the finished top has been flipped in the book - the shoulder slit actually ends up on the right hand side (this confused me for a while; I was convinced that I'd somehow managed to knit the whole thing inside out). Also, unless I'm even more unobservant than previously suspected, there isn't a buttonhole for the shoulder button, so I just overlapped the front and back 'corners' and sewed them together while attaching the button.

As for mods:

a) I made the box stitch panel an inch shorter than directed, so that I could get started on the...

b)...waist shaping without wreaking havoc on the stitch pattern. (I don't mess with stitch patterns. Bad things happen.)

c) I left setting up the side slits until I was 13" in (as opposed to 10") - they were going to be above waist level otherwise (though I have a feeling this might be me rather than the pattern). Anyway, because I started them so late, and the sweater already seemed rather long, I decided not to go down the full long-side-slits-with-buttons route, and made mini-slits instead. I'm actually a bit mournful about this; I might need to make another one just to get those buttons...

d) The biggest change I made, though, was to the sleeves. I'd seen one Raveler complain that, as written, they "might as well be tourniquets", but I decided to ignore her words of wisdom on the grounds that my upper arms are pretty diminutive anyway (the last time I saw my sister, her friendly greeting of choice was "hey, your arms are looking slightly less skeletal than usual! Can you still do that freaky thing with sellotape? Erm, anyway, moving on...) A couple of ripping backs later and I can confirm that the pattern does indeed produce tourniquets! I abandoned the instructions and just invented my own sleeves, working the box stitch section even (and an inch or so shorter, so that it would line up with my shortened body panel), decreasing to the elbow and then increasing to the wrist for flared full length sleeves.

Did I mention that I'm feeling sort of proud of myself?

Fame at last!

2007-11-08T22:21:00.000Z

Who'd have thunk - there's a knitting pattern with my name on it! And it's rather sweet if I do say so myself. Actually, if you can get past the horribly dated styling on her website, lots of the designers' patterns are worth a look, but then maybe that's not surprising considering she's the author of this scrumptious-looking book.

Hmm. Does a post need to be longer than three sentences to justify its own existence?

Monday miscellany

2007-11-05T17:11:00.002Z

1) a simple seed stitch (I know that's an Americanism, but doesn't it sound so much more appealing than moss stitch?) scarf, modelled by the ever-dignified Bangers. Not to be outdone, Bangers' long-term companion, Mash, is dropping hints for a balaclava with ear holes; I'll keep you posted on that one...

2) my Ravelry invitation came! (I'm 'Boffcat', originally enough.) I've already managed to ~~squander~~ spend a ~~deeply alarming~~ perfectly healthy amount of rummaging around on it, though rather than finding ideas to use up the yarn I already have I seem to have accidentally compiled a list of entirely unrelated projects requiring equally unrelated yarn. I'm sure it's just a teething problem. My one slight grievance with Ravelry is that you need a Flickr account to add photos to your projects, and this in turn requires you to set up a Yahoo ID. I can only assume that every subatomic particle in the known universe already has its own Yahoo ID, because it took me at least twenty minutes to find a name that wasn't taken. (When I tried the ever reliable "Boffcat", the best it could offer me was "Boffcat73". Is it honestly trying to tell me that there are already over seventy Boffcats availing themselves of Yahoo's services? Maybe we should have a reunion.)

3) the Textured Tunic is knitting up so suspiciously quickly that I've almost certainly overlooked some crucial step (like, say, making armholes). I was going to post a progress picture, but my camera is under the impression that it was left on all night and is therefore completely out of battery. (I dispute this, but it doesn't seem to make much difference.)

4) contain your excitement if you can, but I've just done a load of laundry! I realise this doesn't sound especially (or, indeed, remotely) newsworthy, but, as I don't have a washing machine in my flat, washing clothes necessitates knocking timidly on the landlord's door and asking if I can use his. It's amazing how much longer than you think you can go without...

5) and finally, 'tis the season for Christmas knitting! Curiously, my list seems to be comprised moreorless exclusively of hats this year. (More curiously still, apparently 'moreorless' isn't a word, which is a bit unfortunate given the frequency with which I use it.) One of my brothers specifically requested a beanie, but unfortunately I can't remember which brother, so I'm hedging my bets by making them for both. I was thinking of Knitty's Tychus for Rick, and something a bit more classic for Adam; possibly Harris from Noro Knits (though if he ever found out that the original was modeled on a girl, its desirability might suffer a fatal blow). I was planning to make a hat as a surprise for Mike, too, but he rather scuppered the surprise element by directly asking for one. Ohh, and last but not least, a beret and scarf set for my sister. It's proving a bit trickier to find the right pattern for that, though: I like the crisp texture of this moss stitch beret, but I'm not convinced by the i-cord crest (which, to my uneducated eye, looks more like the model has an apple stalk coming out of his head), and a matching scarf might be a bit on the dull side. The construction of SockPixie's 'La Parisenne' looks fairly Heather-proof, and the chevrons would be a bit more scarf-friendly, but I'm not sure my sister's really looking for a " kaleidoscopic effect" in her headwear, or indeed her neckwear (also, just as an aside, shouldn't it be Parisienne?). And soft, squishy and generally tempting though this beret looks, I'm guessing it requires a slightly more intimate knowledge of cable needles than having eyed them dubiously in John Lewis once or twice. Decisions, decisions...

Edit: I can't believe I forgot that it's Guy Fawkes Night today! Usually it's one of my favourite nights of the year, but alas, the Germans don't seem to have got the hang of it for some reason...Oh well, hope everyone else is marking the occasion more satisfactorily!

The secret lives of stitch markers

2007-11-02T12:48:00.001Z

I know it looks like a Medieval hat, but it is in fact the beginning of my Textured Tunic from Fitted Knits. I'm just about to separate the sleeves from the body and start the box stitch section (for the third time - my inability to count to two is proving a bit of an obstacle). And nope, my tension's not spot on, but this is sort of intentional - the recommended 13 stitches per 4" makes for an overly loose and holey fabric, plus I've come across some people complaining that their tunics came out too large. (My general stinginess and reluctance to buy larger needles may also have something to do with it, but moving swiftly on...) I like the way the Lana Grossa Royal Tweed's knitting up - it's lovely and soft, and light and airy rather than heavy and bulky. (Incidentally, just in case anyone wanted another opportunity to marvel at my general dimwittedness, I always assumed that 'Lana Grossa' was a designer's name. Call myself a linguist...)

As for the title - gaah! Stitch markers are fast becoming the bane of my existence! They may look innocuous enough, but I am convinced that they are pure malice in plastic form, existing solely to derail my knitting as much as is within their power. Mine look rather like those round paperclips that were popular for a while in the 90s, and I can't help but feel that this is a bit of a design flaw, as it means they slip on and off my needle cord at whim. Spacial awareness Wunderkind that I am, I then invariably replace them in the wrong place, and my raglan seams end up meandering all over the place. My doomed Somewhat Cowl was similarly afflicted - do all stitch markers have it in for me, or should I do battle with my inner miser and fork out for some more sensibly conceived ones?

In non-knitting news, I have a flat! I'd show you pictures, but, well, I don't have any, and I imagine the current tenant might object to me traipsing into her room with camera in hand. (For some reason people generally do seem to object when I do that sort of thing.) But it, and my new flatmates, Lisa and Mischa, might make the odd appearance come December. Also - just to backtrack to knitting for a minute - thanks largely to the lovely people at Craftster I've thawed towards the purple cardigan a bit, and a full reprieve may be imminent. If nothing else it's incredibly cosy, and is putting in a sterling performance as an ersatz dressing gown.

Ta-daaa!

2007-10-30T18:07:00.002Z

The purple cardigan made its debut! As you've no doubt deduced from the photo above, I : a) really ought to wear a slightly less revealing top with it, and b) should possibly learn how to use an iron. Luckily the second picture cunningly disguises my lack of iron expertise with a strategically placed coat:

I have no idea why I chose a mildewed wall as a backdrop. Nor why one side of my hair appears to be several inches longer than the other.

For some reason I didn't think to take any photos of the back, but rest assured that it looks exactly like you'd expect it to.

So, the boring technical bit:

Pattern: the work of my feverish imagination, loosely based on a picture of this. It's worked in a single piece from the bottom up, with the sleeves knit in the round and joined to the body at the yoke.
Yarn: 5 balls (and such a tiny bit of the 6th that I don't think it counts) of Rowan Pure Wool Aran in colour 682, "Amethyst".
Needles: 5 mm (US 8) and 5.75 mm (US 10) 29" circulars.

See that ribbon trailing redundantly across my chest? It was supposed to fasten the cardigan at the neck, just as in the Noro pictures. Unfortunately, though, I got so carried away working waist and bust shaping that the finished cardigan looked decidedly odd tied at the neck, not to mention the small problem of the ribbon constantly slipping and attempting to strangle me. In the photos the fronts are just held together with a safety pin, partly because I'm shameless like that, and partly because I genuinely believe that safety pins are the answers to almost all of life's clothing problems.

So, ribbon issues aside, is it a resounding success that I'll wear with pride? Erm...I don't think so. It's warm, colourful, and it even fits (all those years of maths finally paid off!), but it's just a bit too bulky and tricky to pair with other things. I'm pleased that I finished it, and that I learnt how to work magic loop and graft garter stitch (badly) along the way, but to be honest this poor thing probably has a very neglected future ahead of it.

P.S. For anyone who had a strange premonition that the cardboard torso blocking-technique wouldn't go entirely according to plan, I have to report that I didn't have enough cardboard to do my vision full justice. I still maintain it would work, though...

2007-10-25T15:04:00.001+01:00

The purple cardigan is finally finished, and just a blocking away from being launched on an unsuspecting world! (And a largely indifferent one, but hey, what can you do?) As for the blocking itself, I've somehow taken it into my head that the best thing to do would be to make a 2D cardboard replica of my torso and stretch the cardigan over that while it dries. This is either incredibly cunning or incredibly stupid. As the great Nigel Tufnel said, there's such a fine line...

Anyway, stay tuned for its inevitably anti-climatic unveiling!

How to make chocolate mousse

2007-10-24T14:00:00.002+01:00

Ingredients:

dark chocolate
sugar
suspiciously white eggs
completely untried recipe
overweening confidence

Directions:

1) invite guest round for chocolate mousse. If possible, choose someone you don't know very well, to increase the pressure on yourself.

2) eat all chocolate not required by the recipe. This step is very important, as it makes it impossible to have another go if your first attempt goes horribly wrong. (You could, of course, achieve the same effect by eating all the surplass eggs and sugar, but this might not be quite as palatable.)

3) make mousse following recipe. Be sure to utilise as many pans, bowls and utensils as possible to maximise kitchen-hit-by-bomb effect.

4) notice that resulting dessert bears no resemblance to mousse. Decide that solution is to whisk whole thing vigorously.

4) whisk. In doing so, turn two generous portions of mousse into approximately 50ml of chocolate sauce. Sample sauce. Find that it tastes good. Eat sauce.

5) realise that guest is due to arrive in two hours. E-mail boyfriend in panic.

6) no reply. Remember that boyfriend doesn't know how to make desserts anyway.

7) write pointless yet lengthy post on the subject in the vague hope that this will somehow solve the dessert crisis.

Sugar and Spice

2007-10-21T13:37:00.002+01:00

Proudly presenting my homemade sweet chilli dipping sauce! I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to get a semi-decent picture of it because you'd just feel embarrassed for me.

The emphasis is definitely on the "chilli" rather than the "sweet", which is just as well as I'm not really a fan of the syrupy stuff you get in supermarkets. Mine bears only a passing resemblance to the picture in the book (which looks suspiciously like the aforementioned syrupy stuff - maybe they took a few shortcuts as deadlines began to loom...), but it tastes scrumptious, and was a doddle to make, too. This is the fourth recipe I've tried from the Wagamama's books, and they've ranged from tasty to delicious - I think my stomach's going to enjoy this year! (Although, just to digress slightly, am I the only person who thought that rock salmon was a type of salmon? If you, too, were under this illusion - surprise! It is, in fact, dogfish, catfish or wolffish, rebranded by canny marketing types to make it sound more appetising. Surely this constitutes some sort of trade descriptions violation? I mean, I daresay that re-christening brussel sprouts "chocolate balls" would up their appeal a bit, but an awful lot of people would be left feeling slightly mislead. Just as me introducing myself as Giselle's younger sister might have a mystical effect on my perceived attractiveness, but would, alas, be entirely untrue.)

Anyhohow, I've got a bit of a culinary challenge looming - I have someone coming round for dinner on Wednesday who doesn't like spicy food or fish. This unfortunately rules out about nine tenths of the Wagamama's recipes, and my sad lack of a grill pan or a co-operative oven scuppers most of the rest. I was thinking of gyoza of some sort, but I'm not sure that the combination of me, time pressure and bubbling oil is a recipe for anything other than disaster...

Good things come in threes. Or possibly fours

2007-10-17T18:54:00.001+01:00

Good Thing Number One: the return of the sorely-neglected purple cardigan! The second sleeve's done, and I've joined both to the body (dunce that I am, I really couldn't visualise how that bit would work. In fact, I'm not entirely sure even now that it's done). It's actually finally starting to look like a cardigan, rather than an ungainly mass of wool with Lebensraum ambitions, and now that the end is in sight my enthusiasm's been upped accordingly. I even had it all stashed away (the cardigan, that is, not my enthusiasm) in a bag for some S-Bahn knitting, but that never quite got off the ground, because checking my postbox on the way out what
should I find but...
Good Thing Number Two! Or maybe that should be Numbers Two and Three, because in a fit of indecisiveness I ordered both of these at the weekend. They arrived just in time, as I can now jilt my stupendously ineffective oven (I'm pretty sure I could warm food more quickly by breathing on it) in favour of my wok. My earlier comment was slightly misleading, though - the books weren't actually in my postbox; I had one of those "while you were out..." cards instead. So, obedient instruction-follower that I am (must come from adhering to knitting patterns so diligently...), I trundled off to my nearest collection point, which, the card informed me, was at 71 Manteufelstrasse. What it neglected to inform me was that 71 Manteufelstrasse was in fact an off-license. Undaunted, I had a hopeful wander round, just in case a pile of parcels was lurking behind the East European beer section, but nope, it really was just an off-license. I headed despondently into the carpark, where I stumbled upon...

Never underestimate my ability to overlook large, bright yellow things

These things are amazing! They scan the barcode on your "while you were out" card, you sign the screen with your finger (oddly satisfying), and then one of the compartments in the grey cupboard-y bit slides open, revealing - ta daa! - your parcel. Why don't they have them everywhere? I mean, if you're going to put them in off-license car parks you may as well go the whole hog and have them outside, say, post offices. Just a thought. Anyway, the whole experience was sufficiently exciting to count as Good Thing Number Four, or at the very least Number Three and a Half.

As for the final Good Thing of the day - and this will appeal to an even narrower audience than the Amazing Yellow Parcel Retriever - I've found some really good value language courses at the TU! I won't be able to start till January, but I'm going to go along for a test next week so they can sort me into a group. Hopefully it'll be a bit more rigorous than the procedure at the Humboldt, where they accidentally put me in a class alongside German teachers. (I lasted precisely one and a half days. Perseverance is severely overrated.)

ETA: I've just realised that today marks the end of my first month in Berlin! So, as a mini-overview of my time here so far, I present:

number of places lived in: four

number of sights seen, museums visited, and tourist attractions generally patronised: none (unless the zoo counts? What a culture vulture I am)

number of new words learnt: erm, about five. I should probably try upping that rate a bit, I suppose...

number of times said "einmal Laugenbretzel, bitte": enormous, shame-inducing number

things I miss most about Britain: Sainsbury's; skimmed milk; my kitchen equipment; supermarkets which deign to open more than two tills at busy periods; wooden spoons (have you ever seen a German wooden spoon? They're weedy, half-formed, eminently snappable things! I've been cooking with salad servers); toast; Marks & Spencers lingerie department

things I miss least: the weather; public transport; the conspicuous lack of excitingly yellow parcel-retrieval machines

And just to prove that I have left the flat at least once: (click for a version you can see without the need for a magnifying glass)

The Berlin Aquarium (right and left), and on the steps of the Französischer Dom (centre)

In which our heroine finds a flaw in her plan

2007-10-12T10:31:00.001+01:00

Damnit, it's no good - I need a recipe book! It's all very well saying I don't want to tie myself down to a Sarah-style commitment, but without religiously ploughing through a book like she did I've got much too much freedom for pickiness, as witnessed by the fact that I've just spent 45 minutes dismissing a vast number of recipes for reasons ranging from "it uses a bottled sauce" (reasonable-ish) to "it includes ingredients I haven't got in my cupboard" (unreasonable, seeing as my cupboard contains only muesli and sesame seeds), and "hmm, it's written by someone called Dougie" (scraping the barrel).

Which recipe book, though? Back in the good old Edinburgh kitchen, the South East Asian section of my cookbook cupboard comprises Harumi's Japanese Cooking (good, but a bit heavy on difficult-to-get-hold-of ingredients), three Chinese cookbooks by Linda Doeser, only one of which appears to be available anymore (not bad, but a bit too much artery-clogging deep frying to make them ideal candidates), one Thai book (very repetitive), and Women's Weekly Vietnamese and Malaysian mini-volumes (to my shame, I have yet to cook anything from the former, and the one recipe I've tried from the latter was disappointing). Nothing really leaps out. What I really need is How to Eat's Asian equivalent; a sort of step-by-step training manual that would leave me confidently cleaving things left, right and centre. Any suggestions? Or should I just brave the cookery section in my local Dussmann? (German-Asian, now there's a fusion cuisine that never really took off...)

And now for something completely different

2007-10-11T21:45:00.001+01:00

Why yes, now that you mention it, I am under contract with Yukata

The lull in blogging activity is a pretty accurate reflection of the recent lull in knitting chez Boffcat. Never mind second sleeve syndrome, I seem to have second-half-of-knitted-item syndrome: whenever I get beyond the 50% mark on something my fickle mind abandons it and wanders onto the next project. (This may explain why I've never quite finished making anything larger than a cushion cover.) So in an attempt to reinvigorate my attention span a bit - not to mention providing blog fodder on sadly knitting-free days - I've decided to take on a different sort of project. As you may have guessed from the picture above, it's to do with cooking.

In the normal scheme of things I love to cook, and, though my knife 'skills' would make a trainee chef avert his eyes in embarrassment, I'm generally not too shabby in the kitchen department (a friend of my boyfriend's once opined that I "could cook sh*t and make it taste good," which I assume is the sort of elegantly-phrased compliment which Gordon Ramsay bats away all the time). However, being in Berlin means that I'm roughly 900 miles from my ridiculously well-equipped kitchen. (Just to give you a bit of an idea of the difference, there's a four-shelf cupboard in my Edinburgh kitchen crammed full of spices, with a large box stashed away in a second cupboard to take care of the considerable overspill. By contrast, my Berlin kitchen - which in its entirety is only marginally bigger than the spice cupboard - contains a pepper pot. The pepper pot is empty.) As you might imagine, cooking here presents a bit of a challenge, and it isn't one I've risen to with flying colours so far. Over the last few weeks my diet's basically consisted of a) museli and b) Thai red curry.

Inspired by the wonderfully titled Sarah Discovers How to Eat, though, that's set to change. The eponymous Sarah (whose current blog is over in the sidebar to your left, and well worth checking out) used this site to record her progress as she cooked her way through every recipe in Nigella Lawson's encyclopaedic How to Eat over the course of a year. While I'm not sure I'd want to take on that much of a commitment (not least financially), I really like the idea of expanding your repertoire this way and cooking recipes you'd never normally give a chance. So I've decided to try something (very) broadly similar. To save myself from stocking up on a vast and expensive array of ingredients, this year I'll be sticking to one type of cuisine, namely South East Asian. All right, I know that that's hardly a single category, encompassing as it does all sorts of different countries, but at least many of the ingredients and cooking techniques overlap. I've cooked Asian food before, obviously (if you're in the market for a Chinese hot pot or a batch of wontons, I'm your man!) but in a fairly limited way - hopefully sticking with it for such a long time period will force me out of my comfort zone a bit. I'm not promising to be totally monogamous - I'm much too fond of hearty British soups and Indian dahls for that - but insofar as specialist ingredients are being bought and new recipes experimented with, it's Far Eastern all the way.

I feel a rice-cooker expedition coming on...

Speaking of non-identical twins...

2007-10-05T09:51:00.002+01:00

Sleeve #1 is on the bottom, and New and Improved Sleeve is on the top. As you can see, any furtive intention I might have had of ignoring slight discrepancies between the two and using them both regardless will probably have to go out the window. My inner sluggard (isn't that a lovely word? I only just learned it, but will henceforth use it whenever possible to make up for lost time) is inconsolable. Hopefully the second New and Improved Sleeve won't take as long, though; I had to keep ripping back the first one to make the stocking stitch section longer. My arms are obviously more monkey-like than I'd realised.

On a completely different note, have you seen Kim Hargreaves's Autumn collection? I'm not usually a huge fan of her designs, but this season's are gorgeous! (Though I'm not convinced that "The Thrown Together Collection" conveys quite the image you want for an upmarket range.) My particular favourites are Rosa, Still, Beatrix (with a change or two to the collar), Hannah and Flo. The prices make me wince, though (£57 for Still, and that's not including postage and packaging! I was never under the illusion that knitting was a cheap hobby, but that's practically the GDP of a small African nation), and I'm not sure all those ruffles really lie within my knitting ability anyway. Perhaps more realistic is my new fixation on Tempting II from Knitty Winter 2005. I'm picturing a long-sleeved version, knit in a wool rather than a cotton blend, sort of like this (take that, Ravelry! I'm doing just fine without you. Though, um, if you could see your way to winging an invitation in my direction sometime soon...), but with a lower neckline as per the original pattern.

First, though, the Tweed Tunic! The knitting shop called yesterday to say that my wool had arrived, which rather scuppers the last minute reservations I was having about the colour I'd chosen. And I'm down to my last few Euros, so essentially it's a choice between picking up this wool and buying groceries for the next few days. How long do you think a person can survive on two bananas and a packet of oats?

Which of us is the evil twin, do you suppose?

2007-10-03T17:45:00.001+01:00

I don't believe it - I have a knitting twin! This cheery looking, but sadly blogless, knitter, made the Textured Tunic from Fitted Knits - already earmarked as my next project - in exactly the same wool (same colour and everything!) that I was planning to use (and, um, may have already ordered, in a fit of linguistic over-enthusiasm), with all the modifications I had in mind, too: adding waist shaping, making the sleeves full length, eliminating the side slits, working moss stitch borders at the cuffs and hem...admittedly she did get rid of the neckline split, which I'll be keeping; I suppose that makes us fraternal rather than identical twins. But even so, it's slightly surreal seeing it, like a sneak-preview of mine. Lovely though she looks, the overall effect is a little bit too buttoned-up for me, so I might rethink my plan to knit the sleeves straight and go for more of a bell-shape. I'm considering tipping the cuffs and hem in a contrasting colour, too. Well, when I say 'considering' I mean that the idea popped into my head approximately three seconds before I typed it (for future reference, this is what I generally mean when I say 'considering').

Ohh, and I've become just about the last person in the known knitting universe to put my name down for Ravelry! Go me! I'd somehow failed to realised that you could actually do this; I assumed they had their select group of beta testers all sorted out, and that the rest of us had to patiently wait until they opened their doors to the public. D'oh. Oh well, only 16, 295 people ahead of me in the queue (and - mwahaha! - 345 people behind me! Amazing how quickly you develop a sense of superiority about these things).

I won't bore you with a photographic update on the cardigan (I think "sleeve-in-progress" shots are the kind of thing only a mother could love), but a post without any pictures at all is a rather sorry-looking creature, so I leave you with a glimpse of the wonderful knitting shop which tempted me into ordering wool for the Textured Tunic in the first place. It's the first good yarn shop I've found in Berlin, but I hear rumours that there's one in Kreuzburg worth investigating. That's my plans for tomorrow sorted, then...

This post narrowly avoided having a painfully bad pun for a title

2007-10-02T16:23:00.001+01:00

After extensive comparative tasting (I don't know, the things I do for this blog...) I can finally announce that the best Laugenbrezeln in Berlin are those from the Ditsch in the lower level of Alexanderplatz station. All Ditschs do pretty damned good Brezeln though - they bake them in open ovens in front of you, so as often as not they're still orgasmically hot when you get them. (Is it wrong to use the word "orgasmically" in reference to baked goods? Maybe the love between woman and Brezel is one that ought not speak its name.)

Anyway, my much abused stomach is now recuperating from its Brezel marathon, but my hands have come out of retirement and started knitting again! Chiefly because I finally figured out how to do magic loop, which meant I could start on the sleeves of the purple cardigan I mentioned a post or two ago. Voici!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's magic loop!

This is a commemorative picture, really, as the sleeve will be ripped out when I can muster the heart to do it. Partly because I misjudged where to start the garter stitch ever so slightly (by, erm, about two inches), and partly because I'm going to tweak the shaping a bit, so that the increases and decreases form a sort of underarm 'seam'. At the moment they form two 'side seams,' which seems a bit silly for a technique whose appeal lies in its seamlessness. Actually, though, the whole seam issue has led me to conclude that - much as I like the physical process - sewing sleeves in the round probably isn't for me. The thing is, I don't actually mind seaming sleeves. And sewing a sleeve on straight needles and then seaming it is much less time consuming than all the pushing and pulling of magic loop. Plus, if the sleeve's at all shaped you're going to get some sort of seam effect anyway, so why not have the real thing?

Still, if you've never tried magic loop - or if you have but without much success - I thought I'd share the tips I found most useful. To get you started, I'd recommend this video, but it's worth having a look at this one too, which will show you how to create a less visible join (it's actually aimed at knitters working with two circular needles, but this particular tip is just as applicable to magic loop). Both videos begin with a fair amount of spoken guff at the beginning, but bear with them! There's genuinely useful stuff buried in there.

Magic loop becomes much easier to work after you've done a few rounds and are getting into the swing of things, but to help you through those awkward early stages my top pointers would be: a) always slide the next set of stitches to be worked onto the needle before you slide the set just worked back onto the cord. This saves all sorts of confusion. And b) to avoid ladders of looser stitches forming at the joins of your work, pull especially tightly when working the second stitch on each side, rather than the first. (I have no idea why this should work, but it certainly seems to.)

In other knitting news (if 'news' isn't too grandiose a term for what is essentially me rambling), I'm rather taken with this scarf from the Autumn edition of Knitty; I have a feeling it'll worm its way onto my frantic-last-minute-whirlwind-panic-midnight-on-Christmas-Eve-knitting-list (to give my Christmas knitting list its full name), destined for an unsuspecting male or two. (I have yet to meet a man who was anything more than lukewarm at the prospect of receiving handknitted gifts from me. Fortunately this hasn't dampened my enthusiasm in the slightest.) As for the Woodins, I may have to hire someone to sit on my fingers full time and thus forcibly prevent me from abandoning all other occupations (eating, sleeping, breathing, etc) and knitting them for - I really wish I could say "my three-year-old nephew" here - myself.

Back in the present, I'm hoping to have the cardigan finished before Mike gets here so I can wear it to pick him up at the airport, but given that that's less than four days away, and that I still have almost all of both sleeves to do, not to mention re-knitting part of the back (it seems a bit baggy all of a sudden), working out how to do the yoke, grafting the underarms and finding the perfect ribbon to finish it all off, this may be one of my more wildly optimistic plans...

Hallo aus Berlin!

2007-09-19T22:06:00.001+01:00

(Admittedly this isn't precisely the view from my bedroom window, not least because I don't as yet have a bedroom window)

Ta-daaa - I've moved to Berlin! (Bet you didn't see that one coming! I really should drop these things into conversation now and then.) Well, maybe "moved" isn't the quite right word, implying as it does possession of some sort of address. And possibly a vague plan for the future. But who needs plans or accommodation when a constant supply of freshly-baked Laugenbrezeln is to hand?

An inconvenient truth

2007-09-11T13:28:00.003+01:00

My Somewhat Cowl, which I was working on five weeks or so ago (such is my dedication to keeping you all up to date with these things), came out huuuuuge. Behold!

I'm still not entirely sure why this is. Admittedly my tension did change a bit (all right, confession time: I actually somehow managed to misread the tension specified by the pattern, and therefore spurned my perfect original swatch in favour of one knit on needles two sizes larger. Luckily a God of Knitting was smiling on me, and my tension mysteriously got itself back on track after a couple of inches. What's more, after reading several Craftsters' tales of woe about baggy armholes, I stopped working sleeve increases long before called to do so by the pattern. Unfortunately, however, neither of these were enough to save the cowl from its fate of gigantism, and it's now been reduced to a few extremely badly wound balls of Alpaca Silk. My dreams of cowl-ownership are at an end).

In happier news, I'm currently knitting (though those two words imply a greater level of recent activity than is strictly accurate) a cardigan based on this, and anything major has yet to go wrong with it! Hooray! Somewhat surprising, really, given that "based" here means "I squinted at the photo a bit for inspiration". If it works out without any hic-coughs, all credit will go to Mike's calculator. Pictures will be forthcoming when it resembles something slightly more impressive than a wonky rectangle.

And finally, look what winged its way over from Australia!

Hmm, what do you suppose Amazon's views on hot-linking are?

I won this, if you can believe it (and granted, it is pretty hard to believe, given that I'm usually the kind of person who could buy every ticket for a raffle and still somehow manage not to win anything), in a birthday prize-draw over at Jorth's always-entertaining blog. Huzzah! Although not generally a chunky knits sort of person (ahh, hips, what a limiting effect you have on my fashion choices), I'm particularly taken with the Coco jacket (the picture doesn't do it justice, but, mysteriously, I can't find any other completed examples online. Is this indicative of the jacket's unpopularity, or only of my googling incompetence?), the Twiggy tunic and the Skating Sweater. Now to find a bulky yarn which comes in colours other than sickly pastels...(Though in fairness, I suppose it isn't the pastels themselves which are sickly, but rather me in them. I feel there isn't an awful lot I can do about this at my end, however.)

When she was good she was very, very good

2007-07-28T23:10:00.001+01:00

But when she was bad...

The word that springs to mind is "oops"

If I were being entirely forthright and honest (which admittedly aren't compulsions which routinely trouble me) I might feel obliged to confess that this only represents about half of my recent purchases. Which may not be entirely in the spirit of budgeting (to be strictly accurate, it's not even remotely in the spirit of budgeting - don't let the 'Sale' bag fool you; while others hunt for bargains on the reduced racks I head unerringly for the 'new arrivals' Autumn ranges. I think credit my rating has a death wish), but to be honest (shucks, there I go again!) reporting on my inability to be frugal is getting a tad, well, depressing. So my next post will mark a new blogging direction! (I know, I know; the national press will be duly informed.)

We interupt this silence to bring you...

2007-07-19T11:58:00.000+01:00

...blogging! Strange though it may seem, I've only really just cottoned on to the fact that the purpose of a blog is to be blogged in, and as such mine has rather lost touch with its raison d'être over the last couple of weeks. In a sort of Paul-on-the-way-to-Damascus moment (though with less visual impairment), I realised that my favourite blogs are the ones which are constantly updated, and that mine's falling woefully short of the mark.

Part of the blame for my prolonged absence lies with The Sims 2. I got the original Sims when I was about 18, and I don't think anyone saw me that year beyond my occasional forages for food. My obsession - and geekiness - was such that my brother and I actually devised a talk show during which he interviewed me about a different Sim family each day. It ran for the whole summer. (Ye gads, I can't believe I just admitted that on the internet! I have no shame. Though come to think of it, my brother may emerge looking even more peculiar than me.) Anyway, I've had The Sims 2 for a while, but - for reasons that are now doubtless understandable - thought I might need protecting from myself and so didn't put it on my computer. (OK, this isn't strictly true. I did put it on my computer, but it ran so slowly that I was aging more quickly than the Sims.) But I've finally succumbed, with predictable results (and some not-so-predictable ones, too. Who'd have thought that staring at a computer screen for six hours straight could cause your contact lenses to pop out?).

In the small window of time that hasn't been eaten up by Sim-mania I've attempted a couple of forays into craftiness, with mixed success. Exhibit A, a découpaged box:

This was supposed to be a birthday present for my friend Chris, but for reasons that now escape me I decided that it was irreparably ruined, and therefore (again, for reasons which elude me) manhandled it. And, erm, broke it. So it is indeed now irreparably ruined, and instead of giving Chris a gratifyingly günstig present I'll be forking out for a costly paint-your-own-ceramics session, at the end of which I'll emerge with a cereal bowl which looks like it's been decorated by a small child who hasn't yet mastered hand-to-eye coordination. Poor Chris will then have to pretend to like it. Ah, the price of friendship.

Second up, I went along to the Edinburgh Stitch 'n' Bitch last night, which is held in the surprisingly lovely Chai Teahouse. (I doubt the staff are quite as keen on me as I am on their venue, as I spent the whole evening ignoring their extensive menu and ordering cups of hot water. I briefly considered explaining the budget to them, but I doubt they'd have been particularly receptive.) Five minutes before leaving the house I realised that I didn't actually have anything to knit, so I grabbed a ball of yarn and thought I'd just churn out a mindless scarf. Unfortunately, none of my fellow knitters recognised it as a scarf, and I felt too embarrassed to press the point. Which is how, when one member came round taking notes on what we were knitting, and told me that if I made up any old thing he'd probably buy it, I found myself saying that it was a coat to keep my cat warm in the aftermath of her chemotherapy treatment. Only when I went on to say that the loss of hair had revealed her unfortunate youthful penchant for tattoos did doubt begin to set in.

What kind of person thinks a cat coat is a likelier knitting project than a scarf?

In budget-ier news, I've been taking part in a few PhD students' experiments to try and counteract the effects of last post's budgeting blip. They're not the world's greatest money makers - I've done four so far, and earned a grand total of £19 - but, as the Evil Conglomerate that is Tesco says, every little helps. Some are more interesting than others: a particular low involved saying "the" rapidly and repeatedly for an hour solid while attempting to memorize the colours and positions of various shapes. I doubt that Sony will be releasing a game along similar lines any time soon.

Next time, some more of the Christmas decorations - promise! I need to improve my number-of-finished-decorations-per-week record (currently standing at 0.75) if I don't want to be in danger of missing Christmas entirely...

2007-07-08T00:04:00.001+01:00

For some reason - possibly because I've been living under some sort of view-impairing rock for the last few weeks - I hadn't really realised that the Summer sales were in full swing. So when I set off for John Lewis this afternoon it was in all innocence. Honest. I certainly wasn't going to buy anything. Nope, straight through the doors, beeline for the haberdashery department, eyes on the floor all the way. Quick scan for informative purposes only, about turn, beetle towards the exit. In and out in five minutes. Ten minutes, tops.

Except to get to the haberdashery department, you have to go through the wool department (well, you do if you take a cunningly circuitous route which bypasses haberdashery entirely. Cough). And the thing is, there was quite a large wool sale on. Also, in getting to the wool sale, you couldn't really avoid passing a large display of heavily discounted scarves. And a table of knitting patterns reduced to one pence each (ninety-nine per cent off! Doesn't that have a nice ring to it?). Forty-five minutes later I emerged with a bulging bag and a beaming smile. In fact, only now has the full scale of my idiocy really hit home. It's the middle of July. I have just bought:

1) a vast quantity of alpaca
2) a pattern for a woolen jumper
3) a Winter scarf

I may have to work on my concept of seasonality.

Does it count as cheating if you do it in your sleep?

2007-07-04T08:47:00.000+01:00

My subconscious seems to be rebelling against the budget, as last night I dreamt I was on a shopping spree in H & M (more perplexingly, I also dreamt that I was part of a group of woodlice mercenaries which enslaved a colony of ants, but maybe this isn't the place to go into that...). My conscious self has been a bit better behaved - all I've bought in the last few days has been toiletries (which don't count because they were purchased with my Advantage Card points - huzzah! After four years of saving I'd amassed enough for an extremely small travel miniature of shampoo. I feel Advantage Card points may be a bit long-term for my general budgeting needs) and dye. Dying clothes (and my hands, and the bath, and the stretch of floor between the bathroom door and the washing machine) is my latest obsession. The anticipation! The mounting excitement at seeing the garment transform before your eyes! The realisation that you've accidentally dyed your sexiest lingerie a particularly virulent shade of puce! It's got it all. I'm not convinced that anything involving large vats of chemicals which carry warning signs is a suitable activity for someone as accident-prone as me, but at least it's better than the time I decided to take up fencing.

Ooops, I did it again

2007-06-29T10:14:00.001+01:00

Um...the Boden autumn range may have come out a little bit earlier than I expected. And it may have been accompanied by a "buy before common sense kicks in and get 20% off!" offer. Which there is a slight possibility that I succumbed to. It's conceivable that the item I ordered was, erm, a pair of brown leather knee boots. Which - hypothetically, of course - might have cost ever so slightly more than The Boots of Debt.

Possibly.

You know you have too much spare time when taking pictures of yourself is a legitimate use of an afternoon

2007-06-27T18:45:00.000+01:00

One of the side effects of this budget is that I often find myself attempting to make my own entertainment. This has two major things going for it: (1) it's free, and (2) it doesn't require me to leave the flat and brace the random assortment of hostile elements which constitute an Edinburgh summer. Unfortunately, however, I suck at entertaining myself. I am not, for a start, remotely entertaining. And I lack that only-child knack of revelling in one's own company. When left in my own company I...well, do diddly squat, really. But not today! No, today I instead decided to - prepare to be underwhelmed - investigate a question that's been troubling me for some time: why do I photograph so badly?

I am weirdly, almost laws-of-physics-defyingly, unphotogenic. I generally come out looking like a sort of cross between Stephen Hawking and Ruud van Nistelrooy, if you can imagine such a creature. My brother would doubtless argue that this is a fairly accurate representation, but I choose instead to believe that, by freak coincidence, all the cameras in the Western hemisphere suffer from some kind of me-defacing glitch. However, after an embarrassing number of abortive attempts (does anyone else have problems getting their head in a picture, or is that just me?) I think I've finally found a way to look halfway presentable in photos!

Before:

"Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go and eat worms..."

After:

All the better to eat you with, my dear...

(I did only say "halfway" - you weren't expecting miracles, were you?) The trick is to smile manically. As in, literally manically. Open your eyes as wide as they can go and grin inanely, as though you were auditioning for the part of the Big Bad Wolf in a particularly cheesy musical adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, to be performed to an audience comprised entirely of the partially sighted. It feels ridiculous, obviously, but somehow (humour me here) the resulting photo ends up as a subdued version of the caricature-like expression. Having said that, it has yet to be seen if this method actually works when the camera's being wielded by someone other than my left hand...

And in a belated attempt to keep this post relevant to the budget, this week's £10 is still intact! Though this may say more about my laziness (see plan not to leave flat for duration of twenty-first century) than my self-control.

Edit: Alas! According to Mike I've over-estimated the subduing effect, and still look crazed in the "After" photo. Oh well, back to the drawing board...

Who'd have thought Glaswegians had such good skin?

2007-06-23T13:25:00.001+01:00

Ooops, I didn't mean to leave it so long! I sort of assumed that I'd be churning out Christmas decorations and accompanying posts at a rattling pace throughout the week, but somehow that didn't quite happen, and since I last wrote I haven't made a single one. I have, however, made some money! (I do earn money in the normal course of things, honest. It's just that I only work one day a week, and while that might keep my head above water it doesn't really support my inner shopaholic in the luxury to which she wishes she were accustomed.) It was a one-off thing: carrying out a travel survey among out-patients at a Glasgow hospital. I was assigned to the dermatology department. Unfortunately (well, fortunately for them, I suppose) the people of Glasgow do not appear to suffer from dermatological conditions. By lunchtime I'd read two copies of Good Housekeeping, one Elle , two Spectators, all the health notices dotted around the walls, and interviewed a grand total of nine patients. If I tell you that the morning was positively heaving compared to the afternoon you'll get an idea of how slowly the remaining hours passed.

Still, I think £65 is a fair rate for my boredom, especially considering I'm often bored for hours at a time for no charge whatsoever. Plus, since returning The Boots of Debt I actually have £21 credit on my credit card! Which, obviously, I choose to interpret as £21 of free money. I knew I had a knack for this budgeting thing.

At the risk of undermining the triumphant note slightly, I should probably confess that not a penny remains of last week's £10. The final £3.17 went on plasters, water, those pesky library fines and getting my passport photocopied (photocopies of my passport seem to be in great demand this month; I wonder if this should worry me?). But this week's £10 is as yet untouched, and for once I don't already have a long list of necessities staking a claim to it. Hooray! I've decided on a couple of rules, though, to keep over-excited spending in check:

Rule #1: Thou shalt not buy any new clothes until the Boden Autumn catalogue is released (I reckon this'll be sometime in July, so it's not exactly a demanding test of long-term willpower, but fractionally better than nothing).

Rule #2: Thou shalt not buy fabric to make Summery clothes until we get a forecast of at least 20 degrees C. This, judging by recent weeks, could be an awfully long way off; possibly sometime in the mid 2050s when global warming's really kicked in.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

2007-06-17T17:04:00.000+01:00

No, I haven't gone mad! (Well, maybe I have, but that's a subject for a whole other post.) Christmas has come early to a corner of my sitting room rug (OK, to the entire sitting room...and the bedroom...and most of the bits inbetween. I should probably hoover before Mike gets back), because I've decided that my wedding present for Su and Barry is going to be Christmas decorations! And yes, I know that they've been married for two weeks already, and that Christmas decorations are a somewhat unconventional gift for a June wedding, but hey, at least I don't have to worry that someone else has given them the same thing. (Besides, this is what you get for not having a wedding list! I used to despise the idea of wedding lists, but now I have decided that they are a Most Excellent Thing, saving your guests many hours of anxiety, and eliminating the possibility that one of them will have the bright idea to present you with homemade Christmas ornaments in midsummer.)

Ta-daaa! You can't really tell from the picture (must learn what all the funny buttons on my camera actually do), but they're padded and (this you almost certainly can't tell from the picture, unless you're lucky enough to be possessed of x-ray vision) each is stuffed with a few cloves so that they smell appropriately Christmassy. I'm planning on making about twenty in a range of different designs, but so far these three have eaten up £6.83 of this week's budget, so I might have to reign my artistic ambitions in a bit for the rest.

Budget 1, Spirits 0

2007-06-13T12:40:00.001+01:00

My boots arrived today. They will henceforth be referred to as The Boots of Debt, as they're the purchase which plunged me sufficiently far into my overdraft that even £10 began to seem rather extravagant for a week's expenditure, representing as it did approximately 50% of my remaining available funds. Still, this didn't trouble me unduly - I mean, everyone needs a pair of brown leather knee boots, right? In fact, you could argue that they're a necessity. So it was in a decidedly cheery frame of mind that I unwrapped them, paying no heed to the unfeasibly large sum printed on the invoice which fluttered out of the box as I did so.

The only problem is, I don't actually like them.

They look innocuous enough. In fact, you can judge this for yourselves. Behold! (Erm, I'm not entirely sure where the picture's going to pop up, but doubtless it'll be somewhere in this general vicinity.) I would go so far as to say that seeing these pictures I'd fall for them all over again and order away, budget or no budget. But when you actually get them out of the box, they're strangely oversized. I don't mean that they're too big - the width is perfect, and believe it or not you actually give your calf measurement when you order, so that's spot on too - but there are a good two inches or so of shoe happily continuing long after my toes have come to an abrupt end. They are in fact a full four centimetres (sorry to mix metric and imperial so recklessly; comes of being British) longer than even my pointiest-toed shoes, and make my legs and feet look rather like enormous right angled set-squares. While certainly interesting, this is not the look I was hoping for.

And so, I suppose, I'll send them back, and my critically-wounded credit card will give a sigh of relief. My feet, however, will sulk.

Budgeting isn't quite as fun when you've spent all your budget

2007-06-11T21:24:00.001+01:00

As you've possibly guessed from the rather unequivocal title, the ten pound note and I went on a little excursion at the weekend and only one of us came back. He fought bravely, but was no match for my steely determination to buy a 75 pence carton of pineapple juice (harsh, I know, but the greater good - ie the need for punch to take to Lucy's - was at stake). I was just as merciless over the 89 pence orange juice, and downright pitiless when it came to the 55 pence loaf of bread. (Some might argue that, strictly speaking, bread isn't an essential ingredient in punch. But - hurrah! - none of those people are here. Plus I have decided to justify the wanton extravagance of the bread by the happy coincidence that it cost more or less the exact amount I found in my wallet the other day, which was sort of exempt from the budget anyway. This must be the kind of cunning rationalising that government departments have to do all the time.)

The poor ten pounds' trial wasn't over, however - their scattered remains still had the Edinburgh Treefest to contend with. To the uninitiated a treefest might sound like the kind of place where your wallet was fairly safe from assault, but to the true shopaholic there are self-bankrupting opportunities to be found in the unlikeliest of places. In this case, I came home proudly bearing a piece of spalted beech and another of burr elm. Although I am slightly less proud now that I've discovered that "spalted" means "suffering from fungal disease". Still, at least I've ticked another box (Mike's dad's birthday present - what man doesn't love diseased wood?) off my list. And if I went ever so slightly over budget in the process, then, erm...I'm sure I'll have thought up an excellent excuse for it by tomorrow.

OK, I know I'm updating too often to maintain any semblance of cool...

2007-06-08T19:55:00.000+01:00

The ten pound note survived its trip to the library and lives to be squandered another day! Although only because the librarian had locked the till and was ill-equipped to deal with my ninety pence fine. Plus I found fifty-two pence in my wallet, so my running total has actually risen! I'm beginning to suspect I am some sort of financial genius.

Disaster looms!

2007-06-08T13:21:00.001+01:00

Oh no, I've just discovered a loophole - I can still buy stuff from Amazon and ebay! Damned automatic payment systems...Can you ban yourself from sites? Maybe I could create fake ebay accounts and leave terrible feedback for myself so no-one will ever sell to me again? (Over-reacting? Me?)

And she's off!

2007-06-08T12:30:00.000+01:00

Hooray, I'm a cybergeek again! Although I rather sullied my geek credentials by accidentally posting a blank message. Still, as my readership consists of one, and as his attention span is sufficiently short that he may have switched off a couple of sentences ago, my image might have survived untarnished.

Anyway, onto the budget! It doesn't actually feel like one yet, as the novelty of having a ten pound note has yet to wear off (though I might iron it, to make it look more crisp and alluring). I have a feeling it won't survive intact for long, though. Vying for its attention are:

* my library fines
* postage for my Dad's birthday present
* buying Mike's dad's birthday present (shoot, I'd forgotten about that! Do you think that's allowed to be an exception? What sort of wood could I get for £5? Maybe some kind of twig?)
* some sort of drink to take round to Lucy and Martin's tomorrow
* a new uni card (though considering that me extending my studies has garnered the university £1,200 in extra fees, you'd think they could throw in an extension on my card for free)
* wedding present for Su and Barry
* new face cream
* thread, for my latest living-room-takeover crafting
* flowerpots for my ever-expanding herb collection

Just think how much tougher it's going to be when the summer sales start...