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October 29, 2008

oh, you beautiful rutabaga

Posted by jodi at 09:31 AM | Comments (2) | categories:  food

July 02, 2008

flies

By request, a recipe for English Cream Scones. This is from A Guide to Good Cooking, an old Canadian standby published by Five Roses Flour. I have a lot more to say about the Five Roses cookbook, but for now I want to put this down quickly and go get some quality front porch time in before the thunderstorm begins.

English Cream Scones

2 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup butter or shortening (I never use shortening or lard for anything, but always butter. I've begun keeping butter in the freezer for this purpose and I just grate it in)
2 eggs
1/3 cup milk or thin cream (making these for myself I would use soy milk, but since I'm home with Peter now and he drinks regular old cow milk, I used that)

Stir together dry ingredients, then cut in butter. Reserve a little of the egg white for glazing and beat the rest until light; stir in milk. Make a well in dry ingredients and add liquid slowly to make a soft dough. Stir vigourously until the dough comes away freely from the side of the bowl. Pat to 1.5 cm thickness and cut into triangles. Brush with egg white and sprinkle with a little granulated sugar. Bake on an ungreased sheet at 450F for 12 to 15 minutes.

To make plain scones into flies, add 1/2 cup raisins. The book also says to add 4 more tablespoons of sugar but I didn't bother, as I'm not all that fond of sweets.

Enjoy! And if any get a little overcooked on the edges, save them for me. Those are my favourites.

Posted by jodi at 07:26 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  food

December 02, 2007

temporary cure for homesickness

When you're all alone in temporary lodgings far away from home, it's a reassuring feeling to bake something that you can remember you and your mom baking together, all those years ago. Even if you do have to eat it all yourself.

My mom's pumpkin bread:

3 c. white sugar
4 eggs
1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 and 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. each cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg
1 c. cooking oil
3 and 1/2 c. flour
2/3 c. water
2 c. pumpkin

Mix all and bake in 3 small or 2 large floured and greased loaf pans at 300 for about 1 and 1/2 hours.

Posted by jodi at 10:50 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  food

November 13, 2007

tiny packages full of yummy

Over the weekend I tried out Jae's vegan stuffed peppers recipe to use up the last of some fresh local green peppers in the fridge. I didn't have some of the ingredients, including the main ingredient, millet. Rice just didn't sound like a satisfying substitute, so I cooked up a mixture of barley and mung beans instead (those mung beans had been sitting in the cupboard for a long, long time waiting for me to figure out what to do with them). In place of sunflower seeds I chopped up about a cup of raw almonds, and threw in a handful of ground flax seeds because flax is just one of those things it's good to add to stuff whenever you can. The pumpkin seeds I did have, although I had to scoop them out of a pumpkin first. I also added a chopped chili pepper, since there were a few along with the sweet peppers in the big garden grab bag my friend brought me last week. So, basically I changed about half of the recipe. But it was really good!

I wish I'd thrown some object in for scale, as the severe drought we're in caused these peppers to be quite comically tiny; if you go over and check out Courtney's lemon, it'll give you some idea. The oven bowl they're in is about the size of a Chinese rice bowl.

Posted by jodi at 08:44 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  food

November 06, 2007

happy birthday, Alois Senefelder

When I was a kid my favourite birthday cake was chocolate cake with brown sugar icing, an icing that was cooked on the stove and spread while still warm, and which hardened into a miraculous fluffy crust rather than a runny glaze. I asked for this cake every year. At some point my mom stopped making it and later said that she had lost the recipe (perhaps when we moved in 1982, because I'm sure that it's been at least that long since I had it). No birthday cake I've had since has lived up to the memory of my beloved brown sugar icing, and I've longed for the day when my mom would come across that dog-eared recipe card in her kitchen, wedged behind something-or-other (highly unlikely, as she's moved house twice more since '82).

While sorting through old cookbooks at Peter's mom's house over the summer, I came across a frosting recipe that sounded like it could be the one, and scribbled it down in my sketchbook for later. I don't really have much of a sweet tooth anymore and don't eat cake often, but I thought I'd like to give this a trial run before my birthday, to see if one magical taste would spirit me back to December 1978, before serving it up to my birthday guests this year. And since it just happened that the birthday of good old Alois, the inventor of lithography, falls on a day that I teach my litho class, what better time to try it out (and use my students as guinea pigs).

(this is where, were I a good enough documentor not to be totally distracted by the thrill and anticipation of finally ending 25+ years of sugary longing, there would be a mouthwatering photo of a fat, glistening, brown-sugared chocolate cupcake. Alas. . . )

The consistency of the icing was runnier than I remembered, and acted more like a thick, caramel-ish glaze than a fluffy frosting, but I suspect that the soy milk might have been a factor there, so perhaps next time I'll break down and use cow's milk (ew). I also used Earth Balance instead of butter, but I'm pretty sure that my mom was using margarine back then anyway so that shouldn't have made the difference. I even used a cake from a box for that authentic 70s childhood touch, (although the authenticity may have been spoiled a bit by the hippie-wholemeal-organic cake mix and organic grain fed cage free eggs). Still, the whole thing was delicious, my students enjoyed it and the sugar high I put them on didn't cause any accidents later on when I taught them how to use the big scary guillotine book trimmer. And I'm pretty sure that if Alois were still with us at age 236, this is the cake he would have requested for his party.

One of my students said that the icing tasted like that of German Chocolate Cake, and my heart sank for a moment, because my mom's family is GERMAN. And if this is some common old German recipe that everyone knows about, then I've been missing out on 25 years of delicious birthday cakes for no good reason. I was pretty relieved to discover that not only is German Chocolate Cake not really German, it's got coconut and pecans in it and thus is clearly not MY cake. Whew. My mom never would have heard the end of it.

Posted by jodi at 08:06 PM | Comments (8) | categories:  food

October 01, 2007

4019 love

Cross-posted from flickr, because I'm a slag like that. Although I'm really tempted to leave yesterday's post at the top for a while longer simply because I'm so pleased with the (stolen) title. Ah, well.

I've been waiting a long time for my beloved McIntosh apples to come into season; this is the only time of year I eat apples, and these are the only apples I eat. I can't stand the small, hard, sour apples that are picked underripe at end-of-season and saved to be sold in bags in February, so distant from the perfection of a fat, lovely, tree-ripened McIntosh.

As soon as these finally showed up in Kroger I bought twenty, even though I knew I was flying home for a week-long visit in six days. They're half gone already, and I'm sure I can eat three or four in the airport while I wait for my flight.

Posted by jodi at 12:02 AM | Comments (4) | categories:  food

August 03, 2007

get slushed

At our party last weekend we served my mom and Lynne's rum slush recipe, which was such a huge hit that I spent most of my evening in the kitchen, ice cream scoop in hand, dishing it out.

1 can frozen orange juice
1 can frozen pink lemonade
1 can (1.36L/46oz) pineapple juice
1/2 of that pineapple juice can of water

Mix this all up and add a 750ml bottle (26er) of rum. Freeze overnight.

To serve, fill a glass halfway and top it up with ginger ale (we used Sprite). You can make it stronger or weaker by changing the ratio here, but we found that half and half is pretty much perfect.

Posted by jodi at 05:44 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  food

July 25, 2007

slackass

I'm having a lot of trouble with motivation of late. I can't commit to any projects, can't get anything done, at times can't even lift myself from my seat to do something that I know needs doing, that I very much want to do, even. I haven't been drawing in my sketchbook, haven't touched the printing I brought home with me (should have known), have been staring at the same pile of half-sewn skirts for a week now. And that's just my school work, never mind the things I wanted to accomplish around the house this month. And now I'm facing the prospect of leaving those projects untouched for another year while I go back to school. Gah. And my website is terribly out of date, and I've got weeks' worth of photos to share, and recipes to post, and. . . and. . . I dreamed the other night that I hadn't blogged in so long that I was no longer the number one Jodi Green in a Google search, AND I was reading about it in the New York Times. Pathetic.

We're having a little party this Friday before leaving for Athens, and I've been too sidelined by migraines the past two days to do any cleaning, menu planning, or finding places to put all of the boxes of stuff that fill the living room. Now that there are only a few days left, I have to lift my sorry carcass from my fainting sofa and get down to work (because everybody knows that having a party is just an excuse to get the house clean). Here are the things I need to accomplish today:

-wash out roll-top desk and new bookshelf
-bring boxes of glasses and china up from basement, unpack, wash and put in bookshelf
-move the echinacea to the other side of the garden (I can already see this one getting shunted off to tomorrow)
-sew zippers into three skirts
-move drawing boards to basement
-pack school stuff

Am I setting myself up for failure? Wouldn't be the first time. The dishes part and packing the school stuff are both pretty big jobs, but I'll attack them in dribs and drabs throughout the day (which is probably a hint as to why it's so hard for me to finish things, eh?).

In lieu of anything more interesting than my self-absorbed whine, here's a picture of last night's supper at Terra Cotta, Windsor-Detroit's best pizza:

Posted by jodi at 09:55 AM | Comments (8) | categories:  food : self-absorbtion

January 25, 2007

show and tell

Peter and I used to know some people who would talk constantly, in every social situation, about gadgets and the things they had bought recently and, most especially, why-my-toys-are-cooler-than-your-toys. To make fun of those people and their (to us) vapid, boring conversations, we would sometimes begin a conversation with the phrase "I have nothing interesting to say, so let me show you what I bought".

Ahem. Beautiful new handmade necklace, bought with birthday money:

It's porcelain, purchased on etsy from lusterbunny. I couldn't resist the printmakerly aesthetic, and want to collect more of her work (I have another necklace from her as well, and a supercool fridge magnet with a dirty picture on it).

If you look closely to the right of the necklace you can see my two identical white scars, both gained at age thirteen in grade nine. I've long since forgotton which is which, but one is from chicken pox and the other is from a cigarette burn. Don't having chicken pox and smoking cigarettes seem like things a kid really shouldn't be experiencing at the same age?

Bic pens, bought at Office Max in Athens, GA. Notice anything strange about the box?

I'll give you a hint: Americans (most of them, anyway) don't speak French. I was back in the studio opening the box up when I realized that the French was out of place here, being from a bilingual country and all it didn't really register at first. I know it's just a way to save the cost of printing two different packages for the domestic market and for export, but it made me happy for a moment nonetheless, to imagine that perhaps a little bit of our culture is seeping into theirs for a change. Fat chance, I know.

And here's something I cooked tonight:

The most remarkable thing about this dish is that it is not edamame; bags of frozen edamame were on sale at Kroger this week, and in the last six nights I have had it for supper five times (it would have been six but I had to work late in the studio on Monday night and so ate studio food for supper). AND, yesterday I went back and bought six more bags; Peter thinks I may be headed for an overdose.

I've never really cared for pickled beets, but my pal Krista told me they were very good roasted, so tonight I gave this a try: two beets, two small potatoes, three carrots, an onion and some garlic all chopped into a shallow casserole dish, sprinkled with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, basil and kosher salt and roasted for 70 minutes (uncovered for the first 40 minutes and then I got worried and threw some tin foil on top for the last 30). It was very tasty, and I love how the beets spread their joyous red over everything in sight. I have a brand-new comfort meal.

I've got new knits to show, two cardigans in progress and three more finished Calorimetries (nope, not sick of them yet. I'm thinking perhaps a faggoting pattern in a cotton would be just the thing for spring, which in this freakish place should be starting in about two weeks from now). I also have a new knit-related drawing project I keep forgetting to photograph, and some exciting print-related news. But I'll save all of these things for later, the latter for when I have all of the information and the rest when I can get arsed to take some photos.

Posted by jodi at 07:17 PM | Comments (23) | categories:  food : true patriot love

January 21, 2007

a good day

This morning I got up early and made bran muffins, only scarfing down one with breakfast instead of the three or four I'm usually tempted to eat when they're hot from the oven. Because I spilled water all over the slip of paper the recipe's scrawled on, and inspired by Peter (who has begun archiving on his blog all of the things we like to cook whose recipes, no matter how many times we write them out and stick them on the fridge door, always go missing), I'm posting it here for next time. It's essentially the same bran muffins my mom always made when I was a kid, but of course I've tinkered with it a bit:

2 eggs
3/4 cup oil
2 cups soy milk
3/4 cup sugar (the original recipe called for a cup, but I prefer less; today I used turbinado sugar as I'm trying to quit the white stuff)
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup bran
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
flax seed: I usually grind up a handful, probably between two and three tablespoons, then also add two tablespoons of seeds whole just because they look pretty. Today I left the flax out as my pantry was less than adequately prepared for muffin-making.

Mix up all the dry together and all the wet together,throw one into the other and don't mix any more than is necessary. Fill buttered muffin tins about 2/3 full and bake at 350F for 15 to 20 minutes.

In my opinion, these are best enjoyed one of two ways: straight out of the oven when they're almost too hot to eat, slathered with about twice as much butter as is healthy, or later during a break in your morning work, alongside a cup of tea brewed in a new little teapot sent by a kind and thoughtful friend:

If any natural light ever makes it into this house I'll show you all of the contents of the sweet little care package Bonnie sent: this pot, some lovely teas for me to try, some wee notes, cute little soy sauce squirty bottles for my lunch box, one of Cara's beautiful note cards, and cup ramen! (yup, it's all Naruto all the time around here, folks).

Other things that made this a good day:

-On my way out the door I discovered that in wrangling my bike in and out of Jessica's car last night, the chain came sort of half-off and got wedged very tightly into a terrible spot. Even though I know next to nothing about bikes (okay, who am I fooling? I know nothing about bikes, nothing at all) I didn't panic and I didn't cry. I examined it carefully, figured out where it needed to go, loosened some things, and fixed it. Myself. And then rode to studio feeling stupidly proud for managing such a small job. But, listen! If that had happened at home I would have cried and then made Peter fix it. So, I'm almost like a real cyclist now! I did almost cry though, just for a second.

-I made good prints today, just in time to meet my first deadline for the editioning challenge. Pictures at eleven.

-Sarah Harmer's You Were Here. I love that record so much. Yes, I want to marry it.

-I rode my bike home in the cold rain and got completely soaked. Again, I felt like a real cyclist (instead of someone who bikes when the weather's okay and cadges a lift when it's not, or when she's just too big a baby to ride home in the dark at night, like what happened last night).

-Because my trousers were drenched when I arrived at the house, I got to put my pyjama pants on at 4:30 in the afternoon, so now I'm all cozy and coddled-feeling. Hooray for kittycat flannel pants!

-While waiting for my supper to I got to talk to StephVW on Skype! I really only use Skype to talk with Peter, and don't talk on the phone much with anyone from home because it's so much more expensive than e-mailing, so it was great to chat with a friend about silly stuff and to hear an accent kinda like mine. I always say Steph's name in my head as "Steph fow vay", like Volkswagen.

-Oven fries and edamame for supper. Only half healthy but totally delicious.

-Exclamation points! I can use as many as I want!!

-Skype date with Peter tonight. Those are the best nights. Well, the best nights when I'm in Athens and Peter is not, but y'all know what I mean; the best nights are the red hot nobody else is in the house so let's make some noise nights, but I'm not letting myself think about when we'll have another one of those. It might spoil my otherwise good day.

Posted by jodi at 06:43 PM | Comments (11) | categories:  food : self-absorbtion

January 15, 2007

getting adventurous in the kitchen

And I'm not talking about getting down with the root vegetables. Because, when you think about it, getting down with root vegetables is actually pretty vanilla.

I'm not here to tell you about the stuff on the plate, although it's quite yummy. I want to talk about what's in the bowl, the stuff that looks like chunky baby poo. Because I'm not embarrassed to admit that if baby poo tasted like this stuff, I'd eat diapers.

A few nights ago I made a fine supper of vegetable tawa (that's the leftovers there on the plate) and tamarind rice, all from mixes (Peter's departmental secretary, who is of South Asian descent, turned us on to Parampara brand mixes, and they are really good, so good that I may never bother making Indian dishes from scratch ever again).

Somehow, even though rice was probably the first thing I ever learned how to cook and there have been periods in my life where every single meal I ate (even breakfast) was served on top of rice, I put in too much water this time and it was mushy. Still tasty underneath the tawa, but when I reheated some of the leftovers at the studio the next day it wasn't so appealing.

I've never been the sort of cook who will add food to leftovers or cook something new out of them rather than eating them as-is, partly because I have a (perhaps unreasonable) fear that it will all end up tasting like the bland tomato-and-ground-beef based diet that some of my friends growing up in the 70s ate, and that my house will end up smelling like the house of one particular neighbour kid, whose mom I swear only cooked things you could make with hamburger meat and Campbell's tomato soup. And also, I'm afraid that I'll forget how old the original food is and end up eating something past its sell-by date. So, too-mushy rice is the sort of thing I'll usually leave in the fridge until it's too old to eat and then throw it out. But, being on a tight budget right now, I don't want to waste food.

I was staring at the big solid clump of leftover rice when a memory tugged at me, of a recipe for a sweet congee that I tore out of the Globe and Mail oh, eleventy or so years ago, made once and hated. All I could remember was that congee was made by cooking rice with way too much water and then adding stuff. So I broke apart the slab of rice and tossed it in a pot and started adding stuff, just anything I could think of that might be yummy and not gross. Plain soy milk. Two tablespoons of brown sugar. A splash of vanilla extract, only because I found it there while digging for the sugar and didn't even realize I had any. A bit of nutmeg, a bigger bit of cardamom. And two dollops of tamarind chutney. I cooked it all down, tasted it and saw that it was good. Very, very good: not too sweet (I'm much more of a savoury girl, and don't usually go in for dessert unless it's fresh fruit), a little tangy, a little spicy.

Turns out rice congee is usually a savoury dish, so perhaps next time I'll make some on purpose, rather than just using it to fix a mistake, and try vegetables, and miso (miso is my current food crush). Still, this is going to make a pretty nice breakfast for the next few days. I wonder if it would be good with yogurt?

So. If you want to make my tamarind-cardamom sweet congee, you could probably skip the puliogare powder and just do this:

1 cup rice (I used basmati)
5 to 7 cups water
2 tbsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cardamom powder
2 tbsp tamarind chutney

Boil the rice in the water until it's mushy and fallen apart, then add all of the other stuff and cook it until it's the consistency you want. From what I've discovered about "real" congees, they're usually made with more like ten times the water to rice so they're a ricey soup, but according to Wikipedia the Japanese usually make it a lot thicker, with five to seven water to rice. This is more like what I did and it came out the consistency of rice pudding. You might need to use larger amounts of spices or chutney to offset the extra flavour that was in my rice when I started.

Posted by jodi at 06:51 PM | Comments (10) | categories:  food

December 31, 2006

another day, another Tim Hortons

It's not that I've forgotten about this little journal, it's just that I haven't felt much like talking. Everywhere I go people keep asking me when I'm heading back to Georgia when all I really want to do is live for the moment and savour my time here with Peter before I have to get back on a plane and start counting the days all over again. We've been doing a lot of not-very-much, going out to coffee shops, watching many, many episodes of Naruto, sleeping, and just quietly enjoying each other's company.

Tonight, though, we're breaking out of our little asocial bubble to serve a midnight supper to eight friends. And, because I've been far too lazy this week to write up the lace scarf pattern I was planning to post here, let me instead give you these, which I just took out of the oven:

The Only Shortbread Worth Making

1 pound butter (I think you're supposed to use unsalted butter, but last week I forgot and used salted for the xmas batch and they were wonderful)
3/4 cup brown sugar
4 cups flour

Blend the butter and sugar then add the flour in two or three stages. Dump it out on a floured board, shape into a 1/2 cm thick rectangle with your hands and cut it into 3 cm by 3 cm squares with a knife (I prefer not to tart up my cookies, but rather to let the exquisite taste make up for the rustic appearance). Bake at 325 F for 20 minutes or so, et voila! Now gorge yourself while they're hot; you can afford to, since this recipe makes about sixty cookies.

Posted by jodi at 10:05 AM | Comments (3) | categories:  food : self-absorbtion

December 12, 2006

I've got holiday head. Also known as little motivation.

But I did manage to put up some eggplant in oil today, that had been marinating in vinegar and salt for the last two days:

I'm really, really excited to eat this stuff. Here's the recipe I used, which our friend Jelena had her mother-in-law write out for me:

I love that it's written with the assumption that the person reading knows how to cook, and doesn't need to jack around with little things like measuring ingredients. Intuitive cooking is my favourite kind of cooking.

The recipe calls for garlic and oregano as the only added flavours, but the first time I ever tasted this at Franco and Jelena's house it was spicy hot, so I added some red pepper seeds. When Peter and I were discussing what else to throw in there he said he thought there had been something like mustard seed as well. I realized too late, when I was transferring the flattened-and-drained eggplant bits into jars (it's not like we ever cook eggplant and we don't even make our own baba ghannoush from scratch but rather buy eggplant already roasted and mashed in a can at the Lebanese grocery up the street, so I had no idea what it really looked like inside, or that there would be quite so many seeds.) that what Peter remembered seeing was probably just the seeds of the eggplant itself floating around in there, and by then I already had mustard seeds dry-roasting in a pan. So I put them into one jar and not the other two; who knows, perhaps it'll be one of those weird flavour blends that turns out to be perfect and wonderful.

Also, I've been working on Stefanie Japel's Forecast cardigan:

I'm making a few changes to the pattern to suit me better: starting the ribbing higher, a little below the bust for the body (I really, really hope this ribbing isn't going to perfectly sculpt my amply rounded love handles, but am bracing myself for the inevitable and have added a bit of extra length to offset that) and just below the elbows for the sleeves; I ditched the collar and made a simpler ribbed neck that's lower on the shoulder and shows a bit more skin, because I feel like all of my cardigans are of the boxy type for wearing "over stuff", and I want to make a few that are more feminine and dressy. And I just like a boat neck better than a collar.

The yarn is a lovely red merino that I reclaimed from a secondhand sweater ages and ages ago; long-time readers who hang on my every stitch (yeah, there must be hordes of those, eh?) might recognize it as something you've seen before. It first made its internet debut as this ill-fated cardigan, and later on as a nearly-completed back of the Urban Aran. What you didn't see is the plain top-down number (inspired by Stefanie's Ubernatural, but with the gauge totally re-jigged); I finished the whole body on that one too before I realized that I'd made a mistake in the math and the fit was terrible.

So far this Forecast sweater fits, and looks lovely. I may run out of yarn but I'm not worrying about that just yet. If anything does go wrong, though, I think this time I'll just throw the wool in the garbage and console myself by eating lots and lots of eggplant.

Posted by jodi at 05:25 PM | Comments (8) | categories:  food : sticks and string

August 26, 2006

For Simon

This is the recipe I was telling you about, from the first edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. Looks tasty, doesn't it? Don't worry if you're not really all that fond of processed cheese slices: that only LOOKS like cheese slices all over that attractive and convincingly moulded pineapple.

It's actually a delicious mixture of gelatine and mayonnaise.

Posted by jodi at 12:03 AM | Comments (14) | categories:  dumbass : food

February 15, 2006

An endeavour of Olympic proportions

Here's a peek of my Olympic knitting progress so far. I've obviously got to speed up; at this rate I may not make it past the qualifying rounds. But I have to get it finished, so I will. I'll have some time to knit in class tonight. That thing underneath it is a mushy valentine card that came in the mail yesterday from my sweet mom.

Today I made some butter tarts for the printmaking exhibition reception tonight (which happens at the same time as my 3-hour class, argh):

Note my half-assed fluting. I'm not so good with the pretty, but I've got the tasty down and that's what counts. It's only going to be art students and faculty at this reception, and they don't care what the food looks like just so long as there's food. Right?

The stray cat of the compound (I call her Mister Bunny but since it looks like the guys across from me have taken her in, I'm sure she has some other name as well) came in to visit for a while this morning, and made herself right at home. Here she is getting up on the bedside table to knock down my plush Canada goose.

Thank goodness she finally left. That girl is high maintenance.

Posted by jodi at 01:52 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  food : knit design

February 11, 2006

Studio Saturday : exhausted, and spending a few days thinking about anything but the studio

1. Most of my week was spent working on some letterpress projects that had to be done by Thursday, and the grad print class spent two afternoons over in the gallery critiquing our show. Jessica and I were up until 3 on Tuesday night trying to get the @#$%^&* Epson printer to work properly for us (and I had to get up at 6 the next morning to get on the Vandercook to print my text). Gah. Some images of the letterpress stuff are over on my flickr page, but I'm just too lazy right now to upload them here.

2. For Cari Luna:

I had tostones for breakfast. And that reminded me:

Here is the recipe for butter tarts that I promised you ages ago and then forgot about. It's the one my mom always makes, and comes from the Five Roses Cookbook. I guess I'm probably not supposed to publish a recipe from a book, but I like to live on the edge. Heh.

Prize Butter Tarts (Five Roses Cookbook Edition 24)

1 pastry recipe
1 egg(beaten)
1/3 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons milk
1/2 cup raisins, currants or chopped pecans (optional; my mom often leaves them plain and they're fantastic that way, and I've never tried a butter tart with currants. It sounds gross, though)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Put pastry in tart pan.
Mix all ingredients together, fill tart shells 2/3 full. Bake in a hot oven (450) for 8 minutes, then reduce temperature to 350 and bake 15 to 20 minutes longer or until pastry is delicately brown.

And that's it! Butter tarts are pretty similar to pecan pie, but are way better without the pecans. Also, because they're small you get a much nicer ratio of crust to filling. You could also try them with maple syrup if you want to ramp up the Canadianness a little. Mmm!

3. I'll be putting my beautiful Spike aside for a little while to concentrate on achieving my personal best in the Knitting Olympics, but here's a picture of where she's at right now.

I'm using the handspun cashmere that Claudia sent me last spring, with some bits of Kool-Aid dyed recycled lambswool as accents. This yarn is so soft and so lovely; when I had the first half of the scarf off the needles I wore it around the house for a while and I can't believe the feeling of it around my neck. When Peter first felt the yarn he suggested making underpants, and although I still think that's kind of silly, I also sort of wish I had made underpants now that I know what cashmere feels like against skin. Um, sorry. TMI.

4. I've started dividing up my huge stash of badges into sets of four and photographing them, and as soon as I hit "post" here I'll be uploading them onto flickr, as well as some shrink plastic bracelets and hair pins. We're still working on banging out the shop pages, so for the time being I'll put merchandise up on flickr so people can e-mail me to purchase; I accept paypal, but am willing to make other arrangements as well. Also, for those of you still patiently waiting for the shirts, I'm ordering some new silkscreens this week. So there really WILL be shirts here, and soon.

5. My evil plan to convert everyone I know to the dark side is chugging along at a marvelous pace. I'm teaching some of my colleagues to knit, and we've started meeting up and knitting at Hot Corner on Monday nights. Apparently there are some people who knit on Mondays around the corner at the Manhattan, and we'd only been meeting for three weeks when someone from that group said to someone from our group, "oh, you're one of the Hot Corner knitters". How they knew about us I haven't a clue, but it might be fun to start up a rivalry. We're going to need to get matching bowling shirts, and a logo. Heh. All will be assimilated! So if you're in or around Athens Georgia, come knit with us, Monday nights around 7-7:30 at Hot Corner. You know you want to.

Here's Jenn last week, wearing her newly finished scarf:

And Euni had only known how to knit for about twenty minutes when the photo was taken; look at her hands fly! She's one of those fibre people who can do anything, so I'm sure she'll be putting me to shame in no time.

6. There is olive bread in the oven, nearly done. The smell in this apartment right now is divine.

Posted by jodi at 12:43 PM | Comments (3) | categories:  food : in the studio : sticks and string

January 14, 2006

And thick and fast they came at last, and more, and more, and more

We had some wild weather here yesterday, with periods of torrential downpoar (which I got caught in on the way home, whee!) and big, big winds. The last of the pecans have finally been wrenched from the trees; at times during the evening it sounded like a hailstorm with all the pecans falling on my roof. This morning I went out and collected a big bowl of them. What should I make?

Posted by jodi at 01:30 PM | Comments (11) | categories:  food

December 12, 2005

Sweet, sweet home

It's so good to be back in the snow and cold. I even got to go out and shovel on my first day home! The novelty of that will no doubt wear off quickly, but for now I'm happy.

The trip was pretty uneventful despite my apprehension. I wasn't afraid of the actual flying, just afraid of the airport; I'm always paranoid and prone to panic in places like that, and convinced that I'm going to get lost or walk into the wrong place and never find my way out again and it will all end in tears and possibly starvation in some janitor's closet or disused stairwell that I went into thinking it was the bathroom and the door locked behind me and when they find my body it will be all dry and crackly and the only way they'll know it's me is because I'm the only dried-up decomposed skeleton with three wisdom teeth. Fortunately Sandy is very tolerant and understanding and she held my hand all the way to the security area, and despite the fact that I almost gave birth to my entire digestive system in the parking lot when I found out I had to actually ride a TRAIN from the airport to the terminal, it wasn't that hard. It helps that they herd you like cattle and there's really no way to get lost. As for the flight itself, it wasn't all that exciting. I sort of expected the plane to be, you know, really big; instead it was the same width as a city bus, and not really anything like the movies (that's right, I'm such a hick that I thought flying in an airplane was going to be just like in the movies). But you know the part when you get up past the clouds and into the sun and then they tell you you're at 35000 feet and it's hot and unbelievably bright and you're looking down at a soft, wet white tundra, way down below? I sort of wanted to stay there. Forever. Except I'd rather not stay there with the actual people who were on that plane with me, especially the cell phone lady.

My plane got in at suppertime so we went straight to my favourite restaurant to gorge ourselves on Ethiopian food.

I really, really missed this. Then Saturday I got to have my grape leaf sandwich, so now my belly is well stuffed with the foods I can't get in Athens. I wonder how well those sandwiches would freeze if I brought ten or so back to Georgia with me?

As promised, here are the finished graduation socks, photographed right here in my own home on my great-great-grandmother's sewing chair, with a fat (and apparently itchy) kitty in the background for a little extra stripeyness (have I mentioned how happy I am to be here?). The specs: Lion Brand Magic Stripes yarn; at first I used the Pom Squad pattern, but my novice attempts at short-row heels came out so holey, messy and weird-fitting that I unraveled the whole lot and did them according to my bog-standard sock formula instead, top-down with a reinforced heel flap. The fit is perfect, with just the right amount of ankle cleavage showing.

Here's my progress on the back of the Patons Urban Aran:

It started out as this cardigan, which I realized later just wasn't going to look good at all, since I'd had to block the ribbing so roughly to fit me. I had originally thought that I didn't have enough of the red to make a whole sweater but then I found an extra stash of it, so I'm pretty sure there's enough for the Urban Aran. I'm going to do the front in two pieces to make it a zip cardigan, and not do the collar so long.

See those lovely centre-pull balls at the top? Wonderful Sandy gave me a ball winder as an early birthday gift. Makes me wish I'd brought more yarn with me so I could wind it all up. Whee!

Today's project is a gift for Someone Very Special, which I hope to have ready to give by Wednesday or so. You can see I have a lot done already.

Posted by jodi at 11:54 AM | Comments (6) | categories:  food : jet set : self-absorbtion : sticks and string : windsor

October 31, 2005

The Joey stuff

A couple of weeks ago I went to a pot luck with my neighbours, and Jenn's old roommate Joey showed up halfway through supper bearing an amazing cold pasta dish that was so good it gave me that little food orgasm. I went home carrying all that was left of it, and badly needing to know how to make it. I haven't got the recipe yet, and today I couldn't wait any longer. So I made it up myself.

The dish was basically pasta, greens, garlic, crushed red chillies, bread crumbs (I never would have thought to use bread crumbs in a pasta dish!) and some kind of light sauce. I wanted to try something tahini-based, even though Jenn said that she doubted he would have used tahini. I thought a good starting place would be Jae's vegan "alfredo" sauce recipe, since it contains most of the things I was guessing were in the Joey stuff.

I started by frying up some garlic and onion in olive oil, then threw in a huge pile of chopped-up collard greens (thanks, Cari, for the great tips on how to cook greens. I've been eating them all week) and sauteed them until they were soft and really bright green. Then I added about four chopped (dried) red chillies, some black pepper and sea salt, and about half the tahini and plain soy milk called for in Jae's alfredo recipe. Here's what all that looked like cooking down:

After it had thickened up a bit I added the lemon juice and took it off the stove. I let the sauce cool before mixing it into my cooled pasta, but next time I'll mix it up while both are warm so that it's a little easier to get the collard greens to not clump together.

I toasted three slices of bread under the broiler with butter and crushed garlic (obviously to make it vegan you would substitute margarine or olive oil). I accidentally let about half of it burn up, so only about one and a half slices of bread made it into the salad. This turned out to be the perfect amount.

Then came the fine tuning: I was pretty sure that Joey's recipe had a lot of raw garlic in it, so I crushed one more clove right into the salad bowl. It didn't taste quite hot or tangy enough, so I chopped three more chillies into the bowl and threw about two tablespoons more lemon juice in.

Perfect. I could eat this every day. If you want to try it, you can get Jae's "fettucini no-fredo" recipe in her hot-off-the-press cookzine, Ripe #4.

Update: Jenn told me that Joey likely also puts Braggs in the salad, because apparently he puts it in everything. I've never used this and have no idea what it tastes like, but the second time I made the Joey stuff I threw in some soy sauce, and it was good. Really good.

I also made myself a Hallowe'en costume today, since there's a party tonight. Here's a peek:

I'm going as flypaper.

Posted by jodi at 08:11 PM | Comments (12) | categories:  food