My mother has a friend, Susie that dyes and spins yarn. If you go to her site you can see some of her beautiful handiwork. I particularly like the ‘irises’ and the ‘baby so blue’.
When I got home last night I found a package waiting for me. It was quite unexpected. It was from Susie, who I had met once last fall. Insid the envelope was was a beautiful skein of yarn, hand dyed in vivid candy shades of pink and blue. It’s a very lightweight super wash merino wool. She sent me 1100 yards. I have a skein of hand dyed super wash merino wool that measures 1100 yards! Go to your yarn store and see how many yards are in a typical skein of high quality yarn!
1100 yards of yarn would pass over a football field 11 times! 1100 yards would pass over me 660 times! 1100 yards would kick your mom’s ass and FEEL NO REMORSE!!!!
I immediately pulled out my pattern books to find something worthy of such yarn. I’m still looking though I do have some ideas brewing in my head. Most certainly, this yarn will not be made into gifts. I’m feeling greedy, I want to keep things for me!
Monthly Archives: April 2007
en la edad del miedo le ofrezco los cacahuetes
Before I regale you with tales of my enormously delicious paella meal, I will tell you 2 things from this weekend that are totally retarded. It’s important that you don’t get the idea that I am some sort of super hero with only magic and smooth writing pens. I am just a regular person with a regular life. I want to guarantee balance. If there is no balance, there is no truth…
1) We decided to do our grocery shopping for easter dinner on saturday night at 10pm. This could end here as it is pretty retarded, but it was cool, we got our stuff and got home. I walked in the door with approximately 8000* bags of groceries on my arms. If you know anything about my dogs you will know that they are an excitable and yet entirely retarded pack of beasts with no concept of “other” or “cause and effect”. As I tried to get in the door quickly Maddie was trying to tell me important news like “My name is Maddie” and “OH MY GOD!!! You are now inside the house” or my personal favorite “when you were not in the house I farted and it kind of smelled like dog food and it was really weird so I barked a little.” My dogs never say things like “wow, that’s a lot of stuff, can I help you carry anything?” no, they can’t conceive of any notion other than, “TOUCH ME TOUCH ME ACKNOWLEDGE ME VALIDATE ME!”. In Maddie’s frenzy she managed to knock into my legs and send my flying onto my face.
Sprawled out in the living room, groceries everywhere, do you think Maddie would feel remorse? No, mostly she just saw it as an opportunity to say, “my nose is very wet and I want to leave nose wetness on your face as a gift.”
2) Sunday, after eating a delightful brunch at my dad’s house (ham….the king of the pink meats) I had to swing by my house and hurriedly gather up the food and equipment to make the amazing paella dinner at Owen’s place. With Anna’s help I hauled the bags and pans and whatnot out to the car. I dropped Anna off at home and popped over to Owen’s place. It was a beautifully sunny afternoon, the skies were so clear blue and I was belting out “The Decemberists” at the top of my lungs. When I got to Owen’s and started to unload the car, all my joy dissolved…
In the process of loading up the car I had put my lovely 12 in Calphalon paella pan on the trunk of the car. You know where this is going. No pan in my car, certainly no pan just sitting on the trunk of my car. I lost my pan. I drove home hoping it had fallen off my car as I was pulling out of my driveway and nobody noticed it. Sigh. It either shattered into 1 billion anodized pieces or someone not so unlike myself came upon it and said “a practically new calphalon pan with cover that retails for $168** just lying in the street? Happy easter to ME!”. My pan is gone. I would be sad or angry but really it was my own fault and all I can do is laugh at my own stupidity.
Okay, that was my “retard” portion of the weekend, now on to the food.
Owen is amazing to cook with. Anything I use gets snatched up and cleaned immediately, he takes orders well and makes me buttered english muffins when my energy gets low.
The first crostini we made was went from the planned “Mirableu blue cheese, roasted apricots and spiced pecans” to a combination of Point Reyes blue, roasted plums and spiced pecans due to the vagaries of the imported cheese and stone fruit situation in minnesota. This ended up being a balance of sweet, salty, sour and spicy all at once.
The next crostini was Brillat-Savarin brie, pears poached in ginger syrup and roasted curried yam slices. Same result, sweet, spicy and salty, but no sour. I loved it. The pears were amazingly spicy and sweet. The leftover ginger syrup went into martinis later in the evening.
A salad of mixed greens, flowers, herbs and mint and an orange mustard vinaigrette. The vinaigrette in its initial incarnation of orange juice, oil, homemade mustard and shallots was weak and without the proverbial balls I was looking for. I added about a teaspoon of mustard powder and threw it in the fridge for further flavor blossoming. The mustard powder did the trick, sweet and tangy and definitely not bland.
This is the paella recipe that I used as sort of a base. A jumping off point, so to speak. We got rid of the chorizo to satisfy the sensibilities of the fish but not meat eaters and replaced it with squid, halibut and bay scallops (along with the shrimp, mussels and clams). I wanted the flavor to be more “Spring” than “Summer” so I cut back on the tomatoes a bit and added a metric buttload of orange juice reduction and orange zest. I also used peppadews instead of piquillos.
Also, it took way way way longer for the rice to cook than I anticipated, so the fish got a bit overcooked, but no one minded.
Dessert was an orange cream tart with strawberries, mango and blueberries on the top, glazed with lemon ginger marmalade. I accidentally added too much sugar to the mascarpone cheese and it ended up being way way sweet. sigh. better luck next time I guess. Owen arranged the fruit on the tart as he has way more visual creativity than I do.
We ate, drank, gossiped and had a great time. David and I drove seperately and he won major points for finding and bringing the cocktail napkins that I forgot! I didn’t even have to ask him. He’s like magic.
I hope it was a happy Easter for you all! Oh! April, sorry babe, there were no leftovers. We were big big pigs.
* When you own two dogs it is important to always have a steady supply of plastic bags in the house. This means that when you bag your groceries you use plastic and you place 1 or 2 items only in each bag. a 2 bag shopping trip can easily yield 8-10 bags if you bag things up properly.
** I did not pay $168 for this pan. I got it on sale. I am not THAT retarded.
Beautiful
Met Owen at 10am outside Coastal Seafood. Already there were people waiting to get in. I had forgotten about Good Friday! Celebrate! Eat Fish! You could see the staff die a little in their souls as they saw us out there. I hadn’t even considered the parking lot would be full of nutty women, those fourty-somethings that live in 50’s blocks just south of Calhoun. Not the Edina-ites, they don’t go to the city for their fish, these are the eco-happy, liberal, would be liberal but the taxes are just too high kinds of ladies in their fair trade wool coats and Fendi bags. Hot.
Owen and I were in and out in a matter of minutes. Fuck, I love cooking without a budget. We got mussels, clams, shrimp, squid, tiny tiny bay scallops and some halibut, all for the paella. I’m playing with a paella recipe, I want to make it a little more spring like instead of summery, so I’m going to hit it with orange and cut back a bit on the tomato. We’ll see how that goes.
I’m making two appetizers, one is a crostini with sheep’s milk blue, spiced pecans, and roasted apricots. I love this one because i think it’s going to really balance the salty/sweet/spicy, if we need sour I’ll dash some vinaigrette on there. We also have some brie for the other appetizer and while another crostini would be nice, i’m thinking I’d like to show just a little more creativity than that.
There will also be a quick salad of mixed greens, orange mustard vinaigrette and probably some apricots and nuts, you know, because I have them.
Dessert is currently a tart filled with orange spiked mascarpone, covered in some sort of fruit and glazed with lemon ginger marmalade. This is still up in the air as I don’t know what fresh fruit is available and we’ll have to wing it. This is minnesota, it’s not easy to get fresh fruit in the winter than hasn’t been bred down to super stable but completely styrofoam flavored.
After the seafood store and some dallying here and there, David and I headed out to the Guyanese restaurant. It was okay. The food is an interesting cross between Indian and Carribean, unfortunately, everything at this place was too salty and too overcooked. The service was great and everyone was really helpful, I just had hoped for something….more.
I’m off to get some ice cream as it seems to be dinner time. later Chochachos
stubborn little cuss
Every once in a while the more adult like people around me realize that maybe putting some boundaries on me would be a good idea. Last night David suggested that perhaps I should not have ice cream until AFTER I ate a nutricious and balanced dinner. He also pointed out that ice cream, in and of itself is not a nutricious balanced meal and that I could not substitute ice cream for dinner.
He thought that maybe a good rule would be “eat dinner first, have ice cream after”
I suggested that a better rule might be “heather can have ice cream”
He said that technically, that was not a rule. I said that technically, I did not care. I thought it was a perfectly cromulent rule.
We also had a debate about what constituted an appropriate serving size of ice cream. I felt that since there was nothing mentioned in the rule “heather can have ice cream” regarding the amount of ice cream that the framers of the rule felt it was my right to eat as much ice cream as I wanted. We might have to take this to the supreme court.
Unfortunately, I think that the Supreme Court in my house is populated by dogs. Dammit.
Today is my Friday! It’s like I’m writing to you from the future! Sometimes you just need a day off to buy shell fish for Easter Paella, eat at the Guyanese restaurant and generally swing your butt around.
the beauty and the pain
Date night monday night. It was cute and fun. The Birchwood was doing half priced bottle of wine night (making the bottles of wine only double the cost!) so we cozied up, split a bottle of wine, a salad and the cheese plate.
Being the über-romantics that we are, we headed to the grocery store in all our tipsy glory to buy things like ham, cheetohs, ice cream, lettuce and cilantro. I also got me a bubble gum ball on the way out.
Back at home we put the groceries away and David went to take the dogs out. Before he left he handed me a bottle of wine off the rack and told me to see if I could get it open. Now, had I not already consumed half a bottle I would have said something responsible like “dude, it’s after 10 and I have to work in the morning”, but I didn’t.
Now, I am sitting at my desk in a haze. We got to sleep after 3am and it was fitful, wine fueled sleep. David is on spring break this week and does not have to work. He very very sweetly got up with me this morning, made my coffee, got my clothes ready and made sure I didn’t fall asleep in the tub. He even got me out the door on time. I can’t even get myself out the door on time when I’m not exhausted and sleepy. Luckily I don’t have a hangover or anything.
on a side note, i’m entirely too pissed off at food companies that decide to package their food in smaller and smaller packages. It’s rare to get a half gallon of ice cream anymore, now it is 1.75 quarts. A 5 pound bag of sugar has been downsized to 4 pounds and I even saw a “2 litre” bottle of soda at the store that looked suspiciously small, it was 1.5 litres. It’s not like they’re selling it for any cheaper. assholes.