Still winter here..

 

Finally the Great Lakes are frozen enough that the constant lake effect snow squalls have eased off.  Despite it still being stupidly cold, we've had a couple of sunny days and a couple of sunny-ish days, where it was bright, although there was cloud cover and those lovely white/grey wintery skies we get here.   We've also had hoar frost, and icy fog which is both beautiful and odd at the same time.  

This was first thing this morning, just a bit after sunrise.  A few minutes later, I was heading into town and had to put my lights on because that little layer of fog, became a heavy, almost engulfing fog, which lasted until about 10 minutes after I got home  an hour and a half later.   Literally 10 minutes after I'd gotten home and made some tea, I looked out to see no fog, and sunshine.   A happy surprise for sure, but a surprisingly quick switch in the weather.

At least it wasn't -23C when I left the house this morning.  It was a balmy -17C and had actually warmed up to -14C when I got home.  The local groundhog has predicted an early spring.  Realistically, even if we get 6 more weeks of winter, that's doing pretty good. 

 I remember the year we got the sheep.  They arrived in March and it was -25 during the day and much colder at night.  They were about to lamb and did so before the cold weather broke.   With the birth of the first lamb, I ended up routing through the kids cast off sweaters,  found a couple and cut the arms off to make little lamb sweaters because I worried that these tiny babies with no body fat wouldn't survive the cold.  I slipped them on after mama had finished cleaning them up and they'd dried off.   Neither the lambs nor the mamas cared and a few days later, the babies had outgrown the sweaters, had nice fluffy coats and were thriving.   I don't think they actually needed the sweaters, but it made me feel better!   

This is what I made during the past couple of evenings.  He's a free pattern from Ravelry.  The yarn is some of my early spinning, that I dyed with woad that I'd grown.   The green is leftovers from the green shawl I'd just made.   The yarn is a bit uneven with some thicker and thinner sections.  It's been in my hand spun bin for years.   I believe that beginner handspun yarn should be used, even if it's years later.   He's cute.    I use safety eyes on some of my knitted stuffies.   To make sure those eyes stay put, I cut a square of felt, cut a tiny slit or x in it.  I put the eye through the knitted fabric, then I put the square of felt over the post of the eye, and then put the safety back on the post.   It pretty much holds those eyes solidly in place.

Mrs. Rorer's Peach Pie 1886

This was a super easy and delightful treat which tasted like summer!

2 crust pie dough - home made or purchased

peaches - fresh, frozen, tinned

1/2 c sugar

1/4 c water (or reserved peach juice/liquid)

1-2 tbsp cornstarch (optional)

I made a standard 2 crust pie dough and lined a greased pie tin with it, reserving just over 1/3 for a top crust.   Since peaches are definitely not in season here, I used a tin of peaches, drained with the juice reserved.  I could have used almost 2 tins to make a really full pie, but they're expensive so I tried just one and it was still a nice amount.   

Peach prep:  fresh - scald peaches, peel off the skin, slice and remove stones.

Frozen - thaw and drain reserving juice

Tinned - (I used the no sugar kind) drain and reserve the juice

Mix the peaches with the sugar, water or juice and cornstarch if using.  Put the fruit filling into the lined pie tin.  Roll out the remaining crust dough and lay over the fruit to make a top crust.  Crimp the edges and cut vents.

Bake 400F for 20 - 25 minutes, reduce heat to 350 F and bake until the crust is nicely browned and the filling bubbles a bit.    It's likely a good idea to set the pie tin, on a cookie sheet in the oven, just in case it drips.

This was quick to whip up, tasty and very pretty on the plate.  I used a fancy pie topper template which looks way better before it's baked, but just a few vent slits cut into the pie or a little hole in the middle of the top crust would work just as well to let the steam out

Shawls

This is the green shawl finished, except for blocking.  It's become a favourite of the cats, who seem to enjoy sleeping on it.   I like it too because of the more muted colours.  The pale green, not one of my favourite colours at all, looks rather nice with rest of the greens and the grey.  They work well together. The amazing part of this shawl is that I thought it knit fairly quickly and was quite fun.  Of course after the fact, it may have taken my longer to knit than I recollect.   Its size was limited by the amount of yarn that I had.  I have leftover pale green and grey, but the last section of dark green used the last of all 3 different shades.  I was just a few rows short with the lightest shade of dark green, so worked though the bits and pieces, cut ends, short balls of the other greens, working from the lightest dark green to the darker shade.   It looks just fine, and I only had a few little ends left.  It has a grey garter stitch border so that it would hang straight after casting off and wouldn't curl.

I'm not sure about blocking it though.  It is large and drapey.  I don't think I have a large enough space to block it properly.  I may just wait until the spring and block it outside on the deck.  

Currently I have another shawl on the needles.   I found several balls of this beige/grey colour in the bin of my handspun odds and ends.  I'm not sure if it's handspun because it's been in hand wound balls rather than skeins for who knows how long.   It's a bit flattened in places. Rather than re-skein it, wash it gently and let it dry before I used it, I jumped right in and started another shawl. My first try was a garter stitch shawl, a simple, plain every day garment.  However I got bored of the knitting fairly quickly.   I ripped it out, a whole evenings work, which was a bit irritating, and restarted.  This is almost as simple as the original start, but has a bit more interest in having to count the stockinette stitch rows, and the garter stitch stripes.  

 I had knit too far to rip it out when I realised that I had grabbed the wrong knitting needles and am using a slightly smaller size than I'd normally use for this weight of yarn in a shawl.   I'm blaming that on the fact that my interchangeable needles in my favourite size had one break.  They are stupidly expensive and I haven't wanted to spend the extra money on a new set of that size needles.  The cord is fine of course, although I have to figure out how to wiggle the broken end off it.   Still, the needles are wooden and feel really nice to use.  The one on this shawl is aluminium and has a stiff cord, which just isn't quite so friendly.

Also, I lost one of the needle point protectors, which I use to keep the stitches on the needles while I'm not actively knitting.  It fell off as I was moving it to photograph it and it seems to have just vanished.  I moved it barely 2 metres.  How can it disappear in that space?  There was a cat lurking, sooo.....

I'm pretty sure I don't have quite enough of the main yarn to finish the shawl in the size I was aiming for.   I do have some darker brown which is of a similar grist which looks like it might have enough yardage to do a final repeat or at least a bottom border.  Maybe I'll go for a seed stitch border this time.

I have 2 more shawls in the planning stages, possibly 3 if I weave the one.   I'm spinning up my birthday merino right now.  It's going to be a 2 ply yarn.  I have 454 g of the commercial roving, so it' spinning up fairly quickly.  With that much roving, I should be able to spin enough yarn for a decent sized shawl.  Right now the plan is to dye the yarn in shades of blue or blue grey.   Sometimes plans change though :)

 

Mrs. Rorer's Chocolate Blanc Mange

I had a hankering to try a new recipe, and had some milk to use up, so I spent way too long looking for a simple blanc mange recipe.  There are a lot of them.  Blanc Mange goes way back to when it was a main dish of rice and chicken cooked in almond milk, to various forms as it changes to become the corn flour/corn starch recipe of today.   There are a lot of mid 19th century recipes using egg whites as an addition, but not necessarily cooked.   I found several fancy recipes for a layered pudding and finally found this simple recipe, for what is basically a moulded chocolate pudding, in a fairly modern form.

Mrs. Rorer's New Cook Book, 1902

This was a simple recipe.  I'll admit I used the microwave instead of a double boiler, but it worked.  

Ingredients -  

1 pint milk (2 cups)

4 tbsp sugar

3 tbsp corn starch or corn flour

2 oz chocolate

chop the chocolate.   Mix the milk and sugar together and stir to dissolve.   Heat until almost boiling and remove 1/2 cup of the milk and set it aside.   Into the small portion of milk, add the corn starch and stir until mixed in completely.   Add the chopped chocolate to the rest of the milk and heat until the chocolate melts, stirring until it is well blended.  Add the milk/cornstarch mixture back into the pot, and heat it up until it thickens and just starts to boil.   Stir constantly so it doesn't burn.   Pour into dishes or a prepared mould.

I used standard bakers chocolate. I think using chocolate rather than cocoa may have helped it firm up to be a mouldable pudding.   If I had to substitute cocoa, I'd add 1 or 2 tablespoons of sugar, and a bit more cornstarch to make up for this.

Using a double boiler minimises the risk of burning, and if you don't have an official double boiler pot, just stick a not melting mixing bowl over a pot of boiling water.   Stainless works well, but a quality glass one should be fine too.  Just don't use plastic.  I used a glass bowl in the microwave.  I set it on high for 3 minutes to heat up, removed the portion of milk and added the chocolate, set it at 1 minute and stirred after each time.  It took less than 3 minutes melt and stir in the chocolate.  I added the reserved milk/cornstarch mixture and heated it for another 2 minutes until it was thick.   If you undercook the cornstarch it will taste a bit raw and starch.  Fully cooked, it's nice, thick and a bit creamy.

Iused little cups for moulds.   This makes about 2.5 cups of pudding, so a proper pudding mould in that size would be very effective for a display piece.   I stuck the cups in the fridge to cool.  It didn't take too long before I could tip the pudding out onto the plate.  I didn't serve it with cream or milk, but a bit of whipped cream on top would be a lovely addition.

It's a nice, simple and easy pudding.  The ability to mould this makes it suitable for a fancy presentation.  Definitely a recipe to use again.

Afterthought lifeline

simple shawl with handspun yarn

I'm using up a bunch of odds and ends of handspun yarn to make a shawl.  I've been dyeing much of it as it was various shades of white.  Most of it is a merino/silk blend but there are a couple of skeins of plain merino yarn as well.  I didn't date these bits and pieces but some of the skeins may be over a decade old, just sitting, waiting to be used.   It's the problem when you get 100g or 200g bags of fibre to try.  It's a great sample but what do you do with it afterwards?  It's not enough for much other than mitts or hats.   So I've been saving it and looking through a bin or two, I realised that I had a lot of it.   I'm hoping I have enough to make a reasonably good sized shawl, since I like a more functional garment rather than a decorative one.   It's a simple pattern, with stockinette stitch stripes, with a yarn over pattern between them.  It's slower than the last couple of shawls that I knit that were garter stitch, but easier to keep track of since the front and back are different, and increases are all on the back.    

lifeline added picking up stitches from back

I've knitted almost to the halfway mark, and my fingers are crossed that I don't run out of yarn.  There is a lot of pale green, grey and that peachy pink colour but not so much of the darker greens.   I tried some blue which I thought was the same weight, but turned out to be totally not at all.  I didn't like the way it felt, being so much thicker, so after 3 rows I decided it had to go.  I couldn't imagine frogging each stitch individually since there are already almost 200 stitches per row.  The problem was that I was going to have to rip back to a yarn over row so picking up the stitches from the front was going to be more difficult.   A quick search showed a method of picking up the stitches from the back and for the yarn over row, this was perfect.   It took only a few minutes to take a darning needle threaded with crochet cotton to pick up all the stitches.   I did a quick check, found one missed stitch, but it was only 7 stitches from the end of the row, so I slipped them off the needle and re-picked them up.   I checked again, decided it was good and I will admit that I did hold my breath a bit while I pulled that lifeline out.   Success!  It looks good.

needle threaded through the stitches on lifeline

I'm ready to knit again.   I'm not sure I like that peachy colour, so may need to over-dye it to tone it down a bit.   I don't have enough grey to alternate stripes but the pale green looks like it works as a lighter colour as well.   I'm still wondering how come it turned out so pale, while the other skein with it, was so dark.  Looking at the photos, I'm really glad I got rid of the blue.  I'm also really happy about the technique of picking up a lifeline from the back of the work.  It was so easy.

 

December update

I updated my operating system in early December and bam, I was unable to post any photos to my blog.  All the suggestions made no sense, since there weren't any of those options that I could find in my settings.  Finally though, this morning, I found a hint, tried it and poof things seem to be back to normal.   I did some dyeing over the holidays.  These red mittens were supposed to be made with the Newfoundland mitten pattern.  However the grey was too similar to the blues and yellows in the yarn and the lack of contrast made the mittens dull and unexceptional.  I even tried two different greys, one quite a lot  darker than this one.  Neither looked good, so I settled with a simple cable up the centre.   They look fairly nice, although simpler than I'd wanted.  They are mittens though, so very warm and wearable.

The yarn was leftover commercial wool from other projects.  I had some white which I didn't think was enough for two mittens, and bits of grey.  Both were similar weights.  I'd wanted to dye the yarn pink and blue, with the dyes blending where meeting to make purples.   I had been using quite old dyes, and while usually they are fine, these had obviously started to thicken.  When the pinks started turning red, I mixed in some yellows to change up the colour way a bit.   It looked really good in the skein!   It's nice enough knit up, but this does show how you really can't necessarily gauge how a skein will look when knit up.

Also, more dyeing, these two skeins were dyed in the same vat, at the same time.  They are totally different greens.   The small dark green skein was a slightly off white compared to the lighter green, but not dark enough for this difference in colour.  They were obviously two different breeds of sheep, but both were wool so the take up shouldn't have been quite this dramatic.  Luckily, this yarn is for a shawl with light and darks, so it should work just fine.

Also, sometimes commercial sock yarn doesn't look like you think it will knit up.  This yarn looked bright and cheery in the skein.  I knew it wasn't red and green type holiday colours, but it looked festive and so bright that I made a quick pair of socks from it.  Once knit up, I could tell that they aren't Xmas socks though, they are spring socks.   Pretty and pastel.   Nice enough and it's a German yarn, so a very good quality.  It knit up like a dream.   I've found though that a lot of the imported German super washes, do fine in the washer, but don't like the dryer, so these are hang to dry only, just to be sure.

I hope everyone's holiday time was full of good things.  We got to see family only because we could all only find one day that worked for everyone.  It turned out to be the only day without freezing rain, or ridiculous snow squalls and blizzard conditions.  We had it far easier than other parts of our province, but still, I didn't leave the house even for groceries for a couple of weeks, between the weather and holidays. 

 

Soup a la Julienne

This is a vegetable soup which is quick to make up and surprisingly delicious.   It could easily be served with fried snippets, or bread triangles fried in a bit of butter to make a lovely lunch meal.  I make this for my own lunch during the winter when there are no leftovers handy.  Sometimes I also add a little leftover meat, which of course makes it a little more filling. 

 Sadly, I've only been able to find the recipe book, The Dominion Home Cookbook, 1868, published in Toronto, on microfiche, which really is a more difficult format to work with. Still it's a tasty, simple recipe.

Soup al la Julienne or Vegetable Soup - The Dominion Home Cookbook 1868 (Toronto)

Soup al la Julienne or Vegetable.  Cut various kinds of vegetables in pieces, celery, carrots, turnips, onions &c., and having put two ounces of butter in the bottom of a stew-lan, put the vegetables on the top of the butter, together with any others that may be in season.  Stew or fry them over a slow fire, keeping them stirred, and adding a little of the stock occasionally; soak small pieces of crust or bread in the remainder of the broth or stock, and when the vegetables are nearly stewed, add them and warm them up together.

5 cups chopped veggies -  carrots, onions, celery, turnip, mushrooms, leeks or whatever you have on hand.   If you are also using softer veggies, add them a little later so they don't over cook.

1 litre broth or stock, 

water

bread crumbs, or some crust pieces if you want the soup thickened.

1/4 cup butter. (half that will do fine if you want a less rich soup)

Method

Put butter in a stew or soup pot.  Start it melting.  Add the chopped veggies and stir periodically until they are almost cooked.   Add the broth, a bit of water to thin the soup out a bit or add volume (1/2 cup - to 2 cups).  Add any more delicate veggies at this time : peas, beans, cabbage, etc.  

Heat up and simmer until the vegetables are tender and the soup is heated through.  Add soaked bread bits if you want it thicker.