Textiles and Tea with hot chocolate and gloves

Yesterday's Textiles and Tea featured this longtime Penland Crafts teacher, who talked about her life and teaching, showed the gallery where she sells her work, and her weaving as well as free arm machine embroidery. 

She also spins but says she's only an okay spinner, does it largely to please herself.

Here I accompanied the program with ginger walnut hot biscuits and hot chocolate
 

while I knitted the first of the next pair of gloves, showing you both sides here

Once the second one's done, I'll send off the current three pairs and see what's next. This year has been great for the Sock Ministry which I started in February and haven't stopped. Now I've added in gloves for a bit of variety for the knitter, so I expect to continue.

Meanwhile the puzzle is creeping on, and I've reached the point where I'm not shouting pieces missing, pieces missing, which I'm usually convinced of, for the first part of every puzzle.

Oh ye of little faith, puzzle on.

Happy day, everyone, we don't have to have all the pieces worked out before we can move on. Just as well. 

Today's the last day of this natal year for me. I wonder if I'll feel different tomorrow. .

Daily Bread and Daily Respite

 I needed bread, and thought the fastest form, as usual when I don't feel like heating up the kitchen long, is hot biscuits.

So today I  made a batch and thought a different touch might be good.

Usual buttermilk sub made from whole milk and lemon juice, three table spoons Italian olive oil.

Mixture of durum whole wheat and bolted wheat, baking soda and baking powder, salt, with a new addition, a tablespoon each of dried sage, from my plant, and lime zest which needed using, been in the freezer long enough. 425° ten minutes.

It worked okay, could have used more flavoring but I hadn't wanted to overwhelm the taste.

Lunch, leek potato soup with a sprig of fresh sage on top, and a hot biscuit, split and buttered with Irish butter. Pretty good.

When you're not in the mood for cooking but need to eat, a bit of decoration on top of the soup is very cheering.

Speaking of cheering, I continue to get daily cheerful messages from  Clara Parkes Daily Respite, which she started to help us get through the pandemic. 

I signed up for daily emails, and they're great. Sometimes funny video, sometimes amazing ideas, sometimes her own Vimeo of the water's edge and the sound of little waves near her Maine home.

Highly recommended. She's a designer and very creative person, and you can Google her to find out how to sign up. No, she doesn't know I'm saying this! 

Now I'm reading Bess Crawford, dozing and keeping cool. We had rain overnight, just storms, nothing like the flooding further north. The hurricane hasn't arrived yet. 

These were apparently unrelated rains. They provided us with all the humidity we can handle, which is why I walked this morning and am staying in this afternoon.

Happy Friday, dear readers.

Hot biscuits for a cold day

 These are one half ap flour, one quarter oats, one quarter pastry flour, with walnuts and golden raisins. 

Good for winter afternoon tea. Especially with cranberry jam.

Update on the second pizza. I took it out of the freezer about an hour before needed, and did the final covered cooking. 

The crust was crisp and very good, especially  considering it had been partly baked then frozen and thawed. The fillings were fine. So if you try it, you know you can freeze the second one successfully. It was as good as the first one.

I suddenly remembered a long gone dear neighbor, out of nowhere, you know how that happens. Just brushing my teeth and thought of her this morning. Or rather an expression she invented.

Dot was a post office worker in our tiny local office for many years, and I remembered her explaining patiently about various post office things. My favorite was when she would say, you pay this up front, then later you'll be reinversed. Conjures up interesting visuals.

My Mom had a couple of great ones, such as: she suddenly sat up boltright!  Or my friend after her first visit to Paris saying she tried hard to use her French to talk to the Parishioners.

These malapropisms are funny, and dear, and not entirely inaccurate.  And they're a gentle memory of people who've gone.

Happy New Year

Hoping for a good year for us all.  And thank you to everyone who's made this year a little better for us all.

And here's my latest fitness workout.

This is a mother and daughter team, daughter leading the walking workout, her mother working along.  I like this a lot, much better than young people issuing commands to older ones, without having any in the studio.  She watches how her mother is doing, and doesn't get her stressed out, though she's pretty fit, I must say.  It's ten minutes of perpetual motion, with a lot of variety in movement, which I thought I should try, out of a chair for this series. And if you read on, you'll see why this is important at this exact moment in time.

I made the Shortbread recipe from Tartine, seen here, dough pressed down into the pan

And here it is, cooling, scored for breaking, little fork marks.

At this point I had not tasted it, but it was cooling nicely, when friend from next door brought his two little grandchildren to the door to wish me Happy New Year.  Exquisite timing.  So they went home with a couple of pieces each, warm from the oven.  And they're all dark haired, so I counted them as my First Footers.

Scottish and north of England tradition, you need the first person to set foot in your house (here it was on the step, but who's counting), to be a dark haired man. Since nobody else will be in the house till (dark haired) son visits, I'm all taken care of.  And when the first footer comes in, they get things like this to eat, and adult ones get a strengthening tot of something, all in the name of having a healthy and wealthy New Year.

My dad was our first footer growing up, and he had to leave the house before midnight to join all the other first footers freezing out in the street until they were allowed in for the ceremony right after midnight, after they'd heard the ships in the river sounding their horns or whatever they call them.  Some guys used also to first-foot houses where there wasn't an available dark haired man, and I expect the glass of scotch was very welcome there, too.

Anyway, I tried a piece of the shortbread, and it literally did melt in the mouth.  Gosh it was good.  Posh, but good.

And then, since I need a bready something to go with breakfast, and just couldn't be bothered to bake bread, I made a recipe of hot biscuits with ap flour, no wholewheat this time, with sliced almonds and chopped walnuts.

So now you see why a walking indoor program in this soaking wet weather, is also on the menu.

I don't look back over the year, never have, and this one wasn't very thrilling to remember.  However, some good things came of it.

I got access to meetings, including my centering prayer group, because they went online.  I've developed more blog friends this year, thank you everyone who started reading back in March or thereabouts, you're treasured, as are your own blogposts, those who are bloggers themselves.  And thank you, long-time readers who are still faithfully checking in, after all these years.

And I've been able to take in concerts I'd never have made it to, if I'd had to get there in person. Last night Taiwanese Fusion Jazz, last week Indian Kathak dancing and music. And lectures from the Princeton art museum, The Rug Society, and Emily Dickinson's house. So I feel very enriched.

I hope we've all found some consolations for the anxiety and losses we've dealt with.

Happy New Year!  Hoping for a better one, as always.  And now I have to put the Christmas decorations back in the box for another year. If you were wondering why this is happening on New Year's Eve in the Northern Hemisphere, it's because we have readers in NZ and Australia, for whom it's well into January l, 2021. Being inclusive here! 

Happy New Year, and, in Scots fashion: Lang May Yer Lum Reek!  It means long may your chimney smoke, meaning long life to you.

The reluctant baker tonight

Just thinking about tomorrow's breakfast when I realized, shock, horror, so busy today I forgot I'd run out of bread.

Just couldn't be bothered to bake bread, but I needed something for breakfast.

 Hot biscuit recipe, with fresh dates cut into the dough, whole-wheat flour. In cupcake cases.

This takes about five minutes to mix, ten to bake.

 Even a reluctant baker can manage it.

I must  look up date recipes. These. Medjool are really good, fresh and moist. 

Bored book, chicken and biscuits

Current reading is Bored and Brilliant, really engrossing study of how using tech can splinter our attention, change our brains, and how all is not lost!  A while back I reported on my resolve to recapture my attention span for longer reading, and managed to do it.  Evidently I'm not the only person worrying about thoughts all over the map, and the danger of losing that long term attention span.

And to prove how engrossing it was, I eventually looked up and it was about an hour after I'd planned to start dinner.  That's because when I looked up at the top right corner of the page, there was no time indicator..So I jumped to it, and put the oven on, hot enough for my regular biscuit recipe, a castiron pan in, as it warmed up, then roasted two nice pieces of chicken from the fridge, along with baking the biscuits.  Chicken dusted with kosher salt, lemon zest (from the freezer, always good to have some around) and fennel seeds.

Biscuits done in 12 minutes, at 425F, chicken another ten minutes. Tonight's supper on the plate, tomorrow's chicken and supply of hot biscuits in the background. Really good, and I was able to get back to my book without too much delay. Well, aside from dealing with the smoke alarm which has a personal vendetta against any recipe requiring an oven hotter than a nice gentle 350F.  And toast. It hates toast.

About the book, though, it's really a plan, which people who follow her podcast Note to Self,  know all about, to develop a better use of tech, rather than be leashed to it at all times and feeling unable to complete a task or a thought, even, without checking something, anything.  It's well researched, and I think blogistas who use smartphones more than they ever meant to at the outset might like to look at it.  I heard her discuss the book on WNYC, and since she mentioned her kids, thought at first she had written a board book..noooooo, much better.

Many of our readers are not in the incessant use category, but it's an interesting read, even if for theoretical purposes! A lot of us were, ahem, mature, before the current wave of technology hit, so we have a lot of experience in reading print material, in actual conversation, in real time social life. That helps avoid being overwhelmed.

As an artist, I'm used to focusing on what I need to, and letting my mind go wherever it needs to in the course of developing new works.  In my own experience, the right brain is completely unimpaired by using devices, even my Twitter habit, unlike the analytical left brain, the reading part, which wants everything short and to the point.

I notice, however, and this relates to her point about boredom, that my best art ideas come when I'm tired and have decided to just retire from making art.  Just damn well stop.  That has lasted at most a couple of weeks, then ideas come at me from all over and I have to use them.  And the energy to do it comes back with them. It's emotional as well as mental energy. Art takes a lot of that.  

I think Minoush would probably say, aha, you just stopped dwelling, and let things unfold, that's the point!  And I think it is. Chance favors the fallow mind, as well as the prepared one.

Hot Biscuits. In Full. At Last 6WS

About to make hot biscuits, no bread in the house, shock, horror, and it occurred to me finally, been meaning to do this for ages, to actually give the recipe.  Up to now I've been just saying, oh, look at Silver Palate, it's in there.  

Then I tried that myself, and realized that the little xerox copy I've been working off in my three ring binder, was indeed by the authors, one of them, anyway, but it didn't appear in the book, not the edition I have. Oh. Must have found it in a magazine, oops.

This counts as Giving Bad Advice.  So I will finally remedy it. Simple recipe, which I've adapted here and there.

Anyway, here's the doings, what posh cooks call the mise en place, and ironic ones call the mise en scene, provide your own grave accent there.

Around the clock, whose center is two cups of flour, in this case whole wheat, you see baking powder, one tablespoon, baking soda, half a teaspoon, kosher salt, half a teaspoon, golden raisins for this version, just shake them in as you like. That's all the dry ingredients.

Then come olive oil, five tablespoons (substitute for recipe three of canola oil, ew, and two of vanilla essence, ew again, but if you prefer that I won't judge, very much anyway) one cup of buttermilk (I make this by souring milk with lemon juice). 

I add all the wet ingredients in that container you see there holding the buttermilk, then add them into the flour mixture all at once.

The measuring tools are there, and the whisk is to mix the dry ingredients, instead of sifting, then the big antique Russian fork is for mixing the wet ingredients in, not too vigorously.  You don't have to have a big Russian antique fork, you can use a modern American one, or Canadian, or Kiwi, or whatever you're up for. 

At this point I add the inclusions, raisins, whatever else I feel like.  I've tried adding them to the dry ingredients and they always hung on to unbaked flour and didn't look pretty.  Added in to the wet dough, they get incorporated better.

Oven at 425F, for about 10 minutes, then take a look and see if another two minutes is needed, sometimes is.

I often make it as One Big Thing, on a nonstick dish, probably intended for pizza or something.  I slice it up with a pizza cutter.

And here's a piece of today's version, in action at the lunch table. Bit of  stretch to have a version with raisins in it at lunch, but fine by me. I also sometimes put crushed walnuts, or sunflower seeds, in.   If I'd used ap flour instead of whole wheat, it would look less sort of rustic.  I sometimes do a half and half mix.

So there it is, with apologies for not having realized this earlier, and hopes that you'll give it a try.  This is nice toasted for breakfast, or jammed for teatime.  All purpose handy quick bread.

Mushroom soup and crochet hooks

Today lunch was in the nature of rescued food.  Mushroom soup and hot biscuits.  

The soup came from the water in which I soaked freeze dried shiitake mushrooms, is there such a word as reliquify, if not there should be.  The mushrooms were all used up in the recent spaghetti sauce caper, but why waste that delicious flavored liquid.  So I heated it, bit of chicken broth, salt, dash of lemon juice, bundle of thyme twigs, really good, simmered for about an hour.

And with it hot biscuits, usual recipe, except that recently I had a half gallon of milk which went off before it shoulda.  So I soured it further with lemon juice, then froze it in quantities enough for one recipe at a time of hot biscuits, and it's working fine. Hate to throw away good food.  It's working fine to make biscuits, a little flatter and crisper than with the freshly soured milk, but fine leaven all the same.

And on the craftier side, I was chatting recently on Rav about beaded knitting and showed pix of my phone purses, of which I have quite few.  

They're small, ideal for experiments, and nice little presents, too.  I beaded several of them, using the crochet hook method, which suits me much better than threading them all on ahead of time.  Then I was asked to show the hooks, too, since the size of them was a bit of a mystery to people used to the bigger range of sizes you usually use.

So here's the question: I'm quoting my own post on Rav here: 

Okay, here’s another purse, linen thread and blue glass beads. I used the smallest of the hooks in the pic. Reading left to right, unmarked, probably #10, Boye #10, Boye #9, Bates #3, and Bates # 8 for comparison. I wonder about the sizing, whether these are modern sizes or what, maybe the smallest have their own size range?

And that's the question for any blogista who knows about crochet hook sizing.  I got these from a toolbox found at the thriftie, of a very old person, a serious seamstresss from the quality of silk thread and tools, and the antiquity of some of the newspaper slips things were wrapped in. A Jewish prayer for the traveler in there, too, in the form of a tiny scroll in a capsule, hung on a leather lace. Which I'm keeping with care. So the hooks might be European, brought here as the tools an immigrant might hang on to?   Really don't know, so I'm crowdsourcing for information.  Thank you!

Blistering hot, so sun tea, hot biscuits for afternoon teatime with blueberries

The weather this week is all about blistering heat and storms, well, they do tend to go together around here.  I watered my flowers anyway, just in case.

And figured it would be hot enough to make a batch of sun tea, to have iced, very ladylike, with my newly baked hot biscuits with sunflower seeds in them, 

to be spooned over with blueberry sauce of some kind, not yet made. 

The tea will probably be ready tomorrow, if I remember how this is done.  No rush. It's summer..

Reading a lot as well as all the other stuff that goes down chez Boud, and I'm noticing too many refs to bucket lists.  I really object to this, oh oh, here comes a hobbyhorse from the paddock, neighing and prancing and ready for me to jump right up.

For one thing it tries to make a game of dying, and older people see little to laugh about there (!) and it makes life into some sort of exercise in list making, frantically crossing things off before you go, as if any of us every know when that will be.  Can't help thinking it's a kind of Facebook mentality, or Instagramming to the nth degree, sounds a bit sad, really.  I know people who are fine with it, good for them, really, but I find it works against the notion of allowing life to come in, rather than grabbing at it.

But, since I always like to seek balance sooner or later, before I fall off my horse completely, it is nice to look back and be really glad of the things that you took a risk and actually did, even if they didn't always work out just as planned.  

Like learning the violin at age 47, and being encouraged by six year olds who were a year ahead of me. And playing in an actual orchestra a couple of years later.

And taking a big risk and entering art in juried shows. And accepting invitations to do solo shows, this is a very fear inducing thing, but so glad I did. 

And creating workshops of a kind I'd never seen, to teach other adults to be fearless the same way, in art.  And following the mantra: when it doubt try everything!  Likewise, you don't have to know everything in order to move forward.  You'll learn as you go.  In fact, this is how art works, as well as a lot of other things in life.

Okay, horse is slowing down now, good boy, old Paint, off you go back to the paddock to tell the others what she's banging on about this time..

Which is mainly, it's nice to live without feeling you need to list and plan your life ahead of time!  Life plans are great when you're very young, I had one in my twenties.  Nothing in it transpired, but a lot of much better stuff actually happened.  So there's that.

There's an organizing and planning industry, and good luck to them, but I can't help feeling their keenest clients are people who might do better to just hang loose a bit.  Observe the Shakuhachi effect.

Off to tea now.

 

What's for tea? Bread and jam! 6WS

Astute readers over the years will have noticed that when I get onto an idea, I tend to go a little overboard.  You remember when I got the cordless drill?  the corner punch?  the wall painting gear? Not to mention learning various art techniques..

Same with food. I do love to make things like jam, preserves, pickles.  Something about stirring and saving and spreading on other food is Just Good.  People also like to be given this sort of thing as a little present.

So once again, it's jam, and no fruit is safe in this house.  Recently given three unripe mangoes, I waited a few days for them to ripen then today translated them into mango preserves with crushed walnuts.  Mangoes have plenty of pectin in them, very little sugar, no added pectin, splash of lemon juice, cooked down in a few minutes. Very Ritz.  And I used up the rest of the blueberries the other day making a very nice blueberry jam.  Small quantities, like all the best jam.

I gave half of the blueberry jam to the friend who gave me the mangoes, who after protesting, no, this is too much, conceded that she could easily manage to sample it, preferably before her husband sees it, so she won't have to share..

So afternoon tea is a little baked something, with a little homemade something on it.  Today just hot biscuits with the mango walnut preserve. The pic shows you both steaming hot. Preserve sounds posh, but it only means there's chunks of fruit in it, not a sort of roiling mass of fruitesque material.  You don't have to add the nuts, but I like inclusions in food as in art.

I add just a bit of extra liquid to the hot biscuits, so that the texture is good for splitting and jamming.  Technical point there. 

I like fruit just as fruit, wouldn't waste good strawberries on jam, for instance, but other fruit is good for a trial run.  To date recently I've made jam with figs, dates, apples, apricots, cherries, blueberries and now mangoes. And chutney with bananas and various other items. It's all in moderation, though.

And when you make a small quantity, you can have it practically ready by the time the hot biscuits are baked.  About fifteen minutes start to finish, biscuits now cooling and ready for action. It's not one of those old fashioned harvest home all hands to the kettle type of operation.

Nice afternoon tea, with a pot of English Breakfast, a split and spread hot biscuit, and an audio of a radio play by Ngaio Marsh, on the patio, under the feeder, with birds shouting from behind the fence because they don't like to feed while I'm there.  Some of them don't care, but the woodpeckers are very particular who shares their dining area.

Late July, Corn High

First corn from my local farm today, and since Handsome Son is expected for dinner, I thought it would be good to make a sort of corn thing with three ears of corn, off the cob, a job I hate doing, but anyway,  farm eggs, from another farm, cheese, sea salt and white pepper, and a bunch of thyme from my front yard.  

Added in a can of chickpeas for ballast.  I might have used tomatoes, but I don't get them till tomorrow, and well, I ate all of this week's..I might make a batch of hot biscuits to go with, though, come to think of it. And I'm serving steamed buttered green beans from yet another farm, courtesy of a friend.  Who also gave me another squash..yet another.

Nice glass of sangria, summer sort of wine, will accompany this Lucullan shebang.

Dessert will be build it yourself, fresh blueberries and peaches from the farm this morning, with vanilla yogurt.

Pot of English Breakfast tea, snarling as it comes out of the pot, will round off the proceedings. 

On one of these very hot and humid nights, it's very good to serve yourself a helping of frozen mango slices and frozen blueberries. They act like icecream and candy at the same time, perfect.My mangoes came from yet another friend, and I sliced and froze them right away.  The ones I didn't use to make mango preserve, that is.

Barley flour hot biscuits

Just fyi, I made a batch of hot biscuits using half home ground barley flour and half white wholewheat, with a shower of sunflower seeds in the mix.  I baked the dough in one large shape, then sliced it up with a pizza wheel to cool on a rack.

The original recipe was the hot biscuit recipe from The Silver Palate, which I recommend you take a look at. I've changed it over the years, to my own taste, using more olive oil to replace her canola oil plus vanilla essence, and changed up the sorts of flour I've used and so on.  And added in sunflower seeds or crushed walnuts.  And taken to baking the recipe in a big single piece then slicing it into squarish shapes.

But it's still a very good recipe, heart healthy and all that, which is probably why I originally tried it. And almost as fast as making a sandwich.

The barley flour has a very crunchy, sturdy texture and more powerful flavor than most flours, and very interesting with soup, which is largely how I use hot biscuits.  I expect you could put jam on, if that's your preference, for afternoon tea.  Or honey. Barley's a great nutritious food, good for your lungs among other things.

I love breads of all kinds, really can't manage without at least a slice for toast at breakfast, and maybe some croutons in soup, and sometimes toasted cheese on, for supper.  Good thing I don't have any gluten problems. And don't mind baking.

Also, making bread satisfies the baking need now and then, better for my health than cake, which would vanish all too soon, unless I force it on friends and neighbors, all of whom are on some diet or other.  

But even as I write I wonder if it would be nice to make a few lemon bars in the near future..after the apple turnovers are history, that is.  Not many people resist lemon bars, from Mary-Carol's recipe, handwritten on a little card now enshrined in my loose leaf personal recipe book.

Cooking's a bit like gardening that way, come to think of it.  I have recipes from Mary-Carol, from Marge, a long ago friend, from the long gone mother of another friend, from internet friends, all kinds of sources, just as you get slips and divisions of plants from all kinds of sources and they remind you of the giver.  My little food processor was a gift of another friend, Judy, and every time I use it she comes to mind.  

Or like art, where I use beads from another Judy, and Girija, and yarn from MaryAnn and Ash and other generous givers, and threads from many older women now not able to stitch any more, and ideas and teaching from friends in the embroiderers' group.  I honor them all by using their donated materials and ideas, too. I give back, too, and I think the recipients probably remember me when they use the materials, too.  At least that's the hope.