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I was originally going to do hot or not Tuesday, and then I realized that I didn’t want to think about the not-hot things, because it was depressing. Instead, it’s just stuff that’s awesome.
- 25% off sales at my local yarn shop. Their website’s dated in areas, but it’s a really nice shop, and about twice a year they have 25% off sales. I love this, because I feel totally justified in buying very pretty yarn. I’ve been in sort of a rut lately–nothing I’ve been knitting has been keeping my interest–and I’m hoping that the new yarn will jolt me out of that. Also, weird though it may be, yarn makes me happy. I just love it.
- My Diva Cup. I bought mine seven years ago, and it’s still going strong. Also, it means that instead of thinking about my period every goddamn time I have to pee, I can just think about it twice a day and ignore it the rest of the time. Awesome.
- Connie Willis has a new book coming out today, and the magical gods of Amazon will have it to my house either today or tomorrow. I am so excited. I have two must-buy authors–Connie Willis and Margaret Atwood–and I’m not joking when I say that if someone released a phone book to which one of them wrote a preface, I would quite happily plunk down my thirty bucks for that phone book, and then I’d probably buy several more to give away as gifts. That they’ve both released a book within a year of each other is cause for great, great rejoicing.
- Cats that sleep on my feet. Totally awesome. We keep our house pretty cold, and the cats are fantastic footwarmers. Without them, we’d have to do that thing where you heat bricks and put them at the foot of the bed.
- Malley’s Pretzel Crunch bar. Holy crap, do I love these. We were out visiting relatives on the weekend, and I realized that there’s a Malley’s right by their house. We stopped on the way home and bought, no joke, about fifteen of these. They’re probably my favorite candy bar.
- Leaving work in the daylight. I love winter, but man, it’s really hard to do things when you leave work at five and it’s dark before you get home. The days have gotten longer by just enough that we get home while it’s still light.
- Paint. I’m starting to think seriously about painting some of the house. We’ve been here a year and a half, and the walls are still the boring beige and scuffed white they were when we moved in. I keep building up painting as a Big Deal Thing, but really, it’s a wall. I’m going to put paint on it. If it sucks, I’ll paint it again. It’s not that hard, and I should just do it. (Please feel free to leave painting tips in the comments.)
- Blue Ginger’s Black Sesame and Sea Salt Rice Crisps. Holy crap are these delicious. I bought a giant bag of them at BJ’s, and we ate it within about a week. Which matters not at all, because in addition to being delicious, a giant serving of them is only about 100 calories. Of course, when I went back to BJ’s to buy more, they were gone. I’m going to phone tomorrow and see if they’ll order them. Fingers crossed.
That’s about all I’ve got, but really, that’s pretty good for a Tuesday.
Apparently there’s this meme, 51 things I found in my room? Or 52 things I found in my house, or something like that. Unfortunately, it involves making a video of yourself with random things and setting said video to quirky music, and let me tell you, my tolerance for that is pretty less than zero.
Instead, I give you a list of nine things I cannot find! Since I cannot find these things, obviously there is no video, and if you feel the need for quirky music, I suggest that you queue up your media player of choice before reading this entry.
- The next gem in Bejeweled. Look. I’m a reasonably smart person, and I cannot for the life of me break 200,000 on Bejeweled Blitz. Actually, I can’t break 170,000, and I’ve only managed it that high once. I have a friend who has 400,000 points. How is that possible? What am I missing? Why does it bother me so much that I’m not better at a stupid, time-wasting game on Facebook, which I hate?
- A tiny bit of gives-a-fuck about Apple’s upcoming tablet. I keep finding blog posts and announcements and pre-announcements and and and, and this is what I do: mark as read, mark as read, close tab, mark as read. Shut up about it already.
- The half-dozen thank-you notes I’d written thanking people for Christmas gifts. I wrote them on my lunch break one day last week, and I know that they didn’t get mailed. Where the hell are they? Somewhere between my office (spartan, relatively uncluttered) and my house (messy at best, full of stuff) they’ve been misplaced. I’m trying to convince myself to man up and rewrite them tomorrow, but I hate having to write things with pens.
- Thing number four. This is actually an ongoing problem–in any list, I stall out around four. Once I’ve got four, I can plow right one, but four gets me every time.
- My stripey green underwear. They’re my favorite underwear, guys, and I have no idea where they are.
- Any knitting needles between 3.25mm and 5mm. That’s a big gap, and I am 100% sure that I have needles in that size range. I just…can’t find them. Anywhere.
- Appropriate photos go to with blog posts. You like how I’m sticking that bit of meta in there? I should stop caring about stupid things like photos and just post. It’s not like this is a photoblog.
- An understanding of why this Prop 8 nonsense has gone to trial. I honestly don’t understand–since when do we let the majority vote on the rights of a minority group? How is this even a question? Bonus thing I can’t find: the stomach to read much of the trial coverage.
- Stupid Jasmine stupid Disney Princess stupid Polly Pocket, stupid stupid stupid. Possibly you’re picking up my frustration with that one. Maura–to my distress–is obsessed with those stupid Disney Princess Polly Pockets. As a reward for two weeks of awesome behavior, I ordered Tiana from Amazon. Jasmine is the only one we’re missing, and I can find her nowhere. I’d just order her from Amazon, too, but the goddamn thing costs THIRTY DOLLARS. For a two-inch-tall doll and three little dresses made out of rubber! Twice as much as all the other ones cost! I am so annoyed by this that I’m reduced to exclamation marks as a way of expressing my anger. Argh.
1. See that? That’s maybe my new favorite picture. Maura and Basil are both totally convinced that he’s a lapdog, and apparently they’re just going to keep doing that until I believe them. Hilarious. You should also know that this picture was taken in a brief pause in their desperate wiggling, Basil attempting to lick Maura’s face, Maura attempting to hug him while she giggles and tries to avoid the licking.
2. The new thing around here is green smoothies. I tried to take a picture, but frankly, one picture of badly lit food (see number seven) is probably enough for one blog post. My mornings have been fuelled, of late, by tea and green smoothies. The tea is self-explanatory; the green smoothie maybe less so. Basically, you throw spinach into the blender with milk, water, or juice, then puree the hell out of it, making spinach juice. Which sounds disgusting, but somehow, adding two bananas, two apples, and some other random fruit (which has ranged from peach slices to blueberries, all frozen or canned) makes it taste not like weird spinach juice, but like normal smoothie that happens to be bright green. Bright green, guys. Really, really green. Anyhow, that makes a blenderful–about forty ounces, enough for breakfast every day for a week. By the end of the week it’s less bright, but still tastes fine. Plus you feel totally virtuous, since you’re basically eating healthy-healthy-health food for breakfast. I even added wheat germ and flaxseed to my smoothie!
3. I’m almost done with my second chunky hat, this time taking notes on the pattern. I’m hoping to post it sometime next week. If anyone’s interested in reading the pattern for technical correctness before I post it, I’d be incredibly grateful–drop me an email (meghanmconrad at gmail) or comment, and I’ll send you the pattern when it’s done.
4. Monday was not a holiday for me, but it may as well have been, since I got nothing done. Got to work only to discover that something–a mysterious, inexplicable something–had happened to my computer over the weekend, and it was locking me out of everything. No email, no printers, no internet. Three hours later, we’d managed to get into my email. Four hours later, I was given a new tower, and I spent the rest of the day transferring files over and setting up email and the like. Hopefully this is not a bad omen for the rest of the week.
5. My new year’s resolution was to be more interactive–to comment more on blogs, to be more conversational on Twitter, that kind of thing. So far, so good! Of course, I usually comment on a blog and then immediately have to shut down the computer because for some reason, the stress of commenting elsewhere is overwhelming, but that’s neither here nor there.
6. Related to five, I keep finding that I’ve managed to miss the blogs of people I like. If you guys wanted to leave links to your blogs (or other blogs that you think are swell) in the comments, I would be grateful. I’m thinking about maybe reccing blogs once a month, or occasionally posting link roundups of stuff I found interesting.
7. I made delicious lentil soup.
I have tried and tried to make that picture more attractive–or to take a better picture–and no luck. It’s the middle of winter, the light is crappy, and, really, you can only make lentils and beans so attractive, you know? So pretend that’s a better picture than it is, because the soup is delicious.
Delicious lentil soup:
2 medium onions, chopped
5 cloves minced garlic (I added maybe eight, because I love garlic. You could add less.)
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 cups split red lentils, rinsed and picked over
7 cups water or stock, or some combination thereof
4 medium potatoes, diced
2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
1 block (about ten ounces) frozen spinach, or one pound fresh spinach
cumin
lime juice
chili powder or delicious pepper blend of your choosing
Heat the oil, then sautee the onions in it until they’re almost translucent. Add the garlic and cook another minute or two, then add the lentils, water, and potatoes. (All of them, white and sweet.) Cook for about thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, then add the spinach, the juice of a lime (a quarter cup of juice would be best, probably–I only had one sad, old lime, though, and that was okay, too), maybe two teaspoons of chili powder, and a teaspoon of cumin. The spice measurements are approximate–I pretty much just added stuff until it tasted right. Simmer another fifteen minutes, or until the lentils have broken down and the potatoes are cooked through. Blob with sour cream, if you’re into that, and eat.
8. Next weekend, I think we’re making marmalade. Maybe also candied citrus peels. Maybe also some other things involving citrus. Last week, oranges were on sale at the supermarket, so I have about seven pounds of those. Then my in-laws sent us over thirty pounds of oranges and grapefruits–mostly grapefruits–as a gift. In case you have ever wondered how many oranges and grapefruits thirty pounds of them is, the answer is a lot. I like both oranges and grapefruit quite a bit, but I’m not sure that I can use nearly forty pounds of citrus fruit before it goes off. I guess we’ll find out!
Like I said the other day, we canned some mushrooms over the summer. In all honestly, I didn’t think that they’d be so great, so I only put up two half-pints. Nice person that I am, I gave one of them to my sister for Christmas.
I totally regret that.
Don’t get me wrong, I like my sister, but these mushrooms are awesome. I think they’d be delicious over pasta, just pasta and mushrooms and a little olive oil or butter. They’re so good that I might make more when mushrooms go on sale again, just so that we can have a steady supply.
Just like every other time you’ve canned things, (or read about me canning them,) you have to start by sterilizing your jars. You can do this in one of two ways: boiling them for a while (ten minutes, probably, but I always get distracted and leave them in there for half an hour) or by putting them in a cold oven, turning the oven to 300, and then letting the jars hang out for fifteen minutes or so after the oven’s come to temperature. The lids and rings of the jars need to be sterilized, too. Drop them in a small pot of boiling water, let them boil ten minutes, and then leave them in the water until you need them.
After you’ve filled the jars, they’ll need to be processed. This sounds scary but is actually really easy, plus other people find it very impressive. All you will need for this is an enormous pot with something to keep the jars off the floor of the pot. I use a pasta pot, the kind with the holey insert. Fill this pot most of the way with water and bring it to a boil as you prep the mushrooms.
For about eight half-pints, you’ll need the following:
7 pounds small mushrooms (I used button–I want to use some baby portabellas next time, too.)
1/2 c lemon juice
2 cups olive oil
2 1/2 cups white vinegar
1 Tbsp oregano
1 Tbsp pickling salt
1/2 cup chopped onions
2 garlic cloves, cut into quarters
30 peppercorns (all black, or a mix of colors)
Wash the mushrooms, removing and discarding the stems. Put the caps into a pot with the lemon juice and add water to cover. Bring to a boil and simmer five minutes. Drain the mushrooms.
Mix together the oil, vinegar, oregano, onions, and salt in a saucepan. Heat to boiling. Place a quarter of a garlic clove and a few peppercorns into each half-pint jar. Pack the mushrooms into the jar, then fill the jars with the oil-and-vinegar solution, leaving about a half inch of headspace. Put on the lids and tighten the rings.
Now for the processing. You’re going to very carefully put the jars into the put of boiling water from earlier. My pot can only handle four jars at a time–you can’t stack them, and you need the water to be over their tops. (This may mean that you have to process them in batches, and that you’ll have to add more water with each batch if you’re canning a whole bunch of jars.) Once the water in the pot returns to a boil, you’re going to boil the jars for about twenty minutes. After that, remove them from the pot using either tongs or a silicone potholder.
Let the jars cool on the counter. You’ll hear them sealing as the night goes on–Ping! Ping! Sometimes they’re really loud, other times they’re barely noticeable. Don’t worry too much about it.
When morning rolls around, check your jars to make sure that they’ve sealed. The little button in the middle of the lid should have popped down–if it goes down when you press on it, the jar didn’t seal properly. No big deal–just means that you have to eat them now instead of in a few months.
In unrelated news, I finished a hat tonight! Finishing knitting projects is always exciting for me. This one is for the daughter of the woman who does our daycare–I was given the yarn and asked to make a hat. Three hours later, here it is. I may make another one in a color that is not orange and write out the pattern.
Photos for this one are somewhat less than awesome, as they were taken in my bedroom late at night, but the hat leaves me tomorrow, so we’ll have to make do.
Back over the summer, I went on a canning binge. I canned salsas and jams, pickled cauliflower and onions, and also did a few jars of roasted peppers. I’d never done them before, so I was sort of worried–I love roasted peppers, and we go through jar upon jar of them, but there are a lot of brands I don’t like. What if these were gross? I made them anyhow, though, and since they were special roasted peppers, they got put in the pantry and ignored for six months.
We finally had reason to break into the stash, though. And by “reason”, I mean that I’d run out and didn’t want to go to the store. So we opened the first jar and had some with our supper that night, and they were amazing. Later that week, we went over to the house of some friends, and we took with us some of our peppers. There was an wonderful spread for supper that night–salami, mozzarella, olives, and artichoke hearts from the store, roasted peppers and marinated mushrooms from our summer canning, and dilly beans, pickled onions, and spicy green tomatoes from theirs.
We’re down to about two jars of peppers, and I’m wishing that I’d made more–these are far, far better than the kind you can buy. Even the brine is delicious–I was drizzling it onto my bread the other night.
This recipe makes about eight pints. I suggest doubling it, frankly. Next summer I’m going to wait until the farmer’s market is closing for the day, then I’ll pick up as many peppers as I can carry and head home to roast and can them.
Just like every other time you’ve canned things, (or read about me canning them,) you have to start by sterilizing your jars. You can do this in one of two ways: boiling them for a while (ten minutes, probably, but I always get distracted and leave them in there for half an hour) or by putting them in a cold oven, turning the oven to 300, and then letting the jars hang out for fifteen minutes or so after the oven’s come to temperature. The lids and rings of the jars need to be sterilized, too. Drop them in a small pot of boiling water, let them boil ten minutes, and then leave them in the water until you need them.
After you’ve filled the jars, they’ll need to be processed. This sounds scary but is actually really easy, plus other people find it very impressive. All you will need for this is an enormous pot with something to keep the jars off the floor of the pot. I use a pasta pot, the kind with the holey insert. Fill this pot most of the way with water and bring it to a boil as you roast the peppers.
Here’s what you need:
4 pounds peppers, any color and any heat. I used red, orange, and yellow bell peppers, plus two poblanos that I had in the fridge.
1 c lemon juice
2 c white vinegar
1 Tbsp fresh oregano
1 c olive oil
1/2 c chopped onions
garlic, 1/2 clove per jar, peeled and cut in half
salt
First we have to roast the peppers. If you have an outdoor grill, you can just throw them on that, turning occasionally, until their skins are black and charred. If you don’t have an outdoor grill, you can do them in the broiler by cutting them in half, removing the seeds and pith, and placing them cut side down on a baking tray. Either put them under the broiler or into a very hot (450F) oven, watching them carefully, until the skins are blackened.
Once your skins are blackened and your kitchen is moderately smokey, either put the peppers into a paper bag or put a damp towel over them and let them cool. The paper bag and towel make them easier to peel. Once they’re cool enough to handle, seed them if you didn’t before, then strip the blistered skin off of them–it should peel off in strips. It’s okay if you can’t quite get every scrap of skin. Don’t rinse the peppers if you can possibly avoid it.
Cut the peppers into strips, or smush down the halves until they’re flat. Set them aside.
Mix all other ingredients save for the garlic and salt in a saucepan and heat them to boiling. As that comes to a boil, put one half clove of garlic and 1/4 tsp salt (for half-pints; 1/2 tsp for pints) into the jars, then pack the jars full of peppers. Make sure that the oil and vinegar mixture is well blended, then pour it over the peppers, leaving 1/2″ headspace. Put on the lids and tighten the rings.
Hard part’s over!
Now for the processing. Remember the big pot of boiling water from earlier? You’re going to very carefully put the jars in. My pot can only handle four jars at a time–you can’t stack them, and you need the water to be over their tops. (This may mean that you have to add more water with each batch if you’re canning a whole bunch of jars.) Once the water comes back to a boil, set the timer for twenty minutes. (Same length for half-pints and pints. It’s okay if you go a little over–I often get distracted and things process an extra five minutes or so.) When the timer dings, pull the jars out of the water bath using either tongs or a silicone oven mitt.
Let the jars cool on the counter. You’ll hear them sealing as the night goes on–Ping! Ping! Sometimes they’re really loud, other times they’re barely noticeable. Don’t worry too much about it.
When morning rolls around, check your jars to make sure that they’ve sealed. The little button in the middle of the lid should have popped down–if it goes down when you press on it, the jar didn’t seal properly. This isn’t a huge deal, and the peppers are perfectly fine to eat, but they won’t be shelf-stable. Which means that darn, you’ll have to eat them right away.
I’ll say it again: these are delicious. Far, far better than any pre-made roasted peppers you can buy, and probably cheaper as well. Next summer I’ll put up twice as many, if not more, and probably do several jars of hot peppers as well–and I won’t wait six months to start eating them.
Happy Holidays!
I keep thinking that I’m going to write up the pattern for Maura’s mittens, or for some of the fingerless gloves that I’m churning out, but it’s been one of those weeks. Maura’s been sick, I’m on new medication that’s sort of kicking my ass, and Nick’s job situation is changing, not for the better. Merry Christmas to us.
As soon as we’re healthy, I’ll be posting patterns and recipes, but in the meantime, it’s back to radio silence.
Two nights ago, Maura very mournfully informed me that she couldn’t keep her hands warm at recess. Why, you ask? Obviously because I hadn’t knitted her any mittens. It definitely has nothing at all to do with the fact that she’s already lost one of the gloves from the pair I bought her last week.
Still, when she looks all sad and asks me to make her things, I almost always oblige, so this evening I sat down to make some simple mittens. As you can see above, Basil decided to help me. Funnily enough, the cats–all eight of them–are almost totally uninterested in my knitting. Basil, though, wants to lay on the yarn, and wants to just put the yarn in his mouth, and wants to put his paws over the yarn that I’m pulling out of the skein… He’s more like a cat than the cats are!
An hour or so after that picture, I had a mitten. Okay, more than an hour or so, because I was making a fair isle snowflake, then realized halfway through that the variegated yarn had a section almost identical to the oatmeal yarn I was using, and the snowflake looked horrible. So I ripped it all out and started over. But had I not done that, it would’ve been an hour or so.
I finished the second one last night, and today she wore them to school. She’s reported back that they kept her quite warm, and I’m pleased that they seem to fit reasonably well. (Reasonably well is about all I can ever expect with her, even when I’m making it myself. She can’t hold still, so I end up sneaking into her room while she’s sleeping to slip mittens and hats and socks on, trying to see if they’ll fit.)
I tend to knit almost exclusively with DK weight and lighter, and I have to say that I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying worsted weight lately. There’s something to be said for finishing a project in a single evening. Next up, I think I’m going to whip out a few pairs of fingerless gloves as Christmas presents. This is definitely the year of the handmade Christmas around here–sort of enjoyable in its own right.
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On Not Thinking Pink
There’s a meme going around on Facebook. I got the following email several times yesterday.
I won’t lie—it pissed me off. I fired off a fast response, but struggled to keep it within Facebook’s 420 character limit.
I’ve touched on this before, but what the hell—it says humorless feminist shrew up there for a reason.
Here’s the thing about the Facebook meme: it has nothing—zip, zero, zilch—to do with breast cancer. At the very most, it’s going to eventually make people think about breasts, though so far, it seems that people think it’s about underpants. But let’s face it: the end result is pretty much “Think about me in my underwear!”
Yup. Cancer hates underwear.
Oh, wait. Cancer doesn’t give a fuck. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re wearing a super-cute pink-and-black polka-dot bra with matching boy-cut shorts or if you’re wearing boxers and a singlet. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re wearing a “Save the TaTas” shirt, or if you have a bumper sticker with one of the many desperate attempts to avoid using the word breasts. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re cute and perky and swathed in pink, the magical color of cancer-repellent.
Of course it’s pink. We’re talking about girls! Girls get breast cancer, and girls love pink. My general experience is that women—that is, grown-up girls—do not really get all that upset if their sneakers, Kitchen-Aids, hand sanitizer, and pizza boxes (yes, a local place actually got pink boxes to support breast cancer) are not pink and sparkly. That’s generally reserved for children, not grown women. The exception is, of course, if you have cancer.
Pinkwashing helps make cancer feel safer, more normative. You’re not fighting a disease, you’re joining a sisterhood. Moreover, it makes “breast cancer activism” the easiest form of armchair activism. Are you wearing a pink teeshirt? You’re fighting breast cancer! Did you buy the special pink ribbon macaroni and cheese at the supermarket? You’re totally fighting breast cancer. You bought a pizza, and it came in a pink box? You are the most awesome activist ever.
And don’t get me wrong—I’d like to make having cancer as safe and non-lethal as possible. But painting it all pink and calling it activism isn’t fixing anything.
There are some awesome commercials promoting breast cancer awareness, though! Like this one:
Because men love boobs! Then, just for fun, the ad will ignore the fact that some men—fat men, trans men, men with gynecomastia—have breasts, too. It’ll also ignore that men—regardless of the size of their chest—can and do get breast cancer. Finally, we’ll remind you yet again that men know more about how to take care of a woman’s body than any woman could, and women have a responsibility to take care of their breasts, because men want to look at them.
Or, as pointed out on Shakesville, there’s this ad:
It’s definitely not about objectification at all! Only it is, and it’s shitty. It’s even shittier because this is allegedly about helping women, but the advertisements are dehumanizing and objectifying. Women! Pay attention to your breasts, because they’re the only part of you that we care about.
I’m not sure what this sort of “awareness” is meant to achieve. The only thing that I’m taking away from the ads above is that hey, men really like breasts, so women should make sure that their breasts are healthy, perky, and available to the male gaze at all times. Oh, and maybe if you could also wear a wet white teeshirt, that’d be great.
What the ribbons and tee-shirts and pizza boxes miss is that really, we’re not trying to save boobies or gazongas. We’re trying to save lives. Because cancer kills people. I’ve got breast cancer in my family, and I’ll tell you right here and now, I don’t give a shit if my aunt, sister, friend, co-worker doesn’t have breasts anymore. I care a whole fucking lot if she dies.