Come back cooking mojo, come back ...

I've lost my cooking mojo. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I've ever had cooking mojo (I kind of just wanted an excuse to use the word), but it's true that for the past three years the vast majority of our meals have been home-cooked by me.

This last month has been unusual though. We've been eating lots of pasta with jarred sauce, egg noddles thrown in water flavoured with a bouillon cube, and lots of burritos with not very interesting fillings.

But yesterday I officially became bored with all of that. I'm also probably lacking some essential vitamins from mainly eating wheat ...

When I see a problem, I like to try and solve it, so today I made Spinach and chickpeas and yesterday was Pan roasted broccoli. Both were very simple to make.

I've made a list of next few dinners I'm planning to make. They are vegetarian, won't take too long, have a minimal amount of exotic ingredients (I can't find a lot of the cool stuff at my local store), and don't look like they would suck. It actually took me a long time to find ones that fit those requirements, so I hope you can get some use out of the list too.

Roasted asparagus.

Really simple baked butternut squash.


Goat cheese toasts. I've made these several times. Slice a baguettes width wise (about 4 per person), brush the top with olive oil and put it under a grill. Take it out after a few minutes, then put a slice of goat cheese on the side of the bread that wasn't brushed with oil. Keep it under the grill until the cheese gets bubbly, serve on salad.

Lentil Curry.

Ginger fried rice


And speaking of loosing mojo, this week's bake-along is biscuits. Booo. Failed again.

I looked for over half an hour for a recipe for American biscuits in UK measurements. Half an hour at least, it might have even been an hour since I go into a time vortex whenever I "look up" something on the internet.

I never found one, though I did find some amusing sites discussing what is the British equivalent to a biscuit (the closest is a scone). It's hard enough finding recipes with measurements in ml and oz for American foods, but the term biscuit over here means cookies, so searching "American biscuits" brings up recipes for cookies that are made in America ...

Anyway, after my pop tart disappointment last week I was sure I was going to nail this one. I knew what went wrong last time and found a really good YouTube video on how to make biscuits, and announced on twitter "I think I can do this". It was going well at first, I had put the butter in the freezer, and was able to mix it with the flour just fine, and then I put in all the milk. It wasn't until it was properly mixed that I realized something was wrong. It was far too sticky. I'm kind of encouraged actually that I was at least able to tell what was wrong. In any case I added more flour and mixed it some more, and by doing that it got over-mixed. Sigh.

The lovely J says she likes them, but honestly they just don't taste right. I'm not going to give up though, in a few days I'll modify the recipe and try again!

Weekend travel to Chester and Conway

J's mother is still in the UK, and travelling around. This weekend we joined her in Chester, which is in North West England.

It has the most complete medieval walls in Great Britain and has a very lovely cathedral.








One of the most photographed things in the city is the clock, which was supposed to have been built for the queen's (Victoria) diamond jubilee, but the commitee in charge wasn't able to get their stuff together in time, so it wasn't actually unveiled until two years later, for the queen's 80th birthday.

Chester is also famous for the "Rows" which is a series of streets with two levels of shops.



We bought the best tasting cheshire cheese I've ever had at The Cheese Shop (they have a lovely name, don't they?), it's a locally made cheese (Chester is in the county of Cheshire) by the Joseph Heler cheesemakers, and is less crumbly and not as salty as the generic cheshire they have here in the grocery stores.

On Sunday we also took a day trip to Conway, in Wales.


Conway is another walled city, and has a wonderful and extremely well preserved castle.




We took a really great tour of the castle by a history buff. Presumably the tour was only going to take an hour, but he was so enthusiastic it ended up being over an hour and a half long.


He looks like a history buff, doesn't he?

It also looks like I've photoshopped a halo around him, but it's actually just a fingerprint on the lens, really.

We also looked around a very old and extensively restored house.


And finally, this is, Llywelyn the Great, who, a very very long time ago, founded an abbey in Conway.

More little hats

I've been making more little hats for the Innocent Drink charity campaign.

A simple ribbed one.



This one is two rows of seed stitch to prevent curling, plain knitting, and then an i-cord.


And for this one when I cast on I used 7 provisional stitches for each of the flaps, and 8 normal cast on stitches for the front and back. The rest of the hat is knit normally.

When I went back to make the flaps there was a bit of a gap so I picked up an additional stitch on both flaps. Each flap is 5 rows long.

Pop Tart disappointment

I had high hopes for this this week's bake-along, I really did. The recipe for the pop tarts looked simple enough. But it turned out it was beyond my beginner baking skills.

It tasted like it had too much baking powder. And there was no baking powder in the recipe.

I think I know what happened (over-mixing, mainly), and I have a few tips so hopefully your tarts of the pop persuasion will turn out like perfection.

1. Unless it's really cold in your house turn on your freezer. We're in Scotland, and the heater hadn't been turned on all day, but it was still warm enough for the butter to start softening as I was mixing it with my hands. I did put the dough in the refrigerator for a few minutes once I noticed it was softening, but a freezer would have been better (making it colder, faster).
2. Don't over-mix. I didn't print out the pictures, and I ended up mixing the dough into a gooey mass. From the pictures on SK's site though it seems like it needs to stay very crumbly. I've embeded a video where a baker talks about this type of dough, and gives a tip that I'll be using next time I try to make this. The relevant part of the video starts at 3:20.
3. After you divide the dough in half, each of the halves should be cut into 9 squares for a total of 18 squares (it makes 9 tarts since you need a top and a bottom square). I didn't figure this out until after I cut one of the sides into 6 squares ...
4. I only needed one egg for the "gluing" together of the pastry sides and for brushing the top before baking (the egg for brushing on top is in the ingredients list but not in the written instructions).
5. Leave yourself plenty of time to make them! I was wrestling with mine for three hours (but that doesn't necessarily mean yours will).



In any case I hope I'm not discouraging you from trying out the recipe, as I said I'm pretty sure it was mainly because I over-mixed. Live and learn ...

Very nearly Cramond Island

We set out yesterday morning for Cramond Island, a tiny little island a mile off of Edinburgh.

I was going to make this into a complaining post, about how we got off at the wrong bus stop, and then got lost, and about how people from SF have really crappy depth perception (I think it's because the hills, fog, apartment buildings, muni, and everyone's blinding hatred of people from LA prevent the inhabitants from seeing very far). But instead I'll just show you the pictures.



The island that we didn't actually end up going to because we were too tired.


A cute loo.







And then it was on a bus back to home. Right now the two of them are off on another adventure, but I opted to stay home and recover.

Purty flowers

We went to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh today.


The flowers were in bloom and the trees looked happy.


The surprisingly huge Glasshouse.


And inside:

Stirling

J's mother is in town so we've been doing touristy things. Yesterday was The Palace of Holyroodhouse (I forgot the camera, sorry). And today was Stirling Castle, where many of the Scottish Kings were crowned.



Computer time will probably be tight for the next few days, but I'll try to post more pictures soon.

Knitting Charities

Since I started knitting little hats last week I've been looking into other organizations that welcome hand-knit donations.

Here's a short list of what's out there in charity knitting land.

Based in the US:
A long list of charities from Interweave Knits
Ravelry group for charity knitting in the US
Knit for Needs
Afghans for Afghans
Stitches from the Heart
The Mother Bear Project
Orgs collecting for orphans in Eastern Europe and Russia (on a ravelry group)

Based in the UK:
A long list of charities from UK hand knitting association
Ravelry group for charity knitting in the UK
Blankets for the elderly
Hats for Innocent Drinks
Little Hen Rescue (Jumpers for battery hens)
Teddies for Tragedies

And here's one for our Canadian friends:
pakcanada (preemie items)


What are your favorite charities?

New look!

So I've thinking about what blogs I like and which ones have a really nice page layout and design, like Colour Blast, Velma's World, and Smitten Kitchen, and I've come to the conclusion that white makes for a much cleaner design. Which, you know, makes sense, and which I probably have learned at some point in my life but chose to forget for the sake of a background more "more interesting", which probably just meant it was more distracting.

I still need to figure out what I'm doing with the "pages", and I need make a nice little picture for my header, but that's a whole nother blog post ... 
 
I hope you like the new look!

Little Hats for Innocent Drinks

Sadly it's been a while since I've done charity knitting, so this week I decided to change that by making little hats for Innocent Drinks. For several years now, around Christmas time, Innocent Drinks adorns their bottles with hand-knit little hats, with 35p of the sale going to Age Concern and Help the Aged.





The hats are so quick to make, and better still I made them with leftover yarn scraps!

I'm not sure what my next little hat will be though, maybe one with earflaps ?....

I love the internet, but ...

I love the internet, I really do. It keeps me entertained, it keeps me connected to friends back home and strangers around the world, and it has sites that make me marvel at what humans are capable of, like Nimoy Sunset Pie.

That said, I've discovered today that I can accomplish a lot more crafty stuff than normal if I stay (more or less) away from the computer.

Banana Bread

It's calling to me, saying "please, enter my world of banana goodness."

I finally finished one of the gloves I started way back in September (well, actually it was a sock back then).


And, a little peak into another project I started.
Have you done a mini internet fast lately?

Biscotti

This week's bake-along is biscotti. This is my first time making biscotti, and I used a recipe from Cooking for Engineers which I choose because it goes into more detail than other recipes.





It was all going pretty well until this point. And then I realized that I didn't have almond extract. This made me a bit flustered and not too happy because I was so close to buying it at the store, but didn't because it wasn't on my list of ingredients which I had written down from "prepare these ingredients" part of the directions, and not from the actual ingredient list on the bottom of the page.

And then I put the vanilla extract in with the flour mixture, not the egg mixture. Arg.
And then I started to worry that I had overmixed since it seemed a little "stringy".

It's a wonder I do any baking at all with all this worrying.

But it ended up becoming a normal batter, of course.


Waiting for it's time in the oven.




And it's done!


I really like the texture of the biscotti, but sadly, and I'm pretty sure it's just because of my almond extract stupidity, it didn't taste like very much. That didn't stop us from eating piece after piece after piece of it though.

Days 15 - 16 of Hadrian's Wall walk.

Last weekend we continued with our coast-to-coast walk. We were out of shape, and I think spent more time in cafes and restaurants than walking, and I'm pretty sure I gained some weight, but as a result I had a very nice few days.

I'm a city girl, so I took a lot of pictures of animals on Friday.

The first lambs we saw that day.


And the first cows



And the first horses



On Saturday our feet hurt, so we took a very short walk, most of which was along the river Eden.

Because there was some light rain and because buses didn't run into or out of Carlisle on Sundays we spent some time looking around the city.

The organ at Carlisle Cathedral.

This is the guildhall museum, a very tiny, free museum in a wonderfully crooked 500 year old building. The museum is mainly about the history of Carlisle's trade guilds.


Carlisle Castle.


Part of the castle is over 900 years old, some of it being altered in the 14th and 19th century.

During Monday's walk, starting from where the river Eden runs along the city, ...




Mud! As Jessamy was trying to find the least muddy part to cross I decided to just walk through it as quickly as possible.

Big mistake. I took a few tentative steps. Then put my right foot into the dirt. As my foot was sinking into the mud I quickly took a step with my left foot. It too sank. As I tried to take my third step my foot came completely out of the shoe. I was going to ask Jessamy for help, but when I looked over she was already bent over, laughing hysterically. After some awkward balancing and one sock in the mud I managed to force both shoes out of the mud.

Fortunately we only had a few minutes walk to the bus stop.


A little church in the town of Beaumont, where we waited for the bus.

And lastly one of my favorite pictures of the trip.