Klosekraft

Breaking the fast

I stopped buying spinning fiber at least a year ago, probably considerably longer. I just don't spin enough to justify keeping that much around — a couple of pounds are really all that I want to have on hand at any one time and I definitely have that. I don't like spinning small amounts of things because my whole purpose in spinning is to have yarn to use. I don't knit many small items and don't want non-sweater quantities of yarn.

So you can imagine that I'm a little gobsmacked to have been so taken with some fiber online that I ordered it immediately, even though there's only 90 grams of it. It's merino/tussah silk/kid mohair/firestar (you can't really see it in my picture, but there's a goodly bit of sparkle). It's a rich, complicated color, more lavender than it seems here.

I'm going to start playing with it tonight and expect that the exceptionally meticulous preparation will be a fine contrast to my ongoing spinning project, which is full of hay and sticky with oil from processing. I love the finished yarn and the tweedy effect from inconsistent blending, I love the colors, it'll make something lovely for me (currently thinking about the Pimlico Shrug from Knit2Together; see a finished one here or also here), but spinning it is not so fun. Just 4.5 ounces to go though, so that's not too bad.

All the world loves a fruit tart

This is the tart I brought to a party at Zoe's on Saturday.

I wish I'd made two.

It's a simple sugar cookie base with sweetened cream cheese spread on it and then piled with fruit. It's best made in a pizza pan so you can make pretty concentric rings of fruit (mandarin oranges and chunks of pineapple are nice additions that I forgot to buy) and cut even slices. Mine went missing in the move though, so I just smeared the dough as evenly as I could on a regular baking sheet and got Sarah to cut it:

It's my favorite kind of recipe, where all of the components are simple, but they come together into something that's much greater than the sum of its parts. The only thing keeping this from being the ideal summer dessert is that you have to bake the base. However, you could bake it first thing in the morning before it's too hot and then put it together right before you serve it, which I should have done. The cookie is crisp enough that the pieces hold their shape when you pick them up, so you can bring this to a barbeque or party where you don't know what the plate/fork situation is going to be. Man, I really wish I had another of these waiting for me at home.

Fruit Tart

Crust
zest from one lemon
1 stick butter
3/4 c. sugar
1 egg
1 T milk
1 1/4 c. flour
1/2 t. baking powder
1 t. vanilla

Cream
juice from one lemon
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 c. confectioner's sugar (or 3/4 c. granulated sugar)

Assorted fruit

Preheat oven to 350. Zest the lemon into a large mixing bowl and squeeze the juice into a smaller one.

For the crust, add the sugar to the zest; mix and cream with butter. Mix the egg, milk and vanilla in, followed by the dry ingredients. Pat into a 14" pizza pan and bake for 10 minutes or until lightly browned.

For the cream, add the cream cheese and sugar to the lemon juice and beat well.

When the crust is thoroughly cooled, spread cream evenly and arrange fruit on top.

Bonus: You can watch Christopher Walken roast a chicken here.

The perfect supper for a hot, sticky night

Antipasto and my friend Elissa's trademark Cocktails of the Summer: lemon sorbet, limoncello and prosecco blended together.

I'm going to have another antipasto dinner tonight, though I'm not sure it's still antipasto if no one present is Italian. I picked up provisions (olives, cornichons, hummus, pita, several good cheeses, sourdough, dry salami and a big bag of fresh cherries from the greengrocer) and the only thing that's keeping me from going straight home with the booty and holing up with it, cackling, is the fact that I'm really looking forward to seeing the friends I'll see tonight.

Maybe I could go back to bed and just start this one over.

It's been a weird day so far.

This morning, I filled my electric kettle, put grounds in the french press, went to do something else, came back and poured the water into the press, let it brew, filled a cup, added milk, picked it up ... And it was cold.

I had never turned the kettle on.

(It took me a moment to figure out what had happened. I was standing in my kitchen staring at the cup — I actually wondered for a second if I had zoned out and lost an hour.)

I knocked an almost-full tub of nice parmesan into the sink.

I paid a bill and sealed the carbon into the envelope instead of the actual check. (I pay most of my bills online, but not all)

I emailed an author I need to talk to and got an autoresponse saying, "I'm going to be unreachable by email; please call my cell," with no phone number included.

Etc.

However, I have knitting to show that I may not have even mentioned yet.

It's Nicole from ChicKnits. I'm using the Classic Elite Premiere that I had originally used for that wrap-front top from VK that I put aside for a while and then forgot what changes to the pattern I had made to accommodate the different gauge and my longer torso. I couldn't reconstruct it from my chicken-scratch notes so I scrapped it. For this one, I'm getting the pattern gauge and I knit an extra inch at the bottom above the lace pattern before I started the decreases and another extra inch above the waist line before I started the increases. It's a fun knit, though pattern layout-wise it would have been helpful to have all of the stitch patterns print out on the same page. For some reason, I can't memorize these. The yarn is extremely soft and pretty, but I can tell it's going to pill badly.

And there's a sock in the picture because I realized that all of my handknit socks are several years old and I'd like to get some fresh blood in the sock drawer.

And my lunch is in the picture to prove that I managed to do something right today: I packed and remembered to bring my lunch to work. I made another batch of the zucchini and pasta last night, but grated the zucchini instead of chopping it to see how that was. Eh. It tasted fine, but there was no contrast to the texture at all and the little scrapings didn't hold up, flavor-wise, to the vinegar and cheese the way the chunks did. It was sort of like eating a bowl of orzo and cheese. It was tasty, but not what I was going for. However, if you want to feed zucchini to someone without them knowing about it, this is the way to go.

Wanna help me do my job?

I'm working on an article about audiobooks and could use a couple of quotes: Do you listen to audiobooks? Why or why not? Do you listen to different books than you read on paper? Has the existence of audiobooks changed your book consumption habits?

I'm interested in hearing from people who like them and people who don't. The point of the article is more to investigate how emerging technologies are affecting the publishing industry than to say anything in particular about the technologies themselves. Also, if you have any strong feelings about e-books or book trailers, let me know and I'll send them along to the editors who are working on those sections.

Since I can't use myself as a source, I'll tell you all: I love audiobooks. Love them wholeheartedly and unashamedly. If I became famous and anyone would care, I would shill for Audible for free. They're fantastic for when you're working on stuff that you have to keep an eye on, but still want some kind of stimulation. For whatever reason, I'm fine to watch dvds while I'm knitting almost anything, but I can't look away when I'm spinning. I definitely listen to different kinds of books than I read, mostly mysteries (Anne Perry, Sue Grafton, Patricia Cornwell, Dame Agatha...). I read a lot of nonfiction and literary fiction, but need more constant stimulation and plot advancement to keep me engaged if I'm just listening and don't see the words, especially since I have some other activity going on. I usually listen to them through the computer at home. I don't listen to them on my ipod if I'm just bopping around town, but I definitely put a book or two on there if I have a long train or plane trip.

Feel free to leave comments below or email me at klosekraft AT gmail DOT com if you'd rather. Thanks!

I see me eating a lot more of this as the summer goes on

I love zucchini. I can only dream of living in one of those towns where people lock their houses and cars during zucchini season to prevent people from leaving bags of squash and running away. If I thought there was the slightest chance that someone might put a zucchini in it, I would happily carry around an empty bag and open it up occasionally, looking away and whistling.

My mom gave me one of the early zucchinis from her garden when I was upstate and I used this recipe to make this dish. [edited to correct link]

I oversalted it pretty badly, which I don't mind so much, but I would have been embarrassed if I had been cooking for anyone other than myself. So, even though she tells you to salt the pasta water liberally, aim for Greenpeace, not the Earth Liberation Front, since you add some of the pasta water to the final dish to moisten it. I was pretty happy that I could use my very own basil and mint for the first time. I should have used more though.

It's more of a narrative than a recipe: saute a chopped onion in olive oil, add vegetables and fresh herbs, cook until tender, add a spoonful of balsamic vinegar and cook it off, then add pasta and enough of the pasta water to moisten the dish, add some parmesan. It's more time standing over a stove than is really ideal for the height of summer, but it does make enough for several meals, it's cheap and tasty and it'll be a good way to use whatever's in season without thinking too much about it. There's a similar recipe in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle where they grate the zucchini, which I might try next. It would probably cook more quickly.

What I did on my summer vacation

I canoed:


Dad made me wear a life vest, but I didn't buckle it because I'm such a rebel.

I marveled at the headlines in the local paper:

Historic bell stolen again! Front page above the fold!

I observed some interesting flora:

I ate at my brother's restaurant a few times. It was really terrific. I didn't want to say anything until I had eaten there, but now I can and will recommend it wholeheartedly, unreservedly and loudly. If you're anywhere near Bennington, VT, you should GO THERE NOW. If you call for a reservation, mention my name. It won't get you anything for free (they just opened, after all), but they'll be even nicer than they would have otherwise, if such a thing is possible.

Here's an interior shot, complete with my dad stuffing his face.

Gnocchi carbonara. Delicious, but rich rich rich. He has it on the menu as an appetizer, but I'd have been happy with that and a salad.

Scallop appetizer, which was really tasty. I forgot to take a picture until I had already given one of the scallops to my mom and I had smeared the sauce all over the plate. You can see some of Mom's cannelloni in the background.

I forgot to take a picture of my favorite thing that I had: the mushrooms and grilled vegetables with spicy tomato sauce over pasta. Sounds a little pedestrian, but it was fantastic. I probably wouldn't have ordered it except that my sister in law and the waitress both said it was their favorite thing on the menu. I had a veal special too, but the picture didn't turn out.

And here I am with the chef. Geoff's expression is so, Fans are so trying. If I just grit my teeth and smile for another minute, I can leave. So help me if she tries to talk to me! I made him take another one where he acts like we've met before and might even like each other, but this one cracks me up.

And I took yesterday off so I would have a day to myself between visiting family and going back to work. Since it looked like this outside,

it looked like this inside. What you can't see is that I put my pajamas back on after I showered and stayed in them all day until it was time to meet Tae and see the play D is involved in. I love vacation at home days.

Things I've read lately

1. The Isabella Blow profile in New York magazine.

2. Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. It's a parody of Nancy Drew and a quick, fun read. I interviewed the author recently about her upcoming thriller and she's great, one of the very few pieces I've written where I wished I had a lot more space to write about her. All of the books she's written have been wildly different from all of the others: a hippie handbook, self-help book for superheroes, a memoir when she was 24 and now a really dark, edgy thriller. She made a great comment about deciding to make a living as a writer being an "assholish" thing to declare, which quote I did not use in the article and have filed away in the same mental folder as my memory of Barbara Taylor Bradford telling me in her ultra-posh accent that the sex scenes in her books "are not about the size of the penis, but what he's thinking while he uses it."

Another recent interview that I enjoyed was Sarah Andrews, a geologist and author who wrote a mystery set in Antarctica, where she traveled for several months to do research. The National Science Foundation has an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which provides grants for people who need to go there for non-scientific research reasons. How cool is that? It makes me want to come up with a project I could submit a proposal for. Last month? The month before? when I wrote the piece, she had extensive journals and photographs on her website chronicling her time there, which were awesome, but I couldn't find that section just now when I was looking, so she may have taken it down now that the book has been released. I haven't read it yet, but I have a copy and I will.

3. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle, which I've been meaning to write about for a few weeks now. From the site: "Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, this book (released May 2007) tells the story of how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where we live."

There's been a lot written in the last few years about the political and environmental and personal effects of eating locally produced food, by loads of writers far more knowledgeable on the subject than me. I just googled "eating local" and came up with pages and pages of thoughtful, interesting links. One of the reasons why I haven't written about the book before is that I feel like I should write a real review of it, where I tie it into the larger picture of food choice as political statement and quote Rush and Chomsky on the topic of why exempting yourself from the decision process is still a decision. This mythical real review would discuss what I liked about the book (a lot! loads! all of the naturalism stuff and much of the why-eat-local discussion) and where I thought it was weak (arguments about eating locally and organically being as cheap as not; if I had a garden somewhere with a long growing season and a huge freezer and a full-time, successful writer's flexible hours, maybe. in my current situation, not even in the same universe.), but I just haven't the mental acuity to put it all into words  and I don't think I'm well versed enough on the subject to do it justice so I'm just putting out a half-assed write-up and a long quote.

I would definitely recommend it highly. I keep thinking about it, remembering her discussion about how to start (and keep) an asparagus bed, or how to look for morels, or the absolutely riveting chapter about getting her turkeys to breed. That one is worth the price of admission, no question. Also, she talks about making their own cheese, which is something I've read up on in the past and have been meaning to try. I really love fresh mozzarella and when I lived in Brooklyn, there were plenty of places near my apartment where I could get the good stuff. This part of Queens, not so much. If I could make it myself, I'd be a happy, happy girl.

My favorite thing about the book, though, is reading about how much more connected they all felt to their food, the way that the process of growing the food or sourcing something locally made them an integral part of the food's production, not just the consuming entity. The following excerpt really resonated with me and I typed it out before I returned the book to the library. I forgot to write down the page number though — mea culpa!

"Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair. I've grown new vegetables just to see what they taste like: Jerusalem artichokes, edamame, potimarrons. A quick recipe can turn slow in our kitchen because of the experiments we hazard. We make things from scratch just to see if we can. We've rolled out and cut our pasta, raised turkeys to roast or stuff into link sausage, made chutney from our garden. On high occasions we'll make cherry pies with crisscrossed lattice tops and ravioli with crimped edges, for the satisfaction of seeing these storybook comforts become real.

"A lot of human hobbies, from knitting sweaters to building model airplanes, are probably rooted in the same human desire to control an entire process of manufacture. Karl Marx called it the antidote to alienation. Modern business psychologists generally agree, noting that workers will build a better car when they participate in the whole assembly rather than just slapping on one bolt, over and over, all the tedious livelong day. In the case of modern food, our single-bolt job has become the boring act of poking the thing in our mouths, with no feeling for any other stage in the process. When I ponder the question of why Americans eat so much bad food on purpose, this is my best guess: alimentary alienation. We can't feel how or why it hurts. We're dying for an antidote."

4. I'm tired. I'll write about more books later.

Devil may care

Hey Heather! This one's for you:

Deviled Eggs

Any number of eggs; hard-boiled by covering in a saucepan with cold water, bringing it to a boil, then covering the pan and leaving it off the heat for 15 minutes. Run cold water over them until they're no longer hot and chill in the refrigerator until you're ready for them.
Mayonnaise
Mustard
Paprika

Peel the cold eggs, cut in half and scoop out the yolks. Mash them with mustard and enough mayo to hold them together. For three eggs, I used two spoonsful of mayo and one of mustard. (I also chopped up a handful of cold cooked shrimp that I had on hand and mixed that in, but I wouldn't bother with that unless you have shrimp you need to use up. It didn't add much flavor and the texture was a little weird.) Sprinkle with paprika.

I loved your idea of eating them with pickled vegetables. I still think that deviled eggs with a plate full of cold marinated veggies alongside would be an ideal summer supper, but I'm going out of town tomorrow and wanted to use up some stuff I had around instead of chopping and steaming and making vinaigrette, so I had a bowl of frozen peas instead. That's another quirk I could have put on my list from the other day: I love to eat frozen peas. While they're still frozen, that is. The clumps are best, but I'm not picky. I eat them with my fingers, of course, not a utensil. That would be weird. And it puts me in mind of one of the few poems I know by heart:

I eat my peas with honey
I've done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on my knife.

I'd always thought it was Ogden Nash, but a quick google shows that it's an anonymous contribution to the shockingly tiny canon of poems about peas.

And this was actually the first time in my whole life of frozen-frozen pea eating that I put them in a bowl. I usually just pick the clumps out as I'm adding them to macaroni and cheese or whatever. When I was a kid, my mom used to save the clumps for me when she'd cook peas for dinner, which is one of the warm and fuzzy things that make me happy I'm going to visit my parents this weekend, despite the military-invasion-level-planning I have to do to ensure that they both get equal time. It should be a good time. I'll get to eat at my brother's restaurant twice, get a pedicure, go hiking, visit a financial planner who has the super powers to corral all of my 401(k)s from old jobs under one umbrella (dreary, but important), go canoeing and to a German festival that has no online presence whatsoever. So I'll believe that one when I taste the wurst.

Have a great weekend!

Seven quirks

I know I'm roughly three years late to this meme, but I figured I might as well put it out there anyway. I've seen this around the blogs as seven weird things about me, seven things you might not know about me and seven quirks. I'm going with quirks.

1. I have a highly suggestible mind. Seeing a few words somewhere will get a song stuck in my head that has those words as lyrics. (that was a tough sentence to construct.) It took me several years living in Brooklyn before I could hear someone say Red Hook with hearing Bob Dylan's Joey ("Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the year of who no knows when...") Or I might be walking down the street, realize I have The Big Bopper's Chantilly Lace stuck in my head and trace it back to walking past a bakery advertising something with chantilly cream. The suggestible mind also manifests itself when I'm riding a bike. I won't ride near traffic because I end up going whichever way I'm looking.

2. I'm not remotely germaphobic — I think some dirt and germs are good for the immune system, keeping it in fighting shape (I have no idea if this is true) — but I'm a semi-compulsive handwasher. I routinely wash my hands as soon as I walk into the office or my apartment.

3. I love english muffins, but have to brush off all the cornmeal on the bottom before I toast them. I can't explain it.

4. I hate when people angle furniture into corners. Like, if you have a bookshelf and you want to put it in the corner, instead of just putting it the way it naturally wants to be where the right angles are in harmony with each other, you place it diagonally, hiding where the walls come together. WHY?

5. I truly despise both ketchup and black pepper. I don't see this as odd or quirky, since for me it's on par with an aversion to the taste of bug spray, but I've gotten enough grief from people to recognize that it probably belongs on this list. For the record, because this always comes up after this admission, if french fries are worth eating, they will be delicious plain. I also like vinegar on them. Or melted cheese. Or gravy.

6. My main pet peeve is when people yawn in public without covering their mouths. It's just gross. I have a summer-specific pet peeve too though, which is when people shuffle along in their flip-flops or sandals without picking up their feet, like the slowest cross country skiiers EVER. It makes me insane. One of these days, I'm going to be arrested for shaking some poor slob by her shoulders and screaming, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, HEEL TOE! in her face.

7. Since most of these are about things I don't like, I'll share a nice one. When I'm stuck on a crowded, unpleasant subway car, instead of choosing to be aggravated, I'll pick one person at random and love them as best as I can for as long as we share that space. I'll notice details about them and love them for it: her carefully matched shoes and dress, or the fact that he's recently had to start using a different hole on his belt, how stretched out the handles on her grocery bag are; it's heavy. I'll love the care my person takes with her appearance, the fact that he feels deeply enough about some group of strangers to purchase and wear an item of clothing with their team logo on it, that something was keeping him up last night and his eyes are red-rimmed and scratchy. And I'll love my person and hope good things for her until one of us gets off the train. It makes me feel calmer and happier and doesn't do them any harm either.