Klosekraft

Weekend update

Friday night, I went to the Armory Art Show, which was pretty good for people-watching, but art-wise, it was kind of a crapfest. Some great photography, but not much else of interest that I saw. There was one painting of a panda that literally stopped me in my tracks with its spectacular badness. If you had told me it was a paint-by-numbers kit, it would have made perfect sense. But most of the stuff on display was neither here nor there, sort of vaguely conceptual without any apparent concepts to back the work up. I had free passes from someone I know who's involved with the show; if I had paid $30 to get in, I would have been pissed. We did have some great sushi afterward though.

Saturday, I spent most of the day helping a friend move out of her fifth-floor walk-up. I got home around 7:30, took a shower, made a batch of tomato soup (brown an onion and some garlic, add two big cans of whole tomatoes in juice and one carton of chicken broth, heat to boiling, then blend with an immersion blender. Mix in a little cream and salt and sip it out of a mug while watching Flight of the Conchords.) and then went to sleep for ten and a half hours.

Sunday, I washed and blocked the pieces of Demi.

I'm still having trouble visualizing exactly how the buttonband on the shoulder is going to come together, but I trust that it'll work out if I follow the directions. I'm not sure I'm going to have time to put this together until this weekend — it's a busy week — but definitely then.

Then I went over to Zoe's in the afternoon and had all kinds of cheese and bread and olives and pickles and leftover cake from her boyfriend's birthday and fresh apple/pear/lemon/ginger juice and the most addictive hazelnut praline spread I've ever tasted. And we watched kind of an embarrassing number of episodes of Buffy and knit.

To no one's surprise, I imagine, I started a new project:

Bridie, in the Knitpicks Gloss (ooh, they have a few new colors!) that was originally going to be Thermal. The gauge is way smaller (7.33 sts to the inch instead of 5.5), but following the directions for the largest size should yield the size I actually want, provided that all of my math and measuring is correct. I'm currently lumbering through the ribbing for the back; 3.5" of twisted rib on size 1 needles takes a while. After three episodes, I had just under 2". And I knit pretty quickly. I think the gauge would have been closer to the pattern if I had double stranded the yarn, but I didn't want this sweater to be that heavy. This will just be a long-term project.

The movie quotes that no one got:

4. He was a great agent. I loved him like a brother, I loved my wife like a mother and a hooker, and look where it's got me — alone, afraid, and I just wanna die!
Steve Buscemi as sad-sack lounge singer Happy Franks in The Imposters.

5. Velcro. Next to the Walkman and Tab it is the coolest invention of the 20th century!
I was a little surprised no one got this — 80s dance-off classic Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

6. Yeah, I can remember a few things. Apparently you don't. The end? Katharine Ross has just married this really cool guy — tall, blond, incredibly popular, the make-out king of his fraternity in Berkeley — when this obnoxious Dustin Hoffman character shows up at the back of the church, acting like a total asshole. "Elaine! Elaine!" Does Katharine Ross tell Dustin Hoffman, "Get lost, creep. I'm a married woman"? No. She runs off with him. On a bus. That is the reality.
I would have been really surprised if anyone had known this one; it's from Barcelona, which is a movie I'm convinced no one likes but me.

This was fun to put together. I may well do it again sometime I'm casting about for blog fodder. I keep thinking of great, quotable movies I left out.

Movie meme

I've been busy, but not the kind of busy that leads to much blog fodder (helping a friend pack, going to see a Brazilian dance troupe at BAM, looking at apartments — no luck yet; the roommate at the only place I've really liked so far ended up having one of her friends move in, so I've been playing Sour Grapes a bit (small kitchen! kind of ugly block!) and setting up more appointments over the next week or so.

So in lieu of anything else to write about, I'm doing the movie meme that's floating around these days.

The rules:

• Pick 10 of your favorite movies.
• Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
• Post them on your blog for everyone to guess.
• Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
• Looking them up is cheating. Please don’t.

1. I've just decided to switch our Friday schedule to Monday, which means that the test we take each Friday on what we learned during the week will now take place on Monday before we've learned it. But since today is Tuesday, it doesn't matter in the slightest. Pencils ready! Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, original flavor. Spotted by NerdGirl.

2. That's the kind of greeting a girl likes! Not this "Hello-you-look-wonderful" stuff, just a good straight "Who do you know that's an authority on San Francisco his—" Liz got this one right away: Vertigo.

3. She batted them pretty little eyes at you, and you fell for it like an egg from a tall chicken! Charade — Sonja got it.

4. He was a great agent. I loved him like a brother, I loved my wife like a mother and a hooker, and look where it's got me — alone, afraid, and I just wanna die!

5. Velcro. Next to the Walkman and Tab it is the coolest invention of the 20th century!

6. Yeah, I can remember a few things. Apparently you don't. The end? Katharine Ross has just married this really cool guy — tall, blond, incredibly popular, the make-out king of his fraternity in Berkeley — when this obnoxious Dustin Hoffman character shows up at the back of the church, acting like a total asshole. "Elaine! Elaine!" Does Katharine Ross tell Dustin Hoffman, "Get lost, creep. I'm a married woman"? No. She runs off with him. On a bus. That is the reality.

7. Would you excuse me? I cut my foot before and my shoe is filling up with blood. Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion; Debi got it.

8. "He's three years old, gentle as a kitten, and likes dogs." I wonder whether Mark means that he eats dogs or is fond of them? Jenny knew this one: Bringing Up Baby.

9. This is pure snow! Do you have any idea what the street value of this mountain is? Better Off Dead. Rebecca and Suzanne both got it.

10. As Mr. Sloan always says, there is no "I" in team, but there is an "I" in pie. And there's an "I" in meat pie. Anagram of meat is team... I don't know what he was talking about. Ali knew this one — Shaun of the Dead.

Fried macaroni and cheese: not a great idea

Yesterday, for some reason, I decided to make fried macaroni and cheese.

I had some leftover mac and cheese from a buffy-a-thon with Zoe Sunday night (recipe here; I added a pinch of cayenne to this batch). I love homemade mac and cheese but it doesn't reheat particularly well and apparently I thought that the way to treat a dish that becomes unpleasantly oily upon reheating was to actually reheat the food in oil. It's like a double negative, right?

Sometimes I can't believe that I've managed to keep myself alive this long. I mean, I read sentences like that and just have visions of myself, like, petting an angry bear on the nose and saying "nice doggie."

I absolutely drew the line at deep frying because A: gross and B: scary, so that eliminated most the recipes I found online right off the bat. I used this as my technique guideline. I totally missed the part about dredging in flour though, so consider that step optional. I sent the link to Liz and told her that's what I was making for dinner and she wrote back that if she ever wanted to break up with her boyfriend but didn't feel like telling him, she would just make that exact thing for dinner and he would leave an Otto-shaped hole in the door in his haste to get home to his barley.

Here's the set-up:

Cubed mac and cheese, beaten egg, bread crumbs.

In progress:

It was kind of fun to see it work the way it was supposed to, I have to say. Applying heat makes food brown!

Dinner:

That's more than one serving, obviously. I made more than I wanted because I'm new to this frying thing and wanted to be prepared in case I ruined some.

A close up:

I have to say, after all that, they were just okay. Nothing special. They weren't particularly greasy and had a nice, crunchy coating. But they didn't really taste like mac and cheese anymore; they just tasted like fried. And since I'm not used to eating fried food, I felt kind of sick for hours afterward. The novelty value was reasonably high though, so that's something.

Knitting update

1. Demi. It's in the home stretch. Back and both sleeves are done and I'm up to the armhole on the front. I would really, really like to finish this in time to wear it once or twice before the season passes.

2. Top-down handspun raglan. I've finished the yoke and am a few inches further into the body than I was when I took this picture. I had a minor setback with it last week, due entirely to my own hubris — I hadn't bothered to look up how to handle the body/sleeve split because I've knit plenty of seamless sweaters and have a pretty good sense of the proportions and how to calculate to fit myself. So I set aside 8% of the stitches for the underarm and knit merrily away on the body. It seemed Not Right though, so I looked it up and learned that when you're working from the neck down, you need to add stitches under the arms instead of taking them away. Which sort of makes sense if I don't focus on it too much. I actually have knit top-down sweaters successfully in the past, so I either did it wrong before and it turned out fine anyway or I did it correctly and then blocked out all memories of the process. Brains are weird.

So I ripped back a ways since not only had I screwed up, but I also had 8% more sweater than I was really interested in having. It seems to be back on track now. I'm putting in some princess darts, but just to nip it in a few inches at the waist. Since this isn't next-to-the-skin yarn, I'll have to wear something fairly substantial under it and don't want the shaping to be too extreme. The neckline looks a little wonky in the photo, but it isn't really. That's one mistake I *didn't* make.

3. Road to Not-Golden. I'm stalled on this one. I got a few repeats in and lost interest completely. I think the problem is that it's just not something I'll wear. I like the colors, but I'm not all that wild about the pattern itself. So I think that I'm going to rip out the colorwork portion and do stripes instead. Same proportions, same cap sleeve effect. Just narrow stripes instead of crazy multicolored diamond-y geometric nonsense.

I had wanted to do this sweater to see if I still had the chops to do stranded knitting before I tackle Venezia. Turns out that I do.

I like the wrong side better.

I actually started Venezia at the end of February, but had trouble with the hem flaring out after a few inches of colorwork and ripped back. Instead of the one called for in the pattern (cast on provisionally, knit a few inches then unpick the cast on row and knit it together with the live stitches — pain in my ASS, let me tell you), I think I'll do a sewn-down hem with a purled turning ridge. It may be just the eensiest bit less elegant, but should lie flat more dependably, so it'll look much better in the end. I did take pictures, but managed to delete them without uploading and never got around to posting about any of it. I want to rechart it for myself to make it clearer which color is background and which is foreground and I'm not going to start it again for a while anyway, so I'm not counting this as an active project. Just one that'll pop up eventually...

Happy Easter!

Unrecipes

I really haven't felt like cooking lately.

I mean really. Just thinking about cooking for the last couple of weeks has made me want to take a nap.

But right before this cooking ennui hit, I had bought a fairly ridiculous amount of vegetables and fruit and so I've been trying to prepare them in ways that require the absolute bare minimum of work. Case in point, these roasted green beans.

These were just tossed with a little olive oil and roasted at 400* until they browned.

And I made the absolute easiest blood orange sorbet EVER the other night.

I started with blood orange nectar. Since it's already sweetened, you can dump it right in the ice cream maker without all of those pesky heat juice, add sugar, cool down steps.

I got the whole thing together while the water for my pasta was coming to a boil and it was done by time I finished eating.

This is optional, but makes a big difference in the texture. I find that sorbet gets too icy if there isn't any alcohol in there to keep it from freezing solid.

I used maybe half of that. And about two-thirds of the juice. But whatever. I'm sure more or less of either would work just as well. This isn't exactly complicated.

Then I took a bunch of pictures of the sorbet freezing because I was kind of bored while the pasta cooked and I was worried that it wasn't going to work. I'd had the ice cream canister in the freezer for a while and must have stored a bag of coffee in it at some point because it had some coffee grounds in the bottom. So, like a complete idiot, I tried to wipe them out with a damp paper towel. The towel, of course, shredded and froze to the inside of the canister. I tried picking the shreds off; they wouldn't budge. I swirled a little hot water around inside it, which did work to to unfreeze the paper and rinse out the grounds, but I had to do a couple of rounds of it and was afraid that I had defrosted the canister to the point where it wasn't going to freeze the juice.

It's awfully difficult being me sometimes. Though I think the comments are fixed now. I made a point of talking about Joe Bruno in public yesterday: how he subverts the Peter Principle and that I actually really like how deliciously evil he is. And now my email works. Coincidence?

And the sorbet froze just fine after all. It was great on its own, but even better with a scoop of Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Honey Bee — like a grown-up creamsicle.

Commentpalooza

Thanks to everyone who commented on Flicca — my apologies for not responding directly. Gmail, in its infinite wisdom, has disabled the email address associated with the blog and I'm in the middle of sorting it out with them. I can read comments through the Typepad site, but they aren't being emailed to me. My regular gmail address is fine though, so at least I'm not completely cut off. I filed a "help me, please" request and got a rather snippy response from them earlier today that addresses are usually disabled only when the terms of service have been violated. I explained that I only use the address to talk to people about knitting and really hadn't done anything untoward with it. Now I'm just waiting to hear back.

The moral of the story: Don't talk smack about Joe Bruno. The man will cut you. And apparently even Google owes him favors.

I like the mix of different scales and colors of grid patterning in this window, somewhere off 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn.

My friend Flicca

Project specs:
Pattern: Flicca by Anna Bell
Yarn: 50/50 merino/cashmere mill ends from School Products
Needle: 10.5
Size: small
Started: late August 2007
Finished: March 9, 2008
Modifications: I knit it at a slightly smaller gauge than the pattern calls for (10.5 needle vs. 11). The back ended up narrower than it should have because I just skimmed over the directions and missed the parts about keeping stitches at the sides that didn't get decreased. I have a narrow back though, so it ended up working out better than it might have otherwise. Also, I made the sleeves narrower by skipping the first, very flared bell section. I cast on the number of stitches that you were supposed to have after the first decrease. I added buttons and buttonholes to the bands. I probably shortened the sleeves a smidge too.
Impressions: I love the finished garment. I love the style, I love the fit. I really like Anna's patterns. They're very well written and produce chic, wearable garments. I may add at least one pocket because I have a little yarn left and, since I'm likely going to be wearing this as a coat, I'd like to have a pocket for ipod and/or keys. I've realized, however, that I just don't like knitting with yarn that's bulkier than worsted weight. It's not comfortable for my hands and I don't find large-yarn fabric particularly pleasing. I like the way finer gauge knitting moves and drapes so much better. I think that's the main reason it took me so long to finish this: big yarn = no fun. I would definitely knit this again, but only if I rewrote the pattern for a finer gauge.

To go with my Hercule Poirot mustache-on-a-stick

I know it's a long shot, but does anyone has a lead on where I could find this Jane Marple dress and bag? (Lower right, next to the guy in the plaid suit) Or, even better, just the fabric?

Photo from some Japanese Gothic Lolita magazine, via Jezebel

But wait — I never write about politics!

The past couple of days have found me sighing deeply and saying things like, "Eliot Spitzer, I'm not angry with you, but I'm very, very disappointed," and "Eliot Spitzer, didn't I warn you that pride comes before a fall?" and, months before, "Eliot Spitzer, Joe Bruno is a fucking street fighter and he will take you down one way or another so, for the love of God,  stop taunting him. Prep school did not prepare you for this. We're talking M-O-B here, and not the kind that Michael Kors disparages."

Anyway. I thought that Spitzer would "fall" and "break his knees" while running one day, but I suppose resigning in disgrace after being implicated in a high-class prostitution scandal is close enough. Not that he didn't get himself into it through his own obviously illegal and tacky actions, but the whole thing smacks of ... something. (David Byrne agrees.)

Honestly, I'm more than a little heartbroken. Spitzer kicked ass as Attorney General. I was thrilled when I learned he was running for governor, I voted for him with enthusiasm and I was really rooting for him once he took office. But I have to say — he was a lousy governor. I was disappointed in him long before this all happened. I think it was about the time the second-to-most-recent MTA fare hike went through and he didn't do anything about it even though the agency had two sets of books, one of which showed a huge surplus, that I started to get suspicious that he wasn't going to do anything particularly helpful. And then when he got bogged down with all the infighting, I just wanted to shake him. And cry. Like it or not,  Bruno is an immovable object in New York State politics and, while Spitzer was a force to be reckoned with, he was not an unstoppable force by any stretch of the imagination.

When the story first broke the other day about him being involved with a prostitution ring, I looked around the office and asked if anyone even knew who the lt. governor was. None of us knew — and we're all reasonably aware (quasi-)journalists. I was ashamed; I used to know this kind of thing without thinking about it. I had to look up her last name, but I remember Betsy who used to fight with Pataki all the time because, well, she brooked no guff and was always in the news. Then Mary Donohue took over, and she was easy to remember even though she didn't do anything particularly memorable while in office because when I was in high school, she was the district attorney of the county I lived in and she would sometimes act as judge of the mock trial competitions I was in. The current lt. gov., David Paterson, who has not yet been sworn in as governor as of this writing as far as I know, has a good track record for issues that I think are important (pro alternative energy and stem cell research) and apparently is well respected by both parties. It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out, though, however it goes, I'm proud of my state for (soon) having the first legally blind governor in the U.S. and a little shocked that he's New York's first African-American governor — and only the fourth in the country ever.

Sort of a disclaimer: For what it's worth, I grew up near Albany, and lived and worked downtown at a law-related nonprofit for several years after college. My last two years there, my office windows had a beautiful view of the Capitol building across the street. I used to see — and eavesdrop on — the bigwig politicians out and about at restaurants and bars. Not that it should lend any weight to any of my opinions, but I am speaking from my experience observing the Albany political machine at close range. (Also, I miss having my own office. It had a door I could close and more than one window.)