February 2012
2 posts
2 tags
string quilt
I have been patiently working away on a string quilt for the last few months.
It’s seriously scrappy—it contains 29 different fabrics, mostly bits and bobs left over from other projects. The colors are mostly spicy oranges, pinks, and yellows, with the occasional blue or green for a little relief. The center strips are a cool, steely gray solid.
I quilted it in straight-ish lines...
2 tags
simple moussaka
I am a freak for beschamel. Besciamella, besamel, plain old “white sauce”—whatever. I’m there.
Moussaka is one of the very best ways to eat it, with a top layer of pure beschamel baked into caramelized, custardy deliciousness. But! a good moussaka isn’t just a delivery vehicle for sauce—the bottom layers are savory, spicy, and sweet, with textures and flavors that play...
January 2012
6 posts
3 tags
colette violet blouse
Ohhh, Colette’s Violet blouse. I’ve been wanting to make this one for a long time.
I *love* this pattern. Peter Pan collar, blousy fit, super-girly gathers, buffet-friendly shape, I’m down.
Things I did: I used a lightweight cotton with a woven gray and black stripe for the body. It said Moda on it, so I guess it was a quilting cotton? Anyway, it had soft, swishy drape and I...
2 tags
popovers
Our favorite popovers are Marion Cunningham’s, by way of Julia Child. And oh! What lovely popovers they are—big, handsomely popped beauties with melting-crisp crusts and custardy-smooth interiors. They’re delightful to bake—watching them climb up their tins and then steadily puff-puff-puff their way up and over the rims is so entertaining you can’t help but watch, crouched on...
2 tags
stuffed mustache
Who doesn’t need a moustache for every occasion?
When I saw this Alexander Henry fabric, “Where’s My ‘Stache?”, down at Mama Said Sew, I had to laugh. I didn’t really do the mustache thing the first (100th?) time around, but these here are some handsome mustaches indeed. They’re nicely rendered with line or solid black silhouette, and they’re...
2 tags
mini sewing
I added a tiny little ort bin/thread catcher to my sewing kit. I’ve been using the kit like crazy, but keep leaving tiny snips and snaps of thread all over the place. This is an effort to corral them.
It’s just a tiny drawstring bag with a circular bottom and very short sides. It’s tacked down to one of the pockets. I stuff all my little thread ends and fabric trimmings in...
1 tag
travel sewing pack
Awww yeah. Tiny and cute and crafty. I’m down.
I spent part of Saturday sewing with the amazing women of the Fort Collins Modern Quilt Guild and left full of new ideas and quilting mojo. We sewed at Penny’s lovely new place, and it was so inspiring to see all of her beautiful stuff at work and in use throughout a real, live, living and breathing home.
Carmen was making a...
4 tags
big dutch baby with apples
Though beloved of diners and pancake chains everywhere, each and every big Dutch baby is always new and always interesting. It’s a kissing cousin of the delightfully named apfelpfannkuchen (which I think literally means apple pan cake, awesome) by way of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Yes, yes, okay. This Dutch baby is a big, puffed, gloriously sticky-sweet and rich thing, basically an enormous...
December 2011
1 post
2 tags
Half Square Quilt
I actually managed to finish sewing something. Been a while!
This is a half square triangle crib quilt for my new-ish second cousin (first cousin once removed? I have no idea). Aside from the backing and binding, it came entirely from my stash. The triangles finished at 3” square, and the entire thing measures about 43”x48”.
Material: The colored triangles are pretty much all...
November 2011
2 posts
2 tags
gingered beet soup
An easy one, for blustery weeknights and lazy Sundays, or when you need something cheerful.
Wash, peel, and cut three or four large beets and one tart apple into 1” pieces. Toss in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and set on a baking sheet in a 400F oven for 20 minutes or so, until the beets are starting to be tender and edged with caramel.
Sweat a chopped onion and a clove of garlic with a...
2 tags
dashimaki tamago
This little rolled omelette is a fine breakfast or lunch with some rice, or a nice light dinner with soup, or a beautiful apres-bar snack. There is something about the lovely secret interior—not much to look at outside, hidden worlds within—that can go a long way toward restoring your faith in the world’s worth.
You can make it plain, fill it with nori, or go crazy and use the same...
October 2011
14 posts
1 tag
shallow-fried chicken
We woke up to ten inches of snow on the ground and a power outage at the office today, so we had a little impromptu lunch party for the unexpected snow day. We made the summeriest food we could think of.
Chicken shallow-fried at home is a different beast entirely from restaurant fried chicken, which is usually pressure-fried or deep-fried. It has a shattering-crisp crust, dark and crunchy (but...
3 tags
tiny pies to freeze
Tiny pies! I made these back in January or February with the very last of the apples. We stuck them in the freezer and rediscovered them in the past few weeks; I can confirm that yes, tiny pies are good.
Make these in the summer and fall with seasonal fruit and eat them in midwinter. OMG, tiny pies!
Basic method for frozen pies
All-purpose double crust sweet pie dough
NOTE: This is a...
2 tags
drying tomatoes
Sun-dried tomatoes may be a 90s food cliche, but for good reason—they’re useful, delicious, and a nice change from canned in the depths of winter. Drying tomatoes yourself is easy-peasy. Do it in several batches throughout late summer and fall, and then use them until tomato season comes again. You don’t need a dehydrator—an oven or several hot, sunny days will do.
Drying...
1 tag
favorite jerk chicken
This is not authentic, probably. It’s just good, on a long late-summer evening with rice and peas, a tall glass of beer, and good company. It’s also good in winter, when you need to be reminded of late summer evenings.
Jerk Chicken
Jerk marinade always includes 1) a sour element (lime juice or vinegar); 2) hot peppers; 3) thyme and allspice; 4) a sweet element. All the rest is...
3 tags
green lasagne with lemon
This is a hodgepodge recipe, with ideas and methods borrowed from here, there and everywhere—flavors from Martha, Italian prescriptivism from Marcella. And boy, howdy, is it good.
Method-wise, this Serious Bolognese-style Lasagne—very, very thin noodles, stacked at least six layers high; no cheese except for a sprinkle of Parm between each layer. This dish is as much about pasta as it is about...
3 tags
basil pistou or pesto to freeze
After years of spindly, stunted, slug- and squirrel-chewed plants, our basil grew mightily this summer. What started as ten tiny seeds has grown into two monstrous hedges of bushy green leaves, staggering under their own weight.
This is a good thing.
Here are some basic proportions for making basil pesto (or pistou) in the fall, to freeze and use all winter long. That little hit of...
4 tags
pear conserve and pear jelly
Pears aren’t over yet!
When you can pears, you’re left with an enormous pile of cores, skins, and under- and overripe fruit. Don’t throw them away! As peach skins and pits become peach pit jelly, pear skins and cores become pear conserve and a phenomenally beautiful pear jelly.
I am a little obsessed with wasting as little as possible. It’s mostly that I’m kind...
1 tag
minestrone template
Minestrone. The big soup. Infinitely adaptable to what’s in season, how much time you have, what you feel like eating. Always exactly right.
Minestrone is a good clean-out-the-fridge or tidy-up-the-garden soup. It tastes a little different every time, and a lot different from season to season. But the basic template is always the same. Serve with garlic-rubbed toasts, or Parm wafers, or...
1 tag
mrs. crunch sandwich
This is my own favorite deity in the croque monsieur/croque madame/croque-whatever pantheon. It borrows from Jaques Pepin and uses chicken in place of ham; it takes from sadistic cafe owners everywhere and lays the béchamel on thick. And it has bacon just because (though it’s perfectly fine without).
Look on my sandwich, ye Mighty, and despair.
The croque monsieur (Mr. Crunch) is a...
3 tags
favorite pickled peppers
Mostly I like simple preserves that do just that (preserve the awesomeness of in-season food) and very little more. I generally like stuff that I can use as an ingredient in the winter—whole fruit, dried vegetables, stuff like that. Pickled peppers, though, are kind of an exception for me.
I LOVE pickled peppers. My lizard brain seems to consider them a finished product, not an ingredient or a...
1 tag
pollo al latte
I’ve been trying to avoid roasting chickens in the oven—the high-heat method I like makes a serious mess, and while we like roast chicken, we don’t like it more than we dislike scrubbing appliances.
It’s easy to avoid in the summer, but as the weather gets colder, I’m starting to look for replacement treatments for whole chickens. As simple and fuss-free, if possible, as...
3 tags
trenette fatte a mano
Factory-made trenette is usually just a fattish linguine, useful when you can find it for showing off concentrated sauces. But oh, trenette made by hand! With its charming irregularity and deeply scalloped single edges that add just enough extra surface area, trenette fatte a mano is the ideal vehicle for fine-grained, highly flavored sauces.
Trenette is fast and fun to make, too. My beloved...
4 tags
homemade barbecue sauce for canning
Barbecue sauce drives me nuts. It’s expensive—$6 or $7 for a jar, which you can easily use up in one meal’s worth of chicken-grilling. A given jar is too sweet, or not spicy enough, or too Memphis-y when you need it to be Texas-ish, or vice versa. The solution is to keep like a dozen slightly different open bottles in your fridge.
Or you can make your own!
In a pinch, you can...
5 tags
fast chao ga
When I was very small, my mom would make a giant pot of plain juk, Korean rice porridge, whenever I got sick. It would make its way to my bed on a tray along with a tiny bowl of soy sauce. I’d dip my spoon in the soy sauce first—just the tip, please—and then take up a little bit of porridge.
As I got better, bits of shredded nori or cooked egg would get added. Then some scallions. When I...
September 2011
40 posts
3 tags
spiced elderly cucumbers + pickling lime notes
Have you had a killing frost in your area yet? We still have a couple of weeks, I think.
These sweetish, spicy pickles are a good way to use up the overripe cucumbers that always appear, despite careful and seemingly-thorough picking. A careful treatment with pickling lime, some interesting spices, and you have a very respectable spiced pickle rescued from the compost pile.
I like to treat...
4 tags
SSS day 30
Self-Stitched September, day 30. We did it, through four cities, a photo shoot, a season’s TV taping, and two mini vacations. Today I’m wearing a wool dress I made a long time ago from Simplicity 3673—it was the second thing I made after my Burda shirtdress, and probably the first thing I made that I really loved. It fulfilled the promise of making my own clothes for me—I know I...
3 tags
sss day 29
Self-Stitched September, day 29. One more time on the gingham shorts! Man, I wear these all the time.
We went to the Beirut show down in Denver last night (fantastic!) and stayed in the city overnight and today for the micro-est of micro vacations. I felt marginally less silly wearing shorts and tights in the city than I would have in our little town.
3 tags
roasted tomato soup with rice
Tomato season, soup weather, and turn-of-the-year colds only intersect for so long. Go for it.
Actually, this is one tomato soup that is just fine with less-than-awesome tomatoes. It’s better, of course, with fantastic late-summer tomatoes, but the long roasting concentrates and magnifies the flavors of even the most insipid pink baseball. Even better: Roast good tomatoes now and freeze...
3 tags
SSS day 28
Self-Stitched September, day 28. One of my favorite things about this challenge has been all the styling and sewing inspiration I’ve gleaned from the SSS Flickr group—things I never would have thought to make are rapidly hopping up my queue. In particular, I’ve been super-inspired by items with interesting shapes, sometimes much squarer than I’d think to make for myself.
I...
3 tags
sss day 27
Self-Stitched September, day 27. My drapey silk blouse and ancient pants from J. Crew, pegged because…well, I don’t know why they are pegged. I think I felt really frumpy with them all straight and creased and stiff.
I haven’t worn these pants in years—they’re at least 11 or 12 years old, and I know I haven’t worn them since at least 2006. I wonder why? I really,...
3 tags
payday spoonbread
There are two schools of spoonbread. You can always make a moister, wetter, cornbread leavened with baking powder and call it good. Or you can make old-school spoonbread leavened with egg whites.
The second kind of spoonbread lives somewhere at the intersection between a pudding, a cornbread, and a souffle. And if you’re going to whip some egg whites anyway, you might as well go all the...
6 tags
SSS days 24, 25, and 26
Self-Stitched September, day 24—I wore my Drape Drape dress over jeans and about a million layers on top. The Santa Cruz foothills have weather just as variable and as crazy as the Colorado ones.
Day 25—my little entrelac shrug. I want to make another one of these, maybe in laceweight mohair/silk—I’m finding it super-versatile.
(photos for days 24 and 25 from Terry)
Day 26—back at...
4 tags
cog + wheel and santa cruz
Last weekend, we went on a crazy whirlwind of a micro-vacation to see Phillip and Kayla in Santa Cruz. We flew out on Friday afternoon and came back late Sunday night; it was fast and fantastic.
(photos by Terry)
Mostly we cooked and ate and drank. My kind of relaxation.
They live up in the mountains outside Soquel, which is outside Santa Cruz—which put us:
0 minutes from redwoods;
5...
5 tags
SSS day 23
Self-stitched September, day 23.
I can never remember if the autumn equinox means the last day of summer or the first day of fall. I’m wearing linen pants regardless.
I made these pants a few months ago, using the pattern and fitting tips from Sunni’s Trouser Sewalong archives. They’re in a heavy, slightly slubby linen bought at Elfriede’s when I was feeling flush,...
3 tags
plums in rosemary honey
Taking a cue from Food in Jars and from Mrs. Beeton, I’ve been interested in preserving plums whole for a while now. It was too late last summer when I first started thinking about them, so I spent the entire winter dreaming of whole plums. “This ice cream is great…wouldn’t a plum preserved in honey be nice on it?” “This cake is so boring…I wish we had...
4 tags
SSS day 22
Self-Stitched September, day 22. My shoot is done, done, done, and I’m going away for the weekend for fun, not for work. Huzzah, but damn, I’m tired.
Self-knitted skirt made back in 2007 (I think?) and self-stitched scarf. This scarf rolls like crazy; I might back it with fabric one of these days to help it behave better.
3 tags
SSS day 21
Self-Stitched September, day 21. I’m shooting today and tomorrow, which ordinarily means I’m lucky if I manage to put on a matched pair of shoes.
I’m wearing a very simple one-piece raglan sweater with a boatneck and hemmed edges that I made ages ago. It’s very, very comfortable.
It’s so odd, the things that sewing your own clothes makes you notice—the jeans are...
3 tags
canning tomatoes
Tomatoes at last.
I was seriously fretting that we’d miss out on canning tomatoes this year—I was out of town during our usual week for tomato preserves, and we’re traveling next weekend, too. I kept dreaming of an early frost before I got back, a tornado, a nationwide run on citric acid, maybe? Catastrophizing the harvest.
But it all worked out. We picked up our promised 40 pounds...
4 tags
SSS day 20
UPDATE: I totally changed halfway through the day; the sweater was just TOO small and made me feel overstuffed and awkward, not at all cute. I gave it to Sharon and put on this entrelac shrug instead. MUCH better.
Self-Stitched September, day 20! I have been really liking this experiment so far; it forces me to really think about my clothes and how/why I wear them. I’m going to keep it...
3 tags
SSS day 19
Self-Stitched September, day 19. It’s hot and sunny again here, though the nights are dipping into the 40s. Virginia is for lovers, Colorado is for layers.
I wore my Macaron dress and an old cardigan from TJ Maxx or Nordstrom Rack or the like.
I think this dress was the first thing I ever made that sort of challenged my established ideas about clothes—gingham is definitely NOT something...
3 tags
plum torte
Plum season!
I bought a couple pounds of beautiful little Italian prune plums at the market yesterday—some of them are destined for jam, some of them for plums preserved in honey. And some are for eating fresh.
Here they are in Marian Burros’ plum torte, which has been printed in the Times like every year for two decades. It is very, very, very good—the cake is light and tender-crisp,...
3 tags
SSS day 18
Self-Stitched September, day 18. Kitchen catch-up day—I’m trying to get through forty pounds of tomatoes, plums in honey, plum jam, pickled pepper rings, and spiced cucumber pickles today. Wearing crazytown stripes—a self-stitched romper and a years-old boughten cardigan.
I should totally make some cute aprons. Why haven’t I done that yet?
3 tags
SSS Day 17
Self-Stitched September, day 17. I totally failed at a photo yesterday—we got up at ohgodo’clock in the morning to try and catch an earlier flight. It sort of worked, though we ended up flying east before we could go west, and spent twice as long on a plane as we needed to to get home a few hours earlier. I got home, made something to eat, and then went to sleep for eleven hours straight.
...
4 tags
SSS day 15
Self-Stitched September. Self-knitted cardigan and scarf. It’s cold and rainy here, and omg I’m so tired from this always-exhausting trip. Glad to be heading back to the land of sunshine, bikes, and sweethearts tomorrow.
3 tags
SSS day 14
Self-Stitched September, day 14. Self-stitched gingham shorts, boughten cardigan and tank. The scarf is not me-made, but it is someone-made—I bought it from Nilda Alvarez the first time I met her, out of her trunk show of stuff from the Center for Traditional Textiles.
I’m pretty sure that’s it for the shorts this year. I wear them basically non-stop (are you tired of them yet?)—I...
3 tags
SSS day 13
Self-Stitched September, day 13. Bridge, from Rowan 42.
I made this sweater years ago and I never, ever, ever wear it. I honestly don’t think I’d worn it even once before today. I don’t really know why—I mean, it’s a leettle awkward, what with the super-deep V that slides off my shoulders and the wing-like cap sleeves (I probably should have scaled them down a little)...
4 tags
pickled romano beans with rosemary and lemon
Our romano beans appeared to be caught in some kind of vegetable purgatory from May through September—beautiful, bushy green leaves, prolific flowers, no beans. Nary a one for months and months.
And then suddenly the beanpoles were bristling with flat green pods. We’ll freeze and dry them right and left. We’re already pickling them.
Pickled romano beans with herbs and citrus are...
5 tags
SSS day 12
Greetings from Ohio (and the laptop’s little camera).
I’m wearing a sweater I did for an upcoming issue (simple stockinette with exposed seams in Classic Elite Soft Linen, one of my favorite yarns) and my gingham shorts.
Off to get my face painted!
4 tags
SSS day 11
Self-Stitched September, day 11. I have to fly today, something I detest under the best circumstances. I’m wearing a cardigan I knitted ages ago from an old Adrienne Vittadini pattern.
I’m headed to Ohio for work for a week, taping some stuff. I wear “wardrobe” for most of the day while I’m there, so I usually take minimal real clothes with mostly comfort in mind....