Strawberries and Whipped Cream

I love strawberries and whipped cream. Actually I love them together and independently of each other. When I was a little girl my favorite nursery rhyme was Curly Locks:

Curly Locks! curly locks! wilt thou be mine?
Thou shall't not wash dishes, nor yet feed the swine,
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
And feed upon strawberries, sugar, and cream!

That seemed idyllic to me. The leisure of being able to just sit and do handwork while eating strawberries, sugar and cream. Ah! As I grew up, my tastes refined and not just any strawberry would do. I prefered fresh picked ripe strawberries directly from the field and the whipped cream had to be homemade. Unfortunately, other than growing my own, the local strawberry fields are open only for a few weeks each year for public picking and the roadside stands are fewer and harder to find. When I can find organic locally grown berries it is pure heaven. When I was young I was happy with the "whipped cream" that came in a spray can as well as the tubs of "whipped topping." Neither of which actually had no real whipped cream in them. One day someone made me real fresh whipped cream and I became a whipped cream snob.

Here is my favorite recipe for whipped cream:

Take 1 cup of heavy whipping cream (don't use that lower fat stuff, go for the real stuff) and put it in a glass or stainless steel mixing bowl (preferably one you have chilled). Set your mixer to whip and let it go. Watch it, because there is a fine line between whipped cream and butter. When nice soft peaks start to form add up to 1 tsp of vanilla (I like to use the Wilton clear vanilla as it doesn't distort the lovely whiteness of the whipped cream, but any will do) and 1-2 Tbl of confectioner's sugar. Now if you happen to be lucky enough to live somewhere that actually sells the ultra-fine table sugar (not just regular table sugar, but the really fine not quite confectioner's sugar) you can substitute that, but I have not seen it in stores since cake flour disappeared. Start with 1 tablespoon and if that isn't sweet enough for you add more at 1 teaspoon at a time. Eat. With strawberries or even a spoon or if one is too far across your kitchen your finger.

I've had many a dessert ruined because of imitation whipped cream or out of season strawberries. Both deserve to be fresh. Treat yourself to some soon.

Spring?

I'm hesitant to actually say that spring is here despite all the signs I've seen: a female cardinal gathering sticks to refurbish her nest in the azalea bush; the buds of my oak leaf hydrangea; a weed in my winter-dead lawn; and the green haze of the oak pollen casting an eerie sheen over my car. In my excitement of warmer weather I even made a new skirt that has very wild flowers in aqua, lime, marmalade and fuchsia to go with my pink Converse tennis shoes (the ones with the lime green laces). I'm no longer fantasizing about knitting a fisherman sweater out of 100% wool, but instead am planning my sock selections for easy portable and cooler knitting.

However, I am resisting the urge to go out and plant flowers. My grandmother always told me to "wait until the ides of March" to plant. She said that anything planted prior to March 15th would die because there will always be a last frost. Once you get past the 15th then plant to your heart's content (unless of course Farmer's Almanac tells you to wait again.)

It's odd that I am happy about spring. I love autumn and winter and don't tolerate warm weather well at all. But this past winter has been exceptionally cold. We had a week where it never got above thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit and the nights were in the lower twenties and upper teens. (Don't laugh all you northern people, that's down right bitter for North Florida.) But for some reason seeing Mrs. Cardinal back in my yard made me smile and get that giddy feeling that this oppresionable weather might just be over. I'm thinking of things I want my gardener to do (gardener = my brother who gives me a very good rate on mowing my lawn). I'm thinking of what I want to do in my garden beds and all the work I should be doing this next week to prepare them.

Which brings us around to cooking (because this blog is supposed to be about knitting, cooking and writing and not just me rambling on about miscellaneous topics). I've outgrown my herb box. In fact my herb box is falling to pieces and needs to be replaced. This past year my brother (the aforementioned gardener) cleared out a ton of brush that was growing out in front of my house. I have this grandiose plan of paving that area to make a front porch patio. Behind all that brush, bracketing my front door, were two very long brick planters. Oh, I knew they were there, but they were never accessible. Now I can walk right up to them and they are screaming to be very long herb boxes. I'm imagining regrowing my rosemary hedge and bushes of basil. I want to actually have my own sage this year and I want to give the thyme room to creep like it wants to. I'm imagining bees buzzing around my lavender and lemon balm and pots of peppermint scattered around the patio.

There is just something wonderful about growing your own herbs. Your food just tastes better when the herbs are fresh and they come from your own garden. Spaghetti sauce just tastes richer when it came out of the garden just minutes before being thrown into the pot. All the essence and fragrance are still clinging to them and your fingers smell delightfully of rosemary and oregano. It is satisfying to be able to say, "I grew this sauce."

So come on Spring. Persephone awake from your underground captivity and bring the sun back with you. Sun warm the Earth so it will allow the plants to thrive. Let the air blow sweet breezes and the rains fall gently. I'm ready this year, so bring it on!

We're all a little mad

I joined the infamous Sock Madness on Ravelry. What is Sock Madness? It's a race to finish a set of assigned sock patterns with no alterations as fast as you can. Eight pair of socks in something like six weeks. I'm half way finished with my first sock and thought I was really whizzing through until I logged on this morning and found someone has already finished the pair! Sweet Nelly, what do the drink in Norway that lets someone knit that fast? I knit fast for an English knitter and I know that Continental is faster, but that much? Or maybe it's a combination of knitting fast and not having anything to do. I mean I did take time to eat and shower and dress. I had to take the kids on a french fry crawl (maybe a topic for a later post) and I did have to stop to go pick up the new spinning wheel, but none of those things took terribly long.

I keep wondering why I joined this challenge and I think it is for the same reason I do NaNoWriMo every year. I want to see if I can do it. I have no grandiose plans of actually winning Sock Madness (unlike NaNoWriMo, there is only one winner), but I do have plans to get through as many rounds as I can. It would be fun to be able to say I made it through five or six rounds. For now, I just need to get through this first round.

Off to knit!

My New Baby

I've been scouring Craig's List and Freecycle and the newspaper classifieds for a new(er) wheel than the one I have. Don't get me wrong. I love Eloise, my 18th century Eastern European flax wheel, but she is fragile and needs a little attention. So earlier this week I found an add on Craig's List about an estate sale which listed all kinds of miscellaneous household furnishings and then a light from the heavens showed down on the listing and tacked on the end of "... dishes, linens, two sofas, antique chair" were the words and a spinning wheel. It was hanging there like an afterthought. I immediately contacted the person and asked if they were willing to let me come out and look at it and what kind of condition the wheel was in. She wrote back and said, "Sure, come on Thursday evening. It's in working condition and I'm wanting $100 for it."

Now, being the skeptic I am, I immediately questioned what "working condition" could mean, but decided that I would go look anyway. I mean it might be a good wheel or it might be a nice display piece, but the address was only ten minutes from my house and I could always luck out. Well, I lucked out. It's a beautiful fairly modern Saxony Canadian production wheel. She's in perfect working order (and I even have spun a few yards on her already).

Her name is Elora. I asked the owner if she had a name yet and I was met with confusion. She said, "Well, my students (elementary age) called her Sleeping Beauty." I laughed and said, "But she isn't a flax wheel." That got me a confused look. I then had to explain that Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on a distaff of a flax wheel and not a wool spinning wheel. (That got me a bag of New Zealand wool thrown in.) But I didn't want to call her Sleeping Beauty and I didn't want to call her Aurora, so I combined it with the previous owner's name (Laura) to come up with Elora.

I'm so happy.

Socks in bed

I love my hand knit socks. They are the only ones I will wear. They fit my feet perfectly and don't have any annoying seams rubbing across my toes. They are soft. They know me. But then comes the problem of wearing them in bed. When I go to bed at night I usually am freezing. I have my socks on, my flannel jammies, sometimes an undershirt, and on the coldest of nights maybe even a hat. I am cozy under my sheet and two quilts. I'm like a little caterpillar in her cocoon. Safe. Snug. Warm.

And then it happens. HOT FLASH! When I first started hearing my friends talk about hot flashes I thought those women were out of their minds. But then I started to experience them myself. When they say hot, they really mean HOT and when they say flash, it should be FLASH. Seriously, they hit you strong and hard and fast. You barely have enough time to take off your clothes to escape the inferno. Then five minutes later you are shivering. You feel like Wile E. Coyote has held onto a stick of "Dyn-O-mite" one second too long and have instantly combusted into a pile of ash. And then the arctic wind blows.

The problem with all this is that in the process to relieve yourself of anything that might retain heat (including covers, clothes, and lovers) your socks end up at the bottom of the bed. Retrieving them is no small feat. Trying to get them sorted out of their post strip jumble is nearly impossible in the dark and you are so tired that you forget about them. Until you get up in the morning and your feet are freezing. I do not recommend trying to find and put on crumpled socks in a pre-caffeinated state. It's just easier to pull on a new pair from the pile.

You do this for many nights in a row and then suddenly you can't find any of your hand knit socks because they are all at the bottom of your bed, intertwined like some sort of sock orgy. There in the wedge of your sheets are merino consorting with bamboo and colorwork going at it with lace. And you don't even want to know what the gansey is doing to the stockinette plain Jane. They look up at you like it is your fault.

Honestly, I don't care what my socks do under the covers. I just wish they would start having babies. But then, I'm not sure if I would like the product of this:

and

Bread

I love bread. There is something about a loaf of homemade bread baking in your oven and filling your home with the aroma of warm yeasty wheat. I learned to bake bread when I was a child. My grandmother was a whizz with flour and could make the best biscuits, dumplings, pie crusts, cookies and bread. She taught me to be patient and not try to hurry the bread. "Breads that had forced risings had poor crusts," she would tell me. "But then you don't want to overwork it either." There was a fine line between giving bread enough and too much attention.

In the nineteen nineties, there was the arrival of the in-home bread machine. A marvelous contraption that allowed anyone to have home baked bread without doing any work. Just dump everything into a bucket and push a button. Three or so hours later you ended up with a, well, bucket of bread. If you actually were able to extract your bread from the bucket you had a square loaf with a thick crust and a hole in the bottom. There were hundreds of cookbooks available for the bread machines.

I was a new mother at that time and just knew that this nifty little gizmo would allow me to have fresh baked bread in the house while chasing after a very active two-year old. I baked exactly six loaves of bread in the machine before I gave up on it. After being spoiled most of my life with beautiful rounded loaves of tender crusted bread, I found the bread from a bread machine to be quite lacking. It didn't fit in my toaster (or any toaster that I know of) and the first third of the loaf had a large hole in the middle, so it didn't make for very good sandwiches either. But mostly, I missed kneading and shaping the bread.

I love the feel of bread dough. It has a certain texture that tells you when it is ready for the final rising. Knowing that you put your arms in motion to bring the loaf of bread into being is gratifying when you pull the loaf, piping hot, out of the oven and resist the temptation to just tear into it before it has a chance to cool a bit. You made that bread. You used your hands to shape the top and to make it into the perfect loaf. Not some machine.

People often ask me for the recipes for my bread and I just stare at them blankly. I just don't use recipes. I go strictly on touch. I know that I begin with about a cup of liquid. Sometimes milk, sometimes water, sometimes evaporated milk, sometimes a mixture, sometimes with an egg as part of my liquid. Into that I put about 3 cups of flour, sometimes more, sometimes less. It really depends on the humidity and when the dough feels right. I use anywhere from one teaspoon to three tablespoons of sugar or honey (and sometimes none at all). I usually use a tablespoon or so of butter, but even then it might be olive oil or vegetable oil or even no oil. (I once made twenty loaves of bread without any oil at all because I forgot about it and no one noticed.) The flour can vary depending on what is at hand and what I am in the mood for. It could be just plain white flour or maybe whole wheat or a blend or some rye or oatmeal. And then there is the all-important yeast. Some days I put in a lot (two teaspoons per loaf) and others less (one half teaspoon). In the end, it is still a loaf of bread.

Whatever happened to that bread machine? I still have it. In fact I still use it, but only to mix my ingredients. If I am in a hurry I will simply toss a bunch of stuff in the machine and select the dough setting. It will mix it and let it rise once. Then I take it out and do the final kneading, shaping and rising before popping it in the oven. I still have a need to touch my bread. I still have to put part of myself into it. Bread needs that and no machine can ever give it that individual attention.

For Rachael

I finished reading Rachael Herron's book How to Knit a Love Song. It was charming, funny, sad, infuriating, giggly, precious and content. I enjoyed every page and can't wait for another "Cypress Hollow Yarn" to come out. I'm not sure if everyone would appreciate this book fully for what it is. If you like (what I call) light romance (good story with enough sex to satisfy, but not make you flip back to the cover to see if you accidentally picked up a copy of Penthouse Letters) you will enjoy the story. However, if you are a fiber enthusiast (especially a spinner or knitter) you will adore this book. It is every knitter's fantasy. To inherit a cottage with a cupola filled with fiber and spinning wheels and a very good looking sexy sheep rancher (are they still called shepherds?) right across your lawn is simply divine. I had a hard time reading it only because the people younger than me in the house kept asking for things like dinner and clean laundry and for me to take them places. "Leave me alone. Can't you see that I have a book in my hand and I have no clue what is going on in the world? I just want to get back to Abigail and Cade and the yarn!"

Sadly, I think that for the non-fiber enthusiast this book may not fully touch them unless they have known the comfort of slipping a soft Merino sweater over their head or snuggling their toes into a pair of wool bamboo socks and can appreciate the time and effort that went into making those garments by hand. This book is much like those hand knit pieces. It is full of love and you can easily slip into the comfort of its pages as easily as a pair of Norwegian mittens on a bitter cold day. Pour a cup and pick this book up.

The one thing that it left me longing for, though, was my own Eliza. How wonderful to have an Eliza in your life. Not one who will die and leave you everything you need in life, but one who makes you appreciate what you do and encourages you to seek that thing you love the most. It doesn't even have to be knitting related. A muse, so to speak, who makes you realize that you have worth.

I have been privileged to follow Rachael (or as I have known her Yarnagogo) over the past year as she announced she was being published and as she worked through her own editing rather than doing NaNoWriMo (although she cheered us on as we went). It has been fun seeing her progress and the challenges of getting to her first book signing (which I read her tweet while at the bookstore in that "post book emptiness" while looking for a new read - suggestions anyone?)

Congratulations Rachael! You deserve this lovely book and I look forward to the KAL over at Ravelry.