In a Jam?

Why yes, yes I am...
Well, not in any actual jam, but I'm in a jam making frenzy!  Ever since I discovered the Microwave Berry Jam on King Arthur Flour's Blog, we've had fresh jam.  It started innocently enough with strawberry jam a few days ago, some raspberry yesterday, and most likely, some blueberry today.  I figured it would be good, but I didn't realize how good it would be!  This sounds kind of stupid, but it just tastes so fresh, like just 15 minutes ago it was a pint of berries or something... Oh, wait!  It was!
I've been wanting to learn how to can lately but have been completely overwhelmed by everything that goes into it.  I then decided that freezer jam would be a good place to start; I've even gotten the special little jars for it already.  However, the very next day, the King Arthur Flour site had the answer of where I should start.  Freezer jams and 'real' canning are still on the horizon, but this will tide me over for a short while, especially once the local peach season begins!

Springing

Winter is officially over (according to the calendar), and I'm excited for SPRING!  Summer, not so much, but spring is nice.  It's amazing how excited you can get about flowers in the spring (especially violets), even if they are considered to be weeds!

 



 

 

 



Even snail shells seem exciting in spring...
Just the shells though!
(I haven't totally lost my senses)

More Excuses

I should do better, blah, blah, blah.  Posting should happen more than once a year, blah, blah, blah.  New Year, new resolutions, blah, blah, blah.  (Truth be told, that last one is the most accurate.)



Anyway, moving on.  I don't know if I've said it here or not, (but I'm just going to pretend the past year of posts pretty much didn't happen so it really doesn't matter) but every year I make a list of 100 things.  The list is a wildly diverse collection of random things I would like to do, to make, to become, or achieve in the following year.  This is about my fourth year doing it, and in all honesty, I've never gotten the satisfaction of crossing off all 100 things.  Continuing this honesty thing, I've never crossed off the one constant thing added every year:  "Number 100 - Finish at least 50% of the list".
I started the list after reading somewhere once that people only actually follow through on something like 8-12% of resolutions, so I thought I'd come up with 100 things and see how well I could do.  Not much better than that, I have to admit.  Last year I had starting a blog on the list, (number 58, in no particular order) and this year, actually posting regularly on the blog is on there, too (number 21, again, in no particular order).  So here we go!
I actually have finished something on the list already this year, number 10, to be exact.  It's not very exciting (and normal people don't have issues with this, either), but I helped take the lights off of the Christmas Tree in a timely manner within the first week of the year!  Yay!  If I were anyone else, this may not seem like such a great feat, but I have helped my Dad take the lights off the tree after it had been carted outside because it was a fire hazard for safety reasons, while the temperature was in the 20's, losing feeling in our hands, watching him swear at the tree and saying we'll get a fake pre-lit one next year... not a pretty picture, but you get the idea.  Sometimes Mom takes the lights off, sometimes Dad does, but usually it ultimately involves wire cutters and pruners.  Seriously.  Why does it come to this every year?
Because they let their daughter put the lights on, and I make sure no branch goes without a few hundred tiny bulbs of multi-colored Christmas magic!  But this year was my last chance to prove I could do the lights and get them off in a reasonable window of time.  I always argue to leave the tree up through Epiphany (January 6th), so this year, on January 7th, Mom and I managed to get the lights off in record time.  What actually takes me a few evenings to do before Christmas was completely undone in less than two hours!  Yay!  Scratch off number 10!

The pumpkins from Halloween are fairing nicely on the porch.
Christmas garlands are still up, too...
I'm kinda confused on the seasonal front...



...And these don't help at all!
(Yay, Spring!)

Armchair Fatigue

Okay, so I haven't been as dedicated as I should be to this.  I broke my foot two months ago and have been stuck in this chair pretty much ever since and have had a lot more time than usual to reflect on things here lately, and blog neglect is only one of them.  I have two posts that I finished in February and never posted, so I'm going to post those now and move on, pretending this break never happened, and then I'm starting over.  They've been a major monkey on my back, so it's good to let 'em go! 
This year in general has been kinda weird, juggling an ill behaved puppy and helping with my grandmother who has Alzheimer's, and a whole mess of other problems have been around here lately, too.  I wanted to put that out there, but I don't want to dwell on it here either: I would like to make this blog a positive sort of thing to help me see the positive things around here, all lumped together and cataloged chronologically.  New look, new dedication, and... another confession.  The Knitter's Almanac Knitting Challenge went bust.  In January.  Hmm... I have yarn for most of the projects in the book, so I'm probably just going to wait, finish the swatch, research a bit for the other months and start again next year, third time's the charm, yes?  I sure hope so!

So, here we go again, starting fresh.  Now I just need to go and change the layout, make some things and take some pictures to share, let's see... where to start now?

A King Cake...

...fit for a queen!

A day too late for Mardi Gras, but we've never celebrated it anyway, so it just gave me an opportunity to try another new recipe!  For the past couple of years a recurring resolution has been to try 52 new recipes each year (once a week) to add at least a little bit of variety to what we eat around here, and this week it was King Cake in honor of Mardi Gras, from King Arthur Flour.  Like I said, we don't celebrate it around here, but I love any chance to partake of a holiday, and I'm pretty liberal about what constitutes a holiday.  Friday the 13th, the first day of any season, a blue moon or meteor shower, even things like national juggling day are observed!  All of these give me a reason to research special, seasonal, and regional recipes to dig out and try.  I've discovered a few recipes that have become family favorites since doing this, and a few are birthday requests every year ever since their discovery.  Trying all these different recipes leads to trying new techniques and challenging the skills I already have, but it doesn't always go as planned.  This King Cake for instance?  It almost didn't happen, and that's where King Arthur Flour comes into the picture again.  The new technique I was trying here was using a breadmaker, a real stretch for me as a bread baking purist, but something I wanted to try anyway.  I used my Mom's machine and guidance, since she and the breadmaker are buddies, and off we went.  Everything was going remarkably well, until... well it got ugly.  I took the puffy dough out of the machine and dumped it on the greased counter top to pat it into a 24 by 6 inch rectangle, only to find soup.  Soupy, soupy, soup.  Ugh.  I was not happy about it (at all), but as I was beating myself up over the failure and trying to decide if it was too late to start all over again, I played with the goop on the counter top.  It was like a cake batter with a really strong gluten structure, and I noticed that the longer I played with it and beat it up, the more dough like it got, so I figured all was not lost.  I asked my Mom and tried to ask my Dad, but she had no idea what to do and he was suffering from the headache of the century, so there was only one last thing to do, something I've never done or even considered doing.  I called the professionals.  Yes, about 10 minutes before they closed up for the night, I called King Arthur Flour's Baker's Hotline, and I've got to tell you, I wonder why I waited so long to call.  I think that it was Mary that helped me try to figure out what went wrong.  We decided I needed to add a couple more tablespoons of flour to the mix and throw the whole thing back in the machine for a bit more kneading, so that's exactly what I did, and it worked!  Thank you Mary!  It was really helpful, and believe you me, a few minutes on the phone working out the kinks is much better than a few hours of crying in a dark room by yourself over your baking/cooking (knitting, spinning, sewing, etc.) ineptitude.  Much better, but not that I would know...  Hey! cut me some slack! Thanksgiving can be stressful enough even if you're not the official pie baker of the holiday!

Shiny Things

Okay, so the epic aran swatch is slowly plugging along, but, as predicted, a number of shiny things came up to distract me from what I should be doing. Not all of it has been fun stuff, but even those things have had silver linings. I had to go to an out of state funeral with my Dad, but I do love road trips and new knitting stores (Kanawha City Yarn Company should not be missed if you happen to find yourself anywhere near Charleston, WV). See what I mean?

Now, imagine this on every wall and shelves
in the middlish area too, a very patient father
and a giddy knitter and you'll get the picture.

I'm ready to go back. NOW!

It was one of the best knitting stores I've ever been to! We had a little trouble finding it, thanks to the scourge of the Internet: online maps and directions. Trust me, it was well worth the trouble of getting (very slightly) lost! It wasn't difficult to find at all really, you just need the right directions, novel I know; kind of like how a map to the Grand Canyon won't really help you find your way to the moon, you know, that sort of thing.   But half of the whole 'road trip' experience is the 'road' part of things; if you get lost for a block or two (or an hour on the highway when you came into town and missed your exit), you just get to see more sights, and that's just fine with me! And, traveling through the mountains provides other entertainment, too:

Like how it's always fun to try to scream or hold your breath
through a tunnel, and traveling through the mountains
gives you plenty of opportunities...

...but they can get the best of you if you try to hard.
I failed on this one, but didn't pass out. 
Came close, but no.

Actually getting dessert at a restaurant, a travel treat!

This was the last tunnel and the only one I managed
to hold my breath through, and narrowly at that. 
The other three came close, but never worked.

And then home again to this dapper little devil!

After we came back I got sick for a little while, and while I'm sure there is a silver lining to that, I'm not really sure what it would be (aside from more down time for reading, maybe).  Then my aunt came up to visit and help with my grandmother after a medical procedure.  Once Granny was doing better, that meant field trips and playing tourist in our own area, which is always fun.  Then we got snow, and to be honest, for me the silver lining of snow is snow!  I always love it when it snows, but this year was particularly entertaining with a puppy that tries to catch snowflakes and loves to catch snowballs (and then drag them inside to finish eating them).  This was our only real snow of the year, and it just barely stuck to the ground overnight - too bad for Harper!  Winter wasn't too bad this year, so spring is coming around a little earlier.  We'll see if it lasts...!

Spring has sprung, almost...

...almost.

Back In The Groove

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do,
Begin it.
(Attributed to Goethe)

 Okay, so I'm not back in the groove quite yet, but at least I am climbing out of the rut!  So, at least for now, here is the stitch pattern I've chosen for the so called "January" Aran Sweater (worked in a flat swatch), and I'm still working on the swatch in the round as recommended in the Knitter's Almanac.  It's been slow going due to a few things that have come up here and there, but I will be trying to do better post wise shortly, because there's plenty of good stuff to share! 

But for now, that's all I've got!