Category Archives: kitchen

saep lai.

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That means “delicious” in Lao, and that’s exactly how I feel about last weekend. A dear friend came to visit (long-time readers may remember him from this post), and it was the perfect way to re-acquaint myself with home after my month on the road and the whirlwind that is the beginning of the semester.

D. arrived on Friday, after a long bus ride. I took him straight to a Lao feast, complete (though you can’t see it here) with Beer Lao I picked up from our local beverage store. Tam mak heung, nem khiaow, khao niaow, and a red curry fish dish with a Lao name I can’t remember. Saep lai.

On Saturday morning I made pancakes and we ate them on the porch!

And then we went to the farmers’ market and on a short walk to these waterfalls (seen here in D.’s hipster-view).

On Saturday night, I made a tomato tart with goat cheese and about a quart of farm cherry tomatoes. (This is the one with the dijon mustard slathered on the inside of the crust.) That salad is all farm veggies, too: red peppers, grated beets, carrots, cherry tomatoes, and lettuce. D. brought a growler of a delicious amber brew from his home.

On Sunday morning, we drove to a neighboring lake to go out for a fabulous brunch on the deck. Cheesy grits in homemade sausage gravy, corn beef hash with poached eggs in a dijon hollandaise, rosemary potatoes…so good. Then we visited a distillery and tasted brandies, bourbons, gin, and rye. I was too busy enjoying myself to remember to take any pictures there.

And then it was time for D. to catch his bus home. It was a full (and tasty) weekend!

I enjoyed another glass of beer from the growler D. brought, and prepped Monday morning’s class.

I also ate these roasted vegetables. The eggplant was particularly delicious, and a nice way to conclude a fantastic weekend. I also started another pinwheel blanket (also a wedding present). Pictures of that soon!

project breakfast burrito.

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I’ve begun joking that my second project, something that people often ask about on the academic job market, is a coffee table book on burritos. While my road trip involved plenty of dissertation research, I also managed to eat enough green chile (in all its forms) to warrant an academic application for all of this enjoyment of deliciousness. Not all of the pictures that follow are of burritos, but I think you get the idea!

My first real breakfast burrito in years. Amazing.

Site of the above burrito. So good.

Grilled pizza at the home of my wonderful hosts: marinara, kalamata olives and mozzarella, and barbecued chicken with onions and cilantro. Even tastier than I remembered.

Burrito number 2, from the burrito lady. This burrito contains carne adovada, ham, bacon, eggs, potatoes, cheese, and green chile. So good. Not overkill at all. Seriously.

This one I ate for breakfast and lunch. (Standard-issue diner coffee mug for scale.) I brought work, ate half of it, took a break and did some writing, and then went back to the burrito. Yum.

Enchiladas at El Patio with friends. This is before they brought the sopapillas.

Blueberry ginger pies in Pie Town. There was pie for snack, dessert, and breakfast. Perfect.

Pie-baking hands.

Homemade chocolate peanut butter sauce for spooning over ice cream. Amazing.

The cowboy breakfast at the Gold Street Caffe. Scrambled eggs with ham and mascarpone cheese on a green chile scone. And a side of bacon, of course.

And then, of course, no trip to the southwest would be complete for me without a Fat Tire on the patio at O’Neill’s.

I’d say project breakfast burrito is off to a promising start. Happy weekend!

oh, hi!

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See this? It’s my new bone. Amy ordered it for me to replace the one I’ve been slowly sharpening into a weapon. I think she thought it would be just like the old one, but oh boy oh boy, this one is about three times the size. She’s been busy this week.

The other day she made zucchini fritters with her farm veggies.

They looked (and smelled) delicious. And none of them fell apart. She thinks it is because she actually took the time to squeeze the excess moisture from the veggies before mixing them with the eggs and flour and spices.

She also pitched our tent in the front yard! I think this means we’re going on a trip. She even scrubbed the fly, laid it to dry in the sun, and then patched the hole that was forming on the side you can’t see in this picture. I think I’m going to get to sleep in this soon. (I like our tent.)

I haven’t seen her knitting this week, but I know she has plans to cast on another project for the road. (And I know she’d really love to finish that super cool beret she’s test knitting before we leave!)

Okay, time for a nap.

first tomato of the summer.

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I broiled half of it on toast with cheese and basil, and I ate the other half with my hands. Hooray for the first tomato of summer!

Also, hooray for whisper! I’m starting to think I might need another. I absolutely love the neckline, and I’d love a longer version…

Here’s another knit in action: my very first wedding pinwheel blanket. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing this particular knit in all kinds of use — as a lap blanket, as a spot for a catnap, as a baby blanket, and last night, as a pillow for my favorite greyhound. The Cascade 220 I knit it out of seems to be holding up quite well, as I knit this during the summer of 2008.

Here’s another sleepy dog. I bet he wishes he had a pinwheel blanket for a pillow. Someday, Boh. Someday.

I’m gearing up for a research road trip, so yesterday I began the process of cleaning out my car. I don’t think I’ve ever actually emptied my car of cds. (I normally stick to clearing out the back, not all of the little compartments.) Anyway, it was fun to see just how many mixes I’ve received from friends since I bought my car six years ago. I spent some time trying out and then labeling all of the unmarked cds, ditching and re-burning the scratched ones, and putting them into books and cases. (I’m super glad that I import mixes I get in the mail to my computer before playing them over and over and over again. That way I don’t worry about breaking the cd!) That is the fun part of research road trip prep.

Lots more to do this week before I hit the road: finalize what I want to look at, confirm travel/housing plans, buy more dog food, pack…and grade the term papers from the summer course! Happy weekend to you!

buttercup update (and other stuff, too).

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It is time to increase a little bit so that the top is a little bit swingy. (Due to yarn concerns, I omitted the body increases earlier in the pattern, but I think I’ve got enough to start adding a few more stitches.)

I made some potato salad last week. And then I took it with me to campus, and enjoyed it with last week’s New Yorker.

Raspberries from the farm. Yum.

This is how I dealt with Saturday night’s power outage. Not a bad way to keep cool. (I was worried that this chardonnay was going to warm in my slightly-less-cool-by-the-second non-electrified fridge.) The power was out for about three hours, and I was able to get some grading done as the sun set.

I snapped this while dashing down my steps to get to campus on time. So lovely, and I almost missed it.

Somebody was afraid of the fireworks on Monday night. Poor Boh.

Remember these socks? I turned the heel in class on Tuesday. Thus concludes today’s installment of show and tell. More soon!

saturday night whisper.

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As an afterthought, I slipped my whisper on and snapped a few photos before meeting some friends for drinks at my favorite neighborhood bar. This needs a better blocking, and if I were knitting it again, I’d make it a bit longer. I put this cardigan on fairly often, but rarely do I wear it out of the house. Not so last night. This is my favorite way to wear whisper so far — and it was exactly the amount of warmth I needed to sit outside late into the evening.

Ignore whatever face I’m making there.

Something else I enjoyed on Saturday night? This kale salad. There are versions of this salad everywhere on the internet, and the key is to massage the kale. I’m not kidding. My friend M. made this for me on Friday with her farm veggies, and it was so good that I decided to make it with mine. I ate it from the porch while the sun set, which is why I needed the flash. A good day.

Happy weekend!

cup(pow) of lilac wine?

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Forgive me. I’m doing that thing where I try to link all the things I want to tell you about in a phrase. It’s okay if you want to roll your eyes. But when you’re done with that, look at this:

After I posted about recap mason jar lids for narrow mouth jars, blog friend dearmary offered to order me a cuppow coffee lid for wide mouth jars as part of an order she was planning. We met on Thursday, and talked for an hour. (And she not only brought me the cuppow; she also brought me a jar and a sweet, stripey handknit mason jar cozy!) All of this affirmed what I already knew to be true: blog friends are the best.  Also, the cuppow has my highest recommendation. I filled it with a latte right away, and when I was done, I flipped the lid inside out and put the regular mason jar lid disc over it, sealing in any remaining coffee drips and making it possible to toss the whole thing in my bag. I am going to use this ALL THE TIME.

I finished blocking my lilac wine cowl and snapped a few FO pictures.

I ended up using between 2/3 and 3/4 of my skein of Fleece Artist Merino 2/6 sock yarn. I could have kept going; I intended to, even, but I developed some sort of lilac wine fatigue last week and was ready to bind off.

I think I’ll get a lot of use out of this — in overly air-conditioned lecture halls and during in-between seasons, especially.

I took a few photos of the cemetery on my walk down the hill from campus. I’m captivated by the house-style mausoleums built into the hillside.

Can you tell we’re onto the random pictures from my iPhone segment of the blog? I’ve been eating strawberries twice a day this week. (I picked a gallon last week at the farm, and I’ve managed to eat them all. So good.)

More pesto, this time with garlic scapes and farm basil.

And then there’s Boh and his pile of paws. I’ll post photos of the weekend adventures that prompted such deep sleep soon.

simple rib blues.

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I did some great work on my latest pinwheel blanket yesterday — and I’m really excited to finish this because I can’t wait to send it off to the newlyweds I have in mind. (There are, in fact, three recently married friends of mine who are also sometime-readers of this blog. They know they’ll be getting something hand-knit, so I feel like it is okay to share this stuff. If I kept my wedding-gift-knitting secret, I’d have nothing to share on the blog! If you’re reading right now, this may or may not be for you! There. Now we’ve got some suspense.)

Now, on to the simple rib blues. Ever get those? When all of a sudden you feel like something is taking forever, and you just need to finish it now? That’s how I felt yesterday. I was catching up on Stash and Burn, and realizing that I haven’t done very much Rooster knitting, so I picked up my Lilac Wine cowl. During the semester, this was exactly the kind of knitting I needed — soothing and satisfying. But last night, I needed to finish it. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it is summer, and I’ve got fewer things (okay, right now I have one huge dissertation-shaped thing) on my plate, but all of sudden I was so sick of this ribbing! I had been planning to knit until I ran out of yarn, but I looked at my never-ending ball of Fleece Artist Merino and decided that I couldn’t wait that long.

So I slipped my cowl over my head, needles and all, and took a look in the mirror.

And I decided that it was big enough. So I went back to the pattern to look at the instructions for the tubular bind off, only to discover that it is super tedious: four set-up rows, and then kitchenering all the way around the 180 stitches of this cowl. Nope. Not happening. So I looked at some other projects on ravelry, and decided to do Jenny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off instead.

And now it is blocking on the dining room table. It feels so good to have this off the needles. I’ll post FO pictures once it is dry.

Unrelated, but here’s what I ate for dinner the other night: a spinach and arugula salad with beets and carrots, all from the farm, plus a fried egg. Yum.

And then there’s this guy. This is the face he gave me when I tried to convince him to get off the couch and go outside before bed last night.

And here are his ears, flopping in the wind. Sweet, sweet dog. Happy Wednesday!

tending to.

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If I had to sum up the last week or so, I’d say it was filled with “tending to.” Tending to what? All sorts of things — small but lingering stuff on the to-do list, filing, travel planning, long-overdue emailing, etc. Also, a bit of tending to myself — an end-of-the-semester bug forced me to slow down. Boh and I even managed a few afternoons of reading on the couch.

Pure sweetness is what that is. On Saturday, still feeling lousy, but needing to get out of the house, I decided to tackle my extremely forlorn potted plants. (Forlorn is the nice way of saying absolutely dead, I think.) I’m actually pretty proud of my first ever herb collection — I managed to keep my rosemary, thyme, and sage alive well through a mild winter on the porch, though eventually they succumbed to neglect during the busiest part of my semester.

I snapped these right after potting them: sage, rosemary, basil, cilantro, thyme, mint, and some marigolds I picked up on a whim. (M., if you’re reading: I tried to take good care of those bulbs, but nothing happened, and then after I moved them outside, the pot that doesn’t drain developed a green sludge on the surface. So I gave up and planted marigolds.)

I haven’t done any tending of my yard, unless you count Boh’s “fertilizing,” but this year the wildflowers are amazing!

Also amazing? Asparagus. This has been my go-to meal of late: broiled asparagus witha little bit of olive oil, balsamic, salt and pepper. Plain for lunch, and with a fried egg on top for dinner.

Boh and I are headed out of town for the weekend: he’s going to frolic with my parents, and I’m off to a dear friend’s wedding. Getting ready to leave has been extra hectic because I’ve been feeling icky this week, and because the lake house won’t be empty while I’m gone. It’s graduation weekend, so a friend who is defending and her family will be enjoying my home in my absence. I sure hope it’s clean enough for them…