Miss T's Mystery House of Yarn & Horrors

The Lifecycle of a Pie

Pie.  I work with words every day, and I don’t think there’s a more beautiful word in the English language than pie.  Pie, pie, pie.  It’s simply perfect.

So, I made a pie this week and wanted to show you its entire lifecycle:

A blueberry pie is born.

A blueberry pie is gone.

I tried to be ready with the camera, but it happened so quickly.  Remember that old Tootsie pop commercial, with the owl?  Faster than that.

See if you can do any better.

Bluebery Pie
adapted from The Complete Book of Baking, by Pillsbury  (If you can get your hands on a copy, by all means, do.)

pastry for two-crust pie (I always use Christpher Kimball’s no-fool-can-mess-it-up vodka crust, and I’ll keep saying so until you try it!)

4 cups (2 pints) fresh blueberries
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup AP flour
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. lemon zest
2 Tbsp. butter
milk or half & half
extra sugar

Preheat oven to 425.  Roll out bottom crust and place in 9-inch pie plate.  In large bowl, combine berries, 3/4 cup sugar, flour, cinnamon, lemon juice and zest.  Mix lightly.  Spoon into pastry-lined pan.  Dot with butter.  Roll out top crust, top pie with it, crimp edges.  Cut several slits so it doesn’t explode.  Brush with milk or half & half.  Sprinkle with a little sugar.

Bake for 45 to 55 minutes, or until golden brown.  Resistance is futile.

Competition Begins

I couldn’t manage to get a non-blurry photo of my Forest Canopy Shawl today.  Probably due to the gray skies and rain.  (Yay rain!  We need more!)

Great pattern.  I’m sprinting right along after one brief false start (I always have at least one false start with lace, no matter how easy it is) and one mistake which caused a bit of ripping and will no doubt mean a point deduction.  But I’m back in it now, moving as fast as possible so that I can add to Team Stashdown’s roster of FOs.

Hmm.  I didn’t mention the secret side project, did I?  The one which I started just as the Olympics began and finished in two days?  The one that’s so secret I didn’t declare as one of my events?  Well, I can’t tell you about it yet.  You’ll just have to wait. 

As the Olympics Begin, Let's Not Forget...

...Tibet.

"None of us are free until ALL of us are free"

Faux Pork Tonkatsu

Yep, I just made that up.  There’s no such thing.

I was craving pork tonkatsu.  I had half a napa cabbage left, and that seemed like the perfect thing to go with it.  One small problem, though:  I didn’t think I had quite enough panko left to bread two chops.  And then there was the grease.  I just wasn’t in the mood to look at a pan full of grease.  (What does come over me sometimes?)  So I decided to deconstruct pork tonkatsu and make dinner out of its essential elements.

That would be pork.

There it is, thinly sliced and sprinkled with salt and pepper.  I used boneless chops.

Panko and Japanese tonkatsu sauce.  From Japan.  By way of my favorite Korean-Japanese grocer.

Cabbage.

Shredded and tossed with rice vinegar, mirin, sugar and sesame oil.  With peanuts and scallions for crunch and heat.  I measured nothing, so I can’t tell you how much of what -- just fiddle with it until it tastes the way you want it to. 

I toasted a bit of panko in a skillet with a teensy tiny bit of oil.  This goes fast.  Panko toasts beautifully.

Then it’s time for the pork.  Stir fry it.  Dump it on plates, sprinkle it with the toasted panko, and drizzle on some tonkatsu sauce.

That’s it.  That’s all there is.  Fast and easy, and pretty darn good.  Not as decadent as real tonkatsu, but every now and then I want something that isn’t decadent.  Really.  It happens.  That moment could even come back around in your lifetime.  Like Halley’s Comet.

August Weather

Hot.  Sunny.  Steamy, yet unwilling to rain.  Buggy.  Blogging sporadic and unpredictable.  Yarn unearthed from bins for no good reason.



(Lulu's Merino)

Too much on plate.  Dusty floors.  Furniture in wrong rooms.  Writing project not done.  Brain overloaded.  Chased by spiders.  Too many decisions.  Backtracking more than going forward.  Thousands of trips to hardware store.  Dog eating little blue tile spacers.  Sock started out of anxiousness.



Chocolate Cherry Socks, really just plain old top-down stockinette socks which aren’t changing the fact that August sucks, but I could eat that yarn, couldn’t you?

If I Owe You an Email...

Yahoo mail has lost its mind today.  So I'll get back to all of you when it has returned from the loony bin.

Ready for Winter

Sportweight merino by bellamoden, in Grapes of Wrath.  Size US 3 needles.  Universal toe-up sock formula from Knitty.  Very, very warm.

Olympic Training, Part Three

I’m back, sort of.  I was supposed to be here with a nice feeling of completion and pictures of a new tile floor, but I have none of that.  In fact, here’s the room where the tile is supposed to be.

Where’s the tile, you ask?  Let’s just say that Lowe’s is not scoring any points with us for doing things right.  Last Wednesday, after we’d already moved all the furniture out of the room and found inconvenient places to stash it, they delivered the wrong tile.  Beige.  Not charcoal.  Beige and charcoal are very different colors, at least to people who have functioning eyeballs.  I won’t go into how this happened, but believe me, they’re such a class act that I’m not counting chickens, eggs, or skeins of merino until the exact right tile is actually here.

The M.E. fixed the internet connection in my temporary office, but last week I couldn’t sit in here for more than a few minutes at a time, the fumes from curing paint were too strong.  It’s getting better now, so I might get a little work done this week.  (You know, in between calls to holler at Lowe’s.)

The good side of all this, even though it’s a tiny good side, was that I got to take a couple of unscheduled vacation days last week.  Paint fume days.  I did a lot of knitting.  A fair amount of unknitting, too, but lots of knitting.  I’m almost through Clue 4 on my Anniversary Mystery Shawl, and have only a few rows to go before a pair of socks is finished.  I’m whipping through the border on Stonington, which is becoming a favorite.

I also swatched for my second Olympics project, which will be the Tidal Wave socks (here and here) for my very sweet husband’s very sweet mom.  My in-laws live in Florida, but I figured she could use some good warm socks when they visit us at Thanksgiving.

 

Panda Silk.  Feels very good, knits up into a beautiful fabric, and it’s a perfect pink.  Thank goodness I can use size US 2 needles -- otherwise I’d have little hope of moving at an Olympic speed with these.

Tomorrow:  sock pictures!  But not these socks!

Counting

The mistake I’ve made most often with my Anniversary Mystery Shawl is the good old missed yarnover.  I’ll be flying along thinking things are going just fine until I come to a repeat that’s missing a stitch.  I have markers between the repeats -- very necessary with this pattern -- so it’s easy to find precisely where the problem is and backtrack to fix it.

But backtracking does slow things down.  Particularly as often as I’ve been doing it.  So I’m now counting my stitches after each pattern row.  Takes a few minutes, but doesn’t take as long as unknitting does.  Count, count, count.  Much counting around here.

 

I’m also counting the days until our big house project will be done.  In fact, the lights in Casa Mystery will be out for a week or so, starting tomorrow, while furniture is moved into strange places where it doesn’t usually live, and pretty new tile is laid downstairs.  I’ll be checking email sporadically (and maybe even responding to it), but won’t post anything new here until it’s all done and my office is back to normal.  There will be a large wooden thing in it which will completely block the desk.  And my temporary office (the newly painted yarn boudoir which is pink! pink! pink!) has no internet connection.  Well, it used to.  But there was an incident.

Yeah, that means no food this Friday.  Sorry.  Next Friday?  We’ll see.  Depends on when the tile is done, so I hope you have something in the freezer you can defrost and throw on the grill. 

See you in a week or so.  In the meantime, I’ll be knitting, reading and attempting to work during all the chaos.  If you miss me terribly, leave a note with the guard at the gate.  He might come out of the guard house to deliver it if you bribe him with cheese.

Happy Knitting!

Orange Chipotle Shrimp

I admit, I’m one to try multiple variations of things, each one being a slight tweak of the one before.  It’s like buying the same hue of yarn over and over (don’t even try to tell me you don’t do that).  Certain combinations just work. 

It was only a little more than a month ago when I posted a recipe for Spicy Orange Shrimp, and here I am again with shrimp, oranges, and peppers.  The other recipe was Asian-inspired.  This one has a Mexican flavor.  Isn’t our world great?  Give different people the same ingredients and they’ll come up with marvelously varied things.

This recipe was not only good, it was fast.  Incredibly fast.  And this was one of those weeks in which fast, easy dinners were looked upon quite favorably by the inhabitants of Casa Mystery.  (A week in which we were grateful to not be eating frozen pizza every night.)  Basically, you marinate shrimp in orange juice, zest and chopped chipotle.  Then you cook it.  Yeah, that’s all there is to it.  The recipe is here.

Since it was a million degrees on the day I made this and both of us refused to go outside, the shrimp didn't wind up being grilled.  I cooked it in a non-stick skillet instead, with all its marinade.  This made for quite a delicious sauce -- I’d certainly make some rice or noodles or something next time, to soak it up.

Would I make this again?  Absolutely.  In fact, it’s going on the short list.  More easy dinners will be needed in the coming weeks, I suspect...