In a proper kitchen

Okay so I just posted an entry like 4 minutes ago, but I want to write this next one right away because I'm in the mood. It is all about cooking!

When Justin, Rebekah, and I were living in our Dublin apartment and cooking all of our dinners, one of the most difficult things was working in a very sparsely-furbished kitchen! We had one saucepan, a Teflon-flaking skillet, a spatula, plates, some measuring cups, bowls, knives, spoons, drinking glasses, mugs, and forks. We had a fridge and an oven/stove. I don't think we had very much else.

Anyway, now that I am home, I have at my disposal some very cushy things like a blender, an electric mixer, spoons and spatulas in basically all sizes, a garlic press, and an assortment of pots, pans, and skillets.

So I haven't done quite as much cooking since being home as I'd kind of imagined, but I've been doing some fun stuff! On the table:

I've been making guacamole! I knew I wanted to do this ever since last spring when Julie Klassen my German prof had our class over to her house and she charged me with making the guacamole. It was so easy and super good!!

So Momo picked up some avocados from the store, and I chopped up some cilantro and an onion, and I made some yummy guacamole. It was really simple. You basically just put the ingredients together in the bowl and mash up the avocados. Here's the recipe I used, minus the peppers and tomato!

I'm on my 3rd batch of guacamole, and the biggest problem I've noticed is that after you've made it, the avocado turns brown, kind of like an apple turns brown after you slice it from the oxidation. This doesn't affect the flavor at all, but it does look a little unappetizing. I've tried increasing the lemon juice and getting rid of the oxygen by putting saran rap on the surface when it's stored, but so far I haven't been successful. Oh well!



I've also been making hummus! This has also been super simple (though I've been using a blender, which I've realized takes a little more skill than I used to think, and plus I used a garlic press) - you just mix the chick peas and stuff in the blender and liquidize them. Here's the hummus recipe I used.

The hummus is really soft and has a great texture. It also caused me to buy an ingredient I had never heard of, which is tahini sauce. Tahini sauce is ground-up roasted sesame seeds! Momo and I ate a little by itself, and it's very quick-sandy in texture and strange in taste, but in a good way! Anyway, it came in this giant jar, and I've only made two batches of hummus so far, so I don't know how quick it's going to be used up, but maybe I can find something else to do with it...



Last night, I decided to make a souffle for dinner! I suppose I was spurred on just to see if I could actually do it, since I'm so used to movies where people's souffles fall down and stuff, or there's some huge big deal drama about a souffle.

Anyway, I found this website that walked me through it. Making the souffle was actually pretty simple and really fun! The hard part was that you had to do everything very quickly and mind the temperatures of a few different things at once. But it was really not that hard.

The souffle had a really neat texture, a lot like a puffed-oven-pancake if you've ever had one of those, and it basically tasted like cheese, since it was a cheese souffle. It didn't fall over and collapse like I was expecting, but I think it sort of slowly deflated after it was out of the oven. Next time I'm going to try adding veggies and things!

I'm hoping I'll do some more cooking before I go back for spring term. Do you guys have any ideas of things I should try? What is delicious and fun to cook?

love, Jimmy

Zero t(w)o Mittens!

So it's been more than two weeks since I posted here! Let's change that.

The first weekend in February, I spent Saturday night at Carleton for the Mid-Winter Ball. Of course I was really excited for all of the dancing and seeing of friends, but in one way I was equally excited to head home:

Friday night I'd stayed up until 3AM finishing up spinning, plying, winding, and washing my red 2-ply yarn!

This was the second batch of yarn that I'd spun, and this batch was substantially more difficult. More difficult because I tried to spin the yarn as thinly and evenly as possible! This means I was letting fewer wool fibers into the yarn with each drafting pull. Because they have less friction in between them when there are fewer of them, thin yarn also requires more twist than thick yarn to stay solid.

Spinning thin meant that the yarn was weaker and far likelier to break from the weight of the spindle! If I spun a section too thin or with not enough twist, my spindle would crash to the floor and I would nervously inspect the hook - if it snaps off, I'll be in trouble!

Incorporating fewer fibers into the yarn at a time also meant that I moved through my fiber supply much more slowly than when I was spinning the thick butterscotch slubs! So spinning all of the red wool took me a little over a month. By the time I was done, I was really sick of it!

Once I finally finished spinning the red wool, I had a spindle-full that needed to be plied. Plying is where you twist the yarn together with itself in the opposite direction of how you twisted it during spinning. Plying strengthens, thickens, and balances, the yarn. With the butterscotch yarn I spun at the start of January, plying was a relatively fast process, because the yarn was thick and thus relatively short (86 yards after plying). But when I set out to ply what ended up being 426 yards of red 2-ply, I didn't realize how long it was going to take.

It took hours!!! This is what I was doing until 3 in the morning the night before going to Carleton!

Thankfully, once I'd plied it, the rest went pretty fast: I wound it out onto a chair back, measured it, washed it, and set it to dry.

This is a very round-about way of saying that, when I went to Carleton last weekend, I was really excited to come back home because I knew that by that time my yarn would have had time to dry, and I could try knitting with it!



I'd decided that I wanted to use this new yarn to knit a pair of mittens. I wanted to do a fun pattern, and I was really interested in trying entrelac, which is a neat pattern of individually-knitted rectangles in a basket-weave type pattern. So I spent a couple of days teaching myself entrelac and trying out some variations, but I ended up not being happy with it. Maybe I could have gotten it if I'd stuck longer at it.. But I decided to try something else!

Once I had a pattern, I cast on my ball of red 2-ply! How exciting!!! I was using size-2 needles.

It soon became clear, however, that size-2 was too large! So I decided to use the size-0 needles Momo gave me for Christmas. Size-0 needles are two millimeters in diameter, so not much bigger than toothpicks, and I'm really terrified of snapping them!

So for the past couple of days I've been knitting these mittens with my size-0 needles. It goes super slow because the needles are so small and the yarn is so thin, but I'm really loving it and I'm really happy with the results so far! Wish me luck!

love, Jimmy