It's All About the Salt

My family has spent a lot of time on the Central Coast of California,  and I thought I knew Cayucos, the little town where we stayed this weekend pretty well, but it's changed a lot in the last few years, for the better, I think. It's still a tiny place with none of that Southern California congestion and rush, but it's been spruced up. Of course, that also means that we could never afford a home there as people from my town used to be able to do, but oh well.

 Paige and her "Auntie Ann" both love the beach. It was almost too hot for sweatshirts as we walked out on the pier.

 One new addition to Cayucos (Well, they've been there for four years, but we hadn't noticed them before.) is the Brown Butter Cookie Company. We were looking for coffee the first late afternoon that we pulled into town, and it was about the only place open. They did have coffee, one of my favorites, SLO Coffee, but more enticing were their shelves of cookies. Their signature cookie is, of course, their brown butter sea salt cookie. They're way too expensive, a dollar apiece for a little cookie, but they're sooooo good. I made it my quest this week to copy their recipe, and I think I came pretty close. It's al about the salt. I improvised a recipe I found from Food Channel, but this morning, I found an even better one on Maple sugar Lyrics' blog. Hers sounds more like mine.

Brown Butter Sea Salt Cookies


Ingredients:

1 cup brown butter
1 cup light brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
sea salt

To make brown butter, melt butter over medium heat until browned. It will foam up a little just before it gets brown. Stir in brown sugar and vanilla and remove from heat, let cool.

In a mixing bowl add flour and baking soda  Stir in sugar mixture and let sit for half an hour or so.

Roll 1 inch balls of dough and dip in sea salt.  Bake for 12 - 15 minutes in a 325 degree oven.

So, it takes my sister-in-law coming to visit us for me to be introduced to "salt." How could I know that it was all the rage? Being trapped in a classroom with teenagers for weeks on end, I'm really out of the loop.  I don't know if my cookies would have tasted just as good with two dollar Trader Joe's sea salt, but I got mine at World Market as part of a set. Now, I can experiment with salt endlessly. Hypertension, here I come!  Oh...and I do remember that this is a knitting blog, but one has to have knitting accomplishments to blog about knitting accomplishments!

California Weekend

My sister-in-law, Ann and nephew, Sam came from Nebraska for a fun-filled, long weekend last week, which is part of the reason that I haven't gotten any farther on my L'Amour socks than I was a week ago, not that I didn't try. We had a wonderful, leisurely time, and I had lots of opportunities to knit, but it seems that every time I ended a knitting session, I discovered that I had miscounted stitches. I happily unraveled my errors, and then proceeded to make the same mistakes again while busily chatting away. I still say that it's all about the process, but I was getting ridiculous. The socks are for Ann, and I wanted to finish them while they were here, but that was a little ambitious.

There's nothing like out of state guests to remind you of what a great place you live, especially when the weather is perfect and everything is still so green. When we weren't socializing away, we did a few things, like:

eating lunch at Moo Creamery in Bakersfield, highlighted by basil lemonade and incredible raspberry jalapeno ice cream.

going to Brad's in Pismo Beach for fish tacos and walking off a few of the calories with a stroll on the wharf.

stopping at Kelsey See Canyon Vineyards to pick up a bottle of Golden Delicious Apple Chard and admire the peacocks.

enjoying beautiful views of Morro Bay from our rented beach house in Cayucos, and ending the day, listening to the waves while eating some doctored up Ragu spaghetti and Apple Chard for the grown ups out on the deck.

visiting Heast Castle for probably my twentieth time, Russ's ten or twelfth, Paige and Kai's six or seventh, and Ann and Sam's very first. I'd say we were all equally happy about it. Hearst Castle never gets old. It's always unbelievable. Although the price has really gone up --$25 a ticket. Guess I've gotten spoiled not having to pay when I take kids there on field trips every year.

We went on Tour 1, which is the best tour for anyone going for the first time. We were on the veranda at noon and got to hear the bells from the bell tower, something they've recently started doing. Way cool! And that was only half of our four days together.

Spring Has Sprung

I've been trying to enjoy every minute of spring out in my garden. Last week, I wrote a Facebook posting that said, "I just picked a worm up off of my patio and threw it back in the garden. It's official...I'm my mother." Several of my friends thought that was pretty funny, especially since I'm an English teacher, and I inadvertently spelled "threw" as "through." There was further evidence that I'm developing some of my mother's habits this morning when I went outside to check on my flowers and discovered slugs on my gerber daisies. I found myself a little rock and started squashing them. That'll teach 'em.

Between pulling weeds and ruining my manicure this weekend, I did manage to do a little knitting too. I love these L'amour socks from Spilly Jane's blog, and they were so reasonable too. The pattern called for gloss socks yarn, which is a merino and silk mix. It's not the nicest sock yarn, I've ever knit with, but it's the cheapest nice yarn I've ever used. I'm definitely going to use gloss again. Knit Picks is the best!

My sister-in-law from Nebraska, who is coming to visit this week, has hinted a couple of times that she'd like some wool socks (Actually, she said, "Let's go yarn shopping when I'm there, so you can knit me some socks!") I was so excited that she was interested in hand knit socks that I didn't wait for her to come to get them started. I'm not positive that she's going to like these. They are a little on the quirky side, but that's what makes them fun, and if she doesn't like them, I'll keep them and wear them......next January. On the other hand, before I start bragging too much about them, maybe I should finish the second one since my sister-in-law is a bi-ped, after all.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Being of Danish and German descent, our family doesn't do anything for St. Patrick's Day other than try to remember to wear a little green. On the other hand, I'm always interested in having great food experiences. I waited until the last minute to try to figure out what to cook today. I discovered this interesting recipe for corned beef and cabbage pizza  though. Unfortunately, I discovered that you can't just buy pre-cooked corned beef, so I hadn't allowed myself enough time to prepare the pizza according to the recipe.

My solution was to replace the corned beef with Canadian bacon. I also used a layer of provolone instead of the Monterey Jack that they called for. I have to say that it was really good.

Paige is a vegetarian, so she didn't try any, but Kai did and seemed to enjoy it, which is saying something considering that it had a ton of cabbage in it.

Trader Joe's was selling Smithwick's beer last weekend, so Russ and I shared a bottle of it tonight, not because we are

 abstemious but because Russ failed to listen when I told him that I wanted to save it until St. Patrick's Day. Somehow by today, there was only one bottle left. Oh well, I'm not of a beer drinker anyway.

More Sheep

So, the morning began at 5:30 for Russ and Kai since Kai had to leave for a swim meet at 6:00. I was helpful enough to wake up and tell them to hurry, but then promptly went back to sleep. Paige didn't go either since she's battling a cold. We eventually headed to the swim meet at 11:00 ourselves but had to make a perfunctory stop along the side of the road so that I could admire the sheep, which actually look a bit bedraggled considering all of the rain we had last night.

I didn't take this picture. Russ took it of a Great Pyrenees who was a little concerned about the woman who got out of the car to go get a closer look at the babies.

 
He wasn't aggressive but was pretty adamant that we needed to move along. He was wagging his tail, but he made it clear that he could take care of businesses if he needed to. I told him not to worry and got in the car to take this shot.

Got home in time for Russ and me to take a little nap on the couch. Gidget thought she'd join us even though she almost assuredly spend the entire day napping. I did accomplish a little knitting on our trip today, but I'll post about that later. I have lots of grading to do tomorrow, but for now I'm looking forward to a nice evening of watching Michael Palin's New Europe from Netflix, and knitting, of course.

Awaiting Spring

I have lived in Central California for most of my life, and the summer weather here is almost without exception very harsh. Somehow though, every spring I pretend that the flowers that I plant will make my yard look beautiful for months and months. There is a chance that they will make it until July though, and I enjoy them for the brief time I have them. I used to buy Shepherd Garden Seeds because I loved the pictures on the seed packets. Shepherd Garden Seeds has closed, but Renee Shepherd still sells seeds at Renee's Garden. I ordered a nice selection of them and started planting today. Zinnias and cosmos are hardy and come in pastel colors--the perfect combination for my tate.

As usual, I've had a pretty busy week, but I have also gotten some knitting in too. I bought this alpaca yarn on my  alpaca field trip last fall, and found a scarf pattern in Knitted Gifted that was simple and showed off the yarn well.

 

I'm glad that I have knitting so that I don't need to spend my evening worrying about how I'm going to confiscate cell phones from high school students all day long. Our dean (probably directed by those above her) has decided to wage war on them since there has supposedly been a rash of cheating and fight syncing (planning fight location via phones) among students. If kids even have a phone out during lunch or if they have one visible in their pocket, it's a criminal offense practically.  This is what I love about education. Let's make sure that teachers are focusing on the important things: taking role and trying to hold back the wave of the 21st Century. Poor Kai, he had his phone taken away today in class. I had a hair appointment, and my hair dresser called his phone to cancel. He had forgotten to turn it off since his friends don't call; they text. I can see that it was reasonable to take it away, but he forgot to go pick it up after school. It better be waiting for him tomorrow. I will not be happy if it is "misplaced."

Lovin' Thorpe Hats

 

I really do love Kristen Kapur's Thorpe hat pattern. I can knit one in a day if I'm so inclined, which I was on Sunday.  I actually was knitting this hat for a boy on my kids' swim team who kept teasing me last week at a swim meet that he hoped I was knitting a hat for him.  I thought I would just go ahead and knit him one since I have a gazillion skeins of yarn just waiting to be knit into hats, and he did really seem interested in my knitting. Then my son Kai told me that that that boy had cancer, so I was even more inclined to knit him a hat. Well, Paige fell in love with this particular hat when I was finished with it, and commandeered it for herself. When I protested that it was for the boy on her swim team who had cancer, she said that he'd just found out that he didn't have it after all, and she didn't want some goofy underclassman wearing hats like she wears. Mmmmm, well, I was flattered that she liked the hat even if she does sound a tad insensitive. She has lots of other good qualities really....I guess I'll just knit that boy another hat.

I got Kai to model it  because he didn't go to swim practice today. He didn't go to swim practice today because he is the biggest procrastinator in the world and has two big assignments due tomorrow before the quarter ends. He thought he would just sit down and drink an Amp and eat a bag of chips before he got to work, so I caught him and made him be a model. He may not be the most focused student there is, but he sure is cute, and about as nice a person as you could ever meet. He would have given the boy who ended up not having cancer that hat!

 

On the other hand, Paige really does wear her Thorpe hats all of the time, as evidenced by a picture that she took of herself in the car today on our way to school.

Thanks Capital One, But We're OK

Email Message From Capital One: Please call us ASAP so that we can confirm that your credit card account has not been compromised. There has been unusual activity on it today.

What I Would Have Emailed Back Had I Not Simply Called: Dear Capital One. Thank you for your concern. There was indeed excessive activity on our account today, to the tune of $3,300. I spent five unbelievable weeks in the British Isles during my senior year of college, and we have decided for some reason that my daughter should get to have a European experience too before she even goes to college. She is going on a fast-paced tour which will be much different than my more slow-paced experience, staying in bed and breakfasts, hiking through quaint villages like York and Cambridgeshire, and attempting to read Dubliners at a park near the Guinness Brewery after having a pint....or two.  When we decided to give our daughter this Christmas, birthday, and graduation present combined, we anticipated having paid for the entire trip long before this time, but the economy seems to have affected our finances a bit, so we have not paid a cent since our original $1,000 down payment. Rest assured that we will eventually pay off this amount, but for now, enjoy charging us the nine percent interest rate that we have agreed to have between us, and thanks for checking on us. It is true that we are ordinarily much more frugal than it appears that we are being this month.

Inexorable Week

Note to self; stop and smell the flowers this weekend. My daffodils have been blooming for over a week, and they're just beautiful. I started out with around three or four bulbs, and they've continued to multiply every year. I don't think daffodils actually smell, but I do plan to enjoy some hours in the garden enjoying all of my flowers that are starting to bloom.

I knew that this week was going to wear me out. I started out the week with freshmen orientation, which lasted most of Monday evening. Tuesday I had a field trip up to the mountains to re-enact the trial and beheading of Louis XVI with forty-five high school kids, then that evening, I had to teach my college class, which means that I basically put in a fourteen hour day. Wednesday was a little more relaxed, other than we had an hour and a half meeting with the leader of Paige's Europe trip that she'll be going on this summer.

  

Thursday night was our first swim meet of the season. Fun, but also freezing cold (OK, it wasn't really freezing, but it was COLD!) I did get a little knitting done last night at the swim meet though. I've discovered that if you volunteer to time in the end lanes that you'll ooccasionally have some free time since some events won't have enough kids for every lane. So, here it is Friday night. I still have lots of papers to grade since all of my grading time was eaten up by the list I've must mentioned. I'm thinking that a little trip to one of our little town's ten Mexican restaurants is a good idea, and then I'll take care of those papers, and then....I'll really enjoy this weekend.

 Finally, I finished my little pink Fancy socks. I have that wonderful forty minutes between getting home from running in the morning and getting ready for work that I drink my coffee and knit. It's amazing how much I get knit during that time. I've decided to give them to my cousin's little girl. I gave her a bunny last year, and she wrote me a darling little thank you note. I'd say that's a kid who deserves another little gift.

A Little Bit of Christmas

 

The problem with setting a goal to write in your blog one time more each month than the year before is that sometimes you have absolutely nothing to say. Fortunately, I haven't set a particularly high bar in that area, so I won't worry that my post today is unexceptional. I bought a little Christmas ornament kit at a quilt shop in Bakersfield called Strawberry Patches a while back. There were six patterns for little appliqued felt ornaments in the kit, but the mittens were the ones that really hooked me. As is often my habit, I never touched any of them during Christmas and was about ready to forget about them until next Christmas when I discovered some more felt kits at Prairie Point Junction Quilt Shop's website. I loved the Easter-themed mats and ornaments, but realistically thought I shouldn't consider buying one if I didn't actually like doing the applique. So, last night I tried making one of the Christmas ornaments and was pretty successful. My work isn't perfect, but it's not supposed to look like a machine did it anyway. Mmmmm, which Easter pattern do I buy now.

It's kind of funny that I stumbled upon Prairie Point Junction Quilt Shop because it's located Cozad, Nebraska, which is in Western Nebraska,  pretty much the middle of nowhere. When we used to drive to see Russ's family during the summers, we'd drive through Cozad and would feel so relieved that it was "only" four more hours to Lincoln. I have a sad reason to remember Cozad too, a reason that I re-visit every year when I teach the play Our Town to my students. In the first act of the play, there's a brief scene with Joe Crowell, the paperboy. The Stage Manager, who  knows the future of every character, interjects, (Yes, I have these lines memorized.)

Let me tell you something about Joe Crowell there. 

Joe was awful bright—graduated from high school here,
head of his class. So he got a scholarshipto Massachusetts Tech.
Graduated head of his class there, too.
It was all wrote up in the Boston paper at the time. Goin’ to be
a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died
in France. All that education for nothing.

I went to college with a girl named Julie from Cozad twenty-five years ago. I didn't know her really well, but she came in the library where I worked a lot and was always so cheerful and was an incredible student and go-getter.  I'm pretty sure that she was the valedictorian of the class behind me. The first year that I started teaching in California, I heard that she had been killed on one of her first days of teaching in Oklahoma. She was behind a tractor trailer rig on the way to work, and the trailer came unhitched.  I couldn't stop thinking about her that year, and when I read those lines later in the year in Our Town, I told my students about Julie, making the Joe Crowell connection.  All of these years later, I still think of her when I teach Our Town,  and of her family in that little town of Cozad, and how Thornton Wilder was an incredible writer, except for that weird part at the end where the people who have died are just sitting there in chairs. Sooo, I already buy Wilder's whole idea about the universality of human experiences, but it really hit me that I had just finished teaching Our Town this week, and had recently told my students about how, unfortunately, there are lot of "Joe Crowell stories" around the world; and then I randomly come across a cute, little website from Julie's hometown. The world really isn't that big in a lot of ways, and we are all tied together more than we realize. I'd be willing to bet there's someone who works at Prairie Point Junction who is still sad every once in a while because something reminds them of Julie, just like I am.

Just Showing Off

 

I've so enjoyed the Winter Olympics this week. It's the perfect excuse to sit and knit. I don't want to have to concentrate though, so I've been knitting some fancy socks. Actually, I also knit another Thorpe Hat for one of my daughter's friends earlier in the week, but my daughter delivered it before I could snap a pic. I've had this pattern bookmarked forever. I found it in on A Bluestocking Knits, and thought it was so pretty. I started to knit a pair a couple of times, but I just couldn't get the lace right. This time I really thought about it as I knit and realized that there's a small error in the pattern. (At least, I think so.) My daughter is past pink, lacey socks, so I'm not sure who I'm giving them to.

 

I also have to show off what I've been able to do in my backyard this month. I've been "harvesting" lettuce. I'm bragging because this is one of the few times of the year that I'm pretty sure I have it better than almost everyone else I know weather-wise. I'll be miserable in July, but right now, there's nothing like Central California in February!

Still Needing to Learn My Manners

OK, so before I brag about finished my second Icewine Mitten I have to tell an embarrassing story from my past. When my husband and I were first married, we spent a lot of time with a single friend of ours just going to movies, concerts, and whatever. We'd run into this guy from work and his wife every once in a while. The guy was really nice, and his wife seemed nice enough, but every time we'd see them, the guy would ask us if we'd met his wife, and she'd act like we'd never met me before.  She already knew my friend for some reason, but she never remembered who I was. I don't know exactly why it bugged me, but it did. It was such a dismissal, and besides she kind of seemed to think she was all that. Here's where I reveal my true petty nature. So....one night, we went to this concert--in a church--, and there they were. Same dismissal again. We were sitting right behind them. I took out my program and wrote a note to my friend, something to the effect that the"wife" was a snit. I probably didn't write what I really thought because I was in church, after all. Well, no sooner than I had finished writing my nasty, little note, then the "wife" turns around and asks if she can look at my program because they didn't get one! I hurriedly scratched out what I had written. It was awkward to say the least, at least for me. She had to have wondered what I was doing hesitating to give her that program, busily scribbling away.


I thought that that experience had cured me of being petty in public; however, I guess it didn't.. Wednesday, I wrote a snarky post mentioning Heather Ordover from Craftlit , and she read it, the part where I so caddily complained of her raspy voice when she was battling pneumonia. I never thought she'd read my blog. She was really cute about it, but I'm still a little embarrassed. I mean, she provided me a wonderful service for free, and I'm constantly on her site, browsing through the book choices or reading her knitting posts, then I go and complain that she was sick and that her illness had interfered with my listening pleasure. How Rude. Maybe this time I'll learn to think before I write.

Now, on to a little knitting. I had a small group of knitters from work over to my house yesterday for a couple of hours of knitting, and I finished my mittens. They're for my friend, Julie. She and I had a Christmas swap this year, and among the innumerable gifts she gave me was a box of icewine tea. I'd never heard of it  before, but it's delicious. I ran into the pattern for these icewine mittens and just had to knit them for her. I'm not too worried that I'm ruining any surprise because I happen to know that Julie's working on a big paper this week. And, if she does read this, well she'll have something to look forward to.

I had a little bit of yarn left, so I knit one more heart with it. I think I'll throw it in with the mittens when I send them to Julie.

I Love Hearts

Well, I'm not doing so well with my post writing goals for this month. For some crazy reason, I had five posts last February. I better get writing if I'm going to beat that this year. I don't have a mitten to show off just yet, but I'm within minutes of being finished with my second one again. I received so many encouraging comments about not giving up on it that I just couldn't call it quits!

Everything has gone well with my second try on my Icewine Mitten, except that I had to reknit the thumb twice. They took quite a lot of concentration, so I knit a couple of mindless projects this week while I was listening to Frankenstein  for the college class I'm teaching. I'm kind of proud of these hearts. I'm not all into Valentine's Day, but I do love hearts. I kind of made up the pattern. Most heart patterns I've seen seem to be knit in the round. I knit those little hearts in my middle picture in the round last year. I adjusted a  couple of patterns I stumbled upon for garter stitch hearts on Diary of a Novice Knitter's blog and  Katydid and Kid. Both patterns were cute, but I wanted my hearts to be three-dimentional with a crochet edge. I ended up basically following Katydid's pattern, but instead of using garter stitch, I used stockinette. I knit two of them and then used a picot crochet edging to sew both sides together.

They were the perfect project to work on while listening to a book. I think I've mentioned before that I've enjoyed using Craftlit to listen to books while I knit. I love the concept since it allows me to "read" books while doing my most favorite thing--knitting. I haven't taught Frankenstein before, so I wanted to be really familiar with it. Heather Ordover, Craftlit's creator, had discussed Frankenstein two years ago. She begins by discussing some knitting issues, and then discusses whatever book she's focusing on for the month or longer. She uses Librivox for the actual reading of the books. I enjoyed her discussion a lot of the time although I have to admit that she was beginning to annoy me a bit....OK, a lot!  She was sick for a good deal of her discussion of Frankenstein and although I admire her tenacity, I really didn't enjoy hearing her sputter and swallow into the microphone. I'm sorry, Heather, I hope you don't read this because I know you're well meaning, but it was starting to exasperate me. On the other hand, on good days, I  realy like her perkiness and love of knitting and books. She's a part-time English professor, so her discussions are particularly applicable for me.