2 posts tagged “recipes”
I don't remember where I got this link the other day -- it could have been any number of places. At any rate, here they are:
Gourmet Magazine's Favorite Cookies: 1941-2008 includes a recipe for the "best cookie" of each year. There's a wide variety, from savory cookies meant to be dipped in coffee, to tart-like creations, to stained glass window cookies, to basic gingerbread men. One of my particular favorites is listed for 1965: Ginger Sugar Cookies (here's another take on this recipe).
(Creative Commons photo of Dried Cranberry Shortbread Cookies by Flickr user Belochkavita.)
It was cold and snowy today, around 12 degrees Fahrenheit with what seemed like about 4" of snow. Because my mind was on cozy things, I spent the evening knitting - finished the "Hurry Up, Spring" Armwarmers from Stitch 'n Bitch Nation, which have been sitting around for a couple of months waiting for a thumb. That only took about 30 minutes, so I was able to devote some time to a project I've had on my mind lately - an earwarming headband in a particular style.
It seems like every knitting mag, online and off, had an "earwarmer headband" pattern in it this winter, made of various kinds of yarn. The ones in Interweave Knits and Knitscene (which have the same parent company) were very similar cabled bands. The one on Knitty, Calorimetry, was a ribbed short-row version that was made from front to back rather than side to side - I really don't like the yarn they used for the pattern, the Filatura di Crosa one that makes tiny stripes, but you could substitute another basic wool yarn. Knitty also had one a few years ago called Coif, designed by Megan from NotMartha.
The one that I really liked, though, is the "marled sweater earwarmer" that's an Urban Outfitters offering this winter (catalogue page - the first link is to the expanded photo view). So I tried to do something based on that, with a yarn I got a single ball of in a swap a few years ago... Swiss Chalet Froehlich-Wolle. It looks sort of like a handspun, with two single-ply yarns twisted around each other. It's not really a thick-and-thin, but there is some variation in texture. In some areas the plies are the same color, and in others they're two different colors. The color is mostly black, charcoal, heathery grey, and one or two shades of violet, with a very occasional spot of rusty maroon. It's probably most similar to Coif or Calorimetry in shape, of the pieces I mentioned above, but it's still my own (ridiculously simple) design. Calorimetry is made differently, and Coif is tied under the chin, and the other magazine styles tend to tie under the hair, whereas my band is longer and will button like the one Urban sells (and like Calorimetry). I have very long hair - not ultralong, but now down to the small of my back and quite fine and tangly - and I don't like to try to tie things under it. The button was one of the things that I liked about the Urban design.
Still working out some uneven increases, but I'll probably post the pattern later, possibly when it's finished. For the $15 that the original now costs, I could just save myself the effort... but that would be uncharacteristic of me. & I decided I wanted to work something like this up before they reduced the price - it's just that the holidays got in the way.
(Photo of Froehlich-Wolle shade cards stolen from this post on Black Dog, only to avoid direct linking. I'm using 8686. If you visit the post, you can see a photo showing what a ball of the yarn looks like, albeit in other shades.)
The other nice cold-weather thing I did this evening: cocoa chai! I like Oregon Chai's "Slightly Sweet" concentrate - everything else seems, well, cloyingly sweet in comparison, though I have to admit that when I started drinking it, "Slightly Sweet" didn't seem nearly sweet enough. For a while I was adding a teaspoon of sugar to every cup I made. The result was still less sweet than almost any other chai concentrate you can buy.
It's also ideal for sweet mix-ins, and you can have a nice cocoa-spice drink if you add 1 tablespoon of Ghirardelli hot cocoa mix to your hot chai when it's ready to drink (that is, milk and concentrate mixed and heated - I used 1 cup of each). I've been considering trying hazelnut Torani syrup mixed into chai, but it seems like it might not come out well... I'd have to try making it in a very small quantity, to avoid waste.
