Knitcircus

Knitcircus Podcast #6

Another podcast so soon! Thanks so much to Webmistress Cindy for wrangling the audio and uploads for the podcast.

In this episode: Amy and I discuss all kinds of family holiday traditions, knitting, food and otherwise, and talk about which yarns we'd take to a desert island (especially if that island was, you know, in kind of a cold tropical area requiring knitwear).

Listen to Episode #6 on Libsyn or Itunes.

Mentioned this episode:

• Teeny-Tiny Mochimochi 
• Adorn collection, by Laura Nelkin of  Nelkin Designs 
• Wintertide cowl 
• Geodesic Cardigan by Connie Chang Chinchio 
• Textured Stitches by Connie Chang Chinchio 
• Knitted Dinosaurs by Tina Barrett 
• Mandie Harrington's Speshul Snowflake Yarn Club
• Interweave Knitting Lab
• Knitting with Two Colors by Meg Swansen and Amy Detjen 
• 200 Fair Isle Motifs by Mary Jane Mucklestone 
• Fair Isle Basics and Beyond by House of White Birches
• Feral Knitter 
• Cascade 220 
• Ella Rae Classic Wool 
• Jamison & Smith Shetland Jumper Weight
• Berroco Vintage 
• Berroco Ultra Alpaca 
• Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride 

 

Dark Chocolate Peppermint Bark (recipe on podcast)

Box of 40 mini candy canes

2 12-oz bags of dark chocolate chips (we use Ghirardelli)

1/2 t peppermint extract

Cover two cookie sheets (preferebly with side walls) with parchment paper or waxed paper.

Crushing the candy canes: kids are great for this!

• unwrap candy canes and place in double-bagged zip-top plastic bag.
• using a hammer, on a hard surface (I recommend the garage or basement floor) hit repeatedly until there is a mixture of powder and small chunks in the bag

Melt the chocolate:

• in medium or large thick-bottomed saucepan, on low heat, melt the chocolate chips, stirring constantly. When mostly melted, add the peppermint extract.
• holding a strainer over the pan, pour about 2/3 of the crushed candy canes out of the bag, allowing the poweder to fall into the pan. Stir well.
• when all of the chips have dissolved, remove from heat immediately.

Pour chocolate mixture into the two pans.
Sprinkle remaining candy powder and chunks over the top. and chill for about 20 minutes until hard.

Break by lifting the wholde thing above the pan and throwing it back down with some force. Use clean hands to break the big pieces into one-or-two-bite pieces.

Keep refrigerated; will last up to a week in a covered container.

Happy Holidays!

Molasses Crinkles Recipe

Our family falls into spicy-cookie and vanilla-cookie teams, and this is the Spicy team's all time favorite. We make them all year round, but especially love dressing them up for the holidays. For readers who've been with us from the beginning, you may recognize them from Knitcircus #4.

Molasses Crinkles

Makes approximately 30 cookies

20 min to prep and roll, 12-14 min to bake

Ingredients:

1/2 cup (one stick) butter, melted

1/4 blackstrap molasses

1 C sugar

1 egg

1/4 t salt

2t baking soda

1 t cinnamon

1 t allspice

1 t powdered ginger

2 C flour (for holidays, we use unbleached all-purpose, for the rest of the year, half white and half whole wheat pastry flour)

 2-3 T additional sugar, for rolling; or use 1 T sugar and 2 t sanding sugar for each color desired

To make:

 Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease cookie sheets or use parchment paper.

Melt butter and put in medium mixing bowl. Beat in molasses and sugar. Beat in egg.

Add dry ingredients to mixture and stir well.

Roll cookies into 1.5" balls. Put sugar in  small bowl (or two if using two colors sanding sugar) Roll each ball in extra sugar and place on cookie sheet.

Bake for approximately 11-12 minutes for chewy-in-the-middle cookies, or 14 min for crunchy cookies.

 

 

Weekend Craft Treats

Jelly Orange Slices from Not Martha

Last year, on our NYC trip, Belle and I had tea at American Girl Place, in one of the highlights of her short life. If you have a daughter who loves dolls and tiny things, I highly recommend it. One of the most cunning little treats served on the multilayered cupcakes stands was "orange slices" using a real rind with the fruit scooped out and replaced with orange jell. When Belle and I complimented the pink-aproned waiter he brought several more on the house.

Thanks to this great Not Martha tutorial, we recreated the fun at home, and every kid in sight loved them. 

 Then we made smoothies with the orange pulp, lots of ice and honey.

Five more weekend kid-crafty projects:

• Frozen striped yogurt pops from Betty Crocker (we'll do ours in popsicle molds with GF cereal)
• Jars of solar-powered sunshine courtesy of Dornob.com
• Little handmade roadsters from The Crafty Crow
• Recycled-envelope bookmarks with attitude from OhCrafts
• Big Kanazashi Flowers from baby wipes! Filth Wizardry.

Stay cool and collected!

Jaala

 

Cherry Crisp Triumphant

Every year I get so excited about our little cherry tree; it produces bowls full of fruit every year without any help from us. What a trooper.

 
Yesterday's harvest:

Not photoshopped at all! They really are cherry- red. :)

On some good advice from my tweeps, we went with a cherry crisp as a pretty easy fix to do gluten-free. We fond out about our daughter's the wheat intolerance this winter, so it's the first Cherry Dessert with that particular baking challenge.

 

I used this recipe with a few minor changes, and it turned out great!

The modificiations:

I switched around the proportions on the oats and flour, so it was

1C flour; we used our all-purpose GF mixture; white rice,  brown rice, almond flour , corn starch and sorghum

1.5 C Rolled Oats (note: make sure to use gluten-free oats, like Bob's Red Mill

I also substituted butter for the shortening.

We invited Grammy and Buppa over for our very local produce treat.

We didn't have any vanilla ice cream, which would have been perfect, but homemade vanilla whipped cream wasn't bad either (not pictured).

And the tree still has more cherries, probably the same amount again. I'm thinking cherry-topped cheesecake...Thoughts? What are you making with summer's bounty?

 

Also, prizes will be announced and winners notified  in the sock pattern contest tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who entered!

Enjoy your summer evening,

Jaala

 

Shortbread Cookies Recipe

What a weekend--cocoa and caroling, huge snowstorm, cutting and decorating our tree, making fudge, peppermint bark and shortbread cookies!

Mike was telling me as I mixed up the cookies last night, that he remembered a conversation with his grandma:

"It was in college and I was just getting interested in cooking and I asked my grandma about cooking during the Depression. She said, at that time, they made "Shortnin' Bread" like this: mix up flour and shortening, and if you had some sugar, you could make cookies. So just put those things in a bowl, and if you had enough sugar to make it sweet, you were golden."

As I mixed up our recipe, a family favorite, I thanked my stars for everything we have-- colored sugar for the top, even!

At the holidays, I like to try fancy cookies and pretty cookies we don't get make other times of year, but this quick, easy and delicious recipe is always a joy to make (and eat!)

Shortbread Cookies

makes about 3 dozen

• 1 Cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 1 Cup confectioner's sugar
• 1.5 t Vanilla
• 2 Cups All-Purpose Flour
• Colored sanding sugar, sprinkles or jimmies, if desired.

Preheat oven to 325 F. Line cookie trays with parchment paper.

Beat butter, sugar and vanilla; add flour in two parts and mix just until dough comes together into a ball.

With your hands, take off balls of dough, roll and gently flatten with palm to make 2" discs. Sprinkle with colored sugar or sprinkles, if desired.

Bake approximately 12 minutes, rotating halfway through (until bottoms are golden but edges aren't; we prefer ours a bit soft, but if you like crunchier shortbread, you can give it a couple more minutes for golden edges).

View yesterday morning from our front step. Maybe time to take our benches in?!

 

 

Apples for Sauce

Over the weekend we enjoyed using some of our bounty of apples:

Applesauce!

It's so easy and fun: not so much a recipe, but a do-by-feel project.  This particular batch was enthusiastically hand-cranked on my dad's  apple-coring/slicing/peeling gadget by a seven-year-old with some help from neighbor friends. We got out our two big pots and simmered the apples over low heat for about an hour. Just keep throwing thinly-sliced apples in your pot(s) stirring and roughly splitting with a wooden spoon and cooking until desired smoothness. We used a couple of teaspoons cinnamon in each pot, adding several handfuls of brown sugar to one and about a half cup of Agave to the second.

My blood sugar's a bit feisty, so I have to watch my sweets intake (tricky, since I love to bake and adore sugar in any form). If you haven't tried it, Agave Nectar's a great honey substitute, and doesn't spike the blood sugar. So now I have two containers of mama-safe applesauce (I may have already eaten the small bowl pictured here).

The apples do cook down quite a bit; our big pots made about two sixteen-ounce tupperwares each. The applesauce freezes nicely for future waffle topping or bag lunches.

In Knitcircus News, the Special Gifts Issue's coming out in just a couple of days, so we're doing the last-minute whirlwind of editing, linking and updates.

Here's a peek at a Gifts project that I can't wait to cast on:

This issue's not only our first Gifts Issue, but it's our first time with two issues (Fall and Gifts) running simultaneously. I'm excited and a little scared, but I know Webmaster Cindy's on the job...

The Alice Starmore Giveaway's still in full swing, so if you show us a link to your Knitcircus project, you're entered to win! 

Take care and craft on,

Jaala

Eclipse winner and the Smoothie of Desire

Yes, we have a winner! and I was so excited by the deliciousness of this raspberry concoction that I have to share it with you.

First, the audiobook winner is the lucky Anita F! All you Twilight fans out there, enjoy the movie, I know we will tonight. Whee!

Now, for the Smoothie of Desire, named perhaps in honor of certain scenes in this book worth reading.

  A kind neighbor invited the kids and I to pick raspberries from her impressive backyard cane patch,and we came away with a couple of pints for sure. For breakfast yesterday morning, we made what turned out to be the most luscious smoothie to ever slide onto my tongue, and when you see the ingredients, you'll see why.

I don't have amounts, but with this lineup, you really can't go wrong.

Smoothie of Desire

serves 4

Put into blender cup:

Most of a large container of vanilla yogurt (we used Yoplait); maybe the container was 2/3 full.

Several generous seven-year-old-sized handfuls of fresh raspberries (should make an impressive mountain on top of the yogurt)

A good long squeeze of agave or honey

Pour in heavy cream to almost cover berries (shown below). Yeah. 

Blend well, pour into cups and serve with a straw and a couple of raspberries for garnish (this decorative flourish added by Belle).

Thin with milk if too thick for the straw. If you really want to. Or pull smoothie slowly into mouth and enjoy.

Smoothie in process, photo by Li'l Buddy

 

Have a good one.

Jaala

Strawberries for Pie

As a kid, I always looked forward to strawberry picking in early summer. Once we went with my great aunt and uncle and many times with my childhood best friend and her family. They shared their strawberry jam recipe with us, and we always made strawberry shortcake that same day. I remember the taste of a warm strawberry and the pride of lugging the heavy cardboard containers in for weighing.

yesterday, we took the kids and one of their friends to Appleberry Farm, making it in only a few minues after they opened for the first day of the first season. We worked in teams, each taking one side of the row and crawling along, gently pushing the bushy, sawtoothed leaves aside to spot the little red berries.Less ripe ones than later in the season, and the little guys picked many orange ones, but even they filled the mouth with a strong, if tart, strawberry essence. Mmm. At the end, they got to move our little orange flag to proudly show that we'd cleaned out three-and-a-half rows.

For Christmas, my mom made cookbooks for my and my brothers' families containing our favorite childhood recipes; a thoughtful gift that I've used--a lot.

Here's our traditional family recipe we couldn't wait to eat after our yearly excursion. It's a surprise for my kids that one is waiting for them after school today....As a kid, I remember watching my mom arrange the berries int eh bottom of the pie (which is more like a deep-dish fruit tart), carefully choosing the largest and prettiest and making even, concentric rings.

Strawberry Pie (one pie, 8 pieces)

from our family friends.

8-9" baked pie shell

2 pints fresh-picked strawberries

1 C sugar

2 T cornstarch

1 C water

2 T strawberry Jello powder

Topping: 1 pint heavy cream, whipped with 1 t vanilla (add sugar if you wish)

Directions:

Prepare pie shell.

Stem, wash and drain the berries. Selecting a few ripe or not-pretty berries, mash enough for 1/3 cupful and set aside.

Combine sugar, cornstarch and 1 C water. Cook over medium heat until thick and clear, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat and add Jello. Mix well. Cool slightly. Then add the mashed berries. Fill pie shell with whole berries, setting stem-side down in circles and filling in gaps with other berries.

Pour mixture evenly over them.

Chill for at least 4 hours.

Just before serving, top with stiffly whipped cream.