Spaghetti Monster Tree Topper

Last night our home came under invasion.
This Spaghetti Monster flew into our kitchen, circled around a few times and then chose to land
on the top of our Christmas Tree.
There he stayed, waving his noodly appendages and
muttering in Spaghetti lingo about pirates and climate change.

He is not the first spaghetti monster to decide that the top of a Christmas Tree is a good place to put forth his message. But he may be the first of the knitted noodly brethren.


Construction Instructions:

FSM was made from a few miles (exaggeration) of 4-stitch knitted I-cord on size 8 dp needles and Lion Brand Wool-Ease cream yarn. The I-cord was tacked on a knitted stuffed sphere made of the same yarn. His meatballs are knitted stuffed spheres made with Lion Brand Suede yarn (it isn't easy to find meaty-colored yarn out there...). Two google eyes were attached to lightly wired eye-noodles and a few of the noodly appendages also were wired with jewelry wire so they could wave and wiggle effectively.

An Odd Fellow

This "Odd Fellow" is sitting in our living room. He's from Jess Hutch's incredibly fun toy booklet.

Fiona took him for a test flight
and found him flight worthy.

Now here's the predicament in which I find myself: This Odd Fellow would be perfect for my sister, the psychologist, who god knows has to deal with many a less friendly odd fellow professionally. I knit him with her in mind and keep picturing him sitting in a drawer of her desk ready to smile at her after an encounter with a particularly difficult patient.

And the more I look at the cursed sweater, the less I am inclined to send it to her. My dear sister is just not an olive kind of gal and the sleeves of the sweater are very, very olive.

But for some reason I feel like a shit to send her the toy I intentionally knit for her and not the sweater that I intentionally knit for myself but which doesn't fit and which I previously declared I'd give her since it would probably fit her. (There are other things in her Christmas box--the book of the moment, Fallen, a box of dark chocolate covered glaceed apricots, a great T-shirt from Threadless and the socks I already knit for her, so it isn't a question of getting just a little toy or a sweater.)

Here's the thing that will decide it: does anyone think I can salvage the sweater for my own use (as it was intended) by doing some particularly forceful blocking? I already blocked it once, but I'm a half-assed blocker and I didn't tug and stretch the hell out of the sweater. Expert blockers, please chime in on how you'd approach such a problem--technique, tips, or just the painful truth that I should give up while I'm ahead and send it to my sister since it'll never work and I shouldn't go through making the whole damn house smell like a wet sheep again.

I've fallen for "Fallen"

I finished Fallen today and wowza what a book.

The author, David Maine, chose to tell the bulk of the novel through Cain's and Eve's points of view. Choosing two flawed and troubled characters made the book far more interesting than if characters like Abel and Adam were telling their side of it. There are brief forays into Abel's and Adam's points of view but the bulk of the novel is through the lens of Cain and Eve.

As I've said here before, I'm a sucker for re-tellings of classics whether it be Greek literature and myths or, in this case, the Bible. In both of Maine's books (this one and The Preservationist) he takes a few verses from the bible and expands them into a full novel. And the voice in both books is curiously contemporary in its wit and wry observations, yet it doesn't distract from the biblical setting. Here is one of my favorite scenes--the Temptation of Eve in the garden:

--But I'm perfectly happy with the way things are.
--Are you? Are you really?
Eve hesitated.
--What did you do yesterday? demanded the serpent.
She frowned--I...walked along the river. I was looking for--yes, I was collecting mushrooms, which we ate. Also berries.
--Fascinating.
Eve brindled.--There's nothing wrong with staying alive.
--Certainly not. And the day before?
The day before yesterday was identical to the one that followed, as they both knew. And the one before that...
The snake watched her mockingly and Eve felt herself growing defensive.--We have all we need here.
--Oh sure, murmured the snake. Somehow, sans shoulders, it still managed a shrug. --There's a great appeal to being comfortable. If that's what you want, I won't argue. Go on then. Keep it up. Off with you! There's a lovely patch of berries just behind this clearing.
Eve didn't move.
--Better get them before the bunnies do.
Eve didn't move.
Suddenly the serpent's voice modulated. It no longer mocked, but spoke in gentle earnest tones.--The power of creation will lie within you, woman. That's what your God fears. What He doesn't want you to know.
Eve didn't move.
--Wouldn't that be preferable to wandering naked all day, plucking fruit and shitting by the river?
She had to admit, the creature had a point.--But it is forbidden.
--Only because of fear. Your God is afraid to treat you as an equal. Who knows what His plans are for you here? Or maybe there is no plan other than your remaining forever just as you are.
The serpent's voice drops to a whisper.--Day after day after day after day.
Admittedly Eve had felt such misgivings before.--The power of creation you say?
--Oh yes, purred the serpent. --You will carry it about with you and it will spring forth from your belly at your command.
Which, in a manner of speaking, would turn out to be the case.

There are so many intense emotions in this book--lust, jealousy, confusion, love, sympathy, regret--and I found the process of reading it to be so rich as to make me have to ration myself to a chapter or so at a time, or else I felt glutted with the intensity of the prose. And the reverse chronology demands that as soon as you finish the book, you have to go back to the beginning and read it again.

Most interestingly, for a work based on the Bible, I felt that the main message was incredibly humanistic--while characters have encounters with God their happiness and misery come down to day to day routines and how they live with the people around them. Their perceptions of each other and what they learn from their interactions left me feeling an affirmation of humanity's basic goodness.

For a book to get "Winter Kate" (who hasn't seen the sun in about 2 weeks and noticed that it is supposed to snow 4-6 more inches today) to say something positive about humanity at this time of year is a major accomplishment though my guess is David Maine will not be putting a quote like this on the paperback edition: "This book even made sun-deprived, cynical and bitter Winter-Kate feel OK about the Human Race for a brief moment of time!"

And now that I'm done with the book, I'll go slink back into my cave of doom....

They are watching me....

Last night nature decided to play a cruel joke on me and dumped 5 inches of snow on us thus causing the schools to call a snow day. I was counting on school to give me a brief break from one of my intense kids on the last full day of what has felt like a marathon of solo-parenting while my better half is off on a 9 day work trip. (I know, there are single parents out there who do this all the time and I think they are saints and can not figure out how they stay sane.)

Despite having three different types of chocolates open and available (still a few dark chocolate covered glaceed apricots left after yesterday's knitting fiasco, some truffles, and chocolate covered English toffee) and two open boxes of cookies (all butter shortbread and some of those little chocolate slabbed LU Petit Ecolier biscuits) I felt the need to make cookies today...call it complete parental burn-out or just a sugar desire that is making up for (ahem) "something else" lacking in my life the past 9 days.

After a small amount of kid involvement (resulting in an inordinate number of poppy seeds hitting the floor) we produced these:

Poppy seed thumbprint cookies

They are pretty tasty cookies, despite the fact that they came from Eating Well magazine which usually has baked goods recipes that taste like cardboard. They aren't that healthy since they still contain a full stick of butter and a cup of powdered sugar, which is probably why they taste pretty good. There's some whole wheat flour in them which gives them a nutty taste (without nuts) and I used some homemade cherry jam in the dents which combined nicely with the lemon zest in the not-too-sweet cookie base. My major gripe about most of the holiday cookies made this time of year is that they are too sweet and make my teeth itch and my blood sugar spike alarmingly (sugar cookies with icing and sprinkles??? AAAGGGG!) These little cookies leave me itchless and (relatively) stable.

But there is something a little creepy about them--take a look at the photo below:

I can't shake the feeling that they are all eyeballs (rabid and bloodshot, at that) and that, like Mona Lisa's gaze, they follow me around the room.

The sharp sighted among you might have noticed the beverage accompaniment lurking in the background of the above photo and maybe, just maybe, I should have been drinking tea instead of wine at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and which presumably wouldn't have resulted in being freaked out by my own cookies. (Maybe the opiates in the poppy seeds combined with the tannins in the wine to create the hallucination--Yeah! It was the poppy seeds fault!)
But it was such a nice wine...and it went pretty well with the cookies!

So if you too feel the need to bake some eyeballs, er, cookies, here is the recipe:

Sorta Healthy Poppy Seed Thumbprint Cookies
adapted from Eating Well magazine

1 2/3 C whole wheat flour
1 C all purpose flour
2 T poppy seeds
1/2 t salt
1/2 C unsalted butter (1 stick), softened
1/2 t vanilla
1/2 C canola oil
1 C powdered sugar
1 egg
fresh grated zest from 1 lemon
about 1/3-1/2 C jam, preferably sour cherry

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.
2. Whisk together first 4 dry ingredients in a bowl.
3. In another bowl, use an electric mixer and beat butter, oil and sugar until creamy (mine was still a little runny). Add egg, lemon zest and vanilla and beat a little longer.
4. Stir in dry ingredients until combined into a sturdy dough.
5. Make small balls with the dough (about 1 T) and put them on a silpat or parchment lined baking sheet.
   
6. Press your thumb (or the thumb of any available kid who has washed their hands since they like this part) into the center to make the dent and put about 1/2 t of jam in the dent.
7. Bake for 30-35 minutes until firm and lightly brown. Cool on a rack.
8. Pour yourself a large glass of red wine, eat a couple of cookies and then let me know if the rest of the cookies are watching you as you stumble around the room consuming their brethren. Maybe yours will be more polite and avert their gaze.
   

Damn

You'd think this would be a day where I'd be giddy with happiness, skipping down the street, singing ditties and indulging in other nauseating displays of joy since I finally finished this:
Instead I'm feeling incredibly pissy since the damn thing doesn't fit. Somehow when planning to make this sweater for myself I forgot that I have really broad shoulders. I picked my size based on my (modest) bust measurement, added a few inches on the sleeves since I have long arms but entirely forgot that my shoulders would need more room than, say, a normally proportioned woman. (Too bad the pattern didn't have a subset of how to alter it for your own freakity freak figure flaws. Say that four times fast.)

So now I present to you:

My sister's Christmas Present!

Sigh.

My sister has a much finer bone structure than I do and she's thinner too so I'm guessing this will fit perfectly. And it'll go great with all the size 8 pre-pregnancy pants I finally admitted will never fit me again and gave her. Of course, they all fit her flawlessly.

However to truly suit my sister, I think I should make this sweater a little more feminine. (This is the sweater I made her last year for Christmas. Note the purpley- pink crochet edging and mother of pearl flower-shaped buttons.) I'm a little on the utilitarian/scruffy side when it comes to clothing, but my sister can pull off stuff that is a bit more decorative. As I haven't yet put in the zipper I bought for it, I'm wondering if anyone has ideas on a different, more feminine fastening. I'm thinking maybe some tiny hooks and eyes running all the way up it might look nice, unless they proved to be a pain in the ass. Or I could cover the seed stitch plackets with some sort of ribbon and attach snaps up the front.

Ideas, anyone?

And meanwhile, to comfort myself on this cold grey day (a perfect day for wearing above cardigan I might note) I'm opening up thebox of dark chocolate covered glaceed apricots that I found at Trader Joe's the other day. (If I eat the whole box, then my sister will most likely get my current size 10 pants too and I'll just wander around pants-less, sweater-less and crazy as a loon.)

Free to a good home

I did some cleaning out of the limited book shelf space in the house and am offering the following books, free to a good home:
The pile on the left is fiction and contains:
The Far Euphrates by Aryeh Lev Stollman
Unless by Carol Shields
The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier
Around Again by Suzanne Strempek Shea
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kid
Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier
Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey

The pile on the right is non-fiction and contains:
The Mother's Almanac
Your Baby and Child
What to Expect the Toddler Years

and one book that didn't make it into the picture:
Food For Little Fingers by Victoria Jenest

Of the above, the only two I can really recommend are Unless and Eva Moves the Furniture (though I did read the latter when highly hormonal, and thus possibly more whacked out than usual, after Fiona's birth). I didn't read The Far Euphrates or Around Again though, so they may be perfectly decent books that I just didn't warm up to in the first few pages. Food for Little Fingers might be ok for people with toddlers though the recipes didn't work with my kids. Right now I'm fed up with parenting books though I'd say Your Baby and Child could be fine for a new parent who wants a basic reference.

If you are a writer, I think that reading the two Chevalier books and The Secret Life of Bees can be an interesting exercise. I think all three are seriously flawed novels which made it into print, and Bees has been incredibly popular with book groups (for all the wrong reasons, in my humble opinion). As a writer who someday would like to publish some of my fiction work, I learned a lot about what I don't want a book of mine to do by reading these three books.

If you are local and want any of these I can leave them on your doorstep or you can pick them up from mine. If you are far away and want to pay the postage, I'll be heading to the post office to mail x-mas gifts in the next week or so and could shlep it off to you.

Educational Eating

My son has been introduced to educational eating at Kindergarten. No nutritional value, mind you, but his teacher used food as a tool for understanding science subjects, in this case geology.

I present to you,
Jello Sedimentary Rock!

His class has been studying geology in his class (Geology! In kindergarten! They spent 2 months on it and just moved on to studying Kenya) and to get the kids to understand how sedimentary rock is made in layers over time, his teacher made Jello sedimentary rock (the above photo is of our version--the one they did in school had a different top layer). It took a whole week for them to make it which, in Kindergarten terms, is a hell of a long time, though Heidi explained that real sedimentary rock takes a lot longer to make.

On the first day they made the bottom layer--red magma; the second day they put down the middle layer--yellow with chunks of fruit in it to mimic a composite layer (or maybe a granite intrusion with the peaches being feldspar and the pears being the quartzite?); the third day they put down a layer of graham cracker crumbs (sand or sand stone); the fourth day they put down a layer of blue Jello mixed up with Kool Whip to imitate a glacier. And on the fifth day they ate it!

The kids even got to experiment with fault lines (mostly strike-slip type faults) as Jello rock is not terribly stable.

Ian was so excited by this whole project that we had to make it at home too. We couldn't find blue Jello so we mixed up our graham cracker crumbs with green Jello and made a dirt and grass top layer.

It tasted pretty disgusting, but Ian was proud as punch explaining the concept to all of us after dinner so we choked it down.

A curious silence....

I should explain the silence that settled over this blog on the eve of Thanksgiving. Most of the food blogs I read have been hopping with Thanksgiving recipes, discussions of turkey techniques and the like.

The reason for my silence? I dislike pretty much every traditional Thanksgiving food.

See why I kept my mouth shut before the holiday? I didn't want to spoil the fun for all the folks who love this holiday. Hating Thanksgiving foods seems to cast me as a Benedict Arnold sort of person. I think the sentiments of the holiday are lovely, but I don't understand why the blandest, mushiest, sweetest, gloppiest foods have come to be what everyone expects, but alas, as I live with some people who look forward to this holiday as a return to the foods of their childhood and a break from my kinda cooking, I stand back and let them all be happy while I nibble a brussel sprout or two.

Sure I can chew my way through a slice of roast turkey, that's a pretty basic form of protein and in and of itself, inoffensive. But almost every other food that people like to serve I don't care for (and some I downright despise). They include: stuffing in every form (yes, I've tried it with oysters, cornbread, sausage, and/or chestnuts. I didn't like any of them.), sweet potatoes that have been candied or glazed or marshmallowed (I like sweet potatoes in savory forms--preferably with lots of garlic), mashed potatoes (prefer them roasted), gravy (oil slick), green bean casserole (glop glop), cranberry jelly (I do love fresh cranberry relish of which my sister made a superb variety this year--see recipe below), and pumpkin pie (prefer apple pie or some other pumpkin concoction like pumpkin cheese cake or pumpkin bread pudding).

But now that the holiday is over and I won't ruin any one else's dinner with my sentiments, I feel free to vent them. I made roasted sweet potato fries with smoked Spanish paprika and an apple pie, so there were two things that I did like at the dinner (they were not terribly popular with other people, but hey, they had plenty of other food to choose from.)

There was one superstar at our family thanksgiving meal and he is pictured below:

This is Theo the Basenji, a turkey-lover extraordinaire and now known as "Theo my hero"

Theo is my sister's dog and he is a little love. Being a bark-less breed has its pluses but it also means he can sneak around quite effectively without anyone noticing.

We had closed the baby/pet gate that leads to the basement in order to give our cat, Jojo, a little peace since Theo also excels at cat-harassment. But a gate is nothing to a Basenji who smells turkey. My better half brought home an enormous mound of turkey from the family meal (held at my parent's house) and stashed it in the beer fridge in the basement. He had wisely stocked up on two cases of nice beer so that he and Chris could anesthetize themselves against any familial tensions and putting the turkey next to so much beer must have made him a very happy man.

Unfortunately after one basement beverage run, someone left the beer fridge door open a crack and that crack must have allowed the seductive scent of roast turkey to waft up the stairs and be detected by Theo's fine sniffer.

Theo was discovered on the next basement beverage run sitting in front of the fridge burping. He wormed his way under the gate (something our cat can't do--he jumps over the top) and proceeded right to the tray of turkey and ate it all. The crazy thing is his tummy wasn't pooched out even a tiny bit but my sister reported there were stinky turkey farts coming from Theo her entire long drive back to Syracuse.

Oh dear. I tried to make facial expressions approximating sympathy for my crestfallen turkey-less husband, but it wasn't easy.

(For a hilarious story of a Thanksgiving misadventure of a different sort, go to Sara Donati's blog entry.)

And now the recipe for the fantastic cranberry relish that my sister made which most definitely will not appeal to traditionalists:

Martha Stewart's Cranberry Orange Relish
Makes 2 cups (my sister must have quadrupled the recipe since she made tons. And it was terrific the next day too)

2 cups fresh cranberries
1/4 diced red onion
1 large jalapeno pepper, finely chopped
2 T fresh lime juice
2 navel oranges, peeled, sectioned, and cut into 1/4 inch pieces, juice reserved
2 t fresh grated ginger
1/2 C sugar
2 stalks celery cut into 1/4 inch dice
1/4 C fresh mint leaves coarsely chopped
1/4 C toasted pecans chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Put cranberries in a food processor and chop coarsely. Combine with other ingredients in a large bowl and stir. Refridgerate for at least 1 hour and up to a day.

Authorial predicament

I finished Margot Livesey's Banishing Verona last night. The whole way through the book I wanted to like it (and there were parts that were quite good) but something kept me from embracing it. I enjoyed one of Livesey's other novels Eva Moves the Furniture and hoped that this one would prove to be a good read too. (I must confess that I read Eva shortly after Fiona was born and to say that the subject matter--a daughter, a dead mother--and my hormonal state--giddy yet crying at dopey stuff like a lightbulb commercial--combined to make me a highly subjective reader. So I can't say for sure if it was actually a decent book now.)

First the picky little crap of which I may be more unforgiving than most readers (see my rantings about Pope Groan). I'm not sure why inaccuracies or authorial ignorance piss me off so much--it may have to do with my unreasonable worship of certain authors and my hope that each book I read will prove the author worthy of worship, or it may be that I am jarred from a story more easily than many readers when I find factual inaccuracies or improbabilties.

Picky bit #1
Zeke is described as a meticulous painter--someone who channels his obsessive personality into his job--so you believe that he is probably the best gosh darn house painter out there. But then the author ruins it by writing about the painting process with loads of errors.

For example, Zeke spackles at the same time as he paints (gotta wait a day for the spackle to dry), he paints unwashed walls (a no no as far as paint adhesion goes--need that TSP to roughen up the old paint and to get any greasy hand prints off), and he doesn't cut in, just starts painting smack dab in the middle of a wall (you do the edges first, particularly the edges where the walls and ceiling meet or where there is trim). Anyone who has painted a room knows that the incredibly boring prep work--wash, spackle, sand, tape--takes way more time than the actual painting.

Maybe if you choose to make one of your main characters a house painter you should take the time to, say, paint a room in your own house so you know what you are talking about.

Picky bit #2
At one point she says that a minor character has a blue dot on his throat which was the leftover tattoo from his chemotherapy for Hodgkins. However, the tiny blue dot is the tattoo used during radiation treatment, not during chemo, so that the radiologist aims each time at precisely the right spot. If you just had chemo, no dot. If they used radiation on the lymphoma, then you have a dot. This is the kind of thing I expect outside readers (one of whom was Andrea Barrett who I love!) and editors to catch.

Picky bit #3
A moment of complete improbability: When Verona faints in a hotel in Boston, she has an American hotel clerk order "tea and toast" for Verona. That's a totally British thing to do (which reminds me, I must write sometime about the British penchant for toast which goes way beyond the realm of reasonable for such a humble food). It would be ok if Verona (who is English) had asked for tea and toast to comfort herself. But having an American hotel clerk order it is so unlikely as to make me snort.

The Big Complaint and the Author's Predicament
A normal reader might be able to forgive all of the above gripes if the rest of the book was fine, but unfortunately I had a problem in that I didn't believe in one of the main characters--Zeke. The author refers to his "condition" and his "breakdowns" and clearly implies Aspergers Syndrome (a very high functioning form of Autism). But she adopts some of the easier aspects of the syndrome (obsessions with numbers, inability to recognize faces, lack of awareness of social behaviors) but leaves out anything thing that would really make Zeke unappealing. He comes across as quirky and charmingly honest rather than someone who is really struggling with something substantial.

I suspect that the author fell for one of her own characters and that Zeke is shown through the rosy haze of an authorial crush. Unfortunately, this has the effect of flattening his character--I do think that a character's flaws often are what make them interesting.

So what do you think an author should do when they find themselves in this predicament? How do you make a character appealing and still flawed?

A birthday dinner

You probably figured out what the photo of the phlegm colored gunk in the bowl in the last post was: that was my contribution to the pistachio gelato tasting. (We all now know why most frozen pistachio confections add a little bit of green dye...) I made the Southern Italian version (all milk, no eggs), Sarah made the Central Italian version (no cream but 7 egg yolks) and John made the Northern Italian version (9 egg yolks plus a bit of cream).

The gelato tasting was the conclusion to a birthday dinner for John which, other than my kids having total melt-downs near the end, was a lovely evening. For the tasting, we sent Sarah's Brian (Brian P.) into the kitchen to prepare the tasting bowls and only he knew the identity of the different scoops (one scoop was marked with a cookie, one with a little stick of un-cooked spaghetti, and the other was plain--very clever, that Brian).
And then we all dug in and tried to determine which scoop was which recipe. Sarah got all three right and I got all three wrong....As Brian P. remarked, what business do I have writing about food when I can't even determine the presence or absence of a sizeable quantity of egg yolk!?

Seriously, they all were good, but I'm amazed that I mistook my recipe (the lowest in fat--just whole milk in there) with John's high fat recipe. I really thought it tasted the creamiest!

We all decided that we need to do this again, next time with three chocolate gelato recipes (we'll have to standardize the brand of chocolate and cocoa used) since the texture of the pistachio gelatos was a bit bumpy with all those ground up nuts in there. Maybe the mouth-feel of something that is supposed to be smooth will prove to be more revealing of the recipe source. And I think I can locate the three recipe variations.

The rest of the meal was delicious, too. I made the starter, Swiss chard and prosciutto stuffed ravioli with a tomato cream sauce. (The chard and tomatoes were the final produce from my garden--bye bye garden, till next year.)
The recipe was from a recent issue of Gourmet and unfortunately it hasn't been added to the Epicurious recipe site yet. I followed the recipe with one exception--I felt compelled to grate a little lemon zest into the ravioli filling (there was also sauteed onion, ricotta, Parmesan, egg yolk and nutmeg) and I'm glad I added that little tweak because I thought it saved the dish from excessive richness and gave it a little lift. This time I followed the step by step instructions for making the pasta and it turned out much more elastic and springy than my previous (neglectful) attempts. Key to getting the spring in the dough was a much slower incorporation of the flour into the eggs. I've been pretty slap-dash in the past and thus the dough wasn't kneaded as well as it should have been.

Sarah made a terrific Portuguese chicken soup for the main course.
It was served with the fabulous sofrito pictured in the foreground above--annatto seeds, peppers, garlic, etc. Combined with the rich chicken and rice soup, it made for a perfect cold weather meal. Sarah promised to send me the recipe so I will post it soon.