Chive Vinegar

Here's another of those simple but wonderful ideas I've found on the web - chive vinegar. 

Simple, because all you do is fill a jar with chive flowers, cover with a clear vinegar (I used distilled, but cider or wine vinegar would work, and possibly taste less sharp), and leave for a week or so. 

By then the vinegar will have absorbed the oniony flavour of the chives, but more importantly it will have taken on their colour.  All that needs to be done, is strain and bottle it. So simple. Doesn't it look wonderful? I'm still struggling to come up with a use for it - I could add it to salad dressing but the impact of the colour would be lost. I feel it's best served in a decorative vinegar bottle (my mother had several 'cut' glass ones as part of fancy cruet sets) but I've yet to find the occasion.  

 

Syrups

I've been experimenting with something new in the kitchen - syrups flavoured with flowers and herbs.

The idea came from seeing posts about the idea on social media, and a scrap of paper on which I'd written down the recipe for lilac syrup. 

 I fully expected to end up with burnt brown stickiness in a ruined saucepan but syrup making turns out to be surprisingly simple. Add sugar to water and heat to dissolve it. (Don't leave the pan on the heat and walk away from it though, because who knows what could happen then)

Then add the petals or leaves (the amount varies according to which plant you chose to use but recipes for all sorts of syrups are readily available on the web). Let it stand a while, strain and bottle. 

Oh, and then test it. 

 Lilac, at the top, looks lovely even while preparing it. Lemon balm, below, looks less attractive.

Both give an unusual flavour to drinks whether added to lemonade or gin.

I'm now wondering what else I could find in the garden to try this with - lavender, roses, maybe sage or rosemary for a more savoury taste.

Colourful Stripes and Clearing the Stash

Last year I really embraced stripes in my knitting. They're colourful and bright, and, most importantly from my point of view, they help use up the odds and ends of leftover yarns acquired over the years.

This first one (above), a wool cardigan, is a bit of a cheat as I bought some balls of the brown yarn to pull the other colours together and to be sure I had enough for the button edging, but I think it's worked really well, and helped use up a variety of yarns.

Next was a cotton v-neck jumper. I'm not actually a great fan of cotton yarn - garments tend to be heavy and take forever to dry - but I've still accumulated a store of it which needed using up. There were a lot of odd balls which accounts for the random narrower stripes and the weird colour change from blues/greens to red/orange but I think overall it's worked, and is baggy enough to wear over a warm dress.

Last, and in a way the least, was a really random project using up all sorts of colours to make this short-sleeved jumper. I'd hoped to be able to alternate large and narrower stripes, but as I progressed it became obvious that in some of the yarns I just didn't have enough. Also, I didn't really want to have a white stripe as it feels too startling at the side of the more muted colours. As a garment though it's growing on me - and at least no one knows that it wasn't intended to look this way.   

    
 Something that really puzzles me though is - if I've knitted up all these oddments of yarn, why doesn't there appear to be more space in the storage drawers? In the hope of one day making some space, I've started my next project - a long cardigan, and yes, it's striped!

Using up leftovers

I always believe in using up any surplus - whether it's wool, fabric or food - so when I stumbled on two clever ideas for using up kitchen waste I had to try them; after all, what is there to lose?

The first was for cider vinegar. This basically involves putting apple peel and cores in a jar with a little sugar and covering with water, and leaving to stand for a few days. After this, it's strained and bottled (a washed out fancy lemonade bottle) and stands again to turn to vinegar. It's easy and the only cost is a tablespoon or two of sugar; my main difficulty was finding peel and cores that were good enough to use as the early apples were damaged. I filled a jam jar though, let it stand, bottled it, let it stand again . 

After a week I checked how things were going. Nice and fizzy, and smelling more like cider than vinegar. The instructions said to leave for another week and let the sour vinegary taste develop... 

At this point I decided to change the whole experiment into one of making cider. In short, I drank it. And very nice it was too; somewhere close to the sweet fruit ciders I buy, and definitely something I though I'd try again.

Second time, I somehow forgot to drink it, and when I opened the bottle it had certainly turned to cider vinegar. There are a multitude of ways I could have used it but I added it to an apple/chilli pickle I was making.

 A less successful experiment was the one trying to make beer from stale bread. Having seen Louisa Ziane from Toast Ales talking at Timber Festival about how Toast uses unwanted bread in their manufacturing process, I'd become intrigued with the idea of making something from nothing, or, at least, from scraps I was planning to feed to the birds. I'd found a very basic recipe on the web, which involved stale crusts, water and a little sugar - so nothing much to lose. After its initial few days with the bread steeping in a jar, it smelt fine, and it seemed quite believable that I'd end up with beer. I strained it, sat it in a clean jar on th kitchen windowsill and for a day or so it bubbled, but then the weather turned and cooled considerably, and the beer-making process stopped. Maybe I should have moved it to the airing cupboard to keep warm but I was worried about it bubbling over (I've had accidents with home made wine before!). I'm sure it's something I'll try again - maybe with some failed sourdough bread - but this first attempt wasn't a success.

Pirate Jumper

 I've got into the habit of knitting something special for my grandson at Christmas. Once I made a 'knight's jumper' to go with a knitted helmet; last year (because I'm slow with posting about things) I made a pirate jumper.

I've a couple of patterns with sailing ships designs but I decided they were too complicated and would require a lot of attention to charts, so I settled for a simpler flag with skull and crossed bones, and striped sleeves for a pirate-y look. 

Painted silk scarf

A couple of Christmasses or birthdays (it's been a long while since I started this post) my eldest daughter gave me a silk-painting scarf kit. Both tie-dying and batik are things I've experimented with before , but I've never used silk as the fabric, so it felt a little daunting. 

It came with all the paints needed and a ready-hemmed piece of material to become the scarf  - but without any spare scraps to experiment on, so I was a bit nervous about starting. Get things wrong, and the whole project would be spoiled.

I decided it was an activity most suited to outdoors - that way splashes of paint didn't matter - so I waited till summer arrived, then set up my work station on the patio, using elastic bands to control where the paint would go. The technique is partly tie-dying, part painting as the material isn't immersed in dye.

It didn't turn out exactly as I expected - far more white patches than expected - so I might go back and repaint some sections but it's lovely as is.

 

Catching Up

 I recently noticed that, although I've been busily making and baking over the past year or more, I've completely failed to keep this blog up to date. The last published post (there are a couple sitting in draft) was in August 21, and I've not sure that that jumper wasn't finished months before then!

Since then there've been more stripey cardigans and jumpers, 

a month of vegan food for Veganuary, a hand dyed silk scarf, a felted picture, some joining in with an online art group, 

and some bizarre experiments like making cider vinegar from apple peel and cores (a success), and making beer from stale bread (not).

It's definitely time for some catching up posts. Hopefully coming this way soon.

Stripes again

I'm determined to work my way through the stash of accumulated oddments of yarn, so that's going to mean a lot of stripes - and also a lot of garments based on this pattern which has become one of my favourites. I like woolen short-sleeved jumpers for winter as a warm extra layer over long-sleeved t-shirts; they keep my body core warm, while not having bulky sleeves to get in the way. Also, they don't take much yarn. For this I had 2 and a bit balls of maroon, slightly less of the grey, and a single ball of the lilac, plus really short oddments for the two narrow stripes. 

From the armholes up I knitted all pieces together - not quite in the round but as one super-wide piece.  This helped keep track of how much of each colour yarn was left - and as you can see, there wasn't enough to make the lilac band as deep as the others. Let's pretend that was a deliberate design feature :)

Anyway, it worked, it fits, it works colour-wise with a lot of my other clothes, so all i need is cooler weather to be able to wear it.

 

Experiments with Sourdough

One of the things I've started during this last lockdown since Christmas is the nurturing of a sourdough culture. I wasn't actually expecting great things of it, but it turned out to be easier than I expected to transform flour-and-water paste into something tasty. 

At first I was playing around with the daily discard - making pancakes with the batter, thickening it with flour to make cinnamon rolls, and tarts topped with sticky rhubarb or Mediterranean veg (an experiment to use up a frozen pack I received as a substitute for peppers, which turned out very tasty)

After a week or so the sourdough was bubbling, and ready to make my first loaf of bread. It didn't look brilliant, but tasted good - which is the most important bit.

I'd heard that it was possible to keep the mother culture almost indefinitely in the fridge, so I tried by putting half in a jar and leaving it there, but after a couple of weeks I seemed to be just left with sludge. 

The other half, in the warmth of the airing cupboard, has gone from strength to strength.

 I've managed to bake a couple of respectable-looking loaves with it, cobs and mini-baguettes, and some strange half bread/half cake concoctions like this apple sandwich, but my favourite uses are for pittas and pizza, made with discard and strong flour.

I now make these regularly, and I'm constantly amazed at how flour-and-water paste turns into anything so tasty.

 

Hunter's Chicken from Pinch of Nom

 Among the frozen ready-meals from my usual supermarket I have a favourite - Hunter's Chicken. It's spicy without being over-powering, and feels like something I could eat forever, but there's a stigma to eating ready meals everyday, and, let's face it, there's not much filling up my time these days, so I want to make some effort and find a home-made version.

 

The recipes I've found among my books and magazine clippings vary widely - Nigella's Pollo Alla Cacciatore is lovely but nothing like my shop-bought Hunter's Chicken - so I'm going to work my way through them, find a recipe that's close, and if necessary from there I'll tweak the ingredients - a little more of this, less of that - till it's just the way I like it. 

I'm starting with the version from Pinch of Nom by Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone. Now essentially this is a book of weight-watching recipes, but use your regular full-fat cheese instead of the low-fat option, and add an extra dollop of potatoes plus cauliflower and french beans if you're not bothered about losing weight. I did :)

What I'd actually hoped for was a recipe that took things back to basics - tomatoes, peppers, onions, sugar etc - but as I've found before the Pinch of Nom recipes tend to call for 'prepared' ingredients, in this case BBQ seasoning and hot sauce, which all too easily vary between manufacturer, so I'm not sure I actually got the flavour they were aiming for
. Also, there's a LONG list of ingredients - balsamic vinegar, white wine vinegar, Worcester sauce, mustard powder, etc etc. Not a lot of each is needed and it's fine if you've got them in the cupboard but to buy them specially would make this far more expensive than my beloved ready meal. Get through that fussy list if ingredients, and the recipe is clear to follow. 

The final stages of cooking suddenly required a lot of plates and pans but I don't have a dishwasher and I hate the proliferation of extra pots just for the sake of styling and presentation, so I skipped a lot of fussing about at the end, just added the cheese to the casserole dish and melted it there. It probably could have benefited from an extra minute or two under the grill but the potatoes and veg were ready, so I served it as it was.

It wasn't quite what my taste buds wanted though; a little too acidic (perhaps all those various vinegars), and the base flavour of tomato was too overwhelming. It's definitely on the lines of what I'm trying to reproduce so I have a good workable starting point from which I'll tweak the ingredients.

First knitting project of the year

For Christmas my youngest daughter bought me (among other things) a couple of hanks of wool from The Camel's Yarn, based in Camelford, Cornwall.

It's a wonderfully soft, double knit yarn, in a colourway seasonally titled 'Partridge in a Pear Tree'. 

My immediate thought with comparatively small amounts of yarn is to knit a scarf and/or a hat, but this time I felt I had enough to knit a pair of gloves as well. 

Having decide what, then it's on to thinking about patterns. I toyed with this lacy idea, sort of vaguely representing the 'tree' of its name, but decided gloves with holes in them probably weren't very practical.

Flicking through a book of patterns I spotted this cabled heart design, and thought it would go perfectly, representing I suppose the 'true love' who gave the partridge, pear tree, and everything else.

Not being quite sure of how far the yarn would go, I started with the gloves, then hat, and was delighted to find I had enough left for a scarf; it's thin and quite short (not one to wrap round one's neck several times) but with all three it feels like a complete set.

 

Helmet and jumper for a very small knight

Before Christmas my eldest daughter spotted a knitted version of a knight's helmet, and asked if I could knit one for her 3 year old. A quick search of the web found lots of free patterns out there, and I picked this one from Sewing Away My Time blog. 

As I had more grey yarn, I decided to make a knight's jumper to wear with it - a simple raglan design in DK with a shield design on the front. It looks crumpled as it's not washed or pressed at this point as I was slightly hurried getting things finished before Christmas (as always) but for once it's about the right size. Now all that's need is a knitted sword ...

 

Kale

When you have a vegetable patch in the garden or an allotment you're going, from time to time, get a surplus of something or other. Hopefully it's something that can be frozen or pickled or turned into jam, but occasionally it isn't - or, as is the case at the moment due to tomatoes and runner beans, there just isn't space in the freezer. 

So, I'm working my way through a seemingly never-ending supply of kale. I'm not fond of it just boiled, as you might cook cabbage or broccoli, which leads to some interesting experiments.

I like to add it, much the way I would spinach, to dishes with strong flavour, such as stir fries, chillies, curry, goulash, tomato dishes for pasta, with bacon chops in an apple juice sauce, and both in and shredded on top of enchiladas.  

My favourite way though is none of these but roasted - with oil and spices - to make Chinese 'crispy seaweed'.

 

Rainbow wool project

Just before Christmas my youngest daughter went to Riga for a weekend, and brought back this wonderful rainbow yarn for me. 

I struggled a bit to decide how to use it - there wasn't much, and I wanted something which would show off the marvelous colours, while avoiding the obvious thought of stripes.

This is what I decided on - stripes with stitch interest. It shows the colours off to perfection, and worked brilliantly as a scarf. As a hat, though it looked strange, like a baby's bonnet or something a flower fairy might wear so I decided to rip that back and start again.




















 This time I went for a simpler plain stitch with just an odd row of reverse stocking stitch at intervals to echo the similar lines in the scarf.

I DID get it finished!

 In January '19 I bought some wool in a sale, intending to crack on and make something, but I never really got started. Then in autumn I found it out but couldn't remember what I'd intended to knit.
A lot of hunting among patterns and making alterations to this and that followed, and eventually by the end of February '20 I'd finished!

The full photo isn't very clear but what I wanted was a hip length cardigan, wide at the bottom, fitted at the top. It pulls in at the waist with a repeat of the fancy hem rib, and my only regret is forgetting to add pockets.








It's probably not the longest it's taken between buying yarn and completing a garment because sometimes I just buy on impulse and hoard the wool, but it has taken a while.

Decisions, decisions

Back in the January sales I bought some wool. I had a definite plan of what I’d make but life got in the way and I never started it. 

Now I can’t remember what I was going to knit, so I’ve spent most of the weekend with my head in pattern books but still haven't made a decision!