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New site!

I'm excited to announce that I have a new site: StephanieKlose.com. I've been posting new content over there as well as here for a couple of weeks, since it's terribly dreary to be sent to someone's new site and find nothing but a test post. So, please take a look, update your bookmarks or RSS, and thanks so much for reading!

Quick announcement

I just listed quite a lot of knitting magazines on ebay. There are back issues of Interweave Knits, Rowan and Vogue Knitting, some going back to the 80s and early 90s. I would love to make some money on them, but mostly I want them out of my apartment, so I set the prices wicked low (nothing over $5.00).

Take a look.

Bonus incentive: If you end up buying some of these and let me know you came from the blog, I'll pay shipping.

Thanks!

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

I am a lucky, lucky girl. Earlier this summer, my friend Jenn emailed me and asked if I would be willing to let her measure me, make a sweater to my measurements, take some pictures of me wearing it and then give it to me. I said that seemed like a perfectly satisfactory arrangement, which is how I ended up with Yoshimi.

The yarn is delicious, Lorna's Laces's Honor (alpaca/silk) in the excellently titled colorway Robot Overlords. I tend to shy away from wildly multicolored yarns, since they're so unpredictable when they're knit, but simple texture pattern she uses here highlights the different colors very effectively. The fairly fine gauge (6 st = 1") and deep, open neckline make what could have been an overly warm sweater perfectly wearable indoors. It's a great, classic silhouette and I'm really looking forward to wearing it now that the weather is cooling down.

Late summer at the BBG

There was actually less tornado damage than I was expecting, other than these guys:

But there were all manner of odd and spiky plants towering and lurching and flailing all over the garden.

This thing, for example, was wider than my wingspan.

I never knew that thistles blew out like this at the end of the season. Amazing.

Fine, universe. FINE.

Today's horoscope:

Do you have big plans for the future? If yes, it's time to start laying the framework so you can make those plans come to fruition with a minimum of frustration. This might include some organizational type stuff, like getting your files up to date, or some big picture work, as you brainstorm what you want your life to look like. If you don't have big plans for the future, now's the time to start thinking about some, ASAP!

Minimalist-ish dal

I saw this post on stonesoup the other day and was immediately drawn to it. I'd had a couple of weeks of not really eating as well as I should be for optimal feeling good-ness (and, to be frank, pants-fitting-well-ness), and have been trying to get back on track (good breakfast, fruit/vegetables for snacks, bringing a home-cooked, healthful lunch to work every day). This very simple lentil dish seemed like just the ticket, especially since I already had everything I needed at home.

With such a non-fancy dish, I decided to take the opportunity to try out this fancy rice mix I'd gotten at Trader Joe's. It's completely awesome. The black barley and daikon seeds pop when you chew them and it's really tasty.
I was a little less pleased with the lentils. They were kind of both harsh and flat tasting. I don't know if it's because I used (homemade) vegetable stock instead of water or if I so rarely eat lentils that have so few other ingredients involved that I don't even know what they taste like plain, but a big spoonful of yogurt and some chopped tomato added after I took the picture helped a lot. I had it for dinner last night and lunch today and there's definitely enough for lunch tomorrow, maybe even one more serving over the weekend. Even with the fancy rice, I'd be amazed if this went over $1/serving. With plain rice, I'm sure it would be under a quarter.

Tomatoes and dates

Faced with a tomato-heavy CSA share a few days before I went out of town, I figured it was time to give these slow-roasted tomatoes a try. I halved the cherry and plum tomatoes, keeping the grape tomatoes to eat out of hand and the big ones to use for other stuff, drizzled them with oil and popped them in a 300* degree oven for two hours.
They came out concentrated and sweet, still juicy and a little chewy. The little ones that I didn't eat straight out of the pan were tossed into a batch of Annie's mac and cheese, but the bigger ones are still in my fridge. I'm going to make a batch of this minimalist dal tonight with some red lentils; the tomatoes may be good chopped up and thrown in with that.

Also of note: I came across fresh dates recently and since I'd never had them, picked up a small branch's worth to try. They're ready when brown and wrinkly and kind of gross-looking.
Eating them gave me the completely weird experience of bringing back a vivid childhood memory of something I'd never actually tasted: in one of the Chronicles of Narnia, someone plants a piece of toffee in the wildly fertile soil of a new world and a tree grows on the spot that bears a kind of toffee fruit that's juicy and sticky and soft. Ripe fresh dates taste exactly the way wee Stephanie imagined that toffee fruit tasting, i.e., awesome.

Sweet Home Chicago

Screw this summer crap.

Fall is the air! My interest in life and the world around me is returning!

I can get excited about cooking without deeply resenting the fact that I'd have to turn on the stove or oven and I can get excited about eating rich, delicious food without getting cranky that it's too hot to go work it off and I can get excited about reading about food now that the focus is shifting away from stupid grilling and back to normal kitchen-cooking. I don't have a grill, don't know anyone who has a grill, and am afraid of my broiler. Plus, I don't really like big pieces of meat. I only really like meat when it's cured or cooked slowly and in some sort of soup or stew or saucy concoction that one eats over grains.

Things I'm dreaming about eating (looking over this list, maybe I need more protein?):
Carbonnade
Mushroom bourguinon
Roasted squash and sweet potatoes
Brussels sprouts with caramelized tofu
Chicken soup
From-scratch macaroni and cheese
Lamb and prune meatballs with Moroccan tomato sauce
Regular meatballs with regular tomato sauce
Big batches of curry
Figs wrapped in bacon
Shepherd's pie
Short rib soup with leeks and barley
Minestrone
Butternut squash and hazelnut lasagne
Mulled cider, with or without a tot of something

Food goals for the fall:
-finally making decent gnocchi
-recreating my mom's potato soup with kielbasa and serving it to friends with dark, sour bread, a pickle plate, and baked apples for dessert
-something I haven't made before, maybe palak paneer?

I have been knitting all summer, but it's a lot more satisfying to do it when it's cool enough to wear something warm. Or even just cool enough that I don't want to rip my very skin off every single minute. I managed to finish the back and fronts of the Twenty Ten cardigan. It just needs the collar finished and a couple of sleeves.
And I started a new sweater last weekend. I went up to the Berkshires for a friend's wedding (Hi Zoe! You looked ridiculously beautiful!) and knew I'd have hours of being in a car (Hi Martha! Thanks again!) and on a bus (Hi Deb! Great to have company on the ride! Start your blog already!) and possibly hanging around a hotel where I could be knitting but wouldn't really be able to work on anything that took focus on a pattern or the project itself. I didn't have anything underway that fit the bill, so I started a simple stockinette pullover. It has hemmed edges and lots of waist shaping and is knit in some gorgeous cashmere/silk that I rescued from another sweater last year. It's zipping along satisfyingly quickly, so I should be able to wear it this fall.
The sweater that I ripped out was double-stranded and so warm that I could only wear it on the few Arctic-cold days we get each winter. I'm not 100% sure I love the black and pink tweed, but I'll see how I feel when it's done. I can always overdye it in navy or burgandy later. I wouldn't normally dye whole garments, but don't think unevenness would really matter in this case.

What I Did This Summer

This. I did this, over and over:



(from here, the place where awesome is born)

I do still knit.

Proof!

One completed Just Enough Ruffles, in Malabrigo ... something. I want to say the color is called Pearl Ten? I love this pattern. It goes quickly and produces a scarf that frames the face in interesting, flattering ways. I'll do a modeled shot sometime when it isn't 97 degrees out. (WOE.) This was my first time knitting with Malabrigo and I completely get its rock-star status (knockout color range and super-soft), but I wouldn't want to knit anything larger than a scarf with it. Softly spun single-ply yarn = not long for this world. I require that my garments wear better than that. That said, I should have enough of the second ball left for a hat, which will be nice.

I got up to the armholes on the Twenty Ten Cardigan and divided for the fronts and back. So far, so good. I want to have it done to wear this fall, so I'm trying to crank it out. I'm knitting it exactly as written, except for frankensteining the sizing a bit: the lower part is the third size, but I'm doing extra decreases on the top and following directions for the second size for a closer fit through the upper back and shoulders, which will be a lot more flattering for me. If I'd been thinking ahead I would have done more side decreases on the body, but I didn't.

And a sneak peek at a secret project I should be in a position to reveal in a month or so:

Flashlight Worthy

It's rare that I come across a book-review or -recommendation site that fills me with joy, but Flashlight Worthy absolutely does. Their choices are thoughtful and interesting and the lists into which they're grouped are useful and fun.
A few that jumped out at me:
Great Books About Magicians and Circuses
Culinary Memoirs That Make Perfect Beach Reads
Favorite Reissues of Neglected Books
Creepy Houses That Must Be Explored
The Chocolate and Peanut Butter of Noir and Speculative Fiction
A Practical Fiction List for Surviving After the Apocalypse
The Queens' P.O.V.: Books About How Henry VIII Got Past First Base

Their twitter feed looks like a gem too. Now I'm triple-craving a week by myself in a cabin on an island in the middle of a lake with towering piles of books and firewood.

I don't even know what to call this post.

I spent this past weekend out of town with friends and in addition to performing a dramatic reading of the crazypants religious material left on our car at Wegman's — the gentleman, whose photo clearly indicated that it had been taken in 1986 and whose bio read, in total, "Tony Alamo is probably the greatest patriot the world has ever known," put forth the idea that Satan-via-the-Vatican-controlled politicians are trying to make humanity extinct, which is why they so shamelessly flaunt God's will that girls marry at puberty — which, um, is considerably less funny since I googled him after typing that second em dash and learned that he quite literally practiced what he preached,* I also had reason to start a sentence with "when I had bedbugs..."

I don't know if I've ever publicly said that I had bedbugs, now that I think about it. I did. It was three years and four apartments ago and I'm not exaggerating even a little bit when I say that it was one of the lowest points in a life containing at least the standard amount of loss and heartbreak and that one time I knocked a car window out with my head. (If you don't know much about the bedbug explosion that currently has New York in its thrall, this is a short piece that will bring you up to speed.)

My experience with them was pretty typical, I think, with two exceptions:
1) I was super-sensitive to the bites. Some people don't have much more than mosquito bites, but on me, they were the size of nickels, dark enough that they looked more like blood blisters than bug bites and both hot and hard to the touch, like I had m+ms under my skin. And crazy itchy.
2) I had them for an entire year because I kept getting my apartment treated, but there were people in the building who refused,** so they kept coming back. I cried a lot that year.

Since I didn't know the friends I was with this weekend back then, I got to explain that while having bedbugs was a terrible awful genuinely bad bad bad experience, it did lead to the events that have become one of my favorite New York stories.
Salient point the first: Bedbug treatment involves exterminators coming to your home every three weeks, turning all of your furniture upside down and spraying everything with poison. It's very traumatic, but, luckily, exterminators — and I met a lot of 'em — are almost universally kind people who will tell you all kinds of disgusting stories about horrible infestations if you're the kind of person who finds that fascinating and/or comforting and then, when they notice that you're a woman living alone, will turn your heavy furniture right side up again even though they don't have to.
Salient point the second: During that year, I interviewed for a job at Penthouse.

So. A couple of months into My Year of Demoralization and Despair, I was getting my apartment sprayed for bedbugs. Again. At this point, the process was familiar: the guy or guys would show up, I'd ask them about their most disgusting exterminating experiences while they sprayed, then we'd all leave together and I'd go to the movies to avoid being poisoned to death. That morning, it was a team of two African-American men, one probably in his fifties, the other in his mid-twenties. They were extremely polite, almost deferential in a way that tends to make me very uncomfortable. The older man went into my bedroom, while the younger guy got started on the living room. He didn't seem inclined to chat, so I was awkwardly sort of straightening things on the other side of the room when he started laughing. I look over, he's holding up the two issues of Penthouse that I had bought to prepare for my interview, then stuck in the drawer of my coffee table and forgot about.

So, I'm like, oh, yeah, I had a job interview there. He gives me kind of a strange look, so I realize he thinks I meant as a naked lady, which is pretty clearly not what I'm all about, so I'm laughing at that. Then the older man comes out to find out what we're laughing about, sees the magazines and is all, "Eh, they used to be good but there's nothing good in there anymore." I tell them what I learned at the interview (the letters are all real! really!) and the older man is teasing the younger guy about being so green that he's still satisfied with the relatively vanilla pornstuffs and somewhere in there, something shifts. Proof: a few minutes after that, the older guy asked if he could use my bathroom because he'd had a huge sandwich earlier and was feeling pretty uncomfortable. I don't want to say that we transcended all kinds of societal barriers and responded to each other's essential humanity thanks to the magic of porn, but he did go from calling me ma'am to telling me about his poop in five minutes flat.

Epilogue: I didn't actually want to edit Penthouse, but couldn't resist applying when I saw the listing. I was not offered the job.

*Whoa: I just googled him right now to see if he had an active ministry and it turns out (not surprisingly, really) that he's a convicted sex offender. The wikipedia entry outlines a very dramatic life story involving a religious compound in Arkansas, polygamy, prison, sequined denim jackets and the spectacularly named Birgetta Oyllenhammer. It also includes a photo of one of his pamphlets on the windshield of a car, exactly what happened to us.

**I know, I know. Shock and dismay. This part of the story always trips people up. I just think that there were people in that building who didn't feel like they were in a position to make waves. I was locked into a lease and the management company did what they were required to do, so I didn't have a legal way out. Once the lease was up, I got out of Dodge. But moving is really expensive and generally requires a kind of scrutiny to which not everyone is in a position to expose themselves. Or they could have just been lazy assholes who didn't want to have to do the work. And it's a lot of work. Curious? Enjoy this write-up (continued here) on how to prepare for/carry on during bedbug treatment and keep in mind that that's how I lived for a year.

Sumac-ade

I took another foraging course with Leda Meredith in Prospect Park this weekend. There was a fair bit of overlap between what we found this week with the plants we talked about in June, but some new stuff too. Like sumac, the berries of which are covered with a water-soluble, deliciously acidic substance. When Leda did her 250-mile challenge, she used sumac as a substitute for lemon.

I wasn't sure what kind of proportion to go for, so I put my handful of berries into a cereal bowl of cool water and swished and rubbed them until the berries were tasteless.
There was a fair bit of leaf matter and whatnot along for the ride, so I strained it through cheesecloth into a glass.
It tasted like water with the juice of about half a lemon added, roughly that degree of tartness. The flavor was pretty comparable, actually. I don't know that I would have questioned it if you had told me that's what it was, but since I did know, I'd say that the flavor was ever so slightly darker than lemon. A teeny bit musky. Not quite as sunshiney. Delicious. I liked it unsweetened, but I can see where adding a little honey or maple syrup would be swell. And there are a lot of interesting cocktail possibilities.

That's one thing I really like about playing with wild foods: getting to try things that aren't commercially available. We were talking about that on Saturday, in the context that acorn flour is so fantastically time-consuming to make happen that it will pretty much never be available for purchase, so if you want to know what it tastes like, you have to do the multiple boils with many changes of water and peeling and grinding and drying yourself. I *do* want to know what it tastes like, though word is that this summer has been too dry for a good acorn harvest. I'm thinking acorn crepes when I get around to this someday; you only need a cup of flour and don't have to worry about them not rising. In the meantime, I am super psyched for the October session: mushrooms and nuts.

I love 'community oversoul.'

For all the alienation, the guarded privacy we maintain in our public spaces, in a very basic existential way we each rely on the masses of people around us define ourselves. There is a kind of community oversoul, a species recognition that we will never acknowledge. The city as an idea may begin with the marketplace, the trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk with strangers.

And so each of the passersby on this corner, every scruffy, oversized, undersized, weird, fat or bony or limping or muttering or foreign-looking, green-haired, punk-strutting, threatening, crazy, angry person you see...is a New Yorker, which is to say as native to this Diaspora as you are, and who must be acknowledged as such if we are not to become, even as we live, silver gelatinous ghosts among the ruins of a lost civilization.

–E.L. Doctorow, from his introduction to Gotham Comes of Age: New York Through the Lens of the Byron Company, 1892-1942.

File under: who knew?

One of my co-workers is wearing a pair of very adorable t-strap wedge sandals today and when we all exclaimed over them and asked where she got them — this is the kind of office where no detail passes without comment — she said the Bass outlet and that they cost next to nothing. And I was like, huh, I haven't thought about Bass shoes in a while.* Let's see what they're up to.

Turns out what they're up to is making some very cute shoes with perfectly reasonable price tags. Of course, I really like men's-style oxfords on women, the way they add some gravitas to what could be an overly girlie outfit or dress up a very casual ensemble, so their offerings suit my tastes. Plus, I walk at least three or four miles a day just getting to and from work, which means I need sturdy, comfortable, yet still somewhat professional-looking footwear for all seasons and weather. (This summer, I'm all about my black patent Birkenstock Gizehs. Not especially flattering, but tolerably jolie laide and perfect for walking.)

I think the first ones below are my favorites. Love the wingtip details, though I'd paint the grommets black so they're not so shouty. The white and gray ones are adorable, but too summery for the fall/winter, which is all I'm interested in right now. The heels are great, though I don't wear heels all that often these days, what with the lots of walking and all. They'd suit the kind of dresses I like though, and I do occasionally go places other than the office. I don't know if I'm going to be buying any shoes for a little while (I had a bit of an accident on the Doc Martens site yesterday), but I'm going to keep these in mind. The wingtips especially fit in exactly with the kind of style profile I'm thinking about for the fall, once the weather cools down and I'm willing to care about clothes/anything again.
*I spent the summer of 1997 working at a Bass outlet in Maine with my friend Karen, along with a bunch of guys who lived at something called The Opportunity Farm. Karen and I lived with a couple of hippie dudes I knew and a revolving population of Sierra Club employees and slept on the linoleum floor(!) of what might have been a large closet. Occasionally, one of the guys would bring home a paper bag filled with live lobsters. I sewed a quilt by hand that summer that I still use now. Good times.

Buttermilk farro salad

I was very happy to see this recipe appear on 101 Cookbooks last week, since I had half a carton of buttermilk left over from my brief infatuation with cucumber/avocado soup and a small bag of farro I'd picked up to try. I knew I'd be getting some vegetables in my CSA pick-up that would work well, so held out until Tuesday night to make it. I used a small zucchini, sliced very thin, a handful of French breakfast radishes, also sliced very thin, and a head of lettuce, chopped. My share also included a small bunch of dill, which went into the dressing.

It turned out to be a perfectly serviceable, though not especially exciting, dish, full of whole grains and vegetables, well suited to bringing to work for lunch. (I'll eat anything if I bring it to work.) It missed the mark for a couple of reasons: This was my first time eating farro and I think I'd prefer it as one element in a mixed-grain dish, rather than on its own. It has a fairly aggressive texture that would be great when mixed with, say, brown rice, barley, and quinoa. It doesn't taste like wild rice, but I had the same reaction to it; a little goes a long way. Also, I substituted red wine vinegar, which I had, for the white wine vinegar, which I didn't, and it was a little vinegar-heavy even for me, who drinks vinegar for pleasure. And the very thin dressing worked well with the grains and crunchy vegetables, soaking in nicely, but left the lettuce limp and sad.

Still, I'm always happy to find new uses for buttermilk (oatmeal season is coming!) and this will be a good dish to keep in the make-ahead-and-eat-for-lunches rotation, as long as I tweak the dressing proportions and am savvier about the vegetables I use.

Simple hat

I don't know if this happens to other people, but sometimes I start a project for myself and at some point in the execution, realize that it actually belongs to someone else. So I finish it and give it away. Like this hat:
I've had what looked like a hat-sized ball of this purple tweed wool/silk handspun kicking around for ages. I was tired of looking at it, so I cast on for a hat (80 sts, 3x1 rib, for a while, then 7x1) a couple of days ago and was knitting merrily away while catching up on The Guild (I don't know how I missed all of season 3, but I guess that's just the kind of high-flying, lightning-paced life I'm living). Then I suddenly realized that this hat, which is very soft and quite close-fitting, is obviously meant for my favorite cousin, who's been getting radiation treatments all summer for a large, cancerous brain tumor. She'll be starting chemo soon and losing her hair, so obviously she needs this hat. It's even her favorite color.

Done!