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.