Pizza – the Eternal Quest

As a teenager when I was babysitting my little brothers  I would often make myself pizza when they were asleep. Knowing this my best friend gifted me with a pizza cookbook on my 16th birthday.

I took it out the other day and tried yet another version. It was very delicious, even though the combination of  ingredients seems a bit unusual. 

Sardinian Onion Pizza

For one large pizza cut 2 to 3 sweet onions in thin slices and fry with olive oil and 3 Tbsp milk until the onions are soft. Add salt, pepper and a dash of sugar. Let the onions cool.

Spread the onions on the pizza dough and top with 4 to 5 cubed tomatoes, 8 Anchovies, 12 halved black olives and 6 sliced garlic cloves. Season with dried oregano and add 2 – 3 Tbsp ground Parmesan cheese. Drizzle with olive oil.

Bake at the oven’s highest setting for about 10 to 15 minutes.  

Notes From the Library

As it turns out one cannot have enough backup computers! My computer has not been working  for over a week and I have used my kids’ computer ever since. Last night somebody (who feels very guilt now) turned that one off improperly and now the computer has forgotten how to boot. My IT-Expert aka husband is on a business trip right now, but hopefully he can fix one of them at least soon.

You should have seen me at the dinner table yesterday. Me with my head hanging low and heaving a deep sigh:”Great, I have an on-line business and no computer….” Everyone was very impressed by my misery! Maybe that will work for a bit to prevent future  misbehaviour? (That and a big Hands Off! sign.)

I have been working on my Fair Isle Flower Sock and I am almost done. I have even taken some pictures. It has taken me so long not because it is super complicated and intricate, but because I am too tired to move once I am on the couch these days.

The good thing is that without a computer I have more time do dye and I will be updating the store as soon as I can!

New Addition at Sunnyside Ellen

 Louet has  a wonderful selection of spinning and felting fibers. I could not resist and have ordered a few. I have started with the Superwash Merino Top, but I have also ordered a Merino/Silk blend, Blue Faced Leicester Top and Coopworth Roving. I hope, my customers are going to like it!

A Non Shopping Trip

On Friday I drove with a friend of mine to Richmond looking for fabric. We have redone our living room and I want to make new curtains. Our goal was Fabricana.

Fabricana used to be my favourite fabric store, but when they closed every store I new about a few years ago I had thought they had gone completely out of business. Not true. 

The store in Richmond is huge and I found many pleasant surprises: They have bamboo fabric (It’s great!),Heather Bailey’s and Kaffe Fassett’s prints. We found wonderful silks and fabric with beads and what not. Their selection of upholstery fabric and such is immense and I am still thinking of that wonderful chocolate brown cotton fabric, that would make a beautiful short coat. (Sigh!)

That is the thing: You wander dreamily through the aisles, touch as much as you can and imagine all the things you could sew, if only…

I ended up not buying anything, because I developed a major headache ( overwhelmed by fabric) so that I did not feel in the best frame of mind to make a decision. But I did  take a sample home.

After that we drove to Steveston and had lunch at the Cannery Café, which I love. Then we had to take a peak into the Wool and Wicker yarn store, which has doubled in size since the last time I visited.  They now own also the store next door and were in the middle of reorganizing everything. I saw a lot of Debbie Bliss yarns and Noro yarns all together, which might indicate that they are no longer going to sort the yarns by colour.

Unfortunately we were out of time and had to rush home to pick up our kids. It was a lot of fun to have a friend with me who enjoys fabrics, yarns, textures and colours as much as I do!  

Flower Beanie

I have made this little hat for my youngest daughter. I have dyed the yarn following her wishes out of Louet’s Gems Merino in sport weight.
The pattern is a k2, p2 rib that is offset by one stitch every row. My daughter likes the hat very much especially the flower.

For the flower I basically crocheted a flat disk using slip stitches, then added the outer petals using double crochet stitches. After that I slip-stitched my way to the inside and added more petals using half double crochet stitches.

The pretty little button I found in my stash ( Yes, I have a button stash and no, I have it under control  now, thanks!)

I made up the shaping of the hat as I went along. I prefer to decrease slowly in order to avoid gathered fabric on the top. So I did 3 plain rows between every decrease row.

Now my oldest daughter would like a hat as well, but in blue.  So many ideas, so little time….

My Favourite Recipe

My son told me this morning, that they were having a hot chocolate party at school on Friday and asked me if I could bake some chocolate chip cookies for it.

“Sure!” I replied. But there is a catch. He would like me to take the cookies to school while they were still warm from the oven so that the chocolate chips would still be soft. – What?!

In a way that is funny. The only reason why I took oven warm cookies to school once is because I was in my I-can-do-it-all-mood and seriously miscalculated how much time I needed to bake cookies. Who knew, that that had made them special? 

This time I plan to bake them tonight with my son pitching in. It’s only fair, right?

My favourite recipe for chocolate chip cookies comes from Ben&Jerry’s Ice Cream and Dessert Book .

The ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/3 cup brown sugar, 1 large egg, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1 cup plus 2 Tbsp flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Mix it all together, use an ice-cream scoop to portion the dough, flatten the cookies before baking,  bake at 350 F for about 11 minutes

Ice-Cream DIY

We have a favourite ice-cream parlour where we bought some special Christmas edition gelato for our Christmas Eve dinner in 2006. We loved that so much that we wanted to do it again this past Christmas. But we were out of luck. The store was closed.

So I decided to make my own. I have had an ice-cream maker for a couple of years, but I do not use it very often. You will see why.

First of all you have to keep the mixing bowl of the ice-cream maker in the freezer for about 48 hours before you can use it. The freezer has to be turned to the highest setting.

I made a Hazelnut-Chocolate Gelato using a recipe from this book. I used a store-bought hazelnut butter. First you have to cook a custard with egg yolks, hazelnut butter, milk and cream. Then you dissolve the chocolate in the custard. After that you have to cool it down quickly and refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

 The actual making of the ice-cream is a run against time. You take the mixing bowl out of the freezer and hope, that it does not thaw faster than your custard freezes. (It is also a good idea to put the ice-cream container you want to use later into the freezer.)

Turn on the machine and pour the custard into the bowl. The bowl turns slowly and there is a plastic scrape that pushes the custard away from the wall of the bowl. You let it run for about 25 minutes. If everything went well you will end up with ice-cream the consistency of soft ice. You then have to get it quickly into your container and freeze it for about another 3 hours.

My ice-cream ended up being very tasty, but not as creamy and smooth as a store-bought one. If you wanted that, I guess you would have to seriously invest into an ice-cream maker with its own freezing unit.

It Is Done – Well, Almost!

 Even though my knitting does not seem to work out these days ( too small, too big, too short or not getting done at all ) I think I managed to rescue this sweater from doom.

I succeeded in blocking the band to size with a lot of steam and my iron. The fabric did not even put up a fight. Then I crocheted the two edges together and added a row of single crochet to the hem.

The crochet seam is not as elastic as the knitted fabric, but I do not mind that considering the alternatives, but the best news is, that my daughter loves her new sweater! Yeah!

The dry facts:

• Design based on the Denim Family Tunic by Debbie Bliss from Weekend Knitting
• Pattern: my own, because I had to change the instructions completely, due to the different yarn I used and that I wanted a slimmer fit
• Yarn:  Elann Den-M-Nit Pure Indigo Cotton, 8 skeins, Colourway: light indigo

This Blog Turns One!

Yes, it has been a year! Thank you all for reading and commenting! It has been a lot of fun for me and I hope, I will keep you entertained (and improve my writing skills along the way….).

Now to the sad part of this post: Didn’t I just write in my last post, that knitting was so exciting? Well, it turns out, it can be very disappointing, too.

Evidence 1: I knit the band for my daughter’s sweater and it looked good. It was about 3 inches long. Before I could attach it, I had to wash and dry it like I did with the sweater. ( I have to stress this point: I treated the swatch, the sweater and the band the SAME.) When I pulled the band out, it was 2 inches too small in width. ( Please insert image of me pulling my hair out, stomping my feet and a bit of cursing.) I will try to “block” it into shape today, but I might not have the courage to try and fail.

Evidence 2: I have been working on a baby hat, that has  sort of a helmet shape. For a baby hat is has been a lot of work, because the shaping is quite complicated. There was only one size given ( the right one for “my” baby), but when I was done, I thought, the hat looked too small. Well, it is! The baby came for a visit yesterday and did not like the tight fitting hat. Me neither! Now I have to rip the whole thing out, reknit it larger and worry about not having enough yarn left. ( The hat is supposed to match the mittens.)

That was too much failure in one day, so I cast on for a hat for my youngest daughter. Yep, I can see it clearly: It will be so big, that it will slide down her nose! Sheesh!