Monthly Archives: October 2012

Knit & Crochet, Tutorials

Baby Elf Hat — Free Pattern

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This is Jack’s first Halloween. I’m not much of a Halloween person. I’m over it. I don’t need to dress like a sexy fill-in-the-blank. I’m not out to impress anyone. I was going to put forth some sort of effort with Jack since I have to address every single milestone in his tiny little life.

I dressed him up as a garden gnome, with a bib fashioned out of white felt to look like a beard and a pointy red hat. Here’s a poor-quality iPhone photo:

The hat is just too cute. I discovered after dressing him in green footie pyjamas that he also looks like an elf (no photo, unfortunately). This means the hat can double up for the holidays while I parade Jack around like the little elf child that he is.

The hat is pretty simple if you know how to knit hats. Here’s how I made it.

Materials:

1 skein worsted weight yarn

size 9 circular and double pointed needles

darning needle

Abbreviations:

CO = cast on

k1,p1 = knit 1, purl 1 ribbing

k2tog = knit two stitches together

Directions:

With your ciruclar needle, CO 64 stitches. Knit the last stitch to the first stitch making sure the stitches aren’t twisted on the needles. K1,P1 in the round for 6 rounds.

Knit regularly for 27 more rounds. Place marker at beginning of round. Decrease as follows:

k2tog, K6, repeat till end of round

k 1 round regularly

K2tog, K5, repeat till end of round

k 2 rounds regularly

K2tog, k4, repeat till end of round. Transfer stitches to double points

K 3 rounds regularly

K2tog, k3, repeat till end of round

K 3 rounds regularly

K2tog, k2, repeat till end of round

K 3 rounds regularly

K2tog, k1, repeat till end of round

K2tog, repeat till end of round

Cut yarn leaving an 8-inch tail. With a darning needle, weave in all ends. You can alter the pointyness of the hat by knitting more or fewer rounds between the decrease rounds. I like the cupie-doll look.

Cooking

Hurricane Sandy Cocktail

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While I’m here in Anchorage, avoiding the 24-degree chills outside, my good friends Gary and Kasandra are hunkered down in their Connecticut home, waiting for the fierce Hurricane Sandy to wreak havoc. I imagine Sandy as a middle-aged woman, possibly Roseanne sized, with a bathrobe and curlers in her hair. Also, she’s shaking a rolling pin at you.

Gary and Kasandra have taken all the necessary precautions — parked the cars in the middle of the driveway to avoid trees, secured the house and such, and now there’s nothing left to do but wait. But wait! — they can still have a good time.

May I present via long long long distance, the Hurricane Sandy.


Since they have all the time in the world, my East Coast pals are hand squeezing their juices. And since the next three days of school are cancelled, they’ve decided to clean out their liquor cabinet on this drink. Use all the booze! Better ration, buddies. You still have a lot of time.

1 oz. vodka

1/4 oz. grenadine

1 oz. gin

1 oz. light rum

1/2 oz. Bacardi 151 (wooo now it’s a party!)

1 oz. amaretto

1 oz triple sec

grapefruit juice

pineapple juice

Combine all but the juices in the order listed into a tall glass. Top with equal parts of the two juices. Garnish with tiny umbrella and drink with a bendy straw. Repeat.

Crafts

Man Shirt Redo

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My husband has become addicted to Pendleton. Used Pendleton plaid wool shirts. He keeps finding these beautiful shirts all over the thrift circuit and now he has a full lumberjack wardrobe.

The other day he found me a little Pendleton. Most likely it was shrunken in the wash because the tag indicates it’s a size large. The colors are beautiful, but it is such a boxy shape and pretty unflattering.

Once again my crafty mind was reeling late at night and there’s no better time than the present. I got an idea in my head and went with it.

I’ve seen around the Pinterest arena lately heart-shaped elbow patches. It’s pretty cute. I had some scraps of a cashmere sweater lying around and presto! Cute little heart elbows.

But I still wasn’t satisfied. The shirt just wasn’t wearable in my book. So I had my husband help me pin darts in the back and I basted them up. I didn’t use any kind of pattern but it turned out splendidly. Now I too can look like a lumberjack!

Cooking

Chicken in Veggie Cream Sauce

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I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately. Call me domestic, no wait, call me Natasha the Nifty Housewife. I found a bunch of low-carb cookbooks at the library and I’ve been tweaking the recipes to better suit what’s in my fridge. This recipe called for jarred artichokes. That is a fancy item you’d never see in my cupboard, so I improvised the whole thing. It turned out pretty tasty.

Oh, and move over Kelly and Kasandra. My new best friend is smoked paprika. I have literally used it every day for the past two months. It goes on EVERYTHING and makes it amazing.

Serves 2

Ingredients:

2 chicken breasts, or chicken parts that you prefer

1 Tbs. butter

1 Tbs. olive oil

1 cup baby portobello mushrooms, sliced

1/2 onion, sliced

6 mini bell peppers, or one yellow bell pepper, sliced

1/2 cup white wine or chicken stock

2 Tbs rice vinegar or lemon juice

salt and pepper

1 Tbs. smoked paprika

1 zucchini, chopped

3/4 cup cream

In a heavy saucepan, heat the butter and oil and brown the chicken. Flip the chicken and add the onion and mushrooms. Season with salt, pepper and paprika. When chicken is brown, add the wine and vinegar and bring to a simmer. Turn down the heat, cover and cook for 25 minutes or until chicken is done. Add the zucchini and recover. Cook for a few more minutes till zucchini is tender. Stir in the cream and reheat, but don’t let it boil or simmer. Serve with green beans and brown rice.

Note: You could also add jarred artichokes if you’re feeling fancy.

Crafts

Retro Craft: Felt + Glue = Soft Baby Book

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I’ve been a crafty lady — three blog posts in one day! This craft was the result of my crafty brain not shutting off in the wee hours of the night. I started it at 11:30 p.m.

Baby Jack still isn’t into books — reading them, that is. He loves tasting them and drooling on them. I thought it would be fun to make a felt book with no particular story, since he really doesn’t care at this point. It was fun. I even got my husband involved. He proved far artsier than I, which is why I saved his page for the very end.

Felt always makes me think of crafting in the olden days — back when all I had access to were arts & crafts books from my school library where the copyright date was around 1974. It included projects with toilet paper rolls, ric rac and dried macaroni.

This project definitely brought me back.

What you’ll need:

Felt

Fabric scissors

Tacky glue or fabric glue

Darning needle

Embroidery thread

Cut your felt pages to the size you like. I used a CD. Sew them together using embroidery thread. Then cut out shapes and glue them to the pages. Let glue dry. Give to baby. Let baby drool on it and eat it. See how long book holds up. I’m giving it a few days.

Cooking

Clean-out-the-fridge Stuffed Cabbage

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I’m not too familiar with cooking cabbage. It wasn’t a food we ate much growing up. I love the look of red cabbage in the grocery store — gleaming and perfectly purple. I bought one yesterday and figured out what to do with it. I made yummy little cabbage rolls.

This is a great recipe because you can toss pretty much anything in it and it’ll be good. Trust me on this one. I had a little bit of tomato paste here and half of a lemon there, some celery, golden raisins, some leftover thyme from another dish. I threw it all in. I didn’t really measure anything, but I made some sort of meat stuffing and an hour and a half later I was licking my plate clean.

Here’s an approximation of what I made and how to make it.

Ingredients:

1 head of cabbage, red or green

1 pound of ground beef and/or pork

1 egg

1-ish onion, chopped

1 celery rib, chopped

1/4 cup golden raisins

1-ish can tomato paste

juice of half a lemon

2 Tbs. Worcerstershire Sauce

1 tsp. dijon mustard

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

2 Tbs. smoked paprika

2 Tbs. fresh thyme, chopped

3 Tbs. fresh parsley, chopped

salt and pepper

Marinara sauce

Chicken stock

6 mini bell peppers, sliced

feta cheese

 

Directions:

I had absolutely no idea how to peel the leaves off of a cabbage. They are on there so tightly. If you have a better method than this, please leave a comment. Bring a huge pot of salted water to a boil. Peel the outer leaves off the cabbage and discard. Cut the base off and shove a carving fork into the bottom. When water is boiling, insert the cabbage and turn it around with the fork for a couple of minutes. Place on a dish towel and try to carefully pry off the leaves. You may have to do this a few times. You want six to eight good leaves.

Place the peeled leaves back into the boiling water and parboil for a few minutes, till they are pliable. Drain and set aside.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking dish with bits of excess cabbage leaves and pour in some chicken stock till they are just covered.

Combine everything but the peppers, feta, marinara and stock.

Spoon the filling into the parboiled cabbage leaves and roll them up, securing with a toothpick if necessary. Place seam-side down in the baking dish. Top with marinara and bell peppers. Cover and bake for one hour. Serve with feta cheese over brown rice or egg noodles.

Knit & Crochet, Tutorials

Striped Baby Hat — Free Pattern

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I swear there are Borrowers living in our house. They have possibly shacked up in our entryway, but I’m pretty sure they have borrowed four pacifiers, two house keys, some rubber stamps and the new hat I just knit for baby Jack.

So here I am at home on a Monday because Jack is sick. I’ve succeeded in making breakfast and putting him down for a nap. I have failed in getting dressed.

Other success — new hat!

Baby Striped Hat

Here’s how you can make your very own baby hat with stripes.

Materials:

Leftover worsted weight yarn. You really don’t need much. Up to six colors.

Size 9 circular and double pointed needles

darning needle

large fork for pom-pom

Abbreviations:

k1, p1 = knit 1, purl 1 ribbing

k2tog = knit two stitches together

Baby Striped Hat 2

Directions:

With your circular, cast on 64 stitches and knit last stitch to first stitch without twisting the stitches. K1, P1 for five rounds with main color. Knit two rounds regularly. Cut yarn leaving a four-inch tail. Start knitting with new color. After a few stitches, loosely tie the ends of the two colors together. You’ll tighten this up later, but it’ll help to do this along the way. Knit 2 rounds of each color until you have knit 20 rounds, not counting the ribbing. Switch back to the main color and knit 7 rounds.

Decrease as follows:

Place a marker if you need to, but I can tell where the beginning of the round is based on the stripes.

K2tog, K6, repeat till end of round

Knit one round

K2tog, K5, repeat till end of round

K one round

K2tog, K4, repeat till end

K one round while transferring to double pointed needles. Or knit the round and transfer stitches — whatever’s easier for you.

K2tog, K3, repeat till end

Knit one round

K2tog, K2, repeat till end

Knit one round

K2tog, K1, repeat till end

K2tog, repeat till end.

Cut yarn leaving a long tail. With darning needle, weave in the tail from the beginning and end.

The inside of your hat should look pretty cool, with all sorts of colorful ends. Tighten all the knots you made and then double tie them. Don’t pull too tightly as you want the stitches on the outside to look uniform. Just play with the tension of the knots before double knotting. I then knot the yarn ends vertically to one anther, if that makes sense, and trim them. I don’t bother to weave these all in since I’m totally lazy about it.

For the pom pom:

Take all the colors of your stripes and wind them around a large serving fork. With a doubled piece of yarn about one foot long, tie the yarn around the middle tine and remove from the fork. Cut the loops and trim pom pom to your liking. Using a darning needle, attach to top of hat. To better secure pom pom, run the yarn back up through the pom pom and back down into the inside of the hat.

 

Cooking

Chicken Stuffed with Feta and Red Pepper with Lemon Thyme Veggies

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My husband is back on his South Beach Diet kick, which is always fun for me because I get to try to cook yummy carb-free food. Months ago I found a recipe for chicken roll-ups with roasted red peppers, feta and pistachios with some sort of a lemon yogurt sauce. I was originally going to make this recipe, but I had to wing it when the lemon zest made the yogurt curdle. The sauce went down the drain and what I came up with instead was deeeelightful. My husband is always positive about my cooking, but tonight he said the veggies were the best he’d ever tasted.

Ingredients

Two boneless, skinless chicken breasts

2-4 roasted red peppers (jarred or make them yourself)

1/2 cup shelled pistachios, coarsely ground

1 tsp. smoked paprika

salt and pepper

1/2 cup crumbled feta

2 Tbs. olive oil

For the veggie side:

1 zucchini

1 golden zucchini (or whatever that yellow kind is that’s always next to the zucchini)

6 mushrooms

3 mini yellow and orange bell peppers

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 tsp. fresh thyme

1 tsp. lemon zest

1/4 cup chicken stock

smoked paprika

salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix together the pistachio crumbs, feta, olive oil, paprika, salt and pepper till you have a tasty paste. Pat dry the red peppers. Rinse and pat dry the chicken breasts. Cut a deep slit in each breast as though you were going to butterfly them, but don’t cut all the way through. Stuff each breast with red pepper and the feta mixture. Close the slit with two toothpicks. Heat some olive oil in a frying pan over medium high heat and brown the chicken on each side. Place into a baking pan and bake for 30 minutes. Remove toothpicks and let sit five minutes before serving.

Meanwhile, chop the zucchini into 1-inch pieces. Slice the mushrooms and mini peppers. In the same pan you browned the chicken, add the veggies, thyme and lemon zest. Cook the veggies for a few minutes then add the stock. Add the paprika, salt and pepper to taste and cook till the stock disappears and the veggies are soft. Top with crumbled feta.

Cooking

Lasagna Roll-ups with Spicy Sauce

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Oh Pinterest, how I love thee. Let me count the ways….nah, I’ll just tell you about lasagna roll-ups. Do a Pinterest search for this dish and you’ll find lots of versions. I would like to add my version to the list.

Lasagna roll-ups — what a splendid idea. It’s easier to serve and you don’t have to make one gigantic batch and hope that you’ll eat the leftovers before they become fuzzy with mold. That’s always the problem when I make it for just me and my husband. Each roll up is like one slice of lasagna, which to me is about one third of a serving since I’m always starving.

Here’s my down-home lasagna recipe TRANSFORMED!

Serves 4 hungry people, or 6 regular people

Ingredients for the sauce:

1 large can of crushed tomatoes

1 Tbs. tomato paste

2 Tbs. olive oil

3 cloves of garlic

1/2 onion, chopped (optional)

3 Tbs. or so dried basil

1 Tbs. or so dried oregano

1 tsp. sugar

salt and pepper

1 lb. spicy pork sausage

 

The rest:

One package of lasagna noodles (the kind you have to boil)

1 regular-sized tub of cottage cheese (trust me)

1.5 cups shredded mozzarella

1.5 cups shredded parmesan

2 eggs

1/2 package of frozen chopped spinach

3 Tbs. fresh parsley, chopped

salt and pepper

 

For the sauce, heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan. Add the onion and garlic and cook till onions are translucent. Add the tomatoes, paste, sugar, basil, oregano, salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer and turn down the heat so sauce doesn’t burn. In the meantime, brown the meat and break up into small pieces. Add to the sauce.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Heat the spinach in boiling water till it’s heated through. Drain, cool, and squeeze out as much water as possible.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.

In a medium bowl, combine the cottage cheese, eggs, 1 cup of mozzarella, 1 cup of parmesan, spinach, parsley, salt and pepper.

In a square baking dish, add about a cup of the sauce.

When water is boiling add six noodles at a time and boil for 10 minutes, or whatever the packaging says. Spread the noodles out on a sheet of aluminum foil. Spread a couple of tablespoons of the cheese mix to each noodle. Roll up the noodles and place seam-side down into the baking dish. Top with the remaining sauce and sprinkle the rest of the cheeses on top. Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil and cook another 5-10 minutes.

Enjoy!

Knit & Crochet

Simple Striped Winter Hat Pattern

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Last night an anonymous viewer commented on an old blog post for a winter hat I made a couple of years ago. I didn’t provide a pattern, but now I will. This is my basic pattern for every winter hat I make without earflaps. (For my earflap hat pattern, click here).

I don’t decide on stripes til I get there on the hat, but my general rule for stripes is to start the first one after I’ve knit the same number of rounds that the ribbing is. So, if the ribbing is six rows, I knit six rows regularly and then start the color change.

Normally I make my hats about 32 rows tall including the ribbing before decreasing, so I try to leave the same number of rows as I did the ribbing after the stripes are over. This creates better balance with the hat. So as an example, my ribbing is six rows, then I knit six rows regularly, then do my stripe pattern for about 14 rows, then knit my original color for six rows, then decrease.

Also, this pattern is for a medium adult hat. To make it larger, add eight stitches. To make it smaller, subtract eight stitches and follow the pattern the same way. If you want it to be a baby hat, use lighter weight yarn and smaller needles. I will use the same pattern for a baby but use worsted yarn and size 7 needles, for instance. For instructions on how to change colors while knitting, just do a YouTube search because I’m sure there are good lessons out there.

Ok, ok here’s the pattern.

Simple Striped Winter Hat

Materials:

Chunky weight yarn

Size 10 circular and double point needles

darning needle

Abbreviations:

K2,P2 = knit 2, purl 2 ribbing

k2tog = knit two stitches together

Directions:

With your circular needle, cast on 72 stitches with your main color. Knit into the first stitch, being careful the stitches aren’t twisted.  K2, P2 for six rows. Knit six rounds regularly. Add in second color. Alternate your stripe pattern for 14 rows. Switch back to your original color and knit six rows. Your work should be about 6 inches tall before continuing (for an adult size).

Decrease as follows:

Round 1: Knit two together, knit 6. Repeat for one round.
Round 2 (and all even rounds): Knit
Round 3: K 2 tog, K 5 for one round
Round 5: K 2 tog, K 4 for one round (this is where you should probably switch to the double points).
Round 7: K 2 tog, K 3
Round 9: K 2 tog, K 2
Round 11: K 2 tog, K 1
Round 12: K 2 tog
Gather remaining stitches with a darning needle and fasten off. Weave in all tails.

Pom-pom: I use a pom-pom maker I purchased from a fabric store, but I found a neat idea on Pinterest, here.