preserved lemons

i mentioned preserved lemons yesterday, with the thought that i had mentioned them before. but i don't think i have. "so what are they and why should i care, you jerk?" you wonder aloud to yourself. well, first off, rude. but also, i'll tell you:


they are lemons, cut up, rolled in kosher salt, sprinkled with more kosher salt and unceremoniously crammed into a jar.

the cramming comes next.

when we first heard of them, via food in jars, i believe, but also an indian cookbook and maybe a few other places, i was not terribly enthusiastic. "what ever will we put them on?" i asked. "i bet they'll be hella nasty" i opined. but my lady friend, sarah, told me to shut up and cram lemons and i sure am glad she did.

you see, after the lemons have been crammed, you just give them a little shake every day until all the salt is dissolved and the liquid has covered the fruit (if it doesn't, add a bit more lemon juice) and then you just kind of forget about them for a month or so (seeing as the mix is super salty acid, there isn't really any fear of spoilage). by that point, the juice has thickened to a briny syrup and the rinds have become tender. the flavor is powerful- something like a savory lemon candy.

i now find myself chopping up a piece and incorporating it into salad dressing or stirring it into a soup that just needs that last little something and sarah just puts them in everything, as far as i can tell. we have yet to use them in anything moroccan, which seems to be the point of origin for this idea, or with meat (as i don't eat the stuff) but i've heard they go great with both.

marmalade

after a year of preserves projects, my lady friend got me a great jamming book for christmas- the blue chair jam cookbook by rachel saunders. all the recipes are very thorough and seem to stem from a desire for very consistent and delicious results. so, for our first test drive, we bastardized her delicately crafted page mandarin marmalade recipe and made it with blood oranges instead.

according to ms. saunders (and i thoroughly misquote and make things up here), you have to sneak up on citrus fruits, lull them into a false sense of security and then trick them into being marmalade in a process that takes three days. after an overnight soak in water, the fruit is cooked down...

you can't tell, but there are two pots going here. this one has quartered fruit that will be strained out on day three, the other has the pretty little slices of fruit that will be part of the finished product.

on day three the reserved syrup from one pot is combined with the slices from the other, a bunch of (in this case) lemon juice and a whole lot of sugar. then it is back to the stove...

but only to get the marmalade up to the temperature needed for the jelly to set.

we had extra assistants for this project who kept us on top of the set testing process which involved frozen spoons...

 

this is how you know it's done.

we ended up with around 10 jars of product (half for our wonderful assistants) and, since there were some extra fruit, a new jar of preserved lemons...

now, to be honest, i don't love marmalade. the bitterness doesn't really do it for me. but, that being said, this stuff is pretty dang good.

one sock

i bought the yarn and needles and a pattern to knit a pair of socks sometime in the early fall and promptly started to knit.

and then i found out that #2 double pointed needles suck and big ol' hands make for a terrible sock knitting experience.

and then i learned that i had been knitting wrong all this time!

so i re-learned how to knit (i had been putting some weird extra twist in each stitch that was really ruining my cable work on that orange scarf and lead to me restarting that project as well). and then i learned to knit the magic loop (this tutorial looks pretty good, but there are tons of them on google). and then, after christmas, i re-started my sock.

the heel is blue, too.

it was slow going for a while as i worked through the once-knit (and thus all twisted and bad) yarn but things really picked up after that. i also used the countless rows of straight knit stitches to work on my technique. i can now form a stitch with fewer movements of my wrists and without dropping the yarn between stitches. the drawing below is the wrapping method that works best for me although i think i would drop the pinky wrap for a heavier weight yarn. unfortunately, i haven't gotten purls down nearly as well.

i went to art school.

the pattern also expanded my repertoire of stitches as rectangular scarves don't require reductions or the picking up of stitches. (i also got a lot of practice saving dropped stitches with a crochet hook.) huzzah learning experiences!

now all i have to do is make another one, the exact same way.

season's greetings

sarah and i teamed up for christmas this year and made gift bags for our families. though each was a little different, the basic idea was as follows: a jar of cranberry jam, a jar of pear chutney, a sample of maldon's smoked sea salt (the brown bottle) and a small plum wood cutting board (made from urban salvage lumber and a bit of corn and citrus oil). variations included a bit of honeycomb from the hives on the roof at bluebottle, a bag of coffee, a nice tall beer, and a few other odds and ends. my mama's bag came with a couple knit dishcloths:

she got the two basketweaves on the left. i gave the other two to sarah.

we wrapped them up in scraps of muslin, tied with a bit of rosemary, and a note in sarah's french cursive. a pretty pretty little gift if i do say so myself.

feliz navidad, y'all.

old new things

whoa man, holidays.

but now that that is over, some delinquent projects:

after thanksgiving, when the cranberries were cheap, my special lady friend and i made a whole lot of jam. i think the two batches used, oh, six bags of berries, total. some of it went into christmas gifts, but there is still plenty for delicious cranberry and almond butter sammiches.

there were also plenty of fiber arts this fall. i finally finished my new orange cable scarf and boy is it sweet. i've been wearing it for my bike rides to work and have found it to be the perfect knit size to pull over my mouth and nose- small enough to keep the warm air in but big enough to get good ventilation. (i'm not going to write out the pattern unless anyone is particularly interested in having it, let me know.)

and then there is this chambray work shirt. i used the one shirt pattern i own, but rebuilt the front to open with a three button polo-style placket instead of the full length deal. the pocket and the cuffs have mitered corners and i added rounded shirt-tails as well. the stitching is ecru and is a nice contrast to the light blue fabric. buttons are aluminum, hand-made with (now standard) three holes. as i tend to roll and unroll sleeves a lot, especially on a work shirt, i didn't add buttons to the wrist plackets.

the only issue with this shirt is getting it on and off. the slim cut isn't really suited to a pull over, so if i build this shirt again, i'll add small pleats to the back panel to loosen things up a bit.

i also built a dress this fall. a little grey number from a vintage pattern for sarah, but i don't have any pictures, yet. soon, hopefully.

oh, and the weaving moves slowly forward. with something like 7 yards of warp on the loom and plenty of other projects, it will be a bit longer before there is a finished product. but that finished product will be 4 or 5 stripey scarves. also soon, hopefully.

'lectronics

i bought an arduino almost two years ago, messed around with it a little and then put it in a drawer.

but then i had an awesome idea for a halloween costume that would have all kinds of light up bits and what-have-yous. i spent a lot of time programming and researching and making stupid syntax errors.

and then i got really busy and had to skip halloween. but i was too deep to just shove my work back in a drawer. so i finally got the last few resistors that i needed and finished soldering up a 25 led display with four 74hc595 8-bit shift registers. it looks like this:

the shift registers allow you to independently control more outputs than the arduino board has room for so you can hail each led independently within a program. (if you really want to know more about 8 bit shifters, or if you want to get a great arduino library to help program them, go here.)

unfortunately, i don't really need a halloween costume right now and i have yet to come up with any good uses for this bit. thoughts?