stew

Friday Roundup: New Recipes and Half a Mitt

What I’m Knitting

The colorwork mitt is chugging along! Gone are the days when I could have finished something like this in a few days of knitting, sigh, but at least I’m nearly done with the thumb gusset now:

I’m using my Knit Picks Harmony interchangeables to work the Magic Loop technique for these mitts. Normally I prefer DPNs for hand stuff, but getting the colorwork floats the right tension at the edges of all those needles is a nightmare. The cord on these needles is so flexible that they’re really nice for Magic Loop.

What I’m Cooking

Lots of stuff from the new cookbook I got (Appetite for Reduction). I love this cookbook so much that I’m actually contemplating working my way through the entire thing, Julia & Julia style. My husband’s on board—it’ll mean we try a bunch of new-to-us ingredients and tastes, so it should be fun!

This is a low-fat wine sauce over pasta, with (delicious) vegan eggplant “bacon” on top:

And these are sweet potato biscuits, a clever recipe that replaces nearly all of the butter/shortening usually found in biscuits with mashed sweet potato:

They were perfect with this kale, quinoa, potato, and white bean stew:

And last but not least, this AMAZING tortilla soup. Holy cow, was this yummy.

I did have a little mishap with this one. It called for a couple of jalapeños, which I’ve cooked with before without any problems. But somehow I got some of the juice underneath a couple of my fingernails… and they were on FIRE for the whole rest of the day. I cut the nails short, scrubbed them with an old toothbrush, soaked them in soapy water, used rubbing alcohol—nothing helped. It finally wore off on its own overnight, but yikes. Think I’ll wear some gloves next time I cut hot peppers.

What I’m Reading

I just finished a re-read of one of my favorite books, by my favorite author: The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. The last book in the series is coming out in a few months (very bittersweet for me, because the author passed away a few months ago and this is the last new book of his I’ll ever read). I decided to re-read the previous four books before the new one.

Friday Roundup: Chugging Along

What I’m Knitting:

Despite a terrible lack of knitting time, I managed to start the second colorwork fingerless mitt of the yarn dominance experiment. This Stitch Sprouts Yellowstone (wool/silk blend) is just luscious.

It doesn’t look like much yet, but I have some longer car trips coming up, so hopefully I’ll have some major progress by next week!

What I’m Cooking:

A trip to a semi-local farmers’ market yielded a bunch of kale and carrots, so I whipped up a potato-kale-quinoa stew:

And I got a new vegan cookbook from the library (Appetite for Reduction)! I’m excited to try lots of recipes, but the first one had to be creamed corn, which I love but haven’t had since I stopped eating nearly all dairy more than fifteen years ago. It came out delicious!

My mom just got back from a business trip to Louisiana and brought me some local brown rice, so I made black-eyed peas, collard greens, and cornbread to go with it. My first time cooking with black-eyed peas (and ever eating collard greens, I think), but it came out really good! The recipe uses liquid smoke in place of the usual pork, so it had a bacon-y flavor.

What I’m Reading:

I’m beta-reading an excellent young adult manuscript for a friend of mine before she sends it to her literary agent! Fun stuff. Hopefully you can find this one on the shelves before too long. :-)