Friday, February 27, 2009
I’m a big fan of Lolo – who isn’t? A significant percentage of recipes from this site make it into regular rotation at my house. To date the most used has been the Sweet Chili Lime Tofu, but it seems that the Pine Nut Rolled Lasagna is going to take a run at the title. I’ve made it twice already, which pretty often given its recent vintage.
James doesn’t like eggplant, so both times I’ve replaced it with roasted red peppers. The first time I also added sauteed kale, and the second time spinach. FYI spinach works better. I put a few sundried tomatoes in with the pine nuts, and I also find it needs a little more water to make it more spreadable.
It can really only be described as “damn tasty” and has received high acclaim all around. I highly suggest you make it, tonight if possible.
This recipe has made it necessary for me to find an inexpensive source of pine nuts, on which I will elaborate in the near future.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
I’ve managed to finish knitting my Tubey sweater – knitting with a cast is annoying but not impossible.
It looks very nice on its own:
One I actually put it on though, it’s a disaster. For whatever reason the style just does not get along with my body and I’m definitely not going to take pictures of it. So, I’m going to take it all out and do something else.
Right now I’m leaning towards this:
People ask me, doesn’t it totally suck to have to take out a whole entire sweater? No, it totally sucks having a bad sweater. Which would you rather do, spend a month working on a sweater you hate, or two on a sweater you love?
Saturday, January 31, 2009
I had a bunch of laundry to do today, and though fairly chilly outside, it was clear and sunny so I decided to put it out on the line anyway. When I took it in, though, there was a big plotch of bird shit on my fitted sheet. I’m not dumb enough to put my clothesline under any wires or anything, so it had to be a fly-by shitting. What are the chances?
This led to me doing 4 loads of laundry today, a personal best.
Normally, I do a bit of cleaning every day. 15 minutes or so – besides the obvious everyday things like washing the dishes. This hasn’t really happened in the two weeks since I broke my finger. It’s kinda hard to mop or scrub the shower when you can’t get one hand wet, you know?
Normally James does the daily missions (from the system I use – basically one 10 minute task such as “clean all the light switches” or “scrub the kitchen garbage can”) but he has been sick this week as well, so that’s not getting done either.
On top of that, just the general disruption of my routine has caused some undue clutter. Normally I get home on my bike and have a set number of things that I do, and each one is the trigger for the next. One of them is putting my clothes away for example. Now this system worked really well, but I discovered its downfall. If the first thing doesn’t happen (putting my bike away) then the rest just disappears into a puff of clutter on the floor.
Anyway, all this to say that I’m definitely looking forward to having a functioning left hand again, and while bike riding and snowboarding are major reasons, clean house is right up there as well.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
I’m a pretty low-maintenance lady. No makeup graces the shelves of my bathroom cabinet, and James’ inventory of hair product (one container of gel) is larger than mine. When I needed a hair dryer to put up my window insulation, I had to borrow one from my mother in law. But I do have the softest skin. I only ever put one thing on my face, and that’s oil. I’ve got a little bottle of half olive oil (extra virgin) and half castor oil, with a few drops of sage essential oil mixed in… and it’s my magic elixir.
The method is pretty simple.
- Put on some relaxing music. Tonight it’s Enya.
- Massage the oil onto your face. Take your time to do it really well.
- Get a washcloth wet with the hottest water you can stand.
- Lie down with the cloth on your face until it’s cooled down. Put another towel on to prolong the process, or re-wet the cloth if you need some more relaxing time.
- Return to the sink and scrub your face with hot water, no soap. Not too hard, just a nice exfoliating rub. Soap up the cloth and rinse it out.
I do this as part of my before-bed routine, and besides making my skin nice and baby’s-bum-soft, it helps a lot with the relaxing. No chemicals, detergents, or fragrances mean it’s not harsh on your skin or the planet, and it’s dirt cheap.
I had a snowboarding accident on Tuesday, and now I’m typing with one hand and can barely knit or put my own hair in a ponytail. Washing dishes is right out – see, there is always a silver lining.
Anyway, I was going pretty fast (hard to do otherwise on hard pack), caught my toe edge, faceplanted, then got the nose of my board stuck in the snow which flipped me onto my back. My left pinkie got caught in there somehow:
My whole left hand and forearm is in a cast for three weeks (I don’t know why the full cast, it seems like overkill). It’s coming off on Feb. 5, which is just after my birthday.
I am not afraid to admit that I’m a huge tightwad. I really dislike spending money, and saving is really important to me. There are a few reasons for this, but I can boil it down to two.
1. I want to be financially secure and comfortable. Save as much as you can while you have the opportunity – later on you may not be so fortunate. And if you are, then you’ll have even less to worry about in the money department.
2. I strongly believe that a lower consumption rate is important on many levels – environmental (buying less stuff means creating less waste), aesthetic (I prefer a minimalist style), and practical (buying less stuff means less clutter in my home) to name a few. Basically I prefer owning a few things, but things that have a strong positive impact on my quality of life, over a ton of useless gadgets.
So my overall approach boils down to: Buy less stuff.
I have two main strategies that I use for this approach, and one of them is the waiting list. If there’s anything that I want to buy that isn’t strictly a necessity (food) then it goes on a waiting list. Usually it’s 30 days. When the waiting period is up, if I still want it, I buy it. Sometimes there are exceptions – for example, my snowboard was stolen a couple weeks ago and I don’t need to wait 30 days to know that I want another snowboard. For some other things like a new bike, the waiting period might be longer since I can’t save up enough for a new bike in 30 days.
I’m not perfect, last month I did go clothes shopping on a whim, but overall, this keeps impulse buys way down and saves me a lot of money. Part of it’s that half the time I decide not to buy whatever it is, and part of it is that I have to wait till I have enough money, so I don’t accumulate credit card debt. It’s a pretty good system for me.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
One of my go-to recipes (if you can call it that) when I don’t want to do a lot of cooking and don’t want a lot of ingredients is fajitas. They’re super easy – get some fake chicken (I’m using It’s All Good brand here), slice some onions and peppers into rings (my mandoline comes in very handy with this) and saute them. If I’m feeling uncharitable towards James I’ll add some mushrooms.
Roll ‘em up with some salsa or BBQ sauce. Here we’ve got some beer & chipotle sauce:
Quick and easy. On the subject of fake meat, James doesn’t like it much at ALL, and I’m not a huge fan either. It is more expensive than I’d like, plus it doesn’t really taste like chicken. If I had more time I might have made up some tasty tofu or something, but it’s just very convenient here.
“I mixed it so that it’s neither shaken nor stirred.”
“So… not mixed at all?”
“Right. I think not mixing is a form of mixing isn’t it?”
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
As in, on the needles currently.
- Tubey sweater
- Broderie cardigan
- Pomatomus socks
- Snowflake socks (from now-defunct Magknits)
- Twisty cabled arm-warmers (my own design)
And this is what is in the queue – as in, I have the yarn and the pattern:
Just in case you were wondering.
