Spaghetti Western

I hate to cook.  No one who has met me will be surprised by this.  Eating is fine, and I'm swell at it, but the hunting/gathering/burning required to make food get on the plate is somehow just too much for me.  And my family agrees:  As a cook, I make an excellent knitter. 

It's a bitter irony, then, that as my children get bigger, it's more and more necessary that I woman-up and make food for them.  Sometimes, like, three times a day.  It turns out to be true what my mom told me when I found that stray cat:  If you feed them, they just keep coming back.

Phillip does his part in the kitchen.  He's every bit as weak a specimen in a Chef's hat as I am, but he hates it WAY less.  He even thinks it's fun, so when he's available, he does a lot more of the snackmaking than I. 

But yesterday, Phillip was sick.  He caught the gnarly chest cold I had last week, and was benched for the day.  Which meant it was all on me when dinnertime dawned.  I hadn't been to the grocery in a few days, so pawning it off on the Smallies as a chore was right out:  I was going to have to work without a net.

I spied noodles and a can of tomatoes in some cobwebby recess. Thoughts of an Italian feast danced in my head.  Garlic?  Check.  Tomato paste?  Check.  I even managed a bit of Italian sausage, left in the frozen rubble of some prior attempt.  Done and Done.  And while I was foraging, there presented itself a small plastic container (WARNING, COWGIRL, WARNING!) of tomato-based substance which would have to be leftover pizza sauce.  It passed the sniff test.  I even tasted it, just to be sure.  Dancing, as I was on the razor's edge of culinary improvisation, I was leaving nothing to chance.  Definitely tomato sauce of some ilk.  Into the pot it went, while the noodles bubbled.  A Caesar salad kit and half a loaf of Italian bread materialized, and I really began to feel that I'd dodged a bullet.  The enticing smells even brought Phillip vertical, long enough to make it to the dinner table.

All was right with the world.  Until I tasted it.  

Subtle notes of maple, chipotle and smoke tiptoed across my tongue.  A cloying sweetness argued loudly with the zing of garlic, right there in my mouth.  The afterburn of jalapeno (or something) chased sweet sausage all over my palette.  The cacophony of flavors collided and ricocheted; swallowing was impossible, and only my napkin could save me.  Eject, Buckaroo, Eject!

The tomato-based substance I threw into the pot had been Barbecue Sauce.

I sat there with my eyes watering for a while, wondering why nobody else was gagging.  Phillip could obviously not taste the problem, owing to his having a cold.  The children were not complaining.  Nor, I noticed, were they really chewing, so ravenous had they become in the eleven minutes since their last meal.

And that's when it dawned on me:  This terrible cook has been blessed with a family who cannot taste.  God is Good.

 

Neutral Zone

Today I'm celebrating Beige.  It's not easy for me to love Beige, because I consider it a non-color.  I'd call it anti-color, but Beige doesn't even have that much conviction.  As a person whose very life depends on color, though, it seems unfair to ignore the ones that aren't that bright.

I blame my mother for my Beige problem.  She loathed (feared?) Beige in any incarnation.  She wouldn't even call it by its proper name.  Instead she always said "Blah-Beige".  And it wasn't just the color she impugned; any person whom she considered to have too much neutral in their life was also called "Blah-Beige"; as in "Oh, you know, he's one of these Blah-Beige people without an original idea in his head..."  This was describing a neighbor who, on retirement, bought a brand new taupe and white RV, and a factory-matched taupe truck with which to pull it. 

But I'm a big girl now (with the pants to prove it), and it's time to give a fair shake to Beige.  I realized this when I was gifted with an otherwise unobtainable skein of Plucky Knitter Primo sock yarn.  It's maker, Sarah, aptly named the color "Oatmeal".  What a lovely and approachable way of describing the color.  Nothing wrong with oatmeal at all.  In fact, you'd never expect or want oatmeal to be any other color than what nature made it.  So because I was in love with the yarn, itself, I decreed that I would step outside my comfort zone and embrace my inner neutrality.  I made swell toe-up socks which were fun to knit, and pretty to wear.  And I put them together with my favorite summer party shoes.  Then I looked down to realize they were standing on my beloved new floor, whose wrinkled brown paper has every color of, guess what? Beige in it.  And you know what else I love that's Beige?

Backstage at the sock photo shoot.  Bailey found a stray Milk Bone and would not get out of the shot.

A certain four-legged blonde, without whom we could not imagine our lives.

So there you have it.  I still prefer "real" colors.  But it turns out a little neutrality is not a dangerous thing.

Simple, toe-up Diamond lace socks with a hemmed picot edge.  Post a comment if you think I should publish the pattern, or if you'd like to rant in defense of all things Beige.
 

Sometimes the Toast Lands Butter-Side-Up

Stockinetta and Garterina, twin goddesses of knitting mischief and mayhem , are officially on Summer Vacay.  Here's how I know:  I went to my LYS on Mission: Implausible.  The nice Lady there sensed a disturbance in the Force:  "You look like you know exactly what you're after; just let me know if I can help at all...".  I held up the shawl.  "I'm five rows from the end, and I'm out of handspun.  I know that at this point there are only degrees of failure."  The color actually drained from her face.  "Don't cry for me,"  I said.  "I knew this was a one-way trip, but I just had to try." 

And that's when I spied it:  THE EXACT perfect color.  I zeroed in for the kill.  Brand:  Fibre Company.  Color : Rose Hip.  Fiber Blend:  50% Baby Alpaca and 30% Merino, 20% Bamboo  Not too weird (Bamboo notwithstanding), and with a  halo reminiscent of the one on my handspun.  Sure, the piles were 3, rather than 2, but beggars, at this point, dare not be choosers.  What really matters is the COLOR.  No mere Mortal deserves a match this precise.  I may have done a dance of triumph.  The LYS lady, already unnerved by my dramatic and downtrodden entrance, was stunned out of her ability to make words.  "I know," I said.  "This does not happen under ANY predictable circumstances."  Clearly the Knitting God(esse)s were not paying attention.  Or else, they were in the Caymans.  LYS lady rung me up with a solemnity usually reserved for religious services.

I went tearing home, determined to complete all the other jobs on the day's list:  Write sizing for new patterns; CHECK.  Drop off samples at Post Office; CHECK.   Give haircuts to overheating (and somewhat smelly) Scottie Dogs; CHECK.  Some of their dust ruffles might be a little crooked, but I was on a mission.  I was a To-Do List Machine, maniacally plowing ahead until I could finally work those last STINKING five rows and the bind off (yes, picots; I hear you and obey). 

And MAN is a picot bindoff at the end of a top-down shawl tedious.  Yeah, I said it.  I love picots more than any human should, and if I'M bored with them, there is something wrong with the universe.  I bound off, eventually, but I was totally in a fugue state by the end of it.

And by the way, How (brace for tirade) can any knitting patten in its right mind actually direct us to add a bead to the first picot of the bindoff, the last picot of the bindoff, and NONE Of the other 172 picots in between?  That way lay insanity, my friends.  That's like saying to a ravenous hyena, "Here's the keys to the Butcher Shop.  Just stop whenever you think you're finished".  Puh-Leeeze. 

Of course, when it was time to block, I naturally had to pin out each and every single one of those 174 beaded picot edges.  OCD much?  I know.  Totally Worth It:

Can you spot where the yarn changes?  Neither can I, and I know.  Butter Side Up.

So what have we learned, Dorothy? 
1.    It's okay to look to the stars for a solution once you have arsed up.  Only a complete embrace of defeat can properly clear your head though, leaving you open to a solution. 
2.    I still am not a grownup, with regard to pacing myself through a project.  If the thing I'm knitting doesn't get faster as I go (you know, the OPPOSITE of like, every shawl in the world), I'm likely to loose patience/interest.  If I hadn't been desperate to see what would happen to the edge of the shawl after finding the perfect replacement yarn, I might have let the thing lie around for another two years and twenty minutes.
3.    Crescent-shaped shawls are our friends, but they need bendy blocking wires, so if all you have are straight ones, better be ready to pin. A Lot.

I still don't understand shawls.  Or lace.  And certainly not beads.  But I think this experience has delivered me one step closer to those who do.