Baked Cranberry Sauce
Marnie posted a link on twitter to this recipe on the Food Network this morning and even though we're not celebrating Thanksgiving until Friday this year, I went ahead and immediately made some changes and tossed my berries in the oven. Just over an hour from start to finish, this sauce can be made quite a bit in advance (the recipe says it keeps a few weeks in the fridge) and takes almost no active time. The result is a rich sauce, tangy and sweet, with just a hint of spice. Perfect for any dinner, and you can easily adapt the flavors to suit your meal. You could try changing out the juice and almond extract for tequila and cayenne pepper, with lime zest in place of the orange for a spicy kick on your turkey.
Baked Cranberry Sauce (adapted from the Food Network)
1 12 ounce bag of cranberries, fresh or frozen and thawed
between 1 and 1 1/8 cups sugar, depending on how sweet you like it.
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 tablespoon orange zest
1/4 cup orange juice
1/2 teaspoon almond extract.
Nearly Wordless Wednesday: Growth
Sun Gold Cherry tomato and Sugar Sprint pea beginnings.
Bread and a Challenge
One recent evening Nicole of Pinch My Salt announced, via Twitter, that she was going to bake every recipe in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice and asked if anyone else might be willing to virtually bake along with her. As I am never one to turn down a challenge and I bake most of our bread I quickly signed on for the ride. I ordered the book from Amazon and it arrived shortly before I fell down our front steps and bruised my ribs. Since I've been a little laid up since then, it's been perfect reading. The first 100 pages of the book are all about the hows and whys of bread, written in such a way to encourage you to keep the pages turning. And turn I did.
And that's how we get to the first recipe, Anadama Bread. According to legend this bread is of New England origin--although I've never heard of it before, have you Mom?--involving a man who, upon the discovery that his wife had left him with naught but a drop of molasses and some leftover cornmeal porridge proclaimed "Anna, damn her" as he mixed up this bread. Time and polite society slurred the words together and the result is Anadama, a lightly sweet wheat loaf studded with fragments of coarsely ground corn with a lovely golden tan color. A soft bread, this loaf is perfect for sandwiches and the cornmeal adds a great crunch, especially when toasted.
All in all, it's an easy loaf to make and the final product is versatile (other members of the group have made it into French toast, bread salad, and bread pudding and well as shaping into rolls rather than loaves). I found it to be a very pretty loaf, with a good crumb and a lovely color but not a remarkable flavor. I'd give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.
For more information about the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge, please see Nicole's site, or check out the Flickr pool.
Leafy Curtains
When we moved in to Casa de Baya, the bedroom had a very make-shift curtain hanging in the window. Made from a sheet, it had faded pink flowers and was generally sad. It wasn't my style and it just looked out of place, especially after the fresh coat of sage green paint that we put on the walls. I found this fabric online (it's a Robert Kaufman fabric, panda print in tangerine and it's a bamboo/cotton blend) and ordered 4 yards of the 54" wide fabric.
The trickiest part of this project was ironing the fabric. I only have a mini-sized tabletop ironing board, so it took a lot of shifting and hoping that it wouldn't re-wrinkle as I ironed the next piece. Then I cut it in half and hemmed each edge--twice. Once to pull back the raw edge and the second time to hide that raw edge (I decided not to line or make the curtains double sided in any way, the thought of wrangling that much fabric made me blanch). Then I folded the top over to make a pole pocket, hung them up and had curtains. The fabric was less expensive than panels big enough to cover the window, especially since I wanted a custom length as the window sits above a baseboard heater. It did take about 8 hours of pinning, ironing and sewing time, because I am both fastidious and slow because of my relative lack of sewing experience.
Ursa
One of my biggest projects last year was a gift for my younger sister, Sarah who lives in Vermont. She's cold a lot so a red wool/alapaca blend sweater seemed like an ideal choice. She's a bit picky about her clothing, in that she doesn't like anything "fussy" so I settled on Ursa from Berroco Booklet #279. Since I don't know when I'll see Sarah next, I got a local friend to model it for me after it was finished. This was knit in the 44" bust size, which is a bit bigger than Jodie normally wears, which accounts for the drooping shoulder seams. Speaking of seams, the sweater is knit in pieces and seamed together. Because I am a crazy perfectionist, this part of the process took me 10 hours. Do the seams look fantastic? You better believe it. Did I remember to take a photo of them? No, of course I did not.
I purchased many sets of buttons for this sweater and finally settled on these vintage ones from an Etsy shop. I loved their delicateness, their color and their slight variations. Thankfully, I knew my sister would love them too. If I were to knit this again, I would knit a more structured button hole than the yarn over hole specified in the pattern. The pattern also called for stitching the two layers of the button band together around the hole but if I had done that the buttons would not have fit through the holes (and they're a little smaller than the pattern suggested). It's a little tricky to button it, but not frustratingly so.
The pattern called for 10 skeins of yarn. I only used 6.5. Mileage may vary on that one, but I suspect the estimates for the booklet are a little high. I liked the yarn, it has a silky hand to it once blocked, but the processing chemicals made me a little itchy (I find this common with alpaca yarns. I can handle them fine after they're washed which is my main reason for suspecting processing chemicals instead of the fiber itself. And I can handle raw alpaca fleece with no problems!) It is handwash only and sheds like the devil while knitting with it (or washing it!) but I'm pleased with the final product. And my sister was thrilled.