I heart my iPhone

7 Small Shawls: T - 27 days and counting down.

You know how it is; the recently converted are always the most devout. :) I love the camera, because the quality is astounding! I love the iPod function. And I love that I can check out downloadable audiobooks from the library and play them on my phone while I work. This is the life, I must say.

Courtesy of my iPhone, you can see where my family took me for my birthday last Friday! We went out to Bodega Bay to eat fresh, just off the boat, crab. Here they are, in fact, loading and unloading a boat (most of the boats were still out though).

We stopped by the Salt Water Taffy shack that I remember from my childhood (yes, it's always been striped).

And we had an amazing meal of fresh crab. OMG, it was good. I really tried to like the butter with it because Mr. Romi loves it so much, but I couldn't. The fresh crab just tasted so good without anything on it!

I'm still recovering from dessert.

It was a lovely time. And the kitty even gave me a little gifty. She deigned to sleep in her kitty bed.

I'm pretty sure it was, indeed, a gift, since she hasn't shown any inclination since. I thanked her as befits her royal nature, of course.

And I am really enjoying my current shawl. It's a fabulously relaxing knit and one I love working on while watching Christmas movies. Like the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, with which we ended the day on my birthday. It was a fabulous day from beginning to end, and how could it not be when it started out with dozens of the nicest birthday greetings ever, from the Internet knitting/crafting community?!?! I feel so fortunate for you all! Thank you! :)

Then on Saturday? I got to go hang with my local knitting peeps! And I started on the lace section of my shawl.

See how fabulous my little iPhone camera is? I'm really quite smitten.

btw, Kristine of A Verb for Keeping Warm currently has a sale on the yarn I am using for this shawl! The colors above are Magic Bean and The French Monk's Finest. Enjoy!

Sushi night

Can I just say that I love sushi? If there were one food I could take with me to a desert island, that food would be sushi. I have never met a piece of sushi I didn't like (except maybe some not-so-fresh uni). But with three guys around the house, it is prohibitively expensive to go out and order up all the sushi they can eat.

Enter the local Asian market. :)

In a previous failed attempt, I found the most important part of good sushi to be the rice. It needs to be short grain sushi rice, and it needs to be rinsed. Do not try to substitute rice. Trust me on this.

I found a sushi rice recipe on the back of the seaweed package and it was perfect. 3 cups of rice, rinsed, to 3 cups of water. I steamed the rice in our fuzzy logic rice cooker. When the rice is done, remove it to cool at least 20 minutes. I put it in a shallow oval dish. Boil together 1/3 cup rice vinegar, 1 tsp salt and 1 T sugar until the salt and sugar are dissolved. Pour over rice and mix gently until the liquid is distributed evenly. Let cool to room temperature.

Prepare all the ingredients before you start to put the sushi together. Here I have shrimp (bought prepared and frozen), cucumber, pickled daikon, avocado, fake crab, and some spring mix to make up for the fact that shiso was not in season. I also had tobiko (flying fish roe) and pickled plums (not pictured). Here's where I warn you that I don't officially know how to make sushi, I have just spent some serious time sitting at the sushi bar watching it be made. Also? I stay away from raw. I leave that to the real sushi chefs. :)

First up: rolls. Lay the seaweed out on top of a piece of saran wrap on the bamboo sushi mat. Have a small bowl of rice vinegar standing by. You'll want to wet your hands with it so that the rice won't stick as much.

The larger rolls take a whole sheet; the smaller rolls take half a sheet. Here is what the rice will look like when it is patted out (by hand) on the seaweed.

Add your ingredients down the middle. The sesame seeds are a delicious addition.

This is the tricky part. You're going to roll the mat over while trying not to catch the saran wrap and the mat inside the roll. It may take a little practice.

This is how it will look halfway through. You'll want to pack it down tight and press it into shape. Peel off the mat and the saran wrap and roll it over until the seam is on the bottom.

It will look like the picture below.

While it's in the mat, you'll want to pack it so that it's sort of square-ish. Don't worry about the rice getting mushy from being packed too hard. It will stand up to lots of pressure, and you need that pressure to make the roll stick together properly for cutting.

Finished rolls ready for cutting.

You'll want to use a super sharp knife to cut them, and it's helpful to wash it between rolls to get the sticky rice starch off.

I also made some nigiri sushi (the rolls are maki sushi).

Before shaping the rice, make sure to coat your hands with rice vinegar.

I put little seaweed strips around the rice and stuck them together with a piece of rice.

Then they got filled with tobiko. YUM!

Shrimp came next. I put a little wasabi on the underside. I love wasabi.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

All cut and ready for eating!

Everyone was stuffed. :)

Firsts

7 Small Shawls: T - 70 days and counting down.

My first ever home made sushi:

And my very first skein of Bugga! - in the Adonis Butterfly colorway.

Both delicious in their own way.

I need to work on making the quintessential sushi rice, but the Bugga is already perfect. :)

Did I mention that I'm thrilled that you all like Elektra?! I loved getting your comments; you all really made my day big time!

Craziness abounds here. I've come to the conclusion that I must really enjoy and thrive on it because I seem to be unable to keep from creating a chaos of over-work. My next task: learn to embrace and enjoy it thoroughly and completely. Onward!

Lemmmon {meringue}

Every year, the local Kiwanis puts on a pie auction to raise money for scholarships and other kid-related things. And it just so happens that every year, I seem to have some Meyer lemons on hand to make a lemon meringue pie for the auction, and a lemon meringue-less pie for us.

The recipe I use is from an old cookbook that my grandmother was given when she married my grandfather.

She taught me to bake using this cookbook, and, as you can see, it's very well loved!

First the crust: my grandmother always said to be sure and sift all the dry ingredients. And here you can see why. You don't want those lumps of flour mucking up your delicious crust or worse, making gummy clumps in your pie filling!

I used vegetable shortening and butter in the crust - about half and half. The trick to a flaky crust? My grandmother insisted that it was all in the way you use knives.

She swore by cutting the fat into the flour, and I've always done it that way.

You don't want it completely smooth. The crumbly effect from little bits of unmixed fat is what gives you the crisp texture.

You only add enough cold water to hold the dough together well for rolling out. Not too little: that results in too crumbly a crust!

We never had those little pie crust weights, so we always used whatever beans were on hand to keep the crust from bubbling when it's being cooked without the filling. I cook it halfway and then return it to the oven to finish up without the beans, so that the bottom cooks properly. Cream and meringue pies use a pre-baked crust.

Now for the filling. It all starts with butter in a double boiler.

And moves pretty quickly to a creamy yummy filling!

Only egg yolks go into the filling with the other ingredients. The whites go into the meringue. Since my little Bear can't eat whites, I always make one pie with meringue and one without. The whites from the meringue-less pie go toward making a bigger meringue on the auction pie.

Out of the oven, cooling and setting up.

Time for my assistant to take a taste test.

How was it?

I'm still working on making this recipe perfect. I've added a bit of confectioner's sugar and some butter to the crust, and since it's Meyer lemon and I need to put more juice in the filling to make it tart enough, I added another egg yolk to help it set up. It was almost perfect this last time, but I think it may be metamorphosing into a lemon tart. When it does, and I am able to write down exact measures of ingredients, I'll post the recipe for you all to enjoy as well.

Mmmmmm. Cake.

To compensate for my utter lack of time to blog in a meaningful and fibery way, I thought I would distract you with a cake I made.

Doesn't that look yummy?

The cake itself was made from scratch using an old recipe that my grandmother taught me. She called it 1-2-3-4 cake, because it has 1 cup shortening, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour and 4 eggs (among other things). I cheated on the icing though, because mine never comes out the way I want it to. I think I'm icing-impaired. It was for an auction, so I don't really know how it tasted; I can only surmise. But given the fact that this is my absolute favorite white cake recipe, I know I would have been happy to end up with it. :)

Hope everyone has had a great week! We're getting ready for a swim meet this weekend.