Thank you ALL for your kind comments and well-wishes on my little blog's fifth birthday.

And now, we start year 6.

I spent most of this afternoon sewing. I finished up the Zipper quilt top:



It's a long narrow quilt; longer than a twin size but also narrower (the book's authors call it a "napping quilt," I suppose referring to it as the sort of thing you keep on your sofa to nap under).

The quilt makes me very very happy. I am so pleased with how it turned out. I think the color combination is effective - it's an unusual one for me, I don't use a lot of aqua normally, but it was fun to do.

And it's a fun pattern to make up - as I said before, it's one where you can do all the cutting at one go and then spend the rest of your time fitting together colors and sewing the thing up. And the sewing is not complex, which is also nice. It's a quilt that looks trickier than it is.

I love things that look trickier than they actually are; that's probably why I like cables so much.

Here's a close-up of the quilt, showing some of the fabrics in it:



*****

A couple other catch-up things:

L., the scarf I'm wearing in the last photo is the Artful Yarns scarf - it was a pattern several years ago in an advert for Artful Yarns that was in, I think, Vogue. It's made of a strand of Cinema and a strand of Portrait knit together using seed stitch. This is the scarf that I used the Cinema called "George Bailey" in it (the Portrait is based on the colors in Van Gogh's "The Postman"). This is the scarf that I kind of superstitiously believe is protective - after all, it has a yarn named after George Bailey in it, and we all know how he turned out.

I also guess I haven't commented much on my cooking experimentation here. It's slowed down a little during the Week of the Cold (partly because I lost my sense of taste and partly because I hadn't the energy to do more than heat up tomato soup or make cheese toasts). I have tried three new recipes (or new ways of cooking things) so far, and the fourth is cooking right now.

So far, I've tried:
two-potato latkes (good, but as I said, were I to make them again, I'd cut back on onion)

honey-hoisin chicken (probably would not make again, not without serious alteration. Too much soy, too salty).

country-style pork ribs done in the slow cooker (Wow! Those were good. Definitely a way I will be cooking them again. The way I did it was to rub the ribs with a commercial mixture - the one I had was from Stonewall Kitchen and it had garlic, oregano, and thyme in it, as well as salt and pepper - and I cooked them very long [like 5 hours I think - maybe less] on Low. They tasted when they came out almost like the smoked ribs you get at the real barbecue joints. And they weren't dried out. [I didn't trim any fat off of them; the recipe said not to. Most of it rendered off but I'm sure that had I trimmed it, they would have been dryer). I ate them with a little commercial barbecue sauce but they were good enough that they would have been fine without it.

And now, I am cooking an Asian-flavored turkey loaf in the slow cooker - it has rice and sweet and sour sauce and sesame seeds and chopped up water chestnuts in it. Also it has soy, but this time I halved the amount relative to what the recipe said. And I didn't add salt.

One thing I have noticed about myself is that I tend to be sensitive to salt. People say things taste "good" that taste way too salty to me. So I'm learning to modify recipes and leave some of the salt out so that I don't taste it and go, "yuck, too salty."

Another thing I've been making quite a bit lately - even while I had the cold - is something I call Mushroom Broth. It's kind of a simplified version of hot-and-sour soup. I've been trying to eat more mushrooms after reading about how loaded with antioxidants and other good stuff they are, but I can't stand the taste of them raw.

So what I do is cut them up in chicken broth (you could use veg. broth, of course) and boil them for maybe 5 minutes. Then I add, to taste, rice vinegar, chili powder, and ginger.

I've discovered the "baby Portobellos" (a/k/a cremini) are really good for this. (And they are also excellent on pizza. Who knew? I would never have eaten mushrooms on pizza even six months ago but now that I've tried it, I find it a really good combination.) Even better - there's a mushroom farm in Miami (OK), so they're even almost semi-local (well, Miami is about 3 1/2 hours from me, but that's pretty close, as far as produce goes these days). And I can even get them in my local grocery. (I hope they continue to carry them, now that I've decided I like them.

And this opens up all other kinds of possibilities - mushrooms in stir-fry, broiled stuffed mushroom caps....

I've always been a picky eater but I am slowly trying to rectify that. Maybe someday I will even try cauliflower again....but maybe not.