I did a couple of things already this weekend. (Well, I also mowed the lawn, and changed my clothes -it's very humid here - and went grocery shopping and then swept up the pecan catkins that have fallen all over everything, and changed my clothes again, and changed the air filter in my house).

I also made baked pretzels:



The recipe is from that bread book I was talking about earlier.

They didn't get as brown as I anticipated but they are done through. (Maybe they overcooked them for the photo in the book, or something.) These are just baked, not boiled first (like typical soft pretzels are, or at least typical American soft pretzels - I don't know about the authentic German way of making them).

You glaze them with water with salt and a tiny bit of sugar dissolved in it to (try) to make the sea salt stick. I think if I do them again I'm going to cut back on the salt in the glaze, or leave the sea salt off altogether (it doesn't stick very well) - they come out extremely salty (or at least extremely salty for my taste; I tend to like things much less salty than most people).But they are good, nice and chewy - the recipe has a little rye flour in it.

Maybe the saltiness is because they are described (in the book) as being typically served with beer. Maybe all that salt is to get you to drink more beer, or maybe the salt stuff just tastes better with a beer on the side. I'm not a beer drinker so I don't know...

I had forgotten how good it feels to knead bread. (I had mostly been making stuff in my bread machine). It's a very "centering" kind of motion - it's repetitive and uses a lot of muscles, and it also seems to me that it's something you almost have a "genetic memory" of - my mother bakes bread and her mother baked bread and her mother before her baked bread - probably back all the way to a point where either the families didn't have a means of cooking bread (and let the village baker do it) or back to some tribal state where kneaded bread wasn't a common foodstuff.

Kneading feels like a very ancient motion to me. It's kind of like knitting in its way. I think I want to make more bread this summer. It's enjoyable* and the bread that results is a lot better than store bread.

(*I was going to say "it's fun" but it's really more than that - it's satisfying, and kind of self-reassuring in a way - like, "if you know how to bake bread you will be able to take care of yourself, no matter what happens.")

I also finished another wee amigurumi. This is the smallest one I've ever made, and if I do say so myself, one of the cutest:



It's the Tiny Striped Turtle! (The name of mine is Tessa). If you want one of your own, you can find the pattern at Crochetville; it's written by someone with the screen-name KristieMN.

Tessa is sitting on my newest bookcase, the one that houses (some of) my collection of mystery novels. She's about 3" long by 2" tall and is made out of small bits of two colors of wool-ease.

Here's another picture, showing just how adorably tiny she is:



I'm really tickled with how she came out.

And a couple of comment responses:

Jennifer, I think the red wasps are just predators and not parasitoids (it would be cooler if they were parasitoids). I've seen them carrying off caterpillars before (actually tomato hornworms so I wasn't too upset about that!) I'm hopeful the caterpillars may make it to pupa stage because the dill hasn't flowered yet, and it's often the flowers that seem to attract the red wasps (and it strikes me that I could cut the flowering heads off before they got started to help prevent that). I also haven't seen as many of the wasps right now; I think it's because it's such a wet year.

I also looked up the hungry hungry hippos game - the colors are pink, yellow, orange, and green, as dragonkitter said (I was remembering a blue hippo but it seems there are only four in the game). I might make myself a hippo off of that pattern I linked to...I think I have some yellow yarn that's not too far off of Hungry Hungry Hippo yellow. (I'd really like to make an orange one but I haven't any sherbet-orange yarn and I don't feel like venturing out to try to find some).

I'm really digging making all the knitted and crocheted toys. Part of it is that it's nearly instant gratification - things work up so fast. But there's also something - I'm not quite sure what it is - the satisfaction of making something that's kind of sculptural and 3-D - about it that pleases me.

I have yarn ahead to do another one of those monsters. I think Olaf needs a sister or maybe a cousin. (I think this one I'm going to make more true to pattern, and give just one big eye and do the funny embroidered mouth-with-teeth).