Knitting and soup

So sometimes, the going gets rough. And you kind of square your shoulders, and say, well, dangit, I'm going to keep going and try not to let an unpleasant person spoil my life.

And if you do some kind of creative hobby, sometimes you start a new project.



This actually came about as part of a complex chain of thought. First of all, back when I was up in Illinois last week and visited Ewe Knit, the owner was knitting on a shawlette called "The Age of Brass and Steam." (Which immediately grabbed my attention because of the title). I filed the name away in my mind.

And then this afternoon, while in a bout of self-soothing Raveling, I looked it up. (You can get it off Ravelry, or the author also has it available through her(? I assume) blog.

I wanted to make it bigger. So I figured, I could use worsted yarn, and get more of the yarn...and I had a coupon from one of my favorite online yarn purveyors (and I still had part of the $200 I earned reviewing a textbook left over), so I ordered some sort-of-tarnished-brass colored Malabrigo to make one.

And then I thought: wait, I have some Malabrigo in stash, that one of my friends on Ravelry sent me around my last birthday (but not enough for the pattern as I intended to make it - and not the color I wanted for this particular item).

But I thought about it, and went home and found the yarn (two skeins: enough for a smallish scarf) and wound it off, and decided that seed stitch (or moss stitch, if you're on the other side of the Atlantic from me) would work the best with the variegation - it might help prevent excessive flashing or pooling.

(I know, I said before seed/moss stitch is tedious, but sometimes it's what you want).



This is pure comfort knitting. The yarn feels nice (the color is called something like SM Gold), it's easy, you don't have to think about shaping. I was even able to read a bit, earlier this evening, sitting on my bed, with the book propped on a pillow and held open with my toes. (it was a hardcover - not sure it would work so neatly with a smaller, tighter-spined paperback).

Sometimes you need comfort knitting. I don't know yet for sure if this scarf is going to be for me (but I already have so many scarves), or an eventual gift for someone, or, if I might find one of the charity groups that needs wool scarves and pass it on to them. The point of comfort knitting is not so much the finished project as it is the soothing process.

(The scarf is sitting on one of my many stitch libraries - I bought this one from JoAnn Fabrics with one of their 40% off coupons. It's called Super Stitches Knitting and is published by Watson-Guptill, which I always thought of as a British publisher, but the copyright page lists New York as the location, and the terminology given seems to mostly conform to U.S. usage. It's one of my favorites of the stitch libraries, actually - a small chunky book with nice photos of the swatches. And the more complex stitches are charted as well as written in line-by-line format, and I appreciate that.)

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Also, a recipe. One of my favorite older cookbooks is one I bought years ago - perhaps as many as 25 years ago now - at the Hudson Public Library used book sale. (They used to have one every Saturday, and I loved them, because hardbacks were something like 50 cents and paperbacks either a dime or a quarter, and you could get a lot of books, even on the meager allowance I had).

It's called "The Flavour of France." It's by the Chamberlains, which, if you're a foodie, you might know the name of - they're the people who had Clementine in the Kitchen. They lived in France (Samuel, his wife Narcissa, and then their daughter Narcisse) in the 50s and 60s. And this book is a collection of French recipes.

The really nice thing, as far as I'm concerned, is they're not fancy recipes. They are the sort of farmhouse/everyday recipes - the things, the authors say, you would not likely be served as a foreign guest (and therefore would get the fancier, "better" dishes), but would be the things the family would eat when they were, well, en famille.

And I like simple cooking. Peasant cooking (though this is perhaps a couple notches above that.)

Another lovely thing about the book is that each recipe has a photograph (apparently all taken by Mr. Chamberlain). Usually, it is of some sight in the area where the recipe came from - so Parisian recipes might have a photo of the famous quays, or of Notre Dame, and one from Normandy would have a photo of Mont-St.-Michel or something like that.

And of course, with my new discovery that I am, in fact, distantly, part French, and moreover, I know where my ancestors came from, I've been looking at the photos from near Poitou and the Dordogne Valley with new interest.

And this was a recipe I had seen in there a while back, and marked as interesting. I finally made it over the weekend and found it very good. Again, it's extremely simple, but sometimes you want simple.

It's called Tourin des Landes, or Vermicelli and Onion Soup.

I'm going to give the formal recipe - from the book - but note my modifications for reducing the serving number.

Big recipe (to serve 6)

4 onions, chopped
1 T butter
1 T bacon fat
3/4 cup vermicelli, broken into small lengths
3 T tomato paste
6 cups "good beef or chicken stock or consomme"
Parmesan

You saute the onions in the fat until they are soft and starting to brown. Then you add in the vermicelli, and saute it with the onions until it is "just beginning to brown." Next, add the tomato paste and the stock, cook the whole thing together at a simmer for 10 minutes or so. At the table, on each serving, you grate a little Parmesan.

For my "single person" quantity, I used one onion (and I used a mix of olive oil and butter, not having bacon fat on hand). I used maybe 1/4 cup, maybe a bit more, of the vermicelli, and 1 T of tomato paste*. And a scant two cups of chicken broth (from a can...I'm sure homemade stock would be even better).

(*The tomato paste - I think the brand is Amore - that you can buy in a tube is good for this. It's more concentrated, I guess, than the canned kind, but that didn't matter for this recipe. And I love the idea of tomato paste in a tube - so much easier to store in the fridge, probably less likely to go bad (they claim it keeps "indefinitely"), and you can squeeze out just the amount you need. I bought mine at the gourmet shop in my parents' hometown, but I noticed that the Krogers nearest me also carries it, so probably many groceries do).

As I said, really simple - but it's good and it seems to me that it would be especially nice on a cold night, with some good savory toast on the side and maybe a little salad, or if you needed a bigger meal, a salad and a piece of toast with a poached egg.