Just Desserts

I read cookbooks for fun, several at a time, spread out in front of me or perched on the edge of my bathtub. I imagine what I might cook, plan elaborate dinner parties and clever dinners for one that maximize variety while minimizing the number of ingredients I would need to buy (perfectly strategized, nutritional bounties, of course). I mark the standout or most interesting recipes with strips of paper. And then I fall into my usual habits and these markers languish, sometimes for years, between the pages of my cookbooks.

One's been in a cookbook I've had for years, The Bold Vegetarian by Bharti Kirchner. The book itself is more bubble bath than food stained. There are some markers that are sun bleached they've been sticking out from the top for so long. I'm not even sure when I decided I wanted to make Halwa. Since it's a simple, healthy dessert choice I'm not surprised I singled it out. But this girl always decided to make cupcakes instead.

Well, on Sunday I decided to go for it, with a few modifications. The concoction, originally contained: carrots, apples, raisins, milk and almonds. I veganized it, of course, but also adjusted it to use what I had.

Carrot-Pistachio-Cranberry Halwa


Ingredients: 3 c. shredded carrot, 1/4 c. dried, sweetened cranberries, 1/4 c. pistachios, 2 c. soy milk, 1 tsp. agar agar powder, 1/2" piece of ginger chopped into large pieces, 10 cardamom pods, 3 tbsp. molasses, 1 tsp. rosewater per serving


Add soy milk, agar agar, ginger and cardamom to a pot and bring to a boil. Bharti recommends spraying the pot down to keep the milk from sticking. I should have listened to her. It made me hate doing dishes even more.


Stir in the molasses, lower heat and let simmer until thickened (about ten minutes). Strain out cardamom and ginger.


Add carrots, cranberries and pistachios and cook for 24-30 minutes.


Add rosewater just before serving.

Just like a lovely gingerbread carrot pudding. Bharti writes a friend considered the halwa like a warm kiss. What took me so long? It's subtle and I'm smitten.

Impractical Knitting

There's something lovely about finishing your first project of the year. Even better when that first project is something weather appropriate. Like this hat from Knitting Nature.

Just last week as I wandered down the hall at work to my cubicle, someone shouted: "When are you going to make me a hat?" To which I could only respond: "I don't even have a hat." (This is selective memory. I have two hats in the work-to-be-unprocessed bin that were tragic concepts and must be undone.) But now I have a hat I can wear in public. Next up: gloves. And maybe even some legwarmers. I'm perpetually embarrassed about being the underdressed knitter in winter. Gloveless. Hatless. Legwarmerless. Bumbling through the frozen urban landscape, freezing while knitting. People must think I'm nuts. But I have a horrible attraction for working on weather-inappropriate projects. Like double-knit blankets in the middle of August or like, well . . .

Exhibit A:



I couldn't help but dive right into Victorian Lace Today. Everyone seems to be starting with a shawl or scarf. I wonder if I'm making a huge mistake. I also wonder if I remember where I am in the pattern. I fully believe I didn't set this aside because something had gone horribly awry in the last row. No. I put it aside for Exhibit B.

Exhibit B:



I desperately need this jacket to be finished. I bought my "winter" jacket at Target. In California. While I do love it, it is not East Coast appropriate. Did I mention this is meant to reach my calves? And this is the first piece? And that I will need to either knit a lining or undertake hand sewing one in? But who needs to work on a jacket when you have Exhibit C to while away the time.

Exhibit C:



One day I saw Alchemy Bamboo online for $28 a skein, not even an awfully large amount of yarn there. Who would pay $28 for a skein of bamboo when SWTC bamboo is far more practically priced? Then I touched it. For real. In a store. Let's just say the texture is unbelievable. This one I actually could finish by tomorrow. It is meant to be a shell. It is meant to be 18 degrees here tomorrow. Why don't I have any gloves this close to finished? I don't even think I could finish gloves between now and tomorrow.

I'm already starting to wonder if I could finish legwarmers tonight (and still get up and pretend to work out in the morning and get to work on time). This is how I end up with too many WIP's.

One Down, One to Go

I'd like to pretend I've never fallen victim of that one sock curse. But somewhere in my apartment, stuffed into the back of my closet no doubt beneath the one bit of laundry I always refuse to do, hides a house sock made of springy, pink Rowan Calmer. Part of me knows I’d like to find that sock. I want the yarn back. I have things I can do with it.

But I don’t want to confront the sock because if I never find it again, it’s almost as if it never happened. I don’t have to question my judgment: a house sock? It is always three hundred degrees in this apartment summer or winter. And Calmer socks are too bulky to wear outside. What was I going to do with this sock other than nail it to the wall and stare at it? Besides, I was noodling and the pattern for sock one was on a receipt or something and I think my cat ate it and I don’t remember how many stitches I cast on and I don’t know which lace stitch I used for the bulk of the sock or what size needles or . . .

Really, truly, likely I will not find the pattern again. (Yes, glove number one I am talking to you and I’m recording right now, for the record that you absolutely have to be on size four needles because I stopped working on you to cast on for Mom’s Christmas sweater. Or were you on two’s?) But I could figure out what I’d done. I could even [shudder] do a gauge swatch again. But we all know what one sock is about.

I admit it. I can’t commit. I dropped out of an MFA program one semester before completion because I despised it that much. I’ve worked my current unchallenging job for five years (without a raise, no less) because I’m terrified that I’ll go to law school and hate it and then what would I do?. You don’t drop out of law school owning people $60,000 in student loans. Besides, law school gets you a real job, not just a chance to get to be a waiter at Breadloaf so you can attend without paying. So I sit here surrounded by lawyers becoming more convinced by the day that I don’t want to be one, wondering if this is the kind of job you can do without being passionate about it. Or if you’re frustrated by the whole inefficiency that runs rampant through the field. Or what if you don’t want to work late all that often? And I still watch cartoons on the weekends so I cant work then and . . .

Dad says it’s not enough to talk about taking the LSAT’s. Well, Dad, I’ve started my second stocking.*

* In the interest of full disclosure, because a thigh-high stocking is, like, totally the length of three or four socks, Bottle reserves the right to consider a pair of socks finished even if second stocking on needles never progresses any further. Bottle further insists that in order for the seven inches of stocking currently on the needles to fit over her, err, dancer thighs, that there is so a sock's worth a knitting already there.