kimchee!
February 8, 2010
Here is my first attempt to make kimchee.
I found a recipe for kimchee in The Joy of Pickling, by Linda Ziedrich. My kimchee is a simple mixture of napa cabbage, a little bit of kale, ground hot pepper, slivered green onions, and lots of garlic and ginger. The whole mixture sits in brine for several days, until the desired sourness is obtained…
Step one is to chop and brine the cabbage overnight. So last night, I chopped my cabbage according to directions, into 2″ squares. I placed the chopped cabbage in a bowl, covered it with salt water, and placed a plate on top to keep the cabbage submerged.
This afternoon, I added the additional ingredients to the chopped and drained cabbage. Slivers of green onions, lots of garlic…
…coarsely grated and chopped ginger. I couldn’t find my smaller grater, but the chopping seemed to get most of the big bits out. I added a little extra ginger to the recipe, as I love it, especially in the winter!
I was excited to use the dried peppers that I put up last summer. In the summer I always seem to acquire more fresh hot peppers than I know what to do with. As a result, I usually end up with more dried peppers than I know what to do with. This was a perfect use for some of my lovely dried peppers. I did have to grind them into a powder, which was a little difficult, with their spiciness…
I placed the cabbage mixture into a glass jar, with a plastic bag filled with brine solution on top. Looks like I put a little too much brine into the actual kimchee…
Here is the jar, all tidied up and ready to ferment in a cool corner of my house (not a problem, as I have many).
swatch hat
February 7, 2010
I have had a bag of sport weight Koigu yarn squirreled away on the hold shelf at the store for a while, thinking that I would use it for a sweater. The color is a beautiful, deep, rusty orange (hard to photograph…), and I just love it. When my friend Emmy suggested that we make a saddle shouldered cable sweater, designed by Elizabeth Zimmerman (and her daughter Meg too?), this yarn immediately popped into my head. The pattern is a loose description for how to make the sweater, and it is strongly suggested that you knit a large gauge swatch. She even suggests knitting a gauge hat, or tube, knit in the round as the sweater is, to more accurately measure the gauge. Good plan! I had a sneaking suspicion that the yarn, even thought I loved it, wasn’t my color. Turns out the hat is perfect for my mom. So I am now shopping for a new yarn, and my mom has a new hat!
The hat is made from a combination of cable patterns, including sheepsfold and herringbone. To set off the cables, I added several purls, twisted knits, and a 2 by 2 cable. The additions to the larger cables also work to adjust the size of the finished sweater.
I knit the tube swatch on size 6, 24″ circular needles. It was a little tight working on the 24″ needles for a hat, but I wanted to use the actual needle size and length that I would use for the sweater. (16″ circular needles often have shorter needles, and I was worried that this might change my knitting.)
To close the top of the hat, I decreased dramatically over the last few rows, and threaded the final stitches through a sewing needle and pulled tight. There is still a little hole in the top of the hat, but hopefully with a little blocking it can be disguised.
At the bottom edge of the hat I picked up 90% of the stitches (9 out of every 10). I worked a knit 2 purl 2 rib over these stitches until I ran out of yarn.
Overall, the hat was a perfect swatch, to figure out how the patterns worked, how the yarn worked, how the color worked, etc. And one finished hat is the result!
hojicha pudding
February 7, 2010
Miles and Nozomi took us to a beautiful Japanese restaurant when we were in New York City last week. One of the highlights of the meal (there were many!) was a cold pudding, flavored with roasted green tea (hojicha). As we were eating the pudding, we discussed about how we could make it, and decided that it must have been made with soy milk, and that it would be nice and healthy.
Not the case. My mom asked the waiter if he could tell her what was in the pudding, and after a few minutes someone came back and told us that in the kitchen it was made with milk, cream, eggs, a little sugar at the end, and of course roasted green tea, or hojicha.
Upon further discussion, we discovered that the tea is steeped in hot milk, which is then added to cream, eggs, and sugar. We jotted everything down on a scrap of paper, and stopped at a Japanese supermarket down the street on the way home and picked up some hojicha.
When I got home from my trip, I was very excited to get started figuring out the recipe. Both Nozomi and I came up with a few similar recipes online, and I tried one today (slightly adjusted) with medium/good results.
The recipe below is very closely based on one that I copied from a website containing lots of green tea recipes.
Hojicha Pudding
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups milk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 tablespoons sugar
15 grams hojicha (toasted green tea)
Preheat oven to 320 degrees.
In a baking dish (I used a glass 9 x 13 casserole dish) place 6 little oven safe ramekins. Set aside.
In a small saucepan, steam milk, remove from heat and add hojicha. Cover with a lid and let tea steep for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, mix eggs in separate bowl and set aside. After 5 minutes, add sugar and cream to milk and tea mixture, and stir until sugar is dissolved. Pour tea mixture slowly into eggs through a strainer, whisking the eggs as you do. At this point, pour mixture through a sieve to remove any little lumps (I forgot this step…). Pour mixture evenly into 6 ramekins, and add hot water to the pan, being careful not to splash water into the ramekins. Place baking dish into oven, and bake for 20-30 minutes, or until done. It is finished when it sets up nicely. I asked my friend Mary and she said pudding should be about like pumpkin pie…
Chill and serve.
I am not completely happy yet with this recipe. For some reason, it seems a bit heavier than the version served at the restaurant, and slightly different. I don’t have a lot of experience with making puddings, so I might have to do a little research to figure out what I need to change.
socks and valentines
February 6, 2010
I started a series of socks in December for Christmas stockings, or some sort of decoration, and never managed to finish much of them. A few weeks ago, I picked up one of the red and white striped socks I did manage to complete, and decided that I could probably finish the second sock pretty quickly, and turn the socks into some sort of Valentine thing. I love excuses to finish things. They come in handy when a project needs a little more motivation to complete…
So the socks are for Valentines day, or any day that I want to wear something red, striped, warm and woolly.
The pattern is a basic sock with a traditional heel and toe. The yarn is Jawoll, and I used size 1 1/2 brittney double points. I cast on 60 stitches, and knit 8 rows of each color. (There is a red ribbed border at the top too.) For the first sock, I carried the yarn straight up the back when I switched colors.
For the second sock I twisted the yarn in back every few rows so that the carried yarn didn’t pull too tight. I am hoping that the first sock will be ok, and that the carried yarn will felt a little to the sock and not catch on toes..
I finished the toe a few times, first making a smaller bit of red, but then decided that it needed the larger showing of red to make a substantial finish.
The final product is cheery, and should be nice to wear for the rest of the winter!
living in the woods and making stuff 