It’s been a fair bit below freezing all week. That seems right for winter, but is a little unusual from my experience living here. In previous years, the temperature hasn’t stayed below freezing for very long, and if it snowed (rare), it would melt the next day.
It’s snowed and “iced” twice this week, which was exciting! And because of the temperatures, it’s stuck fairly well in places that don’t get salted. We have a big empty lot next to us that has a nice wintery atmosphere.
The snow from last week. It looked heavier in person.
We walked around a big cemetery in Brooklyn last weekend (the main point of the trip was to eat Asian food in Sunset Park, but I’ve also wanted to go to the cemetery). There’s a Gothic revival entrance gate, with a huuuuge parakeet nest in the central tower.
Parakeets. Their noise gave them away before we could even see them.
We made a vegetarian version of da pan ji (chicken-potato dish) with homemade noodles! The noodle recipe is from an Asian noodle cookbook from the library, This is a book about noodles by Brendan Pang.
While visiting my parents in Austin for Thanksgiving, J and I went to a local pottery studio and gallery.
We hiked along a harrowing stroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad) to get here. So many driveways for cars to hit you at…
Compared to New York stores, the studio was shockingly large inside, like a small warehouse.
There was quite the variety of ceramic items at the store, decorative, useful, and both. I liked the following items.
The vertical lines are carved into the cup. The artist used a glaze that changes color based on the thickness of the coat, so the lines ended up a different color than the main body of the cup. I also like the particular color combo.I like the “notches” in the edge and the little diamonds removed from the side. The decoration is nice but not overwhelming, it’s just simple.J like the size of these teacups. Unfortunately they came as a set with the teapot (plus the colors are ugly!).
Usually my homemade pizza dough is low on flavor, so a master-bread-baker friend recommended using some sort of pre-ferment (discussion of different types). I found an online recipe linked in the preferment article. The author seemed to know what they were talking about and it turned out super well!
Mushroom, almost-caramelized onion goo, blue cheese, mozzarella, and olive oil. Soooo good! The middle was soft without soggy, and chewy. The crust was crisp (almost cracker-like. I rolled the dough a little too thin). The toppings were well-chosen, by sibling C.
Pizza dough
Poolish (preferment)
100 g flour
100 g/mL water
0.3 g yeast
Dough
250 g flour
120 g/mL water
8 g salt
5 g yeast
Mix poolish ingredients. Leave at room temp ~8 hours. If rising longer, can decrease yeast (0.2 g for 12 hour rise, 0.1 g for 16 hours).
Mix poolish with dough ingredients. Knead (7 min with stand mixer, 10-15 min by hand).
Divide dough into four portions and shape each into a ball. Oil and cover. Let rise 1 hour.
Flour hands, work surface, and dough balls. Press each flat, and stretch or roll into a circle 10 in in diameter.
Lightly top and bake 6 min at around 600°F.
If using a pizza stone (highly recommended), preheat the oven and stone 45 min before you baking the pizzas. The oven should be set to it’s highest temperature (around 550-600°F).
If you don’t have a pizza stone, I have a workaround that seems to work well.
Right before you want to bake the pizzas, when you start preheating the oven, heat a large cast iron skillet on the stove until very hot. Put it in the oven upside down. The thick bottom will act similarly to a pizza stone, but heating it on the stove is faster than heating in the oven.
Modelled after a Marshall Farm-to-Pizza flavor, this has tomato (turns out the liquid from canned diced tomatoes works well as a “sauce”), mushroom, Brussels sprout shreds, garlic, mozzarella, and spicy pepper. Officially it was supposed to have parmesan also, but we didn’t add that.
We made this on the recent very cold day. It was 24° in the afternoon and around 10° in the morning.
Sibling C and I have been working on the red and white bowtie quilt project. I finally finished sewing all the seams back together (although a second look-through showed that my initial standard for “good” may have been too low).
I assembled the back panel from some coordinating and some scrap fabrics. The brown floral fabric I mentioned in the last post is actually a large amount (maybe enough to make a dress), so I didn’t want to use it if possible. The tradeoff is that I had to do more piecing.
Planned layout for back. The big purple/green block is folded in half here, so the back would actually be larger. The blue and white and blue speckled-y fabrics are hand-dyed by me with indigo and turmeric using shibori techniques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibori)!The “batting”
I bought a lovely but worn hand-sewn quilt from eBay to use as filling for this new quilt. Reusing an old quilt like this used to be more common, when fabric and batting was more valuable. Old blankets or sheets, for a lightweight quilt, can be used as well. Search on eBay using the keyword “damage” or “damaged” to find good quilt or blanket candidates.
The old quilt needed some repairs to make it useable. Sibling C and I sewed up that big rip and padded thin areas with scraps of cotton batting.
Sandwiched all the layers (back, batting, and top), safety-pinned together, and rolled up around some PVC pipes.
We’re in the quilting stage right now. The quilting pattern is pretty simple, just outlining the red bowties.
Since this quilt is pretty large (maybe 70″ x 78″) we used a special setup to get the excess fabric out of the way when working on it.
I received a surprise sewing request from my dad. He wanted a replacement curtain for the bathroom in his RV. The old one was falling apart — probably rotten from the sun. The fabric was an upholstery burlap with an interfacing layer for stiffness.
We measured the dimensions (essentially a square with some topstitching) and I duped it using surprisingly well-matched fabric from Austin Creative Reuse . The fabric was only $5.50!
Installed, it’s essentially indistinguishable from the old curtain and from the old flourishes (bits with trim) that remain.
I got some free paperwhites to beautify my garden area with. I hope the obvious flowers will discourage owners from letting their dogs romp in the garden.
