For what ails ye.

My husband pointed out to me not long ago, that I always get sick in March. I thought about it and realized Heck, he is right.

So, in keeping with my annual lemon and honey ritual, I got sick last Tuesday. Just a head cold, nothing major, but it does knock the stuffing out of one. I hate that glue-mouth I have on waking.

I have a magic potion which I invented to treat my annual cold, and I'm sharing it with you now.

1 organic orange
2 organic lemons
2-4 T honey
2" organic ginger root

Scrub the citrus well with a brush. Dry on a towel, then zest finely over a small saucepan. Halve and juice the citrus into the pan, without straining. (You want all those crazy bits of solids...that's the magic part.) Peel the ginger (scrape with a spoon works well, or use a little extra ginger and just slice off with a knife. You'll lose more but it's faster.) and grate it into the pot. Throw that honey in there, and heat it to a low simmer. (Don't boil it - too much heat kills Vitamin C.) Test it for sweetness -- this is a super powerful mixture and it can be pretty potent. You might need more honey!

Drink it while hot, stirring occasionally so you don't end up with a quarter cup of pulp and zest to eat at the end. Then, have a nap and wake up feeling a little better! Repeat at least twice a day, though 3-4 is better. (The nap, too - repeat the nap.) It's surprising how many people have said to me, "Oh, you have a cold?! Take some Tylenol and then at least you can get on with your life!" I recoil visibly - when I am sick, I don't want to get on with my life. That's the point of being sick - a virus takes you down because you won't go down voluntarily, and your body has had enough of getting on with things, and wishes to be laid down on the sofa for a few days with a heavy blanket, the ringer off, and a cup of magic potion.

You can put more citrus in there if you like: I use whatever I have and often end up with a grapefruit or two as well, though for no good reason I don't use the peel from those. You can also throw some stick cinnamon in, if you like - cinnamon is wonderful for respiration.


Yum!

(Probably not too good if you have diabetes, though.)

Highest, Hottest

Today I was remembering the brief run of daily posts I put up at the end of last year, and how easy it felt to post every day. There weren't necessarily a lot of comments, but even without the dialogue it was an interesting process.

We've been keeping really busy this summer, with lots of barn time and play dates. The weather has been spectacular, so we're going to try camping soon. We won't go for long - three nights or so - but I think it will do Avery's blood sugar a lot of good to spend a few days running around outside. 

This picture was meant to be a lot more interesting, but the shutter speed on my phone camera let me down again.

I'm working on some projects for Christmas. I've got a gansey going - have just divided for the armholes. It will be a vest rather than a full sweater, because the recipient gets hot easily and doesn't like sleeves too much. I'm knitting it on 2.5 mm needles so it felt a bit slow at first, but really it has progressed quickly. Here is the swatch.

And over the past six months I have been making ice cream. I'm disproportionately obsessed with it. I literally lie awake nights dreaming up new flavours. Like I have a plan for a truly stunning and completely original flavour, which I can't even share with you because I'm hoping to get rich off of it someday. But here is my margarita ice cream - lime, salt, and tequila.

Carolyn, you remarked that Canadians measure blood sugar differently. You're quite right. A U.S. blood glucose number is (randomly) 18 times a UK or Canadian number. So when Avery was running between 17 and 22 (UK or Canadian) for four days, in the US she'd have measured at between 306 and 396.

It's nice to be talking to everyone again!

Well, that was a bust.

Hi Susie!
The run, you ask? Going NOWHERE. My friend dropped out, then my daughter dropped out, and then I'm afraid my MOJO dropped out.

I'm going to carry on with the training, but due to all the waiting around for schedules to mesh, I am nowhere near ready to run 10K on pavement, and we're only four weeks from the race. I'll just have to give it my best shot and try again next year.

It's Easter Sunday tomorrow. My parents are coming over for dinner, so I have some cleaning to do. I hate cooking a big feasty meal in a messy house.

Last Wednesday my youngest daughter turned 9 years old. What?!?! Sigh. Tomorrow afternoon sometime I should be about eighty, and wondering what the heck happened.

Here's the cake I made her:

I've never worked with fondant before - it was surprisingly simple, and the finished product is disproportionately impressive. Win!

Nigellissima!

Everybody knows I love Nigella Lawson. I have her new book, Nigellissima, her tribute to Italian food. It's a great book - lots of flexible options and "inspired by"-type dishes.

I haven't read it quite cover to cover, but nearly. I sat on the sofa the other night with a huge glass of Shiraz, flipping through the recipes, and wishing I could make her macaroni and cheese without having to get up and walk into the kitchen. The book, like all her other ones, makes me feel languid and decadent.

Nigella's books are usually hefty, filled to the brim with delicious recipes and chatty notes. Nigellissima, however, is uncharacteristically slender and understated. Much like Nigella herself, if the internet is to be believed. I'm hoping she doesn't go whittling herself even further - she looks great, of course, but I don't trust thin cooks. The thing I've always loved about her was her sublime unconcern with her weight, and her perfect - neither defiant nor apologetic - acceptance of her luscious figure. "Bosomy and bottomy", to use her words. If her next book is a volume of slenderizing recipes involving things like flax and steamed skinless chicken breasts, she will get a strongly-worded letter from me.

I've made two dinners from this book so far. One was a finger-licking, chin-dribbling feast of "chicken under a brick" - or 'bricken', as I'm calling it. This was unbelievably, smoothly, voluptuously delicious (my fingers just typed "volumptuously" twice, and I liked it both times). It's a whole chicken, spatchchocked (cut through the backbone and laid flat on a baking sheet), marinated in various spices and unguents (I have a small jar of preserved, salted lemons that really came into its own here), and then roasted hot and fast under a foil-wrapped brick. Shockingly good: the only thing I had to complain about is that the damn brick put paid to the Bakelite handle on my saute pan, which I unthinkingly used to lift the whole shebang out of the oven. It was just a few pounds too much, I guess, although my husband pointed out that now, at least, the pan fits into the dishwasher a lot better.

The second meal was a true feast. It was a whole leg of lamb, deboned, butterflied, and dressed with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, slivered garlic, sea salt, bay and rosemary (my addition). It, too, had a hot, fast roast (425 for about a half hour) and a fair bit of resting time. The only problem with THIS meal was that I didn't have enough people around my table to do justice to a whole leg of lamb. Mmm, delicious.

My favourite thing about the book is the way Nigella does NOT use a bunch of chi chi Italian names for the dishes. She uses good old English, which keeps the confusion to a minimum.

The low-down:
- LOTS of meat dishes in this book.
- And a LOT of seafood. Yerch. I am allergic to shellfish and I will end up cruising right on by huge sections
- Delicious-looking desserts
- Nigella's comfy, confidential food-writing turns up in spades and makes the whole thing worthwhile. 

My score - 4 out of 5. And to be fair I'm only deducting a star because a) there is way too much shellfish, which is less Nigella's problem than Italy's problem; and b) Nigella has gone a bit diet-ey.

Mangia!

Hollan-dazed

Well, since I'm sure you're all dying to hear my opinion of Robert Louis Stevenson, "Kidnapped" was better than "Treasure Island".

And now, on to cooking!

Guess what I made myself for brunch today? (Not just myself - my Mum came over.) Eggs Benedict! It's one of my go-to, out-for-breakfast meals, but I have always been too intimidated to try the homemade Hollandaise. Turns out, that's ridiculous - it's easy. Just labour-intensive (my right arm was bright red and aching from twenty minutes of whisking), and you have to pay attention to what you're doing.

Anyway, it was completely divine. A tad salty, but that's because I had no unsalted butter (bad, bad). Sourdough English muffins, cornmeal-rolled back bacon, soft-poached eggies, and my delicious buttery, eggy, lemony Hollandaise.

DEAD.

IN HEAVEN.

GREAT read!

I have just finished "Kidnapped", by Robert Louis Stevenson. What a great book! I'm surprised I've never read it, but I guess that just means I get to enjoy it NOW, instead of THEN.

The volume I bought also contains "Treasure Island", which I read, abridged, as a child. I don't even know if I finished it, so I'm pleased that I've got some more pleasant surprises in store!

Cooking from Nigella Lawson's new book 'Nigellissima" tonight. It's Mr HSB's birthday tomorrow and since he has to work tomorrow evening, I'm making him "butterflied leg of lamb with balsamic vinegar" tonight. I made some lovely roasted vegetables, and am just waiting on the last few minutes of scorching oven time for the meat...I can smell the little lamby-kins already! Heaven.

Happy Birthday to my sister-in-law Ames, for whom I would cook all manner of legs of lamb, if only she were here. Mwah! Mwah! Love you.

Braids, buns.

I finally tried the Latvian braid from the Lizbeth Upitis book…it turned out pretty well.

And doesn’t my breakfast look good?

Potager

I had a bad day today. But I am making a pot of soup for supper: turkey vegetable noodle, a consolation. Biscuits will happen later, and these two things together are almost certainly going to make the world right again.

I would like to have had some homemade bread with it, but maybe that will be for tomorrow. There’ll be leftover soup, of course, and it’s nice to know lunch is taken care of. I do have to remember to bash up the dough tonight, though.

I was poking through my spice cupboard looking for little glass jars of dried whatnot for the soup, when I realised that back in May, I invested in some 2” pots of various things…

what need have I of dried herbs in July? Forethought provides.

Lovage, winter savoury, English thyme, rosemary, purple sage.

Thanks Mum for planting the bush beans.

___________________________________

I keep forgetting to tell you about an absolutely charming series I discovered: they are by Shire Books. Wonderfully no-nonsense books of information about quite specific subjects, they are replete with history and facts, and amazingly concise. I have “Baking and Bakeries”and “Spinning and Spinning Wheels”, but I long to get “The Woollen Industry”, “Flax and Linen”, “Markets and Marketplaces of Britain”, “Evacuees of the Second World War”……oh, just all of them. I’m trying to scheme how I could get the government to pay for them, seeing as they would be for school.

Spinning and Spinning Wheels, by Eliza Leadbetter: from why wool must be spun, to how to work a spindle, to how to comb flax, to what a niddy-noddy is for.

Baking and Bakeries, by H G Muller: from Pompeii to Pillsbury, a fascinating look at the staff of life. This book is so cool – did you know that, in the 1830s, the main cause of lead poisoning was bread baked in an oven fired with old door and window frames painted with white lead paint? Or that the bread of the early 19th century might contain large amounts of plaster of Paris, white clay, alum, copper sulphate and bone dust?

Anyway, if you get a chance to take a look at this line, do pick it up. I think they’ve just released “Beach Huts and Bathing Machines” and “The Slave Trade”.

Finding out is so fun.

Read 'em and eat.

Erudite Mondays at HalfSoled Boots

(Whassamatter, don't you know what day it is?)

Volume 7, Number 2, 3, and 4

Twas the week before Christmas and all through the kitchen

I was cooking and baking and moanin' and bitchin'

Oh, wait......I think somebody already wrote that poem.

Today I'm showing you three cookbooks I love. 'Tis the season for rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands floury, lads, so you should take a look at these.

First off is The Gingerbread Architect. FANTASTIC book for us gingerbread divas...even though this year it looks like I'll be reading about it more than actually doing it. Time, unlike my to-do list, grows short.

The Gingerbread Architect is a collaboration between a pastry chef and an architect, who present twelve designs for awe-inspiring gingerbread houses. The designs are all based on American architecture, and each includes a set of blueprints and exhaustive directions. There is an Antebellum Plantation house, a Cape Cod house, a Tudor Revival house, and my personal favourite, the Urban Brownstone. (It reminds me of Lizbon.)

The authors give all kinds of interesting tips on gingerbread house construction, from tinting the mortar icing brown (HOW COME I DIDN'T THINK OF THAT) to how to light your house from the inside. Get an eyeful of these photos, and if you have a gingerbread artist in your family, think about this book for a Christmas gift.

It's my photograph, not the book's, that is askew.

Next up: The Complete Canadian Living Baking Book. The author, Elizabeth Baird, is the no-nonsense Granny (or maybe mother-in-law) of every single Canadian. She urges you to try your hand at yeast bread, braiding a festive challah, weaving a lattice-top pie crust, and complicated pastries. She breezily states that Canadians are the best home bakers in the world - and makes a pretty good case for it, too - and I can imagine her waving a dismissive hand at anyone who tries to claim that, say, the Scandinavians are also very good.

Elizabeth Baird is the fondly stern Granny of my heart, for sure. She makes me want to grab her and kiss her on the top of her head, just to show her that I'm taller than she is. She's smack me one, though - she's feisty.

Mwah! Mwah mwah!!

The one thing about this book that is quite hilarious is the advice she includes, such as, in regard to Turtle Bars, "...it's hard to stop at one, but you must." Then there's this finger-shake, "a small piece of this is totally satisfying". One wonders whether Elizabeth Baird is a little too concerned that we watch our figures. On another page, though, she says "don't deprive yourself of whipped cream on this cake", so I guess she loves us after all.

I want Granny to make this Plum Sour Cream Kuchen for me.

I think that if you wanted to teach yourself how to bake, or simply needed to improve your skills with an oven, you could do no better than to get this book. I'm so glad I have it, if only because it is completely stuffed with recipes, and with this one acquisition I have probably multiplied my recipe collection by about forty times. I've been thinking it over, and I believe Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess is the only baking book I value more...I'm so sorry, Granny....please don't hit me.

Which brings me to Nigella's new Christmas book. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, they tell me, and this book is a case in point. Nobody but me has even been allowed to look through it since I got it. I haven't finished feasting my eyes on the beautiful pictures yet, never mind the wry, fondly-written text and the mouth-watering recipes.

Maple Cheesecake, people, MAPLE FREAKING CHEESECAKE.

Nigella is the Elizabeth Zimmermann of cooking. She is with you in spirit, leaning over your shoulder and pointing out things in her book, or in your food, or in your life in general, that you might have overlooked. Her style of writing is charmingly conversational and utterly appealing. She is my favourite cookbook author by far, partly because one can read her books from cover to cover as if they were fiction or, more accurately, a letter from a friend. It makes it so easy to remember what's in her books, as well as making it much more likely that I'll try a recipe when she has chatted me up about it.

Mince pies - haute cuisine, only appreciated by the truly haute. Such as myself.

As to Christmas, Nigella's philosophy is that a certain amount of fuss and bother is necessary and inevitable for us to feel that a celebration is taking place, at all. She does give heaps of advice on practical things like timetables though, to minimize the Christmas kitchen-angst.

See the caption on the mug?

Generally speaking, her approach to food is unfussy and prosaic, very taste-based - I find her recipes fairly reliable. The cakes I don't care for, being a North American - British cakes tend to be dry for my taste. Everything else, though - very keen. I can particularly recommend her glorious roast potato recipe, which involves goose fat and butter and is what the angels eat cold out of heaven's fridge.

Oh roast potatoes how I love thee.

Nigella Christmas is a lovely book. It is packed with good advice and chatty writing, and also looks great on my coffee table. It has joined Domestic Goddess, Feast, and Nigella Express on the bookshelf, and is a wonderful addition to my collection.

Now I'm hungry, so I'm going to go bake something. After all - we Canadians are good at that.

Well Begun is Half Done

We Westerners tend to live about, what, 70 years? Well tomorrow I am officially half done. I am thirty-five, folks, and All That.

I spent this afternoon making myself a cake. It's lovely, my favourite cake recipe. You make a more-or-less standard white, butter-based cake, only without the eggs and with a teaspoon of almond extract. Then you beat four egg whites to soft peaks and then beat them into the cake batter. It makes a deliciously smooth and tender cake, delicately scented and so very moreish.


Meringue

In addition to the cake, I'm giving myself a present. It's a good one - I have decided on one internet-free week. The week starts tomorrow night, the night of my birthday. I'll wait until the experiment is over before I explain the thought behind it - although I'm sure you know exactly what it is, because you are probably also telling yourself, "I spend way too much time on the damned Internet".

And one more bit of business before I bid you farewell - I am having a birthday bash on Saturday night at my house. Women only. You're invited - I will be providing the drink but I don't want to have to cook so bring appetizers if you can, girls, unless you are also stressed and busy, in which case skip it and just show up. Mr Half Soled and the little Half Soleds (Quarter-Soleds?) will be out of the house all night, too, so if you find yourself a little more well-to-go than you expected, you can crash here.

And for all of you who will be sadly unable to get flights in time to come to my birthday party, I'll see YOU next Friday.

Ta ta!

---------------------------
Edit: By request of my knitting group, I am posting the rules for my upcoming unplug. I won't be using a web browser at all for a week. No blog posting, no blog reading, no Facebook, no Google, no Yahoo. (So don't write to that sidebar address unless it's profoundly non-urgent.) I will be checking my regular email, though, because people LEGITIMATELY communicate with me that way, and if I didn't open Outlook I would have no idea when my library books are due.

At the end of the week I hope to have a deep, thoughtful post full of inner peace and tranquillity, and observations about abundance of spare time. This peace and tranquillity will have come out of my hermit-like separation from the outer world. A hermit with email, that is.

Every Freaking Penny

I think I made a wise investment decision last week - I used $200 from my dwindling ICBC settlement to buy this:



an Italian pizza oven.

There is an element in the lid of the oven, and a pizza stone set into the base. You preheat it for ten minutes while rolling your dough

and adding your toppings

then you use the wooden paddles to lift the pizza onto the stone and close the lid.

FOUR MINUTES LATER it's lunchtime.

Mr HalfSoledBoots thinks - and I'm sure others would agree - that I'm insane for spending two hundred dollars on this but I assure you, it was worth it. Blazing hot, perfectly cooked, the crust crispy and thin, the flavours intense...(and as an added bonus, it uses much less power than the conventional oven, heats hotter, and cooks quicker). I'm going to have fun with this appliance.

There's a pub nearby that sells an insanely good pizza with pesto, chicken breast and feta, and I think I'll try that next, maybe with some artichoke hearts. But I'm interested in other combinations that might not occur to me (as you can see above, I opted for The Usual on my first trial), so if you have a favourite pizza, let me know what it is.

Specifically speaking....

The days, they do go by. Here it is Messy Tuesday again, and I almost forgot to chronicle my slatternly ways.

I realised, when reading over last week's post, that you could probably put together a documentary just using the material from my Messy Tuesday posts. What I mean by that is, I am giving way too much detail.

I present to you the new, streamlined Messy Tuesday post.

Here's the mess:

it's my coffee table. This has been here for at least six weeks. It's an old mess - a comfortable mess. The kind of mess that thumps its tail on the hearthrug when you get home. I'm rather fond of it.

And here's what I did instead of cleaning it up:

which got me these,

which were delicious.

And they say homeschoolers are lazy.

So just to give you an example of what the BC government wants to know (i.e., wants me to demonstrate on paper) about the effectiveness of my daughter's education, get an eyeful of this. These are just a few outcomes, by the way, in one area (of 12) of one subject - specifically, Language Arts: Writing and Responding, Purposes. (There are other outcomes in this area, and twelve areas in the subject. And there are eight subjects.)

create imaginative writing and representations, often modelled on those they have read, heard, or viewed, featuring - ideas represented through sentences and images that generally connect to a topic - developing sentence fluency by using simple sentences, dialogue, phrases, and poetic language - developing word choice by attempting to use new and descriptive words - developing voice by showing some evidence of individuality - an organization that generally follows a form presented or modelled by the teacher; stories include a beginning, middle, and end


create straightforward informational writing and representations, using prompts to elicit ideas and knowledge, featuring - ideas represented through words, sentences, and images that connect to a topic - developing sentence fluency by using simple sentences, patterns, labels, and captions - developing word choice by beginning to use content-specific vocabulary and some detail - developing voice by showing how they think and feel about a topic - an organization that follows a form modelled by the teacher, such as a list, web, chart, cluster, or other graphic organizer

create straightforward personal writing and representations that express simple ideas, feelings, likes, and dislikes, featuring - ideas represented through words, sentences, and images that connect to a topic - developing sentence fluency by using simple sentences that relate to each other - developing word choice by attempting to use descriptive words and interesting details - developing voice by showing some evidence of individuality - an organization that follows a form or text presented or modelled by the teacher, such as a list, card, or letter



Okay, first of all? Judging by the criteria above, the asshats who wrote these outcomes don't even have a Grade One education, because to finish Grade One you apparently have to have "sentence fluency", and use "straightforward information writing". Neither of those things are apparent in the outcomes as listed above: therefore, or as they used to say back in Clearihue B, quod erat demonstrandum, they must not have finished Grade One.


Second, SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME. My brain hurts from devising worksheets targetted at satisfying multiple outcomes for eight subjects. I've been at it all day, and off-and-on for the last three days, on very little sleep. My little one is sick and is spending half the night coughing and whimpering.


Third, want to see what I had for dinner last night? (Mr HalfsoledBoots had Mini Wheats and the kids had homemade macaroni and cheese.)






I firmly believe there is no trouble so great that it cannot be helped - however slightly - by a piccolo of Henckell. The cool round grapes, Saltspring Island garlic-rosemary chevre, roasted onion & garlic jam, and fresh baguette didn't hurt either.



Anyway, back to being the principal, the teacher, the janitor, the librarian, the burly woman with a whistle who runs PE, the school nurse, the Board, and the Parent Advisory Council. See you on the other side.

The Ghost of Christmas Past Probably Died of Salmonella Poisoning.

I got an email request today for help with a Wassail recipe. I have quite a collection of these, and in perusing them for this friend-of-a-friend, I found some seriously strange and wonderful holiday libations. This one is from my 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, which vaunts itself on the flyleaf thusly:

The Savoy Cocktail Book
Being a
compendium of
Cocktails
Sours
Flips
Toddies
Coolers
Smashes
Daisies
Highballs
Egg Noggs
Tom Collins
Sangarees
Punches
Cobblers
Rickeys
Slings
Fizzes
Juleps, Shrubs
Frappe, Fixes and Cups.

Now that....THAT sounds promising.

So, without further ado,

Tom and Jerry Punch
Thoroughly beat up yolks of 12 eggs.
Thoroughly beat up whites of 12 eggs.
Thoroughly mix the two together adding
1 tablespoonful of
powdered sugar to each egg.

Thoroughly mix the three ingredients together. Use large punch bowl. Keep stirring so that sugar will not settle on bottom of bowl. Use medium-size stem glass, china mug with handle or small tea-cup. Put a tablespoonsful [sic] of batter in each cup. Add 1/2 measure Brandy and 1/2 measure Rum. Fill with absolutely boiling water. Sprinkle nutmeg on top. Serve with spoon.


So, who's coming over?! Tom and Jerries, my place, Friday night. Complimentary trip to the ER early Saturday morning - we'll rent a van.

Now I Feel A Bit Sick

Birthday highlights! (Long, picture-heavy post.)


It began (very, very late due to all the lovely phone calls pouring in) with a friendly scrambled egg sandwich with bits of ham and cheese.

Then I made myself the "Butterscotch Layer Cake" I've been wanting to try for years, since I was first given Nigella's "How To Be A Domestic Goddess". The first step is making the caramel, which I have never done before. They mean it when they say you're going for burnt...here is step 1.

And then here is step 2 - you wait til it's golden brown (it happens kind of suddenly, and there is SMOKE rising here, making your eyes water) then take off heat and beat in a cup of whipping cream.

Nothin' wrong with THAT.


Batter in tin (and this batter was so silky and gorgeous I'm surprised my kids, with their ardent beater-lickage, allowed me to cook any of it).

Pictures of the icing-in-progress didn't turn out, but let me tell you how it's made. You take 400g (!!!) of soft cream cheese, beat it to a voluptuous smoothness, then pour in 250 ml of the caramel, and beat it again: beat it but good. You're going for 1890's-English-headmistress here. Then you Jackson-Pollock the remaining caramel over top.


In this book Nigella uses the phrase "ramshackle" a fair bit to describe her style of presentation. It seems so much more honest than faffing around trying to neaten everything up. So I went with ramshackle for the finished product. Note the cake patch.

Among other small presents, my children performed a little ballet for me. "Show me how long your neck is!"

And you gotta love the Ed Grimley tights. I guess they're comfier that way...

Mid-afternoon, the phone rang (again) and it was the movie store up the street, telling me that I hadn't rented in a while, so they were offering me a free movie. I exclaimed happily "Hey, great! It's my birthday today!" and the girl said "Well in that case you can have TWO free movies!"


I had a momentary setback when the postie dropped off a lumpy, misshapen squashy packet in a plastic bag printed with this message:

Oh yes. It was the ill-fated Sockapalooza socks, and their accompanying goodwill offerings from me to my Danish pal. The goodwill offerings had been monumentally abused in shipping from here to Denmark and back again, and there was loose tea scattered everywhere, even coming out the corners of the bubble envelope I had used. I opened it gingerly to find this:

The tea was almost a write off, though I did funnel it into a tin with plans to (cautiously) drink it later. The chocolate was pulverized into a fine powder, and is almost irredeemable. The candles, besides being coated in a crusty layer of stuck-on tea leaves, were broken into several pieces. The maple-leaf cookie cutter looked more like the bat signal:

But I was able to bend it back into its intended shape.

The letter and postcard were dogeared and lightly perfumed with tea (quite pleasant). They are the only things that will travel back to Denmark with the apparently unharmed socks.

The last thing I did on my birthday was finish off this cute little purse, which I knitted the other day with my old swatch ball of Patons SWS in Natural Geranium. I tried i-cord for a strap, but found I loathe i-cord with every fibre of my being. I don't care what people say, it just doesn't turn out right. Loose in the back, tight in the front, time-consuming. Instead I crocheted about a 6 meter chain, then cut it in thirds and braided the chains together, knotting the ends. Voila, a cute (and quick) strap.

So, a day well spent. To crown the whole thing, I got to spend the last hour, after the kids were sleeping, exploring Virtual Yarns again. My so-generous mother-in-law sent me a card with a CHEQUE inside (oh, the thrill!) which may enable me to finally buy the Rheingold kit. I have to make a careful decision, though - I have a few other options which sorely tempt me. But now I know she reads the blog (Hi Mom!) so I might have to stop mentioning things like this and this.