• So at the gentle nudging of a member of the Mid Ohio Knitting guild I created an event page on Ravelry for Sticks N Stitches. I can’t believe I forgot to do that! You can find the page here. That should be a much more effective way for me to get an idea of attendance levels.
• I have a napping boy and dog on the couch. It’s pretty cute.
• Karaoke is in store tonight to amuse the Iowan who is in town for the holidays.
• I also need to set about looking at stitch dictionaries but I am feeling rather lazy.
• Ravelry has new sorting features for stash yarns. I love it. I also love looking at my stash by color because well for some strange reason I just love my color sense! Shocking I am sure Not to mention all the awesome yellows I found recently are all at the top of my page saying “hello good morning it’s a beautiful cheery day!”
• I managed to locate the recipe for dinner rolls for Thanksgiving dinner Thursday at the in-laws. They look so delicious. (the rolls not my in-laws!)
• There are 6 completed repeats on the Christmas knitting I am working on. I think there may be 15 repeats total. We shall see. I am only knitting until I run out of yarn. I would like to get this finished this week. Thankfully there will be some car trips and oh that’s right a four day weekend!!!
• I have potentially 3 more knitting projects and a crochet project to be done before Christmas. Anyone taking bets on whether I will finish?
• The boy made dinner tonight. Potato and double corn chowder in bread bowls. It was awesome. Oh and he went to the grocery store and bought me yummy juice. Win!
• On that note I need to wake those two up so we can go to karaoke.

In HS I was friends with a girl whose father owned a dairy farm. Whenever I went to visit her I would always have a tall glass of the fresh cow milk. Lately I have really been wanting to find some more of that type of milk. I was told if I wandered over to a Farmers’ Market I should be able to find some and low and behold I did. Snowville Creamery from Meigs county was there with whole milk that had been milked on Thursday. Yum! Of course after buying a half gallon the boy reminded me that we had a full gallon at home that needed to not go to waste. As soon as we got home I set to work looking up recipes that use a good bit of milk on a new site that I rather like. We also started making the innards for Chicken Pot Pie so we would have an easy meal for this week. I had another friend from HS whose mother would spend Sunday mornings cooking up meals for the week for her family. Not only did her house always smell awesome on Sundays but I always got a good filling of yummy food. Basically this is how Saturday ended up for me. First was the chicken pot pie innards and cooking up the steak salad we had for lunch. Then the boy went to take a nap (he’d had a rough night of sleep the night before) and I began making all the foods I had found on the website and in my recipe index.

Pioneer Woman’s Cinnamon Rolls

Pioneer Woman’s Blackberry Cobbler

Erika’s Peanut Butter Cup Brownie Bottom Cheesecake

When the boy woke up from his nap I wouldn’t tell him what I was making but I did drag him with me to the grocery store to buy the missing ingredients. It was fun watching him try to guess what each thing was as it was being created. The cinnamon roll batch was so huge that he couldn’t figure out why I had a whole stock pot full of rising dough. (Note to Self, cut PW’s recipes in half more often! I am not feeding a ranch full of people…) We sliced up half a batch and froze 24 cinnamon rolls for later and laid out another 20 to cook up Sunday morning. We then rolled up the second half of the batch and cut it into 3 logs which we then froze. My parents have claimed one of those three logs. We will probably toss another log to his parents. In all fairness the recipe did say it would make 7 pans of cinnamon rolls…that number just didn’t really sink in with me.

The Blackberry Cobbler he suspected to be Sugar Pie. I had never heard of it but apparently it is a food from the Depression era. When one didn’t have enough money to buy fancy desserts you could use sugar to make a pie and still have dessert. The cobbler was good, his dad will be coming over to get a slice before it is all gone.

Oh and the cheesecake, well considering the ingredients that went into it, he just thought it was a heart attack. We refrigerated the cheesecake overnight and decorated it Sunday morning before my parents came over for lunch. If I were to make it again I would make some definite changes to the recipe. For starters I would remember the chocolate layer in the middle and then halve the filling. The amounts in the recipe really are too much for a standard spring form pan and I don’t have another to put the leftovers in. Oh and it is very rich. Everyone had a bit of trouble finishing their slices especially the boy who grabbed his standard size slice even after being told he wouldn’t really want that much!

I can’t tell you the last time I unexpectedly spent the entire day in a kitchen cooking and baking. It was rather fun but boy was I tired round about 9pm. Oh and we also made dinner in the middle of this. Cornish hens over rice with a pomegranate sauce. Yum!

Pictures of the foodage:

[Show as slideshow]

Not much going on, on the knitting front as I have been spending the after hours doing more work. Did I mention we were busy? I am really hoping that I find time to get to the wool shop before I leave but it’s looking more and more like that won’t happen. Ahh well. There’s always next time. (Hopefully there is a next time!)

Wanna see our yummy dinner?

Chowder cooking, lobster meat steaming

Lobstah meat for the chowdah.

Lobstah meat plain

The boy rescuing the meat from the shell

Fox Run Port purchased during our trip through the Finger Lakes

A complete meal, bowl of chowdah, fresh lobstah, a biscuit and a glass of port.

I surprised myself with how much I really enjoyed the port. It also gave me a bit of a kick. I wasn’t expecting that. The bottle had enough for a glass for each of us and the 2 tbsp we needed for the chowder. Perfect portion.

Tonight the boy and I whipped up the tuna steaks from a recipe I have been wanting to try. The trouble with living in Central Ohio is that I wasn’t sure where to go to get fresh tuna steaks and I wasn’t really willing to risk our health by getting not so fresh fish. The tuna cooked up wonderfully and has been added to our “to make again list.”

The boy pan searing the tuna steaks.

Tuna steak rare to medium rare

This just looks so scrumptious to me.

After making the tuna we decided to partially cook the lobsters so that we wouldn’t have to find a place for them to live until we are ready to cook with them on Friday. We found instructions online and nervously went about placing them in the pot. Thankfully there was no screaming.

The lobsters hanging in the cooler.

Alas, one lobster did try to get away and squirmed out of the tong’s grasp landing on our stove. We managed to wrestle him into the pot though. Now they are relaxing in the refrigerator until I can make the lobster chowder and lobster tail on Friday. Mmmm. The stuffed clams will be tomorrow’s dinner.  We have to get all this fresh seafood eaten up before the boy leaves for Japan on Sunday. (Anyone else jealous that he gets to go to Japan?)