Laurabelle's Blog

For a few weeks Jeff and I have been thinking about making pemmican. Last week I rendered beef fat, which I got from our regular butcher (you want to buy beef fat? we'll give it to you for free!), and yesterday we started drying beef. The recipe I have calls for brisket, so I bought [...]

Since I finished the lace shawl, I needed a new project. (Two works-in-progress aren’t enough, especially if they involve sewing-up. I dislike stitching my knitted pieces together.) Therefore, I started a steering wheel cover. The good thing is, it’s small and will be finished pretty quickly. It’s also a cable (which I like) and an [...]

A few months ago I joined Ravelry, and it has changed my knitting world. I can search for patterns and see what yarns people have used and how it looks on various body shapes. I can look up a particular yarn and see what people have done with it. And last but not least, I [...]

Yesterday Jeff and I made a rice-and-beans dish called Moors and Christians. I chose it by letting the cookbook (How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman) fall open to a random page; that method seems to have worked out excellently in this case. Moors and Christians is basically a stew of black beans, bell pepper, [...]

Thanksgiving, like most of my fall, was marked by food — as well it should be. It was just Jeff and myself for for our little celebration, since we have no family nearby and friends already had plans. But we put together our own little dinner, with Cornish game hens instead of turkey, because one [...]

Dinner tonight: Chicken Kiev Roasted asparagus Potato pancakes garnished with either applesauce or sour cream and chives Fresh baguette with garlic and herb butter

I stayed up too late last night, finishing Jeff’s new sweater. I shouldn’t have done it, but I had already gone too many days without finishing it. Besides, I was comforted (or egged on) by the knowledge that on many occasions my mother has stayed up late, finishing projects for me. The sweater was supposed [...]

A few days ago I gave you the holiday bullet points. Today you get the slide show. I knitted Christmas presents for a number of people, but I only have pictures of those I sent to Ralph and Lori. These I finished and mailed at the beginning of December, so I didn’t even see them [...]

A film every knitter should see: Gangsta Knitter. I haven’t even watched it yet (I don’t have the right codecs under Linux, so I’ll watch when I reboot to Windows), but the jpeg on the webpage is hilarious.

First I was busy with full-time work, and then I was busy with staying home (and trying not to work). Work is more or less what it has been, namely, very interesting in ways that I feel I can’t really talk about on a public blog, for various reasons. This is part of the reason [...]