Baking Bliss

This morning is a beautifully chilly rainy day which is perfect for baking.  I work night shifts the next 2 nights for my weekend and I always bake cookies to bring.  Saturday morning is fabulous for baking anyway because I turn on all the cooking shows on PBS.  Those are my Saturday morning cartoons.  And I just love my kitchen helper!  She likes to insert herself between me and the counter in this little corner just in case I drop something.  The Gophers play later today so she is now wearing her doggy football jersey and she'll sit with her dad for the game.  What did we do without her?

Anniversary Outing

Dave and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary on Saturday.  Good grief, where did this year go?!  Since the first anniversary is paper, we were planning a simple night out to a restaurant and the movies with a paper admission ticket.  Well Dave brought home the goods this year!  A guy he works with gave him tickets to the Wild hockey game because he had a wedding to attend and couldn't use them.  It was so nice for once to be actually ATTENDING something when normally I am fighting traffic and crowds trying to get to and from my hospital downtown. 

It is no secret that I am not a fan of organized sports but I had a really good time.  I do like hockey, but I sit and knit while Dave watches it on the TV.  I must have been paying attention to all his instruction though because I answered his quiz questions correctly during the game.  ("Now Winnipeg has what here?"  "An extra player?"  "Yes.  And what is that called?"  "A power play?"  "Power play is correct.")

There is something too about being in a large crowd of people as they react together.  You could feel the excitement of an attempted goal and the collective despair if we missed.  I was also impressed with how well they entertained the crowd during breaks with the music and the big screens and the kiss cam, etc.  And I loved that Nordy the mascot had hockey hair!

Garden Bounty

 My In-Laws have such green thumbs.  They kept me supplied with fabulous produce all summer long!  We are very lucky that our local farmers market is just a couple blocks away where we bought some potted herbs, bagels, eggplants and cilantro this summer, but everything else has come from Dave's parents.

 It seems every time I turned around, Marianne was bringing me cucumbers, zucchinis, tomatoes, carrots and peppers.  When you have produce like that, you have to put it in something and we really enjoyed pork maifun this summer.  I thinly sliced pork chops and marinated them in Chinese sweet barbecue and Dave was in charge of grilling it.  Then you stir fry up your veggies and some fried egg with maifun noodles.

So good.  This stuff doesn't last long around here.  We get about 2 servings and 2 sack lunches out of this.

They had 10 tomato plants this year that were taller than me!  I would go and pick tomatoes by the sackful and Marianne picked them by the clothes basketful and for every beautiful red tomato you'd pick, there were 5 more green ones on the vine.  They could literally feed an army with their tomatoes.

My sister gave me a canner and tool set at my bridal shower and I finally got a chance to play with it.  I am hooked on canning!  My dear friend Brenda always talked about how she loved it because each batch was a separate concoction and you could try all different variations on a theme.  Now I know what she meant!  I canned 4 dozen pints of salsas, tomato puree and tomato sauce.  I am just sorry I didn't start earlier in the summer and now I can't wait until next year.  We are going to try a little gardening here next year too.  We are not self sufficient by any means but finally having your own home somehow makes you want to homestead your yard and garden.  I love the idea that we'll be eating and cooking our own tomatoes all through the winter.  I can't wait!

What IS that you're blocking?!?

 My niece Annika has the same birthday as my husband.  She is currently very excited about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  I have to admit, I didn't even realize they were popular again.  They have entire lines of action figures and toys and accessories and a new show on TV.  Boy am I out of it!  We asked her which one in particular she liked and what color he wore.  She favors Raphael and his color is red.  I perused Ravelry for TMNT patterns and found this combat scarf thing and whipped one up.  It is mostly stockinette stitch and so just rolled right up on itself and needed blocking, but it looked so funny on the board!

I used this pattern.  She put it right on when she opened it but she did say it itched.  I knit it out of Cascade 220 because that is all I had in the stash in the proper color.  I think it was the leftovers from the Gopher hats.  Hopefully she can actually play in it.