*to the tune of “Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss You show us all the stash you’ve got You keep on knitting and your lap gets hot You buy us yarn, we’ll knit you sweaters You say you wanna learn how to a spin The shearing’s just begun, the carding is next You buy […]
Category Archives: Hobbies
You Know You Have Long Hair When…
You have to make sure your hair is out of the way before sitting on the toilet. Your hair can sit in your lap when you sit down. You buy barrettes and hair clips based on their ability to hold up weight rather than their appearance. You’ve ever looked at a hairnet or cage and […]
Finished!
Speaking of “getting things done,” my persistence is starting to pay off in the knitting department. I am down to only fourteen works-in-progress (WIPs). Yes, this is progress. I have severe Attention Deficit Knitting Disorder. It’s only by the skin of my teeth that I have avoided landing in the pit I found as a […]
Time to Reassess
We just spent a wonderful weekend at Michigan PaganFest with our friends. This was my second year to attend the festival, but the first time I’ve spent the whole weekend there, and the first time the rest of my family came along. My mother offered to come with us, so we were able to use […]
Sock Madness
Did you know that there is a world of competitive knitting? There is Sock Wars, a knitted version of the Assassin game where you “kill” your target by knitting and mailing them a pair of socks. This has been played online with lots of variations for a decade or more, as far as I can […]
I Made Butter
I made butter tonight. It’s not like I set out to do so. It all started with the stew. Or maybe with the grocery budget.
I tried to start a new eating plan earlier this month that required expensive materials. I did one shopping trip trying to obtain the special food, and then gave up, but I had already spent a chunk of money on it. So now at the end of the month, I’m over budget. Even though the freezer is empty and the pantry is draining, I don’t want to go to the store unless I absolutely have to. So tonight’s dinner menu was to be stew, starting with two cans of meatball stew I had in the pantry. (I think I ended up adding 2 cups of pearl barley, 2 cans of kidney beans, 1 can of baked beans, 1 can of peas, 2 cans of tomato paste, water, bay leaves, white pepper, black pepper, oregano, and garlic.)
What good is stew without bread? I wanted to make Irish soda bread, but good Irish soda bread needs buttermilk, which I didn’t have. I went to pull up the recipe for fake buttermilk (1 Tbsp vinegar then fill the cup with milk, if you’re curious). The page I found had a snip at the end to the effect of you could make your own buttermilk if you had heavy cream laying about.
Wouldn’t you know it, I had a whole quart of heavy cream that was in danger of going out of date next week that I still didn’t have a use for! So I tossed it in the mixer and turned it on. Normally when you do this, you stop when it gets all fluffy, and then you add sugar and vanilla and have whipped cream (and if you’ve only ever had Cool Whip or Redi-Whip, you have GOT to try homemade whipped cream). This time, though, I didn’t stop there. I kept going. Just leave the mixer on for 10-15 minutes. It will go past whipped cream and turn into butter. You have to scrape the sides a bit to make sure all the cream gets in. Gradually, it will start to look yellow and crumbly, and when it starts splashing, it’s done.
Now I had butter bits in buttermilk. I strained the butter in a strainer, then used a wooden spoon to knead the butter against the strainer and squeeze out the rest of the milk. The milk went into the soda bread, and then I added salt and kneaded it into the butter. The butter went on the soda bread when it was done cooking. Yay, dinner! And I still had enough butter left over to fill my butter dish for toast and things.
I’ll have to check the prices, but this could be a good way to get buttermilk when I want it, since I tend to buy a quart and then not use half of it. I got about 2.5 cups of buttermilk out of a quart of heavy whipping cream, and what looks like a pound of butter. Considering how fast we go through butter, and the price of the whipping cream, it could be cheaper this way…and definitely more fun!