Periodic reminder that keyboards with sticking keys, more often than not, need cleaning rather than tossing.
I never eat at the keyboard lest I summon the ghost of my sixth grade touch typing teacher, and yet there are definite crumbs in addition to the dust, cat hair, people hair, yarn fibers (so… much… alpaca), bits of paper, and a wasp head as a trophy of Yellowjacket Summer. It’s a wonder the keys moved at all.
So if you’re able, save some money and keep some plastic out of the landfill by prying all the keys off your sick keyboard and seeing if a cleanse cures what ails it before resorting to a replacement.
(Especially if you don’t enjoy wasting money on batteries and creating garbage just so you can type. You can now get a Bluetooth Turbo Gaming Extravaganza with mood-sensing LED backlights and custom key caps for a lower price than a primitive keyboard with a cord, so make that relic last as long as you can.)
In blanket news, the crochet portion is half done.
I love that purple stripe and keep wishing I’d used more. I have to keep reminding myself I mocked up every possible color combination and it popped the most when used the least. Maybe I can get some more of that for a future project and make it the star.
In the realm of fussy bakes, I made King Arthur Flour’s cranberry-pistachio bread with the last of my cranberry haul.
I shaped it like a baby 2-strand challah (I’m over the mess of splitting one roll in half like they did) and used 2 cups of cranberries so there would be a respectable number of cranberries in every slice but otherwise didn’t wildly deviate from their recipe. (Shocker, I know.)
If somebody you plan to serve this to will balk at green streaks in their bread, you can absolutely substitute another mild, buttery nut like almonds or cashews and get the same flavor profile without the visual drama. Pistachios really don’t have a lot going on other than “green.” (Or leave the nuts out and just have cranberry bread! RULES ARE FOR SQUARES.)
I did have to borrow a stand mixer for this one. I’ll make bread with a few tablespoons of butter in it by hand, but I’m not enough of a masochist to take on full-blown brioche manually.
Before I returned the mixer, I also snuck in a lemon pie with Italian meringue (the fully cooked, non-weepy one). Although it’s theoretically possible to gently stream sugar lava with one hand while the other beats egg whites with a hand mixer, I know the limits of my dexterity and thus have been living a meringue-free existence since selling my KitchenAid.
Everyone else who’s been living a meringue-free existence fell upon that pie like a pack of starving hyenas the moment it came out from under the broiler, so no photographic evidence of the fluffy sugar cloud.
This time last year I was up to my eyeballs in baking commissions to pay for the new laptop, and my enthusiasm for end-of-year baking hasn’t recovered. I might have apricot kolache and one cheesecake in me beyond the everyday fare, but I’ll otherwise be taking it easy in the kitchen this December.
