ETA: Neflix put Nimona up on YouTube until February 26. Now everybody can watch the Oscar-nominee that Disney tried to kill because it’s full of graphic sex—wait, sources on the ground are telling me there’s zero porn and bigots just don’t like movies overtly about compassion and acceptance in the setting of religious zealotry to include gay people. Anyhoo, I thought it was fun, until it made me cry, which is exactly how I like my fun.
Currently reading: for my speech therapy endurance runs, Sword and Pen, the fifth and final book in Rachel Caine’s Great Library series. It’s been several years since I read the previous book (she was incredibly kind to me at a writer thing once upon a time, and based on that single interaction, her death hit me hard), but I slipped right back into what’s going on and who everybody is with no problem because every character is distinct and the plot is memorable. She knew her stuff.
And otherwise, Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher, in which a socially awkward and resourceful (adult) princess recruits a dust-wife, a fairy godmother, and a muscular fugitive to kill the prince who murdered one of her sisters and is abusing the other. Also, BONEDOG!
I crocheted 40 rows of the back panel of a spring sweater.
And then I held it up to a template sweater and realized I very badly miscalculated the increases from shoulders to pits.
The whole thing had to be frogged, but on the bright side, this yarn (Upcycle Alpaca Sport) was really well behaved about being freed from its bondage. I love the soft, heathered, non-plasticky colors, too. I’d like to work with fibers found in nature more often, but they’re infrequently dropped to the price range of 100% acrylic. I literally can’t afford to become fond of wool.
At least I had the foresight to write down what types of stitches I used for each row rather than trust my memory or visual identification skills, so I’ll be able to recreate this with better measurements later.
For those ahem-ing about the Millstone Sweater that was “coming along nicely” and then got dropped for first a blanket and then the above, I’m still plinking away at it. I have one set of each color “bricks” on each sleeve plus the wrist trim to go.
I’ll think about interior pockets to hold wallet and keys, but it will be “technically done” at the end of the sleeves. I’ll share its mugshot then.
I made the Claire Saffitz sour cream and chive rolls that everyone waxes ecstatic about.
They’re as good as any of my tried-and-true tangzhong doughs, but not better, and they’re much slower to rise with all that sour cream added. I’ll add “chives” to the list of potential modifications to rolls I use all the time rather than come back to this one.
If you don’t have a go-to recipe for rolls, though, these are definitely worth trying. Just start at least 4 hours before you have to serve them. You can always reheat rolls if they’re done early, but you can’t make dough hurry up when it doesn’t wanna.
A hankering for ice cream coincided with possession of the necessary ingredients. Since the custardy type of ice cream leaves one with an egg white problem, I opted for my favorite egg white user-upper: marshmallow fluff. Kiddo wielded the hand mixer while I poured the lava but, alas, she could not be persuaded to stand there for the additional 8 minutes of whipping.
I froze a smear of fluff as a test, and it stayed soft. I swirled a bit of that into the ice cream, along with a handful of chopped mixed nuts and, since there were a few caramels left over from who knows what, a teeny bit of caramel sauce (which required multiple test freezes to find a cream-to-caramel ratio that didn’t harden into dental glue).
The caramel was overkill, honestly. The compulsion to add One More Thing would have been better served by something with more texture and richness, like brownie chunks, but stopping at rocky road-ish probably would have been the best idea. I always think designer ice cream brands go one step too far, despite which I err in the same direction more often than not.