my favorite peanut butter

when i was a kid, we got foodstamps and welfare peanut butter. the peanut butter was solid stuff that split into chunks and refused to spread smoothly on bread. if it wasn't spread just so, it would tear holes in our whole wheat bread (note: it was not the wimpy wonder bread). it was The Most Awesome Stuff. In. The. World. it tasted like pure peanuts, the inside of a reese's peanut butter cup. my whole life i've wished i could somehow finagle just one more bucket of that peanut butter. even the natural PB in the store isn't quite right.

in my homemade experiments i've come across recipes for making your own peanut butter. some of them call for just peanuts, some add a bit of oil, others a bit of honey. months ago i tried one and wasn't quite satisfied with the results. then one day, going through the cupboards, i grabbed an open can of roasted peanuts and thought 'what the heck.' i pulled out the food processor, determined to grind those peanuts as long as necessary to get real peanut butter.

5 minutes later i was done.

it splits off in chunks. it didn't rip holes in the toast i tested it on, but it does taste very close to that welfare peanut butter of my dreams. guess i don't have to get on government aid to have perfect peanut butter.

how to make your own welfare peanut butter:

grab some peanuts. throw them in the food processor and turn it on. the nuts get ground up, then form a lump. it's not done yet. keep it going and the natural peanut oil will release and the lump smooths out into peanut butter. test your peanut butter on some toast or an old-fashioned PBJ sandwich. close your eyes and enjoy.

2010 in review

looking back, i am impressed with myself. i thought i only posted once last year, but there's 3 whole posts up! 2010 was similar to 2009 in many ways, which is why we have a huge round up post rather than shorter, more regular posts. so, the last year in review, if not in chronological order:

• in the spring, chuck changed jobs, then got fired, and now drives a school bus. that was a whole mixed bag. he was looking for less work stress, which he now has. he's also been wanting to get out of banking, which he has. the initial job switch let us use part of chuck's retirement to pay off a huge debt (with one tiny click. i savored that moment). we're now down to almost a third of the debt chuck had when we got married. not having that $900 monthly payment and several small miracles helped us through the 3 months of unemployment before the bus job and makes it easier to live on the lower income.

• archy work was very short this year, a measly 3 months. i worked in delta again, with all the fun side effects of living in two places that i noted last year. the work and crew were great though. site monitering is where it's at. you hike out to a known site, relocate surface artifacts, make sure the military hasn't blown a hole in anything, take some pictures and notes, then repeat. i loved it. still wish there was a good option for winter archaeological work up here........

• about the same time chuck started driving buses, i started working part time at a yarn store. work has tapered off, so i ought to look for something else, but it's been tons of fun helping people with their knitting and picking out yarn.

• i played more with homemade stuff. we haven't really bought bread since 09, and i've made my own tortillas and english muffins besides sandwich, french and flat breads. our garden gave us lots of potatoes that we're still eating, along with squash. everything else we ate as it ripened. i wish we could grow enough tomatoes to put up. we gathered blueberries, most of which we froze, and lingon (lowbush cranberries), that were turned into cranberry sauce. i also made spruce tip jelly, which has an interesting spicy sweet flavor. next year i want to try rose petal jelly from all the prickly rose in the yard. Homemade mustard and barbecue sauce are in the fridge, along with homegrown (homelaid?) eggs, some of them blue. chuck raised broiler chickens again, so we haven't bought chicken for 2 years. he also raised a turkey that grew to 25 pounds and barely fit in our tiny oven on thanksgiving, and we have 6 laying hens. they average 4-5 eggs daily, more than we can eat, so we trade them for moose and caribou meat. i even made laundry detergent too! seems we buy less and less at the store. mostly i try stuff out for fun, and because i like knowing how to make my food and what's in it and changing things to suit my taste. none of it took very much time (the jelly was a small batch) and costs very little. i made soft cheese, but for the cost of milk vs the lower cost of cheese and considering the ratio of milk to finished cheese......we will keep buying cheese.

• we bought season tickets for UAF hockey while we had money in the summer, and now the games are like free dates.

• i apparently knit a storm through the year, ending up with more large projects (shawls and sweaters) than before. i also experimented with some new things, knitting with wire and making small toys.
  that doesn't count anything started but not finished of course. i knit more for myself - it makes no sense for me to not have enough socks when i'm the one knitting them. out of 25 finished projects, 11 were for myself, almost half and a definite improvement. mostly i knit from stash, since yarn was not really in our budget this year. sweaters were probably the most satisfying projects while socks were not my friend all. year. long. fitting issues. hopefully to be fixed in 2011.

• the fairbanks knitting group just gets more awesome with time. they're a great mix of people with very different tastes and backgrounds and opinions, yet mostly we manage to encourage each other and have intriguing conversations. if we moved, they would be the people i missed.

• we got lots of yardwork done while we were unemployed together. the raised flower beds i built in 07 have been slowly but steadily eroding and we had started building boxes for them in the spring. we finished those and planted rhubarb, a red currant plant, daffodils, tulips and crocus. ever since living in sweden i've wanted crocus of my own to peep out from the melting snow. we even cleaned out the prickly rose from the raspberry bushes and raked leaves! not all of them, but more than normal. i almost like our yard now.

• my wisdom teeth were pulled dug out in the spring. i was a bit worried, from the horror stories told to my body's high tolerance for medication to getting an IV and being put under for the first time ever. my mouth felt crowded though, and the new teeth were trying to push aside other teeth. so it had to be done, and in the end? not so bad. i almost wouldn't mind doing it again. the IV took a couple tries and hurt more than anything else. the dentist had to give me two hits of anesthesia to knock me out and as i came to, he clearly asked is she waking up already? that didn't make me feel too good, but they were almost done. there was a bit of swelling, and i got a cool ice pack band to wrap around my head. made me feel like i was in an old time war movie.
  i took the (huge) aspirin they gave me and nothing else and was back to work on monday without missing a day since the surgery was on friday, my day off. the pains from crowded teeth were gone and i was happy. although i'd've been happier if i could have kept the teeth for souvenirs..........

• we signed up for the rosetta stone online through the military. i'm reviewing spanish, and filling in some everyday words missing from my vocabulary, while chuck is learning swedish. i love hearing him learn, it's more exciting for me than him i think. he's improved in every lesson and i can't wait till his vocabulary is large enough to have conversations.

• i read lots too, although i have no idea where i fit it and the knitting in. according to goodreads, i read 45 books this year. that's almost one a week, not too bad. some really good ones were: Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by patricia wrede and caroline stevermer, a lighthearted, funny fantasy with sequels to follow. stieg larsson's girl who.... series was a fascinating mix of mystery, journalism, crime solving, and political corruption set in sweden. they were gripping reads, and had fairly accurate descriptions of swedes. the only downside was the sexual crimes against women, but i suppose that was the point. the latest additions to the vlad taltos series, jhegaala and dzur, by steve brust added more depth to vlad's character. despite being quick reads, they kept me thinking long after reading. in defense of food by michael pollan made an interesting analysis of our current food culture and how traditional food culture has been manipulated for commerce. an extremely well-written and highly creepy fitcher's brides by gregory frost i would recommend for the writing and morals but won't re-read. i'd like to sleep at night, thank you very much. another non-fiction book i really enjoyed was the paradox of choice by barry schwartz. he delves into the unconscious and conscious factors that go into all our choices, big and small. the book was not as dry as i anticipated and points out a need for us to limit our own options to make effective choices. an interesting concept.
  
  annoyingly less good were: water for elephants by sara gruen, which a few of us in the knitting group read. the story just seemed to descend into melodrama and ended in an unlikely series of events. it started well, but i felt cheated at the end. name of the rose by umberto eco has sat on my shelves unread since high school. now it can sit on someone else's shelves. the long involved story of medieval religious heresies and dissidents is mixed with murders at an abbey. when revealed, the motive for the murders seems absurd and superficial. cheated again. wuthering heights by emily bronte confirms that british female romance writers are not for me. a bunch of whiny noble people make bad choices which have bad consequences and i think i'm supposed to feel sorry for them. um, nope. sorry. think i'll avoid the bronte's along with austen from now on.

• the week of thanksgiving it rained. this just doesn't happen in interior alaska. the warm weather made the foot or so of snow on the roof slide off, which normally happens in april. the fall compacted it all and made normal shoveling impossible. when it started coming off the deck in solid square chunks, what could i do but make a wall? crenelations and archer slits possibly to be added later.

• since summer, chuck has been working on painting the kitchen cupboards (the ones he took the doors off the summer before). the kitchen has slowly transformed from a dark green and gunky yellow 70s combo
  
  to a much brighter white (inside), blue, and yellow.
  
  the colors remind me of sweden and make the kitchen a thousand times brighter. i love it. the cupboard doors have been materializing the last couple weeks, and after a year and a half without doors, it feels odd being unable to just reach in and grab what i want.

• we watched more than a few movies in 2010, but not many made it to our favorites list. we really enjoyed blind side, ondine and the A team remake. oddly enough, tv on dvd was much more popular with us (we don't ever watch any tv shows on tv). a random series of events introduced us to the 2005 season of doctor who. september and october were a haze of the 5 recent seasons. it's a crazy, unpredictable, upbeat, funny british sci-fi space/time travel show and if you haven't seen it, do. you never know what will happen and yet only a few times is the story so outlandish that it seems impossible. we're waiting anxiously for next season to start, and have infected the grandkids with the addiction. we finished watching the dollhouse show, joss whedon is my hero for interesting tv. it's a bummer his shows have such short runs.

• we got a couple camping trips in. we took the bratlings camping in denali in the spring and hiked with them all day with no complaints from grownups or kids.
  
  chuck kidnapped me to paxson lake for a relaxing weekend in the summer, complete with canoeing and a beautiful sunset.
  
  we also finally hiked angel rocks together. we've been saying we'd do that for years. the trail starts out on the valley floor and climbs to the ridge top
  
  where granite tors are eroding into cool formations and caves.
  which of course we had to explore a bit, crawling into that hole behind us that opens into some small caves, then out the other side.

• on the winter solstice, we saw the total lunar eclipse. apparently the last time one happened on the solstice was in the 1600s. the moon wasn't totally blacked out but looked shadowed, like seeing it through a black curtain. very cool phenomenon, but we couldn't get a photo that didn't look like a black sky.

• after the very long break i've had in blogging, i have a clearer idea how i want to blog, a way to balance my content. several blogs i read manage to have good, varied content in short posts and i think i have learned from their good example. i suppose this next year will be the test. my iphone was no replacement for the internet and so there are still podcasts and blogs being caught up on.

all in all, 2010 was a good year. i never got tired of being home with my husband. i'm grateful for my friends, talking to family over holidays, and all the little miracles that keep me going every day. i'm thankful i can do so many things that i enjoy and are meaningful to me, which luckily tend not to be very expensive. reading my summing up post on 2009, i must have got something right in the balance department this year. the year was equally disruptive, busy, and i still worked out of town yet i feel as if i did more in most areas of life and feel more peaceful and happy looking back. i have to keep doing that.

vacation crumbs

the candy bar's all gone, but there's still some crumbs left. small crumbs. honest.

our last full day in MA, we squeezed in a yarn store trip. finally. my idea of vacation is finding yarn shops and checking them out. unfortunately, that's not chuck's idea of vacation. after possibly some pouting on my part, we went to webs. chuck was suitably impressed by the size of the store - until a worker reminded us to "not forget the warehouse."

chuck's jaw might have dropped. he might have broken out into a sweat, thinking of how the checkbook would yell at us if he let me loose in a yarn warehouse. then again, maybe not, since he practically forced me to pick some yarn before leaving the store. seriously, he gets this "you will buy something for yourself while we are here" glare in his eye. he spoils me rotten.

we ended up with sock yarn for me (left), and some for chuck (right). they had all kinds of luscious yarns, but alas, i'm the kind of girl that forgets to bring all the details for the sweater(s) i want to make. and doesn't dare guess on the quantity, cuz i just know i'll run out. *sigh* we got some yarn for sara's dark mark scarf though,

that i'll be making her for christmas. after the fact, obviously. notice that i actually got the yarn specified in the pattern, please. aren't i a good girl?

since i finished up the christmas knitting, i've been swamped with ideas mulitplying faster than rabbits - and definitely faster then i can knit them. i don't really do new year's resolutions, since i make goals as i trash achieve them, but finishing up a bunch of projects around the same time made me kind of reflective.

i've really got the sweater bug. socks are good (portable, fast, mostly mindless and inexpensive) but i'm just itching to make sweaters. my normal knitting habit is to have a couple smaller projects, and one large (ie sweater-like) project going at the same time. in an attempt to quell the sweater bug yet not freak out the checkbook (it's kind of touchy this time of year), i came up with a plan. simple, brilliant, time tested. rather than splurging on 1-2 skeins (usually sock yarn) cuz i feel like i can afford it, save up for the sweater yarn. and knit from the sock yarn stash (since i won't be splurging on the sock yarn).

my stash is not very big at all - it covers maybe two bookshelves - but it's starting to bother me in the anal organizational sort of way. it just sits there. that we cannot have. some of it is sock yarn, which will obviously become socks, but there's a couple skeins of random yarn. i'm sure i had something in mind when i purchased it, but it's long gone now. so i've got to figure out some small projects to use them up. which is not the easiest thing in the world when all i hear is sweaters calling my name.

along those lines, temptations like ravelry and knitty have been luring me with loads of free patterns to neglect the knitting books that i actually have. in my ravelry library, where you can see what books you've used, i think i've only used 2 books that i own. gulp. why am i ignoring them? so i'd like to knit at least one thing from each book i own. to justify buying them and all.

that was as far as my reflections took me. simple plan: knit from stash, knit from books, only buy sweater yarn. it sounds good, don't you think? i hope it works.

in the meantime, i'm working on what's on the needles already. mostly. the priority list keeps playing musical chairs. the FFF shawl should have been done weeks ago, so that's at the top. i may have only half a skein left to knit. if it behaves itself. once that's done, i'll start sara's dark mark. last sunday i cast on a pair of socks,anastacia, in the lovely new yarn from webs. it looks a bit dark here, but that's what it looks like in real life too.

my plan is already set in motion, using a pattern booklet i bought last year (reynolds #82390), with some stash yarn (knitpicks telemark), and a 3mm needle (i figured with the rest of the details i might as well throw in the needle and look like i know what i'm talking about), i cast on for thisnot the actual hat, since hats are too hot, but a headband, cuz my ears still freeze, using the main snowflake pattern from the brim. i figured it was just wide enough. and small enough to try out color stranding - and use up some of those random stash skeins. you know what? it's not so bad. i did knit a couple rows before remembering i could use one color per hand. duh. when i sneak in a row or two, i even like it. who knew?

and the project left without a seat is: chuck's sweater. all i need to do is make some sleeves, but this FFF(ing) shawl past its deadline is pushing it out of the lineup. not to mention the other projects pushed on the backburner for When I Have More Time To Think About Them - and really, when will that be? they're part of the plan too, finish finish finish. so they won't be hanging around, clogging up my sidebar, and besides, i get more knitwar points if i finish them too.

that wasn't too bad for finishing up the last morsels from vacation, now was it?

except for two, itty bitty more things.

i had brought a couple recipes with me to my mom's, just in case i was asked to cook. and i really noticed for the first time that some foods chuck and i eat regularly, my family had never eaten. like jambalya (which adam made very well) and anything curry.

i had a leftover food dream from my mission in sweden that i finally fulfilled - banana curry pizza. sounds really gross, but it's sooooo good. mostly going off memory, i took a basic curry sauce recipe, threw in mushrooms, chicken, and banana and put it on a pizza crust. there was only one hitch: i forgot i was using my mother's measuring cups, which are english. while the recipe was metric. oops. no wonder the sauce was more watery than normal. but still good. my mom even liked it.

and, last of all, next time i buy a house, i'm buying one with stairs. my mom had us in the attic room, so we were up and down 2 flights of stairs all day. oj. my thighs may have been feeling it for the first couple days.

pure bliss

there's so many good things about going back east.

almost always the very first one i think of is this

my car. in alaska, i drive a jeep. i'm happy with it, it does what it should and is good for camping trips too. but it's not "my car." just driving it makes me smile. a 74 pontiac catalina, it's got rear wheel drive, super light steering, class and a V8 engine. vroom vroom. one of these days we'll drive it up to alaska and keep me smiling year round.

then there's real grinders. not the subway kind you could make at home if you weren't too lazy to, but real 12 (or 16) inch ones with choices like eggplant parmesan, italian sausage, meatball. . . .mmmm. we had some but they disappeared way too fast to take pics.

along with the real italian food iscannolis. adam got some for new year's. i'm surprised any lasted till today.

although i don't spend as much time with it as i'd like, i'm always glad to see my piano again.i don't play as well as i used to (since i play much less often), but pulling music from the keys wraps a spell around me. like i'm in a world of my own where things become crystal clear. sometimes when no one else is home, i play and listen to the music and the silence, and feel as if i were praying. and hearing the answers better.

last, but definitely not least, is thisreal snow. the kind you scoop up and it's already a snowball in your hands. snow that accumulates 3 inches in a couple hours overnight, not over 3 days. i love it. there should be more of it.

i'm leaving on a jet plane. . . .

(obviously i didn't get this posted before i left, but what can i say. better late than never and all that. one more postdated post won't matter)

monday i got another day of babysitting teaching math. good to have another day of work, but boring as all get out. i ran across some of my sunday school kids, and they said hi, which is always cool.

today was a no-work day, getting ready for arkansas. my biggest worry before trips is not what clothes to bring, but which books and knitting projects to bring and how many. there's all those hours on planes and in airports, the 3 hour drive from little rock to chuck's parents' house.......all those boring hours in between listening to family talk........i can't stand to have nothing to do.

and the very worst thing of all? make sure you're sitting down and all that: they don't have internet. that i'm worried about. but i'm going to be a good girl and take progress pics and write posts on my computer and put them up once i get home.

although i think for the FFF shawl, i'll take pics and post them all at once at the end. do kind of a start to finish post on it. but i'll still talk about it, you'll just have to imagine what it looks like ;)

for a really cool faroese shawl, check out the raven one at knitspot. wow. the yarn (from blue moon fiber arts) is a new line with all these raven-esque names, awesome black with slight tones of other colors. irtfa'a was designed to actually look like a bird, with feather patterns and this awesome feathery edging. i have so got to buy me that pattern. some day. when i've caught up to my queue - if i can wait that long. like after christmas maybe.

the green man collection was very good. i didn't quite get through all of the stories before the book was (over)due, and it's one of those awful books with references to more cool books, so i'll have to get it back out again later. cool forest stories, i really liked them.

last night we had potato soup in an effort to use up our milk before leaving. we had some kielbasa so i threw that in too, but then the dill that normally goes in potato soup didn't seem quite right. so i put in some cumin and coriander. mmmmmm, that was good. you should try it sometime.

speaking of food, we had a thanksgiving dinner at church last week. i brought stuffing, the real kind. with sausage. everyone else that brought stuffing did the fake stuff. it just doesn't taste as good, and real stuffing is dumb easy to make so i haven't ever figured out why people make the fake stuff. since stuffing is one of my favorite bits of thanksgiving, i asked chuck if his parents would make real or fake and he didn't know. *sigh* if i knew, i'd offer to make stuffing for them. i wonder what kind of food we'll get there anyway, since they're in "the south." could be interesting. . . . .

anyway. . . . 4 books, 2 knitting magazines and 3 knitting projects later, my packing's done. and you know what? i'm still worried i'll finish it all and be bored stiff. silly. huh?

catch up

if you happen to get my feed (so sorry!) you might have noticed a flood of posts today. that's cuz they've been sitting around waiting for pictures and i decided to let them go without the pics. i still haven't taken the pics. once i do, i'll have a big pic post. how's that sound? for some reason it seems like a post isn't a post without pictures of some kind. if that's true, none of those count and you can't feel overwhelmed :)

sunday i was very encouraged to get some squares from people. *whew* i was worried i was the only one making them and there wouldn't be enough for even one blanket. looks like enough for one blanket at least, which is good. now i'll just have to hope that someone wants to help me seam them together saturday....

after finishing broadripple friday (i even grafted the toe and weaved in the ends! i'm such a good girl), i swatched all weekend for thuja. first a normal swatch to get the gauge i wanted, and then to test the stitch pattern. since the pattern is for worsted yarn and i'm using sock, it did look a bit different. i adapted the seed rib to have the same wide look as the original. and then i figured out all the math for the size and the repeats, and then i worked through 3 different toes. cuz, oh yeah, i'm knitting it toe up and with a short row heel. so basically it's a totally different sock, except the idea for the seed rib came from bobby whats-is-name (which i still give him credit for).

i ended up using a crocheted provisional cast on, because the other ones seemed to leave the stitches too loose. i hate having to go back to tighten stitches and stuff. after finishing the broadripple, there was still a decent amount of yarn left and i thought, darn i could have added a couple inches to the leg. so i figured going toe up will help me use up more yarn. those little bits of leftover yarn make me nuts. i don't want to throw them out, but usually can't find a practical use for them. argh.

so the thujas are on a roll, the pattern is easy and fast (so far - bet it'd be faster with worsted yarn). the socktoberfest is still moving along. today i got the yarn for the second mossgrid and woven towels, plus another set of US 1 dpns. goody goody. now i can cast on the second broadripple too. i figure if i work 3 days this week, i'll get the second broadripple and the thujas done.

for a special treat try this rosemary apple meatloaf. it's good stuff. very juicy with interesting flavors. i only used one apple, and some of the rosemary i grew this summer.

the other day i was leaving my web page while commenting somewhere (still diligently trying to delurk), and accidentally left out the "p" in blogspot, making it blogsot. hmmm....do you thin it's possible to get drunk on blogs? if i'm reading so many blogs i don't have time to post in my own, if i eagerly check every couple hours for new posts, would that be a blogsot? are you a blogsot?