I’m finally beginning to think about and understand why high fructose corn syrup is so ubiquitous in American food products. I knew it was sweeter and cheaper than sucrose (ie, table sugar, made from cane or beets) and thus had trumped sugar in processed foods, but the reasons why it was cheaper had not really been important to me until recently. The short (albeit simplified) answer – the price is lower because of gov’t subsidies to corn growers. The long answer – well, start here or here and draw your own conclusions.

I slowly am reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma (link at the left), and while I don’t quite believe everything the author says, I nevertheless have made gradual changes in my diet in terms of what I eat, where I buy what I eat, and where that food has come from. Since January, I started thinking about the cost of fossil fuels to ship food (ie, the organic Fuji apples from New Zealand that I enjoyed so), the advantages of eating locally grown beef, chicken, milk, and produce, supporting local farmers in niche markets, the environmental impact of commercial organic farming, and so on.

Anyway, one of the tiny changes that I’ve made concerns the coffee I drink. I no longer buy “regular” coffee, nondairy coffee creamer, or flavored syrup to sweeten my morning. These days, I generally purchase Peace coffee (although I am strongly tempted to get a subscription to a Kona grower!), ease the bite with lowfat milk, and add a simple syrup to flavor the coffee.

Recipes for simple syrup vary slightly, but it’s essentially sugar and water in some easy-to-remember proportion (usually 1:1 or 2:1 – measured by volume) that is heated until the sugar dissolves. That’s it. So why should I ever need to buy the corn syrup sweetener?

I mixed 2 c of sugar and 2 c of water, split a vanilla bean down the center and tossed it in, and heated the mix until the syrup came to a boil. The final volume after some simmering was about 2 3/4 c. I added water to bring it to 3 c, poured it into bottles, and stored the syrup in the refrigerator.

The observant among you will note that I’m reusing a bottle from flavorganics – they use sugar to make syrup. Their stuff is good, too – but mine is better!

I love the specks of vanilla bean in my coffee. Super yum.

I’ve gotten to the point of the Peacock Feathers Shawl (end of chart 7) where each row takes an ungodly amount of time to complete. That is, to advance 1 row in the chart, I am knitting nearly 900 stitches, the front half consisting of a not-really-memorizable-if-you’re-me pattern.

I needed distraction. Enter the first 2 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy. I’m going to state up front that the opening credits of the show (you know, they end with the gurney and the pedicured feet rubbing the man feet) are downright embarrassing when you’re watching the show on a commuter bus with a potentially stuffy seatmate.

However, the knitting now is going so well that I ran out of yarn again. I switched back to spinning, and at the moment, I’m in the middle of plying. That’s a Bosworth midi spindle shown below, if you were wondering. (And before you ask – singles were spun on a Bosworth mini. My makeshift lazy kate is a sock yarn warping board from Forsyth. Storage bobbins – aka sectional warping spools – are by LeClerc.)

The last DVD of GA season 2 is not in the store right now, so on BKiff’s recommendation, I’m checking out the first season of 24.

Just coming up for a brief gulp of air – I’ve been traveling and not cooking or knitting, so ‘blog fodder is sparse. Thanks to everyone who left such kind comments about the Estonian lace – I have not had time to reply individually, but I did read all of your notes and truly appreciate your enthusiasm. I have since received my lace book with the answer key but have not had a chance to compare the 2 yet.

Well, I’m posting today because I’ve achieved a small milestone and wanted to brag. :D I coauthored a paper about medical errors with some folks in my work group last year. In December, it was accepted by a widely known and respectable journal, and the editor and his staff were wonderfully supportive and eager to publish our work. (The editor-in-chief referred to our revised manuscript as “outstanding.”) We saw the publisher’s proofs in January, and I found out this morning that it’s public! Yippee!

This is my first postgraduate publication, so forgive me if I am a leetle beet excited. Click here if you want to peruse the Abstract. If you don’t have access to an institutional subscription but are really motivated to read the paper anyway, let me know.

[This is cross-posted to the Create Along 'blog.]

I’m ruminating some design ideas that I’m not prepared to detail just yet, but I had “an experience” deconstructing a lace pattern, and I thought it might be worthwhile to share what happened during the design process.

So… I originally was thinking about how one might knit a coral polyp in lace.

Image from here.

They’re quite pretty, actually. I thought that the ends looked something like stars. Now I remembered Marnie knitting something she had described as “star stitch” and browsed her archives until I found it. Hmm… It was definitely pretty and star shaped, but it was a little small, not quite what I had in mind.

A few minutes of Internet searching later, I found the phrase “star stitch” in this description of Estonian lace. The author describes nupps and how they can be used as star-shaped bases for other designs. I’d heard of nupps before (well, I’d heard people complaining about knitting nupps), but I thought they were just bobbles with an Eastern European flavor. Then I saw this:

Image from here.

What a fantastically clever idea! The nupp is used as the starting point of a 3-petaled flower, and the decreases are gradually made over the next few rows. The flowers are tiled such that the increases in 1 repeat occurs with the decreases in the next repeat so the fabric doesn’t buckle. I’d not seen anything like it before and was immediately intrigued.

I thought I could use a single “tile” (or motif) of this stitch pattern as my polyp, and I read anxiously through to see if directions for the stitch pattern were somewhere in the article. No such luck, although the author references a Estonian-language lace dictionary in that article. Sucker that I am, I found someone who carried it and ordered the book that day. But I didn’t want to wait for a package to arrive from Germany (what can I say – I’m an American – I like my instant gratification), and I’ve deconstructed lace before. How hard could this be?

Well, as it turns out, it was kind of hard. Now, for the love of God, do not tell me that this pattern is widely known and available on some site that I’ve never encountered. You’ll make me weep. I studied the picture and wrote down everything that I was sure was happening.

1. The base of the flower was 3 stitches.
2. Each petal was 3 stitches wide. Thus, the base had expanded from 3 to 9 stitches.
3. The center petal was surrounded by yarnovers.
4. Each petal ended with a 3-into-1 decrease (eg, sl2, k1, pass sl sts over).
5. The 3 st that formed the base of the flower were derived from the last stitch of the right-most petal of the tile to the left, the center petal from the tile below, and the left-most petal of the tile to the right.

I wasn’t sure of the maximum width of the tile, the exact location of yarnovers, or the number of rows per tile, but constraits of The Maths said that the number of yarnovers would dicate the final width, and I would likely be knitting 1 row for every 2n decreases (I saw nothing that seemed like an unpaired decrease). As long as I had the same number of increases and decreases, the pattern would work.

I also had no frickin’ idea how to chart a bobble. I emailed Kim and begged for help. She replied, “I don’t know of any books in modern standard notation that show nepps clearly. Most avoid the whole bobble idea by just putting a ‘there be bobble here’ symbol in the main chart and offering up the bobble instruction elsewhere. ” She suggested using grey boxes to indicate “no stitch” (tutorial here) and sent an example. Thanks, Kim!

I swatched and was able to make the main flower easily. I ignored the side stitches, figuring that they would be other tiles in the final iteration.

It was starting to come together, sort of. But I could not get the number of stitches to turn out correctly. In true OCD fashion, I spent all my nonworking hours thinking about how this could be charted. (It was like The Lost Weekend, except with yarn.)

Some problems and solutions:

1) The motif was too tall. I had ended the side petals long before I was ready to start the staggered motif on either the side, so I had too many rows.

Because most of my lace experience is with patterns that are straight knit or purl across the back, I hadn’t considered doing some of the decreases on the private side. If I decreased on the front and back sides, I could squash the motif into fewer rows.

2) No knitter would have any idea which stitch aligns with which from the row below. Clearly, lots of grey (“no stitch”) boxes are needed.

I struggled with where to put the grey boxes. In the example below, the red dots should have lined up with the tent-shape boxes (3-into-1 decrease) to the left and right boxes of the previous row.

3) The pattern would not tile. Remember, the center stitch of each side petal contributed to the flower base of the motif next to it. However, if I matched up the tile on 1 side (blue), it would not match on the other (red).

The pattern repeat as I drew it above has 7 rows. BZZZT! It works a little better if I use an even number.

4) Getting closer…

I forget what was wrong with this, but it had a problem. However, I was close – could nearly taste victory. I had a few other problems that are hard to explain, so I’m just going to gloss over them for now, but I had the final chart at 10 PM one night.

The next morning, I swatched on the way to work.

Got it!

Now I’m really looking forward to the arrival of my Estonian lace book! I feel like I’m waiting for the answer key to a pop quiz.

You can download the stitch pattern (.pdf file) here. (I also put it in the sidebar, if you want to access it later.)

The uncooked lo mein was held in the refrigerator overnight, and the noodles did not stick to each other during that time. (I did notice a little condensation on the inside of the bowl, though.) I cooked the noodles and baked the pork on day 2. This recipe is adapted from The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking.

3/4 lb Chinese egg noodles
1/2 lb char siu pork (cooked)
8 mushrooms
1/4 lb snow peas
1 large carrot
1 T ginger grated
4 cloves garlic
1 1/2 t chili garlic sauce
1/4 c vegetable broth – (or chicken broth)
2 T soy sauce
1 T sake
1/2 t sugar
1/4 t kosher salt

Boil noodles until just underdone, toss gently with a little sesame oil (and salt, if desired). Set aside.

Cut pork into bite size pieces, set aside. Cut mushroom into quarters, remove strings from snow peas, cut carrot into bite-size slices, set aside. Mix ginger, minced garlic, chili sauce in one bowl; mix broth, soy sauce, sake, sugar, and salt in another.

Heat a large nonstick pan, swirl in a little oil, and add the ginger mix until aromatic (10 seconds). Toss in vegetables, stir briskly until carrots are crisp-tender. Remove to a separate dish.

Wipe the pan, add a tiny swirl of fresh oil, and dump the noodles into the pan. Cook without frequent stirring if you want crispy edges, otherwise keep the noodles moving. Pour the broth mix into the noodles. When most of the liquid is absorbed, return the vegetables and pork to the pan. Toss briskly until everything is thoroughly heated and the liquid is gone. Serve immediately.

This was really good. Even though Matt made horrible faces when he saw I had added evil mushrooms, he went back for a second serving. It’s hard for me to cook meals that require this much advance planning (I’m much happier when I can decide what I want and then eat it 30 min later), but I’d do this one again.