Baby hopes you have a spooky day!

While Matt was on paternity leave, he was maybe a little stir-crazy staying at home, so he took the baby to the Walmart down in Faribault and came home with a small bag full of pink, fluffy clothes. (I had to laugh when I saw that!) Anyway, he also bought a cute little jack-o-lantern onesie, and I instantly wanted to make a matching pumpkin hat. This is the Fiber Trends pattern, with minor mods.

The yarn is Misti Alpaca, worsted weight. I made the smallest size hat and had plenty of yarn leftover. I followed the pattern as written, except I left off the pointy decorative edge and instead added a piece of curly pumpkin vine to the stem. (To make the vine, cast on 20 st. Knit into the front and back of each st [40 st]. Cast off in purl. Sew to bottom of stem.)

[And hee hee, Jen has a son nearly the same age as Meredith - great minds think alike.]

Of course, you might notice Meredith is decked out in more handknits. First, green socks – courtesy of a Northfield knitting buddy, Torild. Meredith can grab her own feet these days and enjoys finding her toes through the socks. Thank you, Torild!

And second, Knitty denim pants! These pants are still a little big for Mighty Mighty Meredith, but that’s good, really. She’s outgrown so much stuff already. They were knit for her by Laura. Thank you, Laura!

I managed to squeeze Meredith into her green cardigan for a picture.

She’s outgrown it, mostly. And she only got to wear it twice. Ah well.

For those of you about to enjoy yourselves at Rhinebeck, I salute you! Someday, I will join you there. For the rest of us staying at home, here are some fun not-sheep pictures for you to enjoy.

From bookofjoe

From Fabulously40

From Ohdeedoh

This is a classic recipe for syrup-soaked lemon poppy seed bread – great for the holidays, if baked goods are your thing. The syrup is what elevates this from merely good to outstanding. Don’t skimp on the syrup! This recipe comes from The Art of Quick Breads, by Beth Hensperger.

Bread
3 T fresh poppy seeds – “fresh” meaning “not rancid”
1/2 c milk
5 t unsalted butter, room temp
1 c sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 c flour
1 t baking powder
grated zest of 2 lemons
1/4 t salt

Syrup
1/4 c sugar (regular sugar, not powdered)
1/4 c fresh lemon juice

Soak poppy seeds in milk for 1 hr. Heat oven to 325 F.

Cream butter and sugar till fluffy. Add eggs 1 at a time, mixing well after each. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, lemon zest, and salt.

To the creamed butter, sugar, and eggs, add milk and seeds alternating with the flour mix in 3 equal passes. Combine just until smooth and pour into a large, greased loaf pan (I sprayed a 9×5 in pan with PAM+flour spray). Bake for ~1 hr or until a skewer down the middle comes out clean. Keep the loaf in the pan but put it on a cooling rack.

Make the syrup by heating the sugar and lemon juice until the sugar dissolves (I did mine in the microwave). Pierce the baked loaf all over with a skewer and pour the hot lemon syrup all over it. Leave the loaf in the pan for at least 30 minutes, then turn out onto the rack to finish cooling. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and keep at room temp overnight before serving.

Matt gave it a thumbs up! He doesn’t usually like lemon-flavored cakes (mindboggling, I know!), but he had a slice of this and smiled. Maybe he was just hungry.

If you are approximately my age, you were somewhere in adolescence during the 1980s and probably lip-synched enthusiastically to A-Ha’s “Take On Me” while dancing awkwardly in a streamer-bedecked gym. And if your parents allowed you to watch MTV (or maybe even if they didn’t! muhahaha), you saw their innovative music video.

I saw a new, masterful version (the “literal” version) of the video last night (hat tip to Matt for the link).

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And another fun link from Matt, here’s a t-shirt logo for all y’all Yarrrn pirates (click here for the shirt).

Have a great weekend!

I was thumbing through an issue of Science magazine and came across this neat article about reCAPTCHA. I’m sure most of you know that CAPTCHA is that program that forces you to read a squiggly word and type it in to prove you’re a human before you can comment on ‘blogs, register at Web sites, etc. Well, reCAPTCHA is a variation on that theme. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have used CAPTCHA to harness human intelligence and apply it to digitization of books (specifically, humans decipher words that cannot be read through optical character recognition of scanned pages). I thought this was fantastic and have added it to my site. I hope it doesn’t deter you from commenting!

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Thanks to Cathy for a lovely crocheted sweater for Meredith. Lilac is her color!

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I made a quiche (spinach, cheese, ham, onion, egg – YUM) using storebought pie crust (Pillsbury “Just Unroll”). The crust comes 2 per box, in case you want to make a double-crust pie, but that meant I had an entire sheet of dough leftover. I find the dough pretty salty, so I didn’t want to make a fruit pie. Instead, I recalled Nicole’s egg tarts and figured that would be a good way to use up the last crust.

I cut the pie crust into small rounds (using the cover of a baby bottle!) and pushed them into a greased mini-muffin tin. I used a fork to dock all the crusts. I mostly followed the custard recipe shown on Nicole’s site, but where she says “whisk together sugar and egg yolks by hand until sugar is mostly dissolved,” I could not get the sugar to dissolve. It was more like sugar crystals coated in egg yolk. I added the milk, hoping that would help, but no dice. I strained the whole mix and probably discarded 1/3 to 1/2 of the original amount of sugar. Odd. The custard was still plenty sweet, though.

They were delicious – and the mini size was fun to eat. The dough was really hard to get out of the muffin tin, despite having greased the pan. A lot of the crusts crumbled when I took the tarts out.

I’d make this again, but I think I’ll use paper tin liners to improve presentation. And I might try adding a bit less sugar.