Two Breakfasts in One Day

Waaay back in the last century when I married my sweetheart, I discovered to my shock that he did not eat breakfast!  I told him that was terrible, breakfast was the most important meal of the day and would get him off to a good start.  And then I discovered another thing:  he hated cereal, hot or cold.  Uh oh.  So began my years of making him a hot breakfast every morning.  

Recently I found a recipe for making oatmeal in the crockpot that was supposed to be yummy and take only an hour of cooking.  I like oatmeal, so one morning when Dan was gone, I decided to try making some.  The recipe said it would serve four and unfortunately did not reheat well.  Hmmm.  It also needed a smaller crockpot than I had.  Hmmm.  Again.  Then I remembered that my favorite Instant Pot cookbook had some oatmeal recipes so I checked them out and decided to improvise. If it didn't work, I could just throw it out and no one would be the wiser except maybe the garbage man.

It turned out to be a phenomenal success.  And not only that, when I made it one day when Dan was home he consented to try a bowl.  He loved it!!  He even asks for it now, as he did yesterday morning.

Here's the scoop: 

Instant Pot Oatmeal

1 1/4 cups old fashioned oatmeal

2 Tbsp brown sugar

1/4 cup sliced almonds

1/4 cup raisins

1/4 tsp kosher salt

1/4 tsp cinnamon

2 cups milk (I use vanilla almond milk)

Stir everything together in a 3-qt Instant Pot and set for 1 minute at high pressure.  Let it sit for 10 minutes and then release the rest of the pressure manually.   Stir and enjoy!  

Dan really likes raisins in his; I don't, so I just put the raisins in a small bowl, cover with water and zap in the microwave for 30 seconds and then let them sit until the oatmeal is ready.  I drain them and he stirs them into his bowl.  

After forty-eight years, he can still surprise me!  The original recipe comes from Bare Feet in the Kitchen and I've cut hers in half.  Besides how good it tastes (so creamy and just the right texture), I love that while it cooks I can get myself ready for the day or sit with my coffee and the paper.  No babysitting it while it's on the stove.

And then last night, for supper?  We had breakfast again--waffles and bacon.  Both breakfasts were delicious!!  

Pieces

Well I've finally looked up from my knitting needles and decided it was time for a post.  I have been on a doll sweater binge and made a new one for my AG Samantha and then branched out into a pattern that's been a bit more complicated.  Hopefully it will all go together.  I blocked the pieces today and here's a picture of them as they continue to dry.

The sleeves look so big compared to the body of the sweater, but I think that's true of all sweater knits. Here's a closer look at the pattern it's knitted in.

I've enjoyed knitting this, just have a little trepidation over putting it all together and then picking up stitches to knit the neck edge and plackets.  

After I finished the blocking (which I did in my sewing room), I turned around and saw the Valentine table runner I'd started before knitting pulled me in.  Just one block was done and so I sat down and began stitching.  I got the other two center blocks completed.   It's a kit I ordered from Shabby Fabrics and I really like their instructions which you can see in the following picture.  

Since they put the kit together, all the fabrics in the pictures match the actual fabrics which makes it much easier to get things in the right places.  The center blocks start with a simple nine-patch which is then cut and more squares are added in.

Here's a finished one.

Maybe tomorrow I'll get more done if I don't fall prey to the knitting bug and decide to work on finishing the little sweater.  ♥

Knitting and Me

While I was knitting this afternoon, my thoughts wandered back in time to my knitting beginnings.  Have I told this story before?  I don't think so.  Not here, anyway.  

So, long about 1959 or so, maybe even earlier than that, I must have expressed a desire to learn to knit.  Or maybe my dad just thought it was time for me to learn. At any rate, he sat me down between his legs on the step at the back door and showed me how to knit.  How, you ask, did my outdoors man, paratrooper, smokejumper dad know how to knit?  Simple.  He was mostly raised by his maternal grandparents after his father's death, and that grandmother was a knitter.  She taught him. I remember seeing a pair of socks he'd knitted when he was around fourteen in a trunk at my grandmother's.  

After showing me how, Dad turned over the remainder of his Grandmother Whitworth's knitting supplies to me--needles and yarn in army green.  She died in January of 1945 and had been busy knitting warm things for Dad who had just spent Christmas in the Battle of the Bulge during one of the coldest winters on record.  (I have a vest she knit and managed to get sent off to him before her passing.)

With my own supplies, I began to churn out scarves and hats and slippers.  I was hooked!  And appear to still be hooked.  

Here is a picture of my Whitworth great-grandparents, she of the knitting needles, along with their faithful dog (and my dad's true buddy), Boots.  

I've heard so many stories of them, I wish I could have known them.  I think she'd like that one of her great-granddaughters loves to knit, too.  ♥

And It's Lincoln's Birthday!

Hello Bloggy Friends, how is it the middle of February already?  Of course, with leap year, February is a little longer this year, but still. . .  And Lincoln's birthday.  I remember in elementary school that this was a big day. We made black stovepipe hats, log cabins, and talked of splitting rails and so on.  Now poor Lincoln is combined with George Washington and it's just another Monday off for federal and possibly state employees.  Do they color cherry trees and make hatchets any more?  Oh well.  

And what's been happening at the Resort?  Well, after two trips by the Culligan man, we seem to have conquered the wet basement, much to Dan's relief.  I think he was dreaming of wet basements for days, poor man.  We have finished our sorting and he's built a platform for the bottom of the laundry room pantry so boxes no longer sit right on the floor.  Of course, we're hoping for no more floods, ever, but it pays to be preventative.  

And me?  I've been obsessed by knitting.  Our Ann always calls January knitting month, but we have both extended it this year.  She's knitting a lovely throw for her upstairs family room, and I'm still knitting small things for dolls.  I took the Mary Maxim hat pattern and by using different sized needles and yarns, made hats for two other dolls.

Magic Attic girl Rose. The mirror at the side gives full view

14" Betsy McCall in hers and AG Samantha in new teal one

In both cases, I followed the pattern exactly and they came out perfectly just with needle and yarn differences.  So glad, too, that I bought all the different sizes of pom pom makers.  

And now?  I'm working on a sweater I've made before, this time using an App that my longtime blog friend, Judy of Patchwork Place, recommends.  It's called Knit Companion and is available both iOS and Android through their App Stores.  You can download a free version that is quite helpful and usable, and of course you can upgrade to two more levels.  

I'm using a free 7-day trial of both upper levels right now and attempting to learn all I can so I can decide if I want to pay the amazing price of $19.99 per year for them.  At first I thought, $20 a year?  No way! (Sometimes it's hard to get my brain out of the last century when it comes to money!) But then I did a little calculating and it came to $.05 a day for the use of the program with all its bells and whistles.  I especially like being able to highlight the row I'm working on and even enlarge the page to make it easier to read.  

Here's a look at my iPad with the pattern I'm working on.

It also works for charted work such as cross stitch and crochet and those amazing Scandinavian sweaters.  

So I'll sign off for now, as I'm almost done with my little sweater and I'm longing to see which doll it looks best on.  It's a sunny yellow, just the right harbinger of spring on this cold, mostly cloudy day in mid February.  ♥

Cleaning Up

What a weird title, huh? Well, grab your coffee, pull up a chair, and I'll tell you all about it.

Here at the Resort, we have our own well, which necessitates a room we lovingly call "The Culligan Room" due to all the big tanks it contains to make our water usable. We needed to add a new tank a week or so ago when one of the old ones began to fail.  Tuesday morning Dan appeared in the door to our bathroom as I was getting ready for the day and said, "We have a problem," and then stopped.  I waited for him to say something like, "I think we should eat out tonight and we need to decide where to go."  He does that.  But finally he said, "The basement is flooded."  

That's right, he said, "The basement is flooded."  And so it was.  The new tank had done its weekly back flush and apparently it was considerably stronger with the new tank and the drain couldn't handle the flow.  So the floor did.  Down the hall, into the family room, into Dan's office, the laundry room, and all over the Culligan Room itself.  Even into the closet of the guest room.  Oh the joy.  

So, we gathered up towels, laid them down and began. Thankfully we have a good shop vac and Dan went to work with that.  We hauled out boxes from the downstairs pantry and the guest room closet and as we mopped and vacuumed, we'd take a break and look in the boxes.  Hmmm . . . who knew we still had . . . and as the water disappeared, so did quite a few of the found items.  So, the flood did have its upside!  We had a plumber friend of ours send over one of his workers and he used some kind of pressure thingy to blow out all our drains, but we're not sure if there was a clog that might have contributed, so the Culligan guy will come tomorrow to test and re-calibrate if necessary.  

We still have more cleaning and sorting to do, and we definitely have to replace the carpet because this latest flood was just the last straw for it.  (My long-time readers may recall the floods our old washer caused a few years ago.)  

And just to change the subject and harken back to my last post, here's a picture of me with my first loaves of bread!  In the little tiny kitchen of our little tiny 8'x35' trailer, our first home sweet home.  

It was the start of my love of bread baking, and I still have those wedding present Corningware loaf pans.  ♥

Of Bread and Knives

I think it's already established that as a modern career-oriented young woman of the late twentieth century I was a, well, not a failure, but not a die-hard, either.  I modeled myself more after my great-grandmothers than I did the roles being touted.  I loved and still do, all things home, knitting, quilting, baking, big pots of soup, and so on.  

This morning as I was cutting my latest loaf of bread, I pondered.  I wondered how many loaves I've sliced over the years. I made my first bread when we were newlyweds.  I made bread off and on for a number of years, but then Dan gifted me with a Kitchenaid mixer about 1980 and I began to make all our bread. I did this until I got a bread machine and used it to continue.  So, lots of loaves of bread.  

When we emptied out my parents' house, there weren't many things I said I wanted, but there was one thing I was adamant about: my dad's bread knife.  No one fought me over it; I think they knew I was serious. Dad had taken over most of the cooking years before and making bread was one thing he really got into.  He did it using a bread machine.  Dad was a true lover of gadgets--and a sharp knife.  

I used it this morning. Whenever I use his knife, I can see my dad's hand so plainly, holding it, slicing.  ♥

Algebra Rules!!

I grew up in the '50's and '60's--you know, back in the last century.  It was a new time for girls and for the first time in history (or so they told us), women could be any thing they wanted to be.  I was a pretty good student, and so it was assumed I would go forth and do Great Things.  I could become an engineer and design new things, I could learn to fly! Oh, the list was long and impressive.  No more careers in nursing or teaching for the new women.  So I took math classes.  Algebra I and II, geometry, and "advanced math", a would-be trigonometry class. And then . . . I became a teacher.  

All those math classes (and more in college), what need did an elementary teacher have of them?  Well, I do use geometry in my quilting.  And just this week, algebra came in very handy.  How you ask?  Well, I'll tell you.

I loved the doll hat pictured in my last post so much that I immediately set about to make another. (And I really wanted to try out a pom pom maker.)  I found some left over lilac yarn and churned one out in short order.  But now my doll needed a sweater to match!  I had downloaded a simple cardigan pattern from the Norwegian lady and liked the looks of it, but it called for finer yarn than I had.  What to do?  Then I remembered that a blogger I follow who knits had recently mentioned that any pattern could be knit in any yarn.  Hmmm... She also suggested that a knitter knit a test swatch with recommended yarn and needles to be sure it comes out true to size.  (Here is where I confess I have never done this. Apparently I like to live dangerously, at least in my knitting.) 

After a brief pondering, I choose a needle size and picked up my yarn and knit a swatch.  I knew from the pattern directions that 30 stitches was supposed to equal 4 inches.  My swatch came out five and a quarter. Algebra to the rescue:  5.25x=4, x=4/5.25, x=.76. Yes! All I had to do was multiply all the stitch numbers in the pattern by .76 and I was ready to go.  Did it work?

Why yes, it did!!  It fits little Amalia like a glove!  And that pom pom?  Perfection!

Who says we'll never use algebra in our regular lives? Not me!!  ♥