Malt-o-Meal Magic Muffins

Well, I'm slightly over 21 weeks pregnant and sometimes, I just want to eat certain foods RIGHT NOW. This has, I will admit, led to a situation once now, where, upon watching an episode of Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown and viewing Bourdain partaking of a coney dog, I convinced my husband to go out past 9 p.m. in search of vegetarian hotdogs (no small feat in semi-rural Ohio).

The hotdogs he brought home, by the way, were Yves brand and I was not impressed. They had funny white pebble things in them that perturbed me slightly. However, they can be grilled, which is not always the case with veggie dogs.

Yesterday, a craving hit me and all I wanted, right then, was some Malt-o-Meal magic muffins with jam on them. Malt-o-Meal, for the unaware, is a wet cereal mix in the same vein as Coco Wheats and oatmeal. I couldn't tell you how tasty or bland Malt-o-Meal is in this form, however, because, in my family, Malt-o-Meal is strictly purchased for the muffin recipe on the side of the box.

They aren't fancy and they aren't hard to make, not being a from-scratch recipe per say. However, they are tasty sliced in half and microwaved for a few seconds with a dab of butter stuffed between the halves. Or with a spread of good jam.

Much to my husband's happiness, we actually already had all the ingredients necessary to make these muffins, so I got to baking. Within the half hour, I had muffins in hand, ready to eat. They have a slightly sweet and light taste, but are surprisingly filling despite that, and best of all, they remind me of many a childhood breakfast, waiting for my mom to pull the muffins out of the oven. So really, they taste just a little bit like home too.

Separating the Seedlings

Memorial day has come and gone and that can only mean one thing: it's time to plant the garden. Unfortunately, our garden isn't quite ready for planting. After a week of straight rain, plus a long weekend visiting family, there hasn't been enough time quite yet to get the sod up and the dirt tilled. It is getting there though. The space in the back yard is marked off and almost half of that space is now sodless.

(Ignore the loose piece of fence there. The backyard is a work in progress.)

So far, I can say that the whole gardening from seed idea seems to be a success. I have separated most of the seedlings. I say "most" because I ran out of little pots to put them in before I even finished with the tomatoes and I started with the tomatoes. The finally tally for tomato seedlings is as follows: 4 Bloody Butcher tomatoes, 7 Abe Lincoln tomatoes, 8 Purple Cherokee tomatoes, and 7 Big Red tomatoes. That makes for 26 tomato plants if all of them survive until the garden is ready to be planted. This, of course, does not include the additional 8 purple tomatillo seedlings.

Upon seeing what we were in for, I sent my husband out to a home improvement store to try to find more little pots, which he did not find. In lieu of those, he brought home a package of blue Solo cups. He then drilled holes into the bottom of each cup and filled them with dirt for me. With these, I managed to get the eggplant seedlings, 16 total, (a mix of Shooting Stars and Black Beauty and I can't tell how many of each because I can't tell the seedlings apart) separated, as well as the 10 Romanesco broccoli seedlings and most of the 9 kohlrabi seedlings (though I may have the two mixed up, as they look very similar as seedlings). By the 19 mixed bell pepper seedlings, I was using little starter pots from last year and doubling each plant. Finally, I just ran out and left them in their original starter containers.

(The one on the right is a lone tomato seedling.)

Those plants in the smaller containers are clearly not fairing as well as the plants in the cups or the updated pots. Since returning from Michigan after Memorial day, though, all the plants grew significantly in size.

The swiss chard and blue kale seedlings, being cold weather tolerant, I planted in the front bed with the herbs from last year, spinach, raddichio, and cold weather lettuce. There are about 5 swiss chard seedlings and roughly 7 kale seedlings at present. They aren't getting quite as tall as the seedlings still under nightly porch protection but they seem to still be alive thus far. And that's something. The raddichio, however, looks like it might not sprout for the most part, due to mole interference.

Neither the lavender nor the rosemary sprouted at all. We have since purchased four nice-sized pots for the various herbs, so, unlike last year, I can bring them in when the weather turns cold. The  sage and half of the thyme seedlings went in one pot, while the rest of the thyme went in a pot with the rest of the rosemary seeds I'm really hoping at least one takes off this time. If not, I guess I'll have to go buy a starter plant from the local greenhouse. In the other two pots, I put seeds for the parsley and basil in one and seeds for oregano and lemon balm in another. Some green is starting to come up from the seeds in the herb pots but I can't tell what yet. I do know that there is no luck with the rosemary seeds yet. I gather it is not an easy herb to grow in a pot, let alone grow from seed. Time shall tell.

The lavender, as well as the other seeds, including beets, carrots, parsnips, daikon radish, zucchini, butternut squash, chamomile, red lettuce, Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, okra, two varieties of burpless cucumbers, and Early White Bush Scallop squash, will have to wait for the weekend. Hopefully the back garden is ready by then and I'll finally have time to plant the lavender and chamomile in the front somewhere.

And if all those tomato plants live, I might be looking for new homes for some of them. Twenty six tomato plants seems like a few too many for one small family garden. Also this columbine is totally out of control:

A Baby Sweater

Knitters, for the most part, tend to enjoy making baby things. For one thing, they don't require as much time to make or as much yarn. For another, they are itsy bitsy and it's just adorable. Also, we like making gifts for people who need and will use them, and there's no one who needs warm wooly things quite like a baby. So when baby showers roll around, we get out our needles and some soft and washable yarn and we make something sweet, a blanket or a hat, something the mom-to-be might like. This is all to be expected (unless of course, we get suckered into a year-long commitment to knit our little brother a blanket, in with case, we tend to attend a few baby showers knitless).

However, there's nothing quite so thrilling for a knitter as when that knitter has the opportunity to knit up baby things for herself. Now, I'm not saying I got pregnant just to make baby things, but I do have three different books soley dedicated to the making of tiny garments, 2 for knits and 1 for crochet. The crochet one is called "Baby Crochet" and I only have it because it was on clearance really cheap at Borders, back when Borders was still a thing. The two knitting ones, however, I just fell in love with upon seeing and bought for a rainy day (you know, when that rain consists of babies about to be born). The first is The Expectant Knitter and the second is What to Knit When You're Expecting.

When I first found out I was expecting myself, I pulled out both of these books and started paging through them. Then I made a list, quite an expansive list, of all the baby things I wanted to knit, including both those knits I liked from the two previously mentioned books and any patterns I have favorited on Ravelry. It was a massive, completely unattainable list, and a lot of the patterns were dependent upon whether the baby ends up being male or female.

Of course, I won't know the gender until the 18 week ultrasound, which is, incidentally, happening later this week. There is one thing that I know all babies need regardless of gender: a nice, sturdy woolen sweater. Thus, I picked out two gender-neutralish shades (a bright greeny blue and a gray) of Cascade 220 washable wool at My Sister's Yarn Shop in Green, OH, and I cast on for the Striped Boatneck Sweater from What to Knit When You're Expecting.

I made a few alterations to the pattern, however, as I much prefer to to stockinette in the round and I used a different gauge of yarn than the pattern calls for. I knit most of the body in the round bottom-up instead of flat and then separated the front and back for flat knitting once I reached the sleeve holes. It should make the making up easier when I get to that stage, since the front and back won't need sewn together. I finished the body a few weeks ago now and blocked it out to see how it will look when finished.

If it ends up being a girl, I'll probably add a little flower to the bodice or something, but overall, I think it looks rather nice for boy or girl. I had to pause in the sleeves until this weekend to knit up a requested Go Blue Bro Beanie for a (get this) paying customer. My brother-in-law, now a proud postal worker, wears his wool blend beanie all the time to keep his head warm in the winter on his mail route and a coworker of his wants a Michigan hat of his own. 

I still need to add the M in duplicate stitch, but it will be all set to go to its new owner by the next time I head to the mitten. If you want a version of your very own, I might be interested in the business. I'm thinking twenty bucks a hat seems like a fair price.

I'm hoping to start in on the next baby knit once I know the gender. In the meantime, I'll be swiss darning an M, knitting up some baby sweater sleeves, and getting the garden ready for planting. There are fun things on the horizon.

Lunch with the Kid: A Wrinkle in Time Sandwiches

One of my favorite food blogs (Food Adventures in Fiction) wrote up a recent post that I knew I needed to make as soon as I saw the headline: "Sandwiches and Hot Chocolate from a Wrinkle in Time."

My son and I read A Wrinkle in Time over last summer and finished the followup A Wind at the Door this winter. Then, his English teacher assigned Wrinkle as their first big book assignment in school. It's safe to say at this point that we are very immersed in this series. At the beginning of the novel, there is a dark and stormy night and the main characters, along with their mother and the ever-important Mrs. Whatsit, sit down to some hot chocolate and their own personalized sandwiches. The recipes in question at Food Adventures in Fiction recreate these sandwiches and a no-sugar, rather authentic hot chocolate to go with them.

So on Saturday afternoon, when the boy announced he was hungry, I popped open the webpage and showed him the possible sandwich options he might have with his hot chocolate. The Charles Wallace features an open-faced sandwich with fruit preserves (that one was out--the kid doesn't eat jelly) and the Mrs. Murry involves liverwurst (not going to happen), so the boy and I quickly settled in on the Meg Murry for me and the Mrs. Whatsit for him.

We started with the Mrs. Whatsit, which we agreed would be amended to not include celery. There were still pickles involved and so, green things on the sandwich, so I wasn't going to press my luck by forcing the issue of green things that crunch. The boy added the tuna and mayo into a small bowl and mixed it up himself. The recipe called for diced pickle so we used dill relish, which really amounts to the same thing. I spooned in the specified amount and he swirled that in too, along with a pinch of salt and pepper.

Then, while the boy did the constant stirring of the heating milk on the stove, I put together my Meg Murry sandwich, consisting of cream cheese, tomato, lettuce, onion salt, and pepper on wheat.

We negotiated that the boy's Mrs. Whatsit could be on a hamburger bun. Then, with the milk heated, I added the cocoa, vanilla, and nutmeg, while the boy stirred it in. Then, mom poured the hot chocolate equally into two waiting hot cocoa mugs. (Yes, we have mugs specifically created to house cocoa, given to us by my generous Aunt Debbie. They are fancy and larger than coffee mugs with a decorative lip at the top. They are awesome. Deal with it.)

Of course, we both agreed that hot chocolate really prefers to be topped with whipped cream, which was dully added, and then we sat down to lunch.

The really surprising thing was not that the boy ate a tuna sandwich (he loves tuna), but that he ate a tuna sandwich with relish in it and did not even seem to bat an eye. There's no way that would have happened if he hadn't been eating a Mrs. Whatsit. On my part, I'd never thought to put cream cheese on a sandwich before, and, though the onion salt was a bit much, I loved me a cream cheese sandwich. I can also assure you that a friend of mine tells me cream cheese and pickles make a quite tasty sandwich. I can't wait to try it.

 

The kid also proceeded to have a Mrs Whatsit with Cheese. He claims it was even better. You be the judge.

Gardening from Seeds

My dear readers will note that I've been MIA from the blog for almost three months, so it was winter and now the magnolias are in bloom.

 It was a self-imposed sabbatical, partly to get my head around my latest novel revision, partly to deal with a number of family-related events, and mostly, because I have the proverbial bun in the oven and unlike my previous pregnancy 10 years ago (we can discuss my sanity related to this procreation decision at a later time), the first trimester just kicked my behind. At this point, I'm at 16 weeks and only now started to lose that morning sickness, which really just lasted all day. I've been unable to consume chocolate, pineapple, green or black tea, overly tangy food, overly sweet food in moderate qualities, or basically anything that wasn't bland as the driven snow, nor could I so much as stand the smell of coffee. This, obviously put a damper on my recipe options.

Now, I'm starting to regain my ability to eat more food and I'm not allowed to exercise for at last the next three weeks. Doctor's orders.

This, however, does not mean I haven't been busy. The first big project of spring has been our decision to start the garden entirely from seed this year. While I'm not allowed to rake, shovel, or touch soil without gloves, I can still plant seeds and watch plants grow. With the help of the 10 year old, I got those seeds that need to be planted indoors ahead of time into a little seed-starter greenhouse contraption we bought on clearance at the end of last year, including Bloody Butcher tomatoes, Abe Lincoln tomatoes, Purple Cherokee tomatoes, Big Red tomatoes, purple tomatillo, Shooting Stars eggplant, Black Beauty eggplant, Romanesco broccoli, swiss chard, blue kale, mixed bell peppers, lavender, sage, rosemary, and thyme.

Once they started to sprout, which happened in days, the lid came off and now they spent the sunny, warm days outdoors and the chillier nights and days in the indoor porch. So far, only a few seeds haven't sprouted yet.

I also cleared out a section of the herb/leafy garden to plant the cold weather varietals: spinach, Grand Rapids Tipburn Resistant lettuce, and radicchio.

The rest of the seeds--beets, carrots, parsnips, daikon radish, zucchini, butternut squash, chamomile, parsley, basil, lemon balm, oregano, red lettuce, Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, okra, two varieties of burpless cucumbers, and some bizarre looking summer squash called Early White Bush Scallop--have to wait until closer to memorial weekend, when all risk of frost should be behind us. And not all quite all of the plants will come from seeds this year. The parsley (a biannual), thyme, and oregano are still killing it in the herb garden and the rhubarb, asparagus, and strawberry patch has returned nicely. There's even a flower on the strawberry vines.

We're really going to try to kick it into high gear with the garden this year. I have my canning pot and I'm ready to give it a go. And having purchased all the seeds buy one, get one, there was no monetary reason to hold back. Now, all I have to do is wait for summer.

My Killdeer

When last we saw my knitting progress on Canary Knit's Killdeer pattern, I had hit a small snag in the form of a manufacturers knot in my first ball of yarn. I was remiss as to how to proceed and almost set the whole thing aside in favor of a cape more suitable to winter. I was (this) close, but then, I decided to hope on google and look for demonstrations on how to join yarn with a double knot, as this would easily fix the problem without any more ends that need weaving in. I hate weaving in ends almost as much as I hate manufacturers knots in my otherwise perfect ball of cotton yarn.

After watching the demonstration, it seemed simple enough, so I gave the join a try. I cut the knot from the yarn and took the two resulting yarn ends and I knotted both using the following method:
1. Cross the end under the other yarn strand.
2. Turn it around and cross the end over the other yarn strand.
3. Take the end through the resulting circle of itself and pull.

A small knot will result for both. Then, you pull on both strands and the knots magically come together to form a very strong join that hardly shows in the finished work, so long as you cut off the ends very close to the final knot. There are plenty of tutorials out there if this didn't make sense to you. Just give it a google.

I used the double knot trick to join all of my yarn thereafter and had hardly any ends to weave in when my Killdeer was finished. And it is finished.

I loved this pattern. The shaping gives the cardigan a nice fit, while the short-row detail results in a collar and sleeves with a slight ruffle to them. The pockets, created by knitting an extra patch of stockinette that you then join back into the main garment, were fun to knit. They really made me feel clever when I managed to pull them off.

It needs blocked still, but there's plenty of time to get that gone. It's February here in Ohio with a foot of snow on the ground (at least) and a consistently subzero windchill. I won't be able to bust out the short-sleeved cotton anytime soon.

Bearing It

I have a confession to make. It is February 6th and my Christmas tree is still up. I have no real excuse for this except for the fact that there are still gifts under it. These gifts will not reach their recipients until I see them the weekend of Valentine's Day. The question now becomes: do I leave the tree up until after V-day or do I just take the thing down now? My work-ethic-inclined self tells me that I should just get it done, but that persistent lazy side says: why not leave it up? I mean, it would be festive to open these last few gifts before a twinkling tree, right? Right?

(Took long enough to get the picture to load on here too)

Of course, I am dealing with a side-effect to the tree-still-being-up thing: the cat has decided that the ornaments on the lower branches are toys, since they've been around so long. I keep finding them scattered about the tree. I can't decide if I think it's cute or annoying.

In the meantime, novel revision is in full swing again. I'm focusing mainly on getting the last chapter polished to a shine, but after, there are going to be some tough decisions. I have to figure out how to reconcile what the agent wants my book to be with what my book actually is without losing something essential in the process. I think for beginning writers especially, this is a real concern and I'm not quite sure I know the answer. When does an edit become so all-encompassing that it destroys the book? I know what is sale-able isn't always good (*cough* Twilight *cough*), so I really want to make sure my book becomes sale-able while also retaining what I think makes it worthwhile.

The next meeting of my writers group, which should have happened yesterday but was postponed due to a minor snowpocalypse, will be comprised partly of going through my last chapter revisions and getting me back on track. Partly, it will be talking about the other writer's work, and partly, it will be a book discussion of Claire Cameron's The Bear, which we got advanced copies of through its publisher. At a time when I could use some fictional motivation but am somehow reading two nonficiton books (one about introverts and one about physics and how the universe is actually a mathematical structure), the Bear felt like a needed change. The novel is about a five-year-old girl and her toddler brother, who are lost in the wilderness after her family is attacked by a bear while on a camping trip. The story itself was rather engaging and I got a special kick out of it after remembering a story workshop I experienced during my MFA. Some guy suggested that the main character of my story--now a section of my novel--should be attacked by a bear. The story had nothing to do with bears and the comment was so out of left field that my husband and I laughed about it for weeks. So here it was, the story I never wrote about a bear attack.

What really made it stand out, though, was the narrative POV, which was a first person through the eyes of the 5-year-old girl, Anna. Because Anna is so young, there are things the narrative inherently can't do, like use proper grammar or sentence structure or have a basic intellectual concept of the world. She's a kid and, as such, she has a hard time distinguishing present from past. She doesn't necessarily understand what is going on around her. It's just beyond her comprehension, and of course, like all young children, she is very self-centered.

I have seen reviews from other advanced readers who didn't appreciate Anna's perspective because they felt  like her voice was younger than her age or that they didn't buy her responses because they aren't what that reader's own five-year-old would do (because I'm sure your little darling is the epitome of what it means to be 5...). I think those readers started off this book not trusting the writer enough. Anna might have been a little immature for her age (I know plenty of other 5-year-olds less mature than her), but her POV was very consistent. Once you get in Anna's head, you don't get out again. Sometimes, the strangeness of the language got to me because it was so not grammatical, so caught between present and past that I didn't know where I was, but you know what? That's how Anna felt in that moment and that's what she thought. It was simple and honest, and as a writer, I thought the choice to stick with that narrative voice was quite brave.

As a whole, I quite enjoyed The Bear, especially the last sentence of the epilogue, which just about killed me because I didn't see it coming. It is a story about survival and family, the love between siblings and the sacrifice that parents make for their children. It's not a story I'll soon forget. I hope I can remain as true to my novel as Cameron was to hers.

Oh, and on a side note, if you are curious and have yet to read it, my first interview as a writer is up at Midwestern Gothic. Now excuse me while I chase the cat away from my Christmas tree.