Marching Right Along

In keeping with my apparent one post per month kind of pace, I'm getting well ahead of the game for March.   The past weeks have been filled with my foray into the knitting world.  I have a really good teacher, she is nice to me and patient.  I forgot to take a picture of my very first knitting piece which was just a swatch of stitches and a veritable knitting playground.  I tried knitting and purling and did my best to remember what was what.  I made a couple ribbed sections and practiced switching between the two stitches until I was comfortable.  Then came the scarf . . .

Um, I made it out of yarn . . . and it is a cable pattern.  G still has the pattern, I thought it would be burned into my brain, but I only remember P4,K3,P4,K15,P4,K3,P4 . . . and P7,K4,P15,K4,P7.  There was some repetition and a little variation to get the cable part done.  I only had one big mess up where I didn't cable in the right direction and had to unknit a bunch of rows which was pretty scary, but we fixed it.

We also made some dumpling/potsticker things from scratch the other night.  Standard pasta and even ravioli are pretty easy for us as a team, but these guys were a new test.  I tried to take the easy way out when G offered to buy potsticker wrappers at Sakura Square, but unfortunately the market was already closed, so we blazed forward bravely with a new type of pasta dough.

The basic dough is flour, salt and boiling water.  For some reason I thought I'd be ok kneading for 10 minutes by hand so I skipped using the food processor.  After getting my workout in, it was time to roll, stuff and close some dumplings.

The dumpling press was purchased one morning at the Pacific Mercantile after we dined on dim sum at Super Star Asian.  It came in quite handy as hand crimping 36 dumplings would have been a chore.

For the filling, we went with shrimp, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, napa cabbage, and a few other ingredients.  G mixed up her favorite dipping sauce of garlic chili paste and soy.  The cooking process was fairly straight forward . . . brown one side of dumplings in pan, steam in pan, brown the other side lightly.

 The end result was delicious!

There have been some other various adventures since my last post.  We all, Dempsey included, went on ski vacation to Steamboat.  G and I took knife skills class at Cook St. and we both have all of our fingers still.  I rode bikes inside, I rode bikes outside . . . and despite the season, we made things grow . . .

Wow, February 2013

How/why is it already more than half way through the second month of 2013?  Since my ghost writer has been slacking on my blog posts, I figured I better step in and type something on my own.

There are so many things that happened between October 2012 and today so I'll hit the photographed highlights in no particular order:

G and I have made lots of pastas, various pastas . . . flavored, stuffed, thick noodle, thin noodle, basic, exotic . . . the picture above was a red wine pasta.  It had lovely color, but tasted mostly like . . . pasta.

I bought a couple new to me espresso machines after selling the Nuova Simonelli I bought a couple years back for $100.  Not too surprising, the 2-group machine was less expensive than the 1-group, but the benefit of the single group machine is that I can physically pick it up and take it into either shop if something happens.  I nerded out and put a PID controller on the single group machine for "fun".  It provides some semblance of temperature stability, but no great benefit beyond that.

It did actually snow in Denver once, at some point during the winter . . .

Thanks to new Local Velo sponsor Sugarlicious, we had more gummy candies to play with.  We give gummy army people a solid two thumbs up!

We have been to Dim Sum at Super Star Asian more than once in the past few months.  Dumplings are good!

G found out why Dempsey likes his bed so much . . .

We planted more things to grow in the gardening off season.  The paperwhites seemed like a good way to go and since the above was taken, they have grown significantly.  The succulent in an old portafilter just seemed so . . . artsy . . .

We traveled to snowy and cold locations, fortunately there were hot springs for soaking.  Unfortunately it was so cold south of Salida that the car froze and didn't want to start until we hooked up to a very robust battery and cranked and cranked and cranked . . . -17 degrees is cold!

We went to Steamboat, and stopped at the top of Rabbit Ears Pass on the way to stretch the legs and snowshoe before a weekend of skiing/snowboarding.

G rented skis with authority!  This was her first official ski vacation, longer than a day trip . . . fortunately we were rewarded with healthy snowfall over the weekend and had about a foot of fresh powder the last day of skiing.

We made a handy cutting board rack on the inside of the kitchen cabinet.  Thanks the internet!  You are so full of good ideas!  More to come . . .