Rowan Yarns...and the easy peasy Pie Recipe

Yesterday I made a berry crumble for dessert after Sunday Lunch. I will be the first to tell you that I hate cooking...at least the variety of cooking that has to magically materialize at 6pm when I would rather get a poke in the eye with a stick than waste time (that could be far better served knitting/ crocheting) in front of the stove...yes, such are my culinary leanings...however, when it comes to baking, I am a far happier camper. That being said, my philosophy about cooking and food generally can be summed up as follows: "If it takes more than 10 minutes of my time/hands to make, then it's not worth eating...".
So, over the years of enforced servitude in front of the stove, I have developed super-fast recipes and food shortcuts that allow me to whip something up that is great tasting but brain donor easy!

This fruit pie/crumble is one of those things :)
Pie pastry is essentially a mixture of butter (fat) and flour, a little sugar, salt and a binder like an egg. Now, if you are so inclined you could add all kinds of stuff, like choc chips etc, but for me, the fastest is bestest! Generally you need to use about double the weight of flour to fat (note: weight, not volume!), and I happened to use Self Raising flour, but really, if you have ordinary cake flour, that's fine...just add some baking powder.

I have a round pie dish that is about 30cm in diameter, and needed the following rough quantities to make the pie pastry:

+/- 2 1/2 cups of flour
+/- 200g butter
1/2 - 1/3 of a cup of sugar ( I used brown sugar because it was closest to hand, but you can use castor or white sugar)
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 large egg
Fruit Mix for the filling (I used a frozen berry mix that I bought from a berry supply wholesaler nearby, but really, you could use pretty much any fruit, fresh or canned as well...)



It's easier to work with the butter if it was refrigerated...

I mix the pastry in my Kenwood mixer using the whisking attachment.

1. Place flour, sugar and salt in mixer bowl.
2. Start mixer on medium speed, slowly adding little cut up blocks of cold butter.
3. Add your beating egg slowly...a crumbly pastry dough should start forming...
4. Allow the mixture to form a crumbly fine dough (you can get an idea of the texture above...I literally just took the loose pastry dough out of the mixer and sprinkled it on top of the berry mix...). The dough should be loose and crumbly, but if you squeeze it together, it should hold its shape without being sticky).
5. If you find that the dough is too loose and doesn't have some sticking power, you can add a teaspoon of cold water...just add a tiny bit at a time or you'll get a sloppy dough.
6. When it all looks good, spray your pie dish with some non-stick spray, and scoop some dough mixture into it and flatten with your fingers until the dish is lined with pastry.
7. Pour in your fruit mix.
8. Crumble some more of the dough over the top of the fruit filling...this is not meant to look pretty...just make sure it is sort of evenly spread.
9. Bake in oven at 180 degrees Celsius until the top is brown and golden.
10. Serve with custard or cream...

...easy peasy pie! It sounds far more complicated than it is...the whole thing took about 6 minutes to make...the rest of the time is just baking in the oven :)

I know that there are a gazillion people who will insist that the dough has to be refrigerated for 20 minutes in clingwrap etc etc ...honestly it's too much time and schlepp and it works FINE if you don't! Life is far too short to wait for stuff to get cold!

Try it...let me know how your pie making went :)



My dear and precious husband was in England for a conference at the beginning of December and sweet cherub that he is, went to a yarn shop and bought me some yarn! Now, until recently, the said cherub, still referred to my knitting as "sewing" ...proudly telling people that I am "...really good at sewing..."...so you'll understand that he has no concept about what yarns are and which brands / blends are desirable, never mind color and quantity ...

He has, in the past, heard the word " Rowan" bandied about, so I suspect that when he saw the name on a couple of balls of yarn, he was desperately pleased to have found something recognizable! He brought home a variety of Rowan Yarns that I haven't used before at all. I am the first to tell you that I LOVE Rowan's Milk Cotton, Handknit Cotton and Kidsilk Haze, so I was very curious to see if I liked the following lots...

First Up... Amy Butler's Organic Aran.

I was especially excited as I love all things Amy Butler and the fact that this is an organic yarn, so much the better. I had looked at the wonderful colours on-line, and liked the fact that it is an aran weight, so it would be perfect for big projects like a blanket. It's 50% cotton, 50% wool blend, and you get around 90m in a 50g ball.

Verdict:
Very nice to work with...not as smooth a yarn as the handknit cotton, but not as splitty as the Milk Cotton. I have been using sock weight yarn for such a long time, that I had forgotten how thick aran weight is! It works up very nicely and quickly, and I would buy it again if the opportunity arose...


Kaffe Fasset Kidsilk Haze

This is yarn Nirvana! I mean, Kidsilk Haze people! Is there really anything more you need to say? Add in the fabulous colours in this ball (Note the singular: hubby brought back countless balls of muddy purple All Season's Cotton and *#@!!& only ONE BALL of this yummy stuff!) It is just the most beautiful stuff to knit with and although , like dynamite, it comes in very small balls, there is actually enough to knit a good size project with... DEFINITELY a Keeper!!!!

Rowan All Season's Cotton

Ok...over-sharing time... " Hi, my name is Heidi, and I am a Yarn Snob...it has been 10 years since my last acrylic purchase..."...
Jokes aside...I cannot abide the stuff! I hate that grandma's knitted scratchy jerseys from the stuff in a variety of scary plastic colors , that you were forced to wear to keep the family peace...
Acrylic and me do not play nice! But, I suppose (in defence of the poor grandma's), we have only fairly recently had access to the wonderful new yarns, with the internet and all...so it was with a fair amount of nose-in-the-air that I tried this yarn. It is a blend of 60% cotton and 40% acrylic...again, an aran weight with 90m per 50g.


Ok, I will admit (begrudgingly...)that it is not scratchy. It does however have a supertwisty kind of texture to it, that I am in mortal fear, will pill something crazy when washed over time... I don't think that I will knit anything with this, so I wouldn't know about the pilling...have you used it? Does it pill? The two colours that I have are a burgundyish color and a muddy purple (Arrrggghhhhhh...why would you release a color like that???)...

NOT FOR ME...

Lastly...Colourscape Chunky by Kaffe Fassett. I was quite surprised by this yarn, because anything Kaffe does is generally awesome!
This yarn is beautifully coloured, but like the dreaded Noro Kureyon, seems to be a spun single-ply yarn, with a fuzzy feel. It is 100% lambswool....so I suspect it will felt (there is a huge set of multi-language instructions on the ball band, telling you to hand wash, do not tumble dry etc). It may be ok for felting, but I didn't get palpitations with excitement and anticipation when I thought about what to knit with it...

Verdict: Lovely colours...Nice for felting (I guess I should try make a felted item with it...), but I wouldn't buy it if I could...

Well...that's the story of the yarn, as they say! I need to go and evict more bolted lettuce from my garden (remember what I said...plant less lettuce!)...

Have a good day folks!
♥Heidi

In 2012 I will try to spend more time...

...Blogging!

...putting my patterns and ideas on paper and uploading to my Ravelry Shop.


...dyeing yarn.

...learning to succession plant and keep my vegetable garden clean and organized.


...finish UFO's.

...at Cintsa.


...finishing Nani's hexagon blanket.


...watercolour painting.

...being kind and patient.
...being thankful.
...being organized.
...being positive and optimistic!

Have you made of list of what you would like to spend more time doing?

.-*"*-..•"HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS!"•..-*"*-...

♥Heidi

Welcome to the Jungle...

What a busy day the last of 2011 has been! I woke up this morning to a garden gone absofrikinlutely wild. When we arrived home last night it was raining and dark and I didn't even look at the garden. I got up at 5am to get ready for work, and as I walked to the car, there was enough light to see the armageddon of the flora...it must have rained virtually non stop since we went on holiday because truly, you cannot imagine how out of control the lot was! The grass is long, the vegetables have all bolted and were standing in slimy bases...a heckofamess :(

After doing the first round of the day, I came home to watch the kids, Gerry then going off to see patients. The child minder then didn't arrive, so I couldn't get back to the hospital because there was no one to watch the little cherubs ;) , so essentially the day suddenly turned into an opportunity to start sorting out the mess...
I started yanking out bolted lettuce, basil, cauliflower, rotten peas, mildewed marrows etc... I worked for two hours straight and managed to get through about two and half boxes. As I went, I harvested loads of stuff. Surprisingly, there were remarkably few pests...I encountered one snail, 3-4 tiny slugs, a couple of chafer beeltes hiding in the soil and saw the evidence of a caterpillar's visit in the shredded leaves of the cauliflowers...BUT, a lot of the plants were covered with powdery mildew. This doesn't worry me as much...I'll spray with Margaret Roberts' Organic Fungicide...that will sort it out :) When it started to rain, I took my pots of bounty in and started cleaning...I was most ridiculously pleased with myself because I tried to see what was happening on the potato front...since this is my first season of vegetable growing, I thought it would be a mess, but NO! I have grown grogeous, white, perfect potatoes!!!!! Whoo Hoo!!!!!!

I will tell you this for free...seeing something a silly as a green bean growing, has made me feel like I am the gardener of the year! So easy, yet so self pleasing :) I grew some yellow lemon cucumbers. They are the round yellow balls of prettiness near the carrots (yellow, white, orange and purple). They are really sweet and taste a bit lemony, and grew far better than the regular long green cucumbers. I have been amazed how lonnnggg it takes for a carrot to grow, it's like growing a baby, I swear!

The marrows are ginormous...not yet sure in what and how I am going to put them to use...the yellow marrows are lovely and bright yellow, the squashes little zebra perfect balls and the strawberries fat and red...Tomorrow, I will see what else awaits. The boxes are so overgrown (can you believe? in just 12 days!), that I can't get to the back ones easily, so I haven't gone to see what's happening there yet :)

My poor fence has also seen the worst of the continuous rain...it has rusted badly...another thing my gardener will have to tackle when he comes back from leave..."gardener" , in this case is a very enthusiastic word...James is a great guy, a whizz at painting, carrying, helping... but really...green fingered he is not! He has been with us for long enough that I have worked out that it either grows by itself or it perishes.
I once found him carefully picking my newly sprouted seedlings , one at a time between two pinched fingers, proudly telling me he is ridding the garden of "weeds"...
In South Africa, you would now say "Eish!"....

So what have a learned from my first season growing my own vegetables?
1. Plant less lettuce.
2. Plant less cauliflower.
3. Plant less broccoli.
4. Plant less lettuce.
5. Plant less lettuce....getting the drift here?
6. Companion plant!
7. "Little Finger" carrots taste the best.
8. Squashes have nasty , prickly thorns on every part of their anatomy...wear gloves!
9. Organic does work.
9. Always plant Borage with your strawberries...it WORKS!
10. You do NOT need eighteen different tomato varieties...just because they are pretty and different colours, doesn't mean you cannot live without them...
11. Tomato plants get ginormous! Eighteen different varieties get even ginormouser!
12. SUCCESSION PLANT! The Holy Grail of vegetable gardening... (I haven't even come close to getting this right...)
13. Potatoes and Horseradish are friends...good friends!
14. You cannot tell how big a carrot is from looking at the size of the foliage :(
15. Pick beans often or the plants stops making them .
16. Peas don't like wet feet.
17. Everything grows much bigger than you think...planting hundreds of seeds in a square meter of earth (just in case), does not help...
18. Crushed egg shells prevent snails from eating your strawberries.
19. Plant rhubarb earlier next time, plant brocolli and cauliflower later...
20. When the recommended spacing for squashes and marrows is a metre, there may be a good reason for that...(my marrows are filling half the garden, and laugh at the pathetic box I tried to contain them in)
21. If I can grow stuff, then anyone can!

I must have done something right, because as I was yanking out bolted plants, earthworms the size of small snakes came out of the ground...this is a good thing isn't it? They were as fat as my little finger! I suspect it will take at least a week of hard gardening to get the equilibrium re-established. Oh, that's another thing I learned...your back will so not hold after two hours of bending over...get raised boxes! Hallelujah for raised vegetable beds!

Tomorrow, I am hoping to take the girls to see Sherlock Holmes 2...have any of you see it yet? Is it as awesome as I suspect it's going to be? I am a huge RDJ fan, so I can't wait!

I am now going to have a nice warm bath to ease my poor gardening back, and read some more of a new Kindle book I downloaded...it's called "Killer Instinct: Charlie Fox Book 1" by Zoe Sharp...so far it's excellent! It's a kind of girl Jack Reacher type novel...Charlie Fox is actually a woman, and of course, she is just as cool as 'ol Jack (I am a card-carrying, certified Jack Reacher groupie...). It's getting interesting ...

Have a wonderful (and safe) New Year everyone!
♥Heidi

Farewell dear ocean shores! The pain....

So today we bid farewell to our beloved Cintsa. It is always a bittersweet time, the longing to stay war-ring with the desire to see our other home and our Flashy... Cintsa has become such a special place for us, a refuge and a place of restoration...
We went to the beach in the morning , then packed up and sorted out the house...and wound our way to the airport.
The flight was turbulent to say the least and I came off as nauseous as I was during my pregnancies! I am a terrible flyer...in fact, I hate flying...the problem of course being that I don't relish the thought of sitting in a car for 12 hours driving through the heat of day just to drop dead from boredom and exhaustion at the end of it all...so flying becomes a lesser evil to endure :)
Gerry on the other hand LOVES flying ( :P ), and has no trouble at all with flying nausea. When we flew to Verbier a couple of years ago, I vomited non stop for nearly 24 hours...towards the end I gave up all pretense of wanting to continue my existence on earth, and pleaded silently for the end to now just come, dammit! Such are the vagaries of modern travel....


Yesterday, while I was standing on our bedroom balcony, I saw dolphins in the water, and thought I would snap a few pics...what a sweet surprise to have unexpectedly captured a leaping dolphy, right at the very edge of my shot! They really are very playful creatures! Debbie's son was swimming along with them for a long time one day, and he said that they are naturally very curious, coming up to him constantly to see what this was in the water with them... :)

When we landed at the airport, I took a very poor, blurry photo of Emmanuelle under the lighted reindeer...makes me a little nostalgic for Christmas again...ah well, 2012 is soon underway and before you know it...Christmas will be here again!

Tomorrow, it's back to work bright and early...wish me strength folks...first day back is always tough!

♥Heidi

Knitting on the Beach... The Needle(s) has landed...

Despite my love of for this area and my deep appreciation for the sea and the beach, I must admit to having less than stellar feelings about cold water, sea or not. Although we are on the East Coast of Africa , hence a much warmer current (Indian) than the West Coast (the freezing Atlantic), the water here is wayyyyyy too cold for my liking. So it happens that every year, I need to psych myself up to brave the frigid waves and do my annual "swim". The verb "swimming" is used here with a great deal of artistic licence, my foray into the great blue being more of an attempt to stay upright against crashing waves as I slowly advance ....one numbing foot after the other. Gerry and Aliki use wetsuits to keep out the cold, but Emmanuelle has no cold temperature sensors in her skin, and will dive headlong in, rain, shine, hurricane, icebergs.... regardless. As I mentioned before, the sea is very treacherous here, and a rip can take you out towards Australia within a heartbeat. Yesterday, despite the presence of several lifeguards, it took my friend Pete and his daughter being towed out rapidly , to realize that there was a powerful current and that people were getting stuck way out, unable to make their way back in to shore. Pete and Emma were fine...he grew up on the beach, so these things are taken in his stride, but the lifeguards had to go in an rescue several people.
I have made a rule about our kids swimming...we always have a lifesaver bouy or two and a pair of long flippers when we go to the beach.
So, back to my swalk (:) *swim/walk)... I went in as far as my neck , patted myself proudly on the back for a job well done! and went and sat wrapped up on a deck chair on the beach.
Now for the good bit...my knitting :)

Remember when I wrote about the Knit Companion App?...I have modified and set up a charted pattern for Poppy Socks, and all I needed on the beach, was my iPad and knitting....happy as a pig in mud! The Poppy socks started with me seeing a colour scheme that I really liked...a sky blue/turquoise/greeny variegated blend with scarlet next to it...so I dyed up some sock yarn and fiddled with the pattern for a bit. I started with a plain toe, but changed it so that the poppies start straight away. Hopefully this test knit will be fine, and as soon as I am done, I will put the charted pattern up on Ravelry. I have been using the Red Lace Chiaogoo's...these are fabulous circs! Go out and buy yourself a pair as a New Year's gift...you're worth it ;)

Yesterday I went for a long walk along the beach. It was still fairly early and there was a light breeze and some cloud cover....lovely stuff! I was just thinking about the New Year...it's responsibilities, planning, debating...I feel like it's always a time to start something new, set yourself a challenge, try something different...Not really a New Year's resolution necessarily, just a new outlook on things...
I have been thinking that perhaps I should do a Project 365...perhaps a photo a day? Do you have any plans/ideas/challenges?

Enjoy the day folks!
♥Heidi

Christmas Day Wild Coast...

So...you may ask yourself....?Wild Coast....what is the Wild Coast? And what does that have to do with a sunny beach scene?
We are on holiday in an area on the East Coast of South Africa called the Wild Coast. This region is famous not only for it's breathtaking natural beauty, but for its unpredictable and treacherous ocean. There are several natural landmarks that you may have heard of (eg Hole-in-the-Wall), but one of the aspects to the Wild Coast that I found fascinating, are the number of shipwrecks off its coast, including some famous ones.

A few years ago, I read a book called "The Caliban Shore" by Stephen Taylor, which deeply affected me (truth be told, I was an emotional wreck for weeks afterwards). On the 4th of August 1782, a wooden hulled ship called the Grosvenor, struck rocks and sank off the Wild Coast in an area called Lwambazi. The initial toll was not as great as could be expected....only 14 of the 150 passengers drowned, with the rest reaching the shore. The book follows the subsequent events as told by two of the survivors (written accounts of course ;) ) and after truck load of historical research by the author. One of the survivors was an 8 month pregnant woman. It was her story that had me in tears over many days. If you are easily upset, perhaps this book is not for you...but, certainly it is a worthy read, full of historical data and gives a very real account of why this area is called the "Wild" coast. The characters are really brought to life and the social norms and human behaviour in the 1700's , make for thought provoking reading. I highly recommend it!
The mystery and legend surrounding the Grosvenor and her cargo , continued on for a long, long time, with rumours of gold and treasure sparking several treasure hunt expeditions! You can read about all of it in the same book, as well as find snippets here.
There are a couple of other famous shipwreck events, including that of the "disappeared-into-thin-air" SS Waratah...all fascinating reading.

So, in light of this, on Christmas morning, we woke to find the ocean covered with mist and a fine dizzle falling....two hours later we were on the beach in perfect weather with sun and sand bright with summer. In the first photos you can see the heavy bank of cloud on the horizon...when we see something like that we know...watch out, something is coming! By the afternoon, we had what you see in the bottom photo...black clouds, a heavy oppressive atmosphere and a heck of a thunderstorm....the lightning struck an area in the village, and our lights went out and we had no power! It took 6 hours to sort out whatever it was that was fried by the lightning, so we spent the evening at Pete's house (some of the houses in the area still had power, others not...go figure?). Earlier this year, a massive amount of damage was done to the East Coast when incredibly strong winds and rain, virtually washed away roads and flooded malls and homes....it really was dreadful.
In spite of these unpredictable events, it is the very uncontrollable nature of the area that I love...man still has to tread lightly and beware...nature is till the boss here!

I hope you all had a wonderful day today...thank you for visiting :)

♥Heidi