Halloween Costumes

Anyone born too late to directly experience the 70s missed a good laugh. I was 9 in 1970, so my impressionable puberty was spent in this hideously hilarious decade. How well I remember the thrill of visiting Famous-Barr's version of the "Lemon Frog Shop": discothèque balls and psychedelic strobe lights crazed the midnight blue walls as groovy music thumped shoppers into a state submissive enough to crave the ugliest of fashions. I had a zodiac poncho similar to this one from Montgomery-Ward. Here's the 1970 catalog blurb for this style statement: "Poncho power makes itself known, swinging out free 'n wide above teamable pants. Up-dated poncho is circled by horoscope symbols — you're sure to find your own — and deep fringe for finish. New idea is in the sleeves with trumpet flare." Nothing like an early blast of weird to twist you for life!

Gingersnaps

I can't eat gluten without dire physical consequences, and since gluten is found in wheat, oats, barley, and rye, baking is a challenge. I won't buy those nasty gluten-free mixes full of weird stripped starches, so I'm always experimenting with different whole grain flours and recipes. My latest experiment has been an unqualified success! I took my favorite gingersnap recipe from this old cookbooklet and substituted brown rice flour and flax meal. Delicious. Here's the recipe:
2 cups brown rice flour
3 tblsp. flax seed, ground in a spice grinder
2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cloves
1/4 tsp. allspice
Mix these dry ingredients together with a whisk and set aside.
Cream 3/4 cup butter and 1 cup packed brown sugar until fluffy. Add one egg and 1/4 cup molasses, cream till fluffy. Add dry ingredients in batches, mixing well. Chill overnight. Form dough into 1 inch balls and bake at 350°F for 15 minutes. Cool before moving.

I used the spice mix from the gingerbread recipe in this same booklet for added oomph. You really can't tell these aren't made with wheat flour, which is the whole point of gluten-free baking. For those who have no gluten issues, simply use regular flour and omit the flax meal. But whole grain and flax is healthier, if a cookie with this much butter and sugar can be called healthy!

Fried Eggs

I just got tagged with a "meme," which I believe is blogspeak for "pop quiz." And it happened just as I was hunting through my cookbooklet collection for a favorite gingersnap recipe. While simultaneously screwing around on the computer. (Found the cookies in another offering from this same 1950s series by the Staff Home Economists of Culinary Arts Institute: The New England Cookbook.) There are loads of egg recipes in the cookbooklet shown, but why tamper with the perfection of the ultimate fried egg? And nothing but experience can teach you how to make one of those. This quiz came to me from 7-Letter Deborah.

Egg Meme

Favorite breakfast egg dishes: Two perfectly fried farm-fresh eggs crusted with cracked black pepper and drizzled with brown butter. With bacon.

Favorite dinner egg dishes: Good morning! Eggs are for breakfast!

Favorite egg desserts: Crème brulée.

Egg seasoning of choice: Louisiana Hot Sauce, bacon, and cracked black pepper.

Favorite omelet filling: garlic, sun-dried tomato bits, prosciutto, & mozzarella.

What do you put in your egg salad: The Ojai Cook Lemonaise, celery, slivered toasted almonds, and green onions.

What do you put in your deviled eggs (or stuffed eggs if you're Southern): Durkees!

How do you like your fried egg: Over medium.

Grease of choice: Sweet creamery butter.

What do you put on your fried egg sandwich: Bacon and onions.

Would you use raw eggs in nog, caesar salad, etc.: Yes.

What sort of egg accoutrements do you own: A small, well seasoned cast-iron skillet. Bacon.

Brown, white, omega-3, or what? Farm-fresh or omega-3 (which Schnucks now carries!)

The rules:

Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
List 5 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
Let each person know that they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Add more questions if you like.

Here are my tags: Farmgirl Susan, Laura, Sherill, Tempest, and Becca.

Postscript: I got so hungry for fried eggs taking this quiz that I made two for late breakfast. I was going to make gingersnaps with those last two eggs, but forgot this fact until the last bit of yolk was gone. Oops.

The Case of the Envious Thrifter

There was something ironic about buying, at the local Goodwill, a 25¢ paperback whose cover girl personified glamourous wealth. Me in my crummy jeans and hoodie, handing over a wrinkled dollar bill for the dream image of sables, supercilious manicures, and cigarette holders: how I would love to have the high life of a lonely heiress! All cocktails, lipstick, and shoes that cost more than our monthly food (and yarn!) budget. I'd be willing to slog out many more painful reincarnations on The Wheel for just one penthouse-on-the-park existence. The very thought of extreme moolah really does make me want to purr like a fluffy white cat. I'm so shallow.

Lipstick Ads of Yore

Here are a few of my favorite old lipstick ads, just for the hell of it. Just because I'm going out tonight and thinking about what lip colors work best with my complexion. None, anymore. So might as well go with the brightest red I can find!

Mitt Match

Why do I always give away the things I knit? I made these for a friend who sent me some cool handspun yarn just because I like yarn. I sort of want to keep them. But if I keep them, I'll have no excuse to make more — and that's most of the whole point of giving knits away in the first place. I'll do anything to keep knitting, and knitting, and knitting. Especially now that "back to work" is only three months away... PS: As noted in yesterday's post, I was nervous about matching these two mitts up. Somehow they turned out the same. From a distance, in any case.

Potted Cat

That's our cat Brother relaxing after a hard day of gardening. (He'll assure you that yes, eating rabbits is just as important a task as weeding.) The next photo is a picture of my weeds at sunset. It's out of focus because I'd just had a couple glasses of Beaujolais-VIllages. I needed a relaxant after trying, and failing spectacularly, to knit two Dotted Arglye mitts at a time on one magic loop. Stranding and twoatatime do not go together! I can't hold the yarn like I do for hats, one strand in each hand, because there's too much needle manipulation and yarn detangling involved. So I ended up holding both yarns in the left hand and picking them apart and up through each loop. A slow, slow process, and one that led to many dropped stitches and cuss words. So I ditched the twoatatime deal and finished one by itself, on its own magic loop. But now I'm scared I won't be able to match it! My mind just gunks up when I try to count rows. The chart part will work fine, but after that ... uh-oh. By the way, this mitt used "Aunt Jean's Invisible Jog" as explicated by Cindy Sauerwald in The Best of Vogue Knitting. It's a fantastic trick, and in itself worth the price of admission — though I checked the book out of the library for free.

Oh No, Another Hat, Volume III

What do you do with a giant ball of left over Silk Garden, all the slightly off colors spliced together, the colors that were too weird for last year's Christmas gifts? Recycle! This Circus Loop Hat just might need a pom-pom to make it clown-scary.

Another Day, Another Hat, Volume II

Last weekend I took a trip to Kansas City to ogle some Art and made this Dotted Argyle Hat and the Chinkapin Hat shown Monday on the long boring drive. Kansas City is livelier than I thought it would be, and the Art there was really, really cool. Lucky the students who attend The Kansas City Art Institute! We had some fantastic docents who helped me look at things I might have passed by with a pried open mind. Had the tingly ah-hah moment, like the one I get without any guidance from reading a good poem, more than once.

Another Day, Another Hat

Hats are fun to knit because they're done so quickly and you can add all sorts of fancy flourishes to them with out years of repetition. I love hats. The knitted one pictured is called a Chinkapin Hat, because the Fake Isle leaves vaguely resemble the leaves of my favorite chinkapin variety of oak. Oh, and those doodads around the crown are acorns, which, thanks to all the rain this year, are bursting off twigs as a bumper crop. Chart available on ravelry.