Morticia Knits!

Morticia Knits at the end of most episodes of the Addams Family. Also Chuck & I love her singing, and she's pretty hilarious and cute all around. I couldn't find any of the really great clips of her knitting, but I had to post something about it today. The one I was looking for involved her making hats for a two-headed relative, with Gomez commenting that she should remember to make two different sizes, since on of the heads was bigger. But as long as the clip has some knitting in it, I guess this will do. It does have some poetry for Gomez too. Happy Halloween!



P.S. I just found this related item from a member of EtsyRain, which I think is pretty cute! In an addams family way... http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15953228

Happy Halloween!

I made this little spider earlier this month and never got around to listing him, so I thought I'd get in the Halloween spirit and offer him as a free gift to anyone that orders my Webbed Necklace. Today only, if he's still around tomorrow I think I'll keep him for myself. Oh, some details. He's just under 1"x1" or 2.5cmx2.5cm. I'll hang him on a nice jump ring so he can be used as a pendant. Silver color wire, matte black and silver glass beads...and his legs do spin around a bit. Creepy crawly!

Treasury happy dance

I did it again. This one just kind of happened. I had left my browser window open to the treasury page inadvertently, just browsing through. Then hours later I still had it open and didn't realize it. When I finally did realize it it was about 30 seconds before they were opening up. I very quickly glanced through some of my recent favorites and tried to think up a theme. They seemed to be such nice shades of yellow. Not quite enough for a full treasury though, so I did have to spend a little time & effort searching etsy for yellow stuff and scouring my favorites sellers shops. Which is perfectly fine, it's a task I enjoy! You can view the treasury here:
http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=18016

I'm noticing there are more illustrations than usual, and sketchbooks. Along with candles, coats, scarfs and coffee cups, I hope this lives up to it's title. Ah. If only I could inhabit this treasury...

Vegan Mofo - Summary of a few days

I haven't posted much in the way of vegan meals we've made lately, but there have been some worth posting about. Pictured above is a recent meal, polenta (from scratch) topped with tomato sauce with beans with roasted potatoes on the side. The polenta dish is becoming a standard for me, one that I can improvise. I made this Monday night and managed to time it perfectly for when Chuck got home from his class. It wasn't that long ago I was using store bought polenta, but recently I finally got around to making it from scratch. And it's pretty easy and tastes better, so I think that's something I will keep up. The sauce was just a can of tomato paste, one of black beans, and two chopped up fresh tomatoes. Oh and olive oil. And then the roasted potatoes are basically from the VWAV cookbook recipie...well, except I didn't use fresh herbs.

Another meal I photographed was the brunch Chuck made for us over the weekend. He often throws one together on weekends, using vegan sausage from a tube, Lightlife "gimmelean." It's pretty good. He also makes potatoes on the side. I took a picture this week cause he topped it all off with the leftover Golden Gravy I made the weekend before, and it was even better than usual! Normally I just have it with ketchup. This made me want to try making some sweet potato biscuits, like they served at Silence Heart Nest in Seattle.

Lastly, I didn't snap a picture, but Sunday night saw my Mom & Dad cooking vegan. They made the Stuffed Peppers we'd had success with last month. Again they were excellent. Dad made basily carrots on the side.

There, I'm caught up. There are only two more days of Vegan Mofo left. I don't think I'm going to quite make the 20 post goal for the month, but I think I'm doing pretty well. Hopfully the last few posts will see one involving Halloween cookies!

Dropped & Finished & Other Topics

Finished this drop stitch sweater project I've been working on, on and off, since September. I'm pretty happy with the results, it's just a little tight in the sleeves, but otherwise it feels very nice on. Perhaps the slight tightness is just some added incentive to lift weights at the gym more often? I think that's how I will look at it. I wish I could have more projects that come together like this one. I grabbed the rayon ribbon yarn from my Mom's stash knowing it would be just right for this project and it worked out really well. And it was free! Well, at some point my Mom paid $1 a spool for this yarn, and it took about 8.5 spools. If I could make projects at that price on a regular basis...

In other topics, Vegan Mofo is wrapping up, so look for a few more posts on that subject to round out the month. And oh yeah! My Houndstooth treasury made Etsy's front page. And I missed it! That was the first time that's happened to me and I found it really disorienting. Very cool, but I wish I could've seen it! On that note, it's feeling like it's been too long since I've posted much to the shop, so perhaps I'll get a few new things in there this week. I guess it's really time to think about Christmas. I've got some hang tags from last year I think I might list, and I'm trying to figure out a nice way to do some gift packaging. Etsy seems to post about that every year on the storque, and it's pretty inspiring!

Houndstooth Treasury

This is in response to a conversation my Mom and I were having last night about seeing lots of pretty houndstooth scarves and jackets on the streets of Chicago lately.
Update: This one has expired, but not without making it to the front page first, yippee! Sandfibers has a image of that on her blog here, along with a nice post about some lovely treasuries featuring her work!

Vegan MoFo - Soup & Croquettes

Last night I combined recipes from the two cookbooks I from restaurants in LA and Seattle that I mentioned in yesterday's post. Artichoke croquettes from the Cafe Flora Cookbook with Asparagus & Cilantro Soup from the Real Food Daily cookbook. The pair made a pretty full meal together, and I have to say, I think this is one of my favorite photographs of my cooking so far. I picked out the Asparagus Soup because I don't think I've ever had a soup quite like that although I really like asparagus. The description in the cookbook said you really had to try it when asparagus are in season, and they had some at whole foods recently. Then I picked out the croquettes as a side thinking something about the green soup would sorta remind you of the green stuff inside of the croquettes (artichokes are a little bit green-ish) and because it's one of my favorite things on the menu at Cafe Flora. It all made for a fun time in the kitchen, since I got to use the food processor for both dishes. We haven't had it all that long, so it is still exciting to me. For dessert Chuck threw together a nice apple crisp, which I will post about tomorrow!

Our Evening Walk

Chuck pre-ordered the G1 phone, also known as the android. It was delivered this week. Tonight we used it to map our evening walk. I am impressed & now I want one too.


Although you may notice that something screwy happened, or else we have some kind of superpowers that allow us to walk really really fast. I was unaware. Well, still working out the kinks. Oh and the other night after playing too much on the phone, I tried to play a youtube video by touching my laptop's screen.

Vegan Cookbook Favorites

This is our cookbook shelf. Lotsa fantastic cookbooks up there, including a really neat letterpress one I bought Chuck for christmas last year from an etsy seller, artnoose. Anyway, my five favorite cookbooks are listed below. I'm counting all the Isa Chandra books together to be fair to the rest of the shelf. In no particular order, these are the cookbooks I'm happiest with and have come back to for multiple recipies and to make the same fantastic recipes again and again.

- Veganomicon, VWAV & Vegan Cupcakes take over the World
- Nonna's Italian Kitchen (basics like vegan white sauce but with lots of variations on ideas)
- The New Soy Cookbook (I've been cooking from this one for a long time. It's not entirely vegan, but it is mostly and there are several great dishes.)
- The Real Food Daily cookbook
- The Cafe Flora Cookbook

The last two are restaurants in L.A. and Seattle respectively that are absolutely great. When the put out cookbooks we had to get them, since we can't visit easily anymore. (sniff sniff) They're kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum, I've found the Real Food Daily cookbook to be surprisingly approachable whereas Cafe Flora is the cookbook you want to go to for some really serious cooking. I mainly say that because the ingredients for the cafe flora recipes have so far seemed to me to be a little more obscure, and the dishes are often made up of several parts. (sauces to drizzle on top, etc.) Both are great cookbooks though and make me think about great restaurants in cities I've been to. Of course I like all of our cookbooks for one reason or another, but these are the ones I get most excited about flipping through.

Re-photography for Etsy Shop

I think I must have been pretty anxious to list these cards when I first made them. And, well, I am still working on figuring out a photography set up in the new apartment. So some of my first photos of these cards were just not all that great. I'm not sure what I was thinking with the white background, other than that it was the best I had on hand shortly after the move. So I've been meaning to correct this ever since. I tagged along to the art supply store when Chuck needed to go earlier this week for model building supplies for school. For this photography task I decided to go simple and picked out plain color paper as a backdrop. The cards are avaliable here. And as you can see I've still got some work to do with the backgrounds in the blank card catergory, but it's a start!

Vegan Month of Food - Carmelized Tofu

Tofu that tastes like candy! Half-way through eating this meal I was thinking it might be a good way to get a picky kid to eat some good stuff. Tofu, Brussel Sprouts and Cashews taste really good when candyfied! Okay, those things all taste good anyway in my opinion. It was just a thought.

This marks the second time I've made this recipe from 101 cookbooks, but really I ought to make it a regular dish. It's incredibly easy to throw together, involving only a few ingredients that get thrown together on the skillet, and it comes together really quickly. Plus it tastes really good. Last night I used cashews we had on hand rather than the pecans called for, and I also used regular instead of brown sugar. Both of those substitutions were noticeable, but certainly didn't hurt the dish much. Note to self, make this again!

Vegan Mofo - Very Successful Tempeh Loaf

Last night my Parents & Grandma came over for dinner. Having five people to cook for and finding I was pretty close to having all the right ingredients for tempeh loaf from the Real Food Daily cookbook, I decided to go for it. As I was making it I realized I've been wanting to find a good vegan loaf recipie for a while and as it came together it looked more and more like I had found it. Real Food Daily is a really great restaurant in L.A., all vegan, organic, two locations. When we visited L.A. last October their food was so good we visited them twice and bought the cookbook. And so far I've had nothing but luck with the recipes. The recipes are well written to be exciting yet reliable, and like the Vegan with a Vengeance cookbook, it's peppered with stories about how the restaurant started, why they started offering thanksgiving meals, etc. Anyway, I went with the route of making the recommended side dishes as well, roasted fall veggies and mashed potatoes with golden gravy. Most of the food, other than the veggies, was prepared by me the night before and Chuck helped by reheating it when my family came over. It all worked out really well, and the tempeh loaf got great reviews from the family despite their typically meat-eating ways. Which is exactly what you hope for with a dish like this. Oh, and I got to use the cool dicing wheel on our food processor too, to mush up the tempeh. That was so much fun!

I think we've got just enough leftover for dinner, and my stomach is growling in anticipation!

Vegan Mofo - So Yummy They're Gone

Delicious Vegan Kahlua Chocolate Chip Muffins. Hold on a second, I have to concentrate on not drooling on my keyboard. These were so good. Chuck made these early last week from a recipie on the PPK site. We didn't have the instant coffee called for so instead chuck used Kahlua, which made them taste pretty neat. Also, I noticed Whole Foods is now carrying (or perhaps have always carried in this region) store brand chocolate chips labeled as vegan, which baked really wonderfully in these cupcakes. Er. Muffins. You know they were good muffins, they blurred the line between the two categories a little bit. Had they been iced they would definitely make good cupcakes.

I think this brings me up to date on Vegan Mofo Posts, at least as far as what I've actually documented with photos. My Parents and Grandma are coming over for dinner tonight and I think I've made something really neat for them, so I'll have that to post about early next week!

Socks - I get it now

I say this because my Mom's main knitting projects have been socks. I remember going to yarn shops and looking through the patterns, picking out sweaters I wanted. I wondered why she didn't make sweaters and thought that's what I would do if I could knit. After all, everyone looks so happy in their hand knit sweaters (on a beach in the northeast somewhere, often) in the magazines.

Anyway, I've completed 3 full fledged sweater projects, and have two more on the needles. Although I'm fairly happy with how they've turned out, it's tricky. You don't really know what the fit will look like on you until it's done. There's seaming involved, bleh! And it just takes a long time. So I've completed two (and just over a half) sock projects now and I get it. They are quicker, there's no seaming, the construction of a sock is pretty neat and feet really appriciate hand knit socks. They are sooo comfortable.

I'm by no means done making sweaters, I don't think I could get away with that without making Chuck the sweater I've been talking about since the Winter 2007 issue of Knitscene, but I see more socks in the future. For right now my goal is to knit up my yarn stash as much as possible, which I think will mean something more like scarves and gauntlets and a few sweater-like projects I've stocked up for. But once I've cut down the stash enough to rationalize another trip to the LYS, I'm guessing I'll have a new sock project.

Pictures of the two projects I've completed are below, both use Crystal Palace Panda Cotton Print Yarn, which is a blend of Cotton, Bamboo and Nylon. I just realized I haven't yet posted my first complete pair of socks. October is an appropriate month to do so, although I finished them back in August, because the pattern comes from KnitPink.com and the profits are donated to the Canadian breast cancer foundation. The pattern was written by Vegan knitter Kala Hotakainen, who blogs at Vegan Craftastic. The more recent project is Hedera from Knitty, which appears to be very popular, with 1370 projects underway on Ravelry.

Vegan Mofo Brunch

I am about a week behind on my Vegan Mofo Posts, since this is last week's brunch. Chuck made us vegan sausages and potatoes. The recipie for the sausages called for the Vital Wheat Gluten, so they were a little similar in taste to seitan. I believe the recipie is from Vegan Dad. I thought the preparation was a little interesting, each sausage was molded in foil & placed in the steamer. Chuck made patties as well from the same mix, and the texture of those was a bit tougher. We munched on these during the week this week as well, the recipie made quite a few sausages! Posting this a week later though, I am getting hungry and they are all gone. But, we did go to the grocery store this week, so I should be able to make up some ground and post more yummy vegan food before the month is through!

Arranged

I've been listening to a lot of NPR this week. So it seems appropriate to feature a video from a story I head on NPR. Part of a series of stories they are doing on Muslims in America, this one featured Mediha Sandhu. You can listen to the story here. She was the winner of the 2007 One Nation film contest for the animation below, a contest that seeks entries that "illuminate the Muslim American experience."

Vegan Mofo Bruschetta

This Vegan Mofo Entry represents a little bit of team work between Chuck and I. Well okay, all Chuck in the kitchen. I contributed by bringing home the veggies. Last Thursday was the very last Farmer's Market at Daley Plaza. I bought 4 peppers, 6 tomatoes and 3 mini pumpkins for decor for $6. Then I stuffed all into my handknit market bag. All in all a pleasant experience.

Anyway, I brought them home and Chuck promptly made us this bruschetta. With the fresh veggies, peppers in there too as well as the tomatoes, it was so good. He also threw it on some pasta and it was just as good as a sauce. No, no, it was better as bruschetta because bruschetta is so good. I guess what I want to say here is that it lost nothing in the translation to pasta topping. Bruschetta is always pretty much just tomatoes and olive oil, then whatever spices etc. you are interested in adding. It's always a nice dish, one you can almost always get out at restaurants with confidence that it will be vegan. (sometimes there is cheese, but usually menus make that obvious.) But after eating this I highly recommend making it with fresh farmer's market veggies. This was the best bruschetta I've had.

Exciting Pictures of Yarn!

I bet everyone is pretty excited to see pictures of my yarn stash? Well, that's what I did with myself yesterday. Chuck thinks I'm insane (or maybe just very silly.) But I'm sure other fans of Ravelry will understand. I condensed knitting messes from many locations to one box of yarn and one of incomplete projects, meanwhile documenting it all for ravelry. It's about time I became fully aware of just how much yarn I have and figure out what to do with some of it before I go back to the store. Here's a sampling from my stash:

 

And I also dug out all of my unfinished barely started projects and faced the decision to frog or photograph and store away. There weren't that many I frogged. I have a few projects I haven't gotten very far with for a while and/or have restarted because of too many screw ups. So most of the frogging was deciding that it was probably better to have a ball of yarn than a mess of a piece of fabric with yarn hanging off in every direction. All of my works in progress can be seen here. And just for the heck of it I threw on the drop stitch t-shirt project that needs some seaming and took pictures. Looks like the project will turn out nicely..if I ever get back to it! This is all probably a little more interesting that the stash photos I'm posting here, but I am feeling silly this morning!

Oh, and I've been a little uninterested in blogging this week for no good reason, but I'd like to get back into posting for Vegan MoFo. Chuck's been cooking & baking more than I have over the weekend, and did some interesting stuff, which I think I can get a few posts out of. I was kinda hoping I might convince him to guest blog, but I am not to sure he'll agree to that. Either way there are pictures on my flickr and there will be some blog entries soon!

Lazy Blogging: Current Flickr Favorites

1. chocolate stars, 2. Kaffe Fassett Bird, 3. "This way" said bird, 4. Cute Love Owl Sculpture, 5. Roosevelt, 6. October, 7. Swing Gitan, 8. Pierogies and Cabbage, 9. Stir-Fry w/ Sweet Balsamic Vinegar Sauce, 10. Choc. Cupcakes w/ Banana-Coconut Frosting, 11. Broken, 12. cloudy bedroom wall, 13. Ransom Note 10.04.08, 14. peanut butter bomb cake1, 15. vegan cheesecake, 16. Lucy of Chicago, 17. Overhead Projector is not a Planetarium Projector, 18. Sortie, 19. Skull, 20. Beetle in Amber, 21. Cupcakes you can believe in., 22. this morning would best be spent eating cinnamon n sugar doughnuts and drinking apple cider...10.04.08, 23. colours of the fall, 24. ALBERT, 25. Spooky Matilda

And the Winner is....

This giveaway has been pretty fun I have to say. It's pretty interesting to see that there was a pretty even handed interest in all three color options, though green and red were a little more popular that the purple. That kind of input is always fairly interesting, I know I have my own particular color interest and I'm probably a little biased toward that in what I make.

Anyway, down to business. I'm using the Random Number Generator to pick a number between 1 and 15, the number of comments received.

Drum roll please?

The winner is 6, that's Lisanne!
(please contact me at emmakat@gmail.com with your shipping info)

Congratulations! And thank for all the kind words from everyone that entered! It's been a great year in Etsy!

Vegan MoFo Favorites

Just a few of my favorite posts:

From Raspberry Swirl:
Vegan Meatball Hoagie with Onion Rings
From Vegan Dad:
Vegetable Stew with Savory Biscuit Topping
From The Vegan Mouse:
Corn Stew with Soy Chorizo Eggplant and Potato
From B36 Kitchen:
Vegetable and Cashew Stirfry

And now for the SWEETS!!!:

From Walking the Vegan Line:
Vegan Project Runway inspired Cupcakes
From Creative Kismet:
Vegan Cheesecake
From Bjorkdoff:
Peanut Butter Bomb Cake
From Method:
Chocolate Cupcakes with Banana Coconut Frosting

And don't forget to check out the Vegan Mofo Flickr pool for even more mouth watering vegan inspiration! Also, today is the last day to enter my Etsyversary giveaway.

Maybe Not So Safe For Work...

But I am posting late in the day on Friday, and fair warning. It's nothing terrible, just naked people. In fact it plays on that whole censorship thing, which is why I love it! The video is from the BPA, which I guess is an alias for Fatboy Slim. I always seem to love the videos for his stuff, even if I'm not a huge fan of his music (I like it alright.) I still watch that Christopher Walken one and giggle. Anyway, added bonus is that this song features David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal and I find the song enjoyable too. I really like David Byrne's voice. In fact I think I just downloaded something new of his from emusic. (We have yet to properly tag our new stuff before we can listen to it.) And we saw Dizzee at the Pitchfork Music Festival this year, he was one of the highlights for me! Puts on a fun show. Anyway, I have to post this video for video Friday ...it's one I know I'll keep watching & will always cheer me up! Now off to watch that Christoper Walken one again, it's been a while.

Vegan Mofo: Must have Cupcakes!

I don't think the Vegan Month of Food would be complete without cupcakes so when I first learned about it cupcakes were the first thing on my mind. Naturally I pulled out Vegan Cupcakes take over the World, another fantastic book by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. Buy this book! It's the best resource, like their other books it seems everything turns out fantastically!

Well in this case they are fantastic and very yummy mint cupcakes but I got a little sloppy on the icing. This is because I forgot to pick up the green food coloring. I was planning on going all out and piping the icing on but since it wasn't going to be pretty green icing I skipped that step. Of course I didn't realize I didn't have green food coloring until after I added just a little too much soy milk to the icing, so it's a bit out of control. (I was thinking it could stand to be a little more fluid if I was going to pipe it.) And ...er...it was getting a little late and I was tired. Oh well!

The other thing that I'm not crazy about with these is the icing has mint in it. I think I picked up the wrong kind of mint. It tastes fine in the cake itself, but in the icing it's too much. It tastes oddly chemical, too much like a chewing gum flavor or something. Which is hard not to think about when the texture of the icing is more chewing gum like that say, cake. Well, lesson learned. I was thinking I'd save a bit of money and just pick up cheaper mint extract at the Jewel-Osco instead of the crazy expensive Whole Foods type. Of course now I realize just how much more natural the whole foods type would have been and that would've been worth the splurge. I'll have to remember to only use the cheap stuff in baked goods where it can be a little more buried in chocolaty cakey goodness. Did I mention the chocolaty cakey goodness on these cupcakes is just wonderful? Heavenly. Completely makes up for the mint incident, pretty much.

Vegan MoFo: Vegans & Spice

I love spice. Chuck really loves spice. Prior to being exposed to Chuck's spice appetite I wasn't so into spiciness. Now and then I'd dabble, wanting to think I had some tolerance, but no. Now that my diet is mainly vegan spice has more meaning. I remember proclaiming once in my first attempt at vegetarianism something about it doesn't really matter if you have meat, it's the spice that gives it flavor. Now that I have successfully been a vegetarian for 7 or so years spice is so important. And really spicy food is just wonderful. I'll admit Chuck still has a higher tolerance than I do, but I think my tolerance for it surpasses most mere mortals. Well, Texans anyway, several of my coworkers from a previous job were Texans and I was always amazed at our relative interpretations of "hot."

Anyway, pictured above on the left is a weekend potato concoction. Pretty spicy: turmeric, jalapeño, cumin, etc. This was based on a recipie from a cookbook picked up for cheap at Borders, "The Cook's encyclopedia of" in this case Vegetarian cooking. As an architect, I guess, I'm prone to like books with lots of visuals (don't call us superficial though...well...maybe a little, it's in our job description) and I like this one a lot in spite of not being able to use a lot of the non-vegan recipes. I even have their "four ingredient cookbook" because I find the concept interesting, though there's even less in that one I would make. It's fun to look, and can be inspiring. Also pictured is the lentil chili with rice Chuck made us for lunch today. Topped with a bit of Vegan Gourmet cheese & jalapeños. Jalapeños are yummy but I don't find them very spicy anymore. I think perhaps I once did...six or seven years ago.

Anyway the point is Vegans & Spicy hot food really go together. Honestly, I never thought I'd be one of those bring it on types when warned about a dish at a restaurant...but when it comes up I'm probably thinking "yeah right."

Etsyversary Giveaway!

This Giveaway is Closed. Thanks for Entering!

Yep, I've been a seller on Etsy for one year now! It's been such a great year and I've learned a lot, but most importantly had a lot of fun! So I thought I would have a giveaway.

The winner will receive 2 gocco printed cards (blank inside):

And their choice of one pair of earrings pictured below in either purple, green or red:

Simply leave a comment below with your color preference. I will randomly select a winner Sunday night, October 12th.

I've got to Blog the FO!

I finished the lace wrap I've been working on (on & off) since the move. It's a very happy Finished Object. I love this yarn, Berroco Bonsai, too much. It comes in wonderful colors. In addition to the pretty Etsuko blue here, and the Shiubi Clay I used in my Dream Swatch Scarf I'm also just in love with the Brown, Gold, Red and Green. Hmm, the black is neat too. But I think I'm most in love with this blue. I still have just over two skeins left too, which may end up as a small purse or perhaps a few scarves for gifting, I haven't decided. So I suppose three or four projects in this yarn is plenty and I should move on to new yarns. But I do love the colors and it is so soft.

I love the end result of this project in spite of the fact that I'm still learning how to wear something like this. Yesterday we went for a walk by the lake and it ended up getting wrapped around my head instead of around my shoulders as intended. Which was alright. It was actually too cold out to get away with just the wrap (Damn you weather, have you no respect for my FO?) so I started out wearing it over a sweater. I'm thinking that looked a little odd, so I guess it's just as well. As a head scarf it did really well though, and I certainly needed something to keep my ears warm!

Anyway, I'm immensely satisfied with the project. Hmm...it's funny how a successful FO leads to wanting to find new projects and stash more yarn. It's not like I don't have enough yarn for several other projects...but even so I've spent way too much time looking at new patterns and yarn on ravelry this weekend. The LYS also sent me a note saying everything in the shop is 20% off...must at least try to resist...but what harm would a few skeins of sock yarn do? I can always make socks out of them, right? Hmm, this is trouble.

P.S. The buckle is so perfect for this project! from Etsy Seller abandc.

Vegan Mofo Day #3 - Dinner by Chuck

This is a "nothing fancy" meal that Chuck prepared last night. In fact last night he was grumbling at the fact I was photographing it, this morning at the fact that I uploaded pictures and I haven't even told him that I'm blogging about it yet! It may just be a few things thrown together: tempeh, green beans, soba noodles and a store bought peanut sauce, but it was delicious. Soba noodles are just the best something I think we should always have in our kitchen. They have so much flavor and are really good for you. Plus they make it pretty easy to throw together a quick meal that is just fantastic.

Of course when it comes to throwing together a meal, Chuck is much better at that than I am. I tend to cook directly from the cookbooks. I have a bad habit of getting flustered when I've forgotten an ingredient or can't find something obscure. I probably cook less often than Chuck does because of this mainly, and the fact that when I do cook I pick some outlandish and difficult meal with obscure ingredients. It reminds me a little of our hike up to a lookout by Mt. Baker. I struggled on the way up (drank all our water, claimed I was going to die, wanted to turn back 80% of the way up...something like that.) and Chuck was exhausted on the way down. Meanwhile I was practically skipping and shouting about how it smelled like blueberries. We have different approaches and inclinations, but in the end I think his style has influenced me to be a little more laid back in the kitchen. Especially recently I've been more willing to improvise than ever before. And I'm willing to credit Chuck with that.