winter weather knitting

Knitting is one of those crafts I come to when the weather is cold, good for keeping my hands busy while watching TV, be it the Daily Show with my roommates, an episode of NOVA (last night I watched this fascinating program about the decoding of Mayan hieroglyphs) or the flavor-of-the-month in online lecture series (at the moment, Yale's Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics).

Here are the most recent fruits of my needles:

Pattern: Meg by Berroco
Yarn: Zara, a dk weight white merino that I got many many years ago from the Wooly Monmouth
Notable: My first completed sweater!
Remaining finish work: Needs fabric dye, or whitening--some of the skeins yellowed, which I only noticed after completion.

Pattern: Knitty's Corazon by Joeli Caparco
Yarn: Leftovers of Zara from the above sweater, plus a skein of Jojoland's Splatter Dash in color code 028 that I got at Mind's Eye Yarns
Notable: Learned magic loop and basic color work with this project.  Also, I needed mittens!

pan de bono, v3

After a long hiatus from exploring Columbian breads (and from writing entirely--holiday presents weren't particularly blog-worthy, given that I wanted them to be surprises at some level!), here's version 3 of the Columbian cheese bread I wrote about last year.

Pan de bono, v3
I think this is the best version yet.  They just came out of the oven, and are buttery on the inside but seem to have a harder shell than the ones I made before.

 340g (one package) of Honduran-style Queso Fresco (the package didn't give a brand, but was marked as Honduran and had a cute cow proclaiming it was "pura leche")
1/2 cup maseca brand masa (corn with lime)
1/2 cup julia brand cassava flour (farinha de mandioca, casabe)
1/2 cup Manoic starch (also cassava)
2 teaspoons sugar
2 eggs
water to moisten

Preheat oven to 400F. Mix flours and sugar in a bowl. Crumble cheese into the flour mixture by hand until the largest pieces are smaller than peas. Incorporate eggs and enough water for the dough to hold together (I did this by hand). Form into golf-ball sized spheres and place on a baking tray.  Bake for 20 minutes or until browned slightly.

Yield: 20