Cubicle kitchen: Trail Mix Blondies

Having tested the strength of my co-workers' resolutions enough for the time being, I thought I would give them a break this week with a treat that is actually pretty good for them.  Of course, that still doesn't make it a diet-friendly snack, but it is a treat with a lot of redeeming nutritional value.

Last week, I raided my candy stash for cookies.  This week, I took a look at all of the dried fruit that I had, and thought that mixing those together would be a good idea.  And then, when I gave blood, trail mix was one of the offerings on the recuperation table.  I brought my own apple to boost my sugar levels, so instead I pocketed a bag of mix to add in.  A few additional nuts, and I had plenty of trail mix to bake into something.  I had already done cookies, and these were likely too heavy to incorporate easily into a cake, so brownies made sense.  But I wanted to make this a chocolate-free treat (just for the sake of it), so blondies it was.

I started off with a recipe from Little Bitty Bakes, but switched up a few things to make it even easier to convince my co-workers that they could justify eating a piece or two.  I replaced some of the butter with mashed banana, which I have on hand in my freezer anyway.  Whenever I get bananas, I tend to get a few extra than I think I'll eat fresh, then chop the rest up and freeze for just such an occasion.  I also substituted honey for some of the white sugar, because I like the flavor, and it made sense with my trail mix theme.  I could almost imagine justifying them as a breakfast item.  It's certainly no sweeter than, say, a strawberry danish or something.  And much better for you overall.

Another successful treat, the first 20 were gone by around lunch, and the next 20 were shared between our group's coffee meet-up and another office area where I dropped off the leftovers.  Spreading the wealth, you might say.  Or cultivating cross-team cooperation, if you want business-speak.

Trail Mix Blondies
(adapted from Little Bitty Bakes)
makes a 9x13" pan

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup butter, softened
• 1/4 cup mashed banana
• 3/4 cup peanut butter
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar (I used the equivalent in Splenda Brown Sugar Blend)
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 2 cups mix of nuts and dried fruit of your choice*, roughly chopped

*I included: cashews, peanuts, almonds, pecans, banana chips, blueberries, cranberries, pomegranates, apricots, mangoes, pineapples, candied lemon, etc.

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.  Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit into your pan.
2. In a bowl, cream together the butter, peanut butter, and mashed banana.  Add the honey, sugars, eggs, and vanilla until combined.
3. Separately, mix the flour, salt, and baking powder, then slowly add the dry mixture to the wet mixture, until everything is combined.
4. Fold in your dried fruit and nuts until combined.  Pour batter into your pan, spreading evenly.
5. Bake 30-35 minutes, until the edges are firm and golden, and a knife comes out clean from the center.
6. After cooling, cut into squares.

WIP Wednesday: Cats, cardigans, cops, and cuffs

It's Wednesday again!  That means a couple of things.  It's the day of our weekly coffee meet-up at work, which is why it's also the day that I generally bring in my baked goods.  In an unrelated note, it's also the day I go to the gym.  And now, it's also the day I post about my works in progress, all coming (so far) from my lovely library.  Shall we?

I'm going to need to find some more cats around here somewhere, because I have already run out of my own to take progress pictures with for this cardigan.

As Spice is so helpfully demonstrating, the back of my Lexeme has grown, I'm now casting off stitches for the armholes.  So far so good, but I think the real trouble spots for me are going to be on the back end of this thing, picking up stitches for the ruffle and sewing all of the pieces together.

I also made progress on my handspun.  This is all I have so far, two single cops.

I'll likely get two more out of the roving I have, then I'll start plying.  The nice thing with the Turkish spindle is that you end up with a center pull ball, and plying from both ends means that you can guarantee that both plies are the same length,  But maneuvering that ball is no easy feat.  I'm thinking of wrapping the ends around a tennis ball to create a plying ball, just to make it easier on myself.  But we're still a ways away from that dilemma.  About two ounces of fiber away, to be precise.

While Mom waits for me to finish spinning this yarn for her, she's busy knitting up the most gorgeous fingerless mitts.  She saw a sample knit of the Bobbleberry Mitts when we were at Kid 'N Ewe last November and simply had to knit them herself.

One down, one to go!  These are really yummy.  And she's doing them in Malabrigo, so they are warm and soft.  They are so nice, I had to share them, even though they aren't technically my own WIP.

Don't forget to check out the other WIP Wednesday posts this week!

Random round-up: blood and blackberries

There are so many things that happen each week that make me think, 'I should totally blog about that!'  But before I can do that I have to get back to work, or make dinner, or something.  And I never quite have time to take the idea from that awkward space between too long for Twitter and not long enough for its own post.  So here are a few things that popped into my head this week:

• There was a blood drive at work last Wednesday.  I try to catch every one of these, because I feel like this is a really easy way to do a good deed, and I like having the sporadic check on my cholesterol and other basics.  This time around, I successfully donated without fainting.  Not only that, but the lab tech who took my blood was a crocheter, even better!
• Isn't it strange how certain items are more expensive in some stores than others, and vice versa?  HEB has the best value for most groceries here in Austin, but for some reason spaghetti squash is about 40 cents cheaper a pound at Sprouts.  And since Mom and I worship at the spaghetti squash altar practically every weekend, this was a great discovery.
• Also in the produce section, we got a lot of blackberries last week.  So I integrated them into my portfolio of desserts, along with some whipped cream: cran-blackberry oatmeal, blackberry waffles, blackberry cheesecake pudding ice cream, blackberry pancakes, and angel food cake dessert cups topped with blackberries.  See?

• This week, blueberries we on sale, so the same routine will probably be repeated with those.  Last night I had oatmeal, tonight...pancakes?
• The Raspberry frozen yogurt at Tutti Frutti is delicious.  Especially when swirled with Strawberry, and Taro.
• The Australian Open has started!  The return of tennis is a relief, but I'm still finding myself reflexively looking for where Andy Roddick is in the draw, before I realize he's not there.  And neither are a lot of other players, but those are because of injury.  Will Rafael Nadal ever come back?  I hope so.

Inspiration Saturday: Literary knits

You know what's great about classic literature?  You can read the guiltiest of guilty pleasure stories, and still get that sense of intellectual superiority when a complete stranger sneaks a peek at the title on the cover.  Because they don't necessarily know that 'The Monk' is a gothic tale of a religious rock star whose desperate lust leads him to....well, I won't spoil it!  No, as far as anyone knows, it's 18th-century literature.  And that's all they need to know.

Of course, that's not the only thing I like about classic literature.  But it's a definite perk.  So when you combine gorgeous knits with references to some of those timeless stories, my fingers get itchy to cast on.

Now, I already have these patterns in my library, so I'm okay, but I claim no responsibility for any of you who have taken the Love Your Library challenge and discover that you need to have these.

I'm pretty sure I let out an audible squee of delight when I first heard about Interweave's special edition Jane Austen Knits.  And the fact that there have been two more editions since then (Summer and Fall 2012) only makes it better.  You might even have noticed that the Rose Shawl in my resolution queue is from there.  There are a few others I'm hoping to get around to one day, like:

Margaret Dashwood Shawl by Joanna Johnson

Photo credit: Christa Tippmann, Jane Austen Knits

Relatively simple, I wonder whether I could use some of my more colorful yarn with it.  Plus, I love the wrapping technique for wearing it.

Helix Scarf by Stephenie Gaustad

Photo credit: Stephenie Gaustad

It's designed to be knit with handspun, so my goal is to use some of my own one day.  Quite a lofty goal at this point for me to spin with an end goal in mind, right now I'm just hoping for yarn, and I don't get any more specific.

While there is some knitting in Austen's novels, they never play the kind of integral role that it did in 'A Tale of Two Cities' where the FOs were a part of the French Revolution.  So it makes sense that we lit-knitters would ask ourselves What Would Madame Defarge Knit?.  I grabbed this when Yarn Barn was going out of business, and again it's the neckwear that draws me in:

Ms. Prynne by Kathleen Rogers

Photo credit: Kathleen Rogers

Cozy cables, and maybe I'd even try out the beading, perhaps a decorative 'A' button?  I also feel like Hester is a heroine I would appreciate more now, I read 'The Scarlet Letter' so long ago.

Wilhelmina Shawlette by Chrissy Gardiner

Photo credit: Chrissy Gardiner

Now see, Dracula was a vampire.  No sparkles, just fangs and fatal flirtation.  Love the lacework here, and triangular shawls are probably the things I knit most.

What (else) Would Madame Defarge Knit? is also coming soon, available for preorder now, but no word yet on a date.  There is good news, though.  Apparently, this is not even close to the end of the series, they have things like 'Defarge does Shakespeare' and 'Defarge does Sherlock' in the works.  Be still, my heart!

And, I should also mention, Cooperative Press, who publishes the Defarge series, is having a birthday giveaway.  It's worth entering in, whether you want the iPad mini they're giving away for reading patterns or Proust.

Don't forget to check out the other Inspiration Saturday posts this week!

Cubicle kitchen: Candy Bar Cookies

Organization is always a big thing at the start of the year, and I've been hopping onto that bandwagon with occasional attempts at controlling some chaos.  Part of that effort always has to be a little stash busting.  I have a yarn stash, a fiber stash, a book stash, a notebook stash, even a chewing gum stash.  And, of course, a stash of baking ingredients.  Candy, dried fruits, nuts, mixes, anything that I think might be interesting, it all gets collected for future treats.

Usually I take my inspiration from one ingredient in particular from that stash and build around it.  This time, I wanted to use as many of them as possible at once.  The first thing that sprang to mind was just to do a cookie packed with candy.  I knew that basically I was just making chocolate chip cookies with candy pieces instead of chips, but I went ahead and followed a recipe to make sure I kept the ratio of dough to mix-ins reasonable.

Such a simple cookie.  A perfect milk-dunking cookie.  Or coffee-dunking, I guess, since there isn't a milk machine at the office.  These things disappeared!  It just goes to show, you don't have to obsess over an intricate recipe using expensive ingredients.  Sometimes you can just make a cookie.

Candy Bar Cookies
(made about 60 cookies)

Recipe from Cinnamon Spice & Everything Nice.  The only change I really made was to make mine about half the size.  Here's the candy I used included:

• Peanut M&Ms
• Pretzel M&Ms
• Milk Duds
• Snickers
• Milky Way
• Almond Kisses
• Tootsie Rolls
• Lump of Coal crispy chocolate
• other plain chocolate bars cut into chunks

Tokyo tales: Searching for sushi

What, you thought because it's 2013 you had heard the last of my Tokyo trip?  Nope.  It's going to be a long while before I can get back to Tokyo, if I ever do, so I'm going to make the memories of this last trip last as long as possible.  I apologize in advance for any jealousy cravings, and hope that you may at least be comforted by the fact that I'm giving them to myself by writing this.

There were a few things on my list that I knew I wanted to do when Dad first proposed another trip to Tokyo.  And one of those things was sushi at the Tsukiji fish market. It's bustling, it's colorful, and it has the freshest sushi around.  For those who are truly dedicated, you can get up before the crack of dawn and be one of the hundred or so members of the public allowed into the inner sanctum of the market to witness the tuna auction.  But for the rest of us, you can make your way to the outer edge of the market in the late morning and find a great lunch while hitting up a highlight of being a tourist in Tokyo.

On our last visit, we had found this wonderful conveyor belt (or kaiten zushi) restaurant.  Basically, plates of wonderful sushi just travel around the room while hungry diners grab the ones they cannot resist.  At the end of the meal, your total is calculated by counting up the plates you've collected.  Different colors of plates add up to different values, so a particularly posh piece might be on a gold-trimmed plate while a more humble offering is presented on a plain blue plate.  This particular restaurant is called Sushi Zanmai, and it's a chain that recently made news when the owner made the winning bid on the most expensive tuna auction at Tsukiji ever.

There's obviously a fun factor, especially with the belt wrapping around the preparation area of the sushi, so you are watching the rice being rolled right in front of you as the finished pieces go by.  But it also means that you can pick and choose what you are most interested in trying without having to navigate a set menu with other options.  You can be as adventurous or as safe as you choose, selecting only what you recognize, or taking a chance on something mysterious yet delicious-looking.  And no language skills are required, you simply see, grab, and eat.

I'm not sure why Dad thought it would be so easy to find this place a second time.  The Tsukiji fish market is a packed few blocks of small little alleys filled with fish as well as produce and other offerings.  And particularly on the weekends around lunchtime, it's also filled to the brim with people playing tourist as well as choosing their counter of choice to park and eat.  We both knew we would recognize it when we saw it, but because we came to the market from a different direction than our first visit, remembering directions like 'it was down the third street, on the right' were not as helpful as they might have been.

After several loops around, we had almost given up hope.  But we took a chance and made our way down what we had thought was an alley we had already tried.  The tuna gods were smiling on us, because within a few feet we found ourselves in front of the sliding doors of our sushi destiny.  Behold!

Along with the satisfaction of finding something we were looking for, there was another reason I was glad to have stumbled back upon this place.  It had, both on our first visit and again this time, a particular piece of sushi that had become my own personal legend.  I even have a handmade magnet featuring a picture of it on my fridge.  It's in the center of my little sushi collage, and here is my best description of it: a piece of nigiri sushi (where it's just a little log of rice topped with a piece of fish) made with salmon, which is then roasted slightly using a kitchen torch (like the kind that finishes off a creme brûlée).  That makes it an aburi, for anyone who wants to expand their sushi vocabulary.  This particular piece is also topped with what I think is a squirt of mayonnaise and some chopped chives or green onions.

I have yet to encounter it anywhere else, though I am now one step closer in identifying it, so that should help if I ever seriously attempt to find it stateside.  The trouble is, knowing that I can never fully replicate the quality or the experience, part of me thinks that I'm better off confining my heavenly aburi sushi to Tokyo.

WIP Wednesday: It's all about (Lexe)me!

I joined in on Inspiration Saturday, so I figured tagging along with Tami's Amis and Other Creations for Work in Progress Wednesday would be a good excuse to start chatting about what I'm working on now, especially since I don't have to be secretive about it.  It's not a gift, it's all for me!

No, not the cute kitty.  It's the Lexeme cardigan in Berroco Lustra.  Well, the back piece of it.  It's going to be this:

Photo credit: Berroco, Inc.

I mentioned yesterday, when I outlined my plans for loving my library, that this cardigan has a history.  I first started it a few years ago.  I made it about two inches in before it was set aside for a series of less daunting and more instantly gratifying projects.  Over time, this went from my 'work on between projects' project to my 'stuffed into the closet, maybe one day' project.  Now that I am an older and wiser crafter, I wanted to tackle this task again, and was spurred on when one of my Ravelry groups decided to do a knitalong for sleeved garments.  Plus, I found buttons that match it perfectly during the Yarn Crawl, so I thought that was probably a sign from Bob.

And so, pulled back from the depths of the closet, released from the inky shadows of crafting obscurity, the cardigan that never was had to endure one more indignity: it had to be frogged.  Because if it was worth doing, it was worth doing right from the very start.  And I wasn't the same size as I had been the first time around.

I'm a few weeks into the restart, and I've already passed my previous marker, reaching the end of the ribbing.  And since I took the progress picture, I've made progress on the stockinette section as well, having already done two of the increases.

If I hadn't already had everything about this cardigan planned, I might have switched things up and tried something that was either a little more riveting, stitch-wise, or a little more simple, construction-wise.  There's going to be a lot of sewing things together, with the back panel, the left front panel, the right front panel, and the sleeves.  And then the cute little ruffle as well as the button band comes from picking up all of the stitches and knitting them on at the end.  I would have preferred something seamless, maybe top-down.

But I'm going to get this done anyway, though it might take me a while, and though I will need my mom's help.  I won't pretend that it will be my main project for most of the time.  In fact, it's already sharing my craft time with spinning some yarn for my mom that was meant for Christmas.  I'd like to make more progress on that whenever I can, and leave the cardigan for those times when spinning isn't practical, like for bringing along to the coffee klatch at work.