Reason #47 that I should be a British citizen...

... I adore prawn-mayo sandwiches. I have loved them since high school, the first time I remember coming to the UK. I fully realize that many, many Britons find them revolting. I respectfully disagree with them. Further, despite the revulsion, these sandwiches are undeniably British.

Don't tell me you've never had a prawn-mayo* sandwich? Well, whenever you come to this magical country, please do indulge your baser instincts and settle down to one. Preferably one that comes like this:


This is, after all, a foodie's blog. So let's get right to the point: the food. As I remarked to J., there is something about the conceptualization of a sandwich here in England that makes sense to me. A kind of sensibility that extends to food in general: simplicity and moderation. In a sandwich, this translates to the essentials only: bread, filling, maybe a condiment or crunchy enhancement. That's it.

Let's take a closer look, shall we, at the object of my affection?


What you see here is soft wholegrain sandwich bread pillowing a proper amount of small shrimp mixed with mayonnaise, and a thin layer of crunchy iceberg lettuce. The lettuce is not strictly necessary, but I find it to be a bonus when it's included. The shrimp are tiny and tender, the mayo lubricating the whole affair and providing a richness that complements the wholegrain bread. I hesitate to use the word "pure" about a food item that comes in a triangular plastic box and costs somewhere around £2-2.50, but it's hard to deny its simplicity.

I contrast this 'sandwich sensibility' to that in the US. Like most things, of course, Americans generally value bigger over better. The Subway regime dictates that we should pack in as many ingredients as can fit between two spongy halves of vehicle-bread, just as the American concept of pizza is vehicle-dough with piles of toppings.

Not so with the impeccable prawn-mayo vehicle of tastiness, nor its brethren in sandwich cases across London, in newsagents, off-licenses, Prêt-a-Mangers, supermarkets...anywhere the telltale plastic pyramid is to be found.


While on the train where I consumed this particular specimen of seafood delight, I also drank an M&S Raspberry Brekkie to Go Go, which intrigued me for this reason: one of its four or five ingredients is... oatmeal. Call me crazy, but I had to investigate. Oatmeal -- smoothie? Smoothie -- oatmeal? Could it be that this was not disgusting?

I'm here to tell you, folks, that this is fantastic. My only complaint was that it was a little too sweet. Otherwise? Delish. The oatmeal gave it some texture and chewiness -- I'm aware of how gross this sounds, but just go with me on this -- that reminded me of eating something nutty and working on the little bits of nuts that get left behind after swallowing. Do you know what I mean? Additionally, it made this into a powerful energy-source that would probably be great for a morning when dashing to the Tube is all I can manage before 9am seminar. I've been fairly successful so far at spending next to nothing on breakfast (cereal, tea and toast, yogurt, or some combination), but I know there simply will be Those Days, and it's good to have a backup.

Thank you, England, for not letting me down. Please expect my application for citizenship shortly.



* I should explain here that, contrary to the distinction many Californians (and other Americans?) make between "prawns" and "shrimp", all of these curling sea creatures are termed "prawns" here in England, at least as far as I can tell. The prawns included in such sandwiches are what we might call "bay shrimp" in California/Oregon.

The Eagle Has Landed

When I arrived in London three weeks ago, 23 September, I'd like to say I was terrified or excited. Mainly, I was exhausted. I spent most of that afternoon trying very hard not to fall asleep while sitting up, listening to the classic English rain pattering outside the windows in Camberwell.

Since that Tuesday, I've had several weeks of what I now look back on as madness. At the time, I felt overwhelmed with tasks, exhaustion, loneliness, depression, and -- ultimately -- joy. I won't recount all my adventures in finding a flat, opening a bank account, registering for classes...all that really just provides an unnecessary backdrop. Suffice it to say that I have intense empathy for anyone relocating anywhere, especially on one's own.


The more remarkable part of this story is also a piece of the background. Alongside all these swirling feelings, and more than anything else, there has always been a thick sense of familiarity since I touched down. In a sense, I think this feeling of comfort, of rightness, probably made it that much more difficult to cope with the simultaneous loneliness and longing: after all, if I was home, why was I homesick? For whom, for what, did I long?

What is it about some places? Is it the scent? Is it the architecture? The temperature? The people? I don't know. Perhaps it's all of those -- and none.


I intend to explore this city I now call home. I expect to have adventures, and I expect to find infinite corners of comfort. After all, as Samuel Johnson once said, 'When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.'


Quite so, SamJo. Quite so.

Hey, Hot Stuff

Between the glut of summer produce at the farmers' markets and the plethora of food-related sharing on the internet*, my cup runneth over with inspiration. Doesn't yours?

This past weekend, S and I went to the main Portland Farmers Market downtown in the Park Blocks by PSU, as our weekend habit dictates. Although the temperature by the time we left had reached over 90 degrees (32C), it was gloriously bright and the market brimmed with vegetables and fruit. Our potato guy finally had potatoes, our artichoke family had many enough artichokes that they were rolling off the crates, our egg people still had a couple of dozen left! Not to mention asparagus, cherries, berries, mushrooms, cauliflower, onions, and the It Girl of the season, garlic scapes. Garlic scapes are like Rihanna, that's what I'm saying: everyone's talking about them, they're plastered all over the internet, no one can get enough.

I like Rihanna, so I picked up some garlic scapes. Haven't used them yet. I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, I made a pesto to save some other ingredients, most of which hadn't fared well in the hotter 'n hell kitchen this weekend. Modern refrigeration (not to mention living in a basement) can do only so much, and the basil was staring at me longingly, its extremities already heavy with death. A couple of squishy, plump tomatoes went in along with a few cloves of garlic, the salvaged basil, well-toasted walnuts, black pepper, smoked salt, a little pasta water, some arugula... Tossed with some asparagus and orzo, plus a couple of toasted walnuts. Et voilà! Served with a boiled artichoke, it was the essence of an unfussy, fantastically fresh summer supper. This afternoon I tossed the remainder of the orzo pesto asparagus salad with some fresh arugula leaves and it might even have been better.

(Have I ever mentioned how horrible my blender is? Yeah, whoa. We pulse gently through each blending procedure with lots of coaxing and cursing.)

Speaking of arugula, I've suddenly realized how much I like it. Whereas garlic scapes are the It Girl of the season, I think arugula is a more understated, quirky, yet perpetual ingredient. Perhaps more like Cate Blanchett, or Irene Dunne.** Someone who's always great, always pretty, always hilarious, but every so often they come into soft focus and KA-BLAM! Great with a leading man like Cary Grant or chevre, but equally exquisite lingering in support.

More fun to come. I've got some nice rock cod, a bag of clams, asparagus, artichokes, some petit potatoes, and Rihanna garlic scapes in my fridge!


P.S. Photo at top is of a gorgeous, delicious vanilla affogato from Nostrana.
______________
*When TasteSpotting disappeared, we got Food Gawker. Now we have an embarrassment of riches: both!

**What? I just watched 'The Awful Truth', okay? Irene Dunne is amazing.

Burritos, Bakesales, and Bridges

Because I don't go home to San Francisco very often anymore, and because most of my friends who live in the Bay Area still are not foodies, I usually don't have the scoop on what's new and awesome in the food world. There are, of course, things and places I must eat every time I go -- burritos, for example.


This was a tequila-prawn burrito, served up by the always-competent staff at Taquerìa Zapata (18th and Collingwood) in my hood (the Castro). I ate it with house-made tortilla chips, salsa, and an ice cold Negra Modelo. Calorific? Oh, sure. But this was a special occasion of tastiness.

I prefer the red and green smoother (spicier) salsas mixed together, as you maybe can see above. Usually, I also like a couple of lime wedges to squeeze onto each bite of burrito and tortilla chip, but the condiment bar didn't seem to have any this time. Sad.

Burritos, however important to the diet of any born-and-bred urban Californian, didn't fulfill my adventurous foodie spirit. I've been reading a few San Francisco-based food blogs of late, and a few months ago Chuck of Sunday Nite Dinner posted a review of Bakesale Betty in Oakland. Alors, across the Bay Bridge I went!


Coincidentally, a friend of a friend in Portland had recently mentioned "this really cool bakery where they use ironing boards for tables outside and the stuff is amazing". My mission was clear, and luckily I had a great excuse to go: my best friend is doing a PhD at Berkeley! Of course, having seen the pictures in Chuck's review, I really didn't need any other excuses, but D is also an avid eater and good cook, and in need of a fun diversion from undergrad grading and massive reading lists, so off we went!


By the time we got to Oaktown (around 3pm on a Friday), Bakesale Betty was all out of both sandwiches. As luck would have it, however, they had just pulled a fresh batch of ginger-pear scones out of the oven and pressed one into our eager hands for free because we "had to taste it". We followed this treat with the purchase of a brownie (above) and a strawberry shortcake to rival any my mom and I make.


As you can see, this is a properly-crafted strawberry shortcake: fluffy and barely-sweetened whipped cream taking a backseat to juicy, fresh, gently macerated strawberries, all atop a split scone. The scone, in my opinion, is absolutely crucial. Cakey but not spongy, sweetened but not sugary, crumbly and absorbent, a scone is the ideal "shortcake" for this dish -- indeed, a scone really is a shortcake, being made with cold butter cut into flour. Accept no substitutes, kids. None of this angel food or poundcake business. The whole point is to let the strawberries shine.

Speaking of which, allow me one further rumination on this dish, as strawberry season is practically upon us. I'm a champion of eating locally, and try my damnedest to buy produce and other food that comes from Oregon or Washington while in Portland. That said, I refuse to buy Oregon strawberries. Because, really? WTF? Puny, bruised, overly-sweet little berries, these are poor imitations of the true (California) strawberries I grew up eating. Strawberries must have that sweet-tart tang, be firm enough to stand up to a quick maceration, and be minimally larger than my big toe. They have to be firm to the bite, in order to get that proper juicy-crisp ccsrhshhhh sound when you sink your teeth in.

Oregon strawberries, in case you've never had the "pleasure", are none of these. They're bruised before you even choose a carton, so you can forget about getting them home from the farmer's market without a little puddle in the bottom of the plastic bag. This year, I'm just putting my foot down. Real strawberries are too good to make do with these strange cousins.


What a nice little surprise to discover that, just a few doors down from Bakesale Betty, sits Article Pract -- one of the most perfect little yarn shops I've ever visited! I was thrilled! So thrilled, in fact, that I bought some buttons.

This post has been brought to you by the letter B.

Clement Street: Produce, Frozen Weirdness, and Dim Sum Closets

I promised local San Franciscan foodie adventures, right? The next couple of posts won't be of the haute-cuisine-foodie brand, they're more the down-and-dirty (truly local) brand, complete with completely opinionated commentary. And then back to the cooking and knitting, I promise.

First stop, Clement Street.

If you're not familiar with San Francisco, here's what you need to know about Clement Street. Although Chinatown still has a lot of Chinese immigrants living and working there, this is the new center of Chinese (and other Asian)-American "culture" in San Francisco, and has been for years. Unlike the hordes of tourist-oriented, often bad, Chinese restaurants and tchotchke shops, Clement houses humble restaurants (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and a variety of others), produce/grocery stores, and all manner of specialist stores. I'd say about 80% of the people I usually see in this neighborhood are of Asian descent, and the only tourists who usually stumble around here are lost. (To be fair, I probably looked like a tourist with my camera. Oh well.)


My father, always on a quest for the lowest price on everything, does most of his produce shopping here, at the Clement Produce Market, or the larger one down the street (freezer section pictured below). Apart from selling fresh produce at very low prices, Clement's markets feature a variety of less-common food items: three or seven different kinds of eggplant, fresh tofu, mung bean sprouts, gai lan and other greens common to Asian cooking (choi sum, bok choi...), and often some Vietnamese takes on traditional French pastries.


When we were young, my dad would drag my sister and me to Clement Street every week to buy produce. Usually we would whine so much that he'd leave us to sit in the car (and guard the un-fed meter against overzealous San Franciscan meter maids, quarter clutched in our hands). When he returned, he'd always bring us a small treat from one of the Dim Sum To Go shops nearby, like this one:


This is my favorite, though there are five within a block. When we were little, we favored the glutinous sesame balls with lotus paste filling (some Chinese retaurants give them along with fortune cookies), but now I cannot stand the texture and weird sweetness of them.

On my most recent visit (last week), I got my two current favorites: har gou and pineapple buns. Har gou, steamed dumplings of shrimp and bamboo shoots, are the simplest version of a family of shrimp dumplings -- some have chives, others cilantro and water chestnuts (yum!!), others a mix of meats.


I love the simplicity of these, though; the flavors are really clean, the texture is soft while maintaining the firm bite of well-prepared shrimp, the glutinous, slippery wrapper yields to the bite.


Normally I would eat these with chopsticks, but my sister and I gobbled them all up in the car as soon as we were done with my produce shopping and all we had was a plastic fork.


We also gobbled up our pineapple buns, which do not actually have pineapple (nor fruity flavor of any sort) in them. These are basically a sweet version of bao, quite similar to lai wong bao (steamed buns with a sweet egg custard inside) except that they appear to be baked and the custard makes a flaky, sugary crust on the tops instead of hiding inside. These are my dad's favorite type of dim sum. I prefer lai wong bao, but they only sell those in pre-packs of six, and not steamy hot like they really should be, at this place. The pineapple buns, on the other hand, were still warm! What a treat!


Above and below: one of the many gigantic freezer-bins at the larger produce market I mentioned earlier. This one has seafood in it, but others have meat products, vegetable products, pastry (e.g., won ton wrappers) and bread (e.g., frozen parathas), desserts, all sorts of things. One of the nice things about visiting these markets is that it's easy for me to be inspired by unusual ingredients. I found a mesh bag of small Indian eggplants here and suddenly had the urge to cook a roasted eggplant sauce for some homemade pasta I'd planned on. I found some tender gai lan-like greens and decided to put them in a chow fun dish I was making that night, along with some woodear and shiitake mushrooms.


If you're going to San Francisco soon, or if you live there but never venture to Clement Street, I encourage you to go! To me, this feels like part of the "real San Francisco" -- exactly as Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39 are not. Clement Street isn't gimicky, it's not glossy, it's not mined for tourist potential. It's just where people who live in the City buy their food.

Next time: burritos, bakesales, and bridges.

What do you mean, where did I go?

I've been here the whole time. For serious.

Well, between my ongoing wrist problems -- whinge whinge, kvetch kvetch -- and grad school applications to elite universities and work and not-work and and and.... The point is, I didn't find the time to blog. Sad, really, because I've been cooking up a storm, even though knitting has been still on the Ixnay list (ahem.. for the most part..). My acupuncturist seems totally perplexed by my lack of healing power, which is sort of gratifying (it should be getting better!) and sort of frustrating (stop being confused and heal me, dammit!) -- I'm trying to keep patience, though, since it really isn't his fault at all.

Meanwhile, last week I left rainy, cold Portland for the hot desert goodness of Tucson, AZ. Actually, I expected it to be hot and sunny and dry. That's why I packed tank tops, skirts, t-shirts, a white huge-brimmed hat... Sadly, no! I didn't take any pictures of the rainy, cold misery that greeted us, so you'll just have to take my word for it. My dad and I had a nice time regardless (family wedding), even though our first night there involved eating this:


here:


Where's that? you may ask. Why, it's My Big Fat Greek Restaurant! I apologize for the abhorrent quality of the photographs -- I thought the 36 other people in attendance (extended family wedding) might find it weird if I stood at the end of the table and snapped away, since most of them hadn't met me until late in the meal. Anyhow, I wish the above photo truly captured the enormity and kitsch of this place, but I fear nothing could do it justice, save the real-life experience. While we were there, the poor staff of MBFGR! did some crazy dancing (twice) and lit the entire bar on fire (once). There was gratuitous "Opa!"ing, and frankly the whole thing was beyond words. Oy. Anyhow, the food was edible.

The wedding the next day was really low-key and nice, though the shul (synagogue) in which the ceremony took place was, as my father remarked to me during, possibly the most minimalist shul we'd ever seen. Even the ark was on casters. We were also entertained by the strained mood of pieces of the ceremony: our cousin told us on the way there that the rabbi grew up Methodist and then converted, though she's been a rabbi for about thirty years. What our cousin did not tell us was that the bride is Israeli! (I realize maybe I've lost some people here. Apologies.) During the ceremony there were, like most Jewish-American religious things, both English and Hebrew bits, and in many of the Hebrew bits the bride actually corrected the rabbi on her pronunciation. It was quite a scene. The poor rabbi looked like she'd like to either strangle the bride with the chuppah or maybe just leave the room and have a nice cry.

We flew to San Francisco the next morning. I haven't been to my home city since Thanksgiving, so I was quite excited to be back. In the interim, my dad's house has undergone a kitchen remodel, the dust from which has not yet settled. I won't detail the kvetching I've had to hear (via phone and email) for the last two months. The house was more or less the same otherwise -- it was built in the late 19th Century, so I don't expect much change -- and it felt good to be home in the Castro. Two local foodie adventures to follow.

The first thing I made in the new kitchen was an old standby, and it made me feel more home than anything else. Good canned tuna, wasabi mayonnaise, slice of dark-toasted cracked wheat sourdough (all from TJ's), fresh black pepper: build, slice in half, insert in mouth, experience tastiness.


Why do I like canned tuna so much? Do you?

Progress

There are so many things to say about a new year. I hope to get to them all in time, but for now, I'll simply talk about knitting and my progress in that department. Stay tuned for additional posts about what's been going on in my kitchen, what's been going on in my Ravelry queue, and other such exciting things.

I consider myself a pretty well-rounded knitter, but lately I've been doing a lot more fantaknitting (that's fantasy knitting) than actual starting-progressing-finishing. This saddens me, even though I have a legitimate excuse -- tendinitis in my right wrist/forearm -- because I really do miss the high level of productivity I was used to!

Lately, I've been stalled on one of my last holiday gifts -- S.'s cardigan -- because I ran out of the Oxford color of Bartlett that is the main body of the sweater. It's shameful how long it's taken me even to reach this conclusion. Hopefully, I can find another skein of Oxford and get back on track this weekend. Too bad more places don't carry Bartlett!

Meanwhile, as I dream of the various small and large projects I'd like to start, I've been carrying around my own version of Whit's Waiting Room Socks:


This awkward-looking object is a sock, I swear. I began knitting this quite a while ago, then abandoned it for a few months, and then picked it up suddenly a few weeks ago to tote around with me. It lives above my laptop, most of the time:


Quick access, that's what I like.

At the moment, this sock has no heel. You can see this more clearly in the photo below, which shows the foot and the leg-in-progress, demarcated by a nearly-invisible single-row stripe of nutmeg cotton and a change in stitch pattern. I don't really like the sole of my socks knitted in anything elaborate (e.g., lace) because the ridges and holes don't provide a smooth walking surface. Maybe you know what I mean?


I also really love the "afterthought" heel, about which Stephanie posted not too long ago. I use quotation marks because, really, most people (myself included) don't knit a tube sock and then decide, on a whim, to add a heel -- y'know, just for the heck of it. The heel is planned. I think I'd rather call it an afterwards heel, because that is accurate. I love the afterwards heel. It doesn't interrupt the stripes of a yarn like this. It's knit in the round, which I feel cups the heel really well and makes for no purling (E.Z. would approve). It can be knit in another yarn, either to strengthen it, to preserve the main yarn for maximum showing purposes, or both. In my case, here, it's both.

Around the holidays, I bought a small digital kitchen scale, which does grams and ounces. I've wanted one for my kitchen for a while, but the final straw was my desire to use a scale with my knitting. Does this seem strange? To take an example at hand foot: in an ideal world, I would know beforehand exactly how long a sock I could create with a given skein of sock yarn. The general rule (100g to a pair of adult socks) is entirely unhelpful for those of us who like our socks long. What's more, a lot of sock yarn comes in 100 gram balls or skeins, which is great for economy but not so great for using every last ounce gram.

Right. I am nothing if not a problem-solver. This is where the scale comes in (and, as luck would have it, the afterwards heel). As I knit up the leg, I have been weighing the ball of yarn to determine how much remains. When last I checked (about seven inches into the leg), 75 grams remained. W00t! That's an economical yarn for you! Of course, to be fair, I'm knitting on 2.75mm needles, and most of it is in a fairly open chevron lace stitch pattern, which does yield a little extra mileage.


In order to create the calf increases, I simply omitted the accompanying decreases in every second yarn-over round (that is, every fourth round). This looks bulbous and, in my opinion, kind of hideous when it's lying limply on the table; however, I have it in mind that this will look brilliant and organic when actually stretched around my calves. Time will tell, eh?

In Which I Re-Calibrate

This season always blows in with some unforeseen joys and disappointments. No matter how good a schedule we draw up, something always interferes. Stephanie has discovered this. And so have I.


In order to actually complete the eye pillow I had nearly finished a few weeks ago, A. and I took a trip to the Button Emporium and Ribbonry downtown. I chose three little pearl buttons to create a good closure for the end of the pillow, which will enable the recipient to wash the knitted part if she desires. Admittedly, I came up with this idea mainly for aesthetic reasons, because how nice does it look now? I know. (I was pleased as punch when I realized how well the color of the buttons matches the color of the yarn -- pale butter yellow, absolutely perfect.)

Okay, that's two gifts crafted (counting le chapeau de Koolhaas).


Alongside these finished gifts are the canned apple butter and poached pears that C. and A. and I made before Thanksgiving. Last Friday we divided them up and started labeling (you can see them in the background of the photo above). In order to make the whole crafty afternoon that much more sociable, A. brought some wine and C. brought some pastries from Ken's. Oh, and I brought some delectable little cookies from Ikea, and the jars.

You would think that, between the perfection of an afternoon spent crafting and the victory energy coming from my two finished knits, I would be on a roll, right? Well, I was, kinda.



If you are saying, "Holy Mother of God, what is that, a knitted boat?!" you would not be entirely off-base. Yes, it looks funky, especially from this angle. It is, however, the warmest slipper ever knitted. This baby has stranded colorwork on the instep and ankle, but the heel and sole are double-knitted. The white yarn is pure, handspun (not by me) alpaca, and the red is mohair-wool-silk-scrumptious. The accompanying slipper is about halfway done, though I've only just embarked on the double-knitting portion, so it may take a couple of days. I will post more fully about this after Christmas.


Finally... I hit a bump this morning. I can't say exactly what this is, because the recipient might read this blog (not taking chances here). Can you see it? Maybe if I zoom in....



Okay, I'll tell you. The increases are askew! Paired symmetrical increases every six rounds -- you would think I would be able to accomplish this task! And yet, in the cold light of dawn, between pulling shots of espresso and signing for the week's dairy order, my error has been revealed to me.

La question est... what should I do? I cannot rip back. I mean, dude, seriously. No way. Even if I were the ripping back kind (and I'm not, as my friend A. can attest) this knitting is already not going to make the deadline, and my tendinitis-stricken wrist would revolt if I had to re-knit this. No, here are the two options:

1. Knit On! This is, after all, not a part of the item that will show very much, and the increases are done so as to be nearly invisible. And yet, I will always know. And, if you look carefully, the mistake is rather apparent.

2. Fix it with a crochet hook. I'm adept with a hook, and I'm a pro at fixing things this way. I have been known to drop cables down twenty rows to fix the twist (see, I'm not a ripper). On the other hand, fixing cables and fixing about 40 rounds of increasing stockinette are two entirely different things.

Oy. This is what I get for being too blithe about my skillz. Once I make a decision (admittedly, this will be in the next ten minutes), I can whip through the rest of this part of the project and carry on. If I finish it by this evening, I estimate I will be about 3/4 done with the whole thing, and the last bit should go quickly. Yet, I don't think there will be time for blocking, nor for the finishing I had planned to do before Christmas. It feels especially silly because I started so early. So. Early.

Time for some re-calibration...

Mr Kool

I haven't posted about knitting in a while. Such a shame, really, because it implies that I haven't been knitting much -- definitely not the case. But, as I mentioned before, most of my knitting lately has been gift-related, so I was a little hesitant to show any of it online.

However, I recently finished a version of Jared's Koolhaas Hat [ravelry link]. The recipient does not read knitting blogs (even mine), so I suspect I'm safe to show it.


Yarn: Green Mountain Spinnery Mountain Mohair, in Evergreen (about 1 skein)
Needles: 3.25mm (US3) and 3.75mm (US5) 16" (I used Susan Bates Quicksilver, my circulars of choice)
Cast On: somewhere around 14 November, 2007
Finished: 2 December, 2007
Modifications & Notes:

Strangely, I did modify this pattern a bit, partly due to my loosey-goosey tension, and partly due to some confusion born of preference. I'll explain.

First of all, I tend to have the looser tension I've noticed is common to Continental knitters (those who "pick"), so I knew I would have to go down a couple of needle sizes. In the end, I settled on 3.75mm (size 5) needles for the main part, even though my swatching still indicated the hat was going to be too big. "Oh well," I thought. "A. has a big, dudely head." So I went with the 5's, and 3.25mm (US3) needles for the ribbing. I also decided to use a tubular cast-on method, à la Ysolda -- this was a method of tubular cast-on I'd never tried, but its simplicity appealed to me, particularly for a hat (where a tight edge spells doom). It worked marvelously, though I had to be certain that it wasn't too loose.

The second issue was confusion about the pattern itself. When I first looked at the pictures of the hat, both in the pattern and on Ravelry, I think I assumed that the lattice cabling was a true lattice -- that is, that the twisted stitches actually wove in and out of one another. Then, when I'd got through about two inches of the cable pattern on my hat, I saw that I had done it "wrong" -- in my inattention, all the cables (two knit stitches) were left-over-right. I glanced at the pattern, mistook one of the cross rows (knit stitch over purl stitch) for one of the cable rows, and frogged. This turned out to be a good decision, as my tubular cast-on was looking a little messy anyhow. When I re-knit the ribbing, I examined the chart again, and saw that I had not been wrong the last time: all the cables really were left-over-right! I examined pictures of finished Koolhaas Hats on Ravelry, then decided I preferred my own conception: so I knit a true lattice, changing the cables in one round (5, I believe) to right-over-left. In the crown shaping, I changed one of the rounds so that stitches were decreased right-leaning (k2tog) at the appropriate time, in order to maintain the look of the woven lattice.



Finally, I cabled the two knit stitches of the ribs right at the beginning, in order to create tighter rib columns and a neater look to the whole transition. I like it better this way, in part because it then looks as though the lattice flows out of the ribbing, rather than the lattice flowing down and kind of..collecting in ribs? I wonder if that makes any sense to others.

Anyhow, that's one complete knitted gift down. I got buttons for the eye mask on Thursday, so the second finished gift will be the subject of my next post!

It's In the Bag

Do you know what this bag means?

I'll give you some hints:

1. I am in San Francisco for a week, spending the Thanksgiving holiday with my dad and sister.

2. This photograph was taken at 8:30am.

3. I waited in a very long line, beginning just after 7:30a, in order to obtain this paper bag.

4. The grease on the bag is butter.


If you said, "Tartine!!!" (must be accompanied by the full expression of all three exclamation marks), you're right! Although my favorite things to eat when I come home to San Francisco run the gamut from sweet to savory, nothing quite thrills me like pulling apart a fresh, often warm croissant from Tartine. I've eaten a lot of croissants in my life, but I've never had one quite as good as these: crisp and delicate on the outside, rich and just shy of sour with butter inside. These most basic of pastries are so difficult to get right that there is a line out the door of this unmarked bakery on the corner of Guerrero and 18th Street at the lower edge of the Castro district from open to close. Of course, this may have to do with the rest of the delights Tartine offers, such as quiche, bread pudding, cakes, cookies . . . and the crowning jewel: a pain au chocolat made with Sharffen Berger chocolate. If you're lucky enough to get one while it's warm, the molten chocolate filling oozes out and gets everywhere, making for the most indulgent of treats.

The phenomenon of Tartine Bakery is something that continues to impress me, even though I've lost my heart to the pastries they churn out hour after hour. The flagship of what my dad now refers to as Gourmet Gulch (the stretch of 18th Street between Guerrero and Hartford), Tartine seemed to arrive in our neighborhood like a whisper of fog. Its unassuming exterior (that "Tartine Green" painted wood) belied the sumptuous display behind their glass cases. And then, quite suddenly, my dad and I were betting on how long the line would take this time -- "Fifteen minutes" "I'm going to say thirteen" "Ooh, it's long today, let's say 18 minutes" "Really? I'll be optimistic: nine". It doesn't matter when I go: I queue the same length of time at breakfast, lunch, and tea-time. But it's always worth it.