Fidget

This has happened many times before, to my immense amusement, but this is the first time I’ve remembered to grab the camera:

I’ll be going about my business at home and suddenly I look out and there’s a cat, perched right on the edge of the neighbors’ concrete wall, staring in our front window. It’s not always the same cat, either! Do they take it in shifts to keep an eye on us? Do they do it when we’re not home, even? What do they find so interesting to watch?! I guess I should be glad it’s not the neighbors themselves staring out the window at us. It’s a bit awkward, the way our windows are placed to be able to see right into each other’s living rooms. And in our case, into our kitchen and down our hall.

There are lots of kitties in our apartment complex. I assume they are owned by the residents, but many of them spend a lot of time outside. On laundry day they watch me going up and down stairs with my full and empty baskets, and sometimes engage me in conversation. I think I must look like I speak cat. They give me that look that seems to mean that they know that I know what they are talking about.

The working of these socks is a long, complicated story. In previous socks I’d knitted, cuff-down, I was plagued by either running out of yarn right at the end, or, with so much left over that I wished I had made the leg longer. So, I wanted to try a toe-up pair. I started out with a pattern I found on Knitty.com, with a lovely traveling-vine type of lace pattern and a short-row heel. Once I had a few inches of foot, I decided they were going to be very baggy. So I ripped out and reworked the lace pattern to have more stitches per repeat. As I tried them on, they seemed to fit sleekly and looked lovely. However, a few inches up the leg, I discovered the whole thing was too small and I couldn’t even pull the sock over my heel. At this point, I took a long break from working on this project!

Looking through a library book, I found a lovely, simple, feather-and-fan lace sock. I decided to completely rip out the vine-socks rather than ripping out to just before the heel to try a different heel style since that would have been most of the sock anyway, and I wasn’t totally happy with how the varigated yarn was working anyway.

I worked the socks as shown in the pattern, except from the toe up. This worked out fine, and I like the garter-stitch rows at the ankle and cuff.

I really like the feather-and-fan stitch design. It’s enough detail to look pretty but the yarn is a bit busy so the two don’t fight. Also it goes quickly because only every 4th row is pattern, the rest is all knit.

I did have some sizing issues with these socks as I was working them. I worked the heel-flap twice because the gauge seemed looser once I switched to knitting back and forth as opposed to in-the-round, and I wanted the bottom of the heel to be tight and smooth and durable! So I ripped back and re-knit with size 0’s.

Then, when I was a few inches up the leg, I was horrified to see that again it was going to be difficult to get the sock on my foot, but I didn’t panic - I ripped back to those garter stitch rows and started the leg using size 2’s.

The whole reason that I knit these toe-up was so that I could use all of the yarn. It was looking like that was going to mean knee socks, which I was delighted with, since knee socks are my stay-warm-in-a-cold-house strategy and I wear knee socks every day from October to April. But, the socks weren’t going to go over my calves. I was toying with the idea of adding stitches to each of 4 pattern repeats, but wasn’t sure how to do it gradually and was afraid it would be too many additional stitches. Luckily, it was Monday and I was at the Knit Night at Market of Choice. Several experts there advised me to insert a new repeat at the center back, adding stitches gradually. This totally worked! I added 2 sts on every “round 3″ of the pattern, and worked the “round 1″ pattern as new number of stitches allowed. Saved!

I’m quite relieved to have this project done! It’s been a long time coming.

by Anne Bronte

Now I have read a work by each of the Bronte sisters. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre has been one of my top favorites ever since I read it years ago. I recently read Wuthering Heights by Emily and found it quite compelling but too dark and disturbing to truly enjoy it. The Tenant is a real gem. I think the thing I like most about it is the depth and believability of the characters. They are intense, passionate, but not idealistic or overly sentimental. You feel that if you lived in their time and place, you’d know them just the way they are presented in the book.

I have been thinking off and on recently about female characters written by male authors and vice versa. I find myself analyzing how well an author presents a character, and then I start to doubt my conclusions because of the sex of the author. I may think a male character is believable and empathetic, but is that just because he was written by a woman? Or, I feel I can’t say a female character is really written “truly” because I can’t help remembering her male author. But, who am I to judge? Just because I am a woman doesn’t mean I understand all womanhood. I think some of my intellect may be somewhat masculine in nature.

Maybe some authors simply excell at writing characters in a way that transcends gender. George Eliot (who was a woman named Mary Ann Evans) and Leo Tolstoy are my favorite examples of this. Their people move me. (In Eliot’s case, the male characters might resonate with me even more than the female ones.) Tolstoy astonished me with his broad range of characterization that was utterly convincing throughout the epic War and Peace. I wonder if I was able to read books with the author unknown to me if I could figure out whether they were written by a man or a woman?

I was leading up a point with all this: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is written partly from the first-person narrative perspective of a young gentleman farmer in the Hall’s vicinity, as if he is writing a story in a letter to a friend much later in his life. A large portion, however, is “excerpted” from the diary and letters of the mysterious woman living at the Hall. So, we get to know Gilbert as he presents himself and then as he learns of Helen we are right there with him, or rather with her, as she lives out her early years. I could really relate to Gilbert’s suspense and excitement as he was reading the diary - I could barely put it down!

The book is compelling for another reason - I think it shares this somewhat with the other Brontes’ books, but is the most direct in its quality of “this could be your life.” There are such brutally honest examinations of human nature, thought processes, and how people impact each other. It can be chilling at times - too close for comfort! But, Wildfell Hall is a redemptive story, and gives us hope that people can rise above suffering and vice. (I can’t say the same for Wuthering Heights with Catherine and Heathcliff.)

I’d say, read it. Soon.

I decided to begin with the Crusty Cob recipe on page 20 of Paul Hollywood’s 100 Great Breads. It’s the first page of Basic Breads, which seemed like a good place to start, and all I have is 1 smallish loaf pan – pyrex – so I figured I’d do a baking-sheet recipe first thing and save myself any worry about the pan being too small, the wrong shape (if I decided to go with the 8×8…) or trying one of the pan recipes on a baking sheet (what if it puddles out and ruins the oven?!). Yep, I’m a worrier when it comes to these experiments.

Providentially, I was reading blogs this morning and Smitten Kitchen’s Tips of the Day for today and yesterday were about yeast and bread baking. There was a link to her Eight Tips for Less Intimidating Bread. This took such a load off my mind! I was really uncertain about the whole “punching down the dough” thing, since Paul didn’t say anything about that but I’ve always heard it’s a big step and that you’re supposed to do it when the dough has “doubled in volume.” But how can you tell? Well, SK cleared that up: just gently deflating it is the thing to do.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself… I measured my flour. I put the salt on one side of the mound and the yeast (active dry, dissolved in water as directed on the packet) on the other side, and attempted to not let them touch as cautioned by Mr. Hollywood – apparently the salt will kill the yeast. Though how you are supposed to mix things together without having them touch eventually is beyond me. Some of the yeast liquid ran over into the salt. Oops.

I “softened” the butter in the microwave but I didn’t want it to melt, so just for 10 seconds… I think it might have been a little cold in the middle. So hopefully the butter isn’t in several big lumps or only worked through 1/2 of the dough! I wonder if maybe it wouldn’t matter to just pour it in melted? Other recipes use oil, which is a liquid. And you want the dough to be warm so it will rise. Also it’s totally freezing today. “Highs in the Lows” as we like to say.

I poured in the water in a few stages and stirred with a silicone spatula. (There’s nothing creepier to me than scraping dough off of a wooden spoon. Eeegh.) Once it was sticking together well I used my hands and mixed it a bit more.

I wanted to do my kneading on the table rather than the counter, since the counter is a bit high and I thought it would be an awkward angle for my arms. I have these heavy plastic placemats from IKEA so I floured up one of those and used it to knead on the table. Both Paul and Smitten advised against adding too much flour during the kneading, so I tried to use the bare minimum. The placemat worked out kind of nice because the dough stuck to it some but I could turn the whole mat before folding over the dough for the next knead. Neat!

I kneaded for 10 minutes which was PH’s recommendation for beginners. I washed out and oiled my big blue bowl (it’s a wonderful Big Blue Bread Bowl) and put my dough ball in there and covered it with a clean dishtowl, orange for contrast. Paul says you don’t have to cover it but I don’t want dust or anything settling on the dough while it sits there for two hours! My apartment is not the most dust-free place. I gently and lovingly placed my dough bowl in the warmest several cubic feet of air in the place: on top of the refrigerator. That’s the only place that really ever gets what you could call warm. We like to keep the thermostat at 61-ish – gasp – but the way our ceiling heat seems to work the upper 1/3 of the rooms get too hot if it’s higher than that. So we’ll see. The dough did grow a lot during those two hours, and I poked it as instructed by SK and all seemed well. Yay!

I lined my baking sheet with parchment paper – fancy unbleached silicone-coated – with no cornmeal, contrary to what Smitten seemed to suggest, because that just seemed like a pain in the neck. Wasn’t in my recipe anyway. I formed my dough into a nice ball (thanks again to SK for the detailed tips!) and placed it on the siliconed-pan. I put the dishtowel back over it and put it back in its little warm zone for another hour. My feet are freezing but heck, the dough is cozy. If this loaf turns out good I won’t have an excuse to turn up the heat on bread-baking days. Though I guess if, like today, it’s also bill-paying day, I won’t let myself make excuses for using any more expensive kilowatt hours than I have to!

I moved the oven rack lower… because PH says that “the longer a loaf takes to color or bake, the drier it will be.” I don’t want the top of the loaf to get dry while it’s waiting for the bottom to bake all the way through. Also, the Crusty Cob recipe has a little anecdote saying that “this bread, which dates back to medieval times, was known as one of the oven bottoms, as this was invariably where it was baked.” So we’ll see how that goes.

One last tricky step – slashing the top. I think you are supposed to do each cut all in one slash, but I couldn’t help sawing a little.

In the little beauty goes!

… Later …

Well, it came out great! We had fresh bread and cream-of-carrot soup for dinner. It was lovely. I baked the bread for 30 minutes, exactly as the recipe said, “or until golden brown” and sure enough it was golden brown after a half hour. And it was done all the way through, but not too done. The only thing is it’s a bit salty. I thought a tablespoon was kind of a lot. Maybe next time I’ll do 2 tsp instead. But I’m very pleased, since this is my first time. And the recipe was great - I followed it to the letter, something I rarely do, but it payed off here. I’m excited to try Hollywood’s other bread recipes and work my way up to expert.

Note: this post was made possible by my darling sister SS, who gifted me the cookbooks this Christmas.