Lynn Carson Harris

KitchenAid - March of the Tools 4

I have to say that my KitchenAid mixer is the most used tool in my kitchen.  I bought it when we were first married.  B was in graduate school, and we lived in government subsidized housing.  It was a very extravagant purchase at the time, but I have used it almost every day since, so it turned out to be a wise investment.  I even use all of the attachments.

I make bread with the dough hook.  The two bread recipes I make most are the French Bread and English Muffin Loaves in the recipe book that came with the mixer. I use the dough hook to knead the bread.  Then, I oil the bowl and replace the dough and it rises in the same bowl.  That makes for easy clean up.

I use the whisk attachment to whip butter, cream, and sometimes egg whites.

The flat beater is used the most.  I use it for anything that needs to mixed.  Mostly cookies... but also for pie crusts, scones, cakes, quick breads, and even meatloaf.  I use it so much that I have worn through the white coating on two beaters.  I am on the third beater in 20 years.  I think creaming the butter and sugar that does that.  I remember creaming the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon when I was growing up; that was a lot more work.  Now I can measure other ingredients while the mixer does the work.

Remember, you can find more tools in the flickr pool.

New Pajamas

P is growing fast.  I made her two pair of pajamas this weekend. I used the pattern shown here. This is a well used pattern I picked up at a rummage sale when the boys were little. I made pjs for them and also for some of my nieces and a nephew.

I like that I get to use this favorite pattern again. This pair is out of a soft flannel with a rosebud print. P loves them. The other pair is a cotton teddy bear print. Both fabrics were given to me by a friend when she cleaned her sewing room.

I think P is trying to show you that it has an elastic waist. Either that or she is trying to tell me she is tired of pictures and would like her breakfast.

Scissors - March of the Tools 3

True left handed scissors- if you are right handed you probably have not thought about the difference.  Try this, hold your right handed scissors in your left hand. Now, try to cut out a shape drawn on a piece of paper.  Not so easy, is it? The first thing you will notice is that you cannot see the line you want to follow unless you rotate your hand toward you and crane your neck to look over the scissor blade.  The other thing you might not notice right away is that the natural tendency when using scissors is for the thumb to push out and the fingers to pull inwards. On the left hand this forces the blades apart instead of keeping the cutting edges against each other.

True left scissors have their blades reversed so that the natural tendency to push out with the thumb while cutting keeps the blades together and cutting well.  You can also see where you are cutting much easier.

A few years ago I treated myself to these pairs of true left handed dress making shears and pinking shears. Now, I wish all of my scissors were true left hand design so that I wouldn't have to switch back and forth.  If you are lucky enough to be left handed like me, get yourself some true left handed scissors.  You can avoid hand strain and callouses on your thumb from pulling the thumb blade towards your hand with right hand scissors!  Switch soon, you deserve it!

Be sure to check the flickr pool for more great tools.

 

It's Official

P is officially signed up for preschool.  She will be attending the Chelsea Children's Co-op just like her brothers.  Of course, it was very different when the boys attended.  I was a much younger mother then.  We did not have email.  The school was in the basement of a church and one of the parents had to come in and set up the school every Sunday evening. Other parents packed things away every Friday afternoon.  The parent helper jobs are easier now.  The school is now housed in the first floor of this building.

For  many years this was the parochial school for St Mary's Catholic Church. In 1998 the church sold the building to actor Jeff Daniels and his wife who then donated it to the Chelsea Center for the Arts.  The preschool has three classrooms on the first floor. Thursday, P and I attended the open house and got registered for the fall. She really loved her play time there.  She enjoyed play dough, snack, puzzles, art, rice table, the indoor slide, and the play kitchen (where she called Dad on the wood phone). She also got to paint at an easel - where they have APRONS! They even have a library and the teacher let her check out a book.  It will be a long wait until September. She is already asking to go to preschool again! 
She will have to keep busy with her books here.

She already spends a lot of time on her "homework" after the boys are home from school.  She can concentrate very hard on her serious pencil and paper work.

Cookie scoop - March of the Tools 2

I like to make cookies.  With this tool, I can make 6 dozen oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in under an hour!  I have this recipe down to a science. Really. This 1 1/4 inch scoop makes the scooping go very fast.  I can quickly make 6 staggered rows of 4 cookies on the baking sheets.  I load the second tray while the first is baking.  When the third tray goes in the oven I wash everything up. Total time in the kitchen after the butter is soft is less than one hour.

When I am not in a hurry, I can make fancy cookies.  These are especially fun with a large collection of great cookie cutters.  I picked these up years ago at a rummage sale.

I get them out every spring.  P and I recently made some sugar cookies with these.

I have found that I like making roll out sugar cookies a lot better than I like eating them.  Perhaps next time we should make some art clay like the box suggests.
You can see some of my other favorite cookie cutters here and the gingerbread man  shapes here.

Bootees and Heart Socks

Baby bootees are fun to make for new baby gifts. They use up little bits of super-soft yarn. These are made from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino (oh, if only I could afford an afghan out of that stuff...) from a pattern in 50 baby bootees to knit by Zoe Mellor.

While looking through the book, I saw a great pattern for fair isle socks. The pattern used fine yarn and made socks for a 3-6 month old.  P and I liked the design very much.  I decided to knit them from my recent homespun yarn. 

I didn't want to knit the same sock again (there's that second sock syndrome showing up again), so I knit the second one as a negative.

Since my homespun was thicker, the socks turned out bigger. They are a bit large for P now but after the photo shoot yesterday morning she did not want to take them off and wore them all day!  They will be great snow socks for next winter!

March of the Tools 1

I am joining Heather over at Hello my name is Heather in her March of the Tools event.   Heather has also started a flickr group here where you can see favorite tools from others who have joined in the March of the Tools fun.

I will be sharing some of my favorite tools for all sorts of things throughout the month of March. I have been trying to declutter my life and my home so these tools will be things that I use very frequently or that I feel are the must have tool for a particular task or something that just makes me happy when I use it.

My favorite tool for knitting is my collection of double pointed needles, or "knitting sticks" as P calls them. These range from size 0000 to size 13. Double pointed needles are a must for knitting some of my favorite projects like socks, mittens, and hats.  The shorter bamboo ones really make the knitting go faster.  I also use the double points for knitting sweater sleeves on many sweaters. I like that double points were the way very early knitters knit larger garments in the round. Before there were circular needles they just used more double points to go around the sweater. This technique is pictured in some very old pieces of art.

These little stork scissors, a gift from a very dear friend,  are also a favorite tool.   I love using this elegant tool to snip my yarns or embroidery threads.  I had seen scissors like these when I was small and I fell in love with the clever shape.  It was like a secret childhood dream come true when I was given these scissors. Yes, sometimes it is the little things that mean a lot.

Here and here are some other tools I adore using but have already mentioned.

Stay tuned for more great tools throughout the month.

Kettle Holes

When we woke yesterday it was 50 degrees. A lot of our snow had melted; this was what our upper garden looked like. This garden is sort of a saddle of land between two bowl like depressions.

We live on a glacial moraine, the pile of rubble pushed ahead of an advancing glacier. We have two kettle holes on our property. These were formed when large blocks of ice calved off the front of the receding glacier and were buried under glacial outwash or sediment. When the ice finally melted a depression was left in the land. Kettle holes filled with water are called kettle lakes. Ours only hold water for a few days in the spring.

This is what the smaller kettle hole looked like in the morning.

By the afternoon it looked like this.

This morning it is cold again and there is ice on the kettle pond.

You can even slide ice chunks all the way to the other side.  If it stays cold it may be thick enough for skating tomorrow.  Too bad we don't have skates.
 
They have predicted 6-8 more inches of snow. This is the way of early March.   

Cranberry Bread

Over the weekend I did a little inventory of the freezer. I wanted to see how much jam and pie filling was left.  While I was digging around I found a bag of cranberries and had to use them in cranberry bread right away!  This is a favorite with the boys.  I usually get a few bags of cranberries and put them in the freezer in the fall so we can enjoy this bread in the winter months.

Cranberry Bread

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 egg
2 Tablespoons shortening
2 Tablespoons hot water
1/2 cup orange juice
1 cup raw cranberries cut in half (I use the whole bag and leave them whole)
1 cup nuts (optional)

Mix dry ingredients

Cream together the egg, shortening, water, and juice. Add berries.

Fold the wet mixture into the dry ingredients.

Turn into a greased 9 inch loaf pan.

Bake for one hour or more at 325 degrees F.  (If the berries are still frozen you will have to bake longer.)  Bake until toothpick comes out clean.

In Like a Lion

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb but I never hear much talk about the rest of the month. What is it that happens in between?

Mud.  Here, March is Mud Month.

This was taken March 10, 2007. P and M enjoyed the pond that formed when the snow from the "sledding hill" behind them melted. Notice that M took P out in a dress and not pants because, as he said "the pants would just get muddy."

March his when the snow melts and we get lots of water but the ground underneath is still frozen. Sloooowly the ground thaws and that water soaks in. The top part of the earth becomes saturated with water.  Our driveway turns to mud, a growing layer of mud.   The  boys used to play out there when they were little. They would dig channels with sticks and float boats in the driveway. They would ride their bikes and come back in with brown stripes up their backs.  I often wonder how many shoes have been swallowed by that little area of earth.  Even a truckload of gravel has been eaten by the mud.

The ground will eventually thaw completely and the water drains away as if someone had pulled out a plug. That is March for us.

Happy March.