Shoshiplatypus

What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?

Tiny Carpets

I am continuing work on the tiny carpets for the needle books I am making. I think I’ve completed the pale blue on the third one, and have discovered a few mistakes in my design – I’ve managed to fudge around them OK in most cases but you have to look carefully to spot any others! I have also altered one small part inside the diamond-shaped lozenges to make the design inside extend a little wider, which I think is an improvement. However, I wouldn’t blame anyone for not noticing!

Again, no further progress on the knitting this week.

Recipe of the Week

I’ve been quite busy in the kitchen this week. As promised last week, a nice wholesome salad to keep you going!

Chopped Kale Power Salad with Lemon Tahini Dressing

(As always, I omitted the oil.) This is a really delicious, substantial main-meal salad. I’ve always been in two minds about kale, especially when it’s raw, thinking it was too chewy, and also rather bitter, but I have discovered the Cavolo Nero variety of black kale, which Tesco is now stocking, and for once, it comes with whole leaves, and not all chopped up. I hate the chopped up kale in a bag that they sell – you have to pick through it all and pull out the portions of tough stems. If the leaves are whole, it is easy to strip out the centre tough vein. This black kale is sweeter than the regular green kale. All kale is greatly improved by a few minutes’ massaging to break down the cell walls somewhat, making it easier to eat and digest. This process is helped with the addition of some lemon juice

I was expecting this salad to be too chewy and bitter, but it was delicious, and actually quite sweet!

I love these main meal salads which have starchy vegetables and beans added to them. This recipe has sweet potatoes and chickpeas, and also some nuts and dried fruit for extra texture and sweetness.

If I was unable to get the black kale, I think I would steam the kale for a few minutes to soften it a little. I also thought it would be interesting to try substituting the kale for some baby spinach.

Yoghurt

For some reason my yoghurt culture seems to have died. The yoghurt suddenly ceased to thicken. I have bought some probiotic capsules containing about 16 different cultures and have been assured that these will do the trick, but apparently it takes about 3 batches before it establishes itself. My first batch was a jar of pretty much liquid yoghurt, and the second was a definite improvement. I’m going to persevere and hope for the best. I was very pleased up until now that my old culture seemed to be doing so well with the changeover a couple of months ago from dairy to soya milk so I’m not sure what went wrong.

A bumper crop

We have a delightful widowed lady living next door to us, and throughout the summer she has been sharing her glut of raspberries with us. She is a very keen gardener and her garden is always full of flowers and produce, and I can see it from the bedroom window so I get to enjoy it too! We don’t grow much in the way of produce – just the apples, and some rhubarb, and my herb garden. We had some raspberry canes under the apple tree and my hubby pulled all but one of them out (much to my annoyance as I like raspberries!) – he said they weren’t worth keeping because they didn’t get enough sun under the apple tree, and we never got more than a couple of really small bowls each year anyway. They were a late variety, coming on in late August/September time.

On Saturday we noticed that there were some on the last remaining cane, so my hubby picked them for me.

I decided to give our neighbour a present. I took this box around for her.

(We don’t use this low fat spread any longer, but I’ve kept a load of the containers as they are so useful for the freezer.)

I said to her, “You have been so kind to us all summer, plying us with so many delicious raspberries, so we decided you should have 25 percent of our crop.” She protested volubly but in the end took the box from me, and opened it, to find…

She doubled over, absolutely shrieking with laughter! She said it was the best laugh she’d had for ages! I told her our entire crop this year, since my hubby pulled out nearly all the raspberry canes, was four raspberries. I told her not to eat it all at once.

Blackberries

That same day, my hubby went blackberry picking, and came back with a very respectable bowl full of gorgeous juicy blackberries! I put them straight on to stew, and they are now being frozen in small portions to go with our apples (you don’t need as many blackberries as apples to make a good combination).

On Monday he went again and got a few more. Washed and ready to cook.

Stewed, and cooling ready to freeze. Again, I shall freeze them in small batches.

He went for a walk yesterday and came back with another bowl! Lovely free food!

Soup

This week I also made a nice big batch of leek and potato soup, combining an old, basic recipe with another one I found on Youtube which added a bit of pep with some nutritional yeast, soy sauce, lemon juice and almond milk. It’s good nosh! Freezer fodder for now, but ready when we want it.

Pantry Mini-Revamp

I’ve reorganised a couple of my kitchen cupboards this week, which were cluttered with bits and pieces I rarely use. Most of these are accessories for my various gadgets that I use infrequently or not at all. I’ve taken these out and put them in a box to be stored away in the flat, where I can get at them if I need to. I’ve also thrown out quite a bit of rubbish. Amazing how one accumulates all this stuff over the years! This has freed up a bit of space, and I’ve moved the biscuits and oatcakes in there, which has given me more space on the top shelf of the pantry. Every time I wanted to reach the jars there, I would have to move the biscuits which was becoming a bit of a bore.

This week I also had some new storage jars delivered. I’ve got a lot of the recycled coffee jars but I needed a few bigger ones. I’ve now got another 3 litre, and 3 smaller ones at 1.5 litres, all with clip tops. The large one is for my soya beans, and the smaller ones for lentils and rice. I love seeing all my whole-food supplies in their jars! The pantry looks like an old-fashioned sweet shop.

I have made labels for them to match the rest of the pantry labels. I also have a few unlabelled jars so I did them all in one go.

The labels printed – I have the template for the three different sizes saved on the computer.

Fussy cut and ready to stick onto the various jars.

I should have some pics of the revamped pantry next week.

I’m very pleased with the pantry after its recent major revamp with the new storage drawers and boxes, but there was a bit of tweaking to be done. No doubt it will be an ongoing work in progress, but the major work is now done, and it’s working very well for me.

Nutrition

Beans, beans, beans – be a human bean and not a has-been!

I add legumes to most things these days, because they are such nutrient-dense foods! There are so many varieties too – black beans, red kidney beans, cannellini beans, chickpeas, lentils… They are also extremely cheap, especially if you buy dry legumes rather than the tinned ones. For regular cooking on the stove top, they need to be soaked overnight, but if you have a pressure cooker, soaking is not required – you just extend the cooking time a little longer. I have had great success with this, using my Ninja Foodi electric pressure cooker. I have charts of cooking times for both soaked and unsoaked legumes, and for the yields from various dry weights. In one batch, I cook multiples of the equivalent of a tin of beans, and freeze these in ziplock bags, so when the recipe calls for a tin of whatever sort of bean, I just whip them out of the freezer. When I take out the last portion, I cook up some more, so I never run out. I do this with brown rice, quinoa and other grains too. It takes no longer to cook a lot than it does a little, and it saves a huge amount of time.

“As a vegan, where do you get your protein?”

Vegans generally get very tired of being asked this same question over and over again. If we were given a pound for each time we got asked that question, we would soon be millionaires, I reckon! Part of the problem is that people will concentrate on macronutrients (e.g. fat, protein, carbohydrate) rather than on actual foods. If you eat a balanced diet of whole plant foods, you get all the macro- and micronutrients you need, without having to count or measure anything. The other part of the problem is that we have been inculcated from our youth upwards to believe that in order to grow big and strong, and to remain healthy, you have to eat meat, dairy and eggs, because that’s where you get your protein! This is simply not true. This myth is perpetuated by the food manufacturers and big agriculture through their marketing. Animal agriculture is extremely big business and we are talking billions of profit here. Studies can give confusing results because these are often skewed in favour of whoever has funded the research. A few years ago the cover story on Time Magazine was that butter was back! – and that studies proved it wasn’t bad for you as we’d been told it was. These studies were funded by the dairy industry. Of course this caused confusion, and it also gave people permission to carry on eating what was bad for them – as Dr. John McDougall says, “People love to hear good news about their bad habits.”

“People eat meat and think they will become strong as an ox, forgetting that the ox eats grass.”― Pino Carus.

Think of the largest, most powerful animals on earth – the elephant, the hippo, the rhino, the gorilla. They all eat plants! They get their protein from plants, just plants. Our digestive tract, from our teeth to our rectum, is the same as that of all primates and quite different from carnivores like tigers. We are designed to eat plants. All protein ultimately comes from plants, which make the amino acid building blocks from sunlight and carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis. If you get your proteins from animals, you are getting them second-hand, along with a lot of stuff you don’t need that comes along for the ride, such as cholesterol, saturated fat, hormones and antibiotics, and you are not getting the fibre which is present only in plants, and other vital phytonutrients.

Meat is made of protein, and that protein comes from the plants the animal ate. The standard western diet is too rich in animal protein and this is causing numerous health problems. We can get all our essential amino acids (the building blocks of protein) from plant-based sources, and one of the richest sources is legumes – peas, beans and lentils – as well as nuts and seeds, and green leafy vegetables. These foods are also high in fibre which is essential for gut health, and the health of our gut microbiome. The standard western diet is very low in fibre, well below our actual requirement. Meat contains no fibre at all.

Many top athletes are now abandoning meat and proving that they can compete at the highest level on plants alone, and they are finding that their performance is actually improving. For more information on this, watch the movie “The Game Changers” which is available on Netflix. That film is an eye-opener!

So yes thanks, I am getting all the protein I need, and I’m getting it from plants.

Kitties

They haven’t been out much this week, so they have been spending a lot of time in their various favourite places, sleeping! Most evenings they will sit on my legs on the recliner (they get pretty hot and heavy) and I’ve had lots of lovely cuddles with Ruby.

Queen Ruby clearly didn’t want me to sit down when I came into the sitting room the other day! “Please don’t disturb me! Can’t you see I’m pretending to be a royal crown on a cushion? You must treat me like royalty!”

The other day my hubby made a nest for Lily out of one of his jumpers. This is what he called me in to see.

Silver cleaning

This week I came across a number of websites via Pinterest, which showed a quick and easy, and very cheap, way to clean silver. Silver cleaning products are expensive to buy and usually involve a certain amount of elbow grease too, but this method uses cheap ingredients that most people have in their kitchens anyway, and no rubbing is involved. I thought, “This has to be too good to be true,” but decided I had nothing to lose by trying.

The ingredients are as follows:

A piece of kitchen foil laid in a bowl. 1 cup of warm water added, into which you dissolve a tablespoon each of salt, baking soda and washing up liquid. That’s all! You just stir till dissolved, and then add the silver items. You can use this to clean any jewellery too. My little collection of spoons here don’t look that tarnished in the photo but they were quite in need of cleaning.

I put them into the bowl, and because the large one wouldn’t submerge completely, I spent a few minutes moving them around. I’m not sure if it’s essential that they touch the foil but I suspect this is the case – I think this method involves some sort of electrolytic reaction between the metals and the solution. The foil does seem to become more fragile and start to disintegrate. Anyway, after about 10 minutes the spoons were shiny like new!

You just rinse them off and dry them with a soft cloth, and if necessary (for instance with jewellery) you brush them gently under the solution with a soft toothbrush to dislodge any dirt.

I also cleaned my silver bangles. I wear these all the time, and they get pretty dull. One or two of them are quite textured and it’s hard to clean the gunk and tarnish out of them, but in this case, it took only 2 or 3 minutes for them to come out absolutely gleaming – they’ve never been this clean, even after rubbing them with a silver polishing cloth!

Clothes

Another Romanian blouse this week. This is another great favourite of mine, partly because the colour is unusual, and not the traditional white fabric with predominantly red embroidery, but blue, with yellow embroidery. It went well with jeans when I used to wear these, and nowadays I haven’t got anything that really goes with it because most of my blue skirts and trousers are the wrong shade. It looks pretty good with my ubiquitous black harem pants, though! And just look at all the apples on our tree!

Yellow socks to go with the yellow embroidery on the blouse, and also a string of really cheap yellow plastic beads and a pair of yellow bead earrings. This back view shows the lovely shape of the neckline and the embroidery on the sleeves.

Some close-up shots of the embroidery.

This is a combination of pattern darning and a little pulled thread work. Pattern darning is a very common form of embellishment in Eastern Europe, and is a very simple and effective embroidery stitch. Just like with normal darning that is used to repair damaged fabric, you weave the stitches in and out of the fabric, but in this case using stitches of different lengths, and in a contrasting colour, so that the stitches on the top surface create a geometric pattern. Because it is woven in and out of the existing fabric, it looks like a design actually woven into the fabric rather than a surface decoration.

This is what pattern darning looks like on the reverse side.

The pulled thread work consists of stitches which are pulled tight, distorting the weave of the fabric and creating small holes in a regular pattern.

As with my other blouses, the neckline is embellished with simple smocking. I like how they have edged the neck opening with simple blanket stitch, and reinforced the bottom of the slit decoratively as well. Very nice attention to detail.

The armhole seams are picked out with embroidery, as on my other blouses. The narrow bands of concentrated pattern darning resemble woven stripes in the fabric.

This blouse is made of more substantial fabric than the one I showed you last week. It’s one of my favourites.

Have a happy, creative week, everybody.