Shoshiplatypus

What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?

I’m happy to say I’ve completed tiny carpet #3.

A close-up, showing the variegated background. I’m really glad I did this. If I hadn’t seen a TV programme with an oriental rug on it which had this, I would have gone ahead and just done the plain dark blue and I think it would have lacked interest. I shall definitely do this again for plain backgrounds.

Here are the first three tiny carpets together.

I have now made the design for tiny carpet #4, which has a border and a more all-over design. Here is the picture of the inspiration for this design.

You can see that this has that same variegated background, and I am going to replicate this again, this time in red.

Here is the design I have made.

The entire background will be variegated dark red.

I’ve started working on the border.

Food

I have a fairly elderly Panasonic bread making machine. My hubby and I were trying to remember when I got it, and came to the conclusion it was in the fairly early days in our previous house – we moved there in 1999. It’s done pretty well, but recently the bread has been coming out decidedly lopsided, and not rising as much as it should overall. This is my normal half-white, half-wholemeal seeded loaf, and you can see that it does look a little strange! (It actually reminds me of one of Angela’s famous pebbles – perhaps I should send it to her for her to paint!!)

The machine has also started making quite a lot of noise during the operation. The time has obviously come to replace it. I have been very happy with this Panasonic machine so have decided to go for that make again. Since I bought this one, things have moved on a great deal, and they have quite a selection of models to choose from (which makes it harder to decide!). In the end, I haven’t gone for the top-of-the-range machine, but one that still has quite a lot of useful functions, including programmes for artisan breads and sourdough. My previous attempts at hand-making sourdough had pretty unpredictable results, and I haven’t made any recently. The flavour was always excellent, but the rising was very inconsistent. With the machine, the loaf will come out in the standard shape, of course, and not in the traditional shape with the pattern of the banneton impressed on it, which is rather a shame, but if I can get a more consistent result, I shan’t mind too much.

I have ordered the machine from Amazon, and have been told I won’t get it until late October/early November. I assume this is because of the lockdown when everyone was panicking about the possibility of not being able to get any bread, and started making their own. I expect the company has had an overwhelming flood of orders for machines.

So for the meantime, it will be more lovely lopsided loaves chez Shosh, but we can put up with that for a while longer!

Recipe of the Week

Roasted Butternut Squash Soup

There are many different ways of preparing this versatile vegetable, but I have chosen soup for this week’s recipe.

Served here with my home-made half-and half wholemeal and white bread, and a savoury lentil flatbread. The soup is garnished with paprika and a sprig of basil.

I used my own home-made vegetable stock rather than a veg stock bouillon. I make this stock from all the peelings and tops and tails and outside leaves from my food prep. They all go in a bag in the freezer until I’ve got enough, and then I dump them in the pressure cooker with a few additions (bay leaves, dill, onion powder and garlic powder) and cook it for an hour. The result is strained through a colander into a large bowl and the residue goes in the compost for the garden. I store the stock in a bottle in the fridge, ready for use in various recipes.

I love the method given in this soup recipe for roasting the butternut squash – simply cutting it in half and roasting it face down in the oven, until the flesh is soft. You can then scrape it out of the skin with ease. It has a wonderful golden colour. I roasted mine in a tin lined with one of my teflon sheets, and I didn’t add any oil, and it didn’t stick. You could also use baking parchment. There was no mess to clean up because it all just floated off the sheet when I washed it. Easy peasy.

I used my high-speed blender rather than a stick blender to blitz the soup to a velvety smoothness. It came out thick and absolutely delicious. A lovely seasonal autumnal soup but suitable for any time of the year, since squashes always seem to be on the supermarket shelves.

Nutrition

Supersquash

 

I hesitate to call any food a “superfood” because a well-balanced whole-food plant-based diet is “super food” without even trying! However, the humble butternut squash has numerous health benefits because of all the phytonutrients it contains, so it’s pretty super.

It has more potassium per unit weight than a banana. Potassium is important for maintaining a healthy blood pressure level and a high intake of potassium from plant sources has been shown to be as important as reducing one’s sodium intake for the lowering of hypertension. Potassium has been proved to reduce the risk of all forms of cardiovascular disease and resulting death. However, if you are on certain medications (e.g. beta blockers) which increase the levels of potassium in the bloodstream, it is safer to limit one’s consumption of potassium-rich foods, but if you are already established on a whole-food plant-based diet, the need for such medications would be minimal anyway, since this diet is the only one which has been proved not only to prevent, but to reverse cardiovascular disease, as well as type 2 diabetes and many auto-immune diseases.

Much has been said about the importance of diet in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, but this is usually in the context of management of the condition which most doctors, with limited or no training in nutrition, believe to be a lifelong, chronic and progressive disease which can only be managed and never cured. However, people adopting a whole-food plant-based diet are often able to come off all medication eventually, and their diabetes becomes a thing of the past. This is because the consumption of animal products, especially saturated fat, blocks the insulin receptors on the cell membrane, so that the glucose cannot enter the cell and be metabolised into energy, and it remains in the blood. It’s a bit like putting chewing gum into a lock, so that you can’t insert the key and open the door. The pancreas then produces more insulin in order to deal with this, until it is overwhelmed and ceases to function properly. Type 2 diabetes is not caused by the over-consumption of sugar and other carbohydrates, but by the fat which causes the insulin resistance. Obviously, once you’ve got the condition, the consumption of refined carbohydrates can be a problem as it increases the amount of blood glucose, making the situation worse. Once the build-up of animal fat is cleared from the body, it is able to repair itself and the diabetes can be reversed. There is plenty of well-researched proof and anecdotal evidence from doctors and patients for this which you can easily find for yourself online.

In addition to potassium, butternut squash is also rich in beta-carotene, the anti-oxidant that gives many fruits and vegetables their distinctive orange colour, such as carrots, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe melons and apricots, to name a few. Carotenoids have many health benefits including protection against the development of colon cancer (wish I’d known this fact years ago!!).

Other nutrients present are vitamins A and C, and a high fibre content which is beneficial for all aspects of health, and for feeding and maintaining a healthy, diverse gut microbiome. This vast colony of microorganisms breaks down the fibre into short-chain fatty acids which are then available for the body to absorb. These are essential for health – they reduce inflammation (which leads to cardiovascular disease and many other conditions), prevent auto-immune disease, protect against cancer, maintain brain health, protect against pathogens, regulate appetite and protect against obesity, and so on.

The following nutrients are also present in this extraordinary vegetable (botanically, it is actually a fruit, but is generally referred to as a vegetable): low glycaemic index carbohydrate, protein, vitamin E, various B vitamins, magnesium and manganese, and it is also rich in calcium, iron, phosphorus and copper.

As we saw last week, most foods in the standard Western diet have had all the nutritional value processed out of them, and people then try to replace all these missing nutrients in pill form, which is far from ideal. When they are bound up with the fibre in the natural form, they are available to the body in concert, providing the correct balance that we need, and restoring us to health.

The body is an incredible self-healing mechanism but it needs the right fuels to do this. A constant onslaught of processed, nutrient-depleted empty calories and damaging saturated animal fat and protein cause all the classic chronic diseases of the West, and the body never gets the chance to do what it is designed to do, which is to maintain us in a state of optimal health.

Looking at these weird looking squashes and feeling their weight, they remind me of dumbbells. Not only can you get well fed from butternut squash, but you could use them for a workout too. Better than going to the gym. They certainly require some physical strength to cut them!

Oh, did I mention, butternut squash is not only extremely nutritious, it is also absolutely delicious! Soup, anyone?

Clothes

My poor old red cotton maxi skirt had got progressively more faded, and when I managed to spill a drop of bleach on the front recently, I decided the time had come to give it a new lease of life by dyeing it red, to intensify the colour.

Here it is, being prepared for its dye bath in the washing machine. You have to wet it first, and then spin-dry it until it’s damp.

This is the dye I bought. The pod comes complete with dye and the salt necessary to fix the colour. All you do is remove the outer sleeve, peel back the lid and put the whole thing into the machine on top of the fabric you want to dye.

You then set the machine to do a 40 degree wash cycle and let it do its stuff. It was a bit scary, seeing the bright red water in the machine!

Once the cycle is complete, you remove the empty pod, and run the dyed garment through another 40 degree cycle, and then remove the dyed garment from the machine. Another full cycle, using detergent, completes the operation by cleaning out your machine of all remaining traces of the dye so that your next wash doesn’t come out red!

I pulled the skirt out and was thrilled with the result – a really intense red, which I assumed would lighten a little as it dried, which it did, but only slightly. I hung it over the airer to dry overnight. It is now ironed and ready to wear. The photo doesn’t do it justice – it’s a really rich colour, and I’m very pleased with how it has turned out.

 

My outfit this week is a top I bought many years ago in Totnes. I absolutely love it – it’s more of an in-between one rather than a summer or winter one, and I love the colour and the different fabrics and textures on it. Today I am wearing it with my really baggy black harem pants that I made these several years ago, and green socks.

I’m amazed how loose it looks on me now! I did wear it all through my fat period, but it was rather tight!

A close-up to show the different fabrics and the embroidery.

I’m also wearing the second locket that I showed you last time. It has now been repaired by the jeweller and it opens beautifully to reveal the portraits of my great-grandfather and grandfather, and closes with a satisfying snap.

It strikes me, looking back over my “fashion shoot” pictures, that a lot of my clothes are really old! I have great favourites and could not bear to part with them, even when I couldn’t fit into them. It’s a good thing I kept them because I can now wear them all again! This also makes excellent sense ethically and environmentally, because there is so much wastage in the fashion industry. Not being one to follow the latest fashion trends slavishly and having to renew my wardrobe every season to keep up, my clothes become perennial and eventually wear out, which I hate because I want to go on wearing them. This particular top has been mended several times.

Kitties

Not a great deal of feline activity this week as yet again they have been hard at work sleeping. The other day my hubby got the ladder out and climbed up onto the rockery and did a huge amount of clearing and thinning out as it had turned into a jungle. Ruby sat on her rock and supervised operations. She’s big on advice but rarely lifts a paw to help.

Ruby appears to be star of the show this week. Yesterday she was up on the roof of the outhouse (accessed from the rockery above).

Queen of the Castle,  surveying her estates and putting in a little ornithological study at the same time.

When I’m in the outhouse getting stuff out of the freezer and she’s up there, it sounds like a herd of elephants stampeding about as the sound reverberates around the outhouse! Whoever said cats were silent on their feet obviously didn’t live with them. I think G&S got it about right in The Pirates of Penzance: “With cat-like tread…” (great stamping of feet)!

“Peek-a-boo!”

Shark Attack for Suckers

Why does everything break down at once? First the bread maker, then my standard gooseneck magnifying lamp in the sitting room which has started to develop torticollis and is soon going to need replacing, and finally our old Henry vacuum cleaner which stopped working a few weeks ago and my hubby couldn’t fix it. We had it for a wedding present, and apart from a new hose at one time, it has never needed any repairs. That’s 34 years, which isn’t bad going! We inherited Mum’s, and had one upstairs and one down, to save lugging it up and down the stairs.

The technology has moved on a lot since those days, and I decided to get a more versatile upright one. My hubby said he’d seen an advert on TV for a Shark one that prevented hair tangling around the rotating part, which sounded a good idea, given my long hair, and when I looked it up and compared it with some other ones, I agreed that it looked like the best option. It has a powered tool for getting pet hairs off the furniture too, which is an advantage. So I went ahead and ordered it and it arrived on Sunday afternoon.

You can lift the tank part off and carry it, and use the handle with different tools, which is useful for doing the stairs and furniture. I tried it out, and ran it over a bit of the wooden floor in the hall and sitting room, and then switched it to carpet mode, and did the hall rug and the big one in the sitting room. I couldn’t believe the huuuuge amount of fluff that came up, just from that small area!

It just goes to show that the vacuum cleaners that beat the carpet as well as sucking up the dust, do a much better job than the plain old suckers, which in comparison, really suck. Or not. Oh blow…  errrmmm…  Shoshi’s knickers in a twist now. Ah well. Most crafters would agree that cleaning is for suckers anyway because we are far too busy doing much more important things.

Have a great creative week, everybody.