Food and Yarn: Stop Encouraging Them

I have to say something.  I've been watching my fellow crafters over the years... women who want to dye their own yarn or fiber, but are afraid of "real" dyes and bringing harsh chemicals into their homes... dyeing with Kool-Aid.  Ladies and gentlemen, you are not thinking this through.

Dyeing with Kool-Aid involves taking the powdered drink mix, applying it to the fiber after dissolving it in liquid, and fixing it with vinegar and heat.

Dyeing with an acid dye, such as Jacquard, involves taking the powder, applying it to the fiber after dissolving it in liquid, and fixing it with vinegar and heat.

There is no difference.  NONE.  The substances are exactly the same.  In fact, by purchasing Kool-Aid instead of acid dyes, you are encouraging Kool-Aid to keep creating their noxious drink powders that contain substances that CAN PERMANENTLY DYE FIBER and feeding it to our children.

Instead of being afraid of Jacquard acid fixed dyes, you should be afraid that a company is feeding it to our kids.  Please stop encouraging them.  Kool-Aid is NO SAFER than other protein-fiber colorant agents.  It just has additional ingredients for flavor.

Now, dyes for cotton and plant-based fibers are a whole other story, but I'll save that for another post.

Cooking: Meatless Monday, Lentil Salad

Trying hard to work in a "meatless Monday" every week.  It's cheaper, healthier, and reduces my neurotic worry over our cholesterol levels.  It's also higher in fiber when you include legumes, like this lentil salad.

I heavily modified a version I found in the "Forks Over Knives" cookbook.  While their version uses a lot of cilantro and mint, I wanted to create something a little more like a cross between three-bean salad and hummus.  Sort of.

My Roja garlic hadn't performed up to my expectations.  Only half of them came up, and I wanted the garden bed space for lettuces, so I picked most of them early.  I replaced the green onion and garlic cloves in the original recipe with two too-young garlic shoots.  I added a bit of cilantro, but omitted

Cooking: It's a Birthday all over again... only better.

Saturday was my birthday, and since we were phenomenally broke, I made a yellow cake from scratch from the "Homemade Pantry" cookbook (oy, what a pain with the separating eggs from yolks and such, and it ended up dry.  Delicious, but dry.)  And I frosted it with a tub of store-bought frosting that was probably way past its "Best if used by" date (okay, I won't lie... it was.  But that's a freshness date, not a "OMG you'll die if you eat this" date).

Since the cake was pretty dry, after the first half of it was gone, it wasn't moving very fast out of the fridge, even with a layer of my orange marmalade between the top and bottom layers.  Let me rephrase... a half a cup of orange marmalade mixed with a half a cup of apple juice, between two layers of yellow cake.  And it was still dry.

So here I am with a half a cake, broke, and unsure what to do with it.  I made it into a bread pudding, frosting and all.  Holy hannah!  It saved it for sure.  So here is my recipe for...

Cooking: Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza

Last night I was in the mood for a bacon cheeseburger pizza.  I had half a pound of thawed ground beef that I couldn't do anything with because it just wasn't enough for a family of three to have burgers.  I could have created a stir fry, but with several strips of bacon left over from BLTs earlier in the week, this was a natural solution.  Click through for the full post, including my recipe.

HtH: Garden is In?

Technically, the best bed of my garden has been in since November, when I planted my garlic for overwintering.  The outer leaves (?) died back a little in the winter cold, but now they're sending up multiple new shoots.  Each green leaf (?) equals another clove in the bulb, so I'm happy to see their new spring growth.

If you look down the middle of the garlic bed, you will see a brassica that also survived over winter.  To be honest, I don't know if it's a broccoli, or a brussel sprout, or a cabbage.  I tried to start several of them, and the sprouts just kept dying on me, until I spotted this little guy near the edge of the bed where the water had washed the seed, so I transplanted him.  We'll see what he turns into.  Click through to see the rest.

Food and Cooking: Oven Roasted Veggie Goodness

Welcome to my new food obsession... oven roasted vegetables.  While various veggie types get added or subtracted, there are four core ingredients in my current favorite side dish: onions, yellow squash, zucchini, and garlic.  Salt and pepper to taste, roast in a 350°F oven for an hour.

The mix you see here has carrots and sweet potato in it.  I've been known to dice up a tomato (getting close to ratatouille there) as well.  This amount shown here is enough for a side dish for three people at two meals, and it's incredibly cheap and easy.  I will sometimes make this in small dice instead of slices, refrigerate, and use as a relish on burgers or chicken.  It's incredibly tasty on a burger, so much so that you don't even need ketchup!  Click through to see the recipe.

We Were On A Break

There must be something about the post-holidays that makes me react this way... I just take a break from my blog.  It's not intentional, but between the warming weather, my child's school schedule, and various other factors, I'm just not writing on my blog.

I even set Facebook aside this time... *gasp*!

The new factor this time around was the totally insane flare-up of negative internet activity on Ravelry and Facebook over the credit card processing system breach on Knitpicks.  I was angry.  Then I got paranoid.  I went around removing personal information where I could.  I was changing passwords, deleting accounts I no longer needed (or no longer trusted).

Then I was just sick of the whole internet thing altogether.  I took a break.

Don't get me wrong, you still have to check your email (paperless statements, family, etc.) but I found myself hanging out on forums less and less.  It was like the bad guys had finally invaded the last haven of the geeky.

Yeah, I know... the bad guys moved in to the internet neighborhood almost before they were done putting in the "drywall" so to speak, but I never really felt their presence until now.  I had two credit cards fraudulently accessed in two months.  After the first, I blamed my husband using it at the local gas station, or my daughter's lack of PC security.  After the second, I started scouring everyone's machines, looking for viruses and malware.  There were screaming fights involved, mostly because my daughter has Aspergers and she considers her computer to be an extension of her personal space.  I am NOT supposed to go anywhere near it. 

Then the Knitpicks news hit.  Finally I had an answer... sort of.  They claim I'm not one of the people who were exposed.  I don't think they realize who was exposed.  Whatever.  Two cards, both used at their site, both used fraudulently not more than two months after KP closed their breach?  Yeah, I'm putting money on them.  It's there, or Amazon... which admittedly is also a possibility.

So I'm cagier now.  I got a new card from a company that offers virtual card numbers... a one-use CC number that is no longer valid after you use it.  Unfortunately making payments is not as simple as it is with my bank-attached card.  There it's just a matter of transferring funds.

Anyway, my point is... I've been gone.  This is why.  I'm back, but I may not be quite as active.  Also, I'm starting a second blog... not to replace this one, but compartmentalize things.  This one will remain my personal blog... an online diary, if you will.  The other is going to be more focused.   I'll share that one with you all when it's actually doing something.  For now it is dormant, but there will be some exciting stuff very soon.