Super Seed Trifecta Granola

 

I made this super seed trifecta granola so that I could have something with more protein and fewer carbs than regular granola. I really liked it! I decided to grind the flaxseed so that my body could absorb those nutrients better, so I am modifying that below. I also added a pinch of salt, and I am writing down my baking times.

For the dry ingredients
3 cups crisp brown rice cereal (gluten-free if necessary)
3 cups rolled oats (gluten-free if necessary)
½ cup hemp hearts (shelled hemp seeds)
½ cup brown flax seeds. ground
¼ cup chia seeds
1 generous pinch of salt

For the wet ingredients
½ cup brown rice syrup
2 Tbsp. flax oil (or other oil)
1 Tbsp. molasses
½ Tbsp. vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 275 °F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients. In a small bowl, combine the wet ingredients.

Heat the wet ingredients in the microwave for about 1-2 minutes. Alternatively, you can heat the wet ingredients in a saucepan, until it just begins to bubble around the edges.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and thoroughly combine. Divide the mixture between the two baking sheets and spread out evenly.

Bake the granola for 45 minutes, switching shelves for each sheet (i.e. placing the sheet from the top shelf on the lower shelf and vice versa). In my case, I baked it in a large roasting pan, stirring every 20 minutes, for a total of 1 hour. Once done, let cool completely before transferring to an air-tight container. Enjoy!

Raw Broccoli Salad

 

This recipe is from Marco Borges’s book The Greenprint. I served it as a side to Hawaiian meatballs. I did like the salad, but the dressing skews heavily acidic and I think it could be balanced with some oil (the Little Prince emphatically agrees).

For the salad
6 cups chopped broccoli florets
2 cups cherry tomatoes, sliced
1 yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 cup hulled pumpkin seeds, lightly toasted (mine were salted as well)
½ cup finely chopped red onion

For the dressing (see note above)
1/3 cup stone-ground mustard
¼ cup cider vinegar
2 tsp. maple syrup
1 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 Tbsp. water

In a large bowl, toss together the ingredients for the salad.

In a small bowl (I used a jar), whisk together the ingredients for the dressing.

Pour the dressing over the vegetables and toss to coat evenly.

2024 knitting projects

I’ve been mostly knitting from the stash this year, while still taking it easy because I didn’t want to make matters worse with my carpal tunnel. I started with a skein of Malabrigo Sock Yarn in Disfraz and made the Bedford hat with it. The pattern reminds me of small bricks, and I really like the horizontal braided line to break it up! It was easy to memorize the pattern once I got started, and I like the result! The resulting fabric is thin enough that I could wear this in Texas. It’s a bit more colorful than it looks in the photos.

Then I bought some yarn because the Actor and his Leading Lady had their fourth baby last summer. I got some Madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light in Translation because it seemed gender-neutral enough, and it was lovely to knit with! I made the French Macaroon sweater (with a single plastic star button from my stash in the back) and matching Tiny Tot hat.

I also used some scrap yarn to make another hat with a wave pattern, this time for the Fox’s teacher who had a baby over the summer.

I had two skeins of Handmaiden Mini Maiden Yarn that I bought forever ago (as in, I still lived in Montreal). It’s a lovely shade of green that is now discontinued, and is 50% wool and 50% silk. I had planned to make some sort of baby cardigan with them, I had even bought buttons for it, but never found the right pattern. So I used one of those skeins to make the Honey Cowl. The pattern creates a waffle-like fabric that is really pleasant! The first go-around, I made a few mistakes, like having one row out of sync, and I felt like it was a little too long and not quite wide enough. So I remade it at a better length, and without mistakes this time! I put it in my shop, and if it sells, I’ll make another one with the last skein.

Finally, I used up most of what I had left of the Nirvana 5 Ply in Charcoal to make another Brioche Hood Hat. I didn’t leave a keyhole opening this time, because I remember how hard that was to style… But anyway, it came out nice, and is now in my shop as well, along with a dark teal lace scarf that I ended up never wearing and decided to part with as well.

Copilot and Pussywillow

I had picked up some variegated sock yarn a while back (maybe a year and a half ago), simply because I liked the colors. We all feed the stash once in a while, right? And then I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, so I don’t knit as much as I used to. Anyway, so there was this skein of Malabrigo Sock Yarn in the Cake Please colorway that I got to first, and I decided to make the Copilot cowl (it’s a free pattern, too!). 

After casting on the proper number of stitches, you join in the round, knit a border, and get started with a sort of lattice pattern. As I knit, I got the pattern down pretty quickly, and ended up missing an important line on the paper. I thought it was simply a matter of repeating the lattice pattern established after the border, so that’s what I did, right up until finishing the border along with the last yards of my skein of yarn. It was only as I was taking pictures for this post that I realized it didn’t look like the image… It looked more like the Autopilot, which is in fact how I was knitting. 

So I set it aside for a while, and eventually frogged it to remake it. This time, I cast on fewer stitches, since I thought the cowl had been a bit too long the first time around. I knit up the cowl the correct way, but when I looked at it, I didn’t like it. I think I must have knit two extra rows in one of the lattice stretches at some point, despite using a stitch counter. Plus, it now felt a little too short. Like, too long to wear it without wrapping it twice around your neck, but not long enough to comfortably wrap twice around your neck. 

I eventually frogged it again and knit it up one last time, shorter than the first time but longer than the second, making sure to count my rows properly. I’ve decided to leave it as is now because I’m just tired of this project! I perhaps should have steamed the yarn to make sure it wasn’t twisted, but I didn’t have it in me. It looks pretty good, honestly, but I’m annoyed with how long it took! 

After that, because I can’t help myself when it comes to yarn in pretty colors, I decided to knit the Pussywillow Cap (in which you hold together a strand of fingering weight and a strand of lace weight yarns), with Madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light Yarn in Lakefront Speckle and Shibui Knits Silk Cloud Yarn in Lakefront (the colorways are no longer available at my usual store, Jimmy Beans Wool, but I have seen them elsewhere online as I post this). And I added a faux fur pompom just because. 

Once again, I managed to not pay enough attention and knit a rib pattern on every row instead of ribbing the wrong side and knitting the right side. *sigh* I just didn’t want to start over, so it is what it is. The result is really cute, and I just love the colors, but of course I wish I had more opportunities to wear knit hats. I still have half of my yarn left, too, so I might make another hat for the Etsy shop (but a different pattern, since this one is for personal use only).

The hiatus hat

My hobby has caught up to me: I love to knit, and as I typed this, I accidentally typed “I live to knit” at first, and that’s pretty telling. I started about 18 years ago, and after doing it almost daily for over ten years, I’ve got carpal tunnel syndrome. Time using a computer mouse, working on the backend of my business or just doing things for fun, made things worse. 

Let me back up a bit to recap what happened in the previous months. There are small projects I knit, such as another Baby Fair Isle Cardigan with two skeins of Plymouth Yarn Dreambaby DK Yarn in Grey and some pink yarns and buttons from my stash. 

After that, I used a skein of yarn gifted to me by my mother-in-law. She lives in British Columbia, and there’s a local-to-her business called Wild West Dye that makes naturally dyed yarns. She gifted me 100 grams of bulky weight yarn in Firestar, which is a red colorway that I really loved. This yarn is 80% merino, 10% cashmere, and 10% nylon. It was a joy to work with! It rekindled something in me, because it had been over 10 years since I had worked with bulky yarn – the one with which I learned the craft in the first place. 

I looked up patterns to use up that skein and decided to make the Red Herring Reversible Beanie, coincidentally created by someone local-to-me. I actually had to buy 15 mm circular needles and 9 mm circular needles for this because I didn’t own any that were big enough – I did have a pair of 9 mm, but they were straight needles and therefore not appropriate. After knitting my swatch, I adjusted for gauge (buying more and more needles wasn’t an option), and I love the result! It’s a beautiful herringbone on one side, and ridges on the other, so the hat can be worn either way. 

The only downside to that yarn is that it’s losing some fuzz and I’m afraid it’ll felt, but oh well, so be it. Even though it’s a one-ply yarn, it didn’t break when I was frogging and working it up again, so there’s that.

 As I was looking for hat patterns, though, I had come across a photo of the Everyday Hygge Hat insuch a beautiful colorway that I just had to buy both the pattern and a skein of Malabrigo Noventa Yarn in Anniversario. (I also bought yarn for a third hat, which I will reveal later. The fact that I live in a climate where I only rarely need a hat is but a small detail and I won’t let it stop me.) And I bought some 8 mm circular needles – I was happy to try the SmartStix model I’d been hearing about for so long! 

I started knitting this hat and, after two days (just when I had reached the end of the ribbing pattern), my right wrist gave me some sharp pains. So I took a hiatus from knitting to rest my wrist, even though I still had to spend a day making a panda cake. My wrist got so much worse overnight that I had to make my way to urgent care on the weekend, where I was given a splint and a prescription for painkillers. (I wasn’t even able to fill the latter because I had asked for a prescription for a liquid version, but it turned out that my insurance only covered the pill as the difference in price was exponential. It took a while for a doctor to change the prescription to the pill after I had given my assent, but even then they made a mistake and gave me 10 doses instead of the 100 originally prescribed, so I’ve been hoarding those pills for the next time.) A hand therapist gave me the all-clear to resume normal activities, but did not recommend any exercises or modification of knitting technique, so I guess I’ll be looking for another physical therapist at some point. It turns out that the symptoms I’d been bringing up with my PCP for the past two years, which she had brushed off, were in fact early symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. 

Anyway, knitting at my normal speed and without any frogging, this would have taken me three evenings. In addition to the carpal tunnel break, I also took some time to get the end right – I originally had knit 17 rows after the tip of the front-side pattern before decreasing, and that didn’t leave me with quite enough yarn. So I frogged it and knit 15 rows, which left me with a bit too much yarn, and I frogged again and knit 16 rows before decreasing, which was just right. 

Finally, since the Engineer’s youngest cousin just had a baby named Zelda, I had time to knit a Multiflora cardigan. The mom-to-be said she gravitated toward greens and purples rather than pinks, so I found a few options I liked. The Fox helped me with the final color choice and we settled on Madelinetosh Pashmina Yarn in Lost In Trees. (The photo that shows the colorway truest to life is the first.)

It's a bottom-up cardigan, made in size 9mo. I didn’t have enough yarn to make the matching hat, but at least I didn’t run out while making the cardigan! If I had to do it over again, I would knit the sleeves first, because that would be fewer ends to weave in – you would just graft them on when you got to the arm holes, instead of having to break the yarn at that point to knit sleeves separately. I also found that the buttonholes were a bit too loose for my liking, even though they are only one stitch wide (but the bigger button were too big for the button band, so there’s a chance this cardigan will just stay open). Still, I really loved the delicate floral pattern!