Sick.

Finally the autumn weather is upon me! I love autumn; the crisp mornings and evenings, the clear blue days, the 'whoomp' as the central heating kicks in at about 6:30 in the morning and wakes me up. I love the way the air smells in the mornings, and I love it when there's a moderate day refreshed with a cold breeze.

I've been enjoying this glorious weather, by lying around at home and feeling dreadful all week. Isn't that just wonderful? No. No, it isn't. I hate being sick. Whenever I'm feeling particularly robust, I always wish I could get a cold or something so I can have some time off to just knit and chill at home -- but when I'm actually sick, I hate every sodding minute of it. I hate the feebleness, the weakness, the symptoms (of course). Urgh, everything. But the thing I hate most is the limitation: I hate wanting to do something, planning something out, only to be limited by my suddenly feeble and useless body. It doesn't take much to take me out of action, either. This week has been ruined by crippling low blood pressure -- a ridiculous sentence for me to type, but all week I haven't been able to stand or walk, or even sit for too long, without everything going sparkly and grey. I can't do a damn thing. I felt good yesterday afternoon, so I bounded about (with moderate rests in between the bounding) and optimistically packed my bags for work.

No way. I couldn't even sit up this morning, without the world going grey and me beginning to tilt. So I dragged my pathetic arse to the drop-in clinic. Boy, that sucked. We waited for about 90 minutes before the GP even got to see me. During waiting time, we were surrounded by an assortment of walk-ins, some looking almost crippled with misery (such as myself), others chattering and gossiping and laughing away. I envied them bitterly. Ellen was playing on the TV and many people chuckled at it, which lightened the atmosphere. After seeing the GP -- who I didn't feel was really listening, and who can blame him with a turnover of patients like that? -- we learned my blood pressure was around 95/60 (pretty low, even for me) and my heartrate was about 160. And so I was stuck into another queue for the pathology lab for generic blood tests. Awful. They couldn't even get any blood out of me, so we gave up and I'm going back tomorrow. The whole thing sucks and I'd be willing to bet a bottle of red that they find nothing except a low iron count. And I'm suspecting very low.

Boy, does this whole thing suck. The only plus is that the doctor said I need to eat more salt to retain more water. I loooove salt. Mmm. It's going to be great. As I type this, I'm stuffing my craw with pretzels. Ooh baby.

My knittings, let me show you them...

Well, it's been a busy month. No doubt about it.

It was M's birthday this month, and we're both Portal fans; so when I found the Knitted Companion Cube, it was an obvious choice. It was a really tricky knit! I have never used stranded colour knitting in the round, nor have I ever steeked -- but I thought, hey! A deadline five days after I discovered the pattern? That's perfectly feasible! Off we went.

It's a pretty clever construction, actually. You cast on for all six sides in one big round, with a few stitches in between each side for seam allowance and a few rows top and bottom for the same. I liked doing it that way: I think this kind of colourwork probably benefits from being worked in the round, rather than with intarsia (which would also be an option, but I think you'd either have to work all the squares in one long row, or individually). I liked it; I've never done stranded knitting in the round, and it took me a while to get into the swing of it, but I got there. I still couldn't say the tension was great, especially in the middle rows where I was juggling three colours, but the whole thing came together. I used a merino/silk blend, mostly because that's what I had in my stash but also because it was the only yarn I could find that came in just the right shades of grey (which surprised me). If I did it again, I'd probably aim to use a pure wool, but only to see if there was a big difference in the colourwork if I did so.

To celebrate finishing the cube (it took a while -- whenever I began to relax, I would jump and remind myself to start working on it again), I have cast on a new hoodie. I am as fickle as a breeze with the knitting, and the single day of deliciously cold weather we had on Good Friday was enough to inspire me. This awfully cute hoodie will be my new best friend: Olive Branch Yoga Hoodie (that one at the top there). I think I will look ever so casual and smooth-skinned, as well as stylish and charming. I haven't got much done, and I'm secretly very afraid I'll run out of that particularly buttery aubergine yarn I'm using. But in the meantime, I'm feeling the happy, loving the yarn, and cruising along on the cloud of Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong. Oh yeah. That's what we like.

Argh! she said and she waved her wooden leg.

Oy, what a day I had yesterday. Not cool. No pictures in this post, 'cos I'm blogging in my lunchbreak at work.

I had an awesome weekend, although a tiring one: knitting feverishly on M's birthday present, breakfast with friends, paddleboating and market browsing with other friends, party with more friends, lunch with my family, dinner and drinks in the evening with M's family. Wonderful, but tiring (especially the paddleboating).

That should provide some context. So I didn't get nearly enough sleep on Monday and, well, the day descended from there. I was so tired that I found myself opening cupboards and just...looking. Couldn't, for the life of me, remember why I wanted to open said cupboards, and so I had to walk around aimlessly while my memory came to the party. Work was simply hectic and awful. One of those days where you get a 'lunch break' only in name, and at the end of the day, while I stared at my computer trying to remember how to make it switch off (it's not complicated, but I was a bit absent) I realised I had worked without a break all day long. I know this isn't unusual in some occupations, but the nature of my work means that it was bizarre. I was buggered. Completely spanked.

It got worse. Allow me to tell you about our Lawnmower. Or, as I like to call it, the HatePooper. I figure that if a device is named "noun-verber", then it should at least be accurate. Oh, how I hate our lawnmower. Hate hate hate. And while I push it around the yard like a giant demented wind-up toy, it poops out more hate, which I step in and then smell all day. We bought it in November last year and have used it once (read that again); on its maiden voyage, the front left wheel fell off and went under the blades. Oh how we laughed! The design of the wheels is so bad that they simply unscrew while you push the beast. You have to either be careful and re-screw them every couple of minutes, or you have to accept that the HatePooper is going to chew up a lot of wheels. We took it to the hardware shop we had bought it from, understandably ruffled, and were promised a quick replacement. Well. November ended. December came and went. We popped over to Europe for four weeks. We came back. February bloomed: still no wheel. I was calling all the time, assured it would be here soon. Eventually I spoke to a different person, who was horrified I had waited so long and got the parts to me in a few days.

To recap: the HatePooper was bought, used once, waited MONTHS for replacement, and that brings us to yesterday. We have a real estate inspection today, so we decided to trim the lawn to make it look like we gave a crap about it. As it's entirely dead, it was largely a hollow gesture, but I digress. So I put the HatePooper's new wheel on and off I chugged. Then, about two minuets into it, the other wheel fell off. Want to go over that? The OTHER wheel FELL OFF.

There are not words. (Well, there are, but I'm trying to build up a readership here, so I'm not going to proudly display my fine, flexible vocabulary of curses just yet. Besides, this post's long enough already.) I stormed into the house and planned out foul letters to the HatePooper's production company, to outraged to sit still. Eventually M came home to find me in tears of fury at the HatePooper. He reattached the wheel and we came up with an adjustment to the incredibly bad design and set me on my way. The lawn is tiny, but I was so frustrated and sick of the whole thing that I decided just to mow the long bits (half a dozen weeds or so) and leave the rest. It's so dead it hasn't grown all summer, so what difference does it make. Oh, it sucked.

I haven't done any yoga for over a week now, and I'm feeling it. I feel weak and stiff, and kinda pissy at everything. When I do yoga regularly, I feel all prancey and light, and I laugh things off with a gay trill. Still, I don't foresee any problems tonight, so maybe tonight will be the night I practise my yoga! I can only hope.

Why I Love Knitting

Also, I'm not so great at titles. They just kind of, well, hang there. I promise to work on my title-coming-up-with.

Today, I want to talk about knitting. I love it. I love it with a vigour that startles me. I learned to knit when I was 15 or so, mostly out of a perverse sense of 'no one else was doing it'. I wore my huge, multi-purple scarf with tassels all over school for years. My mum is an extremely talented seamstress, and can make just about anything from almost anything. So I was learning to sew as well. I knitted sporadically, and would occasionally have glory days of sewing, where a day or two of solid sewing would result in a fantastic coat, or some skirts, or whatever. But on the whole, I was really not that good at sewing. I couldn't be arsed making things perfect, so I lot of my projects were about a million yards short of useful. I can remember a fair few unmitigated disasters, too, including pattern sizes that didn't fit quite right, seams that frayed, and just plain cock-ups. It was discouraging, and I don't know why I persevered with sewing for as long as I did.

Then came the huge knitting boom of the 2000's, which was just as I was starting uni. I openly admit, here and now, that I was lured by the evil song of fun fur. I bought balls and balls of the stuff. I couldn't help it; it was all so feathery and soft and flittery. And the colourways of Patons Feathers were fantastic. I knew better than to make a whole item out of fun fur, so I bought plenty of smooth, plain wool as well and made gloves and hats with fuzzy trim for about a year.

And then, one fateful day, it occurred to me that I should snoop around on teh interwebs to see if anyone else knitted. And, lo, I found knitty.com, and the Yarn Harlot, and so many other people who knitted. I found knitting blogs. I found out who Elizabeth Zimmermann was (praise be!), who changed the whole damn shooting match for me. I learned about making socks and tops and even - gasp - summer wear! In short, I found enough about knitting to turn my ironic 'nobody else is doing it' knitting into a full-blown passion.

I loved how it made use of otherwise idle time, such as waiting for pages on the net to load, or while I watched TV. I loved the range of things you could make, from socks to quilts to tiny baby things. When I learned about knitting in the round (and hallelujah, wasn't that a day!), the simplicity of it blew my mind. But most of all, I loved the portability of it, the variability; you could carry a glove or a sock in your bag, and work on a sweater at home.

Sewing required you to clear your day, to clear a workspace, to 'set up' for ages. Then you had to trace the pattern, cut it out, and overlock all the pieces -- all before you could even begin to start putting it together. And if you found it didn't fit *quite* right, heaven help you; you had to pull the whole damn thing apart, only to find that the mistake was in the cutting-out stage, at which point, you're well and truly fucked.

But the biggest difference is the undo-ability of knitting. As someone with a pretty well-ingrained tendency to plunge straight in and say piss off to the consequences, the ability to redo, do over and repair on-the-go is a blessing. Knitted fabric has an enormous amount of forgiveness, by its very nature. But, oh mercy, you can fit as you go and it's just beautiful. And if you screw up -- even when you've got to the end of a sweater that cost you tears and a whole spring -- you can start over. The raw materials are still there, waiting to be de- and re-constructed.

Over the weekend, I finally starting balling up this:

This had, once upon a time, been a bundle of fresh balls of South West Trading Company's Bamboo. Oh, it's blissful, silky, slinky yarn. I knitted it up into this pattern which is gorgeous, despite Stitch Diva's dreadful pattern layout. It's purple. But it wasn't suited for that pattern: the sleeves draped out and down, down down, until you felt like the bulk of the pattern rested on your wrists. (Plus I kept dipping it in my lunch) It wasn't for me. So now it's in balls. Above are the skeins, unwound, washed and dried, waiting in line to turn into neat little yarn cakes.

And you can't do that with sewing. You can't say "Damn, this sleeve is stuffed; I'm going to unravel it and start over." You have to say "Uh-oh, this sleeve is stuffed. I'm going to have to buy more fabric." That's why I love knitting.

Vegetarian Moussaka

After a wakeful night fending off the advances of affectionate cats at my parents' place, I drove home and did some cooking. When I'm pooped, I'm easily bored and get fretful, and what I really like to do is cook something that takes ages. Especially, something I can set, wander off from, come back to, leave to cool on the counter whenever I get bored -- you know, tackle in 5-minute bites. So while this looks like a pretty long and involved recipe, a lot of it you can put down and wander off from. This means it takes all day, but what else were you going to do?

I made vegetarian moussaka. Every time I make this I have to go through the same process (which, incidentally, is the process by which I learn nearly every new recipe in my narrow cranium):

1. Google 'vegetarian moussaka eggplant'. Skim the results and select a few likely ones. Go back and change search terms to 'vegetarian moussaka eggplant recipe' and repeat.
2. Read a few recipes. By 'read', of course, I mean 'skim briefly with a raised eyebrow, mentally adjusting the recipe to taste as I go'.
3. Consider myself well-read on the recipe, that I know everything about making vegetarian moussaka, based on the fact that I've managed to spot a few common elements in each recipe.
4. From this, cobble together my own recipe, adding elements as I see fit and as the pantry will allow.

(There's an optional step: 5. Fail miserably when it turns out I have skimmed over an essential element to the recipe, which I have disregarded as irrelevant or too fussy. Fortunately, this didn't happen with my moussaka.)

I should emphasise here and now that this dish is not strictly authentic. For a start, there's no meat in it. Secondly, the eggplant is mixed all through it instead of lining the bottom. Also, I'm not sure where the potatoes came from. But it's delicious, it's inspired by moussakka, and that's good enough for me. This is how I make vegetarian moussaka.

Ingredients

• 1 eggplant
• 2 small red capsicums
• 1 brown onion
• 1 minced garlic glove
• 1 tin of tomatoes
• 2/3 cup of dried red lentils
• Two separate mixes of the following spices, adjusted to taste;
• 2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 3 tsp of cinnamon
• 2 tsp of nutmeg
• 2 tsp of cumin
• 1 tsp of paprika
• 1 bay leaf
• About 3 cups of liquid vegetable stock (or amount according to proportions on the lentil packet)
• Salt and pepper
• Oil
• Splash of balsamic vinegar
  
• Dash of red wine (optional)
• 4-5 clean potatoes
• Cheese of choice

Halve the eggplant and the capsicums, and deseed the capsicums. Place them all face down on a tray and generously drizzle with oil. Roast at 180 degrees for about half an hour, or until the skins are all black and blistery. Cool briefly, then peel them all and put the flesh into a blender. Process just a little, until they're like a chunky salsa.

Meanwhile, put the lentils in a saucepan with the liquid stock and the spices (including the bay leaf) and simmer for however long it takes for the lentils to swell up. Drain, but reserve about half the liquid and mix a splash of red wine into it.

Finely chop the brown onion and saute in a splash of oil. When it's translucent, throw in some minced garlic and another round of spice mix. When it all gets aromatic and sizzley, deglaze with the lentil stock/red wine liquid. Throw in the drained lentils, the eggplant/capsicum mix, the balsamic vinegar and the salt and pepper to taste. Let it reach a rolling boil, then turn right down to simmer. If it's still too thick, mix a little cornflour into a spoonful of cold water, then mix that into the moussaka. When it's about the thickness you think would suit you, pour it into a greased loaf tin or baking tray.

Slice the potatoes into about 5mm thick slices. Boil them until tender. Drain and arrange over the top of the moussaka filling in the tray.

Optional Step
I like to put a bit of bechamel sauce over the dish, too, so here's a quick recipe for that one.

Melt a tablespoon of butter; mix a tablespoon of flour into it and stir to cook it into a roux. Pour a cup of milk, a little at a time, stirring constantly, into the pan. It will be absorbed, little by little, and make a thick, creamy sauce. Pour this over the moussaka.

Top with cheese and, if you like, breadcrumbs. Grill the whole thing for about 15-20 minutes, until browned and bubbly on top. Serve with a simple salad or vegetables.

And then, well, eat it. You don't need my help with that.

Ignition

Okay, I've figured out how to get this here kajigger to post things for me, so we're in business!

I'm bethini and this is where I keep my spoons. I love cooking and knitting (among other things), and that's probably the kind of stuff that's going to take up a lot of this space. I'll be using it to grumble, bitch, celebrate, show off pictures and generally shout about either or both of the aforementioned topics. If that doesn't sound like your cuppa tea, then maybe this isn't the blog for you.

I really should have begun this sort of thing when I had a witty anecdote on hand -- maybe something about the time Oscar Wilde and I went ice skating in Vermont and stole a tin of cocoa from a corner shop -- but I have no such tale, and instead will distract you with pictures and a quick and easy recipe which will allow you to lunch like me.

Very Easy Lunch

• Filled pasta of some kind, like tortellini or ravioli
• Broccoli, chopped into bite-sized florets
• Zucchini, chopped into bite-sized bits
• Parmesan cheese, finely grated
  
• Chilli flakes, salt and pepper
• Olive oil (or, better yet, oil that smoked tomatoes have been soaking in)

Adjust ingredient quantities to taste. Cook pasta and vegetables in a big bowl of boiling water, drain and pile artistically into a bowl. Drizzle with oil, sprinkle with spices and shower with finely grated Parmesan. Chow down.

And now, a picture of what I did this afternoon with my wool winder:

The squeaky drawer

Give me a sec, I'm still working out the elbows here.