Winter is Coming.

The garden has been given up on, as has any hopes for a social life. My job has finally broken me and I'm just not even trying anymore. Sure, I'm still making bread every couple weeks and when the milk starts to turn I make yogurt. Maybe next year we'll rip out the grass and expand the garden, but maybe not. I'm just not even going to think about it right now. Winter is coming and the biggest thing on my mind right now is knitting and preparing for the long, dark, wet of it.

We are finally getting new windows for the house. It's going to be glorious. We're upgrading from single-paned and aluminum framed to triple-paned and insulated vinyl framed. It should lower the heating bills substantially and make sitting on the far side of the living room bearable without an extra layer.

The cooler and shorter days are making knitting seem much more pleasurable too. I had to force myself to knit through the summer. There were so many other things I could be doing and needed to be doing, but now it seems a lot more seasonal. I'm about three-quarters of the way through my current big project. I've got two more projects in the queue with yarn already bought and I just started up a new experimental project last night. I went a little nutty with the online yarn ordering. It was all so cheap!




I'm starting on a "conceptual knitting" project, a Sky Scarf. The idea is you knit one row every day. The color of that row depends on the color of the sky. I have also seen people do mood scarves, with a different color for each mood and even an exercise scarf, tracking their different activities with greens and reds and gray for days they didn't do anything. That's good motivation - try for as little gray as possible!




For my Sky Scarf I have three shades of blue and three shades on gray. I'll be done when the scarf is long enough to suit my fancy. It will probably be done in the late Spring. I think it will be a pretty cool thing and end up mostly gray in the middle, flecked with short spurts of brilliant blue.

Cheese and Bread.

I discovered a new delicious treat - Fresh ricotta on homemade white bread.

I made ricotta. That's right, I finally made cheese. My first cheese!!

Ricotta is traditionally made from whey, the byproduct of cheese making. It literally means "recooked", as you recook the leftovers from your previous cheese and it makes ricotta. Most recipes you find for homemade ricotta, however, are milk based and don't call for whey. The whole reason I wanted to try ricotta was because I end up with a good bit of whey every time I make yogurt and I never know what to do with it. I've seen suggestions to use whey instead of milk in bread recipes or to water plants with it, but I wanted to try and make ricotta the traditional way.

The whey ricotta recipe I had called for 2 gallons of whey to start and results in a yield of about 2 cups ricotta. The leftover whey from my yogurt making and a little extra milk and cream for volume added up about a quart of liquid. In the end I had about 2 tbsp of ricotta. Not the most triumphant entry into the cheese making field, but an entry none the less. I didn't know what to do with 2 tbsp of ricotta until I put two and two together as my weekend bread came out of the oven. It was amazingly delicious. Warm, fluffy, slightly sweet white bread with a cold, soft, tangy cheese spread. Mmmm...

That's one more check off my list of things to learn this year: Make a soft cheese, DONE.