So I made dumplings (Asian style) tonight for the first time ever. Why on earth has no one ever told me how easy they are? Ok, fine, I've read things and maybe heard one or two of you mention it, but I had no idea how truly simple they are. You take some squishy filling and dump it in the middle of a wonton skin. Wrap the sides up, steam it, and voila! Tasty goodness. And I highly recommend that each and all of you make dumplings some time in the near future.

The "recipe" I used I read on a blog somewhere and couldn't find it again. I just kind of winged it, rather unsurprisingly. Sweet potato dumplings in miso soup. And it's super healthy, too! I bet you're dying to hear what I made. I'll tell you, but I'd recommend leaving out the Sriracha. It was a bit too much in the face of everything else. (Also, this was the first time I used non-canned bamboo shoots, and wow are they a million times better than the other kind.)

Boil some sweet potatoes (I used one Japanese, one regular orange, and one non-sweet). Mash them up. Mix in some sauteed onion, soy sauce, mirin (aka sweet rice wine for cooking), and Sriracha (but really, leave this out. I'm only telling you in the spirit of honesty). Put about half a tablespoonful of this mixture into the middle of a wonton skin and bring all the sides/corners together to make a little bundle dealie. Place on a cookie sheet, to be followed by bunches of little friends. I'm assuming they can be frozen at this point, since I have tons of them and can't possibly eat them all now. I'll let you know how that works out.

For the soup portion, chop up some variety of Asian cabbage (bok choy or something similar) and place it in a pot. Add some sliced mushrooms, sliced bamboo shoots, and chopped green onions (white and green portions). Put some water in to just below the top of the veggies (and some dashi powder if you're me) and bring to a low boil. Add some dumplings on top and steam until they're done.

To serve, ladle some broth into the bowls and mix in miso paste. (You can't do this while it boils because that's bad for the miso and the stuff in it.) Ladle some veggies on top, and place the dumplings over everything else. Enjoy your healthy meal! It's even better with a bowl of rice and a small plate of pickles.

I'm still here and alive. I made a tiny wristlet purse thing, embroidered and everything. Maybe someday I'll post pics. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Work is busy. I need a real vacation, though. I'm getting fed up with the paperwork and the bureaucracy. Home is good. We need to pick up the living room (still!), and the place might even be presentable. I'm not going out much at all, so having a clean house might be a good thing. I'm obsessively tracking my finances and food intake; this month I'm planning on getting all my crap onto Ravelry so I can have yet another obsessive tracking habit. And I'm still making dinner, oddly enough.

I read in one of my many many blogs (just hungry)that today is setsubun no hi in Japanland, and that's it's traditional in the Kansai region to eat ehou maki--a big fat uncut sushi roll with seven ingredients. So of course I had to make them for dinner. They were quite tasty. I used fried tofu, enoki mushrooms, sauteed button and birch mushrooms, carrots, green onion, skinny tamagoyaki (thin little sweetened omelette slivers), and long beans (really long green beans). Colorful and healthy, kinda. Woot!

We got a some new furniture this weekend. A woman was giving (!?!) it away in the stlouis community, and I was all "I love free stuff." So mangledpuppies and I picked it up yesterday. There's a dining table (with pads and leaves), four chairs, a china cabinet, and a large dresser. So much that we had to call jerad_w since my puny arms wouldn't carry it all up our stairs. The cats are wigging out at all the change, and there is stuff everywhere since we haven't had a chance to resituate all the little things yet. But now my clothing can live somewhere other than the floor, we have dining chairs that don't rip at my tights, and there is a bar stocked with booze and glasses. Yay!

As for this weekend, we're camping. I'm hoping it rains less than they're claiming it will. And that it's warmer. Cold weather camping is not so much my favourite, but I have a burning need to be all hardcore.

*I ate breakfast with a few friends at Three Monkeys. Easily the best meal we've had there. Not overcrowded, not too loud, good service, good food. I'll definitely be back for morning meals in the future.

*Hit up Local Harvest for some foods. Got some stripey beets (yum!) and some turnips and some grains, mostly. I love roots and all, but man I'm missing other veggies and some fruits.

*To that end I visited Schnuck's to shop for home--the first time I've done that in months. Picked up some endives, leeks, celery, and bunches of fish. We're even going to be having shark for dinner tonight. I'm tres excited.

*Went to Target for gloves and hair dye. As I type my hair is turning various shades of black and purple--the variety due to the varied bleach-stages in my hair already. I'm kind of excited to see how it's going to turn out.

*Found some boots (in olive) and some heels on Amazon for less than I had purchased them on Zappos. The boots are a whopping $75 different, while the heels' difference is pretty small. I'm in the process of getting a return order from Zappos. Yay for saving moneys.

*I'm baking bread again. Trying out some whole wheat in the mix this time. Hopefully it will turn out well, so that I can get some more whole grains into my diet. The homemade bread thing is working out pretty well; I love the tasty, crunchy crust and delicate insides. Plus, I totally cheat and use a breadmaker, so it's way easy.

*I've also got some turkey soup started. My house smells the delicious. Meals this week should be a breeze given my advance cooking and the veggies in the fridge.

I just ate one of the best sandwiches I've ever had. Shredded turkey (mixed with chopped onion, dried cranberries, mayo, horseradish, grain mustard) on toasted multigrain bread, with basil leaves and some cheddar-ish cheese. Yummy.

(Local = turkey, onion, mustard, horseradish, basil, cheese. The bread would have been homemade but we ate that all up quickly.)

We ate T-Day dinner at mangledpuppies's mom's house, but I really wanted some turkey of my own. Because of this, last month I ordered from Local Harvest Grocery a fancy pants 14lb turkey raised locally, organically, and humanely (assuming you even believe that eating meat can be humane). On Tuesday before T-Day, I went to pick it up. They handed me a turkey that weighed more than 19lbs and said it was one of the smaller ones they received--apparently the farmer underestimated how well he fed his birds. I picked up the rest of the items I needed for dressing and waddled home with the bird.

Yesterday I began cooking the turkey, my first one ever. The neck was still attached, so I had the boy hack it off while I prepared the giblets to make stock; there was also a weird butt-flap of meat that we left on. (Apparently supermarket turkeys (the only kind I've seen before) are trimmed way more than I used to think.) Then he rubbed herbed butter under the skin, and we tossed the thing into the oven. I made two kinds of stock while it roasted, giblet and veggie, though they ended up getting mixed together (yum!). We flipped the bird, and tented the bird, and basted the bird. The house smelled delicious. Eventually we pulled it out of the oven, and after much angst and burning and disagreement we got it to a platter so I could make gravy with the drippings.

While the bird rested, I put together my dressing. The day before I had made some cornbread and roasted veggies (carrots, parsnips, turnips, rutabagas, pearl onions, mushrooms, and garlic), so I mixed these together with some binders and broth before putting the dish into the oven to bake. Super simple, and almost healthy.

The boy carved the turkey, and I dished up the meal. Left over mac&chz from the day before and a green salad with radishes finished out the meal. Tasty! The bird was moist and the skin crispy. The dressing was amazingly good for being totally lazy. And the gravy (I'd never made gravy before, either) was pretty good, though I could use a bit of improvement in my fat-separating skillz. All in all I'm pretty pleased with my first effort; next year I'll add in some cranberry sauce, and dinner will be complete.

So I'm making a Simple Knitted Bodice for National Knit a Sweater Month (long sleeved, of course). I began rather late in the day on 1Nov, since we were out partying until about 5:30a that morning (yay for Halloween in NOLA!). At this point I'm done with the majority of the body, and I'm super happy with it. It fits beautifully. The only concern I'm having right now is the arms, but since it is a raglan I was kind of expecting that (raglan-style sleeves and big breasts don't mix very well).

I will note that I'm using Paton's Classic Merino in a light grey, which behaves very differently than the single ply 100% silk Tilli Tomas yarn the pattern calls for (I would imagine since I can't even afford to touch the silk). (Note for those not into fibers, but curious: Wool is much more elastic than silk, and thus a silk sweater will stretch in length [and lose a bit of width in the process] more than a wool sweater will.) Since I'm between written sizes, I choose to go with a smaller one and add in a few more rows to account for the fiber differences. At the moment these adjustments seem to be working out very well in my favour. I also had to add a couple of short-rows to the bustline, which seem to be fairly well hidden.

Cumin-scented Lamb, sauteed with garlic and chiles
Moroccan-spiced Quinoa, with onions and raisins
Asian-flavoured Green Vegetables (edamame, spinach, green beans, asparagus)
Ripe Tomatoes with Marinated Feta

*I went to a party two weekends ago. My friend Ollie willingly got shot in the face by superstrength peppergel. An hour and half later he was able to stand and talk. It was good times all-round.

*I finally signed up for Ravelry. My username is (unsurprisingly) violentecstasy. If you're over there and like me, feel free to friend me. If you don't like me, you're a silly monkey for reading this.

*I took Hunter's Education this past weekend. It was two whole days of sitting in a lecture hall with scary people. I never ever have to take it again, though. Even if I move to Canada.

*The purple in my hair is exiting very quickly. I think I'm going to dye it all back to pink for Halloween, as that will fit better for my costume. I've no idea what to do with it next.

Thanks to skeletal13, my hairs are now black and purple and pink. They are the awesomest. Now I just need to doctor an avatar to be more appropriate....

I <3 this necklace. If someone loves me, he should buy it for me.

I haven't done this in ages, so I know y'all are just DYING to read what I had for dinner.

Pork Chops, rubbed with Penzey's Four Spice and pan-fried/sauteed, with a Port reduction
Roasted Cauliflower, with a caper & poblano vinaigrette
Baked Potato, with 4-Pepper goat cheese
Purple Moon Merlot

Gelato di Riso Chocolate & Hazelnut Gelato
Vosges Mo's Bacon Bar

Everything was local with few exceptions. The seasonings, of course (olive oil, vinegar, spices--though I've recently found a source for local vinegar). The potato, which friends brought back from Idaho. And naturally the Vosges bar, which I believe originates in Chicago.

Additionally, it all followed the washoku principles. Lots of colours, flavours, and cooking styles. I know where lots of the food came from (and talked to some of the people who produced it), which is a principle that I often have a hard time with at meals so I'm particularly happy.

I think eating locally more often is going to be good for me. It's way healthier--things are often organic, they don't travel as far, and I cook more often (I don't tend to deep fry things or use tons of meat/cheese). Plus, it helps me to follow the washoku principles more than I normally would have. Yay!

I am still alive for those who don't see me around town from time to time. Not much super exciting to report, though. The Disaster Awareness Fair went pretty well. The ZS Presentation at DragonCon was pretty awesome. DragonCon itself was pretty rocking; I've never seen such amazing costumes. We're doing another Blood Drive at the end of this month.

I recently bought a bacon chocolate bar that I'm pretty excited to try. Between Bacon Salt, Bacon of the Month Club, and this candy bar I'm thinking bacon has hit the big time. If only I knew why it took so long. Bacon is the tasty.

...one of every four library users goes to the library simply for entertainment. Most come seeking other things such as family research, job-related or financial information, and education.

From an article about library funding and the dollar amount returned on that funding.

Man, I really really love my job, but there are certain things about it that really make me wish I could just sit at home knitting and taking care of my plantbabies.

*Old Buffy episodes were scary. I'm actually a total pansy when it comes to scary films (and shows). Zombie films are completely awful for me to watch; I'm all cringing in my seat and jumping whenever anyone speaks too loudly. Plus, I can't go to the restroom for hours afterwards.

*I have way way way too much work to do this week. Partly because I've missed so much work this month, but mostly because it's just a sucktacularly busy week. Meetings and statistics and phone calls and programs and paperwork, oh my.

*We had some super tasty fried rice for dinner, made from some aging snow peas and leftover rice. Yum. I don't know why we don't make fried rice more often--it's one of those easy dishes that uses up whatever you have laying around in the fridge. We're going to have quiche later this week, which is yet another one of those assuming you have premade crusts in your freezer. I need to build a bigger repertoire of simple dishes like that.

*Z-Con was a freaking blast. Easily the best one ever. Lots of good people, not-too-horrible toilets, much much fun. We'll probably schedule the float for a different day, though, since there were way too many hoosiers on Saturday.

*I spent several nerve-wracking days with mangledpuppies in and out of the emergency room. He was in severe pain and rather nasty bloody stools. Turns out he had dysentery (which is also known as colitis (aka "We don't really know what is wrong with your colon") but that's not as much fun). He got out of the hospital today so you're safe to make the requisite Oregon Trail jokes. Who gets dysentery anymore is what I want to know.

*I'm back at work after almost two weeks (between Z-Con and the hospital). It's a bit weird to be here, and I surely don't feel like working. Hence the post-iness. With luck I'll be all caught up with my worky stuff by Monday morning, but I'm not holding my breath.