The Golden Iris

Today is already officially a Day of Epic Proportions and I haven't even made it through much of the afternoon yet. First, I have this giant 150g ball of yarn (glasses for scale). This could be the yarn that ate my week! Yikes! As you guessed, I have another knitting commission to work on. I've also been doing some gardening, as it was a lovely day out. I was puttering around, ripping out my broccoli raab that bolted, trimming some things back, and planting some herbs, when I chanced to look up and see this: I was watching my bamboo happily re-leaf itself from the winter, but I did not expect to see a giant 8-foot shoot coming out of nowhere. Where did it come from? How quickly did it grow (we got 6" of rain or more over the last week)? And finally, why the hell didn't I notice it sooner?! It is really 8 feet tall, and flexible, as I discovered when I reached up to grab it. Looking around all my bamboo is doing it. I guess it's some kind of crazy bamboo mons...

As a displaced Chicago native, one of the things I miss is Chicago-style food. This means hot dogs loaded with toppings, Italian beef sandwiches, and, yes, deep-dish pizza. Transporting a frozen stuffed spinach pizza in my luggage has become a fixture of flying home. But now, with some of the research that resulted in the development of an improved Neapolitan-style pizza, we've begun to develop a proper Chicago-style pie. It's a very different animal indeed. While my favorite was my hometown hangout, Leonardo's (sadly no longer in business), the other household favorite was a Chicago classic, Lou Malnati's . This pizza was intended to replicate a Lou's pizza. We started with a heavy, oily, very elastic dough. Unlike the looser, wetter Neapolitan dough, this could be rolled out with a rolling pin. We built the pizza directly into a 9" cake pan. Next time I think we should put some foil strips into the pan to help lift it out. And if you've never had a ...

My new copy of the Summer Interweave Knits arrived today. However, I have to knit up all this yarn in about a week's time. Knit, or read? I think you'll know which one I'll be doing. (By the way... anybody local got a ball winder?)

I woke up this morning to loud peeping and went outside to see this: Meet mama duck. See all those fuzzy butts crowded under mama duck's wings? Those belong to eleven fuzzy ducklings. Yes, eleven. The time had come to herd baby ducklings. Some backstory: when we moved into our apartment, which is two floors above a restaurant with a second-floor deck that opens on to the alley, both the landlord and the previous tenant told us that every year a duck made a nest on the deck and would require our assistance getting the ducklings to the river. Of course, the river is not only seven blocks away, but down a flight of stairs and across several streets. (Nobody ever said ducks were really smart). I found a nest with six eggs in it on Easter morning and had been watching and waiting ever since. The first trick was to get the babies down the flight of stairs without any of them getting hurt. This is me trying to placate mama duck with a bit of homegrown lettuce while I take her bab...

Springtime has already produced some of its bounty in big enough quantities for me to eat! Last night I harvested some lovely leaf lettuce and baby spinach with a little broccoli raab and parsley on the side. I had them with cold spaghetti and a lemony vinaigrette, and it was lovely. It felt very celebratory. So here are some photos of my containers. I have several long, narrow, built in planters, many of which contain bamboo. The open ones all have stuff growing in them now. Here is some mint on the left, and jumbled in the right are parsley, broccoli raab, and spinach. And of course a tomato. It's a Supersweet 100, not my biggest favorite, but I figured I couldn't grow anything much more substantial than a cherry tomato in a container like this. On the left there are two kinds of lettuce, and over on the right are potatoes I planted on a whim. The potatoes have sticks sticking up from them because they are interplanted with some sweet peas that I hope will soon rise ab...

Okay, I admit it: I'm turning into a foodie. As if you couldn't tell, we love food, we always have, and we love to cook. One of the things I love is Neapolitan-style pizza, and my favorite pizzeria is 2 Amy's . There is something really lovely about a real margherita pizza: hot, crisp, chewy, the bright tomatoes and basil balanced by creamy fresh mozzarella. 2 Amy's does a real bang-up job of it, and their pizza is certified D.O.C. authentic Neapolitan. If it's certified authentic, it must be good, right? I can't even begin to tell you. Because 2 Amy's is far away - it's a serious ride on the subway plus about a mile's walk - and because we like to experiment, we decided to try our own version. Without a proper wood-burning oven, our pizza is never going to come out exactly the same as a restaurant's. But we got some good tips from a pizza-making forum. There were two aspects of our past pizza-making that had to be improved: the crust ...

Spring is here in Virginia, which we've discovered means 48 hours of more or less continuous rain followed by minor flooding. Hooray! We've been keeping busy, and between work, planting my garden, cooking, and cleaning, there hasn't been a lot of knitting time left over. I still have about 8 projects left on the needles, some of which would probably take only a few hours to finish. But I'm slow, and I want to start more projects instead of finishing the ones I have. Knitting samples up is also taking time away from my own knitting, but that's okay. In any case, this is the only knitting I have to show lately: These are still the Diagonal Rib socks. By now I've turned the heel and am decreasing in the gusset, but there is no way I'll finish these for the March Sockdown deadline of April 31. Oh well! They will still be lovely socks. I am fascinated by the abundance of flowering things here. Spring seems so early, and so quickly followed by summer - ev...