Last summer, I went to a good Italian restaurant with a friend for dinner. I ordered a tomato salad as an entree. What came was an harmonious blend of tomatoes, red onions, black olives and fresh mozzarella cheese ladled over fresh, crisp greens. To say that it was good is like saying that Placido Domingo can sing a little. It was totally awesome! My tastebuds danced for hours!

Of course, the next day, I set about trying to reverse engineer the concoction and this is what I came up with! This is less a recipe than a general outline. Measurements are to taste and there’s lots of finagling room for ingredients and quantities. It’s pretty much a seat-of-the pants arrangement, but that makes it flexible and fun.

Tomato Concoction

Ingredients

  * 4 ripe, medium sized tomatoes (or 6 Roma or plum tomatoes)

  * 4 oz fresh mushrooms, rinsed and sliced

  * 1 can of pitted, small, black olives, drained and rinsed

  * 1/2 of a small onion (I like red but use what you like), finely chopped

  * 1 bunch fresh basil, picked over, rinsed well and chopped

  * 2 tsp chopped garlic

  * 1 small jar marinated artichoke hearts, drained and cut in half

  * 1/2 - 1 c olive oil

  * Juice of 1/2 - 1 lemon

  * 1/4 c sunflower seeds (optional - I like the crunch!)

Method

  * Seed the tomatoes if you like, then chop and place into a good sized bowl.

  * Add the olives

  * Toss in the onion, garlic and basil.

  * Add the artichoke hearts

  * Taste the tomatoes. If they seem to be acidy, add 1/2 tsp of sugar (that’s all you need - really)

  * Toss in a tsp of salt and add freshly ground pepper to taste

  * Add the olive oil and the lemon juice (use a real lemon!) and stir to get everybody acquainted

  * Cover and refrigerate for at least 24 hours

That’s all there is to it! This will keep in the refrigerator for up to a week and the flavor improves over time. Serve it over your favorite greens or on *cold pasta and top with shredded mozzarella cheese.

Notes

I ususally borrow a couple of tablespoons of the olive oil and put it, along with the onion, garlic and basil, into this:

A mini chopper is a really handy gadget to have. I imagine they’re all pretty much alike, but this one is a Black and Decker (if you’re curious) and does a great job for me.

If you prefer (or would like to try) a more Spanish than Italian flavor, substitue cilantro for the basil, lime juice for the lemon juice and chiles for the artichoke hearts. I love both versions and generally switch between them when I’m making this regularly - usually during the warmer weather.

Do yourself a favor and use the best olive oil you can get - also fresh lemons and/or limes. You can’t believe what a difference those two things will make in your finished product. I had never used olive oil at all before last summer and I’m absolutely converted. Wonderful stuff both for dressings and for cooking with. I can’t imagine what took me so long to try it!

I generally use portabella mushrooms for this, but white will do fine. I mean to try Crimini some day. I’ve used those for cooking, but never raw. Mushrooms are one of those things that absolutely fascinate me and I try every variety I can get my greedy little fungus-loving fingers on :)

*For ready pasta, cook a pound or two of your favorite shape as you usually would. When the pasta is cooked, drain and rinse in cold water until the pasta is cold. Pack into one or two Glad Fresh Bags (these really do help things stay fresher longer - NAYY, just a happy customer) and stash in the fridge. It’s ready whenever you want cold pasta for a salad or you can toss some in a bowl with butter and cheese (or sauce of choice) and nuke it. Works great and this will also keep for about a week.

I have allocated an hour a day to work on my socks - that enables me to get something done on them every day but doesn’t annoy my hands and fingers too much.  I love, love,love this yarn to look at; these are going to be such fun to wear.  How the yarn performs over time is something I won’t know for a while yet.  In working with it, I’ve noticed that the red is just lying on top of the white, that is the color doesn’t extend all the way through the yarn.  I hope this doesn’t mean it will disappear after a while.  I guess we’ll see.

I have started a little bag as well.  Yes, another one, LOL!  I seem to have a thing for them and they can come in handy :)  This is a new experience for me in another way though:

It’s the number of needles.  The yarn is Classic Elite Flash and it’s a light, worsted weight cotton.  The ball band recommends a size 7 (US) needle but I went down to a size 6.  As this is going to be a bag, I wanted the knitting to be fairly snug.  Unfortunately I don’t have a size 6 circular that’s short enough to handle the stitches and try as I might, putting the work on only three needles wasn’t feasible - there just wasn’t enough room :(  So I put it on four needles and am working it with a fifth.  Thank goodness Brittany’s DPNs come 5 to a set.

It’s awkward.  Not so bad now as it was initially, but not real comfortable either.  I kept at it because I remember when knitting around on three needles seemed uncomfortable to me.  Over time, I got used to it.  I suppose I’ll get used to this too.  It seem to be the only way to manage this and I plug away at it thinking longingly of how much easier it would be if I only had the right size circular.  On the other hand, it makes this really cute little bowl….

What saves it is the pattern.  I sat down a couple of nights ago and played with various ideas, combinations of things and the necessary math to make it all work.  I like discrete panels set into a background and while stockinette is acceptable as background, it’s very bland, isn’t it?  Having discovered how beautiful moss stitch was while working the Landscape shawl, my mind was running in that direction.  Since it makes an emphatically textured stitch, what kind of panel would really stand out from that background?  Cables!  But not just cables - cables with bobbles!

I, immodestly, think this is gorgeous.  The pattern is rich, the cable more than holds its own and the color is splendid.  (At this point, my mother would have told me to be careful not to break my arm patting myself on the back.)  The bag should wind up being about 25” in circumference and I think I’ll probably make it 7 or 8 inches deep.  There’s a possibility of a ruffle around the bottom; I’ve certainly got enough yarn an it’s pleasant to consider what shape that might take.  The ties will be monk’s cord (because I love the look of it) and probably heavily tasseled :)  I need to find something appropriate to line it with but I don’t anticipate any real difficulty there.

We wound up getting about 8 inches of snow yesterday but today is sunny - bright and clear as a bell.  I caught the tail end of sunrise this morning when Jade got me up, pleading starvation :)

Oh, and one more thing!  Something to play with over the weekend!  I’m a jigsaw puzzle fan but haven’t done any in a long time both because I have nowhere to store puzzles and because I can’t keep a puzzle-in-progress safe from the cats.  A week ago I bought an inexpensive piece of software that promised hours of fun plus the ability to import my own pictures to make puzzles out of.  Sadly, the puzzle software was an absolute fizzle.  It only created a small image which is fine if you only wanted a 20 or 30 piece puzzle, but was disastrous if you wanted, say, 500 pieces.  I set it up for that just to see what would happen.  The pieces were about molecular sized and the process slowed the system down to a crawl.  Poop - no fun there.

Then, Myria called my attention to Jigsaw Puzzle Lite and suggested that I have a look.  I did and it was wonderful!  Did all the things the purchased software promised but did them right!  The best thing is that the puzzle engine is free - not even shareware.  I like - even prefer - to use my own images for puzzles so this is perfect for me.  You can, of course, buy additional picture packs from the software’s author at about $15.00 each - but you could also grab your digital camera and take pictures of whatever pleases you (or scan pictures you may already have).

This is a picture of my teddy bear rendered into a simple puzzle so you can see what the interface looks like.  It’s very simple and intuitive and I’m having a blast with it!

Have a great weekend!

For some time now I have had, ridiculously good parking luck.  This past Christmas shopping season, even on the busiest days, served to prove that if there was an empty space not too far from the entrance of the store (or mall), I would find it before anyone else did.  It was amusing at first and has come to be a little eerie, though no less welcome.

It wasn’t always this way.  Parking happened to me in the same random fashion that it did to everyone else.  However, a few years ago, we started joking about the parking lot gods.  If I found a good space, well, they liked me.  If I didn’t then either I had annoyed them somehow or they had the day off.  This became a routine entertainment and got trotted out whenever we had to go someplace likely to be crowded.  It was facile and amusing.

And then things began to change.  More and more often, I was finding auspicious parking spots - not 100% of the time, but maybe 85%?  We’d pull into the mall, into the covered lot and I could usually drive right up to the entrance and find someone else just pulling out.  This even seems to work during shark-parking conditions - you know, the times when there are a dozen other cars circling the lot in hopes of finding a space that won’t necessitate a three mile hike and a box lunch.  There might have been a car in front of me a ways up and three cars behind me as I drove down the lane but the space would open up as I got there. 

Yeah, weird, I know.

Last week, we went to lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant and while we were eating, the subject of the parking lot gods came up.  We had always treated it as a joke, but undeniably something had changed over the last 6 or 7 years and had ramped up quite a bit over the last 2 years or so.  I was beginning to feel a bit strange about it but I know it wasn’t just me, just my imagination. Myria had been an observer of all this as well.  I wasn’t imagining things - I was getting good parking spaces on a regular basis - almost as though someone were watching out or arranging things for me.

Over egg foo yung and lo mein (Oh!  And the most excellent crab rangoon), I asked Myria what she thought about it.

She suggested that my luck may be because the parking lot gods like me, and that they like me because they have so few believers that they take care of the ones they have.  Hmmm…

So, do they exist independent of whether anyone believes in them or did our joking about them constitute a sort of belief or faith that brought them into being?  I can’t answer the question because I don’t know.  What I do know is that I can park anywhere, almost any time.  Once or twice would have been a coincidence, but the many many times over the last several years that good parking spaces have been available to me is way more than coincidence could explain.

I realize that this brings nothing new to the discussion of the nature of faith and that being able to consistently find primo parking spots is a very minor thing in any consideration of how the universe wags.  But I can’t help wondering.  If this is all it takes, not even really the faith that something exists, but the suspicion that it might, what couldn’t we accomplish?  Perhaps even more to the point - what are we accomplishing now?

We finished with lunch and the waiter brought the check on a plate with the requisite fortune cookies.  We each took one.  I opened mine and read the fortune (giving the cookie to Myria who apparently likes that taste of sweetened cardboard). Under other circumstances, I would have chalked this up as standard fortune-cookie fare but given the discussion we’d been having over lunch, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up…

You are the master of your destiny

Well, you know how it is.  You look around at everything and suddenly it isn’t interesting any more and you want a change.  I started doing the cosmetic work on the blog over the holiday break and finally finished up last night.  I’m pleased with it; it’ll do for a while :)

It’s snowing again - funny because the temperatures were up in the high 50s yesterday and the day before.  I was going out without a coat and yesterday, I was driving with the window down!  Such is the fickle nature of the New England winter.

I’m hearing that this is expected to continue through late tomorrow afternoon though accumulations aren’t expected to be much more than 6 inches or so.  I’m pleased to have no plans to speak of so I can just bundle down and stay put, enjoy the view out the windows and not have to worry about driving anywhere.  You can believe I’m counting my blessings because I’m terrified of driving in the snow.  It’s a great relief and comfort to know I don’t have to :)

I got some interesting news yesterday that I can’t share just yet - I should know for sure by Saturday and will pass it along on Monday.  But, as a result of the possibility, I’m thinking about making a dressy shawl and a little formal-esque bag.  Probably the blue-violet mohair blend would make a beautiful shawl (or stole - I thought I hated stoles until I had one and found it an extremely convenient and comfortable style to wear) and there’s this for the bag:

And I got started on the Marks and Kattens Clown socks.  The pattern is a combination and adaptation of the start of Wendy’s Toe-up Sock Pattern and the stitch count and needle size of Ryan’s Dublin Bay Socks.  I wanted to make these toe-up so I wouldn’t have to guess about how much yarn was needed for the foot.  This way I make the foot first and can then knit up the leg till the yarn runs out!  I know, from having made Ryan’s Dublin Bay socks (well - embarrassed grin - from having made one of them) that 72 stitches around on size 1 (US) needles works great for my foot so I’m helping myself to that and probably also to the Eye-of-the-Partridge heel when I get there just because it’s so cool :)  Sorry Ryan, I’m going to skip the lace - it would just disappear into the busy-ness of the yarn pattern anyway :(.

I love the colors and patterning in this yarn, but it feels a bit…I dunno…stringy?  Perhaps that will wash out.  As before, I’m finding that sock yarn and size 1 needles make my hands cry, so I’m taking this slowly - an inch or so at a time.  They’ll get done by and by and then, swoon, there’s the Schaeffer Anne to contemplate!

Stay warm and safe - wherever you all are!

Happy New Year!

Christmas and New Years were quiet here which suits us.  We’re not big partiers so staying in worked for us.  Our upstairs neighbors also stayed in - along with about 50,000 of their closest friends.  I think they were having a dance marathon :)

Relief is beginning to get to the victims of the tsunami/earthquake tragedy in Asia.  We talked about it and made a contribution because it seemed like the right thing to do.  Me, I couldn’t have lived with myself otherwise.  I was telling my father about this Friday night at dinner and he explained why he didn’t feel he could donate - retirement, house taxes and utilities going up and so forth.  Of course he also mentioned the lure of the possibility of another cruise later that evening.

I did a lot of reading this past week and that was a pure joy :)  Being able to pick up a book and traipse through the story for a few hours (rather than a snatched few minutes here and there) was heaven!  I also watched a lot of movies which was also fun.  We were able to find a copy of Galaxy Quest on DVD for a good price and so replaced our VHS tape.  Not a world beater as far as the critics were concerned and a niche film at best, it is one of my favorites.  The casting is perfect and the story is perfectly paced.  And it’s funny - really funny.

There was also some good news as far as the sale of our apartment building and our continued tenancy here is concerned.  The building was purchased, papers signed last week.  Our new landlords stopped by a couple of days later to introduce themselves and explain how they saw things.  They do not want us to move and were quite pleased that we’ve been here so long (almost 15 years).  They do not want to raise the rent (at least not right now, anyway) and they were perfectly happy that we have pets.  They have a dog themselves and don’t see any reason that we shouldn’t have the cats.  Those points were all things we had been worried about and now, it seems, don’t have to be too concerned with any more.  In a while we’ll ask about putting the bird feeder back up.  You never know!

They are a young couple who are expecting their first child - a girl - about the middle of March.  So I decided to haul some pink out of the stash (Bernat So Soft) that had been ripening there for a couple of years and make this:

This is the famous 5 hour baby sweater* though it took me closer to nine hours to work because I kept forgetting YOs in the first few rows and thus spent almost as much time frogging as knitting for a while :)  Then, following a link from that page, I made this as well:

I keep thinking this could be done with mitres, rather than having to seam right angles.  I’ll have to give that some more thought and maybe give it a try at some point.

As you can see, they aren’t completely finished.  They both need ties and I’ve been doing the I-cord vs. Ribbon debate in my head.  I think the ribbon’s going to win - just because it’s prettier.  That means I have to get some :)  There’s also the possibility of a blanket though I’m not absolutely committed to that just yet.

I also started the Marks and Kattens socks and a pair of mitts for Myria.  More about those later :)  And I’ve been redesigning the blog - more on that later too.

Happy Monday!

*For what it’s worth, the pattern at this link states that the correct cast-on number should be 33 stitches.  I tried three times to get this to work.  Then I tried the original number of 34 stitches and that did the trick for me :)