Crafting the Striped Hoodie

"No, Mom! You can't take pictures of my sweater for a story without me. It is TOO COZY!"

I love making things. I feel like I'm always asking myself, "Can I make that?" or "Can I make that better?" And because lots of people do work better than I can, I am a big fan of "On second thought, can I have someone make that for me?" But the story of this hooded cardigan sweater springs from the first two questions.

About four years ago, I picked up the cutest baby cardigan from Kiwi Industries. I liked it so much, that for the next two years whenever the cardigan went on sale, I bought it in a bigger size. But this past year, there weren't any bigger sizes to buy. I thought to myself, "Can I make that?" I wasn't too sure, so I didn't try.

One day last fall, I brought Wyatt with me to Imagiknit for a yarn-related errand, and he wore his Kiwi Industries cardigan. After a short conversation with the saleswoman, in which I sheepishly admitted I hadn't made his sweater but wished I had (or knew how), she stated, with the crisp confidence that only a seasoned knitter brings, "You could totally make that. And I don't think it would be that hard. Just sit down and see if you can figure out what they did."

Of course. I mean, how difficult could it be to just whip out a sweater without a pattern? Especially for someone who had only ever knitted a few sweaters (most of them during high school) and had never created a knitting design? The answer is: Paralyzingly difficult. 

But over the last eight months, I consciously worked to improve my knitting, taking on new projects only if they include at least one skill I've never tried. After knitting a praying mantis, I tried a baby sweater. After that, I felt ready for a basket of knitted vegetables. And after that, I felt confident enough to design my own throw blanket. And when that blanket turned out well, and I had already started a lace scarf, I began to think that the little hooded cardigan might be possible after all.

In a decisive move nine weeks ago, Wyatt and I went to Carolina Homespun to buy some yarn for his sweater. I wanted to grab a handful of Elemental Affects--yarn that is "Homegrown, Hand-dyed, and Spun in the U.S.A."--to see if it would be as good choice as I thought it would be for his sweater. It was a great choice, and we selected sport weight Cormo wool yarn after we found ourselves cuddling the soft, springy skeins right there in the shop. 

Six weeks ago, I made and blocked swatches. I obviously meant business.

Three weeks ago, I started doing the math and sketching a pattern for this sweater. I referred to the sweater construction descriptions in Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting Without Tears (pictured below), as well as the dimensions of the three Kiwi Industries sweaters, and Wyatt's measurements.

I cast on what I had calculated to be the right number of stitches, hoped for the best, and continued to measure obsessively my stitches and rows. After a couple of days, I decided I had better start over. I hated the bottom edge. Because it hurt more than a little bit to rip out my own work, I let Wyatt do it. He gleefully unraveled about five inches of knitting in no time. I started over with a welted hem, and I continued obsessively measuring my gauge. As the body of the cardigan grew, I started to wonder about the sleeves. How would the stripes on the sleeves work? Would they be jagged? I hate when stripes don't match. A few online searches later, I knew what to do to achieve matching sleeve stripes in the round.

Once I was into one sleeve and it was actually working, I started to wonder about how on earth I'd manage to build a rounded hood with colored stripes of equal width. After a few failed attempts, and just as I was about to grumble my way into knitting a solid-color hood, my infinitely creative and ridiculously skilled friend came to the rescue with an idea about how to build the hood I wanted. It worked.  

With the end of the sweater in sight, I nearly soured Wyatt on ever wearing it by making him try it on so many times that he started to sprint away from me whenever I approached him with yarn. I also stayed up far too late for several nights, finishing the knitting, and then meticulously weaving in over 60 yarn tails so I could block the sweater and see if it actually fit. It did. And then it was done, except for the buttons.

On Sunday, Wyatt and I headed over to Imagiknit in search of buttons. Choosing the right buttons wasn't easy. We found lots of buttons we liked, but most of the tubes were short of the seven (six, plus one for insurance) buttons we needed. And I insisted that the buttons match the sweater in color and style, requirements Wyatt accepted only reluctantly. We eventually agreed on yellow metal ducks from Italy. And much to my delight, even though I had forgotten to bring the yarn for a color comparison, they match the sweater perfectly.

Unlike the socks I knit for him, which he hates, Wyatt loves his new cardigan so much that he wore it today until sweat was beading on his upper lip and his hair was plastered to his head. After that, he peeled it off, and just hugged it, refusing to let me photograph it for this story without him because it was "too cozy for pictures." 

I'm still surprised at how well this project went. It evolved into exactly what I wanted, and I like it even better than the garments that inspired it. In fact, I'm so pleased with the work I did that it has recently occurred to me that writing a pattern for this hooded cardigan would definitely be beyond me. I am happy to predict that based on my past behavior, there's a really good chance I'll complete my first written pattern within the next few months.

Convenience Food

I've read a lot of mainstream articles, as well as well-nourished bloggers' posts, about how healthy eating doesn't have to be time-consuming. They say that if you plan everything out at the beginning of every week, you can have a wide variety of healthy family meals on the table within minutes. 

Well, maybe you can, but I can't. I tried this "plan your way to speedy, healthy meals" earlier this year. The approach worked for the first few weeks because it was shiny and new, and I was enthusiastic about becoming a well-nourished, time-saving winner. By about the fourth week, though, I wanted to rip my paper calendar to bits and delete my online calendar because it was too much to plan, buy and fit it all into the refrigerator by Sunday afternoon. And then there was the problem that even though I had planned our week of meals, fun and not so fun things always threw-off the eating plan. We'd get to the end of the week and find that there were two or more meals-worth of ingredients wilting in the refrigerator.

Of course I have now overcorrected, and I haven't pre-planned a weekday meal (never mind a week of meals) in months. Instead, I'll look at the vegetables we have from our bi-weekly box from Eatwell Farm, supplemented with whatever we have picked up that was on sale or looked good (or, even better, both) from the market, and I improvise from there.* Maybe I'll roast some vegetables to go with sprouted lentils and rice, or maybe I'll make broccoli fritters, or pull together a salad of beets, plums and goat cheese. It all depends on what I find in the refrigerator.

But at least a couple of times a week, every week, I look in the refrigerator, look at the time, and I realize I don't have time to cook anything other than scrambled eggs before dinner needs to be on the table. Those are the days I'm so very glad to have outsourced much of my vegetable prep work to microbes. 

Fermented dill carrots, dill beans, slices of thyme-infused turnips and radishes, kimchi, gingered sauerkraut--all waiting for me in jars in the refrigerator, all made right in my kitchen, and no jar required more than about 15-30 minutes of my time (okay, also an occasional peek under the lid every week or so to taste progress and confirm the vegetables are still under the brine). These traditional, "slow-food" prepared vegetables are so healthy for us, thanks to fermentation, and they are huge time-savers. They're the reason we eat so many vegetables, even on busy days. And Wyatt loves them, in large part because he helps to make them.

This weekend, I found beautiful organic green beans on sale, so Wyatt and I took the opportunity to get some dill beans going. The beans usually sit for about ten days on our counter before they're the flavor we like, and after that, they keep for ages in the refrigerator. If you want to read more about the details of fermentation, check out Wild Fermentation and Phickle.

Here's how we make our beans.

Fermented Dilly Beans

Ingredients:

• Enough green beans to fill your jars. Remove stem ends from the beans.
• 1 bunch (or more) of fresh dill. (I've used as much as one bunch per quart jar, but have also used less.)
• 1-2 tablespoons of black peppercorns per jar
• 1 (or more) chile de árbol per jar
• 1/4 teaspoon of celery seed per jar
• Three (or more) peeled garlic cloves
• Enough salt and water to make a 5% brine for your jars
• Fermentation weights, one for each jar. I love Sandy Der's weights.

Directions:

Wash the beans and the dill. Put the dill fronds into the jars along with the peppercorns, the chile de árbol, celery seed, and garlic cloves. Fit the beans in the jars, as many as you can, in as organized a fashion as you can. Leave about two inches of space between the top of the beans and the top of the jar. You may need to cut some of the beans.

Measure 1 liter of water (about 4 1/4 cups) and 50 grams of salt (if you don't have a kitchen scale, for the Real Salt I used this weekend, 50 grams amounted to approximately 3 tablespoons of salt) and dissolve the salt in the water. When the salt is dissolved, pour the water into the jar of beans until the beans are fully submerged under the brine. Leave about an inch of space between the brine and the top of the jar. (If that wasn't enough brine for your jars, make another batch.) Place a fermentation weight on the top of the beans in each jar so that the beans stay under the brine. LOOSELY screw the lid of the jar back on the jar. Write the date you started the beans on the jar--grease pencil on the lid or a label made from masking tape work well--and put the jar in a cool corner to ferment. Check and taste every few days to see how the ferment is progressing and to confirm the beans remain fully under the brine. Our beans are usually ready to enjoy in 10 days to two weeks, but that timeframe can shift depending on the time of year and how warm it is in your house.

*My husband is a pescatarian, Wyatt and I are fully omnivorous, and I do most of the cooking. We all eat the same dinner. We usually eat vegetarian meals during the week, on weekends we may have fish, and when my husband is out of town, I visit Avedano's and experiment with cooking a variety of sustainably raised meats.

(Fermented) Bircher Muesli: It's What's for Breakfast

"Mom. After I'm in bed, can you please make Bircher muesli? I would really love to have it for breakfast. Please don't forget to make it."

Over the last few years, I've really started to embrace routine and the liberation that comes from having fewer options. For example, having fewer breakfast options, especially when a child is involved, is really liberating. At our house, if we have to make decisions about what to have for breakfast on a weekday, or discuss how many blueberries or raisins a certain four-year old may have on his yogurt, things will fall apart. As a result, we take a streamlined breakfast approach. And because it's just too much to ask of us, we don't usually cook or reheat food for weekday breakfasts.

So what do we eat? We always have homemade kefir blended with fruit, and I also make yogurt.  We eat the yogurt with fresh or dried fruit and a drizzle of honey. A certain four-year old always gets the same amount of fruit, in the same cup, that he may put on top of his yogurt. As I said, we're into streamlining.

But when it's apple season, it's time for Bircher muesli. And serving Bircher muesli is even easier than assembling a cup of fruit and bowl of yogurt every morning. I make a big batch of it on Sunday, and we eat it for most of the week.

There seem to be infinite variations on muesli. Bircher muesli is named after Dr. Maximilian Bircher-Benner, a Swiss physician, who created a recipe to help his patients consume more fresh fruit. If you search for Bircher muesli recipes online, you will find slight variations, but all seem to include oats, apples, milk and an overnight soak. 

The recipe I settled on was:

• 2 cups of rolled oats
• 2 cups of whole milk
• 1 cup of plain yogurt
• 1 or 2 grated unpeeled organic apples
• 1 cup of raisins
• Juice of half a lemon
• 3-4 tablespoons of maple syrup

Combine all of these ingredients into a bowl with a tight fitting lid, and put it in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, the muesli is ready to eat. Simple and delicious.

But we have Bircher muesli really often. We have it so often that I've started to wonder how wrong it is to eat exactly the same thing for breakfast for weeks on end. Part of this concern stems from my being a first-class worrier, and part of it stems from my understanding from Nourishing Traditions that to maximize nutrition, oats should be soaked at least overnight at room temperature before eating. Traditional Bircher muesli doesn't allow for this step.

Fortunately, Amanda at Phickle came to my rescue this past week with her post on how fermented oatmeal is better than regular oatmeal. I asked her how she would incorporate fermented oats in a Bircher muesli preparation. She had a fantastic suggestion: soak the oats in kefir. This weekend, I made an extra batch of kefir, soaked the oats in it overnight, and then added the rest of the ingredients. The resulting Bircher muesli has a better flavor--more complex and slightly tangy--with all the benefits of the oats having been soaked. 

And now that the nutrition issue has been resolved, I am suddenly less concerned about breakfast monotony. Bring on the fermented Bircher muesli!

Fermented Bircher Muesli

Ingredients:

• 2 3/4 cups plain kefir
• 2 cups rolled oats
• 3 tablespoons raw buckwheat groats
• 1 cup yogurt
• 2 organic apples, unpeeled and grated or shredded
• 3-4 tablespoons maple syrup
• 1 cup raisins

Instructions:

• Combine the oats and buckwheat with the kefir in a bowl, preferably a glass bowl with a fitted lid.* Leave the covered bowl in a cool place overnight. I left it for 10 hours and that length of time gave me a flavor and texture we like.
• Refrigerate the covered bowl of kefir-soaked grains in the morning to dramatically slow down the fermentation. 
• Whenever you're ready, or the night before you plan to eat it, add the yogurt, apples, raisins, and maple syrup. Stir it all up,  cover the bowl again, and put it in the fridge for at least a few hours or overnight to let the flavors come together and the raisins get plump. Then eat!

*As Amanda explained in her fermented oatmeal post, you can improve nutrient absorption by reducing phytic acid in oats. You can reduce phytic acid in oats by adding about 10% of a grain rich in phytase, like buckwheat, to the oats during soaking time. Check out phyticacid.org for more details.

Sending Love

"Can you believe that your baby girl is nearly eleven weeks old? Congratulations! Enclosed are Goodfood Chocolate Ginger Date cookies to help celebrate." 

I like to think I'm a good friend, but if I'm honest, I'm a lot more unreliable and inconsistent than I was before I became a parent. Fortunately, people seem understanding about these shortcomings (or at least they pretend to be). But the fact remains that I see a lot fewer people a lot less often than I used to, and getting together with dear friends seems unbelievably and unacceptably challenging most of the time.

With one good and very likable post, however, social media can help soothe that "I never see anyone!" feeling and give me the impression that I'm maintaining many relationships. It's a good illusion. And even though I know that status updates and photos of my dinner are no substitute for actual communication with people I care about, I will probably continue to rely on the shortcuts that social media offers because they are so easy and fun.

But what about people who aren't on social media? Two of my best friends aren't. Until they had a baby three months ago, I was terrible about keeping up with them because, as I mentioned, they don't exist on social media (and I have become a less-attentive friend). But sometime over the last 15 years of our friendship, these people became family, and I was so overjoyed when they texted to say their baby had been born. I was also frustrated that most of the length of California separates me from them. I couldn't just show up and bring them food on a whim. And I found myself wondering when I'd see the next photo of that adorable baby.

Obviously, these two issues aren't problems. Lucky for me, I pretty quickly snapped out of that way of thinking and recognized these "problems" as opportunities to become a better friend. By making a giant pest of myself by text and email, I get almost all the photos and funny baby anecdotes I could wish for. And by sending care packages, I have managed to supply my friends with snacks over many weeks. 

When I started sending packages, I had no plan for how long I would continue. I just needed to send them love. And snacks. After all, sometimes snacks are love.

For the first package, I baked and sent granola bars that would arrive for the baby's second week birthday. The text I received from my friend when the box arrived was all the encouragement I needed to send another package: "Thank you so much for the granola bars! I just ate 2. Our biggest miscalculation has been how difficult it is to feed us. These literally came in the nick of time...."

Over the next couple of months, I kept sending one package per week. Some snacks were healthier than others. I chose what to send based on what I felt like baking, what we had in the house (like zucchini, or the ingredients for granola), and what I thought my friends would enjoy. I baked all of the recipes gluten-free, because that's how we bake at our house. 

I can hardly express the expansive joy I've gotten from baking (and waiting in line so I can send the boxes)--activities I normally tolerate or even loathe. I'm not quitting social media anytime soon, but all this real life making, sending and connecting has been a refreshing reminder of what friendship can be.

Here are the snacks I sent, including links and my personal recipe notes or substitutions.

Smitten Kitchen Thick, Chewy Granola Bars -- I use hemp seeds, chocolate chips, dried cherries, and pumpkin seeds. These bars are even better with coconut oil substituted for the butter. I skip the corn syrup and add a bit more maple syrup or honey instead.

Elana's Pantry Blueberry Mini-Muffins -- I use 2 tablespoons of honey instead of 1/4 cup of honey or agave, and 1/4 cup melted butter or coconut oil instead of grapeseed oil.

Anytime Cookies -- So good just they way they are.

Cacao Nib Cookies -- I add one egg and 2 tablespoons of coconut flour, and I use plain cacao nibs instead of chocolate chips. As Wyatt says, cacao nibs don't taste very yummy on their own, but they are delicious as an ingredient IN something.

Chocolate Zucchini Mini-Muffins -- I baked this bread recipe in mini-muffin pans. I use vanilla extract, not vanilla stevia.

Everyday Granola -- I use coconut oil instead of vegetable oil.

Real Chocolate Chip Cookies -- I use sweet rice flour instead of oat flour, melted butter, and added 2 tablespoons of milk to the batter. I let the batter rest in the fridge for about 45 minutes to give the gluten-free flour an opportunity to hydrate and lose its graininess.

Bulk Bin Snacks from Rainbow Coop -- I was short on time. Wyatt scooped them some of his faves: cashews, pistachios, and dried organic California apricots

Week 11: Goodfood Chocolate Ginger Date Cookies/Biscuits Get out your cooking scale because this recipe is written mostly in grams, and it's fantastic. I substituted an equal amount of my gluten-free flour blend for the all-purpose flour, added 2 tablespoons of milk, and before baking, I let the dough rest for 45 minutes in the refrigerator to give the gluten-free flours an opportunity to hydrate and lose their graininess.

The Special Momma Day

About a week ago at dinner, Wyatt said to me, "Mom. I have a great idea! On the next Momma Day, let's visit Andy at Rainbow and make that special smoothie we like, but let's have it in the morning so that I'm not so full at dinner. And then when it's quiet time, we can get lawn chairs and blankets and lots of books and have quiet time outside. And when quiet time is over, let's just keep reading! For snack, we can have bagels and cream cheese, and stay outside until it is time for dinner." I agreed that this sounded like an excellent plan, but suggested that we could have the smoothie for lunch--can you imagine? drinking your lunch?--instead of in the morning. Wyatt agreed with a satisfied grin, and he asked me to put the entire plan in the calendar.

Every day or so, for the next week, he asked if the Special Momma Day was in the calendar and if the plan was still on. It was. And then finally, Special Momma Day, otherwise known as Thursday, July 30th, was upon us. 

As things turned out, Special Momma Day was made even more special (and slightly more complicated) by the delivery of Wyatt's big boy bed. We got going early so that we could head to Rainbow Coop to visit with Andy, sample some cheese, and get our shopping done. We headed home just in time to meet our bed delivery guy, Jeremy.

Jeremy was so gracious. He had an attentive audience while he assembled every single peg, screw, board and wheel to the new bed, and it seemed not to bother him at all. When something didn't go exactly as he had originally planned, he went out of his way to explain how he would move forward and how the minor change he was about to make would cause no problems whatsoever, and might even improve things. In spite of (or perhaps because of) his thinking out loud, I felt self-conscious "supervising" the assembly. For a moment, I considered leaving Wyatt so he could watch the process on his own. But then I realized that if I left, it would be worse, because I would be that lady who expected the delivery guy to watch her kid while he assembled furniture. So I matched my mental discomfort with physical discomfort, smushed myself next to Wyatt in his toddler bed, and settled in to watch.

Wyatt reveled in and marveled at the entire hour-long process, but he particularly loved tightening the last bolt and drilling in the final screw. As for me, my self-consciousness lifted somewhat after lending Jeremy an Allen key, and it disappeared once I had given him a tip.

Because of the bed delivery, smoothie lunch was an hour late. And because there were no gluten-free bagels at either of the grocery stores I had visited during the week, we opted for pretzel sticks with cream cheese-as-dip for snack. These adjustments did nothing to disrupt a perfectly planned and executed afternoon of smoothies, lawn chairs, books, snacks, a game of catch, and butterfly, bird and plane watching in the garden.

It would have never occurred to me that such a "boring" afternoon could be so anticipated and so special. We didn't go anywhere, we did nothing new, and everything we did was within the normal rhythm of our day. Minor tweaks and changes elevated things from normal to utterly amazing. 

As you might guess, it was challenging to transition from such an epic afternoon to dinnertime: "NOOOOOOOOO! I WANT TO PLAY FOR A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MORE MINUTES! NOT FIVE!" But my suggestion that we go inside to make a minty melon salad for dinner that we could eat with cottage cheese was just bizarre enough of a dinner suggestion to be an easy sell. A bonus for me was getting to use the three melons that had somehow managed to accumulate in our refrigerator.

Smoothie Recipe:

Lite Bite on Union Street in San Francisco makes the most amazing Omega Smoothie. Even though I am a regular customer, they won't give me the recipe. Fair enough. But it hasn't stopped me from attempting to recreate it on my own. I'm getting very close. Here's what I put in the blender yesterday, and it made two smoothies.

• About 12 oz of unsweetened cashew milk, frozen in ice cube trays
• 8 pitted Medjool dates
• 1 tablespoon chia seeds
• 2 tablespoons of almond butter
• 1 small banana
• a splash of vanilla extract 
• About a 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
• About 1/8 teaspoon allspice
• 2-3 tablespoons cacao nibs

Welcome to String and Twig!

I can't tell you the number of times I've met someone new, and upon hearing that I'm a stay-at-home mom, the conversation just stops. It depressed me until I realized that conversations often worked the same way when I introduced myself as a lawyer. Lack of interesting conversation was not a reflection of my reduced salary or change in title after all. It's just because I have (and have had) a boring job title that doesn't begin to explain what interests me.

For example, over the last four years, I have been learning about and working to improve my cooking, fermenting, gardening, and knitting. I've been cultivating mindfulness, as well as healthy and sustainable living practices. And my husband and I have been practicing raising a child who will (hopefully) appreciate all of these things and more. 

But the point is that there is so much to talk about! And much of it is worthy of a blog post. Somehow in all of the cooking, making, doing, and learning, I stopped writing, and I miss it. It seems it is time to start a blog again. 

As for why I named this website "String and Twig," it's because strings and twigs are, quite simply, terrific. Just ask any kid, any knitter, or anyone who enjoys using their imagination.