Another iPhone photo. But when your fingers are all sticky with dough, it’s hard to handle a camera! Side note: don’t try to handle an iPhone when your fingers are all sticky with dough.

So… remember back in January when I said I wanted to eat a higher variety of foods? Not doing too well with that. We are creatures of convenience and habit in this household. So in an effort to shake things up a bit I’m going to attempt one new recipe a week.

When E. discovered he was allergic to gluten, it didn’t change our dinner routine much. We replaced our standard staples (pasta and burrito shells) with gluten-free brands and went on more or less as before (albeit with a higher grocery bill). But one thing we did have to drop that we’d grown fond of was the potato gnocchi from Trader Joe’s. So this weekend I thought I’d try that.

I used the recipe from the book Gluten-Free on a Shoestring, which is also available on the blog. I doubled it, thinking I’d freeze it. That was my first mistake: one batch makes a lot for two people. Two batches made too much to fit in any bowl we owned. So I ended up mixing each separately.

My second mistake was trying to blend potatoes with a hand mixer. It may be because I don’t have a lot of strength in my hands right now, or because I don’t have large enough bowls, but… well, it didn’t work, and I ended up wearing potatoes. Fortunately I had the food processor as a backup.

Mistake number three (I’m not blaming the recipe for any of these — this is all me, baby!): in a rush to actually cook something, I only let Batch One’s mashed potatoes chill for about a half hour, and they were not chilled through. They are very sticky until they are very well chilled. I left Batch Two’s potatoes in the fridge for two days, and they firmed up quite a bit. It was considerably easier and less messy to knead in the flour.

Mistakes aside — and I made one more, and overcooked the first lot — they didn’t turn out badly. They didn’t disintegrate, in spite of the overcooking. E. said he could taste the potato in them more than in the TJ’s brand. I froze half of each batch for future dinners. We’ll see tonight how the second batch cooks up.

Megabyte is 13 today. It’s hard to believe she was once this tiny furball:

Of course she’ll be celebrating with her grandparents and her cousins in Calgary, but I’m enjoying this video that I took when I was up there a few months ago. She’s pretty spry for 13 — her cousins Solo and Chewie keep her on her toes!

I know, it’s just a refrigerator, but we bought it in January! The cabinet above was about 3 inches too low and we had a heckuva time finding a contractor who would make the necessary adjustments to accommodate the fridge.

So… 2011, huh? Happy new year, everybody. I’ve had a nice break, done a lot of sewing and reading and worked a bit on personal web projects, and released a lot of the tension that had built up over the previous months.

Note to self: time off is good – take it more regularly.

Today is my last day before going back to work, so I’m trying to wrap things up and get organized. I’ve been reflecting on how to approach the new year so I don’t get into the same unpleasant states I was in for big chunks of last year, and I think I’ve worked out some goals.

Read more…

[What to do with the brown paper that came wrapped around each of many poster orders from The Bird Machine this year.]

Today is the first day of two whole weeks off for me, marking the end of a busy and often stressful year. I’m finishing up some last minute Christmas sewing (hint: reusable bags make great gifts, especially as more cities ban plastic bags), puttering around my studio, eating clementines and listening to music. We’ve talked about taking off somewhere for a couple of days, but right now the weather is gray and wet and staying home feels like a completely acceptable plan.

Months ago – um, over a year ago – I bought a hot water canner and jars and lids and a food mill, inspired by an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown made blueberry jam. And then I never got around to making it. But this week I got inspired again, and this morning I pulled all the canning hardware out from the back of the cupboard and bought 15 pounds of apples and made applesauce.

First, let me say that if you’re going to buy apples for applesauce, Safeway is probably not the way to go. The produce at our local Safeway isn’t very good, and of course it’s not organic and who knows where it’s being brought in from. But this was a trial run for me and I’ve been short on spare time lately, so it had to do.

Second, while 15 pounds of apples may not sound like a lot (especially when the site where I got the instructions suggests using a whole bushel, or around 42 pounds) it turned out to be more than my stock pot could handle, so I had to use multiple pots. I used about 10 each of Golden Delicious, Fuji and Gala apples, and a few each of Honeycrisp and Mcintosh. Also, the Oxo Good Grips Apple Corer and Divider is awesome – it makes short work of slicing an apple into wedges and coring it.

I got about eight pints of applesauce in total, plus a small bowlful that never made it to a jar. The only other ingredient was about a half-tablespoon of cinnamon. Since the water canner only takes seven pint jars, I put the last jar in the fridge to be eaten within the next few days.

I won’t know until tonight or tomorrow whether the seals worked, but they look great and I’m pleased. My mom and aunts always canned in the summers: I remember mom making green tomato relish with the neighbours, and mincemeat and I think pickles; my mom and aunt would can the salmon we kids caught when we visited; and my aunt always had a variety of jams. There’s not a lot of space in our San Francisco apartment to store food, but if the apple sauce works out then for my next trick I might try spaghetti sauce.

UPDATE: One day later, all seven seals are tight with no popping, the lids slightly concave. Perfect.

For a while around 1994 I dated a guy who worked in a comic book store, and once I attended a comic book event with him. The vendors were mainly men in the 25-45 range, most of whom were bitterly lamenting that comics were dying. The core audience was aging and their tastes were changing, and comics had become too expensive for most kids so there was no new generation coming up. Additionally, the Comics Code Authority had so tightly censored content that the commercial publishers were losing ground. That gelled with the clientele I’d seen at the store, which sold comics, manga, graphic novels and collectible figurines in the main room, model kits in a smaller adjoining room, and had an awesome indie record store in the back. It was the record store that had brought me in, and I never did get into comic books or the related collectibles. After I got married E. turned me on to some graphic novels like the excellent series Y: The Last Man, and I’ve grown to appreciate some of the artists known for the genre like Dave McKean and David Mack.

It’s sixteen years later, Comic Con is a huge annual event, and last year my cousin’s 16-year-old daughter was super excited to make the trip by herself. Read that last statement again: she was born around the same time comic vendors told me the industry was dying, she’s a teenager, and she’s a girl (a vibrant, artistic, crazy-in-the-best-way amazing girl). I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on with the industry in the interim, but it seems like graphic novels have become a big niche market. This weekend was the annual Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco, and E. and I checked it out yesterday for the first time. What struck me most were (1) it was huge (taking up the entirety of the Concourse Exhibition Center — someone told me that last year it only used half the space); (2) there were plenty of women, both attending and exhibiting; (3) the broad variety, from zines to self-published books, from children’s material to adult content. There were a few tables representing larger publishers or vendors, but in many cases the folks manning the tables were the artist or writer of independently-published works.

Read more…

I have a bit of a writing tool obsession. In particular, I have an obsession for pens with fine, fine tips, that roll on paper like a marble on glass. I’ve been in love with the Pilot Hi-Tec-C in a 0.4mm tip since I moved to the US, as it was the closest I could find to the Pilot G-Tec pen sold in Canada. The Hi-Tec-C isn’t widely available in the US, but there are a couple of Japanese stationery stores in San Francisco that stock it (Maido in the Westfield Shopping Center, and Kinokuniya Stationery in Japantown). It comes in even in a .3mm and .25mm tip, though I’ve found them too fine for anything but the smoothest papers. It also comes in a bunch of colors, and the blue-black has replaced black as my favorite.

Somewhere, recently, someone pointed me to Tokyo Pen Shop, where they sell the Pilot Hi-Tec-C online – and some mini Hi-Tec-C pens (!) and the very classy, refillable Hi-Tec-C Cavalier (pictured above). This is lovely to hold and is going to be my new favorite pen, even if the refills don’t seem to be available in blue-black.

Also pictured above is the Kuru Toga Pencil, a 0.3mm pencil that is in line to replace the Pentel 120 A3 DX drafting pencil as my favorite.

I placed an order last Friday and it arrived yesterday, so their service is impressive too.

After visiting Yosemite we drove over Tioga Pass (which had just opened for the season) to Mammoth Lakes on Saturday, and then drove home Sunday over Sonora Pass. Above, CA 108 just off the junction at CA 395: meadow, desert, and snow-covered mountains in the background.

And, not much later, after many hairy curves and steep inclines, here’s the top of Sonora Pass, at 9624 feet (give or take a few–we drove just over the summit before stopping). Check out the smooth lines from the snow ploughs!