Sunday 29 May 2011

Green Fingers

It seems Dublin knitters have become somewhat obsessed with growing your own veg, and this house is no exception. A discussion started some while ago about growing veg and a few of us decided to give it a go.
I think I posted before about what we planted, so here's an update.

We have peppers!:


I planted 4 different varieties of peppers, from sweet to spicy Jalapeno. We tried these ones before last year, and nothing grew. It seems we got a bit luckier this year. These are the ones we transplanted today, and there are loads more left over that we put into pots outside.

These are courgette and broccoli. Every single seed that we planted has germinated and thrived, so they're all over the place! I have some in this Belfast sink:



And here's just a taster of the others. There's sunflowers there too.



We also planted a herb pot of coriander, parsley, chives and something else I can't remember now. I'm too lazy to get up & go find out. :)

There was a sad discovery made in the garden:



Aww. A whole birds egg. I think it's a robin egg? I wonder what happened to it. Poor little thing.

While hubby & Alice were busy in the garden, I got busy in the kitchen. I'm sure I've mentioned it loads of times before, but I love this man:


We discovered him several years ago when in the States on holidays, and have since acquired every single episode of his show, Good Eats (recently ended, BOO). He's a brilliantly witty chef, who disects a different ingredient each episode and comes up with the most amazing recipes.

I made an apple pie:



Yep. No-one could wait long enough for me to get a photo of the whole one. ;)
I'm also making his southern fried chicken for dinner, with buttermilk biscuits. Biscuits in the States are like scones, but lighter and way more NOM. I can't wait! The chicken takes ages (soak for 12 hours in buttermilk before cooking) but Oh. My. God. it is so worth it. I'm drooling just thinking about dinner tonght!

Just so you don't think I've lost my knitty marbles altogether, I started on a sock:



I posted previously that Mam had picked out a pattern and I was going to make it, but that fell by the wayside. I was out meeting a lovely knitter from Australia with some Irish knitters and also CosmicPluto recently. We went for dinner, and of course all took out our knitting. Not having the pattern with me, I just cast on a foolproof 64 sts and ribbed a bit. So, I had to go back to the book and find a pattern that matched! I came up with this one. Waving Lace Socks by Evelyn A. Clark from Interwave Favourite Socks. That'll do nicely.

I recently downloaded the Vogue Knitting App onto my iPad. You can download issues of the magazine there, so I nabbed the Early Fall issue that came out last week. It was only €3.99! Great stuff. I'll still get the print issue though, I think. I like keeping the print mag. We'll see. Anyway, you know what that means! I hope to get the review done this week.

Good knitting!

3 comments:

Julia said...

I prefer the print mags myself - I had downloaded a cookbook to my ereader but found that doesn't work very well. With knitting and cookbooks I need to be able to sit and page through. I love Vogue Knitting - I never miss an issue of that and the other one I can NOT live without is Simply Knitting, that one is expensive, but worth it1

kelgell said...

Hey I made a mini feature in your post. ^^ That's a nice green for your sock too. I didn't realise you weren't knitting anything in particular. Ha ha.
Good luck with the plant growing.

Tara said...

Green fingers and green knitting! Hopefully everything will continue to thrive ;) BTW, I love Alton Brown too. At least we can keep watching him on Iron Chef America!