Friends and Family

Yesterday was joy. Would have blogged about it then but too busy having the day.

Saturday tried to make Three Sisters Fry Bread with cornmeal, beans and squash, from a VegNews article/recipe by Robin Roberston, website also globalvegankitchen.com. I believe my primary mistake was to make something fried; also I used too much water so the dough was sticky; also I probably used too high of heat. In any case I ended up with oily, hard, overcooked patties instead of something light and nutritious.

I had plenty of dough left so Sunday morning I made muffins with the rest of the dough, which were pretty dense, but edible. I brought these as well as some of my rye bread to the Waffle Devotional, and my daughter came with me. We had a wonderful Giving Thanks themed devotional, met and reconnected with some lovely people, and then went out shopping.

Our hot culture stores of choice were St. Vincent de Paul, Goodwill, and then Hancock Fabrics. We scored some great boots for my daughter and a warm cotton bedspread [for use as a blanket, as I already have a comforter] for me.

At Hancock Fabrics we replaced the sewing kit that people barred her from retrieving from her most recent living situation, and we found some great coordinating upholstery fabric for recovering my dining chairs and making a tablecloth. For the tablecloth I found a linen-type fabric with equal ~4-inch stripes of sand and sage; for the chairs, the same fabric with a sand background and 1-inch sage polka dots.

This may be the first time I actually came home from an outing and turned around and started a project then and there. For recovering the chair seats, I hadn't thought about getting or locating more upholstery tacks, so I had to recycle the tacks I could pry out of the bottom of the seats, and try to hold the fabric in place with wide tape, use minimal tacks, and then reapply the chair frames to the seats. The first one turned out somewhat sloppy, so I redid it.

For the tablecloth, the selvedges of the fabric were finished, so I used cotton crochet thread and a blanket stitch to finish the ends, listening with Pearl to CD's on her computer, and my husband [who had joined us from Eatonville] working on his poetry. It took hours to finish the blanket stitch, and I stopped and made some soup primarily for my work lunches, as well as a late dinner, in the middle of the project. To finish the tablecloth for a fancy touch I sewed decorative wooden buttons at the four corners.

It's such joy, working with my hands, and a luxury I rarely take time for. Pearl found, first my nephew Robin Elwood's My Bird CD, then a CD of my brother's music I hadn't heard before, although I had heard some of the songs, and I felt as if the band Lindsay Street and John and Sally were there with us, sharing our family time.

Pea and Potato Soup

1 cup yellow split peas
2 red potatoes
1 red garnet yam
1 carrot
1/2 onion
3/4 quart plain soy milk
1 1/2 cups frozen peas
1/2 portion Golden Curry flavoring
1 clove garlic, chopped

In pressure cooker, saute onions while you cube the vegetables. Add split peas, potatoes, carrot and yam, plus 6 cups water and curry flavoring into cooker and cook on high for ten minutes, with natural pressure release [i.e., off the burner.] When lid can be removed, stir in frozen peas and soy milk to a creamy consistency, heat and serve.