big bad baking weekend

Really important update, everyone: it still feels like fall. I am practically euphoric about this weather. It’s raining right now and I’m cozied up inside my apartment and I couldn’t be happier.

Another excellent by-product of it feeling like autumn (beyond my insatiable craving to knit and utter joy over the weather) is that I am finally, finally FINALLY ready to start cooking and baking again.  When it’s super hot outside, the last thing I want to do is cook – or even eat – anything. I’d rather just spend the summer eating fruits, veggies, and yogurt.  But those days are behind me and I spent all weekend meal planning, stocking up on food, and BAKING. Holy cow.

The first thing I made (just in time for an unexpected visit from friends) was banana bread from a modified version of my high school RA’s (yay boarding school) cookbook.  I never end up having enough bananas to incorporate into the banana bread, so this time I added applesauce to top off the recipe.  Some chocolate chips might have found their way in there, too. (:  (Recipe below!)

we ate this so fast that it wasn’t possible to get an actual photo.

This morning, on a whim, I whipped up some Sriracha cornbread muffins. Due to the seat-of-the-pants nature of the baking, I discovered we were almost out of Sriracha at the zero hour. Luckily, we are the weird type of people that have four types of hot sauce in the fridge and two more in the cabinet, so I bounced back pretty quickly from that obstacle.  This is without a doubt the spiciest thing I have ever baked (David was so happy).

Banana-apple cornbread (one loaf)
(Modified from Joy of Heidi’s Cooking) 

Cream together: 1/4c softened butter, 1c sugar, 1/4 tsp salt.
Mix in 1 egg.
Stir in 1c mashed bananas, 1/2c unsweetened applesauce, 1/4c milk with a splash of vinegar.
In a separate bowl mix 1.5c flour, 3/4 tsp baking soda.

Add dry ingredients into batter. Be careful not to stir too much. After incorporating dry ingredients, mix in a bag of chocolate chips.  Spread batter into a 9×5 greased loaf pan. Bake at 325 for 45-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the bread comes out clean.

finally fall.

It’s AUTUMN.  Today I woke up and it was positively chilly in my apartment.  Within minutes of my first sip of  tea, I gained full consciousness and identified the strange sensation tingling in my fingertips: a serious craving to KNIT.  I’ve been feeling so uninspired pretty much all summer, especially after forcing myself to mass-(okay, not mass, more like multi-)produce Christmas gifts for all of July.

Rather than throwing myself into more Tuesday Night Cowls (from which I would surely experience immediate burnout), I decided to foster my fledgling urges by knitting something fun: I’m back on the Giddy Up bootie pattern for a friend’s baby, due in December.  I started waaaay back when, a shamefully long time ago, and somehow bungled the first intarsia section in just about every way under the sun. I ripped back and forgot about it.  After picking it up again, things surprisingly went a lot smoother and faster than the first time around. Hooray! (We’ll see how seaming + adding the sole goes, though.) I’ll add photos when I’m finished.

Maybe more baby knits will follow in the near future – I am loving the instant gratification that comes with knitting tiny things (and I also have to finish a few more queued projects before the little one is born!).

sewing quickie.

I’m back with another sewing project (conveniently finished right before my August sew-one-thing-a-month deadline and not photographed until now)!  Since I had taken a bit of an extended break, I wanted to ease myself back into my sewing machine (so as to not accidentally drop myself into another frightful sewing glut) with a simple pattern: the ever-popular (and free!) Colette Sorbetto!  While I was at The Needle Shop buying fabric for the Winter Swap, I saw some funky yellow-green remnant fabric that I just couldn’t resist. It wasn’t quite large enough to cut out the pattern in the right layout, so I just converted it so the back would be two separate pieces, cut in half and seamed down the middle.  I bound it off with yellow bias tape.

I like the top, but I do feel as if I look a bit like a vintage Samsonite suitcase (in a good way (if it’s possible for looking like a suitcase to be a good thing)).