Sunday, March 30, 2008

Reactions to my Shirt

As I got up and started putting on my coat, one of my friends looked at me, "I can't believe you made it, " she said matter-of-factly. Then realizing the possible implications of what she had said she started stammering and soon became an incoherent mess. I smiled, "Neither can I."

What I really meant was, I can't believe I finally finished it - I can't believe it's wearable and I can't believe it fits. I'm still in denial about the whole thing.

It took me nine months. I checked. I'm a bit in denial about the process too. It didn't seem that long. I mean, I have a gazillion reasons why it took so long. Some of them are incredibly valid. You can't sew when your machine goes on the blitz and you have to take it apart and put it back together to get it going again. It takes awhile to figure out that the machine is going to need to be serviced and it won't just fix itself. I even asked it nicely. In return it jammed and tried to eat my fabric. Then it broke the needle for good measure. I may have said some rude things. I may have threatened it with anger management courses. After that, it quit.

Generally though it was my conviction that I was going to screw up and so therefore, it was best not to put the presser foot down and whip up a seam as I was only going to have to rip it out again. I did have to rip out seams and redo them. Often enough to get a bit nervous, which tends to make you make mistakes and have to rip out seams. It becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy and a downward spiral of constructive progress. It was partially due to self-inflicted pressure. When you decide to use the smallest possible stitch and that you will only be satisfied with sometime approaching perfection - well you need to redo stuff - repeatedly.

However, I think that the decision to start out aiming for the best was justified in my end product.

Case in point: I had casually mentioned at lunch that I was going to be wearing my new shirt the next day. At this stage, it still needed three buttons sewed on and to be pressed. Having made the declaration though, I was honor bound to finish the thing. My lunch mates know that I've been working on a shirt. "Ah-ha, " one of them went, "we'll be able to see if it's any good and we can place orders." I smiled wanly. I didn't think they could pay me enough to make them a shirt.

The next day, I wore my shirt. I got zilch of a reaction. At first I was puzzled and slightly miffed. Then I got sight of myself in the mirror. I furtively regarded my reflexion. Hmm, I thought. That looks like a shirt. It looks bought. In no way do the angst and tears that it caused radiate from its seams. It looks like an ordinary shirt. I decided that my co-workers have a memory with holes larger than a sieve and had promptly forgotten that I was going to wear my shirt. The shirt itself didn't appear homemade and so therefore did not trigger their memory.

I took the shirt to Darrell. He said some nice things about it. He congratulated me on getting it done. He said it looked worth the effort and that I had done a beautiful job. I think he was so flabbergasted by the fact that it was done he didn't know what else to say. I think he thinks that I could have hurried it up a bit. I wouldn't deny it. I would go into a rant about my machine. I think he did. He told me about the upcoming sewing machine sale. Uh, yes. If I had a machine that didn't have emotionally issues, I could get my sewing done faster. If I didn't have emotional issues, I could get my sewing done faster.

I now have a new shirt. I am a bit in denial about where it came from and how exactly it ended up in my closet. I think that's best. There are some things you shouldn't remember - especially when you are about to embark on a new project.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Hurray! Shirt Making X

I paused for effect, "I finished my shirt." There was silence on the other end of the phone, then, "Oh wow, Kim . . . I'm so pleased. That's awesome." He should have been. It was thanks to my brother that it got finished. On the week-end he had given me a pep talk about buttonholes and my ability to do them. The basic idea was that I was no worse at doing button holes than anyone else and that I should get up the courage to do them. So I did.

I would detail how I managed to lose my button hole cutter between Monday and today (the gremlins are back!) or how I had to sew on some buttons twice to ensure they were properly placed, or how the machine didn't run entirely smoothly, but instead I am going to put up lots of pictures.

The Front:

The Back:


The Inside:
Note the flat felled seams (which caused problems during construction due to my inability to tell the right from the wrong side.)



The Armhole:

Again flat felled - not easy on a curve.


The Cuff:



Stitches so small, they looked like they had been by mice:

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Miracles Do Happen

Sometimes lightening hits the same spot twice. It happens. It is possible, although not likely plausible that you could win the lottery and never have to work again. But I would like to argue that what gives you a greater sense of satisfaction and is even less likely to occur than these events is the ability to make a special dish by having the appropriate ingredients on hand without pre-mediation.

This rare and utterly satisfying event happened this week-end. I was browsing a cookbook in a local culinary shop. I knew that I was having a roast chicken for dinner but I had not determined the details. I glanced upon a recipe that talked about grapes and chicken and kept flipping. Then later in the store, it struck me that I had grapes at home. They had come with my latest basket. I also had a recipe for chicken and grapes in my Venetian cook book.

When I got home, I pulled out the recipe book and looked up the recipe. I needed a chicken - check. I had a chicken. I needed white seedless grapes - amazingly enough check. I needed white wine - check, I currently have red and white plonk for cooking. Cream - check, it had been on sale and I had scooped some up. Lastly, I needed large amounts of parsley - check, I had bought it on a whim. I had everything I needed. I was in slight shock. Who has all those ingredients on hand just because?

The recipe was easy. Roast the chicken, basting it with butter and wine. Mix the pan juices, chicken stock, cream, parsley and grapes together. Serve with the chicken. It was pretty. It tasted wonderful. But I knew it would. Anything that calls for an odd assortment of ingredients that you just happen to have on hand is going to taste fabulous. It's like what winning the lottery would taste like - when you didn't buy a ticket.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Cleaning

Cleaning tends to mount up and become oppressive. Doing a quick sweep is doable. Realizing that the floors could do with a wash turns an easy task into something more.

Yesterday, it struck me that I really needed to do something about my kitchen. In the end, it didn't take too much effort. It's now all gleaming white and shiny again. I have room on the counters again. I still need to do the rest of the place. But I keep walking into my kitchen and saying to myself, "Look at my nice clean kitchen, isn't it nice? Doesn't it look pretty?"

I had rather hoped that having one nice room would motivate me to get the rest of it done. But no such luck. You find instead that you would rather google different decorating styles, envision different pieces of furniture and furnishing that would totally transform your living space. So then, you put the kettle on and make a pot of tea and loose yourself in decorating dreams.

Then you get swept into gardens. Spring flowers are in the stores and they smell wonderfully like spring. Once you've mentally outfitted a few indoor rooms, you start designing a few flower beds for a change. Mulling over the pros and cons of annuals versus perennial, shrubs and trees, ground cover, your garden becomes spectacularly full of colour and texture; you can smell the grass, the light perfume of the roses, feel the sun on your back and hear the hum of the bees.

By this time, it's lunch. As you leave your mental world and return to this one, it takes a few minutes to readjust. You're trying to figure out where your new sitting room went - you just spent a fortune on new furniture. You're not sure but you think you may have imported it from somewhere. And you had the walls painted and a new floor put down. You were pretty sure that you had knocked that wall through. Then it starts to come back, you were cleaning. Then to make it worse, you realize that the sky is still overcast, the snow is still piled to the sky and spring is still a good month away.

You still need to take the garbage out.

Le petit lapin

Last week-end, I was idly browsing the meat department at the grocery store. I was trying to decide whether on Wednesday I would be feeling like Chicken, Beef or even say Veal. Not that it really mattered what I wanted to eat on Wednesday. It would most likely be the same as what I had on Tuesday. Cooking is easier if you take the option and choice out of it. If you only have fish, then you know you have to make something with fish. You don't waste time trying to decide if you would rather have chicken.

And as I slowly moved across the section, I saw an employee with a roll of bright stickers. She was eyeing the meat packages and then every now and then, she would stick a sticker on a package. My eyes started to gleam. She was doing the meat reductions. And as she was only doing it right now, the meat was still fresh. I started looking for the bright stickers. And as I moved down the freezer looking at the packages, I realized that the package in front of me contained rabbit; to be precise half a rabbit. Nine-something for a piece of meat seemed expensive, but four-something seemed reasonable. I briefly thought and popped it in my basket.

To my knowledge, I had never had rabbit. I had no idea what it was going to be like. The piece of meat looked nice, however. At home, I decided that I had better cook it tonight as I was not going to have the mental energy during the week. Browsing through the cook-books, I discovered that rabbit was a white meat, low in fat, and basically fairly good for you. I looked for the simplest recipe that I could find.

One was mustardy rabbit. It claimed to be a classic French Bistro dish. There's something about being told that a recipe is a classic French Bistro dish. You feel that not only is it going to be good but there will be something rather nice about it. However, I am beginning to suspect that the something rather nice about a dish means that at some point, it's had alcohol tipped into it.

The recipe was rather simple. You smeared herbs and mustard over the rabbit pieces, browned them, removed them from the pan while you did onions and made the sauce, then you put the rabbit back in, clamped the lid on and let it all simmer away.

End result - incredibly moist meat that was nicely flavoured with a sauce that was rather nice. Near the end, it began to feel a bit rich and you had to watch for the smaller bones, but on the whole, I was pleasantly surprised. I think it would be a good dish for guests. Fearfully simple and hardly any work and yet it packs a high gosh factor. As your guest tries to figure out why the piece of meat that seems like chicken at first, clearly isn't chicken and dares to inquire, "What are we eating?". You can causally reply, "Oh, I am so sorry, I should have said. It's rabbit. We've been having rather a lot lately. They've been eating all the radishes."

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

4 Weeks at a Time

As I left work today, I had one sole concern: what to do with spinach. I had not gone to the grocery store at lunch to buy feta or ricotta cheese, so that spinach triangles or cannelloni were out. In fact, as far as I could tell, for most recipes that used whacking great loads of spinach, I was missing the key ingredient that made it appetizing.

At the back of my mind, I was mulling my squash. I already knew it was destined for soup - predestined almost. There was no way, I was going to eat an entire acorn squash by myself. And it had had the audacity to be a large one. I was unsure if I should roast it before turning it into soup or if I could get away with boiling it. I had an uneasy feeling that roasting it would give the soup-to-be more flavour.

Wednesdays have become a new day of panic. For on Thursday, I can get my basket for the next week. After my utter inability to find non-rotten fruits and vegetables that would last an appropriate amount of time before becoming rotten that looked mildly edible at my local grocery store, I had taken the plunge and joined a local organic fruits and vegetable club at a local greengrocer. The store is a greengrocer in every sense of the word. It's small, feels slightly like a step back in time and it's the only place I've ever been in that received an order of edible flowers. They do fruits and vegetables.

I was iffy on the organic portion. Organic is a nice fuzzy term that means a lot of different things. The only thing various definitions have in common is a higher price than for normal fruits and vegetables. I had reached the stage though where I was willing to pay a slight premium for something that I would actually eat.

When I went to pick up my first basket, I knew that this was going to be better. I had my fruit presented and explained to me. I was instructed on how to store my lettuce.

So far I have had grapefruit - both normal and breakfast (still not sure what the difference is), blood oranges, mango, plums, mandarin oranges (the best I've ever had), more cauliflower than I knew what to do with, many different types of apples and pears (I know that I don't like Gala or Ambrosia apples. I do like Red Delicious. I'm still working on the difference between a red, green or Bartlett pear.), golden beets (you cook them like the red ones which didn't help me at all!), tomatoes (even out of season organic tomatoes are tasteless and not ripe), baby baking potatoes (incredibly cute), and a whole bunch more.

The club is simple. You pay in advance for four weeks. Every week you get a basket of fruits and vegetables. You don't say what you would like this week. The store tells you what you are getting. You can look it up online on Wednesdays. This leads to the Wednesday panic. You know what you have left in your fridge and now you can see what else is about to descend on you.

I'm trying to be somewhat systematic. On Wednesday, I see what is coming and how well it goes with what I have. If it would mesh well with what is coming, then I won't make a concentrated effort to get rid of it. If it doesn't go with what's coming, then I try and figure out how to use up what I've already got.

Hence, my concentration on using up spinach and squash. My new problem is the discovery that I have a cauliflower and fresh green beans in my fridge. Who knew? They were under the spinach. Oh yeah, that's the other problem. Storage. There just is simply not enough space in the crisper for everything I currently have. And more is coming . . . .