Week 5

January was, as usual, a long month. But I have to admit that I enjoyed it this year. Looking back on all the bad January days I wrote about in my Line-A-Day journal over the last five years, this year, by comparison, finds me in a much better state of mind. Perhaps part of it is the lack of bitingly cold days, the breaks of sunshine, and regular physical activity. Part of it is having good things to read and work on, and a lack of obligations. And part of it is because I haven't been following the news in D.C.

And now January is over, we have no snow on the ground, and I will be perfectly OK if it snows now because a February snow is much less permanent, and it's romantic in a similar way as December snow. Can you tell, I've thought about this a lot?

This is not to say that the month didn't come with mini crises of confidence. I had a winter wardrobe meltdown a couple weeks ago and tried to remedy it with retail therapy with varying degrees of success. And then I did the stupid thing at the drug store where you check your weight and blood pressure and discover you're 10 pounds more than the weight you always say you are, and your blood pressure is supposedly high. Yeah yeah, I know those machines might be inaccurate and my clothing ads some weight, but I had to try hard to not let it ruin my Saturday.

Let's bring on a love filled February, shall we?

Making

I finished the cowl on Sunday! Now I'm waiting for a cold day to use it.

I've got socks to keep me busy and yarn to make these farmhouse dish towels but I also just bought the pattern for this Kingston sweater, which looks fun both color-wise and chunky-knit-wise.

Recipes

I made a recipe from Bon Appetit this week for a rice noodle salad with cabbage and seared steak, and the photo I took of it will not make you want to make it. Steak on salad under incandescent light, photographed on a cell phone, is not appetizing, even though it really was delicious. Here's the recipe with a much nicer photo. 

I had a lot of leftover salted peanuts from that recipe, so I used them to make Dorie Greenspan's Peanut Butter Change-Ups from Dorie's Cookies. These are fabulous. You don't press them down with a fork, so they're cakier, and there's a lot of peanut bits in them. Also, there's nutmeg - an unusual but perfect enhancement to peanut butter. Recipe here.

I also made and ate a whole bunch of hummus, which got me to eat a whole lot of vegetables. It was marvelous. I eyeballed the recipe, but it was maybe a couple cups of cooked chickpeas (I think the texture is best with freshly cooked beans rather than canned), a third of a cup of tahini, a couple good shakes of garlic powder (I was out of fresh garlic) and the juice from one lemon. I processed it to make a thick paste, then started adding back in some of the bean liquid while processing. Once it got fluffy, I added salt and pepper to taste. I didn't add any olive oil until serving, as a drizzle, with a healthy sprinkle of za'atar. Sometimes I didn't do the olive oil at all and it was still good.

I also made pizza (with pancetta, mushrooms, onions, basil and mint) for the first time with my sourdough starter! This was exciting, though not my favorite pizza dough yet. I need to fiddle with it a bit to make it a little chewier.

Reading

I finished The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater and started immediately on Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I can already tell that this will be the book that ends my one-book-a-week streak. But I'm enjoying the slower pace of it, the writing (it's the author's first book written in English - I'm always impressed by anyone who can write an entire novel in a non-native language), and the reflections on travel.

Watching

We're trying to watch most of the Oscar movies, so this weekend we saw Joker (difficult to watch, but Joaquin Phoenix probably deserves the Oscar) and Pain and Glory (still trying to decide what I got out of this other than delight at looking at Antonio Banderas's face for a couple hours).

Listening

I've been listening for birds when I'm outside. They're out there.