Wednesday 3rd December - Vive la difference

 Here are the cardigan sleeves. I am risking sanity by knitting both  at the same time;

as you can see, the colour matching only lasts as long as a few rows into the cuffs. After that they carry on in their own way. The idea of creating matching fronts and sleeves from this wild and crazy patterned yarn was never to be thought of, so I didn't. Think of it, I mean.

I have been browsing on the woolwarehouse site and managed to exercise some self-control over buying the extra ball of wool. I do like to make the order up to get the free postage if I can! So there's another ball of wool, and some buttons for the cardigan and a few other bits and pieces to come.... 

I taught a fairly mad piano lesson today. It's pretty tough teaching over a whatsapp telephone call where neither of us can see each other. We both have to try and work out which bit of music the other is talking about. On the whole we make it work, just about, until the lady I am teaching begins to tire and get flustered. 

This time it was compounded by my oxygen cylinder reaching zero... low oxygen makes me get confused too.... chaos. I had another cylinder right by me, as I had thought I might need it, so normal levels of madness were restored pretty quickly. For some reason we can't persuade her ipad to work with zoom properly; I know nothing about ipads and I'm not sure she does either, so we use whatsapp instead. It's worked for a year. now...  

 You might be wondering why we don't use video in our call... I tried it once with her, but again she's not that confident with the tech. The more we go over to needing IT in some form or another for admin; tax, booking doctors, paying invoices, etc etc etc, the harder it gets for people without confidence, knowledge, understanding and the gadgetry to manage. I'm lucky - we've got equipment that works, and my husband has always worked in IT, and stays on top of updates and virus hunting and so on.

One-pan-macaroni-cheese - a recipe from Taming Twins

I've never had a fail from this site, and the recipes are all simple, easy-peasy. I guess the title of the website explains why!

Ingredients 

To cook the pasta:

• ▢500 g (1.1 lb) Dry macaroni
• ▢1 litre (4.25 cups) Water
• ▢400 ml (1.75 cups) Milk
• ▢2 tsp Onion granules
• ▢1 tsp Mustard
• ▢Salt and pepper

• To finish:

  • ▢200 g (7 oz) Gruyere, Grated
  • ▢250 g (9 oz) Mature cheddar, Grated
  • ▢150 ml (0.75 cups) Single cream

  Instructions 

  • Put the first ingredients in a pan together, put the lid on and cook on medium-low for about 10-13 minutes stirring often until pasta is just cooked. (If your water/milk is absorbed already and pasta not cooked, add a splash more).
  • When it's cooked, turn heat to low, stir in the rest of the ingredients in and mix everything together until the cheese is melted and gooey.
  • Serve immediately (I like to garnish with chopped chives or crispy pieces of bacon).

I have just lifted this from the website - see link above - and it will make four portions. Look! No white sauce! No flour!

I did complicated stuff with a calculator, because I wanted to use 175g pasta which is a nice quantity for the two of us. 35% of the above measurements, it turns out. If I had looked properly, do you see that box with

1X 2X 3X

just across from the heading INGREDIENTS? It is a cunning little widgetty thing that lets you automatically increase or decrease the quantities! Now we all know.

As usual I varied it a bit - half a finely diced onion instead of onion granules, no gruyere so I used all strong cheddar, and no single cream so I added a good dollop of Philadelphia cream cheese instead. I microwaved some broccoli separately and stirred it all in.

Oh yes, that worked - not as a luxury macaroni cheese maybe, but a pretty good everyday one. 

No picture - after all, we all now what macaroni cheese looks like, don't we?

I seriously recommend you explore the site for more ideas. Here's the Christmas Recipes page.

Poem

It came upon the midnight clear,
that glorious song of old,
from angels bending near the earth
to touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on the earth, good will to men,
from heaven's all-gracious King."
The world in solemn stillness lay,
to hear the angels sing.                    

by Edmund Sears

This is one of my favourite carols. When I was a church organist (hands only, couldn't reach the pedals properly and couldn't persuade my feet to operate independently of my hands) I would choose this for Advent and in January and also at other random times of year to the bemusement of the congregation.

I thought of this carol the other night... tootling along to the loo in the wee small hours I noticed, through the patterned glass in the bathroom window, little sparkly bits. Stars or reflections? Going through to the spare room I looked into the darkness - stars! We have so much light pollution outside our house - streetlights and the busy dual carriageway and glow from nearby cities that it is only in the hours after midnight that we can really see the stars.