Seed starting with kids

Regardless of how many times experienced parents tell me something I don't want to hear and it comes true, I never ever ever learn. I've been told by many parents of the horrors of toddler eating (lack of eating?). I remember my son being a baby and an amazing vegetable eater and being so pleased, smug really, that I had such a good eater. And he was a great eater....as a baby. They are not joking about the terrible twos! there can be so many levels of terrible! Even now, as a three year old, bargaining to eat veggies is sadly in the regular repertoire of parenting tricks.

Two major things seem to help my son eat veggies:
1) Helping to cook the meals.
2) Growing the veggies.

His first vegetable eaten after a particularly long and stubborn fresh vegetable fast last summer was a sungold cherry tomato plucked off the bush at our summer CSA. How he had managed to resist those warm orange globes of sweet and tangy juice the first few weeks of harvest, I will never know, but watching him pluck another and another and pop them into his mouth made me happy we had chosen to do a CSA despite our crazy year.

This year, I have been waiting for seed starting season since the first seed catalogs came in January. Though the vegetable garden will not be our main priority this year, I have big plans. Dreaming big is never a problem of mine.

Seed starting is more of a mental prep for the gardening season. I don't yet have grow lights, and I have a baby tearing through the house, including the room with the best light. I will be surprised if half of our seeds make it out to the garden. But there is something magical about watching that tiny sprout push its two tender leaves through the soil. And starting seeds, explaining what we are growing and what we will use them for is part of the process that connects our three year old with the food we serve. Now that we're figured out healthy food processes with him, our eleven month old is getting to the stage of refusing veggies. And so it begins. Again.

Homemade Pizza Dough

We eat a lot of pizza at Chez Neff. And by a lot, I mean at least once a week, sometimes more. We also have a lot of bread, ala Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. You can use their bread dough to make pizzas, and while the resulting pizzas taste excellent, the dough is extremely wet, and so not at all easy to work with. After multiple pizza disasters of the magnitude where you find dried sauce and cheese on cabinets doors days later....i ended up just buying pizza dough at the store for awhile.

You know what's cheaper, and better? Making your own!

It was time for an actual pizza dough recipe.

I like this recipe because the kitchenade does the work, you get two pizzas worth of dough (I freeze one), and its ready in under two and a half hours, which is doable for a work night. Enjoy!

Homemade Pizza Dough

2.5 cups of bread flour or all purpose (I sub in up to half wheat flour)*
1 Tbl sugar
2 Tbl extra virgin olive oil
1.5 tsp salt
2 1/4 tsp rapid rise yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water

Dump all of the ingredients into the stand mixer. Mix/knead with the dough hook for 10-12 minutes. Dough should be a nice elasticity ball, if not add a bit of flour. Separate the dough into two balls to rise, unless you're planning on making one super huge pizza.

If your house is a balmy 65 degrees like mine in the winter, you will need to create a warm place for the dough to rise. Preheating the oven at 225 for five minutes and then turning it off works pretty well.

*If you like big crusted pizza doughs, use bread flour. If you prefer more of a flatbread, use all purpose.

Pinterest Pins Review Day: Orange Vinegar

I love Pinterest. No, I don't think you understand: I LOVE  Pinterest.  I have dozens of boards, hundreds of pins.  Sometimes, I actually get around to trying some of them.  So far, there have been more than a few failed Pins.  So I thought it would be great to review the ones that I've tried.

Orange Vinegar has been sitting on my DIY Household board for awhile.  It had such a pretty picture of orange peels and vinegar in canning jars.  In truth, pretty much any glass jar woos me.  Canning, mason, those gorgeous ones with the attached lids....I'm pretty sure if you stick something in a jar it instantly becomes more attractive.  That caused me to be a bit skeptical of the premise.  Orange peels and vinegar, let it sit 2 weeks and then you have orange scented vinegar.  Really?

Yes!

It's clementine season in Israel, or wherever those clementines are coming from across the ocean.  Clementines are the perfect snack size for toddlers, so we always have a steady supply of citrus peels.  I popped some in a jar, added some vinegar and gave it a few weeks.  The peels were not gorgeous (even in a glass jar!) at the end of a few weeks, but the resulting vinegar had a decently strong scent of clementine.


We use a lot of vinegar in our house, as I have mostly given up commercial cleaners, so I am pretty psyched to have such an easy and economical way to make it smell prettier!

Note: you can see little bits of peels in the finished product.  I strained my vinegar through a fine mesh strainer.  If you want all of the peel out, you could probably strain through cheesecloth or a coffee filter.

Knitting Blog No Longer

It has been a few years.

I've had another child.

I've moved into a perfect for our family house.

I've done some traveling and had some amazing experiences that I did not share here.

I even did some *gasp* knitting.  Not that I've done any in the nine months since kiddo #2 came...

But I have missed blogging; taking pictures of my small accomplishments and writing miniature stories to share with my two faithful followers.  (Hi, Mom and Dad!)

I would like to continue blogging, but this will no longer be a knitting blog.  to be a knitting blog, you must knit, no?  Instead Knitting in Red Shoes will live on as more of a general "my life is crazy" life blog.  I am a knitter, a runner, a foodie, a stay at home Mom, Master Gardener, farmer wannabe, do it yourself- er, whole-foods-eater, environmentally concerned citizen, outdoor enthusiast, and a budding viticulturist (there's no shame in having to look that one up!).  I am easily a paragraph, if not a novel, and I look forward to detailing my exploits once more in the big wide world of the Internet once again.

Hmmm

So...I haven't been knitting.
At all.
It's amazing how many hours are sucked away by baby worship. Everyday Rowan seems to do something new. Recently, his obsession has been kitties :)
To combat my inability to knit at home, I've been thinking about going to a local knitting group so that I'm actually forced to at least pick up the needles. I did whip up a dishcloth for my mother back in May for Mother's Day. It was gratifying to finish a project, no matter how small.

So instead of progress on those pants....which at this point will be for child number two, here's a pretty picture of a gorgeous Vermont garden.

The Baby Daze is Clearing

Rowan is finally sleeping through the night and I am finally starting to consistently be able to cross things off the to do list. We even managed to visit some friends and see the beach. Vacationing with an infant is like nothing I could have pictured. Babies are so small, yet require so much STUFF whenever you take them places. I am planning on running the Nike Women's Half Marathon in San Francisco this October, and the idea of what we will need to get on the plane is kind of intimidating. I won't even attempt to cloth diaper for any part of that trip :)

The weather is finally starting to turn around. We had a...I'm not sure if I would call it a freak or a typical spring snow storm a few days ago that covered our tulips and daffodils with inches of a wet slushy mess. I saw some really beautiful pictures on Facebook of flowers in the snow, but it dampened my spirits so much that I hadn't the heart to take out the camera.

I am more happy about the green that is everywhere now that those few inches have melted. This might have been why I chose to delve into the stash for this gorgeous handpainted yarn.
I'm slowly working my way through baby bell bottoms from The Blue Blog. I think they'll be a nice fit for my chubby baby...if I finish them before he grows too big, of course. I love the color variations in the yarn.

This winter I was working on a nice quick scarf in Moss stitch, but I made it too wide and started to hate it and the very very slow progress I was making on it...and who knows where it is now :)

Rowan already loves vegetables, of the cotton sort anyways.
And speaking of vegetables, I got a raised bed to garden in this year, with the idea that I will take it from the condo when we buy a house in a few years. I've started the seeds...even the ones you're not supposed too. Poor zucchini. I love raising veggies from seed. It doesn't always work out, but it seems like when it does, I feel like I've accomplished so much more than when I buy the small plants from the farmers markets. Maybe because my kitchen window is no greenhouse. Only the strong survive :)

A Late FO

I was hoping to finish this in time for my sister's baby shower in May....
And then I was hoping to have it done for when she gave birth in June....
And when that didn't happen, I thought, "Heck, why not give myself a few months and aim for the Baptism in August?"....
And when that didn't happen...I thought, "I should really stop avoiding sewing this elephant up and just get it done for Christmas. Ava (her daughter) is now old enough to appreciate stuffed toys...if I put it off too much longer she will be able to verbally thank me for her gift!"

Guess what I was doing while my sister and her daughter were over for Christmas?But I finally got it done.

I made it a rattle on a whim with a small plastic container I had lying around from a shower favor and some mung beans. That was a good decision, because Ava loves different noises and textures, and she LOVED her little elephant. (So much so that it was hard to get a decent picture. :)
Besides the rattle, the only changes I made to the pattern were to add a tail, a suggestion I got from Ravelry.