Thanksgiving is for Spent Grain

I know that Thanksgiving is supposed to celebrate abundance, but I get a kick out of turning things that would otherwise go to waste into something that is fit for a feast! After making the beer, we had two trays of leftover spent grain. I decided that the best way to use the grain would be to dry it, grind it, and use it to add a kick to my baked goods.

The flour tastes sweet and has caramel notes, so to accentuate those features, I made a slow rise bread with blackberry honey and spent grain flour. Bread flour and yeast were thrown in to help it rise since I didn't want to end up with a brick.

For the muffins, I spied a fantastic recipe for Spent Grain Applesauce Muffins from Brooklyn Brew Shop.  For my version, I added 1/2 the sugar, opted to use the butter instead of oil (splurge! it's worth it!), used 1 cup of our spent grain flour, and used apple butter that we canned an embarrassingly long time ago. I had to cook the muffins an extra 10 minutes, for a total of 30 minutes, because my batter was so dense and moist. The resulting muffins are sinful. No one will know that it came about from pantry scraps.

My folks are cooking the Thanksgiving dinner, and although I do love to host my most favorite holiday of the year, they are both fantastic cooks, so I'm content to sit back and enjoy everyone's company. My mom will make her famous turkey jook,  potstickers, and sticky rice stuffing, and my dad will make a juicy turkey and the best gravy ever. What's special and unusual on your Thanskgiving table this year?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Crafty Updates

Free time seems to have a way of disappearing around here. Our ongoing effort to preserve summer's bounty so we can eat locally is still going strong. To the left, you'll find the most expensive ketchup in the world. My recipe was supposed to yield 5-pints of ketchup, but instead, I ended up with 2 1/2. Eh, that's not exactly a year's supply of ketchup, so I'll have to make another trip to the store for more tomatoes.

The ketchup recipe is from the Joy of Cooking. I had to check out the Joy of Cooking: All about Canning and Preserving from our library for this recipe. Why? Because my 1997 JOC edition is lame, that's why! People buy this book not for its ethnic recipes, but for "how tos" on American staples! I thought for sure I would find instructions on jams and jellies in my JOC, and I was confounded when none were present. So, consider this a PSA: do not buy the 1997 edition of JOC because it lacks the soul of the earlier editions. There is tons of info on the Internet about the family drama behind this JOC edition, so I'll spare you, but just know that it is out there if you are curious.

I fondly refer to our canned apple butter as "Look, Ma! No hands!" because I didn't have to lift a finger. The boy made and canned the butter on his own. It is soooooo good! We ended up with many jars, but I don't think we'll be sharing it much because it rocks. Those apples, Fujis, came from my inlaw's backyard - they had a lot of tiny apples that were too small for eating.

There has been a bit of knitting going on in these parts, too. These Lisa Sousa (colorway Olive) socks were my first attempt at knitting 2 socks at one time on 2 circular needles. I love this method! Since I do so many on the fly adjustments to patterns, it's nice knowing that both socks will be the same instead of one being a bit longer/tighter/shorter than the other.


The pattern is my own, but it's nothing really creative. I wanted something mindless to knit, so I made spiraling seed stitches on the top of the foot and through the leg. I can type it out if you're interested, but I'm sure that there are other sock patterns out there with this same motif.

I'm currently working on anklets from sock yarn scraps. This is Schaefer Anne yarn, one of my favorite yarns. The mohair content makes it a little itchy, but boy is this durable!



It's a simple 3x1 ribbed pattern paired with a slip stitch, Widdershin-style heel.

I think I have my perfect sock formula down now! They are knit 2 at a time and toe up using the Turkish cast on. I knit them at 9.5 stitches per inch (usually size 1s) and I increase to 72 inches. The heel is the Widdershin heel with slip 1/knit 1 heel stitch, and the bind off is doulble crochet. Yeah, this is going to be my formula until something better comes along.