Butternut squash soup

I put my garden to bed last week. It's always a chore I dread, but it never takes as long as my dreading has me believing it will.

I was surprised to discover, as I pulled out overgrown plants and weeds, that this was a banner year for butternut squash.


I love butternut squash cut into chunks, tossed in olive oil with some potato chunks, seasoned, and roasted. Delicious.

But I also love butternut squash soup.

This recipe, from Allrecipes.com, is quick, easy, and excellent.

I mean, if the eleven-year-old who visited us this past weekend absolutely loved it and begged for more, then it has to be good, right?

The ingredients are simple: butternut squash, onion, garlic, chicken stock, a bouillon cube, a few other herbs, and you're done.

Ken gave me a hand-held immersion blender two-three years ago, but I didn't like it at first. It has sat in the cupboard, unused. I decided to give it another chance and have found it works beautifully in blending this soup into creamy deliciousness.

Could it be that I'm an artist????

No, there's no chance of my being an artist. If I were, surely the ability would have shown itself by now (although there was Grandma Moses, come to think of it...O

The "watercolors" in this post and in my header were done with an app called Waterlogue.


Here's a photo I took of Sage beside my red geraniums.

And here's Sage after being "Waterlogued."

A cardinal outside my kitchen window one winter.

 Same bird, Waterlogued.

Wild violets in our back yard.

Ditto.

A hanging flower basket in Camden, I think it was.









...and Waterlogued.


This app is fun to fool around with. I do feel a bit guilty, though, that genuine artists have to put creative effort into a watercolor, while all I do is click a few buttons.

Little Girl's knitted top

When I haven't been canning tomatoes, freezing tomatoes, making oven-roasted tomato sauce, making green tomato relish, or making salsa, I've been trying to squeeze a little knitting into my day.

I'm finding it harder to just sit down and knock off a couple of rows now that there's a puppy in the house. Sage takes tremendous interest, which is to say way too much interest, in everything I do. Her interest extends to trying to steal my yarn, my needles or my pattern, whichever is handiest to her. So before I can start knitting, I have to make sure I've built a little fortress around myself to keep the enemy too-curious puppy away.

I have managed to complete a "Like Sleeves for kids" knitted tunic top, though. This will be for our little friend Phoebe, who turns four in November.

I spotted a completed "Like Sleeves" at the Cashmere Goat in Camden in July. I loved its simple design, so I bought the pattern and yarn.

I used Plymouth Encore yarn for this project. The pattern calls for 100% wool yarn, but I'm not sure every child is comfortable in wool, and I'm not sure every young mother wants to wash woolens by hand. Plymouth Encore is only 25% wool, and it's machine washable.

The "Like Sleeves" pattern is translated from the Japanese, I believe. It's a simple, straight-forward pattern, but I did get a little confused here and there.

The title, for instance, baffled me until I realized that "Like Sleeves" means "Fake Sleeves." There's a sentence about midway through the pattern that says, "Those stitches just worked will be upper back body and work in row." I never did figure out what "work in row" means, so I ignored it and no harm seems to have been done.

The most confusing bit of instruction, which caused me to lose two full days of knitting time as I paced the floor and tried to decipher what it meant, appeared in the "Finishing" portion of the pattern. Now that I look back on this, I realize I was being thick-headed, but this is what threw me for a loop: "With circular needle and RS facing....knit 11 sts on waste yarn...." I thought this meant I was to do a provisional cast-on, which I've never learned and don't want to learn. I couldn't figure out why I needed to do a provisional cast-on while knitting the neckband. I looked at Youtube videos of provisional cast-ons, I visited Ravelry and read the notes of others who've knitted this top, I fussed and fumed.

Then finally, on Day 3 of No Progress, I finally saw the light. The instructions are NOT saying "knit 11 sts ONTO waste yarn, they are saying, "Knit 11 sts WHICH YOU ALREADY HAVE ON WASTE YARN." Phew. That I could do. Why I'd insisted on misinterpreting that line of instruction is beyond me.

The Like Sleeves top is now done. Yesterday I started knitting a hat. The hat shouldn't cause me stress because I've worked with this pattern many times.