The Malabrigo yarn in Solis: I finally finished it.

Oh wait, I realized, no I didn’t–those stretches of stockinette in the lace? The castoff curled there. Tink x 324, do k2tog, yo across and purl back and the only reason I didn’t do that in the first place is I didn’t think I had enough yarn. I did. Done! It is drying, and I can’t wait.

And that was going to be the whole post, till I went into the kitchen and saw the leftover toasted skinned hazelnuts in the fridge.

My usual peanut butter cookie recipe is one I discovered in an old hand-me-down cookbook given me in New Hampshire 25 years ago: one cup peanut butter, one cup sugar, one egg. (The Skippy type works best, the natural, not so much.) Great for celiacs. I do occasionally add a tbl of flour for a little bit of extra crispness at the edges, but it’s not necessary. 350, 8-10 min. That’s it.

What if…

So I buttered the cookie sheet. One cup hazelnuts into the Cuisinart. I let that run a long time, trying to get hazelnut butter, not meal, then added 2/3 c sugar, 1/4 c. cocoa, hmm… about 2 tbl butter, how ’bout a little more in there, possibly three, wasn’t measuring… 1 tbl flour just because, and 1 (extra large) egg. Trying to put teaspoonfuls of batter down, it was like sticky silly putty but soon settled down and behaved–ie, it held to itself rather than me after being on the cookie sheet a minute or so.

Which I figured out when I found some extra dark chocolate chips and pushed a half dozen into each cookie. Eight minutes at 350 again did the job, and there you go: the best cookie recipe I have ever come up with.

Toasting and skinning hazelnuts is a pain, but I totally just got over that.

(Ed. to add, if you prefer yours sweeter, go for the full cup of sugar.)

Note that when you toast hazelnuts you have to rub the skins off afterwards: they’re bitter. And after all that work, the nuts go rancid within a few weeks and must be used.

Twist my arm. I have at least another cup’s worth in the fridge to go play with. If you ground them into a paste and added ganache…? I may have to find out. Anybody got a favorite hazelnut recipe? For me to be able to eat it, it has to be in pretty fine pieces at least, hence the marjolaine, which is ganache of varying intensities covering four layers of ground hazelnuts and almonds embedded in meringue. And then the darkest ganache to cover it all.

This is also what happens when I need to gain weight.

Only, my sweetie wishes he had that problem…

I was explaining the term manufacturing cream to the clerk at Trader Joe’s as an explanation for why I had a five-high stack of their Pound Plus 500g bittersweet bars and not much else to check out; one bar, I told her, a cup and a half of that super-heavy cream that I bought around the corner at Milk Pail, and you’ve got the glaze for two chocolate tortes.

And a half gallon of that cream is enough to make ten of them. (Or lots of truffles to go with.) Hence the stack.

“You’re a baker!”

I grinned.

The first two tortes were already cooling. I got home, threw the first bar on the floor over and over inside its sturdy paper wrapper (usually I put it inside a ziploc too, but I was living dangerously) to break up the chocolate for melting into the cream, and glazed and cooled the cakes.

And then I took one to each friend who’d played airport taxi for us on last week’s trip. I loved loved loved seeing the looks on their faces as I rang the doorbells and handed them over.

I saved a spoonful of the glaze for melting into my hot cocoa tomorrow.

The moment I laid eyes on Margaret I exclaimed, Oh of course! I’d met her many times at Stitches West over the years with Ruth. Ruth brought me dark chocolate, Margaret gifted me with some Avon goodies, lovely of both of them and the start of a wonderful day.

After chatting, knitting (well, they did, my projects were both ones that command attention), and lunch with Richard joining in, we went off to Purlescence.

There was a table set up for people to offer up stash yarn they didn’t want and for others to take it. I’d had no idea.

Ruth found two skeins of a lovely heathered gray and asked me, wondering, Aren’t these handspun?

Sure looked like it to me. I told her I thought it looked like it had some silk in there, too.

She hadn’t known and she hadn’t brought anything and she left them there. But they were soft and quite pretty and she kept wishing and going back to them.

There were plenty of people in the store but nobody took them, so at last, when it was time for us to go, she picked them up again.

I asked Sandi if she knew who had spun those. Her face lit up and she said that she had, about ten years ago, that they were merino and silk and had just sat there in her stash unused. She wanted them to go to someone who would actually create something with them.

Oh, I’ll knit it! Ruth assured her, clearly thrilled.

So now it wasn’t just nice yarn, it was a gift from the heart from Sandi, and as I mentioned to Ruth later, those two skeins had sat there all day and nobody else had claimed them. (And I knew several people in there who would have loved the colorway.) This was for you all along.

We got back to my house, I opened my freezer, and they headed towards home with a chocolate torte and a blue-ice pack in Ruth’s insulated bag that she just happened to have in her car. I’d been telling her for two years that if she ever came to my house I was going to give her a torte.

And I sent her home with a box of Kara coconut cream, which for me is available locally, so that she could experiment with it for her friend, who, like our younger daughter, is allergic to dairy. A box of that and dark chocolate gets you a good ganache; the larger box, you’ve got enought to make my chocolate torte recipe, which makes two. The coconut cream substitutes straight across for extra-heavy cream and it can sit on a shelf.

Unless someone really enthusiastic about it gets their hands on it and uses it all up.

A big bag of frozen berries.

A memory triggered. Of the intense comfort food that it was when I was given a single-person berry pie in a restaurant in Federal Way, Washington when I was far from my home, my husband, and my young kids.

When I was growing up, my mother often made homemade pies, a way to get more fruit into her kids and baked I’m sure with memories of her grandmother, who had a pie shelf built right into her kitchen: it was just expected that one would have pies on hand for whoever might show up on a random day, especially if there were young men to meet who might be courting one’s daughter. One could greet them most sweetly.

We picked fruit at pick-your-own farms, most often Catoctin Mountain Orchards in western Maryland. And so, strawberry pies, peach, berries, pear and lime, grape pistachio, it was always the best dinner ever when there was pie coming afterwards.

Then came the day I was in the Seattle area for my niece’s wedding and my brother, parents and I found ourselves with some time on our own and stumbled across that restaurant.

It was a great deal of mixed berries with just enough crust to hold them, not too sweet, just right, the way such things should be but that I had never seen from a commercial establishment before.  As close to mine or my Mom’s as it could have been.  It was so good that we went back and bought more to have for breakfast before our flights home.

A ten inch mixed berry pie just came out of the oven. Biggest pie tin I could find.

But the only thing that fit that leftover crust was a stainless steel 8 oz measuring cup, designed with a handle curving down at the end to steady the thing from flipping over as you fill it. Works on an oven rack too.

Its interior is now bubbly and cinnamony and just sweet enough and it is just right.

And on another note. This afternoon, Richard turned and exclaimed and got me to look up in time to see the second half as the female Cooper’s hawk (ie the bigger one) did a complete figure-8 around the two support poles to the awning and away.  “So fast. SO fast!” he told me. I so love our front-row seats!

It’s been a long time since I’ve been pregnant, which means it’s been a long time since I had to monitor sugar intake for diabetes. I’m out of practice. I spent today cleaning, shopping, baking, pricing slicing dicing hoping.

I think I did okay by the folks who enjoyed my dinner.

And in the middle of all that prepping I sat down a moment and looked up in time to see the incoming hawk: a quick turnaround at the feeder, back to the telephone wires to get a good look in all directions as it shifted its feet to turn here, then here, then back across the yard towards me again, across my roof and away.

All in definitely under ten seconds. Blink. Wow.

Did you see the video Sherry linked to in the last post? This one, and thank you, Sherry. I have a birding friend who has seen robins fledging and she’s sure that’s what that was: a baby robin at first flight, playing air guitar. (I love how the little bird cranes her head up at the singer as he sings to her.)

Its momma expected it to land in the lawn but it wanted bluegrass, for sure.

Singing? Or just chirpy?

He considered that a moment, still looking at the feeder. Chirpy.

Went to two farewell parties today, brought a blueberry cake to each and coconut cream truffles as well to the second: the first was for someone who will be coming back next year, but the second was for a young family where the husband’s new job is near Denver.

If chocolate and blueberry cake can’t make that family stay, it can at least make them want to come back to visit. Even if I gave them the recipes.

I have two blueberry cakes in the oven and a timer on my Iphone loud enough to wake the deaf. Perfect.

There’s a Frazz comic written totally for me, even if the author didn’t know it. Cool!

Oh and, just because. The eagle doing the breast stroke at about the 1:20 mark. I have never seen a bird swim like this.

About 25 years ago, when we’d just moved here, some friends dragged us over to a new shop at Stanford Mall with, You’ve got to try this!

That was the first time we heard the word truffles being used to describe something that was most definitely not a mushroom.

Cocolat was wildly popular, several other shops followed, and then a fire at the central bakery shut the business down, a still-lamented loss.

Alice Medrich, the owner, wrote several dessert books after that; Cocolat’s  photos were an immediate delight to the locals–oooh, I remember that! And that!

She mentioned in her writing that when she’d first opened up, she’d started off making the truffles far too big but by the time she realized that, her customers were used to buying them that way and so, big they’d stayed.

I well remember that. That was what we’d been told we had to try and what we’d come back for for special occasions.

After Steve finished his first truffle last night, he mentioned (clearly not minding overly) that they were too big.

He couldn’t know I was thrilled nor why.

But he and she were both right: because a chocolate truffle should be small enough that you don’t have to hold it melting in your hand as you take several bites to get through the whole thing; too messy. Small is good.

I thought of that today as I decided to experiment with Michelle’s coconut cream. Could I make good dairy-free truffles?

One 6.8 oz box of that cream, a small one for the learning experience. I melted in 300 g of dark chocolate (I was determined to measure carefully this time.)

I just finished rolling small (!) balls of that now-chilled coconut ganache in my Bergenfield cocoa. The coconut taste is very minor in the background; the chocolate totally rules. The texture is just right. Nailed it.

There you go–I found it. That’s a bigger box than mine but a much better price than Amazon’s. Note that the shipping price is the same for one or ten and one of those big boxes is the right size for making two chocolate tortes. Just sayin’.

And the chickadee? You’re looking at the top of its head straight on at the camera at the bottom of the picture.

Last year my friend Kathy gave me a bagfull of soft fur combed from her dog and I set some out where the birds could take it for their nests. The Bewick’s wren appropriated an impressive amount at the Fall equinox: as Glenn Stewart of SCPBRG explains, bird behaviors at that time often somewhat mimic those of the Spring equinox, when the number of daylight hours vs dark is again equal.

So. There was a little dog fur left, and I had tufts of it set out among my amaryllis pots.

I looked up today to see what looked like a chickadee with a very furry blonde beard. She was diving into the fluff again and again, trying to get as much as her beak could hold.

And then she was off.

I went and got my hairbrush and pulled the last two days’ hair out of it; I was curious to see if I might be as acceptable as the dog. I went back to the patio, gathered up all the dog fluff in one amaryllis pot and put the hair with it.

More ! All in one place! Cool! She came back and her bill dove into it again and again, each time looking up and around to be safe in her surroundings: down, quickly up and left, right, down, peck, quickly up, left, right.

It took her a minute or two to be satisfied with her haul. She took to the air.

She seemed to have felted the dog fur into my long curled hairs with all those bobbings up and down: she flew in an uncertain wobble, as if the wind against her treasure was almost too much.

That little chickadee had a streamer of blond fur three chickadees wide and three chickadees long flowing proudly along behind her, like a small plane with a particularly large banner for the cheering crowd below.

And not only that. As it happened, we had Steve Rasmussen, the owner of Milk Pail, bringing cheeses for everybody to sample and rave over. (And believe me, we did.)

Steve carved open a huge wheel and set a gadget to it that I had never seen the like of: it was about the width and height of the wheel, and, as he explained to me in an aside, it was a descendant of an antique iron heated at the fireplace. It warmed that cheese right inside its rind and then Steve scooped the melting goodness out and handed it out on small slices of french bread. Bliss.

I told him I had gotten a call from my daughter in Michigan this very afternoon–she had run out of Milk Pail’s vanilla and nobody else’s came close. Help!

Remember when I was making all those tortes? I had enough cream left for one last pair, but six was kind of enough. So. By that point I had crushed together some bittersweet and a fairly dark bittersweet chocolate, and improvising a bit on the ratio with the amount of cream left over, I melted them into it and hoped. I mean, you can’t go too wrong there, even if it ends up as just chocolate sauce.

It was a bit thicker than the usual ganache. Good. Into the fridge. Then I rolled balls of it in Bergenfield cocoa and froze the truffles: manufacturing cream, dark chocolate, the best cocoa on the outside. That was it.

I took some with me tonight and offered some to Steve to thank him for making that cream available and just to say how much I loved what he’s done with his life with that business. He absolutely swooned over the first truffle and asked for a second. Did my heart good. Thank you, Steve!

And I will never wonder again what to do with any extra of that cream. Wow. That really really really worked.