Sunday, December 13, 2009

Everything's better with bacon

Don't you agree?
Tonight we had roast chicken, roast red potatoes, and collard greens seasoned with... you got it, bacon.

Doesn't compare to the bacon wrapped crackers I had at the Cleveland Knits West party yesterday though. Here's the recipe (Trish, hope you don't mind if I spill the secret - not too many people read this anyways). Wrap raw bacon around Club crackers. Season lightly with garlic powder. Sprinkle a little fresh parmesan cheese over them. Arrange on a cookie sheet and bake at 225F for 2 hours. Apparently there is no need to drain the grease after cooking. It's all soaked in to the crackers.

Anyway, I had about 6 of these suckers at the party yesterday, in addition to spinach and artichoke dip (Thanks Michelle!), homemade marshmallows (Trish!), Mississippi Mud cake (Tim!), and too many other goodies to keep track of. I'm afraid to go to weigh-in on Tuesday. Maybe if I skip all my meals on Monday?

It was a wonderful party - we each had a secret Santa, and brought stocking stuffers for everybody. Everybody brought the most thoughtful little gifts for the stockings - candles, stitch markers, ornaments, handmade cards, candies! Here's a couple of the ornaments:

emergency knitting
Santa

and the rest of the goodies:

stocking stuffers

And here is what Santa (Andrea) brought me!

Midnight Optima

It's a 4 oz. braid of Chameleon Colorworks Optim in Midnight colorway. It feels like silk - but it's merino. Mechanically stretched and set! I've never seen this before, but apparently it was selling like hotcakes at a recent fiber show. Seriously, this feels so soft you wouldn't believe it came off a sheep if you didn't read the label. It's going to the top of my spinning queue. A scarf? A hat? I don't want to attempt socks, I'm afraid it would be too delicate for hard foot wear, and besides, something this soft can go around my neck or ears for sure without itching. Hmmmm, I'll have to plan carefully!

Knitting

I'm now in panic mode. The black BFL I spun for Mike's surprise Christmas hat took a LOT longer than I was expecting - almost 3 weeks of spinning.

"black" BFL

Which means I got a very late start on the actual knitting. Then the knitting got interrupted for a felt applique Christmas stocking for Audrey (almost done, but it's taken 10 days). I couldn't very well bring it along to the wedding in Seattle (wonderful amounts of knitting time on the plane and while hanging out at my BIL's apartment) - there would be too many nosy relatives asking what it was and could they see it - so I worked on a sock - Wanida by Cookie A (in Sock Innovations).

Wanida

And I couldn't bring it to Thanksgiving in Michigan (same problem), so I made a scarf for the Red Scarf Project.

One row red scarf

I finished the Bird's Nest Smoke Ring with my handspun merino/silk (Ashland Bay fiber):
No, I don't usually wear a purple cowl with a green sweater, I was just taking advantage of some decent indoor light to knock off a few photos.

Birds Nest Cowl

There you have it!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home