Productivity

 Nearly the end of January, and I don't know where the month has gone. 

I'm working on the second sock of a pair in an Aran design, so I'll wait till I've got the second one finished. I took a break because C wanted a new hat, having left his warmest one somewhere in Maine or New Hampshire. He fusses about his ears so I spent a while choosing a pattern on Ravelry that had earflaps, and then he decided he didn't want them. By the time I'd lined the first one with fleece (which he was adamant he did want, it no longer fit him, so I had to knit another. It was a pattern that was easy to adjust, the coloured strip ran over multiples of 4, and the diamond pattern over multiples of 10, so to adjust the original 100 stitches up to 112 and down to 110 was easy. So, very unusual for us, we have a his 'n' hers. 

In the kitchen - C came across a recipe in Ottolenghi's "Ottolenghi" for a crusty Italian loaf, and he has fallen in love with the end result. It is, apparently, the sort of bread he dreams of buying when we are on holidays in Greece and France. It's a two-day affair, starting with a biga the day before, so it has required a bit of adjusting to my Sunday morning housework routine to ensure that it's not ready to go into the oven at the same time that I am trying to get the kitchen floor washed. I think we had the book out because I had been trying his double lemon chicken recipe, printed in our national paper and originally appearing in the New York Times, I think. Anyway, by now I have typed the recipe out and laminated it, to save having to hoist the book out every week. So far I have been using pasta flour as what I had on hand, but when C went to lodge a cheque at a bank in the town centre yesterday, I went along with him because I had a pretty good idea I would find 00 bread flour in the supermarket there, and indeed I did - the one specially for long slow ferments, so it will be interesting to see if it makes a difference. 

It is also marmalade orange season here. So I looked up various pressure cooker recipes, chose one and was delighted with the end result. It called for cooking the oranges whole for about 15 minutes first. Then they were wonderfully soft and it was easy to scrape most of the white off leaving the peel to cut finely. I used jam sugar so as not to have to boil it for too long, and we ended up with ten tangy jars. C was horrified when I said there was 6 lb of sugar in there, but he did his mathematics and realised that it was actually much cheaper than quality bought marmalade. I used this recipe here, and it was easy to scale up to 3lb fruit. I did move to a larger pot for the last boil with the sugar, having a larger quantity. 

I would make more before the season is over, but I only have one jam jar left! And, truthfully, there is so much blackberry jam in the cupboard from our September expedition that we are set for the year. I don't eat much of either of them. 

The mornings are already brighter - I'm going in to work a little later on Mondays, so while it's still dark I see the sunrise. I stopped the other morning to take this photo - I should probably have stopped about five minutes earlier, but on the bicycle, the tendency is just to keep going. The photo is from last week. It was just as beautiful the other morning - a dense mist rising and swirling under the trees, the sun just starting to show, and the contrails in the sky a deep orange. 

I got a new computer, which arrived earlier than expected (I wanted one with more RAM, and the advised arrival for that was March, so it was a surprise when it showed up in January, even before I had got around to getting an external DVD drive for it. I absolutely love the quietness of the solid state drive, but because I was unable to restore from my backup, I had to copy everything across manually from the backup, which resulted in every file having a timestamp attached to it. Thank goodness for bulk rename utilities! I upgraded to Windows 11 - the only casualty was the scanner which isn't recognised by it but can still be used downstairs.