Whoopie Pies and Roach Demise

Happy Halloween!  Our pets were the only ones who dressed up around here. 

I don't think they liked it very much!

Colder weather, so I've turned my attention to knitting.  Five years ago, I purchased a skein of Cherry Tree Hill Supersock, and I've had a pretty long history with that solitary skein.  In 2011, I made a pair of fingerless gloves from it. 

A simple cable, stockinette to show off the variegated colors, and two lace leaves on either side of the thumb gusset.  They were my favorite!  Sadly, I misplaced them. 

I had enough yarn left to make socks this year:

I had more yarn left (the skeins are very generous!), so I made another pair of fingerless gloves last week.  I picked something quick and simple.  Ribbing for the wrist and palm, basic thumb gusset, and a series of twisted cables for the back of the hand.

Note:  it's extraordinarily difficult to photograph your own hand with the other!  Anyway, these are soft and warm, and I've been wearing them every day.  I *still* have more yarn left from the skein, maybe even enough for another pair!

I've been baking, baking, baking.  Lots of cookies.  Chocolate chip peanut butter...

Brown sugar cinnamon chip...

...and chocolate whoopie pies with vanilla buttercream.

The whoopie pies were fine, but I absolutely loved both varieties of cookies (recipes found here and here, the latter modified to omit the frosting and add cinnamon chips).  They both used melted instead of room-temperature butter and it made the cookies delightfully rich and soft.   So good.  I highly recommend trying them.

Knitting, baking, and I've been keeping an eye on the wildlife, too.  Suddenly, birds are everywhere.  Mockingbirds, cardinals, tufted titmice, bluebirds, catbirds, and oh, so many varieties of woodpeckers! 

It's not just the birds that are suddenly coming around.

You can call them palmetto bugs, water bugs, or wood roaches, but I consider them just plain cockroaches.  I try to appreciate all insects, but I'm utterly repulsed by these.  They're about 2" long and I start seeing them - inside and out - in the fall.  We live in the south, on water, by woods, so we're basically out of luck for avoiding these creatures!  Most people here seem to have them.  I just try to keep everything very clean and keep traps out.  Thankfully, I usually only see one once every week or so, and I don't seem to see them much after we regularly get down to below-freezing temperatures.  And hey, whenever I do see one and complain to Todd, he gets to sing his 'roach song', which I think he greatly enjoys doing (song here).  So win-win? 

Anyway, I hope you're enjoying the beautiful late-fall weather.  Have a great week! 

Post-Diss Bliss

The fall rains have come!

That means that we're starting to see some beautiful color when we take our morning walks. Some trees have leaves that are barely tipped with color...

...and others that have been completely consumed by it.

Maple trees in fall are nearly my favorite. The bark turns dark, almost black, and the leaves are a constantly-changing riot of color for weeks.

This sweetgum tree doesn't have any red at all...just cheerful yellow leaves among the green.

One of my favorites, the ginkgo, has that bright yellow edge to its fall leaves that I love so much!

Every day, I bring home any leaves that strike my fancy. I brought these home because they reminded me of a rainbow.

This one, because of the dramatic half-changed state.

This one, because of the deeply-etched veins.

Sometimes I'll take whole tree branches, especially oak.

I love to bring them inside and lay them on the table. The colors are really wonderful!

The sweetgum seeds are still green, but are nice to pile up, too.

There's a flurry of fall activity in my yard, too. The swallowtail caterpillars are preparing to go into a chrysalis state.

All over the yard, insects are mating. The timing must be right, so that their eggs can be laid in the ground before frost, but not so early that they would be in danger from digging creatures or from having their growth schedule skewed from too-warm weather. These grasshoppers will soon separate, and the female will lay her fertilized eggs in the still-soft ground.

Still not many butterflies, but several unusual moths around! My cosmos are done for the year, and the marigolds are on their way out, but I still have lots of zinnias that attract these little visitors.

My autumn sedum has finally bloomed, too!

It consists of a flower head full of teeny tiny flowers. They're delicate-looking, but they stay beautiful through the fall rains and a whole range of temperatures.

I recently found several patches of clover outside. There must've been some four-leafed ones there, because we've had some extraordinary luck.

My husband, who possess several attractive qualities, including this one...

...finally completed his dissertation!

He has some easy revisions, but we can both envision a dissertation-free life in the near future. At long last, we're able to schedule a camping/kayaking trip. We went to a movie together...for the first time in over two years. We played board games and then vegged on the couch for the season premier of "The Office". In other words, we've been having some blessedly normal days!

I've been scurrying to complete a knitting project, too. I had some very nice, soft, springy wool in a lovely wheat color, fingering weight, that I thought would be perfect for some fingerless gloves.

I've scorned them in the past ("If it's cold enough to wear gloves, you need your whole hand covered up!"), but they're truly miraculous in the fall. Perfect for those months when it's not quite thick, woolen glove weather, but there's a definite bite in the air. These gloves are perfect protection in cool mornings and brisk, chilly nights. I even wear them around the house, since the open fingers enable me to use my phone or type on the computer.

This particular pattern ("October Leaves" on Ravelry) is really clever. A four-stitch cable snakes up the wrist to the base of the thumb, and then separates to form two delicate lace leaves.

There's also a cable on the other side of the hand.

I'm very pleased with my new fingerless gloves!

Since the weather's turned, I've also been baking a lot. In fact, I've baked three pies in the past 10 days. Pies are so quick and easy, even if you don't have much experience. And there's nothing like biting into a warm, tasty slice of pie that you've baked yourself, from scratch.

I've posted my go-to pie crust recipe on here before. It's Smitten Kitchen's no-fail all-butter pie crust. I highly recommend it for any type of pie.

The first pie I baked this season was also the easiest. I love blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries in a pie, so I paged through several recipes before deciding on one. I'm really pleased with the result.

Three Berry Pie
allrecipes.com
makes one pie

Ingredients
one recipe pie crust
6 cups berries
1/4 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup sugar

Directions
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Mix together your cornstarch and sugar, withholding two tablespoons. After well combined, pour onto your fruit and mix well. When fruit is completely coated, sprinkle the held-back tablespoons of sugar/cornstarch mixture into the bottom of your pie crust, and pour the fruit on top. Cover with second crust. Crimp crust and pierce with fork. Cover the edge of your pie with aluminum foil and bake for 25 minutes. Remove foil and bake for an additional 25 minutes. Cool completely before cutting...this helps the liquid inside to congeal.

It's so easy! The pie only has three ingredients. And the no-fail pie crust truly is no-fail. Look at that flaky crust!

It's the perfect weather for fall. I hope you'll try it soon!

A Quick Peek at Eagle Creek

Indiana is in the middle of a heat wave, and Todd has been working nonstop on his dissertation. We're both feeling a bit tired, and so together decided to take a break - one day to shirk our responsibilities and have free time to do whatever we wanted. As it turns out, what we wanted to do was get out of the house and go hiking. Followed, of course, by a big lunch out and a multi-hour board game marathon!

Eagle Creek, the fourth largest city park in the nation, is a mere twenty minutes from our house. It contains a 1,400 acre lake, and hiking along the shore, in the shade, is a really relaxing and peaceful experience.

Beautiful wildflowers are growing everywhere.

A spotted cucumber beetle (Diabrotica undecimpunctata) finds plenty to do on this dog rose. Spotted cucumber beetles only live for 8 weeks, so several generations might plague a region in a single summer. They're quite destructive. Not only do they eat tender seedlings and later attack full-grown plants (mainly vegetables), some harbor a bacteria called Pseudomonas lachrymans. Lachrymans is similar to the word lachrymose, which means tearful or given to weeping. Farmers must feel this way when confronted with plants affected with Pseudomonas lachrymans, because it infects and then rots leaves and fruits.

Many berry bushes are growing along the water...

...which does not interest this tree swallow in the least. Especially in the summertime, tree swallows eat insects. They prefer to nest around water and are quite social, sometimes forming flocks of thousands. This tree swallow wasn't a bit afraid of me and let me get quite close.

Small fish and minnows hug the banks of Eagle Creek Reservoir. We've seen many herons on visits here, who make regular meals of them.

After circling the lake, we crossed a small stream to enter the forest.

A great many birds nest at Eagle Creek and we saw some beautiful feathers.

A line of fungus crawled up this tree trunk. This particular fungus, which looks like smoky bracket fungus, probably got a toehold here through an open spot on the trunk - maybe a slash caused by an animal, or an open area left from a falling limb. The fungus absorbs sap, water, and nutrients from the tree, causing rapid decomposition.

It must be high season for assassin bugs, because we saw several on low-hanging branches. I think they're such beautiful insects, but they do have a nasty bite, so we steered clear.

Above all, I was impressed by the spiderwebs. Orb weavers create perfect circles.

How do they do it?

But even more interesting were the webs created by grass spiders, a member of the funnel web spider family. Look at this one...a conical web within a web. Amazing!

And this one...a sort of twisted, inverted web that must have been two feet long. Absolutely incredible!

Grass spider webs aren't sticky, so insects blundering across them aren't caught in that way. Grass spiders are fast. They have a complicated system of 'alarm threads' that let them know the second their web is disturbed. They are upon the insect before it knows what happened!

At the edge of the forest we found a small, moss-covered pond. To me, that means one thing: frogs and dragonflies! I scoured the perimeter and heard the tell-tale plops of frogs slipping beneath the surface of the pond, but I couldn't seem to catch sight of any. Not in the water, anyway...

A large shock of vegetation grew at the water's edge, and I was astounded to see the leaves covered completely...with tree frogs!

Some no more than an inch long and completely unfazed by our presence, the frogs remained motionless on the leaves.

They looked like some kind of prehistoric creature!

These tree frogs don't really live on trees. They are easy targets in water, too, so they tend to live near water, on vegetation like this.

I didn't see any dragonflies, but when I got home, I found one in the back yard! Odd, since we don't live around water. This is a blue dasher dragonfly. Dragonflies are great to have around because they eat mosquitoes. They're quite quick...they can reach speeds of 35 miles per hour! It's good that they're such champion fliers, because despite having legs, they are unable to walk. Their eyes, too, are amazing. They have a nearly 360 degree field of vision!

Dragonflies were once known as "the Devil's darning needle." Parents would tell their children that the Devil would come in the night to bad children and use the dragonfly to stitch their mouths closed while they slept. That's quite an incentive to behave!

All in all, we had a wonderful day off and felt ready to get back to the daily grind.

Since it's been so hot lately, I've been focusing on small knitting projects, like this pair of ringwood gloves. I'm using Misti Alpaca yarn in a deep red color, which I've been saving for something special. These gloves are so soft. Their construction is unique - a seed stitch cuff, with a switchover to ringwood stitch for the body of the glove. Ringwood stitch is easy. You simply knit two rows, followed by a row of knit one, purl one, all the way across. Repeat these three rows and you'll have ringwood stitch, a really interesting texture.

I like the cuff, too. One down, one to go!

Last week I posted about pie crust. Now, you're almost certainly going to have leftover dough after you make your pie. Trust me, you want leftover dough. I came up with a really basic recipe for a miniature apple pie. I make mine in a shallow 5 x 4 inch dish, but you could use tart pans, or ramekins, or whatever you've got!

The recipe is really simple.

Two-Apple Pie

2 apples, peeled, diced
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix all ingredients together and cook on stovetop for about 15 minutes, until soft. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease your containers, lay your dough within, and spoon your apples on top of it. Cover them with another thin sheet of dough and crimp the edges. Pierce with a fork a few times and bake for about 20 minutes.

It is so good. Forty minutes to homemade apple pie? Oh, yes!

Now that I think of it, I've got a few apples in the refrigerator...I think I know what I'm making for dessert tomorrow! :)

I hope you give it a try...have a great week!