Prime Time Knitter

A Half-Century of Knitting

One thing about not posting for a while is that there’s a backlog of things to write about, so for this post I’ll travel back in time a bit to the end of February when I passed another birthday.  This was hardly a unique experience—I’ve had so many birthdays that yet another is not noteworthy. (What I suppose would be noteworthy is if I stopped having birthdays, although I wouldn’t be around to contemplate that state of affairs.) But what I did realize and found very jarring is that it was the 50^th anniversary of my birth as a knitter. 

If we travel back farther in time to my 16^th birthday, we arrive at my initiation as a knitter. It all started quite innocently.  All my friends decided to knit bulky sweaters (the size 10 ½-needle variety), and although I wasn’t necessarily one to slavishly follow trends, I was, like any teenager, easily persuaded by my friends.  After begging and pleading with my mother to let me buy yarn—not that skinny out-of-date 1940s yarn she had stashed—she finally relented and took me to a yarn store.  There I got some fire-engine red yarn and a mimeographed (yes, this was before copiers were invented) pattern.

It is a miracle that I persisted in my knitting career.  That first sweater was an unmitigated disaster.  Oh, the knitting was nice enough, but you could fit two of me in it.  Something stuck, however, and I persisted.  Sweater #2 was better, Sweater #3, a tennis sweater, became a favorite, and by then I was on a roll.  I haven’t kept a lot of my early sweaters, but I do have one that I enjoyed knitting and wearing.

It was hard to find good yarn in the late 60s and early 70s, but this was an exception.  It was a Swiss import of wool and mohair (Spinnerin, I think), and the pattern came from Vogue Knitting before it disbanded publication in the 1970s. I bought the bone buttons for an outrageous $8 (for all 12 of them—there are a couple of extras) at Lord & Taylor in New York City, when it still had a fabric department.  This sweater was completed in 1966, because that is when I had a summer job as a switchboard operator and bought the buttons during my lunch hour. 

I might add that a modeling shot of this sweater is out of the question.  It measures 32 inches across the chest, and that includes a few inches of ease.  My days of having a chest measurement like that have long since been over.

Here’s another early effort that I knit at age 17 for my mother.  This was knit from Bernat baby yarn (wool and nylon) from a Bernat pattern leaflet.

I found this among my mother’s things and was surprised that she kept it all these years.  I was also surprised at how good the knitting was, and how painfully inept the finishing was.  Like Marcel Proust and his madeleine, this one brought back memories.  I recalled how much fun it was to string the sequins onto the yarn and have them twinkle as they formed the shiny bands on the front of the sweater.

I’m not sure I’m attempting to recapture my youth, but twinkly knitting has definitely been on my mind for a while.  I think the attraction arose from seeing finished beaded shawls knit by those in my knitting group—once again influenced by knitting friends.  So as I contemplate switching from wool sweaters to summer lace, I came upon Tendrils, Susanna IC’s beautiful beaded shawl (crescent version), that was in the most recent release of the Twist Collective.  I’ve had this nice silk lace in my stash for a few years (Long Ridge Farm 100% silk), and the shiny beads arrived this week:

 

 Although I don’t expect to be knitting for another 50 years, I’ve got to make the most of the time I have left.  After all there are fewer and fewer years to knit up my stash.

Apples, Lemons, and Lemonade

    If life gives you lemons…

I’m ready for the lemonade part of the old adage after spending a couple of months of dealing with lemons.  Up to now, it has just been sloth and too many commitments that have disrupted my blogging, but starting in midwinter, my Mac began to act strangely.  I noticed that it would not restart (warm boot for you Windows fans), and then it wouldn’t awaken from sleep.  I began my many treks to the Apple Store, where the various Geniuses got it to run again.  But a few weeks to a few days later, after the fixes and replacement in the inner guts, the problems would arise again.  On the next-to-last visit, the techs erased everything and installed the new (Mountain Lion) operating system.  This too did not cure the problem, which had extended from not awakening from sleep to having the screen go black after a few hours of work.  I did not lose any of my work files, but I found that I was very lax in backing up my browser bookmarks, my iTunes library, some emails, and many photos.  Eventually, the folks at Apple honored my service agreement by giving me a new machine:

I’m now the proud owner of the new retina display 27-inch Mac:

It is almost as thin as a credit card:

 

So although this is “dandy,” it left me very far behind in my work. I’m finally caught up and now at the point where I can reinstall my bookmarks (I did have the sense at one point to print them out) and then burn my CDs back to iTunes and rebuild my library. (This is not a total disaster because most of my library is classical music, and iTunes needs to be coaxed to categorize it correctly.  I really don’t want 150 “songs” called allegro moderato.)  And now I’m back to blogging.

During this time, I have been knitting away.  My self-designed jacket, which has no name, lacks the top of one sleeve cap and the completion of the front. 

One reason this has been sitting around is that I couldn’t read my notes, and the cap for Sleeve #2 does not match the cap for Sleeve #1.  At this point, it would be nice to complain about the sloppiness of the designer or the poorly written instructions, but since there’s no one to blame but myself, I’ll just spend the next quiet hour I have counting the decreases on the first sleeve and seeing where things went awry.  I also can no longer procrastinate as to what kind of collar I want or buy the wood buttons I found on etsy that seem as if they’ll do nicely for this project.

Another project that is in the works is the Canyonlands shawl by verybusymonkey.  This was intended as a knit-in-public project, but I’m done with the easy part and on to attaching the border.  This has to be done at home in relative quiet.

And then there’s Mara.  This is definitely not a knitting-in-public project.  Sleeve #1 is a few rows from completion (before the ribbing), and I have to devote some time this weekend to picking up the stitches around the other armhole and getting it started.  Time is fleeting for this project because I know I won’t want all that wool on my lap in a few weeks.  But our spring has been cool, and there is a small window of time to get this rolling again. 

There should be no more excuses for long gaps in blog posts, and I certainly have a lot to say with all these projects on the needles, plans for warm-weather lace, purchases of new books, and my efforts to categorize my stash (the sock yarn is now on Ravelry!). And having been without a reliable computer for so long, I'm now resuming my travels in cyberspace--I especially missed visits to my favorite knit bloggers.

Into the Woulds

Every year at this time, I flirt with the resolutions that afflict so many knitters: 12 sweaters, 52 pairs of socks, 13 whatevers in 2013.  But if growing old has taught me anything, it is that by this time next year I won’t have a fraction of those items.  It is tempting, as I look at my boxes of stash yarn, to think that 12 of them might be empty at this time next year.  That would certainly ease my conscience when I get to fiber festivals or yarn stores, but I know it won’t happen (not the fiber fairs—the FOs).

So rather than resolutions, I’m thinking of things I would like to knit.  In one case, the decision has been made for me.  Our knitting group had a Secret Santa, and my present, which still has me gasping with delight, was this yarn from Chameleon Colorworks:

I have yet to knit a circular shawl, and I have more than 1800 yards of this heavenly stuff. I have looked at Evenstar many times, but the yardage of my stash lace yarn is insufficient. I think that Evenstar will be this summer’s project. 

But less fanciful projects on the “I would like to finish them list” is the Helena baby sweater.  I’m up to the front border, and I did some diving in my button stash and found these vintage buttons. They more than likely belonged to my mother—note the 60¢ price.  The pattern calls for knitted tie closures, but in this soft yarn, I think they would pill and fray, so I’m adding buttons.  The end is near on this one, so it is close to being my first 2013 FO.

I know that knitting top-down, in the round, is the method of choice for most knitters, but after knitting sweaters in the round for most of this year, I found myself longing to do something flat that would require purling and seaming.  I also needed something to knit in my knitting group that I could not possibly screw up. (Fair Isle it turns out is far too challenging for group knitting—at least for me.) So I started my own design using Beaverslide Drygood’s McTaggart Tweed in nightshade and a motif with a 4-row repeat (and two of those rows are stockinette). 

The yarn is surprisingly soft for a tweed and very enjoyable to knit with.  The back is done, as are most of the two sleeves.  The hang-up on this one is that I wanted slanted pockets on the front.  Not only do I want them to slant, but I want the pocket inside to be plain stockinette to avoid extra bulk over my stomach (which has sufficient bulk of its own to require no added help).  So I’m knitting the rest of the sleeves in public for now, and I started wrestling with the pockets during fleeting periods of quiet at home.  I also haven’t quite decided on the collar and whether I want a zipped front or buttons.  It is possible it will have a belt.  This one is evolving as I go along—and it could be my 2013 Rhinebeck sweater.

And then there is Mara.  Mara and I have been on a trial separation for about five weeks, but I think I’m ready to reconcile. I got exasperated with her, and me, when I messed up the yarn dominance on the light blue motif. Despite meticulously writing down on the chart which hand holds which color, for a third time when knitting this motif, I didn’t read my notes.  Some rows after holding the yarn incorrectly, I found myself wondering why the colors just didn’t look right.  I have the last of four incorrect rows to tink out, and then I can resume. 

There is still a lot to do on this one—knitting sleeve #2, steeking and finishing the neck edge, and then weaving in ends and tacking down the insides of the steeks. If I keep at it, I might have it done before the weather warms up.  And I would like to knit another stranded sweater this year.

As far as more things that I would like to knit in 2013, there are more one-color sweaters, socks, a couple of scarves, and one or two hats.  But for now, I’m not looking past my current WIPs.

Happy New Year to all.

 

Never the Write Time

For almost all of the fall, I’ve been occupied with work on the interior of my house. When I planned the renovations, I considered only the preparation and not the aftermath. In essence, I imagined that by now I’d be living “happily every after,” not wondering where I stuck essentials (most notably my underwear) or confronting boxes in need of unpacking.  But there is progress. We can now park in our garage, and I don't stumble over boxes on my way to the bathroom at night. I can visualize an organized end to the chaos. 

The floor refinishing, electrical work, and painting not only put blogging on the back burner, but it eliminated any chance that it would happen.

This was my office around 5 weeks ago after the floor were sanded and stained and when most of the electrical work was done.  The computer is under the drop cloth protected from the wall paint.

This is what it looks like today, as I devote this weekend to revamping my filing system and finding homes for all the supplies.  Now that I have ceiling lights, I think the el cheapo Wal-Mart desk lamp is going to go.  Then it will be on to getting some new shelves and putting up some pictures.

All of September was devoted to packing up every stick of furniture and every stitch of clothing and transporting the boxes to the garage, attic, or basement.  A lot was thrown away too and donated to Good Will. If anything, this was a real wakeup call for someone who has packrat-like tendencies. The floor sanding and refinishing began in early October, during which time the birds were boarded so they wouldn’t die from the smell.  We did not manage to survive the smell either, and spent much of October in a motel (with the world’s slowest Internet connection).

At first, I thought that the time “off” would be a blessing.  I could do all my fall garden chores and shop for things like shoes that require trying on.  But it rained almost every day, or the garden was a mud puddle on the days when it didn’t, so the garden chores waited until we got home.  In all, we were good and bored by time we could move in again.

Our delight at moving back in and sleeping in our own beds was brief. We couldn’t move much out of the storage locations because the electricians and painters were coming, and the birds had to go back to the vet for boarding so the paint smell didn’t do them in.  I also spent time hauling my fabric and yarn stash from the laundry area that has tile floors (no floor or electrical work) but would be painted.  So here it is in the center of my spare room, which is almost, officially my sewing and knitting room. 

Pre-painting:

Post-painting:

That room now has a ceiling light (but no fixture because it is on order), and it will have indoor shutters in a few short weeks. I need more shelves for the sewing notions and the boxes of books still in cartons, but it is shaping up.

The closet will be remodeled with shelves to house my knitting stash, which I just placed inside the old closet to see how it will look.

Knitting has happened for all this time, and because I haven’t written about it, there are lots of posts forthcoming about my progress.  I’ve had fewer knitting hours than usual, but I’ve been working away at night, if only to retain the shreds of sanity that were left.  On the needles now is the Helena children’s sweater/dress from Knitty, which is a present for a member of my knitting group.  It is at junctures like this in my progress on children’s clothing that DH always feels sorry for the poor one-armed baby who will receive the item. I just roll my eyes in response.

The yarn is KnitPick’s Swish DK (superwash).  Despite the size of the stash, I have very little that is suitable for children’s sweaters, and this was a purchase from KnitPick’s CyberMonday sale.  It is nice yarn to knit with—very soft and pleasant to the touch.  It is the discontinued parrot colorway.

There’s still more to do inside (fireplace repair, new furniture), but my routine—which includes blogging—is close to being restored.  And now that I’m such a roll with renovations, I might just redo the blog itself.   

As Luck Would Have It

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, and miraculously I sustained no serious damage.  In fact, storms of much lesser magnitude have been more destructive for me than this one. Last year’s Halloween snowstorm left me without power for three days. Now that I see what Sandy has wrought, I have stopped complaining about that outage.  Parts of my municipality are still without power, and some won’t have it restored until the weekend.  And this is hardly as serious as the problems many in New York City and New Jersey are facing.  I’m truly grateful that I was spared.

A few large tree limbs fell around my garden, lots of leaves came off the trees (so much for this year’s fall foliage), and shingles blew in from my neighbor’s roof.  But we’re still eating garden-fresh carrots, and there is a bit of spinach.

Nature does appear to be telling me that it is folly to grow Brussels sprouts (lower right).  After battling cabbage loopers last year, and aphids for most of this growing season, Sandy just blew them over.  There’s a chance I’ll scrounge up a few sprouts eventually, but next year I’ll be planting fall lettuce and kale.

We did face some minor inconveniences.  Finding gasoline this weekend was an exercise in futility (supplies were restored yesterday).  I had some issues with my phone and Internet, possibly from the power glitches.  A Verizon tech saved the day by replacing my router. 

I’m wary of the nor’easter that is headed our way tomorrow.  There are some iffy limbs on some of the trees, and the prediction is for gusts of over 50 miles per hour with up to 5 inches of snow.  So the “big one” for me might just be on the horizon.

Luckily, I took a break from Mara to knit a scarf out of beautiful Zen Garden yarn (Serenity DK; 90% merino, 10% cashmere) for a gift. Zen Garden, whose website has tantalized me for a long time, had a booth at Stitches East.  Their yarns are even more spectacular in person than with my nose pressed to the monitor screen. (Unfortunately, I had to take this shot indoors, at night.)

The simple basketweave stitch is something I can manage by lantern light.  We’ve got all our storm gear handy from the hurricane, and I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be.

Duty Calls...Or Not

I haven’t needed a lot of reasons not to blog or, over the past month, not to knit, but I faced the mother of all excuses in November.  After receiving a summons for jury duty, and postponing it twice, I decided to bite the bullet and agree to serve.  Lest I sound unpatriotic, let me point out that I have been summoned as a juror three times before, and I have served on juries each time.  This summons was different, however, because it was for federal court in Manhattan—a two-hour ride each way, with the specter of being impaneled for an unspecified time.  I’d have to be on a 6:30 AM train to arrive at the court on time. A perk of freelancing is not getting on commuter trains before the crack of dawn, and at that time, I am typically sipping chamomile tea and reading the newspaper.  And as a freelancer, I receive no income except for the pittance that compensates jurors.  All in all, the prospect of losing the income and having my routine turned upside down for weeks on end threw me into a tizzy.  Things seemed even more discouraging when I called the court to see if knitting needles, like cell phones, laptops, or any other electronic devices, were prohibited—and they are.  So even my most positive fantasy of knitting on the train and during the countless hours waiting around for the court to be in session was dashed.

Before I learned about the knitting needles, I went through a series of mental projects that would be ok for train knitting, and I finally settled on hats.  All members of my household need them, especially Ed.  I had knitted Ed a ribbed watchcap some years ago, but it never fit him right.  It always popped up in the center in an unattractive way.  As a replacement, I decided to make another hat that had more fabric around the crown, selecting the plain watchcap from Charlene Schurch’s Hats On! book.  I also had the perfect yarn in my stash—undyed, handspun gifted to me by my Ravelry pal, Chere.  (Chere and I had actually worked together on a book—she was the staff editor and I was the freelancer—long before we knew that we were both knitters.  We “met” in the Knitters in Publishing group.)  Even before jury duty started, I finished the hat:

 

It is everything Ed could want—yet another gray garment, something warm and comfortable.  It was a joy to work with the yarn, and I think that the plainness of the hat shows the handspun look of the yarn at its best. 

I received the new summons to appear the Monday after Thanksgiving, but surprisingly enough, when I called in to see if I had to report to the courthouse, the message said to call in Tuesday.  On Tuesday, it said to call in on Friday for the following week, and on Friday, it told me not to come in at all!  So this year, the gift of time is something I'm truly thankful for, and I can get back to knitting as usual.  If I'm diligent with this week's knitting, I’ll finish Sirdal's sleeve and be ready to steek. 

Of course, I now have to do all the things I said I’d do “when jury duty is over,” but I think I can deal with that.

 

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

Hurricane Irene did not fulfill the dire forecasts, at least not for me.  Although it rained steadily through the night and morning, the winds never picked up sufficiently for the nearby trees to fall—although they did fall across some of our major roads, and there was flooding for lower elevations.  I took in the jar I use as a rain gauge to avoid having it blow around, so I’m not sure how much rain we got, but I’m guessing it was around 6 to 8 inches.

By 11 am the sun peeked out, and I was able to check the damage to the garden. 

Although there are puddles everywhere, the dry and beautiful weather we’re supposed to get for the rest of the week ought to perk up nearly everything (except my newly emerging spinach, which may need replanting). And by next weekend, I hope to pull the broccoli (back left) and put in my transplants. 

Some plants seem as if nothing happened.  My beans appeared to enjoy themselves, and there’s enough to pick for another dinner should the leaves dry out today.

The peppers are regrouping for another crop, some of which will join the 37 stuffed peppers now in my freezer.

And I will have more tomatoes.

I don’t know why the vines grew so high this year.  Those cages are 6-feet tall.

I should enjoy my first row of carrots soon, but those soaker hoses won’t be put to much use. 

It is too wet to take any outdoor knitting pictures, but my shawl, Fiori di Sole, is about half done, and there are assorted UFOs that need attention. Knitting content will return shortly.

 

Taken by Storm

I’m sitting here, now that I’ve made all the preparations I can think of, waiting for the arrival of Hurricane Irene. I’ve lived through other East Coast hurricanes but not in the era of 24-hour news shows and web coverage.  So although this one seems worse than most, the sense of impending doom is much greater than in the past, when we simply knew “it would get here.”  In fact, my first memories of a New York hurricane have almost nothing to do with the hurricane itself.  When Hurricane Hazel hit back in 1955, I spent the night with my grandparents.  I was only 7 or 8, but I remember it being very dark and rainy, with windows rattling.  The image that has stayed with me was my midnight trip to the bathroom, when I saw a small, pink, cylindrical container on the sink.  Not satisfied to leave well enough alone, I opened it to find my grandfather’s teeth—and I was so scared that I ran back to bed and hid under the covers.  And I never mentioned this to anyone, until years later, well into adulthood, when I confided it to my mother. 

The constant coverage of Hurricane Irene, along with clips of winds damaging houses and trees falling on roads and cars (along with the specter of the far more powerful Katrina), has gotten me spooked a bit.  My house is on a hill, and although I’m not looking forward to the predicted 10 to 12 inches of rain, I should experience little flood damage.  But the winds could cause havoc because of the many tall trees.  We removed some dying locust trees like these:

but my next-door neighbor has not.  Now when I wake up at night, I think of the damage those downed trees can cause, and the forthcoming days with no power.  It takes a lot less than 50- or 60-mph winds to knock out our power, and restoring it to such a huge area after Irene will take time.

So for now, I seem to be obsessing about the damage I can imagine—and it too is about as serious in the scheme of things as my grandfather’s dentures.  My poor garden, which I’ve coaxed and nurtured since the spring, may succumb to the wind and rain.  It is ironic that this is happening just as my tomatoes are ripening en masse.

I’ve picked all I can, even the not really ready ones, because I think those may be all I get.

The growing season was a challenge.  Cucumber beetles destroyed my cucumbers and most summer squash.  Only one yellow squash continued valiantly to bear, and to give us a small but regular supply, despite its powdery mildew affliction.  But I think the squash I picked this morning will be the last. 

The 100° heat at the end of July caused my broccoli to turn yellow before the heads got very big, but the side shoots that are still coming have been quite delicious.  I have new broccoli transplants ready to go in, but the last few weekends have been too rainy.  The July heat also delayed my peppers and eggplant, but we did get beautiful peppers after all, as well as beans and more beans. It has been a great bean year.

Before that really hot week, we enjoyed our Chiogga beets and the greens

and picked a great crop of onions.

If the hurricane damage is not as bad as I fear, I’ll be planting that fall broccoli, chard, and lettuce.  And the carrots that are looking good, but not ready yet, should get us through September.  And this might be the first year I get successful Brussels sprouts.

So for now, I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll make it through, and it is time to check again (for the hundredth time) to see if there’s a change in the computer model that has the storm going directly over my patch of the world.

 

Disconnected, Discharged, and Discombobulated

This past weekend has not been the most conducive to knitting or modern life in general.  On Friday afternoon my neighbor packed up his van to transport his wife and three kids to some vacation spot.  He is a bike rider, and his bikes were mounted in a rack atop the vehicle—where they caught onto my fiber-optic cable and ripped it from the side of my house as he drove the van out of his driveway.  In an instant, I had no phone and no Internet.

I can tell you from personal experience that the allure of being unplugged is not the delight that one might suppose.  In fact, it is a huge PIA, especially when one is supposed to transmit finished work electronically.  The other issue is that Verizon is on strike, and getting a repair scheduled is a rather daunting experience.  After an hour on hold (my red-faced neighbor allowed me to use his phone for this negotiation), a repair was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.  And by Tuesday evening, I was back, happily, in cyberspace (reading, not so happily, the 100 or so email messages that had collected). 

I can now state without hesitation that I have a serious Ravelry addiction.  Four days without looking at FOs, new yarns, old yarns, and visiting the forums has been torture.  And I’ve missed my blog reading too.  I couldn’t check the hourly weather (although it hardly mattered since it rained almost every minute of Sunday and Monday and I could see exactly what was going on) or news.  

But, I figured we could live our disconnected life almost normally, until I tried, on Sunday, to make the two-minute drive to the knitting group I joined recently. I turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened.  My neighbor told us that if we could piggyback on his network connection, we could use it until our connection was restored.  This appealed to my son, who is a devotee of online word games, and, because you can’t see their front door from our house, he decided to wait in our car for our neighbors to return home from a dinner out prior to their departure.  He turned on the car lights to read, and waited for an hour.  It also appears he forgot to turn the lights off.  And it turns out that our neighbor’s signal is too weak, so the whole thing was a waste of time. Part of Monday was spent getting a jumpstart for our car—not something on DH’s to do list.   

This also was the weekend I decided to take photos of yarns, so I could finally post some stash pictures on Ravelry, and pictures of my WIPs so I could formally qualify for the Summer of Lace KAL prizes.  The torrential rain (only about 4 inches for us, as opposed to a foot at points south) made that impossible because there was no light, and a stupid mistake eliminated several days of presumed progress on my shawl.  The pouring rain was also the reason I couldn’t walk to the knitting group. 

I finished the shoulder flower area of Fiori di Sole with only one minor glitch, but now that I’m in the easy, repetitive part, I’ve had six rows to rip to fix the dumbest of mistakes.  It took me an evening to tink back, and now I think it is time to pay a bit more attention.

What should I do to express my pleasure at being online again?  Well, posting more regularly certainly seems in order.  

 

Having My Cake

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  It just seems like a time to enjoy yourself and relax.  I don’t have a big family, and so the holiday simply entails goofing off a little and making a meal that we wouldn’t have time for on an ordinary day.  In particular, it gives me a chance to cook.   I like to cook, but DH does most of the routine cooking, and so making a meal always is fun. 

I usually start the day with some reflection of thanks, but this seems like an awesome proposition.  If I just look at the front page of the paper and consider that, unlike so many others, I haven’t had to face a natural disaster over the course of the year, or military action, or rampant disease, any problem I’ve thought I had disappears.  So I set my sights on smaller things.  If “thanks” isn’t the proper word, then I’m “glad” that my El Molino cookbook, which had been misplaced, turned up in my pre-house-repair reorganization.  There are a few recipes in this book that are truly wonderful, and I’ll share a favorite in this post.

I bought this cookbook, which is now out of print, at some point in the mid-70s, and like so many other “vintage” things, it is going for an absurdly high price on eBay or used book sites.  

I used it when I began to bake bread, once I realized I could knead dough in the earliest model Cuisinart.  And there’s a great recipe for honey-oatmeal bread in this cookbook that is covered with stains.  [A goal for 2011 is to convert it to a bread machine recipe.]  The recipe that has nearly as many stains on its page is the one for carrot cake:

El Molino Honey Carrot Cake

2 ½ cups whole wheat pastry flour	1 cup oil
2 teaspoons baking powder	1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda	2/3 cup honey
½ teaspoon salt	4 eggs
1 teaspoon cinnamon	2 cups grated raw carrots
	1 cup finely chopped nuts

Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.  In electric mixer bowl, combine oil and sugar; mix well.  Add one cup of the sifted dry ingredients; blend.  Add remaining dry ingredients alternately with the honey and eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition.  Add grated carrots and mix well; then mix in chopped nuts.  Pour into a well-oiled Bundt pan.  Bake at 325 degrees.

 

I use the Cuisinart (a newer model than my first) to chop the carrots, first using the shredding blade and then the “regular” blade to mince the carrots finely.

 

Once the carrots are peeled and chopped, the rest of the recipe is, well, a piece of cake.  It makes for a very wet batter, shown here poured into a 9-cup Bundt pan.  Because it is hard to find a Bundt pan without a no-stick interior, I only greased it lightly (with butter).  I use canola oil for the cake. 

And, I wasn’t disappointed:

 This cake is so delicious that I have never put frosting on it, and it appears to freeze well. 

What else did I do on Thanksgiving?  Some knitting was involved, but I did, at last, get to play with my new sewing machine.  The fruits of my labor will be on view in my next post.

I hope your Thanksgiving was as much fun as mine.