Green Tea, Cold Comfort Farm, Lace leaf cravat and Sophie Dahl's potato pancakes.

The weather is wonderful and knitting hasn't been a curled-up-on-the-sofa cosy pastime but a kicked-of-shoes sitting cross legged on a rug in the garden one. Whilst sipping ginger or green tea with honey to comfort a summer cold. Happily propped up with an armful of books from the library, where I'm finding myself spending lots of time and borrowing more than I'll ever be able to read before they're due back.


I've been pouring over the pages of 'from season to season' a lovely recipe book from Sophie Dahl.  I not only like her style of cooking because of the ingredients she uses but also for  the thread of family anecdotes woven through the recipes. The cosy memory of family and food. I can't wait to try out the coconut and crab rice with lime and coriander, for a special supper.  I've already made potato pancakes. Although we didn't have them with salmon and cucumber/dill salad. But the way SD remembers having them every Hogmanay in Edinburgh with her Scottish nanny's parents for breakfast with fried eggs and mushrooms, although with poached for me...scrumptious...well I thought so  but 'A' wasn't so keen. I think he prefers pikelets and commented on how "I do like to experiment with new recipes don't I ?"


I'm also reading Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Published in 1932 and for some reason reminds me of my favourite 'I Capture the Castle' by Dodi Smith...Maybe because the main protagonists are young women of the same social standing and both novels were set and written around the same time in crumbling historical buildings and recently impoverished circumstances. I also think that there's an element of trying to solve others problems that I really like.  Obviously written with tongue-in-cheek involving lots of stereotype. I'm enjoying the gentle humour and accounts of idyllic, as well as  not so idyllic rural life. 


Knitting has been using up odds of yarn to make lovely lace leaf cravats. It's a sweet little scarf pattern in Teva Durham's 
Loop-d-Loop Lace book, also from the library.  It takes one hundred gramme skein of yarn and knits up really quickly. I made mine a little longer adding on the reapeat pattern in the main body of the scarf.  The pattern called for Cascade 220 100% wool. I can't decide whether to get the straw or turtle...maybe both..so meanwhile have made a couple with oddments of wool left over from other projects.  Another winning stocking filler pattern.


I'm linking over to join with Ginny's yarn along again today...are you coming?