Rips

It's red current season here in Norway! It is always a joy to see these cheery, sour little berries hiding coyly under the leaves:

To celebrate, I made a batch of scones using the recipe from a blog called Kitchen Sketches, which is maintained by another American expat living in Europe. The scones turned out great, and I really recommend the recipe. I had a hard time getting a picture since they kept getting gobbled up:

I had to be quite firm with my family so as to be able to take this snapshot! I wasn't sure they'd work, as I didn't use fresh berries. Instead, I took a cup of the leftovers from making a small batch of red current jelly. But even with all the juice drained out of them, these eviscerated berries still tasted juicy and flavorful in the scones.

The jelly itself is so pretty that I had to put it in a cut glass jelly bowl:

Not sure that it turned out as well as last year, as I think I may have over cooked it. Can you over cook jelly? The drips off the spoon didn't look at all like the picture in my cookbook, but eventually, after about 45 minutes I just decided that it simply had to be done, no matter how it dripped, and indeed it seems to be setting up nicely. With such a small amount (4 cups of berries makes 2 cups of juice which ends up being about a cup and a half of jelly), we're just going to use it fresh and not bother with canning. Since I didn't have a jelly strainer, I decided to make one yesterday. Neither KE nor my Mom thought it was going to work, but both grudgingly admitted that my improvised frame and strainer ended up doing the trick. I felt totally vindicated about my simple design:

It's something that I'll probably only use one day a year, but even so it's nice to have a piece of equipment that does the job right.

With my Mom visiting this week there's been lots of opportunity to sit and chat and knit, so I've made a lot of progress on the Bulgarian Pleated Skirt. There are only about 2 centimeters to go before binding off, but I can't resist putting up a photo to show the progress:

Such a clever pattern. It's been a gas to knit, and I think it will be great to wear this fall with wool tights, a wool sweater, and tall boots. I just wish I could capture the color, since the green is so much richer than this.

På bærtur

På bærtur ("on a berry trip") is one of my favorite expressions in Norwegian. It is the rough equivalent of "barking up the wrong tree" in English. At any rate, I really was on a berry trip today, but only in our yard. We have about a half acre that used to be wooded. A lot of it is still "undeveloped" and much to my delight there are quite a few types of wild berries. We have wild strawberries, wild raspberries, a few wild blueberries, and two or three different types of wild cherries. None of them produce all that much, and the fruit is quite small, but it's still pretty darned cool to be able to graze like a denizen of the bronze age in one's own little territory.

Still slow going on the eyelet cardigan. I'm almost to the point were I can divide for the fronts and back. The bottom edge is driving me crazy because it flips up. I've never quite understood why some edges do that and some don't. I think it has something to do with the number of rows of whatever edging you're using (in this case garter stitch). This is such slow knitting that I have no plans to rip this out and re-do it, so it will just have to be that way. Very irritating!

I stained the piece of furniture that we used to have the tv on, and was thus able to free what will be my desk from the living room, where it had been serving as a temporary tv stand. The stained dresser looks okay, though I'm not totally excited about it (but it will certainly do for a good long while). This morning KE very sweetly moved the desk into my little work room, so I can finally get started on setting that up!

Not much going on here as yet. I'm still combing www.finn.no for used book cases with glass doors, but haven't found any yet. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be stored, but I'm really hoping to avoid going the IKEA-route yet again...