Exotic Tastes

Question: What do tomatoes, ginger, peanut butter, and chickpeas all have in common?

Answer: They are all in my stomach... at the same time--on purpose!--as part of this crazy soup I just made.

Hungry?

Oh yeah, and don't forget about the curry powder, cayenne pepper, scallions, onions, or cilantro... Talk about sinus-clearing! This is the African Peanut Soup from the Weight Watcher's New Complete Cookbook and it is quite tasty. The recipe made a lot but I fear the Fiasco won't like it. He's not much into Indian/Thai/curry-flavored foods and that's almost exactly what this is. Woops. I like it, but I'm not sure I eat-for-dinner-for-the-rest-of-the-week-like it. But you can't hate a recipe that pretty much goes "open some cans, chop some things, put them in a food processor, cook for 5 minutes in a pot". Love 'em like that. The cookbook is actually fantastic. The recipes are tasty and varied (obviously) and it really helps to have all of the nutritional information broken down. Between tracking everything I ate and getting 1-2 hours plus of exercise every day, I lost four pounds this week! I've been very on-again-off-again with keeping track of food for the past several months but this last week's results has convinced me to give "on" the old college try... again. Sigh.

In other news, look what arrived in the mail today?

All hail the giant knitting tome!

It's a good thing I like textbooks because damn this thing is huge! (Yarn cake with my next sock design shown for scale.) There has been a lot of hype about this book, apparently it was hugely popular and out of print for a long time. Now the auther, June Hemmons Hiatt, has revamped the entire thing and I honestly can't wait to read it. I'm fine with winging things if it's for my own knitting, but now that I'm writing patterns for other people to follow I want to make sure that I'm Doing Things Correctly. I know, I know, "there are no knitting police", but there are efficient and clever ways to do things and I want to take advantage of any resource that I can to make sure I'm familiar with them. I'm unfortunately not lucky enough to have a sweet old grandma who's been knitting for decades and has all sorts of tips and tricks filed away. I must research to learn such things and this book seems like the ultimate primary source. A more in-depth review will follow just as soon as I can get beyond its pretty cover and giant size.

Oh yeah, I've also added my patterns to Craftsy! For those of you who are unfamiliar, Craftsy is an online community for all sorts of crafters: from sewing to knit/crocheting, jewelry-making to baking, home decor to paper cutting. Not only is there a pattern store but there are also a bunch of online classes you can take. I haven't dug too deeply into it just yet but it looks really, really cool (although I do feel a little bit like I'm cheating on Ravelry!). Has anybody else used Craftsy? What do you like best about it?

And two more things in blogland I'd like to tell you about:
1) Julie Matthews over at Knitting At Large blogged about a huge "hurt book" sale going on at the Interweave website starting tomorrow. Sounds like a good opportunity to enhance the book stash!
2) and there is HANDSPUN BEAR FIBER over at Fleegle's blog. C'mon, you can't not click.