Technically, yogurt with the extra liquid drained off is called "labneh," but since I'm a little fuzzy on how you pronounce that, I'm just going to call it "drained yogurt."

Yeah, I know--nobody wants to hear about stuff to do with yogurt, especially not sour, hippie-flavored, plain yogurt. Humor me here.

Drained yogurt
Tub of yogurt (Any kind will do. Doesn't need to be fancy. Fat-free is fine.)
Clean handkerchief
Wooden spoon/dowel/something long and skinny
Tall pitcher
Colander or bowl

Lay the handkerchief flat in a colander or bowl. Dump the tub of yogurt into the handkerchief. Tie two of the diagonal corners together above the plop of yogurt. Lay the spoon or dowel over the knot in the handkerchief and tie the other two diagonal corners together over the spoon-handle, to make a sort of bindle full of yogurt. Tie it up snugly. Lower the bindle of yogurt into the pitcher so that it is suspended from the spoon, which should be across the top of the pitcher. The handkerchief should not touch the bottom of the pitcher. Put it in the fridge and let it drain overnight.

The results will be like soft, tangy, cream cheese, and can be used in place of sour cream in spreads or dips. Even fat-free yogurt will end up surprisingly creamy. It's also good with a little bit of honey stirred in.

* * * * * * * * *

Feta Cheese Spread (or dip)

3/4 cup drained yogurt
3/4 cup feta cheese, finely minced or crumbled
2 tablespoons onion juice and pulp (Squeeze some chopped onion through a garlic press.)
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 teaspoons parsley flakes
1 teaspoon lemon and/or lime juice

Combine thoroughly and let stand in the refrigerator overnight.

Great with tomato slices on Triscuits.

Chickpea Ragout

I stole this from Emeril Lagasse and made it better. His didn't have squash, bay, or thyme. Loser.

1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained (or 2 cups of soaked chickpeas)
1 can tomatoes (or 2 cups diced tomatoes)
1 medium onion, chopped
1 zucchini, 1/2" chop
1 yellow squash, 1/2" chop
(or substitute 1 eggplant for zucchini and squash. Or you could probably use other vegetables. I think carrots and/or cauliflower might be good.)
1/2 bay leaf
thyme, salt, and pepper
1 tablespoon oil
1/2 cup vegetable or chicken broth

Heat oil in pan or large frying pan. Soften onion. Add squash and cook a little. Add everything else EXCEPT thyme and pepper. Cook, covered, until squash is starting to look translucent, then uncover, add thyme and pepper, and cook a little more until some of the liquid evaporates. Don't overdo it, though, or your squash will be pulp, which is neither appetizing nor nutritious.

Pick out bay leaf before serving.

I like this with bread and cheese or a hard-boiled egg.

Easy Savory Sweet Potatoes

I thought for the longest time that I hated sweet potatoes. I actually felt a little guilty about this since so many people seem to like them, and they're good for you, and I generally like vegetables and starches. The first time I ate them was in pie, which I didn't realize was sweet potato pie; I thought it was pumpkin pie with NutraSweet, and that really put me off them.

It turns out, I just don't like sweet potatoes with sugar on them. This should have been obvious since I already didn't like three-bean salad, honey mustard dressing, and other instances of sugar-on-vegetables, but it took me 30 years to figure it out.

2 medium sweet potatoes
1 medium onion (I like white or yellow onions)
a little oil
salt and pepper

Scrub the potatoes. I don't peel them. You can if you want, but I think peeling stuff that doesn't actually need to be peeled is a lot of extra work for nothing. Besides, peel is good fiber.

Cut potatoes into bite-sized cubes. Whatever you consider to be bite-sized. One-inch-ish.

Put the cubes in a pot, cover them with water, and boil them briefly. You don't need to cook them completely, you just need to get them started. This will only take a few minutes so be careful not to overcook them.

While you're boiling the potatoes, heat a little oil in a heavy pot or frying pan. I use 1-2 tablespoons in a well-seasoned cast-iron pan.

Quarter the onion and then slice it thinly (or not. However you like your onion). Fry until the onion is clear and maybe a little golden or brown. Again, your choice.

Drain the sweet-potato cubes well and add them to the frying pan. Move them around to combine them with the onion and finish cooking them. They'll break up but they shouldn't be gruel if they haven't been overcooked and have been drained enough.

Season to taste. I could see a pinch of cayenne in this if you wanted a little more bite.

I've never tried freezing them, but if you put them in the fridge they reheat just fine.

Winter Dresses

It's that time of year again when I begin to wish that southeast Texas had seasons. Discernable seasons, at least. The joke is that we have Almost Summer, Summer, Little More Summer, and Christmas; Christmas looks just like the other three but has weird decorations (things like cowboy Santas riding in sleighs pulled by longhorn cattle).

What passes for "winter" here is usually my heavily air-conditioned office. It's always November at work! (Energy conservationists take note: The cold office is a necessity. I work in archives. We're basically a big refrigerator.)

It's not even supposed to be that cold this year. Last winter was cold (by regional standards) but this summer was miserably hot, and I hear that this winter is supposed to be very mild. Darn. Well, I'm going to Illinois for five days in mid-December; that ought to give me a good cold fix.

Anyway, this is the time of year I daydream of winter dresses. I got the one above--Folkwear 208, which is out of production; number 208 is now used for the child's Kinsale Cloak--on eBay after having looked for it for quite a while. It seems not to have been very popular when it was in production. I've only ever seen one example actually sewn up, which is a bit of a pity because' it's darned cute--cuter than in the picture, I think--and even looks sort of comfortable. The actual pattern I won is a later one; the cover is blue and the woman on the right is wearing a modernized version of the dress that has a shorter, just-below-the-knee skirt. I'll probably make the modern version for work, and possibly leave off the bodice ruffles. It's too late in style to use for most of my pioneer-ish music gigs, anyway.

I don't think my hair will do that Gibson Girl thing, though. Ha, ha.

This is the other dress pattern I keep thinking would be a good winter dress. I need to size it up, but not a lot. I'm not sure what kind of closure it has, either; possibly back buttons? I'll have to check; I don't remember. But it just looks as though it's begging to be made of flannel and then curled up in on chilly days.

Sooner or later, my perpetual-winter office is also going to push my minimal knitting skills over the line into sweater territory, too, out of sheer necessity. I can't find a good wool-blend sweater anywhere these days.

The Guinea Hens, a Tragi-Comedy

My mother has a friend who has this thing about guinea hens. We don't know why, but she's always had this sort of fascination with them. She and Mom are in quilt guild together. Mom did a "round robin" quilt thing once, where people sign up and pass around boxes with directions for what kind of quilt square they want, and everyone makes a square for them in turn. So you end up with a bunch of squares, each made by somebody in the round-robin group, that you can put together into a quilt. Mom asked for birds, and the friend gave her one with a folk-art guinea hen (this matters at the end of the story).

One day, she invited Mom over to see her "new pets." You guessed it--three guinea chicks. She had them set up in her bathroom in a Rubbermaid bin, under a heat lamp.

She kept them in the bathroom for awhile, but of course they grew and started to get too big for the bin. Then, they started getting out of the bin and making a big bird-mess in the bathroom whenever she left them alone.

One day, she was late leaving work and was trying to get home as fast as possible, knowing that the guineas would have destroyed the bathroom in the meantime and dreading the mess she'd have to clean up. When she opened the bathroom door--sure enough, the guineas had gotten out of the bin and there was bird poop everywhere.

Worse, one of them had fallen in the toilet and drowned.

She gave the two survivors to her sister, who lives in a semi-rural area and has room for chickens.



Mom took the guinea-hen quilt square, cut the guinea out of it, and appliquéd it onto a toilet-seat cover to give her in memory of her bird experiment.

Knitting, knitting

I'm not dead, I've just been knitting.

I'm getting closer to finished on the doll shawl. I'm trying to get a minimum of six rows finished per lunch hour, but sometimes I don't accomplish that.

I'm still working on the red/blue/maize shawl but it's so big that it takes a lot of work to make any progress. Eight rows only adds about an inch to the length, but since it's 33 inches wide it takes a while to get that much done, even though it's just plain knit, knit, knit, all the way across. It's 56 inches long. I think the gray-and-black Icelandic wool shawl is either 60 or 70 (I forget offhand), and I'd like the new shawl to be longer than that.

Hallowe'en-y

Some randomness for Hallowe'en:

Prairie Ghosts: American hauntings. Actually, a pretty good site. Has a good page with a more correct account of the Myrtles Plantation.

Ghoststudy: I continue to think that most "ghost" photos are condensation, fast-moving insects, reflections, etc., but the galleries here are fun nonetheless.

The Moonlit Road: Fictional Southern ghost stories.

and . . .

Nightmare on Your Street (Lizzy Ratner, the New York Times)