New Pattern, rice pudding, and Butterick 5744

I actually accomplished stuff this weekend. Holy cow.

For starters, I went to Goodwill to drop off a box of stuff. That always feels good, but I went in to look around a bit and came home with four balls of teal wool-blend yarn and two pencil skirts. I've never owned a pencil skirt before. I feel like I'm playing dress-up in Mom's clothes, even though I'm thirty-three and I don't believe my mother has owned a pencil skirt since high school.

One is light gray and one is purple, and they fit like they were tailored for me, which is bizarre. I have waist-to-hip ratio problem* that makes fitted skirts a virtual impossibility. My only thought is that they must have belonged to ladies--the same lady?--who had a similar figure trait and had them fitted to herself.

*OK, I have a big butt. Well, big hips, but, invariably, if the hips fit, the waist is huge, and if the waist should fit, I can't pull it over my hips. Having both measurements fit in a skirt that's not a dirndl, a circle, or at least semi-circular, does not happen without alterations.

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Then, I went home and made rice pudding. There are lots of schools of thought on rice pudding but, in the U.S., they mainly fall into the "mostly rice" camp and the "lots of custard" camp. I grew up in the "mostly rice" camp: My mother used a recipe that she got from a classmate's mother, using water and sweetened condensed milk and a whole lot of rice. You get a dry, cake-like pudding that can be eaten for breakfast as much as for dessert. Actually, I prefer it as a breakfast dish. Dessert seems to invite the addition of sauces or whipped cream, and I don't like frou-frou on my rice pudding. I'll never forget ordering rice pudding at Katz's Deli in Austin after A2K, sometime on December 31st, 1999/January 1, 2000, and having it arrive straight from the "lots of custard" camp, dressed in cinnamon, strawberry sauce, and whipped cream. Seriously one of the biggest culinary disappointments of my life.

(The third school is the "exotic" school, which includes sutlac, rizogalo, and kheer. A whole other category of awesome right there.)

I used the Allrecipes recipe. I cut the recipe in half and used two eggs, since our current batch of eggs are home-laid ones from Pam-from-Louisiana's chickens and are rather small. They're colored eggs; I kind of hated to break them, but eggs have to be eaten at some point.

Ignore the comments. These people didn't know what they were looking for. It states very clearly in the recipe that it should be baked until a knife comes out clean, which should have told them that it would be a dry, solid, pudding, and not a pudding-y pudding. And yet they're still complaining and claiming the recipe is "wrong".

I find it interesting that there are so many references to this as a "Southern-style" rice pudding, since it's the type my mother makes and she's from New Jersey. I don't believe that the lady from whom she got her recipe was southern, either. Hmm.

This is the result. Mine looks better than Allrecipes' does, I think:

But regardless of what it looks like, it's absolutely addictive. Thank goodness I only made a half recipe so that, in the event my self-control took a leave of absence, I wouldn't end up rolling on the floor, stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey. I could easily have gone through the entire dish in one sitting.

It's very rice-y and just lightly sweet. It also tastes just a bit buttery even though it has no butter, which I assume is from the egg yolks. The yolks must also give it that awesome yellow color, because everything else in it except the raisins is white. I forgot the nutmeg.

According to Calorie Count, the Allrecipes version is 130 calories per serving, if the recipe as written serves 12. My half-recipe would have served six very reasonably, so I don't feel like there was any skimping going on in the name of calorie reduction. (I used skim milk.) Even the planned version with more eggs and milk would be a hair under 200 calories per serving at six servings, assuming I use as much sugar and as many raisins as recommended, which I may not since I don't like to have a lot of raisins baked into things. We'll see. It might also serve more. Even if it doesn't 200 calories for a major breakfast component is not bad.

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On the sewing front, I dug Butterick 5744 (1952?) out of the closet. I started cutting this ages ago, got bogged down and discouraged, and mothballed it. It had already gone too far, though, to change it to a different project, so I just picked it up and went on.

This pattern claims to be "one size fits 12-20", which would have been busts 30-38 in the early 1950's. If that claim raises your eyebrows, well, you're a sensible woman. I don't think even Lycra covers that many sizes at once.

I still have to do some handwork and sew the buttons on, but I'm 99.5729% sure that if I ever make this again, it will need serious reengineering. I'm a bust 34, right in the middle of the size range, and I'm 5'7" tall (two or three inches taller than the current national average), and the bodice is too long and too big. A dainty little 12 could end up flashing the neighbors while she was hanging her laundry. I'm hoping it improves a little once the buttons are on and I'm not fudging the fit so much, but I'm not going to get my hopes up.

I might add darts to the back to keep it from pooching so much above the ties. Oh, and the bias binding on the ties? They lie. Bad idea. I did it, but I shouldn't have. Oh, well. I actually lost my instruction sheet so I have no idea if the ties were supposed to be one thickness or two of fabric (so that the pattern would show on both sides). I did two for the sake of appearance but, again, bad idea. Maybe it will soften in the wash?

It needs longer waist ties, too.

I need to see if I can fudge a version of Advance 5722, which looks like it would fit better.

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I won Advance 4603 (1940's) on Saturday.

I got outbid on one of these a few years ago. This one is a wartime fabric-saver design, which is why the skirt is relatively short and narrow, and the bodice is cut out of awkward panels. It's sort of the Citroën 2CV of dresses.

I thought it looked familiar, though, and discovered that I had this other image in my Flickr collection:

The bodice is the same but--and this might be artistic license--the skirt appears to be longer and possibly a little more full. Did they redesign it post-war, when fabric restrictions were lifted, and just keep the old pattern number?

Now I want one of each to compare them.

Update: Advance 4603 #2 acquired! Redundant, but I think it's necessary for educational purposes, right? Right?? I know y'all agree with me.

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And, of course, no weekend spent sewing would be complete without movies.

I watched through my backlog of recorded "MythBusters" and "Ghost Adventures" episodes. Yeah, "Ghost Adventures". The truth is that I watch that so I can see the insides of abandoned hospitals and sanitaria. I'm not kidding. I'm that big a history and architecture nerd.

The guys on the show, though, are a pack of muscle-bound morons. Apart from the semi-literate narration, apparent lack of any solid historical research beforehand, and not-really-logical investigation methods, I will never understand why they go looking for ghosts and then jump around and scream like little girls when they think they find them. I guess that makes for better television but it kind of spoils my creepy-old-building-watching experience.

Turner Classics had a bunch of good stuff on. Well, some of it was good.

The Rocking Horse Winner (1949): Based on the D.H. Lawrence story, which I read in school about a million years ago, and of which I remembered the general premise but not the particulars. Maybe it's my filthy modern brain talking, but this is a Freudian story if ever there was one. I'm not sure it could be made today without getting some warnings attached.

Lydia (1941): Had some good actors, including Joseph Cotton, but was basically a mildly interesting story made into a boring movie. Lydia should have married Michael (Cotton), I think; I disagreed that she said he saw her as "an angel". He knew her as a bratty teenager and loved her anyway. Whatever. The surprise was that Richard, the "true love" in hopes of whose attentions she passed over her other suitors, arrives at the reunion but doesn't remember her, because their relationship was a fling to him.

In This Our Life (1942): Far better than Lydia, but still primarily a vehicle for Olivia de Havilland looking saintly and Bette Davis flexing her hateful shrew muscles. OK, more like a hateful shrew bodybuilding show in this case.

Daisy Kenyon (1947): Probably the most interesting thing I saw all weekend. I mostly watched it to see Peggy Ann Garner and Dana Andrews. Andrews is a horse's patootie in this movie, but that's kind of the point. Henry Fonda's more conflicted character is a lot more interesting. I kind of felt like Joan Crawford was too much car for the role. In a modern movie, she would have given up both men and built a new life, but I guess that wasn't an acceptable outcome in 1947, so she stays with Peter (Fonda). I'm not sure I can think of an actress who says "wife" to me less than Joan Crawford, though; she makes much more sense in tough career-woman roles.