Weekend cooking and knitting

My fair-isle beret is coming along nicely. It is a lot of fun to knit because I keep changing colors and patterns, but it is easy enough to do while watching Pirates of the Caribbean, The Matador, and the PBS Masters series on Andy Warhol. Fair-isle is pretty easy, though I still need to work on the technique, so I can do it faster. But for this project it's not such a big deal. Notice that in this shot I am working three colors at once (!) This is giving me confidence to maybe try lace knitting again, though the concentration factor is still an issue.

It's been a cloudy weekend, so that means lots of good food in the house. I got out my frozen pizza dough (last time I made it, I did a double batch of dough and sauce and froze them for a later date) and made an absolutely delicious homemade pizza, and got rid of some leftovers, too. We had some extra taco sauce from the Mexican Lasagna earlier in the week, so I just mixed it in with the pizza sauce for a southwestern tang. I thinly sliced a couple of garlic cloves and added some mushroom slices, mozzarella cheese and leftover ground turkey meat with taco seasonings in it, and when the pizza was done, I sprinkled some green onions on it. Served with yummy margaritas and a movie, and we had ourselves a great Friday night at home. Emboldened by my finally successful pizza-making endeavor, I made up a couple more batches of dough to freeze, this time using my Kitchen Aid mixer's dough hook to do the kneading for me. This made it much less painless and messy than last time, and in no time flat, we had a couple of potential pizzas ready to pull out on a busy weeknight.

I also wanted to try my new cookie press, so I made a batch of spritz cookies. Again, we kept some out and froze the rest for later. The press came with a recipe for cheese crackers, which I will definitely have to try sometime. Juan, either out of boredom or fascination was behind me in the kitchen all day yesterday. First, he wanted to see how the dough hook would work with the dough, and ended up just taking over the whole operation. Then, when he saw me get out the cookie press and realized it was a gadget he had yet to try, took over that operation, too. The press was a little complicated at first to figure out (reading the directions thoroughly would have helped), but we finally got the hang of it, and soon had dozens of little sptriz cookies all over the place.