Food - Experiments in (healthy) carbs

Throughout the last couple of months I found that eating low-carb works out great for me. The amount of carbs I do eat I try to make "healthy" ones, as in whole grain and substituting wheat for other kinds of grain. Spelt has become rather popular around here so here go (in no particular order) my "experiments":

Whole grain spelt flour pancakes

Pancakes for a weekend's delicious breakfast. I've got this recipe from Celia Brooks Brown's book "International Vegetarisch". I substituted the flour for whole grain spelt flour on a 1:1 basis and it worked like a charm. The whole family loved the pancakes, each of them with their own favorite topping - be it blueberries (mine) or maple syrup or even Nutella *shudder* (out of a various number of reasons).

Whole grain spelt flour pancakes & blueberries

Whole grain wheat & spelt flour burger buns

The recipe for those buns comes from Hannah Frey's "Clean Eating" cookbook.  Again, substitute (parts of) the flour and maybe add some more liquid and you're off fine! For the beef patties I used one of Jamie Oliver's recipes, which turned out great for the adults but sadly were somewhat heavy on the pepper and too spicy for the kids. I sadly did not notice as I had lots of Jalapeños on my burger (I love love love hot/spicy food!) and will try to make better next time.

Whole grain wheat pizza dough

The ultimate family test/recipe? Pizza dough... I love the recipe I found on chefkoch.de a while back. It's pretty simple and straight forward and as my experience taught me only needs minor adjustments to work with whole grain flour. The original recipe asks for 450gr of flour which you can reduce by up to 1/10th and add a little bit more water to get a smooth texture. The rest? Just as noted, 200°C and 20-25mins in the oven. For my personal taste it worked like a charm. If you like your pizza what I call American style - use the indicated amounts and roll out the dough to the size of one big baking pan. If you like it Italiano - divide into two equal parts, roll out thin and make two pizzas (which I will try next time as my kids prefer the latter version).

Healthy breakfast

Last but not least - I found my favorite breakfast in the shape of Overnight Oats. Again inspired by Hannah Frey the perfect mixture for my taste consists of:

• 50gr of Muesli (Ja Natürlich! Basis Müesli)
• 10gr of chia seeds
• 200gr of low-fat plain yoghurt (Ja Natürlich! 1%)
• 60gr of frozen berries

On the evening before mix müesli, seeds and yoghurt together, top with frozen berries, close container and store in the fridge. In the morning - take container, mix it all through and enjoy. Easy as that! <3

Spelt oat porridge

My son in particular loves this recipe for breakfast on the weekends. Again it's one of Celia Brown Brooks' recipes from the "Clean Eating" cookbook which I changed to my taste. Instead of the blueberries she mentions I coarse-grate half of an apple into the porridge and add some cinnamon - instant healthy warm cozy comfort food!

There's more to come, so stay tuned :-)

Side-note - I'm trying not to push those dietary changes/restrictions onto my family as I'm aware that kids do need different nutrients than an adult, particularly an aerobic-nut who tries to melt the last pieces of unhealthy/uncomfortable body fat... What I'm happy about, though, is that my kids ask to try all the things I make/cook for myself and even have declared some of it to be their kind of comfort and/or favorite food, e.g. the spelt porridge for my son <3

Crafts - Customer service & unintentional yarn

I'm happy to report that I've got my KnitPro Karbonz 4mm tips back! The size is one of the most used ones so I was eager to get my replacements. Kudos to KnitPro - reclamation via the store I bought them at, new ones were there within a week without any problems!

Wollmeile has started to stock Rohrspatz & Wollmeise yarn. I did get some last time and this time - I swear, I was just there to pick up the needles - this beauty called me to take it home:

Purple and grey and almost black? C'mon, there was no other way! ;-)

It's a 80% merino/20% polyamide blend, and this time I'm hard-pressed to find a translation for the name... "Verhext und verratzt" - jinxed and ???
Anyway, I'm sure I'll find a beautiful project to use this for, quite probably something without much texture or complicated pattern as the yarn will be playing out beautifully by its own.

Crafts - New yarn

While I do have quite a stash of yarn at home and a few projects already in the back of my mind (or rather in my queue on Ravelry) there's always new yarn that's begging to be acquired in some way. Here are the newest additions:

Wollmeise "Pure" 100% Merino with the sweet name of "Armer grauer Kater" (which translates to "poor grey tomcat"), a variegated fingering weight. I went to one of my favorite stores, Wollmeile, to make a reclamation for the 4mm carbon tips of my KnitPro set where the screw thread of one of the needles broke. I learned that they just recently stacked some Wollmeise yarn, so I had the hard choice between a few beauties but managed to decide on this one. I see a beautiful shawl in the not to distant future...

The second one came to me as a present from my dear friend Betsy, who asked if she should send along some US-ian yarn as a Christmas present. One of my favorite American stores is Dragonfly Fibers and I opted for a deep purple (if you know me this shouldn't come as a surprise) 100% merino lace yarn with the name of "Arya Squishy Lace". This one also asks to be worked into some kind of shawl, I already worked with a different yarn from this store and the quality is superb:

Yay for new beautiful yarn! :-)

General - Not dead, just very busy

*whooooooosh*

That's the sound that almost 4 months passing by make, it seems. I've been pretty busy, from my kids starting school through crafting quite a lot, following the clean eating and working out trail to lots of things happening work-wise. All summed up, life got busy.

Since my last craft-related blog entry I finished six pieces of work. From the Aurinko shawl to a sweater for myself, some socks and some more shawl and lace work. I will try to write them all up separately soon (hah!).

Food-wise there have been a ton of "kitchen first" adventures! Clean eating is still working out like a charm and while I don't manage to do it -all of the time- I think most of the time counts. Time constraints are a bit different since my kids started school, so... I'm still working out two to three times a week and I've been sticking with Jillian Michael's DVDs - and will probably continue to do so as I just started working on my six-pack proper ;-)

Seriously? My day should have 48 hours, minimum. My "old love" progressive/metal music has been coming back full force, I'd like to be able to read a good book every now and then, so there ain't much time to spare. Oh yes, did I mention I need to catch up on sleep?

Food - Clean eating and getting (back) into shape

While I lost the big part of my excess weight already a year ago I've been battling the beginning weight gain again and have/had the desire to get into shape. The natural consequence of this is to focus on two things - food/eating habits and exercise/work-out/sports.

For the latter I found that doing aerobics seems to work for me per se, but I had to find a way to incorporate it into my daily routine without much time to spare around so, apart from the costs, I ruled out going to the gym again. Through a very helpful group of twin moms on Facebook I stumbled across the home workout DVDs of Jillian Michaels (most notably her 30 Day Shred series) and a food/diet concept called "Clean Eating". I've tried both now for about two months and am super-happy with the results! My work out consists of about 30mins every other day and I'm curious about the other DVDs as I'm about to finish the 30 Day Shred series. While I haven't really lost much weight (4kg) I do have reduced measurements - about 7cm of waistline (almost 3") and 5cm (about 2") of upper leg circumference. Next goal - six pack ;-)

One of the consequences of Clean Eating - which basically means to avoid processed foods and artificial ingredients - is that I've learned to do more things from scratch, which always has been a strong interest of mine. As an IT specialist I always want(ed) to find out what's under the hood, poke at the basic elements and learn how to make things, so it's perfect for me!

My favorite things so far which I made from scratch:

Mexican (hot) salsa

Peanut sauce to go with satay skewers

Vanilla extract (which can't be found/bought here in Austria anyway)

Crafts - Utilities and DIY jewellery

I've been writing about the lace shawl I'd started to take with me and work on during my vacation. The yarn I chose and I took some time becoming friends. I'd cast on a few different things but always ended up frogging after a few rows. But as you've seen in my last blog post the Aurinko is coming along nicely. I was eager to properly try out my new Karbonz needles but found out quite soon that for exactly this yarn they are the wrong choice. I reverted to the KnitPro Symfonie wooden needles - which I had to use for getting through airport security anyway - due to the way the transition between carbon and metal is worked. The Lace Ball yarn is just a fraction too thin and keeps getting caught which is a nuisance working on a piece at approximately 300 stitches after the first third. To illustrate what I'm talking about - this is what the transition between wood and metal looks like with the Symfonie needles:

Just right, pretty much no stitch getting caught. Yay!

On to the project I did together with my daughter - custom made stitch markers! When I started the Aurinko shawl I didn't have any within reach so I used a paperclip. The rather bulky plastic stitch markers (e.g. these) are way too thick to properly work around with a lace yarn. Since I remembered seeing small loop-thingie likes being used by a friend/coworker I checked with the lovely ladies at Hobbykunst Vösendorf/SCS who recommended the perfect solution. DIY stitch markers! You need the following things/tools:

• thin nylon filament
• some beautiful beads
• crimp beads
• pincer (flat nose, but I'm actually working with my Swiss Tool)
• scissors
• some creativity ;-)

That's it! Takes little time and you get to make markers that work just for you - if you need some for thin needles or thick needles - it's up to you how you make them! :-) Of course my daughter helped me as she loves to use proper tools (guess where THAT's coming from...):

The purple bead ones are what I made together with her, the "G" bead ones I made today:

Since we found some amazing and beautiful shells on the beach during the vacation I promised to make them into pendants for necklaces for my kids. While at the craft store mentioned earlier I got a little carried away (ahem) and bought accessories to make simple earrings. So here we go - DIY jewellery! The kids are super-happy and so am I :-D

 

 

 

 

 

My daughter's custom necklace with shell

 

Bling... I'm usually not one for sparkly things but I couldn't leave those guys at the store...

Crafts - Some lace work, some vacation work

Lace work...
As I promised some time ago there is a finished piece I have yet to write about. It is a lace scarf I made for my mother in law as a birthday present. The first time that I worked with a somewhat fuzzy yarn - Schulana Kid-Seta Lux, which is 71% Super Kid Mohair, 20% Silk, 9% Lurex and interesting to work with. On our last stay at my MIL's house she told me about a (lace) scarf her mother had made for her which sadly was too short for her to wear properly. As it goes the idea instantly came to my mind to make a larger/longer one for her and by browsing through various patterns on ravelry.com I ended up picking the Harlekin Lace Tuch. Simple enough pattern and worked beautifully with the yarn!

The blocking is not 100% perfect but Ursula was super-happy with it and I'm looking forward to seeing her wear it!

Vacation work...
We recently went to vacation to Mallorca and of course I had to take some needle work with me. The snuggly jacket isn't done yet but felt too bulky to take with me. Since I wanted to use the Schoppel Wolle Lace Ball I wrote about anyway I ended up starting a shawl named Aurinko, thanks to the recommendation of the lovely ladies at Wollmeile! I was kind of tempting the fates and put the work on the wooden KnitPro set, packing the Karbonz tips with the regular luggage so I had some fall-back needles in case of airport security deciding that knitting needles were a Real Threat(tm). Everything went like a charm, no inspection of the knitting bag or needles so I could happily knit along during the flight :-)

The vacation week was of course spent partly knitting while lounging at the pool side (and using my new stitch markers which I made together with my lovely daughter - story of which will get its own post)...