Family Photos: Power Ranger

Can you find me in this photograph?

No?  I promise I’m there.  I’m not invisible.  I’m not hiding behind someone.  I’m not disguised as a bush.

That’s right…  You guessed it; I’m the one suffocating inside the Red Power Ranger costume.

This was a birthday party for one of our neighbors’ sons.  They are friends of the family.  The birthday boy is that kid in the neon green shirt standing next to me.  This party took place over the summer of 1994.  I’m 12 at the time and, to this day, I’m not sure how I ended up being the one in that costume.  I mean, I was a drama major in a performing arts school at the time but, seriously, I was nowhere near the correct size for the costume.  There was no lack of taller, more appropriately sized men about, either.  Take the father of the birthday boy, standing on the steps in the background, for example.

Anyway, you remember who the Power Rangers are, right?  Tall, muscular and annoyingly attractive (even the nerdy one) “high school kids” wearing skin-tight body suits while fighting big, bad monsters.

Let me present to you an image of the Red Power Ranger I’m supposed to be portraying, for comparison purposes:

Now me again:

Amusingly, I was wearing a few layers of clothes underneath the costume to try to look like I had more muscles, because my 12 year old mind thought that would be a good idea.  You can see from the photograph above that that didn’t work out so well.

If you were a kid, do you think you might be a little suspicious?  Maybe just a little?  Well, thankfully the birthday boy didn’t seem to be and was super excited to have a Power Ranger at his party.  I guess, that’s ultimately what counts, unless you’re the fool in the costume…

Oh, and did I mention that the costume was way too big?

Filed under: Family Photos, Photography , costume, costumes, photo, photograph, photographs, photos, power ranger, power rangers

On the knitting bug and related diseases

Please recall, if you will, that knitting bug that I mentioned in yesterday’s post.  Well, I do still knit (even though I’m terrible about updating you all on my knitting endeavors) and, this season, I have been hit by the knitting bug big time.  So much so that I go through physical feelings of withdraw during my working hours where no knitting is in my hands. If I didn’t think I’d get fired, I might take to knitting at work – during meetings, over “smoke” breaks and perhaps during advising sessions with students…  I really have knitting on the brain.

This year, though, it is not just the knitting bug that I caught but also design disease.  You know the disease of which I speak, right?  The one where you seem to blackout for hours when you sit down to flip through some stitch dictionaries.  The one that makes you wake up in a cold sweats some nights, needing to hurriedly scribble out the idea for that afghan you just dreamed of, and on other nights gives you insomnia as the little voices in your head whisper to you: “just one more repeat… and another… and another…”  Yeah; that one.

So, I don’t need to tell you that I have recently felt the overwhelming need to take on a multitude of design ventures, mostly knitting related.  My brain has been on constant overdrive, with ideas popping into my head at all hours of the day and night.  They especially like to creep in while I’m trying to get some work done on a deadline, while attempting to stay awake in class or am on the verge of falling asleep.

Anyway, one of these pesky ideas was for a pair of socks.  The first sock of said pair has come off the needles and, so, I thought that I’d share it with you:

I haven’t yet been struck by the naming sickness; so, the design currently is nameless.

As you can see, I’ve haven’t opted for my usual eye of partridge heel.  I rather like the more structured look of the slipped stitch rib in this design.  I think it goes well with, but doesn’t outshine the main stitch pattern, which I am deeply in love with.

I apologize for the craptastic photography, by the way.  The daylight continues to elude me these days.  It’s mostly dark when I wake up in the mornings and fully dark when I leave work in the evening and those pesky blackouts and a full social calendar steal my weekends away.  Consequently, I had to clandestinely take these photos over lunch at work… in a very awkward space…  so as not to look like a complete fool…

Filed under: Fiber Arts, Knitting, Photography , design, knit, photo, photograph, photographs, photos, sock, socks

Tuesday’s Tidbits (& Sips): 03 November 2009

Autumn is one of my favorite seasons for many reasons.  It brings with it cooler temperatures and chilly breezes that herald the return, in a big way, of the knitting itch.  We get to enjoy the reds, oranges and yellows of the foliage that are some of the most beautiful colors nature has to offer.  (Unless you’re in my neighborhood where the sycamore foliage simply turns rot brown and falls to the ground, covering every available surface…)  Last, but not least, this time of year means fall foods like hot spiced apple cider, caramel apples, spice cookies, pumpkin pie and hearty soups.  And soup, my friends, is what I want to share with you today; in particular, my recipe for Curried Sweet Potato Soup, a recipe created out of necessity.

We had quite a few sweet potatoes sitting around the kitchen from the last few shipments of the community supported agriculture (CSA) program we took part in this year.  I absolutely love sweet potatoes, but I wanted something other than your standard marshmallow-topped sticky-sweet baked affair.  So, there they sat, waiting for inspiration to strike.  While trolling the internets for some inspiration, I came across a myriad of recipes for sweet potato soup – some simple, some complex, some spicy, some not.  Unable to decide on exactly which one I should try, I decided to create one of my own.  The results?  Delicious!!  (If I do say so myself…  And I do!!)

This is a hardy, creamy soup that has a nice spiced flavor with a little bit of burn at the end.  It’s a great make-ahead soup that reheats well and can be made completely vegan.  I love this soup so much that I’ve made it twice in the past two weeks.

It is best served with toasted crusty bread, perhaps rubbed with a little garlic.  The last batch Andrew and I ate with some herb-laden no-knead bread that we made:

Is your mouth watering yet?  Want to try the soup for yourself?  Well, here’s the recipe:

Curried Sweet Potato Soup

[Serves 6 to 8]

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

3 medium sweet potatoes
6 tbsp. olive oil, divided
1 1/2 stalks celery, leaves removed and diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1 apple, peeled, cored and diced
3 tbsp. ginger, minced
4 large cloves of garlic, minced
1 1/2 tbsp. garam masala
1 tbsp. curry powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. ground coriander seeds
5 cups vegetable or chicken stock
13.5 oz. can of coconut milk*

1. Clean the sweet potatoes and cut them into rounds about 2 inches thick.
2. Place the sweet potato rounds on a baking sheet.
3. Brush the sweet potato rounds on both sides using 4 tbsp. olive oil. and salt and pepper both sides.
4. Bake the sweet potatoes for about an hour, until the flesh of the sweet potatoes offers no resistance when poked with a fork.
5. Allow the sweet potato rounds to cool completely then remove the skin and cut the flesh into smaller pieces.**
6. Meanwhile, heat the remaining 2 tbsp. of olive oil over medium-high heat in a heavy-bottom pot.
7. Cook the celery, onion, carrot, apple, ginger and garlic for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the onions and celery are soft.
8. Add the garam masala, curry powder, salt, ground cumin and ground coriander seeds and fry, stirring constantly, for 30 seconds.
9. Remove the pot from the heat and add about a 1/2 cup of the stock to stop the cooking.
10. Add the sweet potato flesh and stir to coat.
11. Add the remaining stock and return the pot to the heat.
12. Bring to a boil then turn the heat to low and simmer, covered, for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
13. Remove from the heat and cool, uncovered, for 5 minutes.
14. Using an immersion blender, blend the soup until smooth.***
15. Add the coconut milk and stir to blend.
16. Reheat the soup over medium heat for about 10 minutes before serving.

* If you don’t have a can of coconut milk but do have dessicated (not sweetened) coconut on hand, you can make your own coconut milk.  In a small covered pot, heat 2 cups of dessicated coconut and 2 cups of water over very low heat until it is frothy.  Remove the pot from the heat, let it cool and then strain the mixture through a fine mesh strainer or a double thickness of cheese cloth.  Add the resulting liquid, which should be about 1 1/4 cups in volume, to the soup in place of the canned coconut milk.  This is the technique that I employed in the first batch of soup and it turned out wonderfully delicious, if not quite as thick as the batch made with canned coconut milk.
** I found that it works best to refrigerate the cooked sweet potato rounds overnight in a tightly sealed container before attempting this process.  The refrigeration helps loosen the thin skins of the sweet potato, making them easy to peel away from the flesh and resulting in the least amount of waste.
*** If you don’t have an immersion blender, as I did not while making my first batch of this soup, you can blend the soup in batches in a food processor or blender.  You may, however, want to allow the soup to cool completely if using this method.  If you’re under time constraints and must do this while the soup is still hot, be extremely careful to avoid being burned by hot spraying liquid.

Filed under: Food, Photography, Recipe, Tuesday's Tidbits (& Sips) , baking, bread, cooking, photo, photograph, photographs, photos, soup, soups, sweet potato, sweet potatoes