Bonus Recipe Links: Broccoli Gribiche plus.

Here's a link to the recipe I made this weekend. I loved it and it was hoovered up at a potluck.

Heidi Swanson's Broccoli Gribiche

which is, strangely, not on her own really excellent and beautiful website  101 Cookbooks

(home of the infamous Golden Crusted Brussels Sprouts which could not possibly be better )

but is in her terrific second cookbook  Super Natural Every Day.

But the person who transcribed it on her own blog took some good step-by-step photos - I like step-by-step photos in a recipe, especially of the steps that make me say "Ew, that looks gross. That can't possibly be right, I must have messed something up."  For example: whisking hard-boiled egg yolk and red wine vinegar together.

Obviously I'm babbling.
The end.

Neither Lent nor Si-Lent any longer.

Well, that was a complete bust. I was so enamored of my weird, out-of-focus empty tire swing that nothing else seemed to compare.

You'll be pleased to hear that, while I was NOT blogging and NOT painting and NOT sewing and NOT paying attention to my family and BARELY EVEN COOKING, our lenten and easter observances at church went quite well. Working to create and curate them was extremely engaging, in a way not much has been in 2012 up until that point, with the possible exception of the Bejeweled App for the iPhone.

Some web sites I like:
Dapper Lou , which I discovered just this evening in the always-questionable Blogs Of Note roll. You all know I dig The Sartorialist (yes, how desperately original of me, I know.) Dapper Lou is another street fashion blog, and I like it a lot.

Before And After I believe I happened upon this from the Pantone site.

"Because our modern world has made designers of us all (ready or not), Before & After is dedicated to making graphic design understandable, useful and even fun for everyone."

As a long-time fake designer, I must say this is some good shit.

And I really want one of these: Shutter Grip for the iPhone. Between the handle, the button and the tripod mount, I think that this could actually be worth forty of my hard-earned dollars. Or I could just start carrying my perfectly-good, more-megapixels camera again like I used to when I used to take millions of pictures. Hmmm.

In other news, I knit myself a chartreuse sweater over Lent. No one has ever been happier about a spring cold snap than I am these days. I made one damn cable and now I feel like (Knitting) Wonder Woman who can do literally any fucking thing in the (knitting) world.

So I am right now pondering yarns for a cardigan.

I bought a single stunningly beautiful (and local!) lace-weight skein dyed by the Verdant Griffinat the Homespun Yarn Party which I somehow found the cash for even though we were, um, between receivables, as we sometimes are.....but now I am anxious about what would be the PERFECT thing to make out of it. It looks like this:

except a bit smaller. But it's more than 700 yards! There must be something spectacular I can make.

I liked it so much that I dyed my hair that color a couple of weeks later.

I quite like it. I also gave myself an 80s bi-level bob, using my barber clippers, which looks great from the front, weird from the side, and I am in complete denial about the view from the back. As with the hotel mattresses and what goes on in restaurant kitchens, I'd just rather not know.

Two Recipe Links... (with a quick edit.)

..from two of my favorite people.

This article in the NYTimes (Sunday magazine section, several weeks ago) included a recipe for pizza crust by my favorite food writer, Jeffery Steingarten. (By the way -- that picture of him? In the last link, the author page? PRAY TO GOD that anyone ever takes a picture of you that is that flattering. Use it until you die. Require that a paper use it in your obituary. JS is a wonderful writer, a clear thinker, a man of unbounded enthusiasm, and very smart. But he does not look like that.)

EDITED TO ADD: This pizza crust is decidedly superior to my earlier pizza crust. If I invite you over for pizza, you do not need to be afraid!

Pizza quality will improve even more if I can find our pizza stone! I forgot that we even had one!

PS - I am grateful for a family who want to eat my experiments, no matter how questionable they look.

Anyway, I made pizza dough today. I often make pizza dough on Mondays, and it never quite pleases me (though I seem unashamed to serve it to people both inside and outside my family) so I am trying the linked recipe to see how that goes. We'll bake, eat and critique tomorrow.

AND

My dear friend Beth is writing for Suite 101 - her first post, a recipe, appeared today. I have never made this - in fact, I've never even tasted it! But I am going to try it - it's made from pantry stuff I have around (except for the ground beef), and the kid likes beans.

Speaking of beef, I got some bargains while grocery shopping today, and now I have to figure out what to do with a pork "filet". (It's long and skinny. It's like a pork log. I think I might have called this a tenderloin, were I doing the labeling. But perhaps that's not technically correct.) Off to google "pork" (oh good Lord.)