A couple of months ago Hanna’s mom sent her this hand-dyed, hand-spun, hand-knitted meditation shawl, and then my mom sent her a cat-shaped shawl pin to hold it in place. This weekend, we snapped a picture for both moms showing the shawl and the pin. Sebastian the teddy bear was our very patient model.

Hanna and I had lots of not-so-fun stuff to do this passed weekend (bill paying, errand running, paper writing, laundry,) but we did have the pleasure of exploring some of the recipes in a couple of vegetarian cookbooks we checked out of the library, principally the doughnut puffs in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman.

The recipe feels really weird to prepare, but is super easy:

1) Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
2) In saucepan melt 8 tablespoons butter (1 stick), with 1 tablespoon sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1 cup water until boiling.
3) Turn heat down and add 1 cup flour all at once, stirring continually until dough thickens and pulls away from the sides of the pan to form a ball.
4) Remove pan from heat and add eggs, one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each egg.

5) Drop spoonfuls of batter on a greased pan, dust with cinnamon sugar, and bake for +/- 15 minutes (the book says 10-15; in our stove it took about 20).

They kinda reminded me of a richer, smaller popover (also tasty!). You can also deep-fry them in oil, but given the amount of butter in the recipe itself this seems like overkill, and the baked versions were just as nice!

So after a week of (mostly) ranty posts (excluding Hanna’s guest-blogging, obviously), here’s a little beginning-of-the-week fluff for this Monday morning.

My friends (and MHS colleagues) Jeremy and Jamie recently gifted Hanna and I — for the price of hauling — a gigantic television that Jamie’s parents had passed on to her and for which she had no further use. Replacing our previous, dying, TV/VCR, this ginormous set now graces the corner of the bedroom and must be kept in line by Derek the Dalek, who sits sternly upon it to keep it in check while we are not home. When it’s not in use we feel compelled to drape it in a colorful cloth in order to prevent the goblins who live inside it from spying on us in our sleep.

While larger than probably either of us would ever have voted for if purchasing a set, it’s in perfect working order and allows us to watch Mr. Izzard in fine style. We’ve decided it’s entirely chav and we kinda like it.

It was a grey weekend here in Boston, and Hanna and I were both feeling a bit down, so when I walked up to Whole Foods for a few groceries and saw pots of yellow narcissus on sale, I decided we needed a pot. They always remind me of my grandmother’s yard, which turns into a profusion of blooms in the Michigan spring, even before the snow has melted. I brought this bunch home when they were still green shoots and by Monday morning they were already starting to bloom. (Ianto, our philodendron pothos* is keeping a close watch over it in this picture, as is Hanna’s crow who is currently perched between the alarm clock and Ianto and steadfastly refuses to reveal his true name.)

*corrected by my gardener friend Joseph; Ianto is now going through an identity crisis!