letter to my blog

Dear poor neglected blog,
I have missed you so very much this past month. But you know how summer is around here. Kids are home all day demanding things like lunch and snacks. Unless they aren't and we are running all over town. But let me see if I can try to catch you up.

We went on vacation and very nearly missed strawberry season. I did manage to make a batch of strawberry lemonade concentrate and two of jam before we left. Then I made three batches when we got home. (so 5 total) We never got to make the strawberry marshmallows or strawberry ice cream. And we never did get to eat enough that kids declared they were "kinda glad the season is over." Next year.

Cherries have started to come in, but not the sours yet. I still have a ton of sour cherries frozen from last year and so tried to make a cherry limeade concentrate thing like the strawberry. It was successful, in that it was good. It was not, in that when I plugged my recipe into a recipe calculator it turned out to be 410 calories a serving. I'm going to try it with less sugar next time, but here is what I did:
2/3 cup lime juice (I squeezed many limes)
1 cup frozen sour pitted cherries
2 cups sugar
Place everything in a saucepan and heat, stirring occasionally until sugar is dissolved and then bring to a slow boil. Simmer for 5-10 minutes until cherries are all broken up. Remove from heat, and blend with a stick blender. Strain and cool mixture in the fridge.
This made a pint of syrup. To serve, I used about 1/4 of the pint, and filled the rest of the glass with club soda. It was super sweet, so next time, I want to cut the sugar in half maybe.

Oh I know blog, you want to know if I did any knitting this month! Well of course. We went on vacation, and I was almost done with some socks before we left, so I started a new project for the trip. I started another hoodie from the top down this one in the same yarn as my green one--but in white. Here is me int he green, in case you don't remember

I did finish the socks when we got home. Oh how I love this yarn.

The pattern is a toe up pattern from Ann Budd, with a heel I had to improvise from Socks from the Toe Up. The yarn is Mode Knit in Sherlock's kitchen. It is a tonal green, but every once in a while there was a tiny speck of red. It may have been an error in dyeing, but I kept feeling like it was a mysterious blood spot clue in the kitchen. It was a dream to work with and I loved every minute of it. I knit these on my size 1 DPNs. I can't wait to knit the other skein I bought. Although this yarn begs for cables, so I'll have to wait and find a good pattern.

So, blog you can see that it has been busy, and I haven't even mentioned all the fresh vegetables that require endless seeming hours to prepare (seriously, it takes me 20 minutes to get green beans ready--as opposed to 3 minutes tops from the canned variety). I have been knitting, nearly every day at least after the children go to bed. I took the sweater to the park evem on Saturday as we went to a picnic to honor the lives of our former neighbors (deceased going on three years now) and had a small child run up to me and we had the following conversation:
Little kid: Is that knitting you are doing?
me: yes.
Little kid: cool! My grammy does that. She made me a whole dress, it went from here to here! it is pretty.
me: I bet it is, you are lucky to have a grandma that knits for you
Little kid: I am!
And so there you have it blog, I'm either a hipster or a granny whose loved ones wish desperately I'd knit for them. Next time, I may even tell you about all the yarn I bought on vacation. So stay tuned.

Love, me.