Lime-alade!

I made lime marmalade some weeks back. My cutting hand is still a little numb. Worth it, however. Mmmm, lime-alade. So good it is. Although it depends entirely on the quality of the limes I would say.

The recipe said to pick fruit with relatively blemish-free skin that felt heavy for their size, and to soak them in warm water for a couple of hours before cooking them. I guess to soften those rinds right up so they are melt-in-the-mouth rather than chewing-your-own-boots kind of a texture.

All in all, my lime-alade was a great success! It feels nice to get things right.

I Miss Bombay Food

The weather was incredibly warm here last Saturday. The time has come to pull out the cotton singlets and sombreros from their hiding places. Not that you can really hide a sombrero. Anyway, the weather has made knitting a blanket absolutely farcical. I don’t mind farcical, of course. I enjoy it thoroughly most times. If nothing else, it amuses people.

However, I think it is now the time to leave aside the knitting for a little while and start sewing with those wonderful fabrics I bought. Cotton dresses are definitely calling. This weather is also making me second-homesick for Bombay. This is almost like their autumn. It puts me in mind of food. Which is never really much of a stretch for me. Most things do.

Here is a list of food I miss from Bombay. Sometimes it is all about the food; sometimes the place where you have food is just as important.

1. The Parsi eatery Kyani’s in Dhobi Talao for the bun maska (essentially just fresh bread with butter), the plum cake, mawa cake and the chai. The chai is monumentally shitty. I’m fairly sure they just boil the same pot on the stove endlessly, leaving it full of chunks of milk and tasting more of sugar and water than anything else. Nevertheless, I love it and wouldn’t change it for the world.

2. The apple pie at Yazdani Bakery near Flora Fountain. Again, it is another Parsi eating place with similarly delicious bun maska and questionable chai. But the apple pie is a must. The ginger biscuits are also a must. But just look at it. It is this tiny, red gabled bakery surrounded by grey, faded, characterless buildings. Yazdani is from a fairytale.

3. The location of Harbour View watering hole for their buy-three-get-one-free beer deals. A cheap place to get alcohol, with views of the water and of the Taj Hotel. A rare bird indeed.

4. Gokul bar in Colaba for their masala papad and cheap alcohol. Fantastically unpretentious pub which usually has a mix of middle aged men drinking whiskey and college kids drinking too much of everything. It is dim, smoky and dusty and absolutely perfect.

5. Again in Colaba, I miss the deliciously oily steak with onions from the Goan eatery New Martin. Lord, is there anything those Goans don’t do well? Sausages, steaks, fish, beautiful beaches, chilled bear (or child bear, if you want to spell it properly)....

6. My dear old neighbourhood bakery, A1 Bakery for those delicious pavs that came home crusty on the outside and soft and steaming on the inside. I liked nothing better on hot Mumbai days than sitting on my window seat to catch any skerrick of breeze with hot buttered pavs and milky sweet chai. They also had the best mawa cake in the city. The guys who worked there knew my order pretty swiftly; 6 pav, three mawa cakes. Never fail.

7. If I may go a little Western on your arse, I wish here to pause and remember the beef sandwich with chipotle sauce and onions from Wich Latte in Colaba. They redecorated and got rid of it! It is chicken now. Damn political correctness. That sandwich was like Mexican heaven on a plate.

8. On the topic of sandwich-like items, I can’t leave out the Plant Burger from Theobroma’s, a shop set up by a Parsi woman and her daughter to bring delicious chocolatey baked goods to Mumbai. I don’t know when they introduced the lunch food, but it is sooooo delicious. I was violently ill a couple of times during my stay there, and that still didn’t stop me pigging out on their Plant Burgers and the delicious variety of brownies that is their speciality. Went straight through me, but was worth every stomach wrenching second. (Please forgive the detail. I have a problem with filters, especially in this E-world. Anonymity is a blessing for me, but evidently will be a curse for you if you read me too much.)

9. Candies in Bandra was a great place to spend a lot of time. In terms of food, I usually got the kheema (spiced mince meat) roll or the okra chips with yoghurt dip, plus the chocolate lava for dessert (yes, it is as good and gooey as it sounds). The food was probably not the main thing, though it was fantastic to get a whole heap of stuff and pig out under the trees on a hot day. The location was priceless though. You could spend all afternoon there chatting and smoking with friends. It’s usually a real college crowd, or upper middle class families eating there, but it’s also a fun place to people watch. Withering social comments abounded. Much fun had by all!

10. The final place is a whole suburb. Matunga. It is fenced in on three sides by train lines, and has beautiful old houses and green patches of parks here and there. It is almost like a mini South India in the heart of Mumbai. There is a plethora of eating places, mostly South Indian. We usually haunted Cafe Mysore for the spring dosa and the idlis steamed in jackfruit leaves, or Cafe Madras for the filter coffee and the medu vada (black lentils which are turned into a batter and then fried, served with a spicy tamarind stew known as sambhar). There is also another Parsi place here, called Koolar. It is a tiny place, but it feels big because the walls are covered with mirrors. There are a bunch of old soft drink ads on the walls, along with some questionable 80s glamour pictures. This is the place to be for Irani chai (black tea with lemon or mint).

Biting Off More Than I Can Knit

Not content with being a one-knit wonder (har har, see what I did there?), I’ve decided to start TWO new projects.

The first will revisit my dear friend the colour Yellow. This is wool from the same batch as Yellow Hat (ingeniously named, I know), and will be a birthday gift for a girl I’ve never met before. Like that’d stop me hoisting my craft on the unsuspecting mite. The thing is, I’ve heard she has quite a penchant for the 1950s and has Betty Page-black hair. I need no further information. A suitable candidate has been found; her head is mine.

In honour of her penchant, I am going to knit a vintage turban. The pattern is from Ravelry of course, and I am excited to see how well some of the others have turned out. Let’s see how well I can translate 1950s knitting language into the kind of knitting gibberish I speak.

The second project is one I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while. When my friend’s beloved grandmother passed away, my friend gave me all her grandmother’s wool because she knew that I loved to knit. From the immense stash I picked out these balls of wool.

They are going to become an Ice Cream Blanket. The colours of them side by side reminded me of displays of ice cream in those long, rectangular metal buckets.

Mint, strawberry, chocolate, vanilla; yum! I am hungry already. I thought I’d keep this as a fairly mindless knit because of the potential confuzzlement that might be wrought by the turban. I’m using this Super Easy Baby Blanket from Purl Bee as a rough guide. My motto here; when in doubt, garter stitch.

I should suggest that my friend start making babies so I can keep the wool in the family.

The Most Awesome Rocky Road In The World

And I finally have a picture. So beautiful it is.

To Eat, Perchance To Knit

While glancing through my mother’s magazines recently, I came across this beauty on the cover of Australian Gourmet Traveller.

The recipe is on the website, and sure at first glance (glance? More like first rapturous gaze), all you really see is the dark denseness of that chocolate tart. Denseness in a man: very bad unless he’s very handsome; denseness in a chocolate tart: the realm of true holiness.

But then look at the colour of those glorious quinces! After wiping the drool off my chin, I thought how fantastic it would be to knit something in that delicious quince-y colour. I’m sure there is wool out there somewhere with that colour.

Then I unearthed a heap of other things in different colours I’d love to knit with. I’m sure bees experience similar feelings when faced with riotously coloured flowers.

Got to love the orange penguins! The simple design and that bright orange colour. Marketing genius! Well clearly I fall for it anyway....

This Kookaburra was hunting for worms when he spied me admiring his feathers. I love his stripy tail of course, but that beautiful colour change in his body is beautiful too- powder blue and chocolate brown!

Pink would not be my first choice for wool, but this pink has balls. This pink is not to be messed with.

Aaah, marigolds. Divine!

Surreal and Tangled in Brisbane

What better way to escape unemployment and cold weather than go North, to still more unemployment yet slightly better weather? And so to Brisbane I went.

Brisbane never really excited me to be honest. I thought it was far too small to call itself a city. It is really, but that’s actually a really nice thing. I had so much fun wandering around, going into the Gallery of Modern Art and seeing an exhibition on Surrealism, having lunch at the State Library of Queensland, basking in the sunshine by the river, and seeing Saturday markets.

Now for the two best things; first, the City Cat ferry service. I love the water, and this thing travels swift as an eagle. Perhaps that is an exaggeration, but if I could get to work every day like this? Baby I’d be a happy woman. I felt like a dog at a car window with its tongue flapping in the breeze. So much fun!

Second best thing; Only The Most Delicious Rocky Road Ever In The History Of The World. See it here, and scroll down to see the picture. I ate mine too fast to photograph it. Perfect marshmallows, perfect jelly, perfect coconut rough. I would gladly take up concubinage for the person who first created this stuff.

Oh! And how I could I forget. The knitting shop! Tangled Yarns was an absolute revelation. I am used to a shop in Sydney, fantastic yet a little fascist. But Tangled Yarns! She actually said I could sit on their lounges and leaf through their knitting books! Something I thought every major bookseller and newsagency had managed to ban. I sat! I browsed! I didn’t want to leave.

Such a beautiful light-filled shop it is too, and a really broad range of wool. I think that a lot of their yarns and books are imported from America. The brands they had on sale were ones I’d heard mention only on Ravelry; Malabrigo, Madeline Tosh, Berroco. It was like being in Wonderland. I couldn’t find the pattern I’d wanted, but it was from a magazine now four years old. The lady in the shop knew the pattern though; a veritable knitting Rain Man she was. The staff were lovely too; heck, everything was so darn lovely I just couldn’t leave without buying wool. Here it is!

I’d gone in with the intention of picking up some green wool and some purple wool. I have rather too much stuff on Ravelry in different shades of blue. I decided to vary my collection with this delicious green.

And this beautiful purple. No ideas yet for patterns, but I think the green might become a beret in time, and the purple I think would make a lovely infinity scarf.

Lastly I want to add this picture of a sculpture of sorts which was outside the Queensland Art Gallery. I just love it because it seems like a bird from afar, but when you get closer it looks very much like a brick kind of structure. I’m sure there’s a quilt to be made of it somehow.

Mumbai Yarns

Mumbai is truly not a city for knitters. The weather is all wrong; too much humidity and no cold winters. Even now during the beautiful monsoons it is too humid to wear a jumper for long, even though things start to get cooler. The wool supply is also as a consequence not that great. Most of the yarn is nylon, and the most fancy thing you can find is pure wool (scratchy) or a wool/nylon mix (passable).

My knitting sources tell me that there is a man in Bangalore who supplies pure silk wool if you contact him and ask nicely enough. There is also a store in the Fort area of downtown Bombay, the entrepreneurial owner contacted me through Ravelry. It’s almost time for me to leave the city though, and my house is in disarray for packing. Even so, I plan on making room in my bag for more wool just in case my Fort trip proves fruitful. I like to think that knitters are practical in that regard, albeit in a really impractical way!

In honour of this beautiful and maddening city, I have created a list of the twenty things I will miss the most.

1. Paani puri
2. Filter coffee
3. Monsoons
4. Disgustingly over the top saris
5. Fresh hot pav rolls from the bakery around the corner
6. The woman in the train from Vadala to Bandra who sells (at various times of the year) meetha orange, meetha phanas, lichi and mosambi. [translation: sweet orange, sweet jackfruit, lychees and sweet lime]
7. Hinglish
8. Hot milky chai in little plastic cups
9. Hot salty pakode in greasy Marathi newspapers
10. The Arabian Sea
11. Aunties of various descriptions; the old disapproving ones in the trains, the younger ones with friendly kids, the hot ones who exercise up and down parks all along the seaside, the lovely ones who feed you and house you and give you mangoes or laddoos to take home, the shocked ones who can’t stop staring at you because of your skin colour/height/weight, the overly friendly ones who shove their children in your lap to take photos. Last but not least, to the two aunties on a late night Borivali to Churchgate who tried (through my broken Hindi and their broken English) to set me up with their son/nephew who worked for Air India.
12. Ashish book sale
13. Stray cats
14. Stray dogs with furry, curly tails
15. The smell of cooking kebabs on my way to and from the train station
16. My downstairs neighbour, who sounds like a turkey whenever she’s angry
17. My downstairs neighbour’s son, who sings out of tune at the top of his little lungs
18. Harbour Line trains
19. Making fun of Navi Mumbai
20. The ease of communicating with auto drivers without needing to know the language well.

I reread this and realised how much of it was about food. Oh! But who could go past it. The next time I go back, hopefully I can add another Aunty to this list. An Aunty who will teach me how to cook!

Blogtroduction

First mango of the season, an Alphonso.

There will be knitting on this blog, but not as often as the name suggests. I am mostly inept, but I enjoy the smugness of finally finishing something knitted. People become amazed at how creative you can be, when really all I'm doing is following a mathematical pattern that someone else has had the genuine creativity to come up with. The momentary smugness makes me feel slightly less inept.

So in the meantime, feast your eyes on the delicious glowing mango and let me feel the smugness of a full belly.