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Gone Crackers

There are, in fact, crackers in this post. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot of progress on any of my major projects, but there's still a remarkable amount of news. And I decided even though I don't have much to say about big projects because I haven't touched them I still want to natter about everything else.

A close-up of a red and yellow rosebud on a lush green plant, against a tattered lawn with dry leaves scattered over it.
Lady Emma Hamilton fears no frost
So I have two surviving roses-in-pots. One is Wollerton Old Hall, the climbing version, who mostly grouses about being trapped in a pot where there's just not enough dirt to really eat the house the way she'd like to.

The other is Lady Emma Hamilton, who is apparently devoid of any sense of self-preservation. She put five buds out just before Halloween, when the temperature dropped into winter for us, and has been ever so slowly cracking them open. I cut the three most-open blossoms to take home for Thanksgiving, in case the frigidity a few nights ago was enough to convince her that it's time to pack it in for the year.


A mountain of mulch filling the right half of the vertical photo, with a red-handled pitchfork stuck into it and a red hatchback pulled up tight to the slope on the left. A crumpled blue tarp emerges over the near side of the open hatch.
Despite appearances, I did not in fact drive right up the mulch mountain.
And because I love my roses more than life itself, I have fetched approximately 400 pounds of mulch in which to bury their little feetsies until spring. This involved a giant tarp, a pitchfork, and a great deal of shoveling tree bits in stiff winds and 45-degree mornings. Everybody's well-buried now, though, so they should stay nice and cozy this winter.

A close-up of the first set of leaves just beginning to unfurl from a pea shoot, with another bright-green shoot in the background.
Peas on earth!
I also planted a bunch of peas, thinking it would be nice to have fresh peas in the winter, but as with many things, I made the decision about two weeks after I ought to have, and they're only just sprouting. So they've come inside to live in the conservatory with the wee lemon tree, the Potential Ginger (so named because it may or may not decide to grow after all), and a milk jug with a few more peas in it because what the heck, might as well. And as my mum pointed out, sometime in February I'll be pollinating with a paintbrush, just like Mendel.

A rough-edged oval of pale dough flecked with red, on a floured dark-green counter, haloed by a wooden rolling pin, bag of flour and measuring cup with flour in it, a wine glass, a variety of spice jars and salt shakers, a lit candle, a mortar and pestle with ground coffee at the bottom, and a clear pyrex beaker with a ball of pale dough in it.
Lighting candles right next to the serranos encourages them to ripen further. Either that or I'm bad at using up produce.
So, the crackers! I have a bag of dried chickpeas that I've been meaning to do more with for ages, and which I keep not getting around to because...well...they're dried. They take ages to rehydrate and I am not that kind of organized in the kitchen. Crackers! I thought. Those are tasty, and I like chickpea crackers. It took going to vegan corners of the internet where I normally don't spend much time to find a recipe that called for actual chickpeas rather than chickpea flour, and then I mostly decided not to follow it.

Of course, I didn't end up using the dried chickpeas, because having found a cracker recipe I wanted to make them now, so instead I used canned. Someday I'll get around to the dried ones. Meanwhile, I cleaned my apartment and boiled chickpeas for four hours so they'd be soft enough to pulverize with my hand mixer. (Alternate title for this blog: Blatant Misuse of Hand Tools.)

The first batch got half a bottle of onion flakes added, because I had them and it seemed reasonable. The second batch (which I photographed) got tiny bits of chopped serrano and scads of poppy seeds for decoration, since they don't really taste like much.

A stack of pale, thin rounds of dough with poppy seeds and red flecks embedded, on a floury dark-green counter with a lit candle in the background and a shorter stack of dough off-cuts in the foreground.
The Leaning Tower of (Chick)Peas-a!
I rolled the dough as thin as I dared, without making it too thin to peel off the counter—it's a 'hard' dough, so not terribly sticky, but almost every dough glues itself to my charming formica counters—and cut circles with a wine glass. I managed to reroll the scraps twice, but then I just tore the remaining bits into cracker-sized pieces.

A short stack of dough rounds being cut into sixths with a chef's knife, held in a white right hand and steadied with two fingers of the left hand. Three other rounds are lined up above the left hand, already cut, and the leftmost is missing two segments. A lit candle glows in the upper right corner of the photo.
Appreciate this shot. I worked for it.
I wanted crackers small enough to eat in one bite. For one thing, that lets you pretend to be a dinosaur, which is awesome. For another, I had learned from the previous batch that these can be pretty chewy if they're not baked to perfect crisps, and they're not super tasty when they're burnt, so in the interest of successfully erring to undercrisped, I wanted to still be able to eat them easily.

A square baking stone filled with columns of alternately placed triangles of pale dough with red flecks and poppy seeds, balanced on the front half of a gas stove that has a painted ceramic mug and a dark-blue-and-brown pot full of soil on the back burners.
Tessellating crackers is super fun, actually.
Everybody got stacked on the baking stone, which is frankly one of the best things to ever happen to my kitchen, and baked for about 30 minutes in a medium oven—something like 350-375 degrees.

An open closet with three white-painted shelves, showing several bags of colorful fiber balanced on a brown tension rod above the upper shelf, with a few spools and cones of yarn at the right side. The middle shelf is full of two pale-brown square baskets, with a stack of fabric peeping out at the right side. The lowest shelf is nearly packed full of folded fabric, mainly deep blues and warm coral pinks.
Yes, that is a tension rod holding up all that fiber.
In the meantime, I was sorting everything that had come out of my closets and organizing it for better access to crafting things, and better arrangement of clothing. And yes, I did laugh at that video that went around proclaiming all the amazing things you could do with tension rods, and then I used one to create a half-shelf for propping all my spinning fiber where it won't be squashed. I also sorted all my fabric by fiber and purpose, and got it stacked away (silk and wool are sharing a stack, as equally expensive items, and apparently I never need to buy blue linen or pink cotton again. Ever).

There is now a remarkable amount of clear storage space in the closets and on one bookshelf, which had been holding a bunch of the fabric. Good thing, since I still have a very large pile of projects-in-progress to sort and put away somewhere.

A small plastic cup of hummus on a pink-and-green floral print plate with a gold rim, and a small stack of brown crispy triangular crackers.
Crunch crunch crunch crunch. Chickpeas on chickpeas!
Ta-da! Crackers. And a cute little cup of hummus, because that's what I had in the fridge.

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