Banana Loaf

This is a recipe I’ve been using and tinkering with for a few years. It started out as pretty simple recipe for banana muffins. One morning I was making them, and had half a pot of leftover coffee, and thought that banana and coffee are pretty much a match made in ingredient heaven, so I used the coffee instead of milk, which had the added bonus of being suitable for people who can’t have dairy (while at the same time making them completely unsuitable for small children).

Later on, I added some dates and walnuts, and poured the batter into a loaf pan, and the banana loaf was born. While I list wheat flour in the recipe below, I’ve made it several times using gluten free flours, and plan to try it with spelt flour in the near future.

Is it a bread or a cake? Well, that depends on how you eat it, and which of the optional ingredients you use. With dates and/or walnuts it’s more like a cake, and with seeds, or plain, it’s more like a bread. This time, I used sunflower seeds, so it was leaning more toward the bread end of the spectrum. [...]

Toasted Seeds

This is so easy to make that it doesn’t really deserve to be called a recipe, but they are so tasty and can turn a plain dish into something special.

I was first introduced to this method of toasting seeds with soy sauce in my teens, when I was living in a commune in Northern New South Wales. There were many pros and cons associated with that time of my life, which is not surprising seeing as I was young and trying to define myself, but being introduced to new foods was definitely one of the major pluses. [...]

Bits and Pieces

Ack!
I’ve hit a snag with my Swallowtail Shawl.

I’ve finished all the budding lace, and moved on to the lily of the valley lace, and it calls for K1,YO,K1, YO,K1 all into the same stitch. Which is a little time consuming, but doable. But then on the next row it calls for purling those 5 stitches back into one stitch. Now I could easily purl 5 regular stitches together, but these 5 which I just made out of one are too tight for me to slip onto the right hand needle and purl. It’s very frustrating. It’s possible that if I had pointier, better quality needles, and not the cheap ones from lincraft, then I could manage. I think the next step will be to use a smaller dpn and see if I can at least purl the five stitches with that, and then transfer the new purl onto my circs. Which would do the trick. Except that there are about 20 repeats of this stitch so far, and the pattern calls for many more rows of them. [...]

Planning
In other news, my friends H & C are giving birth in a couple of months (well, C is doing that part), so I’m going to start a baby blanket and some clothes for newborns. I wanted to try out mitered squares, so I used some of the green yarn I had left over from my tidal wave socks, and some hand spun from Anne Earyes which has been sitting around for ages, and followed the tutorials for the Sock Yarn Blanket by Shelly Kang. [...]

Some rambling thoughts on knitting, feminism, & class

This is something a bit different from usual, but it’s stuff I’ve been thinking about more and more as I investigate the world of knitting and food blogging, and try to determine what it means to be a feminist who wants to blog about cooking and knitting.¹

The Perceived Problem: Knitting is considered to women’s work, thus the current resurgence of knitting as a popular pastime needs to be subjected to a feminist analysis.

I have no problems with people wanting a feminist analysis of knitting. I want one. But I do think there are other assumptions that need to addressed as well as gender.

1. Viewing knitting as women’s work is a relatively new and definitely a classist assumption.
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2. Assumption: Knitting is merely a pastime, i.e. something done primarily for pleasure, which has the added bonus of producing something useful.
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3. Assumption: Knitting belongs to the domestic sphere, and is women’s work.
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Hypothesis: Yes, knitting can be analysed such that it falls historically into the category of women’s work, but only if you neglect to consider the different reasons why people knit, and how that relates to their economic & social class.
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