Saturday, September 11, 2010

Coat and chicken wings

The wings and egg rolls were a big hit. My daughter had her friend try the egg rolls, too, and both wondered why I didn't like them. Like I said, I'm not fond of the taste of water chestnuts. But I have a basic idea of what to do to make them so next time I will experiment a little.

Today I have Buttermilk Baked Chicken in the oven for Katherine. She can have it during the week or tonight. I rarely follow recipes to the letter and I thought this would look a little bland. So I mixed up a bit of ranch dressing mix with some Ritz crackers and sprinkled that on top to give it color. Yeah, it adds a few calories, but not too many. And I think it's important for food to look nice, don't you?

On the coat topic, I just pinned in the sleeves and will sew them either today or tomorrow. I have a really simple way of doing the basting to ease the sleeves into the armscye (or however you spell it). I got this from one of the Nancy Zieman books. Basically, you run a line of long stitches along the edge and when you get to the end of your stitching, you reduce the stitch size, pivot, make a few stitches then pivot to go back the other way. Then you increase the stitch size to basting again and make your second row. The little stitches are your anchor. It's much easier to do this than to do two separate rows of basting stitches.

The buzzer just went off and I took the chicken out of the oven. It smells really good. I did turn it halfway because I was afraid of the cracker crumbs getting too brown. So of course they got all mushy and fell off after all. But the chicken still looks nice. I'm going to make a broccoli salad and twice-baked potatoes to go with it. I have work in 3 hours so I will probably do that tomorrow. I see one or two other recipes from the WW book I might try later in the week. We'll see.

On the crochet front I did 2 more rows on the baby blanket. I'm about at the end of the skein. When it runs out I'm putting this aside to concentrate on Christmas gifts. I just have to remember to write out my instructions either on this blog or in a notebook: 1 row of singles, one row of doubles, one row of front post triples then a singles row that anchors down the back of the triples. I took a picture of that and showed it in an earlier post.

1 comment:

  1. Great tip for easing the sleeve cap. I'll have to give that a try.

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