Lemon Curd, Mushrooms & More Socks

Hello Everyone,

I hope you are all well and had a good weekend? What is it with time and the weekends? Why does the clock speed up between Friday 4pm and 6am Monday? One of life's great mysteries. On Friday afternoon I was busy making lemon curd – the easiest preserve in the world to make. And although the curd is fantastic I hate the ubiquitous sticky hands.

Sticky hands and crochet just don’t mix as I’m sure you’ll all know. I was then busy trying to create a homemade Christmas Card but wasn’t pleased with the end results and so I decided to stick with creating socks. I’ve now completed three different pairs and am truly ecstatic with the results. I’ve heard of people getting the bug or obsession with hand knitted socks but not hand crocheted socks. What other type of crochet is there? A little interesting fact there is supposedly no machine in the world that can replicate crochet.

Anyway as a result of my endeavours I spent a while looking for yarn producers or manufacturer’s in the UK and particularly in Scotland - who actually make hand dyed sock yarn. At the end of my research with very little discovery I was left wondering what was up with Scottish sheep. They weather all manner of rains, storms, floods, high winds, gales, ice and snow so surely their fleeces would make excellent sock yarn. I just wonder why the popular sock yarns are predominately from Germany – Opal, Regia, Schoppel & Austermann are all German. Noro is Japenese but I don’t see any UK sock yarn producers apart from perhaps Wendy or Patons.

Opal, Austermann Cygnet & Noro Silk Garden Sock Yarn.

If you know of any hand dyed suppliers please let me know. I am really quite keen to work with someone who produces hand dyed sock yarn. I would quite like to produce a collection of crocheted socks using such yarn.

So on with the weekend check out these no so little beauties.

The photo doesn’t do them justice these mushrooms are absolutely huge and measure approximately 8”-10” wide. We believe them to be horse mushrooms and we found an absolute plethora of them at the bottom of the garden.

The mushrooms have literally sprung up in the past few days – probably the result of our soggy September. They are growing at the base of a huge tree where we compost all our grass cuttings. I was absolutely gobsmacked when we went to look.

Our neighbour, who is more experienced than us in these matters, assures me we have a veritable treasure trove here. The major problem being that they won’t last forever and so we rushed back in to the house to check out how we can use and store the mushrooms. We all know about mushroom stroganoff, mushroom risotto etc but we literally have about 20Kg if not more of these lovelies. I again turned to the search engines to see what we could do. Apparently if you slice the mushrooms and fast freeze them they will store well for use in cooking. It was also suggested that you toss them in butter and cook through and again fast freeze on trays.

Lots of recipes can be found here http://www.mushroomrecipes.org/ and here http://www.recipe-ideas.co.uk/mushroom-recipes.htm and here http://www.wildaboutmushrooms.co.uk/mushroom_recipes_uk.asp

When I woke this morning to the sound of rain hammering off the window pane I intended to get this posted before 8am. Time has marched on again – it keeps doing that. I had also anticipated that I might digress further about the weekend but alas no. I must dash and seize the work of the day.

Be creative and I will be back soon.

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