Chinese chicken and Irish yarn

Saturday night was my monthly Cooking Light Supper Club meeting. We made Chinese food, in celebration of Chinese New Year, which is coming up on February 18th. 2007 is the Year of the Pig.

I made Barbecued Chinese Chicken Lettuce Wraps. It's a Rachael Ray recipe, but it's definitely "light" enough -- the only really bad thing in it is the hoisin sauce. And you eat it wrapped in lettuce, so that's healthy, too! The biggest challenge for me was dicing up the chicken. It takes a long time to cut 3lbs of chicken into little tiny pieces! And if I'd thought of it, I would have put the red bell pepper and the water chestnuts and the scallions into the food processor instead of chopping them by hand. I think the cutting and chopping took an hour... the actual cooking only took 15 minutes. We also had potstickers and shumai, shrimp fried rice, rice meatballs (sounds weird, but they were very tasty made with ground turkey), sweet and sour short ribs, and a noodle dish. And two kinds of hot & sour soup. urp. It was excellent. (I took my camera with me, but forgot to take pictures before we all dug into the food!)

Today, after my standard Sunday gym class, I went to my bi-weekly Knitting Meetup at the bakery/cafe near my house. I recently decided that I wanted to try to knit cables. But just as with the socks, I was very nervous. When I first tried to cable last week, I did it with really big needles, so I could hold the cabling stitches with my fingers and move them around before knitting them. [Most people do this with cable needles or double-pointed needles, or some other implement, but you don't have to.] Once I figured out how to do it, Dani suggested I try the Irish Hiking Scarf. I dug out some blue yarn from my stash and tried it today at the Meetup. And just like with the socks, I don't know what the heck I was afraid of! I can't stop doing the cable scarf! [although I am using a skinny crochet hook to hold the cable stitches, because I don't own a cable needle - yet.] Here's what it looks like after only a few hours of knitting on-and-off (I had to watch some football and do laundry, too.)

So, last and most importantly, instead of saying "it's all her fault" (which is what Stick and I usually say about Dani when it comes to knitting projects), I'll say, "Thanks!" I never would have chosen this pattern, but I love it! :)