At Lisa’s birthday on Friday (at her store Rare Device), I sampled some of the most heavenly, poufy, cheese puffs in the world.

I don’t have any good photos of the lovely birthday girl herself, but I did snap a mobile pic of these savory choux puffs made of butter, eggs and gruyere. The woman who made them told me that the recipe can be found in Tartine’s cookbook (a must-visit bakery when you’re in SF).

Obsessed, I searched the interwebs and found that 7×7 magazine published it back in September!

Be warned… I could have easily eaten 38 of these greasy devils… make sure you make enough to share!

Go forth and bake!

I’m in. I’ve made my reservation at Easton Mountain for Joe and Ted’s Men’s Spring Knitting Retreat.

Dude. It’s going to be WAY better than a Keanu Reeves movie with a similar sounding name.

It’s like they read my mind.

Every morning at breakfast, we call the tool that decapitates soft-boiled eggshells, “Choppy.” And bunny has been a euphemism for a certain soft, round (not furry) body part that you’re probably sitting on right now.

Chris snapped this picture of me this afternoon, asleep on the couch with Janie Sparkles. Despite his description, we were not up late the night before (pre-hacking my own haircut). I believe we were in bed by 11pm!

There are a bunch of things that strike me about this photo:

1. Proof that I am knitting: Henry from from Knitty sits on the floor. It’s for Chris, and has stripes every 12 rows, so the chevrons are half orange, half blue.
2. I’m exhausted by the conversation on Knitter’s Uncensored, hence the iPod. Heavy episode, guys!
3. Apparently, I’m a company man, pimping my work’s logo in socks and knitting satchel.
4. For no other reason than comfort, I’ve undone my jeans.

Hope your weekend was as restful!

I feel so 5 years ago… I just finally got an iSight camera from Betsy who’s moving to Italy to start an Art Monastery. She no longer needed it since her fancy new laptop already has a camera built in.

I’ve never had the occasion to video chat, nor do I have the inclination to be LonelyKnitter34 and turn this into a vlog. But time will tell. You may see me sitting here bleary-eyed, not quite looking at the camera in dim overhead lighting soon enough.

Just in case, I opened up a hizKNITS AIM account, should you ever see me online. Grab a window, have a sit and type at me for a spell.

So, I have this day job, you see. One that takes up lots of my time and prevents me from knitting. One that takes up the majority of day and lots of my mental energy. But it also funds my knitting lifestyle and there are plenty o’ perks there. And, I love the peeps.

Today, I launched a refresh (don’t say redesign) of our corporate site. We’ve been actively working on this for over a year and a half. And there were about six months before that of research and RFP’s and trying to figure out what we want.

It’s now live. Go look at it (if you know where I work). Let me know if there are any bugs, but in the meantime, I want to sleep.

And knit, if I remember how.

Thank you to Dan for this laugh this morning.

You go, McCain! Makes me respect Romney ever so slightly.

Dan, of course, would be another one of the guys I’d hope to meet at the Men’s Spring Knitting Retreat in May.

Now, back to writing my self-evaluation for work. If only I could write, “Work eats into my knitting time.” But I don’t think that that would go over too well.

… or is it, Back to Zero?

I spent last night going through my Bloglines. Over 1000 entries of blogs I’ve meant to read, sitting there, collecting pixelated dust. Via scanning and reading and clicking and even a few comments left, I’m all cleaned out. We’ll see how long it takes for them to pile up again. I haven’t even touched MWK or Ravelry…

While going through everything, I saw Queer Joe’s mention of an impromptu men’s knitting retreat in upstate NY this Spring.

Am I the last to know, Mike? This is what happens when you don’t keep up with your online life!

Reading about Easton Mountain, where it will take place, I recognized a high school friend as one of the residents there and another friend is on the board that runs the place!

I don’t think I have a choice. I’ve got the vacation time. Any one else thinking about it? I’d love to meet you fellas who live on the other side of the country.

With the crazy storms hitting Northern California, I left work early on Friday, for fear of getting stuck in Berkeley if the Bay Bridge was closed. Instead of pulling out the laptop and writing the reviews that are already overdue, I ran to the store to buy fixin’s for pea soup.

I always intend to make soups and stews, but never get around to it. During my trip to my parents’ house over the holidays, I hopped into the kitchen with my mom and made a bucket of pea soup and a tub of vegetarian chili. Cooking with her was the highlight of my time with them. (A close second was devouring EZ’s Knitting Without Tears—who wants to make a hybrid sweater with a shirt yoke?)

And what better to go with warm bowls of love? Fresh-baked bread! Because the pea soup was going to be ready that night, I couldn’t rely on the tried and true no-knead loaves. So, I tried my hand at baking my own pita bread. (Pictured are the leftovers on Saturday, with the two no-knead loaves I mixed up to sit that night.)

Now, I’m all for process and the meditative quality of kneading, but rolling out individual circles takes forever, when you’re used to barely touching your dough. Also, by baking them in the oven, instead of a on a griddle, they puffed up tremendously. More like whole wheat turnovers filled with air than warm, soft blankets. Still, ’twas delicious.

This morning we cut into the loaf on the right, made with steel-cut oats. I found a bunch of recipes for no-knead variations at Breadtopia.com. Much denser and moister than plain, old boules. It will taste great tonight with the chili tonight. The kidney beans are already soaking.

Thank you, Mom, for being my inspiration in the kitchen. I wish we had more time to cook (and knit) together. You don’t look a day out of Girl Scouts! (more gorgeous photos of her from the ’60s, scanned into my flickr account, along with some embarrassingly blond baby pictures of me)

And, a (belated) happy birthday here on the blog! (Yes, I called her yesterday, day-of her birthday!)

If any of y’all want to send her a greetings: momannh [at] aol [dot] com.

Here’s our daily bread, freshly baked for the new year. It’s hissing, moaning and cracking on the stove, cooling as I type this.

Perhaps not daily, I’ll do my best to share a little of my breads and other foibles more frequently, hopefully taking pictures all the while.

I’m not a big resolution guy, but I hope 2008 contains many more loaves like this, lots of other handmade things, and sharing them with people I love.

Let’s make it a great one, kids!