Mersydotes

Aha!  So this is what the little puppy does while I'm away, toiling at the kibble factory: Drinking champagne and reading Vogue!  What a squishy life for a little puppy!  Delicious! She's got it pretty good, ~Mersydotes

3 years, yesterday. It feels like a heartbeat. I want it to be the rest of my life. ~Mersydotes

Cooking gluten-free has become so normal and easy that Mr. Mersy and I have a hard time remembering the months after he was diagnosed with Celiac's when we actually had to think about what we could make for dinner.  I admit that I have to do a lot of home cooking, but it works out well- I enjoy the quiet time each day and the smells and rhythms of chopping and picking herbs, and we always make enough so that we can both take a nice lunch with us to work on the morrow.  Here are a few tasty, gleefully gluten-free dishes that have been coming out of our kitchen these past few weeks:   Mozarela-stuffed arepas with avocado and chicken breast   Roasted sweet potato medallions with queso fresco, black beans, and cilantro   Raspberries stuffed with white chocolate chips   Lemon oregano chicken breast with lentil salad (lentils, red onion, feta, and mint)   Mango-pineapple smoothie (frozen mango, frozen pineap...

I've been playing with this lovely yarn since last December, but I just haven't been able to find the right pattern to do it justice.  It was a bargain bin set of three skeins that I found in Brooklyn one drizzly winter afternoon, and the colors were so rich and the fiber so soft that I fell in love.   But every time I thought I had a great pattern, I'd get half way through and rip out all the stitches and start over on something else.  It needed to be small enough for three skeins, the tension needed to be loose enough to do justice to the softness, and there had to be plenty of opportunity to switch up the colors.   I finally found it- the perfect pattern.  Its by DROPS, and you can click here if you'd like to make your own set of wrist warmers for the in-between days of spring.  The only modifications I made were to do the wrist band in double rather than treble crochet and to add a matching edging at the end to tie in the third ...

Would you like to walk along with me for a bit?  Why don't we stroll through the coolness of the morning as I make my way to work.  It will do us a bit of good to quietly enjoy the new day... ...especially because an insane driver from Flushing just chased me, honking, and screaming while I looked for a parking space.  Whew!  I tell 'ya, sometimes I wish I was an undercover cop- that'd teach them! But the morning is bright, and the flowers in the tiny strips of city gardens are opening up for the day.  All the pre-war buildings are slowly crumbling in the most diverse, most animated, most densely populated part of the most intense city in the world. And I am just a little, tiny piece of it.  But that doesn't mean that anybody gets to push me around.  That nasty driver had no idea who was in the car in front of him.  He didn't know a thing about me.  I'd like to invite him to look me in the eye and treat...

Here is just a little dollop of sweet crochet for the weekend.  Is it a petit  gâteau ?   A petit four? A chocolat?  I'm not sure- all I know is that each one is packed with fiber! They definitely belonged in the kitchen, so with a bit of glue I attached some magnets to the back, and they've joined Mama Mersy's butterfly photos on our our fridge: If you'd like to make some scrumptious magnets of your own, just go to the Lion Brand website and search for the amgurumi bon-bon magnet pattern.  Bon  appétit ! ~Mersydotes

Here is what the well-dressed weenie ones are wearing this season: The season's collection includes dapper booties and subtly striped bibs: I hope that my cousin's little guy feels great when he dresses his best for springtime dinner parties! Love, ~Mesydotes

Our neighborhood in Queens is home to New York's Nepalese community.  There has been a lot of sadness and solidarity over the past several days since the earthquake.   Last night, the local monks were leading the whole community in chanting and vigil and prayer as donations for humanitarian relief were made.  It was nice to see folks from every background and every religion and every walk of life standing together.   Love, ~Mersydotes

Mochi has always bothered me.  When you break it down, there's nothing about rice flour dough and sweet filling that I shouldn't like- and yet, I've never come across a mochi that really grabbed me.  How can that be?  Plus, it's gluten free, so it has the potential to be an amazing glee midnight snack for the Mersy household.  It all started when I was working on crocheting my first Amineko last week (lots more about him later!!!!!!), and I began exploring Japanese crochet blogs which led me to Japanese cooking blogs which in turn led me to lost of beautiful mochi recipes.  Surely, it should be delicious!   And then, I started to think about how everything tastes better when it's homemade, and I realized that I'd never had a commercially made mochi that wasn't tough and bland.  The home cooks whose blogs I was reading raved about how soft and gooey and "melt-in-your-mouth" their mochi was, and I thought- aha!  This must be how it should be! ...

Last year, I was taken by surprise by the beauty of our neighborhood come springtime.  And this year, I've been so excited to see it burst out in flowers and greenery again.  I'm glad the landlords take the time to plant the bulbs for crocuses, tulips, hyacinths, lilies, and daffodils all around the apartment blocks.  It's a completely unexpected joy to be walking next to traffic and yelling people, kicking trash out of the way and suddenly be enveloped by the scent of freshly opened hyacinths!  We're called the Garden of Queens for a reason!