Week ending - 14 de julio

I've come to the realization that although I want to participate in group linkups (it's a way of building community, after all), several of the ones that are most popular to don't fit me. I really like {pretty, happy, funny, real} at Like Mother, Like Daughter but the things I have to share don't always fit well enough into that framework. And with many linkups I feel a little lost in the crowd when there are over 50 participants. So I was really happy to find the link that Wanda at Reinventing Mother created to memorialize and reflect on our weekends and I decided that I'll be joining her Week Ending linkup. However, she's taking a break this week so there's no linkup, but I wanted to share what we did this weekend anyway.


Saturdays tend to be our "out and about"days. Sometimes we go to the city near us, sometimes we go on little excursions, and sometimes we just go to the vivero (nursery). This weekend we did the latter and came back with some real finds.


These are called corona de cristo (in English we call them crown of thorns). These two are varieties I'd never seen before, one with pink flowers and one with large pinky yellow flowers.

I was stunned to find crocosmia at the vivero. I haven't seen it around here at all and it's one of my favorite flowers! The owner of the nursery didn't even know what they were!

On Friday the Pirate had returned from one of his excursions with a new type of fruit that neither of us had ever seen or heard of before: the mamey (also known as the sapote). He tried some and decided that it wasn't something he liked. I tried some and was astounded to find out that it tastes just like canned pumpkin. The color and the texture are the same as well. Since I had 3 large mameys that weren't going to be eaten as fruit I decided to find some pumpkin bar recipes that I could use them in. They were going to rot soon so I had to use them all up at once, which meant that I would have to bake far more sweet stuff than we have had in the house for a long time.


I ended up making 2 types of "pumpkin"(mamey)bars, both of which turned out more like cake or brownies than what I was expecting. I got the recipes here and here. They both tasted great - just like pumpkin brownies - but if I try the recipes again I might just leave out the flour (I used rice flour both times) since the mamey seems to provide sufficient body by itself (like what peanut butter does in the 3-ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe).

I added pecans and chocolate chips to the recipe. I wanted to put dates in it - I think they would have gone well - but I didn't have any.

What I spent the most amount of time on this weekend was knitting. I'm working on a shrug which I want to finish this week because I want to start on another project, so I spent probably 5 hours working on it this weekend. This is one of those projects that seems to knit quickly but the piece doesn't seem to progress at all. I measured it on Friday evening and it was 24" long. After knitting what should have been 4" of rows I measured it again and it was 26" long. I knitted 4 more inches of rows and it was 29" long. And yes, I checked the gauge and this estimate is based on the actual gauge of the piece! Ah well, that's what I get for wanting to complete the piece by a particular date rather than letting it lead me in the pacing.