I’ve been amused by the English descriptions on my balls of wool:

Cotton Rainette – Because growth is early, the white pine is useful for a natural environmental protection.  Richmond’s ecology mind is spoken for.

Margherita – The long pitch printed tape yarn.  It would assume a butterfly is flitting around the garden of rape blossoms.

And I thought the patterns were hard to understand!

I have started to knit again.  I was taught to knit in primary school.  I remember being the worst knitter in my class.  I just couldn’t get the wool round the needles correctly.  My teacher realised that my problem could be solved by teaching me to knit left-handed.

Left-handed knitting does make it difficult for me to learn new techniques. I find it really hard to follow the instructions.  I also find watching other people knit confusing.  I now get Marty to translate confusing knitting instructions for me.  It should be a simple matter for me to reverse the instructions but you only have to mention left and right and I’m bewildered.

Knitting Sample

Marty and I thought it would be fun to try to make a traditional Northern Irish breakfast.  We wanted this to contain soda farls, potato bread, and back bacon.

Potato bread is quite easy to make and it’s not difficult to buy potatoes, butter, and flour in Tokyo.  Potatoes are also sold here in threes and fours; the perfect amount for making bread.

Potato Bread

Making soda bread was more difficult.  One of the main ingredients is buttermilk, which we can’t buy in Tokyo.  There are a variety of substitutes for this and today we used milk soured with lemon juice.

Most of the bacon sold here is the American streaky bacon.  I don’t really like this and wanted to get back bacon.  I ordered this from the meat guy.  The bacon was the least successful part of breakfast.  Not because the meat was bad it’s just that it didn’t taste like Irish bacon.  We joked that we missed the food colouring that makes Irish bacon look pinker.  I think we actually expected it to be smoked or maple cured.

Saturday Brunch

It took much longer to make than it would in Belfast.  It was a fun way to spend the morning even though we made too much food.  Maybe, when I lived in Belfast, I could have eaten it all but here I didn’t manage to eat half of it.