kitty: "The BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed here."

	A dear friend recently posted a post about the top 100 books that BBC viewers voted on in 2003. Recently though the "The BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed here." She was interested in hearing which ones her friends had read and loved.
	Instructions: Copy and paste the list to your notes page Review the list and put an 'X' after those you have read. Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE. Star * those you plan on reading. Tally your total at the bottom.
	1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X + 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+ 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X+ 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+ 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+ 6 The Bible - X 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+ 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X+
	RUNNING TOTAL 8
	11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X+ 12 Tess of the D'Ubervilles- Thomas Hardy X 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X+ 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
	RUNNING TOTAL 16
	21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X+ 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X+ 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens X 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+ 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X + 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+ 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X+
	RUNNING TOTAL 26
	31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X+ 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X+ 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+ 34 Emma - Jane Austen X+ 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X+ 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+ 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X+ 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
	RUNNING TOTAL 35
	41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X+ 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
	RUNNING TOTAL 41
	51 Life of Pi - Yann Marte X 52 Dune - Frank Herbert X 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X+ 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
	RUNNING TOTAL 47
	61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X+ 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt X+ 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X+
	RUNNING TOTAL 54
	71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X+ 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X+ 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X+ 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce X 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X+ 80 Possession - AS Byatt
	RUNNING TOTAL 59
	81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X+ 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X+ 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+ 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X
	RUNNING TOTAL 66
	91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X+ 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X+ 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X+ 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Facory - Roald Dahl X++++ 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X+
	TOTAL: 74
	So which ones have you read and which are your favorites. I think it is really sad to think that people may have only read 6 titles from this amazing list of books. Though most of them I read in highschool, so maybe that also says something about modern education. So pleases consider yourself tagged if you are reading this list.

MG: i made bread!

my first loaf of bread--real, bona fide, cake yeast, slow-rise, hand-kneaded loaf of bread. a whole wheat milk loaf based on a shokupan recipe in a Japanese magazine. the flavor worked out a bit bland and needs tweaking, but the texture is surprisingly nice. light, soft, and supple. feeling all chuffed and can't stop thinking "i made this!?"

smeared with butter & gooseberry jam

kitty: eyecandy

March's Sweetgeorgia Fibre Club - BFL

Just a little spinning eye candy. I have been sick with the virus that is going around for the last week and a half so haven't felt like doing much of anything.

kitty: Happy St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

kitty: maybe studying colourwork, just maybe

Yarn: Dragonfly Fibers - Firestar Dragonfly Squishy Sock & Sailor's warning dragon sock Both are really beautiful hand dyes, with no pooling. I really do love Dragonfly Fibers yarns.

Ok, MG, before you say a word... I may have embarked into the world of colourwork. Something like lace I said that I would never do, couldn't do, it is just to hard, and just plane old not going to do it. Oh, and like lace I might have decided to find vintage references because really why make life easy and just learn the modern convention. :) One must confuse yourself even more to aid in those conventional fears of colourwork. So I have been studying colourwork from the following "schools of thought"; Faroe Isle, Florentine, Shetland, Scandinavian, Twinned, Armenian, English, and the misnomer of Fair Isle Knitting. "'Fair Isle Knitting' is only practiced on Fair Isle. The hall marks of a genuine Fair Isle are - a. The method in which the colour design is worked, and b. the sequence of pattering that change all the way up a garment. In these sequences, a broad pattern carried out in a number of colours is generally followed by a a narrow pattern carried out in two to three colours only. The pattering is always done on a ground of white, fawn, grey, or brown. Bold, clear colouring are always used for the patterning as these give the traditional effect known as Fair Isle Knitting." -Odhams Encyclopedia of Knitting by James Nornury & Margaret Agutler. Each of the different type of "schools" have different ways of locking stitches, binding stitches, how much a loop to use, what is the ordering of colour. Really a fascinating subject. Though Armenian and Twinned may win out for me for the technique that is the easiest and fastest to knit.

MG: wiggly

i've had a package of bo kanten (japanese stick agar made by freeze-drying seaweed) in the cupboard for years, waiting for me to brave the world of agar jellies. it had an unapproachable air, a cache of unknown quirks and techniques hidden from me, so i would google and read and think and put it off--repeat ad nauseum.

most of the recipes i found were created for gelatin (similar jelling agent, but of animal origin); add to that agar powders and agar flakes, whose volumes are an unreliable measure, it was hard to know how much stick kanten to use. finally, i happened upon this panna cotta at Chocolate and Zucchini. the recipe was written for agar; it gave the agar measurement by weight; AND it's a panna cotta, which means the soft side of the rubbery jelly spectrum. i do not like rubbery jellies. i still indulged in a bit of characteristic hesitation then went about making the unknowns into knowns.


amazing!! like vanilla milk just this side of solid, with a lovely shimmy but little resistance. silky and fragrant like dining on sweet vanilla perfume. but not too sweet. both hubby and i loved it with many toothy grins and wiggling of plates. i looked forward to the next time a mug of the panna cotta could come out to be unmolded, and hubby kept count of the number remaining in the fridge.

i used the stick kanten in the weight specified by the recipe for agar but first soaked it in cold water before tearing it into small pieces then adding it to the rest of the ingredients. i also oiled my small coffee mugs cum molds with walnut oil to help with unmolding. 1 gram of agar to 250ml/1cup of liquid seems to be a good working proportion.

now i want to agar-jelly everything from double cream panna cotta to all milk blancmange(r), and coffee, and almond milk, and cashew milk, and fruit purees, a myriad of things; and savory ones too--terrines, mushroom cream, tomato cream. mm.

there is already a strawberry batch chilling in the fridge.