Knit Minder for iPhone app review

Like most people, I expect, my joy at creating my first scarves and hat quickly turned to dismay when I stepped things up and tried to knit more complex garments. I battled through to make a girl's jacket, but have temporarily abandoned two cardigans for myself. Taking on complex challenges can be very disheartening. 

With some quick knits for babies required, I've gone back to basics - and it's all to the good. Just a few simple knits here and there - I’ve just made this scarf for Mark on a start-knitting-and-see basis - and my confidence and stitch accuracy have improved noticeably. But I can’t take much credit for what are, so far, very simple knits.

Mostly, I’ve been depending on a great little iPhone app called Knit Minder. It’s a step up from the basic StitchMinder I tried before. You can log patterns, pins and yarns, colours, dye lot and other information from the band and keep a log of project progress. Far easier than keeping the yarn band to hand for reference. 


Helpfully, you can replicate elements of a pattern you've entered before and select any such pattern, yarn and needle info across projects. Listings simply pop up when you're on the relevant tab. Colour swatches for yarns are also shown and you can take or import a photo of your project or the yarn used. Multiple counters are supported - keeping track of how many rows I've knitted ranks as one of the most useful aspects for me and saves me jotting things down on easily lost scraps of paper. This feature is also supported in StitchMinder and other knitting apps.  

Given my wont to go off tack and create something different from what the pattern is guiding me to, such a prompt to stay on course is ideal. 

Mobile music downloads - 7digital app review

iTunes may be the stand-out music purchase and download service, but there are several other music and streaming options out there that are worthy of consideration. Not everyone likes to be tied in to the iPod/iTunes alliance and there are plenty of non-iPhone users keen to enjoy digital music on the go.


Perhaps the best known examples in the UK are AmazonMP3 and MSN Music, but coming up fast on the outside track is 7digital.

The service exists in its own right, tempting users in with its offer of free tracks, but also providing the backbone to the hmvdigital download store, for example. It has also recently partnered with PURE and music-recognition service Shazam to offer ‘hear it, tag it, buy it’ purchasing of songs you hear online.

I recently tried out the 7digital app on a BlackBerry Curve 3G smartphone and quickly realised the appeal of the DRM-free music download service. For starters, 7digital has one of the broadest music catalogues around. It also links in with Last.fm.


You can purchase individual tracks or complete albums and, as long as there’s an active web connection, the tracks you choose are available almost instantly. You get either choose to download purchased music as soon as you’ve bought it or you can wait until you’re in a Wi-Fi area so you can download over the air without worrying about how much of your monthly 3G data allowance you’re using up.

Other useful features are the 30-second previews and the Similar to this prompt. Some weird associations come up as a result, but one of the joys of the web being filled with sound is the myriad ways you come across new music. The 7digital app also acts as a library of your songs, automatically offering up those you like best and playing them all over again. You get Napster or Spotify-like artist biographies and featured albums too.


Not everything is as smooth as it should be, but it definitely adds a useful new dimension to the BlackBerry entertainment line-up. For the full review follow the link to pcadvisor.co.uk. 

Baby knitting boom

It is proving a bumper year for babies among friends and family. Some are having their first; some a second and my brother and sister-in-law surprising us all by rounding off the year with twins. It’s going to be a hectic Christmas. 

What a great excuse to take up needle and pins, though. 

Armed with Debbie Bliss’ reassuring straightforward Baby Knits For Beginners, I’ve so far tackled some very cute but rather angular-looking baby boots. Cunningly, the pattern has been designed to allow duffers such as me to create a volumetric shape out of a single knitted piece and with just a single pair of needles. Non-knitters: you might think asking for a simple pair of socks is a reasonable request of a knitting newbie - foot-shaped garments are anything but. 

Having made one cute pair, I think I’ll make another but see whether I can find a way to round off the stubby toes a little more. I like the idea of planning out the pattern on graph paper though. It appeals to the technical drawing part of my brain. 

Lady Gaga and the garment of meat

I’ve not really taken the pulse of the internet to gauge how badly the latest Lady Gaga outrage has gone down, which no doubt means I’m saying exactly the same thing as so-and-so-whose-opinion-must-be-noted pointed out days ago. 

Her decision to adorn herself in a garment of many meat cuts is undoubtedly distasteful - and probably didn’t smell that great either. It certainly resulted in plenty of column inches decrying the dead animals whose carcasses were used to create her unique attire. It’s possible there was also an important point being made - and not simply that Gaga will go to almost any lengths to remain fresh and controversial.

Meat and its byproducts are used in many forms every day. Fur generates an awful lot of headlines, but leather is the material of choice for shoes and almost every accessory going. Wearing leather doesn’t elicit the same outrage that fur does, yet it’s still sourced from an innocent animal that was probably bred for the purpose and didn’t have a very good life. 

I’m not saying Lady Gaga is right to wear a bikini made of stitched together pieces of meat, but there are plenty of us out there - including vegetarians like me - who find ourselves wearing the offcuts of the meat production industry because it’s available and we’re made to consider it desirable. Now that's what I find distasteful. 

Moosewood North South Chili

The vegetable plot has had a lot to answer for this year. We've just clocked up our first anniversary of owning our garden flat and it's fair to say the garden has eaten up around 50 percent of my weekend leisure hours for the past six months. 

As well as investing a lot of time in our piece of outdoors, it's also cost a fair bit of course. Compost, pots, seeds and plant plugs soon stack up. The garden has also repaid the time and energy - I wouldn't have bothered otherwise. Instead, it's been a real pleasure. 

Inevitably, it's the items I spent least on and that were most experimental that have come up trumps. 

An itsy-bitsy £1 plug of lemon thyme has spawned two bushes I'm about to chop back to overwinter (fingers crossed they make it to the other side of spring) and has kept us in pungent herbs for more than a season. I'll be drying out what I can and dicing some up for tonight's asparagus quiche. Not my own asparagus - I'm still a beginner at this kitchen gardening lark.

But the real winner of summer 2010 has to be the jalapeno pepper plant that promised nothing for four months - another £1 Easter time plug purchase. Three extremely hot green chillies powered the North South Chilli dish I made from an excellent Moosewood recipe last weekend. Another 25 or more chillies look likely to be ready to harvest in the coming weeks. Time to get inventive in the kitchen! 

My take on the Moosewood recipe involved French beans, jalapeno peppers from the garden and sweet potato rather than squash, but is otherwise pretty similar. Here's the basics

Saute two small onions in two tablespoons of olive oil until they become translucent. Add as many garlic cloves as you fancy (Moosewood suggested five), plus three jalapeno peppers, two diced green or yellow bell peppers and a diced large sweet potato. Other fresh vegetables such as green beans and parsnip also work well and should be added at this stage.

Add 200ml of water and season well - cumin, coriander and other spices can be added to taste - and allow it all to cook down.

After about 10 minutes, turn down the heat, pour in a can of rinsed kidney beans and a can of chopped tomatoes. Simmer with lid on for 10 minutes or so and add any final seasoning or garnish. Top with grated cheese if you wish.

Serve with long grain rice and a splash of sour cream. It also goes well with a thick slice or two of homemade bread slathered with butter.

Nigella's Chocolate Honey cake

There don't seem to be that many recipes for chocolate cake that have chocolate at their heart. Very often, cocoa is called for instead, sometimes along with instant coffee granules. 

Armed with a cupboard full of tasty ingredients, I was determined to unearth and make a proper chocolate cake. 

I make a point of buying honey whenever I can for its healthy sweetening properties and because it's treat in sadly rarer supply. This Nigella Chocolate Honey Cake was therefore spot on and has a lovely gooey finish. This makes it very hard to produce a clean-looking result, but looks aside, it's one of the most successful cakes I've made. (Bear in mind I'm no baker.)

I substituted the light demerara proportions for a combination of light and dark demerera, caster sugar and muscovado. I'm not sure it made much odds. The one omission was the marzipan bees in the original recipe.