The Quest for Hamentaschen, Part 2

The Hamentaschen-A-Rama, chez Pie Queen, has hit a snag! Marcy Goldman, usually so reliable, really screwed the pooch with her recipe for Bubbe's Oil-and-Orange cookies, made with vegetable oil instead of butter. The dough was slick and mushy, way too wet to roll out even after several hours in the fridge. When patted out and baked, it turned out bready and bland. Worst of all, it made vast quantities of dough. I hate wasting my great fillings on such a dull wrapper, which means, APO mailing be damned, I'm going to make another buttery batch of Susan's HamenT. to send to K.

Until then, I'll be staying warm in bed with my hot-water bottle, snug in its little knitted cozy. If you (or your sleeping partner) has perpetual icicle feet, this is the answer. No more ice cube feet! The water bottle alone is not enough; it may be warm, but it feels medicinal and rubbery, not what you want in your bed. (Not like that, anyway.) What you want to do is rummage through your yarn stash and pull out any abandoned half-balls of orphaned yarn. All you need to do is knit up two rectangles (keeping in mind that the bottle will plump out when it's filled), with some way of tightening the top around the neck. I knitted in a few holes a couple inches below the top, then wove in a braided strand of yarn. Mine is mostly blue, with a pink square on one side where the blue yarn ran out. On a chilly night, it's like having a kitty sleeping on your feet--a kitty that doesn't mind being shoved down under the covers at the foot of your bed, and who'll never crawl up and start meowing fish breath in your face at 6am. Dorky? Yes. But in a sweetly demented English way--and keep in mind I got this idea from the posh shops in Notting Hill, where the pink cashmere bottle covers with cute red hearts knitted into the front had 50-pound price tags. When your feet are toasty, all's right with the world.