Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl are the top ten books that make me hungry. Ten slots weren’t enough for this week’s list, so here’s a full baker’s dozen:

1. Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu — Adorable graphic novel featuring a gay hockey player who bakes for his team. I haven’t yet read the sequel, but am seriously hoping for end material with scone and pie recipes.
2. Love and Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch — A teen whose mother has recently died is sent to Italy to live with her mom’s BFF. They bond over ice cream.
3. A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd — A girl and her family temporarily move back with her aunt to a hometown with an eccentric ice cream maker who channels feelings into his non-melting ice cream.
4. The entire Lady Sherlock series by Sherry Thomas — Charlotte Holmes, better known by her nom de guerre Sherlock, struggles with a maximum tolerable number of chins. And she is cursed to live with and love people with really great dessert chefs. But you really want to be invited to have tea with her and Mrs. Watson.
5. Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks — On their last night of working at the pumpkin patch their senior year of high school, our two protagonists have vowed to sample every single food stand on the property, from caramel apples to fudge to chili fries. Bonus, there’s a map of the farm inside the graphic novel’s cover with all their stops.
6. The Bandette series by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover — Our masked heroine is a huge fan of chocolate bars. You’d do well to stock up before beginning this graphic novel heist series.
7. The Three Pines series by Louise Penny — Inspector Gamache loves his food, and he will not let crime get in the way of a meal at the bistro (or catered by it) or a delicious dinner with friends (and potential suspects).
8. With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo — Emoni loves to cook, imbuing her food with feeling. When her school overs a culinary course (with a trip to Europe at the end of the semester), she knows she needs to be part of it, even if it means juggling her work, her daughter’s daycare, and her responsibilities to her abuela.
9. Chocolat by Joanne Harris — Opening a chocolate shop in a small French village just before Easter should be a slam-dunk, particularly when the confections are particularly evocative, but maybe not when you’re accused of dabbling in witchcraft by Monsiuer le Maire and the church lackeys he has at his right hand.
10. Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev — A modern take on the Austen classic, but featuring a British-Indian chef as one of our two stubborn protagonists.
11. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery — Okay, so I do not want to eat custard sauce in which a mouse has drowned or cake with liniment in it instead of vanilla. But other than that, I definitely want to sample raspberry cordial and hand-cranked ice cream on a hot day and even a cake that has been shoved into a story to win a writing prize by your BFF.
12. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han — I would love to spend evenings or weekends baking with Lara Jean and frankly the Song girls’ lead-up to Christmas with their cookie baking extravaganzas are the things that dreams are made of.
13. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling — So evocative with her food descriptions they literally made a candy line based on it. However, I could live without Nearly Headless Nick’s deathday feast.

How about you? Do you have favorite books that you just want to invite yourself to a meal in?

I mulled it over my Tour de France Knitalong project one more day, but then decided just to get on with it.

When I’d been looking for various yarns yesterday, I’d come across several contenders for Reyna. There was one that was sort of Christmassy. There were several in my favorite purples and pinks. And then there was this skein:

A skein of Dragonfly Fibers Pixie in the colorway Van Gogh’s Sunflowers — This seemed oddly appropriate for this year’s Tour project, since the change in the 2020 race schedule means that we likely won’t get to see the fields of lavender or sunflowers that usually mark my favorite stages of the race.

I cast on while we watched today’s stage tonight and finished the first garter section.

I’m using a US6 needle instead of the US4 suggested in the pattern, but so far I like the fabric. I won’t know for sure until I get through the mesh tomorrow if it’ll be too loose or not, but it’s a pretty speedy knit so far, so if I have to rip it out, I feel confident that I can make up the loss in time.

I mentioned yesterday that I’d like to knit a new shawl as my Tour de France Knitalong project (and afterwards, because I’m terrible at finishing projects in a set period of time). With Rudi’s assistance, I’ve narrowed it down to four three options (as I was typing this, I realized one pattern called for two skeins of yarn and I only had one). However, Rudi has given some subtle hints that he doesn’t care to extend this process past hour four, so I thought I’d come to you.

The three shawl patterns (with links to their Ravelry pages) are:

1. Reyna — I’d knit this in one of the myriad skeins of variegated fingering yarns I have. I even have a couple options if I want to make it two skeins large. Rudi has been underwhelmed by Reyna every time I show it to him, but I still keep coming back to it, probably because I have so many skeins of yarn that would look beautiful in it.
2. Campfire Cozy — I’d likely knit this from a bag of Cascade 220 Heathers in a burgundy color. However, I’m hung up on the fact that I bought it forever ago (pre-Ravelry) for a cardigan that I’ve never made, but if I use 6 skeins of it to make this shawl, I also never will. I could make a slightly less gigantic version out of DK-weight yarn instead and use the two skeins of Miss Babs Yowza I have:
   

   Since the worsted version measures 112″ x 41″, a smaller version might not be terrible. Rudi points out that I would wear this shawl all the time, and he’s not wrong.

3. Love Grows Here — This is probably both Rudi’s and my favorite of the three patterns and it comes from the designer who made the pattern I knit for last year’s Tour de France (Forever in Blue Jeans). I have two skeins of lilac-lavender yarn I could use as the background color, but I’d have to track down all my leftovers, which feels like a hassle right now, but that would probably be fine once I started knitting. (The versions Cally made used eight colors for her stripes, just as a reference.)

Got any thoughts?

I have several things I’m hoping to do this weekend:

• Start a new knitting project while watching bike racing — It’s time for the Tour de France Knitalong, and I’m trying to decide on a new shawl pattern to knit. Waiting for daylight to make a yarn decision.
• Pickle cucumbers — I have several just hanging out in the fridge waiting for me to deal with them and probably one more that’s ready to pick down at the garden.
• Make peach ice cream — I bought more plain milk tonight, so we’re ready as soon as the ice cream bowl freezes.
• Work in the garden — I weeded last week, which means there was plenty of space for other weeds to expand into. Sunday looks like it will be a beautiful day for this.
• Read in the park — The biting flies have been particularly nasty this year (because 2020), so we needed more bug spray. We can’t find our preferred brand locally right now, and yesterday’s bottle proved useless. Rudi picked up a new bottle with a formulation he thinks will be closer to what we want today. If it fails, I’m buying DEET.
• Bake fig newtons — I found a recipe for making them with whole figs, rather than jam.

A relatively short list this week, but with lots of making and relaxing. I probably need to wash the kitchen floor again (How does it get so dirty in a house where we wear indoor shoes?), fix the elastic on one of my masks, and do laundry but, honestly, I’m fine if none of that happens this weekend. I’m feeling a little run-down mentally and think spending time doing things I like might help.

What are you hoping to do this last weekend of August?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. In the last week, our local park and the fancy steps near it have been home to two proposals and one tiny wedding reception picnic. I don’t know how yesterday’s proposal went; we came from the same direction the beloved was expected from, so we didn’t have any clue until we got to the top of the steps, where there were signs saying “Proposal in progress. Please wait two minutes” on the ground and on the young man’s back.

2. I started a new book this week and it’s told from the first-person plural point of view. As an English major, I find this a fascinating choice for narration and less than a chapter in, I’m already invested in finding out what else the author has in store for me.

3. We had another mishap making ice cream this evening, where I decided to trust the one recipe I saw online that told me what I wanted to hear about timelines, rather than every other recipe that would have made us wait. I’ve learned from past mishaps, though, and just ladled some non-frozen ice cream into glasses and topped them with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and called them milkshakes instead. Tomorrow we’ll have ice cream.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Nothing makes you remember how lucky you are than having three friends dealing with health-related crises.

Life isn’t all Skittles and beer here, but we’re doing okay and that’s enough. Today, that’s more than enough.