Knight vs. Three Pawns

I've started playing and analyzing a game once a week. This weeks game was:

There's a mess of annotations in there: Shredder annotated while I was playing, I annotated it, then I ran it through Fritz and annotated it again. Hopefully it's kind of obvious what the computer annotations are.

It's pretty clear why I lost the game. My previously analyzed games made me think my thought process was the problem, but that if I got too lost in it I'd get into time trouble. So I've just been trying to do a blunder check every move, and in this game I screwed a couple of those up.

The point I'm not sure about is around move 26. I had lost a knight but had three pawns in compensation. In some theoretical sense that's even material. Even though I recognized this, I was thinking as if I was down in material, and so I was trying to avoid piece trades. Do people think it would have been easier to keep and make use of the pawns if I had traded off the pieces, especially the queens?

You're probably gonna have a tough time of it, since all of Black's pieces are posted aggressively.  You should definitely be trying to trade off pieces, especially queens...then you'd have a chance.