Turkish Delight

Although I went to the Boonville fiber festival with a "I'm just looking" attitude, a Turkish spindle jumped into my bag and followed me home.

It's from Jenkins Woodworking. I have been stalking these spindles on their website, and it always seems like they are sold out of the Turkish Delights. So, when I spied these at the Henderson Creek Farm booth, I knew the marblewood spindle was destined to be mine.

Yesterday, I spun some fiber from Henderson (70% kid mohair, 30% Romney lamb) on my new toy. It was so easy to ply from the center pull ball! Aha! This is why Turkish spindles are way cool!


I have also been trying to spin on my wheel again, but I just wasn't feeling the groove. Spindle spinning has the perfect cadence to match my mood.

Tidy Joes

Here in the Bay Area we're at the inflection point between summer and fall, which means that I spend a lot more time in front of the stove and oven. While I love summer dearly and still declare it my favorite season (long days mean a multitude of outdoor activities), fall is a close second because it means baking bread and simmering stews without cooking all the occupants of the house.

Last week, I decided I wanted to make sloppy Joes, but made with lamb instead of beef. Hence, tidy Joes were born. If you're a lamb lover like me, this beats that slop in a can by miles! I made these extra special by sacrificing some dry farm tomatoes and homemade ketchup and serving it on whole wheat sourdough fresh out of the oven.

Tidy Joes
Serves 8


Ingredients
1 medium onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
4 T olive oil
2 lbs ground lamb
1 lb tomatoes, chopped
1/2 c ketchup
3 T Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper, to taste
3 T Habinero sauce (optional)


1. Heat a 12" skillet on medium-high. Add olive oil, swirl it around the skillet to coat the bottom, and then add the chopped onion, bell pepper, and garlic. Saute until the onions begin to soften, about 4 minutes.

2. Add the ground lamb. Break the ground lamb into almond-sized chunks as you saute the meat and cook until no hints of pink remain, about 7 minutes.


3. Add the tomatoes, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce. Turn the heat down to medium-low and simmer the mixture, uncovered, until it thickens, another 7 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. If you like spicy food, stir in the habinero sauce.

4. Serve the tidy Joes over a slice of bread. Just like stews, this tidy Joe mix will taste better the next day and it freezes well.

My Cats Don't Need Ponchos

Right? Cats don't need or want to wear ponchos. An image of little red Greaseballhood just flashed through my mind, and it is all consuming. Talk me out of this!

Mingus, however, rocks the poncho. He doesn't care that ponchos are soooo last decade.

Fiber Festival Time!

The lure of the Boonville Fiber Festival is too strong for me to resist. Yep, I'm going again this year, and if I can get through some of my spinning stash this week I can bring some fibery goodness home with me. Yay! This also means a visit to the Anderson Valley Brewery, which sports an excellent disc golf course, and my favorite winery, Navarro Vineyards.

Vespa and Mingus will also be coming with me since we're going to go camping after the festival. Since we all sleep together in a giant crate, the dogs think camping is the greatest treat ever. I cannot wait, even though we just returned from this area a few days ago. Hopefully, I can get some pics up soon.

Whole Grain Adventures

This looks like a mild mannered cabinet. Perhaps some 10th grader's first woodworking project?


Opening up the top reveals evil grinding stones!


These stones punish the innocent hard red wheat berries...


... and turn them into flour for my bread.


The boy balked at my idea of a buying a grain mill, insisting that his folks had one we could "borrow" somewhere in their garage. Well, after telling me this for 13 years, he found it.

I think this is a homemade grain mill because it has some scary features that can take skin off if you're not paying attention, like the overpowered electric motor with its exposed shaft that made me jump back 10 feet when I flipped the switch. It's also scary loud. Subsequent motor runs have involved earplugs and a long handled spoon. It's like a grain mill on steroids.

Now, we can have flour that is freshly ground. Sadly, my bread starter won't be ready for duty until tomorrow morning, so I'll have to wait to see if this flour makes a huge difference in taste. I'll report back.

Twisted Cherry

I finished Cherry Twist last month, and it's made an appearance at a few dinners, yet I failed to document this on the old blog until now. I'm really happy with how it turned out!

My only complaint about this pattern is the armhole finishing. Next time, I might do an i-cord trim to give a finished appearance.

Recognize the yarn? It's Sublime yarn over from the Anthropology Capelet.

The Dirty Details
Pattern: Cherry Twist by Jessica Felon Thomas
Yarn: 3 balls of Sublime Yarns Extra Fine Merino Wool DK, colorway Milk
Needles: Hiyahiya interchangeable circulars, US Size 7 (love, love, LOVE them!)

More dirty details on my Ravelery page.

Aly Oop!

Meet Aly and her tongue.

She's a silly boxer pup who lives with LeannIAm.

In her spare time, she cleans other dogs' mouths. Yes, she's a dog dentist of sorts.


Once again, Mingus was too much of an elitist to hang with the silly puppy. I wanted to get some pictures of them together, but Mingus refused to lower himself to play with Aly. What a snot.

Time for Breakfast

Inspired by this post, I decided to try my hand at baked eggs, or as the French call it, oeufs en cocotte. They've become a welcome addition to breakfast because they are really easy to put together, assuming that you have other ingredients on hand to jazz them up.

It's so easy that even me, a groggy, grouchy morning person (at best), can put it together with minimal fuss. Here's my lazy Sunday routine: roll out of bed due to a cranky cat who steps on my head because he must eat breakfast at 7 AM, get the coffee going, and turn on the oven to 350 °F. For the eggs pictured above, I cracked 2 eggs into an oven proof dish and added a splash of milk. Meanwhile, I cooked two pieces of bacon in my beloved cast iron skillet. Once the bacon is nice and crisp, I remove the pieces from the skillet and toss in some clean, dry spinach. I saute the spinach for a few minutes, and then turn the burner off.

To assemble the baked eggs, I crack two eggs into an oven proof dish and add a glug of milk, crumble a little bacon over the eggs, add a pile of wilted spinach, and add a dollop of tomato sauce (just some tomatoes I cooked and ran through the food mill the night before). I also sprinkle some fresh thyme and salt over the top, and add a few cranks of pepper. Now, put the assembled dish into the oven on a pan and let it bake for 7-10 minutes, depending on how runny you like your yolks.

In past incarnations of oeufs en cocotte, I added mushrooms that I sauteed in butter and garlic and finished with some marsala, torn basil leaves, roasted squash... Basically whatever is in my refrigerator that morning is fair game to be cooked with eggs.


When I made the eggs pictured above I also served it with some sliced nectarines and a still cup of home roasted joe. (I love my knitted cable mug!)

Speaking of knitting, I have a huge backlog of finished projects to share. Soon.

The Sweater that was Knit in a Weekend

In 2 days, the boy knit his first sweater. This is terrific because now I am off the hook for knitting him one since he's been pestering me the last two years to make him a plain cotton sweater. Since knitting miles of stockinette stitches in either black or dirt-brown yarn is not compelling, I never promised him a sweater, but I did feel guilty whenever I saw my friends knitting complex items for their SOs. I assuaged my guilt by offering up small items like a hat and a pair of fingerless mitts, out of fancy pants yarn, nonetheless. Still, he kept on bugging me about that sweater.

And then, the solution fell into our lap. The knitting machine. While we were assembling it, he said, "Now, I can make myself a sweater" and I replied quickly, "Why, yes! Yes you can!"

Late afternoon on Saturday, while discussing yarn options, he grabbed a 1-lb cone of kitchen cotton from my stash and told me that he wanted his sweater made out of that yarn. I do not fancy myself a yarn snob, but this statement made me recoil. Then, I sat down to do the yarn calculations. Suddenly, spending $20 on yarn vs. $100+ didn't sound so bad. After all, it's his first sweater, right? We procured the right dirt-colored cotton yarn at JoAnn's. We bought 3-lbs of yarn, but it turns out that he only needed 2-lbs (around 1400 yards of worsted weight).

Using a diagram for The Manly Sweater in Stitch 'N Bitch, we set to work. The first thing the boy did was knit a gauge swatch. We both measured the stitches per inch horizontally and vertically, and compared our answers. Same same. Then, we recorded his chest size, arm length, shoulder width, and torso length. Armed with those measurements, I reached for my knitting notebook to do some more calculations, but he insisted on using his own boring graph paper project notebook.

A sweater knit in pieces is the perfect project for him since he already has experience sewing bike jerseys. This was both of our first set-in-sleeve sweater, but since I had knit some (OK, only 2) top down raglan pieces, I had a clue as to how to do this.

Armed with his swatch's stitches per inch, the boy did all the calculations for the sweater on his own. I was only consulted a few times to brainstorm about sleeve shaping and other such tricky bits. I didn't even knit a single row. He finished the last piece last night, after about 4 hours of machine knitting. He had the audacity to complain that it took too long, but when I told him it would probably take me a year to finish a sweater for him if I had to hand knit it in dirt-brown, kitchen cotton yarn (is my non-motivation showing?), he merely said that his next attempt will be much quicker. Show off.

Because I am a sucker, or perhaps because occasionally I can be nice, I am seaming the pieces together. My reasoning is that I got out of knitting him a sweater, plus I am in need of honing my seaming skills. Better to practice on his garment than mine! I am using the kitchener stitch for the shoulder seams (I told the boy to not bind off the shoulder stitches) and a "somewhat mattress" stitch for the sleeves and sweater sides. My deadline for this project is Thursday since the boy is out of town until then.

Additionally, I have to note that the yarn we used, Bernat Handicrafter Cotton Ultrasoft, makes pleasant fabric. I don't know about ultrasoft (I'll reserve that adjective for Blue Sky Alpaca's cotton yarn), but it is soft. In fact, it doesn't feel any less nice than the boy's JCrew cotton sweater.

So, the guy who doesn't know what a purl stitch is can knit a sweater in 4 hours using the machine. I think he should be in knitting machine commercials. The target audience? Women like me who are tired of their husbands* bugging them for a hand knit sweater. Does your husband bug you about knitting him a sweater? Tell him to do it himself!


*We all know about the boyfriend sweater curse, right?

New toy!

A knitting machine fell into my lap yesterday! My aunt's mother was an avid knitter and crocheter. How avid? Well, she crocheted and knit both of her daughters' wedding dresses. That's dedication! After years of hanging on to her mother's knitting supplies (and this is just a small fraction of it - my aunt originally filled up a 14-foot moving truck with yarn!), my aunt realized that she would never use any of it so she asked if the boy and I would be up for a new toy. Of course we would!

The boy is actually the one who is really digging the machine, since he talks to machines like a duck to water. Who knew that all I had to do to get him interested in knitting was to mechanize it?

Below is his first swatch. The machine that we have only does stockinette fabric. I'll have to do the ribbing by hand.


My aunt also passed on a Brother ribbing machine accessory, but it is not compatible with the White knitting machine. :/ I guess I'll hang onto this for a spell, though, since the Brother machines are built like tanks. If the boy decides that the current machine is too limiting, we can upgrade.


Not to be left out, Mingus also worked on a little craft project. Luckily, this seat was out of commission. Anyone want a malamute?

I have a ton of vintage yarn and needles that need a new home as well. Anyone who knows of any charities in the Berkeley area, or anyone interested in vintage yarn (surprisingly, a lot of it is wool, not acrylic), lemme know and I can get back to you with specifics.

Some of the yarn even has my aunt's mother's WIPs still attached. It was bittersweet for my aunt to give these away. I wish I knew how to finish them, but I am ignorant in the ways of crochet.