Because...Lasagne

From 2015, I never got around to posting this.

Lately, though, dairy has been more unfriendly than usual to my gut so we haven't made this recently. Definitely time to make the sauce again, though, because it is soooo good.

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Many friends are aware that Kent and I follow a strictly (or almost strictly) no-sugar-no-grains approach to food. Kent follows more of a strictly Paleo diet that I do but at home you won't find one speck of rice, wheat, etc, in our cupboard. We allow ourselves to wander off the reservation, so to speak, under certain circumstances - say, when waffles are on offer at Chris & Irene's, or for a tasting menu at fancy-pants starred restaurant. Let's be clear: we don't have allergies. I have a few sensitivities, and we have made lifestyle choices - and we choose to ignore them when confronted with something like Michel Roux's menu a couple of weeks ago because we can afford, and choose, to not substitute ingredients. 

This is all just to say: we have made choices, and pasta-in-it's-gorgeous-semolina-goodness has been absolutely verboten. I love pasta in all it's forms. Flat, ruffled, stuffed. And I've found a substitute for flat thanks to three special people. Long-ish story. Settle in, chaps.

Special Person #1: Mom, who introduced me to zucchini-noodle lasagne during her visit last year and started me on this adventure of reintroducing ragu back into our world. Slicing up zucchini is a great option! For my taste, it has to be roasted first to dry it out a bit. We have such a tiny oven that this really does take several rounds of roasting. The zucchini shrivels up so you have to do quite a lot to get the right amount for a proper lasagne. 

Special Person #2: TS, a lovely woman who was my first real friend here in London, introduced me to a few of her favorite places in Camden. One of them was a vegetable shop, Parkway Produce (Parkway Greens? I can never see the writing on the awning), has 95% fresh produce and 5% other. There are veg I've never laid eyes on in this place. They supply local Camden restaurants with goods. They are constantly moving, busy, boxing up produce, unboxing produce. Best prices on unwaxed lemons in town. Best looking lemons in town. Best lemons in town. Anyway, TS told me about celeriac. Whaaaa? I've never used it. She gasped and said "Oh, you MUST try it. Such a lovely mild flavor. Mash it or slice it into matchsticks and put it into salad." (Note: right across the street from The Tiniest Whole Foods Ever)

Special Person #3: Mark Sisson, of Mark's Daily Apple. A few days after this discovery of Parkway Produce, I was reading on Mark's website about his version of lasagne, where he uses celeriac (celery root). 

Hm. This obviously got me thinking about how I could change up my lasagne. I make my own bolognese sauce for it, a riff on two sauces in Stanley Tucci's family cookbook, so I'm already spending a great deal of time on that. I didn't like how much more time the zucchini takes to roast. Celeriac, eh? Great big monster of an ugly root. You have to carve the outside off. It's very firm and a little difficult to slice, but easier than a butternut squash. Mark parboils 1/8" slices in batches of four or so - whatever fits in the pan, so that's what I did. Worked great! Made BEAUTIFUL if somewhat wonky "noodles" for lasagne. I did a crappy cutting job - very uneven - but DH loved it. It has just the right consistency - firm enough to layer but soft enough to cut through with a fork. But oh mercy standing in front of the stove parboiling slices of celeriac...MANY slices of celeriac...in my tiny galley kitchen...not my favorite thing to do. But I did it a few times because...lasagne! Then I read somewhere about steaming it. Maybe on the BBC food website. Maybe somewhere else. 

Okay, what the heck, I try that. 

Success! I can steam half a head of celeriac slices at a time! Woohoo! And, I can steam another set of slices to freeze for next time. Oh, yes by the way, it freezes lovely. Thaw it in the fridge for a day, use it in lasagne that night or the next day. Yummy.

Fine, it isn't the best photo but it's in a proper big American Pyrex casserole dish,
you know what I'm talking about.

Then Kent ponders: "I wonder if we can spiralize it and use it as...spaghetti?" Well, shit yes that actually works too. Steam a head of spiralized celeriac for about 9 minutes, drain it, salt it, cover it with sauce and sprinkle with parmesan. It works. You could just boil them in salted water, too, and it would work just fine. I've read that it's good to add a little lemon juice to prevent it from going brown (might be for storage in fridge) but that hasn't been a problem for me. That spiralizer we bought two years ago has finally come in handy. 

There is almost nothing better than a big plate of spaghetti with homemade bolognese and sprinkled with fresh parmesan cheese after a run (you knew I had to mention that somewhere, right?) - made with ingredients that are consistent with our dietary choices.

Life is good. 

The Skirt, Part 1

This story is as much about sewing as it is about weaving. It is possibly even more about project planning. The things I learned, since I am not an expert sewist, were decidedly in the planning and sewing stages. I found the weaving to be easiest with one glaring exception (the beat) and which I didn’t especially appreciate until it was too late.

This project was driven by a long-standing desire to construct my own clothing. I wasn’t interested in making any political statements or return to some mythic “simpler time” but rather more practical reasons: I’m 5’1” with bust, waist, and hips, and finding well-fitted clothing is a challenge from both a height and shape perspective. As every woman who is shaped outside the normal distribution knows, the off-the-rack clothing industry doesn’t design garments for curvy women.

I was first seduced by a sexy deflected doubleweave (DDW) pattern I found in a back edition of Handwoven. I had to try it but it was a few years before the stars aligned and I had enough nerve to potentially waste some of my precious Jaggerspun Zephyr wool/silk blend fiber. My first attempt went brilliantly right up until I sent it through my front-loading washer, thinking it was gentle enough. The result was beyond disappointing: it shrunk from 7’ x 11” scarf size to 3’ x 6”cravat size. It’s a very warm cravat and I actually do wear it on the very coldest days of the year. Lessons learned! But, I knew what to do – and what not to do – to wet finish this piece of work. I played with color combinations and generally had a lot of fun with discovery.

A year or two before this first experiment with DDW, a very close friend and the woman who played Robin to my Batman -- let’s call her Kerry because that is her real name -- one day tossed four cones of 20/2 cashmere in I my direction and commanded me to weave her something beautiful in dark blue, dark green, burgundy, and ivory. At the time, more than two colors scared me and I promptly parked that beautiful fiber in the stash. The cones followed me on a move to England where they sat in a project box for 18 months.

Back to the future: You get a lot of time to think while you are weaving and I just knew that the DDW pattern would be the right one for her and something she wouldn’t weave for herself. In part because it’s too fiddly and in part because I have more shafts at my disposal and my pattern requires eight. In a moment of inspiration I drew a fifth color from my stash, a BFL/silk blend, hand-dyed by Cheryl at Sonoran Desert Dyed Fiber and I found a way to mix the yarns into a plaid-ish DDW. That first DDW was only three colors. Now I had five!!

Fast forward a few weeks and voila: I was cutting off an beautiful DDW scarf from the loom which I vigorously wet finished by hand. It was fine enough to double over as a scarf without creating bulk. I road tested it around town and took an action picture of it near Tower Bridge.

I was satisfied that as a scarf it was brilliant. I wanted one of my own.  Nonetheless, the scarf went to Kerry, the majority owner of the fiber content; an 18” sample went to Cheryl so she can show off what her fiber could do. We even entered that scarf in competition at Maryland Sheep & Wool and got second prize in the category, and I agreed with the judges comment that it was still a little flimsy. It needed a closer sett and another round of hand-fulling.

Next time: Part 2, Planning the yardage and selecting a skirt pattern

Returning

No, not to the US, sorry Kerry & Cheryl & Mom!

Returning to the blog. It's had a long nap. Also returning to Complex Weavers, my membership now renewed. I miss my extended tribe of weavers, spinners, and fiber enthusiasts. In renewing my membership, I joined the Designing Textile study group. It's led by a weaver I have a lot of admiration for, and it's membership is comprised (to my delight) of some wonderful weavers. I'm excited to be in their company. I approach this as designing textiles for a purpose. My purpose has been for clothing, and I've promised to write up my first adventure in weaving cloth for clothing. Stay tuned.

We spent time in Montana last week visiting my husband's cousin on her organic farm. We did very touristy stuff: horseback riding (wonderful, and came away with sore sit bones!), fly fishing from a boat on the Bitterroot River (more of this, please), hiking up to Blodgett Overlook Trail (longer but less arduous and not as high as hiking up Mt. Teide). My sister-in-law Leslie and I ran the Lake Como trail, though I would have to categorize it more as run-walk-stumble-wade through running water. It's about 8 miles, really beautiful with some drop-dead gorgeous waterfalls, but we were there after a week of heavy rains so it was wet. The trail itself was mainly rocky, at times was a small stream, lots of large puddles, and in one case washed out by a small waterfall which we had to walk through. Also, we were admittedly a little anxious about meeting bears. We didn't, but toward the end of the trail we started hearing things and we were completely soaked and ready to be done!

Also in Montana I attended a pipe ceremony. This isn't something I'd normally sign up for but it was scheduled on the farm to celebrate solstice. So, when in Rome (Hamilton, actually)...I'm proud to say that my urbanite self wasn't entirely closed off to the ideas shared and the woo-woo nature of the entire thing and I found myself hit with inspiration for the 2018 study group topic ("write about a specific object or experience that has inspired you to transfer it into your own weaving, and how you translated it"). So in the middle of this pipe ceremony, the smudge smoke told me it was the object of my inspiration.  I wasn't high, it was just sage mixed with some other grassy/herby stuff, nothing hallucinogenic, and the smoke didn't actually say anything. But it was while each person in the circle was being "blessed" and I was staring into the smoke coming from that smudge stick thing that it popped into my head that the smoke and the objects on the "alter", for lack of a better description, should be my inspiration. And to be fair to the ceremony, it was a strong inspiration and there was absolutely no doubting it. 

I jumped on it right away the next morning in my journal, jotting ideas. In fact, I think the finished textile really popped into my head already formed; the brainstorming is mainly about how I'm going to execute it. 

As with all things, I'm limited by the width of my loom, so nothing goes on wider than 20". Technically, I'm also limited to 8 shafts but the ground cloth structure can be a "simple" plain or twill weave, and I sketched this on the plane coming home. It's the smoke that is the complicated part, and I've been googling this for inspiration on how to incorporate it. It needs to give a sense of lightness and movement, of dancing across the cloth.  I want to see curves. Supplemental warp, damask, inked images on the warp before weaving, ribbon sewn onto the warp after weaving - these are all potential approaches and all are on the table, even the damask if I were to construct a drawloom-thing. It's not out of the question. At the moment my browser is full of tabs on these topics. Today my running brain (the part that isn't putting feet to pavement to make sure I stay upright) will be put to work solving these design mysteries, and I've pulled out all my weaving books and CW Journal past issues for inspiration. As Fox Mulder says, the truth is out there. 

Right now, the dominant colors are dark grey and black/near black with occasional yellow (there was a guy in a bright yellow rain coat) and dark red (there was a dark red bandana on the "alter" which quite stood out against the greys and near-blacks), and then the light grey representing the smoke. 

I currently have two weaving projects wound into chains, but they'll just go in the weave queue. I don't want to put anything on the loom until after August 7, our move date. When I do put this project on the loom, it'll be a sample length proof of concept. Due in December, I have a few months to figure this out, weave/finish, and write about it. 

-E