GO STILLERS!

Yay! Adam is home!

Adam was in Paris for the past week for his company's annual thingy. As they would actually be 30 min outside of the city the whole time, and he would be in meetings all day, and we are planning a wedding and a summer trip to the Wild West (Wyoming) to boot, we decided my accompanying him was unnecessary. However, I did ask him to bring me one thing, a snack I greatly enjoyed during my Backroads trip a few years ago in Provence:



TAILLEFINES PRUNEAUX!!! I loved these snacks, a sort of oversized Fig Newton but with prune filling, when I was there in 2006, and he actually went to several stores until he found the right thing with the right filling. Score!

Best. Fiancé. Ever.

On the way home from the airport (yes, I picked him up; I'm not such a slouch myself) Adam announced he wanted to make a lasagna, but we didn't have any homemade sauce and it's really best with homemade, so we stopped and bought the fixins for all of it and when we got home he got started. He just got home from a week in Paris and he wanted to cook. How cool is that? Anyway, I have a good sauce recipe and my mom's recipe for lasagna, so he used those. Here's the sauce:



It came out fantastic. So then after he made the sauce, we made the lasagna together using the sauce:



It was superb. And now we have tons of leftovers!

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As an appendix, here are pictures of the roast from New Year's Eve, sadly overdue, but better late than never. This was a pork loin crown roast with a fruit stuffing that very nicely complimented the pork. I will leave it to Adam to provide more details in the comments, if he wishes.

Here's an artsy shot of little crowns (which then were all removed because they were made of paper and Adam felt sure they would simply catch fire in the oven. :)



The roast prior to going into the oven:



And last but certainly never least, the happy chef with his gorgeous roast:


 

Knitting and Baking

There was a pretty big snow storm predicted for today and tomorrow, so we decided to bake Amish Friendship Bread. The way this works is, you have a starter that you let grow for ten days, divide into five parts, parcel out four starters (a cup each, three to give away and one to keep for yourself), and use what's left (about a cup) to make two loaves. We decided that instead we would just bake ten loaves of bread at once (freeze them) and not try to keep the starter going any longer. Here's a picture of all five bowls with about half the ingredients in each:



Of course, it didn't occur to me when dreaming up this plan that I only had two loaf pans. So I baked in stages, and used other pans as well. Here are some of the resulting bread loaves - pistachio pudding, chocolate chips, and almonds, respectively:



Here is one of two sheet cake sized loaves. This has wheat germ mixed in, the other has chocolate pudding:



And we even made some muffin sized ones. These are chocolate chip:



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I also have done a lot of spinning and knitting lately. I'm working on a secret project for my bridesmaids' gifts, which I can't post pictures of, but suffice it to say I have been able to use some really fabulous fibers in this project.

In addition to the secret project, recently I've spun 4 oz of alpaca (from King, an alpaca at a local farm), 4 oz of 50% yak/50% silk, and 4 oz of 50% baby camel/50% silk. I have merino/silk/angora waiting to be spun next. The yak/silk is from A Verb For Keeping Warm. The camel and angora blends are from Spirit Trail Fiberworks, which has amazing colorways and fibers for spinning.