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  • Off To Camp

    Here I am at 5:00 on a Monday morning, sitting in the airport waiting to fly to San Francisco for my sewing camp with Sandra Betzina. I have a cup of great coffee in my hand, perhaps a good omen that. When I cleared security and arrived at the coffee stand the manager had just made a pot of french press coffee for himself that he was unable to pawn off on any of the customers.  I jumped at the chance being a lover of strong black coffee and I feel this is a lucky start to the morning. 

    Normally I would be in  San Francisco by now, but September started off with a bang and I had an obligation Sunday evening from which I could not wriggle myself free.  Besides with all that was going on construction wise, having Saturday to pack was a blessing.

    And don’t you want to know what I packed to work on?  Looking at the stash and pulling out potential projects, although something I dread getting started on, is a wonderful way for me to get into "camp mode" and prepare for the exciting creative week ahead.  I have things I planned on bringing and a few things that just kind of fell into my hands as if they were saying "make me".

    And so, what did I pack?

    Challisskirt

    The green, pink and purple swirly fabric in the background is a very lightweight wool challis that I am going to make into a skirt, Simplicity4186 , the same pattern I used for the Maroon cotton skirt  I made in early august.  The skirt will be just below the knee and I am considering inserting a small piece of fringed self-fabric at the hemline.  Then when I tire of it, I can remove it.  I have a beautiful wool tween that will be made into a jacket that coordinates with this, and I definitely need coordinates in my wardrobe but I already have things that go with this fabric in my closet so I did not bring the jacket fabric with me.

    Next I brought this black and white check fabric from Fabric Mart  in the spring  and as you see from all the things piled up with it, there are several options going on here:

    Blackwhitecheck

    I originally planned to make a skirt, inspired by  Carolyn’s January 23rd Post, perhaps a little more subtle, with the slit on the side and a smaller or no bow.  Although I never made it in the spring, the skirt is still on my mind and there are enough frilly feminine touches around that I believe I can still wear it. 

    But I accidentally ordered twice as much yardage as I needed for the skirt and when I saw this Simplicity pattern:

    Simplicity4047

    I knew I had to try it.  I don’t believe I have enough fabric for both, but I might.  So I am going to make a muslin of the jacket.  There are various options for linings shown in the photo.

    But now they are boarding my flight and I must go.

    More later.

  • September Already

    Here it is September already and I have little to show for my summer.  For those of you who have stuck by  me during my hiatus from sewing, I am very grateful for your continued loyalty.  Goodness knows there have been precious few projects here and little inspiration. 

    But September will be different.  I itch to sew.  I need to sew.  Next week I will be in San Francisco for sewing camp and that will be my big kick-off back to sewing, although I am truthfully hoping to get a little sewing time before I leave as well.  Sometimes I seem to need a little distance.  More likely I need to give myself permission to walk away from whatever else is going on and just sew.

    But that does not completely account for my absence.  I called this blog Sew Distracted in order to write about how sewing distracts me from the various stresses and tasks of life, but also to write about how my far too many interests distract me from sewing. 

    Distractions are always present. This is the price of being interested in too
    many things, the price of being too scattered in my attentions, the cost of a
    continued lack of focus. But I hope there is a cohesiveness somewhere if only I
    can find it; perhaps then I will also have found my voice as concerns this
    blog.

    Lately it seems the distractions have been legion:

    Distraction1

    Here I am next to the cleomes in the overgrown flower bed that is blocked by the temporarily located spa, dumpster, gravel pile and a ton of construction debris.  The cleome have grown quite tall, determined to be seen over all the obstacles to their viewing.  I am 5’9" for comparison.

    Distraction2

    And of course the wealth of summer produce has kept me happily occupied for hours in the kitchen.  Shopping the farm stands, planning menus, cooking…. all this pleasantly occupies hours of each day.  I’m not complaining here either.  I will miss this in the dead of winter when there is no decent vegetable to be found.  Of course I will have more sewing time then as well.

    Distraction3

    And the construction crews are back.  Even though I am not doing the work, there seems to be an endless variety of things to be done, people to talk to, little tasks to be undertaken.  And then there is the time spent following the progress, watching one’s house be transformed.  That is distractin enough.

    But a little fiberly progress has been made:

    Distraction4_1

    I finally cut out all the pieces for the nursery room set.  How many weeks ago did I wash this fabric and set it aside?  There is no point in counting the days.  What is done is done.  It took me bits and pieces of two days to get this far:  Saturday and Sunday.  Nothing further has been accomplished since, at least not on the sewing front.

  • Is Dutillieux really harder to appreciate than Haydn?

    The opening concert of the South Mountain Chamber Music series was this afternoon, and, as usual, it was absolutely wonderful.  The Mendelssohn Quartet gave a wonderful performance of Haydn, Dutilleux and Mendelssohn with an encore of Puccini.  It was a lovely Autumn Sunday.  How quickly the seasons have seemed to change. 

    The Dutilleux was difficult but interesting, and the audience applauded politely but was not probably universally thrilled.  I thought the piece was interesting, but not as ethereally breathtaking as the cellist described it before the performance.  And this dichotomy has made me think about music and new music (although a piece written in 1978 is hardly new) and how we listen and approach music. 

    I have only fairly recently come to an appreciation of Haydn.  In my youth it bored me and I found it uninspiring.  I was exposed to classical music, but mostly of a later period, Beethoven through Brahms, perhaps, but Haydn missed out.  In my adolescence I discovered the romantics; much more appropriate to the hormone-ridden years.  Only recently have a really listened to Haydn, discovered what a great composer he truly was, and come to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the music.

    This appreciation did not come in a vacuum however.  I listen to music.  Composers are influenced by each other.  Popular pieces are played over and over, are incorporated into soundtracks, commercials, movies, and televison shows.  If you have lived for a few decades and attended any concerts you come to have an expectation of what you will hear at a concert.  If you attend local symphonies or listen to classical music CD’s you begin to recognize certain genre’s or composers.  “That is Baroque” you might say.  Or, “That sounds like Brahms” even though you are not a musical scholar or particularly music-minded.

    But this does not apply as much to 20th century composers.  The music is difficult because we do not hear it every day.  We have little or no frame of reference because it is not performed often.  We fall back on the familiar sounds.  But I seem to recall that even the “great” classical composers were not always appreciated in their time.  I also recall that some of the complaints we make today, “but you can’t hum it” were applied to composers of the caliber of  Mozart and Beethoven, the most humable of composers by modern standards.   Perhaps if we listened to modern music more it would become part of our mental framework and we would appreciate it more.  Perhaps I would have picked up on that “ethereal” tone.  Perhaps it would even be humable.

    Perhaps future generations will look back on our time and wonder how we couldn’t “get” Dutilleux.

  • Friday Update

    Yesterday
    morning it looked like we would end up crushing my favorite flower bed, but
    careful planning saved most of the flowers.  While we working in the
    garage and driveway (which occupies most of our front yard), the masonry crew
    was in the back setting up a truly maze-like array of forms for the concrete
    pour which is scheduled to occur on Wednesday.  We are now off for
    the weekend, but the masonry crew will be back on Monday despite the holiday.
    It will truly be a laboring Labor Day here, as the crew has a lot of work to do
    before the building inspector, two engineers, and various other contractors
    appear to walk through the site and hopefully get approval on Tuesday afternoon
    so the pour can proceed on Wednesday. 

    And I seem to be becoming the "homeowner from Hell" as I once again
    was out on the site, blueprints in hand, explaining plans, pointing out was not
    being done correctly and generally trying not to be too much of a nuisance
    while insisting that things be done correctly.   When they try to ask
    G he always refers them to me "She’s the engineer" he says.  And
    to think I never knew I would love reading blueprints so much.

    About a quarter of the work done today is not correct, but it is a particularly
    complex portion of the job.  Unfortunately by the time the crew got to
    that portion, the foreman and general contractor had both left and only the
    non-English speaking crew remained on-site.  My pathetic attempt at
    explaining the engineering issues and how the form construction was wrong in pidgen
    Spanish was not effective.  I desperately need to refresh my language
    skills, although this was never my strong point.

     Monday will
    truly be a busy day as I go over the site with the foreman before he progresses
    further.  I am not worried that the pour will go wrong.  The engineer
    who designed the set up for the electric pool cover will be here Tuesday, as he
    prefers to oversee the preparation for and pouring of, the supporting concrete
    for his part of the project, and the current framework will not accommodate the
    housing for the motor and reel for the
    pool cover. The structural engineer is
    known for his meticulousness and being a stickler for detail as well so I am
    not worried about the final job.  But I do hope to avoid further delays
    and get the set up correct on the first try.

  • Construction resumes

    Something’s happening behind the house:

    September1menatwork

    The crew is here to frame for the pour.  They are behind schedule.  The plan is for inspection and conference Tuesday morning with the pour Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday.  However it is doubtful that the forms will all be in place today and the crew is supposed to finish up tomorrow (Saturday) a day which is also supposed to be filled with heavy rains due to the travelling plans of Ernesto.  My apologies to Florida, but I wish he had stayed further south.

    Meanwhile the powers that be (men in boots driving trucks, and my own darling husband) have decided that the only place for the dumpster is next to the spa and the "Iris bed" that I built last summer, with the door to the dumpster opening out over my flower bed.  G has decided, wisely, to lay some boards over the flower bed so that we will all be tromping over the boards, flattening my flowers but not tamping down the soil as well.  I think the whole shebang will just miss my irises, which are starting send up flower stalks for the second bloom and I think I have the boards laid out in a way that only knocks down the glads and cleomes and the annuals in front but those are short-lived at this point anyway.  I think it is well enough laid out that even big clumsy men who don’t think about flowers will miss the iris buds.

    The mixture of lillies, cleome, and gladioulus at the back of the bed has been quite successful.  The first lilies were devestated by the deer when they started to come up so they were replaced with white lilies.  This was fortuitous because the white cleome with the white lilies have been really beautiful and the pale purple gladioli have been just the perfect accent.

    September1cleome

    cleome

    September1glad

    gladioulus.

    Unfortunately I did not get photos of the lilies in bloom.  Next year.

    Luckily for this weekend’s construction the chrysanthemums I planted on the west end of the bed did not come back up this year, well only 1 out of 5 and it is still terribly small.  It fits under the lumberwalkway I just set up.  I don’t know why I can’t grow chrysanthemums.  The sedum in the same position on the other end of the bed have grown fabulously.  They are over three feet tall, thick and lush, after only one year’s growth.  Here they are just beginning to bloom:

    September1sedum

    I will put some more sedum in the bed on the west end, after all the trampling has ceased.  l worry that by matching plantings on the two ends, one side will do better than the other and it will look even worse.  Well, can’t be worse than non-existent chrysanthemums.

    But now, I must go help haul lumber and other detritus so that we can get as much accomplished as possible before the rains.

  • Let Me Hear the Music

    I realize that I have been very bad about posting lately, here and elsewhere as well.  As you know the entire summer has been busy and distracting and there have been many threads pulling at my time. 

    The last two weeks have not been busier, but they have been more distracted.  I realized that I never even posted about the second Bard Music Weekend because my thoughts were drawn elsewhere almost immediately.  I still have the notes.  I might try to reconstruct my thoughts just because I too might like to remember.  But then again it might be too late.

    We did receive the newly rebuilt woofer’s for my old EPI speakers (last week actually) and I installed them last night.    We have been talking about repositioning the speakers and rearranging bookcases, and so I had put off the installation.  But it finally occurred to me that this remodeling is just in its early theoretical stages and if I wait we will never hear music.  I don’t see how these speakers are going to be moved during the remainder of 2006.

    Of course I had to test the stereo system.  We listened to Gorecki’s Third Symphony, The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, and it was spectacular.  I had forgotten how good these speakers were.  Oh I am sure they are not the world’s best speakers, but they are better than anything G had when I met him, and with the new Woofers installed, my 26 year old EPIs sound incredible!  The deep base at the beginning had shivers crawling up my spine and I could feel the vibration in the floors and walls.

    Obviously the woofers had degenerated over time and we had been losing sound quality without even being aware of it.  What an incredible difference.

  • Savoring the Moment

    I never wanted to write a food blog.  There are far too many excellent blogs about food, well written, beautifully photographed, filled with wonderful food, for me to ever want to compete.  I really have nothing to add.

    And yet this summer has been mostly about food.  My knitting and sewing have been neglected, mostly my sewing, and I do feel badly about that.  This blog was supposed to be about travel and books and music and just things I do, but then lately that has been about food as well.

    I have long loved food and cooking; I have savored thinking about food, reading about food, and most of all eating.  Eating is all about the moment and the experience!  And in a way eating is a metaphor for life.  I had forgotten about that.  I had forgotten about the joy to be found in a simple morsel of perfect fresh fruit.  I had forgotten about savoring the taste of the things we put in our mouths.  I had forgotten that food was more than nourishment.

    When I first found out I had Celiac Disease, I instantly felt better than I had in a long time.  Although I had always been interested in food, the diagnosis intensified that interest, piqued my interest in finding things I loved and embracing all the foods I could eat and not the things I couldn’t.  There was a bit of denial mixed in though, and the gluten-free substitutes I found were mostly tasteless and dissapointing. 

    But then I started feeling bad again.  MY GI doctor would say "I told you so"; he never really believed I have Celiac, my symptoms were wrong for the classic diagnosis.  And I began to believe him, and to doubt myself.  Since I felt bad anyway, I stopped worrying about hidden gluten, and if you are celiac you will know what I mean, because I fetl terrible all the time anyway.  I felt terrible no matter what I ate, or even if I didn’t eat.    This was completely self-defeating.

    Well, now we know that there are different symptoms to Celiac.  And my doctor was both right and wrong.  I do have Celiac, but I also have IBS, and one played off the other.  When I stopped eating gluten I made my IBS worse and eventually I felt worse.  Now I have a new doctor who understands this and has been tryng to explain it to me and help me find how I should be eating. 

    Now I feel good.  Energetic again.  Happy with myself.  Well.

    And I love eating and cooking, even though planning menus on my new diet still takes hours of my time.  But it is time well spent.  It would be wonderful if I lived in a city where I could run out each day and find the freshest most perfect thing, but even then I would probably spend hours involved in the process of eating.  Now I go several times a week and find the produce, fish, and meat, and then spend hours thinking about what we will eat, making sure my diet fits the parameters we have found work best for me.  But food is what keeps us alive.  It is also the product of hours of labor.  The food that keeps us alive is worth spending time on, worth sharing with family and friends.  If food, the very basis of life is not worth the time, what is?  Is it silly to spend hours on the very thigns that make life worth living.  In the process I have also rediscovered how to savor the music at concerts, the beauty of the landscape when I am driving, the pleasure of just sitting and knitting.

    But sometimes I am still overwhelmed by the lack of time to do all I want to do, and my own inclinations to take on more and do more and drive myself into a frenzy.   But I am learning to enjoy the moment.

    And now is the moment for tomatoes.  Finally!

    Tomatoes

    Despite the fact that it was an odd summer, despite the fact that we had local corn by July 4th, unusually early, the tomatoes are late.  It has happened before,  The late tomatoes are not as unusual an occurrence as the early corn.  In fact a lot of people lost their tomato crops, myself included.  But luckily there are lots of local farms around.  The tomatoes pictured above are from Montgomery Place.

    I ate a significant portion of them for lunch,  2 1/2 pounds of heirloom tomatoes, quartered and tossed with a smidge  of olive oil, some good balsamic vinegar, and some sea salt.

    Tomatosalad

    Pure Heaven and all mine.

  • 22 yards of fabric waiting to be pressed

    Last night I developed a tremendous headache, one of the worst headaches I can recall.  Although it was not a migraine (I used to get those before i passed the big M) it was hell.  I felt like my head was literally going to burst open.  The headache is still there but it is getting better.

    Yesterday was spent running around:  farm stands, butcher, and fish market in the morning, cat to the vet, cat back home, grocery shopping.  The process took me all day, not made easier by the fact that I couldn’t find what I wanted at one grocery store and so ended up going to three — nothing kills  a day faster. 

    That and worrying about a sick cat, who is moping about or hiding in the closet and not eating.  She has lost 10% of her body weight in the last two weeks, and has in the past few days dropped from eating less to barely eating or drinking.  We are waiting for test results to come back but she is quite anemic.

    Anyway, during my stops at home between stores I had washed all the fabric for the nursery set (that was the cause of my delay not the actual home dec sewing) and I planned on pressing it, all 21 yards, last night after dinner while watching project runway and a few other mindless programs.  But by then my head hurt so much I could barely function.  I could not imagine what was the matter. The cat and I both lolled despondently on one end of the sofa.

    This morning the construction crew is back on the job site, finally, getting ready for the concrete crew to come on Monday to set up the framework for the pour so I was out in the yard a little before 8 (head still pounding) talking to the foreman.    When I walked back in the door, it hit me, the smell of gasoline.  The house reeked of gasoline!  I did not smell this when I came home last night so it must be something new.    It was not the furnace, fuel oil smells different, and when we had a burp-back about 20 years ago, the house was filled with a blue haze.  No wonder I had  headache.

    When we got to the garage, which is under the family room portion of the house, it took us a minute.  Despite the fact that it did not smell like fuel oil (to me, G can’t smell anything much anymore), we checked the oil tanks which had just been filled yesterday.  Not that.  Then we saw it.  The mower had divested itself of all it’s gasoline and it was puddled all over the garage floor right next to G’s car. 

    I have moved the mower outside; G will call the repair shop to come pick it up.  I mopped up most of the spill and have the gasoline soaked rags in a bucket to take to a disposal station later on today, and I have poured a cleanser on the stain to eat what remains before I scrub up the floor later on. I also have the attic fan running with windows open in the house venting it out.   To achieve this I was up on the extension ladder this morning with my utility knife finally unsticking all the windows the painters painted closed (last summer).  I had opened some, but not the ones that were difficult to get at, because I am lazy and we use the a/c most of the time.  It is amazing that those gasoline fumes reached all the way to the opposite end of the house and even my sewing room reeks of gasoline.

    Hopefully I will get the pressing done later this afternoon, although I still have to scrub the garage floor, and I am meeting with the job foreman to review the blueprints and the plan for the job in about an hour.  Hopefully, we caught this problem before the gasolines fumes worked their way into the closets, our clothes, my fabric collection and all the upholstery in the house.  It took me weeks to clean up after the concrete dust fiasco, and I am not looking forward to going through the process again so soon.

  • Exotic Immigrant meets Local Girl

    Local raspberries are in season, at least at local farms.  I saw the first fruits at the the Montgomery Place Farm Stand yesterday.  My own raspberries, which are more of the black raspberry variety,  appear to be about three weeks away yet. I hope I will be here when they ripen.

    As soon as a saw the berries, I knew I need a pint for dessert.

    Augustfruit

    Combined with the little bit of incredibly fragrant sweet pineapple still hanging around after the weekend festivities, a perfect dessert was born.

    1 pint raspberries (about 230 grams)
    similar weight of pineapple — 250 grams.  I didn’t measure, just weighed pieces
    1 tablespoon Cuisine Perel Black Fig Vinegar

    Combine all ingredients.  Stir very gently, but the ripe raspberries will begin to crush as soon as you touch them.  Let sit at room temperature for at least 1 hour for the flavors to combine.  My raspberries and pineapple where both incredibly sweet so no sugar was necessary.  You may have to adjut the flavors to taste.

    Serves 2.

  • Chilled Tomato Soup

    Sometimes I think that my favorite part of summer music festivals are the picnics that we share as part of the festivities.  Summertime lends itself to cold foods, foods that are perfect for a picnic.

    Well, perhaps soups aren’t always the perfect picnic food.  They can be messy.  For the most part the cold summer soups I favor tend to be smooth purees, perfect for serving in a glass or mug for drinking on the lawn.  There are exceptions however, and our favorite summer soup is not a drinking type of soup.  We have it every year during the Bard Music Festival, and a couple of other times as well.  This soup is a meal in itself, with a glass of white wine it is almost a festival.

    Chilled_tomato_soup

    Chilled Tomato Soup with Endive Salad

    This soup is not my creation but I am not sure of its source.  Usually I am quite meticulous about authors and sources of recipes in my collection but this recipe either predates my record keeping or was lost along the way.  I know I have been making it for at least 13 years, and I am pretty sure that the original recipe came from New York Magazine .  They used to do a semi-annual issue with recipes from assorted New York restaurants.  I am not sure if they still do, I haven’t read the magazine for years, the food issues alone weren’t worth keeping up the subscription.  Anyway I have probably altered the recipe over time, but am not sure how extensively.  It was originally an appetizer type soup and served 6 or 8 in the original version, but we make it for 4 and it is a filling meal.

    The soup was originally written for fresh tomatoes, and I have made it as such, but the tomato season around here is sometimes quite short, so I converted it to canned tomatoes long ago.  If using fresh tomatoes you would need to lengthen the simmering time for the soup to upwards of 2 1/2 to 3 hours in order to get the same rich melding of flavors.

    I have been recently converting my recipes to metric weights simply for ease of figuring out nutritional information.  It is just easier to make a calculation with a known quantity than with a vague "1 celery stalk".  1 ounce is about 28.35 grams, my scale does both but I have to push a button to convert to ounces and I often forget.   As in all my recipes, amounts are relative.

    CHILLED TOMATO SOUP WITH ENDIVE SALAD

    1 large or 2 small garlic cloves, 10 grams, peeled and minced
    105 grams celery stalk,  chopped
    105 grams    leek, chopped
    200 grams    red potato, chopped
    32 ounces canned whole tomatoes.  I use Redpack Italian Style Tomatoes with puree.
    1 quart chicken stock
    1/4 cup olive oil
    55 grams  shallots, minced
    200 grams fresh shiitake mushroom caps, about 18 caps
    2 large belgian endive, about 360 grams total
    1/3    cup red wine vinegar
    salt and pepper to taste
    balsamic vinegar for drizzlng on soup, if desired.

    In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, over medium heat, saute garlic, celery, leek and potato in 2 tablespoons olive oil for 5 minutes, until vegetables are softened and beginning to color. Add tomatoes with their juice and stir to combine.  When tomatoes are starting to simmer, add chicken stock.  Bring soup to a boil, reduce heat to low, and cook for about an hour.  Be sure the heat is low and only an occasional bubble breaks the surface of the soup, you want it to be just below a simmer. 

    Puree the soup, adding pepper to taste.  I don’t usually add salt as I find the canned tomatoes are sufficiently salty.  Depending on how well your blender purees the vegetable matter, you might need to strain the soup through a fine strainer to achieve a silky texture.  Chill.

    Heat the remaining olive oil in a large saute pan.  Add shallots and shiitake  and season with salt and pepper.  When shallots are soft and golden add vinegar and cook slowly over low heat until the shiitake are soft and most of the liquid is absorbed.  Remove from heat and allow the mushrooms ot cool.

    In a bowl toss the endive and shiitake mushroom mixture.  If you are not serving the soup right away, chill the salad.

    Ladle soup into four bowls.  Place salad on top of soup in the middle of each bowl. The soup is quite thick and rich and the salad will sit on the top for the most part.   Drizzle with balsamic vinegar if desired.