The Independent Stitch

Where most of the work gets done

I've written about the wonderful places to which I've traveled within the past year to work on the major project that is nearing its deadline (I'm not saying "completion": it will be pulled out of my hands, far from complete, because otherwise it will not be ready for a few decades).

I spent most of a week in a rented cabin shared with other writer friends.

Another set of friends helped me obtain the delight of a full week's residency.

And I retreated for a too-short weekend with co-author Carol Ekarius.

(That's me with Tuf, one of Carol's dogs. Carol took the picture.)

Yet I haven't shown where most of the work is getting done. That's partly because I'm embarrassed. It's organized, but it also looks like, as we used to say, "ten pounds in a five-pound bag."

I've worked in this office for many years—I think it's at least fourteen or fifteen:

For the final four or five years that I edited Spin-Off magazine, most of that work was accomplished in this space. Now this is where I do all the work on the books published by Nomad Press and for my freelance editorial clients. It's compact, but I have a window (the high, basement kind, just out of sight), and the tools I need are close at hand (an understatement). I do go off to a coffeeshop or the library several times a week, taking a single set of tasks with me. It's refreshing.

The photo above was taken during the time when the computers were breaking down, and just before Jessica Derksen, who has been an enormous help in my continuing efforts to accomplish the impossible, showed me how to fit yet another major job (The Project) into my office. It was April 2008. I'd signed the contract for this work four months earlier. Already 14 boxes of fiber were in the dining room (because there was no room for them in the office), and it was obvious that many more boxes would be part of this undertaking before it was done.

There was a storeroom adjacent to the office, separated from it by a wall. When we bought the house, this space was called a bedroom. We learned later that technically it shouldn't have been listed as a bedroom because there's no closet (there was also no closet in the formerly so-called bedroom that is now the office, although we have since built one).

The only access to this room was through the laundry area. This space has a nicer window than the office does. And a heat vent. The office doesn't have a heat vent.

Jessica got the idea of taking down the wall between the two rooms. The primary reason for this was so we could use the small hallway/entry between the laundry area and the storeroom to stash boxes of fiber. It was only about 10 square feet, but that can look like a lot if you are tripping over boxes. If we took down the wall, we could fill that entry space with boxes because we could walk into the storeroom through my office. The change was kindly, quickly, and neatly implemented by Jessica's husband, Jonathan.

I did lose a floor-to-ceiling wall of bookcases, shown here when I'd almost completely dismantled them:

I still haven't found permanent, orderly homes for everything that was displaced. However, these lines on the wall are the start of a big change.

And the wall came down:

Here's the view of the office from the former storeroom:

And the former storeroom as seen from the office:

Most of the work on The Project now takes place in that former storeroom, which, a year and a half later, looks like this:

You can't see all the active boxes in that picture. There are now 54 (if you don't count the ones that contain the extra bits that are not directly part of the book), so in addition to what's here there are more in the laundry room, in that entry/hallway this exercise freed up (which you can see a bit of between the bookcases in the photo above and, from the other side of the opening, below), and in the downstairs bathroom (as seen from the laundry area in the photo below):

I can't get a photo angle that shows the boxes on top of the dryer.

We're not done yet. There will be more boxes, and I'll need to figure out what to do with them. There's still space for about 3 on top of that pile in the bathroom.

It's been nice to pack 12 boxes (the number that will fit) into the car, along with the tools and the computer, and to go elsewhere. It's easier to focus when everything is neatly organized and I'm not having to juggle all the other responsibilities of these spaces and of the house, although I can only withdraw from the other dimensions of my life for a few days at a time.

Yet day in and day out, week, month, and year in and year out, most of the work gets done right here. The trips away have been real boosts to my progress: I'm amazed at what can get done with the support of those protected times and places. Yet plodding along in the middle of everything is also part of the whole package, and without it the job as a whole would be unreachable. 

I'm constantly grateful for Jessica's idea to tear down a wall, for my willingness to say yes, and for Jonathan's help in getting the restructuring job done so I could move forward.

Genghis Khan exhibit, Denver Museum of Nature and Science

I'm about six blog posts behind what's in my head. I'm also spinning and writing on a serious deadline (and putting together a Ravelry ad campaign in the hope of picking up enough income to float Nomad Press and me through this time of non-paying, absolutely must-do-for-many-reasons work).

However, I was just writing a quick Facebook note on the exhibit on Genghis Khan that I went to last night at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, courtesy of friends who are members and invited us to join them, and thought I'd put a short recap in here.

There will be no photos, because taking photos was not allowed. We all left saying that we have to go back, and walked to the car planning how to do that. We also all have different interests: I was the only textiles person, supported in that by my daughter, who took a comprehensive path through the rooms in the hour we had before closing. We had to make the trip to the city after a full day of work all around, so our time there was too short. (We also enjoyed a delicious and varied members-only opening-special buffet supper of Mongolian foods.)

We got a pretty thorough look at the first half of the exhibit, and as the staff was announcing the museum's imminent closure we skimmed the second half to get an overview and plan our return trip. Most textiles are in the second half of the exhibit, with enough just in the first half to have made yesterday's trip a stellar event for a fiber nut.

In that first part, there are some sleeper-but-gorgeous silks (noblewoman's burial series). There are two gowns, extremely faded and damaged—but look closely at the brocade work, and see the way the hems are faced with coarser fabrics, and what graceful shaping there is on the sleeves! (As I look closely and in relative solitude at the cloth, large numbers of people walk past me and the fabrics to see the mummy herself, resting in a secluded area, and then out again to the explosions that demonstrate Genghis Khan's invention of the modern army and of sustained warfare. I experienced those, too. . . .)

In a flat case in the armor area there's a fortified vest made primarily with what looks like a couple of yards of blue heavy chambray. . . . Most folks move around this case with a quick glance down: they've seen things like this on the rack or the bolt at Walmart. Oh, but no, and oh, my: all handspun, and if I had a strong magnifying glass I might be able to see clearly enough through the low-set case to confirm my guess that they are singles. The lining is coarser than the outer shell of the vest. Indigo-dyed. Not only handspun, but made with either handspindle or driven spindle: the timing predates flyer wheels, which were not prevalent in this part of the world in any case (all the Egyptian cottons also predate wheel-and-flyer technology by a long span, of course, as do many others of the world's most exquisite fabrics).

Great pottery, too. Not much time to look at it on this trip.

And some absolutely breath-taking calligraphic pieces, some in Mongolian script (Genghis Khan introduced writing in his home region), and a Chinese version of an earlier Mongolian book that was lost, and then a comparatively very recent piece that is also remarkable, a 19th-century genealogy of Genghis Khan (ink on cotton) that belongs in one of Edward Tufte's books, if it isn't already there: unusual and clear visual presentation of information. As my daughter noted, it's much more effective at conveying its content than the customary-to-us family tree.

There are also performers from the Mongolian community featured in the exhibit area daily—their placement somewhat impedes looking at the artifacts where they're stationed, but in the case of the dancer I watched, well worth the trade-off and a loop back through that area on another occasion to check out the walls and cases. I'm guessing the dancer we saw was Dugluun, based on brief conversation with her after her performance—how many highly skilled, seventeen-year-old contortionist dancers who have been training since they were seven are likely to be in Denver? She is like an extremely graceful and flexible yogini, her poses accompanied by a traditional Mongolian fiddle player of similar youth and equally distinct, of quieter, beauty. Seeing the young people so adept in these traditional arts was an extra treat. (P.S. An older man asked the young woman after her dancing what, basically, she thought the long-term negative effects to her body might be of the flexing she's doing. My guess is that she'll be in a lot better shape in forty years than most football players, ballerinas, or computer-based office workers.)

If you're within driving distance of this museum, or elsewhere that this exhibit travels, check it out. The textiles are not the big draw for most visitors, of course, but they're abundant and worth a pilgrimage to investigate. The cases around them are far less crowded than other parts of the show, too.

Blog Action Day: Climate Change . . . and enjoying life more (mostly)

Today is Blog Action Day, and the topic is climate change. It's a huge topic, with significant impact, usually presented in either intensively data-driven or doom-and-gloom scenarios. Last year, I attended a fascinating series of interdisciplinary presentations at Colorado State University on climate change. There were weather folks and poets and social scientists. Solving, or, rather, effectively responding to, what's going on with global climate change will require communication and coordination among lots of different people who know lots of different things. It's interesting to read down the list of disciplines of people involved with the CSU programs.

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At a personal level, I'm tempted to believe that anything I do as an individual will have such a small effect that it's inconsequential.

However, there are things I can do, and have been doing. Each of them has enhanced my life. I have to trust that there are beneficial results for the planet as well.

Over the past three years, my daughter and I have transitioned to biking almost everywhere we need to go in the city. We do pick up the car keys when the streets are icy, it's pouring rain or snowing hard, there is so much wind that forward motion becomes impossible, or we need to travel after about 10 p.m. It's amazing how often we can bike. This has brought us both a lot of joy. Also more muscle and lung power.

The photo above shows that bike's first day in our household. It has since been outfitted with a back rack and a folding basket, has taught us how to change flat bike tires and lubricate chains, has logged a lot of miles, and has improved the general climate around our house on a daily basis.

We are eating more locally produced food. Wow, does it taste good. We already ate low on the processing scale, but this has taken the flavor up several notches. It's also fun to know who is growing what we're eating, and that our small contributions are helping them sustain their independent businesses.

These potatoes (there were about seven varieties) were so simple to cook and tasted divine.

The next actions we take are bigger, but they only peripherally affect our family's quality of life. So far, these efforts require more work and cost significantly more than their non-ecologically informed alternatives, and don't, as far as we know, increase our income at all.

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Some businesses, like ours at Nomad Press, need to reach out to communities that are not local. We publish books on traditional and ethnic approaches to knitting. Nomad Press belongs to the Green Press Initiative, and we use recycled paper whenever possible (which is almost always). We also carefully watch other aspects of the requirements of publishing, including minimizing the impacts of transportation.

We've been with Green Press Initiative (GPI) a long time. In our first qualifying book (the revised and expanded edition of Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Knitting in the Old Way), there's a text statement about GPI on the copyright page. Later, we added the GPI logo in the same location (Priscilla's Spinning in the Old Way and Donna Druchunas' Arctic Lace). Our more recent books (Donna's Ethnic Knitting Discovery and Ethnic Knitting Exploration) have it on their back covers.

I hope some day (soon) the ecologically based actions we take will begin to make sense for our business's financial bottom line—not so much for our sake (although that would be nice) but because if these decisions were easier to implement, more cost-effective, and did increase sales, even more publishers would be inclined to make similar choices.

There are a few rudimentary marketing efforts for green-aware books in place, although they are not yet very high-profile.

Powell's Books has a Green Press section on its website. It's been in existence for several years, but I don't think many people know about it yet. (To locate it, if you don't have that link I just provided: on the main page, scroll to the very bottom and click on the link in tiny type that says "Green Initiatives at Powell's"; on the new page that opens, scroll down to just above the "tell us what you think" box and click on the Green Press Initiative link within the paragraph of text.) To find our books once you are in the Green Press section, go to the categories in the lefthand column, click on "crafts," and discover that three of the four listed titles are ours. (It looks like I need to remind Powell's of two more . . . we could apparently have five out of six entries in the category.)

Here's a brand-new idea that I hope gathers support more quickly: Eco-Libris is coordinating a green-lit awareness campaign called "It's Time for a Green Book: 1 Day, 100 Bloggers, 100 Green Books, 100 Reviews." The reviews will be released on November 10. We shipped off four books to their assigned bloggers yesterday morning.

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We do what we can. Our choices, small as they are in the overall picture, may make a difference.

At the very least, these choices feel like the right ones for us to make. We have also signed the 20/20 pledge, and are finding it easy to keep up with the commitment.

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Tonight I've ridden my bike to the coffee shop—a local business—to finish this post and work on a book project. It was windy when I left home, but not too windy. It will be dark when I ride back again, but I have good lights. And I might see deer again—in the city—as I did the other day when I rode home from the same coffee shop.*

That's one of the huge benefits of climate change: I have a bike that I love to ride.

Join me?

  (I'm the one on the right, in back. That's my sister on the left, in front, happily on her very own bike.)

* No deer this time. Two foxes, though!

Saturwoolday

It's shaping up to be a fine day. One of the things I love about wool is its variety, and what's going into the tub today represents quite a range:

There's Castlemilk Moorit, a very rare breed closely related to Shetlands. The provider of this sample apologized for its second cuts (snippets caused by shearing with two passes) and scurf (I'll skip describing scurf at the moment . . . ), but it's a lovely color, with excellent staple length, and will be just fine when washed and processed:

There's Polwarth from the Falkland Islands . . . not all of the sheep from the Falklands are Polwarths, but a quantity worth noting are . . . fine, with really cool crimp (those wavy contours in, in this case, both individual fibers and locks):

And we finally, finally (thanks to the generosity of friends on a couple of continents) have some Herdwick, giving us an opportunity to consider things like kemp (coarse, dye-resistant fibers) and Mrs. Heelis:

And while the wools are soaking in the tub, with their 20-minute demands for attention and changes of cleansing and rinsing solutions, I have THIS to enjoy:

It's Clara Parkes' new The Knitter's Book of Wool. Just arrived. I've glanced. I love Clara's take on the world, and am so glad she wrote this book.

It's shown on some Suffolk fleece I have here . . . I pulled out a lock at the lower right corner of the book, because it's so nice and long for a Suffolk. In the background is a rug I wove many years ago from Pendleton mill ends. I have a lot of rugs made with those mill ends, picked up at a weaving place in Poulsbo, Washington, long, long ago. They are still trucking. Our older dog "digs" in this one every night, making herself a nest to sleep in.

Snowing out. A good day for enjoying a variety of wools in a variety of ways.

If I get the washing done in time, I might even get to spin or knit some.

Artposium travel 4: Glenwood Canyon

The interstate east of Glenwood Springs passes through Glenwood Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on earth. Traveling through the canyon always combines both delight and cringes of discomfort for me, close to tears. I remember it from the 1950s, when we would drive to my grandparents' house. I remember peering from the back seat of the car, rolling along the narrow two-lane road without guardrails (this was before interstates, of course), across the tumbling, shining water, studying the light on the rocks, and following the railroad tracks on the other side, appearing and disappearing as they traveled in the open or through tunnels.

At that time, the canyon was obviously the thoroughfare of its time, with both cars and trains traveling through it, although the natural features of the place far outweighed the human intrusions. It still is the thoroughfare of its time, although now the road is a massive interstate, intricately constructed to damage the canyon as little as such a project can. However, the balance between geology and engineering has shifted.

Whenever it's even remotely feasible (nearly always), I take a rest stop and walk down to the river and re-imagine what this place was like a half-century ago.

I think what I really need to do is bring my bike. There's a trail the whole length now. Biking wasn't possible before the massive construction, because the roadway was so narrow. Maybe I can relocate the magic by traveling on two wheels.

But that's for another trip, and it would have to be a trip that was planned for that purpose. It's hard to break loose to just go somewhere just because, but I may have to figure out how to make that happen.

Here's a view looking east from one of the rest stops:

And here's looking west, from the edge of the Colorado River at the same rest stop:

While the water looks moderately calm above, a significant piece of what I remember is this:

Must come back with the bike. Sixteen miles (26km) one way, a total of thirty-two (52km). I think I would like it. I think my close-to-tears might be of the good kind.

Artposium travel 3: McClure Pass (part of the West Elk Loop Scenic Byway)

West Elk Loop, from Hotchkiss through McClure Pass, Paonia, Redstone, and Carbondale

The area around McClure Pass is known for the brilliance of its aspens in the fall. The aspens are ailing in parts of Colorado, and there's a lot of beetle kill in the evergreens, but the colors on these mountains last weekend, from a mix of vegetation and geology, were still breathtaking.

Aspens are fascinating; they are actually colonies, rather than single, isolated trees.

Much variety along the route:

This is Mount Sopris, an iconic part of the Roaring Fork Valley, a mountain everyone from Glenwood Springs to Carbondale and beyond identifies as a beacon of "home":

McClure Pass is open most of the winter, except when there's a heavy snowfall or a mudslide. As you travel through the pass, however, the "falling rock" signs aren't kidding. Boulders the size of large elephants rest on the road's shoulders.

I'd like to do the rest of the West Elk Loop some time, including the thirty-one miles (49km) of gravel road that complete the circuit. I also want to stop and take a look around in Redstone and Paonia.

Green tomatoes

We've had a hard enough frost to blacken the vines of the tomatoes and squash. Because of the repeated, late starts, most of our crop hadn't ripened yet. This is about four times as many tomatoes as we've had ripen on the vine this year.

As is evident in the raised bed that can be seen in the yard, the beets and carrots are still trucking. The tomatoes used to be within the squirrel-impeding wire enclosures directly behind them.

Next things to figure out:

1. What to do with green tomatoes. I did read about hanging them upside down while still on the vines, but I walked around the house carrying the vines for about five minutes and couldn't find a good place to accomplish that task, so they went on the windowsill instead.
2. Whether or not something I remember having read about not putting tomato vines into the compost should be a factor here, and if it should, what to do with the poor, wilted former-greenery, currently sitting on the deck awaiting a decision.

At least it feels like we are clearing space for next year's go at having a garden.

Artposium travel 2: toward and in Delta County

The first evening's event of the Artposium took place in Hotchkiss, at the Creamery Arts Center, which is worth going out of the way to see. Jack Roberts spent his weekend at home producing some of his wonderful black-and-white photographic prints that are going on display at the Creamery this week. It's precision work: he's able to do two or three prints a day, and his goal by the time the exhibit goes up is ten.

Because I was headed for Hotchkiss, the western portion of the West Elk Loop Scenic Byway was the most direct route to my destination. I went back the same way, although in both directions I didn't have time to wander and explore. When I was westbound, I needed to be at the reception before it ended, and when I was eastbound I wanted to be home before I was too tired to be driving. Because I left about 4 p.m. and it's about a seven-hour drive, figuring in brief stretch-the-legs breaks, that didn't leave any time for side trips. . . . I'll have to go back again.

My mother did a bunch of her growing up in Glenwood Springs, and when I was young my grandparents still lived there. I have vivid and treasured memories of the area, although I haven't spent much time there (or driven the roads I took this weekend) since I was quite small. So I wanted to look around, even if just in passing.

Delta County

At the west end of my travels, Delta County offers dramatic views full of contrasts. I took this photo as I was traveling back down to Cedaredge from Red Mesa Grange, where we spent the morning cooking with Howard Dubrovsky.

The area is geologically fascinating. It also demonstrates the effects of water on a landscape. This is a closer view of the area shown above.

I found it impossible to take photographs that adequately capture the scope or the layering of the mesas, although that didn't keep me from trying.

Artposium travel 1: One of the Colorado Scenic Byways

Last weekend, when I attended the Artposium in Delta County, Colorado, I stayed with Priscilla GIbson-Roberts and Jack Roberts. The Artposium's topic was food, and we ate wonderfully throughout the official event.

Priscilla and Jack value the garden and the table as well, and breakfasts, before the official day began, were also delightful: oatmeal cooked with garden fruits, homemade grape juice, Icelandic pancakes rolled around jam made from homegrown strawberries. Priscilla attended part of the Artposium, but during other parts she was at home slow-roasting tomatoes from their garden, because they'd just had their first frost.

When I stopped back by the house to say goodbye before heading east again, Jack had made ice cream with more of their garden's strawberries (this year produced a more-than-abundant crop; they were talking about strawberries like most people talk about zucchinis). Fortunately, I hadn't eaten to capacity at the lunch: almost, but not quite. I initially said no to the ice cream, then, when I realized it was homemade, thought I might be able to handle a tiny bowl . . . exquisite.

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I chose to drive from the Front Range to Delta County, scene of this Artposium, by way of the interstate only as far as Glenwood Springs, where I turned off onto the highways that lead to Carbondale, Redstone, and Paonia. This constitutes half of the Colorado Scenic Byway known as the West Elk Loop, and goes up over McClure Pass, reputed to be one of the best aspen-viewing locations in a state known for aspens (although they're only in the mountainous sections). And this is peak aspen (and elk-bugling) season.

I've loved exploring the less-traveled parts of Colorado, although I tend to do so only in the course of a need to be somewhere other than home (usually work). But I figure if you've got to be somewhere, you might as well enjoy the journey.

My most recent, and by far the most useful and beautiful, guide to the landscapes of Colorado is Colorado Scenic Byways: Taking the Other Road, with text by Susan Tweit and photos by Jim Steinberg. Jim takes fantastic photographs (and lets me see what the place I'm traveling looks like in other seasons, too). Susan's text takes me under the surface of the places I'm seeing with enough detail to be satisfying. On this trip, she especially helped me enjoy the rocks, which are extraordinary.

Colorado Scenic Byways is actually two books: both have text and photos, but the big one is for browsing and the smaller atlas is for use on the road. They stay safely in a slipcase when they're not being enjoyed. Great idea, beautifully accomplished. It won ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award and the Colorado Book Award, and never did a book (or set of books) more deserve that type of recognition.

Getting back on track with the next post, after my rhapsodic outburst. . . .

Artposium in Delta County: Dinner Stories--cooking with Howard Dubrovsky

Saturday afternoon at the Artposium, we had three fine presentations:

Writer Katherine Leiner, of Colorado and New York, has conducted 130 interviews of people between the ages of 19 and 38 who are going back to the land in search of good food for her upcoming book called Young and Hungry.

Chef Howard Dubrovsky from Toronto demonstrated that contemporary molecular gastronomy is within reach not just of diners with very deep pockets but can be played with in the kitchens of regular folks as well. . . . He's opening a restaurant in Toronto, and it looks like it would be fun to visit. . . . (Howard's a vegetarian and a beer connoisseur.)

Multimedia artist Cathi Schwalbe-Bouzide, also known as the Corn Lady, comes from Chicago and I felt like I'd known her a long time, even though we'd just met. She grows corn in the city and keeps people surrounded by concrete aware of their agricultural heritage and the necessity of growing things. She's obviously having a great time with her art.

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Sunday morning, the farm-and-vegetable group of Artposium participants gathered at a grange way out on a mesa to cook lunch for fifty people under Howard's tutelage. Howard is not only a gifted culinary artist, he's a wonderful teacher.

Here's what he had to work with:

• sixteen people, ranging in skill level from those who had been told to stay out of the kitchen all their lives to someone who had run a catering business (most of us were in the middle)
• a grange kitchen with broken plastic colanders, not enough knives or other tools, and no really big pots
• a fridge where "keep cold" was implemented as "lightly freeze"
• just over three hours

So first we put all the food out and got oriented to how this would work: Howard said he was taking the day off and we would be doing the cooking. We did do the cooking, but he didn't exactly take the day off. We also got oriented to the health processes: which sinks we would wash our hands in, which were for washing food, which were for dishes, and how all the procedures needed to take place in each of those locations.

He divided us into three teams—five, five, and six people—and put each team in charge of two of the dishes that would be served. Everyone in the symposium would be arriving for lunch, for a total of about fifty people. The other participants were elsewhere for the morning, either learning how to make wine or making pear strudel.

My team was responsible for the carrot soup and the spaetzle.

On the main counter to the left of the sheet of paper was the working area for the savory tart (its team is shown in the photo above with Howard). To the right of the paper was prep area for the most complex of the salads. The soup-and-spaetzle team set up at the round table in the background, although we hadn't moved our stuff when I took this photo—our two quart bottles of malt liquor are still at the far end of the counter.

Here's what the kitchen looked like for most of the morning:

That's thirteen of the seventeen people all working in the same space simultaneously. I was taking a photo. The other two participants and Howard were over at the prep areas. The only person whose face you can see in this photo is Cathi Bouzide, the Corn Lady, who did get to prep the corn for the salad. Writer/presenter Katherine Leiner is in the red Dinner Stories apron. At front right is one of my team members, Ila Pound.

Come to think of it, the two missing participants are the rest of my team! They were a father-and-son pair. I must have ducked out to take a photo as a quick break from peeling and chopping carrots or mixing spaetzle dough. It took a really long time to mix enough spaetzle dough for fifty people.

So everyone's accounted for at the moment of that photo. And that's pretty much what the kitchen looked like for a solid three hours.

Finally it was time to lay out the feast.

Howard presented our dishes to the entire gathered group, from least complex (toward the kitchen) to most complex (foreground). Hmm: the spaetzle and the soup (black pot) are both at this end. The adjacent bowl is the ceviche, which was the only non-vegetarian dish. I think which dishes were placed where could be debated. That tart looked pretty complex (it's hiding in the middle).

Wait a minute! That was supposed to be six dishes, two per team, and at the finale we laid out nine dishes, going with the flow of what was available and how it fit together.

1. lentils with Moroccan spices
2. savory tart
3. heirloom tomatoes and olives
4. celery slaw
5. ceviche
6. carrot soup
7. spaetzle
8. salad with greens and colorful vegetables
9. medium-cooked eggs (really served as sort of a condiment: they were cooked fully, but the middles were the consistency of jelly)

Howard brought plans for each dish, but no recipes. We cooked by following our noses and tastebuds from the starting point to the finish line, with Howard's help along the way as we used unfamiliar ingredients—and familiar ones in unfamiliar ways.

Here's the centerpiece salad: greens, plus a lot of vegetables, many of which were lightly blanched to take off the raw edge (the yellow and red beets were gorgeous; this was also where Cathi's corn went):

Here's the celery slaw:

And the salad of heirloom tomatoes and good black olives:

I missed getting a photo of the Moroccan spiced lentils, but here's the savory tart with caramelized onions and other things—it was hard to tell what exactly was in it, but it was exquisite. It was topped with a pear compote:

That's the edge of our spaetzle at the right. Here's a better photo:

We cooked spaetzle in a little pot of boiling water all morning, batch after batch after batch. We were a lot better at cooking spaetzle at noon than we were at 10 a.m. It's purple because the liquid it was made with was purple carrot juice (the plan was to use beet juice, but that couldn't be found and purple carrot juice could). It was dressed with a reduction of butter and more purple carrot juice and dressed with herbs.

Here's our soup:

The soup is in two pots because we didn't have a single pot that was big enough. We started it by infusing olive oil with orange zest and star anise. While that was going on, we peeled carrots and cut them into chunks. We strained the flavoring agents out of the oil, added the carrots, and cooked them until they started to brown and caramelize. Then we added honey and malt liquor, along with some of the braising water from the vegetables for the main salad, and cooked until the carrots were soft. Next, we used a handheld blender to make the soup smooth . . . and poured the soup back and forth between the pots to blend the two batches.

I also missed getting a photo of the ceviche, other than the one above with the whole meal together, but here's my lunch (except for the ceviche, which didn't fit on a vegetarian plate; the eggs, which I helped prepare but didn't eat because I don't like eggs; and the pear strudel, which came later):

Everything there was truly delicious—while we were cooking, I wasn't so sure I was going to like the soup because of the malt liquor, but in the end it was subtle, complex, light, and tasty.

It's hard to say, though, which was better: eating the meal, or cooking it. Howard kept coming around and suggesting next steps and telling us we were doing a great job. So we did!