Valentine’s Day Dinner with Knitting

We don’t get into holidays too much but I do enjoy making a nice meal. What better reason is there to make my guys their favorite meal, than Valentine’s Day dinner?

Valentine’s Day Dinner

Now, to be fair, I freely admit that fresh pasta is also one of my favorites. So, it isn’t entirely selfless, but it is a labor of love. I enjoy making fresh pasta by hand. I mix it on the table and knead by hand for 10 minutes. Then just let it rest, covered, about 1-2 hours. This allows the gluten to develop and relax before rolling it out.

The rolling and cutting doesn’t really take that much time, maybe 30 minutes for the whole pound. I use a rotary pizza cutter to cut it. I don’t have a pasta drying rack, so I lay it all out on two floured half-sheet pans. I let the cut pasta dry on the sheet pans for another hour. Then it’s ready to be cooked.

Meanwhile, while the pasta dough is resting, I start my marinara sauce. My secret ingredients for my sauce are fresh basil, lots of fresh garlic and olive oil, a bay leaf, and whatever red wine I have on hand. I like to slow simmer this for at least 2-3 hours, and sometimes even longer. We usually don’t add meat to the sauce, but I occasionally make turkey meat balls on the side. We had vegetarian style today.

Then comes the best part, the eating! A little red wine makes it a perfect celebratory meal. It was delicious and we have enough left over marinara for another day.

A Little Dyeing

Before I get to the knitting half of my post, I have a bit of dyeing to show you.

I think I mentioned that I put in a big order with the mill the first week of January. This is so we can restock for the spring fiber festivals. I like to do my dyeing for this in February, since the days are lengthening and there is usually some warmer weather too. I was expecting to have received it by the first week of February, but there was a delay with my order.

I always order more yarn than I need at the time, so I have extra on hand for situations like this. Yesterday I did this small batch to restock the yarns and colors that were lowest, in case I can’t get to the full restock dyeing until mid March. My first festival of the year, Carolina Fiber Festival, is March 8-9. I will have time after the festival to work on the rest since I only have one other festival in March, and it is here in Tennessee.

Knitting for this week

Now let’s talk about the knitting I am working on this week.

These two have seen a little bit of action. The left is Spiral Splash Socks and the right is Spiral Effect Cowl. Both are knit in my Classic Merino Superwash Sock yarn. I want to work on them more and will do that as soon as I am done with the Classic Baby Cardigan.

As you can see I only have the collar edging to pick up and knit. I should be able to get that done this evening.

I began to run into an issue with yarn as I got to the edging. I was down to 11g of the Garnet, and only 2.3 g of the Earl Grey. I originally planned to make the edgings in only the Earl Grey if I had enough. My plan B was to do a small stripe of the red on the edging if needed. I didn’t even have enough of the grey to do one of the button bands though.

So, I found a swatch I made in this yarn for a sweater I made in 2022. I also found a 10g mini skein from when I was sampling the color mix 4-5 years ago. I like to keep these since they are handy for referencing, or in this case, cannibalizing. :-) I have ripped out the swatch and wound it and the mini skein for using in the collar and button bands. That brought my total of Earl Grey yarn up to 20g which should by plenty, along with the two rows of red in each edging.

I should have a finished sweater by my next post!