Oh Man Am I Glad the Tour de Fleece is Over

Tour de Fleece ended on Sunday with the Tour de France... I spun nearly every day and as much as I like to spin I think it was a bit excessive. I spun:

• 6 oz of hand dyed merino, about 500 yd fingering weight 2 ply, destined to be woven into a scarf for DH. It's the left over roving from the sweater I knit for him.
• 2 Acacia Merino Multipacks from Opulent Fibers (total 5 oz); two ply heavy lace to light fingering. It's going to be a shawl.
• Some unevenly woolen spun cormo singles, from a cormo named Hopi. I bought the raw fleece for it's unusual light fawn color (who knew cormo came in fawn?). Turns out Hopi, a white sheep, like to roll in fawn colored dirt. Anyways, it was fun to wash, card then spin it. I have another pile to card/spin then I'll ply it all together.
• About 2 oz of Abstract Fibers Polworth-Silk  in the Mousse colorway. It's like crack, if you could spin crack and get addicted. I'm about 3/4 of the way through the 8 oz I bought last October at SOAR.

I also plied some spindle spun silk that I'd spun from the silk hankies we got at the knitting retreat four years ago.  The singles had been sitting for more than a year, so I put them back through the wheel to add more twist, then plied with silk and rayon thread with random bead.  I believe I have about 200 yards of yellow-green three ply, uneven lace weight. It's exactly what I'd envisioned and a total art yarn. 

Pictures? OK, they're coming. Hang tight.

July's cookbook challenge:

For July's cookbook, DH chose Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I've been eyeing the Rotolo recipe so I thought I'd break my wheat embargo and finally give it a try.

Essentially it's a jelly roll with pasta as the wrapper and spinach, cheeses and prosciutto as a filling, cooked, then covered in a tomato sauce-bechamel mix, dusted with  parmasean reggiano then baked.

The recipe said to make the pasta as thin as possible. Well, you can make it too thin. I rolled it out on my pasta roller at setting seven... Six or even 5 would have been better. The pasta disappeared into the spinach. It was still damn tasty, just not as pretty as it could have been.

I made a salad as well, though somewhat altered; I forgot to write down the ingredients and came home with the wrong vegetables. The recipe was for cucumber and orange salad with mint and lemon juice; I bought fennel instead of cucumber. It was still tasty.

We had a 2006 Kalinda Sonoma County Zinfandel.

DH and I agreed, would Definately Cook This Again, although maybe with some practice for company.

For August, he's picked Commander's Kitchen. Would it be a cop-out to skip anything savory and go straight to their bread pudding souffle with bourbon sauce?