Soup pots

Slow Food UW interns

One vat of potato salad

Plated potato salad

Plated potato salad

Plated potato salad

All three greens pies

Greens pie

Greens pie

Greens pie

Greens pie

Squash-cranberry bars

clean up

I guest chef-ed for Slow Food UW on Monday night. Like I said, we did all the cooking Sunday afternoon. We made Unky Dave’s potato salad – 20 pounds of little yellow potatoes from Matt Smith, 10 pounds of sweet potatoes from Don’s Produce, 5 pounds of Tipi Produce carrots and a big bag of frozen peas from Willy Street. Oh, and we got the garlic from Sutter’s Ridge - mostly I buy jam from them – the woman was really nice – since it was February garlic – she said just take a few extra in case some of the cloves are too sprouty.

We made Oven’s of Brittany Tomato Dill Soup, and Greens & Cheese Pie with a Yeasted Crust, basically from the vegetarian epicure, but we left out the fennel (and the dash of vinegar), and used mozzarella along with the feta, and a big variety of greens – 2 kinds of kale: red Russian, and curly, collards and spinach from Matt.

And dessert was squash bars, made from my favorite pumpkin-cranberry muffins, based on the one in Savoring the Seasons, the one with honey, where I always basically double the amount of cranberries. And we got the squash from Matt, too – blue hubbards.

When I got back from cooking locally sourced vegetarian food for slow food, I made chipotle sliders – the recipe was from some star chef – Bobby Flay, maybe? (yup) – from the People mag I bought in the Denver airport, on the way home from Dallas, because it had Johnny Depp on the cover – devilled eggs, and baked Brie.

I’m also making a kind of apple-cherry pandowdy, still using up pie crust from pie palooza – I had edges of the onion cheese pies, that I trimmed and stuck in the freezer in November. It’s not precisely pandowdy – it’s a rolled crust, and not thick, but the filling has cherries and apples and brown sugar, so pretty much the homey idea required. And, anyways, probably “precisely pandowdy” is an oxymoron – there are many interpretations for this type of recipe.

Empty tart crust

Cubed, roasted sweet potatoes

Roasted vegetable tart, whole

Roasted vegetable tart, edge

Roasted vegetable tart, cut

Roasted vegetable tart, back

Cherry-apple pandowdy

Posted from my iPhone – at least to start

Mark calls it low motivation. You can enjoy it if you can keep from feeling too guilty. I tried to accelerate myself with coffee and a candy bar, and treated myself to reading the Alice McDermott story in the New Yorker – but I still have those I-don’t-wannies.

What I’d really like to do is cook something good, and take some lovely pictures of it – everything in WI is muddy and grey in the snowless, warm winter that we’re enjoying?! at least most people are; I am not too happy with it myself.

Heath Bar & cup of coffee & New Yorker on my desk

First, I tried to order a replacement beater from Chef’s Catalog – but I got mixed up between the tilt-head and lift-bowl models. The tilt-head has a flared bowl that screws into the mixer; the lift-bowl is narrower, and you hook it over two studs and crank it into place. I guess I can be forgiven my confusion because the mixer at School Woods is a tilt-head – but my main one, that I need the new beater for, is a cobalt blue, 5-qt. bowl, lift-bowl mixer.

Chef’s gives you free shipping on returns – there’s a bar code on the invoice – you cut that off, pack everything up, and take it all to Fed-Ex where the bar code tells them everything they need to know. I was charmed the first time, thought that was a really slick way to send the wrong beater back, and exchange it for what I thought was the right one.

It took awhile – I did the return Jan. 2, and just got the replacement on Saturday – the 28th. And even more disappointing, it was for a 6-qt. lift-bowl model.

I knew I’d have to return the second beater from Chef’s, so I saved all the packing material, located the magic barcode, left it all on the kitchen counter, and went to KitchenAid’s website to try to find the replacement there. Finally following John’s advice – afterall, he was in the womb when I bought the mixer – with a wedding present gift certifcate – so he has been intimately connected with it his whole life.

I got the model number and searched KitchenAid’s website – and here’s what I got:

Next I tried to browse stand mixers and attachments, thinking if I could get the right mixer, I could match the beater that way – you get 56 or 59 or so models, and it’s hard to tell from the mixer displays because the flat beater is standard – so they don’t say anything specific about what comes with :

But you can narrow to 9 pretty fast by selecting flat beaters:

And there was this one that sure looked right. But when you click for specs – no bowl size infor (I even poured water into my mixer bowl at this point to make sure I really had the 5-qt.), and no model numbers that matched mine. Notice the “Features and Specs” and “Buy Now” buttons.

Here’s what you get when you click features & specs – no bowl size, no mixer model numbers, just how great the beater is:

It was late Sunday night, so I gave up, and sent a support email to KitchenAid, asking which beater to buy (Mark teased me saying they’d respond by telling me to get a while new mixer) and packed up the Chef’s Catalog beater to return on Monday morning. Which turned into an odyssey of its own, UPS store couldn’t take FedEx, and the FedEx agent in the bookstore turned computer store on State St. couldn’t take it either – and the box is still on the chair in my office as I write – that magic barcode’s getting less charming all the while)

Thought about it some more, and last night I revisited the KitchenAid site, and clicked that “Buy Now” button on the beater that looks right – and finally got this full display, with my model number listed, but evidently, not searchable – I added the highlighting in orange.

Happily, cheaper than the Chef’s beaters which were like $29.95 – this one’s only $14.99, $18 or so including shipping.

As Rach said this morning, when I related the story of my quest, “bad metadata”.

Triple Chocolate Scones

Triple Chocolate Scones

Triple Chocolate Scones

Apricot scones

Apricot scones

Apricot scones

Pineapple cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches

Pineapple cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches

Chicken sandwiches

Both scones

Tea table

Victoria sponge

Tea table

Victoria sponge

Victoria sponge

I made afternoon tea for 8 ladies on Sunday. We made mild fun of them all weekend, because they wanted their tea at 2:00 in the afternoon instead of the more traditional 4:00 p.m., and triple chocolate scones instead of more traditional, plainer scone flavors, eaten slathered with cream and jam. But they were a congenial group and it was a nice little party.

And who’s to say what’s authentic, anyways – I tried to make the food tasty, more than I worried about authentic.

They ate those all-American, certainly not British triple chocolate scones – I adapted Molly Wizenberg’s recipe. I also made lemon apricot scones, with apricot jam and creme frâiche to go with. Cucumber, pineapple cream cheese, and curried chicken salad sandwiches, each with its own flavor of butter spread thinly on a different bread. The cucumber had a creamed butter with mustard & lemon on white; pineapple cream cheese – pineapple tidbits mixed into cream cheese with toasted almonds – had honey butter, on thin rounds sliced from pretzel rolls; the curried chicken had plain whipped butter on whole wheat. And Victoria sponge, filled with the fresh tasting, uncooked, refrigerator strawberry jam from the farmers’ market. And two kinds of loose tea – Earl Grey and Darjeeling – in teapots, with milk and sugar, and a whole bunch of herbal teas in bags that no one touched.

I took all the pictures with my tiny camera, and I feel a little funny about that – no composing in the viewfinder. I did like some of the macro shots, the scone closeups, though. I am definitely going to relegate the tiny camera to restaurant food while traveling.

My main complaint is the utter inability to know what day it is – I missed Wednesday somehow.

Got back late Monday night to kitty-trampled kitchen counters, and stacks of mail. Today was trash and recycle day, so the kitchen’s looking more normal – I even dumped the compost twice – one advantage of the warmer winter – the compost bin doesn’t freeze closed – but I could do without there still being alive, flying bugs in there in NOVEMBER.

Tonight there’s noodle casseroles for dinner at the supper club – turkey and broccoli-mushroom – spinach salad and fruit salad and cookies. Both recipes made vats – I had to do overflow small pans, beyond the 13 x 9 x 2 I had planned for each. Maybe I’ll get a few pix, but given my usual habits, would that be a sign of normalcy, or ab-?

Half bagel on messy desk atop teetering pile of grad school applications I need to read

PS, as per usual, I guess – even though it was an exceptionally nice dinner group, pleasant conversation, several new members – only one picture from the dinner, and it’s of leftovers the next day:

Ginger cookies & chocolate chip - there were some rugelach too, but we ate 'em before they could get leftover

I had signed up for a lunch – so went and got food, and then proceeded to my next meeting, one where I thought I was my division’s liaison to a larger organizational committee. And there was another person already there in the role. We worked it out without blood after – this was my last meeting; he’ll start now – but I still have to write the report. Shucks.

Not sure what can happen next – here are some pix from last night and today.

And I got to do nature photography of the birds that live on gate A30 in the Denver airport.

I rode the train into Dallas, which took about 2 hours – 2 buses from the airport to the train station, and then the train ride itself – but when I stepped off at the final station, I could see my hotel. When I got to the hotel lobby, the line to get checked in was ridiculous, so I left my bags with the bellman, and went for a drink. Even that was little difficult – had to go to the wine bar in the chop house, because the sports bar was too full. And when I opened my credit card wallet to pay for the wine, one of my cards was missing. After some minor panic, I figured out that I used that card to pay my bag fee when I checked in for my flight when I was still in PJs at home, and eventually Mark found the card in the pocket of my sweatshirt, that was hanging on the bathroom door, safe at home.

I did a little searching for pizza, but the better sounding places didn’t deliver, so I went with the bellman’s suggestion – and got a roasted corn pizza and an iceberg lettuce salad for about $15 – and 2 room service beers for another $16. And watched The Sting on TV. Pretty standard for  a first-night-at-conference hotel night, except usually I’m with Mark.

This morning I had to get up 15 minutes early to shave my legs – it’s too warm in Texas for leggings or tights. And I did my Rodney Yee a.m. yoga DVD, too. I found the closet Starbucks – subterranean, in a shopping mall under a big bank building – 2 ways to get there – from the bank plaza or enter the parking ramp of another building across the street. And I took pictures of the leftover giant Christmas tree ornaments that are still decorating the lawn outside my hotel – sitting on brown sod.

Racoon on plane wing

One of the birds on A30 in DIA (Denver Int'l Airport)

Group shot of the birds in A30

Platform waiting for the train to Dallas - in the middle of nowhere

Wine bar in the Dallas Omni hotel

Giant Christmas Balls

Giant Balls from above