Panzanella – the bread soaks up the tomato’s juices and tastes like distilled summer. And we had possibly the best trifle ever, with cherries, apricots and yellow and ginger cakes, for dessert. Recipes to follow.

Panzanella 6

Panzanella 5

Panzanella 4

Panzanella 3

Panzanella 2

Panzanella 1

Little rocking horses from the baby shower cake.

I was late, every street in Madison is dug up right now, the weather was bad, and the traffic was really heavy – I was creeping around on side streets to avoid the congestion at major intersections that are full of orange barrels, workers, sewer pipes, and big holes in the ground. I got a few blocks into the drive, and realized I had forgotten the chips – and the menu kind of revolved around chips & dip – so I had to go back for them. When we were planning, I asked what the mom-to-be was craving and the word was potato chips and meat. So the menu was:

Asian flavors marinated beef lettuce wraps – sirloin steak strips on wooden skewers, served with lettuce leaves and  a couple of dipping sauces – I used this Korean beef recipe from the NYT, but I did not put the Asian pear in the marinade; and I made this peanut sauce from Gourmet that was utterly delicious

Gourmet potato chips with several dips -  caramelized onion dip (a la 101 Cookbooks, but I don’t save out the onions for topping, I just mix them all in), dill dip -

Lots of  veggies to go with the dips: carrots, Romano green beans & broccoli, lightly blanched, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, and peppers

Warm pita wedges, grilled on my Mario Batalli paninni press – with sets of toppings:  Cafe Flora curried  lentil spread, & chutney – that was the last of some homemade apricot chutney mixed into Patak’s sweet mango – the ladies loved the ginger sauce; and tomato bruschetta topping – good farmers market tomatoes with basil from the back porch, garlic, Balsamic & olive oil, with Trader Joe’s olivada, too

Potato salad with celery from my CSA box, and egg, and radishes sliced on top for garnish

Chunks of cantaloupe and watermelon

Iced tea/juice blends  (black tea-lemonade & berry-white grape)

When I finally got there, they’d been let in, and good caring professions workers that they all are, were adaptable and ready to help. We got the tablecloths under the decorations they’d brought & laid out on the tables, and I had them help me set out plates and glasses and napkins, and make water pitchers, so I could dump dips & chips into bowls and broil the beef and cut the fruit and ice the tea.

They’d come prepared with some good ice breakers like making everyone cut a piece of string they thought would fit around mom-to-be’s belly – with prizes for the best guess. Pretty soon they were all laughing so hard I could barely hear the hurricane sirens going off. I had to go upstairs to consult with my renter’s boyfriend who had a computer on, to see if we should head for the basement – we decided we’d be OK above ground.

While I was cleaning up, John texted me the picture of the Escalade going into a sinkhole in Milwaukee – they got hit harder than us – but I still had to sop up water in the basement when I got home. I tried using mom’s old wet & dry shop vac, and it worked pretty well – the biggest downside is that it’s old and dirty, so once the water goes through the filter to the inside, it’s filthy. I think I’ll get a new filter for it tomorrow – seems a good Saturday kind of thing to do.

After drying the basement up, time to change the sheets on my bed, so Eric, our friend in from Notre Dame to give a talk at WiLSWorld, who couldn’t fly out in all the weather, could sleep in it. No time to have a glass of white wine and some stinky cheese and remember mom – the airlines got Eric on a flight leaving at 5:30 Friday morning, so he couldn’t stay up and toast her with me. I ended up having a glass f red, but too close to bedtime for me, too, and I felt it in the a.m.

It was funny, or ironic, or something,  to be around the Hospice workers when mom died on the same day 6 years ago under their care – but I think these were all paid types, and the woman who was with us that morning was a volunteer – she wasn’t in attendance at the shower, anyhow.

Today I stopped by the house, and there are still bedraggled pink baby shower bows tied to the front banisters – it was raining too hard to take them off last night, and no one’s got around to it yet today.

Esacalde in a sinkhole in Milwaukee

Sometimes in the summer, the UW creamery, Babcock Hall, makes peach Melba ice cream – peach ice cream with a raspberry swirl. I’ve been looking for it hopefully at the ice cream counter at the student union, but it has not materialized.

Last night I was all ready to eat the last of the 5-quart bucket of vanilla with chocolate sauce. Then I remembered that I had a couple of nice ripe nectarines, and some raspberry sauce (filling actually, from the raspberry bars at the last summer supper). So, I topped my dish of ice cream with those. It was almost as good as the Babcock Hall peach Melba – a few little ice chips here & there – it was the bottom of the bucket of ice cream, after all. And missing the peach-y creaminess of peach ice cream as a base, because I only had vanilla.

posted from my iPhone

The nicest part, to me anyhow, was that it was just reassuring somehow, that this big mess of vegetables could be made into a dinner that not only I found satisfying – I’m the person that’s known to eat lima beans with butter and grated nutmeg as comfort food, after all -  but everyone else did, too.

Beets

On the last night of the conference, Tuesday, they put on a big event for us at Navy Pier with a blues band, cash bar – but we got two drink tickets at registration – and lots of food. Plus silly games like bumper car bikes, and balloon animals.

And, this time I got back to the room in time to see the last 15 mins. of Public Enemies – that I saw in a theater in Chicago just about a year ago, when it first came out. Just enough time for me to watch Johnny Depp as Dillinger watch a Clark Gable as a gangster, and get shot in the street after. I thought they filmed it at the Chicago Theater on Lake Street, but they used the Biograph up on Lincoln Avenue, which is where the real Dillinger got shot – and evidently a nice upgrade to the Biograph’s facade. Come to think of it, I might’ve seen a play there – Chicago’s Victory Garden Theater company bought it in 2004.

Chicago sunset

Lights on the water

Chicago sunset from navy Pier

Chicago sunset

People standing around on Navy Pier

Chicago dog condiments

The correct eerie green relish, but ketchup?!! Least it's almost full and the mustard's almost gone

Deep dish Chicago pizza

It was too dark to get a good shot of the pizza

Chicago chopped salad

It had salami, pasta, garbanzo beans, cheese

This is where I leave you, a really funny, big-Jewish-family, kind of romantic comedy; and Let the great world spin, that I’ve wanted to read since I saw the documentary Man On Wire, about Phillipe Petit’s walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The book starts with the real event and goes on into fiction.

Anyways, I got my books, and then I had been thinking about walking farther up North, maybe going to R. J. Grunts or someplace else in Lincoln Park, since it’s my old stomping grounds in Chicago, since I worked at the Chicago Historical Society – now the Chicago History Museum – from 1991 – 1995. But it was getting late, and i was getting lazy, so I walked back down Michigan to Illinois St. and the Star of Siam (after a quick iPhone check to make sure it still was in business.

And proceeded to order way more food than I could actually eat – I got a beef appetizer, and ate 2 1/3 of the 5 skewers of meat provided. Then I got a spicey crazy noodle, not noticing that It was going to come with shrimp and chicken mixed in with the noodles. I ate most of the noodle, and a few of the chicken hunks – I left the shrimp. I got a Tsingtao, and the finished it pretty quick – the waitress was most anxious for me to get another – they’re probably told to push the booze to increase the tab – but I could only drink half of it after all that meat.

My view, down the restaurant - I was sitting in a window seat

I’m in Chicago for a conference, a users’ group for the software that U of Wisconsin (and lots of other people) are using to deliver their online courses. As a theme, because we’re in Chicago, they’re calling it “Architects of Education”. I’ve been thinking it’s really the first non-librarian conference I’ve gone to in a long time – maybe ever? I’m sure because the conference is put on by the vendor of the software, a computer company, it’s a younger crowd. There’s also lots more food than at librarian conferences – breakfast & lunch everyday, and always coffee and water outside all the program rooms – and snacks in the afternoon.

I took the train down from Harvard IL, and when I was walking to the conference hotel, marveling at how empty and quiet the Loop was at 3:30 on a Sunday afternoon, I went past some flowers by the roadside, nicely integrated into architectural features.

On Sunday I didn’t do any conference stuff – I went up to the North side of Chicago, to Welles Park, for an international and folk music festival put on by the Old Town School of Folk Music. I met one of my Chicago Historical Society friends there – one of her friends, who’s an instructor at Old Town, was playing on the staff stage. We got a beer and watched them – they played a fun combination of old rock & roll – “Good Lovin’”; viper jazz – “Minnie the Moocher”; and Chicago-connected songs – Steve Miller’s “Space Cowboy”. Then we went to watch one of the bigger name bands, Red Barat, kind of bongra & soul – but it started raining so we went to get a burger at a corner bar – the benefits to me of hanging out with a local.

I made it back to the hotel after only missing the first 20 minutes of vampires – it was surprisingly easy to get there and back on the EL. I waited up till the 10:30 repeat of the vampire show – and I managed to NOT fall asleep until after the 20 minutes that I’d missed. I’ve had some good food – more later on that.

The first one was last night. It was quite pleasant -  a congenial group – one of my “girls” – a young woman who lived at the co-op dorm where I was the head cook from 1981-1986, when she was 18, and I was 26 – and she brought a long another woman who is wondering if she should keep trying to make it as an artist, maybe get an MFA, or pursue some other graduate degree; a young guy on his own, who turned out to have grown up in Manhattan, across the street from my upstairs renter’s boyfriend; one of my oldest friends; a group of four who’d never been there before – so lots of pleasant conversation.

The menu was:
Pan Bagnat – salad Nicoise in a sandwich – crusty bread stuffed with tuna, tomatoes, cucumbers, and olives – with a no-tuna option for vegetarians (that turned out to be pesto, goat cheese & tomato
Salt & vinegar potato salad
Coleslaw
Rhubarb mousse served with butter cookies

There was a little too much food – a lot of sandwich, only a dab of coleslaw, and a vat of mousse leftover. I had some of the sandwiches  for dinner tonight, and mousse earlier today for second breakfast.

The texture that I remember is not what you get from a typical crumble bar cookie, where you make the streusel part, pat half into the pan, spread on the filling, and then top with crumbs – Mollie’s prune bar was cakier. I am pretty sure that the right type of thing is a crumb cake, or kuchen, where you make the crumbs, reserve some for topping, then add eggs and milk to the rest to make a batter. I think the batter needs to be on the thick side, and then spread in a thin layer. I have a Maida Heatter apple kuchen where the batter part is about right, but the topping is completely different, so years ago I printed out a very plain crumb cake that I found online someplace, and noted – “try for Mollie prune bars” on the top.

Today I finally got around to trying it – and I knew in my heart when I read the recipe, that it was going to be too cakey, produce too much batter, and I really should reduce the milk, and probably use one less egg – but I didn’t. And, since I was making the cake for a mixed group, I made pineapple filling instead of prune – and I knew when I read the recipe for that, that I shouldn’t put in as much water as it said – but I did.

So I ended up with a fluffy and soft pineapple coffee cake – the crumbs just sank, there was so much liquid – so I made a little cream cheese drizzle glaze to improve the looks of the top. It’s a nice cake, but it’s not the prune bars. But I think it’s a step towards the prune bars, anyways. I’ll be sure to let you know when I get there.

Photo by Zane Williams

Tonight is our big fireworks show here in Madison – and Mark & I just decided we’re not motivated enough to walk over to the crew boats pier, and watch them go off across the lake.

There are a couple of smaller shows tomorrow. I think we’re both tired because of being at the librarians conference over last weekend, and not sleeping very well in hotels, and then having a lot of long work days trying to get caught up after getting back. I had to get up early today to go retrieve my foster daughter from camp. So that added 3 hours of highway driving, on top of the inevitable let down of how quickly her room has turned back into a disaster zone. I cleaned it as soon as I got home from dropping her off two weeks ago, but the reversion has been even faster than I thought it would be. She did invite friend to come over and help her mess things up, so I guess it figures.

Tomorrow is going to be the grilling day of the holiday weekend – pork with a chile rub, baked beans, salad – and this grilled pita bread with parsley garlic oil from Gourmet that I made last summer [oh, I see now that I've looked up the recipe, it's me that makes it with parsley - the original calls for oregano], that’s easy and delish.

Today I made other summer stuff that I have made before, old favorites – chicken & sugarsnap pea salad with tahini dressing, and balsamic roasted zucchini. The chicken salad I made the first time for my mom, during those few weeks of her last illness – she was diagnosed with cancer on June 7th, and died on July 22, 2004. In between she liked to eat a big plate of a dressed salad, like chicken salad, on top of lettuce. She liked Whole Food’s tarragon chicken salad, too. Now that it’s zucchini season, I really want to make Tambellini’s fried zucchini – but I really do hate deep frying. I guess I’ll just have to have it if I actually go to Pittsburgh in October. And there’s enough chicken salad that I need to remember to take some to Rach when we walk in the a.m.

Both dishes, in Gourmet's picture - published July 2004