Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

The first film of the Fest for us, about an Algerian refugee who has washed up in Quebec. He takes over as the teacher for a class at an elementary school – their teacher committed suicide by hanging herself in the classroom, where one of the kids found her. All the kids in the class really need a hug, but because this is the 21st century, none of the teachers is allowed to give them one.

Extremely arty – directed by Guy Maddin, who I did not know much about, but he seems quite popular among film aficionados. To me, the film was like a moving, b&w version of the artists’ haunted house at my house last fall – people dressed in vintage clothes, moving about in vintage interiors, and saying short meaningful phrases to each other, like “I remember”, and “Quick, lay her down she’s filling up” – about the drowned girl who was nonetheless walking around. With Jason Patric and Isabella Rosellini.

Girls & boys in striped shirts and skinny jeans. Scenes of Paris in the late 1960s (1970s, really) intercut with environmental pollution – dirty water spewing out of pipes and trees being felled. All with the soft look and colors of Kodachrome – like when people scan their childhood photos to post on Facebook. Mark liked that all the skinny girls had normal-size breasts.

Mostly everyone’s favorite so far – the story of Dom, a night clerk at a little hotel in Le Havre, who meets a fairy named Fiona who grants him 3 wishes. Lots of physical humor, like Dom & Fiona on a scooter chasing a car with their baby on a cushion sliding around on top of the trunk. There’re also a couple of great dance scenes, one underwater and one on a rooftop.

Crooked cops and drug dealers chasing each other through a disco. In French which made it more interesting – I liked how the cop who polices other cops was flic des flics instead of maybe IAD – internal affairs division – as we’d say. We had to sit in the front row, though, and my neck really hurt by the end.

Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Pacquin) at 20 playing 17, an upper west side exclusive private school girl who probably causes an accident by running alongside a bus, talking to the driver, distracting him, so he runs a redlight and kills a woman crossing the street with her groceries. It’s directed by Kenneth Lonnergan, who also directed You can count on me – and Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick are in both movies. J. Smith-Cameron, who’s also been a character in True Blood (Sam Merlotte’s white trash shape shifter mom) plays Anna’s mom who’s an actress, in lots of small plays in NYC. There’s a funny scene where the mom is talking about how she’d briefly been on a TV show and it just paid the bills – foreshadowing that she & Anna would both be on True Blood a few years later.

Posted from my iPhone, at least partly

This morning I took some potatoes that looked like this:

Sprouty, alien invader potatoes

And made them look like this:

Saved potatoes, roasted

And then we ate them with this:

Scrambled eggs with asparagus

Quite satisfying, really. Al did ask if I’d bought like 45 pounds of asparagus, because “you’ve been putting it in everything, mom”. He’s right – we had shrimp & asparagus pasta last Sunday, asparagus pizza on Friday, and eggs with asparagus today.  But I didn’t buy like 45 pounds of asparagus; Molly & David brought us like 45 pounds of asparagus as a hostess gift on Passover.

And, mmm, at about 3:30, I ate the last two pieces of potato, room temp, with the last little hunk of bacon – the potatoes had gotten this lovely flour-y texture on the insides, almost creamy.

Like I said, it got cold again here in WI. The last two evenings, I’ve had online meetings with one of my library school classes. My students are giving short presentations on new technology, and we all meet using web conferencing to hear them. Six students presented in an hour and a half on Tuesday; we got through 8 last night in about 2 1/2 hours. There’s another session tonight, and then two more next week. I’ve been logging in from home, and managing to get some kind of dinner dish into the oven beforehand.

Tuesday I came home a little early, because we wanted to take Al’s 10-speed to the bike shop for a tune up. Which we did, only to find out that it’s junk – he was in a two bike accident, and the frame got bent – he got a concussion. The bike shop didn’t even want it for their red bike program, where they take old bikes, paint them red, and leave them around town for people to pick up and use for free. So we came home, stuck it in the back of the garage, and I quickly layered up the Splendid Table tortilla casserole I’d been wanting to make. Stuck it in the oven, everyone else ate while I was web conferencing, and I had my slice while watching season 2, episode 3, Downton Abbey on DVD.

Last night I got home in time to make a chicken rice pilaf – cooked a chopped onion in butter & olive oil in one of my heavy Le Creuset Dutch ovens, added the chopped up meat from the 3 chicken thighs I had roasted on Passover – to have chicken thigh for the shank bone on the Seder plate – then put in 2 cups of short grain brown rice, and the last of the cleaned spinach – also chopped – about 3/4 of a bunch. Poured in the quart jar of turkey broth I had strained off the matzoh balls (and a little water – I had always heard that you need to add a little water when cooking rice in home made broth – it’s so gelatinous that the rice needs a little help to absorb it – and this broth was really gelled in the jar). Brought the whole mess to a boil, put the lid on, and stuck it in the 350°. Al got home from the gym an hour later and reported it was looking rice-y, not soupy, so I declared it done and he dug in. Between then and 8:30, when I took my portion, the 6 of us in the house ate it all. Even Rach, who’s on a no processed grains, no dairy, no sugar, regime right now would’ve been able to eat it, if we had left any.

So, pretty good for using up Passover leftovers, although today, trash day, I still threw out more stuff than I like to – I hate throwing away food – but I just didn’t know what to do with the last two matzoh balls, the dried out farfel stuffing, and the greasy purple onions that had flavored the brisket – so I binned it all, as the Brits would say. At least there were still pretty blossoms to look at when I went to walk, to make me feel better about throwing away all that stuff, not to mention the satisfaction of the neat & tidy looking, cleaned out refrigerator.

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Splendid Table tortilla casserole

Empty Chicken & rice pilaf pot

Spring blossoms

It’s good Friday and the first night of Passover. The last time I remember this coincidence, I was living in Chicago, and it was also a full moon and Friday the 13th, in 1992. That was the year of the underground flood.  Thank God we didn’t have so many coincidences this year – who knows what would have happened. As it is, I knocked over a bottle of Passover wine onto my iPhone, and smashed the screen. A little earlier, I discovered, in my land line phone messages, a message from the furnace guy left last Tuesday, that the E. Wash house is going to need a new furnace. Since Tuesday was election day, the furnace message was lurking amidst the robo-calls reminding me to go vote for Rick Santorum – good thing I’m a registered Democrat, so I can’t do that in the WI primary – and it did make me slightly happy to know that the Republican party’s records are bad enough that they were wasting their calls on me.

Passover dinner was delicious – although I made the meringues in state of fear and worry, right after I smashed the iPhone. I broke a wine glass while I was cleaning up after dinner, and a platter and a bowl also broke when the platter slipped out of my hands and landed on the bowl in the sink. And even after washing there’s a big red wine splotch on the stripey kitchen rug – or maybe it’s more like a red-wine shadow. I did a meat meal, so we had hummus and matzoh crackers and vegetables and olives to start, then briskit and roasted potatoes that Joëlle made, and farfel stuffing and asparagus salad that Molly brought. And of course matzoh ball soup, with a vegetarian broth. I made an almond cake – it had more ground nuts than matzoh meal and that’s what makes a good Passover cake, I think. I frosted it with seven-minute frosting – whipped egg whites. Jane brought the matzoh butter crunch. The only thing that got completely eaten was Joëlle’s potatoes – but the only leftover that I don’t think we’ll finish is the stuffing.

And, I guess – it’s just going to be about money – and time. $200 later, I have a new iPhone 4s in my pocket, and I spent another $90 ordering a faceplate fix-it kit, and a new sim card and phone service, so we can re-condition the smashed phone. It took me along time to get everything moved over to the new iPhone – and it was pretty terrifying in that computer upgrade way – you know, when you’re wondering, “Am I doing the right thing or am I actually wiping out all my stuff?” The new furnace is going to be in the $3,000 – $3,500 range – but the bills were pretty high, even during our weird mild winter, and maybe I’ll get some energy tax credits – so I’ll end up saving a little bit.

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iPhone after bottle of Passover wine attack

Almond cakes with raspberry filling and 7-minute frosting

Passover cake

Stephen's plate

My plate, while waiting for the meat to be passed to me

My plate, still meatless but better view of the asparagus

My plate with meat and stuffing added

Mark's plate

Red wine ghost

Pecan and chocolate chunk meringue cookies