• Crostini with goat cheese, slow-roasted tomato, & pickled onion – homemade baguettes, and I used Heidi’s technique of pouring the oil (or butter) into a bowl and tossing the bread slices in and mixing it all up – more effective than brushing or spraying or drizzling the oil onto the bread – but I used a touch too much oil. Homemade slow-roasted tomatoes, too, and the pickled onions were a dark magenta hue I’d not seen before, tho it’s a recipe I’ve made many times. And I mixed the goat cheese with a dash of honey. I didn’t make the white bean crostini – so now I have a yogurt bucket of cooked white beans to use or freeze.
• Chicken salad with apples and walnuts – white meat chicken, toasted nuts and one giant, local Delicious apple. I didn’t make the crispy wonton cups to put the chicken in – it ended up being a chunky salad so it woulda been a pain to stuff into the cups. Instead, I made chicken salad canapes – the salad, mounded on buttered bread – and also put out a bowl of the chicken salad for people to eat however they wanted.
• I bought Carr Valley Mobay and Marieka Gouda with Fenugreek and Farmer John’s Asaiago and smoked Gouda – which was the crowd pleaser – more of that eaten than any of the others. I put the cheese out with crackers and fresh figs and pears and olive tapende (made by whirring up all old olives from the fridge with a small jar of purchased). There was also Jacque Pepin’s cheese spread – all the cheese ends, also whirred up in the processor, with butter. This one had some bleu, some cranberry cheddar, some orange cheddar, and some Parmesan.
• Vegetables and chips and dips. Dill dip, because I got a lovely bunch of fresh dill at the Wednesday market. Edamame hummus from the newest Martha, quite tasty – but a little pasty and thick because I cut back on the large amount of water called for, since, naturally, I thought it was one of those Martha tricks to insure that no one can make her food as good as her – but in fact somewheres in between the 1/3 cup I used and the 3/4 cup she said to use would be right. With blanched broccoli, beauty heart radishes, and carrot sticks. And a big bowl of these pickled veggies from Saveur – I left out the zucchini, and only used 1 jalapeno, but it was still a gigantic batch. I’ll be eating them for lunch all week.
• Cocktail meatballs & tofu balls – the standard Heinz chili sauce meatball recipe, using red currant jam and the last of a bottle of siracha along with the chili sauce, instead of the canned cranberry sauce or grape jelly (and packaged meatballs) specified in the original. The tofu balls are Mollie Katzen, from the Enchanted Broccoli Forest – I put them out with a bottled BBQ sauce, but, me, I preferred the fu balls dipped in the sauce from the meatballs.
• Sweets – mini pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, Heidi’s chocolate truffle cake made into cups which had to licked (or spooned out) and Dori’s jammers, a la me.

Goat cheese, tomato & pickled onion crostini

Last three of the chocolates

UN-color corrected radishes

Beaty Heart radishes

'Fu balls, trying to escape

"Fu balls contained

Jammers with American Spoon cherry jam

Pumpkin cupcakes

So, probably the funnest thing was Terese brought Janie, and these two women are my Ovens of Brittany cronies – friends from my years of restaurant work, 20+ years ago. Friday morning, I went for a walk with Rach, and she peeled off early, so I was doing the long last leg of the walk on my own. I ran into one of John’s friends from high school, Sam, unlocking his bike in front of his parents house – he has his own apartment, shared with a girlfriend downtown, but said he comes to his folks’s when he wants to study. Sam ate lunch at my house almost every day for four years in high school. So, anyways, Sam said he works at the Greenbush Bar, owned by another of my Ovens of Brittany pals, Anna. I said I used to work with his boss, Anna, and Sam replied, “oh yeah, the desserts at Greenbush are kinda like the stuff I used to eat at your house.”

On Saturday, I had scrambled eggs with tomatoes, onions & goat cheese from the crostini and broccoli, leftover from being a dip veggie.

On Tuesday I made a chicken & zucchini casserole, from my Pittsburgh community garden cookbook – the Great Tomato Patch cookbook that of course is on WorldCat because Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh cataloged it. It’s one of those recipes that I made-from-scratch-ified, using mushroom sauce in place of a can of cream of mushroom soup, and home made croutons in place of stuffing mix.

Chicken zucchini casserole that I ate for early dinner at 4:30 on the night I had to stay at work till 8:00 p.m.

On Wednesday I cooked the 1/2 pound Snug Haven spinach I’d bought at the previous Saturday market, in garlic butter and threw in some leftover gnocchi and a couple of mushrooms that didn’t go into the sauce for the casserole.

Spinach with gnocchi and mushrooms

Now I’m home on a break from the protests – I was downtown at 8:00 to help serve the farmers’ market breakfast. Mark came down to meet me, and we went up to the square in time for the tractorcade, then we massed with the librarians outside the central library, and marched around once. I gave all my cookies away, and then my foot started hurting, and I felt like I just had to take a break. So we brought the car home, and the spinach-gnocchi mix made a pretty good omelette. I’m starting to feel like I have the strength to look up bus times and head back down there. The crowd is supposed to peak at 3:00.

See recipe

Today when I got back from helping with the farmers market breakfast, where I was too busy to really eat, I fried two eggs, and melted some of the Rembrandt over again, and pan fried a couple of hunks of the chile-cheese corn bread from Thursday on the side. I felt like I needed two eggs – it was noon, and I’d been up since 6:00, and working since 7:00. I sliced up a kiwi that came in that fruit box I got sent for Christmas, and peeled a couple of clementines.

Skillet breakfast

Kiwi & clementines

Wall I went past - ghosts of grafitti - or paint ball?

On the way back, I went closer to the Harbor, down 5th St., closer to where we’d stayed in Little Italy the last time we were in San Diego in 2003, and I liked that a lot better. I think generally, I like San Diego better farther up the hill, away from the tourist-y, New Orleans Bourbon St.-like Gaslamp district.

I managed to make it to the 4:30 showing of The Fighter – the acting is great, they’ll all get academy awards, but I’m not a boxing fan, so the fight scenes were hard to watch, plus it’s really about how awful people are in families, and that was even harder to watch.

I met Martin & Suzanne for dinner at Operacaffe. We shared bread & balsamic vinegar and oil, and a mushroom salad and some bruschetta. I had these Asiago gnocchi that were really fluffy.

On Tuesday I had time before my flight, so I decided to try to find what I had thought was a bigger Starbucks when I saw it on the walk down the hill the day before. More power to Starbucks for creating all these spaces where people can hang out, but the Starbucks closest to our hotel, in the Gaslamp, had a slightly smelly clientele, who obviously spent long hours there. The up-the-hill Starbucks turned out not to be bigger, in fact, it had no seating at all. The customers were all on their way to work, and the staff had definitely been taking happy pills – the guy who waited on me almost cheered when he saw me haul out my own to-go mug. I ordered a chocolate croissant, and he said, “oh do you want that heated? They’re really good that way!” I walked a little further down the hill, and came across the hotel where Suzanne was staying, in a converted bank. I sat in their lobby – a nice lobby indeed, with high ceilings and columns because it used to be a bank – and ate my croissant and drank my coffee and read my vampire book on my iPhone. So I guess I did find that more upscale experience I was seeking.

We walked home, pushed the snow off the walk and driveway, and opened presents with Ethan. I photographed our piles of wrapped loot without the card in the camera, so they’ve disappeared into nothingness.

Then we ate Christmas Kringle, with raspberry filling that I had in the freezer, from 2009 summer’s raspberries, and almond paste, and fruit – bananas & clementines, kiwi from the fruit box that Linda sent me as a cookie thank-you, and Nueskes bacon.