… just too short. I had 4 days of actual vacation this weekend. I only answered a few work emails. And I even took some pictures of food. I knew it had been awhile because when I opened the images in Photoshop, the most recent on the card before this weekend were dated July 26.

friday breakfast

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

friday breakfast

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

friday breakfast

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

friday breakfast

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

corn pizza

Corn & barbecue sauce pizza

Thursday: I got up and made a big fruit salad with watermelon, from my CSA box, and plucots and grapes and pineapple, and then biked to the library and the hardware store. Came back and ate blueberry pancakes (from the freezer) with bacon and fruit salad for breakfast. Ethan had a soccer game on the East side so we decided to save car trips and drive there together- I would loop back and unload the dishwasher at School Woods and tidy up while Mark watched the game – then back west for a movie. It didn’t quite work. The kids needed a ride home from the game, and the traffic was really bad, and we read the movie listings sort of wrong – there was no 7:05 movie that we missed, but there was a 7:45 we could make. Plus our stomach clocks were off – I hadn’t eaten since my big breakfast at noon, and Mark had made some of the leftover bacon into a sandwich at 3:00 – so he was OK with a 7:45 movie and dinner after, but I wasn’t. So I ate scraps for dinner – salami and toast and Jarlsberg and red licorice. We went to see Inception and then finished the pie for dessert.

Friday: a lazier day – another bike over to the east side, Willy Street for groceries, and this time I stopped for coffee and a bear claw. Worked more on converting old School Woods to Word Press, and then the height of decadence, a movie at 4:20 – The kids are all right, which I think I liked better than Inception. I made corn & barbecue sauce topped pizza for dinner.

Saturday: Kids started showing up, first Al, then John. Took Al, who had been phoneless since he jumped in the lake with his iPhone in his pocket in June, to the Apple Store to get his iPhone 4. Which started a series struggles trying to get it to connect with his MacBook, that needed a system upgrade. We had corn and black bean salad in front of the Emma Thompson, High Grant, Ang Lee Sense & Sensibility for dinner, meanwhile continually trying to get the new OS to install on Al’s computer.

Sunday: On Sunday Rach and I walked and got caught up – we say we’re not seeing each other enough when her number goes out of the recents in my phone – she’d been gone from there for over a week! I stopped by the bagel place, and we had a true Shapiro family Sunday brunch – bagels and cream cheese and sliced tomatoes, and scrambled eggs and bacon. John showed up just in time for his everything bagel. Al made a bacon sandwich with his. Then back to the Apple Store for John’s new iPhone, and for help from the genius bar with installing OS 10.6+ on Al’s machine. Our Apple sales dudes were night & day – Al’s was just “sure, cool, let’s do that” – John’s was all about overly explaining everything in a smarmy way. We had a few minor and not so minor crises – John couldn’t remember his IMAP mail password, but once he restored his new phone from his old phone backup, all was well. Al’s machine needed yet more upgrades that had to download from Apple before his computer’d recognize the new iPhone – Al suffered a brief meltdown – the stress of being phoneless for so long, and the new one not working – but once the download finished all Al’s stuff worked, too. I wanted to grill, and so did Al – and he kind of took over, which was fine – we had brats, burgers, salmon, shrimp, sausages, and a lobster tail. Al grilled it all. The kids hung in the driveway, and John and I sat on the couch to eat inside, with me jumping up to pull non-recyclables out of the recycle, and wipe counters, and remove food from where cats could get it, and generally help Al’s friends, even though John kept telling me to stop it. Everyone was gone and all cleaned up before 9:00 – so I watched the last 10 minutes of vampires with Mark, and waited for it to come around again at 10:30 for the whole show.

John at empty Miller Park, weeks before opening day

John went down to Iowa City last night to see Every Time I Die and I haven’t heard from him yet, though I did text him his birthday song.

I feel funny that I’m not making food – last year I over-nighted brownies to his school, because I knew he was in the studio printing up stuff for his senior show. Looks like last year I made salted caramel tart – but not till a bit after his birthday. Other years have featured pasta al’Arrabiata, or beef stew, and for a while there was always a mint chocolate chip ice cream pie – oreo cookie crust, ice cream and a fudgey topping. Maybe I’ll go to Milwaukee Saturday and take him out to dinner, but it’s supposed to snow. If he was here this morning, I’d make waffles and bacon.

Jammy stripe

The giant scones are filled with a fig jam, that starts with the ingenious step of making a caramelized sugar syrup then adding wine and whole spices and simmering the figs in it. I didn’t have port, so I used Marsala, and a touch less than the half cup called for – I didn’t want my jam to be too wine-y. When you puree the jam you add butter; Heidi recommends a pinch of salt – I used salted butter, and only about 6 TBLS instead of the 8 specified. Otherwise I made the jam as written.

The original fig scone scone dough is supposed to be a buckwheat dough with 8 TBLS butter and 1 1/4 cups cream to 2 1/4 cups flour, part buckwheat and part white. I wanted a leaner dough, and more of it, so I used the dough from an earlier 101 Cookbooks recipe – Mega Scones – and subbed in orange zest for lemon, and 1 cup buckwheat in place of 1 cup white flour. I used 1 cup heavy cream and the rest skim milk, ‘cuz that’s what I had and forgot to save a little cream for brushing the top – so I used buttermilk, and sprinkled with coarse sugar.

Yum, especially when the jam was hot. I took one over to Rach so she could share it with her little brother and her pregnant sister-in-law who arrived sometime today.

Still on the parchment-lined pan

Today I went over to the co-op for a 7:30 a.m. finance committee meeting, and then had about 50 minutes to fill, before a staff meeting to announce the site of the new store. My plan was to go to the coffee bar up the street, get coffee and sit and work on my slides for tomorrow’s lecture. I had a Tupperware of Cheerios and a banana and a spoon in my bag, and I bought a pint of milk to put on my cereal.

There were no seats whatsoever at the coffee place at 9:20 a.m. on a Tuesday, so I went back to the co-op, parked on the street, pushed the seat back in the car, and ate my cereal & banana in the car while reading a book.

After the meeting, I came back home to work and wait for the furnace man – the thermostat’s been being weird and the heat’s been dropping too much before it comes back on – we ended up with a new thermostat, but that’s another story.

I wasn’t really hungry, but I still felt I deserved some kind of sit down breakfast, so I finished the carton of Mountain High yogurt with a little granola. I guess I really just need my mommy to make me one of her comfort foods, like tapioca pudding with the egg whites whipped so it’s fluffy, and eaten warm, or maybe fried bananas.

Work-at-home yogurt & granola, with laptop on the side

posted from my iPhone

Here’re some pictures of making breakfast for John while he was getting ready to go back to Milwaukee, and Megan was still asleep.

Unfortunately, instead of cooking for Al, I’m cleaning up puke after him – he seems to have gotten a stomach flu from his girlfriend – we all thought she was just hungover, and were pretty unsympathetic yesterday when she said she felt crappy, but maybe she was actually sick.