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.

Last weekend I sent my foster daughter off to camp, so Saturday we went to Old Navy, and got her packed. I made some beef and peapods from a recipe that came with the large bag of mixed sugar snaps and snow peas  in my CSA box – I separated the sugar snaps for eating raw, even though the recipe touts their wonderfulness in the beef. I do like cooked sugar snaps, too. On Friday I went to Nicole Gruter’s starving artist telethon, and rolled out a piecrust, filled it, and wove a lattice top. It went ou on live webcam, but I can’t find the recording. The pie we made for the online show was raspberry peach, and I made a blueberry one for “after” – so we had pie and ice cream in lieu of dinner several times over the course of the weekend. Sunday morning I made waffles and bacon, before driving to camp.

Wednesday, to clean out the fridge before heading to Washington DC for the librarians conference, I made zucchini & corn enchiladas, and then threw every other vegetable I had into the stock pot – zucchini trimmings, garlic scapes, the last of the peapods, lettuce & arugula mix (although I did have a big salad for lunch, too), the baby carrots Al didn’t eat ….

Rolled eggs with spinach & cheese

Sausage rolls

Mushrooms in parchment

Mushrooms in parchment

Strawberry swirl pie

Plate of food at the wrapped brunch

Wrapped brunch plate

Wrapped brunch plate

The irony of it was that it was the “everything wrapped” brunch in honor of Christo & Jeanne Claude’s June 13th birthday. Sausage rolls – sausages wrapped in dough; asparagus in filo; mushrooms wrapped in parchment and baked; eggs & spinach rolled around cheese; and strawberry spiral pie – slices from a roll of biscuit dough with a rhubarb puree filling. I must’ve forgotten to take out the trash after the last brunch – May 23 – and when I came over to drop off the OJ to thaw, there were fruit flies swarming out of it. I took the bag out, but when I came back Sunday morning, there were still fruit flies – hanging out by the giant bunch of lillies and snap dragons from the farmers market – because they’d still been breeding in the other trash can.

So I had to keep all the food under wraps, until people got there to eat it up, especially the strawberry pie.

After brunch I went to the corner grocery (it’s actually medium size, and kind of gourmet, since it’s in a foodie neighborhood – good meat counter, local produce, cheeses, wines, flowers – and it’s next door to the ice cream factory, so it always has half gallons for a decent price), and located the aisle of dreadful chemicals, thinking I would spray. After squinting at the cans of Raid and trying to decide if fruit flies were “non-stinging gnats” I bought a trap – a little plastic apple with some dope you squirted in – which actually looked and smelled a lot like sweet vermouth. One of the brunch attendees, who’s working as a bartender, had been telling me that Vermouth was great fruit fly bait. I took the flowers home, nice, might as well enjoy them while they last, took out all the trash, made sure everything was clean and dry and left the trap in the empty trash can. Hope it works.

My mom used to say that the heat of summer made her exhausted. I think that’s how I’m feeling today. Except it’s been going on for longer than just today. I’m not feeling too creative, and I think the posts show it. My stuff to cook list is not all that deep right now – though I do have a pretty good stack of clipped recipes & new cookbooks to try out sitting next to the stove. And I’m trying to work up a set of summer suppers – only the first one’s posted so far.

One problem is I haven’t been able to figure out what the current foster kid likes to eat – Cheetos & soda are the only sure things. I’ve sure have thrown out a lot of food since she started living with us.

This morning I felt too tired to bike to the week-long seminar I’m in … to my credit, I had my computer and other heavy junk to carry, plus it was threatening rain & lightning & thunder.

Since I drove, I loaded up the washed tableclothes from Sunday’s brunch, and stopped by – during the hardest part of the rain – and unloaded the dishwasher. The clean monkey dishes & ramekins that I made the eggs in – that I had had to handwash – were looking pretty photogenic.

Stacked monkey dishes

Ramekins and stacked monkey dishes

Egg dishes and ramekins and glasses

An egg dish & glasses

Egg dishes

Egg dishes & glasses

Egg dishes

Now I’m trying out a gluten free version of a vegan cookie – the Vegan Cupcakes girls have a vegan cookies book out, with recipe for a gluten free flour blend – rice & millet flours & almond meal. So I’m making their cowboy cookies, but I didn’t have soy milk, so I used egg – so they’ll be gluten free cookies, not vegan. The dough was good, and the cookie that broke was good too – a little grainy in mouth at the end, probably the almond meal, but no off flavors like some other gluten free recipes I’ve tried. I used potato starch instead tapioca flour, as suggested by Gluten Free Goddess, and I think that’s the trick.

Jazzed up potatoes – Mexican fried potatoes – from Mollie Katzen, with onions, garlic, cumin & red pepper flakes, tomatoes, cilantro, black olives, and fried torn up corn tortillas, topped with a squish of lime juice & melted cheese; shirred eggs, baked with a splash of cream and chives and parmesan; custard-filled corn bread, and a really tasty gluten free version with cinnamon and green chile. I also made a big spinach salad with a red dressing, and water chestnuts, mushrooms, and sunflower seeds – with and without bacon. For dessert, fruit crumbles: rhubarb-strawberry, gluten free, with almonds & pine nuts for extra crunch, and cranberry-raspberry with regular flour streusel. Since it’s brunch, and early in the day, I put out Greek yogurt with honey for topping instead of whipped cream or ice cream.

I got home a little before 3:00, and completely forgot that I was planning on mowing the lawn. I took a bike ride to return a library book, and I’ve settled in on the couch with all the Sunday papers and cable TV shows, vampires and Treme and Tudors.

I had the last of the spinach salad for dinner, with some of the leftover egg sliced up on top and a piece of the skillet corn bread, toasted. All the custard-filled got eaten at the brunch.

I feel a little guilty about not mowing but it’s not too bad. I just might have to eat the last of the cranberry-raspberry crumble, specially because I can have it with ice cream since it’s evening now.

I made broccoli, ham and ham & broccoli quiches. Used up lots of odds & ends of cheese I had around – some Gruyere, some feta, some Jarlsberg that was already grated. A nice green salad with this dressing from the Sunday Times Mag; I just used a scallion instead of a shallot, and added a few pinches of sugar.  Roasted potatoes – they were the most expensive part really – a 2# bag of little red ones from the co-op was $3.50 or so; a 2# bag of fingerlings from this week’s market was $5; and another 2# of small yellow ones from the first outdoor market last week was also $3 something – so like twelve bucks for potatoes!

And I made 2 sweets – biscuit cimmy buns, and a strawberry cobbler from an old Food & Wine – both things I’d made a million times. I had the un-dippable strawberries left, so plenty for the cobbler.

Max – the organizer of the party of 8 – brought her wine-broker husband, and he mixed mimosas, and I got to sit down with them and drink one, and eat my quiche. There was just enough cobbler to leave for prom girl, who was coming back later for more clean up.

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Back in England on Sunday, we’d made plans to brunch with a U.S. ex-pat, one of our librarian friends who’s now married to a Scotsman, and lives in the suburbs outside London. She picked a place – fish!, on the Thames by Shakespeare’s Globe. It was another good meal – I had poached eggs on toast with a salad. The Brits really know how to cook an egg – they were just right – runny yolks, but not snotty in the whites at all. My fried eggs were perfect the day before, too. And, with two other tipplers in the group, I was not limited to wine by the glass, so we split a bottle of !fish white, Trebbiano.

Then we walked towards Leicester Square by way of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and we were in this courtyard at 3:00 on Easter Sunday afternoon, with bells ringing. We walked in and smelled the incense and heard a bit of Latin, too.

Pushed on to Leicester Square for the half price tkts booth, to find that Sunday is the dark night in England, not Monday like here. So we wandered through the National Gallery a bit, got to see some old friends – a whole wall full of J.M.W. Turner; the color paintings for Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode; plenty of Gainsborough. Mark liked that even when we got to the Impressionists and post-, they were different paintings than are in American collections, like the Bathers at Asnières by Seurat, instead of the Grand Jatte. I liked seeing a Monet Thames view of Parliament, and in the same room a naked man by Caillebotte, so different from his nattily dressed people under the umbrella. But it was waaay too crowded and I only stood it for about 30 minutes.

We left and walked by a vegetarian Indian restaurant our friends recommended (he’s a vegetarian; he got the vegetarian special of the day at !fish, I heard “aubergine something…” as he ordered – it looked like a kind of an eggplant parm – and mash for a side, that I tasted – creamy, buttery, yum) as a dinner possibility, then tubed back to our apartment.

We got all packed and ordered a cab to get us at 6:00 a.m., and search to find a neighborhood restaurant to eat at. We ended up at Ciao Bella, where our waiter made fun of our poor Italian pronounciations, and my house red was pure plonk – nobody to split a bottle of better with this time – but other than that, it was simple old-fashioned Italian – just good. We strolled back, and watched some TV, and tucked ourselves in for our last night in London.

I’m ready to go back, and stay longer, and NOT be a tourist any more. Maybe I could rent a storefront and do a series of harvest dinners. They’re so much more civilized across the pond.

Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. Art Institute of Chicago.

They ate:

Spinach crêpe gateau – the recipe also from another early Madison institution, the Ovens of Brittany

Roasted potatoes with rosemary & garlic – all kinds of potatoes, white, gold, red Finn, purple, fingerling, sweet – from the indoor farmers’ market

Tossed salad with reduced cider vinaigrette

Cinnamon chip scones and Door County cherry muffins – the muffins had 3 cups of cherries, 2 cups of sugar and a cup of butter for two dozen muffins – not counting the additional couple of TBLS pf butter for the crunchy topping. Buttery goodness – yum.