Julia Child’s birthday is August 15th, which was a Saturday this year, so that seemed like as good a reason as any to have my birthday dinner that night, even though my real birthday was the Tuesday before. Julia turned 103 – I’m a lot younger, I just feel like 103 sometimes. We had […]
Hot, then Rain. On Saturday morning, I got up and packed. Jenny took Petunia the pug dog for a walk, and came back with a pretzel croissant (I think it must’ve been from the Upper West Side Birdbath/City Bakery) for me to take on the train – thought about taking the other half of my […]
Last night Robyn Hitchcock played the High Noon Saloon here in Madison. Which meant I was out on a Monday night. A frigid Monday night. But it was all pretty civilized – we had a table up close, and Robyn ad his sidekick Emma both said the place was far too clean and smoke free […]
Last summer I bought a big hunk of flat iron steak from Fountain Prairie. I trimmed it up, and froze it in 1-pound hunks. I used some of it to make a steak and Asian noodle dish, from Fine Cooking. I used another piece to make steak tacos. That were good, but I thought the […]
We had a Passover dinner on Friday night, the 5th night of Passover, and good Friday. Like lots of other Jews, apparently, we chose the night for convenience rather than tradition, although I did do a little looking to see if we could go to a seder at a restaurant in Chicago on Monday. The […]
Last night was the 2nd Dinner at DebS. There were 8 guests and three of us. It went pretty well, I think. We had a multi-generation group, WWII, Boomers, Gen X, 30-somethings, and one teenager. I have been worried that these smaller diners might get awkward – this one had a few moments, but overall […]
Last fall, I decided to shut down the supper club. People are just not signing up, and my renters are interested in renting the whole house, which actually is a two-fold benefit: 1) I’ll be getting a little more money every month in rent, and 2) Getting the house to look more like a single […]
With very few pictures. Monday we had leftover lasagna, with salad & garlic toast on the no knead bread I made Saturday. I tried to go easy on the lasagna and eat a lot of salad, but Rach came back with Trader Joe’s chocolate and I had to have some. She quoted one her grandmas […]
Continuing on the theme of being not just busy busy, but stupid busy this fall, I am on day 2 of advising week, 34 30-minute appointments scheduled to discuss grad students in the Library & Info Studies program’s spring 2014 course selections. And how they’re doing in their program, in general. They’re mostly good students, […]
For the last 7 years, since October of 2006, I’ve been operating an underground dining club. I am a small time landlord. I own two two-flats, one on the west side of Madison where I live and the other on the east side of Madison where I rent the upstairs and do the supper club […]