Some things have gone as planned – but even more have not.

We went to see the Black Keys in Milwaukee in Wednesday. Good show, especially the lights, but I was too tired and sick to really appreciate it. We had tacos at Belair Cafe with John beforehand. Mine were a little disappointing – vegetarian rajas – that I thought were supposed to be strips of roasted poblanos & onions. These were merely sliced and barely even sautéed. The margarita was really good but they forgot to bring it to me till after the food came.

I got my first CSA box Thursday – I was going to bike to get it but my throat was too sore. Purple asparagus, rhubarb, some really gorgeous spinach, green garlic, baby turnips with greens, lettuce, bok choy, even though I asked on my farmer’s end of season survey last fall for less Asian greens, please, more kale & spinach. I’ve been told the Asian varieties grow really well here in WI, though.

One of the things not going at all as planned is exercise, but Friday I managed a bike over to school woods to set up the tables and meet Mel, who was dropping off the liquor for his daughter’s grad dinner, scheduled for Saturday.

I made a high school graduation dinner for this girl 5 years ago (same year as Al) – this was her college graduation.

They had drinks & apps in the “garden”; really the back yard: asparagus rolled in puff pastry with cream cheese & Gouda cheese, and a couple of hunks of good local cheese (Willi’s raw milk cheddar, Marieka Gouda with fenugreek, and Hook’s aged Swiss) and crackers and nuts. Then moved indoors for the salad, that I plated – balsamic vinaigrette, toasted walnuts, Parm shavings. Then served family style, Lemon chicken (my version of this Ina Garten recipe; no dried oregano and I used bone-in chicken), really easy and good, and salmon that I just roasted brushed with olive oil, then poured parsley butter over, although I had considered several other more complicated preparations. This green rice by Heidi, that I also adapted a bit – cilantro instead of mint, green garlic instead of shallots. I think the rice was my favorite part of the supper. The desserts were pretty great too – and the only thing I photographed. Strawberry cake with a Victoria sponge cake base and mascarpone cream and Italian almond crostate. We turned on the air con because it was just too hot.

Sunday morning was library school graduation – quite nice, 11 of my distance students, two good speakers (more on that presently). Came home and tried to get motivated to bike to E. Wash and unload & reload the dishwasher and ended up taking Mark to the immediate care instead. At least the wifi was good there – I graded 3 or 4 students while I waited. And Mark seemed quite cheered up just by knowing he does indeed have a kidney stone.

After all that, I drove over to E. Wash to unload & reload the dishwasher – and see Stephen upstairs’s bandaged fingers – while the Saturday night guests were on the dessert course, Belinda came down to consult on where to go to get him stitched up – he broke a glass while doing the dishes and cut himself. We needed buns to go with our brats for dinner – we were sticking to our plan of grilling for dinner. I stopped by Jenny Market, and of course at 6:00 p.m. on a Sunday, only the most Wonder white bread crappy buns were left.

I opened 3 beers – 2 to boil the brats in and one for me to drink. Poured the beer into the pot with the brats, picked up the 2 bottles to drop into recycle, and came back to find an empty – I had just dropped a full bottle of beer into the recycle bin. So I had to crawl into the bin, clean it all out and turn it over on the grass to drain. Oh well, guess I needed something to do while the coals got ready.

I uploaded the grad dinner dessert pix thinking I’d work on this post in front of Sunday night TV – but I got dozy and here I am doing it now on my iPhone on Monday morning. Grabbing time because I must finish grading today. We never got the promised thunderstorms; instead the cold front blew in and now it’s almost too chilly.

I get almond tart & leftover salad with grilled potatoes & egg for lunch though – making the best of the weekends mishaps.

I went to the doc this afternoon to see if I could get any of my aches & pains explained. She poked me and did a blood test and I’ll know in a few days. And I got busted for having to go for a colonoscopy – even though I said I’d never do that again – I guess they’re calling to schedule me also in the next few days.

Now I’m watching Red Hot Chili Peppers get inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Anthony Kiedis gave the acceptance speech, and then they all took their shirts off to play. They closed with Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground, and Ron Wood, Billie Joe Armstrong, Kenny Jones and George Clinton were all on stage – I didn’t realize Billie Joe was there till  Rolling Stone told me so. And next a True Blood repeat – seems appropriate somehow.

And so far the reviews I’ve seen for Dark Shadows are only so-so  – 2 1/2 stars in the Milwaukee paper. But I still just know I’m gonna love it – Johnny Depp, Tim Burton, Barnabas Collins, vampires – what more could you want? They’re all saying it’s stilted and the plot goes nowhere, but what do you expect if you make a movie based on a soap opera? Besides, it’s a Tim Burton movie, so it’s going to look great, and that’s what I’ll go to see it for. And, of course, Johnny Depp with fangs and Nosferatu fingers.

Posted from my iPhone at least partly

The condition should improve on its own. However, the illness may last for months. Long-term or severe complications do not usually occur.

I had plans to cook a nice dinner – steamed asparagus, smashed new potatoes with lots of butter, salmon with chopped tomatoes on top, big salad. But Mark was just heading out for his walk at 6:15 when I got home, and the big dinner didn’t seem like such a good idea – so I just made the salad.

Now I think I’m going to go flop on the couch, and hope the cats will come to hold me down.

Tonight, still working on party leftovers, I had cauliflower and a little peanut dip to use up. I had carrots, and a can of coconut milk, plus a jar of the thin part of another can of coconut milk that I had used for the little lime syrup cupcakes. I wanted tofu to put in the curry, but when I went to the co-op on Tuesday, they were, somewhat unbelievably, out of plain tofu – only a few package of herbed – so I bought some little red potatoes, instead. I quick thawed some vegetable broth, by popping it out of the plastic yogurt tub it was frozen in, into a covered pot on the heat.

Even though Mark was not interested, I thought it was a pretty good dinner.

Thai vegetable curry

2 cups of long grain white rice – like Basmati
about a cup of coconut milk, lowfat or the thin part OK
2 1/2 cups of vegetable broth or water

1 tbs. vegetable oil
2 small onions, sliced pole to pole
4 small red potatoes
1 1/2 cups – or so – cauliflower florets
3 carrots, peeled and chunked
Thai red curry paste – I used the canned kind, which is quite mild, probably about 1/4 cup – if its the hotter jarred kind, start with about 1 tbs.
3 – 4 tbs. peanut dip
1 1/2 cups coconut milk – most of a can – lowfat is OK
a good handful of frozen peas

Combine the rice, coconut milk, veggie broth, and water in a large pot. Bring to a boil and add about 1 tsp salt. Cover, reduce heat and cook for about 15 minutes until all the liquid is absorbed. Put the oil into a wide deep skillet. Heat, add the onions, season with salt & pepper, and stir. Rinse the potatoes, and slice them, and add them to the pot, too. Add the cauliflower and carrots, stir well, add a little water or veggie broth, cover, and cook for 10 – 15 minutes until the vegetables are cooked through but not mushy. Make a well in the center, and add the peanut dip and curry paste, and then add the coconut milk. Stir well. Throw the peas on top, cover, and cook another few minutes just til the peas are cooked. Eat spooned over the rice.

Whole wheat baguette

Whole wheat baguette and lasagna

Coconut cake

The lasagna had that pureed tomato sauce, that I make with my home-frozen tomatoes. Tuesday, I made a big batch with the last 4 bags of tomatoes from last summer (after I had ascertained that they did not taste like plastic). I left the tomatoes out to thaw all day, but it was still like making tomato slushee in the Cuisinart when I pureed them. And kind of fun to see them melt and turn a deeper red as they cooked – I’m sure the addition of a can of tomato paste helped, too.

For the bread I used the King Arthur Flour long rise almost no knead baguette recipe, with part whole wheat. The last time I made this bread, the dough was a little too wet, and the bread wasn’t as crusty as I would have liked. I weighed the flour, both times, but I tried to be more careful with the water for this whole wheat batch. but the wheat flour threw things off I think, though – the dough was really heavy and stiff. And I didn’t let it rise as long as I should have – only an hour. So we got a pretty good crust, and a fine, tight, crumb – not much in the way of holes.

I don’t know what happened with the cake – it’s annoying me. I thought I was making this cake that I made last fall for a luau party – but it didn’t crumble like this in September. So I must’ve used a different recipe, but damned if I can remember which. Another thing to worry about – memory loss. I think it must be hormones.

I started my at-home sick day with a big bowl of cereal. Somewhere in the afternoon, I polished off the malted milk balls. I was pretty good at staying away from snacks during the day, but I did eat three of the stuffed dates (tho only one is depicted). They’re Mollie Katzen’s recipe – an almond inside and coconut with fennel seeds. Mollie says to roll the dates in the coconut mix, and I don’t know what kind of dates she uses, but no way that stuff was going to stick to the big Medjools I had – so I opened up the pitted dates and stuck the coconut to the sticky insides, popped in the almond and closed them up.

Around 6:00 p.m. I sent Mark & Joelle off to the symphony and dinner downtown, and they also got to see a bit of the 1-year anniversary, recall Walker rally (although one of my facebook friends was complaining about why is there both a Friday night AND a Saturday rally?! and she has a point …), including Fireman Irish pipers, coming into the pub. I took a shower and settled in on the couch and had Indian leftovers and watched the first two episodes of the season of Downton Abby on DVD – Indian food seemed appropriate because India was still part of the Empire in 1912. And, since of course Walgreens had all the Easter candy in stock when I visited for cold meds, I had peeps for dessert.

And for Saturday breakfast I had toad in hole eggs & toast & two sausages – Mark & I went out and did all our Saturday a.m. errands on foot, including new glasses for me and new running shoes for him – so I didn’t have breakfast until noon, and was really, really hungry. And, I think this is quite enough of the recording of what I’ve eaten – I’ll go back to shooting what I’ve cooked, instead.

Man, this is hard – I went and got a hard boiled egg for a snack with coffee at about 2:00 – and I remembered to photograph that – on top of the rice pudding lid. I’m doing a dinner tomorrow, and after work I had to go grocery shopping for ingredients – I wanted to go to yoga, but my 4:00 meeting went till 5:15, which was just a tad too late, especially because I had to go buy resume paper for Al. I got home with the groceries at about 6:30 – forgot to get the chicken for the curry, dammit, I’ll have to go again tomorrow – and made cheese quesadillas and chicken quesadillas, with that leftover UN-photogenic chicken from yesterday. I photographed the cheese, but completely forgot to shoot the cheese quesadillas, until after they were all eaten – all I got was the last chicken wedge, atop the extra, seasoned, shredded chicken.

Everyone around me has colds – my throat is really sore and my head’s all stuffed up, so I suspect I’m getting it too. Maybe I can leave work early tomorrow ….

Even though I had such a plethora of baked goods at home, I bought a cookie at the cafe at the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery, where I had a meeting. It’s called Aldi’s for Aldo Leoplod. Bought a cup of coffee, too. Carried it all back to my office – a little too far, coffee got kinda cold. Ate the cookie and drank the coffee with what I’d packed for lunch – English muffin & butter. I already had the Damson plum jam on my desk – American Spoon. And a couple of clementines, that turned out to kinda dry inside.

And a New Yorker article about the shit that Scott Walker’s doing to our state.

How quickly they forget, though. I got home hungry and ate Ritzs & spreading cheese and tomato jam and didn’t photograph them. And I didn’t take pictures of dinner – pasta pesto with chicken on top – until after I’d eaten it. This is Al finishing it off. And the chicken was just too UN-photogenic; not shown here.