slow roast beef with chile rub, roasted green beans & tomatoes, ear of corn

I ate the corn cut off the last ear on top of tabouli for lunch on Tuesday, then finished the green beans with a hard boiled egg yesterday.

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

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.

I made old favorites but with a few differences. Like the honey baked beans, that I usually make with bacon, were vegetarian, but I cooked the onions in a lot of butter, instead of the bacon fat – I read that in a vegetarian recipe for split pea soup – the author of the recipe said that her mom told her if you’re not going to use bacon, use butter. And the ramen salad, that I usually make with Napa cabbage, I made with a bag of “sauté greens” from Harmony Valley at the Farmers’ Market; it seemed to be mostly argula and mustard greens. Despite the hot spring, there’s no cabbage on sale at our markets, yet – that really would be a sign of climate change! I chiffonade-ed the greens – rolled them and cut them in thin strips. The potato salad had chives and flat leaf parsley in it, instead of onions.

I think all the twists produced tasty results – the ramen salad was drier and didn’t get drippy by the next day, and I liked the mild chives in the potato salad, and the butter-flavored baked beans were delicious. The only thing I wasn’t happy with was the strawberry-rhubarb crumble. The filling didn’t seem to get cooked enough. After the first servings were spooned out there was too much juice and that raw cornstarch look about things. I thought I had a great brainstorm, and put the whole dish on the stove Sunday morning, and got it all bubbling and thickened. Then I tried it with Greek yogurt for Sunday breakfast – and I think the rhubarb is still undercooked. It looks good in the pictures, though.

Mark asked how I felt about flexing my grill muscles for the first time of the year. I said I thought I had too much fire leftover, after the meat was all cooked – so I oiled up the last of the potatoes, about 16 of various sizes from marble to fist, tossed them with some coarse salt and pepper, and threw them on the grill. They smelled like heaven cooking. I left them cooling, thinking we might slice them and have them for Sunday breakfast, and went out to pick up John’s camera, and buy more beer. When I got back, the middle school girls – who had taken big plates of burgers & brats and salads, that 2 out of the 3 of them threw out, mostly unfinished – had eaten up all 16 spuds. Guess they must’ve been good.

I made stuffed grilled flank steak.