1. Or at least, thing by thing. For our Dutch exchange student, this was the weekend of the senior prom. For me it was mother’s day, and a brunch at School Woods.
2. On Saturday, I got up and went to the Farmers’ Market on my own for serious shopping – potatoes, cheese, green onions, asparagus, eggs, meat – I think I spent $60. Then to Willy Street Co-op, to spend another $70 or so. I intended to stop by the house, drop off the fragile stuff, like bananas and strawberries, not have to transport them again, OJ to thaw, that kind of thing. My renters were home, so we got to talking – the furnace install seems to have gone OK, but we’ll all have to learn how to program the new thermostat. I have one electric mower and one push – I loaned them the power one to get over that very first mow of the season, but they were finished with it, so I brought it back home.
3. I had started out at 7:30, and by now it was almost 10 and I still needed to go to the regular grocery store. One of my library students was visiting from IL and I knew she was going to call me between 11 & noon, to meet back downtown for coffee. I’d get to hold her baby, so I didn’t want to miss her call. So I headed off to Sentry with my iPhone UN-silenced, and got through there pretty darn quick, and even had enough time to get my knives sharpened. On Wednesday (the night I made two dinners, salmon with asparagus and smashed potatoes that showed up again for breakfast on Friday, and beef enchiladas) my too dull knife bounced off the parsley I was chopping and scraped a thin bit of skin off the second finger of my right hand.
4. Home, put stuff away, ate a bowl of honey nut cheerios and home made granola with an apple cut up in it.
5. Biked downtown to meet my student, her husband, and baby Hannah. Went back to the market to get tomatoes from Mark’s favorite place, Canopy Gardens – on my first trip I’d been mostly buying for the brunch, not for us for the week.
6. Then I had to go to my office to send some emails and make copies of the invoice for the new furnace for the application for the energy efficient rebate. I guess I’ll get $275 back (out of the $3000 spent on the furnace) eventually – 6 to 8 weeks.
7. Home again in time to drive Joëlle to another girl’s house where they were all doing each other’s hair & makeup for the prom – they were so intent, no one even noticed when I walked in – they only noticed Joëlle, who had already done her hair – made her naturally curley straight – and eyes, and was in her sparkley dress.
8. Home again, started making the crusts for the mom’s day quiches – I inadvertently made sweet dough the fist time – 3 TBLS sugar to the 3 cups of flour, instead of the 1 TBLS I cut back to for savory pie. But that means there’s pie dough in the freezer now, for a future sweet pie
9. And the tree guy came to give us the quote on trimming several of our trees including the shrub by the back door that’s been hitting us in the face when it’s wetted down after a thunderstorm in the night, and the birch that hits the house and you can hear while you’re watching TV up at Mark’s.
10. Then I biked to Allen Centenniel Gardens on the UW campus – it used to be the home of E.B. Fred, Professor of bacteriology and president of the University from 1945 – 1958. In the early 1980s, my first few years in Madison, Mrs. Fred still lived in the house, and my friend Mary Terese Volkman, MTV, lived there with her as a kind of caretaker/amanuensis. We had a few picnics in the back yard where the gardens are now; somewhere I have a picture of me and my bike by a tree back there. And I remember taking a pile of records over, and dancing in the front hall to the Grateful Dead. The attic was scarey and full of bats. And bat shit.
11. We decided to go see Dark Shadows, the 7:05 show, so I had just enough time to bake the blueberry muffins, and eat a tomato sandwich. Dark Shadows was cheesey, but I liked it, just like I thought I would.
12. Home again, baked the cranberry corn muffins and the rhubarb upside down ones – a new invention, with chopped, sugared, and drained rhubarb in the bottom of each muffin cup, with a plain brown sugar muffin batter on top. Recipe real soon now, pictures below. Asparagus and bacon quiches. Took me till about 1:00 a.m., then I crashed on the couch with the cats until 3:00.
13. Sunday morning, roasted the potatoes. Cleaned greens and made vinaigrette. And took an extra bag of potatoes, baking pan, olive oil and garlic, with me. Good thing, too – I did end up making more spuds – I had to ask my own family to hold off on eating potatoes until the paying customers got enough, and til the extras were close enough to being done. Somehow, though, despite almost running out of potatoes, I felt like I had plenty of time for everything, and it was a leisurely brunch. Lots of little kids, and I got to sit down and eat with John & Mark & Ethan.
14. Home again, put the pans in to soak, and drank a beer on the back deck and read. John & Al were actually both here in the kitchen for about 10 minutes, and didn’t fight – pretty good for mother’s day.
15. Joëlle cooked Dutch food for us for dinner – meatballs and cheesy cauliflower. Watched game of thrones, resisted having another beer, and was really really sleepy by 10:30, so I crashed on the couch again till 12:30. My throat started getting sore.
16. Woke up at 5:30 a.m. on Monday with a full-blown sore throat, and that “what just happened feeling?” Got up at 6:30 for several hours of intense puttering around the house – unloaded and reloaded the dish washer, fished out 2 dough scrapers that had gone missing since cookie season from behind the big drawer full of plastic containers, put seldom used bowls & trays that’d been gotten out for weekend cooking away into the most overstuffed cabinets where stuff falls out when you open them, cat litter, coffee, bring in the newspapers, logged in to my online course and answered a few student emails, took out the compost, sorted newspapers for recycle, rinsed and cut up strawberries, got dressed & brushed my teeth, packed lunch. And still got to work before 9:00.
17. Whew

Upside down rhubarb muffins

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

When I got back from cooking locally sourced vegetarian food for slow food, I made chipotle sliders – the recipe was from some star chef – Bobby Flay, maybe? (yup) – from the People mag I bought in the Denver airport, on the way home from Dallas, because it had Johnny Depp on the cover – devilled eggs, and baked Brie.

I am allowed to think Johnny’s cute, because he looks like my older son.

Johnny & Johnny

I am looking forward to the movie version of Dark Shadows. The original was on afternoon TV when I was in grade school. I liked it but I’m not sure why – no fang, no color, no action. So surely the Depp & Tim Burton version will be even more fun. I somehow missed Rum Diary, it was in and out of the theaters here in Madison pretty quick. But I’ll get it on Netflix or cable, eventually.

And, this time I got back to the room in time to see the last 15 mins. of Public Enemies – that I saw in a theater in Chicago just about a year ago, when it first came out. Just enough time for me to watch Johnny Depp as Dillinger watch a Clark Gable as a gangster, and get shot in the street after. I thought they filmed it at the Chicago Theater on Lake Street, but they used the Biograph up on Lincoln Avenue, which is where the real Dillinger got shot – and evidently a nice upgrade to the Biograph’s facade. Come to think of it, I might’ve seen a play there – Chicago’s Victory Garden Theater company bought it in 2004.

The correct eerie green relish, but ketchup?!! Least it's almost full and the mustard's almost gone

It was too dark to get a good shot of the pizza

It had salami, pasta, garbanzo beans, cheese

WeatherDock on my computer

…. must have been a busy week, since I have not written since last Friday. We’re into the grinding down part of the winter, we had rain and fog, and now it’s really cold, that cheery sun actually indicating that’s it’s clear enough to be cold. And because of the rain, we lost a lot of our pretty snow cover – when I was walking to work this morning I went past a snow drift that’s outside the university bookstore, where the smokers stand. It was a greyish, pockmarked, lump of ice, studded with cigarette butts. Lovely.

Tonight is soup for dinner; stayed up late cooking on both Tuesday – baking breads & bars, cleaning greens, making dressing – and Wednesday, last night – making the soups themselves, and rolls, and the dough for Heidi’s seedy flatbread, that I’ll roll out when I get there, and bake at the last minute, in a really hot oven – warm the place up. I also made some tea/cidar – some cinammon spice tea with a little bit of brown sugar, mixed with cidar. In the summer, I was making tea/juice drinks, like Darjeeling tea with a peach teabag and some peach juice, hibiscus-mint, and so on. Tonight I think I’ll heat the tea/cidar, serve it as hot spice cidar, since it’s so cold out.

Oh, yeah, and when I was done cooking last night and wanted to watch some mindless TV and drink a beer, the wonders of cable provided me with two versions of Johnny Depp as a criminal – George Jung in Blow (John’s easy Halloween costume a few years ago – all it took was a baggie of Wondra and some cheap aviator sunglasses), and Donnie Brasco. I watched Blow, even though I think Donnie’s a far better movie – it had almost and hour and a half to go, and the last 58 minutes of Blow, till midnight, seemed a lot more resonable.

Teeny tiny camera did a good job in Boston, but I forgot to bring it or any other camera for tonight; iPhoneroids are us, I guess.

We went to see the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, that I wanted to see because it’s Terry Gilliam, and Johnny Depp is in it. As anticipated, it looked great, due to the Gilliam influence. Johnny Depp is barely on screen, as one of the three actors playing “Tony” to replace dead Heath Ledger, but while Depp is there, he is beautifully romancing a lady of a certain age. There were also Victorian cardboard pop-up forests, rolling green fields and puffy clouds to make Peter Max swoon, and a tap-dancing troop of British policemen in half-drag, from the waist down – nylons & high heeled shoes below their jackets and hats.

We went for pizza afterward at Porta d’Alba, no doubt the best wood-fired pizza in Madison. I think they must do their crusts the way that my Big Sur Bakery Cookbook instructs – you divide the dough into individual pizza crust size balls, and then rise it overnight on a tray in the fridge – or on a rack of trays in a big walk-in if you have one. Then you stretch it out and bake it per pizza – you can even toss it if you’re feeling especially dexterous. You end up with this great round rim of chewy dough with a pool of pizza inside.

Meanwhile, the Packers came back to tie the game; I started checking on my iPhone when we got to the pizza place, but then lost in overtime. Our bill at the pizza place plus tip equalled the score: $45.51.

And everyone’s saying that this cardinal player grabbed Rodgers’ face mask, causing him to fumble – not an argument I’m gonna get into.

Is he or isn't he?

Cool.

I made fried rice for dinner – looks like I posted my recipe a little over a year ago.

Fried rice at the kitchen counter, Nov. 2008

I made it pretty much the same tonight but with tofu instead of chicken – I bought a package of some kind of Asian seasoned tofu because I thought it’d be nice & chewy. Instead it was soft and cooked liver-like in texture. Don’t think I’ll buy that kind again – it was WestSoy – the company doesn’t even list it on their web site.

Instead of eating my fried rice seated at the kitchen counter with a beer, while reading the New Yorker, I sat on the couch and watched Johnny Depp in Public Enemies. I still enjoyed the beer – a Hopalicious, local microbrew, that I usually find a little bitter, but it was good with the rice. My cats were just as desparate as always to get a taste of the rice, too.

posted from my iPhone