Deb's Lunch ... and dinner and breakfast too » summer

Last grill-out of summer

DebS — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:10:28 +0000

If you consider summer to be “between the days” – memorial and labor – then yesterday was the last grill out of the summer.

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.

Aaaah, 3-day weekend

DebS — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 19:23:11 +0000

It’s early afternoon on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend – meaning we still have another day off. I woke up at 6:30, (well, after waking at 2:00 and at 5:10 or so to feed the cats) and went back to sleep until 7:12, instead of lying awake worrying like I have the last few days. And delicious sleep it was, too. Heaven – Heaven, by Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians.

Rach and I went for a leisurely walk. I came back and baked a banana chocolate chip coffee cake. I’ve been getting kind of sick of banana bread, (while liking the Orangette recipe I’ve using, leaving out the chocolate & ginger; last time I made it with walnuts & coconut. Seems like the bananas get overripe quick this summer) and this recipe sounded good. I finally had time to take a long shower and wash my hair – instead of the quick rinse, keep the hair dry kind of shower, while the cake was in the oven. And I did my poor woman’s pedicure: shave the legs, wash the feet with this mint & walnut shell exfoliating soap, clip the toenails, lotion. I was thinking about painting my toenails, too, and had let them get a little long, but clipping seemed the better choice.

The banana cake was from an Epicurious recipe – the kind where people were fighting bitterly; comments ranging from “our favorite cake” to “Yuck, waaay too sweet”. I did think it had a lot of sugar – 2/3 cup brown in the topping, and 3/4 cup white in the cake – I cut it to 1/3 brown for the topping, and 1/2 granulated in the cake itself. I used less chocolate chips too – and if I make it again, I am going use even less chocolate – to let the banana take over more.

Yesterday I had time to go take pictures of this wild orange fungus growing on a hillside next to a street in the neighborhood – proof positive that Wisconsin has been a rain forest this summer. Earlier one of the farmers at the market, who had two small baskets of artichokes at his stand, said they’d been a crop failure this year. It’s been too hot and wet in Wisconsin for artichokes, which are thistles after all, used to growing on stony mountainsides in Italy.

Now I am sitting at my computer listening to my cats snore behind me. This is probably the last post from the old iMac – another 3-day weekend task is to set up the new one, that’s sitting in the box a few feet away, and package up the old one to ship off to be recycled. Also, pesto-ify the 2 bunches of basil that are sitting in the basement fridge, roast peppers, and turn the bulghur wheat marinating in olive & lemon into tabouli. If I don’t just curl up on the couch with cats myself, and my current library book, which is getting interesting, BTW. But, hey 3-day weekend – I just might have time for all of that.

Fungus Among Us

Summer’s End

DebS — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:11:41 +0000

My brother wrote a post of the same title a few days ago, listing his accomplishments, or at least what he did, for this summer, so I thought I would follow suit.

I taught an online class on web design for 24 library masters’ degree students. I felt that it was one of my most successful online courses – the students did well on the assignments – they got it – the medium seemed to suit the message. It’s because when one wants to learn web design, there’s a ton of good infor out there on the web, so it worked nicely.
I went to Washington D.C. for the big librarian’s conference. No big deals, a few nice meals, especially Jaleo.
I got to go to Chicago TWICE – once for a software user group, and once for Lollapalooza.
I coped with the bad-match foster kid, mostly by sending her to stuff – while we were at ALA, she went to Phantom Lake, which she liked. It’s the sleep-away camp where my younger son Al is a councilor. I also was kind of the home away from home for some of Al’s camp kid buddies – they passed through a few times for showers and sometimes we fed them, like Memorial Day and a few weekends ago.
In July foster daughter went to MadCap, a theater daycamp that she had wanted to do, but then did not like – which made things even more unpleasant at home. The play she was in, Middle School Madness, was quite good.
I organized a week-long on-campus orientation for 30 new distance library masters students. Despite being the highly experimental first one, and construction, and the angry teenage girl living with me, it went well.
I went to Minneapolis and helped Al move, and then came back and moved the foster kid OUT. Today I took the last of her stuff to the group home. Whew.
I biked a lot – I think I only got my CSA box by car twice – except now that it’s fall, the heavier stuff will be coming in. I carried a lot of groceries with my two panniers – the old black one, and the new Timbuk 2 one.
I served a series of brunches and dinners.
I redesigned the School Woods website.
Now I’m gonna go make chicken poblano corn burritos – if they’re good, stay tuned for the recipe. (they were good; Mark loved them – here’s the recipe – or just go to the recipe page)

So disappointed

DebS — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:29:30 +0000

Initially, because I got a musk melon instead of watermelon in my CSA box – and the farmers I buy from, Tipi Produce, grow really good watermelons. But they sell to Willy Street, too, so I bought a chunk of one of their watermelons at the co-op and it’s in the fridge waiting to be eaten.

And now it’s turned into Sunday evening of a weekend when I did a fair amount of cooking: corn salsa, and sausage-egga-english muffins, and rosemary fried potatoes for Sunday breakfast, and caponata, and a long-rise no knead oatmeal bread, and a gratin of mixed summer & fall vegetables; potatoes, tomatoes, purple onions – but only one picture to show for it. I made pie dough, but no pie. Maybe I’ll get around to writing up some of the recipes, later on.

It was just kind of a poop out weekend – we didn’t go to the Orton Park Fest nor see any bands; we didn’t go to a movie. We DID go to Ride the Drive – but we only did one loop.

Just disappointing, overall.

Last year after Ride the Drive, I went up to Minnesota to help Al move. This year we’re leaving Monday morning, instead. Plus Al’s so grown up – I don’t need to rent a big vehicle to hold all his stuff overnight – I’m just helping him throw out the old furniture he doesn’t want – like the $10 dorm desk from UW’s university surplus – and giving him $$ to go to IKEA. I made a lot of food to take last year – this year the caponata is coming with me, and a hunk of Framer John’s Asiago.

These are yellow ones; they'd sent me one of these a few weeks ago, and I really wanted red

Potato-tomato gratin, with lemon & olives

It’s been real …

DebS — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:52:39 +0000

… just too short. I had 4 days of actual vacation this weekend. I only answered a few work emails. And I even took some pictures of food. I knew it had been awhile because when I opened the images in Photoshop, the most recent on the card before this weekend were dated July 26.

Granola and a biscuit & jam for breakfast

Corn & barbecue sauce pizza

Wednesday: my Friday: Went to work in the morning, took a break at noon to pack the foster kid off to the group home, after retrieving my mom’s needlenose jewelery repair pliers from her bag, finished the sweet-sour rice for lunch, and worked late to finish the syllabus for ONE of my fall classes (to be fair, even though I have three classes, the one I just finished the syllabus for is the only “real” one; 30 students, lectures, exercises, grading. The others are supervising an internship with only one student and an independent study with about 15 people to test the new library cataloging rules.) Mark and I ate leftover succotash and biscuits for dinner.

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.

A grown-up birthday

DebS — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:42:16 +0000

When I was a kid, the family tradition was that the big parties with lots of kids and presents and cake and laser tag and video games stopped when you were 11 or 12, and after that everyone in the family got the same thing: dinner and a movie – a grown-up birthday.

This year, I think I had an especially grown-up birthday.

We slept in, then debated whether to ride to the east side for breakfast or walk to a closer place. We opted for biking. We chose the route that goes behind Camp Randall Stadium, UW’s football arena, that is named after an actual Civil War camp, and under the stone “Camp Randall” arch that is one of the last 19th century remnants (there’s a canon and wooden hut, too). As we rode under the arch to stop at a traffic light, one of the brake cables on Mark’s bike snapped. No matter, it’s his clunker bike that has coaster brakes, too, so we pushed on. But then, a few blocks further, with a great hissing noise, I got a flat. Happily we were just a short way to walk our bikes to the repair place, and then just a little further to go – back into the shadows of he stadium – to get to Micky’s Dairy Bar. So we dropped our bikes and went and ate.

We went about the rest of our day, and got our bikes back later in the afternoon.

For dinner we went out to the summer camp where Mark’s son is working, and ate quesadilla’s from Pasqual’s and watched the kids perform. Camp Shalom is a day camp with three 3-week sessions every summer, and on the Wednesday of the last week, the kids invite the parents out for dinner, and see the show, then the older kids sleep over, have a short day Thursday, and no camp Friday. My first foster daughter, Kaylah, and her girlfriend Kendra, are also counselors there this summer. Kendra’s b-day is a few days after mine, so I got lots of birthday hugs. we cane home and ate peach-blueberry cobbler that I had made the night before – it was just as good as it had been warm. It was a Thomas Keller recipe – I just used peaches and blueberries instead of all berries.

The real birthday dinner came Friday night, when we drove down to Milwaukee to Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro to have dinner with John & Megan, and see their new apartment and kitties. Oh, and Mark got me a cookbook I already had – but John got me one that I didn’t.

My salad of shaved fennel & beets

My trout off the tomate menu - fried trout, with with a salad of argula & cherry tomatoes piled on top

one perfect arugula leaf that came with my trout

iPhone polaroid of John's beer

Regular iPhone shot of the beer

Construction shots

DebS — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:43:37 +0000

So a little over a week ago, I was complaining that my office is in the midst of construction hell, but I didn’t have the pictures. Here they are.

Too busy to cook

DebS — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:49:20 +0000

Sounds like the title of a 1950s cookbook, but story of my life right now. Though I did make ramen salad – I think it was Thursday – yea, musta been Thursday – to use up the cabbage, kohlrabi, radishes, a.k.a.the old veggies in the bin, when I brought home my new CSA box. And I made blueberry pancakes & bacon Sunday morning. And a really good corn pudding to eat in front of vampires on Sunday night, with sliced tomatoes on the side.

I made my annual pilgrimage to Brennans and got a 10-lb box of blueberries. They are now “IQF-ing” – individually quick freezing on trays in the freezer – I’ll have to bag them sometime soon. I splurged on a half case of peaches, too. They’ll need blanching & slicing equally soon.

posted from my iPhone

2008's blueberries - click the picture for the 2008 blog post

Panzanella

DebS — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:06:17 +0000

Panzanella – the bread soaks up the tomato’s juices and tastes like distilled summer. And we had possibly the best trifle ever, with cherries, apricots and yellow and ginger cakes, for dessert. Recipe following. Trifle recipe.

First summer supper

DebS — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:15:12 +0000

So I had this idea to do a series of summer dinners, featuring “the fleeting tastes of summer”.

The first one was last night. It was quite pleasant - a congenial group – one of my “girls” – a young woman who lived at the co-op dorm where I was the head cook from 1981-1986, when she was 18, and I was 26 – and she brought a long another woman who is wondering if she should keep trying to make it as an artist, maybe get an MFA, or pursue some other graduate degree; a young guy on his own, who turned out to have grown up in Manhattan, across the street from my upstairs renter’s boyfriend; one of my oldest friends; a group of four who’d never been there before – so lots of pleasant conversation.

The menu was:
Pan Bagnat – salad Nicoise in a sandwich – crusty bread stuffed with tuna, tomatoes, cucumbers, and olives – with a no-tuna option for vegetarians (that turned out to be pesto, goat cheese & tomato
Salt & vinegar potato salad
Coleslaw
Rhubarb mousse served with butter cookies

There was a little too much food – a lot of sandwich, only a dab of coleslaw, and a vat of mousse leftover. I had some of the sandwiches for dinner tonight, and mousse earlier today for second breakfast.