Labor Day Weekend: Old and tired and uninspired

Is my tagline for the weekend, anyways. Or maybe that should be “seeking inspiration”.

Friday I worked until 5:00, recording a lecture for one of my classes that I think I’m gonna do over, anyways. Came home and made a loaf of garlic bread with our German exchange student, so that she could take it to the pre-cross-country-meet-runners-only potluck. Then I made another version of the burst cherry tomato tart for dinner – this one had yellow squash, corn, diced plum tomatoes, and a layer of pesto, using up key items from my CSA box. Mark and I ate it fit dinner with green beans on the side. I baked it on convection and the crust was nice and flakey. I had also made it on my birthday, our student’s first night here, but this one was better – the crust was a bit doughy and pale on the birthday one.

On Saturday, the kid’s cross country meet was in Verona, and she went off to the bus at 7:00. I turned on the computer and answered a few emails and edited the featured pic for this post – slightly blurry tomatoes and a banana.

We biked to the market and I bought corn and a few extra tomatoes and apples and brats and a mixed bag of Door County fruit with peaches and little plums and more apples and two pears. And spicey cheese bread buns to use for hamburger buns at our grillout Labor Day, and a pain au chocolat and a cinnamon swirl pastry from L’Etoile for our hungry runner kid. While I was buying the pastries, I saw Tory Miller briefly and was quite jealous because I’d also seen his corn for the restaurant in a wagon, while mine was heavy and hurt-y on my shoulder.

I got a nice pic of sunflowers at the market – now it’s the blog banner and my iPhone wallpaper. Let’s tag that inspiration.

After the meet, I cleaned the gutters on the roof of the addition around the deck, trying to get rid of all the raccoon food. Had some more breakfast, granola and cheerios with an apple cut up on top, and went out on my bike to do the last of the grocery shopping. Made those tomatoes shown in the featured pic into Marcella’s tomato butter sauce, and used all of it in this little lasagna.

I got edamame in my CSA box, which meant picking the bean pods from the bundle of silage (vines and beans and leaves) that came in the box, rinsing them, boiling them, and squeezing out the beans. I got the usual scant cup of beans, and I mixed them in with some white beans and some black eyed peas that had been lurking in the fridge, and the leftover cooked vegetables from the tart – corn, tomato, squash and onion, remember – and added the dregs of a jar of homemade vinaigrette, I think raspberry. The result was a pretty OK bean salad. We ate it on top of mixed lettuce from the market, with the lasagna.

Sunday morning I went for a longish walk. When I stepped onto the bike path, it was the perfect late summer/early fall day. Blue sky with little puffy white clouds, a few yellow leaves drifting down but everything still mostly green, past their prime wildflowers lining the path, black eyed Susan’s, something purple, something blue. I wished I could have taken a picture of it – but that still wouldn’t have captured the smell. Loamy and crackly with a little bit of smoke.

I spent most of the walk thinking about how to make the peaches from the market into this cake, how to thick up the filling if I use frozen blueberries, should I use the plums and pears and apples from the same bag, should I stop at Joe’s and buy some fresh blueberries, “Oh, no, the $4 I have with me won’t be enough for that”. Trying to recall the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for pastry cream, to go with the cake, musing about how I don’t use my paper magazines so much anymore, now that I can retrieve the recipes online and making myself feel guilty – wouldn’t Labor Day weekend be a good time to weed the cooking mag collection?; and reorganize my t-shirt drawers and get the cool weather stuff on top …. I think I had some good ideas how to improve the slide lectures for my classes, that one I recorded on Friday and have to do over, and the in-person one I’ll give next Wednesday.

Guess it’s time to go put that inspiration to work, and get those slide decks fixed up & recorded.