… or week and almost a half, really. So not sure what’s going on with me. It’s been a 2-concert, holiday week, and lots of good things are arriving at the Farmers Market and in my CSA box, and I’ve been cooking them, but I haven’t written about any of it for the last 10 days. I guess too much of that old and tired and uninspired feeling – no writing and almost no posting of pictures since the Sunday before last.
In the interest of catching up, here goes. On Monday, that’s last Monday, before the 4th of July, I went over to the community center to help prep for the pantry meal on Tuesday morning. I had to zoom home to get online for a class meeting. Only two students showed, and only one of them stayed through the technical glitch to ask a question. I thought I could login as a student in one browser window, and then login as myself in another, so that I could screen share the student view, but since students don’t have mic rights, I didn’t either. It took about 10 minutes to figure it out, and by then the second student left. Of course, I didn’t know how poorly attended the meeting would be and since I had announced it, I had to be there. I can’t really remember what I had for dinner … I think maybe pie?
Here’s what we served at the pantry meal:
This is scrambled eggs with all green mix-ins – spinach, summer squash, basil, scallions, and olives. Oh there was cheese too and that wasn’t green. And homemade cheesy potatoes, like the casserole that always seemed to get brought to hockey family potlucks, but with real ingredients and no “cream of …” soup. Little sausages – Terese found some tubes of bulk sausage meat, some spicy, some mild, and I added fresh thyme and chopped onion, and on Monday I’d made about 175 of the little guys. Quick refrigerator pickles, that came out a bit too salty, but were really good with the potatoes, and corn bread from the mixes we always get in the pantry, but jujed up with chives and green chilies.
Tuesday I took the morning as vacation, and served the breakfast, and then came home and worked. Mark got back Tuesday instead of Wednesday because of the 4th of July, and we finished the pie for dinner.
Wednesday was the 4th. I got up and made blueberry muffins, then went for a ride on this 10 mile loop I’d been wanting to try, the Cannonball Trail to SW Commuter Path.
We had an omelette with cheese and leftover zucchini gratin inside it, and toast – I stopped and bought a loaf of Clausen’s honey wheat sandwich bread on my way back home, the slices are ginormous – and bacon, and some pitted cherries and I peeled and sliced up a peach. I didn’t even have room for a muffin. They came out a lot better than the last time I had made them – they domed and were pleasantly firm. I did something wrong to my tried & true recipe and the muffins were small and damp that last time, but you’ll have to take my word for it because no pictures, of the good ones anyhoo – here’re the substandard ones.
Not my best blueberry muffins – March 2018
After breakfast, we hung out, I did a little bit of work, and then we headed for Summerfest at about 4:30. We wandered around, got rained on a bit, and Mark got a burger served with tater tots from AJ Bombers for his dinner and I got chicken barbecue served with chive fries from Saz’s for mine. We had reserved seats under cover for Pixies, and it didn’t really rain until almost 8:00 when we were allowed to go in. We sheltered in adjacent bathrooms for the worst of it, and Mark brought a bunch of paper towel from the men’s to dry off our seats. There was an opening act – Wombats, who were pretty good. There also seemed to be preponderance of Tom Petty, the late Tom Petty, that is, on the PA, including Into the Great Wide Open, which has kind of been stuck in my head, since I watched the video after reading the Johnny Depp tell-all piece in Rolling Stone, because the video is the 3:45 minute version of the 10,000 word sad story of an actor/rock & roller’s career slide. Anyways, Pixies came out, said not a word, and launched into almost two hours of basically Wave of Mutilation, not the song, the best of the Pixies album. With a few covers added. Here’s the set list:
Thursday I had to go to work, which was kind of painful after going to bed at 1:30. The downside of going to Summerfest, and a mid-week, 1-day holiday. I took the blueberry muffins with me – I left a few for Mark to eat but he had something else. I made some pasta with pesto, and heated up the ratatouille I’d made with the squash from the last CSA box, that didn’t go into the gratin, and we had that for dinner, with a salad – lettuce, tomatoes, pickled onions, and rhubarb poppy seed dressing that I made during my CSA love fest with rhubarb, back in June. No pictures.
Friday was the second concert – Neko Case and Ray LaMontagne at an old outdoor stadium in Madison, Breese Stevens Field, that’s recently been redone, and has been having lots of events & concerts the last three years or so. It was a nice night for a bike ride, and there was free bike valet parking. There were these women behind us who literally talked the entire time, and nothing about the show; planning a wedding shower, clothes, shows … the kind that made you want to turn to them and say, “you should’ve just met for coffee and saved the $50 you spent on the tickets.” It was a good show, but not exactly my music. I bought the tickets assuming Neko Case was the headliner, forgetting how much people love Ray. We ran into some other friends who had thought the same thing – I was so glad – made me feel much less like an idiot!
Saturday I did some fun stuff with my Farmers Market loot, but I’m going to just jump to Sunday. I made brunch, and there’s more to the story than that, but here’s the food, Spanish tortilla, cucumber salad (to go with the tortilla, inspired by the tasty cucumber and potato combo at the pantry breakfast Tuesday), pepperonata made with the last container of last year’s roasted peppers from the freezer and a nice green frying paper from Tipi, almond puff, a King Arthur recipe I’d been want to try – like kringle but less buttery, and blueberries from Costco and some from the co-op, and strawberries, from the co-op., California, not local, but really good.
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