Finished grading

Gentle reader, please know, I finished grading on Sunday at about 6:30. Now it’s Wednesday at about 9:00, and I’m just getting finished with this post …

Back then, I said, “Yay! Now only two syllabi and two online classes to get written and up and running, in two weeks. Can I put my pajamas on now? It’s 6:57 on a Sunday. I should think it’s allowed since I’m over 60.”

Last time I wrote it was the Sunday before, my birthday – I’m uploading my pictures from the week, and there are 37.

We had peach & cherry birthday cobbler for breakfast and went to an Italian place for dinner. We ate a lot, or I did anyways. Had a cheese and meat board for starters – the meats were very thinly shaved and there was one kind that was nice and spicy, served with a little honey, and cubes of cheese. Mark and I split a panzanella salad that was probably the best part of the meal, then Mark and Al had shrimp risotto, and Emma and I each got different pastas. I had agnoleti filled with ramps – there was a lot of stuff going on in the plate, the pasta, bread crumbs, vegetables; here’s what the menu says was in there, “house-made ramp and ricotta stuffed pasta, asparagus, onion, spinach, bread crumb, parsley, pecorino, parmesan”. We got a tiramisu with four spoons for dessert. The shaved meat, the salad, and the dessert were the best.

I guess my last birthday thing is John & Al’s dad Jeff sent me the Peanuts Gang singing Dark Side of the Moon – because Snoopy’s birthday is August 10, but he might be even older than me – I think the strip started in 1950 or ’51.

Monday afternoon I went to prep the pantry meal. I was going to bike and shlepped everything to work, but when I left it was raining so instead of biking 30 minutes in the rain to the eastside, I biked 10 minute in the rain to the westside, got the car, and drove. I had leftover grated baked potatoes from a Hy Vee potato bar at bootcamp, also bacon and cheese and sour cream. There were no eggs so I went and bought some and we made egg bake with bacon and potatoes and onion and cheese, and egg bake with zucchini and potatoes and onion and cheese; coleslaw from some almost dead cabbages – quite good Tuesday once the cabbage was shredded and dressed and marinated; I took home some pumpkin and made 2 kinds of pumpkin bread: one with dried cranberries and walnuts and one from Marian Morash, that’s actually sweet potato, but pumpkin works fine, with chocolate. I used to make this cake for Al’s birthday when he was young enough to let me pick the cake, because it’s orange and brown good for a near-Halloween baby like him. I also made peanut butter banana smoothies and we had cut up melon, too.

I taught a cooking class at Orange Tree Imports on Wednesday, so Tuesday after work I went shopping for ingredients and then met Susan for a drink and snacks at Mint Mark. I was early so I sat out back of the co-op and had a fizzy water, under this arbor – of what? I guess that was still birthday, too.

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The Wednesday class went well I thought, all veggie dishes. There could’ve been a little more of the corn pudding and scalloped tomatoes, but there was enough of Julia’s Tian de courgettes au riz, and especially the warm cherry-peach crumble with ice cream so I think all was right with the world. I’ll post the recipes here real soon now.

Friday we went to a dinner on the farm, Campo di Bella, sort of birthday for both of us because it’s in between. And reward because I spent the day grading. The cute, friendly dog who visited our table and everyone else’s is named Stella. Chilled carrot soup to start, then beef short ribs with a confit hunk of zucchini (cooked slowly in oil) and butter, creamy mashed potatoes – like Joel Robuchon, who I just discovered is the late. The Guardian UK published his recipe in memoriam. My mom, also the late, gave me his cookbook, written by Patricia Wells, another of my cooking heroes, for Christmas in 1991, and inscribed it, “For the best cook – to improve her?” Plum galette for dessert.

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And oh, yea, the foundation of the garage got poured on Friday.

Saturday we went to the Farmers Market first thing, by bike, then came home, and left my car in the driveway, because we knew no construction workers would be back before Monday (and now all that’s happened all week so far is the the cement guys took the forms off. Although I hear pretty soon they’re going to have the excavator come back, and shovel most of the huge pile of dirt in my backyard back into the hole around the foundation). We took Mark’s car to Harvard and caught the train to Chicago, to see Ben Harper & Trombone Shorty at Northerly Island. We got spicy Asian food for dinner before. Mark was more into Trombone Shorty and I was more into Ben Harper, so it was all good. The guy next to us had actually booked Ben Harper into a gig at his fraternity at University of Iowa in 1994 – so he’d been a fan for 25 years. It was $17 pint cans of craft beer, and we think the Iowa guy next to us said their carafe of wine was $120 – what he knew was a $30 bottle of wine decanted into a plastic carafe. But still, it was a pleasant night on the lakefront, and we walked there, so no outrageous parking fees tacked onto everything else.

Sunday morning we got up to a thunderstorm in Chicago, but it pretty much finished raining by the time it was time for me to leave for the bus, allowing time to stop for coffee (and a jam biscuit) at Dollop.

I finished reading all the papers on the bus, so I took a break before uploading the grades to the registrar, and made corn salsa.

Happily the basement was dry, but a cement truck in your driveway sure leaves a trench, that can filled up with rain water.

The Tuesday pantry breakfast main dish was brown rice with kale and black beans for vegetarians, and cheese and hamburger meat for meat eaters. This week there were a lot of eggs, so I made a bunch of hard boiled eggs, and we cut up some apples for fruit, and there was juice for the first time in a long time. I was a little worried that we didn’t have quite enough, but the big kitchen gave us two pasta salads to use up, one with tuna and one with grilled veggies. I think the hit of the day was the pear cobbler with puff pastry on top.