New car, practicing my puff pastry for the class I’m teaching next Sunday, and a trip to the opera.
I’m afraid that this first batch won’t puff enough because I had the butter too soft. You’re supposed to grate it frozen but that sounded painful to me, plus my kitchen’s been really cold this winter – I think we have a leak or missing insulation or something – so I let the butter sit out for a couple hours. We shall see. And I’ve got the right amount of butter, 11 uh, that would be 13 tablespoons, in the freezer now. So I’ll try another batch and compare.
Two turns
Three turns
After the three turns, I went to Film Fest volunteer orientation and then into work for a few hours and then came home and baked the pastry – and wah-lah!
I guess it rose OK! – Rectangles and cheese twists
Cherry turnovers – I overfilled, so filling seepage lead to their slightly grubby look. They taste good, though
Cherry turnovers
I never made that second test batch. I think between now and class Sunday, I’ll make a vegan batch with and fill it with Chia seed pudding or something like that. I can have my students do a taste test of the vegan pastry vs. real butter pastry vs. store bought.
Originally my plan for Saturday afternoon was to come home and do that second test batch of puff pastry, and then make a big mushroom omelette and salad and toast for dinner. The omelette was inspired by leftover mushrooms from this soup I made on Rachael’s suggestion on Friday night when we cocooned up and ate soup and watched movies on Prime. The soup was good but it’s not terribly attractive after you blend it – kind of brown. We watched A Royal Scandal with a young Richard E. Grant, and this funny documentary, Catwalk, about the cat show circuit in Canada. I stopped and got the soup fixings at Whole Foods on the way home after picking up my new 2020 leased Crosstrek. Like I told John, the new car is blue and aside from the color, pretty much same as the 2016, except everything that used to be a button control is now digital on the touch screen, that unfortunately has all the design charm of windows 98.
Similarly on Saturday I stopped and bought two clam shells of greens at Fresh Market to go with the omelette. But of course, since the first batch of puff pastry baked up so well, and since I was unable to resist eating those cheese straws when they were warm from the oven, and since I was also unable to resist the small trove of chocolates I currently have in office for the faculty candidates’ welcome basket, I wasn’t too hungry for dinner, and suggested we go to a movie. There aren’t a lot of leftover mushrooms – it was oddly pleasing how well I did at guessing the amount to buy, while consulting the recipe on my phone. Whole Foods does not have the inaccurate hanging scales found in so many other grocery stores, but I guess due to my years of practive <grin> I eyeballed 1.25 pounds of mixed mushrooms – cremini, white and shiitake – and 8 oz. of shallots so that I used all the shallots and there was only a handful of mushrooms left.
We got tickets for 1917 out at one of the suburban multiplexes. It was the film with a bunch of currently prominent male British actors each in it for a two minute cameo, starting with Colin Firth, and the hot priest (Andrew Scott), Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, and finally Robb Stark (Richard Madden). I expected to see Dan Stevens in there too, since he spent so much of Downton Abbey season 2 in WWI uniform. It was good, but grim.
We came home and ate the cherry turnovers and the last of the sweet potato pie, with ice cream.
Sunday we spent the day in Chicago for the opera, a kind of weird one, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. Yes, it had puppets. And a vertical bed.
I guess it’s a showcase for a tenor, and the one Lyric got for this production, Brandon Jovanovich, is quite good. He’s the one in the pajamas. We got home in time tonight wrap up our weekend by watching the most recent Outlander, repeating at 10:55 or something like that – so couch time with kitty after the train ride home.