This weekend my me time on Saturday morning turned into work time, so no weekend blog post.
Friday morning my walk was the hellebore walk. I put the pics on Instagram and made a banner for the blog. Everyone liked the pics on Insta, but I still feel like I’m in a terribly not reflective time – not taking as many pictures, not writing enough. I look back at older blog posts and think, “gee, I used to be more interesting.”
I guess I’ve always believed the “unexamined life is not worth living” quote, supposed to be Socrates, although I think I tend to remember it as “undocumented” – more on my creative remembering of other people’s words in a minute.
Friday night I made pasta with roasted tomato, sausage, and cream cheese sauce. No pics, but it looked a lot like this. It was the 2nd to last container of roasted tomato sauce from the freezer – there’s also a container of Marcella’s famous tomato sauce (all made last summer when I got extra tomatoes from my CSA) but since that has butter, I didn’t want to add sausage and cream cheese to it, even though it was Friday, because that would’ve made ridiculously, not-for-a-week-night, rich.
I made pizza some other night last week – Monday maybe? – and in lieu of garlic toast, we had a couple of wedges of that with our pasta. One of the pizzas was as-seen-on-Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, sausage and slaw, and the other was plain tomato. The sausage and slaw was really good cold. I peeled and chunked the tomatoes and added a little olive oil, sugar, and salt and pepper, and layered it on the crust with mozzarella. Even with indifferent winter tomatoes, it was surprisingly good. I’ll have to remember the technique for real tomato season in the summer. I also I used bread flour in the crust and I think it rose better.
Saturday was my baby brother’s 64th birthday. I made granola bars for his reduced ride, two kinds, and sent them. 39 bars for 32+7, 3/27. Not like other years when I made hundreds.
Saturday was Passover too. I roasted a chicken and made farfel stuffing with spinach and charoset. It was a big chicken, and so far we’ve had chicken sandwiches and chicken curry, and next comes more sandwiches and then chicken tater tot hot dish. And right now – Tuesday night – chicken broth is bubbling on the stove.
And probably charoset muffins.
Charoset, or date-buckwheat, only 2 of these left
This week is so much less busy than last week, I woke up really scattered Tuesday morning, couldn’t figure out what to do first, with all the extra time on my hands. I biked over to the co-op and the plumbing supply place next door and got a new aerator for the kids’ bathroom faucet. The water comes out all nice and soft now.
I opted to buy 5 loose oranges instead of the prepacked plastic bag with 7 oranges in it for $6.99, but when I got home and looked at the receipt turned out I paid an extra 50¢ per orange to not get the plastic bag. Oh well, the one I ate for breakfast was good.
Back in December, one of my former students emailed me and said she’d worked on a book about the State Street murals, that went up on the boarded up buildings last summer. A couple of days ago Mark got a copy. It was funded by American Family Insurance and I guess there was a way for citizens to order copies, and Mark did. It came with a letter from the Mayor, 2 copies in fact.
It’s lying on Mark’s kitchen counter and everytime I walk by this old song starts going through my head, that I guess actually starts “Let’s talk it over”, rather than about it. But it was written by Hudson Whittaker, Tampa Red, who wrote a lot of old blues songs that I was introduced to by the Grateful Dead, like Hurts Me Too (they attribute it to Elmore James). And performed by Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry, and Rockin’ Dopsie, and when I was looking around for it I even found this kind of zydeco version by Shakin’ Stevens who I think is Welsh. I thought the version I remembered was NRBQ, but it’s probably Fats or Rockin’ Dopsie because that’s what we would’ve played on WORT when I dj’d there.
I guess the book title actually comes from a Rob DZ song, a local musician and activist who I first met when he was working with Al’s 7th or 8th grade class – back in the ’90s, which I am kind of starting to love saying. It makes me feel like Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess.