It’s been the long, lost week that ended with Mother’s Day.
I was so busy grading with work work work, emailing students & sites about summer practicums, meetings, other administrivia, and moderating sessions at the Wisconsin Library Association Public Libraries conference that I didn’t take very many walks or bike rides – with the stunning exception of Tuesday morning when I biked to the eastside co-op and started locking up my bike (on the back set of bike racks near Jenifer St., in the hope of not getting panhandled by the woman who hangs out by the front set of bike racks on the Willy St side), and realized that I didn’t have my wallet. Nice ride, but lousy grocery shopping trip. I went home and drove to the westside and shopped there.
And I took even fewer pictures, and some of my cooking attempts were not my best. I could blame the oven (it’s not keeping temp) but we all know the “it’s a poor workman” adage …
And I think I’m suffering from some kind of pandemic stress, where I have trouble organizing myself. Take Monday morning: I came downstairs, thinking about the basics for morning, bring in the papers, make coffee, take my thyroid pill & vitamin D, but of course I go off on all sorts of twists & turns – can I neaten up the stacks of magazines sitting on the counter, shouldn’t I turn on the computer and write a blog post, what about that last little load of wash, what about planting the blue flowers with roots that we got at the farmers market that are looking droopy – oh I need a spade for that, shouldn’t there be one in the basement in the cardboard box of ancient gardening tools I saved from the garage when we had the old one torn down to make way for the new, wait a minute what I am going to wear, what about finding a place in my closet for my new Williamsburg straw sun hat that Mark got me for Mother’s Day, oh I knocked down the dried lavender that’s in there, better get that in the compost, should I walk with Mark, and peel off early to be back in time for all my successive meetings that start at noon, and also have time to get the draft syllabus out to students in my summer class, maybe I should bike to the hardware store and buy a spade ….
In some kind of order, I got dressed, brushed my teeth (my gums have been bleeding a lot the last couple weeks, do you think I have diabetes? maybe it’s just because I put a new tip on my toothbrush), went back to the kitchen to find the cabinet door where my pills are open, so I finally took them, got out the scissors and cut off the string that was on the lavender and got most of that into the compost, leaving random stems and leaves in the sink, went upstairs to tell Mark I was going to bike to the hardware store to get the spade instead of walking, and found out he just uses his heavy aluminum flat paddle style ice cream scoop with the orange handle to pot plants. “So are you coming or what?”. So I went.
And all before 9:30am. No wonder I’m exhausted.
What was that about not my best? Here are the oat scones with sourdough discard I made on Wednesday that came out kind of flat. Not as nice as the ones I made last year. The dough was kind of wet … but it also could’ve been the oven, just not hot enough to give them that spring
And the weather’s been really upsy-downsy, too. A week ago Sunday we got our coffees iced; this week I turned the heat back on downstairs.
Remember that rhubarb strawberry cake? Yea, it got ants, back when it was hot. So now all baked goods are sealed in plastic. The cake still didn’t use up all the rhubarb in the house, so last Sunday I made a rhubarb-strawberry galette. Not my best, no pics, the filling was a little wet, and it started to look kind of soggy the second day, but actually held up pretty well. I had it for breakfast on Monday with vanilla yogurt.
We had fried ham sandwiches (Pecatonica sandwich ham) Monday night for dinner with some Mexican rice that I’d made a while back, fried up with cabbage & bacon – sorta Mexican fried rice.
Tuesday I made the broccoli & egg strata casserole that’s in How to eat supper, based on Mama Lo’s collected by Jane & Michael Stern, a long pedigree for comfort food!
Wednesday I biked to the drive through Farmer’s Market and got tomatoes and lettuce, so we had BLT’s.
Thursday I made a big salad with egg and the leftover bacon and some cheese and tomatoes and creamy Italian dressing (very garlic-y), and heated up the meatball pasta from the week before and the last of the broccoli casserole. I ate salad and bit of the casserole and a couple of meatballs, and Mark had the pasta = leftovers sorted.
Friday I had leftover salad for breakfast.
I tried to make a broccoli-filo strudel/pie but I forgot to put the cheese in. It was OK, but another entry on the not my best list. The little pear strudel I made with one of the two pears I bought at the co-op was a lot tastier. We ate most of it for dessert, then continuing on a theme, I ate the last of it Saturday for breakfast.
We had pork & asparagus & potato sheet pan supper for Saturday dinner, pre-Mother’s Day, because since I had to run zoom rooms for iSchool graduation on Sunday, we weren’t doing Mother’s day brunch, or dinner. Instead Al & Emma came over for drinks and snacks, and John & Megan joined on yet-another-zoom.
Sheet pan supper on the sheet
Sheet pan supper on my plate
After dinner I finished the half bottle of red wine left from last Saturday, and we watched Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, the party episode.
On Sunday morning, we walked although I peeled off early and skipped the coffee to be back in time for the zoom rooms. We had blueberry cimmy buns that looked good with the tulips from the farmers market. I used my Definitive Buttermilk Cimmy Buns recipe with sourdough discard in place of buttermilk. I started them in my oven and when that didn’t seem hot enough moved them upstairs.
Wednesday when I took out the trash, I got a nice picture of the backyard lilacs, that I got to smell, but, apologies, you can’t.
The asparagus tart I made for our Mother’s Day drinks didn’t turn out too bad.
And, WAPL had a photo booth – I hope I can use this, or something like it, for the new online students’ orientation in August. But right now – Tuesday – I am on vacay till Friday, so not thinking about it, so not thinking about it, so not thinking about it.
