This is my official extending the birthday, post-grading, weekend (I finished on Friday, yay!), so I am aiming to do even less work than last weekend.
So far, so good. Saturday we biked to the Farmers’ Market, leisurely, since I planned to skip yoga. We bought A LOT. Cilantro. Sungold tomatoes. A basket of Marzano tomatoes. Henry Morren had plums and he said it was probably the only day, so I got some, and some grape tomatoes, that are as sweet as the sungolds. Some of the cute pinto potatoes from Jones Valley, and a very leafy and thin-stalked bunch of celery, which seems to be how it grows here in WI, or at least when I get celery from my CSA it’s like that, too. We got a bakers’ dozen of corn, and I had our new AFS student husk it all, along with the 4 ears left from last Thursday’s CSA, and now there are 4 containers of corn, each about 3 cups, as well as about a quart of corn cob broth, in the freezer. We also got Door County peaches, and two kinds of lettuce. I biked over Lakeside St. to pick up eggs and pork from the Madison Farmers Unite pre-order.
And we got coffee for all of us and a sandwich for the kid, from the Colectivo on the Square, the first time there since pre-pandemic.
In addition to processing all the corn, I made birthday pie. Last Thursday I got apples from my apple CSA, an early variety called Pristine, that their newsletter said was not good for cooking, because they fall apart, and the Internetz seems to recommend making them into sauce. They are way too tart for eating, or at least this particular batch is. Anyways, first I made them into an apple cake, that I seem not to have photographed at all, that we ate for our last Sunday night dessert course. It’s this King Arthur recipe that they say to bake in a tea loaf pan, encouraging me to buy their stoneware version that’s not terribly expensive and I am on the verge of buying except I have a metal one that I keep measuring and I think it’s exactly the same dimensions, except stuff baked in it comes out like my metal pan is smaller, or at least narrower. I don’t get it.
The Pristine apples were delicious in the cake, and also in the birthday pie.
I made the last of them into applesauce for Sunday brunch, and now we’ll see what variety I get this coming Thursday, since it’s an apple week again.
The rest of the week hasn’t been quite so leisurely as the weekend.
Monday I had a couple of zoom meetings, and I went for a Covid test. And grading. There was a thunderstorm, and just as I was getting ready to leave the power went out, of course when I was grading in the online course. I quick logged in with my cell phone hotspot, saved my work, grabbed my umbrella and left, not knowing of Unoin South, where my test was, would have power or not. They did, and our power was back by the time I got home, and I had my negative results by 7:30 PM (after an 11:30 AM test).
I made zucchini Parmesan with roasted vegetable sauce and photographed it so that I could use both recipes for my CSA recipes this week. (Well, the Parm shots are new, and I retrieved a pic of the sauce from I think 2013.)
Layering in the roasted zucchini
Finished dish
Tuesday I know I tried to grade all day and didn’t get very far, and then had a meeting with a student at 7:00. We had these vegetarian stuffed peppers that was one of my found recipes for CSA, where I find someone else’s recipe that uses the week’s veggies, and provide a picture and a link, and a cheery headnote about substitutions, etc., that, TBH, I think is almost harder than simply writing up the recipe! I cooked the brown rice in home made tomato corn broth, and used Rancho Gordo yellow eye beans instead of black beans from a can, and the deliciousness of these components definitely added to the deliciousness of the peppers. I still have small dabs of roasted vegetable sauce, beans, and the rice, that I am hoping I can use before they mold.
I didn’t get to try the roasting instead of cooking in water method after all – to get the peppers into the oven in time for the student meeting, I just stuffed them raw.
Tuesday evening I made a batch of maple-almond-apricot granola that I’ve made before and liked, but I must’ve followed the recipe too closely since it seems oily to me; my normal recipe has less oil to dry goods. That was a bit disappointing.
Wednesday birthday morning wasn’t as relaxed as it probably should have been. I biked to the Hilldale Market for flowers – and got the first good melon of the season. I stopped at Metcalfe’s for some sandwich meat in case we got home late and wanted something quick for dinner – which turned out to be the case – and a quart of milk, and I also scored a gallon bucket of the Schoep’s ice cream we prefer. Then came back to write up CSA recipes until it was time to quick shower, wolf down a bowl of corn chex topped with the disappointing granola and an almost overripe nectarine, and leave for O’Hare to pick up our new AFS student.
When the CSA newsletter came out my recipes had a few typos and a missing image. Oh well. I’ve been cleaning them up and adding them to my New & Improved Recipe blog, and there also a menu choice for CSA recipes under recipes on this blog.
Here she is leaving Germany
Pandemic has not made airports any pleasanter. There weren’t many places to sit in the International Terminal, and we had plenty of time, so we thought we’d go over to Terminal 1 (designed by the recently deceased Helmut Jahn, who also did the Thompson Center), and get a coffee and see if there was more seating. The tram between terminals is not running so we had to take a bus, and Starbucks was closed, and there really weren’t more places to sit, and they closed off the walk-throughs between terminals, so you can only take the bus. We got on the wrong one, and ended up at the car rental return, and the one back to the international terminal wasn’t air conditioned. We ended up getting coffee at the one open cafe on the 2nd floor of the International Terminal. But our girl’s plane was relatively on time, and we were home by about 8:00, when we did eat sandwiches with the turkey I bought. I think maybe the bathrooms were less crowded and cleaner.
Thursday I volunteered for the Friends of the Libraries book sale for the first time since pandemic. I had this book in the discards and thought it was so funny I had to take a picture before I tossed it into the recycle pile. I mean, I feel like someone like Taika Waititi could use it as the inspiration for a movie, like somewhere in the far future where Maya Angelou is only remembered for this forward.
From the discards at the library
Thursday I roasted a chicken and potatoes and made tomato salad with warm shallot dressing. And corn on the cob from the CSA box I just brought home.
Friday we had leftover zucchini parm, and fresh garlic toast, and salad with cucumbers and leftover corn cut off the cob.
Thursday’s chicken was one of Matt’s giant ones, so Saturday for a light supper to leave room for birthday pie, we had chicken salad sandwiches and cucumber salad.
Creamy cucumber salad, corrected.
I wanted a soft, slicing loaf of whole wheat, and I baked some on Friday that I was pretty happy with – it had wheat germ and a little bulghur and honey and an egg in it. It was perfect for my sandwich. Mark & Maya went for the white.
And I guess that’s it.
The news is getting horrible-er and horrible-er – following all the wildfire fire news, it’s all Afghanistan and Haiti.
I’m going to go make roasted salsa and peach & plum crumble with some of our Farmers Market loot.
Chip bag roasted salsa. I will use more tomatoes and less onions