This Memorial Day hasn’t been much like other Memorial Days where we had lots of people over, and kids visiting from out of town, and went to picnics and outdoor concerts.
We did have a small gathering on Saturday, our traditional driveway picnic, but it made me kind of question my hostess status, like do people still want to come to my house. I invited about 6-7 households, it would’ve something like 20 people counting kids, and never heard from maybe 3 households. Who knows – maybe my parties are still a draw, but since I invited people mostly by email, maybe nobody checks their email anymore. I did text my in-town kids and one other family.
In the end, there were seven of us – two people had to cancel at the last minute – and it was an OK party. I made sliders and brats, and this potato salad with BBQ spices in it. And a big tossed salad with feta and dried cranberries and croutons and Terese Allen’s raspberry balsamic vinaigrette.
I was going to make a pasta salad with feta so I had lots of extra feta for this salad
Susan brought baked beans. Tonight (Monday) we’ll have what’s left of the beans and brats and potato salad for dinner and I made an Asian slaw from Smitten Kitchen. Along with the recipe she talks about the disconnect of us celebrating summer – slaw season – in the midst of the horrific mass shootings that have happened in the last two week. Especially horrifying for her, who had to drop off a six-year-old at school the next day. I know several friends kept their kids home.
And I made rhubarb slab pie and these brown-butter-chocolate-stout-pretzel bars from Jesse Szewczyk. I got his book from the library. I thought I kind of over-baked them, but everyone said they were OK.
Sunday we had asparagus quiche for breakfast and I got my bike tuned up. The chain was crunchy – it’s now blissfully silent. The bike guy who used to live next door was doing one of his popups a few blocks away. I dropped off my bike on the start of our walk, then walked down to pick it up while the quiche was in the oven. It rained on me a bit while I was on my way there, but stopped in time for me to bike back home. Blissfully silent.
I used the asparagus quiche as an example for a master vegetable quiche recipe. I think I’ll do something of this for my CSA recipes next week.
Also Sunday I dug around in the wicker chests that my mom thought would be good containers for moving our family photos from Pittsburgh to Madison. My brother wanted to see some pictures of our Dad’s Dad, Sam Shapiro. Here’s what I found. I feel like Sam doesn’t look much like any of us, unlike our Gramma Mollie who clearly had the same eyes and eyebrows as me, my brother, our Dad, and John. My brother says he looks like Seth, our cousin who’s the grandson of one of Mollie’s sisters. Which some how made sense to me, but there’s no genetic reason for it – it only means that maybe two of the Levine sisters, Mollie and Bess (I think), married similar looking men. They’re the two with spouses in the picture.
On Saturday morning we went to the smaller west side Farmers Market and bought flowers (among other things). Mark said for the table and I thought he meant ours but he meant for the party, for our guests to enjoy. I never put the flowers out, but at least one of our guests, Susan, got to enjoy them when she came in to toss the salad. And of course we get to. I also put them in the shot of the NYT Sunday review front page, that pretty clearly outlines what causes our gun problems in the US.
And oh, yeah, Sunday night we watched the last two episodes of Ozark. Plenty of guns in there.
Today is my brother, Dave, and Jen’s 35th wedding anniversary. I called to wish them well – and talk more about the Sam Shapiro pictures – and damn he has Covid. He thinks he got it in his philosophy for elementary school kids classroom last week. Jen is still testing negative, thankfully
The long weekend has been great – sort of dreading back to work tomorrow.
We just had picnic leftovers for dinner on Monday.
