Un-blogged

This is a real catch up one – it’s Wednesday actually editing and adding on Thursday, and I haven’t posted since Monday a week ago.

I think the key elements of my life the past 10 days are babies, kittens and human. Also the Friends of UW-Libraries book sale, one of my volunteer gigs, and of course a few cooking adventures.

So lets start with a Jasper gallery. The 1st two pictures are from last week when he was slime face and then turned out to be sick. The rest are from this week when he was his normal self. He’s just seeming more like a real boy every day. We can sit together and play, and it was high five day, too.

Last Wednesday when Jasper got sick, I took him for a walk that was supposed to be before lunch, but he conked out in my lap and I put him to bed before he ate anything. I left early while he was still sleeping for the Friends’ book sale, and the next day Emma told me he woke up with the pukes. He recovered pretty fast though, and grandma Linda put him in his Halloween costume when she was doing granny sick kid respite daycare Thursday. I actually think it’s Emma’s hands holding him, and Linda took the picture.

And here’s a kitten gallery. They seem already bigger since when I brought them home on Sunday the 8th. I let them out of the sun room where they stayed their first two nights, and all their food and litter is in the basement, and they are roaming the first floor and basement. The male, the more orange one, really wants to make friends with Katie, the reigning cat of the house – who hisses at him – and followed her upstairs one morning. Katie can open the swinging door at the bottom of the back stairs up to the 2nd floor, and left it slightly ajar, and the kitten used his little kitten claws to open it just enough to get through. I found them in the upstairs kitchen, the kitten way too close to Katie’s food bowl for her to like, and she was hissing at him. Me & the kittens still like hanging out in the sun room. They do seem to know that I am their human, follow me around, let me pick them up, and they do perform the vital cat function of holding me down on the couch.

The sun porch is officially completed, and now everything needs to be painted. And that started today. The painters took all the screens down – so they can work on the window frames – and set the screens inside the windows and raised the blinds. So now I am sitting in the sun room and it’s like a fishbowl. I really want to get this done and turn out the lights and disappear.

Thursday and Friday and Saturday it was cold and rainy, probably Friday was the worst day. I sopped up the basement floor frequently. Thursday I drove to Goodman for my food pantry shift, and didn’t go to the library to select books because the book sale was going on. Fortunately the weather did not seem to hurt sales at the book sale – we matched other years’ amounts.

Friday, the really rainy day, I started walking to campus to see the last candidate job talk for vice-provost for libraries, and 3 blocks from home, a neighbor picked me up and drove me. After, I walked up to Colectivo on the Square where I was meeting Susan, and ran into Lesleigh who was on lunch break from the Freedom From Religion conference at Monona Terrace. Then Susan was happy to run me home, so I really stayed dry.

Saturday was so cold and rainy that there were no DCFM cookbook sales; they didn’t set up the booth. So Mark & I went to the market as civilians, and also picked up a Madison Farmers Unite, now Wisconsin Weekly Harvest order, and then headed out to Verona for Pia’s last cross country meet.

In cooking news, this was my last week of recipes for my CSA farm for this season. I did 17 16 of the 24 weeks (forgot that I was on vacation for week 10 in July when we went to meet Rowan, grandchild #2, in Denver). It was fun but we’re at that time of year where there’s not enough daylight left at 6:00 or 7:00 pm to photograph food, so I’m kinda ready for the season to be over. My original recipe for the week was a butternut squash and sausage and pepper pasta bake. I hope I get rehired for next year!

Somewhere in there I made ground sausage and peppers sandwiches, where I fried up a bunch of peppers and onion, added the sausage, stirred in grated cheese, and stuffed it in brat buns. I had some filling left and I stuck it in the freezer, but then got it our again for the pasta bake.

On Saturday night Pia was out with friends and Mark and I had yogurt-marinated chicken thighs (Rach left most of a carton of non-fat Greek yogurt, and I prefer higher fat types of yogurt for eating so thought I’d cook with this stuff), and mashed potatoes, and braised red cabbage, that I also put into the set of recipes for the last week of CSA.

I tried a slightly different sourdough bread formulation, the one Rach says she uses. It takes two cups of fed starter.  The one I usually use is King Arthur No-Knead Sourdough, and the one Rach uses is Naturally Leavened Sourdough Bread. On the board is a comparison of the Naturally Leavened vs. yet another King Arthur sourdough, Rustic Sourdough, that uses sourdough discard and a little bit of yeast. I ended up long rising the Naturally Leavened in the fridge – I ran out of time to bake it Saturday, so I just fridged until Monday afternoon. I think the long rise helped it not taste too sour. I tried the two sourdoughs as peanut butter toasts, and today I had a slice of Naturally Leavened toasted with a little goat cheese spread on, that I shared with Jasper. I like the Naturally Leavened, it’s a lot more interesting than the rustic. Jasper seemed to like it too.

And Tuesday Pia was 18. We made a spice cake with cream cheese frosting with a berry jam layer in the middle.

And oh yea, Sunday we went to Chicago for the day, met John and Megan at Avec (River North) for brunch, and then saw Chicago Symphony Orchestra do a modern piece, Lumina by Nina Shekhar, a German baritone singing Mahler, and finally Beethoven’s 5th. Conducted by Jaap van Zweden. The Chicago Tribune panned it, I thought it was different from when we saw it conducted by Muti last year, but not worse – just different. Ta Ta Ta Tum.

Thursday night coda – I thought I’d be adding some really sparkling prose to this post; I published it Wednesday then UN-published to edit – but instead I’m just getting into a foul mood. It’s late and and I have a headache and there’s a sink full of dishes and the date bars didn’t come out so great and I’m just off somehow. The happy thought is the kittens are purring on the couch behind me, so I better join them for some cuddle time. And say good night. I’m sure things will look better n the morning – even the date bars. Trim those burnt edges.