Two Movie Weekend

I started writing this Friday, lamenting about how I’m so old and don’t do anything anymore. A whole FOMO post. But now that I’ve had the whole weekend if I start listing all the stuff I did there’s actually kind of a lot. I mean when you’re having two movie weekends you can’t be all that do-nothing.

Saturday morning I drove out to my CSA farm to pick tomatoes. I got about 30 pounds and they also were selling 7 1/2 pound boxes of red peppers and bags with 4 big heads of garlic and I bought one each. There were big bunches of basil too, but I declined on those.

As of today (Tuesday) all the tomatoes are processed. In addition to what’s shown above, there’s also a lot more diced and a few containers of whole tomatoes. Thanks to Susan for the tip on getting plastic storage lids for my Ball jars that’re better for freezing than old metal lids & rings. Lids as shown on the ranchero sauce. Two jars of roasted tomato sauce with rosemary and garlic. And one big and one little jar each of tomato jam and (maybe) mild salsa – the poblanos were on the spicy side. They’re not local, but the jalapenos were also from Tipi, except I bought them at the co-op on the way home from the farm on Saturday.

Next up peppers. Pepperonata, roast more, and I think make stuffed peppers.

Friday evening we thought about doing some other things, like going to dinner out someplace. We ended up ordering a pizza and watching The Bikeriders on TV. Even though my son Al’s been telling me about the movie for a few weeks, and I was interested in it when it first came out, I didn’t put together that it was based on the book by Danny Lyon, a photographer I’ve known about since I worked at the Chicago Historical Society in the ’90s. The movie is quite violent, but a good representation of the book, I thought. And far more of Lyon’s work is the civil rights movement the bikeriders. And they even dug up a song to close the credits with, not written for the film, but another artist also inspired by Lyon, Lucero. 

On Saturday I took a break from tomatoes and biked over to the Orton Park Fest to see our local Neil Young cover band. No pics but it was fun, although I was reminded that Neil Young has such a large catalog of songs that I don’t necessarily like all of it. I came home and for dinner I made this Hettie McKinnon corn salad I’d been wanting to try, which meant dealing with corn instead of tomatoes. Shucked and cut the kernels off six ears, which yielded about 8 cups of corn since the ears are so big this year with all the rain. This corn was from Luck’s Produce, our favorites for sweet corn from the farmers market. I served it over the greens rather than mixing them in, and made the crema with half sour cream and half Greek yogurt. It was pretty good, but I think it’ll be really good leftover as a quesadilla or wrap filling – basically the corn part, spread on a warm bread item. [We ate quesadillas with the corn salad as filling on Monday night and they were good. Next I think I will make stuffed peppers filled with some leftover Spanish rice and the corn filling.]

Then we went to see movie #2, Between the Temples, which isn’t the kind of movie we usually go to see on the big screen, in other words not an action picture, or something with fancy cinematography. But Mark’s theory was that since it’s a smaller film it’d be a long time till it’s streaming so we should go. So we did. I’d been hearing about this one too, and in fact listened to Scott Simon interviewing Carol Kane while I was driving out to Evansville to pick tomatoes. It was very funny, recommend.

Sunday morning I made these oatmeal pancakes. They’re actually triple oat pancakes, because they have oat milk, oat flour, and oat meal. I had some rolled oats from the bulk aisle at the co-op that just would not soften up so I ground them up into oat flour. I soaked the oats, flour and meal, overnight in the milk, and they made surprisingly delicate but hearty pancakes on Sunday morning. Recipe to follow.

Way last weekend I made these cinnamon roll scones from the NYT. I’d been eying the recipe for a long time, and didn’t want to make them because it sounded like they were a bit fragile and also best soon after they were made. Really buttery, and rich – 3/4 cup butter to 2 1/4 cups flour and the liquid is heavy cream, compared to my normal scone recipes which is more like 2/3 cup butter to 3 cups flour. I went to babysit Jasper Saturday night and the kids didn’t want any of the scones so I gave some to Susan and we finished what was left Sunday morning. I think Mark liked them though so I am going to try adjusting the recipe to be more to our tastes.

Also way last weekend I made corn salsa. I had plenty of corn and I bought a few tomatoes at the farmers market and later that day they became corn salsa.

This was a jar I brought home from the food pantry to make potato salad to take to a volunteer potluck earlier in the summer. Mark had it up in his fridge and said there wasn’t much left in it, or it wasn’t coming out anyways. I said bet I can get enough for a batch of coleslaw out of there and I did – after sawing open the jar.

Katie kitty has a tumor in her ear and has to wear a cone. Before the cone, she was scratching her ear until it bled and leaving huge splatters and powder puff kitty paw bloody footprints all over the place. She is likely having surgery in September. 

We now have a Duck Donuts in Madison, so we tried it out last Friday morning. They’re OK – cake donuts with lots of gooey toppings. IMHO, even with this addition, there’s no donuts in Madison as good as Chicago, where you can get either Stan’s or Do-Rite, and that’s only two.