It’s been all about using up whatever’s in the fridge, since I got back from Pittsburgh on Sunday.
On Sunday, I made a pasta with roasted vegetables, and a plum tart – used up that pack of RP’s pumpkin tortellini, and the leftover salad greens from School Woods birthday, and the bulb part of 2 butternut squashes, whose necks had been in the squash lasagna that night. Not to mention the bag of prune plums & thawed out round of cookie dough, labelled “cookie dough for tart shells”, in the freezer for almost a year, according to the date on it.
The pain in my back was bad – probably from sitting crunched up in airplanes – and it made me really angry to be not feeling right. But I felt a lot better when I was cooking.
Monday John had to come to Lake Mills, only 30 miles away, for work, so we had breakfast together – cheese omlette and those last two kinda dried out bagels, toasted, with butter, to make up for their aged-ness. I went to the Dr. and discovered that my back pain is a muscle bunch – not a tumor or cancer or any of the horrible stuff I suspected. I get physical therapy in about 10 days now. I went to see Bob Dylan, I biked there, and had bowl of oatmeal – with raisins and brown sugar and a little half & half – for dinner at 10:00 p.m.
On Tuesday, I made a cauliflower gratin from my new Around my French Table book, by Dorrie Greenspan, and some delicata squash rings, cooked in butter and apple cider, that I over caramelized a little. And I left the cheese out of the gratin – and the cauliflower was old enough that although the gratin tasted fine, it left an old cauliflower sulfur smell in the fridge. I threw the cheese on top, and melted it over, but I think it was not quite the same.
On Wednesday I went to see Dikko Faust and Esther Smith of Purgatory Pie Press – I was at Beloit College the same time as both of the book artists in the 1970s; Dikko was a T.A. in my graphics class, and Esther lived in a big house with other artists, where I went to bake bread and for parties from time to time. They were speaking at UW-Madison Libraries because they have a show at Beloit right now, so they were doing a Midwest swing. I came home and ate acorn squash cooked on time bake, with maple syrup and butter, and a little bit of the cauliflower gratin on the side.
On Thursday, I got my new CSA box, and came home and made carrot cake for a private party brunch that was going to happen Saturday, and Bolognese for lasagne, and I’m trying to remember what I ate …Oh, yea it was another edition of my bottom of the vegetable bin stir fry, and a quite good one at that – green beans and carrots and celery and cabbage and a whole jalapeno, so a little bit spicey. Ramen noodles, and I didn’t overcook them. The sauce was lime juice, soy sauce, sesame oil, brown sugar, and one of the 2 packs of ramen noodles’ seasoning packet. Yum. It was even good cold the next day.
My bowl of bottom of the vegetable bin stir fry
