It was a weekend of graduations.
On Saturday, I made a dinner for my upstairs renter at the supper club house, who got her PhD in a convocation Friday evening. The menu was:
- light apps – goat cheese, red pepper, olive & pesto torta, with long rise baguettes, and crackers and peppadews; salami; nuts – Costco cashews and salt and pepper pistachios in the shell
- Ovens of Brittany salad – greens with creamy curry dressing, and a sprinkle of Parmesan and toasted almonds. I got (hydroponic) cherry tomatoes at the Framers Market and added two to each salad for an extra garnish.
- Asparagus custard tart from the 2005 March Gourmet, the London issue, that has a kind of Abbey Road cover – that I make almost as written – I put a little cheese in the bottom instead of painting the crust with egg, and don’t cook the tart at all before adding the asparagus. Oh, and of course I use my crust recipe, not theirs.
- Roast pork – part one of the last pieces of “our” pigs, and part Costco – with lost of garlic and rosemary – and a rhubarb compote
- mushy peas – chunky puréed peas with lots of herb butter, with mint and parsley (also from that London Gourmet)
- roasted potatoes – since the meat was herb-y, I made the potatoes with a Penzy’s spice blend that Al gave me for mom’s day
- Cake with jam filling and real butter cream, and a big bowl of strawberries
On Sunday morning, I got up and went to campus to sit on the stage and watch library school students graduate. (Well first, I put in the white tablecloths & napkins from the night before, as a bleach load, so I could get them done & folded before anyone else wanted to do laundry.) It was a nice ceremony. Good speakers – the alumna of the year on free speech and libraries, and one of my fellow instructors who used Joss Wheedon’s Firefly serenity browncoat “Aim to Misbehave” as the framing device for her talk. We try to play a kind of graduation bingo, who gets the most thank-yous, which student bursts into tears, who thanks their mom or God – but it didn’t work that well because all the students were so polite, and thanked everyone, rather than individuals. Three distance students graduated but did not thank me individually. Probably either one of the faculty who specializes in kids and their use of digital stuff, or the instructor who gave the browncoat talk, got the most thank-yous. There was a reception after, cake and coffee and punch in the library school library, and you could get yourself photographed alongside our new Bucky Badger roller-blind style standup.
I came home, and drove down to Milwaukee to go see Color Rush with John, since it was closing that day. I drove Mark’s car, and I had this underlying apprehension that somehow I wouldn’t be able to drive that tiny little stick shift car all the way there – but it was fine. I even parallel parked it twice. The only real mishap was my Alterra honey latte in my own cup for driving home wouldn’t fit in the cup holder, so I had to kind of juggle it from hand to hand, and balance it between my knees, in the getting out of town phase when I had to shift more. I finished it while I was on 43, before I-94, anyways. Oh, and John called to see where I was when I was coming up the hill from war memorial drive past the pumping station Alterra, and I wasn’t sure how to talk on the iPhone and shift, but I managed.
I thought I had all these pithy observations from the trip, that I wanted to blog, but I can’t remember them now. I must have more to say about the photography show – maybe later. We ate barbecue at the Smoke Shack, and I got home in time to watch Game of Thrones the 2nd time around.
