Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

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I guess this has just been a crazy week. We had tornadoes and straight line winds on Monday night, power outages on campus with no email or online courseware or main wisc.edu website, even,  on Wednesday, and even though we seemed to survive the storm OK here, on Friday morning after a night of what seemed to be NOT as heavy rain, Al’s old room in the basement was seriously wet. And when I tried to fold the futon in there back into a couch, instead of a bed, to get it out of the way of water, turns out it’s got a broken slat. $300 spent on that thing, last October …. and Mark says the place where we bought it is either going, or already, out of business.

Hmm, they’ve got a 50% off going out of business sale on right now …

But it’s all part of that slipping feeling. I’m forgetting, missing, losing it. I made it through my first big event of the summer, and so far I am keeping up with my class of 35 in internships – so far. But the librarian’s national conference is next week, and there’s still the new students’ Bootcamp in August, and two courses to get ready for fall.

I just called the futon place, and sent them a bunch of photos of the damaged frame. They’re super nice and said it was OK if I couldn’t find the receipt – but it still bugs me that I can’t find the receipt. John’s been complaining that there’s something wrong with either the tires or the alert that says the tire pressure is low on the Outback – and the tires are pretty new, too – from last summer – but can I find that receipt? Whaddya think?

I suppose I shouldn’t feel sooo bad – I mean that slipping feeling has certainly inspired songs. Two I can think of right away:

Lowell George, Easy to slip, covered by jam bands from Bob Weir solo to Phish.

Or Paul Simon – Slip sliding away

It makes me feel better if I can at least remember what I cooked and ate for the week – if I can remember that, maybe I’m not slipping so bad –

So, on Monday, I had an online class, just the sort of go over the syllabus Q&A, from 6:00 – 7:00, and then we had leftovers + greens. Mac & cheese, the kind with whole wheat noodles and cauliflower, although this batch somehow wasn’t as good as the last time I made it, and some black eyed peas with ham, frozen since School Woods last event, new years’ brunch, that I had thawed out and served with rice and hunks of fried ham, some night the previous week that I can’t remember. Leftover leftovers. And escarole sauteed with bacon & croutons – new.

Tuesday it was kind of hot, and I couldn’t figure put what to cook, and everyone was sleepy because of being up so late trying to decide whether to stay in the basement, and for me, checcking my towel dams for leaks. Toni had a friend over, so, using teenagers in the house as a handy excuse, we ordered pizza and I made a salad and fruit salad. The fruit salad had the one lone apple left in the fridge with a little lemon squeezed on, and nectarines, strawberries, bananas, and special treat – fresh figs. Mark commented on what a good fruit salad it was.

Wednesday was the day that email and websites were out all over campus. I left at about 2:00. We were having an online Q&A for incoming distance students, using Adobe Connect, which is not on a UW server, so working, and the library school’s website, because it’s also not on a UW DoIT server was also still working – I just couldn’t edit it because the CMS is on a DoIT server – so it was likely that the students would all show up. I took my laptop home, and because it was rainy, I took the bus – and Mark has driven me to work, because it was so rainy, so no walks. I was meeting Heike for coffee at Starbucks, so I figured I’d walk there, but ended up driving after taking Toni out to Arbor Hills. I had a coffee frap with Heike, and then was still kind of hungry when I got home, so had a bagel with some Swiss cheese and salami. Then after the online session, I had ice cream with rhubarb sauce – the last of the homemade strawberry, and some vanilla, so Wednesday turned into a no-exercise lots of food day. I watched two episodes of the Wire with my ice cream, because I started earlier, and there was a real cliff hanger in the firts one – one of the main characters got shot.

All systems but WiscCal are now back online. WC to be restored today. Still working thru email backlog. Congrats to team for a big effort!

— UW-Madison DoIT (@UWDoIT) June 19, 2014

We were going to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on Thursday, so we just had sammiches, and chips. There were three half slices of my own long rise whole wheat, so I had Swiss with mayo & lettuce sandwiched with two of them, and an open face with more Swiss, cherry tomatoes and Siracha on #3.

On Friday I finally made the fried rice I’d been thinking about since last Sunday, with ham, asparagus, turnips, grated candied ginger, scallions, and the last leftover fried egg from trout & eggs for father’s day. I sauteed the big half of the giant bunch of spinach I got in my CSA box with garlic and butter – I kind of wanted to do it Sicilian, with raisons and balsamic, but thought the raisons might be a bit much for the rest of the fam. I put in too much salt, but I think Mark & Toni liked it better that way. Maybe I’ll do the last of the spinach and escarole Sicilian style. We drove out to Stoughton to see Bach Dancing and Dynamite. I watched the last episode of The Wire, season one, and went to bed a little after midnight and slept all the way until 5:17 – how did that happen?

And well before I could even finish writing this post, the futon place got my pics and called me back, and they’re ordering the new piece, gratis. On the phone the owner said, “it’s a full, right?”, and I said, “no it’s a Queen” – and I had already dimly recollected that maybe that’s why I tossed the receipt – my futon that I was buying the frame for is a Queen, and when I got the thing home last fall and it all fit, I tossed the receipt. On the phone, futon store owner had me go measure arm to arm and when I reported 79 1/2 inches, he said, “Oh it IS a Queen”. Maybe at least one thing is slipping back into place. I’m still fretting about the car, but John says he’ll get it fixed.

I’ve been wanting to make ramen salad – it seems like an early summer dish. I’ve been tinkering with the recipe – in 2006, I thought you needed to put in the seasoning packs, and use lots of sugar. More recently, I have switched to the Mollie Katzen point of view – when cooking with ramen, throw out the seasoning packs immediately. And use less sugar.

Somehow, ramen salad, fried rice, and bottom of the vegetable bin stirfry are all connected in my mind. They are all ways to use up extra vegetables – and under utilized parts of vegetables – like broccoli stems, which are good in a stirfry,  and shredded in a slaw.

I got giant bunches of spinach and escarole in my CSA box Thursday, so I’m plotting what to do with those. And asparagus. I have some ham in the fridge, so I thought I’d make a ham & asparagus lasagna. I bought a pack of RP’s pasta lasagna sheets at the farmers’ market Saturday morning, but Saturday evening everyone was going different directions, so not a good night for lasagna. Al and I had crackers and cheese and olives in front of TV, and Toni and Mark had sandwiches.

The easiest way to use up all the spinach and escarole is just cook it  – it’ll shrink so much. I’ve been thinking about wilted escarole with goat cheese croutons. Or maybe Madhur Jaffrey’s spinach with chiles and ginger – saag bhaji. I have everything but the chiles.

Or maybe I’ll make some kind of spinach pie with the spinach – I bought dill at the market and I have lots of goat cheese.

This ramen salad I think is going to have shredded radishes (1st CSA box), kohlrabi (got a giant one in the last box), carrot, and maybe some of the escarole. Maybe turnips – got some of them in the box, too.

We had trout & eggs for father’s day – and there’re leftover potatoes – so now I’m not as sure about the lasagna. Maybe I’ll make something with potatoes and asparagus and ham. And there were two leftover fried eggs, that could go into fried rice – there’s a big bowl of cooked rice in the fridge too – and I have lots of green onions.

So maybe ramen salad AND fried rice will be on the menu this week.

But jeez, it’s almost 5:00 PM Sunday, and I haven’t done all the brunch dishes yet … But, to feel good about what I did do today: went for a walk, meditated 15 minutes, cleaned the cat boxes, made the brunch, lugged a bunch of stuff back from E. Wash …

I guess we’re good.

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Which I’m writing about on Tuesday, for Pete’s sake –

Saturday we went to the farmers market for Cows on the Concourse. Petted cows, watched grilled cheese mass production, bought the first sugarsnap peas of the season. And a bunch of flowers. And two bunches of asparagus to make into shaved asparagus pizza for Heike’s graduation party.

Came back home and I biked to Willy East for stuff like milk. Then home again, and made the pizza. I was sort of surprised at how threatening the sky was – I didn’t know it was supposed to rain. I was going to chocolate dip some of the strawberries we got at Costco on Friday, but decided to take a bowl of chocolate sauce I’d made the weekend before instead, and it was the hit of the night. I took my camera, but no pictures.

So, I got all the food ready, Toni and I went off to get our hairs cut, and we went over to Steve & Heike’s as soon as we got back. Just as it was starting to rain – but we’re hardy Wisconsinites who wouldn’t let weather get in the way of a party. Nice party it was, too, and we were home by 9:30 or so.

Sunday we ate the homemade toaster waffles I had in the freezer, and bacon, and strawberry banana smoothies for breakfast. I reserved a ZipCar Ford Escape, to move the tables and other bigger stuff back from E. Wash. The sad business of shuttering the supper club. The Escape had a back up mirror, but the trip West with the trunk lid roped down was still pretty harrowing. I could tell Mark was a little dubious while we were over there, but by the time we got stuff over here, and he could see where I’d planned to put it, and how well it fit, his opinion improved. He carried in one of the chairs, saying, “these are pretty nice chairs.”

I made strawberry-raspberry crips, for our Sunday night dessert – first time I tried a Joy the Baker recipe; she’s been recommended to me often enough. And I made strawberry ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s recipe – even though we’d had strawberry smoothies for breakfast, and the thought crossed my mind that it was too many strawberry-creamy-thingies for one day. We managed.  I’m practicing for my June dinner – if anyone comes. No pics again, but I am adding a shot of what’s left of the ice cream today.

Back to work on Monday, and that night, instead of my current 10:00 PM TV watching – Ripper Street, or The Wire on Amazon streaming – I stumbled on A Walk on the Moon. I don’t think I saw it in the theater when it first came out – I think I watched it on DVD or actually probably VHS, at home, because I think Viggo was already famous as Aragorn, and not just the blouseman, when I saw it. I was thinking that both he and Diane Lane were playing a lot younger then they were, but she was supposed to be a 31-year old woman in the movie, and was 34 in real life 1999, and Viggo was 41. And if the movie was released in 1999, they probably filmed it a year or two earlier

In honor of Woodstock reminiscing, I’m listening to the Dead’s – admittedly often horrible – set from the Internet Archive while I write. That’s probably why the movie was in cable rotation last night anyways – 45 years since Woodstock, this August. I guess the one who was really playing young was Anna Pacquin – she was supposed to be my age in 1969, fourteen, in the movie, and she was seventeen in real life. Still not that much … I get a lump in my throat when I think back to those days. It’s kind of like watching Mad Men, especially now that they’re up to 1969-70, too.

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Like I said, I got a huge bunch of spinach in my last CSA box, and mushrooms, that Toni doesn’t like, and more asparagus.

So I decided to make creamed spinach. But I just did it really simply, almost Deborah Madison Vegetable Literacy method. No roux, or onions, or anything like that. She says to sauté the spinach in butter and then add up to 1/4 cup cream for a pound and a half of spinach which is how much I had. But I  wilted the spinach first – washed it, then put it in a hot pan until it collapsed, then drained it. Then I squeezed out as much water as I could, put it back in the pan with butter, and added the cream. It was really good – just creamy enough. And roasted potatoes, with a 1/2 lb. of the asparagus tossed in at the end. And sautéed mushrooms – more butter, white pepper, and garlic. And steak – Fountain Prairie wasn’t at the downtown market this morning, but when I biked out to the westside co-op, Knoche’s sign said T-Bone on special, $10.99. So I stopped on the way back, and got one. Watched a YouTube on how to cook a tender and juicy T-Bone in the oven.

Mark and Ethan and I made plates and ate out on the deck.

All that’s left is a small container with the last few slices of mushrooms and hunks of potato & asparagus. Mark even gnawed the last of the meat off the bone.

I was going to write about how yesterday – Friday – was too busy, and work spilled over into the weekend. It’s true that I worked a couple hours Saturday, and will also have to Sunday. But Monday’s slides are ready and I’m basically ready for Monday. Wednesday’s slides are NOT ready – but that’s miles away, and the slides set is about half done. The only reason I feel bad is that I told my co-presenters I’d send them my slides the weekend before. Oh, well, it’ll be fine even if I don’t. They’re both probably doing theirs last minute, too.

Writing about dinner was more fun.

Steak dinner

Tomorrow morning I think I’ll make rhubarb coffee cake to use up some of that extra rhubarb that came in the box, before I go to volunteer at Ride the Drive. Though the weather is saying thunderstorms. Maybe I can just not show up – if it’s rainy, no one will come to ride, anyhow, so they won’t need volunteers. Hmm.

I’m trying to have a four-day weekend.

After I left off Friday, I biked over to E. Wash and hung the blinds. I’m kind of glad, as out of shape as I have been feeling, with that new spare tire around my waist (an extra 5-6 pounds, that’s a lot for my 5′ barely 3″ body) that seems to have appeared at the tail end of our brutal winter, between late February, when I was still cookie-season-thin, and the end of April, that  after two hours of drilling holes and screwing in the blind brackets, my right arm wasn’t sore. I drilled the first set of holes too small; as soon as I got the right drill bit, things progressed nicely. Even though I am still kind of pissed off at myself – I measured wrong, and the blinds were a little too wide to be inside hung. Oh well, the wood of the old window frames is so bad – I was screwing the brackets into better wood with the outside hung, above the window mounting.

I came home and ate the last of the asparagus tart and some salad for lunch. Then I biked down to work, and picked up my laptop – that I still have not, as of Sunday morning, turned on yet. I did a little work stuff, but after I sent an email with a bad subject line including a smiley face 🙂 emoticon, around 3:30, I decided I clearly should NOT be working. Rach was still here for dinner Friday, and the plan was to have salad-y stuff: greens, as much as I could get out of the bunch of leaf Mark had in his fridge and a bunch of argula I got at Whole Foods on Thursday which was not nearly as nice as it should have been for being so new; the black bean and corn salad; some slightly mushy tabouli I had in the fridge – put too much water on the bulghur; boiled eggs; roasted cauliflower, walnut & parsley salad; some of the rhubarb-filled muffins from last Sunday, reheated (a little too much); cheese. We ate and then Mark and I went to see Chef, which was really sweet and funny, and Rachael stayed home to pack.  Chef didn’t over-romanticize the restaurant biz – the film made it clear that even if you’re a great cook, you’re not going to make it in the restaurant biz without deep pocketed backers and promotion. I bought a limonada, but decided to save the 150 calories for ice cream after the movie, and brought it home un-opened. I cleaned up the dishes that I’d left in the sink after dinner so we could make the 6:50 movie, and made myself a custard cup of raspberries and Babcock  Hall mocha macchiato that I ate while working on my last post. I watched Big Love – I don’t think it’s going to become my 10:00 PM weeknights TV, replacing the Sopranos and Deadwood – I’m just not that into it. I’ve been pretending that I need to watch a certain show at a certain time, watching re-runs of old series on an HBO channel from 10 – 11:00 weeknights, then I go to bed. I watched an episode of Ripper Street on Netflix – it may do.

On Saturday, we got up and biked to the farmers market, arriving a bit too late for a holiday weekend, so it was ridiculously crowded. We helped a blind lady around one side and I think I spent $75. Green onions & asparagus & rhubarb, $7; cheese, $17; potatoes, $5; tomatoes, $9; jerkey $6; cheesey bread, $10; trout $14; cheese curds, $5. Came home, had a little breakfast – raspberries & yogurt & one of last week’s rhubarb-filled muffins. Then I biked to co-op, came home, put that stuff away and drove to Sentry. After I got back from that trip it was 3:08 and all I’d done all day was shop for food. And 2 nice rides – so I guess that’s ok.

John and Megan arrived at like 4:ooish. They went to Brat Fest for dinner, so I only pan fried half the pound of trout I got at the market for me and Mark. We ate it with spicey potatoes out on the deck. I mixed up my first Tom Collins of the summer – and spilled it. So I mixed another and sat outside reading my sort of trashy book, until it was too dark to see. Only sort of trashy because I’m re-reading Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic, that I read for the first time in 1968, when I was 13 and we were living in the Netherlands, in Den Dolder, a suburb of Utrecht, because my dad was on sabbatical from the University of Pittsburgh. Our little local public library (that I’m not finding on Google Maps at the moment) had a good collection of Mary Stewart when we biked there and raided for anything in English. I saw her obit in the Sunday Times and wanted to read her again.

On Sunday morning I made my upside down rhubarb muffins, and that turned out to be an adventure in recipe testing. I think I made them the first time for a commissioned brunch at School Woods, so a bigish group. Anyways, long story short, the amount of rhubarb given was enough for 24 muffins, and the batter was only 12 – 14. I thought I was going to have to adjust the batter – I tried to make lots more batter, with three cups of flour and three eggs,  and ended up with 18 muffins – and, after a few WTF moments, realized if I just cut the rhubarb in half, it’d match. So it’s fixed now.

I started the day processing rhubarb – for the muffins, and puree, because I also wanted to make a version of Smitten Kitchen rhubarb-cream cheese hand pies. I used mascarpone in place of the cream cheese, because I had half a carton in the fridge, and my own pie crust, instead of Smitten’s. Then I went for a walk, and did some work. Now, in addition to about 14 muffins, I have last year’s strained rhubarb puree, the new batch I made for the hand pies, and rhubarb syrup in the fridge. I liked the little pies – I only made a bakers’ dozen – 13 – because we had a smallish group for  our grill out, 8 people, but I think what I’ll do is roll out and fill the 2nd half of the crust, and freeze the little pies UN-baked. I bet I can bake them straight from the freezer for future fresh-baked goodness.

From the grill we had little sliders and brats and grilled asparagus. For sides, baked beans with ham broth and shredded ham from the Easter ham I bought – my regular honey baked bean recipe. They came out really good. And I made peanut noodles, another of my old standbys. I did make the trying to use stuff up mistake – an 8 oz. package of Soba noodles and the last half of a pound pack of brown rice spaghetti – which was thicker and cooked slower than the Soba. And I had the pasta water boil over that’s so bad it drowns the gas burner. Once it was all mixed with the dressing and fried tofu, the two noodle kinds were fine, though, and I didn’t tell anyone. Like Julia says, “never apologize”. The stove stop cleaned up pretty easy, too.

Everyone took off and I cleaned up the kitchen and we watched Penny Dreadful and the half-season finale of Mad Men. I didn’t want to drink more beer, so I had some bourbon on ice – which put me right to sleep until the kids came in at 4:00.

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