Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

But it’s Tuesday … oh well.

We went to our state library conference in Green Bay last week, drove up early on Weds. to get there in time to see Chip Kidd, and just stayed one night.

We had dinner at a place called Chives – kind of a gastro pub, casual feel and good food. I had French onion soup with a grilled cheese sandwich and a little pile of salad. I took a picture but it was way too dark.

Had breakfast on Thursday at Kuvarna Coffee – a little over earnest, but good. I had oatmeal and I think it was toasted – like this – and then lots of steamed milk dumped over. So the first bite seemed way underdone, but it improved with sitting a bit. The apple slices on the side were cut with an onion knife.

Friday I wanted to go see Robert Storr MMoCA. I came home to work on my online class midterm, and had had it by 5:00. We ended up going to a movie at the cheap theater instead – The Way Way Back. Mark had gone out to lunch, and didn’t feel like much for dinner, so Toni and I ate leftover frozen pizza, from the supply I had laid in for her, for her sleepover with a couple of other girls while we were at the conference, reheated. We took our house guest Iam to the bus back to Chicago, and then headed off to the movie.

Saturday we did the farmers’ market and then Toni & Mark went to watch the girls’ cross country meet in McFarland, and I worked on the midterm more. I biked to Sentry to do a little more grocery shopping. I made oatmeal bread, and I finally roasted the red peppers I’d been harboring in the downstairs fridge. I made a mixed herb pesto – mint, cilantro, parsley – and we ate it on pasta with roasted squash. It was OK, but  think it will be better on quesadillas, with roasted squash & pepper jack. Then we watched Cloud Atlas on TV. Weird but good. And long.

Sunday morning I walked and then we had a “normal” breakfast – potatoes with garlic & thyme, bacon, scrambled eggs, oatmeal bread toast, pear slices. I worked more on the damn midterm, and another AFS student came over to hang out and make cookies. I drove to E. Wash. with a bag of water softener salt, stopped by the co-op, and went out to PetsSmart for kitty litter and food. Finished the fricking midterm tho I am pretty sure I did rather poorly. Made fried apples with lots of butter and brandy and we ate them with ice cream and caramel sauce – caramel apple sundaes. They were good, but not as good as the last spoonful of apples that I ate right out of the pan with the caramel sauce. I ate too much cheap Halloween candy at the conference, and I dipped into it Friday night, and Saturday, too, out of frustration with the midterm – so it was good to eat “good” sweet stuff instead of crappy.

Just hid the Halloween candy in yet another spot so I won’t eat it all before Thursday. Shouldn’t of got Milky Ways & Reese’s the good stuff

— Debra Shapiro (@DebsLunch) October 26, 2013

Monday a normal work day; was going to leave work at 4:30 and bus to the library for a longer walk home, but our director rousted everyone to go to a happy hour at one of the student unions, trying to make nice with another dept, but only two of them showed. It was OK to have a beer or even two, because we were going to the Head & the Heart, at the Orpheum. I’m listening to them now. They kept saying what a great room it was, and I felt bad – it is a great room, but it’s awful disrepair. I hope somebody hurries up and buys it out of foreclosure, and gets it in shape – and golly, looks like they did.

Today, Tuesday, I worked at home and taught an online class at 7:00 PM. I made a white lasagna for dinner, with greens and ricotta – usingthis recipe for chicken mushroom lasagna, but with veggie broth and cream for the sauce, and ricotta and greens (turnip, beet, and tat soy) instead of chicken & mushrooms, and mozzarella and a little bit of feta instead of Gruyere & Parmesan.

Tomorrow I’m gonna carve pumpkins.

Sunday breakfast

Greens lasagna

Pumpkins awaiting carving

In the past I’ve ranted about how I don’t really like clafouti. No matter how carefully I bake it, it has a tendency to be rubbery, at least made with any other fruit besides apples. There’s an apple clafouti recipe from Saveur that I used to make for breakfast when the John & Al lived at home, and they called it apple clabloui, or I guess that’s more properly “klablewie” because it always overflowed in the oven.

I made it for breakfast this Sunday, and my plan was to document the steps, and do a version of the recipe for here, because I do a few small things differently than the published. I got this far:

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I spent the rest of the day working on my paper for ISAS class.

We’re hosting a visiting scholar, who studies comic books, so I invited Lesleigh over for dinner, since she’s got a lot of comix connections – her husband, Dave, who sadly, passed away 10 years ago, when he was only about 55, was Will Eisner’s editor – tho WorldCat identities mostly shows the title he wrote, rather than edited.

I roasted one of Matt’s chickens. I stuffed lots of herbs – parsley & thyme – into the cavity, and put the bird on a rack, upside down, like the Thanksgiving turkey. When it was time to turn it  over to brown the breast, I threw a bunch of little fingerling potatoes, turnips,  carrots and sliced garlic into the bottom of the roasting pan. I poured some reduced cidar into the pan. It kinda messed up the oven, but it sure was tasty. I was going to make a big gratin of greens, but I ran out of time, so I got Mark & Toni to make a salad, and I used the rest of the reduced cidar to make dressing. Tonight we’ll have chicken soup.

And oh, yeah, the main things I do different from Saveur in the apple clafouti recipe is sprinkle the top with cinnamon sugar, not just plain sugar, and I reduce the the juices before I pour them over.

I woke up at 4:30 this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. I think it’s sinuses.

I am sitting at the computer with a sore throat and tired. I am going to do a bullet list recap of what’s been cooking since last Thursday, and add pictures later.

• Thursday: CSA demo – mmm the squash soup – I ate the last bit of it for my lunch when I got home with chips and salsa and corn relish. Then I made pork roast with reduced cider and broth, and fully cooked the squash casserole from a few nights before, and salad, and corn on the cob.
• Friday: pork fried rice
• Saturday: Squash & eggs for breakfast, pork and bean enchiladas, extra enchilada sauce using up the pork & chicken broths I’d thawed.
• Sunday: rhubarb coffeecake, green tomato mincemeat, vegetable soup – and the last of the lettuce and the last of the reduced cider dressing along with the beans sprouts I grew under the sink, loaded onto cheesy buns from the market.

Gotta go crash on the couch now.

Since Mark got retired, we decided to become domestic partners, so that we could use each other’s benefits sequentially. The way it works in WI is that you do an Affidavit for Domestic Partnership, state form ET-2371. Then you submit the form to the Dept. of Employee Trust Funds, the state agency that manages our retirement and other benefits – that the governor is trying to hamstring as best he can. It’s kind of sickening, this report, which, oh by the way, points out that the WI Retirement System is one of the best in the nation, is addressed to the most mean-spirited, weasel-est of our legislators, Gov. Walker, Alberta Darling, and Robin Vos. All of whom would just love to dismantle it if they could. Anyways you send the form off to ETF, and they send you back an acknowledgement, and then you apply to get your new partner and any of their dependents under 26 onto your health insurance – and, also oh by the way, I will be taxed on the value of the additional insurance, as if it was extra income to me, so it’s going to cost about $200/month. Although hmm, that’s what the retirement benefits person told Mark – I just did a calculator that I got off the UW employee benefits website and it says more like $288. But since it’s taxes, maybe I’ll get some of it back at the end of the year – ha.

Anyways, all that unpleasant stuff aside, we had a little domestic partner celebration last night – the state calls us DPs. We had cake and champagne and just a few friends over.

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It’s Wensley cake, from Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking, that I used to make as a spider cake for Al’s birthday, and flourless chocolate cake, and in addition to the raspberries, I made Crème Anglaise to put on top. Since it was my party, I put a big spoonful of the Crème on top of the last couple of raspberries, and ate them right out of the serving bowl, and no one stopped me.

With apologies to Dave Edmunds. [and this was only started when it was almost Saturday night; finished on Sunday]

I guess, since I haven’t written since Wednesday, and even then was writing about Sunday – we are due for a wrap-up.

Wednesday was Mark’s birthday. We took him out for dinner at Pig in a Fur Coat. Really nice meal. The chef says his aim is to serve really good food in a non-pretentious environment – and that’s just what he does. The menu is little, middle, big, plates, and the server said they’re all designed for sharing. It was me, Mark, and our AFS student, who had just spent an hour and a half running at cross country practice – so hungry. From the small plates column, we ordered duck fat fries.  From the middle, a tomato and burrata salad and pappardelle with oxtail. From the big plates, we got Waygu beef (Wagyu Beef/ bone marrow/ zucchini/ potato/ green bean/onion/ heirloom cherry tomato) and porchetta (Porchetta/potato/ spring onion/ chorizo pesto/ almonds). And because it was a birthday, we even got dessert – sfingi – little Italian donuts with chocolate sauce. We sat at a long communal table that was just a little too high for sharing – made you feel like a kid – it was like chest high, even on Mark. I told the chef on our way out. “We really enjoyed our meals,but the tables are too high”. The people at the other end were all women artists, some visiting, some Madisonians; one of them was Laurie Beth Clark.

Thursday was almost a normal work day. I had an online meeting to rank LITA programs – I’m chairing the committee. Anyways, somehow I forgot how to do a group call in Skype, and ended up shunting everyone over to Adobe Connect. I came home a little bit early, because I had class at 8:00, and wanted a break between, and to get my CSA box. Which included:

Superior white potatoes, 3.5 lb.
Pak choy, 1 head – I think I’ll have to make fried rice …
Slicing tomatoes, 3 lb – they’re cascades – some of them – made into tomato tart Sunday. They’re a really good small round firm tomato that Tipi grows that are meaty and dry enough to cook with, but juicy enough for slicing and sandwiches.
Red bell peppers, 1 or 2
Broccoli – 1 stalk
Cauliflower – a pretty nice big head – gonna make that kind of mac & cheese with cauliflower in it, I think
Yellow onions, 2
Chili peppers: 2 poblanos and 1 Anaheim – that I roasted, along with a yellow bell still left from last week, and the big fat red one from above. I am stil debating whether to make steak fajitas of potato-poblano gratin. The fajitas are winning because I don’t have to buy anything.
Cilantro
a half pint of raspberries – that we ate at one sitting, our Thursday dinner of sandwiches before Mark & Toni headed off to see Ira Flato, and I stayed home for class.

Friday I had a haircut, worked at home after that, and then went to campus for a luncheon/academic staff governance/orientation. For our pre-symphony dinner we had Monday night’s BBQ tempeh made into quesadillas with roasted peppers and cheddar cheese. And brown rice with green beans and leftover pinto beans, cooked in a carton of chicken broth retrieved from the freezer – a small salvo into the defrosting frenzy of the next day.

Saturday I defrosted the freezer and made some pretty good progress in writing the paper for the class I am taking (teaching two, taking one this semester – aaargh) that is, the paper I am ignoring right now. We also biked to the farmers’ market – one of those markets when later in the day I didn’t have $5 in cash to buy bagels, which means I spent $50+ at the market. I had to add up but I eventually got it to come out right; I didn’t drop a $10 or a $20 bill, or leave it in amongst someone’s vegetable display. I made the squash casserole I always make in September, with a herb (rosemary) and roasted red pepper sauce, with no wine this year. And layered it up with a sliced and roasted delicata squash and the bulb of a butternut, and the Gruyere called for in the original recipe, which is a Deborah Madison – from The Greens Cookbook, p. 214, but “No eBook available” Google book says. There’s a little dab of the sauce left – I think I’ll have to make pizza. We went to the WPR radio play, Forbidden Planet Decoded, and came home and watched Saturday Night Live. The best skit was the quiz show, new featured cast member, or Arcade Fire?

I went for a walk on Sunday morning, and, because I had to get my good shoes out of the closet, I assume it’s the first time I’ve walked since we got back from Canada –  what’s up with that? Although it’s also because last weekend and week prior were so wicked busy. I made tomato tart and sausage and potatoes for breakfast – we also had raspberries & little plums from the market and  Toni brought back a whole loaf of the cinnamon bread I made for her to take to the cross country team sleepover, so we had that, too.

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Now I’m going to make this a two pie day – time to make Mark’s belated birthday apple pie. And roast carrots and beets. [well only did the carrots – but beets keep a long time, right?]