Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Let’s see if I can recreate – Monday was the I ♥ SLIS thing at Brocach – benefit for scholarships at the library school where I work. It got pushed back a little later in the day, so I didn’t go to my Dr.’s appointment after work (my dermatologist yearly full body scan that I get because I had skin cancer in 2001) and then directly to the bar. Instead, I went home, stopping at Trader Joe’s for skim milk, and of course also purchased some snacks: White cheddar popcorn, only 160 calories in two cups; chocolate covered marshmallows – also not too bad calorie wise, but deadly because the marshmallows are at that perfect hard phase, and you can’t really bite the things in two – you have to eat them whole, so you eat more; and a bar of Toblerone that I haven’t broken into yet. Once home, I ate some of the popcorn and a cup of coffee, started working on this recipe post, and then drove to the bar. I had two beers, but none of the appetizers appealed. When I got home Mark was heating up leftover pepperoni pizza, so I ate a couple of slices of that, and we indulged in a Downton Abbey two-episode splurge – we have the season three DVD, so we can speed ahead of the local public television schedule. We watched the last two episodes, stopping short of the season finale, in which we know Matthew dies.

Sad Face Beer

Tuesday, we rendezvoused at home to meet a Japanese high school exchange student who we may host this semester. And shovel snow. After she left, I made lentil and sausage soup. I used bratwurst and while I liked the taste the meat gave the soup, I found myself picking out the slices – I thought about eating them with horseradish, but just chucked them in the trash instead.

On Wednesday I had online class at 6:00 p.m. I had popcorn and tea before, and then kale and toasted cheese after. I had to login for chat office hours in my other class, so I made the enter chat sound a really loud annoying door bell, and fixed up my toast and kale, listening. Nobody showed.

Supper after class / kale with olive oil & balsamic, toasted cheese – Jarlsberg on my Thomas Keller bread

Thursday, we played slip and slide walking to work, and we had slush and heavy snow to shovel after work. My feet were wet when I got home, and it was still snowing pretty hard, so Mark & I agreed I could relax for an hour. I am re-watching Downtown Abbey season one on my computer – I wasn’t hooked during season one, so have seen those episodes the least, and we are still waiting for a converter to link the cables from my old BOSE sound system/DVD player to the new flat screen TV. So I made tea, and finished the cheesy popcorn, and watched season one, #3. I made this Food52 potato-celery root gratin (more or less, I had a bit less celery root, but used the same amount of potato, a little less cream, and sharp provolone that I already had grated for the cheese), put it the oven, and we went out to shovel. We ate it with a salad when we came in. Mark had some ice cream for dessert, but I sneaked the last of the chocolate covered marshmallows while I was doing the dishes at 10:00. To make up, I brought the last of the salad for lunch today.

Little sliders with cheese inside, and brats. Flags. A dog named Toulouse wearing booties – who was amazingly well-behaved – didn’t even get near my foil pans of meat sitting on the ice. Cajun shrimp, chicken, jalapeños stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon. And, while I was writing this, they just played Jerry Garcia Band -Elmore James’ Hurts me too – as one of the outros on NPR (or it might’ve even been the actual GOGD – no lyric, so I couldn’t really tell; they used to do it when Pigpen was alive).

So we went off to Seattle, where it was 45° and rainy, leaving Wisconsin, where it was in the 30s and snowy. Over the course of the 4 days we were away, it warmed up and iced in WI, but the most drastic changes have been last night and today. It was 50° and pouring rain when we landed in Milwaukee last night; rain pelted down on us the whole drive home, and I had to sop up the basement and start up the dehumidifier when we got back. Overnight, the temperature dropped and it started snowing. Right now (ca. 3:28 p.m.) it’s about 28° and there’re about 4 or 5 inches of slushy wet snow on the ground. And the wind is picking up and it’s getting even colder, so I am expecting the shoveling experience to be challenging.

Yay, global climate change. You can’t get used to the cold this winter in WI, because it keeps warming up.

I already told you about our first dinner in Seattle. For our second night, after I spent way too much time in all my afternoon sessions, when I should have been listening to speakers talk about how we will transform MARC data to linked data, Yelping and Open Table-ing, making and cancelling reserves, trying to find a restaurant that was close enough to the Space Needle, and could accommodate the lactose intolerant, wheat eschewing, and non-adventurous eaters in our party of 6 – the others all cancelled, and Mark and I went to the Steelhead Diner. We started off with a salad. I had Cioppino and a really nice white wine; Mark had the sole, that was prepared with capers and butter and fennel. And when they accidentally brought Brussels sprouts instead of the roasted potatoes he asked for, they took the sprouts away and comped the potatoes.

In the midst of all of my Yelping and Open Table-ing, I made a reservation for Sunday – the next night – at the place where we really wanted to go – Terra Plata. Really nice meal there – mix and match small plates – but I had a cocktail and two glasses of wine and felt as if I had overindulged the next morning. We also had a little group-shrink; our party of four turned into three, and the third was a little over a half hour late instead of the 15 minutes she expected. The server was extremely nice and accommodating, though. We started off with their house-made potato chips with truffled salt – I thought they were better without the chive dip, because you could taste the truffle more. And we got bread that came with good olive oil and balsamic – and I probably ate too much of it because we were waiting. I had a pasta filled with butternut squash, with lots of butter – the menu said browned but not significantly – and a few hazelnuts on top. I also got the roasted carrots, that even Mark liked. They were roasted with lots of cumin, and on top of crème fraîche or sour cream, and reminded him of fried plantains. Mark had a steak with duck fat potatoes – that were as yummy, but different, than the potatoes the night before. Our third friend had the tuna. We got a dessert – ice cream, and ginger cake, and crystallized ginger – a spoonful or two apiece.

On our last night, we went over to my brothers and I cooked. The day before, I walked over and inventoried their kitchen and left some bread dough rising n the fridge. We ate soup and bread and winter greens Ceasar salad, and an apple pie – because it’s been such a bad apple year here in WI, I really wanted to shop for apples at the Pike’s Place Market. I think I liked this last dinner of the trip the best. I like my own cooking, but even more so because we had family and friends assembled to eat.

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It’s cold and salt-encrusted and dirty everywhere I look outside. I think I have permanent hat hair. And I know I’m not getting enough exercise. Hmm, must be midwinter.

I’m keeping the fridge pretty empty, but I had a nice work breakfast of thick yogurt and thick preserves, topped with granola.

Breakfast at my desk – I own an orange Le Creuset casserole like the one shown in the picture underneath

After breakfast, things kind of went down hill. I was trying to record a lecture for one of my classes, determined to make it shorter than the prior one, but shucks, lecture one was 36 minutes, and this one’s 47.

I’m trying to get myself set up so that I can have an extra monitor to connect my laptop to both at home and at work. Yesterday the tech guys came over and we tried connecting my laptop to an old Dell, and had trouble getting it to extend. And of course as soon as the tech guys left my office, it went black. Today my poor little laptop seems to be having video issues – a couple of times the screen went black while I was trying to record. And then I somehow must’ve pressed the wrong sequence of stop, edit and save in my slide recording program – I went three slides that I thought I recorded, but actually not. Sigh. At least the first live class meeting last night, that I want the two monitors for in the first place, went well. Although it meant that I didn’t get home till 7:30. I’d probably eaten enough for the whole day, but had some ice cream anyways. With green tomato mincemeat. I just felt like I deserved it. I think I might just go ahead and eat too much today, too.

We’re breaking up the winter doldrums with an overnight trip to the Twin Cities, to take Mark’s son back to school. We haven’t started on our quest for dinner yet, so no food pictures, tho we do have brunch reserves at Hell’s Kitchen tomorrow (BTW – huge oversight on their part that the mobile website doesn’t include any Ralph Steadman imagery).

Hell’s Kitchen disappointments aside, we were really happy with our room number when we checked in – 327, the magical number, my bro’s birthday, and number of words in his perfect humorous essay, and powerful in other ways too numerous to mention.

Our hotel room number