Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

On Saturday, I went up to Reedsburg to assist Terese Allen with a cooking class, demoing recipes from a couple of her books, for the fermentation fest. I made green tomato mincemeat bars – moist and hard to cut, but really yummy. Too bad it was such a rainy day, but I enjoyed the drive, despite the fair number of giant Mittens/Ryan signs (I keep wanting to say Regan/Romney) along the roadside. During the class, talking about foodways around the state, Terese mentioned that she was originally from Green Bay,  which I knew, but made me decide to ask her if she knew the family of my first real Madison boyfriend. He was the middle brother in a family of three, pediatrician’s sons from the Green Bay suburb Allouez. If I ever needed more proof that I should be friends with Terese, on top of the fact that she shares my brother’s 3/27 birthday, but my year (1955) instead of his (1957); she said she knows someone who dated my old boyfriend in high school (when he wasn’t old at all).

One of the library school profs hired me to bake three dozen cupcakes and a couple of apple galettes, for a baby shower. I delivered those to her house before I drove up to Reedsburg.

On Sunday I had a really small brunch, only 7 of us, but I thought the food was perfect – poached eggs on spinach on English muffins with or without Mornay sauce; roasted vegetables; fall fruit platter that morphed into cranberry-apple-pear sauce – that I smoothed with the immersion blender – and rhubarb coffee cake with the last of the rhubarb puree from the freezer. Nice conversations, and some newbies to the supper club – always good to get a few new members.

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The LITA Forum wrapped up on Sunday with a virtual presentation from Sarah Houghton, the librarian in black, titled Library Future: Star Trek or Starbucks? Sarah was really good when she stuck to the Starbucks analogy – what could libraries do better if we did it more like Starbucks? – but towards the end, she started kitchen-sinking it (as Mark said); kind of throwing everything in – make hard choices, stick to our core values, benefit the many rather than the few ….

We had Starbucks cookies for lunch again, how apropos, in the Starbucks right outside the Nationwide Arena, where the Blue Jackets (hockey team) plays – where they were playing the Grateful Dead when we walked in. Twice, once Touch of Grey – the only Dead song that got much radio play, and the other time Scarlet Begonias – much more obscure. And funny another connection – the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics is by David Dodd, who was city librarian at the San Rafael PL, where Sarah is the now director – she must’ve replaced him. Yup.

Then we cabbed (because of Mark’s bum knee) over to the downtown Columbus Metropolitan Library, for Innovation in Libraries, a post-conference sponsored by OCLC. Got to see the opening keynote, Phil Simon, and a bunch of short presentations – all good stuff, although I was cynical about the project to catalog TED talks – with MARC.

Retired to the brew pub with a bunch of librarians and ended up having dinner at Ted Turner’s burger joint. Pretty good – I scraped the raw meat out of the center of my “medium to the well side” burger with my fork, and liked the skin-on fries, and cheap ($4.25) Rolling Rock. Got back to the hotel in time to watch Boardwalk Empire and Treme.

Throughout the conference I kept having that feeling that there was something on my glasses – something blurry. At the brew pub on Sunday, I started seeing flashes in my peripheral vision, and then on Monday, when I took my first turn to drive, somewhere in Indiana, I had lots of floaters in my right eye. It was like my own little oil and water show. Naturally I read up on MedLine, and the floaters and flashes are symptoms of a detached retina, which could be cause by head trauma, old age, near-sighedness, and of course tumours.

I decided to call the eye doc Tuesday morning, and when I said I couldn’t make the first appointment time they offered me, at 10:30, the receptionist said, “these are not symptoms that you should ignore” eeech. So I went in at 1:00 and turns out I have this –

Vitreous detachment. The doc said my retina is beautiful, but the goo inside of my eye is collapsing and coming off the back. Normal, caused by old age & near sightedness, nothing to be done about it. She said to avoid contact sports. She made the diagnosis by dilating my eyes; she even added extra drops. So Tuesday, my first day back at work, I was there from like 8:30 to noon, and then off to the eye doc, came home all blurry at 2:00, did as much work as I could until 4:00. Then I had a haircut, co-op grocery shopping, and yoga class – all while blurry. At yoga I take off my glasses, so I didn’t notice so much. Besides groceries, I went and splurged at the cake store – $20 on rubber scrapers and fancy muffin papers. When I got home from yoga, Al was here to watch Sons of Anarchy, and trying to make up his mind about jobs. I ate the sweet potato that I’d left in the oven for myself for dinner, in between talking to him, and trying to write up a discussion summary for my online course. At least the blurries were pretty much worn off by then. I still flet like I deserved ice cream, so I had some with chopped up crystallized ginger – left the ice cream out to soften while I was writing the summary, and it took so long I kept thinking I should put the ice cream back – I scooped out of the middle, instead of the edges.

Today, even though it’s only Wednesday, feels like Thursday already.

I started writing this sitting in my third presentation session at the 2012 LITA Forum (library conference). But that program was pretty interesting so I stopped. Now, on the other hand, I am watching an earnest librarian showing us her slides in the presenter mode. She did just say “I know this is kind of small for you guys” & the IT guy from Cornell just fixed it for her – her monitor & the projector were reversed.

Anyways, food-wise, Friday started really well. I went for a walk on the Scioto River – I can type the name, but I still can’t pronounce it. I was on the Olentangy-Scioto Greenway – got on the trail right by Columbus City Hall, and went North. The trail heads back into the city, and hooks up with a bike path. I probably should’ve gone south for a nicer walk, on the Lower Scioto Trail, but I came back through town and met Mark at Starbucks for coffee and split a scone. When we were walking back to the hotel to start the conference, I realized I was feeling pretty good. Little exercise, little caffeine, little sugar = real nice high.

After the opening keynote, there was a break with snacks: veggies, hummus, dips, pesto, peanut brittle & chocolate-dipped pretzels, bowl of fruit. I was hungry, so I had a triangle of pita & some pesto & a carrot and then went back for another pretzel; thought about a third pretzel, and took an apple instead. Still not doing too bad, consumption-wise.

There was a huge array of appetizers at the reception: cheeses, more veggies & dip, nuts, chicken quesadillas, sushi, butlered bruschetta and steak on sticks. I heard one attendee counseling another – “it all goes downhill after this” so eat up – and think how much money you’ll save on dinner tonight. I didn’t fully take his advice – I stuck to cheese & crackers, and accepted one of the bruschetta – apple and Gorgonzola, so still really bread & cheese – and them proceeded out to dinner.

We went to an Italian place, downtown – Due Amici. We had a long table along the banquette on the side. Nice atmosphere – and good food. Mark and I split a Caesar salad, and I had spaghetti & meatballs. My camera was in my bag, but no pictures. We bought 3 bottles of wine for our table of 12. Woke up this morning feeling like I’d over-indulged more than I logically estimate I had.

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Scene in the Boat House restaurant parking lot at 9:30 a.m.

One of “those” mornings …. I made chicken broth the night before and had to strain it, so greasy messy stuff with cats nosing in for droppings. While wiping off the stovetop I knocked over my little espresso pot, double disaster – not only did it send a flood of coffee down the hard to clean side of the stove, with the knobs, I didn’t get to drink the coffee. Then I knocked over the tea kettle and had the water from it to wipe up, too.

Planning to NOT spill today’s coffee.

Somehow, a lot of tomatoes of a variety of types came home with us the last couple of days, and I’ve spent a lot of time processing them.

On Wednesday, I went to the little farmers market and got some green and pink tomatoes to make a green tomato mincemeat from the Local Food Journal – 2012; 2013’s on sale now – to make some bars to take to this Fermentation Fest in Reedsburg. People who are taking a class with Terese are going to get to eat them.

On Thursday, I got a mixed bag of plum tomatoes and and red and yellow slicing tomatoes in my CSA box. And I also bought a 25lb. box of plum tomatoes. And I taught a cooking class, using an extra example of the same CSA box on Thursday evening – so yet more tomato recipes.

On Friday, when we got home from Your sister’s sister, first movie we’ve gone to since TIFF, and a funny one, I sliced up about 18 of them and laid them out on two baking trays and put them in the oven on 225° and went to bed, and in the morning, I had a couple of pint containers of oven dried tomatoes – plus a few extra to eat right away. They’re like candy.

Today, Saturday, has been the biggest tomato day, though. For breakfast, I put yellow slicers on one side of my bagel and the oven dried on the other side. In the afternoon, I alternated grading student assignments with making the green tomato mincemeat and a double batch of Marcella Hazen’s tomato butter sauce (this is Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen’s version; I use Marcella’s son Guiliano’s version from Classic Pasta anyhoo, it’s all over the Internet; use whose ever you like). We went to dinner with my friend Lesleigh, because her brother’s in town for this conference that the library school is putting on, and when we got back I spent 2 hours blanching and peeling the rest of the tomatoes. I diced most of them and put them in containers for freezing – I think I have 7? or 8, maybe. But I got tired of dicing and threw the last pot-ful whole into a bowl for overnight. The plan is that I will roast peppers tomorrow morning – both poblanos and bell – and make this potato-poblano gratin for breakfast, and puree those last tomatoes with the bell peppers, and make my favorite pizza sauce tomato sauce that is simply pureed tomatoes and pureed roasted peppers, a little garlic, a pinch of sugar and dried oregano and red pepper flakes, boiled down a bit.

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PS. The green tomato mincemeat is really good with ice cream.