Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Came home with my CSA box today. Two pounds of the large-leafed variety that Tipi Produce grows. It made almost 2 quarts of pesto – 3 pint sour cream containers, and 2 samller containers that are probably 3/4 cup each. And a sandwich. With tomato that came in the box, too.

Pesto, tomato, and goat cheese sandwich, half-toned

Tonight, to use up some of the last veggies from my CSA box, the one from two weeks ago, plus the one I got for the class last Thursday – before I get my new one tomorrow – I made Romano beans braised with tomato, and Szechwan green beans – that really messed up the stove, splattering oil. We ate them with rice leftover from Monday, microwaved with a lump of the cilantro-lime butter stirred in. There’s still enough rice for a rice pudding at some point, even though it’s long grain – not really the best for pud. But cooked in milk and cream with cinnamon & sugar – it’ll be good. And leftover beans for lunch.

And I finally made the veggie broth – the bunch of parsley I bought for the class, that inexplicably wilted even in a glass of water in the fridge, half a tomato, most of a giant onion, a little fresh dill, purple carrots, and the last two salad turnips that came, with a number of their brothers and sisters, in one of my very first CSA boxes back in May – their sibs got eaten, but these two got left behind to go into the broth.

And I had to throw out the last of the peach crisp – it had mold spots – but I made crumb cakes with jam, ‘cuz Rach had a craving.

I couldn’t decide if I like the pictures with the beans blurry or the rice blurry the best – so here’s all three.

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I was thinking that rather than feeling all bummed out and sorry for myself, like yesterday, and posting ugly food, I should resurrect a couple of pretty food pictures from the archives. So here they are:

Zucchini lattice tart – a Martha recipe

My own favorite wheat knot rolls

A bowl of last summer’s plums

All summer-y things – the tart’s fussy, of course, it’s a Martha recipe – but I don’t make it exactly the way she says to. The rolls are my standard recipe that I’ve been making for probably 25 years – with bulghur wheat and brown sugar – it’s good as these knots and as focaccia. And little prune plums that you can eat or cook – a bowl on the dining table at School Woods, from a brunch last fall – I’m thinking it was October 2 – the menu says “fall fruit platter”.

Mark saw the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Art Institute when he was there for Lollapalooza, and thought it was so good that I should see it too – seriously enough that he took me there for a belated birthday present. I handed in the first of the syllabi for the three courses I am teaching this fall on Thursday and took the day off on Friday. We took the Metra Train into the city  – drove to Harvard IL; train to Ogilvie Transporation center – it’s always been the Metra terminus, under the blue waterfall building, across the street from the ugly side of the formerly mighty  Union Station.

We had a really nice room at the Hotel Monaco. I wanted to take the EL up to a park on the Northwest side, and see a free reduced Shakespeare Taming of the Shrew – but Mark didn’t really want to sit on the grass, plus, as he rightly pointed out, we did not have the equipment for it – no blankies or lawn chairs. So we had an early-ish dinner at the Browntrout, and then went to see a late show of Dark Knight Rises. I spent a lot of the time in the movie not knowing what the hell was going on, but it was still fun to watch, and filmed in Pittsburgh. In fact, they used the City County Building, where my mom used to work, when she was a librarian for the Allegheny County Planning Dept., for a lot of scenes, as well as the yellow Fort Pitt bridge. And a lot of the chase scenes were in small crooked streets in downtown Pittsburgh, like Smithfield Street and Cherry Way. Looks like somebody mapped it. I think they altered the skyline so it wasn’t quite so recognizably Pittsburgh, but to a Pittsburghers eyes, like mine, it was still Pittsburgh.

Since we stayed up till almost 2:00, I was even able to stay in bed past 6:30 the next morning. We got coffee at Intelligensia, the anti-Starbucks, each cup of coffee brewed painstakingly – and very lengthily – by hand. I had what they called their V6 brew- they had three ceramic Melita filter holders going into 3 quart-size glass pots – yielding 2 16 oz. cups of coffee. The barristas were boiling the water in these little metal teapots and pouring it in.

I liked the Lichtenstein – the painting were grouped thematically rather than simply by date. My favorite was in the room devoted to Lichtenstein’s deconstructions of art history – his gridded Monets, and dotty Picassos – called Woman III, 1982.

Then we walked south to have breakfast at the new near south Bongo Room, an old friend from Wicker Park. It took us a little finagling to find it, it’s kind of tiny, on a corner, but we had a good breakfast – perfect over medium eggs, good potatoes with lots of dill, one slice of multigrain toast, and decent jam. The place was so small that they had to keep all the people on the dining room side – the most direct path to the bathroom went right past the main serving hatch, as I realized when I got shooed over to the civilian side.

So two good meals, a movie, lots  of walking and a deluxe hotel stay, not to mention going everywhere by public transportation = a really good trip. About the only thing that would have made it better is if we had biked.

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So, I came home from work on Monday and started cooking to use up stuff from my CSA box and Farmers’ Market.

On Sunday, Mark and I went to his work’s (WiLS) 40th anniversary picnic. We took corn on the cob, grilled, with cilantro lime butter for smearing, and the nun’s cookies – a kind of oatmeal cookie with coconut. The corn actually worked really well – we got 2 dozen good fresh ears of corn at the market on Saturday from our favorite corn guy, Luck’s Produce, from Randolph WI. The next morning, I peeled the outer husks, and took off the silks, and then left it in the sink strategically covered with cookie sheets to protect it from cats, and went off to the Northside Ride the Drive. Mark ran the water in, and made the fire at 3:30, and then we grilled the corn, 6 at a time, and put them in a Styrofoam box I got by ordering some fancy cheeses online, lined with foil. I baked the cookies and made the butter, and I even had time to shower before we went to the picnic –

On Monday morning, I put some black beans in a pot to soak, and got out a couple of containers of veggie broth to thaw. There were 9 or 10 ears of corn left, and I’d  cut the kernels off the cobs. First thing Monday night, I made corn salsa, with onions and jalapeños and red peppers and cilantro. Fortified by snacking on the salsa and some chips, I skinned all the tomatoes I had accumulated and put them in to slow roast with garlic and basil and a little olive oil.  I’m planning to make the tomatoes into a pasta with the bunch of basil that I trying to keep green till we can eat it – I’ve been spritzing it with water every day, and it’s blooming. Then I measured out enough of the veggie broth to make enchilada sauce, and used the rest to cook the black beans in. While the beans were cooking, I ate the last of the eggplant caponata pasta that I made Lollapalooza weekend. Caponata – eggplant with olives, celery, onions, garlic, tomatoes, capers and a little vinegar and sugar over RP’s rigatoni, with a little heavy cream mixed with corn starch for thickening and mozzarella cheese on top. Yum, but not to anyone else in the house except me.

By the time I was finished eating the pasta, the beans were cooked so I sauteed a half a chopped onion, and more diced up red pepper in a little oil, and added chopped cilantro, and cumin, and the beans, and used that for enchilada filling.

I ate enchiladas for dinner tonight, with corn salsa and sour cream and chips. And then I finally made my birthday pie – peaches & plums in a free form tart – I think I put a little too much flour in the filling, but I think it’ll be good anyways. I’m going to wait and take the pictures in the morning, so at least it’ll look good in the better light.

‘Cept there was no better light, shucks, it’s kind of a cloudy day for Julia’s 100th, and my 4th day of being 57. But I took the galette to a Julia’s 100th Birthday Brunch that a friend was hosting – she was a historical researcher at Pleasant Company, so the party was full of graphic designers and artists and creative people – very fun. It was devoured in short order, and pronounced “brilliant” by the former art director, who is British. I made pasta with the roasted tomatoes that evening, after spending about 90 minutes tabling at the co-op, “Vote for Me“. I was supposed to stay for 2 hours, but it started looking like rain, and I wasn’t talking to much of anyone, so I decided to head home. And it did rain on me on the ride back to the west side, but very lightly, it felt like sparkles on my arms, and there was a rainbow, too – so I guess my timing was pretty good afterall.

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