Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Yesterday morning when I was going through my morning routine in the basement, feeding the cats, scooping litter, dumping the dehumidifier, I noticed water seeping under the partition between the laundry room half of the basement and the furnace room half. A few weeks ago, I had said that probably the next thing to break in the house would be one of the furnaces, or one of the water heaters – and it turned out to be one of the water heaters. I called the plumbing company who’s sticker was on the leaking water heater, and they had a guy over to take a look at 7:45. I just had to bike home in the 100º heat at 1:00 to let the installers in, and we had a new water heater. I didn’t get home until 8:30, after Willy St. Board meeting, and this time when I went in the basement, it was all dry where it was wet before, but they had dumped the old water heater out down the floor drain in the laundry room, but it didn’t go down, because there was a pile of of grainy, grey, salty, stuff that I think is years of mineral deposits from the old water heater tank. I mopped that up, then went upstairs to discover that – possibly because the water had been turned off – that the broken kitchen sink sprayer was  in permanent drip mode, and – possibly because of that – there was a small flood under the kitchen sink.

I took everything out from under the sink, and proceeded to make the key lime bars & vegan brownies and start the overnight tabbouleh for Ann’s dinner tonight – more on that in a minute.

So this morning I called our other plumber, Karl, and Saturday I am going faucet shopping. Everything’s all dried out, so I think Karl’s theory that the flood was just a one-off is correct – especially because he also said that if I want a new faucet, I can have one.

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I made this salad on 4th of July – it’s from Plenty, the cookbook from London’s trendiest deli, Ottolenghi. Grilled zucchini, basil leaves, toasted hazelnuts, shaves of Parmesan, olive oil. It was really good freshly made, but I took the leftovers for lunch and the basil tasted like soap – I just closed up the container & chucked it down the disposal when I got home. Coulda gone in the compost, just didn’t.

I also grilled a pork roast, and some potatoes, and we ate them to Steve’s special 4th of July mix, that he brought over on his iPod.

We watched Another Earth, to work up an appetite for pie & ice cream – it was rhubarb peach, pictures soon. [well, I never did take the pictures; I thought they;d just look too much like every other pie picture … it was a good enough pie, but maybe a tad too tart, and the crust was a little too short – I threw in not only butter and vegetable shortening, but a little square of cream cheese lurking in the dairy bin in the fridge, too] None of us liked the actor who played the bereaved dad, but now that I look at his IMDB entry, I think it’s because he just wasn’t suited to playing the character he was – a guy with a wife & kid and music faculty at a big university – he’s better in other roles; he’s been in a bunch of TV cop shows, Lost, and horror movies.

Posted from my iPhone – at least partly –

I saw a newspaper headline today that said that the mid-week 4th of July holiday is confusing would-be vacationers & tourists – it’s too hard to make the Wednesday 4th add into a 3- or 4-day weekend, and nobody wants to burn the extra days off work, or figure out when to travel, when to celebrate the holiday.

It’s not that confusing for me; I am teaching two online classes this summer, so I am taking off the 4th, and that’s it – back to work 7/5. But, I think I am permanently confused, or calendar-shifted – first there was the trip to Anaheim, for the librarians conference, then we took our AFS student to Chicago to catch her flight back to the Amsterdam, and that turned into an odyssey of flight cancellations and trips back and forth to O’Hare via our secret route (River Rd.), that I knew from almost 5 years living in River Forest. “vlucht geannuleerd – Het was een hel” as I heard her telling a friend over Skype; instead of leaving at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday on United, she went at 3:40 on Friday on Lufthansa, through Frankfort, finally to Amsterdam by 10:00 a.m. Saturday (like 4:00 a.m. here).

Mark and I had a good dinner (albeit food a bit too rich for the high temps outside) at a place called Gaetanos in Forest Park, while texting with Joëlle about what she should do. Mark had a pasta with sausage & goat cheese in a creamy tomato sauce, that was the better of our two dishes. Mine was a little odd – a crab cake – that was made from what I think was supposed to be the stuffing for a trout, and they ran out of the trout – with scallops around it, and spinach and tomatoes on top. I said we should take all the leftovers for Joëlle, and I got a mozzarella salad, which she did eat some of. Her Dutch frugality made her want to use the food vouchers the airline gave her, but the wrap she got on the C concourse at terminal 1 was basically inedible.

What’s really outta whack for me is photographing food. After we dropped off Joëlle at O’Hare for the 2nd time, we drove back to Wisconsin via Milwaukee to try to meet John for lunch. We sat on the back deck at the Humboldt St. Alterra, and ordered a nice breakfast/lunch, but John was between looking at an apartment and a job, so he just dropped by. I bought him an iced coffee, then spied his car coming towards the cafe, and went out to meet him with it in hand, and we got to chat on the sidewalk for about 10 minutes.

So I never took pictures of the food – a breakfast burrito for me, a turkey sandwich for Mark.

We had ice cream with chocolate sauce and strawberries for dinner that night – Mark had his over an Alterra scone – I saved my scone for Saturday breakfast. On Saturday afternoon I made greens and feta pastry – it was gorgeous when it was right out of the oven, but nobody ate any. I had my slice when we got home from Bach Dancing and Dynamite, and on Sunday I froze half.  I ate another slice today (Monday) when I got home from work – cold with red pepper flakes shaken on top and a puddle of olive oil to dunk the crust into – that was really good, too.

I made a cherry clafouti for our Sunday night dinner-dessert. Somehow I just don’t like clafouti all that much – or I have never made a cherry or apricot one that I’ve been satisfied with. They’re too rubbery. I have an apple clafouti recipe that’s really good, though, from Saveur, that was a standard Sunday breakfast when John and Al were younger – they called it clabloui because it always overflowed in the oven. If Mark lets me I’m going to pick all the cooked cherries out of this one, and eat them with ice cream and chocolate sauce.

I also made the last bread a week installment – cheesey bread.

Shots from our day of tourist-ing in L.A. – we toured Warner Brothers studio, and saw cars – like 2 batmobiles, and the caddy from Driving Miss Daisy, fake food & real appliances, stuff from the Friends set, the woodshop, chandeliers, a generic building that can be Merlotte’s or a bunch of other places, the tree near the Merlotte’s parking lot where vampire Bill rises … and there was a really nice porch attached to the Starbucks-giftshop-waiting room. Then we drove up into the hills to get some pictures of the Hollywood sign.

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