Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

We’re back in Disney Land – haven’t been here since 2008. I am doing a crap job of recording meals we’ve had – but to my credit, we haven’t had anything that was truly wonderful – at least in my humble opinion (which is really not so humble).

The first night here we drove to Huntington Beach, walked around a bit, and ate at a place called Duke’s. I made an open table reservation. We were starving and cranky, and, in her punctual Dutch manner, Joelle just could not understand why we had to wait 30 minutes when we had a reservation. Once we finally got seated, the service was still a little slow, but we got an appetizer – a kind of crab Rangoon, cream cheese & crabmeat in fried wonton skins – and that helped tide us over till the entrees. We all opted for fish in different preparations – Joelle had salmon with Parmesan & garlic and after her first bite said it might be the best salmon she’d ever tasted. Mark ordered tuna and had to send it back to get it made a bit less rare. I had opa, with some kind of dark crust on top of pickled bok choy. I got an ice cream scoop of utterly plain white rice, but Mark got a wild & brown rice pilaf that was good albeit with a slight undertone of bouillon cube.

On Thursday we started with a little mismatch – Mark had visions of a hearty Southern California diner-type breakfast, and Joelle wanted lunch with mimosa at an outdoor cafe. We ended up grabbing some Starbucks, then driving to Santa Monica pier and Venice Beach. We saw a great tumbling act on Venice Beach, 4 guys, “the Calypso Tumblers”, who did all sorts of contortions, hurling themselves around on the cement with no pads, told good jokes, and closed by jumping a row of 10 people. We got lunch at a cafe, but Joelle just stuck to fruit with her mimosa. I had a basil-tomato panini that was more like a toasted sandwich, and kind greasy, but OK. Mark had an omelette & potatoes, so he did manage to get a form of breakfast. We suffered through traffic and, when we finally got back to the hotel, I discovered to my horror, that I had needed to swap our ALA Disney ticket vouchers for the real thing at the convention center – that was all closed by then. I managed to talk our way in – another example of bad customer service for Joelle – and we had an ok Disney night. Rode Pirates of the Caribbean, ate ice cream, bought Minnie Mouse ears for Joelle’s little sister, watched the fireworks over our shoulders as we walked out.

Friday was my big workshop day. I started with a triple shot skim latte, which is basically what I’ve been making for myself at home (since my brother got me started on when I visited in May). I make espresso in my 6-cup stove top pot, and while it’s coming to a boil, I heat about 3/4 cup skim milk in one of my big 16-oz. china mugs, and pour in the espresso when it’s ready.

For lunch I had a prepackaged convention center muffin. We were going to baseball, so I figured I’d go hungry till I could get a BBQ sandwich & fries & a beer at the stadium. I ended up in a brew pub outside the stadium, waiting for Mark & Joelle, because I believed the map librarian who bought our ticket block – he said I couldn’t leave their tickets at willcall because they’d already been picked up. Joe & Terry started calling him the ticket Nazi, but he wrangled 35 tickets on the 3rd baseline, and they were only $25 a piece. Instead of BBQ, I had coconut shrimp and a fat tire in the pub. And watched the game on TV. And when Mark called around the 4th inning to say they were still probably an hour away, I dared to approach the willcall window. And, when I inquired, expecting to be told “no”, the ticket guy simply handed me an envelope and said, “print the name”.

Saturday morning I kind of wandered from session to session, not finding anything I really was interested in. I met one of my students, who lives in San Clemente. She was at the conference with her mom, who’s also a librarian. We walked up to downtown Disney and ate salads at La Brea Bakery.

It turned out to be a good thing that I had a nice lunch. For dinner, we were supposed to meet some librarian friends at a brew pub that was just past the Angels stadium on Katella Ave – about a mile and a half from our hotel. They made it there; we spent over an hour in gridlock traffic, and finally bailed when we were probably only 1/2 a mile away. The problem was Snoop Dogg at the Honda Center. We ended up at a neighborhood Italian place, Carolina’s, kind of divey but the food was OK – see below. The main casualty of the evening is that by the time we were finished eating, it was almost 10:00 p.m. – so we missed seeing the Rock Bottom Remainders, with Roger McGuin sitting in. But I can still watch them on YouTube, and in fact the vid from the night before at a club in L.A. is way better than any of the iPhone movies shot by the librarians.

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Last night we hosted our exchange student’s farewell graduation BBQ. It was a really nice party – lots of pleasant young people, and one whole family, our neighbors from up the street, who also have a graduating senior daughter, so there were some grown ups for me & Mark.

We asked people to bring something to drink, or meat for the grill – a 2-liter bottle of Sprite showed up, but no meat, but that was all for the better, because it meant people ate all the other food. Joëlle made some tortilla roll ups with Boursin, smoked salmon, and lettuce, that everyone loved. Her other recipe was my favorite of the party – potatoes with herbed butter in foil packets roasted on the grill – so grilled potatoes with butter – the best. She also made a giant fresh mozzarella and tomato salad – just enough of it left to make some pizza, one night soon. I made a pasta salad with garbanzos and and feta and salami and garlic scapes and sun-dried tomatoes – I doubled the recipe, 1 1/2 pounds of pasta, and I should have stuck to the single, 3/4 pound of pasta, batch – we’ll be eating it for days (like tonight). The crême caramel I was worried about was fine, just not very pretty for serving. Again if I’d made less in a smaller pan, it would’ve been better. The two peach & raspberry jam galettes, 24 biggish slices in all, were consumed, giving Mark further proof for his idea that I should open a desserts-only café. I also made a sour cream dip that was really good on the snap peas from my CSA box – that’s where the garlic scapes came from, too. I’ll be having veggies & dip for lunch this week, too.

I brought over all the director chairs from E. Wash, and we set them up with tables and grills in the driveway. Joelle made a Spotify playlist and we connected her computer to one of the Bose radios and pointed it out the window for music. And we made an alcohol free sangria with tea and fruit juice with strawberries, oranges and cherries floating in it.

Pasta salad from the trapeze artists’ wedding – the one last night looked a lot like this

I didn’t finish cleaning up till 11:22. Rach put together a group so we had like 20 people. It was an easy menu, everything made in advance – roasted the chicken in the a.m. when it was cool. I only had to turn the stove on to grill the polenta. Which, by the way I should have done in a regular skillet instead of the grill pan – it stuck terribly. I figured it out by the third batch. And in the end it meant a really good cleaning for the grill pan; I left it scrubbed & freshly oiled.

Anyways, the side effect of having a big group is that I started off with all these big containers of salads and ended up with little dabs, that all needed to be transferred to smaller containers, and everything washed. I also was in a bit of a rush to get to the dinner, because I’d gone to see Joelle walk in the West HS graduation, so I left all the chicken pans to wash later, too.

I just got a Maryann pan that makes a cake with a concave top to be filled with pastry cream & topped with roasted rhubarb – I was hoping to be redeemed for the mess of the 25th anniversary tarts. The cake base wasn’t really the cake that I envisioned. It was a brown sugar coffee cake from Dorie Greenspan, that sounded like it would be perfect. The recipe had butter and oil, and the oil seemed to give the cake a hard crust. The pastry cream was smooth and creamy, but I thought the rhubarb was too fiber-y. Sunday morning I wanted to use the leftover roasted rhubarb in a coffee cake. I put it through the food processor, but it was still too fiber-y, so I strained it – or, I started off with a strainer, and realized the china cap was the tool to use. So more stuff to wash. Too much work, but the coffee cake was delish, and the cake was the nice tender yellow cake I want to try next in the Maryann pan.

I never took any pictures till the Sunday morning leftovers.

Last year we had breakfast burritos for Ethan’s graduation brunch – so this year we made one year anniversary breakfast burritos, with the rhubarb coffee cake. I went out on my bike to get the tortillas, and I had a David Shapiro-like altercation with a driver who was going the wrong way on a roundabout. She had Cleopatra hair, nice green VW Jetta, window open, so she could hear me real well when I said, quite mildly, I thought, “counter-clockwise”. She exploded, “YOU’RE wrong, wake up”. Actually I’m not wrong – you can only go left if there’s no oncoming traffic – I was there, so I was the oncoming traffic.

And not quite as long term an anniversary, but I celebrated the pastry cream leftovers from Saturday’s dinner the same way I did after Dave & Jen’s anniversary two Sundays ago – parfaits.

We’re in Duluth/Superior for a librarians conference, the Lake Superior Libraries Symposium, held Friday June 1. It was the first one and it was a pretty good library conference. Some good sessions, good keynoter, and ubiquitous wifi because it was held at a Community College. And that also meant that there was a never ending supply of homemade donuts with the coffee. The taco bar that they set out for lunch was OK – as one of the organizers said, the salsa was Norwegian style, mild and very mild – somebody at my table said it tasted more like barbecue sauce. I used some of the Siracha that they had put out for chile lovers, instead.

Nice after party at a Brew pub, the Thirsty Pagan. Really the only downside is the construction on the bridges that’s making going back & forth from Duluth to Superior a little harder depending on the time of day – but it’s not real traffic gridlock, like in a big city – it’s Northern WI traffic jams that last 20 minutes.

After the brewpub, we went to see Snow White & the Huntsman – leaving our exchange student to work on end-of-the-school year stuff in the hotel. She had decided that she’d rather skip the potentially hokey senior class party – none of her friends was going – and come with us to see more of America. I think the movie was our de rigour action flick for the summer. The main thing I couldn’t get over was how much smaller Chris Hemsworth looks when he’s not playing Thor. We went and collected the kid and got some pizza after the movie.

Slept way in this morning, and now doing a little catchup at the Caribou – finally got the bootcamp schedule updated and emailed an invite to faculty. Time to go collect the kid again and take her hiking, to see more of America. I think we’re going to Tettegouche State Park.

Canal Park Caribou Coffee in Duluth

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On Saturday morning I laid out all the pies on the counter at the neighbor’s house where I’d been baking for their group shot. Dave & Jen are house- and puppy-sitting, so I got to bake on the Viking range at the neighbor’s.

Around 4:00 we crammed everything into the car and headed for the place where the party was going to be – it’s called the Center for Wooden Boats, so it was kind of a little house with a big deck on a pier right on the water. The plan was for me to talk to the caterer, and figure the pie service. What I wanted to do was tier four tarts, and then cut and platter the extras on the side. That was the first snag – the caterer took one look at the extra giant apple tart on a metal baking and said, “I’m not cutting anything on a metal pan, it’ll wreck my $300 knife”. She also had not brought any extra platters for desserts. I rooted around in the little kitchen at the place, and found an OK knife, and some boards and a platter, and started tiering and cutting. Even though the head caterer was really nasty, the 2 women working for her were really sweet, and they agreed to replenish the cut tarts as long as I left the tray of the extras up on a high shelf out of the way.

Dave & Jen did a toast and a kind reaffirmation of their vows around 9:30, and after that I UN-tired the tarts and cut those too.

All went on pleasantly, until about 11:05. We were supposed to be outta there, with every glass picked up, every table cleared, and the floor mopped, by midnight. While Dave & Jen were walking her Dad to his ride home, the caterer told the DJ that this was his last song. Then she told Lea and I that we needed to clear the pie table immediately. I went back to our car to get trays, loaded up and made the first long walk to the car. I  overheard the caterer arguing with one of the bartenders about clean up while I was walking. By the time I got back, the pies I had left on the table had been moved to the stairs – kind of an unused stair, up to the closed office of the place, but still. Jen said when she and Dave headed back in after sending off her dad, people were streaming out of the party – because the music had been stopped.

I hadn’t treated this like a real catering job for myself – I hadn’t brought anything for serving and carrying, and when I was setting up, I wadded up all the foil I had covered the pies with when I brought them to the place, instead of leaving it flat for wrapping leftovers. Anyways, the result was that there were about 3 uncovered trays of pie jammed into the car along with people, strings of lights and paper lanterns, clothes, cases of champagne and leftover liquor. One strawberry tart fell into the drivers’ seat and turned into a mess to cleaned up instead of something to be eaten. When we got back to Dave and Jen’s and Dave opened the trunk, apple pie fell out. But whatever was left got carried into the house, and the guests who had come over for the after party ate most of it, and the dogs got some in the morning.

I have to look at how great the tarts look on the tiers, to compensate for how bad I feel about them being such a mess at the end. I guess we can just blame the crabby caterer though, it’s all her fault, not mine.