Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

It’s still “unseasonably warm” here is WI – it was 81° today, ad it’s still in the high 60s at almost 10 p.m. In the morning, Rach and I walked, and because I thought my first advising appointment was by Skype, I figured I’d just do it at home. But when I got on and looked for the student, I couldn’t find her, and when I checked the sign up sheet there was a phone number instead. Turned out, though, that she had originally signed up for Skye, but the wifi at her house had been wonky, so she changed it. And the advising by phone, with my iPhone on speaker and her student record on the computer screen, turned out to be quite effective. Afterwards, I was feeling pretty smug – I’m so on top of it, still in my walking clothes, catching up on email. At 10:21 I checked my calendar and my next advising was at my office at 10:30, NOT the 11:00 I remembered. So I threw on clothes and jumped on my bike and was only about 7 minutes late – 2 minutes after the student gave up and took off. But she came back 15 minutes later, so all was well.

After another advising appointment and a bunch of email and a meeting, and because I hadn’t had time to pack any food, I decided to come back home and work – pretty productive. I knocked off at 6:00, and biked to the grocery store. Came back and made lemon meringue pie – which came out awfully flat – I suppose it should be an 8-inch pan and I used 9 inch, and a little burnt. And a big hunk of crust broke off the side, and there’s actually a crack in the bottom, and I suspect lemon filling seeped out into the bottom of the pan. I like in one of Nigel Slater’s recipes, for a lime tart, he cautions to make very sure the crust – pastry case, in British – has no cracks or the filling will escape, guaranteed – and, in loose bottom tart tin, it’ll be much messier. But I don’t think we can eat the pie until it chills over night, so I had cocoa puffs for my dessert. And I baked a loaf of bread – I did a boule, with the baguette dough – it came out a little better looking than the pie.

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I decided to eat a small slice of the still runny pie with the TV weather. And, even though I discovered my bike headlight wasn’t working on my way back home from the grocery store, and had to struggle the thing off my handlebars to bring it into the house to diagnose – the giant package of Costco batteries I got last week are the right size. So maybe I’m not such a mess afterall.

It’s not just winter that’s been cancelled here in Wisconsin, evidently spring has been cancelled, as well. We have gone directly from mild snow-less winter to summer heat. We are in the midst what is looking like a 2-week stretch of day time high temps in the 70s and 80s, and only going into the 50s at night. Most people are enjoying it, but it’s also worrisome – are we going to have another big snow and freeze, killing all the tender shoots that are budding out? or is this it, and we are heading into an extremely hot summer? The other night, the TV weather man said the last time we’d had this warm of a March was in 1995, when we had several weeks worth of days over 100 in July and August. I remember clearly because I was living in Chicago and coming up to Madison to interview for jobs, driving my UN-air-conditioned car.

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I’m writing this on Saturday morning, and it’s supposed to be 81° today. The heat really got turned up early last week – on Tuesday. I got up that day, and in honor of going sockless, gave myself my at-home pedicure – pumice stone the heels, and scrub the feet well with the expensive exfoliating mint soap with ground walnut shells in it, that I buy at the Soap Opera, finished off with a good slather of Burt’s Bee’s coconut foot creme, “a tropical treat for feet”. I opened the window in the kitchen – it was almost 50° first thing in the morning. The night before, knowing the heat was impending – and just because I needed something to feed everyone (Mark’s son Ethan is home from MN on spring break, so there were 4 of us – Ethan, Mark, me & Joelle, our Dutch exchange student)  – I made a dish of pasta with sausage & peppers, using tomatoes, peppers and sausage from the freezer. Heck, if it’s summer, it means I need to get last year’s put-by food used up so I can start new. I’m sure our local farmers are debating hotly whether it’s safe to plant.

I stayed home on Friday with my cold, and interspersed bouts of working between couch time and cups of tea. I went to Walgreens and got cold medicine, and took two doses  but I woke up so dehydrated on Saturday morning that I haven’t taken anymore – seems better to let the cold drain.

I started my at-home sick day with a big bowl of cereal. Somewhere in the afternoon, I polished off the malted milk balls. I was pretty good at staying away from snacks during the day, but I did eat three of the stuffed dates (tho only one is depicted). They’re Mollie Katzen’s recipe – an almond inside and coconut with fennel seeds. Mollie says to roll the dates in the coconut mix, and I don’t know what kind of dates she uses, but no way that stuff was going to stick to the big Medjools I had – so I opened up the pitted dates and stuck the coconut to the sticky insides, popped in the almond and closed them up.

Around 6:00 p.m. I sent Mark & Joelle off to the symphony and dinner downtown, and they also got to see a bit of the 1-year anniversary, recall Walker rally (although one of my facebook friends was complaining about why is there both a Friday night AND a Saturday rally?! and she has a point …), including Fireman Irish pipers, coming into the pub. I took a shower and settled in on the couch and had Indian leftovers and watched the first two episodes of the season of Downton Abby on DVD – Indian food seemed appropriate because India was still part of the Empire in 1912. And, since of course Walgreens had all the Easter candy in stock when I visited for cold meds, I had peeps for dessert.

And for Saturday breakfast I had toad in hole eggs & toast & two sausages – Mark & I went out and did all our Saturday a.m. errands on foot, including new glasses for me and new running shoes for him – so I didn’t have breakfast until noon, and was really, really hungry. And, I think this is quite enough of the recording of what I’ve eaten – I’ll go back to shooting what I’ve cooked, instead.

In the evening, I cooked Indian food for the School Woods dinner on Thursday, so we never sat down to eat. I made pasta salad, though. And some of my snacks were Indian ingredients – like raisons.

Here’s most of the rest of Monday’s food –

Even though I had such a plethora of baked goods at home, I bought a cookie at the cafe at the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery, where I had a meeting. It’s called Aldi’s for Aldo Leoplod. Bought a cup of coffee, too. Carried it all back to my office – a little too far, coffee got kinda cold. Ate the cookie and drank the coffee with what I’d packed for lunch – English muffin & butter. I already had the Damson plum jam on my desk – American Spoon. And a couple of clementines, that turned out to kinda dry inside.

And a New Yorker article about the shit that Scott Walker’s doing to our state.

How quickly they forget, though. I got home hungry and ate Ritzs & spreading cheese and tomato jam and didn’t photograph them. And I didn’t take pictures of dinner – pasta pesto with chicken on top – until after I’d eaten it. This is Al finishing it off. And the chicken was just too UN-photogenic; not shown here.