Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

At least, cooking and foodwise. I was in Minneapolis on Sunday & Monday, so it was road food then. I took plastic containers of yogurt & granola, and a banana & an apple for the bus, and filled my to-go cup with coffee. The refill coffee that I bought at the Pilot truck stop on I-94 where the bus took a 30-minute break was undrinkable – I poured it out in the ladies. Al & I went to a Caribou with nowheres to sit at about 5:00 after we loaded the truck – full of undergrads studying – and I had a blueberry muffin and more coffee. Al had a chipotle turkey wrap – he had to pick out the tomatoes. Tincher made a good dinner for us to eat while watching the Oscars – all the vegetables from his fridge, beets & parsnips & potatoes & onions, and chicken thighs and chorizo, sauteed a bit on the stove and baked, over rice. He seasoned it with a good bit of cloves, too.

Tuesday Mark had colonoscopy, and I went to the Willy Co-op Board Dinner at an Asian place called Fugu – we had 9 people so a lot of dishes on a lazy susan in the center of the table – some good, some not so good. The appetizers were probably the best – edamame, dumplings, seaweed salad. I ordered beef brisket hot pot, and it was kind of fatty. The twice cooked pork seemed to be pork belly, so also kind of fatty. There was chicken with dry peppers that was like popcorn chicken, breaded and fried, very salty, lots of peppers – very good in an appetizer-y kind of way. I liked the veggies the best –  eggplant – tho Anya & Mike thought it was mushy – and the Chinese broccoli, which is the same as broccoli rabe, in vegetable oil & garlic instead of olive oil & garlic.

I think Wednesday – leap day – was greens & mashed potatoes day – and I’m not sure what happened Thursday – but somewhere in the late afternoon, maybe I grabbed grabbed a few too many peanut m&m’s from the office candy dish, and it ended up being one of those days where I seemed to eat all the wrong stuff and had a bad stomach by bedtime. Made 5-hour rice pudding with real milk instead of soy milk, and that was mostly dinner, but I had a piece of cheese toast and some jello, and even mild rice pudding didn’t sit right.

It snowed today, Friday – heavy wet stuff. I took a bagel for lunch and an orange. New food – I decided that maybe my first step to ruin on Thursday was taking leftover greens, and layering them on and cheese and the last slices of heavy sunflower seed bread – that I of coruse could’ve chucked, those last two slices – don’t need to do the mom thing and eat all the bad old food. I think maybe I feel better of I eat new food for lunch – I think maybe I’m just not one of those people who should take leftover casserole in my lunch box. Yogurt and fruit, sandwiches, cheese and crackers – more my thing. Leftover hummus, maybe. Leftover vegetables can be OK, but those greens weren’t. For dinner I made the salmon cakes with the leftover mashed potatoes, finally, and tried out a cranberry bars recipe. Not quite enough filling – I had to supplement with raspberry jam, and speaking of jam, and I think these bars’d be better with jam instead of cranberries. Ended up with a dividend of some extra streusel that I toasted and we can eat on ice cream, or in trifle. And set some new bread, long rise whole wheat, to rise for tomorrow.

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On Sunday I rode the megabus up to Minneapolis so that today I could drive this 10-foot UHaul with Al’s stuff in it back to Madison. It was a lot easier than I had worried it was going to be; none of the things I fretted about came to pass: there was a truck when we showed up at the place to pick it up, I didn’t get lost driving it in the Twins, we got a perfect overnight parking spot for the truck in front of the place Al was moving out of, I didn’t hit any other cars with the truck, the weather was just fine, the highway driving was OK, and I even got the thing pulled into my own driveway without hitting the house. Still, it wasn’t an experience I’m wanting to repeat any time soon.

It was fun being in Minneapolis – a real city, at its grey & gritty best, late winter dirty snow clumps lining the streets, salt and grime covered cars, and everyone hunched up inside of their winter jackets with hoods over their faces. On my way to get Al this morning I stopped to get coffee & bagels in a strip mall with a Starbucks and a Bruegger’s, and there were more languages than I usually hear in Madison – except on the 80 campus bus. There were big African men, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, a few city ladies, black & white & yammering on cell phones, one with long painted nails, and especially at Starbucks the baristas were all blond Midwestern college girls – the one I paid for my coffee could’ve been one of Al’s girlfriend’s sorority sisters. At the Bruegger’s, the kid who took my money looked and sounded like Jonah Hill, but was a few shades darker.

But I was happy to get home safe and sound, by 3:00 – I left my toothbrush at the friend’s house I stayed at – but he’ll being it to Madison his next trip.

We were the 2nd set of people to rent this truck - only 345 miles on it when we picked it up, and already equipped with graffiti

Warby Parker "Miles" frames in Amber on me

I’ve been needing new glasses – I have so much astigmatism, when my glasses get bent they don’t work anymore.

The girlfriend of one of the co-op board members came into the after-party at the bar yesterday evening wearing these totally cool glasses with orange frames. My board colleague said she got them from Warby Parker, an online glasses buying place, that does a buy one, give one deal – for every pair of glasses they sell to a full-price customer, they give a pair to a poor person somewhere in the world. It’s $95 per pair of glasses. And there’s an avatar system where you upload a picture of yourself to virtually try on your new glasses.

I gave it a try this morning – and was a little disappointed that they don’t do lineless biofocals; they’re too hard to fit, virtually – so I don’t get a whole new pair of glasses, ready to wear, shipped to my door, for $95. But I got the frames, anyways. Warby Parker will ship them to me with non-prescription lenses, and they take off 10%. And I’ll just take them to an optician here in Madison, and have the non-prescription lenses popped out and my prescription lenses put in. It’ll cost a little more than the $95 (actually quite a bit more – my lenses are like $110 each…) but they’ll give a pair to someone who needs them, and I think I’m getting some frames I’ll really like.

On Monday, Mark took us girls (me and our exchange student) out for dinner for valentine’s day. It was the first Monday our local & organic Italian place was open – after years of being closed on Monday nights. It was my first day back at work with my broken toe. I gimped to the free 80 bus, which drops me off right by my office, but a couple of blocks from home – and kinda on the way to the restaurant. I stayed at work a little late, and it was snowing. Our reservation wasn’t till 7:00, but I decided that if, when I got to the underpass on the way home, it was at least 6:15, I’d turn right and head to the restaurant, instead of turning left for home. It was 6:21 at the underpass, so I went to the restaurant and got a seat in the bar. Had a glass of wine, read one the books I have in my phone (The Marriage Plot) and watched the cooking channel on the screen behind the bar. I think it was Giada de Laurentiis making a cake, that looked like it had hazelnuts & coffee beans ground together in the food processor, then butter, chocolate & eggs added. She put whipped cream on top, and fed it to some kids in a tent – I can’t seem to find the recipe, but the episode listing for this season includes kids & camping.

When we got seated, we all opted for salads & pasta – Mark & Joelle had Caesar; I had the house with fennel dressing & greens (and nicely thinly sliced red onion, that even though I picked out I could still taste next day). Mark had pasta Bolognese, I had seafood with vodka-tomato – I liked the mussels, but not the shrimp – and Joelle had the wild boar lasagna. We sat near my hairdresser & her husband, and chatted across tables.

Last night, actual Valentines, I was going to make steak frites – We had gotten a really nice steak from Fountain Prairie at the Saturday market – but everyone seemed to be going too many directions. Al was home, so I made a tray of nachos with leftover taco meat for the kids, and I ate bread & cheese. Then I made 6 little chocolate cakes from a Splendid Table recipe that I got from their email news letter. Almost flourless, melted bittersweet & unsweetened chocolate, chocolate chips or chopped chocolate – the only unusual ingredient was a whole teaspoon of cinnamon. We ate them topped with whipped cream, in front of our respective TVs. I watched the last season 1 episode of Game of Thrones. All indoor, bad light pictures – as the Breakaway Cook complained recently, it’s so hard to get food photographed indoors at night to look good – why I’m so jealous of Heidi & Deb, who, as cookbook authors, can stay home and photograph their food in the day time.

So that’s the double – the steak frites is looking to come in third, probably Thursday.

I did finally cook the steak Thursday, and we ate it with creamed spinach and oven steak fries. Yum. There was a good sized hunk of steak left and we talked about how this pound & a half piece of meat that we had just fed 3 people on was small for the US, but would be considered enough for four in the Netherlands.

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On Friday morning I woke up with a sinus headache, so I was glad when my walking partner had forgotten our date, and wasn’t really ready to go. I thought about going back home and getting back in bed, but instead I walked downtown through light snow, almost ice pellets, and got my work laptop, and walked home.

Before I got busy working at home, I treated myself to a bowl of Honeynut Cheerios with granola and a banana on top and a big Chai made with mostly whole milk & a little 2%, and a Game of Thrones episode – though watching those dark medieval scenes at 8:30 in the morning was a little not quite right. I guess I waiting for the guys in the little red truck to come to fix the windshield on John’s car (formerly Dad’s car – Mark’s father’s car that he gave Mark when he decided he should stop driving at the age of 89 or so). It’s a 2003 Toyota Camry, the type of car that Madison is full enough because people give them to their kids to take to college and then buy something new for themselves.

I guess I had a productive day – worked on one of my online classes, mostly. John came back and we had coffee and talked about his prospects as a someone with a 2-year-old BFA, living in Milwaukee – graduate school still looks like the best plan. School portraits – driving miles & miles and getting only paid for like 17 hour per week, supplemented by the occasional wedding – just isn’t enough to sustain him. Even if he has fun from time to time getting to shoot high school sports.

I made pizza for dinner, kind of the usual flavors – pepperoni & artichoke hearts & fresh tomato and tomato sauce, squash (using up that bit of cooked, roughly mashed, squash that had been in the fridge for so long) caramelized onions, and goat cheese, and mushroom, fresh garlic, and a sauce of pureed roasted peppers and tomatoes. Tomatoes & peppers that I’d thawed for this pie last Saturday. There’s a little bit of squash, onions, and pepper purèe left – they’ll be a good start for veggie broth, along with that old bunch of parsley in the veggie drawer – good thing, too because I decimated my freezer supply, because I donated 10 quarts of of broth to the slow food dinner. John didn’t make it back, he was off celebrating a friends’ birthday, so he gets pizza to take home.

I made a red velvet cake, too – I’d been wanting to all week, since I had cream cheese frosting left from slow food dinner, and another tub of it at the back of the fridge. I had gotten out the butter and eggs to come to room temperature, (can’t remember exactly which day – it’s been that kind of a week) and put them back after not making the cake, so I was glad to finally get to it. I used a recipe from this All Cakes Considered book, by a woman who works at NPR and take a weekly cake to the office. There are some good recipes in it, but some annoying aspects – it’s laid out so that the ingredients and the instructions are almost never on the same page, or even page spread, which I don’t like. The red velvet cake is pictured on the cover, and as well as inside the book, as a three-layer cake, but the recipe only calls for two 8- or 9-inch pans. And, considering it’s a recipe that also calls for 6 eggs, 2 sticks of butter, 2 1/2 cups of of 2 kinds of sugar, granulated and  and & light brown, 3 cups of flour and a cup of sour cream, I think if you did try to bake it two 8-inch pans you’d have serious overflow (it might not even fit in two 9s). I used 3 8-inch, and it’s one tall sucker of a cake. I’m looking forward to photographing it sliced, for the white icing/red cake contrast.

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