Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

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I guest chef-ed for Slow Food UW on Monday night. Like I said, we did all the cooking Sunday afternoon. We made Unky Dave’s potato salad – 20 pounds of little yellow potatoes from Matt Smith, 10 pounds of sweet potatoes from Don’s Produce, 5 pounds of Tipi Produce carrots and a big bag of frozen peas from Willy Street. Oh, and we got the garlic from Sutter’s Ridge – mostly I buy jam from them – the woman was really nice – since it was February garlic – she said just take a few extra in case some of the cloves are too sprouty.

We made Oven’s of Brittany Tomato Dill Soup, and Greens & Cheese Pie with a Yeasted Crust, basically from the vegetarian epicure, but we left out the fennel (and the dash of vinegar), and used mozzarella along with the feta, and a big variety of greens – 2 kinds of kale: red Russian, and curly, collards and spinach from Matt.

And dessert was squash bars, made from my favorite pumpkin-cranberry muffins, based on the one in Savoring the Seasons, the one with honey, where I always basically double the amount of cranberries. And we got the squash from Matt, too – blue hubbards.

I’m making the vegetable pie on the cover of the January Bon Apetit, with modifications, chiefly I’m leaving out the eggplant & fennel because those aren’t vegetables I generally have on hand in January. I’ve got roasted tomatoes & red bell pepper from the freezer. I’ve got sweet potato from the indoor farmers market today. Instead of onion, fennel, eggplant, sweet potato, tomato, peppers, fresh thyme, and goat cheese, my versions got onion, mushrooms, sweet potato, tomato, peppers, dry thyme, parsley, and goat cheese. I almost bought one of the 10-inch white fluted ceramic tart pans that this pie should really be baked in at Wisconsin Cutlery where I was getting my knives sharpened, but I resisted. I’m using a glass 10-inch un-fluted pan (of which I have two) instead.

I’m also making a kind of apple-cherry pandowdy, still using up pie crust from pie palooza – I had edges of the onion cheese pies, that I trimmed and stuck in the freezer in November. It’s not precisely pandowdy – it’s a rolled crust, and not thick, but the filling has cherries and apples and brown sugar, so pretty much the homey idea required. And, anyways, probably “precisely pandowdy” is an oxymoron – there are many interpretations for this type of recipe.

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Posted from my iPhone – at least to start

OK, so, during cookie season, the enamel coating on the flat beater for my 25-year-old stand mixer started to flake off. In other words the beater I use all the time. In late December I started my quest to replace it.

First, I tried to order a replacement beater from Chef’s Catalog – but I got mixed up between the tilt-head and lift-bowl models. The tilt-head has a flared bowl that screws into the mixer; the lift-bowl is narrower, and you hook it over two studs and crank it into place. I guess I can be forgiven my confusion because the mixer at School Woods is a tilt-head – but my main one, that I need the new beater for, is a cobalt blue, 5-qt. bowl, lift-bowl mixer.

Chef’s gives you free shipping on returns – there’s a bar code on the invoice – you cut that off, pack everything up, and take it all to Fed-Ex where the bar code tells them everything they need to know. I was charmed the first time, thought that was a really slick way to send the wrong beater back, and exchange it for what I thought was the right one.

It took awhile – I did the return Jan. 2, and just got the replacement on Saturday – the 28th. And even more disappointing, it was for a 6-qt. lift-bowl model.

I knew I’d have to return the second beater from Chef’s, so I saved all the packing material, located the magic barcode, left it all on the kitchen counter, and went to KitchenAid’s website to try to find the replacement there. Finally following John’s advice – afterall, he was in the womb when I bought the mixer – with a wedding present gift certifcate – so he has been intimately connected with it his whole life.

I got the model number and searched KitchenAid’s website – and here’s what I got:

Next I tried to browse stand mixers and attachments, thinking if I could get the right mixer, I could match the beater that way – you get 56 or 59 or so models, and it’s hard to tell from the mixer displays because the flat beater is standard – so they don’t say anything specific about what comes with :

But you can narrow to 9 pretty fast by selecting flat beaters:

And there was this one that sure looked right. But when you click for specs – no bowl size infor (I even poured water into my mixer bowl at this point to make sure I really had the 5-qt.), and no model numbers that matched mine. Notice the “Features and Specs” and “Buy Now” buttons.

Here’s what you get when you click features & specs – no bowl size, no mixer model numbers, just how great the beater is:

It was late Sunday night, so I gave up, and sent a support email to KitchenAid, asking which beater to buy (Mark teased me saying they’d respond by telling me to get a while new mixer) and packed up the Chef’s Catalog beater to return on Monday morning. Which turned into an odyssey of its own, UPS store couldn’t take FedEx, and the FedEx agent in the bookstore turned computer store on State St. couldn’t take it either – and the box is still on the chair in my office as I write – that magic barcode’s getting less charming all the while)

Thought about it some more, and last night I revisited the KitchenAid site, and clicked that “Buy Now” button on the beater that looks right – and finally got this full display, with my model number listed, but evidently, not searchable – I added the highlighting in orange.

Happily, cheaper than the Chef’s beaters which were like $29.95 – this one’s only $14.99, $18 or so including shipping.

As Rach said this morning, when I related the story of my quest, “bad metadata”.

Whatever that is – My brother’s writing about  the string of snow days in Seattle that disrupted his schedule, and I’m in Madison still feeling conference-time-shifted. For me, rather than snow storms, I think it’s the perfect storm of a long weekend in Dallas, including one twilight zone day, (capped off by Mark’s bout with food poisoning) plus the start of a new semester, plus we have a new exchange student (also at loose ends, patiently waiting for second semester to start at high school – Jan. 30th), plus the off winter weather we’ve been having. We finally got some real snow, but we’ve also had ice and rain and temperatures in the mid-30s in the daytime.

My main complaint is the utter inability to know what day it is – I missed Wednesday somehow.

Got back late Monday night to kitty-trampled kitchen counters, and stacks of mail. Today was trash and recycle day, so the kitchen’s looking more normal – I even dumped the compost twice – one advantage of the warmer winter – the compost bin doesn’t freeze closed – but I could do without there still being alive, flying bugs in there in NOVEMBER.

Tonight there’s noodle casseroles for dinner at the supper club – turkey and broccoli-mushroom – spinach salad and fruit salad and cookies. Both recipes made vats – I had to do overflow small pans, beyond the 13 x 9 x 2 I had planned for each. Maybe I’ll get a few pix, but given my usual habits, would that be a sign of normalcy, or ab-?

Half bagel on messy desk atop teetering pile of grad school applications I need to read

PS, as per usual, I guess – even though it was an exceptionally nice dinner group, pleasant conversation, several new members – only one picture from the dinner, and it’s of leftovers the next day:

Ginger cookies & chocolate chip - there were some rugelach too, but we ate 'em before they could get leftover

So far, this is the conference day when nothing’s turned out as expected. First, the meeting in a private suite in my hotel with recruiters from a big library consortium, to talk about placing library school students from my school in fellowships & internships, turned out to be from 9:00 – 11:00 instead of 10:00 – 11:00 like I thought. Then I trekked up to one of the most far away hotels, for another meeting and once I located the empty locked meeting room, realized it’s tomorrow. I was already 20 minutes late for any of the other things I could have gone to in that time slot, plus I was a 20-minute walk away. So I found another of Dallas’s subterranean Starbucks with really well-hidden bathrooms – I assume to protect them from street people. You had to go up a closed escalator and ask the security cop – who directed you to the bathrooms behind an unmarked door.

I had signed up for a lunch – so went and got food, and then proceeded to my next meeting, one where I thought I was my division’s liaison to a larger organizational committee. And there was another person already there in the role. We worked it out without blood after – this was my last meeting; he’ll start now – but I still have to write the report. Shucks.

Not sure what can happen next – here are some pix from last night and today.

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