Since Thursday’s dinner, as usual, I’ve been using up leftovers for meals en famille. We are hosting an AFS student from the Netherlands this semester, and she arrived on Friday night. We ate the Spanish country soup that Mark made last weekend (for the Downton Abbey 2-hour season premiere), along with leftover borscht and cheese bread and black bread and veggies & dip. Saturday morning, after the farmers market, I made pumpkin-dried cranberry muffins for breakfast. Saturday evening, our Dutch student met up with some other international students – who came in the fall – and went to the West HS basketball game. So she and I snacked on boiled eggs and beets and cheese (some purchased at the indoor market that morning). Later, after the game, we had streusel-topped apple pie with ice cream. I still think it’s a little too much streusel.
Since today is Sunday of a three day weekend, we are being a little lazy. Waiting for it to warm up to pursue outdoor activities, and trying to activate an old iPhone for our student. Ethan got picked up at 8:00 to drive back to Minnesota and college with his mom. I folded laundry, and made cherry-stuffed French toast for breakfast. I’m going to have to do actual work work later today, setting up my online courses that will start on January 23rd while I am at the ALA conference. And of course, all Wisconsin is in anticipation for the Packers/Giants game this afternoon.
I was kind of a couch potato, again – but maybe a little more productive than Monday – baked the rye bread for the soup dinner Thursday. Which served nicely as my excuse for hanging on the couch, waiting for it to rise, and then bake. I realized in the morning that there was a quasi-work writing project I should have attended to Tuesday night, but oh well – just have to get to that Real Soon Now™. One loaf of the rye bread came out perfectly shaped, but its brother is misshapen. Tonight I’ll be prepping all the rest of the menu, so I’ll be sure to add more pictures later on.
One deserves such things, right? I worked until 5:30, then took the bus instead of walking. I didn’t do a yoga DVD. I made myself a nice little dinner – the last of the mushroom soup from last week (tho I only ate a few spoons, seemed to have lost its appeal – the mushroom slices were too hard, the milky broth was starting to seem too much like a cream sauce instead of soup), two slices of my own multi-grain bread with Jaarlsberg melted on, and a small spinach salad with a boiled egg & purple onions that had soaked in vinegar and more mushrooms, marinated, these ones. So the salad was actually a little over-dressed – but the best tasting component of my dinner, I thought. But then I spoiled it by munching up a couple of peppermint pats that were lying around, followed by plopping on the couch with a new cooking magazine, tea and 5 oreos.
And cats –
Cats & my feet on the couch
Posted from my iPhone, picture & all – tho I edited the picture next day on my laptop
My winter break got cut short by my unhappy discovery that our syllabi for spring term classes are due Jan 10 – I was operating on the blissful assumption that I had till the 17th.
So I’ve spent way too much of the weekend on the computer, trying to get the syllabi for my two courses written. They’re courses I’ve taught before, but I always want to update and add new material and readings … sometime I wish I could be one of those profs that just teach the same thing year after year …
I got out for a walk this morning with Rach – high 30s and sunny, no snow anywhere – it’d be just right if we were in Colorado, like in Boulder, NOT in the mountains. john posted a sleepy cat picture – wish I coulda spent more of the weekend like this, but I guess I did spend a lot of last night on the couch with cats holding me down. I watched the movie about Valerie Plame and only tuned into Saturday night life for a few minutes to hear Kelly Clarkson sing ger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” – which I guess was her first number. She’s not really my kind of thing, politically OR musically, but definitely one of those ear worm kind of songs – here’s the link to see her on Hulu, courtesy Rolling Stone.
We had a scrambler for breakfast, sweet potato, onions, Matt Smith’s spinach, Boursin (leftover from the cookie party), along with bacon and fresh bagels that I brought back from my walk.
Mark’s making soup for dinner – Ovens of Brittany Spanish Country Soup. It smells good. I made cup custards to eat with the last of the Moravian ginger thins – and Downton Abbey season 2 first episode. I seem to have gotten the custards out of the oven on time – they’re just the right jiggly-ness. Wish I could photograph the smell.
Cup custards cooling on a towel
Looks like my Johnny Depp tag is getting too small, so thought I better do a Johnny post.
I am allowed to think Johnny’s cute, because he looks like my older son.
Johnny & Johnny
I am looking forward to the movie version of Dark Shadows. The original was on afternoon TV when I was in grade school. I liked it but I’m not sure why – no fang, no color, no action. So surely the Depp & Tim Burton version will be even more fun. I somehow missed Rum Diary, it was in and out of the theaters here in Madison pretty quick. But I’ll get it on Netflix or cable, eventually.
A lot of people have been saying that 2011 was a sucky year. In the women’s bathroom at the co-op the other day, on the chalkboard provided for grafitti, it said, “good riddance to 2011” but underneath someone else had written, “never wish for time to go away – it’s all you’ve got”, and below that, another person, “my grand daughter was born this year”. Sounds like my brother is ranking 2011 right up there with his best years, 1987 – when he got married – a good one for me too, since my older son was born. And 1997, when his daughter was born.
For me, my main feeling about 2011 is that I’ve never been so busy at work, so more a grinding-down-too-busy-falling-behind year. And I know I should exercise more and I could be fitter and thinner and yadda yadda, but I guess I didn’t expect to see so many of the signs of aging in my own body when I’m only 56.
On the upside, I have been feeling better – especially in December. I got some yoga DVDs, and I’ve been doing Rodney Yee’s a.m. stretch. I think I’ve lost the easy first 5 pounds, so my face looks a little less jowly and old to me – at least in the right light. In the summer I rode my bike A LOT – not close to my bro’s 7000 miles, but I did almost all the grocery shopping by bike, as long as the weather held. And I’ve been walking a lot.
In fact, since I took a long walk this morning, and maybe I’ll do the p.m. yoga tonight, I think I’ll skip yoga and try to do a gallery of favorite food shots of the year – watch this space.
I’m going to go ahead and tell you all the things that didn’t come out quite right – by my lights, not the diners – on the New year’s day brunch menu. First I somehow went brain dead, and instead of pilaf-ing the Hoppin’ John – that is transferring the rice and beans and liquid to a casserole, and baking it in the oven, I put everything back into my big soup pot and boiled it on the stove. So the rice was a bit too soft and clumpy – didn’t have that nice baked rice consistency. And it was a little too rice-y, not bean-y enough. But the dish had great flavor – I cooked the black-eyed peas with leeks and onion and garlic and a jalapeño, and bay leafs and a rosemary sprig, and added two flavors of veggie broth.
Lora Brody rugelach, mini carrot cupcakes, and hazelnut truffles for dessert – I mis-cut the truffles, somehow … I used a half batch of my standard carrot cake recipe, but I didn’t cook the grated carrot – didn’t seem worth it for 3/4 cup carrot, but I think it threw the carrot to cake ratio off. Personally, I didn’t like the cupcakes all that much, but the kids, as I anticipated, liked them a lot.
The grapes all fell off their stems so I had to serve them in a bowl, instead of artful little bunches arranged around the satsumas and clementines. So, I took some bananas to augment the fruit selection, and no one ate them – and I dropped one, and I think I got that particular one as my breakfast banana today, because it was squishy inside.
I made one long rise almost no knead whole wheat loaf with beer, and a white loaf with white wine – figuring that since one of my favorite focaccia recipes, from Carol Field, focaccia from Liguria, has white wine, it’d be good in the bread. The white loaf came out kind of dense, while the ww one rose much better. People still ate up the white faster, though.
I shouldn’t have brewed the last pot of coffee, nor mixed the last can of orange juice – we’re still drinking both of them today.
The shirred eggs, on the other hand, we just about perfect – I put a piece of butter into the bottom of each ramekin and heated them – and then broke in the eggs and poured in the cream and topped them with the grated Parm. So the eggs didn’t stick and ramekins were easy to clean. John, Megan, Mark and I had egg & bacon breakfast sammiches today, and there was even a half left for a Al, that he snarfed within 5 minutes of coming home.
So this was one of those nights when everything seemed to get kinda messy and dinner was way late and I got that tension pain in the back of my neck and I tasted lots of stuff while I was cooking, so I wasn’t really hungry when the food was done. Plus I was cooking in my work clothes, worried about splatters, and digging in elastics, and scratchy wool socks I’d been wearing since 7:00 a.m.
The new peppermint brownie recipe that Al saw on the cover of one of my cooking mags and wanted, is one of those annoying recipes where it’s all “3/4 cup mint chocolate chips, divided” and you melt some with butter and chop up the rest … and it has 1/8 teaspoon measures, too.
But the squash soup, that I’ve made many time before, came out truly silky with the new immersion blendor and there was far less to clean up than when puréeing in the food processor, and no awkward pouring and ladling hot liquids. Instead of just plain water in the soup, I put in some Thanksgiving turkey broth, that I thawed to make these Brussels sprouts (hope to make them today), and some leftover Francis Coppola fizzy white wine, that somebody brought to the cookie party and I opened on Christmas Day, that was good, but not that good.
After we ate our soup and rolls, I got into pajammies and we watched the Swedish Girl With Dragon Tattoo, and agreed it’s better than the new American version. Lisbeth is tougher, and the Swedish version is truer to the original book. Though the new one is pretty to watch – of course, it does have Daniel Craig. And by bedtime, I’d gotten the cookies neatly cut, and everything was cleaned up. So the kitchen (and my stomach) back to rights, and oatmeal for breakfast today.
We are having an extremely mild winter in WI – no snow, and the average temp is like 35 degrees, probably. The lakes are still open. All the municipalities around WI are saving a ton on not having to plow the roads – the figure given for for Madison on the local news last night was something like $300,000. But the private contractors who make a living plowing are laying off their guys and crying – no work.
It just creeps me out. I feel like it means us humans have ruined the climate. And it’s depressing – white snow would be prettier than brown matted grass. One of my facebook friends said she went to a solstice bonfire last week (on 12/21) and wondered if it was some kind of commentary on the state of our civilization – she found herself standing in a large group of people huddled around a fire in the mud.
The other thing that worries me is that because so many municipalities are saving money by not plowing, our governor (image from Michael Duffy) will be able to say that the anti-collective bargaining legislation he passed is working – obviously since us expensive, overpaid, lazy public employees are not doing the work, all these local governments are saving beaucoup bucks. I hope the private businesses who are losing money raise holy hell.
Open Lake Mendota, 12/27/2011
