Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Lots of pumpkin and orange fall-y foods – Autumn vegetable hash with eggs baked on top, squash challah – but the hits of the day were the bacon & cheese pull-apart bread, and the pumpkin sticky pudding. I got the bacon bread recipe from taste of home – but instead of using purchased bread dough, I used my own standard pizza dough – 3/4 cup water, 1/2 – 3/4 tsp. active dry yeast, 1 tsp. salt, 1 tsp sugar, (optional 1 TBLS olive oil – I left it out here because I figured there’d be plenty of oil in the bacon & cheese) , 1 1/2 cups flour, mix and knead in the mixer for 3 mins. or by hand until smooth and elastic (about 8 minutes …) and let rise in the fridge for 4 – 8 hours. I also omitted the packet of ranch dressing mix. Next time I make it, I think I’ll add some red pepper flakes, so it’ll be even more like the famous Stella’s Hot Spicy Cheese Bread, but with bacon. I thought I got the pumpkin sticky pudding from Epicurious, but it doesn’t seem to be there, so seems to me I’ll have to post it myself.

I had a nice birthday party for School Woods on Friday. I’ve been serving meals there for 5 years. It was an after work cocktail party, stand-up, nibbles and sips. I made:

• Crostini with goat cheese, slow-roasted tomato, & pickled onion – homemade baguettes, and I used Heidi’s technique of pouring the oil (or butter) into a bowl and tossing the bread slices in and mixing it all up – more effective than brushing or spraying or drizzling the oil onto the bread – but I used a touch too much oil. Homemade slow-roasted tomatoes, too, and the pickled onions were a dark magenta hue I’d not seen before, tho it’s a recipe I’ve made many times. And I mixed the goat cheese with a dash of honey. I didn’t make the white bean crostini – so now I have a yogurt bucket of cooked white beans to use or freeze.
• Chicken salad with apples and walnuts – white meat chicken, toasted nuts and one giant, local Delicious apple. I didn’t make the crispy wonton cups to put the chicken in – it ended up being a chunky salad so it woulda been a pain to stuff into the cups. Instead, I made chicken salad canapes – the salad, mounded on buttered bread – and also put out a bowl of the chicken salad for people to eat however they wanted.
• I bought Carr Valley Mobay and Marieka Gouda with Fenugreek and Farmer John’s Asaiago and smoked Gouda – which was the crowd pleaser – more of that eaten than any of the others. I put the cheese out with crackers and fresh figs and pears and olive tapende (made by whirring up all old olives from the fridge with a small jar of purchased). There was also Jacque Pepin’s cheese spread – all the cheese ends, also whirred up in the processor, with butter. This one had some bleu, some cranberry cheddar, some orange cheddar, and some Parmesan.
• Vegetables and chips and dips. Dill dip, because I got a lovely bunch of fresh dill at the Wednesday market. Edamame hummus from the newest Martha, quite tasty – but a little pasty and thick because I cut back on the large amount of water called for, since, naturally, I thought it was one of those Martha tricks to insure that no one can make her food as good as her – but in fact somewheres in between the 1/3 cup I used and the 3/4 cup she said to use would be right. With blanched broccoli, beauty heart radishes, and carrot sticks. And a big bowl of these pickled veggies from Saveur – I left out the zucchini, and only used 1 jalapeno, but it was still a gigantic batch. I’ll be eating them for lunch all week.
• Cocktail meatballs & tofu balls – the standard Heinz chili sauce meatball recipe, using red currant jam and the last of a bottle of siracha along with the chili sauce, instead of the canned cranberry sauce or grape jelly (and packaged meatballs) specified in the original. The tofu balls are Mollie Katzen, from the Enchanted Broccoli Forest – I put them out with a bottled BBQ sauce, but, me, I preferred the fu balls dipped in the sauce from the meatballs.
• Sweets – mini pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, Heidi’s chocolate truffle cake made into cups which had to licked (or spooned out) and Dori’s jammers, a la me.

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So, probably the funnest thing was Terese brought Janie, and these two women are my Ovens of Brittany cronies – friends from my years of restaurant work, 20+ years ago. Friday morning, I went for a walk with Rach, and she peeled off early, so I was doing the long last leg of the walk on my own. I ran into one of John’s friends from high school, Sam, unlocking his bike in front of his parents house – he has his own apartment, shared with a girlfriend downtown, but said he comes to his folks’s when he wants to study. Sam ate lunch at my house almost every day for four years in high school. So, anyways, Sam said he works at the Greenbush Bar, owned by another of my Ovens of Brittany pals, Anna. I said I used to work with his boss, Anna, and Sam replied, “oh yeah, the desserts at Greenbush are kinda like the stuff I used to eat at your house.”

On Saturday, I had scrambled eggs with tomatoes, onions & goat cheese from the crostini and broccoli, leftover from being a dip veggie.

On Saturday, I had breakfast quesadillas – I made an egg pancake with cubes of roasted squash (leftover from last Wednesday’s pizza) and onions sauteed with a dash of smoked paprika, then grilled it inside flour tortillas with some cheese. Eaten with sour cream & salsa – but the pictures with the condiments didn’t look as good as these plain ones.

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On Sunday I made ramen salad with all the shreddable veggies in the bin – bok choy, peeled broccoli stems, kohlrabi, beet greens. Kind of a very dark green and crunchy ramen salad. And butternut squash soup, from my favorite Cook’s Illustrated recipe, where you cook shallots in butter, add the seeds and scraping from the squash, add water, and then steam the rest of the squash over that mix for instant, special stock for the soup.

We went to see 50/50 – good movie but probably not the greatest for me to see – now I’m sure all my aches & pains are cancer. It’s been a really bad fall for allergies and sinus – I’ve had sore glands in my neck and those shooty pains in the back of my head like all the time. But what’s really been worrying me is when I walk I’ve been getting aches in my groin – like I have cervical cancer or something – or something – a cold, waay more likely.

Speaking of walking – I still can’t get my instagrams to post directly to Tumblr, but I figured a kludgey indirect way.

And the brewer game still totally sucked.

Mark’s dad died last Friday, and we got back from the funeral in North Carolina at about 10:00 p.m. last night. That’s why I was writing and obliterating my leek tart post in the Orlando airport on Sunday – we were on our way to NC. Had to get up at 3:45 a.m. on Sunday to drive to Milwaukee for a 7:00 a.m. flight – that’s not even Oh my effing God – 3:45 is just ouch. I am not recovered from the trip yet – first getting up too early, then I had a little too much wine on Sunday night. There was a big crowd at dinner and Mark’s brother Gregg, who knows a good bit about wine, got two bottles of a nice red, then there were another two bottles of an even better red back at their room. Such bad form – note to self – not supposed to get too drunk when attending father-in-law’s funeral to support your spouse. Poorly done. Not about you …. And now I’ve got a cold.

I didn’t take a single picture of North Carolina food. My last food shot was Sunday breakfast in the Orlando airport.

We had a few good meals – Sunday night was Bonefish, which I think is a limited chain. I had swordfish and pumpkin ravioli, before I drank too much red wine. Monday after the funeral, and after a lot of the family went home, we went to a place called Ironwood Cafe. Also nice – I had ribs and sweet potato fries and haricot verts – tasty but heavy. I broke my water glass while Gregg & Jean were eating dessert and I was drinking a cup of lemon tea to try to settle my stomach – splashed water all over Mark & Ethan, broke the stem off the glass. Tuesday was the lawyer, lunch at a Panera, and another 9 hours of travel. Meals – half a mozzarella panini & tomato soup at the Panera, scone from Starbucks, and ice cream from Baskin-Robbins in the BWI airpot – shoulda been good but there were too many ice chips in the ice cream.

Today back to work and a 9:00 a.m. meeting, and a 2:00 to 4:30 class. I am sooo out of it.

But maybe it’s not just me – I made pizza for dinner, and Instagram and Tumblr don’t seem to be talking to each other – here’s the pix tho –

Plain tomato pizza

Goat cheese, squash and caramelized onion pizza

Arugula & prosciutto pizza, with goat cheese, squash and caramelized onion at the back

We have an AFS student this school year, a 17-year Italian girl. As I’ve alluded to in past posts, she’s a bit like me at 17 – persnickety about food, because she wants to control what she’s putting in her mouth. Like Mark, she’s not a hearty eater to gobble up whatever I cook. (It’s also looking like she’ll be leaving us – she’s asked to be placed with another family. I know it’s not because of the food – she wants to live with a family with more kids at home. Kinda hurts my feelings, but that’s all for some other kind of blog – we’ll stick to food here.)

Anyways, last night I made steak fajitas – I had a two-pound piece of flank steak that I marinated in cumin & garlic & lemon juice, and loads of peppers from my CSA – little orange ones, one reddish-orange bell, 1 long green frying pepper. Our student didn’t want to eat, so I cut the piece of steak in half, and froze one of the halfs. Then I broiled the rest under the broiler, and Mark and I ate it rolled up in flour tortillas with the peppers sauteed with some purple onion. With rice cooked in homemade veggie broth from Friday on the side. I was extra decadent and put a little butter on my rice.

Tonight I was going to make tomato tart, but again it seemed like I’d not have too many eaters, so instead I made some tabouli, using up the last few good leaves off a bunch of fresh mint that was lurking in the vegetable drawer, and a bunch of parsley I bought on Sunday when I had a vague notion of turning the flank steak into braciole. And one of the tomatoes that would’ve gone into the tart. And half a box of tofu, also found lurking the fridge, cut into little cubes and crisped up in a skillet in oil, and soy sauce and a sprinkle of brown sugar – Mark said the Italian girl wanted tofu, but I think he might’ve misunderstood. I ate the tabouli on a bed of greens, mostly a really peppery arugula, with a small roast beef sandwich on the side – even though it seems an odd side for tabouli – made from that too dry challah, and leftover flank steak.

Now I have a free form plum tart in the oven, made according to my own recipe for a peach version – pictures forthcoming.

Tabouli on a bed of argula

Roast beef sandwich on Rosh Hashanah challah

Plum tart