Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Today I emptied everything – bucket after bucket (washed out quart yogurt containers and cottage cheese tubs) of veggie broth and chicken stock and pesto and pie cherries and corn and rhubarb puree, ziploc bags of blueberries and peaches and cranberries, a few hunks of meat – a pork roast – a bag of shrimp, miscellaneous breads and rolls, some home made, some store bought, a pound of bacon, a pound of breakfast sausage, and two and half packs of hotdogs – from the downstairs upright freezer into the freezers of the three fridges in the house: the extra one in the basement, mine on the first floor, and mom’s/Mark’s on the 2nd, so that I could defrost the freezer.

All the ice melted remarkably fast – I did the unloading at about noon, and it was all thawed by 3:30. I sopped up the freezer with towels, and then went off to volunteer with United Wisconsin. That was also interesting in its own way. We were stationed just outside the Taste of Madison – as a political group we couldn’t be really at the event. It rained pretty hard most of the two and a half hours I was there, but there were a lot of people walking around the square drinking beer and wine and sampling the wares of local restaurants. And most all the people we talked to were Recall Walker supporters, too – only heard from 2 or 3 that said they like the guy.

Got home with that feeling like my toes were shriveled inside my shoes from being out in the rain for so long, put some Spanish rice in the oven (it came out a little bland), and reloaded the now-cold-again freezer. Used a laundry basket to carry everything back where it belonged. Then we had quesadillas (made from fresh corn and zucchini calabacitas) and the rice for supper. After all the lugging and protesting I was pretty tired so I soaked in the bathtub for about 20 minutes. I feel pretty rejuvenated now, but I still have to tackle the dinner dishes.

We are going to have an AFS student this school year, a 17-year old Italian girl. We picked her up yesterday afternoon. I made some dinner for us – pasta with a fresh tomato sauce, and cucumber sour cream salad. Nothing came out quite the way I wanted it to. The basil in the pasta wilted and turned the color of cooked spinach. Somehow the sour cream dressing for the cucumber salad was filled with tiny bubbles – almost foamy. I also made a tart with apricots from the farmers market that had gotten a little bruised on the way home, and I ended up stuffing in some of cute little donut peaches we’d also bought at the market. All in an effort to cover up the lurid green of the almond-PISTACHIO frangipane. Shoulda known. I think it will taste good, but it looks awful:

Ugly apricot peach almond pistachio frangipane tart

Over dinner, Mark and I told the Italian girl about the Julia Child, and how she said “never apologize” for your cooking  – it only makes the people who are eating your food think maybe something really is wrong. Actually, on the page attached, which is p. 90 from Julia’s posthumous autobiography, My Life in France she amplifies: not only never apologize, if the food is truly vile, you must bear it with a smile – and learn from your mistakes. Most of the time, the food is not truly vile. Usually, it’s pretty good, it’s just not exactly what you, the cook, had in mind.

Yesterday it rained all morning, my legs were unshaven, and I had an early morning meeting so I did a bunch of things I rarely do: I wore pants, and I drove.

I think I actually accomplished pretty much at work, but it was stuff like trying to edit the departmental website through the content management system and cleaning out email and playing phone catch-up – unsatisfying and frustrating. Plus “the drilling in the walls kept up and no one seemed to pay it any mind” [Bob Dylan, Lilly Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts], except it gave me a headache. They’re doing whatever the equivalent of tuckpointing is for this 1970s brutalist style building where I work. The pants were kinda tight; not bad for standing and sitting, but any amount of walking caused them to give me a wedgie. While driving, I had an inspiration to take a bubble bath and shave my legs, but I got distracted from that idea by the I got home tired and cranky and headachy.

I ended up taking the car for a few errands – tho I should have biked – and decided that what I really wanted for dinner was a hot dog – not a gourmet dog, just an Oscar Mayer regular hot dog – of which I had two packs in the freezer. With sweet pickle relish and Durkee sauce. So I got half a pack out to thaw, and made my last errand a stop at the grocery store for the relish, and had the perfect hot dog for dinner.

Hot dogs cooked in the micro with just a little water, so theyre almost roasted - the way I used to make them for my kids when they were little

Today would be my parents 60th wedding anniversary if either of them was still around. They didn’t make 50 years, even, since my Dad died a couple of months after their 47th anniversary in 1998. I liked it when Clinton was president and my parents were alive because I’d usually hear on the news one way or another that it was Clinton’s birthday, and that served as my reminder to call my folks and say, “Happy Anniversary”. Actually I liked a lot about those times in the early 1990s when Clinton was president and my parents were still alive, but it would take this whole post to list those things here, and that’s not exactly what I had in mind today. And I’d probably get all weepy and nostalgic partway through.

This morning I remembered my parents’ anniversary as soon as the public radio guy said, “It’s August 19th”; they didn’t mention Bill until the next news break. I’d rather celebrate my parents. Even though Bill’s birthday has been quite handy for me as a memory device over the years, I kind of feel like he killed Ahmet Ertegun – or had a hand in his death anyways. Ahmet died as a result of head injuries sustained back stage at a Rolling Stones concert. Martin Scorsese filmed it for his documentary, Shine A Light – the Stones playing, not Ahmet falling. It was kind of a faux show, for the purposes of the movie, and a benefit for Bill’s Clinton Foundation. Limited admittance, star-studded attendees. I read someplace that the invites promoted it as Bill’s 60th birthday party, even though the concerts were in late October and Bill had been 60 since August. Still I don’t want to be down on Bill – just like I’m not saying word one against Obama – Bill was probably the best president the US has had in my life time, save JFK – and since Kennedy got shot after only two years in office, who knows how things really would have turned out had he served longer.

Art I made about my parents' wedding - screen prints of their wedding photos printed on cloth, patchworked and stuffed to stand up in a box

I had a nice little day after birthday party last night, but I took no pictures at all. I meant to … Even though I’ve always been a birthday pie kinda girl – as is my entire family, boys and girls and even the married-ins – I wanted cake this year, so I baked myself a birthday cake, spice cake with raspberry filling and cream cheese frosting. The part that didn’t get eaten last night is depicted below (not to mention – because I am mentioning – I got a nice fingerful of frosting off the cover when I went up to shoot the leftover cake).

We also ate:

• baked Brie, wrapped in puff paste with a layer of American Spoon tomato jam
• goat cheese with sundried tomato pesto
• do-it-yourself smoked salmon canapes – cocktail rye, cucumbers, the smoked salmon (one hunk brought as a host gift by a visiting friend from Seattle; another hunk I let Costco bring from Seattle), and horseradish cream
• Aged Gouda to put on crackers with pickled onions and peppadews
• muskmelon from my CSA box cut in wedges
• $25 worth of chocolate from Trader Schmoes – Toblerone, chocolate covered ginger and chocolate covered cherries, and chocolate-raspberry sticks
• fresh corn salsa layered dip – the salsa, refried beans, and sour cream – I liked the corn salsa a lot more without the overly cumin-seasoned canned refried beans – good thing everyone ate up the layered dip, and there’s still a while bucket of plain salsa leftover.
• Little ham & jaarlsberg sandwiches on sliced pretzel rolls – ate my first pretzel roll at the State Fair Wednesday, with a Usinger’s sausage in it, and then voila, Sentry had the rolls by the box on Friday morning

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