Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Last weekend I was in San Diego for the grocery co-op conference. I got back, and now we’re leaving again for the librarians’ conference in New Orleans. Yesterday I took in Rach’s orphan produce ‘cuz she’s traveling a lot too – we had a smoothie made from her strawberries & a banana for breakfast this morning – and I froze the rest of the bananas. Tonight I’m trying to use or preserve the rest of what’s in the fridge. Mark picked up my CSA box last Thursday, and he & Ethan ate the strawberries that came in it. But the farmers’ market was “a blizzard of strawberries” according to Mark – I’m going to freeze the strawbs he got there. I made a big stir fry the other night, that was pretty good, asparagus, sugar snaps, carrots, squash, red onion, daikon radish, dried shitakes, mustard greens – but I didn’t quite get all the grit out of the asparagus. I picked all the mushrooms and sugar snaps out and ate them cold for an after-work snack. Now I need to go figure out what to do with chard, the remaining mustard greens, several types of lettuce and 2 summer squash – I think much if it will be going into veggie stock – and the last of that stir fry can probably get stocked, too.

I ended up having a salad with the oldest lettuce, some red romaine, topped with tuna and egg and I kept adding stuff – almonds & grated Parmesan, salt & pepper. That leaves two bunches in the fridge, to keep till next week. Sometimes it seems like if the lettuce is a bunch or a whole head, it keeps best if rather than washing it, you keep it intact – the outer leaves wilt & die, but they protect those nice tender core leaves that you can eat for a salad later on. I took the veggie drawers out of the fridge to wipe out as I emptied them and I thought I wasn’t going to get them back in. I had to take out the glass shelf that sits on top of the drawers, and the glass dropped out, but thankfully it didn’t break. I think/hope I got the fridge put back together right, now. I blanched the chard & mustard greens – they’ll probably wind up in a pasta, also next week. And I made a big batch of veggie stock, with parsley and a bunch of oregano, and baby carrots, and garlic scapes, and not sure what all else – smells good. I composted the gritty stirfry. Now I want ice cream with chocolate sauce.

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So after just being here in January, I’m back in San Diego again. In January I was here for the librarians conference – this time it’s food cooperatives. One nice thing is that in contrast to ALA, CCMA is small enough to fit into one hotel, in this case the Hard Rock – the picture is the space age chair in my room. It means less walking around in San Diego’s Gaslamp District, that I – and my brother – feel is similar to New Orlean’s Bourbon St.; not all that good for a walk unless you want to party. Where I’ll be next week.

Tonight for dinner I made two of the recipes from Heidi Swanson’s new cookbook, Super Natural Every Day. One of them I liked in principle; the other I plain old liked.

The one I liked in principle was the Spinach Chop. This is blanched and chopped greens cooked briefly with olive oil and garlic, and then harissa (North African chile paste), chopped hard boiled eggs, and toasted almonds. What’s not to like? I used a combination of escarole, and already blanched spinach from my last CSA box.  I couldn’t find harissa to buy at Whole Foods, and didn’t want to bother with making my own (it’s not hard, but it’s really one of those things you need to make in advance and just have sitting in a jar in the back of the fridge), so I bought a jar of Asian chile-garlic paste, and used that – and left out the fresh garlic. I had a bag of toasted sliced almonds leftover from the trapeze artists’ wedding – at which they were a salad topping – so I used those instead of slivered. The resulting dish was pretty good. Not as perky looking as Heidi’s, and I think the Asian chile-garlic paste has fish sauce lurking in it, so in combination with the spinach, not as fresh tasting as freshly sauteed garlic & harissa would be. And slivered almonds would be crunchier. Still, good in principle, and possibly applicable in principle to the CSA box cooking class I’m teaching on the 30th. I mean, all we’re getting in the boxes is greens – here’s what was in the last two boxes:

The recipe I really liked was the yogurt biscuits. Heidi recommends a combination of white whole wheat & spelt flour; I used unbleached white,  and 1/4 cup each whole wheat and rye. When I opened the lid of the carton of plain yogurt I wanted to use up in the biscuits, it was getting moldy – so I scraped off, and used what I could, and used sour cream to get to the 1 1/2 cups needed. Heidi has a patting out and cutting in half and stacking method to make flakey layers in the biscuits, and you get one-dozen square biscuits, no wasted edges. I used salted butter and forgot to leave out the salt – but they were still really good biscuits, even salty.

Pretty good dinner, especially with the addition of several handfuls of chocolate cheerios for dessert, although the waist of my skirt is feeling kinda tight now.

Spinach chop & a biscuit

God damn it. I’ve been trying to move my word press blogs to a new host, and that’s a scarey frustrating process. I’m on staycation, trying to clean and organize, and that’s a process that generally starts with high aspirations – I’m going to get everything just perfect – and then fails miserably. I’m just moving crap from one place to another, namely from the floor of John’s old bedroom to the basement. There have been a few truly horrifying things. I knew that when we moved John out of his dorm room at MIAD we just put everything in boxes and carried it out, whether it was trash or not. I just discovered that we actually moved empty liquor bottles back from Milwaukee to Madison. John was still underage in the spring of 2006, and they were concealed in a CD rack box. Taking all his old punk band flyers down off the walls is a lot more fun. Fun Rod, Chauvenists, Rushmore & the 40s! yeah.

And speaking of the basement, the dehumidifier’s stopped working – I think it’s at least 6 or 7 years old – a.k.a. out of warranty. A new one is going to cost close to $200, I think. Shit. So it’s made me feel bad about carting more stuff down there but c’est la vie.

I’m doing pretty good at using up all the Memorial Day food, and my CSA box – Monday I made radish leaf pesto. Tonight I made a pasta with caramelized onions, the last of the white cheese blend I had made for the apps for Davy’s going away – mascarpone, goat & cream cheese – the radish pesto, and the last three green onions from the bunch i bought at the Saturday market, Oh and some chicken breast meat I  had thawed and roasted yesterday. I think at least that combo worked, as did the cat’s usual attempts to jump up and lick whatever she could get of the luscious cheese, meat & noodles.

Radish leaf pesto pasta