Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

We ate at Cafe Chloe last night, a tiny French Bistro in San Diego. I ate two dishes from the smaller plates selection: frites with trio of sauces, and scallops with candied squash. The sauces were [basically] ranch, a spicy ketchup, and mustard. The scallops came with not only the cubed, candied squash, but also a little puddle of a creamy squash purée. San Diego. Mark & Martin had the beef – the whole place smelled of it when we came in.

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I started Sunday with a walk – on the cold side, and no one was out but me and the ice fishermen. Since we’ve had such dramatic highs and lows in temperature – on New Year’s eve day, it went up to almost 50°, and then got really windy and dropped to like 17° in about 2 hours – Lake Mendota froze almost clear, and shiny.

Actually just a puddle on my street, but this is what the ice on the lake was like, smooth & shiny

silicon pans

I didn’t go to yoga. I made 101 Cookbooks Heidi’s espresso-banana muffins (see page 38 for the recipe and a picture). I reduced the espresso powder to 2 teaspoons instead of a whole tablespoon, and used pecans instead of walnuts. I made them in my rainbow silicon chocolate lava cakes pans – they didn’t get brown at all on the sides, only the bottoms and the tops. I made cream of root & gourd soup, too – butternut squash, parsnips and rutabaga. So that was dinner, and we watched Hurt Locker. Tough movie.

Today, Monday, back to work.

Came home and made Veganomicon hot sauce glazed tempeh, and ate it with the extra bunch of greens that I didn’t put into the new year’s Hoppin’ John, sauteed, and some of the Hoppin’ John, microwaved. The marinade is mostly hot sauce and lemon juice (I used a lime) and a little oil. I left out the cumin and oregano, only used half the amount of wine, and added a bit of brown sugar. I was feeling pretty out of it – opened the high cabinet over the oven to get the colander for the greens, and 2 plastic containers fell out, narrowly missing the dish of tempeh in its marinade. Put the containers back, closed the cabinet up, forgot to get the colander, so when I opened the cabinet again, the same two containers fell out, and this time they landed in the marinade. I realized I’d only had one cup of coffee all day, so I made more and drank it with my dinner – seemed all the more southern, somehow.

Before

After

The other night some friends (Steve & Heike) came over for dinner. I guess it was still a bit of fallout from having the cookie party on blizzard night – they had not made the party. Last year, the year of the broken thumb for cookie season, Heike was my kitchen manager for the party. She came in and organized – cleanup was almost the hardest part for me, because I had to rubber glove my cast to not get it wet. She was wonderful. She offered to do the same this year, but then illness and school and the weather all conspired against us.

We ate vegetable shepherd’s pie, from Gourmet. It was a bit of a production, the idea being, or the way the recipe was presented in the magazine, was that it’s a full-flavored vegetarian dish that could be the star of Thanksgiving dinner. Somehow I read “seitan” in the recipe, and bought tempeh – soy based fake meat, instead of wheat based. That had to be browned, for starters. You were supposed to make a rich vegetable stock – I used turkey broth from our Thanksgiving bird, that was rich enough to gel in the fridge. There were pearl onions in the stew – I used frozen ones, but if I’d used fresh, they’d have had to be blanched and peeled. Also in the stew: carrots, parsnips, leeks, and cremini mushrooms. And chopped flat-leaf parsley. After sauteeing all the veg, you reduced a whole bottle of red wince down to one cup, then added the stock, thickened it with beurre manie (flour kneaded into soft butter), added all the veg back, and simmered it for another half hour. Topping was mashed potatoes with celeriac – I used what was left from xmas dinner, and added a few more potatoes (I didn’t have anymore celeriac).

The stew was a little too thin, in my opinion, anyways – maybe I didn’t reduce the wine enough. So the shep’s pie was a little messy – overflowed the sides of the baking dish. The recipe said to place it on a baking sheet with 4 sides, though, so maybe the overflow was planned.

We ate the dregs of the cookies for dessert.

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For starters, we walked to Starbucks for coffee. Mark predicted it would be packed and it was, and largely our demographic – mom & dad out for coffee until the kids come back for Christmas. We sat down at a shared table, and when the other person already sitting there raised her head, it was one of my former archive teachers, who’s still at the historical society. We talked about our kids – her daughter’s out in Seattle, where my brother is, and might actually be working at the same community college soon. Rach called, to say she’d just watched the Queen’s Christmas message, with her boyfriend and several members of his family, who are all in England, courtesy Skype – here it is courtesy YouTube.

We walked home, pushed the snow off the walk and driveway, and opened presents with Ethan. I photographed our piles of wrapped loot without the card in the camera, so they’ve disappeared into nothingness.

Then we ate Christmas Kringle, with raspberry filling that I had in the freezer, from 2009 summer’s raspberries, and almond paste, and fruit – bananas & clementines, kiwi from the fruit box that Linda sent me as a cookie thank-you, and Nueskes bacon.

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Since it’s the week before Christmas, I went to work-related holiday parties the last two nights. The first was at the home of two of the younger faculty members in my department, so it was a collection of mostly 30- and 40-something professional people, some in their 20s, a fair number of kids in the 6 – 12 range, a few toddlers, and one 3 1/2 month old baby. There was a smattering of us 50-somethings, and one of the professor’s moms was there, so there was at least one representative of an even older bracket.

Last night, I went to the associate director’s annual cocktail and dessert buffet. She had it earlier in the evening this year; usually it’s really a kind of drinks and desserts party starting around 8:00. This year it started at 5:00, instead. I was the youngster at this gathering, but not by much, a few to 5 to 10 years younger than the others there. The talk was of adult children’s careers, travel, politics, and elderly pets.

I made the leftover artichoke pastry filling into quichettes. I think I have arrived at my perfect quiche crust – 1/2 cup vegetable shortening (I like Earth Balance even though their website is chirping at me as I write), 10 TBLS butter, 3 cups of flour, a pinch of salt unless you used salted butter, and 3 – 4 TBLS cold water. I liked it so well that I decided to line my square loose bottom tart tin with it, and make a bacon & leek quiche for Mark and I to eat after the party.  But I didn’t have enough crust, and I think I almost ruined the tin, by cooking the leaked egg onto it. I left it soaking overnight, and scrubbed it again this morning – seems to be OK now.

Scrubbed tart tin