Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Yesterday I biked to work without even needing gloves. Today is like the third day in a row with highs close to 70 degrees, in November, in Wisconsin. I think maybe this is the year when it’s just not going to get cold at all. What does that do the Wisconsin psyche? We live here because we like cold & snow – we like to ski and make snowballs, and feel hearty. And, if it never gets cold, how will I store the cookies between Thanksgiving & Christmas, if it never gets cold enough to keep the vestibule of my house in the 40s?

And the Republicans want to give back the high speed rail money, and build more roads. Gov-elect Walker’s even talking to US Dept. of Transportation to try to re-purpose the $$ earmarked for rail – personally I think he’s an idiot – but it’s starting to seem like he’s going to get his way. I feel like they’re a bunch of spoiled brats, and us liberals/Dems are like parents – we’ve been trying to say there will be consequences, but they’re getting away with it for now. 60-degrees in November may be lovely, but New York & San Francisco are going to be underwater any minute now.

Tonight is the eve of the annual REAP Pie Palooza. My pies are baked – Greens and Fennel Pie, from The new vegetarian epicure, 8 rectangular ones, that I can’t decide whether to cut into 6 or 8 pieces each. Baked in Janie’s prep bakery – a converted store front on Williamson Street – now that is a hidden kitchen. I successfully foraged at the farmers market for salad greens and cider (and bought some from the co-op, that are local but easier to get the larger quantity from the co-op than the farmers’ stand at the market). So really I should be getting into pjs, and heading off to watch Saturday night live, and getting a good night’s sleep so’s I can get up at 5:30 tomorrow (thanks God for fall back), to serve the pies ….

Guess I will.

So this is the year I didn’t carve a pumpkin. I bought two at the Wednesday farmers market. This morning I noticed that one of them – the $2.25 one that leaned back a little too much – had a few spots on it. I took it over to the other house for Halloween lunch decorations and left it on the front steps afterward.

At about 4:00 I got ready to carve the other one. I set it up on newspaper, and stuck a knife in. The stem came off when I pulled on it, and when I lifted the lid, it was all soup inside. Rotten. I assume because of global climate change – the pumpkin must’ve ripened in September – my CSA had their Pumpkin U-Pick & Gleaning Party way back on Sunday Sept. 26. So my pumpkins must’ve been picked weeks ago – plenty of time to spoil. I took it directly to the compost and came back in and made a paper bag luminaria instead, with cat litter and a candle. Good thing I made lots of Halloween-themed food to make up.

The eyeball cupcakes are a nice plain cake with white frosting and gummy lifesavers for iris and pupil. The punch had hand-shaped ices. The spiders are a King Arthur mix – I’d like to try them with mint chocolate filling. I got a blister on my index finger from splitting licorice Twizzlers into spider legs – I couldn’t find any plain licorice strings. I wish I had photographed the tart before I cut it. I made a vampire blood soup – tomato fennel, pureed smooth for drinking, and a pan of those popcorn and pretzel bars, too, but I didn’t photograph those. I let the caramel get a little darker for the bars, and I think they were better than last time.

It’s been all about using up whatever’s in the fridge, since I got back from Pittsburgh on Sunday.

On Sunday, I made a pasta with roasted vegetables, and a plum tart – used up that pack of RP’s pumpkin tortellini, and the leftover salad greens from School Woods birthday, and the bulb part of 2 butternut squashes, whose necks had been in the squash lasagna that night. Not to mention the bag of prune plums & thawed out round of cookie dough, labelled “cookie dough for tart shells”, in the freezer for almost a year, according to the date on it.

The pain in my back was bad – probably from sitting crunched up in airplanes – and it made me really angry to be not feeling right. But I felt a lot better when I was cooking.

Monday John had to come to Lake Mills, only 30 miles away, for work, so we had breakfast together – cheese omlette and those last two kinda dried out bagels, toasted, with butter, to make up for their aged-ness. I went to the Dr. and discovered that my back pain is a muscle bunch – not a tumor or cancer or any of the horrible stuff I suspected. I get physical therapy in about 10 days now. I went to see Bob Dylan, I biked there, and had bowl of oatmeal – with raisins and brown sugar and a little half & half – for dinner at 10:00 p.m.

On Tuesday, I made a cauliflower gratin from my new Around my French Table book, by Dorrie Greenspan, and some delicata squash rings, cooked in butter and apple cider, that I over caramelized a little. And I left the cheese out of the gratin – and the cauliflower was old enough that although the gratin tasted fine, it left an old cauliflower sulfur smell in the fridge. I threw the cheese on top, and melted it over, but I think it was not quite the same.

On Wednesday I went to see Dikko Faust and Esther Smith of Purgatory Pie Press – I was at Beloit College the same time as both of the book artists in the 1970s; Dikko was a T.A. in my graphics class, and Esther lived in a big house with other artists, where I went to bake bread and for parties from time to time. They were speaking at UW-Madison Libraries because they have a show at Beloit right now, so they were doing a Midwest swing. I came home and ate acorn squash cooked on time bake, with maple syrup and butter, and a little bit of the cauliflower gratin on the side.

On Thursday, I got my new CSA box, and came home and made carrot cake for a private party brunch that was going to happen Saturday, and Bolognese for lasagne, and I’m trying to remember what I ate …Oh, yea it was another edition of my bottom of the vegetable bin stir fry, and a quite good one at that – green beans and carrots and celery and cabbage and a whole jalapeno, so a little bit spicey. Ramen noodles, and I didn’t overcook them. The sauce was lime juice, soy sauce, sesame oil, brown sugar, and one of the 2 packs of ramen noodles’ seasoning packet. Yum. It was even good cold the next day.

Saturday morning I got up in my hotel in downtown Pittsburgh (formerly the Hilton, now … who knows …), and went and retrieved the car from the self-park, to start my day of uncovering the mysteries of Pittsburgh. I lost my ticket, but the maximum was $20 and I was going to have to pay that either way, because the car had been there from 1:30 Friday afternoon, until 8:30 Saturday morning. I got the whole story from the parking lot attendent, Kenny, just another bit of proof that in Pittsburgh, casual acquaintances are immediately ready to tell you their life story. This isn’t a life story, but my fave bit of overheard conversation was Friday morning. I went for a little walk around downtown, to get coffee before my conference and to see what was left. Hornes is a medical building, Kaufmann’s is a Macy’s, and U.S. Steel has sold most of their building to UPMC – University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – so the blood red CorTen steel skyscraper says UPMC instead of steel. ‘Course the Steelers have used U.S. Steel’s original logo since the 1960s.  Anyways, while I was out walking I went past two large, burly, middle-aged guys, and one was asking where a third guy was. The other one said, “He’s back – he’s here”. And the first one said, “Why are you being so mean to me today? You know how sensitive I am.”

I started by driving to Highland Park – I took the Blvd. of the Allies to Oakland, then Forbes to Morewood to Highland – to discover that after all the urban renewal that reconfigured East Liberty when I was a kid, created a big circle, that you weren’t supposed to drive through, they’ve made it even easier to drive through. Where Sears used to be, across from Peabody High School, is a Home Depot. They’re building a new Target on what used to be Penn Circle, across from the Shakespeare St. Giant Eagle, and there’s a Trader Joes and a Staples on Penn, and National Biscuit Company is now Bakers Square – empty but fixed up to be offices and retail. Some book I read set in Pittsburgh talked about the warm bread and cookies smell from NBC – that’s what I remember from late nights out walking in Shadyside and Point Breeze when I lived there.

I parked in the Park, walked around the reservoir – what struck me the most was the restored stairs – they were always crumbling and pitted from acid rain when I was a kid – and even up to the 1990s. I walked through the neighborhood  to my parents’ house, and looped back to the park on Highland Ave. by way of a coffee bar that’s where Marcus Pharmacy used to be. I crossed the Allegheny on the Highland Park Bridge – it’s all fencing now, no more green leafy railings – and went to my mom’s favorite Deli, Labriola’s, and then to the Waterworks Mall wine store.

I headed back over the bridge – and don’t know what was going on; maybe the Halloween party at the zoo? but the traffic was all backed up, so I took Washington Blvd. back to East Liberty, and then headed to Point Breeze, to Homewood Cemetery to visit my parents’ grave – more on that in the next post. Then lunch with a guy I knew in high school – like he said we went to different high schools together. And our families went skiing at the same small resort, Hidden Valley, outside of Pittsburgh.

I went to Oakland to see the Steelers show at CMU – and then I walked down Flagstaff hill, and decided that the tiles my dad bought for my kids at Phipps Conservatory were inside a paid part, so I didn’t go in to take a picture of them. Back through Oakland a bit more, past the original Carnegie Library, decided it was too late to go into the art museum, but I browsed earrings at the gift shop a bit. I drove to Squirrel Hill, and sat in a Starbucks and uploaded my iPhone pictures until it was time to go visit Isaac & Anna on Polish Hill. My last Pittsburgh adventure was driving down Herron Hill to Liberty to go back downtown to the hotel via Liberty Ave. – almost the strip district.

It was so emotional being there – it seemed like every spot was so packed with memories of my parents, and me & my brother as little kids and teenagers, my (now grown) kids as little kids… I’m exhausted. And I didn’t sleep all that well in my 4 nights at the no-name hotel.