If you consider summer to be “between the days” – memorial and labor – then yesterday was the last grill out of the summer.
slow roast beef with chile rub, roasted green beans & tomatoes, ear of corn
I ate the corn cut off the last ear on top of tabouli for lunch on Tuesday, then finished the green beans with a hard boiled egg yesterday.
The schizoid-ness of two computers with almost the same identities on my desk
It’s early afternoon on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend – meaning we still have another day off. I woke up at 6:30, (well, after waking at 2:00 and at 5:10 or so to feed the cats) and went back to sleep until 7:12, instead of lying awake worrying like I have the last few days. And delicious sleep it was, too. Heaven – Heaven, by Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians.
Rach and I went for a leisurely walk. I came back and baked a banana chocolate chip coffee cake. I’ve been getting kind of sick of banana bread, (while liking the Orangette recipe I’ve using, leaving out the chocolate & ginger; last time I made it with walnuts & coconut. Seems like the bananas get overripe quick this summer) and this recipe sounded good. I finally had time to take a long shower and wash my hair – instead of the quick rinse, keep the hair dry kind of shower, while the cake was in the oven. And I did my poor woman’s pedicure: shave the legs, wash the feet with this mint & walnut shell exfoliating soap, clip the toenails, lotion. I was thinking about painting my toenails, too, and had let them get a little long, but clipping seemed the better choice.
The banana cake was from an Epicurious recipe – the kind where people were fighting bitterly; comments ranging from “our favorite cake” to “Yuck, waaay too sweet”. I did think it had a lot of sugar – 2/3 cup brown in the topping, and 3/4 cup white in the cake – I cut it to 1/3 brown for the topping, and 1/2 granulated in the cake itself. I used less chocolate chips too – and if I make it again, I am going use even less chocolate – to let the banana take over more.
Yesterday I had time to go take pictures of this wild orange fungus growing on a hillside next to a street in the neighborhood – proof positive that Wisconsin has been a rain forest this summer. Earlier one of the farmers at the market, who had two small baskets of artichokes at his stand, said they’d been a crop failure this year. It’s been too hot and wet in Wisconsin for artichokes, which are thistles after all, used to growing on stony mountainsides in Italy.
Now I am sitting at my computer listening to my cats snore behind me. This is probably the last post from the old iMac – another 3-day weekend task is to set up the new one, that’s sitting in the box a few feet away, and package up the old one to ship off to be recycled. Also, pesto-ify the 2 bunches of basil that are sitting in the basement fridge, roast peppers, and turn the bulghur wheat marinating in olive & lemon into tabouli. If I don’t just curl up on the couch with cats myself, and my current library book, which is getting interesting, BTW. But, hey 3-day weekend – I just might have time for all of that.
My brother wrote a post of the same title a few days ago, listing his accomplishments, or at least what he did, for this summer, so I thought I would follow suit.
Initially, because I got a musk melon instead of watermelon in my CSA box – and the farmers I buy from, Tipi Produce, grow really good watermelons. But they sell to Willy Street, too, so I bought a chunk of one of their watermelons at the co-op and it’s in the fridge waiting to be eaten.
And now it’s turned into Sunday evening of a weekend when I did a fair amount of cooking: corn salsa, and sausage-egga-english muffins, and rosemary fried potatoes for Sunday breakfast, and caponata, and a long-rise no knead oatmeal bread, and a gratin of mixed summer & fall vegetables; potatoes, tomatoes, purple onions – but only one picture to show for it. I made pie dough, but no pie. Maybe I’ll get around to writing up some of the recipes, later on.
It was just kind of a poop out weekend – we didn’t go to the Orton Park Fest nor see any bands; we didn’t go to a movie. We DID go to Ride the Drive – but we only did one loop.
Just disappointing, overall.
Last year after Ride the Drive, I went up to Minnesota to help Al move. This year we’re leaving Monday morning, instead. Plus Al’s so grown up – I don’t need to rent a big vehicle to hold all his stuff overnight – I’m just helping him throw out the old furniture he doesn’t want – like the $10 dorm desk from UW’s university surplus – and giving him $$ to go to IKEA. I made a lot of food to take last year – this year the caponata is coming with me, and a hunk of Framer John’s Asiago.
These are yellow ones; they'd sent me one of these a few weeks ago, and I really wanted red
Potato-tomato gratin, with lemon & olives
So everybody’s in the band – when they got up to play all the tables of people who’d been chatting cleared out and hit the stage.
Carson's Dad (Greg Smith) on reeds; Daithi Wolfe - fiddle; Kia Karlen - accordion
posted from my iPhone
… just too short. I had 4 days of actual vacation this weekend. I only answered a few work emails. And I even took some pictures of food. I knew it had been awhile because when I opened the images in Photoshop, the most recent on the card before this weekend were dated July 26.
Thursday: I got up and made a big fruit salad with watermelon, from my CSA box, and plucots and grapes and pineapple, and then biked to the library and the hardware store. Came back and ate blueberry pancakes (from the freezer) with bacon and fruit salad for breakfast. Ethan had a soccer game on the East side so we decided to save car trips and drive there together- I would loop back and unload the dishwasher at School Woods and tidy up while Mark watched the game – then back west for a movie. It didn’t quite work. The kids needed a ride home from the game, and the traffic was really bad, and we read the movie listings sort of wrong – there was no 7:05 movie that we missed, but there was a 7:45 we could make. Plus our stomach clocks were off – I hadn’t eaten since my big breakfast at noon, and Mark had made some of the leftover bacon into a sandwich at 3:00 – so he was OK with a 7:45 movie and dinner after, but I wasn’t. So I ate scraps for dinner – salami and toast and Jarlsberg and red licorice. We went to see Inception and then finished the pie for dessert.
Friday: a lazier day – another bike over to the east side, Willy Street for groceries, and this time I stopped for coffee and a bear claw. Worked more on converting old School Woods to Word Press, and then the height of decadence, a movie at 4:20 – The kids are all right, which I think I liked better than Inception. I made corn & barbecue sauce topped pizza for dinner.
Saturday: Kids started showing up, first Al, then John. Took Al, who had been phoneless since he jumped in the lake with his iPhone in his pocket in June, to the Apple Store to get his iPhone 4. Which started a series struggles trying to get it to connect with his MacBook, that needed a system upgrade. We had corn and black bean salad in front of the Emma Thompson, High Grant, Ang Lee Sense & Sensibility for dinner, meanwhile continually trying to get the new OS to install on Al’s computer.
Sunday: On Sunday Rach and I walked and got caught up – we say we’re not seeing each other enough when her number goes out of the recents in my phone – she’d been gone from there for over a week! I stopped by the bagel place, and we had a true Shapiro family Sunday brunch – bagels and cream cheese and sliced tomatoes, and scrambled eggs and bacon. John showed up just in time for his everything bagel. Al made a bacon sandwich with his. Then back to the Apple Store for John’s new iPhone, and for help from the genius bar with installing OS 10.6+ on Al’s machine. Our Apple sales dudes were night & day – Al’s was just “sure, cool, let’s do that” – John’s was all about overly explaining everything in a smarmy way. We had a few minor and not so minor crises – John couldn’t remember his IMAP mail password, but once he restored his new phone from his old phone backup, all was well. Al’s machine needed yet more upgrades that had to download from Apple before his computer’d recognize the new iPhone – Al suffered a brief meltdown – the stress of being phoneless for so long, and the new one not working – but once the download finished all Al’s stuff worked, too. I wanted to grill, and so did Al – and he kind of took over, which was fine – we had brats, burgers, salmon, shrimp, sausages, and a lobster tail. Al grilled it all. The kids hung in the driveway, and John and I sat on the couch to eat inside, with me jumping up to pull non-recyclables out of the recycle, and wipe counters, and remove food from where cats could get it, and generally help Al’s friends, even though John kept telling me to stop it. Everyone was gone and all cleaned up before 9:00 – so I watched the last 10 minutes of vampires with Mark, and waited for it to come around again at 10:30 for the whole show.
There was this container of cooked brown rice sitting in the fridge forever, and I was itching to use it up. I tried on a few tentative plans for it for size, but they were all falling into the category of when you buy $20 of additional ingredients to use up 97 cents of leftover food. The compost was starting to look like the best option. Finally, on Monday I got home from a contentious meeting on whether the food co-op should build another driveway, and turned it into sweet sour brown rice with mushrooms and cashews. This is based on a recipe of Mollie Katzen’s. In the original Enchanted Broccoli Forest (1982), she had a recipe for sweet & sour tofu with mushroom and cashews. The sauce was made out of lemon juice, soy sauce, tomato paste and honey, seasoned with ginger and garlic. To me, the combo was somehow especially delicious, and it was something my kids (who didn’t come along until later in the ’80s, 1987 & 1988) would eat, too. In the rewrite (2000), Mollie changed the recipe all around, to include pineapple and oranges – I have never tried it – it might be equally delicious – but doesn’t have the appeal to me of the old version, so I’ve had to keep my old, cover detached copy of the book.
Sweet & Sour Brown Rice with Mushrooms and Cashews
For the sauce, whisk together the lemon juice, soy sauce, water, honey and tomato paste in a small bowl and set aside. Pour the oil into a wide skillet and heat. Add the onion, garlic, and ginger, salt them, and stir fry until softened. Add the carrots, and cook them until they’re softened, and then add the mushrooms. Mix all together and cook for a few minutes until the vegetables are releasing their juices. Add the rice, mix again, and then make a well in the center and add the sauce. Mix well, and cook until the rice has soaked up the sauce and everything is nicely combined. You can cover it for a few minutes if you like – you can cover it earlier to help the carrots get done, too. Add the cashews, mix well, and eat.
Be sure to really mince (or grate) the ginger – I was in too much of a hurry to chop it small enough, and biting into those big ginger pieces is not fun – that’s what those bits on the side of my empty bowl are – picked out ginger.
When I was a kid, the family tradition was that the big parties with lots of kids and presents and cake and laser tag and video games stopped when you were 11 or 12, and after that everyone in the family got the same thing: dinner and a movie – a grown-up birthday.
This year, I think I had an especially grown-up birthday.
We slept in, then debated whether to ride to the east side for breakfast or walk to a closer place. We opted for biking. We chose the route that goes behind Camp Randall Stadium, UW’s football arena, that is named after an actual Civil War camp, and under the stone “Camp Randall” arch that is one of the last 19th century remnants (there’s a canon and wooden hut, too). As we rode under the arch to stop at a traffic light, one of the brake cables on Mark’s bike snapped. No matter, it’s his clunker bike that has coaster brakes, too, so we pushed on. But then, a few blocks further, with a great hissing noise, I got a flat. Happily we were just a short way to walk our bikes to the repair place, and then just a little further to go – back into the shadows of he stadium – to get to Micky’s Dairy Bar. So we dropped our bikes and went and ate.
We went about the rest of our day, and got our bikes back later in the afternoon.
For dinner we went out to the summer camp where Mark’s son is working, and ate quesadilla’s from Pasqual’s and watched the kids perform. Camp Shalom is a day camp with three 3-week sessions every summer, and on the Wednesday of the last week, the kids invite the parents out for dinner, and see the show, then the older kids sleep over, have a short day Thursday, and no camp Friday. My first foster daughter, Kaylah, and her girlfriend Kendra, are also counselors there this summer. Kendra’s b-day is a few days after mine, so I got lots of birthday hugs. we cane home and ate peach-blueberry cobbler that I had made the night before – it was just as good as it had been warm. It was a Thomas Keller recipe – I just used peaches and blueberries instead of all berries.
The real birthday dinner came Friday night, when we drove down to Milwaukee to Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro to have dinner with John & Megan, and see their new apartment and kitties. Oh, and Mark got me a cookbook I already had – but John got me one that I didn’t.
So a little over a week ago, I was complaining that my office is in the midst of construction hell, but I didn’t have the pictures. Here they are.
