Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

I get tweets from Heidi Swanson when she posts a new recipe at 101 Cookbooks. I got this one Tuesday evening while I was at the Willy Street Co-op for a Board of Director’s meeting, so I could easily pick up a box of tofu – and I had some cold cooked asparagus, and a few stems of broccoli, with some florets still attached in the fridge, all leftover from the dip veggies for Erika Lukas party last Saturday. (here’s what I made)

I fried the tofu, with soy sauce & brown sugar, the way I do for peanut noodles – it’s a method I got from Deborah Madison. The dressing for the salad is miso, sugar, and Mirin & sake – so almost all sweet. When I tossed the salad together I added some rice vinegar to cut the sweet. Then I decided to put the salad over some rice noodles. The last time I made these – you soak them in hot water and then stir fry – they got too soft, so I was extra quick to get the noodles out of the soaking water water. And I didn’t fry them in a lot of oil or sauce, or for very long. They were pretty chewy last night. I felt really full after dinner, but nicely empty by morning – I am sure it’s because I ate a plant-protein based meal – even though I ate a lot of it!

I brought the leftover with-noodle salad for lunch today – there’s sill some left without the noodles the fridge. As often happens when I bring something savory, I got hungry well before lunch time, and ate all the salad and noodles at about 10:00 – they had gone from chewy and stretchy to chewy and hard, but not unpleasantly so.

While my brother was watching bicycle-related movies out in Portland, even one that he and his wife & daughter made, we were busy watching indie films here at the Wisconsin Film Fest.

We started with Art of the Steal, about the Barnes Collection. It was a well-made, trying hard to be fair documentary, but its prevailing opinion is that the city of Philadelphia is the party that’s stealing the art, and IMHO, it was always Barnes. He amassed this incredible collection, that’s published in thousands of art books (and as one of Bill Gates early digitization projects on CD), but he kept it in his own building in Merion PA. He wanted  to limit how many people could see the real thing and how they could see it. True, he bought and paid for every piece in the collection – he got lucky and purchased at a time when modern art was undervalued – many times in the movie somebody says, “well, it’s his art and he can do whatever he wants”. Yeah, right.

Next we saw The happiest girl in the world, about a Romanian girl who sends in juice labels and wins a car – that her father plans to sell immediately to fund a business venture. Part of her prize is getting to be in a commercial for the juice and most of the movie is spent filming the commercial.

Thursday we went to the UW marching band concert instead of any movies – another kind of experience, mostly good, except for the interpretation of music from Miss Saigon, complete with soloist with non-working mic, and small Asian child used as prop.

Friday it was Madison symphony, Russian masters, Philippe Bianconi plays Rachmaninof.

Finally back to movies Saturday, and it was probably the best night. First Shameless, about a Czech weatherman who leaves his wife because her nose is too big. He ends up with an older woman who is a popular singer; the wife finds a cute boyfriend and is his (the weatherman’s) parent’s favorite.

Then Girl With Dragon Tattoo, the hot ticket of the fest. This was the Swedish version; the US is coming in 2012. It was a good thriller and a great adaptation of a complicated book.

Sunday we spent all of a cool sunny April day in the dark watching movies: Everyone Else, that the New Yorker said don’t go see on a date; Paddle to Seattle – 2 guys who did the old video game Yukon Trail backwards – Skagway to Seattle, instead of vice-versa; and Bomber, the family road trip from hell – one reviewer called it the Brit Little Miss Sunshine.

We had a longer break between Paddle to Seattle and Bomber – Mark wanted coffee, I wanted ice cream. The line was ridiculous at the Union – so I walked to the ice cream place up State Street – and got free ice cream from one of John’s friends working there.

So my edible book contest cake didn’t win anything. There was a critic’s choice – our critic was Raphael Kadushin – and two runners up, plus people’s choice awards in four categories. Come to think of it, nothing I voted for won anything, either.

My cake was just a cake, albeit with stuff on top. The entries that did win were big productions. For example, the edible (?) version of Kafka’s short story, The Metamorphosis, that looked like two giant bugs, with Nori wings and some kind of crumply fish noodles around them, as shards of their cast off shells. Raphael said it won precisely because it looked so inedible.

The critic’s choice runners up were a chess board made from 3 batches of brownies, with cast-from-chocolate, both brown and white, playing pieces, for The Chocolate Wars; and a cake typewriter frosted green, with Rollo candy keys, with letters piped onto each one, for a kids’ book called Click Clack Moo. I thought the keys were peanut butter cups, but the daughter of a colleague told me they were Rollo; “I know my candy”, said she.

In the people’s choice category, I might not remember all the winners; I know that one of them was for Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and it was quite clever, really – a pretzel rod stockade protecting vegetables, real food, from onion rings and twinkies on the outside. And the  green cow typewriter won again.

Here’s my cake; click the picture to see more views. The peas are marzipan – my right thumb is still a little green from making them; the jello is fruit juice jigglers; the potatoes are really potato, made them into a potato cake to eat for dinner last night; and the meat is a  Larabar, sliced thin.

Easter Sunday. We slept in a bit – we’d gone to bed on the late side after after-movie cookies and ice cream. There was some yelling in the street – I was surprised that Easter Sunday morning wasn’t completely quiet. Silent as a tomb – ha! I did get a “happy zombie Jesus day” text from one of my kids when we were on the runway in Minneapolis on Monday and I finally had AT&T again.

Back in England on Sunday, we’d made plans to brunch with a U.S. ex-pat, one of our librarian friends who’s now married to a Scotsman, and lives in the suburbs outside London. She picked a place – fish!, on the Thames by Shakespeare’s Globe. It was another good meal – I had poached eggs on toast with a salad. The Brits really know how to cook an egg – they were just right – runny yolks, but not snotty in the whites at all. My fried eggs were perfect the day before, too. And, with two other tipplers in the group, I was not limited to wine by the glass, so we split a bottle of !fish white, Trebbiano.

Then we walked towards Leicester Square by way of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and we were in this courtyard at 3:00 on Easter Sunday afternoon, with bells ringing. We walked in and smelled the incense and heard a bit of Latin, too.

Pushed on to Leicester Square for the half price tkts booth, to find that Sunday is the dark night in England, not Monday like here. So we wandered through the National Gallery a bit, got to see some old friends – a whole wall full of J.M.W. Turner; the color paintings for Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode; plenty of Gainsborough. Mark liked that even when we got to the Impressionists and post-, they were different paintings than are in American collections, like the Bathers at Asnières by Seurat, instead of the Grand Jatte. I liked seeing a Monet Thames view of Parliament, and in the same room a naked man by Caillebotte, so different from his nattily dressed people under the umbrella. But it was waaay too crowded and I only stood it for about 30 minutes.

We left and walked by a vegetarian Indian restaurant our friends recommended (he’s a vegetarian; he got the vegetarian special of the day at !fish, I heard “aubergine something…” as he ordered – it looked like a kind of an eggplant parm – and mash for a side, that I tasted – creamy, buttery, yum) as a dinner possibility, then tubed back to our apartment.

We got all packed and ordered a cab to get us at 6:00 a.m., and search to find a neighborhood restaurant to eat at. We ended up at Ciao Bella, where our waiter made fun of our poor Italian pronounciations, and my house red was pure plonk – nobody to split a bottle of better with this time – but other than that, it was simple old-fashioned Italian – just good. We strolled back, and watched some TV, and tucked ourselves in for our last night in London.

I’m ready to go back, and stay longer, and NOT be a tourist any more. Maybe I could rent a storefront and do a series of harvest dinners. They’re so much more civilized across the pond.

On Friday, we tubed & walked to Buckingham Palace, and looked at it from the outside with masses of other tourists. I really think all the English people are gone for the 4-day Bank Holiday, leaving the city to us foreigners. We had to do some finagling to get the Arsenal tix delivered, because the office of Apartment Services, Ltd., the agency that we got our rental through, was closing for the holiday.

We walked through Hyde Park in the rain, and finally wended our way to the Victoria & Albert Museum – we tried to take a detour to avoid construction, and almost lost ourselves in the winding streets again.

I had us pay up extra for the Quilt Show at the V&A, Quilts: 1700 – 2010, a well put together show (although more shuffling with the tourists) where the curators interspersed modern quilts with historical. I liked Sara Impey’s stitched letter quilts the best – picture above and links to more.

After the V&A, we once again tubed back, dried out, cleaned up, and went to tea at Fortnum and Mason. I was a little disappointed in the tea – the sandwiches were kind of indifferent, the egg salad on a little Brioche football shaped bun not all that flavorful, the cress in the cucumber gritted on my teeth, the chicken wasn’t all that tender; and all the pastries had little things not quite right – the madelines were too dark on the bottom, the jam cookies had seedy raspberry jam. The scones and clotted cream and the tea itself were the best parts.

We had about half an hour to cruise through the National Portrait Gallery – so not worth it to cough up the admission for Irving Penn, and we were after the last admission time anyhow, so we stuck to the free stuff. I liked the Tom Phillips corner: Iris Murdoch, Brian Eno, Phillips himself the best, but there was a lot to look at in a few minutes.

We only had half an hour for the Portrait Gallery because we were going to hear a Mozart Requiem at St Martin in the Fields. It was quite nice, good singers and the lady beside me fell asleep more than I did.