Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

So it’s that really yucky part of the spring when it’s cold and damp and the snow is melting to reveal mud and trash. Last night I had a cheese sandwich for dinner – a sub, made with whole wheat sub bun bread from the sub shop up the street, sliced Tillamook cheddar from Costco, carrot & daikon slaw from the meatball bahn mi sandwiches I had made to eat while watching the Oscars, and Ovens of Brittany dill mustard dressing. I warmed up the bread a little, but somehow it still was a cold and not quite satisfying dinner. I finished off the Hershery’s kisses that had been in  a (covered to keep the cats out) serving bowl in the counter.

Today I went over to the co-op for a 7:30 a.m. finance committee meeting, and then had about 50 minutes to fill, before a staff meeting to announce the site of the new store. My plan was to go to the coffee bar up the street, get coffee and sit and work on my slides for tomorrow’s lecture. I had a Tupperware of Cheerios and a banana and a spoon in my bag, and I bought a pint of milk to put on my cereal.

There were no seats whatsoever at the coffee place at 9:20 a.m. on a Tuesday, so I went back to the co-op, parked on the street, pushed the seat back in the car, and ate my cereal & banana in the car while reading a book.

After the meeting, I came back home to work and wait for the furnace man – the thermostat’s been being weird and the heat’s been dropping too much before it comes back on – we ended up with a new thermostat, but that’s another story.

I wasn’t really hungry, but I still felt I deserved some kind of sit down breakfast, so I finished the carton of Mountain High yogurt with a little granola. I guess I really just need my mommy to make me one of her comfort foods, like tapioca pudding with the egg whites whipped so it’s fluffy, and eaten warm, or maybe fried bananas.

Work-at-home yogurt & granola, with laptop on the side

Vicky & Lysander at Grand Opening

Earlier this week, while I was at my day job, but thinking about serving dinner that night, I got this message about Vicky & Lysander’s month-long dinner party, at a store front gallery in New York.

It’s dinner for 12, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the month of March – sitting in the storefront, food catered in from Mama’s Food Shop with dessert by Sugar Sweet Sunshine – two New York joints that look perfectly reputable.

For $40/ticket, people get to eat with strangers and make uncomfortable small talk. Oh, and looks like it’s two seatings every night, one at 7:00 p.m., and one at 9:00 and they just extended into April. That’s a lot of people!

Guess it’s popular.

Sounds like it’d be fun – but I’d want to do the cooking myself instead of catering in. There are pretty many open storefronts here in Madison nowadays ….

2017 Postscript – the only working URL 7 years on is for Sugar Sweet Sunshine; here’s a bit more about the dinner party event.

Brunch for 20, people who work at, or used to work at, Madison’s Community Pharmacy. The brunch was a retirement party for one of them, who is working on a history of the pharmacy – so the stories I got to overhear were great. Recollections of old blue laws from the 1970s in WI, when condoms could not be displayed, and how the pharmacy started as a workers collective, selling vat-size containers of commercial shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste and toilet paper by the case to the housing co-ops in town, in contrast to the all natural products they sell today. I love going there and buying fancy chocolate and organic hand lotion in the same place.

They ate:

Spinach crêpe gateau – the recipe also from another early Madison institution, the Ovens of Brittany

Roasted potatoes with rosemary & garlic – all kinds of potatoes, white, gold, red Finn, purple, fingerling, sweet – from the indoor farmers’ market

Tossed salad with reduced cider vinaigrette

Cinnamon chip scones and Door County cherry muffins – the muffins had 3 cups of cherries, 2 cups of sugar and a cup of butter for two dozen muffins – not counting the additional couple of TBLS pf butter for the crunchy topping. Buttery goodness – yum.

Tired of the Olympics, tired of being too busy at work, tired of being tired. Not tired of winter yet – I still like the snow. We had few nights this week where we got an inch plus, and last night just a dust – made it pretty in the morning. My brother wrote a few weeks ago about the murder of crows he saw near his university campus now that the weather’s gotten more spring-like in Seattle. They were in a tree by my university yesterday but they didn’t show up well enough to take a picture – this one’s someone else’s crows – mine looked something like this but the trees weren’t nearly so well organized. More scraggly.

posted from my iPhone

Sunday the vegetarian meet up group met for vegan cupcakes and board games at School Woods. I used a couple of recipes from the Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World girls, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. In Veganomicon, they have a caramel apple recipe that I was quite taken with – it has penuche or caramel frosting, and caramelized apples in the spice cake batter. I made two dozen of them. And about a dozen and half each of white and chocolate, and then topped them with fluffy white frosting, the aforementioned penuche (which came out on the hard side; shoulda mixed in more soy creamer when I had the chance) and this extremely yummy (though this does sound like a bit of a non-sequitur) soy-chocolate mousse. Along with the other woulda coulda shouldas – shoulda made more chocolate, both cupcake and mousse. But all was happily eaten and I even got half a gallon of cider to take home.