Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

I’m making Joel Robuchon bittersweet chocolate tart – on the first sunny, relatively warm (40°) day in March, when I probably should be out walking.

It’s kind of a blast from the past; I think I first made it in the late ’80s sometime when the recipe was published in one of the cooking mags, I think Bon Appetit. The tart recipe is in Patricia Wells’ cookbook, Simply French, in which she adapted Robuchon’s recipes for the home cook. I asked for the book, and my mother gave it to me for Christmas in 1991. From her inscription, looks like Ole Ma read the publisher description of the book – “Recipes from Robuchon’s restaurant, Jamin, along with tips to make a good cook a great cook.”

It’s been a dessert for state occasions; I see I made it for a School Woods dinner in 2007. But I’ve also had dalliances with caramel chocolate tart, and flourless chocolate cake. Both have served their terms as my  ultimate chocolate dessert.

Kind of everything went wrong with this tart – including the battery in my camera dieing – but it smells good and I’m pretty sure it will taste good, too.

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Walking on Bascom Hill. The Bucky snowman has lost his head – but I didn’t take a picture.

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Culminating in my mother’s and Eustace Tilley’s 90th birthdays. Eustace, the fictional dandy who was on the first New Yorker magazine cover,  and my mom both arrived around February 22, 1925. It used to be George Washington’s birthday, too, but now we have President’s Day.

The nine New Yorker covers for my mom & Eustace Tilley’s 90th – I got the bottom row on my print mag

I left off with pumpkin stuff and soup, last Saturday. On Sunday I made the Portuguese Stone Soup from Asparagus to Zucchini – it’s a vegetable soup with sausage and Cannellini beans – white kidney beans. But we didn’t eat it Sunday night. I made cheesecake. I used the very last of the Christmas cookies that had been in a bucket in the basement fridge ground up for the crust; a bunch of the Moravian ginger thins and a few of the gember koekjes to make the crumb crust, which meant that there was ground candied ginger in the crust. I had a piece for dinner on Tuesday, and there’s one piece left that looks a little shopworn, but also kind of looks like lunch, to me.

Mark got to stay in Madison Sunday night, instead of returning to Chicago as usual, because the ALA gave him President’s day off. We watched the Saturday Night Live 40 years shenanigans, with a break for Downton Abbey.

Monday I worked at home, because I had this Medical Expenditures interview in the afternoon. The interview took an hour and a half, and I went back to work afterwards. Then out to dinner at Greenbush – salad and thin crust pizza with argula & bacon. My dinner companion was having a fancy cocktail, so I joined in with a Manhattan. Megan was studying in front of the downstairs TV, and Rach and a friend were having soup and cheesecake and knitting upstairs, making Mark’s cat go nuts over the yarn, when I got back.

On Tuesday, I  had big plans for dinner, but came home and snacked and worked, and, as mentioned above, ate cheesecake in front of TV, instead.

On Wednesday, I made vegetable curry, with squash and potatoes and carrots and kale and peas. Served over short grain rice, with chutney. Mark wasn’t interested when he got home from Chicago, but all us girls ate curry; Rach took it for work lunch on Thursday and I finished it off for work lunch on Friday. I am starting to get a bigger collection of glass containers with plastic lids, that I can microwave food in at work.

Vegetable curry

Thursday I think was the coldest day – Rachael and I drove in. A bunch of people at work decided it was too cold to go out for lunch, and so they ordered in Chinese, but I had peanut butter and jelly and an apple. And lots of meetings. Even though I drove, I walked around campus from my parking spot – almost 15 minutes – and from meeting to meeting, and you could literally see people hit the wall on their tolerance of the cold. They’d suddenly speed up, start walking as fast as they could or jogging, like saying, “I just can’t take this anymore”, got to get inside.

For dinner on Thursday, we ate the black bean & butternut squash chili that I had lugged to Chicago for our doomed – or blizzarded, I guess – Super Bowl party, and Mark lugged back. I had online  class, and, during the obligatory talk about the weather wherever you are portion at the beginning of the meeting, one of my students was talking about eating ice cream after class. That sounded like such a good idea to me, that  indulged, too. I made butterscotch sauce – since I atypically, had heavy cream in the house from the [cancelled] dessert buffet, and ate vanilla ice cream with diced candied ginger and butterscotch sauce in front of the Sopranos.

On Friday we finished the soup, with turkey salad (frozen Thanksgiving turkey, shredded) and bean salad (extras of the Cannellini beans).

Saturday seemed well-paced for a Saturday. I made scones, and I stayed in pajamas until 10:00. I had time to go grocery shopping, and still had time to go for a walk before our neighbors with two little kids and a new baby came for dinner. The older kids are about five and three, and  the baby is just 2 months. Mom’s not eating soy, dairy, tomato, or egg. So, I made pot roast – Costco chuck roast that I browned and then braised in the oven with red pepper puree, garlic, and veggie broth. Roasted vegetables – carrots, potatoes, onion, with sage. Big salad – with the cheese on the side, and an oil & vinegar slaw with carrots, cabbage and kale. I made coconut milk rice pudding with the last of the cooked rice that had been served with the curry.  Nothing but coconut milk, the rice, 1/4 cup sugar, and a teaspoon of vanilla – yum. I also made white chocolate lime blondies for those of us that could indulge in butter and egg. I think those topped with ice cream (and maybe caramel sauce) will be our Oscar-watching treat tonight.

The neighbors brought flowers, and Rach brought out the tulips she’d had in her room. We enjoyed them on the sideboard during dinner, but I had to shut them up in the sunroom after to keep the cats from munching them.

Cat proof flowers

For an in-honor of Ruth brunch, I made Marion Cunningham yeasted waffles, lots of bacon, and a few sausages. I cut up one of the new variety of apples that I got at the co-op yesterday – Lady Alice. They’re a little like Pink Lady – firm – but juicier and they don’t turn brown very fast, which Mark tells me is a new holy grail for apple breeders.

Stack of waffles – note glimpse of Feb. 23 New Yorker

Waffles wrapped around bacon – the way I like to eat them – using fingers rather than fork, dunked in syrup

I think I don’t have to cook much the rest of the week – there’s at least one bowl of chili, leftover pot roast & turkey salad, scones, waffles that I’ll freeze to become toaster waffles, a big bag of salad greens, slaw … riches.

Guess I better go finish cleaning up, and go for a walk while the sun’s out.

I feel like I didn’t have much of a weekend, because I worked a lot. But I did some fun stuff, I guess. The theme for the weekend seems to have been feeling a bit sorry for myself, and eating too much.

Ugh – good Sunday gone bad. Started with too icy to walk, steel cut oats brekkie to total nervous eating chips chocolate. Bedtime

— Debra Shapiro (@DebsLunch) February 9, 2015

And evidently shoulda watched Annie Lennox on Grammys. Most of Tuesday slides done; one class graded. #Iworkedallweekend

— Debra Shapiro (@DebsLunch) February 9, 2015

On Saturday there was Grillin’ for Peace. Before heading out to grill, I tried to do a little work. Somebody sent me a slide (Mac Keynote format) that I needed to transfer to a power point, and that turned into an odyssey of updating the OS X on my work computer to Yosemite, and getting the new Keynote. Of course Yosemite bleeped out the java version my older Photoshop needs to run, so I had to re-install that too. I left my computer updating; when I got home from Grilling the giant 5-gig download was done, and I set it to install. Graded a few students on my home computer downstairs.

We went to see Boyhood at the cheap theater – it was as good as all my film buff friends were saying.

Came home, checked in on the computer, and we had leftover Mac & Cheese and pasta and a salad for supper. I can’t remember if it was Friday (after a dinner of egg salad sandwiches and chips and onion dip and salsa and carrots and celery) that I indulged in ice cream and chocolate sauce, too late at night, on top of the crumbled up Hootie bars that came back from Chicago, another Super Bowl-party-that-wasn’t-leftover – or if that was Saturday. Somehow I thought I’d fit in a walk, amidst all that on Saturday, but no.

Sunday started a little off – I tried to walk and got scared back in because it was icy. Feeling guilty, I cleaned all the cat boxes and put down new newspaper, and did laundry. I made fancy steel cut oats for breakfast, and then just worked all day.

Mark and I finished the Hootie bars with ice cream and chocolate sauce for Downton Abbey and the Grammy’s – but I ate all kinds of other junk too – finished the onion dip, with sweet potato chips, wheat thins with egg salad, and a Trader Schmoe’s chocolate covered marshmallow or two … feeling sorry for myself, so eating to make up. The TV kept freezing, and I couldn’t even go to a web page on my phone. Missed Annie Lennox at the Grammy’s and everyone on my Facebook & Twitter said she was the best. So I watched her on my phone on Monday morning while I drank my coffee. I did a 10 minute Barre 3 workout and walked to campus – more exercise by 9:00 AM Monday than the whole weekend.

I never got around to testing the burner from CSA Fair Share to see if it works, and I never bought light bulbs. And I never made veggie broth. I remedied two out of three Monday night. The burner doesn’t work – it started getting hot, but then just tripped the outlets in my kitchen. I’ll have to use my almost as old as me Farberware electric Dutch oven for the soup cooking demo at the garden Expo this Saturday. And I made veggie broth and vegetable soup. The broth had a whole host of vegetables past their prime – parsley and cilantro (the giant bunch I brought back from Chicago) and carrot & celery sticks, and a sprouty potato. I used some of the same for the soup – the better parts – onion, carrots, celery, parsley and cilantro, peeled and trimmed potato, a few lentils, a spoonful of miso, and most of a carton of diced tomatoes frozen last summer – the rest went into the broth. The miso and lentils made the soup rich and brown.

Think it’s time to shower and get in pajamas and figure out how to re-watch Downton on Apple TV – we missed dog butt last night because of the freezing.

Bottom of the vegetable bin soup, with lentils

A zillion things to do at work – tried out a new way to do screen captures, after the method I’ve been using created a recording with weird dropouts, and took forever to upload, email, email, email, meetings, meetings, meetings…

Our evil governor (as my mechanic calls him) is being eviler than ever. He wants to cut $300 million from the University, AND continue a tuition freeze, AND this is after 2 years when the University was forced to spend down its reserves. The legislature has been really good at portraying the University as the bad guys. Obviously, we’re the ones that cause students to go into debt, charging such high tuition and not teaching enough sections of classes, so that students can’t graduate on time. Gee, it couldn’t be that the state government is not funding higher education, doesn’t value education at any level, so the burden of paying for college has been shifted to students and parents.

The governor’s been calling his budget effectively “Act 10 for the UW System,”; that it will remove “limitations like shared governance”. Cut funding, and decouple the University from state government; make it a separate public authority. Which would give the University the flexibility to  make up for the loss of funding – just like municipalities and other state agencies were given freedom by Act 10, which prevented public employees from unionizing.

But what scares me even more is that he wants to amend and repeal chapter 36 of the Wisconsin State Statutes.

edited UW System mission statement

Chapter 36 allows for shared governance.

The faculty of each institution, subject to the responsibilities and powers of the board, the president and the chancellor of such institution, shall be vested with responsibility for the immediate governance of such institution and shall actively participate in institutional policy development. As such, the faculty shall have the primary responsibility for academic and educational activities and faculty personnel matters. The faculty of each institution shall have the right to determine their own faculty organizational structure and to select representatives to participate in institutional governance.

The academic staff members of each institution, subject to the responsibilities and powers of the board, the president and the chancellor and faculty of the institution, shall be active participants in the immediate governance of and policy development for the institution. The academic staff members have the primary responsibility for the formulation and review, and shall be represented in the development, of all policies and procedures concerning academic staff members, including academic staff personnel matters. The academic staff members of each institution shall have the right to organize themselves in a manner they determine and to select their representatives to participate in institutional governance.

The students of each institution or campus subject to the responsibilities and powers of the board, the president, the chancellor and the faculty shall be active participants in the immediate governance of and policy development for such institutions. As such, students shall have primary responsibility for the formulation and review of policies concerning student life, services and interests. Students in consultation with the chancellor and subject to the final confirmation of the board shall have the responsibility for the disposition of those student fees which constitute substantial support for campus student activities. The students of each institution or campus shall have the right to organize themselves in a manner they determine and to select their representatives to participate in institutional governance.

My position is defined in there as well, and it also says something about my sick leave benefits. The Board of Regents says that anything that is repealed from chapter 36 will be pulled out, and popped into Board of Regents policy, but I don’t find that all that comforting – something that was a statute is now a policy? Sounds a lot squishier to me.

And ugh, I’ve been trying to pick thru the 1800+ pages of the budget bill, Assembly 21. 36.09 that allows for shared governance is repealed. There’s also a provision in the state statutes that highway construction has to allot funding for bike- and pedestrian-ways – that exceeds what the federal government decrees – so of course that is repealed, too. Why should Wisconsin to continue to be the best at things they were always the best at before? Jim Baughman says, Don’t turn the UW into just another university.

It’s standard political procedure – hide stuff in the budget bill that can have real consequences and hope no one will notice.

I came home and made pasta – sweet potato, kale, caramelized onions (with a dab leftover that I made into dip), goat cheese and parsley. And busted up no-boil lasagna noodles. The kind of pasta that’s called old rags – irregular edges of fresh pasta sheets, or lasagna.

old rags pasta with sweet potato, kale & goat cheese

Lea sent me this crazy necklace with a picture jasper pendant that looks like a house. In thanks for the cookie boxes I send them – they’re never getting off the list now.

Beyond that, it’s winter. It’s cold and my skin’s too dry, and I’m probably eating too much, and not drinking enough water, and not getting enough exercise – although today I did walk a lot with my snow boots on. And, maybe we’ll be marching again soon at the Capitol – but somehow, I don’t think so this time.