I was thinking about writing about all the haters I’ve been observing recently – it’s an election year, and the Republicans who are running are running some pretty nasty ads. My current “favorite” is the one by Scott Walker, a candidate for governor, who’s the current county supervisor for Milwaukee County, where they have the lowest rate of high school graduation in the state, talking about how he’ll save money on education – and spend it on roads (the Republicans want to give back the money Wisconsin is supposed to get for high speed rail) – by cutting teacher’s health insurance. Walker says those teachers don’t need those fancy benefits!
Wisconsin is swing state this election, so Barack Obama’s coming to Madison to rally democrats next Tuesday. I made the mistake of reading the comments on the announcement of the event in the online Milwaukee paper – Man, lotta hating there too.
The Co-op that I’m on the Board of Directors of has outgrown its parking lot, and they’re also going to dig up the street it’s on next summer, so we’re planning to put a driveway out the back. The building used to be an Eagles Club, before it was a grocery co-op, and it had two driveways going out that back then. A small group of very vocal neighbors is hating on the co-op for that too.
But instead, mostly, today I just cooked. Well, I shopped at the farmers market, and went for what turned out to be a long bike ride: started going west to the credit union to drop off yet one more document for my mortgage refinance, then to Food for Thought, to see the cookoff, then to East Wash to unload the dishwasher and take out the trash. And finally back home, where I made challah, and soup, and roasted tomato sauce. And birthday pie, for Mark & Ethan. I tried a new method, where you drain the apple juices before putting them in the pie, and then make them into a syrup with cornstarch and pour them back in when the pie’s done. The recipe’s from the Greyston Bakery Cookbook, another one of those Zen monastery cooking operations, like Tassajara, but in New York instead of CA. The challah is a long skinny one – it’s fate might be french toast next week. I wanted a vegetable beef soup like my mommy used to make, and this soup came close – doesn’t have the shreds of soup meat, but it’s beef broth, and I diced up one strip of bacon and fried it and then cooked the onions in the fat – and left the bacon bits in the soup. The roasted tomato sauce was made from slicing tomatoes, what I got in my CSA box, and I froze about 2 cups of it; a cottage cheese container’s worth – it’ll be good for pizza. There was a little left in the cooking pot, so I used it to flavor the soup.
