Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

I didn’t finish cleaning up till 11:22. Rach put together a group so we had like 20 people. It was an easy menu, everything made in advance – roasted the chicken in the a.m. when it was cool. I only had to turn the stove on to grill the polenta. Which, by the way I should have done in a regular skillet instead of the grill pan – it stuck terribly. I figured it out by the third batch. And in the end it meant a really good cleaning for the grill pan; I left it scrubbed & freshly oiled.

Anyways, the side effect of having a big group is that I started off with all these big containers of salads and ended up with little dabs, that all needed to be transferred to smaller containers, and everything washed. I also was in a bit of a rush to get to the dinner, because I’d gone to see Joelle walk in the West HS graduation, so I left all the chicken pans to wash later, too.

I just got a Maryann pan that makes a cake with a concave top to be filled with pastry cream & topped with roasted rhubarb – I was hoping to be redeemed for the mess of the 25th anniversary tarts. The cake base wasn’t really the cake that I envisioned. It was a brown sugar coffee cake from Dorie Greenspan, that sounded like it would be perfect. The recipe had butter and oil, and the oil seemed to give the cake a hard crust. The pastry cream was smooth and creamy, but I thought the rhubarb was too fiber-y. Sunday morning I wanted to use the leftover roasted rhubarb in a coffee cake. I put it through the food processor, but it was still too fiber-y, so I strained it – or, I started off with a strainer, and realized the china cap was the tool to use. So more stuff to wash. Too much work, but the coffee cake was delish, and the cake was the nice tender yellow cake I want to try next in the Maryann pan.

I never took any pictures till the Sunday morning leftovers.

Last year we had breakfast burritos for Ethan’s graduation brunch – so this year we made one year anniversary breakfast burritos, with the rhubarb coffee cake. I went out on my bike to get the tortillas, and I had a David Shapiro-like altercation with a driver who was going the wrong way on a roundabout. She had Cleopatra hair, nice green VW Jetta, window open, so she could hear me real well when I said, quite mildly, I thought, “counter-clockwise”. She exploded, “YOU’RE wrong, wake up”. Actually I’m not wrong – you can only go left if there’s no oncoming traffic – I was there, so I was the oncoming traffic.

And not quite as long term an anniversary, but I celebrated the pastry cream leftovers from Saturday’s dinner the same way I did after Dave & Jen’s anniversary two Sundays ago – parfaits.