Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

I saw a newspaper headline today that said that the mid-week 4th of July holiday is confusing would-be vacationers & tourists – it’s too hard to make the Wednesday 4th add into a 3- or 4-day weekend, and nobody wants to burn the extra days off work, or figure out when to travel, when to celebrate the holiday.

It’s not that confusing for me; I am teaching two online classes this summer, so I am taking off the 4th, and that’s it – back to work 7/5. But, I think I am permanently confused, or calendar-shifted – first there was the trip to Anaheim, for the librarians conference, then we took our AFS student to Chicago to catch her flight back to the Amsterdam, and that turned into an odyssey of flight cancellations and trips back and forth to O’Hare via our secret route (River Rd.), that I knew from almost 5 years living in River Forest. “vlucht geannuleerd – Het was een hel” as I heard her telling a friend over Skype; instead of leaving at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday on United, she went at 3:40 on Friday on Lufthansa, through Frankfort, finally to Amsterdam by 10:00 a.m. Saturday (like 4:00 a.m. here).

Mark and I had a good dinner (albeit food a bit too rich for the high temps outside) at a place called Gaetanos in Forest Park, while texting with Joëlle about what she should do. Mark had a pasta with sausage & goat cheese in a creamy tomato sauce, that was the better of our two dishes. Mine was a little odd – a crab cake – that was made from what I think was supposed to be the stuffing for a trout, and they ran out of the trout – with scallops around it, and spinach and tomatoes on top. I said we should take all the leftovers for Joëlle, and I got a mozzarella salad, which she did eat some of. Her Dutch frugality made her want to use the food vouchers the airline gave her, but the wrap she got on the C concourse at terminal 1 was basically inedible.

What’s really outta whack for me is photographing food. After we dropped off Joëlle at O’Hare for the 2nd time, we drove back to Wisconsin via Milwaukee to try to meet John for lunch. We sat on the back deck at the Humboldt St. Alterra, and ordered a nice breakfast/lunch, but John was between looking at an apartment and a job, so he just dropped by. I bought him an iced coffee, then spied his car coming towards the cafe, and went out to meet him with it in hand, and we got to chat on the sidewalk for about 10 minutes.

So I never took pictures of the food – a breakfast burrito for me, a turkey sandwich for Mark.

We had ice cream with chocolate sauce and strawberries for dinner that night – Mark had his over an Alterra scone – I saved my scone for Saturday breakfast. On Saturday afternoon I made greens and feta pastry – it was gorgeous when it was right out of the oven, but nobody ate any. I had my slice when we got home from Bach Dancing and Dynamite, and on Sunday I froze half.  I ate another slice today (Monday) when I got home from work – cold with red pepper flakes shaken on top and a puddle of olive oil to dunk the crust into – that was really good, too.

I made a cherry clafouti for our Sunday night dinner-dessert. Somehow I just don’t like clafouti all that much – or I have never made a cherry or apricot one that I’ve been satisfied with. They’re too rubbery. I have an apple clafouti recipe that’s really good, though, from Saveur, that was a standard Sunday breakfast when John and Al were younger – they called it clabloui because it always overflowed in the oven. If Mark lets me I’m going to pick all the cooked cherries out of this one, and eat them with ice cream and chocolate sauce.

I also made the last bread a week installment – cheesey bread.