Standing on the moon

Both newspapers that come to our house - at least for now - ran the photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon. I remember watching it, sitting in front of the TV with my brother and my parents, back when there was network television, and we all watched stuff at the same time. It was the summer I turned 14, between 8th grade and high school - we didn't call it middle school then - the 7th and 8th grades were just the top two floors of the elementary school.

It made me want to hear this Grateful Dead song, "standing on the moon" - which I always have thought was more about the isolation of the road for musicians, drug use, and illness, not to mention the war atrocities in El Salvador, than it was about the glory of the US space program - but still. It was written in the late 1980s, after Robert Hunter lost a kid and Jerry Garcia had come back from a diabetic coma.

Looked for the song in the Internet Archive, and they performed it at Alpine Valley, the summer of 1989; here's the whole show - this is audience so you can download it. I must've been at this one, it would've been when I was in library school, and we would have had to get a baby sitter for both kids.

The verdict

I actually tried out two 101 cookbooks recipes for the brunch today; the lasagna tart and the savory zucchini-ricotta cheesecake. I edited the tart recipe, but I made the cheesecake as written except for using part mascarpone instead of all ricotta, making it a little richer. I used about 1/3 mascarpone, and the rest part-skim ricotta - a scant cup of mascarpone replacing that much of the 2 1/2 cups ricotta called for in the original.

The verdict? Both were quite delicious, but I liked the cheesecake better, even though I did not expect to like it at all. And it's another gluten-free dish to add to my repertoire. I set it on a footed serving dish, with a wreath of dill fronds around it, so it looked and smelled great - but did not take a picture, shucks.

The other recipe that I tried for the first time was this King Arthur Flour no-knead sticky buns - applying the currently fashionable no-knead method to a sweet dough. You make a very wet dough, and then instead of kneading - it's too gooey to knead, anyways - you let it rise for a long time to develop the gluten and structure.

Applying the no-knead method to sweet rolls is a great idea - they were wonderful. It's common practice to give sweet doughs a long rise, often under refrigeration, especially if the dough has lots of butter in it - it firms up and gets much easier to handle. I messed with this recipe a bit too. I made the dough as is, but played with the filling, and topping. I knew that if I put both brown sugar and honey in the topping, the rolls'd be way too sugary. I buttered the baking pans, liberally, and drizzled in honey to coat, probably about 3 - 4 TBLS per 9-inch pan, and then put in chopped pecans (actually crushed - bashed with a rolling pin while still in their plastic bag, my current fave way to chop nuts because it's neater than using a knife & cutting board). For filling, the recipe recommend King Arthur bakers' cinnamon filling, which is sugar, cinnamon, and dried shortening - you mix it with water. So, instead of using just white sugar and cinnamon as the recipe says to sub for the filling product, I used melted butter, brown sugar, a little white sugar, cinnamon, and just enough water to get a nice spreadable paste.

Yum. See that big piece out? I ate that all myself.

My take on Heidi's tart

I spent some of the afternoon today making 101 Cookbooks Lasagna Tart, but with a few variants, as follows:

2 medium zucchini, grated
1 TBLS olive oil
salt & pepper to taste

Tart Crust
1 1/2 cups unbleached flour
4 TBLS salted butter
4 TBLS vegetable shortening - I like Earth Balance, tho their current flashy web site is maybe a bit much!
finely grated zest of one lemon
scant 1/2 cup cold water

Tomato Sauce
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
scant 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
pinch of salt
1 10-ounce can tomato puree
2 TBLS tomato paste
grate of nutmeg

a few TBLS pesto if you've got some
1 cup ricotta cheese
3/4 cup grated mozzarella

Prepare the zucchini: heat the oil in a large skillet, and add the grated zucchini. Cook and stir a few minutes, until it gets a little transparent. Season with salt and pepper, and transfer to a strainer to drain.

Make the tart shell: measure the flour into a bowl, and grate in the lemon zest. Slice the butter and shortening in, and cut the fat into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse meal - using your fingers, 2 knives or a pastry blender. You can also do this in a food processor, or mixer. Drizzle in the cold water with the mixer running, or mix with a fork, or by pulsing the blender, just until the dough comes together in lumps - stop before it's a ball. Dump out on a lightly floured surface, gather into a ball, and wrap in plastic or wax paper and chill for about 30 minutes. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a circle roughly 13-inches across. Ease the pastry into your tart pan and press it into the corners and up the sides without stretching the dough. Trim away any excess dough, and place the pan in the refrigerator for at least thirty minutes, or freeze it for 15. Prick the crust with a fork a few times, and line the shell with parchment paper and fill the tart with pie weights or dried beans. Bake for 15 minutes at 400 degrees. Remove the paper and pie weights, and return the crust to the oven for another five minutes or so. Check and if it bubbles up, prick it a bit more, and coax it to lie down flat with a fork. Transfer it to a rack to cool. Leave the oven on, but turn it down to 350F.

Make the sauce: Combine the garlic, olive oil, red pepper flakes, and salt together in a small, cold saucepan. Turn the heat to medium-high and cook until the garlic starts to sizzle just a bit. Stir in the tomato puree, mix well, and add the tomato paste and nutmeg. Bring to a simmer, cook till it thickens a bit, maybe 10 minutes, then remove from heat.

Assemble the tart: Spread the pesto onto the bottom of the tart shell first if you're using it. Then use a rubber spatula to spread the ricotta cheese over the pesto. Add thr zucchini next, followed by the sauce.

Place the tart on a baking sheet and bake for about 30 minutes. Sprinkle the mozzarella over the top, and bake until the cheese is melted, and a little colored.

Back home and now what

Well, I'm still waiting for the new fridge for one thing, which motivates me to cook from what's here, rather than going on a grand restocking shopping.

Wednesday morning I woke up in Chicago, and rode the train to Harvard, and then Mark drove us back to Madison. I wore shorts because after a long weekend sojourn in Chicago, surrounded by tourists, but me getting up early and putting on semi-decent clothes and going to meetings every day, I so wanted to be the one that people were looking at like, "oh, she must be on vacation, lucky duck." Got home and the house wasn't too bad, but still had to wipe some counters and scoop cat litter and scrub a toilet or two. Then off to work, to teach a class - student presentations, thank god, and a little trouble shooting for an assignment they have due Sunday.

Had to go to a meeting, home at 7:30, and Mark walked in with pizza. I tried to make a kind of steakhouse, lettuce wedge salad, drizzled with bottled bright red French & ranch dressings, and bleu cheese - but I didn't have quite the right type of lettuce - I had a red romaine from my CSA box that was far tenderer than standard steakhouse fare. Still it was quite tasty, and we ate it all up, while watching the Weeds and True Blood episodes we'd missed - and thus using up everything from my last CSA box except the kohlrabi and cabbage, to clear the decks for the new one that I got Thursday.

Which had in it:

• small head of butter lettuce
• big bunch of basil
• 3 zucchini
• 2 summer squash
• 2 cucumbers
• 2 long skinny Asian eggplants
• 2 early onions, globe shaped but with long green stems
• a tree of broccoli
• 2 fennel
• celery

So far, I am thinking some kind of pasta with the basil, tonight, and a salad with the lettuce, and nan. I'd like try one of those pesto recipes where you blanch the basil. I can't decide if I want to make the fennel into caramelized fennel, onion and goat cheese pizza, or add it in with the celery in sweet sour celery (I have most of another bunch in addition to what I got in the box). And I think the zucchini will go into the lasagna pie for Sunday - I am going to try Heidi's recipe, but use grated zucchini, a white flour & butter crust, and possibly more cheese.

President's Lunch

Here's what I got for lunch on Monday at the conference - a wedge of iceberg with a bacon dressing and some bleu cheese, that was quite tasty, and some kind of chicken breast with a pine nut-ricotta filling, and a red pepper sauce. And a bun. Oh, and score - the chicken breast was resting on some scalloped potatoes - there were two stalks of steamed asparagus, that I ate, and some chunks of sort of roasted summer squash, that I did not.
There's always supposed to be an element of humor at this event; it is a presentation by the President of the 800-pound-gorilla of the library world, a huge company that owns the largest database of library records in existence, but that is actually a consortium of libraries. I like to describe them more or less in Pogo's words "Them is Us". Anyways, this year the humor was a set of slides of fake Twitter tweets; muppets Statler & Waldorf griping about rubber chicken again; Sarah Palin offering to field dress a moose for next year's lunch; Joe Biden complaining about the word-lmit on his tweet. But the best one was Melville Dewey (yes, the Dewey Decimal System Dewey), who played around with "economical" spellings, like Dui for Dewey, saying 140 characters suited him just fine.

In Chicago with the librarians

Yesterday I lugged my big bag:
WITH camera and tripod in, all over Chicago, and never took a single shot. Today, I flipped to my fast, shallow lens, ditched the tripod, and tried to get on the program of at least documenting the food I'm getting while here in Chi-town with something like 30,000 librarians.

After attending an interesting, but completely oversold, program on linked data - the image you see if you follow the link was on one of the presenters' slides (Eric Miller - who I used to say was the only person in the word who really understood RDF). I started off standing, but eventually got a choice floor spot, where I could lean my back against the wall. I decided to bail and come back to the hotel room to do a little work. I have read and graded one student's assignment so I am cutting myself slack to play (blog) a bit.

I bought a Starbucks yogurt parfait for breakfast - Greek yogurt with honey and granola, entirely superior to the one I had before that was vanilla yogurt with flabby, thawed-out frozen fruit. It was way too crowded in the session to even think about hauling out food and eating it, so I stopped on my way back up North Michigan, to eat my parfait on a bench in the little sculpture garden by the Art Institute, where I used to eat my lunch when I was an intern in their library, something like 16 years ago.

And there was this dead dragonfly on the ground, who let me take his picture.

Now let's see what I get for lunch.

iPhone fireworks July calendar

Click this little one to get a bigger one to download - set as desktop picture, and enjoy!