A life in food

I've always thought that the best food writing isn't really about food - it's using food as a way to talk about everything else.

Usually I'm disappointed in my ability to make talking about food BE talking about everything else - the problem with blog writing is that it's just not everyday that you have some great insights to relate. Yesterday in the car I was thinking that somehow, if I record what I cook and eat, maybe it will tell my life story - somehow -

This weekend the theme was cooking for kids, but not shopping a lot.

Friday Al and I spent two hours at the urgent care and got sent home with some vicodin, kind of a dilute vicodin w/tylenol, but still, not at all what we expected - which was antibiotics for his lingering flu - infection. We were there from something like 4:45 until almost 7:00, so I was not the only one having a cell phone call with a family member about what there was to eat. John got in from Milwaukee, and wanted to heat up the leftover bow tie pasta with roasted butternut squash & onions & goat cheese - on the phone, I was giving him directions on how to lightly dust the top with smoked paprika (smoked paprika with winter squash or sweet potatoes is a common Cafe Flora combo). Meanwhile, the woman a few seats over waiting with her sick mom was discussing ramen noodles with her husband, so I felt pretty la-de-dah, smoked paprika, isn't that nice. I ate the last of the pasta when I got home; Al had mac & cheese - I had made it last weekend and stored in the fridge for kids, and it came out perfect, BTW, the crumb topping was buttery and cripsy; John just did not want to wait.

On Saturday, I made eggs & toast for John and Matt - the 2nd sleeping lump under the blankets in the living room turned out to be Matt, not Al. I made a loaf of home made bread on Friday night, especially to use for eggs & toast toast. When John was younger he preferred Brownberry, he didn't like how I couldn't get the home made sliced thin enough, but he's old enough to like homemade now. I spent the morning while all the kids were sleeping reading library students' assignments, but that meant I could make a batch of granola, and I had some of that with an apple and Brown Cow maple yogurt for my breakfast. Al slept until 2:00, so he never had breakfast.

For Saturday dinner, I made beans & wieners - I had two cans of baked beans in the closet since way last summer, and that pack of little wienies from the freezer, that I bought in January, that probably made the Packers lose - so I mixed that all up, and baked it for a long time, and kids just dug in. The little wienies got all caramalized and had this wonderful puffy but chewey texture that (with apologies to Michael Pollan) I am sure only highly-processed foods can achieve. I ate mine while watching snow falling on cedars on DVD. [Monday I sealed up the DVD to go back to Netflix, and got in the car with a pile of stuff, my computer, a pile of books to go to the library, free samples of the power bars a la Heidi I think I want to send to my brother's 2008 bike race ... and now I can't find it - I hope I put it in the return at the library, and they will mail it back to Netflix for me]

Al has always liked the quick biscuit cimmy buns from Cooks Illustrated, so I made those Sunday morning. John had a spinach & Swiss cheese omelet with more of that whole wheat toast. I had a cimmy bun and a grapefruit, and Mark and I had an argument over the upstairs furnace, which, sometime in the night on Saturday, had stopped making his apartment warm.

Later Mark & I walked down for coffee at the closer Starbucks, and even later we walked to the Mexican restaurant (Texan really, it's run by a guy from Austin TX, who's just as much a musician as a chef). John called while we were walking to say he'd made it safely back to Milwaukee, and was pleased to hear that Mark & I had made up enough to go eat tacos. (although I'm sure that Mark was less than pleased at my rudeness; I spent a good chunk of our walk on the phone with John)

We're still a little prickly, but today the furnace is fixed and we have the house to ourselves, so eventually it'll all be OK. We mostly have differences of style, not substance - so not really supposed to count, but oh-so-annoying, especially in this last month of a long hard winter.