A Weekend of Cooking

Here it is Monday, and where did the weekend go?

On Friday evening, I cooked dinner for volunteer catechism teachers at a church near my house. To me it's sort of humorous that Debby Shapiro ended up cooking in the church basement for volunteers who teach religious classes for Catholic kids that attend public school - but, I suppose, it's really a compliment to my cooking. A neighbor, a member of the church and former catechism teacher herself, who had eaten my cooking and liked it, was the one who asked me to cook for the volunteers.

They ate choice of seafood or spinach lasagna, the former based on Giuliano Hazan's; the latter on a recipe from the Barilla pasta web site - it had cream cheese mixed into the ricotta filling, which I had not encountered before. But in one of those funny recipe coincidences, both Saveur magazine and Sanford Amato in the Milwaukee Journal just published recipes for old time Jersey shore/Philadelphia stuffed manicotti, and Sanford's had mascarpone, a.k.a. Italian cream cheese, in with the ricotta.

On Saturday morning, I went down to help with the winter indoor Farmers' Market Breakfast. That was fun. I came home to a bunch of car shenanigans - visiting teenager's car dead in the driveway, no one had jumper cables, one of my cats stole Mark's package of sliced ham lunch meat out of his grocery bags, that I had helpfully moved indoors so we could look of jumper cables in his car. I made a giant spinach omlette and split it with Kaylah, John & kendra, and we went to the Apple Store to buy John an iPhone.

Later, I made a version of Gourmet's Cheesy Chicken Lasagna, with white sauce leftover from the catechism teacher's dinner, and we ate it with salad made from CostCo greens and poppy seed dressing from the Sunday Supper of last week.

Later still on Saturday, I went to a funny going away party for some friends who are moving to France - I came away with most of their pantry - jarred pasta al Arrabiata sauce, various herbs, capers - plus a giant fish platter, plastic containers, and a Waring Blender.

Finally, on Sunday, I made cimmy buns for breakfast, and barley soup with chicken broth for dinner.

And I still do not have that fixed new lens focusing correctly - some of the tips I found online said yes, it is soft in autofocus, and crisper if opened wider in manual - soft is right, impressionistic, I'd say, especially the bread. I can't figure out what - if anything! - it is focusing on.