Deb's Lunch ... and dinner and breakfast, too

Debra Shapiro is using Word Press

2010-01-02T14:17:00.000-08:00

Or at least, I'm trying to - trying to start up a new Word Press edition of Deb's Lunch - you can take a look at: Deb's Lunch ... and dinner and breakfast too.

Robyn Hitchcock is using Word Press -

2009-12-29T08:20:00.000-08:00

- albeit a highly customized Word Press with his own eponymous theme, for his new web site. I've been toying with the notion of moving my blog, too, ever since last summer when I played around with Word Press a bunch. So I think here's what I'm going to do - new decade, new blog - I won't move this one over, but it can become the archives. After all, as Rach just pointed us, us WI state employees have a 5-day weekend coming up: Wednesday, 12/30 is a furlough day, so we're not allowed to work; New Years Eve day & New Years Day are both holidays, and we still have Saturday and Sunday. Plenty of Word Press play time, and it'll probably be good hand therapy.

Speaking of holidays, there's a very cool little stop-motion animation vid starring vegetables on Robyn Hitchcock's new site, called The day before boxing day.

More Christmas pictures

2009-12-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

I think somewheres back there I promised more Christmas pix - I never did take any of dinner but there were some nice ones of presents & breakfast:

the present pile

I got a new pannier for my bike

Mark's dress shirt had the prettiest paper

I got Mark a waffle iron

We had waffles & bacon & fried apples and Asian pears

Dad's 89th

2009-12-28T12:27:00.000-08:00

Today would be my Dad's 89th birthday if he was still alive. I have lots of fragmentary memories of birthday celebrations past, dinners-and-a-movies we went to - I seem to remember My Fair Lady followed by dinner at Le Mont on Mount Washington; that must've been 1964 - IMDB says the movie came out on Christmas that year.

There were also celebrations when Dad wasn't there - we went to the newly opened Grand Concourse at Station Square (now it seems to be owned by the Muer chain) when he was in the hospital - that must've been 1978 Christmas season, before he had his first heart valve replacement in February of 1979. The reservation was so hard to get, my mom wasn't going to give it up just because Dad wasn't there. And there was his memorial, on the first birthday he missed, December 1998 - speeches in Heinz Chapel, and then across the street to the Pittsburgh Athletic Association for the reception, where they let me bring in cookies, because in Pittsburgh, they're so used to that from weddings.

Not sure what do in dad's honor tonight - I bought shallots and arugula, and have a basket & a half of grape tomatoes, so I could make the Martha pasta that's on the Jan. 2010 "light" issue of Everyday Food - roasted tomatoes & shallots with arugula, on rigatoni - for dinner. It's not really such a Dad dish, though - he wouldn't have cared for the green stuff thrown in at the end. But I have lots of the Lora Brody ruggelach, and canned peaches, so we could have the Dad dessert: chilled canned fruit, cookies, and tea. He'd probably have had Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux, but he'd have liked the ruggelach, too.

Grey Christmas

2009-12-25T09:28:00.001-08:00

White Christmas, bah humbug .... this is the view from my window today.

In Wisconsin, we're having a grey, slushy Christmas, with rain on top of about a foot of snow. The big winter storm is dumping tons of snow on Minneapolis & the Dakotas, but it's mostly north and west of us here in WI & IL, where we've been getting ice and rain and wintry mix. The National Weather Service called it a "complex" storm system; the best description we've heard so far was a reporter on NPR yesterday, who called it a "variety pack of nasty weather".

We heard that NPR reporter when we were on the exit ramp from the Beltline around 5:00 p.m. yesterday, about 10 minutes from home. Even though I stressed and worried, the travel back from Chicago turned out just as Mark (the optimist in the family) predicted - we missed the worst of it, and were driving in just plain rain, not ice. When we got to the train station in Harvard, the car was sheathed in ice, but it was so warm - 36 or 37 degrees - that the ice just slid off the car. The car was stuck in its parking spot, but because there were 3 of us, I drove and mark & Ethan pushed, and we got out pretty shortly. One of the tires was low, but 2 gas stations and 5 quarters later, we were on the road.

And we are having a perfectly nice little Christmas - waffles cooked on Mark's new waffle iron that I gave him for breakfast, with bacon & fried apples. Beef tenderloin, roasted potatoes, and trifle for dinner. And Lora Brody's ruggelach for snacks. I'll add more pix after dinner.

Corner bakery breakfast wreakage

2009-12-24T08:35:00.000-08:00

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Christmas Eve

2009-12-24T07:50:00.001-08:00

And trying out iPhone blogging somemore. I'm in a window seat - that should have had a step ladder so's you could climb up into easier - at our hotel, trying to make sense of the weather reports. The WI Dot road conditions is not working, of course - too many people trying to check it + the new map is not very well optomized for the iPhone.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Waay too stressful for me

2009-12-23T14:32:00.000-08:00

We're in Chicago to see the Addams Family, got a great room at a Kimpton & a nice dinner at Shaw's Crab House - but we're in the midst of an ice storm, and I'm over-worrying about the roads. Not much to do but wait & see.

It was just rain and slush in all the gutters walking home from theater - so maybe it'll all be OK. A Christmas miracle'd be fine by me.

Location:Chicago

Big Day

2009-12-23T04:29:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I sold the Passat, and got my cast off.

I should be happily on winter break, but because of all the running around, I did not finish grading, even though I worked till almost 10:00 last night. I still have 8 students' work to read. So here I am sort of back at it, at 6:30 a.m.

I guess that's this year's theme - not quite what we expected. We planned a trip to Chicago - we have tickets to see the Addams Family, with Nathan Lane & Bebe Neuwirth - but a big storm is threatening the whole midwest. Weather.gov calls it "complex" - it's supposed t be snow and rain and ice all mixed up. The plan is to take the train, but we have to drive about an hour and a few minutes to Harvard IL to catch the train. And it's not just me - John & Al are flying to California today, and Ethan is coming with us to Chicago. I think Ethan got the biggest disappointment for Christmas - he was supposed to be in Mexico right now, but got a concussion in hockey - and not even in a game, at a scrimmage, just a glorified practice, and the doctor said he shouldn't fly.

Mark, our optimist, says that if all the weather works as predicted, not only will we miss the worst stuff, so will John & Al - they're flying out of Minneapolis, and it's not supposed to be so sloppy up there, all snow for the Twins. And my grades aren't due till the 29th - maybe NOT finishing can act like my library book. I always take a library book - and make the kids do this too - when I fly, because it means I'll have to get back to return it. Let's hope it all comes off as scheduled.

Deb's-busted-thumb-using-up-the-leftovers-cranberry-chutney

2009-12-18T12:45:00.000-08:00

This was going to be called "holiday exhaustion" when I started it but did not finish it yesterday.

But, I took the day off to cook for a 50th anniversary party I have tomorrow at the dining club. The woman in the couple is the author of a series of books called "Eat Smart In [country name here]. She has done 10 books, so we're making a dish from each country. Fortunately, I am only doing Mexico, Sicily, India, Morocco, Brazil, and Turkey - other family members are bringing the other countries.

So I slept in, and hand-delivered some cookie boxes, and didn't do as much cooking as maybe I should have, but I feel somewhat recovered. My broken thumb is aching a bit, but right now it's the corollary ailments that are bugging me most - my left hand is tired & beat up from doing so much, and my skin is dry since it's too hard to lotion up with one hand.

The Mexican dish is a flan, flavored with tequila, and tomorrow it will be flamed with tequila after it's un-molded. It looks great so far. Sicily is what we used to called Spiedini at one of my restaurant jobs - little beef rolls on a stick with onions and bay leaf. I only made the filling so far - it's going to be meat stuffed with meat; the filling is onions, bread crumbs, a little tomato, and prosciutto and salami. They're served on a bed of fried potatoes - I boiled the potatoes, and will fry them tomorrow. Tomorrow I have to make a pineapple curry, orange salad, kale with garlic, and zucchini filo pie. I don't think it'll be too much of a problem, even though I am slow with the hand.

It's kind of fun to be cooking all this stuff from other countries - it's not buy fresh buy local, that's for sure, but reminds me of my youth in the 1970s, when it was fashionable to try to recreate other countries' food, and the experience of eating it. Maybe more politically correct than fashionable, or at least it was a liberal thing to do - looking for authentic experiences in the depths of suburbia, respect for other cultures and all that.

And things were certainly not as fusion-y as they are now - we never would have eaten this chutney in baked Brie - but that's how I'm going to use it.

2 TBLS olive oil
1/3 cup finely chopped onion
5 quarter sized slices of crystallized ginger, diced
1 jalapeno pepper, diced - remove some or all of the seeds to reduce the hotness
1 16-ounce bag of cranberries, fresh or frozen (no need to thaw, if they are frozen)
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup apple cidar
1 tsp. coriander
2 tsp. brown mustard seeds

Heat the oil in a 2 quart or larger saucepan, and add the onion, ginger, and jalapeno - I ground them up in the food processor, to be easy on my thumb, but even if your hands are working fine, you can use the processor if you like. Cook until softened, and then add the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook uncovered until all the cranberries are popped and the chutney is thickened, about 20 minutes. Use as the filling in baked Brie, or serve with cheese and crackers.

2009 cookie plattering slideshow

2009-12-14T15:21:00.000-08:00

View all

Get your own

Best cookie shot

2009-12-13T17:24:00.001-08:00

I think this is probably the best cookie shot - John set my camera to focus nice and wide.

The party was last night, and I packed the first four boxes to ship this afternoon - already used up a 100-count box of ziploc sandwich bags. I'm beat. We just ordered Thai for dinner, and I'd like to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the evening.

Last cookie kind

2009-12-09T20:52:00.001-08:00

This year the last cookie kind is the ruggelach, or nukhorns. That never happens, but I never broke my thumb halfway through cookie season before, either.

Most years, I make about 4 pounds of butter worth of ruggelach - about 4X my recipe - and I get the big square container plus a 5 quart ice cream bucket full. I usually try to make them on a Saturday, and spend half the day rolling them out. This year, I made 2 pounds of butter into the dough this morning, and just spent about 2 1/2 hours start to almost finish - I have to rubber glove my cast and go wash the cookie sheets. The big square container is full, but not to the brim, plus a small, probably 1-qt., plastic on the side.

Here's 2006 - 3 buckets - for comparison:

It will just have to be enough - maybe I'll only send them, and not put any out at the party ...

I think I like iPhoneroid better than the regular pictures - I love how it is posterized just enough, and it's got those magenta highlights - everything just comes out yellow when I shoot at night.

Last night I drank a cup of cocoa with a shot of bourbon thrown in and then took one of the vicodins with tylenol I got for my thumb pain, and I was sort hungover this morning. Tonight I'm sticking to regular tylenol, and the bourbon in a hot toddy. On to appetizers.

Snow Day

2009-12-09T12:49:00.000-08:00

So last night we got about a foot of snow. There were blizzard predictions, tho - high winds and whiting out and drifting - most of which did not happen because the snow was too heavy and wet. It's 27° out there now, supposed to keep dropping, (it has been all day) and a high of only 7° tomorrow. Everyone freaked out and the Madison Schools and the university announced they'd be closed today by 10:00 p.m. last night. The buses aren't running, most streets are not plowed. Mark shoveled for three hours this morning - I got excused because of my thumb. I have a blue cast now; came home with it yesterday afternoon.
I made the ruggelach dough and pecan bars so far today - and waffles for breakfast at 1:00 when Mark was finally done shoveling. The cast is actually more comfortable than the splint, there's no big piece of metal jabbing my palm like the splint. It's also more secure - I feel more like it's in the right place and I won't rehurt myself. But I don't quite have an oppose-able thumb on my right hand - I can't really clamp my right index finger and my thumb together. So I am fucking awkward, or as Mark so much more kindly says, "you're not fucking awkward, your cast is fucking awkward."

Dancing with tears in my eyes

2009-12-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

Dancing with tears in my eyes is an X song that I've always liked - I've never checked, but it could be a cover of a country standard. In an NPR interview, on the release of his album with the Sadies, I loved it when John Doe said, "Of course I've always listened to country music" (subtext being even though I'm an aging punker), "I'm a white guy."

Anyways it seems a good analogy - carrying on in the face of pain, for this year's cookie season, because this is going to go down in history as the cookie season when I broke my thumb, and carried on baking.

I'm in this splint now, and I go to see the hand specialist Tuesday. They already emailed him the x-rays of my hand they took Friday - I wanted to ask for a copy. They used a big old hunk of film to capture the image, but scanned it immediately and it showed up on the screen in the corner of the room. Kinda like John's process, with his large format camera.

So my two big worries are: 1) will I have more or less mobility after they cast me or do whatever they're gonna do Tuesday? I think I'm gonna try to make the ruggelach Monday night, and I am almost more worried about the Rose's Crescents, since every one of those center dents that makes the boomerang shape is the tip of my right thumb; and 2) when I go to this hand doc Tuesday, are they going to say I have permanently damaged myself? I mean, it's my right thumb, and I am right handed, and I'd like to have it actually work for another 30-40 years.

It also means not too many pictures - note the blurry quality in the left-hand-held iPhone picture - my camera shooting style kinda depends on a good right thumb. I'll try to get lots at the party.

Meanwhile, I'm getting really good at wiping down the countertops lefty, even my OCD wiping up the puddles under the dish drainer, that must be done as the close to any dish washing session. In fact, I'd have to say that I'm better at wiping counters lefty than I am at wiping my own ass, but perhaps that'll come with more practice.

Not a good night

2009-12-03T09:31:00.000-08:00

So I hope that last night was the nadir of cookie baking. I tried out a new Martha recipe for little ginger cookies, rolled in coarse sugar - and the vital step that Martha left out was you have to chill the dough - it's like soup at first mix. Even after chilling overnight, the dough was sticky.

My plan was to mix up the dough for slice & bakes: the candied fruit cookies (although I used all dried, no glowing red cherries); the windmill cookies; and the pistachio-dried-cranberry that everyone raved about last year. The candied fruit cookie logs are fine, I think - we'll know after I bake them tonight. The windmill dough was much stickier than I remember it, but tasty - and I think it'll bake OK too. The real tragedy was the pistachio-dried-cranberry. The recipe list of ingredients includes egg - 4 of them since I quadrupled the batch - remember I said everyone loved them last year - but it is for brushing on the dough logs so you can roll them in sugar and it will stick. I put the eggs into the batter - so it was sticky, too. I made a test pan this morning and they are softer blander cookies, but essentially the same - I'll try to not to tell, and maybe no one will notice.

And I hurt my right thumb - caught it on a bannister and gave it a nasty wrench. I have to pull the cookie sheets out of the oven lefty, because righty hurts too much.

Sigh. Well, things'll have to get better from now. And, after all, it's only cookies....

Good thumb left, bad thumb right

Cookie fret

2009-12-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

I went to bed in a state of mild cookie depression last nigh, fearing that nothing's coming out right - the Biberli are dented, the pine nut macaroons are too brown and there's not enough of them, the ginger creams are too hard and there's not enough of them, either - and when I work up this morning, all I could think of was should I do over any kinds. In other years, I've had a few make-overs. It also seems like my aches & pains are worse this year, too - that pain in the back of my neck is almost intolerable, and I don't seem as able to self-massage it out by rotating my shoulders as easily. Last night I gave up on baking and went to blogging, and it hurt just to sit in the chair.

But, a night's sleep and hope springs eternal - after fretting about a re-do, I went on about the day. Initially getting work there was just too much administrivia. Hadda to go meet a plumber at noon, and now the dining club house needs a new water heater - but the rebate from the lead line replacement will cover it, so it's a wash - ha!

And it's sunny and 50 degrees - which does kind of bother me at this time of year - golbal climate change fears aside, it needs to be in the 40s to make the vestibule a good cookie storage chamber - but it is nice to walk outside on a sunny 50-degree December day! I stopped in the co-op, and got mistletoed; got to kiss the co-op services manager on the cheek - and somehow, on the walk back to the office, I was happy. I know what I'm making tonight - ginger slices, gemberkoekjes, spoon cookies - a quadruple batch, because they were so well-received when I made them for the 1st time last year, Mexican wedding cookies - and I am just going to let it go - no do-overs - no apologies - it will all be just fine. And I might start taking some Advil for aches & pains.

Cookie Season. Thanksgiving. Cookie Season

2009-11-28T08:16:00.000-08:00

Whoo - everyone said it was the best Thanksgiving ever - I haven't written about it, nor posted the pix, till today - this post is only dated Saturday because I wrote the title & saved it to finish Monday. The main thing that impressed me, when I looked at the shots of the table, was the height of the pile of meat on the platter - ably carved off the bird by my vegetarian brother, and visiting friend, Chad (Chad does have a few Thanksgivingses as the head of the household under his belt, so he should be good at carving). We did totally go into traditional sex roles - the men watched football, the women cooked. But the clean up crew was completely co-ed, so we broke out of stereotype as the night went on.

Here's the menu -
Appetizers:
Chex mix (called crack mix by my brother, for its addictiveness)
Leek confit, with goat cheese, to spread on long rise no-knead bread
some amazing cheese, that Lea brought, especially the Gouda with fenugreek
I made some little cheese & mustard crackers that were good the first day, but went soft pretty quick - served with apple butter, which seemed like a good idea, but I didn't like the sugar free variety I got at the co-op - not sweet enough. Shoulda got Smuckers
pickled carrots

Dinner:
two kinds of cranberry sauce, plain and this clementine and pomegranate variety that was my niece Mimi's offering - she also made customized name plates for everyone, shaped like her hand turkeys, with attributes, like Mark has a computer and we both had the librarian book.
Jen's cheese grits
Lea's wild rice salad
Brussels sprouts with chestnuts (the chestnuts were a little hard - they were roasted from fresh; the ones in the stuffing came in a jar)
Turkey with chestnut stuffing - I had a little container of stuffing frozen since last year, and instead of mixing it in, I fried it up and put it out on a big tray with forks while the men were watching football and it disappeared - even though I got a few gripes about putting it out on a common platter in these days of swine flu - they just came and got individual plates, to avoid contaminating each other
mashed potatoes - Dave mashed 'em in the pot, so they were less fluffy than if I'd done them in the mixer
Sweet potatoes with chile & lime
Vegetable stir fry with broccoli & daikon and peppers and Hoisin sauce

Desserts:
Pumpkin mousse with crispy spice cookies in the shape of turkeys
Apple pie with leaf cutouts on top - we all made it together on Wednesday night
Cranberry frangipane tart - it was a Martha - good in concept, not so hot in execution. I made home made cranberry jam for the bottom. Next year I will use the jam in a thinner tart, instead, something like an Italian crostata

Meanwhile, I made 2 kinds of cookies - the bar type lebkuchen and the Moravian ginger thins - before Thanksgiving, and the Simnel cake. I had to do another big shopping at the warehouse grocery for more cookie ingredients, Saturday, so real cookie production didn't really recommence till Sunday, although I made the jam cookies Saturday. So far, I'd have to say that the fruit cake types are coming out the best this year - I made the fruitcake gems last night, and they are lovely. Mollie Wizenberg's fruit nut balls are looking good. But the marzipan-stuffed spice cookies, the Swiss biberli, not withstanding that I thought they were going to be the best ever, because the dough went together so well, literally fell rather flat - the little wedges deflated on being removed from the oven - you can see the little dent in the top in the ones below. The pine nut macaroons batter tasted good, but I only ended up with about 55, and one tray was a little dark on the bottoms. And I think I must've left the baking soda out of the ginger creams - they are hard and small.

Oh well, I'm giving myself and the oven a break tonight, I only made doughs and frosted things, no baking.

Bottom of the vegetable bin rice salad

2009-11-22T17:11:00.001-08:00

Last winter I tried to perfect the bottom of the vegetable bin stir fry, using up a carrot or two, broccoli stems, cabbage, an onion, over rice, or maybe ramen noodles. Tonight I tried it using some components from a sushi salad recipe that I tested for a forthcoming Japanese cookbook, written by Sarah Marx Feldner, who also writes about monthly for the Milwaukee Journal.

In Sarah's sushi salad, you cook some rehydrated dried shiitake mushrooms and diced carrot in water & soysauce - so this sushi salad has that, plus beet greens (where that faint pink is coming from), broccoli stems, and a matchsticked kohlrabi that cooked up surprisingly sweet.

Then I went up and polished all my mom's copper-bottomed Revere ware, that's hanging over the kitchen sink on peg board, like much of our house in the 60s & 70s and just like Julia's kitchen, too.
This is Dorie Greenspan's picture of Julia's kitchen.

Divided

2009-11-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

There's a common recipe ingredient list instruction, where the amount of something that you need will be given followed by the word "divided"; e.g. 1 3/4 cups sugar, divided. I tend to screw this up myself, since I often kind of cook from the ingredient list without really reading the instructions, so I put in all the sugar when I was only supposed to put in that 3/4 cup. A lot of times I alter the method with my own method, because I know what I'm doing, yeah right. The idea behind the "divided" instruction is that it's better for the recipe to lay out the total amount of an ingredient needed right at the outset. There are other styles of recipe writing; Joy of Cooking tends to give ingredients embedded in the method, like the lebkuchen recipe I just followed which begins:

Cook
2/3 cup honey or molasses
1/3 cup sugar
3 TBLS butter
over low heat stirring until the butter is melted

Stir in 1 cup flour
that has been sifted with 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking powder, and a pinch of salt

Add
1 cup flour
1/2 cup chopped almonds
etc. etc.

I made the honey butter syrup, mixed all the other ingredients in a big bowl, then stirred in the syrup. But I had to read the recipe a little carefully to apprehend the fact that it really needed two cups of flour, not just one.

Anyways, I feel kind of like that 1 3/4 cups sugar, divided, right now. I am trying to start cookie season, at the same time as planning Thanksgiving dinner, and it's making my little brain hurt. Thursday night I made my master list of cookie kinds, and yesterday I went shopping partly for cookie ingredients, and partly for Thanksgiving food.

This morning I got up and walked, then baked some scones, to eat today and to have around when family shows for Thanksgiving, and made the lebkuchen. But I'm also making the list of Thanksgiving apps, and taking time off tomorrow to clean and straighten the house like my bro's doing at his place.

The main thing I can't figure out is where to stash all the cooking mags and recipes I have pulled out for cookie season, when I go into total tidying mode tomorrow. Usually I just leave them on the dining room table for the duration, but that won't work with this year's divided cookie season, with Thanksgiving in the middle.

I am soo confused.

Always wanted to do that

2009-11-18T07:27:00.000-08:00

There are two stairwells in my building, as well as an odd outdoor set of stairs to the third floor balcony. The building, Helen C. White Hall, is an example of 1970s Brutalist Architecture; at dinner on Saturday someone said that the stairs were some remnant of a plan to link it to the administrative buildings on Bascom Hill. I usually use the staircase that only goes to the 4th floor where I work; the entrance is right across from my office door. The other staircase, that's closer to the women's bathroom - which is giant, spanning the whole floor, because this is the library school, a female-dominated profession; the mens' room is much smaller and kind of hidden in a corner - goes all the way up to the 7th floor, but it's knd of steamy and subway station-like, so I avoid it usually. There's this graffito in there that spells "dep", and I always want to add the second "p" for Johnny, but I always forget to bring the marker. Last night I realized I could do it with Photoshop, by taking a picture. In the end I used the iPhone ap, Brushes. It worked, although I found the little screen extremely frustrating. I guess I'll never be any where near as good as the guy who's doing all the New Yorker covers with the program.

So, the leftovers

2009-11-16T17:59:00.000-08:00

In my Julia Child The Way to Cook, at the end of every section on meats (and probably some of other foods as well) there are a couple paragraphs under the heading Feasting on the remains - "wonderful things can be done with leftover lamb, raw or cooked". You can just hear Julia.

Anyways, here're my plans:

Tonight Mark & I had a reprise of the vegetarian option from Saturday - mushroom pate en croute, roasted broccoli, and mashed potatoes with spoonfuls of the Madeira sauce. The only thing left from all that is about a pint of the sauce which I just stuck in the freezer to go over the vegetarian's mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving.

The forgotten whipped cream will go into cinnamon-chip cream scones (I'll leave out the cream cheese in this recipe, and just use the cream), also a good thing to have in the house when the family arrives for turkey day. These are pumpkin but you get the idea.

I'm going to make a shallow dish of corn pudding (I had a little bit left unbaked) and leave it in the front of the fridge in the hope that Al eats it with hot sauce way late this Thursday night when he gets in - he's coming home this weekend and Thanksgiving, too.

The Bagna Cauda will go into a pasta puttanesca for Wednesday, served with a wilted salad from the leftover greens and a few slices of bacon.

And that's done it, I think - at some point I have to make a stir fry from some of the vegetable remains, I bought some tofu, oh, and I want to make a roasted-butternut-quash-and-greens-filled lasagna, starting with this idea from Splendid Table, and putting it lasagna, instead of tossing it with bow ties.

Oh, and in an unrelated note - I thought I could make the half a bunch of cilantro & couple of tortillas in the fridge into bahn mi wraps with the tofu, if I don't make it into stir fry, if I buy a cucumber.

Fall Fancy

2009-11-15T10:42:00.001-08:00

Last night, I served what I called a "Fall Fancy Dinner" to a crowd of 14.

Here's the annotated menu~

Appetizers: Baked Brie "crostini" - thickish slabs of Brie laid on slices of baguette, sprinkled with sliced almonds, and baked - this is the way we served it when I worked at the Ovens of Brittany (scroll past Turkey Divan Sandwich to get to the recipe, courtesy Google Books) - they got three pieces and a nice side of fruit - I put it out on a bread board with grapes last night. Bagna Cauda (from one of Amanda Hesser's recipe history columns in the NYT) with daikon sticks, purple and regular carrots, kohlrabi slices, and a few baby peppers.

First course: corn pudding, baked inside of Delicata squash rings, with a big pile of salad with reduced cider dressing on the side. The rings were made from the squashes above. I've always used the corn pudding recipe from this slightly obscure Deborah Madison book - Heidi Swanson posted a recipe for corn pudding in acorn squash halves but that makes too large of a portion for a first course - the Delicata was the right size - everybody got two, and not a bite came back.

Main meal: choice of mushroom-pecan paté en croute (in a crust) or beef tenderloin with a horseradish crust, both with Madeira sauce. I used the Cafe Flora Cookbook mushroom-pecan paté (the Google Books preview for this one won't quite get you the whole recipe - the book's too recent) that they put in their mushroom Wellingtons. I wrapped the whole loaf in a yeasted pastry dough and egged it so that it was golden - it was quite pretty. The Madeira sauce is also from Cafe Flora. The beef was from Cook's Illustrated, and fussy, like many of their recipes. I managed to use less oil, paper towel, and zip loc bags than recommended. My crust did not stick so well, but it didn't matter a bit.

Everyone got creamy mashed potatoes - local potatoes, butter and half & half - and roasted broccoli for sides.

I made tiny desserts: pumpkin cheesecake (although I wimped on using my real, individual mini-cheesecake pan; as the over-equipped baker, I own a set of two, to make 24 at a time) and just used 4 small spring forms, also from my collection of baking gear - they are about 4-inches - and cut them in quarters. Chocolate-pomegrante petits-fours - they were fun, but if I make them again, I am not going to bother with the home made pomegranate jelly, consisting of reduced Pom Wonderful and cornstarch; instead I will use red currant jelly. And lemon tarts. My vision was for these to have a tiny rosette of sweetened whipped cream on top, but I forgot to take the carefully pre-whipped and stored in a pastry bag, cream. Still, one of the guests wanted the recipe, even without the rosettes, so here goes:

Crust
1 large egg yolk
1 tablespoon heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2/3 cup confectioners' sugar
pinch of salt (or use salted butter)
8 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick) cut into cubes

Combine the egg yolk, cream and vanilla in a spouted measuring cup (I used cream this time because I had it, but I've also used 2% milk in this if I had no cream). Combine the flour, confectioners' sugar, and salt in a food processor, and pulse a few times to mix. Add the butter and pulse until the butter is cut into the flour, and the mixture looks a little sandy - no large pieces remain. Add the liquids, and pulse just until the dough come together. Form the dough into a disk, wrap in wax paper or plastic wrap, and chill for as little as an hour or as long as overnight.

Lemon Curd - this is from a book called The Neighborhood Bakeshop; I use the same ingredients, but I don't make it quite the way they say to -

1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 large egg yolks, plus one whole large egg
1/2 cup unsalted butter, cut into bits

Combine the lemon juice, sugar, egg yolks and egg in a sauce pan, and whisk over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Start adding the butter and cook over medium-low heat, whisking until it's thickened and almost boiling - try not to let it boil, but if you boil it, just strain it to get any egg-lumps out. Pour into a small bowl and press plastic wrap on top and chill.

Assembly
Roll out the crust and cut it into 3-inch circles, and fit into fluted tart shell pans. Bake at 375 until set, and only starting to brown around the edges. Remove from the pans while warm, and cool on a rack. Fill the cooled tart shells with the chilled lemon curd right before serving - they will hold in the fridge for a few hours (or even overnight), but the shells will soften considerably. Garnish with rosettes of sweetened whipped cream.

And oh yeah, there was a big loaf of really good almost no-knead bread, and a cheese & onion focaccia, that was pretty sharp with a lot of bleu cheese.

Tomorrow I'll let you know what I'm doing with the various leftovers - I plotted while I walked this morning. My BFF and walking buddy Rach is out of town so I had lots of time to think.

Reduced cider dressing

2009-11-13T15:34:00.000-08:00

Gourmet (the late lamented Gourmet) published a recipe for a salad dressing with reduced apple cider in it, and I keep having to look it up, and it's not an easy search, because of cider vinegar, and because the dressing's not in the title; it's like Fennel & Oak Leaf Lettuce Salad - so I decided to make a copy of my version, here, where it'll be easier to retrieve:

3/4 cup apple cider
3 tablespoons cider vinegar, or other - I used a cherry Balsamic from Vom Fass that was lurking in the cupboard
1 shallot, finely chopped - about one heaping TBLS
1 teaspoon grainy mustard - like Boetje's
salt and freshly-ground black pepper to taste
maybe a pinch of sugar, if you use cider vinegar
1/3 cup olive oil

Boil apple cider in a small saucepan or skillet over moderate heat until it's reduced to about 2 tablespoons, and is syrup-y. Cool. Meanwhile, add the chopped shallots to the vinegar in a bowl, than add the mustard, salt, and pepper and whisk in the cider syrup. Drizzle the oil, whisking to combine. Enough dressing for about 10 cups of greens.

Survived

2009-11-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went out at about 2:00 in the afternoon, and got a pumpkin latte from the Peets Coffee in the student Union. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with Peet's -
they're close to my office, but they don't have a good store layout and the line can be ridiculous. They're not local (but of course, neither is Starbucks and I go there a lot). They make all their flavored drinks waaay too sweet. But their skim lattes are nice and hot. So all of this repressed angst must've acted its way out, and as soon as I got back with said pumpkin latte, I spilled several tablespoons of it on my computer (on the keyboard, near the hinge). I immediately tipped the liquid out, and took it down to the IT guys, who removed the battery and left it to dry out overnight. And lo and behold, it seems to be just fine now - I'm supposed to watch for sticky keys. I didn't even like the latte, and dumped it out, but I did get to leave work at at 3:30, so's I could use the computer there while my laptop dried out.

Shapiro family Thanksgiving dinner

2009-11-12T11:48:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I got an offer to win a whole set of Le Creuset by entering a family recipe. The only thing I could think of that seemed truly of our family was Thanksgiving turkey, so I wrote that up - I'll let you now if I win!

My family's Thanksgiving turkey recipe is more unique in its technique than its ingredients.

5-6 cups bread cubes, all kinds, raison is especially nice - I save heels of homemade bread in the freezer to use in the stuffing - there's some rosemary focaccia in there now that I think'll be a great addition this year
1 8- or 9-inch pan of cornbread
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, can be salted or un-)
3 - 4 cups chopped onions, or leeks - white & pale green parts only
1 bunch of celery, cleaned, trimmed, and chopped, including some leafy parts
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
fresh herbs - sage, parsley, thyme
3 TBLS juniper berries
1 bottle of white wine
2-4 cups vegetable or chicken or turkey broth
2 12-ounce jars of vacuum packed chestnuts (or about 2 pounds fresh, roasted and peeled)
1 fresh, never been frozen, 12 - 15 pound turkey
Special equipment - 2 roaster racks

On the night before Thanksgiving, spread out the bread cubes on a large cookie sheet, and leave them to dry overnight. Crumble the corn bread onto another sheet, and toast it lightly in a 350 degree oven, then set it out to dry as well.

On Thanksgiving morning, melt the butter in a large skillet, add the onions and celery, season with salt and pepper, and cook over medium heat until softened. Add the herbs and juniper berries. (Alternatively, if someone in your family doesn't like the texture of the juniper berries, place them on a square of cheesecloth, tie it up with string, and steep them in the broth to be added to the stuffing later, after removing the berries.) Add about a cup of wine, and boil it off. Add up to 2 cups of the broth, and boil that down a bit, too. Meanwhile, transfer the bread and cornbread to your largest mixing bowl. Dump in the onion mixture, add the chestnuts, and mix. Add enough additional broth to get a damp consistency - all the pieces of bread should be moistened. Set the stuffing aside.

Rinse the turkey and pat dry. Stuff the cavity with handfuls of stuffing, and work some under the skin of the breast. Tie or skewer the bird closed (I use an old nutpick for this, that I have to dig up from the kitchen drawers every year - sometimes the wire holding the bird together when it comes with work, though often this is plastic now, that can't go in the oven.) Place any leftover stuffing in a covered casserole to bake outside the turkey.

Preheat the oven to 425. Grease one of the roasting racks, and arrange the bird on it, in a large roasting pan (can be foil), with the back up - this is important. Place the bird in the oven and roast until there are some brown spots and maybe even a little smoke going on. Pour the rest of the bottle of wine over the turkey, and cover the whole pan with foil. Reduce the oven heat to 325, and cook until it's within 30 minutes of being done - approximately 20 minutes per pound.

Remove the bird from the oven. Summon the family if you want an audience, by announcing "the great turkey turning" - or just do it all on the Q.T. if you prefer (some family members will likely cruise in looking for fallen and flying bits of stuffing and meat). Take the rack out of the roasting pan. Strain whatever liquid is in the pan into a saucepan for gravy making later. Chill this saucepan in the freezer or outside if it's cold enough, so that you can skim the hardened fat. Place the extra rack on top of the bird, and invert it back into the drained roasting pan, rack on the bottom. Remove the rack that's now on top, and return the turkey to the oven, uncovered, to brown the breast, 20 - 30 minutes. Let the bird rest, and carve.

Meanwhile, remove the fat from the saucepan of pan drippings. In my family we always just boiled the juice down to make gravy (my mother always insisted that there was flour in the juice from all the bread in the stuffing), but you can thicken the liquid with flour for a more traditional gravy if you wish.

Feeling out of it

2009-11-11T08:25:00.000-08:00

Somehow the last few days I'm feeling out of it, like I'm missing out on important events in pop & local culture. Maybe it's because the power went out Monday night before I could see the Muppets on Jimmy Fallon. In a way it was nice, a reminder of what life was like before artificial lighting. We lit a bunch of candles and read at the kitchen counter for awhile, but the stools tall enough to draw up to the counter are kind of hard, and it was dark and cold and we just went to bed at 10:40 or so. And even though the power outage was a reminder of the low-tech life, I just watched the Muppets on Fallon on NBC's website - and they actually made it pretty easy to post them here:

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

Maybe it's because, even though I spent a huge chunk of Sunday at the wildly successful pie palooza - where we served pie to around 500 people - I also read the New York Times book review and arts & leisure, and the section (from LAST week) on upcoming holiday movies, and even though I put some books on hold, not many of the movies have made it to Madison yet.

Maybe it's because I really am old & over the hill - but I've been checking in on Facebook, too. Although Facebook seems to be becoming the Boomer social network. We all got on to keep up with our kids at college and now we're chasing them away.

Both kids called to check in this afternoon, though, so that makes me feel more in touch.

And I made mac & cheese with squash hidden it for dinner. It sounds like a mom's dirty trick, or what was that flap a bit ago - there were two cookbooks on how to hide vegetables in your kids' food, one by the wife of someone famous .... ah, here it is, Jerry Seinfeld's wife. But the squash really just makes the sauce oranger and maybe sweeter. Yum.
A Study of Gourds by Pieter Withoos, ca. 1675-1693

Martha, Martha

2009-11-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

So this morning in the bathroom, I idly leafed thru the November 2009 Martha Stewart Living. I enjoy the mag, I love the pictures, but sometimes, Martha is just too much. The first thing that struck me was realizing how tightly she controls her own image - there was a picture of the 68-year-old Martha, looking about 30, with her milk mustache, in a "Got Milk?" ad - and I realized she must be wearing some type of Spanx, to make her form in white blouse and black trousers echo the curvy wasp-waisted shape of her milk glass. And the milk ad was adjacent to an article about Martha's picks in natural cosmetics. Next I came across the little blurb they include, on who's recently been on TV with Ms. Stewart and the featured guest was Snoop Dogg, learning to make mashed potatoes. At least he looked like his 38 years. Finally, I got to a big spread on family farms in Vermont, and the picture of the farmer-couple relaxing seated on a hay bale in their own barn, wearing shorts & sandals - bare thighs up against that hay - was bad enough but then there was the full page of photos of cheesemakers over their vats without hairnets or hats. I could just imagine Martha's photographers - following Martha's instructions - telling them to take the nets off, because they just didn't look cute enough. Hope they didn't have to throw the whole batch away - but maybe they just did a mock-up for Martha.

Taking on the harder stuff

2009-11-08T15:44:00.000-08:00

I started out on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff

To make up for the overflowing quiches last night - and because I had just enough ingredients leftover - I made a quiche tonight, in a real ceramic pan, not foil, and it didn't overflow.

Here's before
In the oven
And after We ate it with a nice salad - reduced apple cider and shallots in the dressing, greens from the farmers market.

Pie Palooza was a hit - we fed at least 500 people on those 1200 slices of pie; very little pie left over - only enough to send home with the volunteers. Somehow, I managed to do my part to stage it all - I was pretty much the one deciding what to serve when, and getting it all out. I went over yesterday afternoon to grok the pie, and got back today at 7:00 a.m. - and I think I did OK. Two pies got forgotten in the cooler, and one cheesecake got sold at the whole pie price of $15, total score for whoever bought it, but overall, all the generous donations went to happy eaters.

But somehow, I feel like my brother's still taking on the harder stuff, while I keep looking for enlightenment in writing about food. Today he wrote about the disappointment of looking in the mirror and not seeing what you expect. I always expect to see the me that's in this picture he has of me on the fridge - taken 11 years ago, when I wasn't 50 yet, and probably 20 pounds thinner, both our parents were alive (though it was our dad's last summer, we just didn't know it yet). And come to think of it, in the summer of 1998, I was not yet the parent of teenagers either, the point in life when all us parents get their true comeuppance - when your kids are teenagers, you are suddenly a bad parent, because all that stupid teenage stuff they do, it must be your fault.

Yesterday I was thinking about aging, and not able to write about it - how none of my parts are in the right places anymore; when I was undressing to get in the shower after the leaking pie fiasco, I felt for my flat belly - it shoulda been there, but it was not, and don't even ask about the girl parts. But hey, I almost have cleavage sometimes now - I guess that is the upside of weight gain.

The county wants me to take in another foster kid, and I don't want to, and I feel guilty about that, too. I kinda like the empty house, just me and the old man, kids only passing through only on occasion. I should have had 5, I guess, instead of the two, maybe I'd feel less like I have to help more now. But they take up so much more space as they get older.

And maybe folks' souls are soggy and grey in Seattle - here, it's unseasonable 63 degrees at 10 p.m. - and that's almost creepier, even if it's only for our buried memories of Indian attacks, on top of newer fears of global warming. PS - Plus, as I noticed while biking to work on Monday morning, when it's so mild like this, the whole west side of Madison smells like cow manure - like cow ass, as John would say - from the University barns.

My Julia Moment

2009-11-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

So tonight is the eve of REAP's Pie Palooza, a benefit at which we are going to serve 1200 slices of pie. Or so. We got the pie through generous donations from local restaurants and chefs. For the last three weeks or so, I have been scrounging for some of the additional foodstuffs needed - coffee, salad greens, ice cream, cider. I did pretty well by dint of persistent phone calling; I spent a bunch of time today picking up - stops at the farmers' market and the co-op for greens and 30 gallons of cider.

Then I came home to bake my own pies - roasted squash with goat cheese [and I used my "new" crust] - and had my Julia moment. "You're alone in the kitchen", and damn good thing, too, because damn is about the mildest word I uttered. I filled the 6 pies with cheese, squash, and onions, and then poured in the custard. Started loading them into the oven and realized I meant to sprinkle Parmesan on the tops. And that was the proverbial straw that broke the camels back - they all started overflowing and had to be cooked on trays. At one point I had trails of custard from the oven to the counter, and from the counter to the sink, puddles on a chair, splatters on the cabinets, and sponges and towels on the floor. I even got some custard in my hair, by banging my head on the "cat-proof" shelf above the oven, that had a drooling pie on it. And one cat shut in the bathroom, frantically pawing the door, and the other one piteously mewing from my bedroom - they do love eggs and cream. Oh, well. everything's baked now and cooling, and I've showered. Even most of the dishes are washed - just 3 of the cooked on egg-y trays soaking in the sink.

But the labels worked on the first try - go figure.

New tricks

2009-11-03T17:44:00.000-08:00

Back last summer I made a pie to take to friends in Minnesota, when I went up to help Al move. It was apple-plum, a combination I had never tried before, but that turned out really nicely, the plums added a rosy tinge, and the flavors were great together. I had a piece for breakfast my last morning there, before going to unload Al's stuff from the rented van, use it to move three of his friends, return it, and head back to Madison.
Somehow, in the course of making that pie, I inadvertently altered my mother's time-honored ratio for pie crust - 2 sticks (1 cup) of butter to 3 cups of flour. I upped the shortening a little - I was trying to eyeball measures, cutting up an unmarked portion of a 1-pound block of unsalted butter & a partially used stick of vegan shortening I had left over from something else. The dough was more difficult to handle than my usual, but it was flakier and delicate and really tasty.

So my new ratio for pie dough is 2 sticks of unsalted butter + 2 TBLS vegan shortening to 3 cups of flour. For sweet pies add 3 TBLS sugar, and for sweet or savory pies add a few pinches of salt, or use salted butter. This recipe is not only radical for changing the ratio, it also uses vegan shortening - Earth Balance is a good brand - instead of Crisco. But, come to think of it, even though her father and brother both worked for Procter & Gamble - my grandfather was a chemist who specialized in hydrogenated fats, so he almost invented Crisco, or at least, his research went into the product - my mother generally just bought the very smallest can of the stuff that she could find, and kept it around for greasing pans. I don't think she thought it was really intended for eating.

I used my new ratio pie dough to make Molly Wizenberg's leek tart for Sunday brunch. Yum. I didn't take any pictures, but Molly did.

Halloween's a Saturday this year

2009-10-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

And there were both Badger football and hockey games. I carved my pumpkin on Friday night. Saturday I parked cars. We live about 4 blocks from the stadium. Got 5 cars, at $10 each, and sold 4 or 5 bags of iced gingerbread cookies in Halloween shapes - severed hands, bats, witches and pumpkins - 3 cookies per bag, for 50¢ each.

We went to the hockey game, and there were a lot of students in costume, ready to go over to the big downtown celebration, Freak Fest. It used to be sort of a guerilla holiday, people would simultaneously congregate in costume on State Street in Madison on halloween night, or the closest weekend night. But there were lost of fights ad even worse in the eyes of city government property damage, so the city turned it into a gated and ticketed affair.

Some people say it's ruined Halloween in Madison.

Even scarier, even though Bucky won both football & hockey on Saturday, the Packers lost today, to Bret's new team, the dread Vikings.

Time shifting

2009-10-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

I am not at all sure where I am at the moment, chronologically. Last night I went to see Emmylou Harris - she was great - her oeuvre spans from something like 1973 when I was 18, to now. I probably listened to her the most in the mid-seventies, Pieces of the Sky, but really I've always loved her. And to see her still rockin' at 62 was quite encouraging, but made me wish to be tall, so I could wear cowgirl boots and a short skirt and look so good, too.

This evening after work I went to a show of art from the 1970s on Williamson Street here in Madison. I was a member of an artists' collective on Williamson Street, mostly in the 1980s, though - I did not arrive in Madison until 1977.

Anyways, the show was mostly posters, and was set up in a lower hallway of the art center here in Madison. At the same time, there was a disco band playing in the main lobby, VO5. They were utterly amazing. I thought I hated all that stuff - I remember getting to Madison and going to a Saturday Night fever thing at a community center, and wondering what the hell happened - one minute I was listening to EmmyLou and the Dead, and the next thing it was BeeGees everywhere.

So anyways, I went to the art center, went to see the '70s art, and there were a bunch of people I knew through various contexts, Willy St., art, music - I used to do a show on community radio - milling around at the show, and I talked to a few.

And then I went upstairs to listen to the disco - and not only did I know all the songs, I knew a lot of the musicians and a lot of the dancers and fans, too.

Then I came home and made a grilled cheese with cole slaw & dressing made from ketchup & mayo mixed, for dinner, sort of like a vegetarian Primanti Bros. sandwich, without the fries. I have been listening to R.E.M. - recorded in 2007, but always '80s to me.

Guilty of not raking leaves

2009-10-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

So, I guess I'm a bad person - today, approximately the one sunny day we've had in the whole month of October here in Madison, when all my neighbors were diligently raking, I did not. I went for a nice long walk in the morning, and for dinner I made cabbage soup, and in between we moved futons around in the house, and broke a lamp (more on that in a minute) and I even did lots of laundry. But I didn't fold the laundry, and I didn't rake the leaves.

I took pictures of the leaves.

I like the above one, here - nice depth of the leaves.

On Friday when I got home, my whole kitchen was pink.

The lamp we knocked down was one of a pair my mother bought, pole lamps where you tap the stem, and the lights come on. We broke the glass shades. Today I went to a lamp repair place and bought three new shades - they don't quite fit, but they sit in the lamp rather than hanging so they can be less exact, and the bulb kind of holds them in. The 40-watt tube-shaped bulb that was in the lamp was too tall for the new shades, so I tried a blue party bulb that had been in drawer for years. It was so pretty that I went and bought 3 more in assorted colors. The tapping to turn on doesn't work anymore either so I plugged it into a switched power strip. $15 for the shades, $12 for the bulbs (but I have an extra) + $4.79 for the power strip. But it's pretty. This is the blue, blue red arrangement, but I could also do green in there somewhere. Almost looks like it could be in my brother's house.

Along College Ave. in Appleton

2009-10-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, after sitting through a last session on the new library cataloging rules (that I actually followed, and probably could have presented - how scarey is that?), instead of going to the Wisconsin Library Association business meeting, I took a walk along College Avenue in Appleton.

I stood under a tree and looked at the river from the Lawrence campus, and went into their library and looked at a little photography show. An assortment of students (some art majors, some not) were given little plastic film cameras, Holgas, and sent out to shoot. Each student had two photos in the show. The results were pretty mixed - there were a few good ones, of vegetables, and one student got kind of high-concept, photographing the same couple, from the back, holding balloons on strings, in two settings.

I tried to take a few arty shots myself.

I ordered a big (16 x 20) print of this one from Kodak - might've been a waste of $20, but it might look good on the wall.

Stuff to cook list

2009-10-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

When my handheld device of choice was still my trusty little Palm Tungsten e that I operated with a stylus, and kept in a little steel case that looked like the side of an airplane, and my phone and music were separate devices, I had a little notes program, and I used it to keep a list of stuff I wanted to cook.

On the ever-so-much more advanced iPhone, the best note taking thingie I have found so far is the calendar. Since that means my list, that I think of as ongoing, has to be tied to a date, that doesn't work so well. And yes, I know I should be keeping my notes up in the cloud, and just accessing them on my iPhone, but so far the apps I've tried for that I don't like so well.

I've mostly used this blog as the place to report on how well the dishes on my stuff to cook list turned out, after I make 'em, but today, just for safe keeping, here's what I've got:

Squash stuffed cannelloni, riffing on a Martha - it's in the newest everyday food, so I'm not finding it online yet - mashed squash and shallots in the filling, no bechamel, ricotta thinned with milk for the sauce, fried sage on top [tho here's someone's who's already tried it and blogged it on MySpace]

Cabbage soup

something with the gorgeous red Italian frying peppers I got in my last CSA box - roast? Fritatta, for the last brunch of the season?

cole slaw? - I have a lot of cabbage

Something mac & cheese ish, but with bleu cheese and other fancy cheese left from the 3rd birthday; maybe this baked bow ties

Roasted delicata squash & beets salad with yogurt dressing

some kind of cake with sour cream, and/or spices - for years, since Al's birthday is close to halloween, I made him either the Marian Morash sweet potato chocolate marble cake (I always used squash instead of potato) from the Victory Garden Cookbook, or Wensley Cake from Laurie Colwin (really Laurie Colwin's modernization of an old English recipe, with cream cheese frosting and a spider web and a plastic spider.

I keep having this feeling that I should make something that John and Al like, because they'll be around ... but neither of them says they're coming to Madison this weekend, not 'til Halloween, and Al's not even sure about then. This must be like when the amputated foot itches.

Koreana

2009-10-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to Koreana for dinner. Since (I guess) I'm a food snob, once I got over the idea of being in a Korean & sushi restaurant in Appleton, Wisconsin, the food was really good. (I kept looking at the two sushi chefs in the open kitchen, and wondering what they thought.)

My plate of food looked pretty much like this.

They cut Korean short ribs the other way, so that you see cross-sections of the rib bones (I was going to say little, but cow ribs just aren't all that little.) The link goes to a good discussion of how to buy and cook short ribs cut Korean style. Nick Kindelsperger (the paupered chef) talks about how they're still pretty fatty, so you should eat them with Kim Chi (Korean hot cabbage pickle) and veggies - which is just what I did.

The Wisconsin state librarians conference

2009-10-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

I know there's an aphorism, "travel is broadening" that sounds like maybe something my mom would've said, or that could be said ruefully, with the addedum "... to the waist."

I wonder, though, after this morning - we drove from Madison WI to Appleton, up the Fox River Valley. Some of the place names may sound romantic, like Fond du Lac, or Rosendale, but Fond du Lac is just a wide place in the neon hell of car dealerships and fast food places along US highway 151, and Rosendale is a small town speed trap with two stop & gos, that usually smells like cow manure.

It was all equally as beautiful as the stretch of highway from Seattle to Olympia, Washington, that we drove down two weeks ago toward Portland, that looked about like New Jersey with more pine trees.
hwy 151, in Fond du Lac
I-5 South near Seattle
So, maybe travel is broadening, but I felt more like it's been narrowing - the further I go recently, the more alike it all seems.

Self portraits

2009-10-19T18:35:00.000-07:00

In late August at the faculty retreat, we had some photographs taken for the library school web site, on the roof top of the conference center, at noon. I think mine is horrible - its only redeeming quality is that I look sort of like my dad in it. In self defense I tried to take a few self portraits yesterday, using my tabletop tripod. A little better looking, to me, anyways.

Food of my Russian heritage

2009-10-18T17:37:00.000-07:00

On the plane to Seattle, I read more of Mollie Wizenberg's A homemade life: Stories and recipes from my kitchen table. There's a recipe in it for cabbage braised in cream that sounded delicious to me. I wanted to make it the whole trip. By coincidence - or happy accident - I got a big head of green cabbage in my CSA box when I got back. Tonight I braised half of it in cream, and we ate it with kasha. When Rach went gluten free last summer, she gave me a big bag of buckwheat groats (although I am still not sure that buckwheat contains gluten, even though it has that wheat word in it, it's an entirely different grain). I didn't do it as kasha varnishkas, with bowtie pasta, just the groats, sealed with egg, boiled in veggie broth, with diced onion, celery and carrot, that had been cooked in vegetable oil tossed in - since the cabbage had so much cream and butter, I wanted the kasha to not.

Cabbage and kasha, a perfect combination - yummo. And it was sort of like high and low - the lowly cabbage braised in cream, served with buckwheat, that's been peasant food for centuries.

Home again, home again, jiggidy jig

2009-10-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

Why not squash for breakfast? Left it cooking in the oven while I went for a walk, eaten with butter & sugar when I got home.

This time last Sunday, I was still in Seattle, back at InfoCamp by this time, after having brunch with the Steelers and fantasy football, at my brother's good friend Harley's hangout, Bill's Off Broadway.

My father's older sister, my Aunt Harriet, was a drunk, and she used to call up my Dad at 2:00 a.m. (and wake up all the rest of us) a couple of times a month to yell at him. I guess it was worst when my grandmother was alive - they lived together - because often both of them would call my Dad, "do you know what your sister did to me?" "do you know what your mother did to me?"

My aunt was unhappy, but a high functioning alcoholic - New York City social worker by day, drinker by night. She had trained as a nurse. She was married for about 4 years, got divorced, and went back home to live with her mother. She never had kids. When my brother and I got older, she would sometimes call us - she used to berate me that she and I had never had a real relationship, because she could have introduced me to such a wealth of culture in New York City, and the rest of the world. She was so mean to me on the phone, though, on top of her history of waking the whole family in the middle of the night all my childhood, that I could never see being friends. My brother was far kinder to her, and got to know her better than anyone else in the family, I think.

The only time I thought I was having some real conversations with Harriet was right after my younger son (Al, like my dad) was born - his big brother was born by Cesarean section, but I didn't need it with Al. She said she'd argued with her medical colleagues that this was possible, way back in the 40s and 50s, and no one believed her - she seemed to like that I had been successful in this way. I felt so adult, talking to my aunt about labor & childbirth. I never felt closer to her, and sent her some photos of my kids.

Two weeks later, my dad called and asked if I'd sent Harriet baby pictures. When I said yes, he said, "That explains it. She's been on a tear the last few phone calls, saying 'you have beautiful grandchildren, you son of a bitch.'"

I've always been confident that my brother and I would never carry the argument on into our generation. But sometimes, in my heart of hearts, I worry (the same as Harriet did) that my brother has a better life than I do. He lives in a bigger city - Seattle, instead of Madison WI - so there's more interesting stuff going on. He rides his bike more than 100 miles a week, and does yoga regularly, so he hasn't gained 15 pounds after turning 50, like I did. His house has a certain funky/hip style that mine will never have - although that's probably more his wife's doing than his. He's climbed higher in academe than I have; written books and finished a PhD, while I am a merely masters' degree instructor.

But bigger cities have more crime and drugs than little old Madison WI - here, the armed robbers are my kids' middle school classmates of 10 years ago. And I'm trying to get more exercise. And someday I'll get the house in shape. And who knows, someday I might even publish that cookbook/food memoir that's been brewing in the pages this blog all these years.

Seattle & Northwest Trip Notes #3

2009-10-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

I guess I had several days of doing pretty contrasting things on my trip - like the day I got up and biked in Seattle, then picked up a rental car, drove to SeaTac, got Mark, and finished in Portland with dinner at Clyde Common. Our last day in Portland was a little like that, all over again. We woke up in Portland, started driving back to Seattle and stopped to hike around at Mount Saint Helens. We did a mad dash to retrun the rental car, had coffee at Victrola (on Pike), made a detour to the giant REI to get coffee cups and water bottles to take to InfoCamp, and finally ended up at dinner at Poppy with a bunch of librarian friends, and their loved ones.

Poppy is Jerry Traunfeld's (of HerbFarm fame) new restaurant - he was the chef at Herb farm; he is the chef-owner of Poppy.

You get a whole platter of little tastes; they call it a thali. It's inspired by India, but not really India cooking.

The night we were there, we had a similar assortment to this one. To me, the best tasting things were the squash under the poussin, the burdock-ginger pickle, the beets, and the naan.

Seattle & Northwest Trip Notes #2

2009-10-13T13:44:00.001-07:00

We took a side trip down to Portland when we were out in the Pacific Northwest. If Seattle is really hip, Portland's terminally hip.

We started off with dinner at Clyde Common (in the Ace Hotel) - very hip, long common table, very local food, very dark. I was going to start with a beet and roasted Delicata squash salad (my trip of roasted squash: I made Delicata rings at Dave's house Monday, and we ate roasted squash at Serious Pie Tuesday, then squash again in Portland Wednesday), then have a pork terrine, and a half order of wild mushroom pasta. But they were out of the pork, so I had a full pasta instead. Which was a good thing because even the salad was sort of rich, the vegetables roasted in oil and set atop what was called a yogurt vinaigrette but was really more like the richest of Greek yogurt mixed with some garlic, and maybe more oil. So good to not eat pork, too.

I only had one glass of wine because I thought I'd have an after dinner liquer, and maybe cheese or dessert. I biked 20 miles earlier that day, following my brother out to work on the Burke-Gilman Trail, and back again, after breakfast at a mall with a book store called Third Place Books that I thought got Neil Gaiman to speak on Halloween. They're actually entering a contest to get him. But Clyde Common was out of the liquer I wanted - it was some type of local flower, not elderflower, but something like it. Our server was nonplussed that I turned down the thyme-flavored one he suggested - I said the pasta had had a good hit of thyme; he must've been implying that it was the perfect thyme-i-ness - but tough, so I'm a rube. Instead we shared a dessert - an apple tart with a little scoop of house-made vanilla, and cheddar cheese in the crust.The next morning's coffee ordering at Stumptown Coffee in the Ace Hotel was even stranger. The line was out the door, but the expediter-order-taker guy was being vigorously chatted up by the young woman ahead of us in line. The other barristas were shambling around aimlessly. The blond stoner dude who took our order was thrown by me first ordering a large press coffee, and then, after he handed me the cardboard cup, asking for it in a china cup - the for-here coffee's only one size, different price. And Mark prefers his mocha in a to-go cup. I handed the guy a $10 bill, and he never rang us up, or handed me change. I asked how much we owed and he handed me the $10 back, and said he had to think about it.

When we got back to Seattle, our friends there laughed about the hippies in Portland, and countered with stories of similar "Northwest" attitudes at a bagel place in Seattle.

Seattle & Northwest Trip Notes #1

2009-10-12T10:03:00.001-07:00

One of the things I got to do in Seattle was go see Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 at the venerable, but now under new management and remodeled, Crocodile Cafe. Robyn's got a special attachment to seattle - the climate's temperate, like the UK, and all his American musician cronies live around here; Peter Buck actually in Seattle (and a part owner of the the Croc, I think), Scott McCaughey in Portland, and I'm not sure where Bill Rieflin lives. The Fellows opened.

It was a fun show, maybe not especially innovative in song selections, but well-played. And, as my brother said, the sound was great. I wonder if there're any recordings? (Only pretty crappy YouTube vid so far... [10/13] aah, they're getting better now; I'll fill in on the songs as I find 'em)

For once, I made a set list:
Fellows open

~~~
Trains
Kingdom of love
Brendans iron sledge
Adventure rocket ship
What you is
Saturday groovers
NY doll
Television
Vibrating
Beautiful queen
I'm falling
Creeped American girl
Beatle Dennis
Madonna of the wasps
Up to our nex
Goodnight Oslo (for Michelle)
You were a blond
encore
Ballad of John & Yoko
W/ Chris Ballew Queen of eyes
Give it to the soft boys
Briggs

Travelling and not blogging about it

2009-10-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

I think I have been breaking some unwritten rule of blogging. I have been away from home for almost 10 days and only one measly blog post to show for it. Well, 2, if you count my desktop calendar. I have not taken a lot of pictures either, although I am seriously considering replacing the desk top calendar with this one of them.

Well, I have a whole day now to sit in airports, so who knows what I might get up to.

Seattle, in cups of coffee, of course

2009-10-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

I'm in Seattle for a divided vacation/work trip. I got here Sunday, and we watched the Steelers game and ate vegetarian Primanti Bros. sandwiches for dinner, assembled by my brother.

Yesterday morning I hung around and stayed in my PJs till late and skyped into a meeting for the grocery co-op in Madison where I serve on the Board. Then I went out for a walk, and sat in the sun and read and drank coffee and ate a baby cupcake.My sister-in-law drove us over to one of the many PCCs, where we bought just a few things, so I could make dinner. We ate:

Jo Jo "Deluxe" potatoes, a flour- and seasoning-coated baked French fry
Delicata squash rings, one of my faves, the idea came to me from Deborah Madison - you cut the squash in rings; I like to peel but with Delicata this is not necessary - and then cook them slowly in butter in a skillet, truning as necessary, until they are caramelized on both sides
Kale with garbanzo beans and tomatoes - used up a bunch of Lacinto Kale from the fridge and Russian from the garden. Cooked onions slowly in olive oil, add garlic, blanched the kale, squeezed it out well, chopped it and added it too, along with peeled and diced tomatoes and a can of garbanzo beans, drained.

Today I got up earlier and went over to the University to sit in on a friend's library science class. He had an interesting exercise where the students listed about 75 aspects of the book, and then categorized them as Content - the author getting his point across; Structure - like the binding; and Metadata - externally applied information about the item - like the bar code. We had lunch, salads at the Hub, and then I walked back to my brother's, navigating by iPhone. I'm not sure if the additional information in hand (ha) provided by the phone is a good thing, or if it only makes me more nervous - I would have found my way anyway, without incessant checking of the little screen to make sure I was still on the purple line - and it was running out of juice, to make it even more nervous making.

This evening, my brother had to work late, so me, my sister-in-law and my niece went to Serious Pie, and then to see Whip It. I didn't get any very good pictures of the pie (we ate one that was sausage & little cherry peppers, and one that was potatoes and rosemary) but I got a good shot of my cup of espresso.

October Calendar

2009-10-05T15:40:00.001-07:00

And here's the October Calendar - as usual, not as nice as Clotilde's. It's green leafs overhanging a street in Seattle. Also as usual, click the small image to get a bigger one to use as your desktop picture.

Salt Lake City

2009-10-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

I just spent 2 1/2 days in Salt Lake City for a librarians' conference. What I've been saying about it is, "you know how Denver kind of feels like the frontier? Well, Salt Lake City does too, but it's the desolate frontier, not the bustling frontier." I don't know if it's because the Mormons are the only game in town, or because SLC's been hit harder by the global economic collapse, or if it's because the real downtown is out in the suburbs.

Despite the Mormons' rep for austerity, we ate two really good dinners. The first one was at Bambara, the restaurant in the Kimpton Hotel. I'd been trying to figure out why my credit card bill for that dinner was $100 - but I just checked the menu, and we had a $25 entree, another for $35, a salad for $9, and two $12 glasses of wine - plus tax, and there you go.

The second one was at Cucina Toscana, billed as a real Tuscan bistro, with the chef-owner in the house - and I did see him, greeting selected, must've been special customers, and fighting with a tippy table. They brought us tomato-mushroom bruschetta to start, and kept refilling the bread basket with good, chewey, slightly squishy, Italian bread. Mark & I split a prepared-table-side Caesar, that was massive and rich and delicious. I got fettucine bolognese, and it was also massive - a mountain of pasta. The sauce was prepared perfectly, just a little too meaty for me - I would've liked more tomato, carrot, celery tastes. Mark's arrabiata looked way too red and bland, but was in fact really nicely zippy. And the bill for this dinner was only $77 or so.

Pizza Night

2009-10-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

Pizza night at School Woods, Wednesday night - what fun! There were 11 people in all. There was a group of women friends celebrating one member's birthday - a school librarian, from the elementary school that my kids attended (years ago, they're 20 almost 21, and 22 1/2 now) who started introducing herself as "Deb's kids' librarian". There was a family group, who did a local eating blog last year; another family, with baby Charley, a cute, bald, Buddha-like little girl with ears that stick out; and one of my friends that I've known for over 20 years.

I made a bunch of different kinds of pie:

Margharita - with regular and fresh mozzarella, tomatoes from Tipi, and basil from the back deck - it was a little wet from the fresh
Sausage & pepperoni, with Willow Creek Sausage
My fave, roasted broccoli, bleu cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, & purple onion on whole wheat
Caramelized onion, roasted red pepper & goat cheese
I made some plain cheese, too -

At the end of the dinner, one of the women from the big group came to tell me that it was the best pizza she'd ever had, because of how good my crust was, and she also said she was an east coast pizza snob, from New Haven - so high praise coming from her.

It was kind of interesting making a dinner the night before leaving town. It worked out surprisingly well - my upstairs renter came home in time to take a bag of leftover salad; I left the pizza for our cat minder, Mark's son; and I froze some stuff - a dab of cooked sausage and onions, pizza sauce, and I tried freezing the fresh mozzarella that was left - I expect the freezing to make it crumbly and dried out. I plan to use all the dabs in a lasagna when I get home.

I only took pictures of the dessert pizzas, on a biscuit crust - using up all the perishable fruit in the house - plums & pears and a bit of apple (even though the apple will keep).

Worst Travel Day Ever

2009-10-02T11:41:00.001-07:00

We had kind of a hard time getting from Madison to Salt Lake City. Our travel day started off with sitting in the Madison airport for 2 1/2 hours waiting for our flight to Minneapolis. I guess the weather was really bad in the Twins. We decided NOT to get up and queue up to try to re-book our connecting flight to Salt Lake - we figured what was the point - we'd just be adding to the overall atmosphere of stress and worry. We figured we'd just see what we could do when we finally got to the Twins. I was starting to contemplate a nice overnight with Chad & Lea.

When we got to Minneapolis, finally, at about 7:30, after a not too bad flight - punching through the clouds was not as awful as I feared - we hiked over to concourse C after coming in on F, and quickly discovered that Northwest had re-booked us on the later flight to Salt Lake City, because we'd missed the flight we were supposed to be on by about 3 hours.

We went and got dinner - sandwiches at a cocktail bar - I ordered a pot roast sandwich, because I guess I was thinking about the leftover roast beef sandwiches my Dad used to make, and this was nothing like that. It was bland stew-y beef on a bun - with some cooked onions, and a flavorless horseradish sauce. The sandwiches of my childhood were round, boneless beef slices - mom usually made chuck eye roast - on whole wheat toast with my Dad's homemade 1,000 island dressing - ketchup & mayo mixed with garlic powder and oregano - and lots of ground pepper. And, it must be a Minnesota-nice thing - they are so law abiding - I even got carded when I ordered a beer, Surly Bender.

Our flight to Salt Lake kept getting pushed back; we finally left about 11:00, and got to Salt Lake at 1:00 a.m. mountain time.

The shuttles weren't running so we took a cab. When we were a few blocks away from our Hilton, in front of another Hilton, the Hilton Garden, on one of the big, wide multi-lane one ways that Salt Lake City is famous for, a big SUV turned across our path and smashed into our taxi. We pulled over; they dropped behind us, pulled in to the Hilton Garden parking lot, and two guys jumped out of the SUV and ran into the hotel.

Our driver - who didn't speak English all that well - got another cab to take us the rest of the way to our Hilton, while he waited for the cops.

Talk about Minnesota-nice - I'm such a small town girl, I paid the driver. A New Yorker would never have paid for taxi service like that.

Brunch with a decent number of people

2009-09-27T15:05:00.000-07:00

9 people came for brunch today.

Here's the menu. Now it's turned into a rainy Sunday - wonder if there's any good TV

Pollan Mania

2009-09-26T16:32:00.001-07:00

We've just finished 4 days of all Michael Pollan, all the time, here in Madison WI. Pollan's In Defense of Food was selected as the inaugural book for Go Big Read, one of those everybody reads one book programs for the UW-Madison campus. On Thursday, Pollan spoke to almost 7,000 people in our basketball & hockey arena, the Kohl Center. I did not go to that, but I went to see him as part of this panel discussion on Friday afternoon. One of the panelists was Susan Smith, who runs a farm with her husband; they're long time farmers' market vendors - I've bought my Thanksgiving turkey from them the last 4 years or so. Susan used to write for the local paper, and now is a science writer at the UW Medical School. She also teaches writing at the University and has done so for years. Other panelists were John Vrieze, owner of Vrieze Farms Inc., who runs a highly scientific and forward looking dairying operation with 2,500 cows, and a senior at UW-Madison majoring in agricultural journalism, Andrea Bloom - I thought she was a little scarey, in a young Republican way.

I am not sure exactly how it happened, but here at UW, a big land grant ag school, Pollan got portrayed as anti-technology, and anti-farmer. A group organized here called In Defense of Farmers, and got people to wear green t-shirts to the big Kohl Center talk. Maybe it's because Pollan says you shouldn't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Some of the things Pollan says are getting push back from Big Ag, and seems like that's as it should be. Because most of what he says is wrong about our food system happens after the food leaves the farm - I mean come on, we take potatoes and make 'em into potato chips and frozen french fries - and it's like 3 big companies that do it; we make a million different food additives from corn, not to mention that high-fructose corn syrup that some people say is what makes us fat. Except for that one little nagging fact that farmers can't make money if they don't grow what the processors will buy.

Pollan was also the keynote speaker at the Food for Thought Festival. I was a volunteer there so I got to see him again. Since we were bringing in such a prominent author, we ran a writing contest in conjunction with the fest, and I introduced the winners. The smaller crowd at Food for Thought was all pretty pro Pollan - no green t-shirts, lots of positive statements about small farmers, and even big farmers. Pollan talked a lot about the ingenuity of farmers, and traced the history that's in his books - how we got to where we are today by taking apart the munitions industry after World War II, and using cheap oil and chemical inputs to produce vast quantities of cheap calories, which is undeniably an impressive achievement. Today things have gone full circle, and we have too many cheap calories, and expensive oil, and global warming - we need to switch to valuing quality over quantity - and paying farmers that way! and make sure that it's not just the people with the time and money to shop at farmers' markets and cook good meals, who have the quality food - we need to have quality food for all - that's the remark that got the most applause, both times I heard Pollan say it, Friday & Saturday.

But near the end of his remarks, Pollan did say that we are going through Ghandi's stages in the sustainable food movement - first you're ignored, then ridiculed, than fought - we're at fighting now. Do we have to be? - If we're gonna fight, here's a good blog for it - and if we're gonna fight, let's please not let it be the sustainable food movement vs. small farmers - that's just nuts.

Old Hippies on Parade

2009-09-21T14:19:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I went and volunteered at the Willy Street Fair, a Madison institution that's 32 years old.

Since I'm on the Board, I was selling food at the Willy Street Co-op booth. We had samosas, Indian pastries filled with potatoes, vegetables, and curry spices; and black bean empanadas, that were really more like burritos, a giant flour tortilla filled with black beans and plantains, with a tomato salsa on top. Everything came with plums and a can of fizzy water - a deal for $5.

But everything we were serving was edible at room temp, not cooked, and there were lots of other booths frying and searing and grilling with much more dramatic effects. In fact, our booth was strategically located between Lombardino's, a high(ish) end Italian place that was selling fried calamari and egg plant strips, and roasted corn slathered with pesto mayonaise and Parmesan cheese, and the booth that was selling pop guns for kids - so we got both the frying fumes and the popping noises. I envied the t-shirts the Lombardino's staff had - black, with an outline drawing of a pig on the front, and "yeah, there's pork in it" on the back. One of my fellow Co-op food hander-outers said they wear those shirts at the restaurant, too, and they fit in much better at the Fair - a little too in your face for fine dining.

It's funny to see the changes over the years at the Fair. They started having the Packer game on, on a big flat screen, under a tent, a few years back. This year the tatooed, mini-skirted, kinda biker chick girl ahead me said "pathetic" as she went by; I was thinking "I love Wisconsin". There are also a lot more booths for massage and chiropractic and align your spine and cure your aches & pains by holistic means as we age.

You get to see people you haven't seen in years. This year, that meant Tommy & Todd, a gay couple we knew in Chicago - they're living in Madison again. Tommy worked with my ex-husband. Jeff moved to Chicago 5 months before the kids & I did, because I was finishing library school. Jeff slept on Tommy & Todd's couch while he house hunted. They were so kind to us when we first moved down - they bought us a Weber grill for our suburban backyard, and took us to the Brookfield Zoo - which became on of our most favorite places - I still have a picture of the kids there on my dresser. And, here's the irony - 18 years later, me and Jeff, the heterosexual couple, are divorced, but Tommy & Todd, the gay couple, are still together.

UN-Kosher Rosh Hashanah Dessert

2009-09-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

But only with a meat meal - and that's what we're having - brisket, of course.

On the request of my hostess for Rosh Hashanah dinner, I made dessert. And because she said her daughter'd make honey cake, I made trifle.

I had extra milk, because of buying a gallon for a yellow jacket trap, so I made vanilla pudding. And I had raspberry sauce in the basement that needed to get used - I extracted one innocuous-looking white spot of mold, tasted, decided it was fine, and put it in. I baked a 1-layer yellow cake last night, crumpled that up, and doused it with a syrup made from sugar, water, and poire william. I bought some fresh raspberries for topping, and thought I'd make some dark chocolate shavings. Right before layering it, I folded some sour cream into the pudding, and now with that extra cream in, I'm not sure if I should top the trifle with whipped cream, or not. Guess I'll just take everything with me, and we'll see. Can't imagine that anyone will turn down whipped cream.

So - we ate it with whipped cream and chocolate shavings and raspberries. And the honeycake. It was a wet pudding-y trifle, although I guess that makes no sense in British, where pudding just means dessert - trifle being a very British dessert,.

I also made cauliflower sauteed in olive oil with parsley, a round challah, and veggie broth, with corn cobs, parsley stems, a bunch of basil that had been in the fridge since last Weds, that I had only used a few leafs of, cherry tomatoes. I strained the veggie broth, and I just now braved the yellow jackets in the compost pile, under cover of darkness, dumped all the scraps, and did not get stung.

Happy New Year!

Where does the time go?

2009-09-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

Instead of blogging, a number of other things have been taking up my time this week. And, it was a short week with the labor day holiday and all. If I can remember back to Tuesday, seems like I had two meetings that day.

I started trying to trap the yellow jackets - I made my first trap, and, being new to all this, I hung it right next to the compost bin, that's already infested, not realizing that the point of the trap is to draw the buggering buggers AWAY. They're sleepy in the a.m. when it's cool, but I got stung again trying to take my trap down. I bought a gallon of cheap supermarket milk ($1.78 - is that the dairy farmers' curse or what) and made another trap today. Tomorrow morning I'm going to try again to take down the first one.

Wednesday, I think the day's highlight was shopping at at the west side farmers' market by bike before work; after work, I had an eye doctor's appointment, and got dilated so everything was blurry the rest of the night.

On Thursday, I spent most of the day fighting that demon spawn, power point, trying to record a lecture to put into my course. I'd record a minute and a half of narration for a slide, then power point would decide that slide was only 13 seconds long. Sigh.

On Friday, I made a tapas birthday party. Nuts & cheeses with olives and pears and apples and fresh figs. Tiny empanadas stuffed with caramalized onion, roasted red pepper and goat cheese. Little meatballs. 3 salads: green beans with walnut miso sauce, a surprisingly good one that was mandoline'd string of zucchini, cherry tomatoes and tomatoes and corn, tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, and shredded basil leafs, and pasta pesto with peas and fake crab. Plum tarts and whipped cream.

the whole table

Cheeses, goat cheese in the center, blue chese blurring in the fore

so hard to make meatballs photogenic - but I made the leftovers into a good pasta for four tonight

the zucchini salad was pretty, too

I had cheese on toast and figs for breakfast. Then when I went over to unload the dishwasher and put stuff away, the fall colors dishes looked so nice in the dishwasher, I had to try them as a still life, too.

Yellow Jackets in the Compost

2009-09-07T18:57:00.000-07:00

Omigod, there's yellow jackets in the compost.

I dumped a regular bucket of watermelon rinds and vegetable parings earlier today, and that didn't make them mad, but then I dumped in the grill ashes and that got them all boiling and swarming. I got stung twice, once on my finger and once on my foot. They're calmed down now because it's dark. I think I'm supposed to go get* a yellow jacket trap, and then wait for them to go in and die.

There's a cabbage leaf and some carrot peels on the grass in the backyard that I am afraid to go pick up. Mark thinks maybe a racoon will eat it up in the night - that'd be nice.

*after more Googling, I think I'm supposed to make the trap!

Lazy Labor Day with a cold

2009-09-05T11:04:00.001-07:00

I started this one on Saturday, when I felt I wasn't yet fully recovered from my past weekend of moving in Minneapolis. Here's the last MN shot, pie for breakfast at Worcester's after my hosts had taken off for the Big Apple to visit their son. When Lea asked "what am I forgetting?", I replied, "they sell it in New York". Chad picked up my refrain, but it took several choruses to get them out the door.
I wanted to straighten kids' rooms, now that kids have vacated for college, but I only got as far as recycling the liquor bottles and washing all the sheets. What was in the the lint trap of the dryer was pure, virgin cat hair, untainted with any cotton or other fabric lint. So soft and fluffy.

I parked cars for the first Badger game, and sold cookies along with - made $70 - 6 cars and 20 cookies. It was more stressful than it should have been. I ask people to leave their keys so no one gets parked in, and the last guy didn't leave his. He paid me, I just never got the keys. A kid bought a bunch of cookies right after the last car transaction, and I was afraid he picked up the dude's keys. So I spent the next few hours hoping that his car would just miraculously disappear, proving the guy kept his keys. And after having to back out only one car from in front of it, it did.

Hanging around as car park attendant gave me time to fold about 3 weeks worth of laundry.

They used to say, "Man works from sun to sun, but woman's work is never done", and that's really the theme of my labor day weekend - I would've loved to have a big meaningful project - Rach painted the living room, Steve & Heike did all sort of house stuff - but instead I just kind of caught up on, and maybe did a better than average job of, the regular chores that will just have to be done all over again, tomorrow.

September calendar

2009-09-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

This time it's courtesy of my new iPhone app, ShakeIt Photo, that takes fake polaroids with your iPhone - made this dish of peaches look like an oil pastel!

Click this little one to get a big one to download.

Curries

2009-08-31T10:12:00.000-07:00

My son John has been making chicken curry recently - so I thought I'd post some of my favorite curry recipes, so he, and all of you, can use them.

The thing with curries is if you just start with cooking onions and adding curry spices, either your own blend, or purchased - kind of the American way - or if you make, or buy, a spice paste - kind of more authentic.

I have used a packaged dry spice mix, by Arora which is good, but is kind of pricey for what you get - $4 for the little spice pack, and then for say Chicken Tikka, you still have to add the chicken, olive oil, onions, ginger, garlic, tomato sauce, and cilantro. I used to buy a jarred spice paste called "Instant India"; don't think that's available anymore - but Pataks is good.

Sometimes the spice paste has nuts in it - like this one. Or you can make a paste of onions and ginger cooked together in butter until the onions are brown, puree it, and then add spices.

The chicken curry that I usually make is based on a shrimp curry recipe from from Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me With Apples. It's from her days of living in a hippie co-op house in Berkeley, so it's a fast, relatively cheap, skillet American curry that you eat over lots of rice - so 2 pounds of protein can feed a lot of people. When my Californian Aunt Janie showed me how to make curry, she said it should be sweet, sour and hot - hers had chicken, green peppers, apples, lemon juice, and curry powder to be all those tastes.

Chicken Curry a la Reichl & Jane Thomson
2 pounds skinless boneless chicken breasts or thighs, cut into bite size pieces
4 TBLS butter for frying
1 large onion, chopped - about 1 1/2 - 2 cups
2 cloves of garlic, chopped or put through a press
1 TBLS grated fresh ginger
4 TBLS curry powder (I use Penzy's sweet curry)
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom (optional if it's not already in your spice rack)
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground tumeric (this is the yellow; again optional if it's not already in your spice rack)
1/2 teaspoon ground red chile, or cayenne pepper to taste - OR, put in a small amount of hot red Thai curry paste
1-2 TBLS flour
1 15 oz. can coconut milk
1 + a little cups chicken or vegetable broth (canned is perfectly OK if you do not have homemade)
grated zest of one lemon or lime
2 TBLS lemon or lime juice
1 TBLS (or more to taste) honey
salt & pepper to taste

Melt 1 TBLS butter in a large skillet, and cook the chicken until it is no longer pink and a little browned in spots. Remove the chicken to a plate. Melt the rest of the butter in the same skillet, and cook the onions, garlic, and fresh ginger until the onions are softened. Add the spices, curry through chile, and cook and stir until they are fragrant. Add the flour and stir well. Whisk in the coconut milk and broth, bring to a boil stirring constantly, and then reduce the heat and simmer uncovered and stirred only occasionally, until thickened, 10 - 15 minutes. Add the chicken back, and cook until the chicken is nicely reheated. Add the citrus zest and juice, and honey, stir well, and taste for seasoning - add salt & pepper if desired. Serve over rice with condiments such as plain yogurt, chutney, raisons, and slivered or sliced almonds.

Cooking for Minnesota friends

2009-08-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

This is the summer that I only got one day of vacation. And this is the weekend that I'm helping 2 sets of kids move. Friday I was mostly in Milwaukee, moving my foster daughter in at UW-M. Her girlfriend is a freshman at MIAD, and we used the girlfriend's family's van to move my foster daughter - so I got to pull up outside the MIAD dorms and drop stuff off, just like when John lived there. I have to say the 2009 freshman look significantly more clean cut than the 2005 ones. I got home about 10:30, after driving through a thunderstorm. I watched vampires and drank makers mark and finished a jar of peanuts and, after I went to bed, got waked up by kid and cats a few times.

Sunday I'm heading to Minnesota to help Al move from one house to another in Minneapolis. I am staying with two different sets of friends, so I spent Saturday plotting what food to make to take up there to give them, and making it.

I got up and biked to the west side farmers market and got Farmer John's good provolone, that he's not allowed to sell on the square. It was a cold windy threatening rainy day, so I was happy to spend the rest of it indoors.

I made two long-rise, no-knead baguettes, from this new King Arthur recipe - they came out chewy rather than crusty, and good. I harvested our basil, that Mark grew in the pots on the back deck, and bought two bunches more at the west side farmers market, and made 2 batches of pesto, one with pine nuts and one with cashews. All so I could take the baguettes to MN for sandwiches with pesto & cheese & salami - and I even stuck in a red pepper to roast.

On the way back, I realized I could turn the zucchini stuffed with roasted peppers & feta, that I made that no one except me ate, into quiche, so I walked over to Joe's and bought half & half. I made crust for the quiche, and an apple pie, because I got early apples at the market. The quiche crust handled like normal, but the pie crust was really short - it clumped from just combining the fat (unsalted butter and vegan shortening) and the flour - before I added any water. Later when I made the pie, which turned out to be plum & apple pie, the dough handled like all the recipes say pie crust is like - very fragile and soft. This morning the cat poked her head under the tupperware I had covering the pie, and nibbled a little out right in the middle. I blanched and peeled and froze the dozen or so tomatoes I got in my CSA box, though that didn't have much to do with food to Minnesota - except that they would have gone bad by the time I got home.

101 Cookbooks Heidi twittered a blueberry cake sweetened with only molasses, no sugar, so I made that, too, although I just used the Grandma's molasses I had in the pantry - no special trip to the co-op for something more organic.

I paid bills somewhere in there, too, and did some other chores. By 10:00 p.m. I was starting to feel falling down tired, so I lay on the couch and watched TV while getting held down by cats. I went to bed at 11:45, Al called at midnight to say he wouldn't be in, and then cats and kids let me sleep all the way to 5:30 - mercifully, since I had to get up at 6:00, so's I could go volunteer at the Ride the Drive thing - it was fun, but they made us first shift volunteers show up too early (7:00 a.m.) - most of the events were just getting going when I left at 10:00. I was a bike ambassador, riding a segment and and making sure all was well - when I did my first cruise up State St. at 7:30, the only people there were the ones who had slept there.

A small friendly brunch

2009-08-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

I made brunch for seven this morning, 2 regulars and their baby, three friends who come occasionally to the dining club, and one totally new person and her son.

The menu was:

Potato-zucchini pancakes, served with raspberry sauce & sour cream
Scrambled eggs - I offered to do eggs to order, since it was a small group, but everyone just ate scrambled anyways
Bread, butter & jam for toast - I had raison and long-rise no-knead whole wheat
Bacon, sausage, & vegetarian sausage
Melon
Coffee, juice and iced tea

My not-so-secret trick with the pancakes is to cook the potatoes, so they don't turn black - I always do this for Channukah latkes and hash browns, too. You boil the potatoes for about 13 - 15 minutes the day before, and then chill them - grate them the next day when they're cold.

I still like the iPhone fakeroids - that's all I took.

iPhone polaroids

2009-08-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

So I don't think I have ever been so good at cleaning out the fridge while still having the ingredients for a few dishes. There hasn't been much of anyone around to cook for this week. I have a brunch tomorrow, but it's small. So I let the larder get pretty darn bare.

I made peanut noodles yesterday, not only using up a half-bunch of cilantro from last week's farmers' market, I also grated up the bowl of pickled carrots that was in the back of the fridge and mixed them in. Today I made a mustard potato salad, using up that small bunch of parsley from the bottom of the veg bin.

John came back to visit with a new iPhone app that makes fake polaroids, and I decided to try it out. I think I like it.

Salade a la Orangette

2009-08-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

I tried out a salad from Homemade Life on Monday night. (to go with pizza with the really good crust from my other new book, Big Sur Bakery Cook Book; one had cherry tomatoes & leftover goat cheese herb dip; the other had mozzarella & a few spoonfuls of the bacon-y tomato sauce from Sunday's meatloaf)

It seemed a very Pacific-Northwest-y salad (the author lives in Seattle) - it had big crusty croutons, cherries, and goat cheese, tossed with arugula. I loved the technique for the croutons, even more than the finished salad. It's a take on crostini, and saves you the trouble of rubbing toasted bread with a clove of garlic. You take a hunk of bread, the size of 3-4 slices - I used a sourdough boule - and trim off the crust. Then tear the bread into rough bite-size chunks, place on a baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil, and toast in the oven. Meanwhile, put about half a clove of garlic through a grarlic press into a mixing bowl big enough to hold the bread with room for tossing. When it's toasted, and still hot, dump the bread into the bowl, and mix, and Wa-Lah - garlic croutons, with no rubbing!

To make the salad, the croutons in turn get tossed with the cherries, salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, more olive oil, and finally the greens, and topped with the cheese. I just didn't like how the combo of cherries & balsamic made such a darkly stained salad - and, this is the kind of thing that calls out for highly superior olive oil and vinegar, and I only used ordinary - and I probably wasn't lavish enough in pouring the oil on, either. Additionally, I used up a piece of good-enough feta, that had been lurking at the back of the cheese drawer for weeks - scraped off all the pinkish mold - rather than some more distinquished goat cheese. Hence my state of like, not love. Still, the last portion made an awfully nice lunch for me to eat while sitting on the Wisconsin Union Terrace yesterday, reading a 25-page student paper, that (happily) turned out to be 12 pages plus annotated bibliography - and even more happily, was well-written.

Real Dinner

2009-08-16T14:03:00.001-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, I haven't been cooking nor writing much this week - a combination of teaching a workshop on library cataloging, getting took out for my birthday, (had the pan-seared sole, it was good, but can't say I was in love; Mark's swordfish was seriously undercooked, red in the middle, and the service was leisurely at best) potlucks, and other people's parties conspired to prevent me from cooking. (Tho I did make chicken wraps with Asian peanut sauce for Chris' party yesterday - and it was a really good peanut sauce; I want to make it again, on noodles with grated pickled carrots)

Tonight, I made a real dinner - meatloaf, with buttered pasta and Romano green beans that came in my CSA box. The meatloaf was an Italian variety, made from turkey and pork sausage, which makes a lighter-textured loaf than beef. It's from an NYT recipe that included a story about cooking it for Nora Ephron - this loaf was the writer's fall back on when he had problems with the first one. His version's funnier than mine, so go read that. In the story, it said to serve the loaf with buttered pasta with mint, but in the recipe it said to toss torn mint over the loaf before you sliced it. I opted for the former, and I had a few leaves of basil from the pots on the back deck, so I tossed them into the pasta as well. Mark said while we were eating it that he could taste it in sandwiches already. Me too.
I also made cookies & juice for a games afternoon for the vegetarian group I've cooked for before. And got one surprisingly good photo of vegan gingersnaps, which were also surprisingly good - but the recipe is really just a standard gingersnap recipe, made with margarine instead of butter, and a little water instead of egg. And gingersnaps are often made with vegetable oil, anyways, even when you're cooking for those who indulge in animal products.

Late summer food

2009-08-12T07:37:00.000-07:00

So here it is almost the middle of August, and I'm not even sick of zucchini yet. I haven't had a dinner entirely composed of corn on the cob, although I did have squash casserole and roasted green beans last Friday, shared with the teenage girls. I've had a few good tomatoes - last night for dinner we had grilled cheese & tomato, on some wheat ciabatta I made Sunday. Today for my lunch I have a sack of the orange cherry tomatoes that my mom loved so much, and one of dark cherries.

But mostly I'm still yearning for summer food - yesterday I was looking at the cover of my July Martha mag, where it said, "Lobster Made Easy", and I couldn't remember the last time I had lobster - and, since in my family we never ate lobster - except maybe in Chinese food - except when we were by the ocean, I couldn't even think of where to go to eat it. Maybe Seattle.

August Calendar

2009-08-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

Here it is - I did not resize this time to make it exactly the right size for some screens, but on my Mac, it looks best if I select "Stretch to Fit Screen"
Click the small image to be taken to a larger for download.

happy August.

Wouldn't of happened to Molly

2009-08-09T08:37:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying reading Orangette/Molly Wizenberg's A Homemade Life; her stories about food and cooking are so sweet. They have mostly happy endings, although she admits to eating way too much cake in the process of testing a recipe, for example. It's her process that I admire - eating something, encountering a recipe, and making it her own - and also that I aspire to in my own food writing.

I was pretty happy with my plum muffin recipe and story yesterday, but it has a coda. This morning, after eating one of the muffins while reading all the Woodstock articles in the Sunday papers, I left the muffin paper sandwiched between the shallow bowl with brown stripes I'd had melon chunks in, and the saucer I'd used for the muffin. Both old dishes from our house in Pittsburgh, where I lived the summer of 1969, when I was turning 14 and just a little too young to go to Woodstock. I was remembering that summer, and wondering what I might've eaten from these very dishes 40 years ago. I turned to do something at the sink, and one of the cats jumped up to get the muffin paper - just buttery enough to be attractive to her, I guess - and knocked down and broke the bowl. The saucer was Corelle, the dishware that was advertised as almost unbreakable when we were kids - when it does break, it basically explodes - so I guess I was spared that. Still, not at all the ending a Wizenberg story would have had.

Waitrose Cook the Cover

2009-08-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

Today has been one of those days that feels like several in one. I got up to dark and thunderstormy, went to work for a few hours, and when I came out, it was hot and sunny.

In that first dark hour of the morning, I made some plum muffins while listening to Daniel Shore reminisce about Nixon's resignation - I always thought I watched him resign on my 19th birthday, a few days before I moved to Wisconsin for the first time. But I guess - if it was really August 9th, 1974 - it was really two days before my 19th birthday.

The muffins were on the cover of my Waitrose Food Mag, Brit food porn, worth every penny of the $50 a year it costs me. It was in the mailbox the day I came home with a basket of plums because they smelled so good; I had yogurt, and I even had the right kind of tulip-style muffin papers from King Arthur Flour.

Anyways, here's the muffins, adapted for us in the U.S.

Plum Yogurt Muffins
Makes: 12

1/2 stick (4 TBLS) butter
4-5 slices of candied ginger, chopped
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1/4 tsp. salt
1 3/4 cups unbleached flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup vanilla yogurt (I used Mountain High, my current fave - it has a little more milkfat and a little less sugar than Dannon - but any vanilla yogurt will work!)
1 1/2 cups chopped plums

Line a muffin tin with paper cases or squares of parchment paper that have been cut to fit each hole. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Melt the butter (I just do this in the microwave in the mixing bowl) and set aside to cool slightly. Chop the plums. Chop the ginger into the bowl of butter, and add the sugar and the eggs. Mix well. Add the soda, salt and yogurt. Dump the flour on top. and mix until the flour is moistened but the batter is still lumpy. Add all but about 1/2 a cup of the plums, and mix to combine. Spoon the batter into the muffin tins, dividing evenly, and press a few hunks of the remaining chopped plums into the top of each muffin. Bake for 20–25 minutes, until golden brown and risen. Cool in the tins for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

After the day turned hot and sunny, I went for a bike ride and came back with a basket of peaches - but no magazines with something peach on the cover came in the mail today.

Not Good

2009-08-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

For a worrywart like me, it wasn't good to go get something out of the deep freeze down the basement - butter, I think - on Sunday morning, to discover a can of juice that was thawing, and then to see that the freezer was unplugged. I think it was a marauding cat - one of them likes to sleep on top of the freezer - it's near her food bowl and warm on top - and she knocked a pile of baskets down that must've unplugged the plug. I checked to see if everything else seemed frozen and it did, so I just plugged it back in. But two hours later when the juice did not seem to be re-freezing, although, true, it is sugary, and also true, it was on the door, I panicked and decided I better defrost the whole thing and start over.

So I shleped all the stuff upstairs and into the three other freezers available in the house, and let the deep freeze thaw, and chipped ice, and mopped up water, and washed towels. Finally, I froze a test tray of ice cubes, and when that worked, I moved everything back, finishing up around 10 p.m.

But I guess - live & learn - it gave me a chance to inventory, and I decided I had a lotta frozen fruit. So I made blueberry crisp for the CHEW meeting Wednesday.

Using up the leftovers

2009-08-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday evening I have to give a talk for a group of culinary enthusiasts & historians, on my theory of food & cooking. One of my three rules is going to be "use up the leftovers, but don't go nuts". You know, don't buy $75 worth of ingredients to make a dish that will use up that half a bunch of cilantro in your fridge.

I've recently made food for two slightly under-subscribed events - my last dining club dinner, and John's art opening - and I've been spending a lot of time re-purposing those leftovers.

First, I gave away 2 quarts each of the potato and corn & black bean salads from the dinner. One of my friends didn't make it to the dinner at the last minute, so it was easy to pass of salads on her, since she was the cause of some of the quantity.
Yesterday, I gave the kids a big bucket of all this fruit to take to Lake Ripley.

I had baked Brie for lunch.

Not sure yet what I am going to do with this goat cheese torta; it's pesto, olivada, and roasted peppers - but I think the culinary history group might be eating it.
I made a picnic yesterday to take to a folk music fest - all the strawberry-topped cheesecake squares have now been eaten; took the Brie as well. I sent John back to Milwaukee with a bunch of brownies, and the rest are going to my class tomorrow. I might freeze the plain cheesecakes - or maybe they'll go to the Wednesday group too.
I pickled the carrots and cucumbers and made the peppers into an egg dish for breakfast.
There's not a whole lot of this salsa left - so maybe we'll just have to eat it! I do have lots of tortillas in the freezer - cheese quesadillas, fastest supper known to moms.

Pimento cheese - hmm

Crackers just went into the cracker bin.

Now I'm going to make some arrabiata pasta to use up salami & pesto. 'Course what I'm really worried about is the culinary group is actually at the same place the art show was; since there was too much food for the show, stands to reason I'll have too little for the talk. Or then again, maybe it'll all be just right.

Summer's Bounty Dinner

2009-07-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

Since my brother's got a 9-month contract, he's blogging away - lotsa good entries.

I myself am teaching a 5-week class this summer, to be followed immediately by a 1-week workshop. Then I have a few days to get everyone's grades in, by August 19, and I have about a week I can take off - but then the regular semester starts Sept. 8

So I'm not writing much at all.

I did take pictures for once, at the Summers Bounty Dinner Sunday.
Above is the tomato-basil salad, curry potato salad, and the black bean & corn salad.
Another view, same salads.
One of the chickens on the grill - I snipped the wing tips, stuffed them with rosemary and tied their legs together. Cooked over indirect coals, back up, so no basting.
The black bean corn salad stars here.
Tomato, a bunch eaten and a closer view of the curry potato.

This year -

2009-07-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

I remembered my mom's yahrzeit, or anniversary of her death, but I didn't do anything about it except think. She died July 22nd, 2004 - so it's been 5 years. I didn't light a candle, didn't eat her favorite foods, didn't call my kids and tell them to remember their Oma that day. I still have two big trees of broccoli in the fridge that I was going to steam and eat with salad dressing, maybe over a bunch of arugula; what she called "my leafs" - and drink some cold white wine with it. But I was too tired when I got home on Wednesday night, and I made grilled ham & cheese sandwiches, and ate them with leftover hash brown potatoes - all very UN-momlike - too much grease, too much starch.

Good thing my brother had a nice I-remember-mom lunch for all of us that day.

And maybe we'll have that broccoli and salad tonight - mom wouldn't have minded - she would've just turned up her nose at the sandwiches and potatoes on Wednesday, and eaten something else - and be happy to share, or even eat most of, the broccoli today. <grin>

Standing on the moon

2009-07-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

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 Jerry Garcia had come back from a diabetic coma - and I think Robert Hunter had a kid that died, but I can't find proof of that right now.

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

2009-07-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-16T11:19:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-06T15:46:00.001-07:00

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

4th of July: iPhone Fireworks and Peach Cake Sunday Morning

2009-07-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

It hasn't felt like a particularly holiday-ish 4th of July weekend to me - I have a class that starts Monday, so I've been preparing for that, brought my computer home and everything. I didn't invite anyone over to grill yesterday, so I was only cooking for three, me, Mark & Ethan - Al and his camp buddies passed through, but did not stay to eat. The big Madison Fireworks, Rhythm & Booms, were ridculously early this year, scheduled for Saturday June 27th, rained out, and went off Sunday June 28th - we didn't go at all. And we went to the big Milwaukee party, Summerfest, on Wednesday (July 1) to see Bob Dylan, rather than ON 4th of July.

Rhythm & Booms is always the Saturday before 4th of July, so as not to eclipse the other communities and neighborhoods around Madison if they want to do their fireworks on the 4th - that's how it got so stupid early this year with the 4th a Saturday itself. So last night we biked over to the closest of those neighborhoods that does its own fireworks, the Village of Shorewood Hills. They set off their fireworks on the golf course - we watched from the parking lot of a state office building across the street. Kind of an obstructed view. The people next to us were listening to car racing on the radio - sounded like Indy cars, but at Watkins Glen, I guess it was the Camping World Grand Prix - I know I heard the announcer say Matt Kenseth, and seemed like it was a longish race. A nice bike ride over and back, and we felt like it was a good low key celebration of our Nation's birthday.

This morning I got up and walked, it's getting hot, and then made a cornmeal peach upside down cake, melding a couple of Martha recipes.

Greens & Cornbread

2009-06-30T08:10:00.001-07:00

I know, I know, it's supposed to be "beans and cornbread", at least in the words of Louis Jordan, but that's not what I made for dinner last night.

Actually, I had started writing a lengthy screed about the pure FML-ness of Monday - but after 4 paragraphs, I was thoroughly sick of it, so I imagine all of you would be too.

So I went home and made dinner, and made cornbread to go with the turnip greens and beet greens I had in the basement fridge - one of the FML events of Monday was having to deal repeatedly with Sears' automated system to confirm that my new refrigerator will not be delivered until July 7th - although, briefly, after Sears' first phone call at 7:30 a.m., from a real human! it looked like maybe it would come today, July 1. So another week plus of running up & down between Mark's fridge on the 2nd floor to my auxiliary fridge in the basement, to accumulate all ingredients for food prep, and even just to put a slug of milk in my morning coffee. The basement fridge tends to freeze things - the leaf tips of the turnip greens were a little whithered. I just added bacon, and all was well:

Greens with bacon
1 large bunch of turnip greens
Greens from one bunch of beets - see below for what to do with the beets
3 scallions or spring onions
4 strips of bacon (I used round cottage bacon, from Willow Creek, which is very lean - I thought it was the same part of the pig as pancetta, but some Google searches tell me that pancetta is belly, and cottage bacon is shoulder - I guess the British differentiation: "streaky" for strips of fat streaked bacon from the belly; bacon for everything else, is the most clear.
1 TBLS olive oil, if your bacon is lean

Bring a large pot of water to the boil, and salt it. Pull the stems off the greens and rinse them. Plunge the greens into the water, separately, just until wilted. Drain, and cool while you cook the bacon. Cut the bacon into bits, and cook in the same pot - after you pour out the greens water, set it back on the warm, but turned off burner on the stove to dry, to reduce spattering. Cook the bacon till it is somewhat browned, adding the olive oil if the bacon does not give off much fat of its own. Slice the onions thinly and throw them in. Squeeze out the greens, chop them and dump them into the pot, too. Stir to coat everything with oil. Season with salt and pepper and eat with cornbread.

Pickled beets and eggs
1 bunch of beets (I had 7 smallish beets)
3 - 6 eggs

Trim the beets, and rinse them. Cook by your favorite method - boil, roast, steam - since I was making cornbread, and had the oven on, and it was a cool day, I roasted. Cool them enough to slip the skins off. Place the peeled beets in a jar or bowl, and add 4 - 5 TBLS sugar, 1/3 cup cidar vinegar, 2 teaspoons of salt, and enough hot water to cover - about another 1/3 cup. Hard boil the eggs, peel them, and drop them into the jar, too. Swirl the liquid around to make sure the sugar is dissolved, cover, and refrigerate. If you use a bolw, you can cover the beets and eggs with a plate that is slightly less in diameter than the bowl, to hold them down in the pickling brine.

You can vary this by using interesting vinegars, and/or adding spices like whole cloves, cinnamon stick, allspice -

Some suggested ways to eat the beets and eggs are to make yourself a salad plate with sliced beets and sliced purple egg around a small dab of mayonaise (full fat recommended). Or make deviled eggs with the purple eggs, and garnish with the beets.

Sweat equity

2009-06-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to help a friend, Susan, with the cooking for her daughter's graduation party, out at the farm. We cleaned and trimmed and roasted about 25 pounds of of their chicken, using a spice rub that I had put together the night before, with chili powder and brown sugar and lots of pepper. Their chickens are pretty big birds, and they have the processor cut them into 8ths - so all the breasts have a piece of the back attached (it's like when you buy it in the store, and the label says "chicken breast with rib meat attached"). We cut that off, and divided all the breasts in half. We started off saving the wings and backs for stock, but the backs were so meaty that Susan was inspired to invent a new cut, the fatback, a boneless piece of the back, dark meat with skin attached. Succulent and delicious, and, because I was squeezing limes for quacamole, we discovered that a squish of lime juice was the perfect garnish.

We also made six pans of mac & cheese, using 5 pounds of noodles and something like 8 pounds of cheese - somewheres between their grandma's recipe and mine. The night before, I baked two big sheet cakes to go under their strawberries, and whipped cream out of a can, using my new favorite plain buttermilk cake from Gourmet, times 10 - which technically should only feed 60, but the batter nicely filled my 2 half sheet cake pans, which is at least 80 squares of cake.

I worked in exchange for farm produce, and I think I really scored, coming home with 4 whole chickens, a bag of trimmings for chicken stock, at least two pounds of chicken liver - plenty for chopped liver for the next Jewish holiday - 2 big and one little bags of frozen strawberries, and two big bags of raspberries. Plus 2 quarts of fresh strawberries for the brunch tomorrow.

She even loaned me a cooler to bring all my loot back in.

I came home, loaded everything into freezers and fridges, and had a bowl of ice cream with strawberry sauce - hey, gotta rotate the stock - use up the old when the new stuff comes in.

Continues to suck

2009-06-24T05:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday about the only good thing that happened was I got a lot of work done on the information architecture course I'm going to teach starting July 6th - and this despite the jackhammering in the basement of my building. It was way too hot, John was in a bad, pessimistic and down on himself mood, and I overflowed the laundry sink by washing the cat-hair-covered fleece throw & full size blanket that are usually wadded up on the couches.

I folded all the laundry, though, and we ate tuna melts on my home made focaccia - I believe I have perfected the sandwich focaccia. This is based on Carol Field:

Sponge:
2/3 cup lukewarm water
2 1/2 teaspoons (scant TBLS, or 1 package) active dry yeast
1 cup flour

Measure the water into a mixing bowl, and sprinkle the yeast over. Let it sit until the yeast foams, about 10 minutes - if it doesn't foam, throw it out and start over with new yeast. Add the flour, and mix with a rubber spatula to make a soft batter-y dough. Cover (I like to just put a plate on top of the bowl) and let rise for 30 minutes to 1 hour (30 minutes is enough, but if you want to go for a walk or something, an hour is OK).

Dough:
the sponge
1/2 cup lukewarm water
1/3 cup white wine (room temperature)
1/3 cup olive oil
2 1/2 cups flour, approximately
2 teaspoons salt

Add the liquids to the sponge, and then add the salt and flour. If you have a stand mixer, do this in the mixer bowl. Mix on low speed until the dough clears the bowl adding a little more flour, by the tablespoon, if necessary. Increase the speed to medium, and let the mixer knead for 3 minutes. By hand, after the liquids, start by mixing in one cup of flour, and then adding the rest more gradually. Knead on a lightly floured surface until smooth and satiny. Form the dough into a ball, transfer to an oiled bowl, and turn the dought once to coat with oil. Cover with a damp towel and let rise for 1 hour.

Shaping and baking:
Pour 1 1/2 - 2 tablespoons olive oil into a 13 x 9 x 2 baking pan. The key to getting the focaccia the right thickness for sandwiches is baking in the 13 x 9 x 2, standard casserole size, pan. Scrape the dough into the pan, approximately on top of the oil, and turn to coat it. With oiled fingers, press the dough out to the edges of the pans as well as you can. Let rest 15 minutes, then stretch again, dimpling the surface of the dough with your fingers. Let the focaccia rise about 45 minutes, until puffy.

Meanwhile, heat the oven to 400 degrees. Fill a spray bottle with water. Place the focaccia in the oven and mist the walls of the oven with water. Do this three more times in the next 10 minutes, then let the focaccia bake about 20 - 25 minutes more - undisturbed - you can check it, but don't spray it anymore! - until it is golden brown.

Naturally, in keeping with the overall suckiness of the day, the Brewers lost while I was folding the laundry - and it was just about the dictionary definition of a sucky game - it was 3 - 0 Twinkies when I turned on the radio; the Brewers got their score up to 3, but the Twins scored like 4 runs on some Brewer fielding mistakes, and all this happened in the first four innings; the game just dragged on and on and the Brewers never scored - they left guys stranded on base almost every inning - 12 runners in all, according to the news this a.m. Their manager said the " 7-3 loss to the Twins Tuesday night at Miller Park may have been the worst game the Brewers have played all season."

Wotta week

2009-06-21T11:25:00.001-07:00

So lets see - well, the washer died, and the fridge died. I had to go to Milwaukee for the day Thursday, for Kaylah's UW-M new student orientation, but who knows if she will graduate high school. The washer turned out to be repairable - only about $90. The fridge needs to be replaced, only about $933.66 - but I think I can apply to get a $75.00 rebate of the delivery fees, since I re-upped my Sears charge to buy it.

I got the same LG that I have at the dining club.

The Brewers keep losing, I'm not ready for my class that starts July 6 yet, I have 2 big baskets of laundry waiting in the basement for me to fold them, my application to run for Willy Street Board still needs writing, and requires eloquence that I am not sure I possess ....

For father's day, we grilled burgers - made them square to go on my home made focaccia, with bacon, mayo and lettuce, and also grilled potatoes and broccoli, zucchini and asparagus from my veggie box - the asparagus came fat and dead purple - more phallic even than usual, but it turned green on the grill and that's how I knew it was done. Now I am drinking gin and bitter lemon. And I made really good strawberry ice cream even though Mark, the father in this household, wanted pie.

Mark sent me love poetry Friday, but unaccountably, I am resisting - I just cannot see the lovely sentiments in the poem that he found applied to me.

Strawberry Ice Cream - based on Ben & Jerry's recipe, from an old book I was given, along with an ice cream maker, in the late '80s, when they still owned their own company ...

2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup half & half
1 cup strawberry sauce (strawberries mashed with sugar)

Whisk the eggs until they are light & fluffy. Add the sugar and keep whisking until the sugar is dissolved (no more sandy feeling at the bottom of the bowl) and sightly thickened. Add the cream and the half and half and mix well. Add the strawberry sauce. Freeze according to the directions on your ice cream freezer. Makes one generous quart.

Wanted to go,

2009-06-16T14:40:00.000-07:00

but it just did not happen.

Robyn Hitchcock & Venus 3 at Bell House in Brooklyn, last Thursday June 11th, covering (O.M.G.) the Kinks' Waterloo Sunset

Dedicated to his wife, "Hopefully you'll see this on YouTube, honey" - nice
Although this N.Y. Doll is recorded much, much better

Weekend food - Strawberries and Crêpe Gateau

2009-06-14T15:47:00.001-07:00

Most of the time this weekend I was trying recondition myself to think of myself as zaftig; I may be fatter than I want to be, but that's not necessarily ugly - you know, the real women have curves way of thinking - I can't get over my jowls, unfortunately. But enough of that -

We went to the farmers market Saturday morning, and the big news is the local strawberries are in. My CSA, Tipi Produce, emailed us all Friday night to let us know that they'd be at the market with berries, and if we said we were CSA members, they'd give us a buck off a quart.

I got a quart from Tipi and another one from Matt Smith over on the other side of the square.

In the afternoon, I went over to Naomi's to learn how to play Canasta, with her mom, who's been living in Miami. It was pretty humorous - we had to call her Canasta mavens back in Florida to get the rules.

In the evening, Mark and I went to Bach Dancing & Dynamite - they always do a series of concerts in June. This program was called "The Dating Game", and all the pieces were about love and loss. The second set was a Schubert song cycle, "Die schöne Müllerin" for baritone and piano, featuring photographs by Katrin Talbot, about a broken hearted mill boy who drowns himself. The singer was Timothy Jones, a Black baritone with a beautiful voice, but they kept the theater extra dark in order to show Talbot's slides, that she created to illustrate the songs - the images were nice, but the darkness made me really droopy and sleepy. Looks like Talbot has made a cottage industry of illustrating Schubert - she is also a violist with the Madison symphony.

On Sunday, I canceled brunch - not enough eaters - and went for a walk with Rach instead. I biked out to her place, and biked to Whole Foods, so a pretty good amount of time spent outdoors - so I decided to work on indoor stuff the rest of the day. Probably a mistake, on the first beautiful day of the summer. I sort of worked, as much as I could stand, listened to the Brewers on the radio [they lost], and finally took the NYT out to the porch to read until I started cooking dinner.
I made a crêpe gateau for dinner on Sunday - kind of like lasagna but with crêpes instead of noodles. It also used up a bunch of stuff I had in the fridge. There are a few steps, but overall it's pretty easy (and sometimes you can find pre-made crêpes to buy):

Crêpes:
6 eggs
1 cup of water, or milk
1/3 cup white flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
2 TBLS oil
pinch of salt
fresh grated nutmeg

For the crêpes, combine eggs, flour, water or milk, oil, salt, and nutmeg in a blender, and blend on high speed until well mixed - you might need to scrape down the sides. Refrigerate batter for at least 1 hour.

Heat a 10-inch nonstick crêpe or sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add a teaspoon of oil or just enough to coat the bottom of the pan. Using a not-quite-full 1/4 cup measure, add batter to the center of the pan. (The handle on mine is just long enough to not be submerged in the blender jar) Swirl the batter until it evenly coats the bottom of the pan.

Cook until edges just turn brown, about 1 minute. Flip and cook 20 to 30 seconds longer. I use my fingers for this - the edges actually start to curl a little when they are ready for you to grab them. Slide the crêpes out of the pan onto a plate, stacking them as they get done. Repeat until all the batter is gone, adding more oil as needed to prevent sticking.

If a crêpe happens to tear or crumples up, they are actually almost best right straight out of the pan - resist eating more than one, or you won't have enough for the gateau.

Gateau:
You can fill it with lots of stuff - when I worked at the Ovens of Brittany, we filled it with a ricotta-mushroom-mozzarella and jack cheese filling, and topped it with Mornay sauce - crêpes made with 6 eggs. I was fond of calling it a cholesterol bomb. Last summer I made it filled with grated zucchini sauteed with fresh thyme, olives, and a fresh chunky tomato sauce. I think I was driving at something like that with this one, but I was determined to use up stuff from my last CSA box, and random veggies in the fridge. So it had a spinach layer, with cooked spinach with the water squeezed out, chopped, and tossed in garlic butter, cottage cheese, nutmeg and a little lemon juice. I bought Organic Valley cottage cheese at Whole Foods, and not only does it not taste as good as Nancy's or my fave, Breakstone, it's kinda watery. Hence some of the ooze you see in the picture. The other layer was tomato - diced green pepper, celery, tomatoes, and onion, cooked in olive oil, and then some jarred tomato sauce I inherited from KT & TL, with capers and olives, dumped in and cooked down, a lot. I also sprinkled grated mozzarella on the tomato layer.

So what you do is get out a springform pan (or a cake pan) and butter or oil it or spray it with cooking spray. Layer in two crêpes, and then start adding the fillings - thin layers are better than thick. Just keep on layering til you run out of crêpes - remembering that you need two for the top, but just use one crêpe between each layer of filling. Heat the layered gateau in a 375 degree oven for about 30 minutes. Cover the pan with foil or a cookie sheet. During the last ten minutes, uncover, and sprinkle with cheese. Remove from the oven and let rest about 15 minutes. Serve cut in wedges topped with tomato or Mornay sauce.

Dinner

2009-06-11T18:24:00.000-07:00

Last night I came home from work and Al was here with 4 other guys from camp. Fortunately (?), they did not need to be fed, so I proceeded with my plan to use up the giant bag of spinach I got in my CSA bag by layering it into lasagna. Mark, Ethan and I ate more than half the pan, accompanied with garlic toast - from ends of everyone's bread - and coleslaw left from the graduation party last Saturday.

Here's what it looked like after we cleaned our plates.

Lost weekend

2009-06-08T19:16:00.001-07:00

So here it is late Monday, and I'm not sure what I did this weekend - or, what it feels like is I was busy, but didn't do anything productive.

Graduation for my foster daughter's high school was this weekend - she's within a hair of graduating - still has to finish 2 online courses, but she was part of a chorus that sang a song during the ceremony on Sunday, so she got to be on stage in cap & gown, and her name was in the program - she just didn't collect a diploma. Here are the pictures - I only took silly ones.

There was a grad party on Saturday organized by the parents of one of her friends. I made cookies on Friday night, in between moving furniture - Rachael's moving so I inherited a wicker couch from her, that looks absolutely perfect in the front porch at the dining club, and got Ruth's orange love seat back. It's my cats' new favorite place to sleep, reminding me that one of my childhood cats, Snoofy, liked sleeping on it too.

Then got up early on Saturday to boil potatoes and make coleslaw and a veggies & dip platter. We even squeezed in a visit to the farmers market. Took all the stuff to the party, and ate, and met grandparents and aunts and other members of the Middleton High School class of 2009; made small talk as long as I could.

I left at about 4:00 and went over to Bob Dylan Day organized by Ken Lonnquist - it was fun - a lot of good performers. But it was 52 degrees and rainy, and I left just before the grand finale, since I was just too cold.

Left there, came home, tried to warm up, and then went to see a movie - the Brothers Bloom.

Sunday was even worse - I think all I did was shlep kids to the Alliant Center for the graduation. I made a pretty good dinner - bok choy, and fried rice, and shrimp cooked in pineapple coconut juice - but no pictures.

Still, last night was probably better than tonight - I feel kind of gross from sampling cake edges from a cake for a baby shower tomorrow. I've got a bad crick in my neck (started last week after all the biking with a computer on my shoulder) - it's really hard to turn to the left. And I have been reduced to 'net surfing for interesting pictures, and taking stupid photobooth shots of myself.

Worn out

2009-06-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

Chocolate Chocolate Birthday Cake with 18 candles and odd reflections

This week I attended a summer teaching institute for faculty and teaching academic staff (the category I am in) of the University of WI. It was held at the UW Arboretum, a beautiful spot, thought by many to be the birthplace of ecological restoration -- "the process of returning an ecosystem or piece of landscape to a previous, usually more natural, condition".

It was really a great experience - I went for two reasons: 1) I have an online class I have been teaching for almost 10 years, and even though I have been renovating it every time I teach it, I wanted some time to think about a real overhaul; and 2) my School is expanding our distance program, and I wanted to hear the latest thoughts on best practices in online teaching, and what new cool toys the University has for us to play with (I guess that's 2 1/2).

I got some really good ideas - we did a group project exercise this morning that I think'll work great in a face-to-face class I am teaching this summer. And it was also really reassuring to have what I do taken so seriously, and find out how much support I have on campus. A lot of the time I feel kind of like a second class citizen in my department - I am not tenure-track faculty, do not have the PhD.; I am teaching academic staff. But a lot of the teaching at UW is done by people in my category, and a lot of the people at this institute were in my category, and no one regarded our work as second rate.

Tonight, I am beat. I biked a lot today - over to the Arb, and then, at lunch, down to campus to fax in a form of one of my students, and then I decided, rather than biking back to the Arb, to swap my bike for the car. And the Institute has been pretty much 8:30 to 4:30 everyday - and it was my foster kid's last week of school, so some late nights, like Tuesday when she went out with a friend, and last night when we ate birthday cake & ice cream at 10:30.

A couple of days ago, my brother was writing about doing too much, self-deprecatingly, like he should have stuck with each activity for longer, but it made me tired to read about all the stuff he stuffed into one day.

And of course we've been staying up late to watch Conan - Pearl Jam Monday, Tom Hanks & Green Day Tuesday (Conan's like a foot taller than Billy Joe). Last night I watched Letterman instead, because he had Steve Earle, singing a Townes Van Zandt song, and then Jmmy Fallon had Dave Matthews - the Dave Matthews GPS slot was actually really funny.

June calendar

2009-06-01T19:35:00.003-07:00

here 'tis - click this little picture to get the screen-sized one for your desktop. I think the calendar grid's a little too close to the top - but I will try to fix that later.

WordPress

2009-05-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

I've always been a bit envious of the more technologically advanced bloggers who use Wordpress (or other blogging software), and have it running on their own server, so it is totally customizeable.

On Friday it ocurred to me that I probably had everything I needed to try it out - I emailed my hosting service (1&1 Internet) to ask if I had all the requirements (I was pretty sure I did) right as I was leaving work, and by the time I got home, they had emailed me back with a link to the "installing wordpress with 1&1" FAQ.

The Deb's Lunch WordPress ed. is up and running, still pretty rudimentary so far - but it's endlessly fascinating. My first goal is to create a recipe index, except I think it'll be a little tricky, because I think it'll have to be based on tags - so I'll have to go back and tag all my posts that include recipes ... plus some recipes are actually IN posts; others only linked to. Endlessly fascinating.

Summer on campus

2009-05-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

The last week of May weather here in Madison has been chilly, grey, and rainy - currently it's 62°.

Not only that, despite the financial downturn, the University, a.k.a. the state of Wisconsin, and the city of Madison, have numerous building and road construction projects that were planned and funded before the economy collapsed, and so are going forward (in fact, I have heard whisperings of contractor deals, where the builders and road construction companies are doing the work for less than what they bid, just to keep all their guys working).

Some of it amounts to a perfect storm - the City is repaving and regrading a stretch of a major thoroughfare that goes right past two sites where the University is building a big new research facility and where they've knocked down an ugly, 1970s, satellite student union building, to rebuild one that'll be nicer (we hope).

Besides all that, they are ripping out the parking ramp that is below my building - the one that had stalagtites dripping down from its warm cavelike ceiling, and corrosive pigeon crap. The drilling began this week, and goes on from about 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. everyday. I am thinking about packing up my computer and heading off to work at home.

Random iPhone shots of springtime on campus:
The Wacker, a machine for pounding down the dirt before cement is poured

Courtyard of the Helen C. White building on a damp day - I think the water stains on the outdoor stairs look like a ring of dancers holding hands, although only one has a head.

The back of Lathrop Hall, one of the handsomest classical buildings on campus, with a blooming tree and a green one.

A blooming tree inside a cage on library mall, which is also under construction.

Rhubarb-strawberry crisp and strawberry cake

2009-05-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

Both cobbled together from multiple recipes. The filling for the crisp is from a recipe for a rhubarb-strawberry pie, with a story about an elderly couple; "it's never too late [for love] rhubarb pie" from a book called American Pie, by Pascale Le Draoulec - came out in 2002, so perhaps eclipsed by the movie of the same name. It's a flour-thickened filling. The crisp topping is from an apple crisp recipe in a special issue of Bon Appetit, September 1999, called the American Century in food. I can't find it in the magazine's online archive, but looks like I posted a version myself. It's to make a 13 x 9 x 2 pan of crisp, and the pie filling is a 9-inch pie, so I think the crumble to fruit ratio is a little heavy on the crumble, but that just made it more indulgent. I had some for breakfast at work today, with vanilla yogurt, instead of ice cream - it was breakfast after all.I think I started making strawberry cakes about 2 years ago - the first was for a high school graduation party; last year I made 2 - one for the art show, and one for the Midsummer's Dinner.

From this experimentation, I have decided that I like the filling idea from Cook's Illustrated - macerate the berries in sugar, then drain the juice, and chop the berries in the food processor. Cook's has you reduce the juice with a little kirch and mix it back in; I prefer cornstarch. I've tried a couple of different cakes; Shirley Corriher has a really good one in CookWise, Shirley's Basic Moist Sweet Cake, that has both oil and butter, producing a tender golden cake, good with berries and cream - but it's fussy. Yesterday I used this quick & easy buttermilk cake from Gourmet, omitting the raspberries and sugar topping. But Shirley's mascarpone cream with honey: 2 TBLS honey stirred into 1/2 cup mascarpone, whip 1 cup cream, add the mascarpone, and whip a little more till stiff - is hands down the absolute best for strawberries and cream cake. It's amazingly sturdy, and great swags of it will freeze-frame in flow, for a great looking cake.

And the whole affair was done in something under 2 hours - baking the layers, filling, frosting and all.

Memorial day weekend, or the start of grilling season

2009-05-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

So Friday was the pasta made from leftovers, Saturday I grilled, and then we went to see the Star Trek movie at a late show. Sunday we ate salad for dinner, and watched Last Chance Harvey, a sweet romantic comedy for aging boomers.

The highlight of Saturday's grilled foods was the little 3-pound chuck eye roast, from Fountain Prairie. I made a spice rub (found in the new June 2009 Gourmet) rubbed the meat with it, and grilled it over indirect coals, 15 minutes per side, covered, no peeking. Worked a charm - crusty crusts, and rosy pink interior. The same Gourmet recommends using the leftover meat in a salad; that just didn't feel right to me last night, but I like the notion of strips of beef and dressed greens rolled up in a tortilla for my lunch at work tomorrow.

Now it's Monday, so the holiday's winding to a close, but I was in PJs till 1:00, so that's something. I still want to make ramen salad, and a rhubarb-strawberry crisp (frozen strawberries from last year, this year's rhubarb).

Cooking class, and cooking class leftovers

2009-05-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, I taught a spring foods-themed cooking class. It was disappointing, in that it was small - only four students - but it was a pleasant way to spend an evening with a group of women. We made: asparagus wrapped in filo, roasted asparagus with walnut crema, and chicken tenders - as vehicle food for some rhubarb chutney, which I brought already prepared. Also in advance, I made honey-roasted rhubarb, and we ate rhubarb custard tart, and I tossed a salad with some of the roasted rhubarb, and greens, and bleu cheese, and Trader Joe's sweet nuts, and a chive-y vinaigrette. I forgot the sugar in the tart - it's a recipe from the UK National gallery - so it stayed pale, and didn't get nice and brown like this one:

The most surprising thing, though, was the radish leaf pesto - that we ate on crackers with salami on top. The other disappointment was that I did n't take many photos, and the ones I did take didn't turn out very well.

Using up the leftovers turned out to be a happy surprise, though. The day after the class, I got yet another bunch of asparagus (and more rhubarb, and radishes) in my CSA box. Last night, I grilled the asparagus in my ridged grill pan. I cooked two 9-ounce boxes of RP's Campanelle (and it stuck together, so all of the pieces weren't the trumpet, bellflower, shapes they're 'sposed to be, but they were more gnocchi-like, dumpling-y, which was good with this sauce), and tossed it with the last of the walnut crema (about a cup) and the last of the radish pesto (about 2 TBLS). I cut up the grilled asparagus, and warmed it in a big skillet with a few TBLS butter, then tore in 6 or 7 oil cured black olives, and added the pasta. Also happily, I had eaters on hand when the pasta was ready - John & Al, and Mark, were all here for dinner.

We ate it with garlic toast, and a salad - and it was pronounced good even by AL, since it was a tomato-free sauce. He even ate the last bit when he got in from a night of drinking.

Feng Shui House for Art

2009-05-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday afternoon, after attending yet another graduation ceremony (for the library school where I work) I biked over to the Village of Monona (basically, a suburb of Madison) to see Nicole Gruter's MFA show.

Working with a couple of Feng Shui experts (one of whom used to work at the library school where I work), Nicole divested herself of something like 70% of her belongings and reorganized what was left. She rented one of those PODS things to use as a reception area, hired a bunch of her art school colleagues to be galleristas, and opened her home for the show.

Nicole has this great deep voice - the first time I met her face-to-face, I already knew her voice, from messages she had left on our answering machine for my son, booking his high school band at the teen loft. She used this great voice to record an audio tour for the show. I never get the audio tour at museums, the line's always too long; I figure, "hey, I have a bachelors' degree in art history, who needs the curator, I'll make up my own audio tour", but it was crucial to Nicole's show.

You make a reservation, arrive at the place, mill around a bit in the reception area, then the gallerista hands you your CD walkman audio tour, and a map, and you enter the house. It's divided up into about seven stations, each with its own recording. The one I liked best is the one in the feng shui'd living room, where the walls are sage and tan and one is purple - Nicole's voice describes the feng shui expert's hands flipping through the color chips to arrive at purple, and I envisioned the hands of the feng shui expert that I know, not knowing she was, coincidentally, seated outside the house at the same time. Nicole's voice goes on to detail her strong reaction to the purple - it reminds her of a particular time in her life, and a particular betrayal by a former boyfriend. The last song, to sail you out the kitchen door to the back garden, is also quite perfect.

I forgot the Lilac pictures, from the May dinner

2009-05-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

Nick Drake Tribute evening

2009-05-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

May 16th in Birmingham, U.K. Organized by Joe Boyd, Drake's manager and producer (and author of the memoir all about that time, White Bicycles)

Merry May [vegetarian] Dinner

2009-05-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

I served up a vegetarian dinner at the dining club last night; I think I composed a perfect menu:

Appetizers: Lentil paté with cocktail rye | cucumbers and radishes with herbed cheese | hummus and pita | Chile-Lime Cashews (Martha's, rather the Trader Joe's - I have always disliked the Trader Joe's Chile-Lime Cashews - they have an artificial flavoring taste to me) - these were easy (from the June 2009 Everyday Food; can't find it on the Web yet) I think, because I used one of Matt's Smith turkey eggs that are bigger than chicken eggs, for the egg white, they had a little residual egg white froth around the edges, but people devoured them nonetheless - only a handful left on Sunday)
Asparagus Tart - this is from the Gourmet that's a London issue (March 2005), with chefs looking like the Beatles crossing Abby Road. It's the first course to a dinner with roast pork and mushy peas, with rhubarb trifle for dessert, er uh, pudding.

Chiffonade of mixed greens & herbs salad - served alongside the tart - I had a vision for this, that it would be chiffonade - long strips of greens. But I left the bag of spinach from one vendor at the farmers' market at another vendor's stand, and that was really the only green that I bought that lent itself to being chiffonade-d. So instead it was a herbaceous salad, with watercress, tarragon, arugula, and new baby greens.

Pea & mint risotto - made with vegetable stock; based on a Patricia Wells recipe

Carrot Timbale - I made this as a terrine or loaf instead of individual actual timbales - it stuck a bit, but was super delicious - nothing but carrots cooked slowly in a lot of butter, then pureed with egg and whole milk yogurt and baked. I couldn't stop licking my fingers while I was making it.

Crusty breads - the long rise, no knead bread

Cheese Board: assorted Wisconsin cheeses, dried fruits, nuts & crostini - Turned out to be Willi Lehner's aged Swiss; his relatives, Forgotten Valley's Havarti with horseradish & chives - a cheese that begs to be melted into potatoes; Carr Valley Mobay; and Hook's Blue Paradise.

Queen of Sheba (chocolate-almond torte) with whipped cream - I plated because I only had a few raspberries, and wanted to use them for garnish. From my Greyston Bakery Cookbook, that I used for all my special occasion desserts in the late 1980s.

Grocery store food

2009-05-13T18:31:00.000-07:00

I wanted to make a quick dinner, en famille. I also wanted to use up some rhubarb puree, turning it into a rhubarb chutney, as a recipe test for my cooking class that I hope I am teaching next week - not enough students signed up, yet.

I bought some chicken tenders a while back, and stuck them in the freezer thinking they'd be a good vehicle for the chutney, pounded and dredged in flour and sautéed. I got them out to thaw this morning, thinking I'd make rice - sort of homemade rice a roni, with diced celery, carrots & onion, and little pasta like orzo or stelline, and broth or a bullion cube - and chicken and chutney.

There ended up being 4 of us, two teenagers, and two adults, and I decided to cook a bag of frozen french fries instead of the rice. I made the chicken into homemade fast food chicken tenders - dredged in flour, fried, and then finished in the oven. And I made a bag of frozen organic green beans, tossed with "fast" caramelized onions - onions cooked in a bunch of butter, a little sugar sprinkled over, and then soy sauce.

Everything tasted pretty good, even if most of it was salty - especially the fries. The green beans were a bit spongey. To me, the chicken with chutney was the best, with the beans a close second - I think everyone else liked the fries, and the chicken with ketchup.

The ironic part was that while I was taking innocent green beans and dousing then with salt, fat, and sugar, Terry Gross on NPR was interviewing a guy talking about how salt, fat, and sugar hijack our brains - hardwiring us to eat more salt, fat, and sugar. I think I wanna go have a bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce now.