So many recipes are for those who are too busy to cook. Me, I’m not too busy to cook, but I’m too busy for writing. I feel like I’ve had some successes, made some tasty food, as the Penzy’s signs say, but that may or may not be apparent in the written version.
Last Thursday I tried out this new-to-me Dorie Greenspan granola recipe. Dorie wants you to make it glass 13 x 9 x 2 pans; I used a half sheet, lined with parchment. With pistachios, pumpkin seeds, flax seed, wheat germ, sliced almonds, and cashews for the nuts – no millet or sunflower seeds – a little extra coconut – that I just mixed in all at once at the beginning.
And I made enchiladas, using the chicken broth I’d made from the Memorial Day pulled BBQ chicken, and the New Mexico powdered red chile that Jenny sent me for Christmas. John & Megan and Mark & me and Rach ate up all but one and half of the nine enchiladas for dinner that night.
On Saturday, we went to the Farmers Market and got the first strawberries of the season, and peonies, and frozen corn, and arugula, and parsley.
I volunteered at Burgers and Brew, checking tickets for Willy Street Co-op, but before I went out there, I made food to take to our neighborhood block party. These s’more bars, that came out extra good this time – I think I whipped up the marshmallow fluff just the right amount. And I don’t use a candy thermometer, just boil the syrup for about 5 minutes, until it looks, well, syrupy. And new invention, First CSA Box Pasta Salad. With radish leaf aioli – just slightly doctored – more lemon and a little sugar, and green garlic.
On Sunday, Rach and I walked early, and after I made Tex-mex migas for brunch, with corn tortillas and egg and tomatoes and jalpeño and cilantro and green garlic. The avocados were too hard to chop up to put on top. Served with oven roast potatoes, also from my first CSA box, bacon and sausage and those first strawberries from the market. Can’t wait to try the radish leaf aioli on the leftover potatoes.
I made a huge batch of hummus, too, and some vanilla pudding (with vanilla paste, so speckled with vanilla seeds) to use up the egg yolks leftover from the s’more bars. Then I went to memorial service for a neighbor. And after that, I took the hummus, along with the two flour tortillas that we didn’t eat with the migas, toasted in a dry cast iron skillet and cut into wedges, and a box of wheat thins, and cucumber for dipping, to a photography book club that I just started going to.
Rach and I walked about 40 minutes, then I walked another 40 or so to the memorial, then I biked almost an hour to the book group. Which meant that I needn’t feel any guilt at eating a bowl of the pudding with cut up strawberries, in front of Game of Thrones. Nor even when I finished the rest of the strawberries, after GoT, with a little pudding and some rhubarb purée. I had to do it – before the show, I had carefully cut up the berries, so they’d be easier to eat with the pudding, then accidentally spooned a big dollop of pudding into the serving bowl with the whole berries. So they had to be eaten, right?