I started writing this on Sunday – I had some kind of idea about writing about weekend cooking – but here it is Tuesday and still not done. Not even not done; not even close.
I’ll see if I can remember at least what we ate:
On Friday, I had a normal work day – can’t remember what I packed for lunch. We went to see Carol, which I, like a lot of reviewers, thought was just beautiful to watch. The only downside of the evening was that in the parking lot we stopped to talk to two other couples, about our age, the parents of one of Al’s high school friends and a librarian I used to work with and her husband. It’s not that our conversation – or they! – were in any way unpleasant, it’s just that they’d obviously been to as many movies at the Sundance Cinema as we had, so I got a kind of chilling vision of all of empty nesters whiling the hours away in the movies. I ate a bowl of oatmeal before the movie, and then got into my marzipan date stash after and ate way too many of them.
Saturday was a pretty good day. We walked to the farmers market and had Gotham bagels for breakfast. Did a little grocery shopping, a little work, a little cooking – the latest batch of the hard squash hummus, using up the two little squashes I got at the week prior’s market, but leaving a few wedges for the pasta that I made for dinner, with garlic toast and salad. “Everything” pasta, which in this case meant bacon, squash, shallots, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, Boursin cheese and spinach.
On Sunday, we had biscuits & gravy for brunch. I finished recording lectures before brunch, and had time to walk with Mark, and head to work to upload on the fast wired connection before going to get Rach at the airport. All us girls nibbled on tea and cookies for supper. There were peanut butter blossoms from the batch of dough I’d frozen during cookie season – I had some wild notion to make a ton of peanut blossoms, and I ended up dividing the dough into four parts and freezing it. I made one part for our cookie party South in Chicago in mid-December, and baked off a second part (52 cookies) last Thursday. Took some to work Friday, and retrieved the last three of those (and my container) when I was in the office Sunday afternoon, and added them to the dozen or so still left at home. I’ve been dreaming up bar cookies with another part – peanut dough, chocolate top layer made from the leftover filling from the gluten free peanut sandwiches, and chopped salted mixed nuts from the annual too big Costco jar sprinkled on top. For the soup dinner on Sunday. I ate three of the last 5 springerle (which I totally nailed this year, using my own recipe) and watched Downton Abbey with the upstairs cat. I packed the last two springerle to take in my lunch on Monday, then washed the last bucket and put it away – so the official end of cookie season was January 24th.
