Back from vacation cooking

We got back at sort of an odd time – early afternoon Saturday. Early, but too late for the farmers market or the strawberry U-Pick at my CSA farm, that I went to last year, and brought two buckets home. And ate them for breakfast, and made jam.

I got started cleaning up and doing laundry, cat puke and hairballs and general neglect, and didn’t have time to really unpack before it was time to bike to the library to see why my account had been frozen while I was on vacation. I only had 75 cents in fines, so it seemed weird to me – I thought you had to get up to like $3 before they cut you off.  It turned out to be that my card had simply expired. I guess you have to renew every four years. I also wanted to do a little grocery shopping after the library so that complicated getting out of the house because I was inventorying the fridge and trying to figure out what to do with what.

I was grumpy and hot and dusty – and of course Mark had gotten all unpacked and cruised out way before me, but getting out on my bike felt great. The Whee! moment that my brother and I like to talk about, when you realize that you’re out on two wheels and it’s fun. For me, it’s usually this corner from Allen St. onto Hollister, where it’s a little downhill and you pick up speed.

Anyways, I’d decided that I’d make taco salad. So I bought some ground beef and salsa and chips and cilantro. I had a bunch of romaine from my last CSA box that I thought would still be good, and it was. Oh yea, and I bought a cucumber and made a pico de gallo with half of it, the cilantro, and other resurrected stuff from the fridge: a shallot that’d been rolling around in the veggie drawer, pickled jalapeños from a jar, a few handfuls of cherry tomatoes. There was cheddar cheese, so I grated it. And I made red French dressing using up a bottle of Heinz chile sauce that must’ve been in there since Christmas meatballs. So a nice little dinner. Then we went to watch the fireworks. In the course of making dinner, I threw out moldy argula pesto and blender Hollandaise, and carefully spooned out the UN-moldy parts of the last of Anna’s jarred tomato sauce and some tomato paste, to put into the taco meat. So even more fridge clean out.

We biked and watched from behind the Brittingham Boat House, like I did last year with Hanne and her friend Isabella. This time it was just me and Mark.

Sunday morning we had sort of BLT benedicts – fried eggs on top of Canadian bacon that I picked up during my Saturday grocery run, and sliced tomatoes, ditto, on top of the last three English muffins I had in the fridge, with some of the cheese I grated for the taco salad on top. The red potatoes I bought at the farmers market a few weeks ago were getting sprouty, so I used some for fried potatoes with rosemary and garlic, and boiled the rest for potato salad.

Satisfying to get the fridge cleaned out and a few nice meals for us.

We went to see Rocketman, which seemed like a good choice for the last day of pride month. I kind of liked the movie’s approach to the rock star bio pic, just turn every event into a production number with one of the artist’s songs, and linearity be dammed. But it seemed like we were stuck in the ’70s and ’80s for a long time, and it ended really abruptly after he went straight. Which I think happened in the 1990s. And they left out probably my favorite Elton John song, Mona Lisas and Madhatters.

We came home and had ice cream for late dinner – vanilla on top of the fudge nut brownies I made right before I left town. Anna wouldn’t touch them, but our AFS liaison who Anna stayed with for the last few days before going home to Germany, appreciated the half dozen I took her as a hostess gift.

Monday morning, after the weekend’s cooking, it looked like this.