• About
  • Recipes
    • Recipes – New & Improved
    • CSA Box Recipes
  • DebsLunch on Instagram
  • Old DebsLunches
    • 2010 – 2015 (Word Press)
    • 2006 – 2010 (Blogger)
Deb's Lunch

Deb's Lunch ... and Dinner and Breakfast too

Leap Day Weekend

March 2, 2020 by ds83473@gmail.com

New car, practicing my puff pastry for the class I’m teaching next Sunday, and a trip to the opera.

I’m afraid that this first batch won’t puff enough because I had the butter too soft. You’re supposed to grate it frozen but that sounded painful to me, plus my kitchen’s been really cold this winter – I think we have a leak or missing insulation or something – so I let the butter sit out for a couple hours. We shall see. And I’ve got the right amount of butter, 11 uh, that would be 13 tablespoons, in the freezer now. So I’ll try another batch and compare.

Two turns

Three turns

After the three turns, I went to Film Fest volunteer orientation and then into work for a few hours and then came home and baked the pastry – and wah-lah!

I guess it rose OK! – Rectangles and cheese twists

Cherry turnovers – I overfilled, so filling seepage lead to their slightly grubby look. They taste good, though

Cherry turnovers

I never made that second test batch. I think between now and class Sunday, I’ll make a vegan batch with and fill it with Chia seed pudding or something like that. I can have my students do a taste test of the vegan pastry vs. real butter pastry vs. store bought.

Originally my plan for Saturday afternoon was to come home and do that second test batch of puff pastry, and then make a big mushroom omelette and salad and toast for dinner. The omelette was inspired by leftover mushrooms from this soup I made on Rachael’s suggestion on Friday night when we cocooned up and ate soup and watched movies on Prime. The soup was good but it’s not terribly attractive after you blend it – kind of brown. We watched A Royal Scandal with a young Richard E. Grant, and this funny documentary, Catwalk, about the cat show circuit in Canada. I stopped and got the soup fixings at Whole Foods on the way home after picking up my new 2020 leased Crosstrek. Like I told John, the new car is blue and aside from the color, pretty much same as the 2016, except everything that used to be a button control is now digital on the touch screen, that unfortunately has all the design charm of windows 98.

Similarly on Saturday I stopped and bought two clam shells of greens at Fresh Market to go with the omelette. But of course, since the first batch of puff pastry baked up so well, and since I was unable to resist eating those cheese straws when they were warm from the oven, and since I was also unable to resist the small trove of chocolates I currently have in office for the faculty candidates’ welcome basket, I wasn’t too hungry for dinner, and suggested we go to a movie. There aren’t a lot of leftover mushrooms – it was oddly pleasing how well I did at guessing the amount to buy, while consulting the recipe on my phone. Whole Foods does not have the inaccurate hanging scales found in so many other grocery stores, but I guess due to my years of practive <grin> I eyeballed 1.25 pounds of mixed mushrooms – cremini, white and shiitake – and 8 oz. of shallots so that I used all the shallots and there was only a handful of mushrooms left.

We got tickets for 1917 out at one of the suburban multiplexes. It was the film with a bunch of currently prominent male British actors each in it for a two minute cameo, starting with Colin Firth, and the hot priest (Andrew Scott), Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, and finally Robb Stark (Richard Madden). I expected to see Dan Stevens in there too, since he spent so much of Downton Abbey season 2 in WWI uniform. It was good, but grim.

We came home and ate the cherry turnovers and the last of the sweet potato pie, with ice cream.

Sunday we spent the day in Chicago for the opera, a kind of weird one, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. Yes, it had puppets. And a vertical bed.

I guess it’s a showcase for a tenor, and the one Lyric got for this production, Brandon Jovanovich, is quite good. He’s the one in the pajamas. We got home in time tonight wrap up our weekend by watching the most recent Outlander, repeating at 10:55 or something like that – so couch time with kitty after the train ride home.

Posted in: Blog post Tagged: cooking class, live music, weekends
← Twilight zone
Self indulgence →
March 2020
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Feb   Apr »

Tags

autumn food baby boy's baby biking birthdays bread brunch busy busy busy cats Chicago Christmas climate change cookies cookie season CSA box eating out elections Farmer's Market fear and loathing first world problems Happy New year kids leftovers library conferences live music memory movies muffins museums Oma overeating pandemic pie Robyn Hitchcock Seattle spring flowers spring food summer food tomatoes travel vacation walking weekends week night cooking winter working at home

List of links

Other people you should might want to read

Food blogs & Web sites
101 Cookbooks
Cook's Illustrated
David Lebovitz recipe section
Dorrie Greespan
Epicurious
Eric Gower, Breakaway Matcha
Food52
Harold McGee – news for curious cooks
I am a food blog
Josey Baker
Lottie + Doof
Orangette
Smitten Kitchen
The Art of Eating Quarterly
The Wednesday Chef
Friends & family
327 Words – my brother, funny & philosphical 327-word essays [closed]
327Words on Sabblogtical
Cuckoo Bizarre
Deb's Home page
Something Else - Harry Rag
Jennifer Dixon - my sister-in-law's art
John Lusis on Instgram
John Lusis photography – my kid's artwork
Point8327 – my brother's words about riding with a bike gang
Yoga, Cycling and Pot

Helpers

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2025 Deb's Lunch.

Omega WordPress Theme by ThemeHall