Stuck

I started writing this post last Sunday as Halloween 2021, continued yesterday, a week later, when nothing had gotten written except the title. So I changed it to Stuck. And now I am continuing on post-fall-back Monday morning, when it seems like I have a little extra time to write, before I go out to walk with Susan.

I’m just feeling swamped with work, too many meetings, too little time – I mean, I could actually be grading … all against a backdrop of scary news, election appointments, our WI hero Aaron Rodgers turning out to be not such a hero, and global-warmed fall weather.

So what’ve I been cooking and what’s coming out the way I wanted and what not so much?

Al’s 33rd birthday was a week ago Friday, and he came over for Sunday brunch. I made squash and goat cheese quiche, that baked up pretty much as I envisioned, except the crust leaked a bit, and it stuck to the pan, not so much that you couldn’t get a nice slice, but enough that I felt my crust rep was a bit tarnished.

I also made these spicy tater tots from a Bon Appetit recipe. I didn’t bother with air frying the tots, because I don’t have an air fryer; I got fancy all natural tots at the co-op and baked them on a sheet pan, and I used less honey. Taking a bite of spicy tot and then a bite of creamy quiche was really nice I thought, although Al, as he used to do as a kid, ate all the of one thing before moving on to the next.

I guess I didn’t take a picture of the cimmy buns – I used my quick biscuit recipe and they looked kinda like what’s below, although the batch in the pic seems to have rhubarb in it. I used part ricotta and part buttermilk as the liquid and they were really soft.

I envisioned making a salad but only got as far as cleaning the lettuce, but that was good because it was all ready to go with butternut squash and black been chili for dinner on Monday night, after my class. I had used my extra morning time last Monday to make the chili, and incidentally got the bean amount in the recipe corrected – it was too much; don’t know what I was thinking back when I first wrote it.

In the midst of the busyness I’m trying to remember what else I cooked for the week. I haven’t been super good about recording my meals in my diet & exercise app, but l0oks like Tuesday I had to stay at work late for zoom meetings, and we had leftovers. I had baked beans on toast and too many of the tots, at least from the way Mark looked at me.

The beans also figured into this Sunday’s brunch, a big scrambler with ham, potatoes, tomatoes, scallions, and cheese, the last of the beans, and toast – store bread and also the last whole wheat bun, from some soft wheat I made weeks ago, and had frozen.

And fruit salad, with pears, apples, and grapes.

I thawed out the buns – and some pepperonata – for Wednesday’s dinner, which was pasta with peppers and goat cheese and tomatoes and sausage – we had a couple of slicers from the farmers’ market that got spotty pretty quick, so seemed like pasta was the best destination for them. I heated the buns and buttered the tops and we had it with salad. The pepperonata had herb stems in it that didn’t bother anyone but me, and the lettuce was at a point where I spent a lot of time picking stems out of it, too – so dinner prep was a lot of stem removal. I didn’t take any pictures but here’s the leftover pasta, almost a week later.

Thursday, like Monday,  I had class until 7:00, so we had leftover quiche and veggies with ranch dip – including some beauty heart radish that I had envisioned in a fine julienne on top of that salad that never got made for Halloween brunch. And reheated leftover veggie curry, not the rice, just the veggies, from week 23 of CSA – scroll down in Tipi’s newsletter, I have not transferred to my CSA recipes … yet. And I made Smitten Kitchen’s cheesecake brownies. I am here to tell you that the batters do not swirl very well made in a cold Midwestern kitchen in November, not nearly as nicely as in Deb P.’s tiny NYC kitchen in September. Nevertheless, they were eaten probably the quickest of any baked good I have made of late.

So I guess I will end with food – I made cranberry scones that came out softer and flatter and pinker than I wanted – but are getting eaten – at Sunday brunch we each had one, and Mark had one for a snack, and Maja even took one for lunch today. I chopped the cranberries, which I am sure contributed to the pinkness and flatness. Mark makes cranberry scones with whole berries, and they’re kinda floury and dense, not pink at all, and nice to bite into a whole berry and have it pop between your teeth. I probably should’ve made them that way; I suspect that’s what he was expecting. When I scrolled past the pic in my phone it looked nice, back lit – not quite as nice here, but not bad.