Dinner and a show

And a show with no dinner.

Monday night my plan for dinner was freshly griddled English muffins with various toppings. The English muffins had  been rising in the fridge since Saturday night, while we were in Chicago for the day on Sunday; more on that in a minute.

The muffins were the Washington Post no-knead English muffins that I also made at  the beginning of the pandemic, and I guess I made them again, with sourdough discard, in October of 2020. They involve a lot of waiting – dough that rises for 5 hours and then shaped muffins rising in the fridge for 24-48 hours. I had such high hopes for this batch. I used sourdough again in the dough, and I griddled them with a lid on and and they seemed to rise really nicely.

So, I’m still getting used to the new oven. You heat the broiler with the door closed, not open like my old one and every other electric oven I’ve ever used. I started heating the broiler, and I’d checked that there wasn’t anything inside, but my 8-inch cast iron skillet was on the top shelf and I guess I didn’t see it and it was getting really, really hot under the broiler. I kept smelling something like wax or grease but thought maybe it was just the oven itself, new finish burning off.  The fam arrived for dinner and I told them to pick their muffins, and I’d fork split them and stick then under the broiler, and then they could add toppings of their choice – ham, sliced cheese, butter, and jam.

When I opened the oven there was the smoking pan. I pulled it out and stuck it on the back of the stove to cool, and thought I’d pour a little oil into it as long as it was hot. Meanwhile the first three muffins went into the broiler and burnt, and the oil in the pan also smoked, and the new smoke detectors went off with the Nest app nice lady voice telling us,”emergency, emergency”. I turned on the fan, and stuck the pan outside, and composted the burnt muffins, and started over again. Later when I retrieved the cast iron pan to clean it, instead of re-seasoning the pan, the oil had gotten sticky, it was so hot.

Kind of heart breaking after all that wait for the muffins, to burn them up.

Mark said it was dinner and a show.

The show without dinner was Fire Shut Up In My Bones, at the Lyric. A new opera based on Charles M. Blow’s memoir, with music by Terence Blanchard. I heard about it and wanted to see it – I’d read Charles Blow in the newspaper, and often agreed with his opinions. He has the same birthday as me, although he’s 15 years younger. But maybe that’s why I wanted to see it. I thought the first half, act 1, was kind of slow but the second half, acts 2 & 3, and the ending, were great – inspirational. There’s a repeated phrase sung in the opera, describing young Charles as a strangely graceful boy, that echos Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy“. Almost the first spoken lines in the first act are Charles’ mama telling him not to skip like that.

We had hoped to have dinner with John and Megan after the show, belated birthday dinner for John on my brother’s birthday. But sadly, Megan got Covid. John was still testing negative, but we decided it’d be best to just wait until we could all be together. And now, as I’m finally finishing this post, started on Tuesday, on Friday, they’ve both tested negative.

I had a perfect pear for lunch at my desk Monday; another baked good that came out a bit off in the new oven – didn’t rise much and had dark spots on the sides – morning glory muffins, I saved with cream cheese frosting; banana pineapple muffins that worked. (400°, shelf in 3rd position). On Tuesday morning I took the muffins to the library for book sale volunteers, and as soon as she saw the cream cheese frosting, one of the volunteers broke her muffin in half and flipped it to sandwich the frosting in the middle. She said that was how her mom packed cupcakes in their lunches when she was a kid. Clever. Neat and maximum frosting per bite.