Coping, I guess

Since I can’t go anywhere, I’ve been indulging in sleeping later – until 7:30 – and staying in pajamas later, too. Even so, without the commute, I’ve been starting work earlier and ending later.

When I work from home, I can either work upstairs where it’s warmer and I have my up/down desk & big monitor, or I can work downstairs at my own desktop computer, that has a better camera angle for online meetings. And during this time on crutches, I’ve started spending a fair amount of time with my laptop on the kitchen counter.

On Thursday, the morning that my crutches slid off the counter in Mark’s kitchen and turned on the dishwasher, I had three in row online meetings, staring at 11:00, and I thought it’d be best to take my coffee up and work upstairs. So I made my coffee in one of my to-go cups, because that’s the only way I can carry it up there on crutches – put the to-go cup in my back pack cupholder.

But it tasted terrible because the last thing that’d been in the cup was Earl Grey tea. So I moved downstairs and made myself another cup and did the meetings in the kitchen.

Friday I decided I’d just work in PJs. I worked and had my coffee downstairs and then finally got showered & dressed and moved upstairs after I ate, so around 12:30.

When I got the crutches, I told PT that I was spending about an hour/90 mins. everyday up and in the kitchen cooking. They allowed as how it wasn’t great, but probably OK. I try to keep my weight off the bad knee as much as possible – I lean on the counters and use a canvas bag to carry veggies and other ingredients from the fridge to the counter and sometimes carry stuff in my left hand and support my bad leg with my crutches on the right.

Dinners haven’t been so exciting, leftovers & winter blahs. Week before last I made a version of this gnocchi gratin from BBC food. I used ricotta instead of mascarpone, and less of it, and added some smoked Gouda. I had a kabocha squash and I’d cut it half and roasted half as cubes and half in the shell. The cubes got pretty toasty, and I’d thrown the really charred ones into the compost, so where the recipe says to mash some of them to make the sauce, my cubes wouldn’t mash and there weren’t enough of them, so I added cooked squash from the other half of the squash. Anyways Monday dinner was leftover gnocchi gratin.

Tuesday, kind of testing it out for a cookie party appetizer, I made these Smitten Kitchen roasted mushrooms with Brie. Sort of. Mark got this Humboldt Fog goat cheese at Whole Foods and it tasted great but it was a wedge instead of a round, so harder to dip. Good though. And I toasted slices of a loaf of not quite sourdough – it’s a King Arthur recipe where you oomph your starter with yeast but I hadn’t fed my sourdough enough and my yeast was dead so the loaf came out a bit too dense. I think we had corn, and carrot sticks too, lower fat sides with all that cheese and garlic butter. There might’ve been a salad or coleslaw too.

Also some prior night, not last week, I made pork tenderloin from Pecatonica Valley, and roasted broccoli and mashed potatoes, Blue Valley Gardens potatoes, picked up at Madison Farmers Unite – now, that was an all star dinner by Mark’s lights –  and meant I had leftover pork. So Wednesday we had fried rice. Not as high up on Mark’s dinner scale, but I used the last of last summer’s kimchi, and generally got the veggies drawer cleaned out, and made a batch of veggie stock. And the next morning I even figured out how to dump the compost. I can carry the bucket when it’s empty – it’s like a 5 gallon bucket, the same kind lots of things come in from food stuffs to dry wall mud – and I put it on a towel in the back hallway and put a new bag in and dumped the counter-top compost in. But then I just set it right outside the door and let Mark get it back into its regular spot by the recycle bin when he left for his morning walk. So there’s a little coping that worked better than the Earl Grey tea-tainted coffee.

I had some sausage & tomato pasta sauce in the basement freezer that I could bring up easily in my canvas bag when it was frozen although it was a little scarier getting the container of sauce out of the fridge when it had thawed. Anyways, I thought when I made it the sauce didn’t have enough chunks. So I threw in the leftover mushrooms and cheese, and that made it delicious, over farfalle pasta. Rich – sausage, garlic butter, full fat cheese – but delicious. I tried to make the rest of that too-dense loaf into this chili cheese garlic bread from Nigella, but I didn’t have fresh mozzarella and used regular and it didn’t really melt into the bread enough. And now I have this remaining lump of garlic butter with grated cheese in it. I tried to use it to make croutons last night and the mozzarella stuck to the bottom of the bowl I melted it in, and there wasn’t enough butter for the croutons – I needed to add olive oil. I think I’ll have to use it in something where you need to cut butter and cheese into flour like cheesy biscuits or pie crust.

Friday was going to be leftovers including the pasta but I decided there was enough pasta for a whole dinner by itself with a salad, without the other leftovers, and there was just a dab of that rich sauce left, so I made it into Jamie Oliver’s Cheat’s deep dish pizza. I had also discovered that I overbought on onions – I thought I was out and got a bag, but there was a bag in the basement fridge. So good to use up two whole onions caramelized in the pizza. That was another good by Mark’s scale dinner and also made me realize I can use the quick dough from Jamie’s recipe with lots of other veggies, and that might come in handy when CSA recipe writing starts.

Saturday I made cranberry bread and allowed myself a second cup of coffee with my piece.

We were actually supposed to go to Chicago this weekend, overnight. We had tickets for the opera on Sunday afternoon, and Mark got us tickets for a special CSO with Wynton Marsalis playing Duke Ellington on Saturday night. And a good price on a room at a Kimpton, the Monaco, where we have not stayed for awhile. But this was all before crutches. I think I could manage the train to Chicago, but not the L – I’d have to Lyft everywhere – and all of our seats were up in balconies. So I decided not to go because crutches, and then Mark decided not to go because snow.

He got up at 6:30 and shoveled and went for the day on Sunday for the opera, so left on my own I did a bit of recipe testing for my now postponed from Feb 26 to March 5 brunch coking class. You might remember on New Year’s Day observed I tried out Smitten Kitchen’s twisty cinnamon buns and liked the dough a lot but not the shape as much. And I like this Giant Cinnamon Roll from King Arthur but I think their dough has too much butter and egg. So I tried the Smitten dough with the King Arthur shape, and then my recipe for the cream cheese glaze. With qualified results. I’m going to have to test them again, I think.

I think I’m going to try making it free form on a parchment lined sheet instead of in a pan. Al and Emma and I enjoyed big hunks of the cinnamon bun on Sunday when it was still warm. Here’s what it looked like in thin slices Monday.

And to close, since now I must include baby pics as well as food, here’s what Jasper looked like Sunday – seems like he can see the bright colors better now! And he’s learning to roll over. It wasn’t the greatest visit for me – didn’t even get to hold him – but that just means I’ll have to go back soon.