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<\/p>\nI can’t decide if last week was the last week of summer, or if it’s really this one. It’s a late Labor Day, Sept. 5, and the high school kids have 2 days of school beforehand, but the college kids don’t go back until after.<\/p>\n
Either way, the school year is cranking up – I’ve been working away on the syllabi for the three courses I’m teaching this fall, and my calendar is starting to get all full of meetings. Today was the faculty retreat, my department’s yearly strategic planning exercise. It was a fairly painless one, except for being held in the conference center where the food’s always a little weird, and it’s freezing. Today’s lunch was kind of a mix of Asian and food service – OK mixed greens (with a few slimey cucumbers) and two kinds of bottled dressing, vinaigrette and blue cheese, then a big steam table pan of vegetarian fried rice, with very well-cooked veggies in it, then another big steam table pan of broccoli and baby carrots, mini-egg rolls, with thick red sweet-sour sauce and mustard sauce that looked like it would do better on a bratwurst, and finally a pan of grilled chicken breasts. Cheesecake with cherry pie filling on top – more bright red goo – that looked good but was pretty tasteless.<\/p>\n
In one of those “how the heck does that happen” moments, on Friday I made some long rise bread that rose beautifully, but on Sunday when I made the same dough into cimmy buns, they didn’t rise. They came out very low, and chewy. Maybe too big of a pan, or maybe the yeast was just tired. I still managed to eat two of them when I got home hungry after the conference center lunch.<\/p>\n
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On Sunday I had a pretty nice morning. I set the cimmy buns to rise, then went in to my office to make some copies for the retreat, and then headed to the co-op. I was dodging move in traffic at the dorms, and it looked like the jazz\u00a0 brunch was going on at the Orton Park Fest<\/a>. I saw a few people I knew and it was a nice ride, but I lost track of time and got home at something like 11:20, when I thought it was only 10:30. Oh well. For brunch we had toad in the hole, British style, popover batter on top of fried onions and sausage, using up some of the leftover brats from Friday when Steve & Heike came over for dinner. And the low cimmy buns, and lots of fruit.<\/p>\n For dinner, we went to Debbie & Walter’s pie party, and that was its usual fun in a slightly dorky librarian way. It was at Brittingham Park this year, so the shelter had a million dollar view of the lake, and nice cool breeze blowing in. I had a whole ratatouille pizza<\/a> and a zucchini-basil-tomato quiche<\/a> (pretty much like this, but I didn’t drain the zucchini enough, so it was a little soggy on the bottom) in the freezer, so I just thawed those out and heated them up.<\/p>\n