09 December 2009 @ 08:57 pm
Today we had a snow day. But it wasn't just any snow day; it was a blizzard that was so well predicted, and came with so much warning, that we already knew (by the time we went to bed) that school would be cancelled today. It began snowing yesterday afternoon, and was a blizzard by evening. It snowed all night... Here is the scene at 8:00 a.m:
The deck was so covered, it was hard to walk out the door!
The deck furniture was upholstered...
The birdfeeder had a snowcap...
And all the branches are heavy with snow...
After breakfast, K and I went out to take a walk. The temp was just below freezing, but falling fast, and the wind had picked up. The road was slippery but it was so cool to be out in a mostly silent world. When we got home, though, there was a lot of work to do.
I thought I was wearing enough, but perhaps not. Now I feel like I'm getting a cold....
With any luck, we'll be able to drive out of here tomorrow morning....to be very fair, I did NOT do the lion's share of the shoveling! I did make dinner, though :)
The National Weather Service says there were 17" of snow on the west side of Madison by late afternoon, and we live about 15 miles west of that, so that sounds about right. Right now the temperature continues to fall, and the low is expected to be zero, and that's Fahrenheit, folks! Happy winter!
02 December 2009 @ 10:05 pm
Wow, I guess it is!
Thanksgiving was great. We had 23 people, awesome food, and kids who were willing to go out and play Ghost in the Graveyard in the dark after dinner..... and keep in mind that the youngest "kid" is 20, while the oldest is 30! Although we made our traditional apple crisp for dessert, my friend stole the show by baking these gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cookies! She says she got the recipe from Gourmet magazine, although when I searched, I couldn't find it... someday, when I get that faster computer and internet connection!
Things here are fine..... lots of good food (some of it photographed), lots of social occasions, lots of work.
21 November 2009 @ 11:31 pm
Just because I haven't been posting, doesn't mean I don't exist :)
In the past few weeks, I've had fairly constant company (K is back!), social engagements, parent-teacher conferences, homework, etc. etc. etc. Also, a very slow internet connection that makes me feel like I have dial-up. But am I complaining about all that? Heck, no! I am, however, complaining that today was partly sunny, 50 degrees F, and I looked at it through the window as gunshot echoed across the valley.... it's the first day of hunting season, grrrrrr...... So K and I went to the gym and "ran" on the elliptical.
What else have we been doing? Well, cooking a lot......we still have food from the garden stored in and around the house, and I do mean stored! An extra refrigerator would work pretty well but as it is we are taking up a whole drawer just for carrots:
Onions are hanging in bags in the basement, and we have beets in the garage. Here is a carrot-beet-onion salad made with the dressing for Polish Tomatoes from the Vegetarian Epicure. Turns out to work super-well with beets; I think I'll make it for Thanksgiving!
K baked an apple pie:
We made portobella-squash-quinoa stew:
Cauliflower curry, and another vegetable curry, and dal (not pictured):
This evening I made pizza for the first time in awhile. Long-time readers of this blog (all four of you) will recall I am always whining about vegan cheese and am never satisfied with the brands I try. Still, every six months or so finds me giving in and buying something new to give it a chance. This time I tried Teese for the first time, and it was pretty good on a pizza -- I was surprised! No photo, because by the time it was done, we were very hungry.
Another thing - I'm spending soooooo much time on school work I feel I "take the office home" more than usual lately. My latest math unit is more than multiplication and division, as I'm trying to give them some real-world context and we have "bitten off" almost more than we can chew. I asked a student what, in her opinion, was a very important issue that we could study, and she said "World Hunger." So it's a very timely issue, and we are spending a lot of time with curriculum from the United Nations Food Programme. Let me tell you, by the time you figure out how much someone can eat when they earn $1.00 per day, it kind of takes the joy out of eating lunch, or cooking dinner, etc. If you know what I mean..... And the thng is, most of the kids are really getting it about the starving people, etc., but they are still able to let go of it at recess time, whereas I am not.
Because I have K at home, I'm doing a lot more socially. A few weeks ago, we went to the Madison Area Vegetarian Meetup's latest meal, at Bunky's Cafe in Madison. (in picture # 14, I'm on the left.) The appetizers were awesome, although the main dish was lacking. Still, I'd go again.
And last weekend we went to a Couchsurfing potluck where all the food was vegetarian and most was vegan. I met a whole bunch of new people, and we had a great time.
So all in all, life is super full, I am basically fine, and my computer sucks. I look forward to some great Thanksgiving food and seeing friends, but missing friends who moved away :(
31 October 2009 @ 10:30 pm
Well, it's the last day of Vegan Mofo, it's the last night of October, and sadly, not the first night it's been below freezing here. (In the 20's F, below 0 C) The juxtaposition can be seen here with the zucchini bread made from the last of our fresh zucchini, next to the first squash of the fall cooking season.
It has turned into hot food season, preferably with soup for dinner! Here we made some soup with garden beets, onions, cabbage, carrots and tomatoes, with some non-garden potatoes. The muffins were made with apples from the tree in our yard. I loved the soup but the rest of the family decided tomatoes didn't belong in there with the beets.
The cold weather makes the recently-returned K hanker for Southern Asia. Last night she made us a Thai dessert involving coconut milk, bananas, sugar and a pinch of salt. A hot bowl of that stuff was just the antidote to the cold night.... but a warm day on the beach would have been even better!
23 October 2009 @ 05:55 pm
On Wednesday I had some family business in Chicago, and on the advice of Andrea went to The Chicago Diner for lunch. Its slogan is "Meat-free since '83," and everything on the menu is vegetarian; almost everything is vegan.
The menu was overwhelming, and even though all of the main dishes looked delicious, we went with sandwiches. Mine (foreground) was a Reuben made with seitan, accompanied by chili; his was something called the "swarma," which included harisa and sauteed cauliflower, with sweet potato fries on the side. Even this was too much food!
However, we ate it all..... and were left overly full for the rest of the day. Lucky for us, it was a beautiful day in Chicago (as opposed to the cold, rainy weather we're having day after day here), and we went for a walk along the lakefront. By evening we were at O'Hare airport, where K finally arrived from Hong Kong, over 14 months since leaving home. Yay!
15 October 2009 @ 10:18 pm
Before my trip to Maryland, I asked a friend who lived there to suggest some restaurants. There were several possibilities, but the only real vegan one in the bunch was, amazingly, around the corner from our hotel - a five minute walk! Located in a nondescript strip mall, it didn't look too promising at first glance.
Imagine how thrilled we were, then to see the following signs on the door!
There were nine in our group, and we each ordered something different. Then we put it all on the enormous lazy Susan in the center of the table and tried everything. I only photographed what I ordered, although even that was viewed as lunacy. Below you'll see my butternut squash bisque, "bamboo rafts," (with some kind of sauce - unfortunately, the least appealing item we were served), and some kind of mock duck hot pot. Normally I'm not into faux meats, but the picture looked good, and indeed it tasted delicious. The best of the night was an eggplant dish that melted in our mouths. We were all insanely happy with all of that food, and lucky to find it! (Because the next night I ate a boring taco salad with vegetarian chili on it at some bar & grill in DuPont Circle.... the company was fun, but I was longing for Vegetable Garden!)
12 October 2009 @ 07:45 pm
Yesterday I returned home from the Progressive Education Network conference in Bethesda, Maryland. As always, I return humbled to pieces and in total awe of how lucky I am to teach where I teach and work withsuch good people around me. Even though I met some wonderful teachers, and saw some great schools, there really is no place like home.... especially one like mine, with the freedom to teach the way I want to teach. Nothing beats that!
The Washington, D.C. area, however, does beat the Madison area when it comes to food. We had to eat out on three of the four nights we were there (the first night, we got in past midnight due to flight delays), and on two of those nights I had simply amazing meals. Those photos are on another camera (my school one - oops!), but suffice to say that I was so inspired I had to try to recreate perfection when I went to make dinner last night.
I began with the Vegetarian Epicure's Spiced Dal. Of all the recipes I ever make, this is consistently the most delicious. Do I know how to take a food photo or what?
Because we still had all the same ingredients in the house as we did before I left, I began making the Cabbage Curry with Tofu, or whatever it's called, from Lorna Sass' Shortcut Vegetarian Cooking. Then I remembered I didn't really like that recipe and was just making it to use up cabbage. So I changed the recipe by slightly frying the tofu cubes in a bit of oil, then adding all the spices and continuing to saute until they seemed perfect. I removed them from the pan and sauteed garden onion, pepper, zucchini, and cabbage.
I added back the tofu, tossed in a garden tomato and a few frozen peas, and let it simmer a few minutes. Well, it was much better than the original that way, so I'm going to have to remember that for next time.
In fact, the whole thing was so good we couldn't stop eating it. Maybe it wasn't as perfect as the food at Shangri-La in Bethesda.... but it was cheap, plentiful, and made right at home :)
06 October 2009 @ 08:51 pm
...... when you're at work and you put all the leftovers you brought from home on a plate, stick it in the microwave, and then realize how good it looks, and then you take a picture of it, and then someone reminds you that you have lunchroom duty, so you have to eat it while walking around the lunchroom helping kids open their gogurts and stuff. But it's still a good lunch.....
Tomorrow I'm heading to Bethesda, MD to see whether the Washington DC area has anything good to eat. Or to attend a Progressive Education Convention, whichever comes first!
05 October 2009 @ 09:36 pm
This may not look like "garden food," but we were getting tired of just stir-frying all of the zucchini, tomatoes, onions, peppers, etc and eating them over rice or whatever - not that we have no imagination, but just not a lot of time now that school has started. I thought that pizza might be a nice way to use the basil, but we also had broccoli.... so I made some of that tofu sauce with blended-in basil and broccoli, put them in a calzone with some really delicious tomato sauce made from Claudia's tomatoes (that's where the sauce went, Claudia, and thanks!) and our onions and peppers (and that ubiquitious zucchini), and baked them. The thing is, I had never actually made a calzone, and these were enormous! Very exciting to do, though, and made quite a lunch the next day (half was DEFINITELY enough). The dough was totally effortless, speaking of no time, because I made it in the bread machine (hint to Jeni Treehugger).
04 October 2009 @ 10:18 pm
Seems we just planted that garden, and now we're harvesting the end of it! Hard to tell from the photo, but we have some enormous beets, which sort of make up for the miniscule eggplants and peppers. With those beets, we recently made some of the best borscht ever, courtesy of the good old Deaf Smith Cookbook! Here it is served with a few boiled potatoes dropped in, and photographed quickly while they still had a chance of staying white. In my family it was also traditional to add sour cream (which I never liked), or chopped egg. Anyway, it was great just like this.
03 October 2009 @ 10:08 pm
Back when we had recently returned from Hong Kong (just six weeks ago - how can that be?), we woke up one morning wondering, Where is Congee Wonderland when we need it? Located just a few steps from our door, we had eaten breakfast there twice. (Not the best street photo, sorry, but it was pouring rain at the time!) Basically, congee is white rice boiled in waaaaaay more water than you'd normally use to cook rice regularly, and for way longer, until it just breaks down into a glutinous porridge. People eat it with all kinds of additions, like preserved egg, seafood, tofu, vegetables, etc., but I just had it plain with a little sugar and sesame seeds. I ate it for breakfast twice when I wasn't feeling well (thanks to something I ate or drank!), and it was very soothing. However, never did I enjoy congee more than when we ate it for a midnight dinner after a long day of moving Kailah out of her apartment. In that instance, we had walked a few blocks in the other direction to find something open, and ate it at a much more, um, authentic? cafe..... if by authentic I mean , "a huge cockroach was scuttling around underfoot." But we were exhausted, and the bowl of hot congee, coupled with the cup of fresh soymilk, was the best thing I could have possibly had at the moment.
So, back in Wisconsin, we were faced with our regular oatmeal, and suddenly it just didn't seem as satisfying. (Even though, of course, a whole grain oat porridge is more nutritionally sound than a white rice one!) I looked in the pantry, and decided to doctor up our breakfast with some ground black sesame powder, regular sesame seeds, peanut butter and a little farina. Well, it was good! Now, maybe I'll just have to find the patience to make my own congee..... perhaps in a slow cooker?
30 September 2009 @ 09:16 pm
Next month (tomorrow!) Vegan MOFO, the Vegan Month of Food, will begin all around the blogosphere. While I do like to talk about, and eat, and cook, and look at.....etc.....food, there is also more to my life. For instance, I seem to spend most of said life at school, where last week we built a geodesic dome entirely out of newspaper and, um, masking tape. (A little too much masking tape, if you ask me, because the top began caving in, hence the internal support.) It has been standing for a week, to the delight of my kids, who love to read or work inside it. Naturally, it takes up some valuable real estate, but I don't have the heart to (oops!) collapse it at night.... what we'd really like is one built out of something sturdier, or a small loft, or some other structure they could make that would be more permanent. (The neighboring classroom has a loft, so my kids feel left out.) We're thinking dowels, pvc pipe, plastic tubing..... but I want something we can do as cheaply as newspaper. The next challenge is to build a dream home out of Legos. There. Wasn't that almost as interesting as tomorrow's salad?
27 September 2009 @ 02:46 pm
Yes, it's Wei-K's birthday! Send her some love (in Thailand!!!) and some virtual cake :)
22 September 2009 @ 09:38 pm
If you've ever tried something new, something so out of your comfort zone that it may as well be on Mars, then you might be able to guess how I felt this evening in my first Zumba class. I decided to do it because a) I really need the exercise, b) It's offered in my town, c) It looked like fun. I'm glad to be there, but boy, is the learning curve steep! Between the moves, the music, the steps, and the directions, I was totally out of my element. It reminds me why I never dance. (I could break something!) But it was all women my age, and they were all very nice, and I'm going to make a commitment to going... after all, winter is coming! The sun has been setting earlier and earlier (it's the equinox today!), and it rained all day today, and I think my outdoor fitness plan (taking daily walks) is getting iffier and iffier. So we'll see how long it takes until I am dancing with the stars... or at least learning a few steps! And I think the point is to have fun.
So I rushed home early enough to make and eat dinner before dashing out to said class. I was really in the mood for tomato soup, and thanks to our garden and Claudia's, we have some big, ripe tomatoes. We also have the oft-mentioned zucchini, onions, basil and chard. How could we not have a great meal with all that?
Here's how I made it.... I sauteed onion, garlic and chard stems in olive oil, then added some serrano pepper and chopped tomato. I blended some more tomato chunks with some zucchini (peeled, so it wouldn't be a green mess, but add some creaminess) and added it to the pot. Then I added some tender, small zucchini slices and fresh basil, and some parsley. Finally, I added some cooked brown rice. It was very delicious.
21 September 2009 @ 09:39 pm
This blog is pitiful, but we have been eating well. By the time I have picked, cleaned, cooked, (photographed) and eaten the food, it's bedtime! But here is a sampling of what our garden, and our friends' gardens, have been giving us for dinner..........
Stir-fried zucchini, chard, onions, and peppers in peanut sauce, served on buckwheat soba noodles,
Onions, serrano peppers, tomatoes and zucchini with black beans (served over rice),
Fresh tomato sauce with basil (what? no zucchini?) for pasta; we also added steamed tofu chunks,
We have also made (and frozen) pesto, and frozen beans.
I have made zucchini bread, lasagna, stir-fry, and more. Last night we had the ultimate in zucchini cuisine, the Mock Apple Pie. (The "nobody can tell the difference" claim in the recipe, given to my husband by a work mate, pretty much clinched my decision to make it.) (In fact, I COULD tell the difference, and I didn't bother peeling the zucchini because I figured we weren't going to fool anyone, and it still tasted good. Doesn't anything with lots of sugar and fat taste good? The recipe called for butter and I used EB sticks. I also halved the recipe. You can only take this kind of thing so far.)
Coralee's Mock Apple Pie
Crust:
4 cups flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
2 cups sugar
3 sticks butter
Mix dry ingredients in a bowl. Cut in butter until crumbly. Pat half of mixture in the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch pan or two pie tins. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.
Filling:
8 cups zucchini, peeled and sliced (it should be younger, smaller zucchini, not the big spongy kind)
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
Cook the zucchini in 2/3 cup lemon juice until tender. Add the cinnamon and nutmeg. Simmer one minute and then add 1/2 cup of the crust mixture. Let cool and thicken for a bit.
When filling is cool, spread on crust in pan. Add 1 tsp. cinnamon to remaining crust and sprinkle across the top. Bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes. Serve warm or cool. Tastes like apple pie. No one knows the difference.
06 September 2009 @ 09:25 pm
We just had our first week of school, which was AWESOME, and anyway, if it wasn't I'd never admit it.... my new class of kids contains four of my original kids and nine new ones (it's a multi-age class of nine, ten and eleven year olds). The new ones are so small! I know; I say that every year.... but it's true. They are cute, and say the darndest things, and, you know, etc. Like, they are so young that one of them seriously thought Pearl Harbor was when someone bombed the twin towers. They were babies then; it's ancient history!
Yesterday (Saturday) I went in to work again, making it two six-day-weeks in a row, so my partner and I could work on our presentation to the Progressive Education Network Convention next month. In a tempting lineup of progressive theory and practice, who's going to want to come listen to how we run our school store? Well, just in case, we're making our slideshow and writing our note cards.....
So the days are busy, and the nights are busy (you know the job is keeping you young when you are sitting at the dining room table after dinner practicing your cursive!), and the weekends are busy..... it's that time of year, when you can't look your garden in the eye because of what you are neglecting. This weekend so far we have had chard, cabbage, onions, zucchini, peppers, beets, spinach, basil, radishes and tomatoes from the garden, but no broccoli or beans. It's like the Jewish mother joke where the son wears one of the two ties she sent him, and she says, so what's wrong with the other tie? You just can't do everything. Already we had a few nights last week when I didn't make dinner at all, or it was leftovers or sandwiches. But this weekend I've made muffins, lasagne, granola (and burned it! grrrrrr....), pickled beets, and cabbage soup. The most exciting meal, though, was courtesy of Roya, who randomly sent me this recipe. I have no idea where she got it:
To make the tofu dressing, combine 1/2 pound of plain tofu with a 1/4 cup of olive oil, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, 1 teaspoon of honey, 1 teaspoon of rice or apple vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon of tamari soy sauce (or a pinch of salt), and 1 tablespoon of tahini.
That was it. It just so happened that we had had a really busy day (what a surprise!) and I had thought that some pita bread with Papa's homemade seitan and the tomatoes and cucumbers Claudia had just given us would seem like felafel if only we had some sauce to put on it.....and so I figured I'd try this and see how it tasted over vegetables. Well, I used some silken tofu, substituted a few ingredients and added others (some garlic, less oil, different sweetener, more tamari and tahini) and it was the BEST THING WE HAVE HAD IN A REALLY LONG TIME. Not only that, but it was easy. As we were eating it, we thought of other uses for the sauce, including a sort of white sauce substitute. So a few days later, I sauteed some onions and mushrooms, carefully folded in the leftover sauce, and gently heated it. Served over pasta, with garden broccoli on the side, it was sooooo delicious, I know we'll be making it again soon!
Tomorrow is Labor Day here in the U.S. That means I get the day off (although Papa has to work). I am very excited to have a day at home to clean up and get ready for the coming week, which will include our class overnight trip to Upham Woods!
30 August 2009 @ 10:03 pm
So last Sunday I returned from a month of traveling, and hit the ground running.... on Monday I returned to school and worked six days in a row getting my room ready for school to start TOMORROW!!!! And here it is:
Today, on my one day off, I went to the gym, visited Claudia, came home and cooked more garden food (zucchini bread, fresh stuff sauteed and served on buckwheat groats, roasted potatoes). Yesterday we used a whole lotta chard to make "cheesy chard," recipe provided ad nauseaum in past posts..... below, however, is a photo of just the chopped chard stems. This year we grew three colors of chard, and it's pretty:
Also, we grew some cute mini-cabbages this year. One went into a delicious dish that didn't photograph well.
Tonight we're a little concerned about the garden, as the forecast is for possible FROST! It has been very chilly at night lately, not very summery during the day, and in general feels like a very early fall. Seriously, I almost feel like I should be picking apples or carving a pumpkin, and it's still August!
Apologies to anyone whose blog I haven't read, but next weekend I'll have more time.... right now I'm going to bed. I hope to have no more night-before-school dreams; recently Lisa and I have had our traditional "we called them to Group and they didn't come!" dreams...... and last week I dreamed it was the first day of school and kids just kept coming and coming into the room. There were at least 30 kids, and I didn't recognize most of them. And HOW many years have we been teaching?
26 August 2009 @ 10:19 pm
This evening my friend and I had the same dinner, different menu: "The garden." When we compared notes on the phone, we had each made roadside-stand-purchased sweet corn, and then the rest was from the garden. Below, you'll see that we had a refined-carb-free dinner of sweet corn, beets, beet greens sauteed with onion (also from the garden), and broccoli. We're not on a diet; there just wasn't time to make rice also. But then Claudia suggested putting stuff in a pita, which of course had not occurred to me.....
The previous evening, in another attempt to use as much garden produce as possible in one meal, I made chili with corn, zucchini, onion yellow wax beans, carrots and a few chard stems. Tomatoes and peppers, which grow in any normal person's gardens, are not growing for us this year. Therefore, I also used a can of diced tomatoes with chilies.
So.... we are back from all our travels. I wanted to post something snappy like "Planes, trains, automobiles, ferries, doble-decker buses, light rail, commuter train, minibus, feet......" but frankly have been too busy. But to update, I did finish both my classes by the deadline. Then I spent three weeks traveling nonstop. First I went to Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and after a one-day turnaround I went to Hong Kong. I had a whole 1 1/2 days after I returned to get ready for a weekend drive up to Minneapolis to deposit my youngest daughter in college, and the next day I went back to work. Whew! So I have a zillion photos from all that, and if I actually dig out from under everything, I promise to post them, and then not to be such a stranger.... my next challenge is to get my classroom ready for the first day of school - on Monday, and the clock is ticking!
Well, I just can't resist one photo.... here's one of the funnist foods I didn't eat on THIS trip: why, it's Hello Kitty! processed cheese snacks!
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