StephanieL

We scored Cool Beans, Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Bread Bible, and Dorie Greenspan's Baking at a local library's book sale--$105 worth of books for less than $10.

The weather has been warm the last couple of days, so I asked N if we could have a grain salad for summer. She mixed together barley, pickled onions, cherry tomatoes, red pepper, cucumber, tinned smoked herring, jammy hard-boiled eggs, and a dressing that I don't know the ingredients of. Served over a combination of arugula and butter lettuce. Ice cream for dessert.

The Rhinestone Cowboy, courtesy of Imbibe Magazine: 2 oz. bourbon 3/4 oz. peach liqueur 3/4 oz. lemon juice 6-8 fresh mint leaves Ginger beer (I used Fever Tree) Muddle the mint and lemon juice together in a shaker. Add the bourbon & peach liqueur. Add ice and shake, then double-strain into an ice-filled Collins or highball glass. Top with ginger beer.

A record: 3 red cards in the first game of a World Cup.

That's a pretty wide ask. What kinds of recs are you looking for? Blow-out dinners, SF classics, cheap holes-in-the-wall?

I won a raffle for 2 tickets to any cooking class held at this fancy school in Napa. N and I are going up there next month to learn how to make filled pasta, and to have a mini (overnight) vacation.

RG Black Calypsos cooked with herbs and good olive oil, sauteed greens from our garden plus scallions, pre-sliced speck, and a baguette to make open-faced sandwiches/smorrebrod.

What a nailbiter!

Berliner sausage sandwiches on ciabatta, with long-cooked onions and peppers. Butter lettuce on the side.

Yup. I've occasionally had to "sub" for N on calls.

Customer service voice recognition software has a very hard time with N's accent.

At 75. Great voice.

The cakes ended up being a little overdone--the tops got pretty hard--but they tasted good and folks at the potluck really liked the one I brought. The other cake broke majorly as I took it out of the pan, so it's now in the freezer and N has plans to turn it into trifle with custard, canned peaches, and either brandy or peach liqueur.

Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane are performing a 4-night gig at SF Jazz this weekend, doing a centennial tribute to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Last night's show was excellent; at one point, they and their band (a really tight quartet) played about 35 minutes without a break.

In making a cake for a potluck, I accidentally put in double the amount of butter. Luckily, I noticed just before putting the cake in the oven, though the fix involving scraping the dough out of the pan and into the mixing bowl, and then doubling all of the other ingredients. So now I'll have 2 cakes. We'll see how they come out.

Basic dinner for the cooler weather we've been having this week: beef stew with carrots and homegrown parsnips, mashed potatoes, and steamed broccoli.

I made a simple lemon-blueberry cake from a recipe our local paper recently printed--it's an oil cake that also has plain yogurt in the batter. I used frozen blueberries from last year's garden harvest (we've been eating this year's blueberries out of hand for the most part) and Meyer lemons because those are growing now too. Sadly, we lost our steady supply of regular lemons when our neighbors cut their tree down.

Warm bean salad with RG Buckeyes, romanesco broccoli, leeks, cooked radicchio & endive, and a mustard-based vinaigrette. Homemade sourdough discard cheese bread (N used cheddar) with scallions and herbs. Greek pastries from last week's Oakland Greek Festival. We didn't have anything to drink with it because N wanted to go to a local bar after dinner, but with the leftovers we're going to have a 2019 Acquiesce Bourboulenc we were gifted.

Basque, specifically.

They sure don't make politicians like him anymore. By coincidence, I'm currently reading "Smahtguy", a graphic bio drawn by cartoonist Eric Orner, who used to be one of his staff members (and who also drew the gay comic strip "The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green").

Our society's big annual meeting is in NOLA in October. I keep joking that they're going to send us staff there by Greyhound.

Nearly $1500 pp to go round-trip between SFO and EWR for Thanksgiving. And that's regular (though not super-basic) Economy, not even Premium Economy.

Maybe the two of them can dish it up in the afterlife, with Pauline Kael sitting bemused on the sidelines.

They don't make film reviewers like that anymore.

Cooks on whaling ships, in addition to wages in the form of shares of the profits (called "lays"), were also entitled to take some of the used cooking fats, called "slush", to resell when the voyage was over. No kidding, this is where the term "slush fund" comes from.