A one step forward
and two steps backward kind of a day. I had a delightful lunch with my friend
Heather, who cooks at the Modern and teaches at Sur La Table. I had whined to
her that so many of the recipes I collect contain things my family won’t eat.
She suggested I send her one, so I did—it was called spaghetti pie, though to
me it was just a skillet spaghetti meal—and it had eggplant in it, a no-no in
this household I’m sure.
Today she brought
it for lunch, and I fixed a quick green salad. We feasted, and we talked about
dogs, cats, politics, TCU, and all things irrelevant. I enjoy our occasional
lunch visits. My turn to cook next, so I will have to find another recipe I
want to try that the kids wouldn’t like.
And speaking of
things the family won’t eat: Jordan being out of town, she picked our Sunday
night menu—hot dogs with a semi-Korean topping of cabbage, cilantro, onion,
kimchi, a sauce of mayo, lime juice, sesame seeds, and scallions, and grated
cheddar. Too me that was more than one poor hot dog could bear, so I
simplified. I had never tried kimchi—to eat or to cook with—and I was
apprehensive about Christian’s reaction. I bought “mild cabbage kimchi”—he
doesn’t like cabbage, but hey! He said he loved it. I thought it was pretty
good. Jacob ate his hot dog with ketchup and cheese. Strangely enough, the
recipe said to sauté the kimchi—Heather said she’d never heard of cooking it. Now
I have half a bag of kimchi—any takers?
Tonight’s
experiment was a gourmet pizza of crème fraiche, smoked salmon, and caviar. But
for two people I decided to make individual pizzas on lightly toasted flour
tortillas. Lesson learned: flour tortillas puff up like sopapillas when you
toast them, but they deflate quickly. And crème fraiche is a bit sweet. Still,
my dinner guest raved about it. Good quick easy meal. Served with Caesar salad.
But on to today’s
frustration—in mid-morning, I suddenly had no wifi. Unbelievable how that
hampers you—I couldn’t send or receive email or Facebook messages, and, most
important, since I was working hard on the Alamo project, I couldn’t do online
research. So I still don’t know who General Andrade was and if he really tried
to destroy the Alamo after San Jacinto but was met with flaming swords, nor
what happened to the chapel during much of the nineteenth century—did it just
sit vacant and decay? And other questions—I’ve made a list. Most frustrating
was that somehow, I would get notices that someone had posted on Facebook—but I
couldn’t see the posts. My cell phone tells me I have fifty invisible posts.
Who knows how many emails?
I did find that I
could text Christian, and he reported that the outage is all over the
Metroplex, the results of a lightning strike to one of AT&T’s motherboards.
No estimated repair time. Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have bothered me
much; now it makes me frantic. Ah, technology. Save a little time and waste a
lot more.
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