So...whats for dinner?

lacey - are your son and GF flying or driving to Gainesville? We live about 2 hours south of Gainesville, but they are more inland than we are, and it is currently quiet here after raining all night with wind and lightning/thunder. The "Swamp" at UF is a very steep stadium so actually pretty well suited to excess rain as long as they can funnel it away from the field - they will have fun there - it is an experience! DH went into work although had to take an alternate route as his usual one is under water, which it typically is with any bad storm. My MO and at least one BCO member friend locally live right in that area he normally drives through, and some others lives over toward the beaches where it get even more dicey - hope they are all ok and don't have any flooding inside their homes.

Special, glad to hear that you made it through the storms with minimal damage! Sunday's guest is coming from Florida. Her flight this morning was canceled. She has been moved to an evening flight and is still hoping that her BIG New England Birthday celebration isn't ruined completely.

Lacey, great pictures. That is quite the condo, huh? Looks really suburban, to be honest, but I know that area, and it is NOT suburban at all! Really nice that they have a real dining area. So many of the redone buildings have lost that feature.

*susan*

And Susan - rye rolls for breakfast suits me perfectly. Or for lunch, or dinner. Yum.

Butter and/or gouda please. Oh wait -- you were talking to minus.

That S. African restaurant sounds fascinating. There’s a place on Chicago’s Restaurant Row called “Peri Peri”--wonder if it’s the same concept but just different spelling/pronunciation.

This morning, a two-egg (single yolks this time) omelet with diced peppers (red & yellow bell, green poblano), scallions, mushroom and Emmenthaler cheese. No bread, no meat. I realized that were I to buy low-carb bread or bagels, they’d have to go into the freezer, as except for tonight & tomorrow I won’t be eating at home: tomorrow night we’re staying over at the hotel in Oak Lawn where our friend’s birthday bash will be on Sun.; Sun. night I’ll be staying at a motel in Geneva, IL in order to get a decent parking space for our 11 am set at the Fox Valley Folk Festival. Buying bread & bagels today would mean they’d likely be moldy by Tuesday. And no need to buy tomatoes--three on our windowsill have ripened enough to eat now, one’ll be there in a couple of days, and we have several decent sized ones (and three or four little guys) still on the vine.

So I’ll likely have a Caprese salad, followed by mixed spiralized squash (zucchini & butternut) “noodles” with the rest of the pesto I made, perhaps even making some more--WF has Parm-Regg. ends and I need to cut back my basil considerably. (We have a plant growing in water indoors just in case).

Ooooh.....homemade chicken pot pie!!! Glad Hermine didn’t wreak too much havoc, Mary. We in Chicago always are more nervous about wind blowing down power lines or high AC use from heat waves over-stressing the grids and causing outages than we are about lightning strikes during downpours frying transformers, as there are always others in the chain that can take over. Brownouts and windstorms were responsible for our last couple of power failures this past spring. (I felt like Pioneer Woman hand-crank-grinding my coffee and lighting my stove with a match. A girl’s gotta get her caffeine).

Susan - thanks for sharing about the peppers. Once I clean out my fridge - hopefully by eating everything - I'll be having stir fry w/a piece of my rib eye which I froze.

Tonight was a big bowl of spirialized zucchini and yellow squash. Dessert was two small macaroons with the base dipped in chocolate. These are leftovers of what I took to play dominoes this afternoon. One lady brought a great green salad w/kalmata olives, cherry tomatoes & other good stuff. Another brought cut up Honey Kiss melon - sort of a cross between Honeydew & Cantaloupe. Another did pimento cheese sangys. We don't plan ahead. Everyone just brings what they are in the mood for or what they have in their house if they've had a crazy week at work.

So tonight turned out to be “raid the fridge” night. I had some rainbow chard, a couple of tablespoons remaining from my homemade pesto, half a package of spiralized butternut squash, some button mushrooms and a chicken Italian sausage. It took a couple of skillets and a little coordination. I stripped the leaves from the stems, chopped and sauteed the stems (red, white & yellow) in olive oil and the melted pesto. In the other skillet, I sauteed the coarsely chopped chard leaves and transferred them to the stems, oil & pesto. I sliced the sausage into chunks and seared them off in the large skillet and transferred them into the first. I added the squash “noodles” to the large skillet with some more olive oil, salt and a little water. As the squash noodles softened, I transferred them into the first skillet. Then I chopped a mushroom and a small heirloom tomato and added them with a splash of red wine (leftover Brouilly, a cru Beaujolais). I transferred the mixture to a pasta bowl and topped it with chopped basil spikes. Yum.

HappyHammer I am glad that you missed the storm the worst of it

April I hope you do OK as well as the rest of Connecticut Rhode Island and Massachusetts dwellers

I have to go to an orientation for the students tomorrow and part of it is outside

With the talk of rye bread I am now craving a vegetarian Reuben I will go to the farmers market to see what is on sale at the local catch today maybe some little necks

I still have not decided what to do about internet as I balk at spending $80 a month on cable and internet. Any suggestions?

I still have a land line, but it’s now part of a powered modem system now that I’ve switched from AT&T to a “bundle” from my cable company. (Phone, TV, internet all goes through this “master” modem). Not ready to give it up, especially because of all the people and creditors I’d have to notify. (Creditors, because they use my phone number as verification that it’s me who’s seeking to activate a replacement card or make a phone payment). The downside now is that because I no longer have a conventional AT&T landline, in the event of a power failure I can’t just plug an old-school phone into a wall jack and expect it to work. All my house phones are cordless--and if there’s no power to the main base, there’s no signal to or from the handsets, despite the modem having a hefty back-up battery.

Watered lawn & tomatoes--will have Gordy keep an eye on the larger ones and rescue them if necessary. (Hoping they last till Tues.).Going down to Oak Lawn tonight (staying at the Hilton, where our friend’s surprise 70th will be tomorrow at noon) but Bob won’t be able to make it till all the restaurants & room service is closed (he checked us in and headed to Christ Hosp. for rounds), so I picked up some “cowboy chicken” thighs & drumstick plus brussels sprouts primavera from WF’s hot bar. Will pack (suitcase, iPad mini, guitar, extra strings and tools to change them, dulcimer and a few CDs) and then dine & dash. Long drive down there--horrible construction traffic no matter which route. Same with getting from there to Geneva tomorrow night.

The "Horse Farm" woman had lovely carrots today at market, so we bought a full bunch in addition to our normal 2 heads of Galese lettuce. The stone fruit folks, who have no stone fruit this year, had beautiful corn. We have not been into corn this summer, but we had her reserve 20 ears for us and returned later to gather them. They are all processed and in the freezer, ready for Thanksgiving. We will head to Wilson Farms on Monday to stock up on the rest of our weekly vegetables.

Tonight we had small 4oz burgers on the grill. He had a English muffin as a bun. Me nothing? I made a shredded carrot salad with a simple vinaigrette, and a huge green salad. One garden tomato sliced completed the dinner. Fall is coming. The tomatoes are getting more acidic. I had pulled a frozen puff pastry from the freezer only to notice that it has a 2013 sell by date. Nope. Not for guests! But, I sautéed up some apples with cinnamon, baked off the pastry, and we had dessert! We never have dessert so this was a real treat. Again, he had two, I had one. Two will become the guests breakfast-to-go in the AM, leaving us 3 for tomorrow.

* the Horse Farm is actually called something else, but she farms completely with horses. No tractors at all.

I did 8 hours of coding today, and now my desk is clear. I get a two day vacation. Just need to figure out what I do with it, besides turning over the guest suite tomorrow.

*susan*

Special, Brilliant idea! I will put that on the calendar! :-)

I'd go for Special's suggestion with maybe a break in the nap to include Minus'.....

We had our association neighborhood beach dinner party tonight, which offered many interesting dishes...more than usual. Not as many pasta dishes as we often see. That said, I did make the linguine pasta with lobster and shrimp in red sauce. It was really tasty. I got to the beach a bit late, so many folks had already gone through the line, so there was some linguine left...but all the lobster and shrimp had been carefully picked out! I had saved some at the house for our dinner tomorrow evening....after all, it was DH's lobster, painstakingly shelled by his son...and there was a lot of lobster meat, so I hope DS2's hands are feeling okay. I do not like that task, myself.

Some of our neighbors scored a large sheetcake by winning a local 5K, so in addition to brownies, cookies, and trifles, we enjoyed the cake. I am a sucker for store boughticed yellow cake! Could anything be worse for a person's body?! I loved it!!

I think I would consider a baked spinach. Cook down the spinach just a bit and squeeze to a drier state. Sautee the pancetta. Mix together with an egg, perhaps a bit of milk. Cube the cheese and stick into an oven. Some bread crumbs on top perhaps, or parmesan cheese? Blister the tomatoes, and make a tomato jam. When the spinach is done, top each serving with a bit of the tomato mixture.

My other idea is brie-deprived. Sauté pancetta, add spinach, and tomatoes. Toss with cooked pasta and serve with parmesan. Perhaps bake the brie in that pie crust or puff pastry?

All I have....

Our dinner will be a tuna steak we found at Costco today, with lots of side veggies.

*susan*