Monday, February 21, 2011

Long Weekend

This weekend Lindsay and I had our advisors and their spouses over for dinner.

A striking squash.

Spinach pasta.

The main course.

We made squash lasagna, roasted cauliflower with hazelnuts, sauerkraut, and brownies. Our guests brought wonderful wine. A good time was had by all. Also, it was my brother's birthday! Happy birthday, Seth.

On Sunday Lindsay and I biked to Capitol Hill, making use of these new buffered bike lanes, and I got a haircut. I went to the Elliott Bay Bookstore and bought Canning for a New Generation. It's a beautiful, encouraging book. Here it is on typical canning books:

[I] found that the common thread running through them all, from the classic Ball Blue Book to the newer, prettier books on jam and jellies, is the notion that Canning Is Hard: tedious work, complicated, deadly. I somehow got the impression that I would die if I tried this without three thermometers calibrated monthly, a hundred-foot roll of litmus paper, and a topographical map that pinpointed my location and its exact elevation.

I once read a book on canning that advised its readers to boil their canned food for ten minutes immediately before eating it, in case it had developed botulism. This sounded impractical if I just wanted some jam in the morning.

Then we got completely lost trying to get to the arboretum and went home, where I discovered that pages 148-161 were torn out of my new book. But still, it was a very nice day.

Those pages must have had some good recipes.

On Monday, I ate dutch babies, did math, and ate fresh pasta with tomato sauce. (When you borrow a pasta maker, you should use it! Thanks to Chris and Nathalie for lending it to us.) I also ate some apple-walnut cake, the subject of a future post. If every weekend was like this I would be very happy.

1 comment:

Seth said...

I sympathize, but note that if every weekend were like that, I'd be very, very, very old.