pasta

I'll post this and see if it's a usable size. Can you print it? I can also send this scan by email, if you can't print it from the blog. (Now that I've looked at it, I see that it is marginal.) I'll email it too, and this version can just be for reference. I make all of this recipe, because it's good left over. And why everything but the yellow bell is julienned, I don't know. I julienne it, too. The carrots should be shredded (as they instruct) so they cook faster. I've finally ordered the small julienne blades for my mandoline, so I'll be making this again soon to try them out. I don't mix the three elements at the end. We take a blob of spaghetti, put some of the vegetables on top, and then put the walnut mix over that. Such a topping is called poor man's parmesan in some recipes. I am particularly fond of it. You new garlic slicer will do well for this, Suze. I do wish recipes would give amounts rather that call for one of something like a squash or pepper. I like precision.


This is from Forberg and Callahan, The New Mayo Clinic Cookbook, Oxmoor House (n.d.), 147. It's an excellent cookbook. Let me know if anyone is interested in their recipe for wild rice and lentils with crispy onions. We had it last week, and it's great. This is also where the sesame-fried tofu comes from, along with a lot of our regular favorites. A cookbook worth having.

Beautiful weather here today, just about sixty and sunny. Some bulbs are coming up, but nothing is very green yet. And out of the 25 crocus and 25 grape hyacinths we planted last fall, only a few are emerging. Somebody must have had a subterranean feast during the winter. Lawn greening up nicely, but slowly. We could use a few days of rain now. The spinach we planted a month ago shows no sign of emerging. I'll give it a couple of days more and then we'll replant if nothing has happened. An important crop, and it'll bolt in early June, so we have to get it going. Garlic is up through the mulch. I need to plant lettuce. Etc., etc. We got the lawn tractor changed from a snowblower to a tiller today, so that's ready to go.

Chicken wings for lunch today, along with the polenta from FC 79 (Q&D) and, as a matter of fact, spinach. I wish I could make myself plan menus for a week at a time. What I cook is mostly dictated by what's in the freezers, so it would be fairly easy. Gotta do it.

Now I'll do a little answering.

I agree with Suzy, Mom. You should sleep where and when it's comfortable. I'm thinking that I'm out of step and should purge my fridge, too, but actually I have it under control for the moment. I know exactly what's in there. Too bad people don't still make Eggs Goldenrod or some such thing (creamed hard-boiled eggs). I have a number of easter eggs left. I don't think I could pass this off as food for Charlie, and he's off egg-salad sandwiches for the moment. I'll just have to remember to eat them.

We stayed in a really nice hotel in Madrid. What I remember that night (and I think we just spent the night and moved on the next day) was that Dad and I went out looking for a bottle of wine. We found one cold bottle of white in a refrigerator compartment of a small grocery store, but we couldn't buy it because the grocer was chilling it for a particular customer. Mom may remember where and what we ate.

It's fun to read my old house & garden news. The spinach problem (never enough) was already at the fore. Beets, on the other hand -- I grew 100 beets (ended up being 75, actually) in a square yard (adapted by my gardening book from Square Foot Gardening) a couple of years ago, and we're still eating them. Anyway, it's fun to hear about gardens of yore.

The wall coming down in the house is the one whose removal turned a two-bedroom bungalow into a one-bedroom shanty and even with the addition made it hard to sell nearly twenty years later (for the record: bought the house in March 1983 and sold it in February 2002). The "temporary" fix of the ceiling articulation between the two rooms (which the carpenter, Wyman Julius, was ashamed of every time he looked at it) was taken care of by Charlie almost as soon as he moved in, in the summer of 1993.

Please may I have the Marcella cuke, orange and radish salad recipe? I bought some radishes to have with fennel (as suggested in the FC 79 Q&D recipe for salmon) and ended up throwing the rest of them away because I couldn't think of what to do with them. For some reason I never put them in a tossed salad, though surely I could. Anyway, that sounds good to me. I'm always looking for new salads, and I could make the radish and fennel again, too.

It's an excellent idea to have the cuisinart on the counter, Suze. You'll use it more and be happier with it. I wish I didn't percieve it as hard to clean. You just have to put all the stuff in the DW, but it takes up a lot of room. I use mine constantly, and though it's only 5 years old, I'll need a new bowl soon. Mine's starting to crack a little. Probably all those trips through the DW, actually.

Eat. Beets. Wear an apron.

Mom's been in flipflop heaven since they came in style for kids. They're everywhere, and of every possible style and color. Girls in the public schools started wearing them again for spring a couple of weeks ago, even after that April snowstorm when snow was on the ground everywhere.

Enough already.