THAT Salad

Gainesville

Spent most of yesterday and today both concocting strategies to avoid going food shopping. This forced me to be quite creative.

Yesterday I had a cauliflower and some nice asparagus I needed to use. I dug around in the freezer and found some Italian sausage that I fixed with peppers and onions. Good meal.

Today I realized I had the leftover asparagus plus some papaya from the week before-- essential ingredients for what I call "THAT Salad," other ingredients being salad greens, kalamata olives, red potatoes (which I omit) and a heavenly scallion and herb dressing-- and then spent a good part of the day sorting through my stacks of cooking printout clutter looking for the one and only copy of the recipe for it, which I'd failed to put back last time. (It was lost in the great Mac crash of several years ago.) Amazingly, I finally did find it, and immediately typed it into my current computer, you betcha. Now maybe I should think about backing up all my recipes. Good idea, Suze.

Anyway, once again, the freezer provided me with a hunk of flank steak, and my clutter-sort produced a curry recipe for it that was doable. Not sure I've ever pulled back-to-back meals out of thin air before. Tomorrow I MUST go food shopping, though. And liquor shopping too-- much harder to fake that, unless we want to be drinking some unholy cocktail combo like Fra Angelica and vodka!

Watched a Devil Rays/Orioles game last night, which reminded me that Barry B was about to get his record. I missed the homer that tied it, but watched the rest of the Giants/Padres game. Today I watched the SF/SD series closer, but Bonds was not in the lineup. I guess I'm going to have to camp in front of the tube for a few days whenever the Giants are playing, and attempt to see the record breaker.

And tonight-- FOOTBALL!! Watched the Hall of Fame game on the NFL network. It made for a good sudden plunge back into that world.

Finished JPod yesterday. Reading Strangers in Paradise compact ed. vol. 1, and some comics biographical essays. About ready to plunge back into Middle Earth. It's time.

Thanks for reminding me about that Tamale Pie recipe, Mom. I've got the rest of this next week set, but I want to do that one again soon. Well, maybe I'll have to wait until it cools off a bit here. I hate running the oven for anything longer than 10-15 minutes when it's this hot.

No rain today-- probably just as well, as we're still trying to dry out from the deluge Friday.

Clean sheets on the bed. Two sets of dirty sheets laundered, folded, put away. A load of my darks, ditto. A respectable weekend, all things considered.

No firm vacation plans yet. Stay tuned.