Foreign and domestic

Like daylilies, either buy them on purpose or just notice them growing wild all over the neighborhood. Out walking earlier, I was reminded of this by the down the street  neighbors, who have a cultivated variety of spiderwort, bought at a nursery, and given tender care

And the wild sort is running happily all over my ground cover

The flowers have closed shop for the night, brilliant tiny blue jewels. Which I sometimes yank out if it starts crossing the path.

I seem to be drawn to America's test kitchen again, this time I was the person running to read the label on my Parmigiano!

Interesting findings with good tips on what to look for in supermarket precut and wrapped Parmigiano: dry, crumbly, marks of enough aging, and lovely nutty flavor, not too salty.

Here's the cheese shop version

And here's the panel favorite. $20 a pound.

But this is the chef's choice, from Wisconsin, made by Italian immigrants who know their onions. And their cheese. $18 a pound

And here's this blogger's current supply, obviously getting used. It's got all the good things crumbly, dry, lovely nutty flavor. House wrapped, who knows the origin.  $13 a pound, and I think it will do me fine.

I used it along with blue cheese, to make that Alfredo sauce on the butterfly pasta, a while back, and it's fiiiiine.

The thing is that you never get the real lovely cheese flavor you get in Europe because the US will not allow raw milk, either produced in the US or imported in products. It has to be pasteurized. Which does kill a lot of undesirable bacteria, also a lot of the flavor. 

I remember talking about this with a tetchy old Fox News-watching lady I used to play music with, and she looked at me in horror, then screamed I DON'T BELIEVE YOU. 

Moral: don't tell people stuff they don't want to know! 

Handsome Son is coming tomorrow evening to help eat roasted cauliflower chunks with a dipping sauce I'm making, ketchup, mayo, Worcestershire sauce. 

And pasties stuffed with yellow potatoes, hot turkey sausage, broccoli, onions, carrots and mushrooms. And a lightly toasted kitchen sink, unless someone restrains me.

Lemonade and suntea. Yogurt and farm fruit. I think it will go well.

The cleaners are coming tomorrow morning, which is when some of the shopping will happen for this extravaganza. At least that's the plan.

Upcycled food and thoughts

My day yesterday was immeasurably improved by reading Autumn by Ali Smith. I'd only vaguely known of her as a famous, Booker prize level of writing fame, writer.

But the other participant in our Tiny Email Book Group was rereading it, a bit puzzled but game, so I got it on Kindle, and started.

Several hours later I emerged from the kind of dream state I got into on first reading Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, that headlong rush of thoughts and images and time shifting back and forward, and shafts of wisdom, and I returned reluctantly to the everyday.

In order to say I wish I'd read it years ago, but glad to be already familiar with a lot of its raw material, Joyce, Woolf, the Profumo scandal, pop artist barrier breaker Pauline Doty, postwar treatment of women collaborators, Klee, Kandinsky, sexism in the world of art history, so as to distinguish the factual history from the work of the storyteller. 

At one point the two main characters, an old man and a young girl, discuss taking raw material, an accepted story, and changing it for better truth telling. Facts are not synonymous with truth, is the underlying message. And the storyteller, the magician herself, is showing us the secret behind the illusion, right at the moment of performing the illusion. It's not really a book to read, more of an experience to have. See if you agree.

On a more material plane, lunch. Yesterday I had that broccoli dish, with enough for two more meals. It was okay but a bit incomplete. So I thought briefly about making it into pie, putting frozen flaky pastry on the grocery list, then decided to just make a simple tortilla type pastry, and make Cornish pasties.

I like food you can pick up and eat, and made the dough right away. 

Enough for six tortillas, I figured was good for four pasties.

So I made circles, stuffed two circles with the broccoli mixture, folded over, sealed the edges with a fork, couple of holes in the top, baked at 400f for about 25 minutes, and here's one of them, a nice workmanlike lunch, to  pick up and eat. 

This is another possibility for sausage and mushrooms, come to think of it. 

Later today the Misfits box arrives. We'll see what happens then.