Indian chicken curry over rice

N.’s suggesting I videotape myself while I’m teaching, so I have a text that I can analyze, see what’s going well and what’s not working, what to throw out and what to keep and do more of. It is a mark of how much I respect his expertise, how much I enjoyed our conversation over rice bowls, that I’m actually considering borrowing that flip-camera of his come September, even though the sound of my own voice on my voicemail makes me curl up in a tiny ball of shame. I sound so much like a girl! Why?!

 

Gazpacho and Thai chicken salad with rice

L. swung bye to pick me up at the desk, but I was embroiled in the ticky-tacky tasks that come with extend-o summer breaks–processing print jobs, troubleshooting staplers, managing a giant key ring of  copy machine keys. Why are there always so many keys? When I went to make copies of yet another key yesterday, the guy at the key shop looking at my huge jangly set and said, Secure office, huh? I mean, I guess so! Anyway. L. waited patiently and then we skipped out and up the block to the restaurant, gossipping about classmates and comparing notes on the Bolano class in the fall. I don’t usually go in for soup and an entree unless they’re paired together in some kind of special combo, but L. was so on about it that I couldn’t say no. Refreshing!

 

Chicken over rice, plus soft serv

Land legs back under us, L. and I walked through the vendor fair in search of late lunch. I was tired from the beer on the boat, four or five shades redder than sun-kissed, spent. L. had the lamb pita, I opted for a platter of chicken over rice (a bit gnarly for my taste, but careful forking and a creamy sauce took care of that), we sat in the grass watching a woman belly dance in sneakers. Post-digestion, we stood in line for cones before heading down the hill to the ferry line home.

 

Indian chicken curry over rice

Why I wish we could just take food tabs and be done with it, exhibit #4682: So my class runs two nights a week until mid-August, running like a freight train through the middle of the dinner hours of 6pm and 8pm. I am an on-the-dot three-squares kind of girl, struggling to compute. If I could just sneak a pellet in between relentless teacher’s-pet class contributions, I wouldn’t have a problem. Instead, I tried wandering down to the restaurant and ordering this rice dish as a size-large so I could eat half and save the other half for later as an early pre-supper snack. Timing, man. I ate while reading through the homework I didn’t finish on the trip, made fast work of the whole ginger candy as I struggled through Oroonoko. I’m good at delay, but not that good.

 

Grilled chicken, green beans, and Mediterranean salad

I appreciated the extensive research and instruction. No, really. But well into the second hour of Cook’s Illustrated salad prep and I really envied/didn’t recognize myself in the pages of the magazine. As I chopped and drained, L. made chicken on the charcoal grill, and it came off with grill marks like you see at Burger King. I’ve had some practice, said L. We ate under a hot sun, dry even for the moment, and it was like summer. The greens in the salad and the green beans too came from the garden in that same backyard, a miracle every time.

 

Chicken and vegetable kebob, watermelon, and coconut cake

Grilled chicken, onions, peppers, mushrooms, and zucchini were followed by slices of watermelon D. hacked up with the knife she brought with her. Then came paddling around in a kayak looking at the city and the water and the Statue of Liberty, waving to L. and A. on shore, watching D. in her kayaking hat go farther and farther out into the currents–she’s a brave one. I paddled back in to shore to a fat slice of coconut cake–coconut somehow became the primary flavor palate of my 34th year–in my new easy-carry outdoor chair. Because I love L. enough that I’ll admit to things I’m not especially proud of, things like Now that I’m old I don’t want to sit on the ground anymore, I want to sit in a chair when I’m outside. And L. doesn’t simply roll eyes at my bourgeois tendencies and stop calling. L. goes out and gets me a chair. It was hot, the sun out for the first time in days, a gift, the whole good day.

 

Acorn squash with chicken and rice, plus salad

M. stepped off the Badger Bus from Milwaukee in maybe the cutest hat i’ve seen on an adult, a black felt number with a little tie on the side. Because M. always knows where to find good food like some kind of eating wizard, I let her walk me to a Turkish restaurant where we both ordered the squash after it turned out they were out of dumplings. While much of my Wisconsin weekend seemed random and a little out of place (cheering Wisconsin against Iowa in ladies’ crew?), trading complaints and blessings the way you can with someone who watched you get drunk for the first time was awful nice. It nearly made up for the fact that I woke up to snow.

 

Chicken with hot peppers and peanuts

Surprise, surprise, the morning session went long, so we had to hustle. That meant lunch at Ollie’s, blast from the past, though I didn’t get the dumplings like I used to. I thought nothing on the menu could be hot enough. I was wrong. MBWF and S. and I ate and went on about how we would have done things if we’d been in charge. More archivists at the archives conference, for sure.

 

Chicken tikka over rice and a vegetable samosa

My voicemail buzzed just as I got back to my cloffice from the microwave so I called in to the second message in as many days from my mother. I called her back and we talked while I ate last night’s leftovers. She’s in Seattle for M.’s birthday, they’re gambling and winning. She asked after my weekend and we agreed that cleaning the house, while dull, is satisfying in its own way and greatly assisted by the existence of iPods. She bustled off the phone after only a few minutes, turning me towards a magazine. My eyes just darted around the page, picking out the boldface words. Things have gotten so bad over here that I’ve not only pledged No new balls in the air until early summer, I’ve even started pulling the most unyielding out of the air, stashing them in drawers marked maybe later. I’m having a difficult time just casually breezing through a magazine these days.

 

Chicken nuggets, fries, a baked potato, a diet Coke, and a frosty to share

Things took a turn for the sadsack, so K. drove us down to the Wendy’s across from Veteran’s Park. They moved it across the parking lot to accommodate the new Albertson’s and it doesn’t have a salad bar anymore, but it still felt an awful lot like home. According to the cup it came in, it’s impossible to frown while eating a frosty, so we got one of those along with a whole raft of value menu items to share. We’re good at sharing, and have lots of practice. We swallowed our almost surgically equal portions of everything with no negotiations, even finishing the soda, and got back in the car to go trolling for a place where K. could get impulse-pierced on a Sunday. Maybe that’s illegal here we wondered after driving past a darkened Stingerz and locked-tight Ink Daddy out in Garden City. Why weren’t we this bored yesterday?