Asparagus salad

With London broil, oh yeah, I'm going to eat the whole thing. Eventually.

Obviously they're boiled or steamed first. This ice bath is to arrest the cooking and to shock the chlorophyll to dark green and hold that delicious color. If you don't it turns a less attractive green. This is ARTS! 

1/2 teaspoon sugar.

The vinaigrette is taste-tested and found wanting. Too much lemon. 1/3 dumped out, replaced with oil, adjusted with body-imparting anchovy and heat-imparting chile flakes and with purple onion.

This is it right here. This should be the picture on top but it's shown with a tomato instead. 

That happened at the store where I got this idea. The asparagus looked okay on its own and next to the tomato salad looked okay on its own. I told the guy they'd look a lot better together. He laughed and said, "Yeah." 

I realized later I could have bought both and mixed them myself.

Extra potatoes were baked a few days ago for London broil. All the potatoes are small. Three are refrigerated and they turn into something else. They' dry and not so good by themselves. One potato is opened up. It's cracked throughout. Broken to pieces and reheated in the microwave for one minute so the crystallized starches are dissolved, moisture spread throughout by a moment of steam heating through the potato pieces making them easier to accept the marinade in the bowl. The potato is tossed all around. Now the asparagus salad has potato and no tomato, although that too can still be added again. This serving has chunks of cheese. It's versatile.

Macaroni and cheese

With cold London broil. 

These packages are noticed in large boxes by what would be a discount end of an import aisle. The area has oddly mixed norteamericano influences on labeled brands manufactured in Mexico, apparently, while marketed back in the United States, if not produced here, to satisfy a mostly if not entirely immigrant target market. Coca Cola for example made with cane sugar and different than what we've become accustomed, and sold here in the U.S. in very small historic size bottles at a premium price of imported products. It says on this package in English made from durum wheat and that is a crop of northern United States and of Canada, cold climate with short summers, not of Central America. This very well could be produced here. They caught my eye because they looked like Ramen noodle packages and they're sold for 35¢. I think they are cute so I bought 3. 

A whole dollar worth.

"Hey, look at this." I half expected the woman to ignore me. Who speaks to strangers at the grocery like this, with an imperative no less?  Later I would speak to another woman gathering green beans, she gave me the idea to buy them, they look good. Her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf and she wore long gray heavy for summer unrevealing frumpy clothing. She smiled and responded mildly and her husband, I presume, moved directly straight in from near distance, like an arrow, ping, disrupting our incipient harmless confab. "DO NOT SPEAK TO MAN" the tacit command. Religious proscription no doubt.

What a fuck'n bummer. 

But this woman in dairy, a random black woman who happened to be there, the only person around, joined me in discussion of the remarkable discount on cheese. Both of us could not understand it. Asiago. Most confusing. It's good to look at these discounts. Their reasoning is odd. They must move things. Nothing can linger. It's all customer driven. Customers rejected this cheese for some reason, usually bad reasoning. Asiago. Reason alone to at least try it. I have plenty of cheese already, but c'mon, who can resist this weird serendipitous discount? Carpe caseum, seize the cheese. I bought three. What the heck. After all that friendly cheerful cheese-related discussion the random woman chose not to buy any.

What a minor bummer. 

Ready and waiting, the last thing added to sauce when it's finished off the heat.

Sauce: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour.

Salt and pepper, of course, goes without saying, but there I just said it so apparently it does not go without saying. 

When you see this it looks like magic. It does. My buds are amazed seeing it. "Thank you for showing that," I've been told repeatedly like I'm some sort of magical chef or something. I'm not.  

Sometimes a sauce like this is done in two stages whisked off the heat. First an alcohol of some sort, to sludge, reduced a few seconds. 

Boiled down until a new sludge is formed and the remaining liquid whatever it is, whisked in to full boiling. It goes very fast and changes forms stunningly at hand while whisking, it looks a hopeless mess then looks too thin to use then as it reaches boiling temperature thickens right there in seconds. With cheese flavoring and thickening further, clogging it up off the heat. 

Nutmeg the last thing scraped on after plating, or last thing scraped into the sauce.

London broil, jacket potato

London broil to the faraway towns with the mustard smeared on whole grain and brown, London broil with with Rosemary pine smelling of forest and chopped very fine with zest of one lemon stripped to the pith high level flavors that shouldn't go with London broil don't look at us the standard dry rubs taste too much like rust, London broil. 

Denver broil, actually. 

The show tonight. 

Tuna, avocado, crackers

Eh, you win some you lose some. The crackers were the best thing.

So there's that.

An acquaintance died. His memorial was held at his small house outside in his small but ample back yard. The back yard was packed with people at the height of it, an unnecessarily desultory affair dragged out by a clergyman interested in drawing interest to himself. And to a loquacious and vapid popular poet. Singularly the most outstanding feature is what had all of us stunned. The entire front and back yards are surrounded with large commercial-size containers stuffed with exotic and tropical plants. 

In the front under trees, elephant ear leaf roll out from different directions filled in with other colorful shade plants caladiums by the hundreds, every variety combined with hostas and vines and other non-flowering tropical plants. 

In the back yard both fences faced with large containers, large as reasonable and close together as possible creating layers of arranged vignettes of mixed flowering plants with vegetable and with herbs, each container a world of its own. 

How I regretted not knowing him better. His garden is inspiring. His Pinterest page featured several such mixed plant containers, and it pictured a book on the subject. I bought the book. The author wrote five. I bought them all and few more and attempted to emulate what I saw at Wade's house. 

I failed. 

Most pots failed three times this summer season. These are the survivors. I killed literally hundreds of plants, some 480, to get this far. I learned a lot in a short time. Mostly what not to do.

It's all on my terrace such as the one seen below, except a little larger. I made the hummingbird feeder. 

There is a fountain in a pot underneath the vine in the corner hidden by the bench.

This is what I am most pleased with. In seven years it is only the second hummingbird that I saw. I had hoped to be ready with a camera right here the next time a bird came. Fat chance. 

And I was!

The screen door is shut. If I opened the screen door the bird would fly off, so the photo is taken through the screen. It's not out of focus, that's the screen door. This one little bird makes the whole project worthwhile.

No it doesn't. But it feels that way.

same photo, closeup.

I'll do better next year.

Bacon, apple, cheese

Six slices to a LB.