Independence Day Eve barbecue (because isn't it the All-American thing to do?)

Francis and Kim are wonderful hosts, and tonight's crowd was a terrific mix of library and non-library people. I hope any of them whose names I bludgeon will forgive the errors.

In the meantime, some photos from an evening replete with food and a few glasses of pink wines for me! Pia and Conrad, catching up. Pia and I have a deep deep friendship. Don't tell the other Circ Managers, or Conrad.

Photo temporarily removed

Courtney's sister Chelsea came to town. CG2 visiting CG. So great to see her - she's such a fun, witty, and gorgeous woman. And, she's a newly minted IU grad!
Other guests included Kim and Arek...
...Heather, Arek's wife and a DePaul librarian...
...CG herself in a beautiful dress the colour of a deep rose wine (much like the Argentine one she found for us to enjoy again) along with Eric...
...Mora and LaDonna (with Arek)...
... (and here's where I draw an unfortunate blank, but I think it's) Eileen and John...
...also four dogs, two shown here: Ellie (Chelsea's dog, a coquette if ever there was one, and proud owner of the Davis Bootie)...
...and Milo. Gay. Gay. Gay. Gay. Gay.
I have been summoned to bed! Enjoy the holiday everyone, and I hope y'all observed Canada Day this past Saturday!

Trifle, cake, and chicken wings

Hmmm, now THAT sounds like a nutritious breakfast! Yea and verily, a breakfast of champeens!

Three food items that took up some of my time this past long weekend (okay, I actually had to work today, but I was still in the kitchen after that!). The lemon blueberry trifle (another Emily Luchetti recipe), in fact, took longest as it involved making a sponge a day or two in advance, making lemon curd and blueberry sauce, folding the curd into whipped cream, layering it, then topping with a last minute layer of whipped cream for a nice clean appearance. By comparison, the rose water angel food cake was a simple matter of using up some egg white yesterday afternoon, then whipping up some cream and flavouring it with rose petal syrup to garnish the cake this morning. Chicken wings? Marinate overnight in a buttermilk, cumin, and garlic mixture, drain this afternoon, and bake in a hot oven with a couple of bastings of a lemon juice, cumin, and salt mix.

In the end, though, all three were hits, or so I think. I didn't taste the angel food cake; instead I gave it to the Reference Department in thanks for them covering some chat shifts for me. I hope it was good - I feared it was a little too moist and dense.

I'm not nearly so good a food photographer as Jeph. He stages his food nicely and plates it well, something I don't quite have enough patience for. So I instead offer you humbler photos of things that were yummy. Enjoy.

cardinal

Three blurry photos for you - I was wary of scaring the bird off but thrilled to see it. We eventually figured out that the male bird (pictured) was trying to distract us from junior on the ground. When we figured it out and walked away, Mom flew down from the tree and joined the other two at the ground.
Gorgeous bird, a real delight seeing it! I'm not a birder by any stretch, but I can appreciate the rare sight of one in the city.

Liz and Adrian turn 10

We often try to have weekends that are oh-so-very productive. This weekend we crammed in a lot, but we took it easy on ourselves just the same. Oh sure, we did laundry and some online banking and other duties, but no, we just had a nice time.

Case in point: yesterday Liz (Thursday night swim coach) and Adrian (great dentist) celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary by having a number of people over to enjoy the warm summer Sunday afternoon on their big back deck. Conrad and I made our way there after the clothese were out of the dryer and folded and had a nice little while of it there. Photos follow, of course!

Deborah is in the house! With Dave. And not kissing me this time!

Ruth, Kenn, and Cliff - Smelts, you ask? Mais oui!

Dr. Bill!

Tall Paul (as it seems we've come to know him) and lane 3 Paul (because there's more than one Paul on the team!)

Sarah admires my chest or some stain that must have been there. Dominic looks on.

Channing, a man who gets things done for the team!

Ruth's mother and Michael chatting

Dave - sweet guy, nice looking, single. Yes, I'm hinting to you men out there!

Bill, almost married himself (a few weeks from now up in Traverse City - stay tuned for photos!)

SB, handsome as always!

SB, last night of June 2006

Nothing much to report in this entry. I simply wanted to post a cute photo of my sweet handsome man before I wander off for a long night of sleep. I'll work on diligently posting through the weekend!

roasted shrimp

Dinner out on the balcony tonight, but not without taking some photos first.

I have great admiration for Steven for being able to pull things out of the fridge and cobble together a meal. I can do it, too, but I sometimes resent having to. Around our vacation time and the conference I was trying to use up everything in the fridge and in the cupboards. Getting down into the staples and frozen goods, I found myself craving real greens and things. A week in Sweden - not a bastion of good vegetable preparation - and New Orleans - surprisingly poor on vegetables as well - left me craving fruit and veg. I loaded up on them last night and stocked the freezer with cuts of chicken and fish.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

It was a late workday today, but I took comfort in knowing a had a pound of nice pink shrimp in the fridge to play with. Originally I thought I would try something vaguely Mexican/fajita like. Indeed, I looked at a Rick Bayless recipe for a garlic and chipotle shrimp, but I didn't have the time to slowly produce a sauce. Swim practice meant some easy prep and some quick cooking afterwards. Well, one out of two accomplished.

I ended up going with a recipe idea out of John Bishop's book. I still want to try his restaurant in Kitsilano one day, but for now I modified his recipe for overn-roasted shrimp. He makes a clarified butter with fresh thyme and garlic to brush ont he shrimp. Lacking thyme, I went with fresh rosemary and added chili flakes. When I brushed on the butter I added more rosemary and some coarse sea salt. The effect was entirely delicious.

Conrad and I dined outside, sipping a French rose (I'm enamoured of pink wine these days - scorn me as you will, but to go with the slight heat, saltiness, and sweetness of shrimp dish, it was a good match). It all was so good that we killed the entire bottle as we talked of things. Another thing I love: a summer evening on the balcony with a bit of good food (I should use that clarified butter to make a wicked garlic loaf!) and the man I love. Some chocolate tablets given to me by my treasured colleague Carol completed the evening.

Must I really get up in the morning?

Bayona

Sometimes I am wrong.

Shocking, but true.

Bob D. (also known as RAD, pictured above) had suggested Bayona as a spot to dine while in NOLA. The Web site didn't hook me. Indian AND Mediterranean? Eesh!

I should know better. RAD was on his fourth meal there while on this trip, so that's always indicative of something. Turns out he was spot on. Almost four hours spent there, and definitely the most expensive meal I had in NOLA (but far from my most expensive meal ever, I assure you). Mary Augusta Thomas and her husband were at a nearby table, and we now all have vague plans to dine together in Seattle and/or DC next year. Given their love of food, that should be fun.

I arrived before Bob and settled in the lounge (brightly lit with daylight from the courtyard outside). A glass of sauvignon blanc in hand. Relaxing, though today was hardly trying at the conference. Bob arrived and we headed to the table. Staff came and went, all chatting with him as they had gotten to know him in the days preceding.

First up for me: asparagus salad with poached egg. I hadn't had much in the way of good vegetables here, so this was a nice treat after a handful of days in town.

The staff generously surprised us with the smoked quail salad next. We'd asked for them to give us suitable wine pairings, so while I had another glass of sauvignon blanc with the first salad (no Sauternes available by the glass), it was a half-pour each of a pinot noir rose for the unexpected course.

Dinner for me was veal sweetbreads with sherry mustard. Goodness, but that was a treat! How often does one get sweetbreads. I ate very slowly - unusual for me - because I savoured them so. Ahhhhhh. Excellent fare! A glass of a Riesling (not too floral or fruity) was a nice accompaniment.

Robbie, the waiter, recommended I not get the olive oil cake for dessert, and I will admit it was dry if light as an angel food cake. On the other hand: lavender sabayon. How lovely. A bit more of it would be enough to moisten the cake, really; the amount of blueberry compote was fine. And here's another thing: they do coffee well here. No, I'm not a conoisseur of roasts and blends, but I do like a good cafe au lait that has a good representation of milk. Bayona did it up well, even using decaf!

So, last night here. I have a somewhat early shuttle, then in the door in Chicago by mid-afternoon. I miss my SB, and I am getting sleepy. I may yet take a few days off blogging, but I'll return with a vengeance this weekend!

Back to Cochon

It does seem like a shame to go to a restaurant twice while I'm here in such a great culinary city. Call it laziness - Cochon is in Opentable, so that helps. We did have reservations for elsewhere originally, but I changed them last night. Cochon it was, and I think I'm even gladder.

I won't get into dinner last night. No, that's a lie: I simply have no photos. We dined at Redfish Grill across the street at the Chateau Sonesta Hotel. Busy place, but I had Opentabled it, so no worries. Large, cavernous, loud. If we'd been able to hear the waiter better we might have understood his accent a little more. The menu wasn't promising: any place that uses mushrooms in half or more of its entrees is hiding things through the use of those cheap bulking things.

My friend Bob and I ordered, and barely had the wine arrived than the dinner did too. Suspiciously fast, but then, mine was a mound of dirty rice surrounded by a few pieces of seared fish (not too bad, mostly good for the salt) and some shrimp. I should say that the shrimp was mostly shrimp heads and I was feeling to polite to suck them clean with gusto. Given this meal, small wonder it arrived in probably less than ten minutes. Turning tables was their ploy. A shame we had almost a full bottle of wine to kill. We stayed on and sipped and shared a rich dessert of peanut butter chocolate pie, then waited for quite some while to attract some attention and get the bill.

The kicker? That bit cost more than the meal the night before in which I'd had three courses, shared a half bottle of wine, and had coffee. My advice? If you actually like food, then don't bother going.

You can understand, then, why I wanted some place I had tried and liked for tonight.


I met Melissa (pictured with me - and isn't that a fabulously sharp-looking shirt on me?!) and Courtney at the Hilton at a reception that had a nice complement of Big Names. The two of them told me they needed to hang out with me more, but it's really all down to the connections Martin (pictured at the top) enjoys. Nice event, though. We walked over from there and settled down to dine.


I started with the headcheese. I gather they do a bunch of their own charcuterie at the restaurant. I don't think I've ever had headcheese before, but it sounded intriguing, and it proved to be a good choice. A little mustard, some toast. Yum!


I followed that with the rabbit and dumplings. Also good. I think I liked my cochon two nights ago more, but this was tasty. Martin also had the rabbit (hence the photo at top), CG enjoyed the brisket, and Melissa went for the oyster and bacon sandwich.

We washed it all down with a decent rose - South American, I think (Courtney ordered it). Pink wine, only a very light light ruby in colour instead. Dessert followed, and CG and I chose wisely: a cornmeal pineapple upside down cake with coconut sorbet and dulce de leche. Whoa! The sort of thing I want to lick clean. So good. I craved more right away. Awesome, and I worked at getting the last drops of sauce (well, melted sorbet!) poured off the plate onto my spoon without the slightest shame!


A good meal, like a change of clothing available to me, makes a difference. Ask me on Thursday at work how the conference was, and I'll offer some good reviews. The hotel room is quite nice. Two good meals out. I've seen a number of familiar faces and met a few new ones. Some great programs - I will dig up what I can on the ACRL ANSS program on the social science of food and link it because the two speakers I saw before I had to leave were really super. Oh, and I bought 5 new pairs of khakis, each a different colour, for $14.99 each at The Gap. Fun!

So, yes: it's hot, my feet hurt from my shoes, I had a bad arrival experience, the view from the room is not as stunning as it might be. Boo-hoo! I'm having a good conference, and my feelings about the city have improved dramatically from where they were following my first, tightly-budgeted trip here.

But most of all, I just really want another go round of that cake awaiting me for breakfast tomorrow morning!

:-P

Amazing what fresh underwear will do!

Yes, I'm a much happier camper today. The luggage came overnight sometime, and this morning I set off for the convention center with fresh clothes on. YAY!

I've never really been fair in my criticism of New Orleans. I still will not at all say that the city is one I especially like. The heat is oppressive. I like to walk to and from the converntion center, but I feel a slight burn from a bit of walking today. Moreover, I like not having to sweat excessively. Ah well. There's a lot of derelict storefronts to be seen, of course. I still think that people come here to try to hard to have fun or something like that.

But I also know this: the great financial corner-cutting I had to undertake on my last conference visit in 2002 meant I experiences only a cheap hotel and lame food. The weather was not great then - drab and grey. I didn't know other people at the conference other than my colleagues. This time, despite some flight and luggage issues, things are different. Nice hotel room. I am running into people from elsewhere whom I know. I need not count my pennies so.

And I had a good meal tonight. I only wish the photos had all turned out!


My meal of Louisiana cochon (pork) with turnips, cabbage, and cracklins. Not sure where the cabbage really was, but it also had some peach chunks on it. Very very very good!

David and I met for dinner at Cochon. In fact, I was early (having come from Madeleine Albright's keynote lecture - I only wish she'd mentioned her appearance on Gilmore Girls!), so I sat down with CG, Melissa, and Terry as they finished up. It's a handsome place in the Warehouse District - clean lines, blond wood, that lofty/sort of finished feel. David and I each had three courses, split a half bottle of an Argentine Cabernet Sauvignon, and had coffee to finish. Total bill with tip: $53 each. If we'd had as much food the night before at the touristy place, it would have been a similar price and nowhere near as good.

Our meal:

"link" sausage with stone ground grits and peppers (David)
smoked ham hocks with braised greens (me)

fish special - lemonfish? I wasn't paying attention. It looked good. That was David's.
My cochon.

David's dessert was some orange creamsicle/chocolate cookie thing that looked lovely. Mine was the homelier but tasty peach buckle with creme fraiche (shown below):



I actually kind of want to change a future reservation and go back and try some of the other things like the wood-fired oyster roast or the head cheese with house -made mustard or the rabbit and dumplings.

Anyway, a decent day. One program done, lunch - unexpectedly - with a GLBTRT colleague, a meeting that was kind of weird (no quorum, a little steam blown off by others), the excellent Albright speech during which I sat next to an architect from Edmonton whom I chatted with at length before it all got underway.

Shall I actually get up at 8 tomorrow for a program?

And if the luggage doesn't arrive...

..you'll see photos of me wearing this tomorrow!



I'll hold off on commenting on New Orleans so far: I've been here only a handful of hours, and it's not fair of me to judge the city on the basis of an hour and a half delay in my United flight and the failure of the airline/TSA to get my bag on the plane despite me being at the airport more than an hour and a half before the original departure time. Also an aggravatingly long ride into the city on the shuttle, stopping at a lot of hotels before mine. And I can hear Bourbon Street ww floors below my hotel room window.

Dinner, meanwhile, was pleasant for having been with CG and Melissa, but in the end it was not much more than a moderate portion of crawfish-flavoured gravy and some converted rice. Etouffe (shown here with CG), they call it (I'm too lazy to add the diacritics). Ah well....

In the end, meringues

So, meringues it is. Home early from work, I quickly put together dinner (charred some tomatoes in a hot skillet; chopped them; tossed them with red onion slices, chopped rosemary, coarse salt, and a bit of olive oil; let it sit while cooking pasta; tossed the pasta and uncooked sauce together with a bit of feta; served with a salad), then set to work on making meringue cookies while waiting for Conrad to come home.

The recipe comes from an Emily Luchetti cookbook, Stars Desserts. It's one of the bibles in my kitchen. I searched high and low for it in hardcover, and I'm using it enough to have to take it for rebinding one day, I think. The chocolate meringue cookie recipe is a simple one requiring exactly the 6 egg whites I had on hand. So, cookies it was - rather than the cake I thought I might do - and a batch of imperfect but delicious chocolatey blobs sit on my counter. I hope the humidity lately will not affect them adversely, else Conrad will be taking in to work tomorrow a collection of tasty chocolatey crumbs that resemble this:



I don't care to discuss the Valentine's Day Meringue Massacre, however. Read for yourself.

Should I pack tonight, I wonder?

cakes

Having just spent some 15 minutes on the phone with Jeph trying to figure out what to do with 6 egg whites (a cake of some sort preferred, and I don't want to use more egg whites) without hitting just the right thing on line, I'm giving up for the night. Two cakes just out of the oven: Rose Levy Beranbaum's All-Occasion Downy Yellow Butter Cake, studded with raisins I soaked for a few hours in sauternes. We'll see how they turn out. The batter tasted darn good, though, I must say!

Maybe some meringue cookies tomorrow night instead....

Recap: or, last posting on Sweden - until the next visit (maybe!)

Ruminations before I head to the pool. I opened some sauternes last night to make an asparagus risotto, and I want to use them up, so tonight I'll bake a couple of cakes with raisins soaked in the sauternes, I think.



Day one: yes, we were exhausted. But we slept well once we checked in to the hotel and otherwise occupied ourselves well as good tourists all morning and as fellow gay swimmers dining out that night. Looking back, the lunch at the National Museum was a terrific meal in a lovely, fairly quiet setting. Dinner with the Dolphins, meanwhile, was both a delicious meal and a very enjoyable one for the good company.

In the end, though, we were in Stockholm, and it's a darn gorgeous city. The shot above is from that first night on the way back to the hotel.



Day two we did some souvenir hunting after sleeping in late. Nine hours of sleep the night before, and we were all set to go. Getting a swim in was a good thing, especially in a 50m pool, but a leisurely dinner outside with Mats and Lars was a great capper. The photo above shows me in the narrowest "street" in Stockholm - it's narrower up top - on Gamla Stan, just after shopping at Duka.



Day three was another museum, the Vasamuseet, and some real heat in the city. Also, a lovely meal at an old restaurant on Gamla Stan (all recapped earlier). The Vasamuseet is the most visited in the city, from what I understand, but I think it absolutely worth it. We timed it right: the crowds were moderate, and it took us into a cool interior at the height of the sunny afternoon! The photo is a museum shot.



Day four, and it was up to Conrad's cousins by way of the hottest little railcar in history. I lie. It was only 31 degrees inside it. Ugh. I am so not a hot weather person. Snivel snivel whine whine. We made it there safe and well in time to enjoy the afternoon and evening. And we had the good company of Kersti and Ivar as well. Pictured above is Conrad in the decorated doorway of the guest house.



In honour of day five and a road trip to Hudiksvall, a pronunciation test for you readers in the shape of the photo above!



Day six was the trip to the Zoo, but it is also noteworthy for Conrad dressing in bright colours for a change. Sweden beat Paraguay, much to our delight, but given that none of the villagers dressed in home team colours, it was encouraging that Olov did so!



Our last day with the cousins took us to Dalarna on another sunny drive, but we finished with pancakes. In the photo I am holding up a dancing goat, symbol of Hälsingland and a common sight on the side of houses. We want one for home, but never found a good one, darn it!

Day eight was back to Stockholm and for the most part a moratorium on photos. We do stop sometimes, you know. Still, good food is good food, and so....



My meal of plaice with beets. Very good, and a frankly huge portion!

That's Sweden, then. You have the highs and the highs and the not quite as highs. On to New Orleans on Friday, though for Conference. Relax, there will be more food photos in the future!