Mishaps and other haps

The alfredo sauce turned out just right.  My Parmesan-grating guy was ten feet away and within earshot while I stirred and tested it.  Scrubs was on the TV.  It was not a particularly unusual Monday evening, but it was perfect.

You know it’s summer in Wisconsin (even if the calendar disagrees) when there is no longer danger of frost, there are mighty gusts of rain, normal humidity levels approach that of Florida, and the temperatures sync up so that Wisconsin’s daytime highs are about 10 degrees cooler than Florida’s.

I am not going to complain about the weather.  My mom and sister, who both live in Florida, have already reported several days of temperatures in the mid-90s and heat index above 100.  My sister likes to spend a good part of her weekends outdoors, so she is both heartier and braver than I am.  I hope she drinks a lot of water.

On the other hand, we have had some pretty intense storms the past few days and some flooding has occurred in our basement.  Water generally spreads quickly on the floor for a very brief period, then the water recedes pretty steadily.  This does mean, however, that we’ve had to shift objects around and I think some magazines and boxes that were on the floor this morning are now only fit for the trash.  Nothing important has been damaged, however, and only part of the basement floor has been affected.  I guess we will sort through items that were moved a bit later.

I was baking this morning when Joe discovered that we had a problem downstairs and I was able to continue baking while we were moving things and setting up a beach towel barricade against the water. Peanut butter bread with chocolate chips and healthy(ish) peanut butter & honey cookies (courtesy, again, of Laurel’s Kitchen) were the results of a morning in the kitchen.

I can safely say that tomato plants are not going to be staked today, but if they have made it this far, maybe they can survive a little longer without outside support.

If you have not roasted garlic before, it’s easy to do.  This instruction guide helped me choose the right oven temperature and roasting time.  I didn’t use aluminum foil or a muffin pan and our garlic roasted up just fine.  However, wrapping the garlic probably helps prevent over-browning.  I used the toaster oven because it seemed silly to heat the whole kitchen JUST to roast three heads of garlic.

However, I did heat the whole kitchen to bake lasagna, which is cooling upstairs now.

We had a nice morning with much sleeping-in.  Yes, we skipped a trip downtown for the Farmer’s Market.  Maybe next week!

Joe made us tuna melts for lunch (yum!) and we went out to shop.  I picked up a handful of new d8s at Pegasus and Michael bought the very last copy of the 4th edition Player’s Handbook.  Frankly, I am surprised that they had any stocked by the time we made it there today.

We did not buy a copy of the new Arkham Horror expansion, although we considered it (and probably will at some point).  Nor did we buy Puerto Rico.  Pegasus did not have a copy in stock.  I think we are going out a little later to check out other places that might have Puerto Rico.  I have played this game once and have wanted to own a copy for a while now.

Reports from upstairs indicate that lasagna is now safe for human consumption, so I am going to go consume it.

The start to the morning was a little rocky today, so I went upstairs and made coffee and started preparing the beef for dinner with a melange of crushed tomatoes, green onion, garlic, lemon juice and zest, salt and pepper (slowly cooking now in the crockpot).

Then I decided to bake banana bread (the recipe I usually use is some variant of the recipe in Laurel’s Kitchen).  Still feeling an urge to be productive, I made a chickpea salad.  Before people start showing up for gaming, I think I will start on brownies.

This level of kitchen productivity does tend to create a lot of dishes, but wow, it puts me in a much better mood!