Pete and I walked to the garden shop this morning and came back with some perennials for our new garden bed. We took down the battered old playhouse earlier this summer, and cleared out the weeds and bricked in the space. We added a couple of hostas, and now we have a few taller plants to put behind them. I'll post pictures after we get them in. I should also post a picture of our little butterfly garden, which is thriving.
Pete and Joe asked me to climb with them this afternoon. It's really nice that they're always so happy for me to come along with them. I can certainly imagine a world in which they found it painfully embarrassing for their middle-aged mother to attempt to rock-climb with them, but they are welcoming and encouraging 100% of the time. We were bouldering today, climbing without ropes or harnesses. I've been stuck for a while at the V2 level, but today I got my first V3 indoors. The outdoor routes are harder because they tend to have a lot of overhang. But today I got my first V2 on the outdoor structure. After that I rested on my laurels in the lovely breezy shade, and read about the life of Chiara Corbello Petrillo.
Before we left I got dinner started. I boiled up a bunch of tiny CSA beets and put a pork loin in the Instant Pot with gochujang and soy sauce and garlic. After we came home I used the food processor to slice a small onion and a pile of cabbage and to shred some nice fat carrots. I steeped the veggies in a dressing based on a Nigella Lawson recipe: 1.5 T. each of vegetable oil, fish sauce, and lime juice, 1.5 t. of rice vinegar, 1 t. sugar, a minced clove of garlic and half of a minced jalapeño, along with a handful of chopped mint and another of cilantro. We had quinoa bowls for dinner, which lets everybody choose their preferred proportions of grain/meat/slaw. Three out of four kids were enthusiastic and the fourth did not complain. And we had the nicest wide-ranging dinner conversation-- about 90s dietary recommendations and pancreatic function and epigenetics and unexpected lessons from our long-ago NFP class and ways one might improve coaching for high school athletes, among other things.
After dinner Stella and I walked downtown together. I wanted to return library books to the dropbox; she wanted to get out of the house. We swung by CVS on the way home and bought a box of ice cream bars. The students are back, filling our little downtown after five weirdly quiet months. I don't know how long they'll be here, but they're back for now.
I just want to say, please never stop posting what you make for dinner...I like to cook, but I hate deciding what to make, and your Gladly household meals are often great inspiration for me! When you posted this the other day I thought "ding! I have a pork loin and gochujang and cilantro and mint and this sounds divine." A few days later when I got around to making it, I discovered I was out of gochujang so I threw together a different Asian sauce in my (knockoff) Instant Pot, and I had a different assortment of veggies in the dressing, but that dressing--wow! Much better than the various things I've tried so far in Buddha bowl meals. I will be making that dressing forever! You also turned me on to the "my heart beets" blog and all of its onion masala puck goodness. I've made various dals and saags and we've even done homemade roti on the side. I feel very much like I owe you some good recipes....maybe I'll drop you one by email sometime. THANKS! Hope you have a wonderful sabbatical, and that you cook a lot. ;-)
Posted by: Giedra | August 22, 2020 at 01:30 PM