But not every day can be perfect; this morning Leo and I began our walk in the usual fashion: head to the elementary school, walk around the football field, run up Suribachi hill, but then, alas, we could not complete our morning fitness circuit because they took down our pull-up bars to make room for a field hockey field!
I returned home hungry and with my arm muscles beginning to atrophy. I drowned my sorrows in syrup, with pancakes underneath, and a glass of milk.
With school starting tomorrow, in the form of a conference day, my mornings of frittataing, pancaking, and omeleting will be a thing of the past, so I hard-boiled some eggs.
As you can see these eggs were a little too fresh to peel, but OH! the color of that yolk.
While biking home from tennis practice I came up with the most brilliant idea for lunch - a quesadilla. I had a couple tortillas and some cheddar left over from the Mexican lasagna. I topped the tortillas with tomatoes, basil, and peppers...
...and popped it in the old George Foreman.
I had planned to add some crushed red pepper flakes because although I'm not a very good cook these little flakes make it seem like I am. I forgot said flakes but my quesadilla was still delicious. In fact, I've learned this month that fresh cheese adds a lot of flavor to a meal.
It was at least 85 degrees at tennis practice, and I still felt hot and sticky so I decided to make more ice cream. I had a hair appointment to get to and had no intention of leaving my maple mixture in the ice cream maker long enough, but even mushy it was still a cold, refreshing treat that hit the spot. And I'm not the only one who found it enticing.
This afternoon I completed my last big cooking project of the month - vegetable lasagna. I followed a recipe from the Food Network, but was dismayed when it did not call for lasagna noodles. Apparently these foodies intended to replace pasta with thinly sliced zucchini. I have no problem with zucchini, but decided to make some pasta to lay down as well. The recipe also called for eggplant, which I have never been able to cook without it tasting like my bicycle tire, and mushrooms which I couldn't get. Instead I included broccoli and green peppers.
It turned out pretty good, and, as always, the first piece of lasagna was a little messy to serve up.
A few times this month people have commented on how my bread, pancakes, pasta, etc. are brownish in color. I've been using all purpose flour, not whole wheat as you might expect, but it's not bleached and retains some of its original pigment, xanthophyll. Bleaching isn't necessarily harmful, though bleached flour may have less vitamin E. Even non-bleached flour needs to be exposed to aging chemicals so it will gluten-ize well and be more elastic for baking and cooking. Pasta has a yellowish color because the semolina it is made from is never bleached.
Well, one more day! But stay tuned, there will be a few more posts after tomorrow.
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