Flog #0004
Fall break can't last forever, but restaurant worker trauma sure does
This week’s food log, wherein I ate leftovers, not my feelings.
Saturday: Marinated flank steak and beet toast. The fall break fun continued with a great if slightly incongruous meal at home. I roasted the beets (five golden beets, one red) in the morning; let them cool; then peeled, chopped, and mixed with parsley, mint, shallots, olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, pistachios, salt and pepper. Before my daughter and I headed out to see “The Eras Tour,” she whipped goat cheese, lemon juice, grated garlic, and a splash of cream in the food processor while I put the steak into a ziplock bag with the marinade (sesame oil, olive oil, brown sugar, hot sauce, lime juice, garlic, and the white parts of a bunch of scallions – not measuring but basically following Jenny Rosenstrach’s flank steak marinade that has become our house steak recipe, if we were to have one). I was spent after the movie, so I was thankful my husband had the grill hot and ready when we got home. Toasts were toasted, goat cheese was spread, beets were heaped, and I chopped the green parts of the scallions to throw on the steak after it rested and was sliced. It was a fresh, amazingly flavorful meal that seemed fussy with two long lists of ingredients, advanced roasting and marinating, chopping, chopping, chopping, but the work was spread out over the day and turned into an act of service from each one of us to the other two to make our last family meal for another six weeks extra special. The fact that the steak was vaguely Asian from the sesame oil and the beet toast was, what, Mediterranean didn’t matter. We listened to more Taylor Swift, lingered around the table, talked, and ate some more.
Sunday: The plan was to get up early and be on the road by 10, maybe grabbing pastries or stopping for breakfast along the way, but early did not happen. After one last late morning in her own bed, my daughter ran around gathering her laundry and charging cords while my husband made scrambled eggs, sliced avocado, and chili crisp atop sourdough toast. I am Team Delish Stuff on Toast for life, y’all; I’ll weep when I have to leave this trend behind. I packed up the frozen bags of chicken soup and frosted a batch of pumpkin muffins that the kid was taking with her. I made the muffins the night before using Deb Perelman's pumpkin bread recipe but with a few changes: I added chocolate chips and cream cheese frosting. It’s my go-to pumpkin bread recipe, and while I sometimes add the chocolate chips, I’ve never frosted them before (totally not necessary). I just felt like being a bit extra because these muffins were heading back to school to fuel my daughter and her squad as they studied for midterms. The muffins went into the container that has transported cupcakes, cookies, and orange wedges to school, games, and tournaments through the years and still has her purple name sticker on the bottom and if this scene were in a movie, a critic would rightfully call it an an artlessly unsubtle signal that the protagonist is clinging to any and all vestiges of her daughter’s childhood and yeah what about it? I regret nothing except not holding back a few muffins.
Monday: Meatballs in lots of red sauce with roasted Brussels sprouts on the side. Comfort food was a must after a rough Sunday. There was yet more Taylor Swift in the car on the way there, lots of talking and feelings on the way home. College is hard, man. For me.
Tuesday: Pot roast sauce over noodles, roasted beet melange over salad greens. Yep, just pot roast sauce. The meat was long gone but not at all missed. It sounds like Depression-era leftovers, but the deeply flavored, veggie-rich sauce is so good on its own and actually feels complete. The beets were still great, too.
Wednesday: Chicken soup from last week’s chicken stock. Heat the stock, add vegetables to simmer for a while, then throw in the pulled meat from a rotisserie chicken. Part scratch-made, part store-bought.
Thursday: I sent a smug photo of my smug smoothie to show the kid what lunches are like around here so that she doesn’t think we’re eating fun stuff while she’s eating dining hall food. But then I broke my gold-star streak and decided we’d had enough leftovers for the week. I needed a pizza, and after a discussion on Slack we landed on Grimaldi’s. It’s a chain, but they have decent salads and a wood-fired oven. The crust is too thin (it is possible to be too thin, actually) but it’s only one of two pizza places that aren’t on our No Fry List. It was OK, until about three-quarters through our meal when I mentioned the smell of dirty mop water and triggered my former-chef husband. Triggered both of us, tbh. You can take the service workers out of the restaurant, but you can never suppress the memories of stanky mop heads and the tables that made you cry.
Friday: Long week for you, too? Everything is so heavy. Trying to follow the news, wading through bad information on social media, angry that our decimated media infrastructure cannot meet the moment, chuckling at the House speaker shit show, feeling disgusted anew by Justin Timberlake and everyone who exploited Britney, worrying about your Jewish friends, fearing for Palestinian citizens – humans weren’t built for this much at once. Three things that made me feel better today: first, watching Jennie Perillo make challah for Shabbat. (She did it in three live segments – I wish she had saved them as Highlights.) Second, taking a break from Taylor (and TrayvisTok) and subbing in Bob Marley and a few reggae stations. (The trailer for the new Marley biopic was shown before “Eras.”) Third, the quickest of chats with the kid, who ran into some friends mid-call and became too distracted to answer my inane mom questions. Hearing from her made me happy but it was even more comforting to know she’s too busy to miss me. The way it should be.
(Almost forgot! Lentil bowls with lamb meatballs from Cava.)