So...whats for dinner?

Lacey, mazel tov on the engagement! Susan, the crumb in that ciabatta looks so perfect I can practically smell and taste it.

Got back into the city from the folk festival just about the same time Bob left the S. Side. So I dropped off my suitcase & instruments at home and met him at Calo in our old neighborhood one mile south (Andersonville). It’s been the neighborhood meeting place since the late 1950s, when it was still your basic southern Italian old-school “red sauce and pizza joint.” About 10 years ago, it went a bit more (okay, a lot more) upscale but it’s still the nerve center of A’ville. Started with some tomato foccaccia, then Caesar salad and linguine with mussels in white wine. Drank a Domaine Chandon brut ($9 per split, same price as the--IMHO inferior--prosecco).

Grilled grass-fed ribeye (left 2/3 of it for Gordy) along with plain corn on the cob (half an ear--my half didn’t shrivel, but the other half shriveled as it cooled. Guess you need to eat it right away) and sauteed broccolini with olive oil, garlic, salt & red pepper flakes. NPO after midnight because of tomorrow’s cataract surgery.

Thanks, Minus! Hope to have eyeglasses to freecycle soon!

I will ask my doc about getting a soft contact lens with my left eye distance & astigmatism prescription--he may even have it in stock. That way I can just wear drugstore readers. Otherwise, we’ll go to Lenscrafters and just get a plain no-correction blank put in the right side of my frames.

Treated myself to a nice chocolate egg cream. Gonna take my bedtime meds, shower and wash & dry my hair (won’t be able to for at least a couple days after), put in my last eyedrops for the day and set the alarm clock. Catch you from the other side--still typing one-eyed (this time until I can take the patch off).

Good luck Sandy!

Hope the surgery went well, Sandy. I will be "watching" your recovery closely as I keep avoiding the process, but will need to face it if (when!) my cataracts get much worse.

Yesterday, we spent seven hours cleaning, packing, and buttoning up the lake house, before heading down the highway....in two packed cars. That was exhausting.

I made a stop at the NH liquor outlet to get some celebratory beverages to be enjoyed on Saturday while tailgating with DS2's cohorts before the UMASS/BC game. I was worried about leaving DF's pooch in the car, and almost didn't stop for this errand, when suddenly I drove into cloud cover with lowered temps and rain. Yay! Mission able to be accomplished with doggy perfectly comfortable! Whew!

We arrived home just before our transplanted Cali friends picked us up to try the tapas place in Wellesley. It is actually a chain, Bocado, part of the Niche restaurant group...with good food. We had the menu for 4, which was a LOT of food! We started with 4 charcuterie selections, (my friend and I didn't even notice that thisxwas included) 8 tapas, and a paella. It was fun to select the items that were pretty inventive. I took a few photos but kept forgetting since we were all eager to dive in! I thought this salad was so pretty......cantaloupe arugula salad with goat cheese, walnuts and merguez (sp?) sausage.....very nice! A mushroom dish over a white polenta was delish as was the gazpacho, and a braised rabbit dish. My first time trying rabbit and I will not be telling the docvegans. Both DHs enjoyed an octopus dish and there was a very unusual fried avocado item that was so tasty. I can't begin to recall all the component parts to these dishes, and missed others altogether. After the paella classico, we had flan and churros (with chocolate for dipping) for dessert. The waiter ended up packing the plentiful leftover paella which DH happily brought home. I am still full this morning!

I am seriously going to try to return to my more moderate eating habits after indulging so much this summer.

We are about to head into Savin Hill to return the grand dog. We are always a bit sad and a bit relieved when he leaves. 😐

So Bedo - I didn't even know there was such a thing as Quaker co-housing. I looked it up & found this paragraph about mealtimes most interesting.

Family dinners, a tradition since the house's founding in 1957, are a central community activity for residents. (the) director of the Beacon Hill Friends House, views mealtime - often curry chicken or tofu with rice and salad - as a chance to practice sustainability while interacting. We consume less by buying things in bulk, so our footprint is smaller. We strive to live as better stewards of the earth, she said. I think that when we live in a community like this, we are fixing a lot of our basic needs, [including] social needs [by] eating together family-style.

Hooray for your new four day work week. That's great.

Lacey - the latest meal sounds good - and like lots of fun.

I had a giant omelette for 'linner'. My 4 choices were fresh mushrooms, asparagus, spinach & havarti cheese. This was served with a lunch size salad w/blue cheese dressing on the side. Is it just me or has blue cheese changed? Of course I prefer Roquefort but I don't know anywhere in town you can order that. And somehow blue cheese dressing now is oil & vinegar, or yogurt or something. Where's the creamy delight of my younger years? I can't even find a dressing in the grocery store that I like - refrigerated or not.

For those of you having problems with pantry moths, a few years ago I started using the Safer sticky traps (I think raid makes one too). I haven't had to throw one thing away since then because of weevils or moths. You might have to order the Safer unless you have an organic gardening supply source but the raid brand is available at home depot and Lowe's. They last about six months. I love them.

Dinner tonight was an old fashioned Cobb salad with a vinaigrette and some bread from an artisan loaf made with herbs de Provence.

Went to the retina doc today. Weird eye disease is stable but cataracts are progressing enough that I need a surgery evaluation. SIGH. Hope Sandy is home and recovering comfortably.

Oh Lacey, I forgot. Your first chance to see the rock when you take the dog back!!! Exciting.

Why not? Buttermilk freezes VERY well!! I will write up the recipe and post tomorrow.

Glad it went well, Sandy! But I cannot imagine how determined you were to read and post given that level of pain, blur and overbrightness. Impressive!

I tried those moth catchers this year for clothes and then pantry. The pantry issue was not significant, but I got some bio something traps which caught a very few moths. Recently a friend had introduced me to the Safer product, but I checked reviews on Amazon and decided to go with GreenWay for the clothing moth traps. Definitely works faster than my Safer ones. Kind of creepy to see how many were propagating in my closets. The Greenway product attracts both male and female moths which may be the reason for increased captures. I hardly see a thing flying about anymore, so either there are many larvae secretly chomping away or the problem has mostly been resolved.

Yes, Susan it is annoying to hear the huge trucks and loud banging at 7AM, and the new third floor definitely dwarfs the whole neighborhood. Imhear the plans show eight bathrooms. Oy!

And YES, Minus, we got to see the ring today....actually, the real rock, but in a "loaner" band until she selected the one she wanted. I did not know the concept of a loaner band. That tells you that DS2 did this by himself so it would be a surprise. Cute... Just DF was home to receive the pooch, (she works from home a lot since moving here) so we had a chance to chat with her about the process, and it was interesting to see her open up more about how she handled waiting this long for him to be ready to make the commitment and how he is now "all in" and so excited. Very sweet....and she is a smart girl. Oh, the solitaire diamond is beautiful!

What a creative living idea, Bedo! Can the cats go with you?

I fell (more like jumped) “off the wagon” yesterday--it was a comfort-food kinda day. When we got back housekeeper made one of my faves from my pre-low-carb days: corned beef hash cut with diced bell peppers & onion, topped with a fried egg, accompanied by a piece of low-carb toast. (Grahams, apple juice & coffee in the recovery room just didn’t cut it for me). And last night I ordered out for a NY-style sausage pizza, salad (craisins, cherry tomatoes, red onions and gorgonzola over mesclun with raspberry vinaigrette) and beignets. Bob & I each had a beignet, 2 slices of pizza and 1/3 of the salad. I had to teetotal for 24 hrs., so I had some Minute Maid Light lemonade cut with seltzer. This morning I still felt lousy, and had to leave early, so I had just my meds, vites & black coffee. A 40-min. trip took 90, due to rain and unpublicized lane closures on Lake Shore Drive; but the ophthalmologist was late too. I was able to keep my eye open in the car, with the shield on and the special shades over it. (Rode home with my regular glasses beneath the shades). But I was still in comfort-food mode. Alas, Mickey D’s doesn’t do biscuits for its all-day breakfast menu, but Drunken Donuts did have a chicken-and-waffle sandwich. Never tried fried chicken & waffles together before--way to carby, but again, today was about comfort. Kinda soggy, but it crisped back up in the toaster oven. Unfortunately, there was no way to scrape off the American cheese (what idiot puts THAT on fried chicken?). My housekeeper confirmed that cheese has no place in real Southern chicken & waffles. It was an okay experiment, but with my curiosity satisfied, one I don’t care to repeat.

My eye is much better today. Surgeon says to use the shield only for sleep or in the shower--no shampooing for awhile except by my hairdresser (who has the right stuff that won't strip the keratin out of my hair). I had my follow-up today and was able to keep my eye open while riding in the car (the special shades fit over the shield). And the pain pretty much stopped when he applied a lidocaine drop. (Too bad I can't use it all the time, since it can destroy the cornea if used more than once in a blue moon). I can also start using the NSAID, steroid & antibiotic drops, which helped pretty quickly too. Turns out the pain was from a couple of tiny blisters on my cornea (it figures--I get blisters on my feet all the time, and I'm a seroma-former) which should resolve with the drops. Therefore, no contacts, ever. My acuity (sharpness) in the "new" eye isn't there yet (have to wait till the swelling goes down and I do still look like hell)--but the lens is much clearer and everything looks more vivid and 3-D. By comparison, the acuity in the left eye is still a little sharper (which is why I can type this) but everything out of that eye looks like it has a yellowish haze, like smog, over it. Guess you could say the right eye is blurry but the left eye is foggy. It'll be 3 more weeks till the swelling is down enough to refract that eye for reading correction--right now it's at about 20/80 (had been 20/40 before the cataract ripened), same as the left. And there is no astigmatism--I just put on a pair of drugstore readers and a square grid looks square, not like a rhombus or trapezoid.

Have a Black Tie Gala From Hell to attend Sat. night (we’ll Uber or cab it--Bob wants to drink freely and I don’t want to take the wheel at night yet) but my right eye, while pretty functional, is still bloodshot and looks half its normal size because it's so swollen that the lid is protecting it. And no eye makeup for a week. Will have to let my hair & jewelry do the talking....and look mysterious in sunglasses.

Tonight will be the leftover salad, with some sardines on the side. Diet "Arnold Palmer" (gonna actually brew some decaf tea to ice) to drink with it; when Bob gets home, limoncello shots out on the deck.

Sandy I hope that surgery went well and Nance I hope that your eye appointment goes well as well and - minus

Susan I hate to tell you but I See Seven Stars every Saturday at the farmers market and completely bypass it because if I had a loaf of bread and some butter I would eat the whole thing in one day Seven Stars is about a mile from my house

Regarding the friends house total cost is $1,000 including room and board and meals per month

Lacey I think it is actually something I would like as I have lived with many people before in groups I am not sure about the cats they are really my daughter's haha and congratulations on the engagement

NANCE

My 10 foods for the island would be lox and bagels with cream cheese and red onion and capers I guess that's five anchovy pizza I'm going to count that as one ginger ale Lobster cheese fresh bread and butter I don't think I would be very healthy

Dragon that sounds very good and tasty

I am sorry for anyone I have missed I have to go look up some things

oh Sandy I forgot about the tomato and now I have to eliminate one item and I can't think of which

Sandy - glad the eye is some better.

The top of my list is bread & butter. If I could rotate good breads with EXTRA butter, I probably wouldn't care about anything else. Well, maybe popcorn w/melted butter.

Lunch was Bok Choy lightly sauteed in olive oil with almost the last of my MeiYen seasoning (I've been rationing because Spice Islands no longer sells this). Side was 1/2 a toasted pumpernickel bagel w/butter. (tomorrow will be bagel w/cream cheese & lox) Dinner was raw cauliflower & radishes dipped in ranch dressing. Main dish was 1/2 a baked potato with lots of butter. (as you can tell, butter it at the very top of my food group & I never gave it up).