A Dash of Cold Water...

...on youthful optimism.  This is compliments of a friend who teaches in the Humanities, but a fair bit of it also applies to those of us teaching in the CSU system as well, I think.

Stir-fried Sweet Potatoes

Gropius and I made a new recipe recently that was a bit of a crapshoot and it turned out incredibly tasty, so I have to share.  I came across a recipe for stir-fried sweet potatoes, noticed that I liked all of the ingredients, and thought, "Why not give it a try?"  When I think of stir-fry, I tend to think of chunky vegetables, but this recipe called for grated sweet potato and it worked out well (and sped up the cooking time!).  It was a quick weeknight meal and I think it may see regular rotation because even Lulu was a big fan of the leftovers.

The observant of you can date this photo by the NYTimes food section articles. 

It had a nice amount of spice without being overpoweringly hot.

We decided to serve it over white rice and it was a great combo.  I don't know that brown would've tasted as delicious.

Dinner

butternut squash "farrotto."  Very tasty, whole grain, and vegetarian.  Very spicy with three red, late summer/fully ripe jalapenos!

Yogurt-cumin sauce in the bowl and roasted butternut squash seeds with a little chipotle chile powder.

"You don't make friends with salad!"

Or so goes one of my favorite Homer Simpson quotes....but I think even Homer would like THIS salad:

The salad portion is a bed of fresh basil, mint and spinach leaves underneath rice noodles topped with chinese barbecued pork tenderloin with spicy peanuts and fried ginger as a garnish.  I found this recipe in my Donna Hay Flavours cookbook.  Tasty and delish!

Potato Sorrel Gratin

We made our first recipe with sorrel from our herb garden earlier last week.  I found the recipe for potato and sorrel gratin at marthastewart.com and it was very tasty!  Sorrel has a lemony herbal taste that's nice and refreshing with hot summer weather.  Given the other recipes on her website, I gather that Martha thinks it's also good with fish, too.

This message is brought to you by the Berkeley Cheese Board....

This weekend, Gropius joined the BMW 2002 caravan down to San Francisco for the Bay Area 2002 Club's annual get-together.  Everyone in Sacramento met up at 7:30am and drove down together.

Because getting me up and dressed and Lulu up and dressed before 8am on a day that we don't absolutely have to just ain't happening, we had a nice girls morning together with Daddy weg (away).  We had a nice breakfast of biscuits before getting ready and driving down ourselves.

We met up with Kristin, my colleague, and her daughter, Tia, for lunch at The Cheese Board in Berkeley.  Kristin had forgotten her keys in Sacramento and we were happy to return them to her.

After waiting in line, we enjoyed tasty cilantro pesto pizza with red onions, feta, mozarella and corn.  Delicious!  Afterwards, we had a little gelato.

After the ice cream was gone, the girls were fascinated with dropping leaves, etc. into an Asian-inspired garden area near where we were seated.

Such a nice day!  Thanks for forgetting your keys, Kristin!

Random Food-related Photos.

In no particular order, here is a variety of photos taken in the past couple of weeks:

Getting ready to do a little gardening with Auntie Hellen and Uncle Derek's latest gift:  

a pink plastic spade from Wal-Mart!

Posing with our transplanted sage from Tina and Kyle

Me, indulging my inner anal-retentive chef tendencies....that dicing is very uniform!

One of the new(er) arrivals in the vegetable section of our local Whole Foods:  emu eggs

I wonder if chickens feel egg-envy??

Someone enjoying her shopping trip?

Enjoying a post-Maifest repast on the patio.  

That's Mt Tam triple cream cheese on rye bread in her hand btw....

Who, me?