#310
Smoke, shows
Like many of you, I am guessing, we were affected by wildfire smoke from Canada last week. This happened for the first time in my lifetime a couple of years ago, when our friends who live in the western part of the country were like
I had actually forgotten about this, and when I let the dogs out Thursday morning, I thought it was foggy, just summer mist that comes along with 90-something degree days. But then I smelled campfire.
It’s eerie, and if I hadn’t known that the fires in question were hundreds of miles away, I would have been very nervous based on the visual and olfactory evidence. We mostly lived indoors for a couple of days, with the outdoors in a perpetual Instagram-Valencia-filtered haze. I didn’t let the dogs stay outside for very long; however low to the ground they are, I can’t think it’s all that good for them.
As I write this, the air quality is back to “moderate,” and the temperature is similarly normal. We left the windows open overnight Sunday night for the first time in a long while. I have to say it doesn’t feel great to continually have to monitor air quality along with all the other absolute bullshit the world keeps kicking up, but we do what we can.
Last night we did something insane: went to see a band. ON A MONDAY NIGHT. As a reminder, I am 52 and 3/4 years of age, and this is a very advanced-level move, in my opinion!
The occasion was Bloc Party, another box ticked on the list of bands I haven’t seen since/didn’t get to see in the glorious musical period of 2002-2006ish. I listened to Silent Alarm every single morning on the way to work during the summer and fall of 2005, and I have extremely strong positive associations with the entire album, which really is good from beginning to end.
It was a really fun show despite the couple on molly in front of us who held their glowing drinks aloft and danced without concern for things like personal space or, it must be said, situational appropriateness in general. The venue is shiny and new, though it lives within a very old Cleveland carapace, a former foundry and shipbuilding company. Now, instead of sooty steelworkers building the backbone of America, there is a hardscaped courtyard, good lighting, plenty of restrooms, and adequate climate control. This is another clean and cashless concert venue, but you could do worse than having a beer outside under the Main Avenue Bridge on a summer night. Really the only negative was that the band did not play “Positive Tension,” a huge miss as far as I am concerned, but I suppose part of the magic of live music is that you sort of roll the dice and hope for the best.
There is an outside-at-best chance that we may double down and see Pavement later this week, but that depends on how desperate people are to unload the tickets they bought and hoped to resell for many times more than the original price. Concert ticket pricing, even for my middle-class DINK lifestyle, is eyebrow-raising to begin with, and resellers have made it worse, along with the internet. In my day, ticket scalpers had to skulk around the parking lot, hoping to unload their wares. Nobody wants to work anymore!
Food things: Even though we replaced our crummy, poorly sealed oven a few years ago, I do still try to avoid using it on especially hot days. We have a grill, and I feel strongly about using it as much as possible when the weather allows, but at the end of last week I did use the oven to bake some chicken thighs, which I added to these halloumi souvlaki bowls.
As a rule, if there is a recipe out there that calls for adding a bunch of stuff to a bowl, I am going to make it. In fact, I borderline apologized to my husband for always being inveigled by these recipes via Instagram or the New York Times, both successful dealers of this particular drug. The halloumi souvlaki bowls were good, although, to be fully transparent, I didn't make the “yogurty rice” first of all because it just sounded unappealing, but also because I didn’t have time to faff with it. I just made basmati rice, stirred harissa into some Greek yogurt and put it on top of the whole thing.
I knew the CSA farm share zucchinis were about to rain down on my head in full force, so I saved this salt-and-pepper zucchini recipe. Sure enough, two robust courgettes appeared in my share last week; on Saturday I made my standby zucchini-user-upper, the zucchini and ricotta galette.
I used the remaining cottage cheese from last week’s pasta in place of ricotta (this worked fine), and I threw together the pastry in a bit of a hurry. I took it out just short of the recommended chill time and fretted as I rolled it out and folded it over the filling. At one point I told myself “this will either be a disaster or the best version of this galette I have ever made,” and in the way of these things, it was the latter. My husband used the farm share onion, green beans, and potatoes to make a sort of North African curry and the whole thing was very good, helped along perhaps by the batch of corpse revivers I made earlier in the evening.
Yesterday I made a big Instant Pot batch of chicken shawarma (there are many many recipes for this online; I used this one) and a batch of hummus, which is simply
2 cans of chickpeas, drained and 3/4 liquid reserved
1/2 cup tahini
1/3 cup lemon juice (or more to taste)
2 t kosher salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
Put the chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, salt, and garlic in a food processor with 1/2 cup of the reserved liquid from the beans. Whiz it around in there for 2-3 minutes. Add more reserved bean liquid to achieve your desired texture. Eat it all week or have a party and make other people eat it.
Corpse Reviver is one of my favorites.