Chopped May 4, 2013

Chopped                       May 4, 2013

Well, who knew?  Ramps are similar to leeks with an aroma of garlic and are only available in the spring.  See, I knew I was really being educated with my junk TV.  Of course, I was introduced to ramps through Chopped, one of my favorite shows.  [After writing this, I went into Whole Foods and the first thing I saw was ramps!  At $12.00 per pound!!]

In case you haven’t seen Chopped, contestants are given a picnic basket full of ingredients that they must use for three rounds: appetizer, entrée, and dessert.  After each round, one person is eliminated by the three judge panel of food experts.  In my opinion, it’s appropriate that the picnic baskets are black because they contain some of the weirdest combinations of ingredients known to man.  Often, I have no clue as to what the exotic vegetable is and sometimes they throw in a stunner such as lemon drop candy – for the entrée!

And the contestants are amazing and create wonderful dishes in only 30 minutes.  I couldn’t figure out what to do in 30 minutes!  I often end up staring at the contents of my fridge and come up blank.  It’s pretty hard to make “real food” out of sundried tomatoes in oil, green olives with lemon and garlic, butter, eggs, and minced garlic.  Yeah, I know: pasta putanesca.  (I always have some kind of pasta in the food closet.)  Did you know that name is actually “the whores’ pasta”?  Supposedly, when the working girls got home, they were ravenous and threw in anything they could find in the fridge.  Hence, the name.  Anyway, I made a  go of it and learned that thin spaghetti topped with shrimp, garlic, aforementioned sun dried tomatoes, and a little more olive oil is yummy.  (The shrimp was frozen and I left out the olives to use another time.)

I’m sitting here on a gloriously sunny day and should be outside, but I have been lounging around recovering from a two day work week.  Yes, you heard that correctly.  A week ago Friday, I had a cough at work.  By Sunday, I was sick and on Monday they sent me home. (Good thing, I got REALLY sick after that.)  It was just ‘an upper respiratory thing,’ but I’m sure hayfever didn’t help.  We now have so much pollen in the air that my car was covered in yellow from just one day out of the garage.

 

Anyway back to being sent home from work: nobody wanted my germs.  And I can fully understand that!  I don’t wish sickness on anyone.  But I think people can go too far.  By the third day, I was going stir crazy so I made a fruit tart and brought it in with me to work.  There were some who wouldn’t touch it – even though it had baked at 350 degrees!  Now that’s a bit much I think.

Lazy Woman’s Fruit Tart

1 Pillsbury refrigerator pie crust (they come two rolls to a pack)

8 inch pie plate

3 apples, peeled, chopped

1/2 cup or so of fresh blueberries

2 tablespoons flour

3 tablespoons sugar

Butter – about two tablespoons, slivered

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Put the pie crust into the plate.  Add apples, blueberries; sprinkle flour, sugar and cinnamon over top.  Dot with butter slivers.  Fold extra crust over top, leaving vent hole.  Bake at 350 F for about 20 minutes and check it.  Crust should be brown. 

How easy is that? I think it would be even better with some vanilla ice cream while the crust is still warm …

There is a wonderful exhibit of portraits of WWII veterans in the atrium of the Jones Library now.  Chris Demarest is the painter and we had a lovely chat.  He will actually be painting two portraits of Amherst veterans in the atrium, next to his exhibit.  I was thrilled to learn that he has seen my quilt (The Free Spirit of Massachusetts) in the Women in Military History Museum at the gates of Arlington National Cemetery.  I was thrilled that “Bennie” (aka Bernarda) came to volunteer for the Office as she does every Friday.  She is 90 years young and a wonderful person.  She was a WAVE who had been stationed in Washington, DC.

But at one point, she was in Germany and she and her friends would go with her for a drink after work.  They thought they were being very sophisticated when they ordered, ‘A martini, dry.’  They were always mystified when they got three martinis.  (Hear the word “dry.”)

Anyway, I introduced Bennie to Chris and she observed that his portrait of the young Navy man, Jack Kennedy, made him look very scruffy in his uniform.  (Chris usually works from photos and in this one, Jack had a walking stick probably due to his war injury.)  Bennie said, “He was always beautifully appointed when we saw him,” noting that she and her husband had an apartment across the street from his campaign headquarters.