Today was a low-stress food day. Breakfast in bed: coffee (as always), scrambled eggs, and whole wheat English muffins with fresh strawberry freezer jam. Lunch on the back patio: reheated lamb & eggplant casserole left over from last night. Afternoon snack on the back patio: wine and Twizzlers. Dinner: baked chicken drummettes and steamed broccoli. iced tea for Michael and water for me, followed by treats from the ice cream truck. Michael had a bomb pop, and I had Jolly Rancher push-up.
It must be summer; it's hard to believe that we had an ice cream truck come through our neighborhood, and maybe it wouldn't have, but Michael stopped by to see Ella (our neighbor's dog) and Sarah, who is pregnant, said, "Did you hear the ice cream truck?" We hadn't, but she had, two neighborhoods over, so we drove over there to ask him to be sure to come into our street.
As it turns out, Sarah decided not to indulge, but while Michael was buying ours, a car drove up and a father got out with two little kids. I guess they had decided to follow the truck as well, preferring that to waiting to see if it would show up on their street.
It's been a long time; we live in the eastern suburbs of Salisbury, in one of five neighborhoods that open onto Parker Road. The variety in the atmosphere of these neighborhoods is vast; some are close-knit little families; others, like ours, is a collection of mostly congenial acquaintances. Michael knows everyone better than I do, but he recognizes them by their cars, and I hardly know the cars my friends drive. He waves to everyone who goes by unless it happens to be the people who live immediately across the street from us, whose presence we never acknowledge.I have no idea who's riding by, so I don't wave--I suppose I'd rather snub a neighbor than wave at a stranger. That seems very odd. In any event, we don't live in the kind of neighborhood where one would expect an ice cream truck. We've had a few over the almost thirty-four years we've lived here, but not very often and never even two summers in a row. We've decided to patronize this one to keep it coming back.
I started a new book today--I can't remember the title just now, but it has something to do with cutting stone (the title, not the book so far). It was recommended by Barb Fernald, who lives on the island in Maine that we visit. I ate the twizzlers while I was reading; Michael was cutting the grass.In about an hour he finished the grass and I got through a hundred or so pages. It's quite interesting and I'm hooked.
I think tomorrow will be a company dinner day, so I'll have to rattle around in the freezer to see what my options are. I think there's only one casserole left from last summer's bumper crop of eggplant and peppers. This year's pepper plants already have blossoms. Once summer is in full swing, I'll have to start cooking again and refilling the freezer. My favorite part will be replacing all the blueberries Michael picked last summer that we had to throw out when the freezer died in October. It's a tragedy to run out of blueberries in the middle of winter, so we supplemented with frozen ones from Sam's, They're not bad, but they're not local, either. Still, in a smoothie with banana and Greek yogurt, Sam's blueberries do just fine.
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