Meal planning

I love themes, I love sports, and I love making everyday events feel a little bit special.  

These hobbies mash together perfectly when matching food to places and events.  For each major sporting event on the calendar, I dream about hosting a party coordinating a menu appropriate for each team's home city.  (I guess it should be added here that I also love corny and hokey ideas.)  When I brainstorm with Josh, the conversation usually involves one really easy set of answers and one awkward silence.  Take baseball's 2010 World Series, for example, which pitted the San Francisco Giants against the Texas Rangers.  

San Francisco: sourdough bread, Ghiradelli chocolate, etc.

Texas: ...barbecue?

But every Southern city claims the best barbecue, right?

I tried to do the same thing with Arizona for the 2011 All-Star Game and totally struck out.  (Ha!  Good one!)  Same thing with this year's Super Bowl: Green Bay would've been pretty easy: beer, brats, cheese, etc.  But Pittsburgh?

So you get the idea that my great dreams haven't always panned out, okay?  But I still keep an eye toward matching a city or team to its iconic food traditions, especially whenever I travel: in New England it has to be clam chowder.  If I ever get to New Mexico for the balloon festival, I'll be eating chilis all day long--and in Philadelphia, I'll have to eat a cheesesteak.

Here I am in a region of Colorado known as the Melon Capital of the World:

Secretly, Josh loves it, too.  See?  He's in Maine and his heart is all aflutter over a lobster roll.

There's an opportunity coming up soon to build on this exploration.  I'm spending a weekend in Chicago in October for the Chicago Marathon, and part of my trip-planning includes food-planning.  I've been dying to visit one of Rick Bayless's restaurants for years, so that's inked into the itinerary.  The rest of what I knew about Chicago food traditions is pizza, pizza, pizza, and I'm staying an extra night in the city post-race specifically so I can leisurely enjoy a deep-dish pie.  Yum.

But my horizons were broadened over the weekend thanks to Jeff Mauro, otherwise known as the Next Food Network Star.  He won the competition last week, and his show debuted on Sunday.  In the episode, Jeff featured a recipe for Chicago's famous Italian beef sandwiches--a phenomenon completely new to me.  He toured the kitchens of these little restaurants and delis to showcase this legendary sandwich, and I was hooked.  Another meal to add to my itinerary--probably another post-race one. 

It reminded me of all of the other regional specialties out there that I don't even know about.  Reader, help me add to my idea bank.  What foods is your city known for?  What about your favorite city's traditions?  If you live in Minnesota, what is ours?  Is it walleye-anything, or something completely different? 

These are a few of my favorite things

On Friday night, Josh and I took in some Twins baseball at Target Field.  The radar looked ominous, but instead, the rain held off, and we were treated to a wonderful display of swirling clouds.  Clouds and baseball? 

You don't get that in a Metrodome.

Basil bonanza

This month, I have noticed myself cramming.

It started when I had two days before I left for my weekend in California and I went to a grocery store with the intentions of buying strawberries but left with strawberries, a huge watermelon, and four peaches.  This decision was motivated partially by seeing the price on the strawberries creep up while the quality of the strawberries had dipped gently, which reminded me of the date.

It's mid-August, and there's a smell in the air that will probably always make me think of leaving for college.  I heard a baseball broadcaster say yesterday that there are two weeks until September call-ups for minor-league players, and it blew my mind that the baseball season is practically winding now.  There are signs of fall starting to crop up everywhere, and don't get me wrong, I love fall.  (Get ready for an abundance of leaf pictures, kind readers.)  

But around mid-August, I start going overboard with summer produce and activities that will fade out soon for the better part of the year. As mentioned previously, I start carefully considering what my January self would like me to do and eat on a given summer day.  This weekend, that means going for a sweaty long run, eating canteloupe and corn on the cob, and hunkering down in my seat at Target Field for a balmy Twins game.

On Thursday, I dropped my friend Sara off at her house after our "Crazy, Stupid, Love" movie date.  Sara is a real live homeowner--although this feels silly to note now that we are both nearing 28--and over the past couple of years, she has worked very hard to build up her gardens and learned an enormous amount in the process.  I've seen her gardens before, but August is when gardens in Minnesota really explode, and hers is no exception: it was barely recognizable to me.  Without even realizing it, I found myself taking copious amounts of photos of the crops, which probably caught her off-guard.  I didn't even do it with the intention of blogging about it later--but now I can't resist.  (Hi, Sara!)  

Seriously: this is not even half of the whole backyard garden, and look how beautiful it is:

I also have my eye on this guy come October:

Sara is nurturing and thoughtful, so this summer project is right up her alley.  I love the pride she takes in her garden and the care she devotes to it.  Within two minutes of me entering the backyard, I had already tasted a stalk of swiss chard and a nasturtium bloom.  I was skeptical at first (see below) but it tasted good and spicy!

I loved the colors in her garden: purple and orange and red and yellow.  And green, of course.

I pretend that she tends to her garden in red shoes, too.

And then we were talking basil.  My basil is cooking along, but it's more the kind where I can grab 10 leaves for caprese-related activities than a crop that yields batches of pesto.  "I have to make pesto every week to stay ahead of my basil," Sara lamented dramatically.  I immediately started poking fun at this horrible quandry, and she threatened to send me home with some. 

Okay!!

The enormous plants in this row are all basil. I know Minnesota gardeners encounter a ferocious August produce surplus--it's when tomatoes and zucchinis start appearing in office kitchens everywhere--but I had never really seen it first-hand.  Whoa.

I left with an enormous bag of basil and my sweet urban gardener looked positively gleeful to get rid of it.  This is a win-win situation.

The next day I procured some pinenuts and, you got it, the pesto started flying.  I've never made my own before.  But now I realize: what's the very worst that could ever happen when one is blending basil, pine nuts, garlic, parmesan cheese, and olive oil?  My first effort was a little over-blended, but my taste buds did not notice.

I bought a premium seat on the pesto express train.  Now I just need to make a few more batches and freeze them for winter.

Midday pizza party

I appreciate many, many parts of my job, and one element of that is my commute.  My longest commute since I joined the workforce was to a suburb 16 miles from my front door, to a suburb on the opposite side of the metro area, which made for some memorable rush-hour and/or blizzard-related snarls.  For the last several years, my commute has been six minutes.  Believe me, I do not take this for granted.  Sometimes I show my appreciation by going home for lunch!

On Wednesday, I went home for lunch because the draw of leftovers was strong.  Does everyone but me already know about Pillsbury's refrigerated roll-out pizza crust?  (That sounded like a really feeble paid endorsement, but I swear it's not.)  I just discovered it earlier this week, when I wanted to make pizza but didn't have time to make my own dough.  

Pause: That implies that I make my own dough often, which I have to admit isn't true.  But it's on my list.

Buying pre-made dough made everything come together so quickly, though, and it provided a convenient vehicle for any toppings I desired.  I have a hunch that it will come in very handy for using up summer vegetables from this month's CSA boxes.  This does not bode well (or perhaps bodes too well) for my as-yet-untested hypothesis that I could eat pizza literally every day and never tire of it.

Dinner: Brush crust with pesto.  Add fresh mozzarella, basil from the patio, heirloom tomatoes from the CSA box.  The next day, I had leftover slices and then realized I had one more tomato to use, so I tore up some more basil from the patio and went along my merry way.  Looks like caprese-themed overload, right?

NO!!  That was a trick question, and I hope no one fell for it.  

In Miles and Laurel, there is no such thing as caprese overload.  Those two words will never be strung together again in this blog.  My January self would like this lunch very much--and my August 16-18 self did, too.

Shopping the friendly skies

Oh, Miles and Laurel readers.  You know by now that this blog is built on the premise of loving life's small delights. But the next delight is almost too easy.

SkyMall.

If you've ever been on a plane, you know what it is: the in-flight catalog stocked full of strange little indulgences, from sports paraphernalia to foot massagers to patio furniture, unified under the umbrella of all somehow making life a heck of a lot better.

In cultural studies coursework back in college, my classmates and I enjoyed applying critical theory to popular culture phenomenons, which gave way to this fascination somewhere in between purely detached amusement and sincere, unabashed fondness of said phenomenons.

I continue to revel in that gray zone, and SkyMall plops right into that category.  (See also: Justin Bieber, Jersey Shore, and Lifetime movies.)  I start flipping through SkyMall during the ascent, when my Kindle, computer, and iPod are a collective no-go.  I start by poking fun in my head at the expensive gadgets.  By the time I de-plane, I leave convinced that I need a huge dog bed (for my dog that is, at press time, nonexistent) or a little toy gun that shoots marshmallows. 

On Monday's flight, I started tearing out products that drew my attention.  This went on just two or three times, until the guy in the middle seat in front of me turned around to see what I was doing.  (I'm sorry, 11D.)  

Then I crossed a treacherous line. 

I became the person who actually tucks the SkyMall into her carry-on at the end of a flight, just as the flight attendants always recommend.  I've gone down a serious road with SkyMall now, and I'm not sure I'll be able to turn back, so I might as well share the highlights.

Right away, I noticed this dog bed.  I was more interested, though, in how one would go about procuring a pile of puppies like that one.  Then I wondered how on earth the photographer coerced these puppies into 1) sitting still all together and 2) looking uniformly angelic.  The more you think about it, the more Herculean the task seems.  Is this photo fake?!

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The next gem looks just like ripped jeans but is actually a comfy pair of lounge pants, complete with drawstring.  How 'bout that?
 

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Last, there's the "The Zombie of Montclaire Moors Statue."  I just googled Montclaire Moors to make sure I never accidentally go there, and the top results were for this statue, so I think I'm safe.  If I ever ran by a yard that featured this statue, there's no guesswork to be done.  I'd faint delicately and expire on the spot.

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WARNING: BONUS TIDBIT!

It would be cruel, scary and also probably bad for readership numbers to leave you with the Zombie.  We shall depart the world of SkyMall, for an utterly unrelated photo, courtesy of an ad in my neighborhood newspaper.

Kate Perry, you're a firework.