I had the urge to cook yesterday. Eileen accompanied me on a little morning excursion to buy some local cheese, bread, and other ingredients to make these two recipes:

Zucchini Flan Recipe – NYT Cooking

Corn and Jalapeño Muffins Recipe – NYT Cooking

The “flan” is not what I think of as a flan. I think of that as an Hispanic desert which Eileen has made in the past. This is more like a crustless quiche.

I substituted Poblano pepper for Jalapeño since I had some aging in the fridge.

My goal was to back the Zucchini dish and get the muffins in the oven and empty and fill the dishwasher before my rehearsals.

This didn’t work out so good. It might have worked better if my oven had preheated properly. Like any good cook, the first thing I did was set the oven to its temp. But when I went to put the Zucchini dish into the oven it was cold. The pilot light had gone out.

This is particularly problematic because my oven takes a long time to heat up. So I lost a half hour there or so which caused the Zucchini to still be in the oven when it was time for me to go to rehearsal.

I did manage to get the muffins ready to go in the oven, waiting their turn before leaving.

I didn’t however get the kitchen clean at all. Eileen good naturedly picked up the slack and cleaned the kitchen and watched the dishes in the oven.

Unfortunately, the kitchen heated up as the day progressively got hotter outside. Poor Eileen!

She texted me that the next “we” want to bake, “we” could do it in the morning before she gets up and it’s cool.

I bought this cookbook as a Kindle book yesterday. It was on sale for $2.99. It’s regular price is $9.36 so I saved a bit on it. The author is opinionated and fun to read.

Howard Schultz: America Deserves a Servant Leader – The New York Times

Ironic that this article was in yesterday’s NYT. I haven’t read yet about last night’s circus of a debate. I cannot believe people are so disenfranchised with government that they would vote for someone like Donald Trump. I read yesterday that he is a “post-policy” candidate since his candidacy avoids content. He is definitely an example of the sad “cult of personality” driving so much our culture.

 

Reading Cicero this morning I was musing that there are many things wrong with our public leadership these days. One of them is the legal bribes of lobbying that go on and create laws that are immoral. Also I am unimpressed with the Supreme Court (especially its right wing). It saddens me that one party is convinced that the way to get more power is to limit (!) who gets to vote.

I wish that fair voting had a more non partisan effect. I think it’s part of what’s hurting us in our endeavor to be a democracy. It feels like the third wave of hate from the Civil War/Slavery debacle (The second wave being the Jim Crow, segregation thing).

As Schultz puts it: “Too many of our political leaders are putting party before country, power before principle and cynicism before civility. The common purpose that created this great nation, which has united us in difficult moments, has gone missing.”