TracyFood

Monkey Monday: my birthday came early edition 27 August 2007 11:02 pm

Posted by Tracy in : eating, eugene, friends, garden, restaurants, summer, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

My birthday isn’t for a little under an hour in this time zone, but it feels like I’ve been celebrating for days. As previously mentioned, my parents are visiting, and today I got home from work just in time to watch Peter put the final brushes of blue paint on the trim of our newly yellow house. Yay! (Every time my parents visit, they do a project. This one is extra awesome.) Also, yesterday was Kitchen Garden Day and we had a fabulous dinner, and we also ate a super-delicious family-style dinner at Iraila the night before that (Saturday). The festivities will really kick into gear with a total lunar eclipse that’s just a few hours away (more astronomy nerdery here), but that’s not exactly edible (except in the Cookie Monster song “If Moon Were Cookie”) so the rest of this post will be about more delicious celebrations and my plans for making this Green Bean Appreciation Week.

So for dinner on Kitchen Garden Day we ate cold soba noodles with homegrown carrots and CSA green onions and farmer’s market shiitake mushrooms, sushi-style cucumbers made with a mix of CSA and homegrown cucumbers, CSA corn on the cob, and homegrown green beans in a spicy Asian-inspired marinade. That last turned out so well that I’ll be writing up the recipe in the not too distant future, as part of Green Bean Appreciation Week here at TracyFood, in honor of Kitchen Garden Day, my birthday, and more. Yay!

We ate a fantastic family-style dinner at Iraila on Saturday night instead of the usual last Sunday of the month, because Mark and Kenne had planned to attend Shakespeare in the Park on Sunday, only to have those plans go awry when the restaurant was short-staffed all weekend. Those guys are every kind of heroic and awesome, to the tune of a menu like so:

Spiced nuts

Yam (sweet potato) fritters in dilly yogurt-cucumber tzatziki sauce

Orange and red onion and oil-cured olive salad in pomegranate dressing

Lentil and chickpea salad in citrus dressing (still awesome)

Roasted summer vegetables

Vegetarian (vegan, actually) vegetable tagine of root vegetables and dried fruit and cabbage and deliciousness

Chicken piccata (not my favorite but once again they tricked me into eating capers and liking it, so that’s impressive)

Phyllo dough pear galette or pear cheesecake for dessert.

We also learned that they made a bid on a gorgeous Victorian house near downtown Eugene — a location that basically could have been Iraila meets Apple — but received a counter-offer that would have left them with money for either regular operating costs or renovating the place into a restaurant, but not both. Eek and dangit!

Coming up this week: many green bean recipes, because my garden is overflowing. Earlier tonight I brought in almost two pounds of tomatoes, mostly cherries but a few Romas as well… and the first of the Brandywines are so close I can almost taste them: one red and one yellow, aw yeah. Happy birthday to me, indeed.