1. I strapped on my back pack and leapt on my bicycle -- it sure works better with air in its tires -- and rode to Yoke's and picked up a few items and came home on a slightly longer route to get a bit more exercise. My bike rides the last two days haven't been, by any stretch, very long, but they've been beneficial. They got me a little winded, got my heart pumping, and, maybe best of all, helped me sleep a lot deeper at night (well, and during the day when I nodded off in a chair after returning home!).
2. Back around the turn of the century, in Eugene, Nancy LaVelle introduced Debbie and me to the cookbook, No-Cook Pasta Sauces by Joie Warner. I love these recipes. Today, Debbie thumbed through it and suddenly said, "Bill, I want you to make this one for dinner tonight" and directed me to the recipe entitled, "Asian Peanut Butter and Garlic Sauce."
No problem.
Around 4:30, I poured myself a refreshing gin and tonic, took out the food processor, and got to work. First, I processed a few cloves of garlic and a chunk of fresh ginger. Next, I put peanut butter, a few peanuts (since I didn't have chunky peanut butter) water, sugar, soy sauce, sesame oil, red wine vinegar, and garlic paste with chili in a bowl and dumped it all into the food processor and ran the machine. Soon, the sauce was ready.
In the meantime, I boiled a pot of water with some sesame oil and salt and then turned the heat down to low. After a bit, we decided we were ready to eat dinner, so I brought the water back up to a boil and cooked a batch of pasta. I drained it and combined it with the peanut sauce I'd made.
We had cilantro and green onion greens and peanuts on the table to garnish our pasta bowl. Debbie also gathered some red lettuce and herbs from the garden and made a light salad.
I'm crazy about peanut sauce. For unknown reasons, I hadn't made any for a long time. This sauce was superb: creamy, nutty, a little salty, slightly sweet, and just a little heat.
We loved this dinner and enjoyed eating it in the comfortable late afternoon Kellogg air and refreshing shade out on the deck.
3. No single Bill Davie performance on Tuesday night is more special than any other. They are all superb, giving all of us who love his music and his sensibilities an hour of humor, terrific songs, and scintillating poetry. Tonight, Bill's wife, Diane, was in charge of the set list. I thoroughly enjoyed finding out what some of Diane's favorite Bill Davie songs are. Her choices were exquisite. As he does each week, Bill augmented our listening pleasure by reading poetry. Tonight's poet was Billy Collins. In the best way possible, Billy Collins' poems are loaded for me: he was popular among friends in Eugene, I loved introducing students to his poems when I was an instructor, and, on August 30, 2014 I leaned against the wall (or sat on the floor) in a huge hall at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D. C. at the Library of Congress Book Festival and listened to Billy Collins give a splendid poetry reading. I loved that day.
So Bill's songs transported me, as they do every week, to different phases and events of my life over the last thirty-five years or so and the poetry of Bill Collins was sublime and stimulated both pleasant memories and some thinking, among other things, about the nature of poetry, the devotion of mothers, and jazz music.
Bill is taking a couple weeks off from his Tuesday night performance schedule. I look forward to his return on August 4th.
In today's limerick, Stu takes us back to the working lives of Fred Flintstone and George Jetson:
You really do not have to choose.
Whether future or past you can’t lose.
Fred has Boss, Mr. Slate,
George made “Sprockets” first rate.
Watching their antics now sure beats the news.
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