Compost salad, annoying backdrop

Isn't that gorgeous!? It was darn good. Unfortunately, our battery backup went haywire nearly an hour ago, and the  water-torture-like staccato of Bee-Bee-Beep is killing me. I just thought I had a migraine prior to this; now I'm darn sure. Oliver is yelling about being ready to play even though he's been in his crib just 5 minutes. I think my hopes of newspaper reading were for naught. We had a fantastic morning together, but I've no more energy for pretending that the 5 toy logs he has (from a log carrier) are actually a school in which I need to sit and learn. T minus 63 minutes until the babysitter arrives...

Fantastic breakfast- citrus

There's something wonderful about citrus on a bleary day; its bright, crisp freshness seems to supplant some of the heaviness and glum that accompanies a day so gray you can hardly tell where the sky ends and land begins. If you've read Em-i-lis for a while now, you know how much I hate to waste the opportunity present in any meal. This morning, I couldn't decide what I wanted for breakfast, and by the time I was homing on an idea, it was time to leave for school. When O and I returned home, I immediately got out the lemon curd, intending to toast some of my bread and slather it with this lemony goodness. The stewed prunes, a half pomelo and some sour cherry spread looked good as well, and what a breakfast this all did make. I will tell you that the bread + curd was beyond divine and well worth waiting for. Next time you head to your market, grab a pomelo if they're new to you. Wonderful! It's the largest citrus fruit, has an enormously thick rind/pith and the interior looks like a grapefruit but is much less sour. Off to post the bread recipe...

Cured salad

I just realized how much the picture of my bread I posted earlier looks like some sort of boob. Oh well, I'm a nascent breadmaker, and one side puffed out a bit more than the rest. Bygones. I went to a talk on Quaker Aesthetics tonight which was quite enjoyable but started at 7, and I didn't have time to eat beforehand. Starving and migraining when I returned home, I immediately  put together the "cured" salad I've been going on about, subbing golden beets I'd pickled a few months back for the ones called for in the recipe. How fortuitous to have those on hand! I knew my canning obsession last summer would come in handy. Anyway, this was a very delicate, lovely, simple salad that I enjoyed quite a bit. It felt very restaurant, in the sense that it had multiple components and definitely required the use of Grade A ingredients- a fun meal for 1. I served it with toasted slices of my bread and the roasted garlic I'd made the other day with the tomato raisins.

Much as I want to turn on the debate going on in Tampa, I'm off to bed. Readers, I hope you suspected some sarcasm in the prior sentence: it was there, in spades.