Quarantine Weekend: More Sewing, Making with Clay and Meal Prepping

What a great weekend despite the emotional upheaval of a husband in severe knee pain either from arthritis or a pulled tendon. I started the Saturday by cooking an avgolemono to bring to my claymate's home for lunch. 

And while my soup was simmering, I made a little headway with my quilted pillow that had been hanging in my closet for quite a few years, which I'll post when it's finally done. But I've got the attention of a little kid--squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel! and got distracted by this quilt I spied on Instagram.

The quilt made me think of the orange skies in the Bay Area from all the fires in Oregon and Washington and all the bits of ash floating and obscuring our air. How do I render that abstractly in a color palette similar to the one above? 

After a couple weeks of fire, smoke and unbreathable air, I finally got to go to my friend, Meral's clay studio aka her garage. I got to finally behold the finished miniature mug that Meral had thrown and which I surface decorated with Chinese rice paper decals and an Amaco celadon called Downpour. I'm mailing it to the Dani girl because it's so cute. 

 

I also made a butter dish with tar paper that I worked too quickly on, and alas it cracked. However, Meral is hydrating it, and I will hopefully be able to repair it.

I started my Sunday with a Filipino breakfast called Longsilog. I took out from my freezer a package of longaniza, which is a sausage of minced pork, loads of garlic seasoned with vinegar, salt and sugar and deeply dyed red. Silogs are Filipino breakfasts of leftover rice, a fried egg and maybe spam aka Spamsilog or tocino (Filipino bacon) aka Tocilog or tuyu (dried and salted fish) aka Tuyusilog or in the case of breaking my fast, longaniza, hence the name Longsilog. My parents hailed from an area in the Northern Philippines called Pampanga, and I suppose it's common there to eat chopped tomatoes like a salad with our meals and was so glad to still eat the sweet heirloom tomato. Unfortunately, I broke the yolk on my egg because I normally like my rice coated with yellow "sauce" but still I was comforted by a meal from my childhood and made even more special with a spicy or chili-infused coconut vinegar called Pinakurat.

After breakfast and sewing, it was already afternoon! I took the girl dog for a walk to Beresford Park and harvested eggplant and peppers and shared with Meral after making the Szechuan sauce. And then it was a laborious and failure of chile rellenos with all the peppers. 

Edible and tasty enough, but visually a hot mess and hence no pic. The evening before returning to work came too soon and all the meal prepping for my lunches at school: leftover monggo, rice and spinach; beet and goat cheese arugula salad; and chili. Oh and I wanted to make 1000 Island dressing to go with the fake crab and hard boiled egg salads I want to eat too. Here's how: take out your favorite mayonnaise, seafood seasoning which has lots of celery seeds, sweet or not relish, and ketchup and just mix all in the proportions you like. I aim for a very light pink.

But I can never leave well enough alone. I added fresh dill. And then remembered lemon.

Yep, so much more flavorful.

And now I'm longing for a seafood salad of cold boiled shellfish.