What’s for supper? Vol. 439: We put the “disgrazia” in . . . everything.

Happy Friday! Today’s post will be about food, and gardens, and home improvement projects, and that’s it. 

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Especially lavish leftovers, since, incredibly, we still had some steak from last week. I’m struggling mightily to cook less food now that we only have seven people in the house, but, like I said, I’m struggling. 

While I was out shopping, Corrie made two loaves of banana bread. She’s getting really great in the kitchen! It turned out scrumptious, tender and moist. 

Here’s the recipe. 

Jump to Recipe

Sophia has also been baking more, now that the cooler weather has arrived. She made some really intense apple cider muffins with cider buttercream topping later in the week, but I forgot to take a picture. But three cheers for kids who bake! 

I myself made some pretty lousy applesauce. We had these lousy apples 

from our elderly apple tree, Marvin, which the kids feel sentimental about, so every year I make applesauce.

I washed all the spiders off, cut the apples in half, and cut out as many bad spots as I could manage. I took this picture:

because this was an especially large and pristine specimen. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to this tree to produce better apples. I’ve tried nothing, and I’m fresh out of ideas. 

I put the apple halves in two stock pots with about 3/4 cup of water and set them to simmer. Then I burned one! But I did not burn the other. I let it cook until the apples were soft, and then I put the pot in the fridge. (This is not a necessary step in the recipe; I just didn’t feel like dealing with it anymore that day.) 

Oh, also on Saturday, I fulfilled my end of a contract and dyed Corrie’s hair bright pink. She’s happy with it, but less enthusiastic about having her photo online all the time (sorry, kids. I have regrets), so I will just show you a photo of the dye we used

It is Lime Crime Unicorn Hair, and the color is “Juicy.” The label is the most egregiously illegible thing I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve squinted at a LOT of hair dye. But I have to say, this stuff adheres really, really well. The color is exactly as advertised (I did bleach her hair pretty light first), and it’s staying put so far. 

SUNDAY
Roast beef sandwiches with smoked gouda, garden corn, chips

The beef round eye hunks were still on sale, so we got another one and Damien seasoned and slow cooked it in the oven, and it turned out perrrrrfect. Very juicy and delicious. Unfortunately, the pictures I took make it look like something the plumber would hold up while saying, “Well, HERE’S your problem,” so I’ll skip photos. 

I splurged on some smoked gouda from the deli, and I also bought a jar of hot pepper sandwich spread

and oh man, that was a great combination. 

I see now that my table is gross. I’m not deleting the picture as an act of humility and penance in the face of the way I acted yesterday on social media. Anyway, really great sandwiches.

I picked the second round of corn from the garden, and Damien cooked it in the husk on the grill, and it was sweet and juicy and delicious. Lovely meal. 

Then it was time to make the apple sauce, as I’d been promising! So I set out to look for the foley mill, which I only use once a year to make apple sauce, but for which there is no substitute. Couldn’t find it in the island cabinet, but I did find a bag of rotten potatoes, so I threw that away and scrubbed out the inside of the cabinet. Then I thought, well, the other cabinet could probably use some cleaning, too, especially since it’s not even a cabinet, it’s just a ghastly conglomeration of wire shelving and milk crates and spidery misc. So I started pulling stuff out, and I DID find the foley mill, but then I got to thinking how much I didn’t want to go through that again next year, and how it wouldn’t be that hard to replace this chaos with some actual shelving, so I started looking for scrap wood, and then I thought for once I would treat myself and take some measurements and actually buy some wood specifically for this project, so I went to Home Depot and got back and settled in among the musty old double boilers, dusty candy molds, fusty wedding cake pans and bottles of terrible vermouth, and greasy pencils and bent measuring spoons that had slithered down into the gap, and I got going with the saw and the drill

and Corrie comes in and said, ” . . . I thought you were gonna make apple sauce.” 

I was! I mean, I am! This is the process! For some reason. 

Well, it took seven hours, and it’s not quite done. My pride will not allow me to show you photos of what the new shelves look like. They are level, and made out of real wood, and not likely to fall apart soon, and they are better than what we had, so that’s a win. I just can’t seem to take a picture where they don’t look like they were built by a Dr. Seuss bird, and possibly photographed by a second Dr. Seuss bird who is the first bird’s enemy. But I did fill two cartons with stuff to throw away, which is always nice. 

In my defense, I have built things out of wood before, but I’ve never built something that has to fit inside something else, and it involved more precise  measuring than is . . . customarily my style. 

Anyway, we delivered the bomb. I mean we found the foley mill. I mean I built some shelves. I mean we started making some applesauce!

MONDAY
Garlicky pork chops, homemade applesauce, baked potato

So Monday I actually finished making the applesauce. I spooned the cooked apples, peels and cores and all, into the foley mill. If you’re not familiar with this device, it’s basically a pot with a strainer for a bottom, and in the middle is a crank. When you turn the crank, a tilted blade forces the apples (or whatever) through the strainer, so only the soft, edible parts get pushed through the holes. Turning the crank also makes a spindle scrape the underside of the strainer, depositing the applesauce (or whatever) into the bowl below. It also has three little brackets so the mill stays in place over the bowl while you crank it.

Actually I have a picture!

Just a nicely-designed device. Of course you can peel and core your apples before cooking them, and then you won’t have to strain them out afterward; but it’s so much easier this way (assuming you’re not using a recipe that includes a trip to Home Depot), and cooking the peels along with the insides gives you more flavor and color (if you have nice apples!). Apples that are red, for instance, will result in a lovely dusty rose-colored applesauce. 

When I got it all cranked through, I put the apple pulp into the slow cooker with some butter, white sugar, and lots of cinnamon, and let that go all day. 

Pork chops were on sale, and I really struggle with cooking pork chops so they’re not dry. I thought Nagi might have a solution, and she did! She has a recipe called “Just a Great Pork Chop Marinade,” and even though it’s made with soy sauce, brown sugar, and garlic, she promised it just tastes savory, not Asian, and she was right. It also has dijon mustard, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce. I marinated the chops for several hours, and then broiled them right up under the broiler (the recipe calls for grilling, which would have been nice). SCRUMPTIOUS.

I will absolutely be returning to this recipe. These are probably the juiciest pork chops I have ever made. 

I threw a bunch of potatoes in the oven for 40 minutes or so, and we had the pork, applesauce, and baked potatoes for a very fine fall meal. 

Someday the kids are going to have applesauce made from actual good apples, and they’re gonna realize . . . well, you know what, it doesn’t matter. They liked the applesauce, and this was a very popular meal. And I delivered the bomb. 

TUESDAY
Buffalo chicken wraps

Tuesday Damien and I and a kid spent all day on the road and at a largely useless and frustrating doctor’s appointment, so I was very glad I had planned an easy dinner: Buffalo chicken wraps. 

Or, I was glad until I realized I had planned it, but not actually bought any buffalo chicken. A small error! Damien gallantly zipped off to the store and bought some, and we had a late but popular meal: Tortillas with buffalo chicken, blue cheese or ranch dressing, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, shredded pepper jack cheese, and crunchy fried onions.

We still have a giant backlog of tortillas in the house, so get ready for more wraps. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken with chickpeas and piquant onions, Jerusalem salad, yogurt sauce, pita

Wednesday I made a dish I haven’t made for quite some time: Chicken with chickpeas. It’s a middle eastern-ish recipe and none of the steps are hard, but I’m always a little surprised at how many elements it has. I guess I have it in my head that it’s an INCREDIBLY SIMPLE meal, and it really isn’t. It’s just regular-easyish. 

Anyway, I got the chicken marinating, cut up the onions, and made the lemony onions side dish and the yogurt sauce and the Jerusalem salad. Tons of color!

I’ll put all those recipes at the end. Oops, I guess I don’t have a card for Jerusalem salad. Well, it’s just tomatoes, cucumbers, fresh cilantro and/or parsley, some olive oil, and lemon juice, salt and pepper. All of these dishes really want fresh lemon juice, if you can manage it. Bottled lemon juice always has kind of a stale stank to it, so if you’re going to use it in a dish that doesn’t get cooked, I always try to do fresh. 

Then when I got home, it really was very simple and easy to just chunk the chicken and chickpeas and onions into the oven. This recipe has you marinating the chicken in a spiced yogurt sauce, which makes the meat moist as heck, but even more importantly gives the skin a magnificent texture. 

The marinade kind of melds onto the skin and make it, like, chicken ultraskin. 

Sometimes I keep the chicken warm while giving the chickpeas some extra time in the oven to crisp up, but it was already super late and we were starving, so I just served it, along with some store-bought pita. I do like chickpeas with a little crunch, but soft and savory is also very good!

Really wonderful meal. 

On Wednesday I realized I had never picked the peaches from my tree, which is funny, because last year at this time, I was picking for the 476th time and blanching and freezing them as fast as I could, and still being neck-deep in peaches. I guess it’s pretty common for peach trees to be on a schedule like this. 

The peaches this year may be few but some of them are HUGE. 

This is not some kind of optical illusion photo. They’re the biggest peaches I’ve ever seen! They’re delicious, too, super juicy and nectar-y. I’m saving the pits from the biggest ones, and I’ll try to sprout them. Last year I used a method where you dry the pits for a few days, pry them open to get the inner seed out, and plant them in pots in the ground in the fall, so they get cold stratified and can sprout easily in the spring. 

I did this with six seeds, as I recall, and got two good seedlings, which are now in the ground and doing great. I have hopes of turning the side yard, which is currently overgrown with goldenrod and wild grapes, into a little orchard. Right now it has the apple tree, a very young peach tree, a valiant blueberry bush, and of course the ubiquitous wild raspberries. I would like a cherry tree, but I’ve struggled with fungus on cherry trees in the past, so maybe I will do a nut tree in the spring. Lucky me! Always something to look forward to. (The other new peach tree is by the duck pen, so eventually they will have some natural shade and, presumably, some windfall snacks. I’m not worried about them eating the pits because they routinely mooch around the existing peach tree, and they have figured out how not to eat pits! Which makes two things they have figured out. The first thing is screwing.)

THURSDAY
Rigatoni alla disgraziata with homemade cheese and homemade bread

Thursday I overextended myself, and I don’t even know why. I guess I was cooking my feelings, and also I had some pretty little eggplants from the garden that also wanted to be cooked. 

The plan was rigatoni alla disgraziata,

Jump to Recipe

which is a meatless but very hearty pasta dish. It is not difficult. You toast up a bunch of breadcrumbs in oil, and then take them out of the pan and fry up your eggplants in more oil. 

No need to peel them. But at this point I realized I didn’t have as much eggplant as I thought, so I added some diced onion. Then you add tomato sauce to the eggplant, then you boil up some rigatoni, mix the breadcrumbs into the eggplant sauce, and stir it all together with torn-up mozzarella, and top it with grated parmesan. I also tarted up the jarred sauce with some chopped tomatoes and fresh basil. 

I decided to make fresh mozzarella cheese for this, and that was a good idea, except I decided to make a double recipe, and I was unsure about the timing of the chemistry part of it when you’re making a double batch. I really struggled with getting the almost-finished cheese to a high enough temperature before stretching it. The stretching is what gives it that stretchy, string-like texture, but it’s really hard to stretch hot cheese without gloves! I don’t know why I don’t have gloves!

Anyway, the cheese tasted fine but was very grainy, because of the heating/stretching issue. 

I hope that, because it’s folded into the pasta and is supposed to melt a bit, it wouldn’t matter much, and it didn’t matter that much, but it was a little sad. I was a little sad. 

I decided to cheer myself up by making bread, and that was where I really went wrong. First the dough rose right out of the bowl and slopped itself all over the windowsill and floor, and then I decided to get cute and make twelve separate little loaves, and then I realized I was LATE, like “text your teenager and promise you have not forgotten them” late. So I zipped through the process as fast as I could, which, believe it or not, does not produce the highest quality of food.

The good news is, we ate so late, everyone was happy to see anything hot and ready. I did take some pictures, but they’re not great, and it was not a great meal. These are decent recipes which I recommend! Sometimes things just don’t come together, and we all live to fight another day. I did buy some gloves for future cheese. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just regular old pizza, no fancy tricks. And that’s-a my story. We live to fight another day. 

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Banana bread or muffins

adapted from Quick Breads, Soups & Stews by Mary Gubser

Ingredients

  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 3 ripe bananas, mashed well
  • 1/2 cup chopped nuts optional

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 375.

  2. In one bowl, sift flour, baking soda, and salt together.

  3. In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well in between. Add mashed bananas and mix well.

  4. Gradually add the dry ingredients and blend well. If you're adding nuts, fold them in.

  5. Grease 12 muffin tins or a loaf pan and pour the batter in.

  6. Bake 20 minutes or longer, until the top is slightly browned.

 

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Cumin chicken thighs with chickpeas in yogurt sauce

A one-pan dish, but you won't want to skip the sides. Make with red onions and cilantro in lemon juice, pita bread and yogurt sauce, and pomegranates, grapes, or maybe fried eggplant. 

Ingredients

  • 18 chicken thighs
  • 32 oz full fat yogurt, preferably Greek
  • 4 Tbsp lemon juice
  • 3 Tbsp cumin, divided
  • 4-6 cans chickpeas
  • olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • 2 red onions, sliced thinly

For garnishes:

  • 2 red onions sliced thinly
  • lemon juice
  • salt and pepper
  • a bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
  • 32 oz Greek yogurt for dipping sauce
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced or crushed

Instructions

  1. Make the marinade early in the day or the night before. Mix full fat Greek yogurt and with lemon juice, four tablespoons of water, and two tablespoons of cumin, and mix this marinade up with chicken parts, thighs or wings. Marinate several hours. 

    About an hour before dinner, preheat the oven to 425.

    Drain and rinse four or five 15-oz cans of chickpeas and mix them up with a few glugs of olive oil, the remaining tablespoon of cumin, salt and pepper, and two large red onions sliced thin.

    Spread the seasoned chickpeas in a single layer on two large sheet pans, then make room among the chickpeas for the marinated chicken (shake or scrape the extra marinade off the chicken if it’s too gloppy). Then it goes in the oven for almost an hour. That’s it for the main part.

    The chickpeas and the onions may start to blacken a bit, and this is a-ok. You want the chickpeas to be crunchy, and the skin of the chicken to be a deep golden brown, and crisp. The top pan was done first, and then I moved the other one up to finish browning as we started to eat. Sometimes when I make this, I put the chickpeas back in the oven after we start eating, so some of them get crunchy and nutty all the way through.

Garnishes:

  1. While the chicken is cooking, you prepare your three garnishes:

     -Chop up some cilantro for sprinkling if people like.

     -Slice another two red onions nice and thin, and mix them in a dish with a few glugs of lemon juice and salt and pepper and more cilantro. 

     -Then take the rest of the tub of Greek yogurt and mix it up in another bowl with lemon juice, a generous amount of minced garlic, salt, and pepper. 

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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

  • 32 oz full fat Greek yogurt
  • 5 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 3 Tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp pepper
  • fresh parsley or dill, chopped (optional)

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Use for spreading on grilled meats, dipping pita or vegetables, etc. 

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Rigatoni alla disgraziata

A hearty, meatless pasta dish with eggplant, breadcrumbs, and mozzarella

Ingredients

  • 2 lg eggplants with ends cut off, cut into one-inch pieces (skin on)
  • salt
  • 3/4 cup olive oil, plus a little extra for frying bread crumbs
  • 3 cups bread crumbs
  • 3 lbs rigatoni
  • 6 cup marinara sauce
  • 1 lb mozzarella
  • grated parmesan for topping

Instructions

  1. In a very large skillet or pot, heat up a little olive oil and toast the bread crumbs until lightly browned. Remove from pan and set aside.

  2. Put the 3/4 cup of olive oil in the pan, heat it again, and add the cubed eggplant. Cook for several minutes, stirring often, until eggplant is soft and slightly golden. Salt to taste. Add in sauce and stir to combine and heat sauce through. Keep warm.

  3. In another pot, cook the rigatoni in salted water. Drain. Add the pasta to the eggplant and sauce mixture. Add in the toasted breadcrumbs and the shredded mozzarella. Stir to combine. Serve with grated parmesan on top.

 

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French bread

Makes four long loaves. You can make the dough in one batch in a standard-sized standing mixer bowl if you are careful!

I have a hard time getting the water temperature right for yeast. One thing to know is if your water is too cool, the yeast will proof eventually; it will just take longer. So if you're nervous, err on the side of coolness.

Ingredients

  • 4-1/2 cups warm water
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 2 Tbsp active dry yeast
  • 5 tsp salt
  • 1/4 cup olive or canola oil
  • 10-12 cups flour
  • butter for greasing the pan (can also use parchment paper) and for running over the hot bread (optional)
  • corn meal for sprinkling on pan (optional)

Instructions

  1. In the bowl of a standing mixer, put the warm water, and mix in the sugar and yeast until dissolved. Let stand at least five minutes until it foams a bit. If the water is too cool, it's okay; it will just take longer.

  2. Fit on the dough hook and add the salt, oil, and six of the cups of flour. Add the flour gradually, so it doesn't spurt all over the place. Mix and low and then medium speed. Gradually add more flour, one cup at a time, until the dough is smooth and comes away from the side of the bowl as you mix. It should be tender but not sticky.

  3. Lightly grease a bowl and put the dough ball in it. Cover with a damp towel or lightly cover with plastic wrap and set in a warm place to rise for about an hour, until it's about double in size.

  4. Flour a working surface. Divide the dough into four balls. Taking one at a time, roll, pat, and/or stretch it out until it's a rough rectangle about 9x13" (a little bigger than a piece of looseleaf paper).

  5. Roll the long side of the dough up into a long cylinder and pinch the seam shut, and pinch the ends, so it stays rolled up. It doesn't have to be super tight, but you don't want a ton of air trapped in it.

  6. Butter some large pans. Sprinkle them with cornmeal if you like. You can also line them with parchment paper. Lay the loaves on the pans.

  7. Cover them with damp cloths or plastic wrap again and set to rise in a warm place again, until they come close to double in size. Preheat the oven to 375.

  8. Give each loaf several deep, diagonal slashes with a sharp knife. This will allow the loaves to rise without exploding. Put the pans in the oven and throw some ice cubes in the bottom of the oven, or spray some water in with a mister, and close the oven quickly, to give the bread a nice crust.

  9. Bake 25 minutes or more until the crust is golden. One pan may need to bake a few minutes longer.

  10. Run some butter over the crust of the hot bread if you like, to make it shiny and even yummier.

What’s for supper? Vol. 438: Can you dig it?

Happy Friday! I hope you like hearing about digging! 

SATURDAY
Hamburgers, chips

On Saturday, my SISTER and three of her kids came for the weekend! We scheduled and then postponed this visit so many times, and I was delighted we finally managed it. Damien grilled burgers, and we made s’mores in the evening. Sonny made an absolute ape of himself, abasing her person before Sarah, who is one of his favorite people in the world. 

While I was out shopping in the morning, Damien was out in the woods trying to get the ducks to smarten up and run away from the hawk that may or may not be what’s been picking off our smaller ducks. I don’t really think it’s the blue heron that’s doing it, but we are in a drought, which means there are fewer ducks and frogs for everyone to eat, so who knows. (We have since bought one of those scary owl decoys, and it’s working so far?)

Anyway while he was out there, a baby squirrel fell out of a tree right at his feet. It had fur, but its eyes weren’t open yet. So he put it in a box and waited alll day for the mom to come back, and she didn’t. So I brought home some Pedialyte and some goat milk, and he warmed it up and fed the squirrel with a dropper. 

He put it to bed in our room wrapped in a t-shirt next to a sock full of rice that had been warmed in the microwave. I might as well tell you now that the squirrel did not make it through the night, but he go out with a full tummy and a warm, snuggly spot, and he must have just gone to sleep and not woken up. Tough world for little guys. 

Well. Anyway, in the evening, I started some vanilla ice cream. (Below is the recipe for strawberry ice cream, but just skip the strawberries, 1/4 cup sugar, and lemon juice, and make the “base.”)

Jump to Recipe

I made two batches at the same time, and you know what? It’s not silly having two ice cream makers! What’s silly is that they don’t make ice cream makers bigger. I suppose there might be some physics or thermodynamics problem I’m not taking into account, but I feel like American ingenuity ought to be able to solve the More Ice Cream Problem. Anyway, I see lots of ice cream makers in thrift stores, and it is always ice cream weather, all year long, so you know what to do. 

SUNDAY
Steak, corn, nectarine-rhubarb crisp with ice cream

Sunday after Mass it was perfect weather, so we went to the town pond, snacked on fruit, and tried out kayaking, which is new for my sister’s family. 

Lovely, wonderful afternoon altogether.

In the afternoon, the kids played Mysterium, and then Damien grilled some steaks, and I picked corn for the very first time. I was extremely proud of my corn!

It’s been hard to wait until the ears are fully formed, and a few of them could have benefitted from a few more days on the stalk

but most of them looked absolutely great. 

It’s pretty easy to find extremely fresh, local corn around here, so it wasn’t exactly a revelation to discover what it tasted like, but it was sweet and tender and juicy. Yay! I have one more round of corn that will be ready to pick in a week or so. Next year I’m going to plant a lot more corn. And a lot more potatoes! 

The steaks (actually a round eye roast cut into steaks) were most excellent. 

I had been planning baked potatoes, but I was so tired from kayaking that I skipped it, and along with dessert, there was plenty of food. What I made was a nectarine-rhubarb crisp, using the last of the rhubarb from the garden. I sorta kinda followed this recipe for peach-rhubarb crisp, but I think I left the skins on the nectarines, and I threw a few plums in there, and I topped it with a streusel made of a box of yellow cake mix scrunched into bits with a stick of melted butter, plus some oats mixed in.

I baked it in ramekins and topped it with the ice cream and fresh whipped cream. 

Not a great picture, but a lovely dessert, and HEFTY. We did not regret not having baked potatoes in our recent past at this point. 

On Sunday, the 31st of August, (in the morning! Before I ate enough for ten strong men!) I did the very last day of a thirty-day yoga challenge. I had missed one day when we went to the ocean, but doubled up the next day. And I don’t know if I’ve ever come closer to finishing up a thirty-day challenge of . . . anything. It’s a red letter day if I finish a novena, or heck, if I get to the end of a sentence without forgetting to

I was following this Alba Avella series, which is 20 minutes a day, and most days I added some weights training, because “bone density” has stopped being a phrase I’m able to tune out. September 1, I started a new challenge with Charlie Follows. This series is for “confident beginners and intermediate improvers,” but she also has easier and harder ones. I like her a lot, and it’s been fascinating to see how different yoga instructors (and fitness instructors in general) have their own style. This lady has a tendency to giggle when a pose feels weird, which I appreciate, and she has short legs like me, which is nice. (I do not resemble her in any other way.)

MONDAY
Leftovers

Monday we had our customary leftover nite, just shifted a bit, and somewhat fancier than usual because of steak!

I don’t know why I post pictures of leftover night. It always looks so gross, I don’t think I’ll convince anyone it’s a good practice to adopt. But in real life, it is! All day long, I think, “Ugh, I have to get supper going” and then I think, “No, I don’t!” And that is the most delicious food of all. Except maybe for food that someone else prepares entirely. 

TUESDAY
Sausage subs, garden skillet, raw vegetables and dip

Tuesday, fresh from my personal corn victory, I decided to see if I could make something else from the garden. There was some leftover corn, plenty of basil, some eggplants, and the garlic I grew. 

If anyone has tips for growing better garlic, I’m all ears. It tasted fine, but really all I did was put sprouting cloves of garlic in the ground, water it for months, and then dig up the exact same number of cloves of garlic. I think maybe one turned into two cloves of garlic. It did keep me entertained, but I’m having a hard time categorizing it as a successful crop!

Well, I cut the corn off the cob, peeled and diced the eggplant, minced the garlic, and chopped the basil, and I sauteed that in stages along with some diced onion 

and realized what I really needed was some tomatoes. The closest thing I had in the kitchen was some leftover spaghetti sauce, so I stirred that in, and a bunch of panko bread crumbs. I seasoned it and topped it with some fresh mozzarella. 

It turned out. . . . pretty goodish. 

I don’t really know what it was. A skillet, I guess. A bake. A sortatouille. I think with less corn and with fresh tomatoes, it would have been great! Anyway, it was something a little different, and I had fun using my garden produce. 

For the main, I fried up a bunch of Italian sausages, and some peppers and onions with salt and pepper, and we had subs. 

I also made a raw veggie platter with dip, which I have mostly been eating myself in the afternoons while I drive around. 

And here is the point in the week when my kids noticed with glee that it was ALL SANDWICHES FROM HERE ON OUT. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken honey mustard ranch wraps; fruit platter

Wednesday I revisited the Amazing Hole I had started to dig a few weeks ago. The plan is a duck pond, and the only smart thing I did all day was decide not to lift weights before digging in the mud for two hours. No wait, two smart things: I considered taking my shoes off, because they kept getting stuck in the mud, and then I immediately dug this up:

So I decided to keep my shoes on! Smart. 

This is what it looked like when I started:

When I first started digging, the spot filled up with groundwater and the ducks were in HEAVEN. Then the entire region dried up, and you can see that the ducks kept visiting this spot, stomping around and wondering why it wasn’t any fun any more. 

Well, I dug and dug and dug and dug, and it didn’t look all that different when I was done, but I know I doubled the area and made half of it twice as deep, and trucked a lot of the soil up to the front of the house to fill in the spot where the porch used to be. I listened to the first episode about Mary, Queen of Scots from The Rest Is History podcast, and that helped quite a bit. 

The sandwich of the day was actually a wrap. I cooked some frozen chicken tenders and served them on tortillas with sliced tomatoes, lettuce, and some kind of fancy ranch dressing that was on clearance at Aldi. A surprisingly popular meal. I mean I thought it was delicious, but usually that’s a personal opinion that does not extend to the rest of the family. 

I have been doing a lot of fruit salads lately, so this time I shook things up and made a fruit PLATTER. 

Watermelon SPEARS, rather than slices or chunks, and two kinds of plums and a dragon fruit I bought on a whim. The green plums are Sierra Honey plums, and they were wonderful. They had a honey-nectar taste, but also some tartness, and the texture was crisp but juicy. Really nice. The dragon fruit was meh, but it sure was pretty. 

It was actually a really great meal. 

Or possibly I was starving from digging! But the kids liked it, too, and I assure you, they had not been doing manual labor all day. I ASSURE YOU. 

THURSDAY
Spicy chicken sandwiches with pepper and cheese, fries

Thursday I got my yoga in and had to do a bit of running around for the kids, and then I figured as long as I was out, I’d stop by and see if this sale from the local floral farm was really anything. WELL, they had perennials for $2 each! Uh, I bought sixteen. Lupines, hollyhocks, coneflowers, and bunch more. And I paid full price for an extraordinary blue and white African daisy, an annual in these parts.

This picture doens’t show how pretty the daisies are, but I really must wrap up this post at some point.

While listening to the crazy backstory to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, I dug out the rest of the pond and hauled many, many loads of soil into the front yard. Damien put the pond liner on (it’s 10×10 and pretty much fits, which means I lucked out, because I didn’t measure anything!), and I carried four rocks up from the stream before I got super tired of carrying rocks. Picked up the kids, picked up some cheap topsoil from Home Depot to mix in, because the marsh soil is super dense and clay-y.

Supper came together pretty fast: This spicy chicken sandwich from Sip and Feast, which is mostly popular around here. I seasoned the boneless chicken thighs with Tony Cachere’s, then browned it slowly in oil.

(And we are now a single-pan family! I can’t believe it. Just seven of us at home, sometimes six.)

When it’s done, you take it out of the pan, top it with American cheese, and cover it so the cheese melts, and throw the shishito peppers in the hot pan to blister them up a bit. Serve on soft rolls with raw red onion and BBQ sauce, and oh, it is tasty. 

It was a very filling meal (I made french fries for a side), but it was cool and pleasant out and the neighbors were being quiet for once, so I pushed myself to find spots around the yard for all those perennials, and I added some used duck bedding and the topsoil to the beds in front of the house, and yeesh. 

It looks like a credit union or something, and I’m even gonna add some colored mulch, just to basic bitch it up.

It’s not bad, it’s just weirdly tidy. There are a lot of houses like that around here, very clearly IN PROGRESS. Maybe there are tarps flapping on the roof and a perfectly innocent collection of catalytic converters on the front porch right next to the deer skulls and the warning notice from the selectmen, but the fucken tomatoes are doing great.

(Obviously those are mainly annuals in this picture. The perennials are all things that should bloom next summer, so it’s an investment.) 

It rained last night, finally, and I already knew the pond hole I dug wasn’t level, so no surprises there. The pond is on a slope, which will help us when it’s time to drain and refill it. 

Dang, those ducks are lucky. This is going to be a wonderful spot. If I ever finish it. Which I will! If it kills me! Which it will. 

FRIDAY
Bagel, egg, cheese sandwiches, maybe oven fries

It’s after 1:00 and I am still in my nightgown. I guess I’m pretty lucky, too! Gonna do yoga and then get my ass to adoration, and I will pray for all of you. 

Print

Ben and Jerry's Strawberry Ice Cream

Ingredients

For the strawberries

  • 1 pint fresh strawberries
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1-1/2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

For the ice cream base

  • 2 eggs
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 2 cups heavy or whipping cream
  • 1 cup milk

Instructions

  1. Hull and slice the strawberries. Mix them with the sugar and lemon juice, cover, and refrigerate for an hour.

Make the ice cream base:

  1. In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs for two minutes until fluffy.

  2. Add in the sugar gradually and whisk another minute.

  3. Pour in the milk and cream and continue whisking to blend.

Put it together:

  1. Mash the strawberries well, or puree them in a food processor. Stir into the ice cream base.

  2. Add to your ice cream maker and follow the directions. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes, then transfer the ice cream to a container, cover it, and put it in the freezer.)

What’s for supper? Vol. 437: The Supper of Theseus

Hello! Happy Friday! It is upside-downy day. I slept later than I meant and then spent the whooooooole rest of the day writing until it was time for dinner. Made some spaghetti, THEN did yoga, then cleaned the kitchen because Lucy wasn’t feeling well, then cleaned the dining room because I suddenly couldn’t stand it anymore. And now I am finally writing my food post, which I usually do first thing after yoga on Fridays. 

So! Here is what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers and Aldi pizza

I absolutely trapped myself into going to confession while we were out shopping, and that was a relief. (No murders or anything; it’s just been a while.) I don’t remember much else about Saturday, except that hardly anyone was home. I think Damien was helping Moe with something. Oh yes, and he took Corrie along for the ride. Sadly, the hedgehog shop below Moe’s apartment (yes) was closed for the day, but they had a nice day anyway. 

SUNDAY
Beach food!

Sunday we finally got to the ocean, on the very last day of summer vacation. Poor Damien hurt his back and couldn’t go, and the older kids all went together in a separate car with friends to belatedly celebrate Lucy’s birthday. So that left me, Benny, and Corrie. We were pretty far away from the hurricane, but the ocean was still feeling it. 

Bunch more pictures here.

 

Since it was just the three of us, we hit the arcade and then picked a beachside restaurant. Corrie got her very first footlong hotdog

and Benny got a burger and I got some ridiculous cheesy bacon fries. We don’t have a lot of outings with just the three of us these days, and it was fun! We got home purty late, showered the sand off, and fell into bed. 

MONDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, fruit salad

First day of school! The younger kids just had half days (not the same half, of course), so we were pretty much driving all day. A fine day for ham and cheese. 

I cut up a watermelon and a bunch of strawberries and threw in some grapes and called it good. 

TUESDAY
Chicken genovese, bread

This past weekend I got fed up with my cinnamon basil, which I bought accidentally, and which has been flourishing like nothing else I’ve ever planted. I don’t really like cinnamon basil, though. But I kept telling myself I was going to make something with it, so I kept watering it and picking the blossoms off every few days, and getting madder and madder as it got bigger and bigger. Anyway, I finally dug it up, chunked it in holes in the front of the house, and declared it flowering plants. I used the open garden space, plus the space where the potatoes were, to plant some cucumber seeds. I don’t know if I’ll really get a harvest before the frost comes, but I might!

Then on Tuesday, I picked a ton of regular basil and made pesto, more or less following this recipe. 

Good stuff. 

I ran out of pine nuts, so I toasted a bunch of almonds and then forgot to put them in. OH WELL. Pesto still turned out great, if a bit pale. 

The recipe is actually for chicken genovese, which is chicken roasted with pesto on and under the skin. It was whole chickens that were on sale, and it turns out most of the kids don’t like pesto (THEY DON’T LIKE PESTO), so I just roasted one with basic seasonings (salt, pepper, garlic powder, I think maybe paprika) and olive oil, and one with the pesto. One of the kids came in when I was shoving pesto under the skin and got permanently creeped out, and I have to admit, it was a little creepy!

Delicious, though. I honestly can’t tell if this looks yummy or grisly, but it was, in fact, yummy. 

When I cut it open, the layer of interior pesto looked so fancy. 

Again, not really sure if this looks gross! I’m tired, and just can’t tell!

I just cut up a bunch of baguettes and dumped a bag of fresh spinach into a bowl, and it was a nice meal. Something different. 

WEDESDAY
Weird tacos, tortilla chips

Wednesday I made some really terrible tacos. I couldn’t find the garlic powder, so I used garlic salt, forgetting that I had already added quite a bit of salt. Then I was out of cumin, so I decided to put a whole extra lot of chili powder, which doesn’t even make sense. I guess I was kind of distracted. Anyway, we had tacos. 

THURSDAY
Salmon, risotto, roast butternut squash

Thursday I was planning to try my new-to-me air fryer, and a few people told me salmon was a great thing to make it in. So I bought some frozen salmon at Walmart, and then for some reason at the last minute I decided to try a slightly more complex recipe than just, you know, salt and pepper and lemon juice. This calls for cutting the salmon into chunks, rolling it in a mixture of spices and brown sugar, and then air frying. Which isn’t that hard, except that I could not get the air fryer to heat up, at all. The light went on, the timer ticked and binged, but no heat, no matter how I set it. UNFORTUNATE. 

So I pan fried the salmon in hot oil, and they turned out pretty okayish. 

Salmon is already on the sweet side, so I think next time I’ll stick with a simpler recipe next time, with no sugar. I guess I was hoping maybe the kids would eat it if it had sugar on it. Don’t tell that shaved ape who runs the health department.

I also cut up a couple of butternut squashes and roasted them on a pan with honey, olive oil, uhhhhh salt, cinnamon, and chili powder, I think. 

That, too, turned out okay. 

The last part was risotto, and I made it in my new-to-me pressure cooker. My Instant Pot kicked the bucket, and what I really wanted was another 8-quart Instant Pot, but those are hard to find (it’s mostly 6-quart ones); so I settled for an 8-quart Instant Pot knockoff. I got it on the day we went to see the petroglyphs. And immediately realized it was, in fact, 6-quart Instant Pot knockoff, and kind of smelled like cigarettes. 

NO MATTER. I wiped it down and there was juuuust room in it to make a triple recipe of risotto. I followed this recipe, except without the sage and squash, and also I shoved a stick of butter in there before adding the cheese. And I doubled the cheese. And I used regular rice instead of arborio. Well, I guess I didn’t really follow the recipe. But it was good!

A good meal altogether, if a bit Ship of Theseusish. 

FRIDAY
Regular spaghetti

I already told you about Friday. What I didn’t tell you is doing yoga after eating a hearty bowl of spaghetti is not highly recommended. But you probably didn’t need me to tell you that. 

So tomorrow, my SISTER is coming, and she and some of her kids are going to spend TWO NIGHTS here! (Okay, yes, that is why I cleaned the dining room. But really, it was out of control anyway.) I am very excited. Thinking about trying out our new-to-me rotisserie thing, since we’ve had so much success lately with new-to-me appliances. I think I’m gonna finally pick my first round of corn, too. 

Okay, that’s it! Happy Friday!

Those gangly adolescent souls

If you’ve spent any time with adolescents, you’re familiar with one of their more endearing traits: disproportionate development. They wake up one morning 4 inches taller, but it’s all in the legs, and their torsos are still the same size. Or maybe their arms and legs are the same length as they were last year, but their hands and feet have suddenly gotten huge. It’s adorable, and a little bit pathetic.

Some kids grow so fast and so unevenly, they end up careening around, bumping into things and bouncing off the walls. It looks like they’re being careless and intentionally disruptive, and maybe they are; but a big part of it is that they literally don’t know what size they are. 

It’s not only their bodies that are growing quickly but disproportionately; it’s their minds and their hearts and their consciences. So you may find them careening around the house not just physically, but intellectually or morally or socially. Their thoughts and feelings and desires and sense of self are developing fast, and not at an even pace. They are disproportionate, and it’s adorable, and a little bit pathetic.

And sometimes infuriating. Disproportionate development leads to some truly insane inconsistencies in their opinions and behavior. They often come across as wildly hypocritical, requiring the highest standards for other people and (apparently) the lowest for themselves. They can be self-righteous, and they can be very harsh, as well as emotional and ludicrously sentimental, sometimes in the same breath.

The standard explanation for this behavior is that their hormones are fluctuating mercilessly, so they’re under assault from the inside; and at the same time, the world is bombarding them from the outside with nonstop information, nonstop stimulation and nonstop nonsense.

These are all solid explanations for why adolescents act the way they do. But I find it easier to look at them with kindness when I remember that their most irrational behavior is not as senseless as it looks. In fact, it is a sign they are growing. It’s just that the growth is disproportionate. 

The best thing you can do, for your own sanity and for their current and future good, is to look for, name and praise the parts that are getting big and strong and well-developed, and to be patient while the rest of them (it is to be hoped) catches up. 

Here’s an example. When the Space Shuttle Challenger was preparing to launch, our class got copious lessons about Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who’d been selected to join the crew through the NASA Teacher in Space Program. She taught high school not an hour down the road from us, and the whole school followed her exploits enthusiastically.

Of course she never made it. The whole class was all glued to the screen as the ship exploded. It was horrible in many different ways.

But in the aftermath, very shortly after, a bunch of us complained to our teacher, Mrs. Blanchard, that we were tired of hearing about boring old Christa McAuliffe all the time. … Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image by Alex Proimos from Sydney, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Nomadic canon lawyer” Balestrieri fined $50k for defamation

By Damien Fisher

Self-described nomadic canon lawyer, Marc Balestrieri, is going to have to pay $50,000 for defaming a New Hampshire priest, the Rev. Georges de Laire.

Balestrieri was the final defendant in de Laire’s epic lawsuit against Gary “Michael” Voris and his Church Militant news outlet. According to court records, Balestrieri is the author of a 2019 defamatory article which caused de Laire emotional distress as well as the loss of his position as judicial vicar in the Diocese of Manchester.

Church Militant and its parent organization, St. Michael’s Media, shut down as a result of a settlement agreement with de Laire reached last year. The Michigan-based nonprofits that Voris founded 20 years ago to spread his weird version of Catholicism also paid de Laire $500,000 as part of the deal to avoid a worse fate at the coming jury trial.

Voris managed to stay out of a trial by apologizing in writing to de Laire last summer. Suzanne Elovecky, de Laire’s attorney, told us Voris also paid a “substantial” amount of money as part of the settlement. Voris later denied he paid any money to de Laire, and blamed a former staffer for the defamation. 

While de Laire wanted Balestrieri to pay $100,000, United States District Court Judge Joseph LaPlante wrote in his Aug. 25 order that $50,000 was appropriate given the undisclosed settlement cash he’s already received from St. Michael’s and Voris. 

Balestrieri and de Laire knew each other professionally, and Balestrieri represented people involved in a New Hampshire annulment case that de Laire presided over. When that case did not go his way, Balestrieri complained to Rome about de Laire, according to court records. The Vatican does not seem to have responded to Balestrieri’s complaints.

Balestrieri also represented Voris, various Church Militant staffers, and the Richmond, New Hampshire Feeneyite group, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. But it was Balestrieri’s side gig as an anonymous reporter for Church Militant that caused the problems for Voris, the Slaves, and de Laire.

Voris went to New Hampshire in 2019 to interview the Slaves after the Diocese of Manchester disciplined the group. As the judicial vicar, de Laire was the diocesan point man on dealing with the Slaves. Church Militant then outlet published videos and articles calling de Laire ‘emotionally unstable,’ stating de Laire is incompetent, and implying he’s corrupt, according to the lawsuit. 

Voris initially took credit for the reporting when de Laire brought the lawsuit, and kept Balestrieri true authorship secret. At the time the original article came out, Balestrieri was involved in the Slave’s canon law defense. Both Voris and Louis Villarubbia, the Slaves leader also known as Brother Andre Marie, claimed they had no knowledge of Balestrieri’s conflict of interest. 

Voris placed a large chunk of the blame for the articles on his failure to properly vet Balestrieri’s work. 

“As CEO of St. Michael’s Media and Church Militant.com, I did not ensure the proper vetting the article as I should have. Mr. Balestrieri did not substantiate, and has not substantiated in the lawsuit, his claims regarding Father de Laire by identifying sources. Prior to publication, SMM should have questioned this lack of substantiation, and should have assessed Mr. Balistieiri’s and his story’s objectivity. I did not ensure that SMM did so,” Voris wrote. 

Court records show Voris worked to keep Balestrieri’s identity secret for months after the lawsuit was filed. After Balestrieri’s connection came to light, Voris supplied him with an interest-free $65,000 loan as Balestrieri dodged process servers. Balestrieri was finally ruled in default and liable for the defamation for failing to respond to the lawsuit. 

As the case moved closer to a fall, 2023 trial, court records show de Laire’s team learned Voris and his Church Militant staff had been hiding evidence sought in discovery, including messages with Balestrieri. Balestrieri then made a surprise appearance at a June, 2023 hearing in the United States District Court in Concord seeking to get out from under the default judgement. 

Weeks before, Balestrieri denied to Villarubbia that he had written the original article. At the June hearing, Balestreiri agreed to sit for a deposition scheduled for July, 2023 during which he was likely to repeat that denial under oath. However, court records show the day of the June hearing, Voris sent Balestreiri a text message warning.

“Marc – you are committing perjury. You know you wrote that article. What you don’t know is this morning we found proof – your digital fingerprints – all totally documented – on that article. Remember the email address – TomMoore@Churchmilitant.com.? We have all the receipts. You go through with this and we will rain down on you publicly. You are a liar, and a Welch,” Voris wrote.

Balestrieri cancelled his deposition 24 hours before it was to start, and again disappeared from the scene for a time. 

From this point on, Church Militant and Voris were headed for disaster. Three defense lawyers quit the case, more evidence that been withheld was found, Voris was fired for violating Church Militant’s “morality clause” via a gay sex scandal, and Church Militant ran out of money. In February, the outlet agreed to settle with de Laire for half a million dollars before it went dark in April.

Balestrieri made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to get the default judgement lifted. But after two damages hearings this summer, at which Balestrieri was surprisingly present, LaPlante issued the $50,000 order this week. 

Voris has since resurfaced with a MAGA-flavored Catholic news blog called Souls and Liberty based in Houston, Texas. Voris has recycled some of his Church Militant video content on Souls and Liberty, like the talks he gave at the 2016 Church Militant Retreat at Sea.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

What’s for supper? Vol. 436: Not governed by me only

Happy Friday! This was somehow both the fastest and longest week all year. I am going to make a stab at fasting and praying for peace today, especially in Ukraine and Israel, at the Pope’s behest. Don’t forget, you can fast all kinds of ways. It doesn’t have to be like Good Friday; you can fast from sweets, or from TV, or from being a big whiny baby (impossible).  

Also today Elijah is moving out. Our fifth kid to move out. A fine day not to be able to eat one’s feelings, humph.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s artist profile, Our Sunday Visitor magazine is shuttering, as well as several other OSV publications. Of course the Lord will provide, so we are just praying that he provides until he provides, and all will be well. I truly did love writing that art series, and pretty much loved writing my monthly column for them as well, so it’s just a shame. Lots and lots of great writers were there. Although I suppose if we can survive the loss of a picture of a barrel on a sign, we can survive this.

Anyway, this past weekend we saw Benny and Clara in a production of Alice, and they were both great. Here are just two of the roles they played: Clara as the Red Queen, and Benny as Shrunken Alice. 

This is an ensemble that Clara put together with her cousin and a bunch of friends, which is very cool!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and mozzarella sticks? 

On Saturday, two unlikely things happened: One is I found three giant, handmade, high quality pillows with a really neat menagerie pattern for the living room

and the other is that I donated three bags of clothes to the same thrift store. I donated them, I tell you! My usual technique is to sort clothes into bags, then leave them under the dining room table until they get enough macaroni stuck to them, then put them in the back of the minivan and drive around with them for several months until the bag gets stepped on and ripped, and then put them in a second bag and bring them to the thrift store, who politely and reasonably declines; and then I throw them away. BUT NOT THIS TIME. 

The we did the rest of the shopping, and then for supper we had leftovers and, as far as I can recall, mozzarella sticks.

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips

Sunday I absolutely splurged on ground beef. I remember when ground beef was $1.29 a pound. Now it’s $1.29 to smell it, and if you actually want to buy it and take it home, you have to fax proof of income to the loan officer, and they don’t even give out lollipops anymore. We used to be a proper country, with hamburgers, and lollipops!

But before supper, Damien and I went kayaking! First time this summer. Boy is it hard to do all the things you want to do in the summer. But we went, and it was absolutely lovely. We explored this placid little river for about an hour, surrounded by a chorus of buzzing grasshoppers and the splash of irritated turtles as they turned their backs and fled. 

We paddled until we met a beaver dam on either side, and I did not fall in the water while getting out of the kayak OR while getting in. Absolutely gorgeous and perfect afternoon. And then we got ice cream, just us two grown-ups. 

MONDAY
Pizza

On Monday, Benny and Corrie and I dug up our potatoes. This was kind of an experimental crop, which I invested zero doll hairs in. Just shoved a bunch of sprouting potatoes from the supermarket into the ground in the spring, added plenty of compost, and kept it watered.

Wow, it was fun and exciting to dig them up! I had planted at least three kinds of potatoes, and we really didn’t know what we would find. 

I mean, we found potatoes! It was a very pleasant little treasure hunt. Here’s our haul:

They would have gotten bigger if I had left them in the ground longer, of course, but I was very happy with new potatoes. 

Also on Monday, Corrie started some pork butts dry brining for bo ssam. She is the one who is most excited about continuing to cook, and this is a very popular meal, and quite easy (you just have to start well ahead of time). For this first part, you just mix together a cup of salt and a cup of sugar, rub it all over the pork

and wrap it up and let it brine overnight. The salt draws the moisture out of the meat fibers but then back in again, or something? I don’t know how the magic works, but it works. 

Oh, and we had pizza for supper. One plain, one pepperoni, and one with black and kalamata olives, feta, fresh basil, and fresh garlic. 

Kind of ghastly picture, but it was very yummy pizza. 

TUESDAY
Bo ssam, rice, pineapple; world’s biggest s’mores

Tuesday, we double wrapped a pan with heavy tin foil and started the meat cooking in the early afternoon. It needs five or six hours to cook. When it got close to being done, we made a pot of rice and then Corrie made a little sauce  of brown sugar, salt, and cider vinegar and slathered it on the meat.

This caramelizes on top and gives it an extra sweet and tangy punch and a wonderful crackly crust, with impossibly tender fat underneath. It came out spectacular. 

We got it in the oven later than I meant to, and had to turn up the heat a little higher than usual, so I was afraid it might not be shreddy and moist, but it sure was

I cut up a few pineapples and even though I forgot to buy lettuce to wrap the meat it, it was an excellent meal. If not an excellent photo or presentation.

Here’s the recipe we use, although we do only the most basic parts of it. And now Corrie knows how to make another meal! 

Also on Tuesday, we finally had everyone home in the evening, and it was finally finally time to make the world’s biggest s’mores. I had already made two giant graham crackers, two big slabs of marshmallow, and an absurdly thick giant chocolate bar. It was so much work that I couldn’t quite bring myself to make any plans for how to actually . . . make it into s’mores. Pish tush. 

Also, I was afraid the graham crackers were going to be stale as heck since they were almost a week old, but in fact they got really soft. I put them in the oven for a while to firm them up, and it didn’t help at all. So I just lit the propane fire pit and FORGED AHEAD. 

What I ended up doing is putting the marshmallow on a metal baking rack and toasting it over the fire that way. Which meant I couldn’t really flip it and toast both sides, but I did anyway, and of course I got burnt and sticky and all the dumb things you might expect. After a while I just kinda dumped one graham cracker on Corrie, dropped the chocolate on that, flopped the marshmallow on that, smacked the other graham cracker on that, and then topped it with another pan like a clamshell and held both pans over the fire until I thought maybe it was hot. 

Then I carved it into Big Mac-sized pieces and gave them to the understandably skeptical kids.

Who ate as much as they could and then escaped inside to watch TV.  So, this project was a success in that I finished it! I am trying really hard to finish projects instead of abandoning them, and I did finish it. So there. 

WEDNESDAY
Pork fried rice, frozen egg rolls

Wednesday we had a sort of complicated little outing: First I went to buy an off-brand Instant Pot from some lady on Marketplace, and then we went searching for ANCIENT PETROGLYPHS. They are in Bellows Falls, VT, and it seems like they are being deliberately kept on the DL to avoid a lot of tourist fuss? So I will abide by that! You can find them with a little sleuthing.

Not knowing exactly where they were, and spending a lot of time clambering up and down on the slippery boulders of a gorge with a hydroelectric dam nearby

 

made it all the more exciting when we finally found them!


I think I’m gonna write a whole separate post about this, but it was a wonderful experience, very beautiful and moving, somehow. These petroglyphs were carved probably by Abenaki people, several hundred or maybe a few thousand years ago, and nobody really knows why. A signpost for souls in the afterlife? A family portrait? An elaborate doodle? We just don’t know, except that they are clearly faces, and someone knew what they are — just not us. Real Richard Wilbur vibes:

A lark, because I’d been wrong
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely, 
Not governed by me only. 

Yeah, that’s what it was. 

I was there with only three of the kids, and everyone really enjoyed it. Then we went to the fabled nearby Dari Joy

where the people are friendly and the ice cream cones are enormous. And then we drove home, and then I remembered we were out of milk, and then I remembered we were out of duck food, and by the time we actually got home, it was late o’clock. 

I made some quick fried rice with the leftover pork 

Jump to Recipe

and heated up some egg rolls. And then I took the leftover s’mores, of which there was about 43 pounds, and cut it into squares, wrapped it in tinfoil, and heated it up in the oven until the chocolate was actually melted.

This is, in fact, probably the best way to make giant s’mores: In the oven. But the whole point of s’mores is that you make them over a fire, so that’s why we did it the dumb way that didn’t really work. 

It was still a mess and still kind of overwhelming! And that’s why people don’t make giant s’mores! I left the pan in the kitchen and it made great food for teenagers to pick at while yacking about whatever. And then I bundled up the tinfoil and dumped it all in the garbage, and that felt great. Better than dropping off used clothes, even. 

THURSDAY
One-pan chicken, brussels sprouts, and new potatoes

Thursday I gave all our lovely homegrown potatoes a good scrub. 

I cut up a bunch of brussels sprouts and put them in two big greased sheet pans with the potatoes, then nestled some chicken thighs in among them, and doused it all with what is meant to be a marinade,

Jump to Recipe

but I forgot about making supper until it was too late to marinate anything, so I just splashed it on top and then added extra garlic powder and salt. (This recipe calls for summer squash and zucchini, but obviously you can improvise.) It came out nice and sharp and garlicky.

The potatoes were delightful. The skins were just tissue-paper thin and the insides were tender as heck. Many of them were only bite-sized or smaller, so I left as many whole as I could, and it was a treat. 

Delicious. 

FRIDAY
Fish tacos, tortilla chips

Just batter-fried fish from frozen, shredded cabbage, avocados, I think maybe jalapeños? and salsa and sour cream. I’ll have to look it up. I do have some non-radioactive shrimp in the freezer, so maybe I’ll stir things up a bit (by cooking shrimp).

And this is our last weekend of summer vacation. The kids are at a magic show at the library, and we are going to squeeze in one last playdate on Saturday and an ocean trip on Sunday, and maybe we can get to the pond on Monday. I’m going to plant some cucumbers in the empty potato bed today and see if I can get a quick harvest before the frost comes.

Yesterday, I had the kids buy TV time by picking apples from Marvin

so I guess I’ll be making some apple sauce soon. Still haven’t picked my first round of corn, so I’m looking forward to that. And the grape vine continues to ramble around everywhere, so I added a new little trellis (well, a bendy stick) and it’s going along with it. 

Some day you’ll be able to pick grapes with your teeth while swimming in the pool. Who knew New Hampshire could be so decadent. 

One thing I do feel good about is that I have practiced yoga every single day this month, and almost every day I lifted weights, too. I made myself a motivational sticker chart, and although I haven’t been getting a lot of gold stars in food, I have been getting lots of flowers in yoga, and birds in weights.

It’s not stupid if it works!

This is your periodic reminder that I have an extremely low-key private exercise group on Facebook, where people just check in and note what exercise they have done, aiming for three workouts or more a week, and we encourage each other and share information about workouts we recommend. I’ll probably be starting another thirty-day challenge in September, so if you want to hop on, this would be a good time. 

I just now took this picture:

even though I just took this one of us a couple days ago:

and then off he went. Dang it. Ah well. 

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Basic stir fried rice

This is a very loose recipe, because you can change the ingredients and proportions however you like

Ingredients

  • cooked rice
  • sesame oil (or plain cooking oil)
  • fresh garlic and ginger, minced
  • vegetables, diced or shredded (onion, scallion, peas, bok choy, carrots, sugar snap peas, cabbage, etc.)
  • brown sugar
  • raw or cooked shrimp, or raw or cooked meat (pork, ham, chicken), diced
  • soy sauce
  • oyster sauce
  • fish sauce
  • eggs

Instructions

  1. In a very large pan, heat up a little oil and sauté the ginger and garlic for a few minutes. If you are using raw meat, season it with garlic powder and ginger powder and a little soy sauce, add it to the pan, and cook it through. If you are using shrimp, just throw it in the pan and cook it.

  2. Add in the chopped vegetables and continue cooking until they are cooked through. If you are using cooked meat, add it now.

  3. Add the brown sugar and cook, stirring, until the brown sugar is bubbly and darkened.

  4. Add in the cooked rice and stir until everything is combined.

  5. Add in a lot of oyster sauce, a medium amount of soy sauce, and a little fish sauce, and stir to combine completely.

  6. In a separate pan, scramble the eggs and stir them in. (Some people scramble the eggs directly into the rest of the rice, but I find it difficult to cook the eggs completely this way.)

  7. If you are using cooked shrimp, add it at the end and just heat it through.

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One-pan garlicky chicken with potatoes, summer squash, and zucchini

Ingredients

  • 12 chicken thighs
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
  • 1/4 cup cider vinegar
  • 6 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
  • 2 tsp ground pepper
  • 1 Tbsp onion powder
  • 1 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • fresh basil, chopped
  • more salt, garlic powder, and onion powder for sprinkling
  • 4 lbs potatoes, scrubbed and sliced thickly
  • 6 assorted zucchini and summer squash, washed and sliced into discs with the skin on

Instructions

  1. Combine the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cider vinegar, garlic, garlic powder, onion, powder, salt, pepper, and fresh basil. Marinate the chicken thighs in this mixture for at least half an hour.

  2. Preheat the oven to 400.

  3. Grease two large baking sheets. Arrange the chicken, potatoes, and vegetables on the sheet with as little overlap as possible.

  4. Sprinkle additional salt, onion powder, and garlic powder on the potatoes and vegetables.

  5. Cook about 40 minutes or until chicken is completely done and potatoes are slightly brown on top.

Andrew Coleman works with wood, for now and for the future

Wood doesn’t last forever. That’s one of the things Andrew Coleman likes about it.

“God’s the one who made wood. Its properties are what they are because he made it that way,” said Coleman, the artist and owner of Coleman’s Handcrafted Sacred Art and Fine Woodworking.

Even a substantial and ornate wooden altar, like the one he built for Our Lady of Mount Carmel in St. Francisville, Louisiana, doesn’t have the lifespan of stone or metal — especially in humid south Louisiana, where Coleman’s workshop is based. But that’s not necessarily a flaw.

Some parts of the church will last for thousands of years; some of it is designed more for the here and now. That’s true for church buildings and for the Church as an institution.

“Even if you’re going to have a church built out of marble, you can’t do it without the use of wood,” Coleman said. You need both, and there’s a wider lesson about complementarity there.

This meeting of the eternal and the temporal gets played out throughout salvation history: Some of the things God does are permanent and unchangeable; some of them are meant for a specific time and place. Coleman, who founded the company with his wife, Ashley, four years ago, tries to keep both the temporal and the eternal in mind as he works.

After studying in seminary for a year, Coleman discerned he was meant for married life — specifically, marriage to Ashley, whom he’d known since they were kids growing up in Baton Rouge. His main goal, early on, was just to support a family, so he took a job as a salesman at a septic company owned by a fellow daily Massgoer. The job wasn’t glamorous, but it paid the bills.

But he did long to serve the Church more directly. He’d always been interested in woodworking, ever since he built a kneeler in shop class, and gradually he began to spend more and more time woodworking as a hobby. When his pastor at Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Baton Rouge said the church’s altar rails needed restoring, he made the time to get it done.

That part-time project changed his life. A friend of the pastor who was visiting saw his work and was so impressed that he asked Coleman to build the entire sanctuary for a new church they were building in Alabama.

“It was a jump! It was like two years of work, and I was like, OK, well, I’m quitting my job to do that,” he said.

He was ready to take the leap, but Ashley was less certain. She considers that caution part of her job, along with managing the business end of the company, including social media accounts and their newsletter, The Whittler.

“That’s our dynamic. Andrew is the dreamer and the idealist, in a very positive way. Andrew is like, ‘Let’s go!’ and Ashley is like, ‘How are we going to do this?’” she laughed.

As the couple described the complementarity of their business dynamic, they took turns managing their toddler son, who spent the interview playing with his favorite toy, a calculator. Ashley is expecting another child in March.

Since that first big leap into full-time woodworking, the Colemans have been busy with commissions for churches, mostly in and around Louisiana, where both Catholicism and family ties are deeply seated.

“We’re very, very embedded in our community,” Andrew said. Much of the work they do is for priests who were friends with the Colemans before they were even ordained.

Mixing business and friendship has the potential for awkwardness, but the Colemans are overwhelmingly grateful their work is so personal.

“These different pastors are willing to trust us with these big projects that maybe they wouldn’t have trusted to someone they didn’t know personally,” Ashley said.

They’ve hit a sweet spot….

Read the rest of my latest (and possibly my last) for OSV. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 435: There’s a phost time for everything

Happy Friday! I ASSUME some of you are going to Mass today, har har. We went yesterday for the vigil, and now I can’t even remember why. The plan for this weekend has changed so many times, it’s like the scene in Airplane where the announcer is like, “Flight 209, now arriving at Gate Eight. Gate Nine. Gate Ten . . .” 

 

Coincidentally, I also spent much of this week sweating my head off like Ted Striker landing a plane.

SATURDAY
Leftovers with tater tots

It was Corrie’s shopping turn, and that is a kid who enjoys a thrift shop, so we added that to the shopping routine. One item found and left on the shelf:

No thank you please.

Corrie used her own money to buy a game called “Farting Sheep,” and it’s actually not a completely terrible game. It comes with a whoopee cushion and you can play it without consulting the instructions ten million times. 

While we were doing that, Damien drove Benny into Boston go to the big comic con with her friend. She had a great time, found some cool merch for her obscure fandoms, and MET CATHERINE TATE. Who was so charmed by her sheer Bennyness that she gave her a free autographed photo. 

Benny said she was really nice and called her “darling” several times. Benny told her she liked Donna better than Rose, haha. 

Back home, I was pooped and asked the kids to heat up supper, which was leftovers and tater tots. And you know what?

There’s nothing more delicious than food someone else made while you put your feet up. 

This weekly planned leftover purge has been working really well, at least for me. We just heat up everything that’s still edible, and the Shopping Turn kid gets to choose one frozen food to supplement it, and anything that doesn’t get eaten gets thrown away. I’m way less neurotic about waste than I used to be, but it super duper helps me to have a system, and this system of “you get one last chance and then we throw you away, because that’s the system” is great. 

Speaking of things I’m less neurotic about than I used to be, I gave Lucy her first driving lesson on Saturday evening. 

She did great. This is the seventh kid I’m teaching how to drive, and I hardly even pulled a muscle slamming on imaginary brakes in the passenger side. 

SUNDAY
Pho

You know, I don’t remember what the people at home ate. I did not exactly cover myself with glory on Sunday. It was extremely hot, and the heat makes me feel like things are out of control, and I respond to this by taking control by tackling huge projects, which makes me hotter, etc. etc.

So on Sunday I decided I had no choice but to start digging a pond for the ducks. They have a kiddie pool and of course the stream, but these both freeze over in the winter, so we’re making a little pond in a spot where we can run a horse trough thawer into it, and also easily fill it with a hose and drain it with a pump, either into my vegetable gardens or into the swamp.

Anyway, it was a lot of friggin diggin, and SO hot, and I got absolutely coated with mud and pretty mad about various things, then went inside and had a medium-grade mom tantrum and briefly turned into Zuul. 

 Happily for everyone, Lena had already invited me out for the evening, so I cleaned up and stomped off, and got to see her new apartment, and we tried the new noodle place in town. I have somehow never had pho before. I’m a fan! 

It tasted great, and also had two of my favorite elements: Arriving half-assembled, so you can mess with it as you eat it, and arriving in an absolute basin. 

Then we went to see The Fantastic Four. I have zero knowledge of this franchise and I have a generally low opinion of superhero movies, but I really enjoyed this one. They went to a lot of trouble over the aesthetic, without being too precious about it. The characters were interesting and even showed some development over the course of the movie, and the casting was very solid. I could tell what was going on during the fighting and action sequences. And a few scenes were really wonderful, just gorgeously set up with some real emotional punch. Good stuff! And a very winsome baby, which never hurts. There is some bad language and some fleeting mentions of people being sexy or desirable (Silver Surfer is a woman in this movie), but it’s a really solid family movie for kids who aren’t super sensitive. (It does make a point of calling something “ethical” which is decidedly unethical, but the overall thrust of the plot overrides that.) 

MONDAY
Chicken drumsticks two ways, fruit salad

I had big big plans for writing on Monday, but instead I took Corrie to the doctor because her foot was still hurting from a swing injury last week. Maybe I’m biased, but I think this is the cutest foot x-ray I’ve ever seen.

Look at those little toes. Anyway, happily it looks like just a sprain, so the world’s most fabulous patient

just needs to rest that foot. The x-ray tech recognized us, which is always a sign you’re having a wonderful summer. 

Anyway I was a little rattled and couldn’t seem to get any writing done, so I decided to make some giant marshmallows. I used this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. I had planned to triple it, but ran out of corn syrup, and it was just as well, because a double recipe came very close to overwhelming my standing mixer. I poured it into two casserole dishes and let it set.

Then I roasted a whole bunch of chicken drumsticks, and made two sauces: Honey mustard lemon (as described, plus some pepper), and buffalo (hot sauce, tons of melted butter, and a little sriracha). Very popular main course right now. 

Then I made a kind of weird fruit salad with watermelon, grapes, and something called a crunch melon. Which I bought 100% because I thought the name was funny. (I may start a whole series of reels just cutting up fruit and telling dumb jokes.)

It was . . . fine. It tasted like a rather bland cantaloupe, and it was indeed crunchy, like very crisp cucumbers or I guess an apple. Not something I would seek out again, but now I know!

Now you all know. 

In the evening I went to see what I had actually done when I was digging the duck pond, and I was very gratified to see that it was (a) bigger than I remembered, (b) already filling itself with water from the surrounding marsh, and (c) already beloved by the ducks. 

When it cools off a bit, I’ll dig some more and then put in a pond liner and set up the hose and pump. Yay! It’s really easy to make ducks happy, and I guess that’s why I like them. 

TUESDAY
Chicken caprese sandwiches, fries

Tuesday, I was like, okay, I didn’t get any writing done Monday, and that’s okay, but today I really really have to get some writing done. So I began by sorting through all my shirts and pants and throwing out half of them and then when I was putting the survivors back, the mop handle I use for a closet rod collapsed, and all my skirts and dresses fell down.

So I was like, oh no, this is terrible! I better make some cheese. 

I made a nice hunk of mozzarella with a gallon of milk (I have this kit), and I discovered I haven’t been heating it up quiiiiite enough in the last stage, and that’s why my last few batches have been kind of grainy. But now that I know better, it comes out much smoother! Yay!

Then I was like, okay, that’s done, and now I really must get some writing done. So I made some giant graham crackers

using this recipe; and I turned my marshmallows out of the pans

and then I started on the giant chocolate bar. Which I don’t have a picture of, because I asked Corrie to make a video of me pouring the melted chocolate into the pan, and now I have a video of a split second of melted chocolate and then a splash and a scream and then nine minutes of footage of the kitchen floor with crying and soothing noises in the background. 

Man, I felt terrible. (I was using a jerry-rigged double boiler, and my hand wobbled and I splashed her with boiling hot water as I pulled the top pot out.) Luckily, we still have Desitin in the house, which is great for burns. And Benny cheered her up by telling her about the various times I burned her when she was little. So she is okay. 

So then I picked some basil from the garden and cooked some chicken burgers. I may be the kind of mother who scalds her kids while trying to launch a cheap TikTok career, but I do serve them homemade cheese with homegrown basil

so it all evens out. 

Perfectly fine meal of caprese chicken burgers and fries 

with a generous side of guilt (not pictured). 

WEDNESDAY
Mexican beef bowls

Wednesday it was Elijah’s turn to make supper! He opted for Mexican Beef Bowls, which everybody loves. 

Jump to Recipe

One of the funny things about this project, where the kids plan and make supper for the family, is finding out which parts of various meals they care about, and which they do not. I serve a lot of meals that have lots of little things in bowls, so people can customize their plates. When I made this meal, I make rice, marinated beef, sauteed peppers, roasted corn, black beans, cilantro, shredded cheese, and sour cream. Elijah opted to add the corn to the meat as it cooked, and just stuck to basic cheese and sour cream for toppings. He would have served corn chips but I forgot to buy any. 

Stupendous. Delicious. I had seconds. 

And that’s everybody! Project Kids Make Supper yielded: Oven fried chicken and mashed potatoes (Corrie); stuffed shells and french bread (Benny); cheese-stuffed potatoes and sloppy joes (Lucy); cuban sandwiches (Irene); chicken shawarma, pita, and tiramisu (Sophia), and now Mexican beef bowls. A howling success, in my view. Sometimes all you have to do is plan something for seven or eight years and then go for it!

THURSDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs

On Thursday the heat finally broke, thank goodness. We had a soaking thunderstorm, and while it got hot again afterwards, the air feels so much cleaner and fresher. I did manage to get quite a bit of writing done on Thursday, which makes me suspect I just plain can’t write when it’s hot, which is unfortunate. 

I also got some fruit macerating for ice cream.

I meant to also make the ice cream, but when it got down to it, I thought I would just not. I was following this recipe for peach ice cream. Note that every last single ingredient except for lemon juice is some candy-ass fancy-pants expensive specialty item, which I complained about on Facebook while macerating.

The thing is, I truly understand that good ingredients make better food than mediocre ingredients. I get that. But having a recipe where every last damn item is the Elevated version is somehow tacky. It’s like when you go to someone’s house and all of their furnishing are in good taste, like every last single one, down to the carefully curated curtain pulls. I can’t explain why, but that’s bad taste. 

Anyway, I actually didn’t have enough peaches to make a double recipe, so I added a few nectarines and plums. Then I amused myself by putting all the peels and pits and other kitchen scraps onto a tray and bringing them out to the compost heap, which happens to be behind the pool, which happens to be where the kids were hanging out and brooding over the terrible fate of having to get out of the pool soon so we can get to Mass, and then not even eating supper until afterward, and they were so hungry! but wait! Here comes our mother with a serving tray piled high with snacks for us! Here she comes! But oh noooo, it’s actually just kitchen scraps for the compost heap! Ha ha, if only our mother understood how she looked with that tray, and how devastated we felt when we realized she wasn’t actually coming out with snacks for us!

Heh. heh. heh. heh. heh. If someone had told me how entertaining it would be to see your kids assuming you’re a complete moron and that you have no idea you appear this way in their eyes, I would not have believed you. I don’t even know why it’s so funny. I guess it’s because they’re not really wrong, but I am fifty years old and I just don’t care anymore. 

Oh, anyway, we had spaghetti and meatballs. A very pedestrian recipe, just ground beef, eggs, and basic seasonings, and I baked them in the oven. I omitted the bread crumbs and bulked up the meat with leftover rice and got no complaints. 

Clara had stopped by to pick up Benny and to drop off her car for Damien to work on, and she brought some nice baguettes from work, as you can see. 

FRIDAY
Tuna?

As I said, our plans have shifted many, many times in the last 24 hours. But either tonight or tomorrow, we’re going to see Benny and Clara in Alice In Wonderland, so that will be fun. Clara and her friends founded a little theater troupe, and they’ve put in SO much work making costumes and finding theater space and so on. I’m impressed! 

So I do now have giant marshmallows, two giant graham crackers, and a giant chocolate bar. (I made it by melting six bags of chocolate chips in a double boiler with two scoops of vegetable shortening whisked in to make it smoother and more stable, and then I poured it into a pan lined with parchment paper and put it in the freezer to set.) Obviously the world’s biggest s’mores will be happening at some point before vacation ends. It’s harder than you might imagine, finding time to make the world’s biggest s’mores! Or maybe you can imagine.  I really don’t know what you can imagine. 

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Beef marinade for fajita bowls enough for 6-7 lbs of beef – 1 cup lime juice – 1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce – 1/2 cup olive oil – 1 head garlic, crushed – 2 Tbsp cumin – 2 Tbsp chili powder – 1 Tbsp paprika – 2 tsp hot pepper flakes – 1 Tbsp salt – 2 tsp pepper – 1 bunch cilantro, chopped 1) Mix all ingredients together. 2) Pour over beef, sliced or unsliced, and marinate several hours. If the meat is sliced, pan fry. If not, cook in a 350 oven, uncovered, for about 40 minutes. I cook the meat in all the marinade and then use the excess as gravy.  

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Beef marinade for fajita bowls

enough for 6-7 lbs of beef

Ingredients

  • 1 cup lime juice
  • 1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • 1 head garlic, crushed
  • 2 Tbsp cumin
  • 2 Tbsp chili powder
  • 1 Tbsp paprika
  • 2 tsp hot pepper flakes
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 2 tsp pepper
  • 1 bunch cilantro, chopped

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together.

  2. Pour over beef, sliced or unsliced, and marinate several hours. If the meat is sliced, pan fry. If not, cook in a 350 oven, uncovered, for about 40 minutes. I cook the meat in all the marinade and then use the excess as gravy.

What’s for supper? Vol. 434: Shawarmageddon

Happy Friday! Hope this finds you well. It finds me listening to Mozart Piano Sonata No. 5 in G and then suddenly AN AD FOR FREAKIER FRIDAY, which is essentially a war crime. Not to mention the Lay’s potato chip ad, which features someone loudly chomping on a chip right into the microphone. WHO WANTS THAT?

Anyway, so, here’s what we had this week. Some pretty good summer meals, a new recipe, and another successful kid-made meal! To wit: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers, onion rings

Saturday is a blur. I vaguely remember angrily cleaning the refrigerator out. Don’t know if I’ve ever cleaned the fridge out without being angry. 

SUNDAY
Parking lot pizza

Sunday we went to Canobie! I got an unexpected royalty check and it was enough to pay for most of the trip, so I was feeling pretty triumphant about that. I was riding the migraine train all weekend, but I medicated and caffeinated myself to the max, and when we got there, Damien gave me his sunglasses, sent the kids away, and put me on an inflated tube, and we floated around the lazy river together until I felt a little more embodied. 

We stayed for seven hours and it was a pretty great day. I have no regrets about having all those babies, but DANG life is easier without babies.

I posted some pics here if you want to take a look. 

We left the park at nine and chose the nearest pizza spot that was still open, which turned out to be the elegantly-situated Salem House of Pizza. 

All your bodily needs, from the lashes of your eyes to the soles of your shoes, catered to in one spot. I was kind of fascinated by “Bread Makery.” If only there were a word for that! We have a local business called “Jenna’s Butcher” and we used to have a “The Barbery.” I feel we should RETVRN to . . . I don’t even know, whatever. Just, everyone, before doing anything, ask me. 

On the other hand, I’m the one who was very excited to have found this very old penny with a rare misprint on it. It says “ONE CENT” backwards!

So I posted about it on Facebook and started thinking about how valuable it might be if it were cleaned up, and maybe it would even pay for a new roof, and I showed it to Damien, and he gently pointed out that it was a regular penny that I was holding upside down. 

Yeah, well. I’m still starting a roof repair fund. So far, I have one cent. 

Anyway, this pizza place closed at 10 and we got there at 9:15, but they were still pretty mad! So most of us skulked outside while the pizzas cooked, but Corrie opted to have a seat inside, and have a chat with her favorite person

and I have to admit, that pizza was frickin delicious. Possibly because it was the freshest possible pizza imaginable, as they essentially pulled it out of the oven and threw it at us. But it was also very late and we had all logged our 10K steps and then some; but it was also just good pizza. We ate it on the car hood and it was fab. 

I fell asleep a few times on the way home. Sadly, I was driving. But I did wake up again right away, and filed the experience away to my “maybe we are getting too old for this kind of thing” folder. 

MONDAY
Salad with chicken, blueberries, almonds

Monday was a bit of a blur, but I did get supper on the table. Roast chicken breast over salad greens, with blueberries, minced red onion, crunchy onions from a can, and sliced almonds (toasted in the microwave). 

This salad is good with feta or blue cheese, but I didn’t buy any. I think I had blue cheese dressing on mine, and it was good. The blueberries are sweet this year. As you can see, we also had watermelon, and it was another massively juicy one. 

TUESDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, pickles

Tuesday the new swing I ordered (after the old swings broke mid-swing) arrived, and Corrie put it together herself,

and now she lives on the swing. 

Seriously, I thought she would probably like it, but I did not anticipate she would be on there 23 hours a day. We had a tire swing when we were growing up, and it was The Place, so I get it. I still remember the smell of the rubber tire, the sound of rainwater sloshing around in the bottom, the prickle of the frayed rope, the sway of the ground passing by. Dragging your fingertips over the roots of the tree as you drift through leafy shadows. Ah, summer. 

We had a blessedly easy dinner of grilled ham and cheese, with chips and pickles. 

Last night I dreamt I was in college again, and it was pretty terrible. I was carrying hay-bale-sized rolls of toilet paper upstairs for the whole dorm, and nobody even said thank you, and my friend Dena from elementary school was there, and she didn’t like me anymore.

The dream did not include one of my actual greatest college experiences, which was getting drunk as a skunk at Penuche’s, and then staggering next door to Jesus Grocery and asking for a hot dog, and the polite Pakistani cashier gently explaining they didn’t have hot dogs, but he could make me a chhham and cheese for a dollar twenty-five. Best chhhham and cheese I’ve ever had. But this one was pretty good, too. 

Tuesday evening, Sophia started prepping for her marvelous Kid-Made Meal of the week. First she shopped for and then made tiramisu, following this recipe, and she made the exact same mistake I made last time I made tiramisu, and mixed the egg custard and the cream parts together, rather than having them as separate layers. I was happy to be able to reassure her that it wasn’t a disaster and everyone would love it anyway.

I also showed her how to skin and bone chicken thighs, and she did that and made the marinade and got the chicken marinating for the next day. And cleaned up! 

WEDNESDAY
Shawarma, pita, tiramisu

AND OH WHAT A SHAWARMA IT WAS. Here’s my oven shawarma recipe.

Jump to Recipe

I still hope to use that rotisserie spit I got at my favorite store, but this recipe works great, especially if you give the meat plenty of time to marinate. 

Sophia also made pita, using this recipe. Guys, it was so much better than any pita I’ve ever made. I’m so impressed. Also, her yogurt sauce was better.

Jump to Recipe

Also, the shawarma was better! I don’t know what she did (and when I asked, she said she just followed my recipes!), but it was a completely fantastic meal. 

Served with tomatoes, cucumbers, feta, black and kalamata olives. We lost the parsley, but didn’t miss it. 

Amazing. I know shawarma is supposed to be in little bits, but the chicken was so tender, we didn’t bother. 

The tiramisu was also splendid. I didn’t get a picture, because I was too busy arguing with myself that I would rather have tiramisu than get a gold star in food today (yes, I have a sticker chart, and yes, I give myself a gold star if I stick to my calorie goal. And yes, the tiramisu was a good trade). 

THURSDAY
Vietnamese-style meatballs, rice, peas, cherries

New recipe! I ended up using just ground beef, rather than beef and pork; I had lemon zest rather than lime, and I didn’t make the sauce. Still super delicious, very flavorful, with all the good stuff: Fresh garlic and ginger, cilantro, fresh mint, fish sauce, and of course the citrus zest, plus red pepper flakes and scallions. And eggs and panko crumbs, as long as I’m listing all the ingredients. I made a double recipe and ended up with about 75 meatballs, which means I made them smaller than they were supposed to be, but I thought it was a good size. The fish sauce makes them quite salty, so smaller is good. They are baked in the oven, so that’s easy. 

I made rice on the stovetop like an absolute peasant, because I completely forgot about fixing my Instant Pot, which just flashes and beeps and does nothing else. We had just plain peas, which some of my kids are weirdly enthusiastic about, and cherries. 

So kind of an odd but satisfying meal. I’ll probably make the meatballs again, and will probably make the spicy sauce, which calls for peanuts, yum. 

I also started phase 1 of  Project Enormous S’mores, which was homemade graham crackers. I made a triple batch of dough from this recipe, and put it in the fridge to chill

and I was going to make a giant slab of marshmallow, but the recipe was pretty adamant that you don’t want to make homemade marshmallows when it’s humid out, which it sure was. I think I’ll try again on Saturday. Benny is the chief S’mores lover, and she will be out of town on Saturday, so it would be fun to have all the stuff ready for Sunday.

For the giant chocolate bar element, I just keep buying bags of chocolate chips (not all at the same time, because that would be expensive. Instead, I am buying them a few at a time, which is thrifty. In some way), and I’m probably gonna melt them in a double boiler with some Crisco, and then spread that in a pan lined with parchment paper, and put it in the fridge to set. That should work, right? 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

Or, as one of my kids used to call it, “pigsnetti.”

What did your kids call spaghetti? Tell me cute things! Right now, I don’t have anyone in my house who mispronounces things in a cute way. I do have a bunch of teenagers who started out saying things like “kway-sa-DILL-a” and “GWACK-a-mole” to be funny, but now it’s just habit and they just say it that way automatically, and some day they’re going to be very embarrassed in front of someone they care about. But that’s not my problem! 

The summer really is wrapping up, and I didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted to, yet. I have to get back to Corrie’s treehouse (which is still just two planks bolted to a tree!), and I haven’t made any progress on the front walkway at all. I honestly wouldn’t feel bad if I just set that project aside for the spring, but I do want to make that treehouse. We are planning one more ocean trip, but man, it went by fast!  So fast. We have a kid starting college in a few weeks, and, sighhhh, also a kid moving out into their first apartment. Yeah, I gotta get that treehouse done. 

Anyway, tell me the cute way your kid says spaghetti. 

5 from 2 votes
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Chicken shawarma

Ingredients

  • 8 lbs boned, skinned chicken thighs
  • 4-5 red onions
  • 1.5 cups lemon juice
  • 2 cups olive oil
  • 4 tsp kosher salt
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp pepper
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes OR Aleppo pepper
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 entire head garlic, crushed OR bashed into pieces

Instructions

  1. Mix marinade ingredients together, then add chicken. Put in ziplock bag and let marinate several hours or overnight.

  2. Preheat the oven to 425.

  3. Grease a shallow pan. Take the chicken out of the marinade and spread it in a single layer on the pan, and top with the onions (sliced or quartered). If you kept the garlic in larger pieces, fish those out of the marinade and strew them over the chicken. Cook for 45 minutes or more. 

  4. Chop up the chicken a bit, if you like, and finish cooking it so it crisps up a bit more.

  5. Serve chicken and onions with pita bread triangles, cucumbers, tomatoes, assorted olives, feta cheese, fresh parsley, pomegranates or grapes, fried eggplant, and yogurt sauce.

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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

  • 32 oz full fat Greek yogurt
  • 5 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 3 Tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp pepper
  • fresh parsley or dill, chopped (optional)

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Use for spreading on grilled meats, dipping pita or vegetables, etc. 

Finally! Religious liberty for (white) Americans

American Catholics were jubilant recently over a new religious freedom guidance issued by the Trump administration.

Some of it is fine, as far as I can see. I can think of instances where people were bullied or harassed for openly expressing their faith in the workplace, and where they were made to feel inferior for being religious.

Some people have taken the Establishment Clause of the Constitution to mean that to mean that religious expression is sort of vaguely illegal, and should be quashed. So this new guidance says federal employees are allowed to have Bibles and crosses and so on in the workplace. (It’s notable that all the examples it gives are either Christian or Jewish, explicitly mentioning tefillin and rosary beads, for example, but it avoids any mention of Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu practices of faith. Which is a clear violation of the Establishment clause. Note this. Note. This.)

Some of the guidance makes me extremely nervous. You can click through and read it for yourself if you don’t trust me to summarize—it’s just five pages—but it essentially says that federal employers and employees can display signs of their religious faith, pray and organise prayer groups in the workplace, and talk about and argue for their faith with others in the workplace, as long as they’re not aggressive about it and respect requests to stop.

Here is what I promise will happen: Decent people will adhere to the guidelines, and indecent people will not. People who are good Christians will quietly wear a cross and pray sincerely at lunch and be welcoming and inviting to others; and people who are bad Christians will bully and harass and intimidate people they don’t approve of, and they will point to these guidelines and say they’re entitled to do it.

This is not just a Christian thing; it’s a human nature thing. If people think they can get away with bullying other people, they’ll do it.

I just wanted to establish that the guidelines are absolutely guaranteed to be abused. They were deliberately written to give cover to people who will abuse them. That is how this administration functions, on every level, and it is what we have come to expect from them.

But let’s assume for a minute that it’s all been done in good faith. Let’s pretend that all they want is for Christians and a few docile Jews to be able to keep worshipping God all day long, and not have the government forcibly stripping away their religious convictions and expression.

It sure sounds like that’s what they’re calling for. The first paragraph says:

“The Founders established a Nation in which people were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by their government.” President Trump is committed to reaffirming “America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty,” including by directing “the executive branch to vigorously enforce the historic and robust protections for religious liberty enshrined in Federal law.”

And the fourth paragraph says:

“The First Amendment to the US Constitution robustly protects expressions of religious faith by all Americans—including Federal employees. The US Supreme Court has clarified that the Free Exercise Clause “protects not only the right to harbor religious beliefs inwardly and secretly,” but also “protect[s] the ability of those who hold religious beliefs of all kinds to live out their faiths in daily life.” Indeed, “[r]espect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic[.]”

That’s what they say.

What are they actually doing? … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.