What’s for supper? Vol. 430: deal w/ ur own Beans

Happy Friday! This will be the shortest WFS post known to man, because I have had and continue to have SO much to do. But I just had to share something. 

This morning, I woke up, started the coffee, let the dog out, fed the ducks, collected eggs, fed the dog and the cat, cleaned up a mess the cat had made, looked at an oil bill, and then went into the kitchen to take my meds. And here is what I saw:

and I laughed so hard the dog came over to see what was up. DEAL W/ UR OWN BEANS, said the child who cleaned the kitchen last night. And you know what, they were my beans, and I hadn’t dealt with them! I was rushing around and looking for some quick protein for lunch, so I had half a can of beans, and I forgot to recycle the can. It happens that I overheard this child complaining about this last night, and they also has some pretty hard feelings about the way I bought fruit, even though fruit attracts fruit flies.

And that is how it came to pass that a teenager who lives in my house had the inconceivable experience of having to clean up someone else’s mess. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE WHAT THAT WOULD BE LIKE, CAN YOU????

They don’t realize it now, but I’ve given them a great gift: The chance to feel self-righteous. That really is what makes the world go ’round. I get annoyed that my husband doesn’t turn off lights, and he gets annoyed that I don’t put towels in the laundry. I snap at my kids for leaving ice pop wrappers all over the place, and they roll their eyes at me for not dealing with my own beans. We’re like the island where the entire economy is based on taking in each other’s laundry, except everyone is mad about it. And then the cat throws lentils all over the place, because he’s just trying to do his job. 

The good news is, there’s plenty of summer left! I just asked the kids what they were doing on Sunday, thinking we could do a day trip to the ocean if they were free, and they answered with such hostile suspicion that I decided . . . well obviously we’re going to the ocean. I love the ocean. Maybe they’ll have beans there. 

Anyway, how are you? We had a big, superfun party here last Friday, which is why I didn’t do a WFS that day. In the morning, I went to Millie’s memorial service, and her sister, who is also a tiny, wiry, white-haired, bright-eyed taker of no crap, got up and told a story about the time Millie went to meet her boyfriend’s family and went to cut a pickle, and it flew off the plate and landed right in the grandfather’s lap. I brought a little bouquet with the peonies I had stored in the fridge as buds during peony season, and that was that. Requiescat in pace, my friend. 

Then the party! Lots of family and friends came, Damien grilled hot dogs, hamburgers, smoked chicken thighs,

Jump to Recipe

and brats, and we had millions of chips and millions of sodas, Benny made square brownies that looked round

and I made 18 cups of Shine, Perishing Republic Jell-o

I also made 15 pounds of this potato salad from Sip and Feast and ate most of it myself. You have to brine it overnight before adding the mayo, and it was a pain in the tuchus, but I gotta say, that was not a bland potato salad, and the texture was great. Would make again. I did add hard-boiled eggs and chopped celery, because I like that.

We had vegetable platters with dip, and tons of watermelon, and people brought fruit salad, a more German-style potato salad, and a lovely tabouli salad. And we had ice cream, and I bought uhhh 10.5 pounds of candy. And we rented the cotton candy machine again! I got sticky all the way up to my armpits, but it was so much fun. Couldn’t find temporary tattoos OR face paint, so I got edible paint meant for cakes, and it certainly does cling to the skin, it certainly does! My sister brought sparkler and fireworks and we had glowsticks and pool time, the little guys enjoyed the sandbox, and maybe best of all, people brought musical instruments.

 

And it didn’t rain! It almost always rains on our July parties, but this day was sunny and breezy, just perfect. A lovely day, including THREE babies. Here’s a bunch of pics on Facebook if you’d like to see. 

 

We dearly missed family that couldn’t make it, but like I said, there’s plenty of summer left. 

Then the Sunday we had leftovers, and then Monday, Damien cooked some food I bought that we didn’t cook; and then Tuesday, we had Aldi pizza. On Wednesday, I shredded up the leftover chicken and made quesadillas, and on Thursday, I went shopping and got ingredients for Italian sandwiches. Which I did not take a picture of, but I did take a picture of the lovely basil I gathered from the garden. 

I have been assiduously pinching off any hint of a blossom, and it’s paying off! Or maybe it’s just a good year for basil. Either way, usually my basil gets all leggy, but this year I have four lovely basil bushes. 

What else is new? I got a haircut. One of the ducks (Faye) died. We saw Superman and the kids liked it but I thought it was meh. The 10.5 pounds of candy are mostly gone, except for a few Tootsie Rolls and seven or eight mini boxes of Dots. 

Today we are having spaghetti and Damien has promised to take the kids to the pond. I have so so so much work to do (I’d been telling myself I had one big project due in July and one in August, which is true; but it turns out one is due July 28 and one is due August 1. 

I shall now go and deal w/my own beans. Adieu. 

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Smoked chicken thighs with sugar rub

Ingredients

  • 1.5 cups brown sugar
  • .5 cups white sugar
  • 2 Tbsp chili powder
  • 2 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 tsp chili pepper flakes
  • salt and pepper
  • 20 chicken thighs

Instructions

  1. Mix dry ingredients together. Rub all over chicken and let marinate until the sugar melts a bit. 

  2. Light the fire, and let it burn down to coals. Shove the coals over to one side and lay the chicken on the grill. Lower the lid and let the chicken smoke for an hour or two until they are fully cooked. 

Shifting borders: The remarkable art of Anastassia Cassady

Anastassia Cassady doesn’t have one particular style of painting — and that’s kind of her style.

Cassady, 35, who sometimes goes by her childhood nickname of “Tess,” is a painter, iconographer, mother of three young children, part-time high school art teacher, and something of a hurricane of words and ideas.

“I don’t have a personality disorder!” she said. “But I feel like there’s so much going on in my life, that to sit down and be in the same headspace every day would make me feel like a copy machine.”

Instead, she leans into what she calls her “erratic nature of switching styles.”

Her sister, a photographer and co-owner of an art gallery, says she can always spot Cassady’s work, though, because of her trademark color palette.

“The deep colors, the reds, the golds, that would have been in pysanky and in icons” are in all of Cassady’s works.

Cassady grew up in South Bend, Indiana, in a house heavily influenced by her Ukrainian mother.

“We had icons everywhere, in an age when icons weren’t cool,” she said.

She and her five siblings grew up making pysanky, the intricate, jewel-toned traditional wax-resist Ukrainian Easter eggs, every year.

“All Lent, that was our penance on Fridays: water, bread and pysanky,” she said.

Cassady, an Eastern-rite Catholic who is a parishioner at both the local Ukrainian church and the cathedral in South Bend, has worked hard to instill a sense of Ukrainian heritage in her own children — and also to retain a sense of humor about the faith she learned from her parents. She recalled the evening when her father, a convert, once again tried to corral his kids to say family prayers, waving away their excuses and hollering at them to sit down.

“He played in the NFL; he was a big guy. But he had a soft reading voice, and he would say, ‘And the angel of the Lord declared to Mary –‘”

A sudden burst of flatulence, courtesy of her brother, interrupted the angel’s words. Their father finished the thought: “WOULD YOU SHUT THE H*** UP?”

“He tried so hard to push this piety on us. We ate him alive,” she laughed.

This push and pull between the sacred and the lighthearted seems to be another hallmark of Cassady’s work. A family portrait she painted is something of a puzzle, including dozens of references to various artists. Her watercolor of St. Benedict, one of the illustrations from the 2023 book “Saints: A Family Story,” shows him relatively young, his head mere inches away from the feathers of an incoming raven. Even her icons, which she writes with careful adherence to tradition, have a blithe feel to them.

Fresh it may be, but her work is not careless; it is born of hard-won skill. Cassady teaches her students at Trinity School at Greenlawn, where every student learns art history and studio art, how to master tools and techniques in a methodical way, and how to put them to use with intention, with a thorough foundation of art history.

“It’s not just about ‘expressing themselves,’” she said. “If you want to express yourself, you have to understand the process, the technicalities.”

Cassady wishes some priests, especially those choosing artwork for their parishes, had taken art history in seminary. They have good intentions, but many have never been formed aesthetically.

“People just kind of streamline one style as beautiful. They just want to go back to neoclassical,” she said. But that just won’t work if the building is more suited to cubist art, or art deco.

She will argue with potential clients if she doesn’t like their ideas, and has turned down some large commissions because experience tells her the project as requested would look awful.

Cassady has high standards for herself, as well. One rule she keeps: As long as she’s working on a piece of secular art, she also has to be working on an icon.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Cassady speaks of icon painting as a process in which the artist’s  grip on the reins of control is looser …. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 429: Bao chicka bao bao

Happy Friday! The heat has broken and we are all back in humanform, more or less. Hope you are same. 

It was the second full week of my car being in the shop. I have hope of getting it back Monday, which may or may not make me less crazy.

Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers, pork fried rice, mozzarella sticks

I had a ton of pork left over from last week’s char siu, so I chopped up about 1/2 of it and put it in some quickie fried rice. Here is my basic fried rice recipe:

Jump to Recipe

I did use fresh ginger and garlic, which is always worthwhile, and also chopped up some sugar snap peas. Corrie helped me make it, and confided in me that she likes cooking because she just likes being in the kitchen. ME TOO. 

The shopping turn kid chose mozzarella sticks for the frozen food supplement, and it looks like we had that, fried rice, reheated quesadillas, and a smidge of spaghetti carbonara. 

Very important to stay carbohydrated in the summer, ho ho. 

SUNDAY
Pork buns, rice, watermelon, spicy cucumber salad

Sunday was when it really got hot in earnest. Our parish had a Corpus Christi procession after Mass, which I dearly love, but last time we did it, one of our kids fainted, and this time, I’m wearing an air cast, and one kid was already melting down and the rest of us were just sort of melting in general; and you can tell yourself, “Hey, if the priest can do it in several layers of synthetic fabrics, I can, too!” and that’s true, but that doesn’t mean it’s smart. So we went home. 

I gathered up all the fans we could spare and tried a new recipe: BAOZI. Pork buns! You know that feeling of sitting in a Chinese restaurant and they bring the bamboo steamer over just for you, and you take the top off and inside, all snuggled together, is happiness in bun form? I wanted that. 

So I chopped up the last bunch of leftover char siu

(THREE MEALS with this pork! I’m gonna do this more often — cook an extra bunch of char siu and save the rest for another meal or two. Here’s the char siu recipe I used, by the way) and then started making the dough. 

I returned to dear Nagi for the bao buns recipe. It’s a very different kind of dough from anything I’m used to making: It calls for a cup of corn starch per two cups of flour, and then you let it rise for two hours, and then you mix in baking powder. This results in a really pillowy soft and tender dough.

I was doubtful I had chopped the pork filling up small enough, because it seemed kinda soupy, so I threw it in the food processor, and it came out a bit more cohesive. 

It wasn’t until later that I realized I completely forgot to cook the filling! Duh! Don’t ask me why I thought a mixture with cornstarch in the sauce didn’t need to be cooked. I guess I figured it was already such a weird recipe, all bets were off. This is the kind of thinking that led me to do what I thought was just shrugging my shoulders and trusting the directions when I was in seventh grade in Mrs. Dakin’s sewing class, and I was making my very first skirt and I had cut out two bell-shaped pieces of fabric, and it said to sew the long edges together. That’s what it said!

So . . . I sewed the long edge to the long edge on one piece, and then I sewed the long edge to the long edge on the other piece. And ended up with two extremely skinny skirts. THAT’S WHAT IT SAID, MRS. DAKIN. So that’s what I did.  

Anyway, that’s how I learned how to use a seam ripper. 

Anyway, I watched the video of how to shape the buns a few times, and then did my best. Some of them turned out nice

Some of them less nice! But I made a double recipe and ended up with 24 good-sized, if not good-shaped, buns. 

I did make a couple of videos showing the process — one in normal time, one speeded up), if you want to see what it looks like when someone is making bao buns for the very first time! It would absolutely have been easier if the pork mixture had been cooked properly, but it wasn’t super hard.

For some reason when I use my bamboo steamers, every other single time, I have put off making liners until the kitchen is already steamy and I’m a little hysterical, and I end up just smashing something in there, and it doesn’t go well. So this time, I didn’t do that! Earlier in the day, I traced the steamers onto parchment paper, cut the circles out, and then folded them like paper snowflakes and snipped out steam holes. So the whole process went better. 

I have two large steamers and one small one, each with two layers, and I was able to steam all 24 buns in at the same time. 

Ladies and gentlemen, they were excellent. EXCELLENT. 

They were cooked perfectly, incredibly light and fluffy inside with a beautifully tender, satiny outside. 

The ones in the smaller steamer were, predictably, a little crowded, but they still steamed up fine. 

The only photo I got of the inside is not actually a great example; it’s one that got a little squished. Most of them were loftier than this. 

It does show that there’s not quite enough filling, though, which is the only thing I will do differently next time (besides actually making the filling right!). I think everyone liked them, and it was overall a great success. Yay!

As you can see, I also made rice, cut up some watermelon, and made a quick cucumber salad. Great meal. 

The cucumber salad is a super easy side dish that I really like. It’s piquant and refreshing, and you can make it as sweet or spicy as you like.

Here’s that recipe: 

Jump to Recipe

And that’s my story! Yay bao buns! Yay for future us, who will definitely be having more bao buns. 

MONDAY
Honey mustard kielbasa, potato, and brussels sprouts 

Monday was actually so terrible. I think it was in the high nineties, and I understand that’s normal for some of you, but our houses are not designed for that, and our bodies are not used to it, and also the air conditioner was stuck in the attic for various stupid reasons. So we sat in front of fans and ate ice pops and went in the pool, which, now I’m embarrassed to say that it was a terrible day, because that doesn’t sound so bad! 

What happens is, when it gets hot, my brain scrambles, and I get tearful and irrational and just generally intolerant of life. It’s not great. I did make supper, however. I made a kielbasa, red potato, and brussels sprouts one-pan meal. 

Here’s that recipe: 

Jump to Recipe

The recipe says “cabbage,” but I finally wised up that I’m the only one who likes cabbage, so now we have it with brussels sprouts. 

I made the honey mustard sauce, cooked the food for about 15 minutes, then drizzled the sauce over it and shoved it back in. Usually I stir up the food before or after adding the sauce, but it was so dang hot, I just let it be. It turned out so much better that way! The sauce had more of a chance to permeate the food where it was, and it developed a really lovely little glazed situation, with the outer leaves of the brussels sprouts getting a little crunchy char. 

Delicious. 

Eventually I will get around to updating the recipe card.

You can also make this with broccoli for the vegetable. It’s your life! 

TUESDAY
WHATEVER WHATEVER WHATEVER

Oh mercy it was so hot. It was one of those days when you go in for a five-minute check-in with your kid’s therapist and 30 minutes later, she’s handing you tissues and reassuring you that parents’ mental health is a legitimate part of the treatment plan. SIGHHH. 

For supper, I decided I would cook some chicken in the Instant Pot, because that doesn’t heat up the kitchen much. But guess what! I plugged it in, and all the lights started flashing and it started beeping in a really ominous way. It’s probably just a sensor that needs to be cleaned, but that involves taking the bottom off and messing with electronics, which is not recommended when you’re suffering from profound brain scramble.

So Damien said he would come home with charcoal and grill the chicken  when he got back. But guess what! I had stuffed the freezer with so much ice pops and bananas and stuff that there was no room for the meat, so I left it in the fridge, and when I opened it, I discovered it had gone bad.

No matter, I could switch to pork.

But guess what! The pork had also gone bad. 

You know, I feel that you should be able to buy pork and chicken on Saturday and keep it in the fridge until Tuesday, and it should not go bad. I don’t feel like that’s unreasonable. But nevertheless. 

So, we did something I almost never do: I told everyone to just find something for supper. I myself had a couple of PBJ sandwiches, and I truly don’t know what everyone else ate. I was grateful the kids are old enough that I can do this, but mainly I was just miserable because it was so hot. 

I think it was that evening that Elijah pushed through our various personal difficulties and got the air conditioner unstuck, and Damien got that set up in the living room, and WHEWWWWWWWWW. 

WEDNESDAY
Grilled pork ribs and chips

Wednesday Corrie had her pal over, and while they played in the pool, I got caught up on some gardening. It had dropped down to a temperature where I had to take breaks and drink water in the shade every half hour or so, but it didn’t feel like the sun was screaming at you as soon as you stepped out the door, so that was nice! 

Then when Damien got home, he brought pork chops and grilled them. Here is the dog, acting as Remote Supervisor with Extreme Longing. 

I just seasoned the chops heavily (and I mean HEAVILY) with salt and pepper, and Damien grilled them to perfection. 

I think we had chips for a side. Perfect. 

THURSDAY
Roast chicken and pasta salad

Thursday I had a post-heat-wave surge of energy and did I guess a landscaping project in the front of the house, although that seems like too professional and grandiose a description for what I did.

I had a wheelbarrow full of day lilies I had dug up several weeks ago. Every week or so, I threw a little water on them, and let me tell you, those mofos are tough. They actually produced flowers while they were in the wheelbarrow, without any soil besides what was clinging to their roots. So I did truck up a bunch of compost from the back yard and spread it on a bare spot, but I realized that might be overkill, so I just basically threw the lilies onto the spot where I want them to grow (one side of where the porch used to be), and I think they’ll be fine. 

Then I dug up a bunch more lilies and also moved them. Then I dug up and moved a bunch of rocks, and then, without a real plan, I dug up a giant concrete block that used to be in front of the porch, and was just sort of hanging out in front of the porchless house. 

You can see that, since we tore down the porch and then I realized we couldn’t afford a sunroom, we’ve been using a pallet on cinder blocks as a front stoop, which is a little demoralizing. And meanwhile, this cement block is marooned next to the driveway, getting tripped over. 

I could budge it with my shovel, but I most definitely couldn’t move it myself. So I bribed two teenagers and slowly, tediously, maddeningly inefficiently, WE MOVED IT. 

First I levered it up with a shovel, and one of the kids would jam a rock under it. 

Then I levered it up from the rock, and they would stick more rocks under it. Then two of us would lever it up from those rocks, and the second kid would stick more rocks in. It was just a couple inches at a time, and I’m so incredibly impressed at how much these kids mostly kept their remarks to themselves until I had my back turned. They are really very great kids, and this was a really dumb and dangerous project!

So eventually we managed to lever it up until it was nearly vertical, and I dug a little trench on the other side, and then we hooked a strap around it and the two kids pulled on one side and I pushed on the other, and we flipped it.

You can see by the rocky bottom that no one has ever moved this block before, and it was poured directly onto the ground when they made it. Which is the normal and sensible way to do things. 

So we all took a little break and then we repeated the process, and flipped it again, so this time it was right side up.

I DID measure it, and I was aware that it wasn’t high enough to make a step to get to the door. But I figured it would be better than what we had before. 

What I didn’t anticipate is how far from the door it would end up. Even though we had spent the last hour or so straining our muscles to the limit to move it as far as we did, I was convinced we could just sort of nudge it into place to get it the final ten inches or so.

I was wrong! It’s that freaking last mile problem! 

But it was already 4:45, so I just shoved some cinder blocks in there so no one would break an ankle in the gap, and ran inside to make supper. I put some chicken drumsticks and thighs on a pan, drizzled them with olive oil, and seasoned them with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and cumin, and roasted them at 450. 

Again: Usually when I roast chicken parts, I will put it on a rack and flip it halfway through cooking. Instead, I elected instead to take a shower and just let the chicken cook. And guess what, it was perfect. The meat was super juicy, the skin was wonderfully crisp, and yeah, I’m gonna do it that was from now on. 

I also made some unremarkable pasta salad. I cooked some farfalle, drained and cooled it under cold water, and dumped on a bunch of Italian salad dressing, some crumbled feta, and some basil from the garden. Perfectly adequate. 

Sad to say, I didn’t find anything especially interesting in the dirt where we were digging. There are usually some vintage beer cans or sometimes a limb from some long-defunct cartoon show

or some mysterious bits of hardware or old-fashioned tools or pottery. Once one of the kids found a key from a door on a ship! This time, all we got was a knife and two spoons.

So, I totally understand forks and whatnot ending up in the back yard. You were eating out there, kids were playing, you were shaking out a tablecloth, and so on. These things happen. What I don’t get is how they end up in the front, where there is very little besides a driveway and then the road. What happened? What was the mechanism? I can only imagine a George Booth-type guy going, “It’s a beautiful night, hon. Want to step out front and throw some cutlery around?” Maybe it was really hot. Things happen. 

In any case, by evening, it was so chilly, I wore a sweater to water my garden. New Hampshire weather needs to access its uncrazy side. 

My gardens are doing okay, considering I wasn’t planning to do any gardening this year. 

Corn, pumpkins, and rhubarb:

I have since planted some more corn, since this came up kind of sparse!

Here’s my poor strawberry patch, that I really neglected and it shows:

and we have garlic, onions, basil, and potatoes over here, with two peach saplings in buckets:

and a few eggplants I threw in late, and which I couldn’t find any more fence to protect, so they look like dangerous criminals in an old dog crate:

and my mostly-marigold mixed seeds are chugging along. This is about half of them:

and I planted tons of zinnias, nasturtiums, and tithonias in pots, and some other stuff that I can’t remember. I also planted some broken peony roots and a bunch of lupine seeds, with no luck yet. They may just need a while, so I’ll keep watering them. 

The two $2 dry pomegranate sticks I got on clearance at Walmart are leafing out nicely! Kind of excited about that. 

Pretty good year for all the old stand-byes, the mock orange, the stella d’oro, the roses, the hydrangeas,

and the catmint. I managed to wreck all the sunflower seeds I had saved, but I got a volunteer anyway!

I will resist giving a report on the rest of my flowers, as I’m even boring myself at this point. I do have a little mystery on my hands, though, that maybe some of you knowledgeable folks can help with. The little tree in front, that grew up from the root stock after the apple tree got eaten? I still don’t know what it is. 

My best guess is Red Baron Crabapple. It did have deep pink blossoms in the spring, and the leaves were dark red in the spring, but I don’t recall it turning orange in the fall. Also the fruit is kind of inconclusive. 

I tried cutting it open to see if it has five chambers or a pit, and it was, as I say, inconclusive. I guess we’ll find out! 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Regular old, begular old pizza. Goodness, what a long post this turned into. And a long week. But it’s Friday! Last Friday, I managed to complain about someone else in adoration in such a way that my neurodivergent friends are mad at me and Facebook took my post down for threatening violence. So that’s the bar to clear this week. Excelsior. 

 

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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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spicy cucumber salad

A spicy, zippy side dish that you can make very quickly. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 cucumbers, sliced thin (peeling not necessary)
  • 1/4 cup rice vinegar or white vinegar
  • 1+ tsp honey
  • 1 tsp sesame seeds
  • 1 tsp sesame oil
  • 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1/4 tsp kosher salt

Optional:

red pepper, diced

  • 1/2 red onion diced

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Serve immediately, or chill to serve later (but the longer you leave it, the softer the cukes will get)

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One-pan kielbasa, cabbage, and red potato dinner with mustard sauce

This meal has all the fun and salt of a wiener cookout, but it's a tiny bit fancier, and you can legit eat it in the winter. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 lbs kielbasa
  • 3-4 lbs red potatoes
  • 1-2 medium cabbages
  • (optional) parsley for garnish
  • salt and pepper and olive oil

mustard sauce (sorry, I make this different each time):

  • mustard
  • red wine if you like
  • honey
  • a little olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • fresh garlic, crushed

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400. 

    Whisk together the mustard dressing ingredients and set aside. Chop parsley (optional).

    Cut the kielbasa into thick coins and the potatoes into thick coins or small wedges. Mix them up with olive oil, salt, and pepper and spread them in a shallow pan. 

    Cut the cabbage into "steaks." Push the kielbasa and potatoes aside to make room to lay the cabbage down. Brush the cabbage with more olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. It should be a single layer of food, and not too crowded, so it will brown well. 

    Roast for 20 minutes, then turn the food as well as you can and roast for another 15 minutes.  

    Serve hot with dressing and parsley for a garnish. 

The wealth we all have

Worried about money? Me too! So is everybody I know. Everything that was already expensive, which is everything, is getting more expensive and is poised to get even more expensive. It’s hard to find even one glimmer of hope for the financial future. Taxes? Horrendous. Retirement savings? Dust in the wind. Treats for vacation? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve already warned the kids we’re going to have an Imagination Summer, and possibly an Imagination Christmas, because I’m the one who tends the budget in our house, and the writing on the wall spells out B-R-O-K-E.

That phrase “Imagination Christmas” is from “The Simpsons,” in the episode where the eye-wateringly wholesome Flanders family is broke because they spent all their money charitably sending Bart and Homer to Hawaii to have their fake leprosy treated. The Flanders family is there as a foil to their dreadful neighbors, but they’re also undeniably happy. And they are very clear-eyed about what is important in life.

I mention this because what I am going to say next may come across as unbearably Flanders-like in its optimism. But I can’t help it. The truth is, our family, broke as it is, is doing great. We are incredibly wealthy, and the more I look for it, the more evidence I find of our wealth. It just doesn’t happen to come in the form of money.

I told the kids: “Look, everything is expensive right now, and we probably won’t get to buy a lot of cool stuff this summer. But it’s O.K., because we already know how to be poor.” And they more or less agreed. There are so many things you can enjoy when you are poor—and some, it seems, that are easier to enjoy when you’re poor because you cannot lean on the crutches and the shortcuts that litter the path of the rich.

Let’s start with that line from “The Simpsons,” which our family quotes frequently. If you have running jokes in your family or friend set, do you know what a gift that is? It sounds like a little thing, but think about how bereft and impoverished you feel when someone has an inside joke that you’re not in on. Running jokes are gold. It is evidence that you’re so wealthy you live among a group of people who reliably laugh with you and also understand you completely when you say two or three words in a certain tone of voice. What a gift! Security, community, laughter, and it’s all free.

Also “Simpsons”-related: At age 50, I have calmed down, and I no longer torment myself over how thoroughly pop culture has saturated my family’s psyche. There was a time I would have rent my garments to think of how often we communicate via lines from TV shows, but I’ve let it go. We live in the time we live in, and we’re not hermits, and my kids have screens. That has not all been good, but it certainly hasn’t all been bad, either. We talk often about when it’s important to buck the trends and be uncool, and my kids seem to be willing to do that; so I don’t need to feel like a failure just because they are not cultural aliens. So that is another sign of my wealth: I look at my life and see that I’ve gotten a little wiser, and I can see that my kids are reasonably wise, too, according to their age. That is incredibly valuable, and definitely not something you can buy.

A big one: The great outdoors. I don’t even mean white water rafting or tent camping or knowing how to thrive for six weeks in the wilderness; I just mean going outside for a bit and knowing how to enjoy it. Not everyone knows how.

Our family is extraordinarily lucky to have a huge backyard with a little pine grove, a babbling brook to wade in and rich soil where just about any seed will thrive. But even when we lived in a dense neighborhood with only a little scrap of yard, we still had the sky. We had treetops that waved in the wind. We had birdsong and tenacious weeds finding a place to root in sidewalk cracks. It is a skill, learning to seek out emissaries from the natural world wherever you are, but like any skill, it can be learned.

Here’s how to learn it, even if you’re very busy: If you’re driving, slow down to get a closer look at passing wildlife. Occasionally, take the long way home, so you can coast through a side street where the trees are especially lovely in the fall. Think about fog, and notice how the light passes through it; roll the windows down and listen for moving water. See what you can smell on the wind when you pass by a forest or field. If your neighborhood is bright at night, spend an occasional evening staying up late to drive out to a spot where it’s dark, and go see what the stars are up to.

It is all free, and once you start becoming aware of the vast riches that surround us, it is hard to stop looking for more.

This may seem like a random list, but that’s kind of the point….Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 428: There must be … fifty ways to stretch a meatball

Happy Friday! Let’s hop to it! Here’s what we ate this week: 

Oh, but first, last Friday I made something I don’t normally: French bread pizza. I got store-bought bread but made homemade mozzarella , which is very soft and mild. 

The kids love frozen french bread pizza, so I thought the homemade version would be popular. I WAS WRONG. Why? Who knows. Oh well! 

SATURDAY
Leftover buffet (?) 

I have no memory of Saturday’s dinner. Damien and I went to the No Kings rally, and I must have made supper at some point?  Here’s a collection of signs I saw. 

Possibly my favorite:

Huge crowd, great energy, no violence or litter or unpleasantness, just an extremely diverse crowd of people, including lots of people who were pretty clearly at their first protest. I got my picture in the local paper!  We’ll definitely be going again. 

SUNDAY
Chicago-style hot dogs, fries

Sunday I went shopping and then we had a low key father’s day, with a few of the big kids coming over for supper. We had Chicago-style hot dogs, which are supposed to be on poppy seed buns, which I couldn’t find; but we had mustard and then “dragged them through the garden” with pickle spears, fresh tomatoes, chopped onions, pickled peppers, and celery salt. I skipped the pickle relish because I didn’t think anyone would eat it. 

Looks like I ran out of room before I put any peppers on, actually. 

I made some brownies from a mix (and the kids did not miss their chance to torment me about having bought brownie mix on purpose for the first time in my life, after a long and tragic history of being incredibly stupid about brownie mix for some reason). Ice cream on warm brownies topped with hot fudge sauce, mini M&Ms, whipped cream from a can, cherries. 

Unsophisticated and delicious. Americans really get some things right. 

MONDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, raw vegetables

Monday I suddenly found the giant pile of scrap wood in front of the house intolerable, so I flung it onto the other, even gianter pile of scrap wood on the side of the driveway. Follow me for more curb appeal tips. I’ll fling you, too. 

In the afternoon, I started some pork marinating for Tuesday. Corrie helped with this. This recipe has a certain appeal for her:

namely, that I used an entire tube of red food coloring. Walmart was selling sets of food coloring for like fifty cents, so I bought uhhh all of them. In anticipation of the day when food coloring becomes outlawed but we won’t have the energy to fret about birthday cakes colored with beet juice because we will all have polio!

Then we had grilled ham and cheese and veggies. 

Also on Monday, Clara stopped by to pick up Benny for play practice, and dropped off a sample of the tarts she had made for the cast. 

It is a graham cracker poppy seed and ginger crust filled with grapefruit curd tart and topped with basil-infused whipped cream. All made from scratch, and, as far as I can tell, a recipe she invented.  I’ve been off sugar all month, but I made an exception, yes I did. I nearly wept at the marriage of flavors. It was like, I don’t know, pirouetting through a garden.

TUESDAY
Char siu, rice, pineapple

Tuesday I was still in a bit of “MUST ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING ACCOMPLISHABLE” frenzy, so first I sternly informed myself that, if I were really ever going to upcycle all those animal feed bags, I would have done it before we had eighteen of them. 

So I listed them on a “buy nothing” group, and a capable-looking woman claimed them right away. These are actually really useful items! You can use them to insulate your bird coop, lay them down for a weed barrier, use them to line a compost bin, fill them with dirt and grow potatoes, use them for outdoor trash bags (I actually do this), or make a few modifications and turn them into sturdy tote bags. Or you can just list them on Marketplace and say hail and farewell. 

I also sorted through a couple of bags of seeds I saved last summer. It was mostly marigolds, but also zinnia and something I couldn’t identify, plus lupines, and some rose hips I gathered on the island we visited last summer.

I broke open the lupine pods and set the seeds to soak, and I cut open the rose hips

and put the seeds in a bag in the fridge. Then I took my vast collection of plant pots and filled them with compost, and planted all the rest of the seeds, and sternly instructed them to grow. Accomplishable!

I actually forgot about the lupine seeds until this minute, so I hope they haven’t soaked too long. 

Speaking of soaking, though, I was extremely pleased to remember I had been marinating that pork for 24 hours. I had followed this char siu recipe from Recipe Tin Eats which has you basting the meat every half hour or so. It turns out MAGNIFICENT. 

Just perfect. Super easy, and mainly an investment of time. The pork is tender and juicy, but not shreddy like pulled pork. Just lovely in thin slices. I cut up a few pineapples and cooked a big pot of rice, and it was a great meal. 

There is quite a bit of leftover pork, so get ready for pictures of leftover pork. 

WEDNESDAY
Meatball subs, cheezy weezies

Wednesday, I spotted the glorious spectacle of one of my teenagers planning a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the two youngest kids. I’m trying to be better about not sharing too many photos of them, but believe me, it melted my gorgon heart. My kids are turning out pretty great. 

In sadder news, we are at the point in our history where it’s exciting when ground beef falls to $3.49 a pound, and we still have eight people in the house. So I put on my thinking cap and combined a few pounds of ground beef with a few pounds of ground turkey that is cheap at Aldi, plus some breadcrumbs, which I normally use in meatballs, plus a bunch of leftover cooked rice. (I also mixed in a bunch of beaten eggs, a ton of Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder.) I got fifty good-sized meatballs out of it. 

I documented it because I’ve never stretched meatballs with rice before. So here is a picture of raw meatballs with rice. 

I’m giggling at how not-round they are. What the heck was I doing? Probably thinking about some other food. I’m always thinking about food. 

Anyway, unless I’m being fancy, I generally bake meatballs in the oven on a rack. Then I put them in a crock pot with sauce and keep them warm until supper. 

They turned out great! You really couldn’t taste the rice. You could see it

but otherwise they were completely normal meatballs. So, phew! Take that, expensive ground beef!

I spent the rest of the day tearing around doing various tasks I’ve been putting off, culminating with sorting through every last one of Corrie’s stuffed animals, packing up half to put in the attic, moving a dresser from the dining room into her newly-clean closet, and hanging a net for the rest of the stuffed animals. 

And here was my vibrantly-colored reward.

You can see in the background the trash can, brimming with exactly four items I was allowed to throw out: A pilled dollar store Christmas stocking, an especially ratty snake, a box with a shattered plastic lid, and a one-legged dinosaur with no head. Everything else Must Be Saved. I really can’t blame any of my kids for being pack rats, because I honestly had a really hard time throwing away that dinosaur. It was a dinosaur with :::memories::::. 

The super glue is to hold my brain in. Keeps falling out. 

Oh, but this made me laugh. I did Google how to stretch ground beef, but I made a small but significant typo, resulting in this response:

Normally I loathe and despise anything AI, but this time I felt kind of bad for it. It tried so hard to make sense of my question. “It seems there might be a slight misunderstanding . . . ” Story of my life, pal. 

THURSDAY

Spaghetti carbonara

Thursday it suddenly got really hot, and I was having some doubts about my plans to serve carbonara. Then it turned out three of the kids were going out for dinner with their friends, and one kid was at work, and of the two kids at home, one doesn’t like carbonara and one is neutral on carbonara, if you can imagine. To me, carbonara is still one of those things you go around telling people about, and possibly making them come over and admire!

So I was a little flummoxed about how to proceed. Was it sweating over a frying pan and steaming up the kitchen for a meal that only a few people even wanted?

The answer is: Yes, if it’s carbonara. I ended up saving out several pieces of bacon for the weird kid who doesn’t like it at all, and making two pounds of spaghetti with the rest. And you know what, it was the best carbonara I’ve ever made, and everybody liked it! 

And I had mine outside, feeling very wealthy indeed. Earlier in the week, I broke the mower and Damien fixed it and then I broke it again and he fixed it again, so I had done a bunch of mowing and weeding and mulching over the week, and dang, it’s so pretty out there in June.

And it was not too hot for carbonara! For some reason pasta with tomato sauce feels like a cold-weather dish, but you can be sweating all your limbs off and still feel good about eating carbonara. 

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa

Regular old quesadillas, perfectly fine.  I’m hoping against hope that the mechanic will finish my car today. It’s been in the shop all week and I truly don’t know if the bill is going to be a “well, we’ll just tighten our belts for the rest of the month” situation, or more of a a “Merciful Lord, please make someone dumb enough to give me a loan” deal. Oh the suspense! At least we have June. And leftover pork! 

Print

Meatballs for a crowd

Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs. 

Ingredients

  • 5 lbs ground meat (I like to use mostly beef with some ground chicken or turkey or pork)
  • 6 eggs, beaten
  • 2 cups panko bread crumbs
  • 8 oz grated parmesan cheese (about 2 cups)
  • salt, pepper, garlic powder, oregano, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400.

  2. Mix all ingredients together with your hands until it's fully blended.

  3. Form meatballs and put them in a single layer on a pan with drainage. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or more until they're cooked all the way through.

  4. Add meatballs to sauce and keep warm until you're ready to serve. 

Print

Spaghetti carbonara

An easy, delicious meal.

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs bacon
  • 3 lbs spaghetti
  • 1 to 1-1/2 sticks butter
  • 6 eggs, beaten
  • lots of pepper
  • 6-8 oz grated parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Fry the bacon until it is crisp. Drain and break it into pieces.

  2. Boil the spaghetti in salted water until al dente. If you like, add some bacon grease to the boiling water.

  3. Drain the spaghetti and return it to the pot. Add the butter, pieces of bacon, parmesan cheese, and pepper and mix it up until the butter is melted.

  4. Add the raw beaten egg and mix it quickly until the spaghetti is coated. Serve immediately.

 

Faith on S.T.A.G.E.: Lee Hotovy marks 25 years of student theater

Theater director Lee Hotovy was trying to perform “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” with her troupe of young actors. Hotovy, who founded S.T.A.G.E. student theater 25 years ago, thought the beloved story of four children discovering Narnia would be perfect for the organization’s mission: to evangelize, educate and entertain.

But it wasn’t going well. She couldn’t make the script work for her group, and every time she made a change, it got more expensive. The problems multiplied, and it just wasn’t going to work. Time to pivot.

Hotovy was homeschooling six of her children at the time, and her son suggested a play focusing on boys. Her first idea was to dramatize the life of St. John Bosco, but she quickly realized there was a “John Bosco” right in her backyard. About an hour away from Lincoln, Nebraska, where S.T.A.G.E. is based, was the original Boys Town, founded by Father Edward Flanagan. And that wasn’t the only personal connection. Hotovy’s mother had been a secretary at Boys Town, and her husband’s step-grandfather was one of the original five boys Father Flanagan rescued from the streets.

It felt like God’s will, so she pivoted again. Hotovy holed herself up in a cabin for several days, and somewhat grumpily sat down to write “Flanagan’s Boys: The Story of Boys Town.”

“That initial weekend was a battle of wills between me and God,” she laughed. “I was sort of, ‘Fine, I’ll do it. But you have to provide the Father Flanagan.’”

Hotovy is flexible. Part of her charism is building up kids who don’t have any obvious flair for theater to begin with. Children will join her group so shy that they barely move, but by the time production day comes, they are boldly acting and even singing and dancing before a crowd.

But building confidence is only one of the goals of S.T.A.G.E. Hotovy and her team work hard to produce something entertaining and engaging, with thoughtful dialogue, gripping drama, detailed sets and costumes and, yes, good acting.

God did send a Father Flanagan, and a great one — but not until the very last minute. As Hotovy prepared, she had to keep trusting God would hold up his end.

Relying on God is a lesson Hotovy, 63, has learned many times while producing two to four plays a year for decades. She often prays a novena of surrender to help her remember to hand the whole thing over to him.

It’s a lot. Her organization deals with the typical crises and chaos of any theater group — fumbled lines and missed cues, equipment that malfunctions, or the time when, two hours before Joan of Arc was due on stage, a prop handler accidentally tipped a can of black paint directly over her spotless white costume.

There’s also the added pressure of a specific mission of evangelization. S.T.A.G.E., which stands for Student Theatre and Godly Evangelization, uses drama to teach the faith, to the audience and also to the actors, the stagehands and everyone involved in the program.

Hotovy put on her very first plays in high school, when she and a friend from drama club produced little plays for elementary school kids to enjoy while munching on peanut butter sandwiches.

But in college, she set theater aside and went on to earn a degree in art, pursuing painting and graphic design as a career.

She married and began to raise a family, and some of her kids gravitated toward theater. One of her daughters had a small part in a community production of “Alice in Wonderland,” and Hotovy was disgusted to find that the company had injected sexual content into it, starting with the very first scene.

She thought, “Well, we can do as well as that. Maybe better.”

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

I’m always looking for more Catholic and Catholic-friendly artists, performers, and others involved in the arts (restorers, architects, song writers, choreographers, etc.) to interview for this monthly profile! Please send suggestions to simchafisher at gmail dot com with “artist profile” in the title. Thanks!

Pope Leo may not have a list. But I DO.

Pope Leo, God bless him, seems to be making a big effort to resist a “Francis vs Leo” narrative, and appears to be making intentional gestures of respect toward his predecessor, emphasising unity and continuity.  

If he has grievances, he’s not airing them, and if he has disappointments, he’s not letting them control his behavior. This is clearly the right thing to do. Everything he says and does has huge, universal ramifications. He needs to be very wise, and the last thing we need is more division in the church.  

That being said, it does seem like he has a list. It’s early days, still, but in the first month of his papacy, he’s brought about several things that can’t have been spur-of-the-moment decisions. It’s hard not to feel like he had been thinking quietly to himself over the last several years, “Boy, if I ever find myself in that chair, here’s what I’m gonna do.”  

So now he is, and here are some little things he has done: He reinstated the bonuses for the staff that served during the Conclave. The Vatican website abruptly shed its adorably insane parchment background and now looks like it belongs to this century. And the scandalous, hollow-eyed spooks of Marko Rupnik have vanished from the Vatican media.  

Little things! Not huge changes. But that is how wise leaders do things: Not by storming in and wrecking up the place, but gradually and thoughtfully doing what needs to be done, as he and everyone else get used to the new regime. So far I’m really impressed by his thoughtful and deliberate but clear and direct approach. I’m trying to imitate him and focus on good works without being a jerk about it.   

But yes, I have a list…. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 427: PRODUCE!!!

Happy Friday! If you read closely, you will notice that pizza shows up not once,

not twice,

but three times

this week. The reason for this is that pizza is delicious [winks and says bon apetit]

But there were a few days we managed to escape its saucy and seductive charms, and so the other major theme of the week is FRESH FRUITS AND VEGETABLES. That is to say, produce! Because it is spring! And also, I have a little story to tell. 

One afternoon, I was parked along the street, waiting for a kid to come out of school. It was a fine, sunny afternoon, and I had a bunch of other kids in the car, including one who was learning how to read. She saw a delivery truck with letters on the side, and asked, “Mama, what does ‘p-r-o-d-u-c-e’ spell?” So I turned my head to say, in a loud voice so she could hear me in the back of the van, “Produce.” But it happened that a teenage boy was passing by my open window right when I turned my head, so I startled him by inexplicably shouting “PRODUCE!” right in his face. 

He jumped and scurried away, and I laughed pretty hard at this poor kid, and kept on laughing about it as we drove around town picking up kids and dropping them off and doing this and that. 

And then.

We got everything done and were finally headed home, and as I passed through the downtown, you’ll never guess who I saw. Yes, it was that same poor baffled kid whose face I had yelled in half an hour before. So I did the only thing my heart would allow me to do do: I drove up next to him, rolled down the window, and screamed as loud as I could “PRODUCE!!!!!”  

I should be sorry. But I’m not. That poor kid. 

Anyway, we sure did eat a lot of fresh produce this week. Produce!

SATURDAY
Leftover Delite and pizza

Okay, no produce on Saturday, but that’s not what Saturdays are for. There were not tons of leftovers, especially since I was setting aside the leftover chicken for Sunday; so we got a couple of Aldi pizzas and all was well. 

But speaking of leftovers: Before I went shopping, I had a little tantrum about how much the car smelled like garbage, so I did a thorough investigation, and it turned out to be garbage. See, last time I was at Millie’s house, her son said he was gonna throw out anything I didn’t want, so I emptied her pantry into a laundry basket, and then I ran out of room, so I emptied the rest into what I thought was a clean trash can. I was planning to bring them to Vincent de Paul, but instead of course I drove around with them in the heat for a week, and guess what? That trash can wasn’t empty! It had garbage at the bottom. Which turned into juice and leaked out all over the back of my car. 

So I got a knife and cut the carpet out, and I have no regrets. I also used baking soda and soap and hot water and bathroom tile cleaner with bleach, and scrubbed the hell out of it, and if you’ve ever done a job like this, you will know that . . .it still smells a little bit like garbage. But less every day. 

Anyway, one thing made me laugh: No disrespect, not even a tiny little bit, but here are some of the foods I found in her pantry:

It’s like she was shopping at some special Old Lady Market that you don’t get admitted to until you’re at least seventy years old. Cheddar cheese soup. CREAM OF SHRIMP. DID YOU EVEN KNOW THIS EXISTED? Bless, as my southern friends would say. 

SUNDAY
Chicken quesadillas, chips

Like I said, on Sunday I used the shredded chicken which was leftover from last week’s “enchilada bowls” to make quesadillas with. I also went to the flower farm and used my mother’s day gift certificate, did a bunch of yard work, made supper, and then sorted all the clothes Corrie dragged out of her room last week, and also, yes, brought the non-garbage-smelling basket of food to Vincent de Paul. so I felt pretty accomplished by bedtime. 

MONDAY
Pasta primavera

Here comes the produce. 

I more or less followed this recipe I found on Reddit “from Sirio Maccioni’s Le Cirque.”  It wants you to blanch the broccoli, zucchini, asparagus (from my garden!!), green beans, peas, and sugar snap peas individually. I can see the sense in this, because vegetables are different densities and take different lengths of time to blanch properly. 

On the other hand, I didn’t wanna. So I just dunked it all in boiling water for three minutes, and then dumped it in ice water, then drained it. 

It truly is a pain in the ass of a recipe, and you end up using four different pots and pans. Truly a dinner for which you will want to bring all your mise en place skills into play. 

But dang, it was delicious.

I had half-and-half instead of heavy cream, so I just made a little flour roux, and that worked fine. The vegetables I blanched together all willy-nilly turned out great. Nothing was overcooked or undercooked, and I had zero regrets. This recipe calls for toasted pine nuts, and that was a very pleasant little subtle addition. 

I think maybe one of the kids ate it, but that’s about what I was expecting. I just have to make this dish every 2-3 years and get it out of my system. 

TUESDAY
Waffles, sausage, eggs, fruit salad

Even though I have started selling duck eggs on the side of the road and sometimes make as much as $4 a week, I still have a surfeit of duck eggs; so I used a bunch of them for homemade waffles. 

Some decent breakfast sausages were on sale, and I cooked those, fried up a bunch of eggs, and made a fruit salad with watermelon, strawberries, grapes, and blueberries. 

A very pleasant meal. The fried eggs are chicken eggs, because that’s what the people want. 

WEDNESDAY
Greek chicken salad, cram

I guess the pasta primavera made me feel like it was the 80’s again, which got me thinking about Greek salad, but I got mixed up with the endless salad bar at Papa Gino’s, and narrowly avoided bringing home sesame seeds, orange jello with mandarins suspended in it, cottage cheese, and rock-hard croutons. 

Instead, I heavily seasoned some chicken breasts with lemon pepper seasoning and garlic salt, roasted that, and cut it up, and served it on salad greens with kalamata olives, feta cheese, and cherry tomatoes. And ranch dressing, because I forgot to get anything else. 

It was fine. You know what would have made it a really nice meal? Some soft, puffy, golden pita bread.

You know what I made instead? Cram. 

You KNOW I’ve made pita bread before. I have no idea what happened this time, but yowza, it was terrible. It was Corrie who said it tasted like cram, and I can’t argue with that. It sure wasn’t lembas cake. 

Anyway, here’s my salad bar and cram dinner. 

It was fine. I’ve had worse. 

THURSDAY
Rubber chicken/pizza

Thursday was pizza #2, because Damien and I went to the NH Press Association dinner and left pizzas at home for the kids. And Damien won TWO awards, first place for Investigative Series and second place for Community Service journalism. I am so proud of him!

They serve the same buffet every year: salad and rolls, butternut squash ravioli, roast potatoes, green beans, and chicken, with some kind of cream cake for dessert. I’m not complaining; I just think it’s kind of funny that someone decided this was the ideal menu and must never be altered. Someone’s grandparents never took them to the Papa Gino’s endless salad bar, and it shows. 

This being a collection of journalists, I was sitting next to someone with a flask of Irish whiskey in his breast pocket, but I settled for a can of ginger ale. This was after two weeks of no sugar, and it absolutely kicked my ass. I fell asleep on the way home and woke up very confused and sick, and went to bring my eggs in from the roadside cooler and one pack was missing! I was so mad that someone would steal my eggs! Who does that?!? Then I realized someone had also left money in the money jar. So, like, someone bought some eggs. This doesn’t happen often, and it took me by surprise. 

The next day I woke up with a terrible ginger ale hangover. All are punish’d.

FRIDAY
French bread pizza

YES, PIZZA. I bought several baguettes and some sauce, and any minute now I’m gonna get up and make a batch of mozzarella, and make pizza with that. Today was the last half day of school for all but one kid, who has one last lingering orphan day on Monday, for some reason. This morning I dropped off the kids and then went to the doctor to see what the heck is wrong with my ankle, because it turns out hoping it will go away by itself for six months is not best practice, even if you ice it at night. 

I got X-RAYS, which I LOVE. I just like seeing my bones. They’re so beautiful! I asked the x-ray tech if I could see them, and he was very pleased to show them to me. He said he thinks bones are beautiful, too, and he just thinks it’s really neat that he can see people’s skeletons, which is how I would hope an x-ray tech would feel. 

As maybe you can see, there is no fracture, hooray! The doctor said probably a sprain that triggered achilles tendinopathy, and I just need to wear a brace for 4-6 weeks, which is fine. She didn’t say “go away, you giant dumb baby, and stop wasting everyone’s time,” which is what I always assume all doctors are going to say. 

Anyway, I picked up the kids and we got home and I basically insisted they watch the dumbest TV show they could think of, because it is summer vacation. I feel like I had something funny to tell you, but I didn’t write it down, so now it’s gone. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 426: You may want to write this down

Happy Friday! I didn’t have anything extra on my calendar this week, and it was sunny every day, so I was able to just . . . do the things I am in charge of, and it was immensely satisfying. 

You know what else is satisfying? Food! Especially when you are hungry! I don’t know if other people have made that connection, or if I just invented it.

Here is what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftover Delite and taquitos

Looks like some bo ssam, spiedies, chicken pie, and pizza pockets, plus of course taquitos. 

Note the peppers! A bona fide vegetable!

The family is not nearly as enthusiastic about Leftover Buffet Saturday as they were when I inaugurated it, but I still absolutely love it as a weekly staple. It saves money (I generally spend less than $10 on Saturday meals), it saves time and mental energy (I always know what’s for supper!), and it doesn’t force me to clean out the fridge once a week, but it sure encourages it. And I have a much easier time throwing out Perfectly Good Food if it’s been given a second chance and still didn’t get eaten. Very Marie Kondo, with a lot fewer nameless ziplock bags of sludge lurking in the back of the fridge. So I’m pretty proud of this new thing I invented: Eating leftovers. Feel free to copy this idea. 

SUNDAY
Omelettes and hash browns

Sunday I did the thing I’ve been threatening to do for weeks now: I cleaned Corrie’s room. First I sent her up to bring down one big bag of trash and as many clothes as she could find, and try to put all the books in one spot. Then she went to a birthday party and I went in and did the fling zone method I invented, and I listened to the first two of “The Fall of the Aztecs” episodes of The Rest Is History. I’m not a big podcast person, just mainly because I’m a late adopter in general, and don’t want to rush into any new fads. But The Rest Is History is FANTASTIC. Incredibly entertaining and compelling episodes about people, places, and events you may never even have thought to wonder about, and all rigorously researched and frequently very funny. Damien often plays it in the car when it’s his turn to bring the kids to school, and it is not exactly PG, but in general I would be comfortable playing it for kids ages 10 and up. 

So that took probably three hours, including removing the old bunk bed and putting a single bed in. Well, first I had to repair the bed, because it was Millie’s old bed (it’s a really pretty white wooden bed with spindles at the head and a sea shell carved on it), and I couldn’t get it out of her house, so I ended up uh sawing it in half. The actual repair was fast, but it took me FOREVER to figure out which piece went where, somehow. (There were four pieces. I’m just. . . not good at some things.) 

I knew this would take all day, so I planned a quick meal: Frozen hash browns and omelettes with your choice of cheese, Canadian bacon, and mushrooms. Nobody picked mushrooms. 

I use about three eggs per omelette, but I speed it up by cracking all the eggs into a bowl and beating them, and then measuring out about half a cup of beaten egg per omelette.

They were not delicate and beautiful, because I was TIRED, but they tasted fine. 

Perfectly fine. I lay down for a while and kept thinking about how tomorrow, I was going to put together a pen for the new ducks, so they wouldn’t keep getting stuck in the stream and need Damien to come get them, but then freak out like lunatics when he does come get them. Eventually I realized I was expending so much mental energy thinking about it, I might as well go ahead and do it.

We have an old trampoline frame, which I put together upside-down and then stretched chicken wire around it and fastened it with zip ties. Easy peasy. By the time they ducks are big enough to jump over the fence, they’ll be big enough to roam freely but still come home at night, and we won’t need the pen. I highly recommend having an old trampoline frame in your yard! You can use it to make an enclosed garden, too. 

MONDAY
Pizza

Monday I planted a ton of flower seeds finally, and I potted a bunch of pansies in hanging buckets from Aldi, and made a little flower area — a garden, I suppose you could call it. This week, you may have noticed, I’m in the business of inventing things that definitely haven’t already existed for millennia — in front of the deck

Daisies and day lilies transplanted from elsewhere in the yard, and clematis seeds in the pot on the left. I feel like I also planted some kind of seeds between the lilies, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see. Life is so exciting when you routinely hide your own actions from your conscious mind. Either way, it won’t matter, because any seedlings I plant will get eaten by rabbits.

But I had fun. I finally got to use my new Japanese weeding sickle I got for Christmas, and dang, that thing is useful in about six different ways. It’s also one of the few tools I put the little plastic sheath back onto when I’m done, because dang, that thing is sharp. (Yes I cut myself.) I’ve also been using my hori hori knife a lot. I really think the Japanese are onto something. 

Monday I also found a NIB electric rotisserie on the side of the road, plus a vinyl countertop in great shape! Corrie also got some kind of wooden shelf thing that she feels will be useful. I don’t know where she gets these garbage-picking ways. Some people are just born pack rats. Probably a recessive gene. 

So, a ROTISSERIE. Just think of the meat we can slowly turn. We can eat like Hobbits! We can eat like Henry VIII! I can make SHAWARMA WITH THAT LAMB I’VE BEEN SAVING IN THE FREEZER. I remember when the kids were little, we would go shopping, and the three exciting things were: Free cookie, lobster tank, and “the chicken ride.” And now we shall have a chicken ride of one’s own. 

I also remember going shopping with my son, who was so incredibly terrible in the store that every time I got back I would tell my husband “I am never taking him out of the house again.” And now he is a children’s librarian. You never know. 

TUESDAY
Musakhan and taboon

On Tuesday, I got some chicken marinating in the morning and measured out the ingredients for bread, wrote a ton, and then did some extensive cleaning out of old flower beds. Then, with the gracious permission of Millie’s family, I dug up a white peony and a purple lupine from her yard and moved them into my yard.

The peony is doing great, as peonies tend to do. The lupine is not super happy about the move, but I think it will pull through. I had bought a bunch of crazy cheap perennials from the local garden club, and added those to this garden, so now it has tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, and crocuses in the early spring, and then alliums, speedwell, some asiatic lilies, purple lupines, white and pink peonies, pink dianthus, purple garden phlox, siberian blue irises, and shasta daisies for the late spring/summer. I hadn’t really planned a pink, white, and purple summer garden, but it just worked out that way, and soon it will have a background of goldenrod, so that works out! 

The chicken was mousakhan, or Palestinian chicken. I use this Saveur recipe and I was a little sad because I was a short on sumac, which is an important flavor in this dish, giving it a wonderful sour-bright tang. I subbed in a bunch of lemon pepper seasoning, and it wasn’t quite the same, but not a terrible idea. 

Got home from the afternoon run and made the taboon dough. Here is that recipe:

Jump to Recipe

It has to rise for an hour, so while it was doing that I put the chicken in the oven and did a little more gardening. Then I rolled out the dough and stretched it onto a giant pan and baked it for about 12 minutes.

It was a little bit gummy, to be perfectly honest. I think I rushed mixing the dough. But still, piping hot bread with savory chicken on top, sprinkled with sizzling hot pine nuts and fresh parsley. Pretty, pretty good.

You just tear off what bread you want and then help yourself to chicken, and the juice from the chicken seeps into the bread and it’s pretty great.

I had mine outside. 

And then I went inside and had some more!

WEDNESDAY
Regular tacos, chips and salsa

Wednesday I decided to mow, and gave the pull string thing a mighty yank, and yanked it right out of the lawnmower. So instead of mowing, I tackled the area with the potting table (or, as I absentmindedly called it much to Corrie’s delight, “my plant desk”), where I have just been flinging basically everything yard-related all year. I threw out three bags of rotten crap, tossed some disreputable wood onto the scrap pile, organized my extensive collection of empty flowerpots, dragged a lot of old chickenwire out of the tall grass, and reconfigured the whole thing using that countertop I picked up. 

Pretty swanky! I need to slap something on the underside of the counter to seal the wood and make it last a little longer. There is, in fact, wood sealant in this photo, and it is a thing I may actually do, because it’s June, which is the month when I actually do things. 

Then I quickly made some very boring tacos. I had a “chub” of ground beef — the kind that is wrapped in plastic printed with a photo of meat, which is not as reassuring as they think — and added salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, paprika, and cayenne pepper, and we had shredded cheddar, salsa, and sour cream, and tortilla chips. Basic but fine. I was HONGRY. 

THURSDAY
Chicken enchilada rice bowls, black beans with spinach

Thursday it suddenly got quite hot. When I get hot, I get angry, and suddenly the things I’ve been ignoring become intolerable, so I often end up doing gross and heavy jobs on the hottest days. Hey, it’s an ethos.

This time, I cleaned out the fire pit, which was all overgrown and kind of foul (SOMEBODY had pulled the old straw off the strawberry bed and just dumped it, and it was rotten and stinky and full of slugs); and then I was so sweaty and grubby I figured I might as well face the six tubs of broken bricks and gravel that I had deserted on the side of the patio when I made the patio uh two years ago and have been avoiding thinking about ever since. 

I thought maybe I could use the sand to fill in some eroded spots in the driveway, which is unfortunately uphill and on the other side of the house. So I did one load, then another, and then another, and then decided, you know, death comes for us all eventually, things fall apart, the driveway will erode, and what can one do, really. Definitely not drag any more of this shit up that hill, I don’t care what Kate Bush says. 

I complained about this problem I had invented until Damien suggested maybe the fire pit could use some gravel and sand, and that happens to be downhill. That man is brilliant. 

I also dragged the old plastic play house out of the blackberries and across the yard to the duck house

and was extremely proud of myself for inventing a system where you could store hay in a special little house that’s sheltered from the rain and conveniently located next to the animals, until a friend pointed out that this what’s commonly known as a “barn,” and I didn’t actually come up with it. Then Damien reminded me of the time when I was pretty, pretty tired and came up with the idea of plastic bowls.

Whatever! I am living life fully over here, enjoying my specially curated grass-adjacent flower area, my outdoor plant desk, and my weather resistant hay house, and if you people keep pushing me, I won’t tell you about the incredibly convenient portable food I once invented, which you can carry with you by, get this, affixing it to a piece of bread. It has lots of protein in it, because it is made of nuts, of all things, that you process in some way. I haven’t worked out the kinks yet, but I am thinking they could be blended up into something almost resembling butter. So it would be spreadable! Wouldn’t that be handy? I bet it would taste good, too. 

(This is a faithful rendition of an idea I actually had one time, when I was, yes, pretty tired, and invented peanut butter. You’re welcome.) 

Anyway, on Thursday I invented chicken enchilada bowls. I took some chicken breasts and seasoned them with Tony Cachere’s seasoning, on the principle that, if it’s orange and sprinkly, it’s probably more or less Mexican or whatever. I browned the chicken slowly in oil in a pan, and then shredded it in the standing mixer. Then I sliced up a ton of onions in the food processor and browned them slowly in the pan that I had cooked the chicken in. Then I mixed the chicken and onions together with a can of red enchilada sauce and put that all in the slow cooker. 

I also made a batch of black beans, and I threw some spinach in there, and left that to cook all day. 

Jump to Recipe

Late afternoon, I made a big pot of rice, and we had rice with the saucy, oniony chicken, beans, shredded cheese, sour cream, and corn chips, with lime wedges. PRETTY GOOD. 

I was pretty pleased with myself for inventing this entirely new dish. As I was writing it up just now, I went to add the new tag “chicken enchilada rice bowls” and discovered that I had already used that same tag.

Do you know what this means? I INVENTED IT TWICE. Science should study me. That’s how good I am. 

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle casserole 

Sophia volunteered to make dinner and this is what she wants to make, so I am not arguing. 

And that’s my week! Last night I dreamed I had signed a contract for a new book, and I came up with this brilliant plan of taking every essay I had already sold to this publisher, and just billing them for it again. Toward the end of the dream, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that this wasn’t how you do it, and then I woke up. 

I tell you, between me and the ducks, there’s just not a lot of brain action around here lately. But it is Friday!

Print

taboon bread

You can make separate pieces, like pita bread, or you can make one giant slab of taboon. This makes enough to easily stretch over a 15x21" sheet pan.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups bread flour
  • 4 packets yeast
  • 3 cups water
  • 2 Tbsp salt
  • 1/3 cup olive oil

Instructions

  1. Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.

  2. While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.

  3. Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.

  4. Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.

  5. If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.

  6. Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.

  7. Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.

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Instant Pot black beans

Ingredients

  • 2 tsp olive oil
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 6-8 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 16-oz cans black beans with liquid
  • 1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
  • 1 Tbsp cumin
  • 1-1/2 tsp salt
  • pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. Put olive oil pot of Instant Pot. Press "saute" button. Add diced onion and minced garlic. Saute, stirring, for a few minutes until onion is soft. Press "cancel."

  2. Add beans with liquid. Add cumin, salt, and cilantro. Stir to combine. Close the lid, close the vent, and press "slow cook."

John Wayne was scared

It was John Wayne’s birthday last week. You probably missed it, because Americans are not so madly in love with John Wayne, the ultimate masculine American man, as they used to be. I’m a moderate fan, at best; but on his birthday I read something that made me like him a lot more than I used to.

It’s a short excerpt from a book called “Miracle of Molokai,” and describes what happened when the famous actor visited the once-notorious Hawaiian island where victims of leprosy were segregated, and largely left to fend for themselves, for decades.

Here is an account of how Wayne’s appearance went:

As the plane touched down and taxied toward the welcome committee, hundreds of leprosy patients surged enthusiastically across the rope barrier and almost engulfed the plane. Their disease-scarred faces stared up at the little windows, searching for their famous guests.

Their crippled hands were extended and applauding. At last, the door was opened and John Wayne, America’s original man of macho, the strong, silent champion of little people, the fighter who used his fists and guns against incredible odds at Iwo Jima and in the wild, wild West, stepped out to greet them.

One of the residents of the island describes what happened next: “He took one look at all us lepers staring at him, then turn right around, got back into the plane and closed the door. He said he not coming out, seeing the patients, eh? Was scared. So he went back in.”

What a rotten, bitter end to the story that would have been. But that is not how it ended.

Instead, the other American manly man on board, actor James Arness, who played Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke,” apparently had a little talk with Wayne. I don’t know what he told him, but after a few minutes of suspense, while the crowd waited in silent confusion, the door of the plane opened again and the two men stepped out. The crowd cheered, and Wayne walked up to the microphone and said something extraordinary.

“I came to give you courage,” he said, “but I took one look at what the disease has done to you and I knew I couldn’t do it. I wanted to go right back home. I was scared, but my buddy here, James Arness, talked to me and helped me get my wobbly legs out the door and down the ramp. I’m sorry I was scared and I wish you well.”

It’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard. He acknowledged what happened and why, he gave credit to the man who set him straight, and he apologized for the offense he caused.

I don’t want to make more of this story than is really there. John Wayne was not an especially virtuous man in general, that I’m aware of, and he certainly didn’t claim to be some kind of model Christian.

But when we hear a story of a widely admired man who comes down from on high to bring strength to the lepers — well, you tell me who springs to mind!

(It’s Jesus.)

The problem seems to have been that John Wayne, in this story, thought he was Jesus, who could bring about healing just by virtue of who he was. It turns out he was actually one of the lepers, one of the victims, one of the ones who was afraid and in need of being strengthened.

But here’s the neat part. … … Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image by Hugo van Gelderen / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons