What’s for supper? Vol. 466: Oh toum, where is thy victory?

Happy Friday! I don’t think there was a single day this week when I knew what day it was. Which is why I put every single thing down in my calendar, so I don’t get confused. Unfortunately, I have an incredible knack for entering things on the right day of the week, but the wrong month. So I’m constantly getting notifications like, hey, remember that scholarship deadline? Yeah, that’s gone. Yo, happy one month anniversary of the time you said you’d bring in muffins and didn’t! Also, alert: that lab order has officially expired, and unfortunately you are now dead.

The good news is, these notifications don’t bother me at all, because I somehow accidentally turned off my ringer and the battery died, and my phone is carefully tucked in between some dish towels where I set it down for a second and then just walked away

Did I mention I don’t have any cognitive impairment? This is just what I’m like. This is what peak Simcha performance looks like!

But seriously, I so, so appreciate all the many kind messages, prayers, and donations folks have been sending. We are all doing pretty much fine and chugging along. My special intractable schwannoma headaches are ramping up again, but what can one do. Oh actually, probably surgery. I’m waiting to hear back about that! 

And here is what we had for supper this week!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and stuffed potato skins

Just a regular day of chores and shopping. I also did a big Egg Reconciliation. Duck eggs can sit on the counter unrefrigerated for quite some times, as long as you leave them unwashed; but I was running out of counter space! So I scrubbed them all

and then carefully dropped them into a pitcher of water. The ones that sank and lay flat were the freshest, so I boxed those up and sold them to the Chinese restaurant down the road.

None of them floated (which they do when they’re really stale), but about half of them tipped up a bit on one end, which means they’re not super fresh, but still edible. So I separated those and froze them

, without any specific goal except to stop thinking about eggs for a while. Perhaps I will make a pavlova for Mother’s Day. I really like pavlovas!

The shopping turn kid chose stuffed potato skins for the leftover supplement, and there was tons of other food leftover.

I also heated up the last of the chicken soup with matzoh balls, and it was yummy one last time. 

SUNDAY
Pizza

Actually I must have done the egg thing on Sunday. Anyway I remember hoping to get some other kind of big project done on Sunday, and then not doing it. I did make a yummy pizza. 

I spread half the cheese on the pizza, then adorned it with prosciutto. Then I put the rest of the cheese on and baked the pizza, then topped it with arugula dressed with lemon juice and pepper. Yummo. 

MONDAY
Buffalo chicken drumsticks, garlic knots, raw veggies and dip

Monday I just roasted a bunch of drumsticks with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then tossed them in bottled buffalo sauce and put them back in the oven to reheat saucily while I made some garlic knots with the leftover pizza dough. (I bought three balls of pizza dough out of habit, but there were only FOUR people home for supper, so I made a mere two XL pizzas.) And a nice robust vegetable platter. 

I was gonna roll the baked garlic knots in melted butter, but everyone was super hungry, so I just served them right out of the oven. 

Solid little meal, easy peasy. 

TUESDAY
Pulled pork on waffle fries, raw veggies

Tuesday was a very drivey day, so I started the pulled pork nice and early. Here’s the recipe. 

Jump to Recipe

I found a replacement Instant Pot for cheap on Marketplace, so we are pressure cookin’ again, hooray!

Sonny and I got some stream time. Poor Sonny, he drives me absolutely bonkers when he’s inside. He’s just so gross and smelly and dumb and in the way. But we get along so well outside. He chills out and becomes a noble and sedate enjoyer of nature, and also yearns to protect me from biting ducks, which is endearing. I guess he has just learned to accept that I kind of hate him when he’s inside, but when we’re outside, we’re best friends, and that’s just how it is. 

Anyway, it sure is purty down there. We’ve had a lot of sudden bursts of rain lately, so a pretty good haul of pottery and bottles had washed up on the banks. I like to collect these and put them in a pile by a tree, and admire lichen. I guess probably I’m the one who chills out when I get outside. 

In the afternoon, I gave a kid a driving lesson, and we set a new record for how close you can zoom past a tree without actually hitting it. Also thrilling in its own way, a new light came on on the dashboard. Alas. 

But supper was delicious. I cooked a bunch of waffle fries and sliced up some red onions, shredded the meat, set out some BBQ sauce, and we had tasty pork bowls.

I’m not too proud to tell you that I think this would have been even tastier with some horribly orange, dangerously salty fake cheese melted, or possibly extruded, over the top. But it was very good without, as well. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken shawarma, pita, toum 

Wednesday I spent almost all day cooking, for some reason. I was planning two meals with chicken thighs, but had thriftily bought ones with bone and skin, so I spent a good long time processing about eight pounds of thighs, much to Sonny’s intense interest. (Unfortunately this was Inside Dog, so I hated him, and did not give him any chicken. Also, even though I hate him, I had actually given him some pork yesterday, which he promptly threw up, and I HATE that.) I set aside eight of the most intact ones for the next day, and set the rest to marinating. 

Yes, oh yes, it was SHAWARMA DAY. Here is my oven shawarma recipe

Jump to Recipe

Then I made a double batch of pita dough. Last week’s pita was a little disappointing, so I reverted to this recipe, which is a little more labor intensive (more ingredients, and the frying process is longer and slightly more complicated), but it’s really worth it, and easy enough once you get into the rhythm. Anyway I made the dough and let it rise for an hour and a half, and then I put it into the fridge because it was too early to do the second rise. 

AND THEN, I made some TOUM. I have never heard of this Lebanese garlic sauce before, but I saw a video and it looked magnificent. I settled on the Serious Eats recipe, which calls for a cup of garlic cloves. This turned out to be about two-and-a-half heads of garlic, which I peeled with the aid of one of those little silicone tubes lined with nubbins. 

The recipe says you should split each clove open and cut the germ out, but life was passing me by, so I skipped that. You pulse it up in the food processor with some salt, and then add some lemon juice and make a paste. Then, with the food processor running, you start slowwwwwly adding three(!) cups of oil,

alternating half cups of oil with the rest of the lemon juice and then with ice water.

I’m so bad at adding things slowly, and even though I read the little explanation about emulsification and whatnot, I really just wanted to dump the whole amount in. I just had to keep thinking about that part in The Witch of Blackbird Pond where Kit gets mad and dumps all the cornmeal into the pudding at once, and the family has to eat lumpy corn pudding and that was all that was for dinner, and she feels so bad; and that gave me the fortitude to keep it at a slow drizzle. In this way, I avoided the harsh approbation of my dour and exacting uncle, at least for one more day. But oh, ’tis a weary task. What would grandfather think, to see me this way? 

Well, I whipped it and whipped it, but it was still kinda soupy, and even though I’ve never had or seen toum, I was pretty sure that wasn’t right. Happily, the recipe says if this happens, you can just pull most of the toum out of the food processor, whip up the rest with an egg white until it’s fluffy, and then add the rest back in. Worked great!

I can’t really think of anything with a similar texture. It’s light and fluffy, but . . . I guess unguent is the word? But not really. It’s definitely not greasy, and not exactly creamy. One thing we can all agree about: It is GARLICKY. One little dab of it lights your whole head up like an emergency flare. Wow! I was delighted. 

Then I made some normal yogurt sauce (Greek yogurt, lemon juice, crushed garlic, salt), because People Don’t Like Change, and they had been looking forward to this meal and I didn’t want anyone to be sad. Then I put a bunch of stuff in bowls.

and heaved my sorry self outside to deal with the giant smashed window. NOT a window of the house, I hasten to add. Just one of those gigantic windows I lugged home last year — or was it the year before? — to make into a sunporch, and then didn’t do that. I had dragged one into the back yard and leaned it up against the old bunkbed,

thinking I would surely figure out some way to make this into a little greenhouse. Then came a mighty wind, and we got this:

The good news is, it is safety glass, so there were not super sharp shards of glass everywhere. The bad news is, broken safety glass collapses into millions of teeny little bits when you so much as breathe on it, even if you don’t have ultrasonically powerful garlic breath. Also, I had set this up on an area of the yard where I had made an attempt to do some landscaping, by which I mean I dumped thousands and thousands of little rocks there, back when we were digging up the ground for the pool and had to move thousands and thousands of rocks.

I did kind of enjoy this “mighty whale breaching out through the arctic ice” effect

but most of the rocks are much smaller, very effectively trapping the glass bits in between them, so the glass sinks into the dirt buuuuut you can’t reach it. 

So . . . I’ll just say I tried lots of different ways to clean it up easily, and there is no such thing. And I’m not gonna rent a shop vac, because the only thing that would make this project worse would be spending money on it. So I settled for putting on my goatskin gloves and just gloomily grabbing up handfuls of glass and throwing them in a tub, over and over and over and over again. I did this for quite some time, and there is still a lot of glass out there. And of course in my foot.  

I’m gonna have to get out there with a shovel and excavate the whole thing, which I’m not super excited about. Also, it has since rained very hard a couple of times, so the tub and bag full of glass bits are also now full of water. 

HOWEVER, after the school run I got home, cut up the pita dough and started it on its second rise, cut up a bunch on onions and sprinkled them over the meat and got that cooking, and ALL WAS WELL. BY WHICH I MEAN DELICIOUS. 

The method for this pita recipe is to fry on one side for 30 seconds, then on the other side for 30 seconds, then brush both sides with olive oil and continue cooking for five minutes, flipping it every minute or so. I made eight pieces (I doubled the recipe and just made really big pita), and it did take quite a while, but man, they were yummy. 

They puffed up so nicely in the pan, and came out really fluffy and chewy, with little crisp bits and a rich flavor. Excellent. 

It was all excellent. 

 
Sadly, nobody else would even try the toum! (Nobody except Damien said the food was good, either, but I’ll kill them about that later.) So I ended up with quite a bit of it leftover. It took so much time and effort to make, I decided to go ahead and offer it on my town Facebook page, and it got snapped up right away! So that was nice. The woman who picked it up even gave me a dozen eggs from her chickens, and several heads of garlic from her garden. I’m growing garlic this year, but it’s nowhere near ready to harvest.

Anyway, the meal was just great and I was very proud of myself. A very satisfying way to turn the day around. 

THURSDAY 
Spicy chicken pepper sandwiches, cheese curls

Thursday I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about one of the bedrooms upstairs. I knew supper would be easy, so after I did my calisthenics (I’ve been doing calisthenics lately, I don’t know why) I lumbered upstairs with a bunch of garbage bags and tore into the mess. Six bags of laundry and three bags of trash later, it looked a little better up there! I was powered by the sound of Tom Holland’s spectacularly horrible southern accent. I will never, ever, ever once again be embarrassed when an American tries to do a British accent. Seriously, it will make you feel like you are going insane. 

Damien volunteered to pick up the kids, and he also got a bunch of cleaning supplies and my prescriptions, and I was able to stay home and push through to start scrubbing the walls and ceiling (don’t ask), and I got so much done. 

Eventually I called it a day, took a shower, and then threw together some chicken sandwiches with the thigh meat I had prepped the day before. It’s basically this recipe from Sip and Feast, except I use Tony Chachere’s, and I had cubanelle peppers instead of shishito, and kaiser buns instead of brioche rolls. Neither one is necessarily an improvement; it was just what I happened to have. This is a wonderful sandwich, though, and I think you should make it soon. 

 
With some pointed prompting, the child thanked me for cleaning her room, and then I slithered off to bed. Well actually first I handwashed some dishes, because the stinking dish washer broke. But then Damien fixed it! I guess it was some food and grease had gotten into the control panel or something, which is strange, because the children certainly always rinse the dishes before loading them, as they have been instructed to do. A mystery. 

While I was cooking the chicken, the dog came over and horked up a Brillo pad. Then he lay down and looked regretful for a while, then he went back to hoping intensely for some chicken. Which I did not give him, because, dude.

FRIDAY
Tuna sandwiches, possibly risotto

Today Damien is working on my car, and he also got a new coil or something for the water heater (we’ve been taking lurkworm showers for a while now, which is kind of discouraging), and also a pipe for the basement, because when the kitchen sink pipe broke, it leaked dirty kitchen water into the dirt basement floor and you know what, that is probably why we have so many flies. HOWEVER. We’re gaining on them, I feel. The flies, the appliances, the children, the mess, the everything. Superabimus, or something like that. Anyway, when I was cleaning I found six pairs of scissors. 

Not to get too edifying on your asses, but I did realize that, as long as I’m going to be digging up a big swath of dirt to clean up all that glass near the patio, I might as well plant something there. It gets TONS of sun, and I might just get one of those giant pouches of mixed seeds and dump it in. Gotta have some fun somehow! 

Don’t forget, make the sandwich!

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Clovey pulled pork – fatty hunk of pork – salt and pepper – oil for browning – 1 cup apple cider vinegar – 2/3 cup apple juice – 3 jalapeños with tops removed, seeds and membranes intact – 1 onion, quartered – 2 Tbsp cumin – 1 tsp red pepper flakes – 2 tsp ground cloves 1) Cut pork into hunks. Season heavily with salt and pepper. 2) Heat oil in heavy pot and brown pork on all sides. 3) Move browned pork into Instant Pot or slow cooker or dutch oven. Add all the other ingredients. Cover and cook slowly for at least six hours. 4) When pork is tender, shred.  

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Clovey pulled pork

Ingredients

  • fatty hunk of pork
  • salt and pepper
  • oil for browning
  • 1 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 2/3 cup apple juice
  • 3 jalapeños with tops removed, seeds and membranes intact
  • 1 onion, quartered
  • 2 Tbsp cumin
  • 1 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 2 tsp ground cloves

Instructions

  1. Cut pork into hunks. Season heavily with salt and pepper.

  2. Heat oil in heavy pot and brown pork on all sides.

  3. Move browned pork into Instant Pot or slow cooker or dutch oven. Add all the other ingredients. Cover and cook slowly for at least six hours.

  4. When pork is tender, shred.

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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.

I don’t care what Trump posts on social media

The late great Norm McDonald used to talk about what it was like to discover that beloved actor and comedian Bill Cosby, known far and wide as “America’s Dad,” was actually a rapist. McDonald said a friend of his told him the worst thing about the story was the hypocrisy. 
 
 
Let’s keep that in mind as we talk over the events of the week. 
 

Perhaps you saw Donald Trump’s dumb picture of himself as a divine healer, before he deleted it, and then said he just meant to show himself as a Red Cross doctor or something. Here is the image he posted:​

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Maybe you also saw his insane little rant about the Pope, which he apparently stands by. ​

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Bishop Robert Barron, the founder of Word on Fire Media who serves (and I do mean “serves”) on Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission,” did see it, and he responded. Here is Bishop Barron’s response post on Twitter:

Barron wasn’t the only one who thinks Trump should apologize. Lots of Catholics, and others, including the President of of Iran?? were horrified and offended that he would say and share such things. 

Not me! I don’t care. It’s all dumb and ridiculous and yes, I guess it’s offensive, although my capacity to be offended has been worn down to a mere grease spot these days.

What I do care about is why this, a stupid little social media post calling names and being dumb, is what finally stirred Bishop Barron out of his long, comfortable slumber and spurred him to make a statement (sandwiched in between some bootlicking). This? This is what finally gave his conscience a little twinge? 

The Pope doesn’t want or need an apology for the president being disrespectful, I guarantee you. It’s the kind of thing Trump posts all the time, and always has. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is what Trump DOES. 

So I wonder, Bishop Barron. Should Trump apologize for bombing a girls’ school? 
Should he apologize for referring to our fellow children of God as “animals,” “garbage,” and “people with bad genes?” Should he apologize for sharing an AI video of himself dumping liquid shit on the heads of American citizens? 
Should he apologize for yanking funds away from USAID, consigning thousands of utterly innocent people to death,  while pouring torrents of money into wars of choice, vanity projects, and of course golf?   
Should he apologize for gleefully cramming countless human beings into a man-made hell without even the pretense of a trial?  

I could go on. Bishop Barron, though, is apparently pacing himself, saving his dissent for the crimes that will really echo through the halls of eternity: A post on social media.

Social media matters because it amplifies opinions and shapes people’s worldview. But when that worldview and those opinions are already being translated, in real time, every day, into real life acts of terror and destruction and wholesale degradation of the entire country, only a fool cares what someone posts on social media. Only a fool adjusts his collar and asks for a Truth Social apology when the real world is in flames. 

An insult on social media post isn’t the worst part of what Trump has done, your excellency. The worst part is everything else. 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 465: Life with Abby Normal

Hello! Hello! Hello hello hello. I am so very sorry it’s been so long. I will tell you what we’ve been up to, and why I’ve been off the radar. 

The truth is, most of what has been preoccupying me are stories that are not mine to tell. So I will just ask you, in your kindness, to please pray for the beloved X family, and the beloved Y person, the Z beloved person, and the beloved kid. Multiple rolling emergencies and really painful situations.

Then right before Holy Week, we were finally able to procure a family member’s diagnosis we’ve been fighting for for two years; and then right after that,

I found out I have a freaking brain tumor.

It’s BENIGN, and growing very slowly. I may have had it for ten or even twenty years, but it has only been symptomatic since about October. I got an MRI on March 24th and saw the neurosurgeon on April 7th. It is almost certainly a trigeminal schwannoma, which is rare but almost always benign. But look at this thing!

What the heck!?!

I can try medication to control the symptoms, radiation to keep it from getting bigger, and/or surgery to remove as much as possible, depending on how tangled up in nerves it is. The catch is that radiation sometimes causes scar tissue, so if I do need subsequent surgery, it will complicate matters. 

It’s very unlikely to cause an aneurism, though, so I’ve got that going for me. To my disappointment, it is not what’s causing my migraines, which are global; whereas all my schwannoma symptoms are all markedly on the left, (so I cannot ask them to implant the spare Instant Pot valve I have, which would allow them let the steam out when I need to. And they call themselves specialists, pah.) The way it’s placed, it affects my facial nerves (so, tingling, numbness, headaches, and potentially double vision) but not really scary stuff like speech, memory, or cognition.

Although, as it turns out, knowing you have a brain tumor, but not being able to meet with the neurosurgeon to discuss the implications for a full two weeks does affect your speech, memory, and cognition, especially when you are preparing for Easter, Passover, and a birthday all in the same week.

And that’s the main reason I’ve been struggling to get writing done: Knowing something is wrong, not knowing how serious this is, and not being able to tell anyone, including the kids, because I don’t really know anything! So it’s a huge relief to actually have some information. 

To put it into perspective, the neurosurgeon made an appointment for six months to check in with me, in case I haven’t made a decision by then. So yes, I have to deal with it, but it’s not a, yanno, BRRRRAINNNN TUMORRRRR!!!! It’s just a . . . brain tumor. Which is still not IDEAL, but you know, I got the initial MRI in the evening twelve days before Easter, feeling like it was silly to make such a big deal out of some little stuff, and probably I was just imagining it anyway, and probably if I learned how to hold my neck right, my symptoms would go away.

Then the next morning I opened up the portal expecting them to say everything is fine and I must have just tweaked a nerve by chewing gum too forcefully or something.

Instead it said “tumor” and “neurosurgeon,” and I closed my eyes and some tears leaked out, and then I was like, “Okay, Jesus. I did not ASK for a tumor. So clearly this must be YOUR tumor. So I am officially handing it over to you.” And it has been a pretty light burden since then. (With some more crying, but I always cry at Easter anyway.) 

So now I just have to figure out what to do. Right now, for various reasons, I’m leaning toward surgery, preferably at the end of the summer. I would be in the hospital for 2-3 days, and recovery would be 4-5 weeks. Prolly gonna keep most of my hair and get an interesting scar behind my ear, and my skin will not enjoy the radiation I guess. The surgeon did say I might struggle with chewing and talking for a bit, and I did say BUT THOSE ARE MY TWO FAVORITE THINGS TO DO. 

Any. Freaking. Way. Life goes on, and Damien has been an absolute rock. He has been really sick with a horrible sinus infection for most of Lent, but in callous disregard for his illness, the cars have both been breaking repeatedly, sometimes simultaneously, and also Sophia’s car, too; and also the water heater, the bathroom sink, a drain pipe in the basement, and half a dozen other things I’m forgetting about, have been breaking. Yesterday we drove home from the dentist, got out, and the door fell off. 

Which I have never seen before! But he has just been going ahead and watching tutorials and ordering parts and fixing everything, one by one by one by one, and even saying things like, “It’s okay if  you want to get rid of this loveseat you just asked me to pick up from Facebook Marketplace, and find another one, and I will pick that one up, too.”

We didn’t get a nuclear war, so that was good. The first round of eggs we put in the incubator didn’t hatch, so we just started a second batch. None of the peach pits I planted have sprouted, but my rhubarb is suddenly thriving, the crocuses are coming in thick and gorgeous this year, and even though the snow plows threw tons of gravel up over my garden, the daffodils are just ignoring it and poking through anyway. Jesus is risen, the sun comes up every stinking day, and life is good. Gonna build Corrie’s tree house this spring if it kills me. 

NOW, who wants to see the strawberry Tom Servo cake with cream cheese frosting I made for Irene’s birthday?

Poor guy is leaning pretty badly, but I was proud of him anyway. I was also pretty pleased with the earrings I made her, and it turns out carving wood and twisting up little bits of metal are a really good way to occupy your mind, so you don’t go crackerdog.

I guess I will just do a quick round-up of foods, starting with Passover. All my Passover recipes are here. 

We had cinnamon garlic roast chicken: 

chopped liver, gefilte fish, and spinach pie bites:

roast lamb:

Chicken again, and charoset:

Of course we had chicken soup with matzoh balls, but I forgot to take pictures. This year, I decided to try using seltzer in the matzoh balls, which is supposed to make them light and fluffy. It worked a little too well, and about half of them fell apart! I’ll probably go back to the can recipe next year, and just take my chances. 

Yes, I was worried there wasn’t enough dessert: 

I did the same thing I did last year with the sponge cake, and squeezed fresh lemon and orange juice, then forgot to add them. So I made a syrup with half the juice, poked a bunch of holes and let it soak in; and then I made a glaze with the rest and poured it over the top. Pretty nice. 

Several of the big kids were able to come over, the other kids brought a guest, and we had a lovely seder, even though we never did find the beautiful illustrated haggadahs. Here is Corrie reading the four questions: 

Then we went to the Easter Vigil, which was three hours long and very beautiful and threeeeee hours long. Got home, set out the kids’ baskets, and went to sleep. I spent most of Easter Sunday in bed and I didn’t even feel bad about it. 

We kind of muddled through the rest of the week with leftovers, Aldi pizza, and bagel sandwiches. Then Wednesday I chopped up and heated up the leftover lamb and leftover chicken from Passover,

and I made some pita and we had extremely delicious gyros. Some of the pita turned out a little . . .unpuffy . . but it was still an excellent meal, which we ate with the pita still hot from the pan. I had mine with lamb, red onion, yogurt sauce, feta, tomatoes, and hot sauce. 

Scrumptious.

Then yesterday morning, I quick pickled some carrots and got some pork marinating with onion, garlic, sugar, pepper, and fish sauce, and roasted that up right before supper 

and we had banh mi on toasted baguettes, and some of us added chopped liver. Banh mi is already the queen of all sandwiches, and the chopped liver puts it right over the top. 

Insanely delicious. 

Not sure what we are having today, but it is MEATSTER, so I may spring for some hamburgers or something. 

And that’s-a my story!

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 464: I fell into a burning ring of prosciutto

Happy Friday, SUCKERS. How’s the Lenten fasting going? How’s all those lentils and broth treating you? I bet it never even occurred to you that you could spend your entire Lent feasting on the most sumptuous, opulent dishes imaginable! And all it takes is to be a fairly crappy Catholic!

That is the route we took this week. So, sorry about your custody of the eyes and whatnot. 

SATURDAY
Burritos, chips and queso

Friday night, Damien and I zooped away to Vermont and had two entire nights at a rustic cabin at Camp W. It’s a summer camp and adult retreat venue, but they rent out their cabins in the winter, and we snagged a lovely one. This little cabin had electricity and a pellet stove, but no running water. It snowed on and off, and we were nearly alone on the side of the mountain, except for six lively and friendly outdoor cats, and the sound of various wind chimes, and the wind. We ate a lot of candy and listened to music and read our books and did very, very little. 

We did go snowshoeing on Saturday. Snowshoeing is hard, and I was like, why are we doing this thing that makes walking harder? I keep stepping on my own feet! Then I clomped right past a footprint that was about 18 inches down into the snow, and I realized I was clomping along right on top, rather than 18 inches down. So that’s why you do it!

Later, we drove into town and got beef barbacoa burritos at Tito’s Taquieria, and holy cow, that was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. 

SUNDAY
Ragu and fettuccine, salad, fresh bread, sorbetto 

Sunday morning, I woke up early in the cabin and thought there was a fire truck outside, casting a red light on the wall. So I got up and stepped outside to investigate, and it was the sunrise!

A really blessed spot. When we were snowshoeing, we found some way more rustic cabins that are part of the summer camp. They are were just three sides of a shed with built-in bunks, and the fourth side is open to the east, except further up the mountain than we were. Imagine waking up to this! It would be life-changing. 

We packed up somewhat reluctantly and had a hair-raising skiddy slide drive down the mountain, and made it to Mass at St. Michael’s church, which was our adopted parish several years ago. Nice to be back. Then we had some breakfast in town, got home and did some whirlwind prep for a visit from my friend, Danielle  McLellan-Bujnak, who is something of a globe-trotter but happened to be in the New England. 

For dinner, Damien made a big pot of his delicious ragu. He more or less follows this recipe, and this time he used veal, pork, and beef. I started some bread dough rising

Jump to Recipe

and threw together a big salad, and got the bread in the oven just before Danielle came. We snacked on crackers, grapes, and a nice mango cheese from Aldi while Damien finished cooking, and then we had a really lovely meal. Which I took zero pictures of, and also zero pictures of Danielle — which is how you can tell we were having a REALLY interesting conversation. 

And then we collapsed like bunches of broccoli! Quite a weekend! The kids did great. They fed themselves, did their chores, cared for the pets, and got to Mass all on their own. Amazing kids. 

MONDAY
Meatball pizza

Monday I made three pizzas, and Damien and I agreed that meatballs only get better as they age, so I topped one pizza with meatballs from Elijah’s birthday, which was . . . kind of a while ago. Delicious. 

The kids just had cheese pizza, though. Cowards!

TUESDAY
Irish breakfast, banoffee pie

Tuesday was St. Patrick’s day, and everyone in the house except me is Irish, but I think I’m the only only who likes corned beef boiled dinner. So I went with the alternative meal: Irish breakfast, modified. Baked beans, roast mushrooms with parsley, roast tomato halves, bacon, oven fries, fried eggs, and big hunks of toasted bread. It involved a LOT of moving pans in and out of the oven and microwave, but I got it all hot at the same time, and I was proud of that.

Extremely yummy meal.

I made my annual crack about how I don’t now what the Irish were complaining about; seems like the eat really well. No one laughed, which no one ever does, which is why I keep saying it. 

I also, on a whim, made a no-bake banoffee pie, which is not strictly Irish, but it’s pretty popular in Ireland, and it’s something we don’t usually have. I kind of fudged the recipe, and made a graham cracker crust (half a box of graham crackers pulverized and mixed with three tablespoons of sugar and a stick of melted butter, pressed into a pie plate and baked for ten minutes). For the last few minutes of baking the pie shell, I sprinkled some white chocolate chips on the bottom and let them heat up, then took it out of the oven and spread the melted chocolate over the bottom. 

I made a kind of caramel from sweetened condensed milk, brown sugar, and butter heated up slowly in a pan, and then I spread that on top of the crust and stuck it in the fridge for a few hours. Then at dessert time, I cut up a few bananas and spread the pieces on top of the caramel, and whipped up some heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla, and spread that on top of the bananas. 

It was . . . not beautiful. The pictures I took honestly made it look gross, so I’ll skip those. It was pretty good! Insanely sweet, of course. The kids said they’d rather have just plain banana cream pie going forward, and that can definitely be arranged. 

Looking at the calendar, I see we had a meeting with the school in the morning (and while we were there, got a phone call informing us that we had forgotten another meeting somewhere else at the same time, whoops) and then the kids were supposed to do a “wax museum” history project in the evening, so no wonder I was a bit stressed about getting that cooking done. As it turned out, the kids were too sick to go out anyway. Everyone has been taking turns getting sick and then re-sick this week. Late winter’s last revenge, I guess. 

WEDNESDAY
Bossam, rice, roast broccoli and cauliflower 

Wednesday I sadly realized I had forgotten to dry brine the pork the night before, so we couldn’t really have proper bossam. I had a pork loin rather than a shoulder anyway, so I was already treading on thin ice with this dish. I skulked around for a different recipe, couldn’t find the hoisin sauce, got mad and took apart the entire refrigerator and scrubbed the whole thing out and yelled at everybody, and decided we’d just go ahead and have second rate bo ssam for dinner.

So I let the meat brine in salt and sugar for a few hours, anyway, and then started cooking it in the early afternoon. I cut it into pieces, thinking maybe increasing the surface area would  . . . something something, I don’t know. Then I cooked some rice on the stovetop, because my Instant Pot briefly started working again but then I dropped it, and now it definitely doesn’t work. I found some broccoli and cauliflower in the back of the fridge and cut it up, tossed it with olive oil, sesame oil, salt, and garlic powder, and roasted it. It came out looking like it had seen God

and it tasted pretty okay. By which I mean some of the kids picked out the broccoli and ate that, and I had a giant bowl of both so I could ride the fart train all night, not that I need any help with that. 

The meat turned out, eh, fine. The magic of salt and sugar, not to mention an additional splash of brown sugar, cider vinegar, and sea salt toward the end, went a long way for the outside of it 

but it was, unsurprisingly, quite dry. Oh well, it was a hot meal with a protein, a starch, and a veg. 

Somehow we survived. 

THURSDAY
Suppli, ragu and fettucine, salad and olives, prosciutto bread, zeppole de san giuseppe 

St. Joseph’s day! St. Joseph is our family’s patron, and even though I’m a little fuzzy on how the Italians got involved, we always have a big Italian meal on his day. I was, frankly, exhausted, and did not have the energy to put together a fancy antipasto plate like I usually do. We had tons of pasta, ragu, and salad in the house, and Lucy had a half day, so she made her yummy suppli (arancini). 

Jump to Recipe

I did want to make zeppole, though, because I LIKE zeppole. They’re so fancy and cute, and actually quite easy to make, although there are a lot of steps. I use this recipe from Sip and Feast, which is a baked version, rather than fried. First you make a choux dough, which comes together very easily. Then you pipe a disc with a ring on top for each pastry, and bake them. 

I wish I had left them in the oven for another 2-3 minutes, but I was so afraid of burning them! So they were the tiniest bit damp in the very middle, oh well.

Anyway then you make the custard filling, which is simple but requires a lot of stirring. You chill it, and then fill the pastries with a piping bag. I do it by cutting the tops off, filling the inside like a sandwich, putting the top back on, and then adding a little extra bloop of custard on top. Then you sift powdered sugar over the top, add a cherry, and there they are. 

I think I could have made the custard a little thicker and it would have piped prettier, but they were quite nice as is. I used duck eggs for the first time this year, and they are so rich and bright! 

Oh! Speaking of ducks, I took this picture on Thursday morning. 

Doesn’t look like much, but it’s exciting because (a) this is the first time the snow has melted enough so they can get out of their little pen. Which is nice for them, and really nice for us, because now we don’t have to lug water for them. They can go get it themselves.

But the MAIN (b) thing is that there are five ducks here. One of them (we think it was Tulip, but we’ve kind of lost track) went missing last Wednesday. We’ve been hearing coyotes, so we sadly assumed she had been eaten up. But on Thursday morning, she turned up again, hollering loudly to be let in! Where was she for six days? How did she, who can barely walk across the yard without stepping on her own feet, survive on her own all that time, especially when there was a heavy snow cover and nothing to forage? No idea! But we have five ducks again, and we are very happy. 

Oh I forgot, I also decided to make a prosciutto bread for St. Joseph’s day — also a Sip and Feast recipe. This one was delivered straight into my inbox, so I was powerless. The only hitch is, I didn’t read the recipe ahead of time, of course not, so I was happily mixing the dough when I came across the words “Refrigerate for at least 12 hours, but ideally 24 hours before using.”

Ah, well.

I refrigerated it for four hours and told it to just do its best, which it did. 

The recipe is fairly adaptable, regarding what kind of meat and cheese you stuff it with. What I had was a package of stuff from Aldi

plus some decent provolone. So I chopped all that up, peppered the dough good, and pressed in the meat and cheese and sloshed some olive oil over it

because the recipe called for pancetta, plus some of the rendered fat. Honestly I had mostly abandoned the recipe by this point. Anyway I rolled it up. You’re supposed to just make a tube, but for some reason I made a spiral, like a cinnamon bun. Then I twisted it, like you’re supposed to, and then I set it to rise again, and then brushed it with yet more duck egg, and baked it. 

It was looking very likely! But it was a little disappointing when I cut it open. I think the spiral rolling was a mistake, and that limited how much the bread could puff while it baked. Although honestly, it had such an abbreviated time to rise, that was probably the main issue. And the extra olive oil probably didn’t help. Anyway, it was rather DENSE inside. 

It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t super bready! Honestly I would have gone bananas over this when I was a kid, but Damien and I are the only ones who even tried it, so I probably won’t go to any lengths to make it a second time and try to correct my mistakes. 

Anyway it was quite a yummy meal altogether. 

Lucy’s suppli were delicious, and I set out some olives I found, and the ragu had of course only improved with time. 

We managed to say the litany to St. Joseph in the evening, so the day wasn’t ENTIRELY about carbs, and that was that. Best patron ever. 

FRIDAY
Grilled cheese, tomato soup 

Last night I fell asleep at about 8:30, and didn’t wake up until almost 9 this morning. The kids have no school for various reasons, and we have teacher conferences and then adoration this afternoon, and grilled cheese and canned soup sounds like about the right speed. If we can make it through the next week without any feast days, I think we’ll be okay. 

Although while I was looking for the link for the prosciutto bread recipe, I saw a recipe for pizza rustica, and oof. It looks so good. I feel like we had it a few times when I was little, and maybe I’ve been wanting it ever since. It’s also possible my brain is struggling through Cheese Overload and am not thinking clearly. Stay tuned, I guess. 

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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.

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Suppli (or Arancini)

Breaded, deep fried balls of risotto with a center of melted mozzarella. 
Make the risotto first and leave time to refrigerate the suppli before deep frying. 

Ingredients

  • 12 cups chicken stock
  • 8 + 8 Tbs butter
  • 1 cup finely chopped onions
  • 4 cups raw rice
  • 1 cup dry white wine
  • 1 cup grated parmesan cheese

To make suppli out of the risotto:

  • risotto
  • 1 beaten egg FOR EACH CUP OF RISOTTO
  • bread crumbs or panko bread crumbs
  • plenty of oil for frying
  • mozzarella in one-inch cubes (I use about a pound of cheese per 24 suppli)

Instructions

  1. Makes enough risotto for 24+ suppli the size of goose eggs.


    Set chicken stock to simmer in a pot.

    In a large pan, melt 8 Tbs. of the butter, and cook onions slowly until soft but not brown.

    Stir in raw rice and cook 7-8 minutes or more, stirring, until the grains glisten and are opaque.

    Pour in the wine and boil until wine is absorbed.

    Add 4 cups of simmering stock and cook uncovered, stirring occasionally until the liquid is almost absorbed.

    Add 4 more cups of stock and cook until absorbed.

    If the rice is not tender by this point, keep adding cups of stock until it is tender. You really want the rice to expand and become creamy.

    When rice is done, gently stir in the other 8 Tbs of butter and the grated cheese with a fork.

  2. This risotto is wonderful to eat on its own, but if you want to make suppli out of it, read on!

  3. TO MAKE THE SUPPLI:

    Beat the eggs and gently mix them into the risotto.


    Scoop up about 1/4 cup risotto mixture. Press a cube of mozzarella. Top with another 1/4 cup scoop of risotto. Roll and form an egg shape with your hands.


    Roll and coat each risotto ball in bread crumbs and lay in pan to refrigerate. 


    Chill for at least an hour to make the balls hold together when you fry them.


    Put enough oil in pan to submerge the suppli. Heat slowly until it's bubbling nicely, but not so hot that it's smoking. It's the right temperature when little bubbles form on a wooden spoon submerged in the oil. 


    Preheat the oven if you are making a large batch, and put a paper-lined pan in the oven.


    Carefully lower suppli into the oil. Don't crowd them! Just do a few at a time. Let them fry for a few minutes and gently dislodge them from the bottom. Turn once if necessary. They should be golden brown all over. 


    Carefully remove the suppli from the oil with a slotted spoon and eat immediately, or keep them warm in the oven. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 463: Wiggly eggs and other perverse urges

Happy Friday! We’ve had kind of a nutty week that I can only describe as RIFE WITH INTERPERSONAL COMPLEXITY. By which I mean I’ve changed my mind, and from now on I’m going to clean school buses for a living, and raise mushrooms instead of children, and possibly stop speaking entirely, like . . . 

Well, I couldn’t think of a good example, so I googled “vow of silence who took” and this is the first result that popped up:

And now I feel better! Also we’ve had ABOVE FREEZING TEMPS all week, and dang, it’s nice. Water flowing, grass showing, fewer ice patches, more mud puddles. Good stuff. 

Okay, here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Pretty luxurious leftovers

Look at this! 

Leftovers get a bad rap, but that’s just because they haven’t had Saturday night at my house. I wish there were, like, some hungry seminarians who lived next door or something. Or maybe we should buy a goat. 

SUNDAY
Meatball subs, curly fries, birthday cake

Sunday we celebrated a birthday, and the kid in question requested meatball subs, curly fries, and a chocolate cake with Kit Kats and Reece’s Peanut Butter cups, and not too much frosting. 

I made the meatballs with ground beef and ground pork, eggs, panko bread crumbs, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, and Worcestershire sauce, and cooked them on a rack in a hot oven, then transferred them to the crock pot with jarred sauce. 

I did a three-layer box cake, but made the frosting from scratch. I creamed together 1.5 sticks of butter and 4.5 cups of powdered sugar, then a little salt and three ounces of melted, unsweetened chocolate. Then I just added milk until it was the consistency I wanted. 

The cake turned out . . . fancy! 

The design on top is the logo he uses to sign his artwork. 

Twenty-two candles, and it was a hit. 

The kids were trying to work out how many birthday cakes I have made over the years, and I really don’t know. Ten kids, and the oldest is 27, so you can work out that formula; except some of them had multiple cakes in a year, and occasionally they would request tiramisu or something instead. Anyway, it’s a number that’s so high, you’d think I’d be better at decorating by now! I always give it my all, anyway. Never an unenthusiastic effort; this is my pledge. 

MONDAY
Chicken ranch wraps, chips, raw vegetables

Just chicken tenders on tortillas with shredded lettuce, shredded pepper jack cheese, and ranch dressing. I actually love this and would make it every week if I could get away with it. I love wraps of all kinds. 

I am working on increasing my vegetable consumption. I’ve been serving big platter of raw veggies early in the week, and then I will have them ready to snack on for the rest of the week, and I have actually been doing it. I don’t even have any illusions of losing weight at this point; it’s just a matter of self respect. Hard to respect self that is coated in orange cheez dust. 

TUESDAY
Chicken biryani, naan

I had four big chicken leg quarters that were on sale, and I really never know what else to make with them besides chicken biryani, which Damien and I happen to love. They get seasoned and then seared. 

Then you take the meat out of the pan and start building up the rest of it: First ginger and onions, then your spices, then the raw rice, plus cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, and blond raisins. 

I have begun to play pretty fast and loose with the seasonings, but I more or less followed this recipe, except that after I put the meat back in and add the broth, I immediately move it all to the slow cooker, and let it cook all day. That is the only way I’ve ever been able to actually get the rice completely cooked. 

Before I left for the afternoon drive, I made a double recipe of naan dough from King Arthur, except I was out of yogurt so I used sour cream.  I make a double recipe, which should make 16 pieces, but I only make eight, so they come out nice and big. 

Doesn’t look big here, but this pan is huge. 

I keep a wet cloth ready and wipe the burnt flour out of the pan in between frying each piece, and they turned out yummy. Nice buttery taste, and chewy but not tough on the inside, with a little crispness on the edge. Brushing them with melted butter at the end really makes them special. 

I served it all with mint chutney, and some cilantro and some almonds that I pretty much burnt, but it was really tasty meal. I burnt the almonds because I made them in the oven and they burn REALLY fast. Next time, I’ll go back to toasting them in the microwave like I usually do. Although the microwave has reverted to one of its old habits of turning on any time the door is closed, so I get nervous using it, wondering if the next trick is going to involve flames or what (there is always a next trick with our appliances. They can’t just die quietly; they have to be on fire). 

WEDNESDAY
Spicy chicken soup with corn chips and guacamole

Wednesday I had about six chicken drumsticks I forgot to cook last week, and the original plan was chicken tortilla soup, but that calls for chicken breast, which I think is an inferior chicken part for soup anyway. So I roasted the drumsticks with oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, and chili powder and pulled the meat off. 

Then I started throwing stuff in the food processor to make the soup base. I put in two onions, 6 cloves of garlic, a jalapeño, a bunch of cilantro, and about a pound of tomatoes. I whirred that to a pulp, then cooked it in the pot in hot oil to thicken for about ten minutes. Then I put the meat back in and added a bunch of chicken broth. 

The recipe I usually use calls for chiles and adobo sauce and tortilla strips, but I realized I’m really the only one who likes tortilla soup anyway. I offered to the kids that I could make crunchy chili lime tortilla strips, or corn muffins, or even quesadillas, but they didn’t want any of that. So I made a nice bowl of guacamole

and served the soup along with some of those oversized “street corn” corn chips from Aldi, with a little sour cream and cilantro on top of the soup, and it was a highly delicious and nourishing meal. 

The soup was thick and very spicy, and I liked the corn chips much better than tortilla strips. I might have also added some corn and/or beans to the soup if it were just for me, but it was really good as it was. Also I couldn’t find the can opener. 

In situations like this, where the kids just do not want any part of dinner, they generally just go fix themselves whatever they want. They’re all old enough to cook, and they have some general idea that protein=good. Often this means they make omelettes, which is great; but sadly, on this day, what they all wanted was things in cans, and the can opener had really gone thoroughly missing. They were all mad at me about this, for some reason, even though I, too, frequently wish to open cans, and had not hidden the can opener for my own perverse reasons. Anyway,  I guess they all found something, and I have gotten so much better about not caring what they eat, and I enjoyed my soup and guacamole! We did have some bleeding when one kid tried to open a can of Spagehtti-o’s using the stabbing method, but it wasn’t a deep cut, and we did have bandaids in the house for once. Maybe next week, I’ll just serve bandaids. Bandaid omelettes. 

Now that I think of it, I think I actually made the soup on Tuesday, while I was making the biryani, because I knew I was going to be busy the rest of the week. I remember people coming in and asking what was cooking, because it smelled like so MANY kinds of things. 

THURSDAY
Chef’s salad, fresh bread

Thursday I had some apprehension about the meal I had planned. I talk big about not caring about what the kids eat, but obviously I actually care deeply. However, I have to balance food the kids enjoy with food I have time to make and food that isn’t outrageously unhealthy and food we can actually afford in This Golden Age of America, and it’s not always obvious what to make. So I was starting to have my doubts about the chef’s salad. 

Again, to me, this is a pleasant and yummy meal that I’d be happy to eat every other day. I did my best to present it in an attractive way. I even cut the hard boiled eggs with a special wiggly cutter!

Isn’t that cute? There’s a big bowl of greens in the back. Two kinds of cheese, two kinds of meat, cute li’l grape tomatoes. I would have gone ape over this when I was a kid. I even put out some of those crunchy onions that come in a can.

But I still thought maybe it needed to be bulked up a little, qua a meal. So I made some bread, following the King Arthur hearth bread recipe, which is apparently an old classic, but which I have never made before. It was going great, but I started it at the wrong time, and ended up leaving it for the second rise for way, way too long while I was driving around. So by the time I baked it, the loaves had overinflated and then slumped pretty badly. I baked them anyway, and you know what? It was nice bread!

Wonderfully crackly outside and soft and chewy inside. I was pleased, and will definitely make this again, just timed better. I liked the whole meal. 

And I got my dang vegetables. I also got a new can opener, and I’m pretty sure some people had Spaghetti-o’s for supper.  

You know what, though, these kids do like bread with all kinds of nuts and seeds and stuff in it, and I bet this hearth bread can be adapted pretty easily that way. I’m enjoying the novelty of just making single recipes of things, these days. I’m starting to realize how much my cooking has been affected by quantity. Like, there are meals that seem incredibly laborious and/or expensive to me, but that’s because I was serving twelve for so many years. It now feels very freeing to just . . . follow the recipe, as written. It feels like cheating!

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just regular pizza, no tricks!  And Damien and I are planning to be very kind and gentle with ourselves this weekend. It’s been a hell of a year, honestly, and that goes for just about everyone I know. I would bake you all some nice bread if I could.

Anyway, spring is coming, birds are returning, snow is melting, can opener is with us again. I think we’re gonna make it. Poopsmith out! 

Fisher Family Mandatory Lent Film Party limps on!

The Fisher Family Mandatory Lent Film Party! It’s our annual Lenten tradition, except sometimes we don’t do it. This year, we’re sort of doing it. The idea is that we have screen-free evenings in Lent, but on Fridays, we cordially insist the kids join us in watching a movie that has spiritual or moral themes, and which we expect to be worth watching for one reason or another — and which we probably wouldn’t get around to watching otherwise. You can find I think a few dozen previous reviews at the Lent Film Party tag. 

So far this year, we have watched two very different movies: Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison and A Man For All Seasons. We paid $3.99 each to rent these on Amazon Prime, but they’re both available on other platforms as well right now.

Here are some quickie reviews!

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) 
where to watch

I had no idea what to expect from this movie, but since it has Deborah Kerr as a young Irish nun and Robert Mitchum as a hard-bitten marine, and they’re both stranded on the same South Pacific island, I kind of assumed smoochiness would ensue. I will spoil it for you: They do not end up together. 

It’s a John Huston movie, but it’s no African Queen or Treasure of the Sierra Madre. There’s nothing wrong with it; it’s just not that deep. The story moves along fine, there is a decent amount of suspense, and you do wonder what will happen to the characters. It’s very nice to see the faith, and holy orders, being explained simply but clearly by an intelligent, admirable woman. And Robert Mitchum is always fun to watch. 

And that’s it! It’s a reasonably entertaining movie that more or less held our interest. It’s hard to imagine anyone making this movie today without cramming in a romantic entanglement (although Wake Up Dead Man managed, come to think of it. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND WAKE UP DEAD MAN, BY THE WAY.) There was not much to talk about after Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, but most of us liked it well enough. Here’s the trailer, which is a little goofy, but gives the general idea. 

 

Suitable for all but very sensitive viewers. It has a little violence, nothing gory, and lots of shooting and bombs falling, and Mr. Allison gets drunk at one point. I feel like it shows a Japanese soldier’s butt cheek at one point. 

***

A Man For All Seasons (1966)
where to watch

This movie deserves all the hype.

First, the casting is impeccable, and the acting is thoroughly persuasive. Robert Shaw (whom my kids know as Quint from Jaws) is tremendous as Henry VIII. You feel like you’ve definitely met this guy, and this is exactly how he would act if he were the king (bad); and Damien says that, as far as he can tell, the portrayal is pretty historically accurate. But also the wife, the daughter, the son-in-law, the friend, the traitor, and of course the exceedingly unhealthy cardinal (Orson Welles) are all fully formed characters who deliver subtle, compelling performances.

So too, most of all, does Paul Scofield as Thomas More, who comes across as kind of a pain in the ass who is aware he is annoying people, but truly can’t help being who he is, and putting who he is thoroughly in God’s service. (This is a message that was kind of good for me to hear right now, for reasons.) But the acting is good enough that you can really see his distress toward the end, as he struggles to convey his motivation to his family, even as he sees them suffering because of it. Lots of under-the-surface emotions portrayed in several characters. 

I also appreciated seeing a saint who is heroically holy without being scrupulous or self-immolating. He doesn’t want to die! He wants to live, and keeps looking for ways to stay alive in ways that won’t violate his conscience. Sort of reminds me of Gianna Molla. So many people believe she found out she had cancer and immediately embraced or even pursued death as a sacrifice for her baby. In fact, she hoped all along that they would both survive. An often-misunderstood point about sainthood.  I also like how he makes room for other people’s weaknesses. He sees through his son-in-law, but allows his daughter to marry him anyway. He recognizes that the law only requires him to pay a certain fare, but when the boatman tells him it’s harder to row upstream, he pays him more than he’s required to. He has such high standards for himself, and so much compassion for everyone else. 

The dialogue requires you to listen attentively. They speak quickly and they say a LOT (it was originally a play). This is the part the kids struggled with the most. There’s a lot of talking, but the dialogue is all carefully crafted and illuminating, well worth paying attention to, and sometimes pretty funny.

The pacing works perfectly, but you have to allow it to not be an action movie. I thought it was important that they show people in great haste and agitation — but still having to row laboriously up and down the Thames, sometimes throughout the night, to deliver urgent messages. That illustrates one of the themes of the movie, which is having to work within the framework (or season?) you are given. That’s what Thomas More does: He is who he is, and that’s what he has to work with. The world is as it is, and you have to understand it thoroughly in order to discern how to behave morally. I need to develop this thought more — something about the tension between what changes and what is unchangeable —  but I’d need to see the movie again. 

Anyway, the settings and most of all the costumes were so fabulous, I almost passed out. I would absolutely watch this movie again with no sound, just to stare at the various fabrics. I also admired how comfortable the characters seemed in the period clothing. They wore them like clothing, not costumes. Same for the setting. They seemed really at home in the 16th century, and not just moving around in a museum. 

All that said, most of my teenagers and young adults didn’t think much of it. They didn’t like the characters, they got frustrated at all the talking, and they wanted more exciting things to happen. This is more or less how I felt about the movie when I was a teenager. My 15-year-old daughter, however, was spellbound, and didn’t take her eyes of the screen the whole time. She found the drama moving and compelling. So, I guess it depends on the kid! 

It’s suitable for all ages, although my youngest (age 11) fell asleep halfway through. It might possibly be upsetting for sensitive viewers toward the end, when Thomas More is in a dungeon and has an emotional final visit with his family. And of course it is a martyrdom story, and it does have that scene. You don’t see the death, but you hear it. 

This is a pretty thin review of a great movie, but so much in-depth commentary has been written about it, I’ll just urge you to watch or re-watch it. It was much more entertaining than I remembered, and gave me a lot to think about, even though I’m already very familiar with the story. Some of it felt extremely relevant to 2026 — this scene in particular (starting about 1:51)

“Where would you hide, Robert, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, coast to coast. Man’s laws, not God’s; and if you cut them down …  do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

Yeah, go watch it! So good. 

Not sure what we’ll watch next. I would like to finally watch Of Gods and Men, which I haven’t seen, and I would like the kids to finally see The Passion of the Christ, which they’ve been resisting, but out of sheer honesty, if they can sit through Nosferatu and other gross stuff, they can watch this one. Out of sheer honesty. 

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 462: Mutter love

Happy Friday! We’re about a month away from Easter, can you believe it? I don’t even know if I mean it’s that soon, or that far away. Either way, it feels unreasonable. 

A few months ago, I was having a spell of OH I HAVE RUINED MY CHILDREN’s LIVES, WHY HAVE I BEEN SUCH A WORTHLESS MOTHER ALL MY DAYS, so when an ad for the circus came across my feed, obviously I bought a bunch of tickets. So that is what we did on Saturday, rather than go shopping. 

SATURDAY
Pizza

We arrived in the city early and I took this photo which is just begging to be made into a meme. Feel free to use it if you need it!

We had some yummy pizza at Caesario’s, where the pizza is delightfully garlicky, and positively gloppy with stretchy cheese. Then we went to the arena where the circus was, and IT WAS LOUD. 

It was, to be honest, kind of incoherent — I mean, even for a circus. I been to circuses before, and they generally have some kind of loose theme, even if the various acts could be anything at all. This particular circus was, I guess, 90’s pep rally style, and they had a singing ringleader, a DJ who did absolutely nothing, a sassy robot dog, and a breakdancing red dragon. I dunno. The kids liked it, so that’s what matters!

Some of the acts were truly thrilling and amazing, but there was also a ton of filler, and some of the acts were actually a little dull, and the clowns were actually terrible. And this was Ringling Bros, not some rinky dink outfit! But as I said, the kids liked it, and we all had a good time. 

Got a kind of cool shot of the night sky as we went back to the car. 

And it was a fine way to wrap up February vacation. 

SUNDAY
Oven fried chicken, biscuits, glazed carrots

Sunday I ran out to the store and grabbed a bunch of miscellaneous things that seemed like they were reasonably priced, and I figured I would work out a menu later. I used the drumsticks I got to make oven fried chicken

Jump to Recipe

and biscuits. After I made the biscuits, I was pretty low on butter, so the chicken was cooked in mostly oil with a little butter, rather than my usual half-and-half. I mean 50% of each, not that I cook it in half-and-half. 

I used Recipe Tin Eats recipe for the glazed carrots, except, again, all olive oil rather than some oil and some butter. I made them early in the oven and then warmed them up later on the stovetop, because I knew the oven was gonna be busy. 

Then I went to make the biscuits

Jump to Recipe

and I’ll be durned, I was also out of white sugar. So I used brown sugar. I halved the recipe and made it into eight large biscuits. 

Meal turned out great. The chicken was gorgeously crispy, and I seasoned it nicely. 

And that was that. I think that was the last recipe I used all week. 

MONDAY
Aldi pizza

Monday I had  a lady check-up and a mammogram. I made the face you’re supposed to make when you get a mammogram 

but actually I have never found them to be terrible. I think if you have very small breasts, it’s pinchy, but that is not a problem I myself have encountered. I did ask the tech if I could see the images, which is something I do every time I get something imaged, and it was cool! With all the ducts lit up, they look like Power Boobs. I do like seeing the inside of my body, as long as it’s on a screen. 

I think it may actually have been Monday that I went shopping, because I remember we had Aldi pizza. I dunno. Anyway we had pizza. I think I probably spent Sunday filling out forms. I have gotten . . . a little behind on my forms, and I’m going through a season in my life when filling out forms is the main thing I do. I hate it and it sucks, but I got that mofo done.

TUESDAY
Carnitas, beans and rice

Tuesday I had this giant pork shoulder and no real plan, but I did have the ingredients for carnitas, so that was settled. Oh, I guess I did use a recipe for that

Jump to Recipe

although I pretty much wing it. Hack up pork, salt pepper and oregano, brown it, then simmer it with cinnamon sticks, orange chunks, bay leaves, oil, and Coke. 

You cook it way, way down and then take the meat out, shred it, and brown it up

While it was cooking, I made some okayish beans and rice. Just rice, kidney beans, diced jalapenos, diced tomatoes and juice, I guess probably garlic and onion, and I imagine cumin, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper. We were out of chili powder, sadly. 

Served on tortillas with sour cream and cilantro. 

I have spoiled my family by usually making guacamole with this, so there was a little muttering, but oh well. I thought they were yummy. 

I think it was also Tuesday we got a call from the school saying that a certain child had insisted on being goalie and then, when child got hit with a soccer ball, flew into a rage and spent kind of a long time muttering about what fate the person who had kicked the ball deserved. This is not the first time we have gotten a call from a school, informing us that a child has engaged in muttering. I guess I’m glad they’re paying attention? But also, their father is Irish and their mother is Ashkenazi Jew. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Fishers gotta mutter about who’s gonna die. It’s our patrimony. Just let it go. 

WEDNESDAY
Pork quesadillas, chips and salsa, raw veggies 

Wednesday it got WARM. Well, warmer. The ducks wandered off their beaten path for the first time in many months, and found it confusing. 

They find everything confusing. 

On Wednesdays we get home around 5:00, so I was glad to have a quick meal to make. I heated up the leftover beans and rice, cut up a bunch of raw vegetables, and made quesadillas with the leftover carnitas. I also served tortilla chips and salsa. 

Most of the kids opted for just plain cheese, but I had mine with meat, and I thought they were fab. I also shocked myself by opting for vegetables instead of chips. 

THURSDAY
Cumin chicken, tomato salad, fries

Thursday we got our first duck egg of the season! This looks like an Annie (black swedish) egg to me. Usually they have started laying much earlier by now (it’s the amount of light that affects them, not the temperature), but you really can’t make a duck do anything. I was pretty glad to see this egg. 

This year, we are going to hatch a bunch of them and sell the ducklings, probably. I saw a gal on Facebook showing how she was incubating eggs in her crock pot, and to my delight, all the comments were interested and encouraging. Not a single person berated her for torturing a defenseless animal by refusing to use a certified Hen Bum Simulator with a bluetooth-enabled hygrometer. So that was nice. 

For supper, I looked at my freezer and rapidly cycled through several possibilities before landing on a vaguely middle-eastern meal. I started the chicken thighs marinating in Greek yogurt with lemon juice, lots of cumin, and a little water; and then I made a tomato salad.

It was supposed to be a Jerusalem salad, but the cucumbers had somehow both frozen and rotted since Sunday. So this salad was tomatoes, leftover feta cheese, leftover cilantro, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and a little red wine vinegar. 

I was planning to make pita, but realized we had fries in the freezer, so that was settled. I cooked the chicken for about an hour at 425 and they came out nice. 

Although there was some muttering from certain dogs who had, despite the best legal advice, convinced themself that mom was making an entire platter of chicken just for them. 

I put hot sauce on my fries, rather than ketchup, hoping the combination would make the whole plate reminiscent of gyros. 

Truth be told, everything was a tiny bit bland. Not a terrible meal for no plan, though. But everything except the fries needed salt. 

I had to stop at Market Basket on Thursday to get cheesecake ingredients, and they sometimes sell these packages of cheese ends at the deli — just miscellaneous cheese that was too small to cut or too misshapen to sell. You never know what you’ll get, and it’s like $2 a pound, so obviously I got some. 

Mine turned out to be mostly Swiss and provolone, which is A-OK with me. 

I also picked up some Passover stuff, which was mysteriously cheap ($4.99 for one of those five-pack cartons of matzoh??). We once again planned to separate Passover and Easter, but the calendar once again put them together, so I’m starting to amass my seder food.

FRIDAY
Pierogies, spinach quiche

Friday morning I made a quiche. Here’s my pie crust recipe

Jump to Recipe

and this was more than enough for a deep, 11-inch bottom crust. I used my new pie weights and my new dough crimper that I got for Christmas! I was flaking out a bit when I rolled it out, though, and next time I’ll put the crimper to better use. It’s fine, it just looks a little weird.

We did get another egg this morning, but rather than incubate it or put it in the quiche, I opted to put it in my pocket and then forget it was in my pocket. And yes, I muttered about this a bit. 

For the quiche, I think I used six eggs and 1.5 cups of half and half, and some salt and pepper and a bit of nutmeg, and I put in provolone, steamed spinach, and some leftover tomatoes. I did blind bake the crust, and then baked the quiche at 350 for, I don’t know, 35 minutes? It looks promising

although I wish I had used more eggs. Kinda low in the dish, oh well. Although probably I’m the only one who’s gonna eat it anyway, mutter mutter. 
I also have a big sack of frozen pierogies in the freezer which I intend to fry up, and I’ll probably serve the rest of the spinach as a salad. I’m really trying to get more vegetables on the table! 

Now I have a cheesecake about to come out of the oven, and then I gotta clean that egg out of my pocket, and then, let’s face it, I’ll probably eat some cheese ends. We had a two-hour delay for school today because there was basically ice falling out of the sky all night, but it’s melting now. I’m always ready for spring, but this year, BOY am I ready for spring. 

my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai

i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet

mutter mutter 

5 from 1 vote
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Oven-fried chicken

so much easier than pan frying, and you still get that crisp skin and juicy meat

Ingredients

  • chicken parts (wings, drumsticks, thighs)
  • milk (enough to cover the chicken at least halfway up)
  • eggs (two eggs per cup of milk)
  • flour
  • your choice of seasonings (I usually use salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, and chili powder)
  • oil and butter for cooking

Instructions

  1. At least three hours before you start to cook, make an egg and milk mixture and salt it heavily, using two eggs per cup of milk, so there's enough to soak the chicken at least halfway up. Beat the eggs, add the milk, stir in salt, and let the chicken soak in this. This helps to make the chicken moist and tender.

  2. About 40 minutes before dinner, turn the oven to 425, and put a pan with sides into the oven. I use a 15"x21" sheet pan and I put about a cup of oil and one or two sticks of butter. Let the pan and the butter and oil heat up.

  3. While it is heating up, put a lot of flour in a bowl and add all your seasonings. Use more than you think is reasonable! Take the chicken parts out of the milk mixture and roll them around in the flour until they are coated on all sides.

  4. Lay the floured chicken in the hot pan, skin side down. Let it cook for 25 minutes.

  5. Flip the chicken over and cook for another 20 minutes.

  6. Check for doneness and serve immediately. It's also great cold.

 

5 from 1 vote
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moron biscuits

Because I've been trying all my life to make nice biscuits and I was too much of a moron, until I discovered this recipe. It has egg and cream of tartar, which is weird, but they come out great every time. Flaky little crust, lovely, lofty insides, rich, buttery taste.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups flour
  • 6 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp cream of tartar
  • 1-1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, chilled
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

  3. Grate the chilled butter with a box grater into the dry ingredients.

  4. Stir in the milk and egg and mix until just combined. Don't overwork it. It's fine to see little bits of butter.

  5. On a floured surface, knead the dough 10-15 times. If it's very sticky, add a little flour.

  6. With your hands, press the dough out until it's about an inch thick. Cut biscuits. Depending on the size, you can probably get 20 medium-sized biscuits with this recipe.

  7. Grease a pan and bake for 10-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

 

5 from 1 vote
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Carnitas (very slightly altered from John Herreid's recipe)

Ingredients

  • large hunk pork (butt or shoulder, but can get away with loin)
  • 2 oranges, quartered
  • 2-3 cinnamon sticks
  • 4-5 bay leaves
  • salt, pepper, oregano
  • 1 cup oil
  • 1 can Coke

Instructions

  1. Cut the pork into chunks and season them heavily with salt, pepper, and oregano.

  2. Put them in a heavy pot with the cup of oil, the Coke, the quartered orange, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves

  3. Simmer, uncovered, for at least two hours

  4. Remove the orange peels, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves

  5. Turn up the heat and continue cooking the meat until it darkens and becomes very tender and crisp on the outside

  6. Remove the meat and shred it. Serve on tortillas.

 

5 from 1 vote
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Basic pie crust

Ingredients

  • 2-1/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1-1/2 sticks butter, FROZEN
  • 1/4 cup water, with an ice cube

Instructions

  1. Freeze the butter for at least 20 minutes, then shred it on a box grater. Set aside.

  2. Put the water in a cup and throw an ice cube in it. Set aside.

  3. In a bowl, combine the flour and salt. Then add the shredded butter and combine with a butter knife or your fingers until there are no piles of loose, dry flour. Try not to work it too hard. It's fine if there are still visible nuggets of butter.

  4. Sprinkle the dough ball with a little iced water at a time until the dough starts to become pliable but not sticky. Use the water to incorporate any remaining dry flour.

  5. If you're ready to roll out the dough, flour a surface, place the dough in the middle, flour a rolling pin, and roll it out from the center.

  6. If you're going to use it later, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap. You can keep it in the fridge for several days or in the freezer for several months, if you wrap it with enough layers. Let it return to room temperature before attempting to roll it out!

  7. If the crust is too crumbly, you can add extra water, but make sure it's at room temp. Sometimes perfect dough is crumbly just because it's too cold, so give it time to warm up.

  8. You can easily patch cracked dough by rolling out a patch and attaching it to the cracked part with a little water. Pinch it together.

What’s for supper? Vol. 461: You can certainly try

Happy Friday! The kids have been on February vacation this week, and we’ve been surprisingly busy with various activities, parties, unavoidable whatnot, and of course snow. Snow snow snow. And food. Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Just a regular shopping day, with regular leftovers, supplemented by taquitos. I was pretty happy to have leftover vindaloo and rice from last week. 

When I went shopping whole chickens had been advertised @99 cents a pound, but when I got to the store, there was only one small bird left. I asked the meat guy if he had any more in back, and he said they had all gotten snapped up by people hysterical about the coming snow. So we complained a bit about people who live in New England but still get hysterical every time there’s snow in the forecast, and I guess he was so enchanted by my kvetching that he wanted to do me a favor, so he grabbed a big organic chicken and went out back, and when he brought it back, it was labelled 99 cents a pound. Score! I was only recreationally kvetiching, but it’s nice when it pays off sometimes. 

SUNDAY
Chicken ranch wraps, Storitos

Sunday after Mass, I ended up going on a bit of a wild goose chase. The original plan was that Damien and I would have a lovely Old Parents’ Day Out, toddle up to Brattleboro and visit the restored camera shop, get some tasty lunch from a Greek food truck, and stop by the convenience store that I’ve been told has a good selection of bulk Indian spices.

But poor Damien was sick and exhausted, so I went by myself, got sneered at by fancy camera people, was fairly grossed out by the spice store that was overpriced, grimy, and didn’t even have cardamom, and belatedly realized that ONCE AGAIN, I’d fallen for the old hippie trap. This town always promises it’s going to be a funky and whimsical hodgepodge of quirky graffiti, multi-culti eateries, and cozy used book stores. Just, you know, fondly preserved architecture all layered in jubilant palimpsest with glassy art galleries and fanciful urban updates. It always seems like it’s gonna be such a good time.

In reality, it’s all glum homeless men shuffling down the sidewalks and artsy people who don’t have time for you. And that is pretty much it. All the graffiti has been copied off Etsy, and instead of normal air, it’s just pot smoke, absolutely everywhere. SO much pot smoke. Bleh. The hippie trap! I fell for it again. I did meet a nice dog, though. 

Anyway, determined to at least get my money’s worth from the parking meter, I sat in my car with the seat warmer on and prowled through Facebook marketplace until I found a Polaroid camera, and drove off to get that. Nearly four hours later, I finally got home with the dang camera, and oops, I forgot one kid had a thing at the library, so we had to go right out again. But have I mentioned the car has seat warmers? Actually both cars do, but my car has been humbly waiting under the snow for a new fuel pump.

Seat warmers is one of those things that felt like unthinkably futuristic luxury to me when I was growing up. Finding out a friend’s mom had seat warmers was like finding out they were secretly a rajah or something. That, and skylights, and built-in microwaves, and the Barbie Dream house with the little hot tub that has a rubber bulb and, when you squeeze it, it makes bubbles in the water. I also had one friend who had a split level home with carpeted stairs, and I always felt like I was stepping into an alternate reality where everyone is a billionaire. Like, WHAT, you don’t have to open the front door by ramming it with your shoulder, and then immediately trip over a wood stove that’s draped with wet mittens? Instead you have some kind of FOYER? And a LIGHTED DOORBELL? With BOSTON FERNS? I was living amongst sultans, emperors, dwellers in a sumptuary futuristic wonderland. My friend Dena even had a waterbed!????!!!!

Anyway, if you are wondering if my new HRT is making my brain work better, no. However, sometimes when I gabble on and on about pointless things, people give me a chicken, so write that down.

Anyway, on Sunday, only a small group was home for dinner, so I just roasted up some chicken breasts and served them on wraps with lettuce, shredded cheese, and ranch dressing. I also got a cheesecake order and made a cheesecake. And that was that. 

MONDAY
Ina Garten roast chicken, steamed broccoli

Chicken time! I went with Ina Garten’s lovely, easy recipe, skipping the thyme and fennel. So basically plenty of butter, kosher salt, and pepper, and you stick some entire heads of garlic and lemons up in there, throw some vegetables around, and roast it without even touching it or basting or anything. It’s SO easy, tasty, and juicy, and comes out well every single time. 

While the chickens were resting, I steamed up a bunch of broccoli, and it was a yummy meal. 

I pulled out some of the garlic, because I like eating garlic, and weirdly it had turned blue in spots? I have no idea what that’s about. I did eat it. 

I think it was Monday that we got the first big snow dump of the week. This is snow that fell on top of several feet of previous snow, and we’re all kind of over it. Because we live on the highway, our road always gets plowed, so we weren’t stuck in our homes like some people, though! Some of my family in Rhode Island, who got way more snow than we did, had to manually shovel little tracks thrugh their streets so they could leave their homes! And they are vegetarians, so no one even gave them a reduced chicken. 

TUESDAY
Kielbasa, brussels sprouts, red potatoes

Tuesday, Corrie and I went out to buy party supplies. We went to uhhhh five stores. She’s crazy, I’m crazy, I don’t know. Anyway, we got the party supplies and got home and two of the kids were like, when are we leaving? For indeed I had forgotten I said I would get them to a thing and also another thing, I forget what. So we did that, with seat warmers. And eventually came home again. 

Dinner was a sheet pan meal of kielbasa, red potatoes, and brussels sprouts. This is a fairly divisive meal in the family. Some people are bananas for it, and some find it repulsive. So I split the difference and make it whenever I want to, but feel bad about it. I, myself, am in the bananas column, though. It’s so beautifully simple, and so beautifully salty. Here’s the recipe: 

Jump to Recipe

This recipe actually calls for cabbage, but you can just swap in brussels sprouts cut in half, and it’s even easier. You cook it for a while, then slop on the sauce and cook it a little longer, and boom, hot meal with a protein, a starch, and a green veg.

This is a meal that cries out for some kind of hot, chewy bread, like beer bread or hot pretzels, but I felt accomplished enough to have made dinner at all.

Yum. 

The older kids helped Corrie make her desired ice cream pies for Wednesday. It was a bespoke amalgamation of graham cracker crust, black raspberry ice cream, mint chocolate chip ice cream, twin snakes (which are gummy worms with two flavors, or something), and Skittles, all frozen together. 

Oh and I made the piñata, which was supposed to be a dragon egg shape. The kids basically grabbed me by the shoulders and made me repeat the words “there is no earthly reason to get papier mache involved.” So I just cut two ovals out of cardboard and attached their edges together with more cardboard (so basically an oval box), and then taped brown and gold scale shapes all over it, and everyone agreed it was a very fine dragon egg piñata indeed. Lucy and Irene mercifully agreed to make the desired treasure hunt, so I was off the hook for that. 

WEDNESDAY
BLTs, Pringles, ice cream pie

Wednesday was Corrie’s Actual Birthday, and also I got another cheesecake order, and also I had a rather intense interpersonal meeting, and then spent the rest of the day cleaning (?) I think? It’s a duck blur. But Corrie had requested BLTs for her birthday dinner, and no one was mad about that.

Clara came over, Corrie loved all her presents, and we had a good day. Lucy and Irene were away in Boston seeing Conan Gray, and I have been reliably informed that he did, indeed, wear his little sailor suit. 

We got more heavy snow, but the kids were spending the night in Boston, so I was glad they weren’t on the road. I’ve been spending about half my time in migraine town (thanks so much for that, Anthem/Blue Cross Blue Shield), and honestly even looking at the snow was more than I could handle much of the week. I mean everyone feels that way at this point. We better not have a drought this summer! 

THURSDAY
Calzones, fruit, birthday cake

Thursday was the party. The original plan was to invite lots of people for the party, then allow a select few to stay for a sleepover. But February vacation is a tough time to throw a party, because many people were sick or away on trips; and it turns out people don’t really do sleepovers anymore? Which I absolutely see the sense of.

So three kids came over and had a stay-late, or, I forget what it’s called. But they had their party and then stayed on to have dinner and have the FUN part of the sleepover, which is lying around drinking soda and eating candy, running around and yacking and getting into little fights while your parents hide in the other room. But nobody had to have a miserable night being too cold or too hot on someone’s floor, and no parents had to worry that their kids were in a house full of guns and vicious animals and sex offenders. So the guests stayed until about 11 and then went home, and it worked out great. 

It was a vaguely Dungeons & Dragons-themed party, but I never did work up any enthusiasm for imaginative snacks or decorations. Luckily Corrie had plenty of ideas. She made fancy labels, and the snacks were: Bugles (dragon claws), candy robin eggs (dragon eggs), punch (dragon blood), ginger ale (ale) and root beer (beer). The original plan was to twist brown packing paper into vines and transform the house into . . . I don’t even now what, an underground cavern with vines or something. But I was so tired, so we just taped up some gold foil tablecloths from the Dollar Store, and voila, it looked Different And Fancy. Good enough. 

The treasure hunt was set up so that the pinata was the prize at the end. I couldn’t find a baseball bat for the pinata, but a candle stick worked fine

I had been so proud of myself for remembering to reinforce the cardboard around the hanging part, so it didn’t immediately rip itself apart under its own weight and fall down. But instead, the zip tie it was hanging from broke, and it fell anyway. Luckily, these girls like stomping on things

so they got their candy! 

Dinner was calzones, which, happily, all the guests liked. I made twelve. 

They look dumb with the little food label on top, but I don’t know how else to keep them straight. Mine was olive, with a little ramekin of warm sauce, yum. 

Anyway, the kids are old enough that they entertained themselves, and I was just on standby. The one thing I did spend a lot of time on was the cake. She had initially requested a Kuo-toa cake, which I was not enthusiastic about. But we eventually settled on a D20 cake. For reasons I can’t explain, I persuaded her to let me try to make it three dimensional, rather than just piping a design on top of a flat cake. 

So I actually baked the cake on Wednesday. I used two hexagonal pans in different sizes, and put one on top of the other, then cut the top layer in angles. 

Then I just sat there staring at it for a really, really long time, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. 

I ended up carving up the scraps and building up the angled edges into equilateral triangles that reached the edge of the bottom layer. 

Then I sat there staring at it for a really long time again. I made some marks with a knife, and also some chalk, which, chalk is edible, right? Anyway, my kids have all eaten a lot of chalk.

Then I just did a bunch more carving and shaving and piecing together, and I mixed up a big bowl of very thick frosting (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk) and basically spackled it all together. I came up with something that looked . . . convincingly geometric. 

 

At this point I realized that, for the result I was likely to get, I could have made things a lot easier on myself. If I had this to do again, I would bake a dome cake plus a large sheet pan of cake, and then cut the sheet into a bunch of equilateral triangles, then cut the dome into facets and stick the triangles on it. But my specialty is learning on the fly about things I hope never to do again.

Anyway, I ended up with this

and then piped the thick frosting into the cracks until it become one continuous surface. Then I stuck my finger in a cup of milk and smoothed the frosting out as best I could. I don’t usually bother with a crumb coat, but I had cut this cake up so much, it was half crumb at this point.

I also wanted to make the different planes of the shape more pronounced, because what I had was less of a icosahedron and more of a really bumpy hexagon. ANYWAY, I ended up with this:

So I jammed this in the fridge to chill and harden up a bit. This was on Wednesday. 

On Thursday, Corrie and I made our very first mirror glaze. I kept finding recipes with ingredients I have never even heard of, so I went with this recipe from Chelsweets. It only has five ingredients: White chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, unflavored gelatin, sugar, and gel food coloring; and you can work with it at a lower temperature than most recipes. I made a triple recipe and I think that threw off the heating times, but it still worked out more or less as she described.

We made four bowls: Blue, dark pink, lavender, and white with gold flakes. I wish I had skipped the lavender, because it just diluted the other colors. I also didn’t pour it correctly. But the main thing is, Corrie was absolutely delighted with the results. She threw some black sanding sugar over the top and declared it perfect. 

It was cool! It really did resemble one of those marbled resin RPG dies. So I let it sit for a bit, then trimmed off the drips and let it chill for a while longer. Then I piped lines and numbers on it. I thought perhaps I should put “11” on the top face, since she was turning eleven, but this suggestion was shot down with scorn, because it is a D20, so obviously it has to say “20” on top. Okay with me!

As I have repeatedly lamented, I have shaky hands and I’m not great at piping, but this turned out better than I hoped. I got a little confused about which way the numbers should face, but nobody noticed but me. 

The drawback of using white chocolate in this mirror glaze is that it loses its shine a bit after a few hours, but, again, I was the only one who thought so. I was afraid the glaze would continue to flow and travel right off the cake, or that the gold flakes would all drift down to the bottom, but that did not happen.

And she loved it! 

I actually liked the flavor of the glaze. It tastes mainly like sweetened condensed milk/white chocolate, which is a flavor I, a degenerate and uncultured swine, happen to enjoy. One of the guests said she loves Corrie’s parties because the cakes are so cool, which made me feel good. Then she corrected herself and said that the main reason she likes Corrie’s parties is because of Corrie, and THEN because of the cakes, and that made me feel even better. These kids are all right. 

The big kids got home safe and sound in time for cake. Then that evening we got some hard and scary medical news about someone I love very much, so I would really appreciate your prayers about that. I will tell you, this week, this month, and this year have been . . . difficult. Dih. Fih. Cult. For health, for relationships, for work, for finances. Many many opportunities for trusting in God. Which is what Lent is, so there you go. 

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa

We ran out of oil this morning, because of course we did; but Damien was finally able to see a doctor, and there’s even a possibility I’ll get my migraine meds this weekend. Tonight we are having quesadillas, and then on Saturday we are going to the CIRCUS, which I bought tickets for a while back. It’s hard to believe this post started with a gifted organic chicken and ends with a circus, and yet it’s still full of me just basically kvetching, but there you go. You think I’m kvetching here! You should hear what an earful God gets. At least it’s not snowing. I think it’s gonna snow tomorrow, though. 

Oh, I forgot to share my calzone recipe. Here you go!

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Calzones

This is the basic recipe for cheese calzones. You can add whatever you'd like, just like with pizza. Warm up some marinara sauce and serve it on the side for dipping. 

Servings 12 calzones

Ingredients

  • 3 balls pizza dough
  • 32 oz ricotta
  • 3-4 cups shredded mozzarella
  • 1 cup parmesan
  • 1 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 tsp oregano
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1-2 egg yolks for brushing on top
  • any extra fillings you like: pepperoni, olives, sausage, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400. 

  2. Mix together filling ingredients. 

  3. Cut each ball of dough into fourths. Roll each piece into a circle about the size of a dinner plate. 

  4. Put a 1/2 cup or so of filling into the middle of each circle of dough circle. (You can add other things in at this point - pepperoni, olives, etc. - if you haven't already added them to the filling) Fold the dough circle in half and pinch the edges together tightly to make a wedge-shaped calzone. 

  5. Press lightly on the calzone to squeeze the cheese down to the ends. 

  6. Mix the egg yolks up with a little water and brush the egg wash over the top of the calzones. 

  7. Grease and flour a large pan (or use corn meal or bread crumbs instead of flour). Lay the calzones on the pan, leaving some room for them to expand a bit. 

  8. Bake about 18 minutes, until the tops are golden brown. Serve with hot marinara sauce for dipping.  

 

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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. 

Cringe for Christ

One of my core memories is sitting in the pew at Mass, shriveling up with secondhand embarrassment. This was in the early 80’s, and the old French Canadian pastor, Fr. M, loved to roam around the apse, emoting.

One of his favorite hymns was “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” and when he got to the part that goes, “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble” he would demonstrate by rolling his eyes up to the ceiling and doing a sort of jazz hands motion with each “tremble.” The liturgical dancers swooped around him in their polyester robes, he rolled his eyes, and I shriveled in my pew.

It was terrible. Completely terrible. I was old enough to know it was terrible, but also self-aware enough to feel terrible that I felt that way. Because he was talking about being there when they crucified my Lord! And here I was, wishing the roof would fall in so he would stop. What is a girl to do?

I now have a whole category for this kind of thing. It’s called “Cringe for Christ,” and I think it’s what will save me. It’s the same thing I feel when I want to share something on social media, but I hesitate because, even though it’s indisputably true, it’s from The Wrong Group. It’s what I feel when I have to teach my kids things like, “When that couple in the movie you’re watching starts having sex, you need to turn your face away, like THIS” and show them.

I felt something similar when I saw the videos of the protesting Minnesotans walking slowly through the streets, singing their 21st century protest songs: “Ho-o-o-o-o-ld on, ho-o-o-o-old onnnnn, my dear ones, here comes the dawn,” or gathering outside the hotel windows of ICE agents, crooning, “It’s okay to change your mind.”

I’m well aware many readers here do not think the protestors have a worthy cause. That’s okay! I can live with that. My point still stands.

“Cringe for Christ” is a flexible principle, applicable to many situations and to literally everyone. It doesn’t matter who you are: Sincerity is more important than good taste. It’s great to have both, and often we can; but if we have to choose one or the other, we should choose sincerity every time. Virtue over vibes.

It sounds so obvious, and I doubt you disagree. But I think we are more susceptible than we realize …

Read the rest of my latest for The Pillar. (Note: This is paid content for Pillar members.)

What’s for supper? Vol. 460: It was the shroopiest of times, it was the doopiest of times

Happy Friday! The other day I thought of a really clever pun for this week’s food post title, and decided not to write it down because I would definitely remember it later. Now it is later, and, well.

It’s just as well. These things are always disappointing. One of my kids once had a dream about a fiendishly clever new advance in technology that would revolutionize the way we fight wars, and she woke and and DID write it down so she’s remember it. In the morning, she looked at her notes, and it said “bag of bees.” 

Anyway, I’m sorry it’s the first Friday in Lent and this post is gonna be full of the yummy things we ate for Valentine’s Day and for Mardi Gras and also because I’m a cooker of yummy things. Some years I come up with a putatively clever gimmick to shield the viewer from graphic (=meat) content, but we are solidly in bag of bees territory here, mentally. All buzz, no honey. I don’t know. Well, here is what we ate:

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizza

Saturday was shopping day, and I had the pleasure of paying for it almost entirely in cash earned from selling cheesecakes. That felt pretty good. 

Saturday was, of course, Valentine’s Day, so along with frozen pizza, I also got corn dogs as a romantic gesture, because only Damien and I like them. We didn’t eat a single corn dog like in Lady and the Tramp or anything. Don’t get the wrong idea. 

We all gave each other chocolate and candy, and for dessert, I decided to try my hand at one of those fancy decorated swiss rolls. I followed the directions from The Squeaky Mixer, which were nice and clear. (I see she also has a post for a master guide on decorated swiss rolls!) It was very pleasant using a small bowl and whisk for a change. I love my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but it was nice to move more slowly. 

This recipe requires a very tender cake, so you can’t over mix anything. I did use the standing mixer to make stiff egg whites, which get folded into the batter. 

After you do that, you set aside a little bit and color it, and put that into piping bags (well, sandwich bags). The trick of putting the bags in cups and folding back the tops over the rim before filling them is SO helpful, especially if you just have a small amount in each bag

Then you grease and line a cookie sheet and pipe your design onto it. It opted for the old classic Valentine message: Shroopy doo.

Origin story: 

I wish I had spent a little more time coming up with an actual design, but I did manage to get the letters all backward! Then you freeze the design for a bit, to help it stay intact. 

Then I used a large bag to pipe the rest of the batter over the design. I took a pic just before I covered up the decorated part with plain batter.  

Here is where I made my first mistake. The pan is a rectangle, and you only decorate one half of it, because the other half is going to get rolled up and no one will see it. But I decorated the long half, rather than the short half. So at this point, I was locked into rolling a long, thin roll, rather than a short, stout swiss roll. Not necessarily a mistake, I guess, but not what I intended.

So you bake it for a short time (it’s a very thin cake), take it out of the oven, turn it out of the pan, and carefully peel the parchment paper off the bottom, revealing the baked-in design. I took a video of this part, and you can hear me breathing heavily. 

 

Here is where I made my second mistake, and this one was a doozy. I sprinkled the cake lightly with sugar and covered it with a damp towel and carefully rolled it up. 

The wrong way.

I rolled it so the design was on the inside. And I didn’t notice until it had cooled for about twenty minutes. So I unrolled and re-rolled it the other way, but of course it cracked, which is the one thing you’re trying to avoid with a swiss roll! 

I was annoyed at myself, but not devastated, because if something is going to go wrong, it’s best when the mistake is super obvious and super avoidable in the future. One has simply not to be a bonehead, and it will work out better next time!

So while it was cooling, I whipped the heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla, carefully unrolled the cake, spread it with the cream, and rolled it back up again, and let it finish cooling. 

It was, indeed, the shroopy doo-est of cakes. 

You can see that I festooned it with leftover molded chocolate from another project, and that really shrooped things up, I think. 

I actually used double the amount of cream filling, because, I don’t know, I like cream filling. When I sliced the roll open, it had a decent spiral, considering it was a long, skinny cake. (I know from watching Great British Baking Show that the spiral is very important.)

It was so bland, though. Next time I make one of these, I will do a layer of something with a stronger flavor on the inside along with the cream, and will  probably dress up the outside, as well. But honestly, I considered this project a success, because everything turned out well except for two things that are easy to correct next time. We live to roll another day. 

In the afternoon, we watched Yojimbo, and in the evening, we watched Moonstruck. Each perfect Valentine’s Day movies, in their own way. 

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips, king cake

Sunday our old friend Elijah was over, and it was another weekend where I felt powerless to resist making a bunch of big hamburgers (I had bought a bunch of ground beef while it was still on super bowl prices). I also got a sudden urge to make a king cake before Lent descended. I found a King Arthur Baking recipe and thought, oh yeah, I’ve used this recipe a few times before. Started putting it together and I was like . . . mmmmmm I don’t think I have used this recipe before. It calls for dry milk, which I didn’t have any of. It also calls for lemon oil or zest, which I also didn’t have, so I used orange zest. Then I tried to figure out what I could possibly use as a substitute for dry milk. You’d think wet milk is the answer, but that only works if you decrease the other liquid, which it was too late to do. I don’t even remember how I resolved it, but the dough I ended up with was less “soft and silky” and more “disgusting” and “something I don’t want to touch.” 

It requires two rises, and, by adding plenty of flour, I managed to coerce it into a reasonable shape. I added the cream cheese filling and then discovered there was a jar of homemade strawberry topping left over from cheesecake, so I spread that on, too.

Things are looking up! Many of us have untidy back stories, but we turn out well anyway! So why. not this king cake! All I had to do was fold over the margins and pinch them together, and carefully place the whole thing into a bundt pan. 

Well , . ., ,,,

I got the fuckin thing in the pan. Possibly the ugliest transfer possible. If there were king cake police, I’d be in jail for life for what I did to that dough. 

ANYWAY, I baked it, and it actually came out of the pan more or less intact, and I shoved a baby-sized rubber alien up in there, and drizzled it with three colors of icing, and threw some edible gold flakes on top because why not. 

It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. I did overbake it, so it was a little dry, but it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t filled so much as infiltrated with cream cheese and strawberry.

I was cutting it up and passing out pieces, and Damien’s piece was last, with the rubber baby clearly visible. He was in the other room, so the kids and I declared that whoever gets the baby has to buy everyone ice cream, and then we gave Damien his piece. In other words, we shrooped his doo. Shrooped it good. 

MONDAY
Pork vindaloo, basmati rice, naan, mango

Monday I salvaged my good name in the kitchen. This meal turned out absolutely delightful, and I was very pleased with myself. 

In the morning, I assembled my spices for this pork vindaloo recipe from Bon Apetit. 

Then you just pulverize them all together and marinate chunks of pork in the resulting paste. The recipe calls for pork shoulder and pork belly, but I just used a rather fatty loin, and it was fine. I only used half the number of guajillo chiles it called for, and it was still quite fiery. I would do it that way on purpose. Hot enough to really light up your head, but not enough to make it hard to taste anything else. 

So I set the meat to marinate

cut up the mangoes, set up the rice, and made the dough for naan. I used the King Arthur Baking naan recipe, and this time I really had made it before. I decided I would get fancy and weigh the flour, rather than measuring it by volume like I usually do. Well, I had to add so much extra flour to get the texture right, I don’t know what the point was! 

But they turned out so, so good. I made a double recipe, which should yield 16 flatbreads, but I divided the dough into only eight pieces, so they were a nice, generous size. I cooked them in a very hot iron frying pan, wiped it out with a damp cloth in between fries, and brushed the pieces of naan with melted butter on both sides when they came out of the pan. PERFECT. 

They were SO soft and nice, I was just delighted. Probably the best naan I’ve ever made. 

The whole meal was delightful. 

I got a little ramekin of yogurt to sooth my mouth when the meat got too hot. I want to make this again right away, but it doesn’t feel very Lenten!

TUESDAY
Mardi Gras

I have such mixed feelings about Chili’s having somehow become our traditional final place of debauchery before Lent. The restaurant was practically empty, but they seated us next to the bathroom anyway. It was fine. I ordered some kind of chipotle chicken bowl and it was perfectly fine. Then we followed up with our other, equally dubious tradition and headed over to Price Chopper to pick out individual tubs of ice cream.. I got a Ben and Jerry’s thing with a caramel core and pieces of blonde brownie. Damien was sick and Elijah was working, so we brought them to-go boxes. And that was our festal meal! Shroopy doo.

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and salad

On Wednesday I was the one who was sick, so Damien brought the kids to Mass. I spent the afternoon ruthlessly decluttering the dining room (four bags of trash, yay!), and for supper we had spaghetti and salad, and, just to round out the church basement dinner vibes, white bread with butter.

THURSDAY
Roast drumsticks, mashed potatoes, roast butternut squash

Thursday I was busy all day, and for the life of me, I can’t remember what with. So I threw together supper at the last minute. I just sprayed the chicken drumsticks with cooking spray and seasoned them heavily with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder. I roasted them and then put them in a covered baking dish in a low rack in the oven to stay warm, so I could use the broiler to make the butternut squash. I peeled and sliced up two squashes and laid the disks in a pan on parchment paper. I may or may not have sprayed them with cooking spray, but I definitely put a little heap of brown sugar on each one, and then sprinkled them pretty heavy with a lovely biryani masala by Spicewalla. 

I had a five-pound bag of potatoes, and the original plan was to bake them, but you really cannot make baked potatoes for seven people when two of them look like this:

Five potatoes total in the bag! I used to buy potatoes like this on purpose, and slice them into these ludicrously long french fries; but it was definitely not a deep frying kind of night. I just boiled them and mashed them, and I did a pretty poor job, too. Very lumpy. The squash was great, though!

I just adore Indian spices on squash. Really tasty and interesting. 

It turned out to be a pretty good meal despite the potatoes. 

And that’s-a my story. 

FRIDAY
Grilled cheese and tomato soup

I’m actually really looking forward to this meal. I may even throw some leftover rice into the tomato soup. The kids got an early release from school because there is a big storm coming. I saw the highway department pre-salting the roads before the snow even started, so I guess it’s gonna be a doozy. 

I guess we are gonna try our Fisher Family Mandatory Lent Film Party again this year. Damien and I are both exhausted and couldn’t come up with anything creative, so we’re going to watch Spartacus, which I haven’t seen in many years. I remember it being very sweaty. The kids have been lots of fun to talk about movies with lately, though, so I have medium-high hopes. 

In conclusion, you will have a lizard in your pocket. Be you. Shroopy doo.