Month: April 2017
What’s for supper? Vol. 79: Asparagus me, Domine
Can’t remember the last time I’ve been so glad to see a week be done. Here’s what we had:
SATURDAY
Sausage, fried eggs, and muenster cheese on bagels
I will never complain when there are sandwiches for supper.
***
SUNDAY
Lamb lo mein with spaetzle; rice; pot stickers; rice
Probably the weirdest meal of the week. We had a nice meaty bone left over from last week’s lamb feast, so I cut the meat into bits and added it to this simple lo mein recipe from Damn Delicious. I made it even simpler by just chucking in a couple of bags of frozen stir fry vegetables, rather than using fresh. Then I made it weirder by using a few bags of spaetzle for the noodles. The result was a multi-ethnicish meal that soared to the level of Not Bad At All.
No one in my family has actually tasted lo mein before, so they were the right audience, I guess.
The potstickers were frozen from Hannaford. Kind of a pain for frozen food – you have to brown them in oil and then steam them – but they were tasty. One kid ate just the wrapper, and left behind little bundles of steamed cabbage and chicken, which I of course ate also.
You are thinking, “Why did she also make rice, with all that other stuff?” The answer is that at least three of my kids are currently following a strict Rice and Tears diet.
***
MONDAY
Tacos
On Monday, I looked at my driving schedule for the week and let out a weak whimper. Seriously considering buying each kid a moped and just letting them get where they need to be on their own. I’ll take out a credit card in the choir director’s name. Add an entire extra concert with rehearsals every night for two weeks right when all the other teachers are realizing we need to squeeze in all those field trips and special projects and fundraisers, will you? EAT MOPED DEBT AND DIE.
Oh, so we had tacos. It turns out cumin can be fairly overwhelming if you angrily shake in half the jar, but you can disguise it with extra salt.
***
TUESDAY
Pizza
Nothing to report. Luckily, I have two pepperoni distribution specialists living in my very house.
***
WEDNESDAY
Steak tips with mushrooms on noodles; rolls; roast asparagus
This is a slow cooker meal from Damn Delicious, and chuck roast is still on sale! The sauce never thickened up as much as it was supposed to, even with extra cornstarch, but the flavor was, in fact, damn delicious.
I mixed up the asparagus with a little olive oil, spread it on a pan, and slid it right under a hot broiler, then sprinkled it with lemon juice when it was done. Did you know you are supposed to eat asparagus with your fingers? Do you know it’s hard, but not impossible, to drive while licking your plate?
***
THURSDAY
Korean beef bowl, rice, roast sesame broccoli
Still a great meal, still easy. In the morning, I cooked up the meat and then transferred it to the slow cooker; I set up the rice in the Instant Pot (affiliate link!) (the 1:1 formula works fine); and prepped the broccoli. So when I tore into the kitchen that afternoon knowing half of us had to be out the door again in 25 minutes, we still had a swell meal.
Have I mentioned how I love roasting vegetables? I drizzled the broccoli with sesame oil, spread it in a single layer, sprinkled it with sesame seeds, and slid it right under the broiler until the edges got a little blackened. So many veggies taste good this way.
***
FRIDAY
Tuna noodle
And tears, no doubt.
What about Lucia?
Why isn’t Lucia being canonised along with her cousins?
The cute answer is: Our Lady is to blame.
Juicero delenda est
Friends, it has come to my attention that you have no idea what to do with your money.
First, you went and spent $400 on something they openly and deliberately called a “Juicero.” I know that names aren’t everything, and we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Heck, I can remember when Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific was a product that normal people bought without shame. But when it’s a high end item that was in development for ten years, with millions of dollars in investment, for which they almost certainly employed a team of marketing and creative types to . . . you know, I once met a sedevacantist priest named Father Pulvermacher. I think that would have been a better name than “Juicero.” So that’s the first thing.
Second, I gather that the Juicero, or The Pulvermacher, if you will, is some kind of counter-top device that allows you to ingest the juice of fruits and vegetables in your very home, if you can imagine such a thing.
Previously, when we were hoping to have the liquid aspect of plant products find its way into our mouths, we would be all, “Oh! Ah! Here is an apple, and here is my mouth, but I simply cannot work through the logistics! Help me, Gwyneth Paltrow! You’re our only hope.”
But Gwyneth can’t always pencil you in, so maybe you would go ahead and, in a juice-deprived panic, buy some kind of peasant-style juicer, like at Target or something, which inevitably results in what La Goopessa terms a “nightmare of clean-up.”
Now, when I say “nightmare of clean-up,” I’m usually thinking more in terms of shopping for a new couch slipcover while muttering, “And that’s why we don’t keep prunes in this house.” But I think Gwyneth meant that Pilar, who is in charge of the west end of the kitchen, is a little put out over all the little bits that can’t go in the dishwasher.
So anyway, this Juicero solves all of your problems that you are pretending you have by delivering some kind of loathsome pouches of chopped-up fruits and vegetables. They are organic, non-GMO, non-pasteurized, and still lightly dewed with the sweat of Pilar’s nephew, who is nine and someday hopes to find out what those strawberries he picks for eleven hours actually taste like.
You ask your Juicero to open wide (it only speaks Esperanto at present, but the next gen will be more flexible) and drop the bag in and then you use the pinky finger of your left hand to touch the air next to a button, or something, and then guess what?
Juice comes out.
I know.
Truly, this is a century of marvels. The Juicero contains four hundred custom parts, a scanner, and a microprocessor, and it is, of course, also wifi enabled. It is very, very important to have very local fruit brought directly to your home so that you can then leave that home and remotely command it to make local juice, so when you get home . . .
No, Pilar’s face doesn’t just look like that. She really does hate you.
And think, you’ve only spent $400 on this astonishing machine, plus let’s say $7 on a single-serving produce pack called “Root Renewal+” which “may help keep inflammation at bay.”
Now, when I want to keep inflammation at bay, I put my feet up on a laundry basket while I drink my bottom shelf g-and-flat-t with the restorative juice of a quarter of a lime, if they had any at Aldi. If I still feel puffy after this rigorous treatment, I dash off an angry email to that bastard Fr. Pulvermacher. Lay off the Jews, man. And down goes the inflammation! Or it may. The FDA has not evaluated this statement.
So a few of the guys who didn’t know about my regimen were pretty happy with their Juiceros . . . until they discovered that you could actually skip the Juicero part. You could just go ahead and squeeze the pouches with your very own paddy paws, and juice would come out of them. And you really didn’t need to buy a machine at all, because you already have a machine, called a “hand.”
And this aggression will not stand, man.
What the next step is, I do not know. Probably a march on Washington. Those seem popular. And when you get home, you can very easily make yourself some nice, refreshing juice.
Or, you know what? You’ve been marching all day. Get Pilar to do it.
***
Image: Baldassare Franceschini [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
When Ella Fitzgerald had no one to watch over her
Ella Fitzgerald’s voice means warmth, joy, careless brilliance, strength wrapped in velvet. But her early life was cold, rough, harsh.
It’s Ella Fitzgerald’s 100th birthday today, and on NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg reports that Fitzgerald, born poor, was orphaned at 15. Her surviving stepfather was hard on her, and she lived for a time with an aunt, but then started skipping school, eventually living on the streets.
“She was on the streets of Harlem dancing for tips” [Smithsonian Curator of American Music John] Hasse says.
She earned more pennies as a lookout for cops outside a brothel. At one point, she was arrested for truancy and sent to a reform school, where she was regularly beaten. So she ran away — this awkward, gawky girl with skinny legs and old, cast-off boots — with no money, living on the streets and sleeping where she could.
Around this time, Fitzgerald used to say, she first began to sing on stage. She was 17, and found herself terrified in front of a brutal audience at Amatuer Night at the Apollo. She had been planning to dance, but her legs shook too badly; so instead, she sang. And everyone loved it, so she kept on singing. At least that’s the way she tells it.
Who can describe her voice? Instead of talking about it, let’s listen. The velvety ballads are my favorites. Here’s one of the greatest:
Oh, how I need. What a miracle of vocal engineering that she goes all high and hoarse without losing an ounce of power. Happy birthday, you beautiful woman. Someone I’d really like to know.
Image: Ella in 1940, photo by Carl Van Vechten [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
RIP Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez did not die today.
Instead, it was his illegitimate grand nephew, Gabriel Garcia Garcia Marquez, who was eerily like him, except where the one was merely careless, the other was cruel — or is it the other way around, in the end?
Marquez (the other one), who was born at some point when the sky wept and was simultaneously full of turtledoves doing something unusual, spoke three languages by the time he was eleven days old, and had the penis of a forty-year-old gypsy. Nobody was sure what to do about this, but the nuns thought it was hilarious.
His wet nurse, a jungle woman, used to pass the steamy hours cracking nuts with her toes and teaching him mystical acrostics, until his overbearing father caught wind of it and sent the tyke off to the village priest to be instructed in Latin, brutality, and alchemy; but somehow, at age fifteen, he came home instead a man, a man in sweltering pants who knew how to dance in a way that made women’s hair grow long and savage at the mere sight of him.
Only one woman was immune to his charms, and this made him hunger after her with an unreasoning hunger. He thought only of her, in and out of days, through through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are, and also a shitload of prostitutes and barely pubescent girls that he banged and sometimes even loved, but honest to goodness, the whole time, he was only thinking of her. Those sweltering pants.
On the day he didn’t die, the crows wept. The tobacco leaves shivered in the windless field. The bells tolled at midnight, and no one knew why, but when they tolled, they smelled like jasmine. Ai, did they smell like jasmine. The woman smelled it through her veil, and she knew it was time to open that letter at last. A letter more stamp than envelope, having travelled swelteringly around six continents and back in search of her, who was living in his woodshed the whole time.
For she! She was that jungle woman. And now he had been dead, and it was too late, and had been for some time.
If he had died on this day, the children, all of whom were named “Gabo” or “Marky Mark” would have playfully mutilated his once powerful now impotent corpse. Instead, he died back in 2014, but people on Facebook think it just happened and are sad about it all over again. Which is just how he would have wanted it.
Marquez and his illegitimate grand nephew Marquez are survived by their mutual half-brother, who has the same name, but a different mustache.
***
Garbriel Garcia Marquez photo by Ver en vivo En Directo via Flickr (Creative Commons)
What’s for supper? Vol. 78: Hallelujah! Let’s eat!
Hooray, a Friday food post again! I actually spent last Friday, Good Friday, cooking and not tasting. IT WAS HARD. But I was way behind on Passover cooking, so that’s how it turned out.
Here’s what we had this week:
SATURDAY
Holy Saturday is when we have our Passover seder. On the menu for the feast:
Chicken soup with matzo balls
The soup turned out much buttier than usual; no idea why. It’s supposed to be on the clear side, and “golden” (i.e. shimmering with fat). Tasted great, though.
Chopped liver
Gefilte fish (store bought) with horseradish
Charoset
Spinach pie
and Garlic cinnamon chicken and
A tiny bit of roast lamb (it hadn’t gone on sale yet!)
You can find recipes for all of the foods above in this post.
The only thing I intentionally made different this year was to cook the spinach pies in mini muffin tins, rather than in a pie plate. I just don’t think you should hear “pie” and then taste spinach and onions. (For some reason “spinach muffin” doesn’t trouble me.) I thought they were cute and tasty this way, and will make them this way again.
I didn’t have a meat grinder this year (but am eyeing this attachment for my Kitchen Aid), so I made the four pounds of chopped liver in small batches in the blender. This was not a gratifying experience. It wasn’t velvety smooth, but still delicious.
Dessert:
Chocolate walnut cake with apricot
Lemon sponge cake
Four kinds of macaroons (store bought)
Chocolate-covered jelly rings
Chocolate-covered halvah (sesame candy)
Sesame crunch candies
Pistachios and almonds
Chocolate caramel matzoh
I moaned and groaned over not having any fruit slice candy this year, but we survived.
Both cakes were from new recipes this year. The chocolate one had a nice flavor, but it was squashier than I would like. Pretty, though.
The lemon one also tasted fine, but man, it was dense. No sponge about it. I just don’t have a light touch with baking, and baking without flour or yeast is just asking for some really compact treats! I think I used the recipe on the side of the potato starch can.
***
SUNDAY
Seder leftovers!
And boy, there were plenty. And of course hard boiled eggs, and a world of Easter candy.
***
MONDAY
Matzo brei, salami, dill pickles, grapes
Matzo brei is a weird little recipe that everyone should know. You take a sheet of matzo, break it into chunks in a bowl, and pour hot water over it. Let it sit for thirty seconds or so, and then press the water out. Then beat up two eggs, stir in the drained matzo, and fry the mixture up in some hot oil, turning once, until the edges are crisp.
You can serve it with jelly, you can serve it with salt and pepper and fried onions, whatever. It’s SO GOOD. Worth venturing into the Jewby aisle to get yourself a box of two of matzo, believe me.
***
TUESDAY
Beef banh mi
Remember when I asked how to make Easter last for fifty days? You could do worse than making a lot of banh mi, especially if you just happen to have a lot of leftover chopped liver in the house. These sandwiches were out of this world.
In the morning, I sliced up some carrots as thin as I could, then put them in a jar to pickle with some white vinegar, a little water, and some sugar.
Then I sliced the meat (I used London broil) pretty thin and put it in a bag to marinate, using this recipe. I let it go for about six hours. My husband cooked up the meat — well, first he ran out for more bread, because I burned the first batch while toasting it. Then he toasted more bread, and then he cooked up the meat in a single layer on a roasting pan under a hot broiler, just enough to blacken the edges a tiny bit.
So, the smell. This marinade calls for garlic, shallots, and fish sauce. Benny spent the dinner hour hiding under a fleece Our Lady of Guadalupe blanket and weeping because the house smelled “wike dog frow up.” Which, well, she wasn’t wrong, especially early in the cooking. But it tasted so good.
Toasted rolls with mayonnaise, lots of cilantro, pickled carrots, sliced cucumbers, the meat, and then chopped liver. Oh, my stars. The sweet, savory meat frolicking with the snappy, sour carrots, and the strong, bitey liver cuddling up to the cool cucumbers and cilantro. It was so good, it was almost indecent.
***
WEDNESDAY
Hot dogs, chips
I spent the afternoon sorting winter clothes to be stored away. Four hours from start to finish:
so the kids made hot dogs.
***
THURSDAY
Instant pot mac and cheese
I made a triple recipe of this in my Instant Pot (associates link). The hot sauce and mustard give it a good flavor. This is miles easier and faster than cooking the pasta, cooking the sauce, and then mixing them together and baking it. Also, this time, I read the directions more carefully and did not shoot a geyser of yellow cheese at the ceiling through the steam vent.
***
FRIDAY
Roast lamb, challah, maybe asparagus if I remember to get some
Today is Friday within the octave of Easter, or, as it’s traditionally known, Meatster Friday. Leg of lamb was at the astonishing price of $2.99 a pound, so I got a niiiiiice big one. Gonna stud it with slivered garlic and rosemary, slather it with white wine and honey, and roast it.
Gonna try out this challah recipe. Here’s a pic of the last time I made challah:
And now I’m running out to buy some yeast. Benny says, “Yeast makes everything rise! God thought of it! He thought of everything! He made friends and family! He made sisters and brothers! And cousins! Well . . . I’m not so sure about cousins.”
Sorry, cousins. I don’t know how you earned a place in Benny’s theodicy, but there it is.
Happy Easter! Happy Meatster! He is risen! Let’s eat.
Protected: Podcast #16: Reporticus Shutupicus!
Hey, faithful Catholics, why are YOU here?
This plea goes for sinners whose souls are heavy with old-fashioned sins of the flesh, and also for sinners whose souls are heavy with the even older sins of pride and presumption.
The speaker you need is Simcha J. Fisher!
![photo by Carl Van Vechten [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AElla_Fitzgerald_(1940).jpg){kind=link}
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My speeches are funny, passionate, and sincere, and they aim to entertain you, make you think, and come away with a practical plan. Some recent popular talks include:
Your Family Is an Icon
What did I learn from having a photographer follow our family around, documenting large family life? My family — and yours too — is an icon, a beautiful and powerful evangelical tool to bring people closer to God. And it is so because of its imperfections, not despite them.
Beautiful Stranger: Making Contact with the Mother of God Mary, to me, was Our Lady of Maybelline: pretty, demure, pristine — and nothing to do with messy, slobby, crabby me. One terrible year, everything fell apart, and I abruptly came face to face with the actual Mother of God. Here’s what happened.
Swimming in the Dark: Spreading the Good News When You’re Feeling So Bad Pope Francis has made it clear that evangelization is an obligation, not an option. But what if we’re not feeling joyful right now? What if we’re shy, or depressed, or suffering? How do people like us evangelize?
Not what you’re looking for? I have several more talks prepared, or I’d be happy to tailor one to your audience.
Drop me a line at simchafisher@gmail.com and let’s see what we can work out. And spread the word!