Friday again! What do you know about that. I had no way of knowing this was coming, but here we are.
Here’s what we had this week:
SATURDAY
Chicken burgers, chips
I guess I went shopping, and I guess we had chicken burgers when I got home. Plausible, but I have no memory of it.
SUNDAY
Cumin chicken with chickpeas, elite pita
I sort of remember Sunday. Some of the older kids were over, and chicken thighs were on sale, so I made this simple but tasty sheet pan meal: Lemony, cuminous chicken thighs marinated in yogurt with onions and chickpeas.
Jump to RecipeI got the chicken marinating in the yogurt sauce in the morning, and I made the red onion, parsley, and lemon juice side dish, but discovered to my sorrow that I hadn’t bought enough yogurt to also make yogurt sauce.
I did, however, make homemade pita. I followed the recipe from TheKitchn, which has directions for both oven-baked and pan-cooked pita. I started a double recipe of dough and set it to rise, and then I finally got around to tapping some maple trees.
We have 1.25 acres of land, and I went around with my Picture This app, identifying leafless trees, and we have more trees than I can count . . . except maple. We turned out to have a grand total of two maple trees, and one of them is just a little guy.
I tapped it anyway, as you can see, but it hasn’t produced much. (Normally I’d be excited to see the stream running and not frozen, but it barely froze this year!)
The other tree is a pretty good producer, although the nights have been warming up, so it’s stop-and-start.
I had been storing the sap outside in bags inside a bin, but I misjudged the temperature, and I’m afraid the sap I already collected may have spoiled. I made a new dumb mistake every year I do this, very exciting! Anyway there’s still some late winter left, so I haven’t given up. Too dumb to give up.
I also scoped out the wattle materials situation, and I gathered up a variety of straight, supple branches that I will probably practice on before I invest in a large amount of stakes. Trying out all different kinds of wood and vines.
And I planted the last of my winter sowing jugs. I didn’t end up with as many as I wanted, but there’s a lot of variety, vegetables and flowers.
The group I’m in keeps saying “trust the method,” which is what groups always say when things are clearly going horribly wrong, but I also have not given up on this. It was WONDERFUL WONDERFUL WONDERFUL to be outside in the fresh air. And I have a variety of flowers and vegetables sprouting indoors, as well.
So then, feeling frisk and fine, I went inside and slid the chicken and chickpeas in the oven and started on the pita.
Now, I own a wooden rolling pin and a marble rolling pin and even a pink plastic toy rolling pin that can be useful in a pinch, but they had all vanished into . . . I don’t know where. I imagine there is some shadowy, cthonic kitchen cabinet somewhere with all my useful kitchen stuff in it, waiting fearfully in the dark for what comes next. There abide the whisk with the nice handle, floating around eerily, wreathed in mist and flour; biscuit dough cutters flickering in and out of visibility and wailing, unheard, longing to be touched by human hands once more. That one butter knife with the pretty pattern on the handle, just clattering fruitlessly around in the gloom.
However, I did find the embossed rolling pin we got one of the kids for Christmas one time, and that is how I made my very first . . . .
ELITE PITA
Isn’t that lovely?
I wasn’t sure if the pattern would stay when I baked it, but it did!
Only on one side, of course, because rolling the dough out presses it flat on the other side. So the other side got the characteristic “pressed bubble” pita pattern when I flipped it over in the pan.
I used an iron frying pan, and kept a little olive oil and a brush nearby, as well as a wad of napkins for wiping out the oil and flour in between pitas. This keeps the pita from getting blackened residue on it when you cook it.
I was delighted with this pita. It tasted good, too.
I also discovered, about 7/8 of the way through the 16 pieces of pita, that they do puff up if I leave them in the pan about ninety seconds longer than I think I should. This is something I discover every single time I make pita, about 7/8 of the way through. I would trust the process, but I’m too dumb.
The chicken turned out great. The onions are crackly-crisp, the chickpeas are nutty and crunchy with a hot, mealy core, and the chicken has a ridiculously delicious skin, and it’s all set off beautifully by the piquant lemon onions.
I forgot to take a picture, but here is an old one:
It was about 50% tragic that we didn’t have garlicky yogurt sauce to dip everything in, but it was still a pretty good meal. The pita got all eaten up, which made me happy. It’s so embarrassing to make something you think of as a treat, and then have tons and tons of leftovers!
MONDAY
Hammy mac and cheese, raw veg and hummus
On Monday I faced last week’s leftover ham that was still lurking in the fridge. I made two batches of mac and cheese, one plain and once with diced ham. (I don’t really have a recipe; I just made a bunch of white sauce, then shred up any cheese I can find and mix it all up, then stir that up with cooked macaroni, and top it with buttered breadcrumbs and bake it until it’s bubbly. I usually add mustard or hot sauce or both to the cheese sauce, but since I was adding ham, I didn’t think it needed it.)
It was pretty good.
About half of the ham one and half of the cheese one got eaten, so I call that a success.
I also made a tremendous platter of raw vegetables and put that out, along with hummus. My goal is to make a tremendous platter of raw vegetables early in the week every week, and then keep putting it out until it’s gone. This is basically me lately, on the right:
Ol’ Melon Pelvis, they call me. Olllll’ Corn Ulna. Lady Kale Pecs.
TUESDAY
Pork fried rice, egg rolls, raw veg
Tuesday I got the small hunk of pork out of the freezer that I stashed away a few weeks ago, when I made most of it into chili verde. I’m getting better at this “buy what’s on sale and use it all” thing. I cut it into little bits and made some fried rice, using the vegetables I had on hand, which turned out to be peas, carrots, scallions, onions, cabbage, and mushrooms, and of course garlic and ginger.
The ducks are laying reliably again, so I scrambled up three eggs and tossed that in as well.
I guess I’ve made this often enough that I should do a recipe card, so here’s that:
Jump to RecipeIt’s less of a recipe and more of a “recipe,” but I do consult it every time I make this, so it seemed worth making a card!
We also had some frozen egg rolls for Aldi (not bad) and some raw vegetables.
On Tuesday night, I baked a cake and started some gum paste decorations, because I wanted them to be dry by Wednesday.
I even remembered to anchor some toothpicks in them while they were still wet, so they would stay put on the cake. I am a golden god.
WEDNESDAY
Bacon cheeseburgers, fries, birthday cake
Wednesday I had a bunch of errands and cuckoo running around to do in the afternoon, so I got hopping on the cake right away. Mr. Birthday had requested a Shadow the Hedgehog cake, and sent me these reference images:
and I was willing to make a gum paste hedgehog head, hands, and feet, but for some reason I just didn’t want to make a gum paste hedgehog torso. Just didn’t want to do it.
So I looked at the reference images again, and thought I could probably get away with having him busting out of the cake in a sort of explosive . . . exploding cake situation. Couldn’t be simpler!!!
Then I thought, oh, he sent the logo as a separate image, so that must be important. I printed one out and did one of those icing transfer things. You print an image backwards, tape it to the counter, tape parchment paper or wax paper over it, and use a piping bag to trace the image. Then you freeze it, flip it onto your cake, and carefully pull the paper away. Trust the process, right?
Well, this only works if you . . . you know what, never mind. Never mind. All you need to know is that, within half an hour, I was feeling the need to remind myself that I used to be a National Merit Scholar, and lots of people struggle with candy melts, and my hand tremor is not my fault, and if he got a terrible cake it would probably be good for his character in some way. I ended up starting over twice and significantly downgrading my vision, and at the last minute I decided that the logo thingy needed to stand up, rather than lie flat. So I used candy melt to cement a couple of lollipop sticks to the back of the logo.
Then I used more candy melt to color in the feet and head, and then ran out to the store to get some hard candies.
I bashed them up in a bag with a rolling pin and spread them out on parchment paper in a medium oven for a few minutes — one butterscotch with pieces of ruined candy melt logo mixed in, for embers
and one just butterscotch, and I sort of feathered the edges while it was still hot, for flames
Then I let it cool and broke the candy sheets into pieces. Then I had another mental breakdown or two but eventually THIS IS HOW IT TURNED OUT
Shadow the Hedgehog APOCALYPSE. But I didn’t think through the angle of the feet when I was making them, so I had to pipe some little legs on, and it ended up looking like he is sort of angrily lounging in some kind of extremely hot hot tub. I was laughing so hard while I was putting it together. It was at this point that I called Irene over to see my cake, and she said, “Well . . . it has heart!”
Here’s how it looks with 20 candles:
It turns out twenty candles will absolutely melt a candy logo in the time it takes you to sing “Happy Birthday.” Now I know!
Anyway, the birthday boy liked it and, whew.
Damien made the requested bacon cheeseburgers
and some of the adult kids came over and we had a nice time. Whew.
And there was . . . leftover bacon. It’s still in the fridge right now. I really don’t understand.
THURSDAY
Spaghetti with sausage sauce
The plan was just loose sausage and jarred sauce, but I seemed to have a lot of canned tomatoes, so I cooked some diced onion along with the sausage, then broke up the tomatoes and added those in along with some tomato paste and some bay leaves and salt and sugar, and oops, some belated oregano, and some hot pepper flakes. Good enough for the likes of us.
Actually, it was just plain good. This is one of those meals, like whole chicken, that I used to make constantly when we were broke, so I’m kind of sour on it, but every once it a while, on a foggy, rainy day, it’s perfect.
FRIDAY
Pepper and egg sandwiches
We have quite a backlog of duck eggs, so this meal seemed like a good Friday choice.
Beat a bunch of eggs and set them aside. Then chop or slice green peppers and onions and sauté them in olive oil in a large pan for a few minutes, then add a little water, cover the pan, and let them cook gently for several minutes until they are soft. Uncover the pan and cook a few more minutes to let the remaining water evaporate, and then season the peppers and onions with ground pepper and salt. Add in a little more olive oil, then add the beaten eggs and scramble it all up together. Serve on nice rolls. (I think I got potato rolls, but kaiser buns would have been better.) I like mine with a little hot sauce.
Previous egg and pepper sandwiches:
I wish we had fruit salad, but we may have to settle for string beans.
Okay! And that is what we ate!
Couple of food chat odds and ends: One is that I found a perfectly good TAGINE for sale at the thrift store.
A tagine is the name of a variety of North African stews, and also the name of the vessel you cook it in. I, myself, would enjoy something with lamb and pistachios and apricots and nonsense like that, like this restaurant meal we had a few years ago for an anniversary or something:
but I don’t think anyone else would want that. So what would you cook in a tagine?
Second thing is that I recklessly signed up to cook dinner for the youth group, assuming the world would come to and end before the date came up, but it turns out it didn’t. Or at least, it hasn’t yet (fingers crossed for Sunday). It’s only about 20 people. Our current youth says that, if you make anything besides pasta, they laugh at you. I say I don’t mind being laughed at by teenagers, but I actually do. I did just find out that the vegan kids are not going to be there this week, so that’s easier (my plan had been to serve them a hot steaming bowl of Tough Luck anyway).
In the past, for youth group, I have made shawarma, rice pilaf, pita and hummus, and baklava, and then last time we made Marcella Hazan’s three-ingredient sauce on spaghetti, with garlic bread and fruit and salad. I think I’ll just have one large oven to cook or heat food in, otherwise I’d just made a bunch of pizzas. It’s supposed to be a main dish, a side, dessert, and drinks. I may just do stuffed shells, but I’m not happy about it, so if you can think of something relatively cheap that 20 kids would eat without too much scorn, I would love to hear it.
Cumin chicken thighs with chickpeas in yogurt sauce
A one-pan dish, but you won't want to skip the sides. Make with red onions and cilantro in lemon juice, pita bread and yogurt sauce, and pomegranates, grapes, or maybe fried eggplant.
Ingredients
- 18 chicken thighs
- 32 oz full fat yogurt, preferably Greek
- 4 Tbsp lemon juice
- 3 Tbsp cumin, divided
- 4-6 cans chickpeas
- olive oil
- salt and pepper
- 2 red onions, sliced thinly
For garnishes:
- 2 red onions sliced thinly
- lemon juice
- salt and pepper
- a bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
- 32 oz Greek yogurt for dipping sauce
- 3 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
Instructions
-
Make the marinade early in the day or the night before. Mix full fat Greek yogurt and with lemon juice, four tablespoons of water, and two tablespoons of cumin, and mix this marinade up with chicken parts, thighs or wings. Marinate several hours.
About an hour before dinner, preheat the oven to 425.
Drain and rinse four or five 15-oz cans of chickpeas and mix them up with a few glugs of olive oil, the remaining tablespoon of cumin, salt and pepper, and two large red onions sliced thin.
Spread the seasoned chickpeas in a single layer on two large sheet pans, then make room among the chickpeas for the marinated chicken (shake or scrape the extra marinade off the chicken if it’s too gloppy). Then it goes in the oven for almost an hour. That’s it for the main part.
The chickpeas and the onions may start to blacken a bit, and this is a-ok. You want the chickpeas to be crunchy, and the skin of the chicken to be a deep golden brown, and crisp. The top pan was done first, and then I moved the other one up to finish browning as we started to eat. Sometimes when I make this, I put the chickpeas back in the oven after we start eating, so some of them get crunchy and nutty all the way through.
Garnishes:
-
While the chicken is cooking, you prepare your three garnishes:
-Chop up some cilantro for sprinkling if people like.
-Slice another two red onions nice and thin, and mix them in a dish with a few glugs of lemon juice and salt and pepper and more cilantro.
-Then take the rest of the tub of Greek yogurt and mix it up in another bowl with lemon juice, a generous amount of minced garlic, salt, and pepper.
Basic stir fried rice
This is a very loose recipe, because you can change the ingredients and proportions however you like
Ingredients
- cooked rice
- sesame oil (or plain cooking oil)
- fresh garlic and ginger, minced
- vegetables, diced or shredded (onion, scallion, peas, bok choy, carrots, sugar snap peas, cabbage, etc.)
- brown sugar
- raw or cooked shrimp, or raw or cooked meat (pork, ham, chicken), diced
- soy sauce
- oyster sauce
- fish sauce
- eggs
Instructions
-
In a very large pan, heat up a little oil and sauté the ginger and garlic for a few minutes. If you are using raw meat, season it with garlic powder and ginger powder and a little soy sauce, add it to the pan, and cook it through. If you are using shrimp, just throw it in the pan and cook it.
-
Add in the chopped vegetables and continue cooking until they are cooked through. If you are using cooked meat, add it now.
-
Add the brown sugar and cook, stirring, until the brown sugar is bubbly and darkened.
-
Add in the cooked rice and stir until everything is combined.
-
Add in a lot of oyster sauce, a medium amount of soy sauce, and a little fish sauce, and stir to combine completely.
-
In a separate pan, scramble the eggs and stir them in. (Some people scramble the eggs directly into the rest of the rice, but I find it difficult to cook the eggs completely this way.)
-
If you are using cooked shrimp, add it at the end and just heat it through.
Chili over rice (for the true chili haters to fill up on) with fixings, chips, and cornbread? Or with cheese quesadilla “slices” (thirds? Points? Not sure the word I’m looking for) on the side as an alternate chili-hater alternative that also goes with the meal?
Is this for St Patrick’s Day? Shepherds pie and soda bread??
Or maybe the world will end 🤷🏻♀️
Super impressed with the cake as well as the elite pita! I always enjoy these posts.
Another amazing cake! Sonic and his buddies were a huge part of our son’s life and I am so grateful he never asked me to try to make a cake like that (he knew better, I guess) – instead, we used to get an ice cream cake froirm a local place b/c his birthday is in August and they were really good at drawing Sonic on top. I am going to try the way you make peppers and eggs, which we really like for dinner now and then – thanks! Love the creek on your property and good luck with the maple tapping.
I’m really impressed that you went the extra mile with that cake. It looked wonderful. Disclosure: I don’t have kids, but if I were ever faced with a request for one of the cakes you have shared with us, my response would be a hard stare and “Sprinkles. You get to pick the color of your sprinkles.”
The chicken and chickpeas is always a winner as far as I’m concerned. Yum. I googled “how to use a tagini” and found several recipes for meat stews or a veg-and-rice sort of thing. That might work. You could always edit out some of the less familiar ingredients if necessary.
Make your baked ziti! With that recipe from Deadspin. I’ve made that for several families with new babies, and everyone loves it.
I love that cake! And the fancy rolling pin! I might buy myself a fancy rolling pin, I like yours so much.
I’ve fed an army of young people a time or two. Typically I’ve done either meatball hoagies or hot roast beef sandwiches with chips on the side – both are easy, filling crowd pleasers. And two large crock pots can hold all the meat. Also, can easily be served in either crock pots or the disposable trays over sterno.
If you’ve got the oven there and can make the food on site, little hot dogs are easy and relatively cheap and somewhat of a novelty. Of course, big hot dogs are super easy and actually cheap, but you’ll definitely need additional food because some of the kids will have “The Jungle” fresh in their minds and will be smack in the middle of a several years long hot dog/sausage boycott.
Another thing I’ve seen done is a baked potato bar. Sour cream, chives, butter, scallions, bacon bits, chili, and cheese are all excellent toppings. Along those lines, I have several times done a taco bar at our family parties. You can stretch the ground beef by adding beans, so I think you can still get away pretty cheaply doing tacos. Easily served from crock pot or sterno trays.
BUT, at that age it’s a good bet that there will be a few vegetarian girls, even if the known vegans will be gone that week. So unless I was doing the baked potato bar, I’d probably also bring devilled eggs, tomato pie, or bagel bite pizzas. Or even just a tray of soft pretzels (not sure if soft pretzels are a thing in NH, but down here I can get 25 large soft pretzels with a bottle of mustard thrown in for $12).
Shwarma is now on my regular dinner rotation thanks to you. So now I’m going to add in some chickpeas with them thanks to your cumin chicken recipe. We do like roasted chickpeas but I don’t make them often. This will be a great upgrade to the shwarma.
I look forward to “What’s for supper” every week- thank you for writing it.
Not sure why you are making yourself crazy with stuffed shells for youth group. Why not just two big trays of baked pasta? If you make butter fried croutons for salad and brownies from a mix for dessert it should make almost everyone happy (someone will always be unhappy, it won’t really be about your food!)😂 Good luck with whatever you make!