Happy Friday! Today’s post will be about food, and gardens, and home improvement projects, and that’s it.
SATURDAY
Leftovers
Especially lavish leftovers, since, incredibly, we still had some steak from last week. I’m struggling mightily to cook less food now that we only have seven people in the house, but, like I said, I’m struggling.
While I was out shopping, Corrie made two loaves of banana bread. She’s getting really great in the kitchen! It turned out scrumptious, tender and moist.
Here’s the recipe.
Jump to RecipeSophia has also been baking more, now that the cooler weather has arrived. She made some really intense apple cider muffins with cider buttercream topping later in the week, but I forgot to take a picture. But three cheers for kids who bake!
I myself made some pretty lousy applesauce. We had these lousy apples
from our elderly apple tree, Marvin, which the kids feel sentimental about, so every year I make applesauce.
I washed all the spiders off, cut the apples in half, and cut out as many bad spots as I could manage. I took this picture:
because this was an especially large and pristine specimen. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to this tree to produce better apples. I’ve tried nothing, and I’m fresh out of ideas.
I put the apple halves in two stock pots with about 3/4 cup of water and set them to simmer. Then I burned one! But I did not burn the other. I let it cook until the apples were soft, and then I put the pot in the fridge. (This is not a necessary step in the recipe; I just didn’t feel like dealing with it anymore that day.)
Oh, also on Saturday, I fulfilled my end of a contract and dyed Corrie’s hair bright pink. She’s happy with it, but less enthusiastic about having her photo online all the time (sorry, kids. I have regrets), so I will just show you a photo of the dye we used
It is Lime Crime Unicorn Hair, and the color is “Juicy.” The label is the most egregiously illegible thing I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve squinted at a LOT of hair dye. But I have to say, this stuff adheres really, really well. The color is exactly as advertised (I did bleach her hair pretty light first), and it’s staying put so far.
SUNDAY
Roast beef sandwiches with smoked gouda, garden corn, chips
The beef round eye hunks were still on sale, so we got another one and Damien seasoned and slow cooked it in the oven, and it turned out perrrrrfect. Very juicy and delicious. Unfortunately, the pictures I took make it look like something the plumber would hold up while saying, “Well, HERE’S your problem,” so I’ll skip photos.
I splurged on some smoked gouda from the deli, and I also bought a jar of hot pepper sandwich spread
and oh man, that was a great combination.
I see now that my table is gross. I’m not deleting the picture as an act of humility and penance in the face of the way I acted yesterday on social media. Anyway, really great sandwiches.
I picked the second round of corn from the garden, and Damien cooked it in the husk on the grill, and it was sweet and juicy and delicious. Lovely meal.
Then it was time to make the apple sauce, as I’d been promising! So I set out to look for the foley mill, which I only use once a year to make apple sauce, but for which there is no substitute. Couldn’t find it in the island cabinet, but I did find a bag of rotten potatoes, so I threw that away and scrubbed out the inside of the cabinet. Then I thought, well, the other cabinet could probably use some cleaning, too, especially since it’s not even a cabinet, it’s just a ghastly conglomeration of wire shelving and milk crates and spidery misc. So I started pulling stuff out, and I DID find the foley mill, but then I got to thinking how much I didn’t want to go through that again next year, and how it wouldn’t be that hard to replace this chaos with some actual shelving, so I started looking for scrap wood, and then I thought for once I would treat myself and take some measurements and actually buy some wood specifically for this project, so I went to Home Depot and got back and settled in among the musty old double boilers, dusty candy molds, fusty wedding cake pans and bottles of terrible vermouth, and greasy pencils and bent measuring spoons that had slithered down into the gap, and I got going with the saw and the drill
and Corrie comes in and said, ” . . . I thought you were gonna make apple sauce.”
I was! I mean, I am! This is the process! For some reason.
Well, it took seven hours, and it’s not quite done. My pride will not allow me to show you photos of what the new shelves look like. They are level, and made out of real wood, and not likely to fall apart soon, and they are better than what we had, so that’s a win. I just can’t seem to take a picture where they don’t look like they were built by a Dr. Seuss bird, and possibly photographed by a second Dr. Seuss bird who is the first bird’s enemy. But I did fill two cartons with stuff to throw away, which is always nice.
In my defense, I have built things out of wood before, but I’ve never built something that has to fit inside something else, and it involved more precise measuring than is . . . customarily my style.
Anyway, we delivered the bomb. I mean we found the foley mill. I mean I built some shelves. I mean we started making some applesauce!
MONDAY
Garlicky pork chops, homemade applesauce, baked potato
So Monday I actually finished making the applesauce. I spooned the cooked apples, peels and cores and all, into the foley mill. If you’re not familiar with this device, it’s basically a pot with a strainer for a bottom, and in the middle is a crank. When you turn the crank, a tilted blade forces the apples (or whatever) through the strainer, so only the soft, edible parts get pushed through the holes. Turning the crank also makes a spindle scrape the underside of the strainer, depositing the applesauce (or whatever) into the bowl below. It also has three little brackets so the mill stays in place over the bowl while you crank it.
Actually I have a picture!
Just a nicely-designed device. Of course you can peel and core your apples before cooking them, and then you won’t have to strain them out afterward; but it’s so much easier this way (assuming you’re not using a recipe that includes a trip to Home Depot), and cooking the peels along with the insides gives you more flavor and color (if you have nice apples!). Apples that are red, for instance, will result in a lovely dusty rose-colored applesauce.
When I got it all cranked through, I put the apple pulp into the slow cooker with some butter, white sugar, and lots of cinnamon, and let that go all day.
Pork chops were on sale, and I really struggle with cooking pork chops so they’re not dry. I thought Nagi might have a solution, and she did! She has a recipe called “Just a Great Pork Chop Marinade,” and even though it’s made with soy sauce, brown sugar, and garlic, she promised it just tastes savory, not Asian, and she was right. It also has dijon mustard, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce. I marinated the chops for several hours, and then broiled them right up under the broiler (the recipe calls for grilling, which would have been nice). SCRUMPTIOUS.
I will absolutely be returning to this recipe. These are probably the juiciest pork chops I have ever made.
I threw a bunch of potatoes in the oven for 40 minutes or so, and we had the pork, applesauce, and baked potatoes for a very fine fall meal.
Someday the kids are going to have applesauce made from actual good apples, and they’re gonna realize . . . well, you know what, it doesn’t matter. They liked the applesauce, and this was a very popular meal. And I delivered the bomb.
TUESDAY
Buffalo chicken wraps
Tuesday Damien and I and a kid spent all day on the road and at a largely useless and frustrating doctor’s appointment, so I was very glad I had planned an easy dinner: Buffalo chicken wraps.
Or, I was glad until I realized I had planned it, but not actually bought any buffalo chicken. A small error! Damien gallantly zipped off to the store and bought some, and we had a late but popular meal: Tortillas with buffalo chicken, blue cheese or ranch dressing, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, shredded pepper jack cheese, and crunchy fried onions.
We still have a giant backlog of tortillas in the house, so get ready for more wraps.
WEDNESDAY
Chicken with chickpeas and piquant onions, Jerusalem salad, yogurt sauce, pita
Wednesday I made a dish I haven’t made for quite some time: Chicken with chickpeas. It’s a middle eastern-ish recipe and none of the steps are hard, but I’m always a little surprised at how many elements it has. I guess I have it in my head that it’s an INCREDIBLY SIMPLE meal, and it really isn’t. It’s just regular-easyish.
Anyway, I got the chicken marinating, cut up the onions, and made the lemony onions side dish and the yogurt sauce and the Jerusalem salad. Tons of color!
I’ll put all those recipes at the end. Oops, I guess I don’t have a card for Jerusalem salad. Well, it’s just tomatoes, cucumbers, fresh cilantro and/or parsley, some olive oil, and lemon juice, salt and pepper. All of these dishes really want fresh lemon juice, if you can manage it. Bottled lemon juice always has kind of a stale stank to it, so if you’re going to use it in a dish that doesn’t get cooked, I always try to do fresh.
Then when I got home, it really was very simple and easy to just chunk the chicken and chickpeas and onions into the oven. This recipe has you marinating the chicken in a spiced yogurt sauce, which makes the meat moist as heck, but even more importantly gives the skin a magnificent texture.
The marinade kind of melds onto the skin and make it, like, chicken ultraskin.
Sometimes I keep the chicken warm while giving the chickpeas some extra time in the oven to crisp up, but it was already super late and we were starving, so I just served it, along with some store-bought pita. I do like chickpeas with a little crunch, but soft and savory is also very good!
Really wonderful meal.
On Wednesday I realized I had never picked the peaches from my tree, which is funny, because last year at this time, I was picking for the 476th time and blanching and freezing them as fast as I could, and still being neck-deep in peaches. I guess it’s pretty common for peach trees to be on a schedule like this.
The peaches this year may be few but some of them are HUGE.
This is not some kind of optical illusion photo. They’re the biggest peaches I’ve ever seen! They’re delicious, too, super juicy and nectar-y. I’m saving the pits from the biggest ones, and I’ll try to sprout them. Last year I used a method where you dry the pits for a few days, pry them open to get the inner seed out, and plant them in pots in the ground in the fall, so they get cold stratified and can sprout easily in the spring.
I did this with six seeds, as I recall, and got two good seedlings, which are now in the ground and doing great. I have hopes of turning the side yard, which is currently overgrown with goldenrod and wild grapes, into a little orchard. Right now it has the apple tree, a very young peach tree, a valiant blueberry bush, and of course the ubiquitous wild raspberries. I would like a cherry tree, but I’ve struggled with fungus on cherry trees in the past, so maybe I will do a nut tree in the spring. Lucky me! Always something to look forward to. (The other new peach tree is by the duck pen, so eventually they will have some natural shade and, presumably, some windfall snacks. I’m not worried about them eating the pits because they routinely mooch around the existing peach tree, and they have figured out how not to eat pits! Which makes two things they have figured out. The first thing is screwing.)
THURSDAY
Rigatoni alla disgraziata with homemade cheese and homemade bread
Thursday I overextended myself, and I don’t even know why. I guess I was cooking my feelings, and also I had some pretty little eggplants from the garden that also wanted to be cooked.
The plan was rigatoni alla disgraziata,
Jump to Recipewhich is a meatless but very hearty pasta dish. It is not difficult. You toast up a bunch of breadcrumbs in oil, and then take them out of the pan and fry up your eggplants in more oil.
No need to peel them. But at this point I realized I didn’t have as much eggplant as I thought, so I added some diced onion. Then you add tomato sauce to the eggplant, then you boil up some rigatoni, mix the breadcrumbs into the eggplant sauce, and stir it all together with torn-up mozzarella, and top it with grated parmesan. I also tarted up the jarred sauce with some chopped tomatoes and fresh basil.
I decided to make fresh mozzarella cheese for this, and that was a good idea, except I decided to make a double recipe, and I was unsure about the timing of the chemistry part of it when you’re making a double batch. I really struggled with getting the almost-finished cheese to a high enough temperature before stretching it. The stretching is what gives it that stretchy, string-like texture, but it’s really hard to stretch hot cheese without gloves! I don’t know why I don’t have gloves!
Anyway, the cheese tasted fine but was very grainy, because of the heating/stretching issue.
I hope that, because it’s folded into the pasta and is supposed to melt a bit, it wouldn’t matter much, and it didn’t matter that much, but it was a little sad. I was a little sad.
I decided to cheer myself up by making bread, and that was where I really went wrong. First the dough rose right out of the bowl and slopped itself all over the windowsill and floor, and then I decided to get cute and make twelve separate little loaves, and then I realized I was LATE, like “text your teenager and promise you have not forgotten them” late. So I zipped through the process as fast as I could, which, believe it or not, does not produce the highest quality of food.
The good news is, we ate so late, everyone was happy to see anything hot and ready. I did take some pictures, but they’re not great, and it was not a great meal. These are decent recipes which I recommend! Sometimes things just don’t come together, and we all live to fight another day. I did buy some gloves for future cheese.
FRIDAY
Pizza
Just regular old pizza, no fancy tricks. And that’s-a my story. We live to fight another day.
Banana bread or muffins
adapted from Quick Breads, Soups & Stews by Mary Gubser
Ingredients
- 2 cups flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 3 eggs
- 3 ripe bananas, mashed well
- 1/2 cup chopped nuts optional
Instructions
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Preheat oven to 375.
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In one bowl, sift flour, baking soda, and salt together.
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In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well in between. Add mashed bananas and mix well.
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Gradually add the dry ingredients and blend well. If you're adding nuts, fold them in.
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Grease 12 muffin tins or a loaf pan and pour the batter in.
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Bake 20 minutes or longer, until the top is slightly browned.
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
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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:
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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.
Yogurt sauce
Ingredients
- 32 oz full fat Greek yogurt
- 5 cloves garlic, crushed
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 3 Tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp pepper
- fresh parsley or dill, chopped (optional)
Instructions
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Mix all ingredients together. Use for spreading on grilled meats, dipping pita or vegetables, etc.
Rigatoni alla disgraziata
A hearty, meatless pasta dish with eggplant, breadcrumbs, and mozzarella
Ingredients
- 2 lg eggplants with ends cut off, cut into one-inch pieces (skin on)
- salt
- 3/4 cup olive oil, plus a little extra for frying bread crumbs
- 3 cups bread crumbs
- 3 lbs rigatoni
- 6 cup marinara sauce
- 1 lb mozzarella
- grated parmesan for topping
Instructions
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In a very large skillet or pot, heat up a little olive oil and toast the bread crumbs until lightly browned. Remove from pan and set aside.
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Put the 3/4 cup of olive oil in the pan, heat it again, and add the cubed eggplant. Cook for several minutes, stirring often, until eggplant is soft and slightly golden. Salt to taste. Add in sauce and stir to combine and heat sauce through. Keep warm.
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In another pot, cook the rigatoni in salted water. Drain. Add the pasta to the eggplant and sauce mixture. Add in the toasted breadcrumbs and the shredded mozzarella. Stir to combine. Serve with grated parmesan on top.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Bake 25 minutes or more until the crust is golden. One pan may need to bake a few minutes longer.
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Run some butter over the crust of the hot bread if you like, to make it shiny and even yummier.
I remember one year when I was in college and living in a house my parents owned, and Dad had planted a peach tree by the front door a few years before then, but it was still pretty small and you didn’t expect more than a couple of dozen peaches from it in any given year. But the year I was there, we got a frost while the peach blossoms were still on and there were exactly six peaches that grew that year. They ended up approximately the size of small cantaloupes, and when I took one to school to eat in my lunch someone asked me what it was. Like your peaches this year, these were the sweetest, most delicious peaches I have ever eaten.
This experience made me a believer in in pruning, and– not every time, but sometimes– when I feel like shaking my fist at heaven for yet another plan which I can see is not going to come to fruition, I remember how insanely good those peaches were, and I gently put my hand down.
In other news, on Tuesday, I went to the library to pick out books to read to my friend’s kids, because we had planned for me to come over today. Because I studied Arabic in college (pre 9/11, and I haven’t used it since) I picked out a book set in Syria during their recent civil war. The kids picked out that book out of my bag for me to read today. It’s called _The Cat Man of Aleppo_, and it’s about an ambulance driver who started taking care of the cats in his neighborhood who had been left behind by fleeing residents. Eventually, with donations, he was able to start an animal sanctuary and build a playground for the neighborhood children.
The thing is, my friend is from Arizona, and has a cousin who goes to UVU, and both she and her kids were feeling out of sorts today. And after we read _The Cat Man of Aleppo_, we talked about how there are always helpers. Her son asked if we thought he could be like ‘Alaa (not God; different vowel at the front than Allah, but that’s the name of The Cat Man of Aleppo). We told him that God has given him his own talents, and that he can certainly be a helper if he chooses to be.
Anyway, I felt and feel pretty amazed that I picked the book out on Tuesday, and that the kids picked it out from the options I brought today, and I felt like sharing.
Thank you, as always, for writing. This blog really does make my world feel like a less lonely place.
My family was thrilled that we were given saucing apples this year. We get apples from someone–or more than one someone–every year, but they’re not always good for saucing. This year I made 12 quarts of applesauce, which isn’t enough, but is more than the zero we had last year.
I am intrigued by that chicken and chickpea recipe. I think my whole family would like that one.