What’s for supper? Vol. 454: This is the account of what we had for supper.

Happy Friday! Let’s talk about food. 

SATURDAY
Leftovers and fancy cheesecake

Just a regular day of shopping and chores. The leftovers were slightly more disparate than usual, because of the day’s proximity to NYE.

The day before, I had to cancel a cheesecake order because of the shattered oven door, but I still had all those ingredients at room temperature; so I made a cheesecake just for us. I used the opportunity to experiment with a baked-in design. I took a few spoonfuls of raw batter and mixed them with different food colors, then piped lines onto the raw cheesecake, and then dragged them in concentric circles with a wooden skewer. 

Then I baked it as normal and left it in the oven to cool very slowly overnight. In the morning, it looked like this:

A little darker than I like to let cheesecake get, and the yellow does not look great, but otherwise a success as far as the design! There are a million tutorials for clever wet-on-wet designs, and I could also do names or messages. I have some almost-certain news about my baking future that I want to share, but it’s not a done deal yet!

Anyway, it was a very yummy cheesecake, and it was the first one my family and I have had in a long time! I’ve made so many cheesecakes lately, but they all went out the door. 

Anyway, the kids helped me make my menu for the week, and we somehow arrived at the idea of A Week of Sandwiches. So here’s how that went. (Spoiler: It went in between two pieces of bread, mostly.)

SUNDAY
Meatball subs, veggies and dip

I usually take allll the shortcuts for meatballs,

Jump to Recipe

but this time I used fresh garlic and onion, rather than powders. But I did use the easy peasy cooking method of putting them on a rack on a pan and baking them. 

It still shakes me up that this is enough food for the family. I used to make almost three times this much! 

When the meatballs were cooked, I transferred them to the slow cooker with sauce, cut up a bunch of veggies

and lo, there was supper. The first sandwich. 

This picture reminds me that I also made banana muffins. I was cleaning the kitchen and found an ungodly number of nearly-dead bananas, so I made 24 muffins for snacks and lunches. Here’s my basic recipe:

Jump to Recipe

Not thrilling, but a very decent muffin. 

And that was the end of vacation!

MONDAY
Vermonter sandwiches, fries, hot pretzels

First day back at school. It went about like you would expect. Sophia (who in in college and still on vacation) made some fancy cookies, so I ended up switching around my menu, and one of the kids discovered some frozen pretzels I forgot to make on Saturday, and we had a tasty but slightly incoherent supper. 

Vermonter sandwiches: Chicken breast, bacon, sharp cheddar cheese, tart green apple, and honey mustard sauce on sourdough or ciabatta. I ended up finishing cooking the chicken in the leftover bacon grease, and I have no regrets.

Tasty.  

And that was the second sandwich. 

TUESDAY
Chopped Italian subs, antipasto 

Tuesday the replacement glass for the oven door arrived! Damien has had 9,000 other repair projects, though, so it’s still in its box. The oven actually works fine. I’m just opening and closing the door very carefully! (It’s just the inner glass that’s broken, so I’m not cooking with a big hole in my oven, thanks for asking.) 

The only tricky thing about serving sandwiches all week is coming up with different side dishes. I don’t like serving chips or fries more than once each per week. So for Tuesday, I figured we’d lean into the Italian thing and have an antipasto dish, made up of all the little snicky snacks still leftover from NYE and Sophia’s birthday. We also had leftover challah, which gets dry really really fast, so I cut that into cracker-sized pieces and toasted them with olive oil and kosher salt. They turned out kind of weird! Less bruschetta, more, I don’t know, biscuit-y. Much better when hot out of the oven. 

So again, a little incoherent, but yummy. 

*ahem* 
sound like anyone you know? 

[here I have deleted a photo of me winking archly at the camera. You are welcome]

Anyway, so then we had the sandwiches, which really would be better if the kids would let me mix up all the ingredients together like you’re supposed to. But they like their separate bowls, so we had chopped ham and various kinds of salami in one bowl, then shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, chopped provolone and chopped other cheese, I forget what. And then I put out various dressings and vinegars, and a jar of that hotsy totsy pepper spread. And a big jar of pickles. 

The third sandwich.  

Also in this photo, you can see the absolute star of this year’s Christmas presents: A water bottle that looks like a can of Slurm. Corrie’s pride and joy. 

WEDNESDAY
Grilled ham and cheese

I think Wednesday was the day I slept 12 hours. I honestly don’t know if I’m getting sick, or if I’m catching up from Christmas, or maybe I just really like sleeping, but that is what happened. I was none too sharp the rest of the day. We had grilled ham and cheese, fake Doritos, and pickles for supper. 

And you know what, for once I didn’t burn any of the sandwiches. Still, some of them turned out better than others. 

The fourth sandwich. 

THURSDAY
Chicken wraps, baked potato

I think it was Thursday morning that Damien noticed my tire had kind of fallen off. You would think this is the kind of thing I would notice on my own, but I did not. I mean, presumably it happened while the car was parked and not while I was driving it around, but who knows. So that meant both our cars were out of commission, too ra loo. Luckily, we were able to borrow Sophia’s car. Score one for the terrible economy that prevents adult kids from moving out too fast, I guess! 

I had bought a bag of spicy chicken cutlets from Walmart — the kind where the chicken is raw under the breading, so it takes longer to cook, but it’s somewhat cheaper than pre-cooked, and they’re really quite good. We had chicken wraps with shredded lettuce and various cheeses left over from various meals. I put ranch dressing on mine. And we are calling this a sandwich, because what else is it? That’s a sandwich. 

I also baked some potatoes because the whole side dish thing had gotten out of sync, and that’s what was left. So kind of a weird combination, but nobody went hungry. Not when we had potatoes, and the fifth sandwich. 

FRIDAY
Pancakes? 

Okay, pancakes are not sandwiches. I can acknowledge that. However, Damien put a new tire on my car and 90% fixed his brakes, and that’s not sandwiches, either! What it is is actually pretty hot. I gotta run out and mail out a thing I sold on Marketplace (a five-foot-tall Batman lamp that I thought would be a huge hit on Christmas, and it absolutely was not), drop Damien off at Adoration, pick up the kids, and get Corrie’s ear hole that closed up re-pierced so her ears will be healed in time for her birthday, which is not really soon, but somehow the entire household is planning for it already. I slept so late I had time to dream a really long dream, and then dream further that I woke up and was telling people about the first dream. A dream within a dream. A dream sandwich, if you will. 

Aha! And so it was morning and it was evening, the sixth sandwich. And I saw all the sandwiches I had made, and they were not bad at all. 

In conclusion, I have one other photo on my camera roll that I didn’t manage to incorporate. Here it is.

Okay, now I can rest.