What’s for supper? Vol. 476: Talk to the blanket

Happy Friday! I can’t believe a whole week has gone by since the last week’s what’s for supper, tee hee.

This week has been very improvised, so if you were hoping for recipes, you will be disappointed. If you were hoping to find out what a family of seven eats when nobody is hardly home and nobody is really in charge, read on!

SATURDAY
Leftovers plus pizza pockets

Saturday was when the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage arrived in NH, with its first stop at our parish! Here is the bishop bringing the Blessed Sacrament into the church. 

I was going to correct the slant in this photo, but I kind of like how it looks like the church is leaning toward the monstrance. There was adoration, then lunch, then a procession through downtown, and then Mass, but we had a ton to do, plus some people were bugging out, and I had a migraine; so we bowed out. Caught part of the procession on the way home. 

I do love a procession. During Adoration, they sang O Salutaris Hostia, which I happen to know in English, thanks to Fr. Stan’s trademark supersonic benediction trap. So when we got to “Qui vitam sine termino,
Nobis donet in patria,” I knew it as “O grant us endless length of days in our true native land with Thee,” and that is when I started to cry. Because of The Everything. If we could sing that instead of the National Anthem from now on, that would be good. 

Anyway, I did a bit of grocery shopping to get us through the weekend, and then schlorped myself home. 

SUNDAY
Father’s day!

Damien does not like a big fuss for Father’s Day, and the best I could do was bully him into having bacon cheeseburgers and store-bought strawberry shortcake. Nine of the ten kids were able to come for the afternoon, so that was lovely! 

Clara and Wesley had to scoot off pretty early, but I did get a group photo of almost everybody. I have found that if you suddenly scream “SAY ‘BANANA HAMMOCK,'” then you will get some kind of smile out of your family. 

It’s possible this will only work one time.

Anyway, despite my protests, Damien ended up cooking the burgers on the grill (not that he doesn’t cook well, but we were REALLY trying to get him to not accomplish anything for one day), but he prevailed. Delicious burgers

and very low-effort strawberry shortcake, with angel food cake and squirty can whipped cream. 

A lovely day. Those are nice kids. 

MONDAY
Very homemade pizza

Monday, I faced the fact that, when we got home from camping on Thursday, we agreed that if Damien brought all the gear into the house, I would put it away. And I did! Sort of. Well, most of it. Well, probably half of it. Not including the tent or the air mattress, and some other things, a few. The good news is, the tent was basically clean, so all I had to do was roll it . . . 

oh dear. Okay, so I shook it out and brushed it off, but it was still pretty wet, so I set it up to dry in the sun, and then tackled the air mattress. So I inflated it …

Actually I wasn’t sure which air mattress we had used. If you will recall from my camping post, there was SOME CONFUSION about the air mattresses, and there were actually three of them out and about in the house. Which was truly not making is easy to get around our postage stamp-sized dining room. So I basically smacked myself around until I unwillingly agreed to inflate all three of them, see which one leaks and what size they all are, deflate them, roll them up, LABEL THEM, and put them away. So it turns out we have two one-person air mattresses and one two-person air mattress. Which was, of course, very wet. 

So we did this for a while:

and if you noticed the plastic full of debris hanging down from the ceiling, just walk away. Just walk away, man. 

So eventually the mattress dried, and I labelled and put that one away, too, and all the rest of the camping stuff, finally. I was feeling extremely smug and competent because of all my hard organizational work, until I looked out the window and saw that someone had discovered the tent

You guys know I love my ducks, but they do be crapping. So yeah, they found the entrance, went in, and crapped all over the place. Then it started to rain. So I decided that I would not think about it for a while, and that is what I did! 

My decision-making skills were all used up by this point in the day, and the idea of going out and shopping for groceries seemed unbearably horrible. So I made some pizza dough. I followed this recipe from Darwin Catholic, uhhhh sort of. Well, not really. I didn’t have any flax seed (which is optional anyway), and I ended up using QUITE a bit more flour than it called for. I dunno. This recipe came highly recommended, so I assume I messed up somehow, based on the fact that my pate was very addled that day. (I say “that day” as if I didn’t today shout, “Oh, YOU’RE back again, eh?” to what turned out to be a blanket.)

Anyway, I flobbled the dough into a bowl to rise, and assessed our cheese situation. It was low, boys. But we did have plenty of milk, so I decided to make a batch of mozzarella. It was raining, my day was already ruined, and you can make cheese mostly sitting down, so it was a sensible choice. I do love making cheese. It goes through so many magical transformations. First the milk separates into curds and whey

and then it organizes itself into a lovely, stretchy whole again. 

And the whole thing only takes about 25 minutes. 

Or, from another angle, about nine months. 

AM I CRAZY? Does this not look like a full-term baby, upside down and smiling, possibly curled up with a twin? 

It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. Just never speak to me or my cheese baby again. 

Anyway, eventually I got the pizzas together, and I made one with just cheese, and then decided to make the other one a homemade trifecta, with basil from the garden. So red onion, black olives, garlic, and basil.

They both came out very nice, if slightly overbaked.

Sonny gallantly reassured me that if I had any doubts about these pizzas, any at all, Mother, he would be more than glad to take them off my hands. 

TUESDAY
Hot dogs?

Tuesday is a blur. I cannot remember what we ate, but I’m looking at my calendar and it sure looks like I spent the day in the car, so I think hot dogs leftover from camping is likely. I do remember doing a lot of writing in various waiting rooms and parking lots! 

The main thing I remember about Tuesday was going out to check on my peach tree, and discovering it had these crazy clear and yellowing blobs of gel all over it, which I’ve never seen before. 

I was alarmed, because I’ve really been using my whole ass with this peach tree — pruning, culling, fertilizing, and so on — and I was really looking forward to a big harvest this year. I looked it up, and it seemed like it was gummosis, which is not a diagnosis in itself, but a condition that could have many root causes. 

So I made a true rookie mistake: I joined a fruit tree hobbyist group on Facebook, and asked for advice. I was, of course, immediately informed that my tree is dying, I will have no peaches, it’s thoroughly infested with worms, insects, and rot, and I will need to lop branches off and bring them into Emergency Peach Services for diagnosis, but the only thing for sure is that the outlook is GRIM. 

So I went back and looked more closely, and really could not see a single bug or worm, but something that looked like even worse news: A few places on the trunk with a line of holes, which definitely hadn’t been there before. 

I was distraught. I tried to comfort myself with the two baby peach trees I had grown from the pits of this tree. If it really was dying, I could just start over with the next generation. But I really did not want to. I wanted this tree. 

Then I remembered my mother always used to call the university extension service for nature advice, and she always said they were super helpful and nice and knowledgeable. So while we were in yet another parking lot waiting for a kid to get out of work, I called, and GUESS WHAT? Carl, who was indeed helpful, knowledgeable, and nice, said that the holes were almost certainly the work of a sapsucker. Basically a woodpecker who was deliberately poking my tree to make it freak out and ooze sap, because it is, well, a sapsucker, and when a peach tree is stressed out, it oozes in an attempt to heal itself.

And the tree is fine, Carl said. I might loosely wrap some burlap on the injured spots, and keep an eye on it to make sure no bacterial infection seems to have entered, but otherwise it’s not an emergency at all. No one is dying! Not this time. 

I was so encouraged by this escape from the jaws of death that I raced around doing a bunch of other little gardening tasks. I mixed some perlite into the last remains of my compost heap and got my olive tree into a bigger pot and found a place in the sun for it; and I took my pineapple top, which has grown some nice little roots,

out of its windowsill jar and into an outdoor pot; and I potted up some geranium cuttings that may or may not be salvageable.

When Moe was here, he helped me get my grapevine organized onto two arches. Before, it was just a big floppy mess sprawling over the bow of our murderboat, which was originally supposed to be a playhouse but has become a spot for storage and grapevine sprawling. My plan is to eventually add some extra structure around it so I can fill it with soil and turn the whole bow into a giant planter. But honestly, probably not this summer. For now, it’s just a good sunny spot for things in pots. 

WEDNESDAY
Omelettes and watermelon

By Wednesday, it seemed like it would be silly to go grocery shopping at this late stage, and plus my vibes-based budgeting system had left me in a bit of a pickle, temporarily. But half the family was out anyway, so it seemed like a fine time to make omelettes and eat them in front of the TV. 

The rain had stopped for a bit, and it was supposed to be hot that day, so in the morning, I got going on some more garden tasks. First I put up a little fence to keep the terrible ducks from stomping on my wildflower seedling patch. 

Oh, do they love to stomp on things. My pumpkins are big enough that I don’t care if the ducks get into them with their big dumb feet, but I REALLY want these wildflowers to grow. 

Corrie’s pal came over, and they had a good day swimming in the pool and then doing terrible things in the kitchen. They came up with deep fried pancake batter fritters topped with apple and cinnamon. Most people would take the peel off the apple before putting it in the food processor, but not these fearless young turks! I very much enjoyed my first bite, and then, when the kids weren’t looking, Sonny very much enjoyed the rest.

Then I faced up to my egg situation, which was out of control. You can leave unwashed eggs on the counter at room temperature for QUITE a while, and their freshness only starts really diminishing quickly once you wash them; but the downside to this system is that your counter very fills up with shitty eggs. It’s not great! So I soaked them for a while and then scrubbed them clean(er)

and tried not to think about how I had done this exact thing several weeks ago with the last batch of eggs, and those eggs are still in the mini fridge. 

and uhhhh there are also a bunch in boxes in the shelf under that. Dang it. 

Anyway I made sure they were all fresh enough, then texted the lady who runs the Chinese restaurant down the road and said I’d make her a special deal, and then I got to work in the front flower patch. My friend Margaret had sent me a whole bunch of wonderful iris cuttings in different colors, and I wanted to get them in the ground before the rain started up again. I had a lovely time weeding, mulching, composting, and expanding the bed, and I got all the irises in. This is a tough spot to grow stuff in, because it gets a lot of salt and gravel from the highway, but I think the irises are far enough back that they’ll be fine. 

Here are before and after pictures that don’t look all that different, but I can FEEL it. 

Before: 

and after: 

and most importantly, this is how it looks from the back:

oh yes. It’s going to be lovely. The egg lady came by while I was working, and she was excited about my irises, so that was nice. Also, spending ten minutes chatting with a woman who runs a restaurant reminded me to never, ever, ever think my life is busy. 

Anyway, we did have omelettes and watermelon for supper. I had ham, cheddar, and diced onion in mine, and it was yummy, if not beautiful. I meant to throw in some garlic scapes (I pulled a new batch the other day), but I forgot.

The original plan was to make some biscuits or maybe waffles, and I had saved a jar of whey to use for that, but by dinner time, I was feeling much more toasted hamburger bun-ish. 

I also listed my corn starts on a buy nothing group. I had thinned my corn patch out on Sunday, and so many of them came up with the roots, I didn’t want to just toss them. I’m glad I didn’t, because there was a LOT of interest. Two nice ladies claimed them, and that felt good. I always think I’m going to sell stuff from my garden, but when it comes down to it, it never feels right.  

THURSDAY
Rubber chicken

Thursday we had an awards ceremony to go to, so Damien and I did the world’s fastest writing, I dropped a kid off at work and stopped at the thrift store and found a dress and bought it with my egg money, and then we got gussied up, and then psyched each other up to be sociable with people we aren’t related to, which is a STRAIN. I went so far as to dig out some supportive undergarments, which is something I haven’t done in many years, and haven’t missed at all.

The food was truly terrible and Damien only won two awards, but we actually had some fun conversation and got home before it was too horribly late. The kids at home had chicken tenders with buffalo sauce, chips, and also raw vegetables which I am pretending they actually ate. 

FRIDAY
I actually don’t know.

What should we eat? Very old duck eggs. Mulch. Supportive Undergarments Flambé.

I haven’t even gotten dressed yet, but yet I still found time to forget I was supposed to take a kid in for a physical, and now it’s too late, so that was pretty efficient. She also has an art class later in the day, and I will probably ask Damien to cover nap time, I mean adoration. Let me know if you can think of what to eat!