What’s for supper? Vol. 490: O for the wings of a duck

Happy Friday! We just got back from getting our passport applications in. Damien told me, “Good job getting that done!” and I said I really couldn’t bring myself to say it was a good job, but we did get it done. 

Do you ever feel like you just … struggle more than most people? Like, things that other people just plain do, without thinking twice or breaking their stride, are things that make you feel like your flippers are on backwards and someone turned out the lights? That’s my starting point, and then I start looking for everyone’s birth certificates, and, well. 

Anyway, we did eat well this week. It was, in fact, a very Amelia Bedelia week, complete with me coming out of the kitchen holding food that makes people think, “Well, let’s not kill her yet.” Here is what we had: 

SATURDAY
Halloween, of course!

Can’t remember the last time we had Halloween on a Saturday. So easy! The kids managed their own costumes almost 100%, except I did make Benny a sword. Here they are:

The bigger kids flitted off with their friends, and Corrie and Damien and I met up with one of Corrie’s friends and trick-or-treated until we closed the place down. The kids watched Army of Darkness when we got back, but Damien and I were pigzausted and just went to lie down. We had pizza pockets at some point. 

SUNDAY
Pulled pork sandwiches, apple pie, vanilla ice cream 

Sunday I felt a huge rush of domesticity, which is a good thing, because I suddenly had tons to do. First I sat down with a lovely capuccino, which kiiiind of looks like Donald Trump as a chameleon 

and then I got to work! First got some pulled pork going for supper. Here’s my recipe:

Seared the pork with salt and pepper and threw it in the pot with onions and jalapeños, apple juice, cumin, cloves, and red pepper flakes. We were out of cider vinegar, so I used white.

I don’t use the Instant Pot as much as I used to, but being able to just push the button that says “meat” is pretty great. I let the pork cook and then stay on warm the rest of the day, until it looked like this:

and then drained out most of the liquid and shredded it. 

Then I got some ice cream going. This was to go with pie, so I just made one batch of plain vanilla (2 eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 cups of cream, 1 cup of milk, churned for 30 minutes), and one batch with this trail mix I got at Aldi: 

I am forever pining for the neapolitan trail mix they sold one time and then never again, that had candy chips shaped like ice cream in cones, which I used to make extremely cute ice cream. But this also looked promising! 

The kitchen is now cool enough that I don’t have to put the ice cream machines inside coolers to churn. 

Then I made one of the heftiest pies I’ve ever made, using apples from the orchard. I don’t know why I made the pie crust so ponderous, but it was a good pie!

The filling was just apples, flour, sugar, a little salt, a little cinnamon and nutmeg, and dots of butter. Here is my pie crust recipe. 

I set it aside to bake it later in the day, so it would still be warm at dessert time. Once I had that set, the meat cooking, and the ice cream freezing, I started up with the cheesecakes. I am not regularly advertising or selling cheesecakes anymore, but, like Tom Hagen, I have a special practice; I handle one client. And this client needed five cheesecakes: Two plain, one apple caramel, one pumpkin, and one maple pecan. 

I hadn’t made a cheesecake in many months, so I figured I’d start with the plain ones, to get the ol’ . . . cheesecake gears running again, or whatever. 

Now listen to this. I used the same ingredients for both. Same recipe. Put them in the same oven, at the same time, using the same sized pans. I switched racks halfway through baking. And one of them took almost half an hour longer to bake! Such is the madness of cheesecake. I still don’t know what happened. They both turned out fine, though.

I also made the pumpkin cheesecake, and that turned out absolutely luscious.

(I made a few minis so I could sample them.) First taste was like very light pumpkin pie, and then the cheesecake flavor developed in your mouth. Perfect. 

MONDAY
Minestrone soup, soul cakes

Monday I was like, oh, all I have to do is make two more cheesecakes, and then I’m done, easy peasy. First I made a batch of soul cakes, because it was All Soul’s Day. I use this recipe, and usually I use my skull cookie cutter and my angel cookie cutter to represents souls before and after being prayed for;

but I hadn’t yet sorted my kitchen gadgets after the great Cabinet Rebuilding Tantrum of last week, so I just made heart-shaped soul cakes. 

and to be honest, their lack of luster was a pretty fair reflection of our spiritual practices these days. I did sugarcoat them, however, as you can see. 

Then it was time to make cheesecakes. It took ALL DAY. To be fair, I was making a slightly more involved crust (made with ground pecans) for each, but the tricky part was adapting and combining two recipes for each cake, to get the flavors I wanted; and also they both needed toppings. I also attempted to make caramel from sugar and butter, even though I’m terrible at making caramel, and it turned out terrible like it always does; so I rustled up some sweetened condensed milk and made caramel in the microwave. This takes forever, but it works great. You just put it in a really big bowl, lightly covered with plastic wrap, and then microwave it, stir it, microwave it, stir it, and then do that like thirty more times, until it’s just a little thinner than you want it, and watch it closely so it doesn’t boil over. Let it chill, and it thickens up. 

So then I made a caramel swirl cheesecake on one of the pecan crusts, and oh my dears. It was a thing of beauty, and highly delicious. 

I also used a pecan crust for the maple pecan one. The filling for that one was made with maple syrup and also maple flavoring, and the topping is candied pecans. I wish I had put the candied pecans on the side, rather than the top, but I would call it a success. 

 
By the time supper came around, BOY was I glad I discovered a forgotten batch of wonderful minestrone my dear sister Rosie made for us, when I was fresh out of the hospital. The soup was delightful, and the soul cakes were, you know, fine.

The second part of Monday turned out to be VERY drivey, because one kid has graphic novel club, and one kid has writer’s group, and one kid wants to be picked up from work, if you can imagine. But it all got done!

TUESDAY
Pasta not quite carbonara

Tuesday I did the last little bits of the cheesecake order: The apple topping and caramel, to serve with the caramel swirl cheesecake. I made another batch of caramel from sweetened condensed milk, and made the apple topping part of this recipe from Carlsbad Cravings. 

You can see that I cracked one of the plain cheesecakes — NOT while baking it, but while moving it from the pan to the cake board. Felt dumb. The rest survived, though. Got that all packed up and then picked up a kid, took her to therapy, ran to Aldi, brought kid back to school, went home, put cheesecake in car, took other kid to other therapy, dropped off cheesecake, went back to other town to vote, picked up kid in therapy, went home, went to the library to get the other kids, picked up a kid from work, picked up a college kid who had no way to get to the polls, dropped off two kids at home, took one kid to vote, brought other kid back into other town to get some proof of residence because we were confused about what town he was voting in, brought him to vote, and then went home. 

And it’s not bad! It wasn’t as good as carbonara, but it also wasn’t not as bad as getting in the car again! 

WEDNESDAY
Sausage, squash, kale gnocchi; chicken burgers

Wednesday morning, I was, like many people, kind of in shock about what had actually happened on election day!  I’m not gonna dwell on that right here, but I will say that watching Abdul El-Sayid say, “JD. Habibi–” into a microphone is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. 

Be that as it may, I still had to make an appointment for the oral surgeon for Benny, make an appointment for half the family to get passports, and find everyone’s birth certificates, which was easy because of course I had them all stored away neatly in a labelled folder in the top drawer of a file cabinet. 

I mean, I– look. I do have a file cabinet. It’s behind the treadmill where I keep wrapping paper and broken sewing machines, over by the duck food and bearded dragon supplies (we do not have a bearded dragon). And there IS a folder in there that says “important documents.” That folder may be empty, and it’s possible that one of the birth certificates is torn in half, but this does NOT reflect on–say, does anyone want some pie?

Too bad, I already ate all the pie. But I did have planned a meal which sounded absolutely delicious, made entirely of ingredients I already had in the house, and which was guaranteed to be dismissed with extreme prejudice by most of the family. Look at these ingredients!

Well, I prepped everything and then set it aside to cook right before supper, and then I leaped into another insane driving rigamarole, which was not quite as frantic as that of the day before, but still pretty drivey. Got home and added gnocchi to the sausage, squash, and kale and cooked it all up, topped it with some freshly-grated parmesan, and it was SCRUMPTIOUS. 

Damien and I ate it all and no one else even considered it, although they did correct my pronunciation of gnocchi.

Oh I forgot, here is the recipe I was following (although I messed with the proportions a bit). I don’t know if you’ve been able to tell, but the theme of the week was “whatever weird shit you can find in the back of the freezer.”

THURSDAY
Chicken tenders, chips, raw veg

Thursday was EXCITING. First I finally heard back from the neurosurgeon’s office, who said that the ticking sound my head is similar to the sound an old house makes when the weather starts to cool, and is nothing to worry about. Well, that’s not exactly what he said, but it’s what I concluded. I’ve been, as the kids would say, low key freaking out about it, because one does not want one’s head to be producing sounds (it is coming from my skull! It’s not in my ears!), but apparently I am not dying, so that’s good. 

So then I had to face the fact that I only have a photocopy of my birth certificate, which I cannot use to get a passport. The reason we need passports is because we’re going to my nephew Augustine’s ordination in Canada in December! And it seems like a good idea to have passports these days, anyway, election or no election. So I bit the bullet and prepared to drive to Brattleboro to get a new copy of mine. 

On the way there, I was a little agitated, because I had once again left everything for the very last possible minute, and there was a chance I might spend a lot of money and get nothing done and miss the thing and it would all be my fault. Then there was a highway sign warning “tree work ahead,” and they were not kidding! Look at this tree work!

So that kind of cheered me up, for some reason, and I thought since it was lunch time, once I got my birth certificate, I’d splurge a bit and get a Wendy’s salad or something on the way back.

So I finally get to the place, and then something really lovely happened. Here’s my post about it:

I left the office feeling so great about life, what with my non-lethal skull, flying trees, all my birth certificates in order, and love alive and well, and thought I’d salute the universe with an even better treat than a Wendy’s salad, i.e., stopping at a Thai food truck I’ve had my eye on for a while now. 

So I pull into the parking lot and start looking over the menu, and you know, I had been a little nervous that the Thai food would be too authentic, and I wouldn’t recognize anything or know what to order. But that was … not happening. The menu was all burgers and pulled pork, and not just any old burgers, but extremely heavy, extremely American specialty dishes called, like, Big Dawg Guzzlebuger or Cody’s Mac-a-laccin Cheese Whompin. So I was like, uhhh, did they . . . consolidate with another food truck? I kept looking at different signs, and thinking maybe I should just order something so as not to be weird, but I didn’t really want anything like that, at all. I cook like that, but it’s not something I’d buy myself for a treat!

Finally the lady running the truck leans out to see what my problem is, and I confessed to her that I thought it was Thai food? And she goes, “oh, that’s over there” and points to the other side of the parking lot, where there is most certainly a Thai food truck parked in plain sight. Two food trucks! What will they think of next.

Then a bunch of ducks flew overhead, and I sure wished I was going with them. Anyway, I got back in my car, drove over to the Thai food truck, got out, saw the sign that said cash only, realized I had exactly two dollars, got back in my car, and drove to Wendy’s, where I ordered a salad. 

Ah well. I still had some time to kill before school let out, so I stopped at Old Navy, promised myself that, if I could find a pair of jeans that was $5 or less, I would buy some in my actual size, and not the size I think I ought to be. And to my credit, I did come away with a pair of jeans that are, for once, not too tight. Instead, they are way too loose. But they were less than $5, so. Mission accomplished, or whatever. And I got my birth certificate! And a salad. 

Came home and made some chicken tenders. I dipped them in a seasoned milk and egg mixture, then rolled them in seasoned flour, and fried them in oil. I had mine with a sweet chili sauce, which was tasty. 

This was an unexpectedly popular meal, so I’ll probably be making it again. I’m still baffled that the kids don’t really like fried chicken, but this is easier anyway. 

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle

So today, we thought about the logistics of getting the kids to three different schools, picking them up in time for our passport appointment, and getting them back to school, and then picking them up again a few hours later, especially since the library where we meet them is going to be closed. And so we  decided to call a Fisher Flop-Out. We didn’t go to school at all, but did get to the post office a few minutes early. 

I started pulling all the birth certificates out of the envelope, feeling really proud because, honestly, it had been an entire week’s worth of preparation and searching and fetching and looking stuff up and running around that had gotten me to this point, and I did it!

Two seconds later, I stopped feeling proud because I FORGOT THE APPLICATIONS. So the woman took my photo and then I dashed off home, rehearsing in my mind all the different places I would look. In the hutch. On the hutch. On the piano. On the bookshelf. In the nightstand. Inthe laundry basket. In . . oh please no . . . the file cabinet with an empty folder marked “important documents,” next to the bearded dragon hammock. And so on.

Got home, started tearing around the house physically reenacting all my mental searches, until I found the applications in the last place you’d expect: The wire basket next to the door where I keep important paperwork. 

Dashed back, realizing as I drove that I hadn’t completely filled in the parent information in four of the applications, because, I forget why. Got back, reassembled the gang, quickly googled my parents’ obituaries to find out their birth years while Damien texted his sister to find out his parents’ birth places, forgot to sign all six applications, and finally, just for good luck, wrote the wrong year on Benny’s birthday. 

But yes, we got it done. I didn’t do a good job, but we got it done. 

Went home, got a little work done, and then it was time for adoration. Corrie wanted to come along so I could drop her at the library. So we drove into town, and GUESS WHAT, THE LIBRARY WAS CLOSED. WHICH I KNEW. AND THEN FORGOT. But I didn’t have time to bring her home. So I did what any red-blooded American Catholic mom would do: I gave her $20, told her not to talk to strangers, and drove away. 

It’s fine! Everything was fine. I complained to the Lord steadily for an hour, mostly about myself; located my children, and went home to eat some steamed broccoli, because God forbid I should spend a night not farting.

Anyway, I am making tuna noodle for the kids, but as soon as Damien’s meeting is over, I think I will kidnap him so we can go get some pizza with off-putting grown-up toppings on it. 

Corrie would like you to know that she already knows not to talk to strangers, and anyway, I owed her $30.

Print

Basic pie crust

Ingredients

• 2-1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1-1/2 sticks butter, FROZEN
• 1/4 cup water, with an ice cube

Instructions

1. Freeze the butter for at least 20 minutes, then shred it on a box grater. Set aside.

2. Put the water in a cup and throw an ice cube in it. Set aside.

3. In a bowl, combine the flour and salt. Then add the shredded butter and combine with a butter knife or your fingers until there are no piles of loose, dry flour. Try not to work it too hard. It's fine if there are still visible nuggets of butter.

4. Sprinkle the dough ball with a little iced water at a time until the dough starts to become pliable but not sticky. Use the water to incorporate any remaining dry flour.

5. If you're ready to roll out the dough, flour a surface, place the dough in the middle, flour a rolling pin, and roll it out from the center.

6. If you're going to use it later, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap. You can keep it in the fridge for several days or in the freezer for several months, if you wrap it with enough layers. Let it return to room temperature before attempting to roll it out!

7. If the crust is too crumbly, you can add extra water, but make sure it's at room temp. Sometimes perfect dough is crumbly just because it's too cold, so give it time to warm up.

8. You can easily patch cracked dough by rolling out a patch and attaching it to the cracked part with a little water. Pinch it together.

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