Tag: What’s for Supper?

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!

What’s for supper? Vol. 474: And I alone scaped to tell thee

Happy Friday! This week has been an insane mix of medical emergencies, yard work, milestones, and of course potato chips. So many potato chips. If this sounds like your jam, read on. 

SATURDAY
Panic food/hospital food

Saturday I got back from shopping and Damien was just getting back from the dump, and we found the one kid who was home crying in horrible pain. I immediately thought appendicitis. So we went to the hospital and they said oh yeah, it’s appendicitis, but we don’t do pediatric surgery here. So Damien went with the kid in the ambulance to the big hospital an hour north, and I ran home to get some extra clothes and a sandwich, and then followed in the car. 

I will spare you the tale of how many turns I missed and which new issues with the car cropped up along the way, but the rest of the evening and night and following morning were not great. So we languished in the second ER for many hours, waiting to hear when we could get the surgery. We were doing better than a lot of other people there, let me tell you. 

A kind nurse interceded for us and around midnight we finally got moved to the PICU, which was much nicer. Surgery in the morning. I went to brush my teeth and in came the attending doctor and said they had presented it to her like it was definitely appendicitis, but when she looked at the actual reports, that was far from clear. So we got an MRI at around 3 a.m. and that too was NOT GREAT. Poor kid. Back to the room, kid is all worked up and can’t sleep, everything is beeping, eventually we doze off.

SUNDAY
Wendy’s 

Around 7 a.m. the surgeon bursts in and shouts “YEAH NO THIS ISN’T APPENDICITIS NO SURGERY SORRY FOR THE BACK AND FORTH THANKS” and leaves. I was having a nice dream about a bear and had no idea what the hell was going on. Eventually the previous doctor comes back and fills us in some more. They don’t know what it is. We will be staying at least another night while they keep running tests.

Kid is really unravelling at this point, more from hospital aggravation than from pain. Every single person that comes in tells me something slightly different about what is going on and what is likely to happen next. Time passes, people keep pushing on the part that hurts, everything is still beeping, and about eleven consultations later, they say it’s almost definitely not appendicitis, but we don’t know what it is (possibly a burst cyst, possibly inflammation of lymph nodes from a virus), but white blood cell count is now normal and we can go home if we want to. Which we do! So that is what we did. Eventually. We got Wendy’s for dinner on the way home. Kid shares amazing stories of ambulance and MRI and shows off her IV bruise. Damien and I collapse like bunches of broccoli. 

MONDAY
Muffaletta sandwiches, fries

Monday, kid sleeps in, naturally, and wakes up feeling so much better, thanks be to God. I did very little that day. Ain’t no tired like “home from the PICU” tired, especially when you keep thinking about how you went right up to the brink of a kid getting surgery they didn’t need. And I don’t think anyone did anything wrong! It was just an ambiguous situation.

During my afternoon errands, I did buy some ice cream sundae things to say thank you to the kids at home for being so awesome and taking care of everything while we were away.

Supper was muffaletta sandwiches. I threw a bunch of stuff in the food processor – black and kalamata olives, a few jalapeno slices, parsley, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and red pepper flakes – and made a little tapenade, I guess.

and we had soft rolls with ham and various salamis and whatnot, and cheese. And fries. 

I don’t know why my dinner looks like someone plated it with an air cannon, but it was yummy. 

TUESDAY
Dino nuggets/Italian food

Tuesday was Lucy’s last day of school, and Benny’s 8th grade graduation! I suddenly realized we were supposed to bring a dish to share, so I was very glad we had meat and cheese and tapenade in the house. I put together a little platter with all those things, plus some string beans, grape leaves, and pita, and garnished it with chive blossoms, and it was not bad.

Graduation was nice. It’s a small school and they keep it short. Benny was radiant.

And that is the ninth eighth-grade graduation we’ve been to! 

Afterward, she chose a local Italian restaurant for her graduation celebration meal. We had “gondola bread” which is just toasted bread with garlic and melted cheese on it, very yummy. I had a big antipasto salad, and some kind of cake soaked in orange syrup. All delicious. 

WEDNESDAY
Tacos

Wednesday was the last day of school for Benny and Corrie. One more kid to go. I looked at the weather report and saw that we were supposed to get rain starting on Thursday and then every day basically until the end of the world. So I figured it was my last shot to do something about the spot where all that horrible wood used to be. I figured I’d rake it a bit and then scatter some seeds, boom, done. 

Five hours later, I had cleared the scraps, tilled the soil and dug up a bunch of root balls, dragged over some felled trees for borders, mulched the edges, laid a tarp to prep a spot for a path to pave later, dug up five loads of compost from the heap and spread it on the new spot, and THEN I scattered the big pouch of wildflower seeds I had bought. I guess I had some leftover hospital angst that needed working out, and this was the perfect job for that.

This is what it looked like before the junk guy came:

and here it is after I got through with it:

Feeling fairly smug about that!

Then I dashed around doing this and that garden task. I had built up some furious sweaty energy by this point, so I mowed down a bunch of blackberry bushes on the other side of the house, and tore up some soil and broadcast the other big pouch of seeds I had bought. But I had my doubts about the soil, which has been degraded by blackberries.

So at some point during the day — and hospital confusion segued straight into end-of-school-year confusion, and I shrimply do not know what time it is, what day it is, or where I am supposed to be, but I just keep moving — I bought some humus and manure, and spread that on top of the seeds I had just planted, and rustled it around a little bit. I have no idea what I’m doing, but it sure is green around here, so probably something will grow. It started to rain just as I was finishing up, which was immensely gratifying. 

Oh, and then I made some tacos real quick. 

You can see that the tabletop is . . . somewhat improved. This is a wrought iron table that is supposed to have a glass top, and we DID have a glass top, but it broke. Then I miraculously found a free replacement, and that broke, too. At some point I made a tabletop out of wood, and painted it; then a few years later, I had the brilliant idea to use natural objects as stencils and paint it again. This looked, of course, terrible; and then the wood started to warp and splinter, and it’s been a really really bad tabletop ever since.  At some point during the week, I stormed angrily (?) into Home Depot and bought a sheet of some kind of plastic stuff that I guess you are supposed to use on walls to protect them? I don’t know. It turned out not to be stiff or thick enough to work as a tabletop on its own, so I just laid it over the existing wooden one, and it’s . . . . . . . . . . . . somewhat improved. And that’s-a my story. If you happen to have a 48″-round piece of tempered glass that you’re not using, please just roll it in my direction. I have need of it. But actually the plastic is fine. It’s fine!

THURSDAY
Hamburgers, chips

Thursday it got murderously hot. I was expecting cool rain, but guess we are alternating rain and high heat, which is not ideal, but what can one do. I had bought some PVC pipes and zip ties last week, and on Thursday I finally drilled holes in the ends and lashed them to some T posts, because I want a second and third arch for my new grapevines to grow up, so eventually we will have a little shady canopy of leaves over the entrance to the stream. 

It was not to be. It was a good idea in theory, but the way I set it up, the tension was too much, and the pipes snapped. 

Alas. The truth is, my grapevines are not going to need support for quite some time, so it’s okay that this is not done yet.

The pond (you can just see the edge of it to the left of the chair in this picture) is full of frogs and tadpoles, so that’s fun! And allll the flower seeds and bulbs and tubers I planted last week are coming up, and so are my potatoes, corn, pumpkins, cucumbers, dill, garlic, eggplant, and basil. And a few stray potatoes I planted last year and apparently did not harvest, oops. 

I heard a gardener say that it may seem obvious, but remember only to plant food you want to eat. He’s right, it’s something I need to be reminded of! I do like all those things, though. I’ve also been munching on asparagus right out of the garden, it’s so tender and sweet. We didn’t get much this year because a vole chewed up a lot of the roots, so I’m just picking a spear here and there and eating it. The strawberries also got dinged pretty bad, but we are getting a few. They are everbearing and sometimes take a while to get going. Who among us. 

Anyway, we had a bag of premade hamburger patties in the freezer, so Damien grilled those up and they were yummo. As were the chips. 

FRIDAY
Tuna and chips

Yet another super drivey morning. Honest to goodness, I cannot remember the last time I spent this much time in the car. It’s just been nonstop half days and parties and special events and rehearsals and “oops they let us out early” and job orientation and writer’s group and field day and I don’t even know what. We opted out of a lot of stuff in May, so I guess we’re paying for it now! The stuff will always get you in the end. 

Speaking of getting you, I pulled out my garlic scapes yesterday. This is my second time growing garlic, but my first time doing it right, so I’m pretty hyped. I haven’t gotten around to doing anything with the scapes yet, but aren’t they neat?

I left one growing on the plant, to see what it looks like when it flowers. I guess I need to wait a few more weeks until the remaining leaves turn brown and floppy, and then I can dig up the garlic. EXCITED. 

Lucy’s Graduation is tonight. It will be outside and we have been told to expect light rain and high heat, so maybe I’ll just save some time and pass out now. Except then I would miss dinner at Chili’s, which is the spot she has her heart set on for a graduation celebration. I have resolved to stay conscious so I can order something that comes with a side of beans. Their beans are surprisingly good, and I don’t care who knows it. 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 472: In which I (Persephone) have high hopes

Happy Friday! I hope spring is being good to you. We’re supposed to get down into the 30’s the next couple of nights, but HIGH thirties, so I’m just gonna throw some blankets around in my garden and hope for the best. I had a wonderfully outdoor week and got tons of yard work done, and took a bunch of things too personally, and made some very good food, and some that was just okay, and now I’m gonna tell you all about it. 

SATURDAY
Pancakes, sausage, OJ

Saturday after shopping, I went to pick up one of those gliding benches that someone was giving away. It needs work (new seat slats, sanding, and painting), but nothing hard or expensive. 

Will I ever get around to this? Impossible to say. But I might! I think it will be great down by the stream. 

Damien drove over to go fishing with Moe and got back late, and I took the opportunity to make breakfast for dinner. We used to go through an entire box of pancake mix for our family, but our family is so teeny tiny these days, I figured we’d only need half. Then I realized pancake mix boxes have also gotten teeny tiny, oops. So an entire box was just barely enough! It’s also possible I ate more raw batter than I realized. I am truly a freak for raw batter, and nothing that can be done about this. 

SUNDAY
Leftovers and pizza pockets

The shopping kid chose pizza pockets for her fun food to supplement the sad leftovers, which was a tactical error because part of the leftovers included last Saturday’s pizza pockets.

But somehow we survived, and right after supper I badgered everyone into driving to Westmoreland, where there was going to be a free summer event of some kind. The details were a little skimpy, so I tried to keep expectations low. 

But even if I had hyped everyone up, I don’t think we would have been prepared for . . . EL PULPO MAGNIFICO.

As you can see, it is a giant flaming octopus! It’s tentacles, eyes, and mouth move, and the man inside the octopus manipulates the flames (which also come out of the top of its head) in time to the music he was playing. It. was. tremendous. I loved it so much. Here are some pics of the evening,

 

and I also shared a few videos on Facebook and Instagram.  One of the videos got — let’s see, 46,000 views on Instagram, and I got a bunch of followers who . .. . might have the wrong idea about what kind of account this usually is (ducklings).  

MONDAY
Hamburgers, potato salad, con on the cob, chips; strawberry rhubarb crisp

Monday was, of course, Memorial Day, so we had the day off school. I have been desperately in need of more exercise. I can feel my joints rusting together day by day. But my stupid arm just won’t get better, so I can’t really do yoga or weights or any of my regular things. So I resorted to taking a WALK, like a CHUMP. 

It actually turned out really nice.

Of course it did. Walking is nice, and I live in a nice place. This hill is up behind my house, so I didn’t have to go anywhere to get there. Got home and discovered that it was exactly one mile, half uphill, so a pretty perfect workout. I decided I would start every day this way, with a pleasant, invigorating walk.

Then I didn’t do that even one more time. But I might! 

New Hampshire is it is full of mossy stone walls meandering through woods. You might wonder why they bothered to build walls between trees, but of course they did not. A hundred years ago, they had felled all the tree, and this was all pasture — mostly for sheep. There were way more sheep than people, and NH exported fleece and wool all over the world. Then someone figured out how to mass produce cotton, and that was pretty much the end of the wool boom. The trees grew back in the pastures, the farms fell down, and all that is left is the stone walls. On my walk, I did spot some stone foundations left from the houses that used to stand off the road. Sometimes you will also spot daffodils in the middle of the woods, and that is a sign that some human once lived there. 

Anyway, the weather was wonderful all week. We have started putting the baby ducks outside during the day. They’re big enough that they don’t need their heat lamp all the time, and they love marching around in the grass, fighting with buttercups, and struggling in and out of the little wading pool. And they still like being whistled too. 

 

Then it was parade time! Our town was founded in 1776, so we’re having a big anniversary along with the country itself. I mean, relatively big. This is the biggest memorial day parade I’ve ever seen here. Also the cutest. 

Only Benny and Corrie and I wanted to go, and we were rewarded with free ice cream afterward. (Again, quite an exceptional thing for this little town!) 

Got home and made some potato salad. The last few times, I made a version that seemed extremely yummy to me, but the kids felt very different indeed! It’s not like I put raisins in it or something, or capers or something, sheesh. Anyway, I made the dressing with mayo and cider vinegar, a little olive oil, salt and pepper, celery, and hard boiled eggs. 

Then I started prepping dessert. My beloved rhubarb plant is having a wonderful year, although I have concluded that I have an evergreen rhubarb, and it’s just not going to turn red. Some of them are like that. Slightly disappointing, although the flavor and texture are great. I more or less followed the Smitten Kitchen recipe. Here it is before I put the topping on:

I baked it right before supper, so it would still be warm when we ate it. 

Elijah came over, Damien cooked hamburgers and corn on the cob on the grill, and we had a lovely, chill dinner. 

After supper, I whipped up some heavy cream, and dessert was lovely. 

If I had one rhubarb-related wish other than for redder rhubarb, it would be that I could get my crumble topping to brown up better. It always turns out pale, for some reason, and I don’t know why. Anyway, it tasted good! 

I think I will cut up a bunch of rhubarb and freeze it, so I can make a compote or something at some point. That seems like the kind of thing I would be happy to suddenly remember I have in a few months. 

That evening, I started a big pork shoulder brining with a cup of salt and a cup of sugar. 

TUESDAY
Bo ssam, lettuce, rice, pineapple

Tuesday was chock-a-block full of appointments and whatnot, which is why I planned bo ssam, which is very hands-off. I was up early and cut up some pineapples. Then I got a little sidetracked, because I keep seeing reels about propagating pineapples at home. You’re supposed to twist the tops off and then peel off the bottom leaves to expose the root nodes. I had no idea these were under there! Here is one unpeeled, and one peeled:

Look at those root nodes!

I had no idea. Anyway, I trimmed the rest of the fruit off and set the tops in water, and now we’re waiting for roots to develop. 

Dreaming about the day when, a mere four or five years from now, I might get another, very small pineapple or two from these tops.

Then I remembered I was actually really busy, oops, so I got started on stuff I actually had to do. Threw the pork in the oven around 12:30, and then had some appointments, and when I got home, I got my pumpkin seeds into the ground in my hugelkultur bed, and then made a spot for cucumbers and dill next to it. I dragged a torn trampoline mat over to keep the weeds down, then filled eight pots with compost and set them up in front of Damien’s trailer office. 

Then I planted a dozen sprouting potatoes in one bed, and then weeded and composted another bed and got most of my corn in! 

SATISFYIN’.  I think Tuesday was the day I cut things so close, I didn’t have time to take a shower before going out, so I just washed my hands feet and put on a long skirt to hide my grubbiness. By the time I got home, I just had to start some rice cooking in the Instant Pot, and then put a little extra sauce on the pork for the last ten minutes or so. I finally made up a recipe card for my cheater’s version of bo ssam, so here’s that: 

Jump to Recipe

The pork came out gorgeous and tender, juicy and wonderful, as always. 

Probably could have left it in the oven a little longer to crisp up the top some more, but I was HONGRY. 

Tasty meal, productive day. This “being outside” thing is great. 

The older I get, the more pronounced becomes the difference between winter me and summer me. I love New Hampshire, I love the ice and snow and those brilliant, glittering winter skies, and I’m deeply wedded to the idea that having real, distinct seasons is existentially important, and spring and summer are all the sweeter because of how fleeting they are. 

At the same time, phew, I am SO much happier when it’s warm out. Here is a real question, specifically for people who have moved from a cold climate to a warm climate. Does the euphoria of being able to be outside all the time wear off? Or do you get used to it, and stop appreciating the sunshine after a while? I never though I’d even consider living anywhere besides New England, but the idea is creeping in, and the Persephone thing is getting kind of old. It does help to take vitamin D and get exercise throughout the winter, but it’s a struggle still. Winters are really getting hard, and we just kind of shut down. I don’t know. 

Well, on Tuesday Damien had to go cover some kind of event, and he was gone all afternoon and evening, boo. After clean-up, I sat the kids down and started reading the new encyclical to them, so there. On Tuesday, we read the introduction, and I liked it, and they did not. 

WEDNESDAY
Not sure what to call it but wow it was good

Wednesday the plan was some kind of bi bim bap situation. But I utterly succumbed to Being Outside, and just did that all day. I must have been doing gardening and yard work, but I was so wrapped up in it that I didn’t even take pictures; so just imagine a lot of green, green, green. I think I mostly did weeding and organizing, because I was getting mad at myself for working so hard on growing beautiful flowers, and then having my own view ruined by tubs of garden tools, old tarps tumbled and flapping around, heaps of scrap wood, chairs on their sides, etc. My phone says I walked over two miles just trotting back and forth in my yard making things look better, so that tells you how much crap was lying around!

I think I also potted a bunch of stuff in the front yard — a big, deep purple lupine, some double impatiens, a clump of dahlia tubers, and two holy basil plants to frame the door. Last year I planted some cinnamon basil in my herb garden and I kept pinching the flowers off and the plants got huge and bushy. Then discovered I don’t like the taste at all, so I demoted them to a decoration and moved them to the front door. Every time we went in or out, we got a little whiff, which was very nice (I like the smell, just not the taste)! So I hope they will do as well this year. The ferns and hostas are thriving, and the daisies and alliums I put in are blooming just as the tulips and daffodils die off, so I’m pleased. 

It’s still a baby garden, but I have high hopes. 

By supper time I was tired and starving and sweaty, and truly did not want to cook. So I just cut up a watermelon I meant to serve on memorial day, and some broccoli I meant to roast on Tuesday, and then I found some leftover rice and leftover pineapple, and I cut up the leftover bo ssam real thin. And it looked very promising. 

I served everything cold. I put my plate together and then threw some bottled yum yum sauce on top, and then sprinkled some furikake over that, and went outside to devour it like a goblin. 

My heavens, it tasted like the best food possible. Just wonderful.  I may serve this exact combination of foods on purpose next time. 

After supper, I noticed that my biggest lupine is blooming! This is from the plant I dug out of Millie’s garden last year. 

As it turns out, this is the one year-anniversary of the day she died. Say a prayer for dear Millie! She would be very proud of me for my garden this year. There are actually lupine seedlings all over the place this year, front and back of the house. I don’t know if they’re from the plants I put in, or if it’s just a lupinous kind of year, but I’m not mad! 

Damien had another long dumb event to cover, and he was gone most of the day again, alas. Wednesday evening, we sat down and started to read chapter one of the encyclical, and then I basically quit mid-word. I thought it would be a good project because I know they care about AI, and the pope is no nice and whatnot, but phew, it just wasn’t landing.

Then I mildly horrified the kids by getting a little emotional while I explained my struggles in getting them educated as adults in the faith, and we ended up agreeing that I will open a new Word document and they will be added as editors, so they can anonymously contribute questions or complaints about religion, and we can start from there. WHAT CAN ONE DO. I was gonna say I am doing my best, but I don’t know if that’s true. Anyway, I’m trying somewhat, sometimes. What can one do. Tricky times. 

THURSDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, salad

Thursday I had nothhhhhhhing on my calendar. I actually did some writing for once, and then back outside I went. I cut down a bunch of saplings from the woods and got some twine and a staple gun, and made a trellis for the cucumbers to climb up. 

I also planted some dill seed in each pot. They are supposed to be good companion plants for cucumbers, and by the time the cucumbers grow, the garlic should be ready to harvest. Corrie and I plan to make pickles! 

Then I did this and that, and dumped out some old pots of soil and repotted a few things and weeded and whatnot, and, feeling competent and optimistic, I decided to finally start prepping the hill behind the patio for a big wildflower garden. I knew some wild blackberries had popped up again, and I was feeling a little grim about that, but I knew I could deal with it.

THEN
I
FOUND
SOME
BITTERSWEET. 

In my backyard, which is supposed to be my little haven. My deal (with who, I don’t know) was that bittersweet can be a menace in the front yard, and I will fight it and stay vigilant, but I will accept that it will always be with us. But this was in the back.

 
I didn’t cry, but I felt like my insides had turned to clay. Oh bad. Bad bad bad. I sat for a while, and then complained to Damien for a while, and then I found my Round Up and gloves and clippers and did what I could. I need something with a higher concentration of glyphosate, but it’s a start, anyway. BOO INVASIVES. Very boo. 

Obviously I couldn’t do any more gardening in that spot, because the herbicide was still fresh. So I showered good and made supper, which was grilled ham and cheese and salad.

I was a little nervous about serving sandwiches without chips or fries, which is pretty de rigueur around here, but nobody said anything.

I ate outside, and had the wonderful consolation of realizing that my peach tree, which yielded something like eleven peaches last year, is absolutely LOADED with tiny little fruitsies this year. 

I was hoping that would happen! Big year, little year, that’s how it goes. But I didn’t want to count on it. But yeah, we’re off to a fine start!

At some point during the day, I went to Home Depot and got some long, flexible PVC pipes, which I intend to use for grape arbors in some way. The details in my mind are still foggy, but PVC is cheap. Maybe I will paint it green or something, maybe not. I have some tall T posts and some zip ties, and all the clearance grapes from Walmart that I shoved in the ground are putting out leaves already, so I don’t see how this can fail. The vision is a tunnel of leaves at the entrance to the boardwalk over the marsh. I’m trying not to slip into “maybe they will accidentally lobotomize me at the end of the summer, but at least I will leave a grape arbor as my legacy” thinking, but it’s possible some of that has been happening, who can say. Anyway, PVC is cheap.

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

I really really need to finish up some essays I started, but I want to be outside! Wah! Boo! I actually already got a considerable amount of writing done this week. But I also have a bunch of mystery bags of gladiolus bulbs I bought for a song at the town garden club sale, and it occurs to me that a long line of glads in front of the house would be gorgeous. Possibly not enough to make up for the fact that the kids saw a bunch of paper bags on the table and thought someone had brought pastries, but still, very pretty. 

This Sunday, we’re expecting a visit from an enterprising young man who went door to door letting people know he hauls junk. What it was that brought him to our door, in particular, it’s impossible to say; but I’m hoping that (a) he’ll give us a quote that’s about the same amount as the money I’m expecting to get from the guy who’s going to haul the Yukon away as soon as we get the replacement title, and (b) I have the emotional fortitude to tell him to haul away ALL the junk, and that I won’t be a crazy little freak and try to hold onto a bunch of it because it might come in handy.

Damien has to cover RFK Jr. coming to NH and talking about Lyme disease. I am crossing my fingers that a giant tick comes and eats him live on camera, but I would settle for . .. . well, I’ll settle for whatever I can get, I guess. Ain’t that the way. 

5 from 1 vote
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bare bones bo ssam

If you really want to knock people's socks off, look up My Korean Kitchen bo ssam, and make all the sauces and sides. This is a pared-down version, and I use this meat in many ways. Mostly, I just serve it with lettuce and rice and some kind of simple fruit of vegetable for a side, and it's fabulous. Start it the night before, let it cook all day, and you get maximum flavor for minimum effort.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1 cup salt
  • big pork shoulder, preferably with a a bone and a nice fat cap
  • 7 Tbso brown sugar
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 2 tsp cider vinegar

Instructions

  1. Mix together the cup of sugar and cup of salt, and rub it all over the pork. Let this brine at least six hours. I usually do it overnight, and put it in a ziplock bag in a bowl in the fridge.

  2. Turn the oven to 300. Put a double layer of tin foil over a pan, to make clean-up much easier. Set the pork on the pan, fat side up, and cook it, uncovered, for about six hours.

  3. Combine the brown sugar, cider vinegar, and Tbsp of salt. In the last ten minutes of cooking, crank the oven up to 500, take the pork out, and spread the brown sugar mixture on top. Put it back in the oven and cook it until it's got a glistening crust.

  4. Serve with lettuce and rice to make little wraps.

What’s for supper? Vol. 466: Oh toum, where is thy victory?

Happy Friday! I don’t think there was a single day this week when I knew what day it was. Which is why I put every single thing down in my calendar, so I don’t get confused. Unfortunately, I have an incredible knack for entering things on the right day of the week, but the wrong month. So I’m constantly getting notifications like, hey, remember that scholarship deadline? Yeah, that’s gone. Yo, happy one month anniversary of the time you said you’d bring in muffins and didn’t! Also, alert: that lab order has officially expired, and unfortunately you are now dead.

The good news is, these notifications don’t bother me at all, because I somehow accidentally turned off my ringer and the battery died, and my phone is carefully tucked in between some dish towels where I set it down for a second and then just walked away

Did I mention I don’t have any cognitive impairment? This is just what I’m like. This is what peak Simcha performance looks like!

But seriously, I so, so appreciate all the many kind messages, prayers, and donations folks have been sending. We are all doing pretty much fine and chugging along. My special intractable schwannoma headaches are ramping up again, but what can one do. Oh actually, probably surgery. I’m waiting to hear back about that! 

And here is what we had for supper this week!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and stuffed potato skins

Just a regular day of chores and shopping. I also did a big Egg Reconciliation. Duck eggs can sit on the counter unrefrigerated for quite some times, as long as you leave them unwashed; but I was running out of counter space! So I scrubbed them all

and then carefully dropped them into a pitcher of water. The ones that sank and lay flat were the freshest, so I boxed those up and sold them to the Chinese restaurant down the road.

None of them floated (which they do when they’re really stale), but about half of them tipped up a bit on one end, which means they’re not super fresh, but still edible. So I separated those and froze them

, without any specific goal except to stop thinking about eggs for a while. Perhaps I will make a pavlova for Mother’s Day. I really like pavlovas!

The shopping turn kid chose stuffed potato skins for the leftover supplement, and there was tons of other food leftover.

I also heated up the last of the chicken soup with matzoh balls, and it was yummy one last time. 

SUNDAY
Pizza

Actually I must have done the egg thing on Sunday. Anyway I remember hoping to get some other kind of big project done on Sunday, and then not doing it. I did make a yummy pizza. 

I spread half the cheese on the pizza, then adorned it with prosciutto. Then I put the rest of the cheese on and baked the pizza, then topped it with arugula dressed with lemon juice and pepper. Yummo. 

MONDAY
Buffalo chicken drumsticks, garlic knots, raw veggies and dip

Monday I just roasted a bunch of drumsticks with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then tossed them in bottled buffalo sauce and put them back in the oven to reheat saucily while I made some garlic knots with the leftover pizza dough. (I bought three balls of pizza dough out of habit, but there were only FOUR people home for supper, so I made a mere two XL pizzas.) And a nice robust vegetable platter. 

I was gonna roll the baked garlic knots in melted butter, but everyone was super hungry, so I just served them right out of the oven. 

Solid little meal, easy peasy. 

TUESDAY
Pulled pork on waffle fries, raw veggies

Tuesday was a very drivey day, so I started the pulled pork nice and early. Here’s the recipe. 

Jump to Recipe

I found a replacement Instant Pot for cheap on Marketplace, so we are pressure cookin’ again, hooray!

Sonny and I got some stream time. Poor Sonny, he drives me absolutely bonkers when he’s inside. He’s just so gross and smelly and dumb and in the way. But we get along so well outside. He chills out and becomes a noble and sedate enjoyer of nature, and also yearns to protect me from biting ducks, which is endearing. I guess he has just learned to accept that I kind of hate him when he’s inside, but when we’re outside, we’re best friends, and that’s just how it is. 

Anyway, it sure is purty down there. We’ve had a lot of sudden bursts of rain lately, so a pretty good haul of pottery and bottles had washed up on the banks. I like to collect these and put them in a pile by a tree, and admire lichen. I guess probably I’m the one who chills out when I get outside. 

In the afternoon, I gave a kid a driving lesson, and we set a new record for how close you can zoom past a tree without actually hitting it. Also thrilling in its own way, a new light came on on the dashboard. Alas. 

But supper was delicious. I cooked a bunch of waffle fries and sliced up some red onions, shredded the meat, set out some BBQ sauce, and we had tasty pork bowls.

I’m not too proud to tell you that I think this would have been even tastier with some horribly orange, dangerously salty fake cheese melted, or possibly extruded, over the top. But it was very good without, as well. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken shawarma, pita, toum 

Wednesday I spent almost all day cooking, for some reason. I was planning two meals with chicken thighs, but had thriftily bought ones with bone and skin, so I spent a good long time processing about eight pounds of thighs, much to Sonny’s intense interest. (Unfortunately this was Inside Dog, so I hated him, and did not give him any chicken. Also, even though I hate him, I had actually given him some pork yesterday, which he promptly threw up, and I HATE that.) I set aside eight of the most intact ones for the next day, and set the rest to marinating. 

Yes, oh yes, it was SHAWARMA DAY. Here is my oven shawarma recipe

Jump to Recipe

Then I made a double batch of pita dough. Last week’s pita was a little disappointing, so I reverted to this recipe, which is a little more labor intensive (more ingredients, and the frying process is longer and slightly more complicated), but it’s really worth it, and easy enough once you get into the rhythm. Anyway I made the dough and let it rise for an hour and a half, and then I put it into the fridge because it was too early to do the second rise. 

AND THEN, I made some TOUM. I have never heard of this Lebanese garlic sauce before, but I saw a video and it looked magnificent. I settled on the Serious Eats recipe, which calls for a cup of garlic cloves. This turned out to be about two-and-a-half heads of garlic, which I peeled with the aid of one of those little silicone tubes lined with nubbins. 

The recipe says you should split each clove open and cut the germ out, but life was passing me by, so I skipped that. You pulse it up in the food processor with some salt, and then add some lemon juice and make a paste. Then, with the food processor running, you start slowwwwwly adding three(!) cups of oil,

alternating half cups of oil with the rest of the lemon juice and then with ice water.

I’m so bad at adding things slowly, and even though I read the little explanation about emulsification and whatnot, I really just wanted to dump the whole amount in. I just had to keep thinking about that part in The Witch of Blackbird Pond where Kit gets mad and dumps all the cornmeal into the pudding at once, and the family has to eat lumpy corn pudding and that was all that was for dinner, and she feels so bad; and that gave me the fortitude to keep it at a slow drizzle. In this way, I avoided the harsh approbation of my dour and exacting uncle, at least for one more day. But oh, ’tis a weary task. What would grandfather think, to see me this way? 

Well, I whipped it and whipped it, but it was still kinda soupy, and even though I’ve never had or seen toum, I was pretty sure that wasn’t right. Happily, the recipe says if this happens, you can just pull most of the toum out of the food processor, whip up the rest with an egg white until it’s fluffy, and then add the rest back in. Worked great!

I can’t really think of anything with a similar texture. It’s light and fluffy, but . . . I guess unguent is the word? But not really. It’s definitely not greasy, and not exactly creamy. One thing we can all agree about: It is GARLICKY. One little dab of it lights your whole head up like an emergency flare. Wow! I was delighted. 

Then I made some normal yogurt sauce (Greek yogurt, lemon juice, crushed garlic, salt), because People Don’t Like Change, and they had been looking forward to this meal and I didn’t want anyone to be sad. Then I put a bunch of stuff in bowls.

and heaved my sorry self outside to deal with the giant smashed window. NOT a window of the house, I hasten to add. Just one of those gigantic windows I lugged home last year — or was it the year before? — to make into a sunporch, and then didn’t do that. I had dragged one into the back yard and leaned it up against the old bunkbed,

thinking I would surely figure out some way to make this into a little greenhouse. Then came a mighty wind, and we got this:

The good news is, it is safety glass, so there were not super sharp shards of glass everywhere. The bad news is, broken safety glass collapses into millions of teeny little bits when you so much as breathe on it, even if you don’t have ultrasonically powerful garlic breath. Also, I had set this up on an area of the yard where I had made an attempt to do some landscaping, by which I mean I dumped thousands and thousands of little rocks there, back when we were digging up the ground for the pool and had to move thousands and thousands of rocks.

I did kind of enjoy this “mighty whale breaching out through the arctic ice” effect

but most of the rocks are much smaller, very effectively trapping the glass bits in between them, so the glass sinks into the dirt buuuuut you can’t reach it. 

So . . . I’ll just say I tried lots of different ways to clean it up easily, and there is no such thing. And I’m not gonna rent a shop vac, because the only thing that would make this project worse would be spending money on it. So I settled for putting on my goatskin gloves and just gloomily grabbing up handfuls of glass and throwing them in a tub, over and over and over and over again. I did this for quite some time, and there is still a lot of glass out there. And of course in my foot.  

I’m gonna have to get out there with a shovel and excavate the whole thing, which I’m not super excited about. Also, it has since rained very hard a couple of times, so the tub and bag full of glass bits are also now full of water. 

HOWEVER, after the school run I got home, cut up the pita dough and started it on its second rise, cut up a bunch on onions and sprinkled them over the meat and got that cooking, and ALL WAS WELL. BY WHICH I MEAN DELICIOUS. 

The method for this pita recipe is to fry on one side for 30 seconds, then on the other side for 30 seconds, then brush both sides with olive oil and continue cooking for five minutes, flipping it every minute or so. I made eight pieces (I doubled the recipe and just made really big pita), and it did take quite a while, but man, they were yummy. 

They puffed up so nicely in the pan, and came out really fluffy and chewy, with little crisp bits and a rich flavor. Excellent. 

It was all excellent. 

 
Sadly, nobody else would even try the toum! (Nobody except Damien said the food was good, either, but I’ll kill them about that later.) So I ended up with quite a bit of it leftover. It took so much time and effort to make, I decided to go ahead and offer it on my town Facebook page, and it got snapped up right away! So that was nice. The woman who picked it up even gave me a dozen eggs from her chickens, and several heads of garlic from her garden. I’m growing garlic this year, but it’s nowhere near ready to harvest.

Anyway, the meal was just great and I was very proud of myself. A very satisfying way to turn the day around. 

THURSDAY 
Spicy chicken pepper sandwiches, cheese curls

Thursday I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about one of the bedrooms upstairs. I knew supper would be easy, so after I did my calisthenics (I’ve been doing calisthenics lately, I don’t know why) I lumbered upstairs with a bunch of garbage bags and tore into the mess. Six bags of laundry and three bags of trash later, it looked a little better up there! I was powered by the sound of Tom Holland’s spectacularly horrible southern accent. I will never, ever, ever once again be embarrassed when an American tries to do a British accent. Seriously, it will make you feel like you are going insane. 

Damien volunteered to pick up the kids, and he also got a bunch of cleaning supplies and my prescriptions, and I was able to stay home and push through to start scrubbing the walls and ceiling (don’t ask), and I got so much done. 

Eventually I called it a day, took a shower, and then threw together some chicken sandwiches with the thigh meat I had prepped the day before. It’s basically this recipe from Sip and Feast, except I use Tony Chachere’s, and I had cubanelle peppers instead of shishito, and kaiser buns instead of brioche rolls. Neither one is necessarily an improvement; it was just what I happened to have. This is a wonderful sandwich, though, and I think you should make it soon. 

 
With some pointed prompting, the child thanked me for cleaning her room, and then I slithered off to bed. Well actually first I handwashed some dishes, because the stinking dish washer broke. But then Damien fixed it! I guess it was some food and grease had gotten into the control panel or something, which is strange, because the children certainly always rinse the dishes before loading them, as they have been instructed to do. A mystery. 

While I was cooking the chicken, the dog came over and horked up a Brillo pad. Then he lay down and looked regretful for a while, then he went back to hoping intensely for some chicken. Which I did not give him, because, dude.

FRIDAY
Tuna sandwiches, possibly risotto

Today Damien is working on my car, and he also got a new coil or something for the water heater (we’ve been taking lurkworm showers for a while now, which is kind of discouraging), and also a pipe for the basement, because when the kitchen sink pipe broke, it leaked dirty kitchen water into the dirt basement floor and you know what, that is probably why we have so many flies. HOWEVER. We’re gaining on them, I feel. The flies, the appliances, the children, the mess, the everything. Superabimus, or something like that. Anyway, when I was cleaning I found six pairs of scissors. 

Not to get too edifying on your asses, but I did realize that, as long as I’m going to be digging up a big swath of dirt to clean up all that glass near the patio, I might as well plant something there. It gets TONS of sun, and I might just get one of those giant pouches of mixed seeds and dump it in. Gotta have some fun somehow! 

Don’t forget, make the sandwich!

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Clovey pulled pork – fatty hunk of pork – salt and pepper – oil for browning – 1 cup apple cider vinegar – 2/3 cup apple juice – 3 jalapeños with tops removed, seeds and membranes intact – 1 onion, quartered – 2 Tbsp cumin – 1 tsp red pepper flakes – 2 tsp ground cloves 1) Cut pork into hunks. Season heavily with salt and pepper. 2) Heat oil in heavy pot and brown pork on all sides. 3) Move browned pork into Instant Pot or slow cooker or dutch oven. Add all the other ingredients. Cover and cook slowly for at least six hours. 4) When pork is tender, shred.  

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Clovey pulled pork

Ingredients

  • fatty hunk of pork
  • salt and pepper
  • oil for browning
  • 1 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 2/3 cup apple juice
  • 3 jalapeños with tops removed, seeds and membranes intact
  • 1 onion, quartered
  • 2 Tbsp cumin
  • 1 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 2 tsp ground cloves

Instructions

  1. Cut pork into hunks. Season heavily with salt and pepper.

  2. Heat oil in heavy pot and brown pork on all sides.

  3. Move browned pork into Instant Pot or slow cooker or dutch oven. Add all the other ingredients. Cover and cook slowly for at least six hours.

  4. When pork is tender, shred.

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Chicken shawarma

Ingredients

  • 8 lbs boned, skinned chicken thighs
  • 4-5 red onions
  • 1.5 cups lemon juice
  • 2 cups olive oil
  • 4 tsp kosher salt
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp pepper
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes OR Aleppo pepper
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 entire head garlic, crushed OR bashed into pieces

Instructions

  1. Mix marinade ingredients together, then add chicken. Put in ziplock bag and let marinate several hours or overnight.

  2. Preheat the oven to 425.

  3. Grease a shallow pan. Take the chicken out of the marinade and spread it in a single layer on the pan, and top with the onions (sliced or quartered). If you kept the garlic in larger pieces, fish those out of the marinade and strew them over the chicken. Cook for 45 minutes or more. 

  4. Chop up the chicken a bit, if you like, and finish cooking it so it crisps up a bit more.

  5. Serve chicken and onions with pita bread triangles, cucumbers, tomatoes, assorted olives, feta cheese, fresh parsley, pomegranates or grapes, fried eggplant, and yogurt sauce.

What’s for supper? Vol. 465: Life with Abby Normal

Hello! Hello! Hello hello hello. I am so very sorry it’s been so long. I will tell you what we’ve been up to, and why I’ve been off the radar. 

The truth is, most of what has been preoccupying me are stories that are not mine to tell. So I will just ask you, in your kindness, to please pray for the beloved X family, and the beloved Y person, the Z beloved person, and the beloved kid. Multiple rolling emergencies and really painful situations.

Then right before Holy Week, we were finally able to procure a family member’s diagnosis we’ve been fighting for for two years; and then right after that,

I found out I have a freaking brain tumor.

It’s BENIGN, and growing very slowly. I may have had it for ten or even twenty years, but it has only been symptomatic since about October. I got an MRI on March 24th and saw the neurosurgeon on April 7th. It is almost certainly a trigeminal schwannoma, which is rare but almost always benign. But look at this thing!

What the heck!?!

I can try medication to control the symptoms, radiation to keep it from getting bigger, and/or surgery to remove as much as possible, depending on how tangled up in nerves it is. The catch is that radiation sometimes causes scar tissue, so if I do need subsequent surgery, it will complicate matters. 

It’s very unlikely to cause an aneurism, though, so I’ve got that going for me. To my disappointment, it is not what’s causing my migraines, which are global; whereas all my schwannoma symptoms are all markedly on the left, (so I cannot ask them to implant the spare Instant Pot valve I have, which would allow them let the steam out when I need to. And they call themselves specialists, pah.) The way it’s placed, it affects my facial nerves (so, tingling, numbness, headaches, and potentially double vision) but not really scary stuff like speech, memory, or cognition.

Although, as it turns out, knowing you have a brain tumor, but not being able to meet with the neurosurgeon to discuss the implications for a full two weeks does affect your speech, memory, and cognition, especially when you are preparing for Easter, Passover, and a birthday all in the same week.

And that’s the main reason I’ve been struggling to get writing done: Knowing something is wrong, not knowing how serious this is, and not being able to tell anyone, including the kids, because I don’t really know anything! So it’s a huge relief to actually have some information. 

To put it into perspective, the neurosurgeon made an appointment for six months to check in with me, in case I haven’t made a decision by then. So yes, I have to deal with it, but it’s not a, yanno, BRRRRAINNNN TUMORRRRR!!!! It’s just a . . . brain tumor. Which is still not IDEAL, but you know, I got the initial MRI in the evening twelve days before Easter, feeling like it was silly to make such a big deal out of some little stuff, and probably I was just imagining it anyway, and probably if I learned how to hold my neck right, my symptoms would go away.

Then the next morning I opened up the portal expecting them to say everything is fine and I must have just tweaked a nerve by chewing gum too forcefully or something.

Instead it said “tumor” and “neurosurgeon,” and I closed my eyes and some tears leaked out, and then I was like, “Okay, Jesus. I did not ASK for a tumor. So clearly this must be YOUR tumor. So I am officially handing it over to you.” And it has been a pretty light burden since then. (With some more crying, but I always cry at Easter anyway.) 

So now I just have to figure out what to do. Right now, for various reasons, I’m leaning toward surgery, preferably at the end of the summer. I would be in the hospital for 2-3 days, and recovery would be 4-5 weeks. Prolly gonna keep most of my hair and get an interesting scar behind my ear, and my skin will not enjoy the radiation I guess. The surgeon did say I might struggle with chewing and talking for a bit, and I did say BUT THOSE ARE MY TWO FAVORITE THINGS TO DO. 

Any. Freaking. Way. Life goes on, and Damien has been an absolute rock. He has been really sick with a horrible sinus infection for most of Lent, but in callous disregard for his illness, the cars have both been breaking repeatedly, sometimes simultaneously, and also Sophia’s car, too; and also the water heater, the bathroom sink, a drain pipe in the basement, and half a dozen other things I’m forgetting about, have been breaking. Yesterday we drove home from the dentist, got out, and the door fell off. 

Which I have never seen before! But he has just been going ahead and watching tutorials and ordering parts and fixing everything, one by one by one by one, and even saying things like, “It’s okay if  you want to get rid of this loveseat you just asked me to pick up from Facebook Marketplace, and find another one, and I will pick that one up, too.”

We didn’t get a nuclear war, so that was good. The first round of eggs we put in the incubator didn’t hatch, so we just started a second batch. None of the peach pits I planted have sprouted, but my rhubarb is suddenly thriving, the crocuses are coming in thick and gorgeous this year, and even though the snow plows threw tons of gravel up over my garden, the daffodils are just ignoring it and poking through anyway. Jesus is risen, the sun comes up every stinking day, and life is good. Gonna build Corrie’s tree house this spring if it kills me. 

NOW, who wants to see the strawberry Tom Servo cake with cream cheese frosting I made for Irene’s birthday?

Poor guy is leaning pretty badly, but I was proud of him anyway. I was also pretty pleased with the earrings I made her, and it turns out carving wood and twisting up little bits of metal are a really good way to occupy your mind, so you don’t go crackerdog.

I guess I will just do a quick round-up of foods, starting with Passover. All my Passover recipes are here. 

We had cinnamon garlic roast chicken: 

chopped liver, gefilte fish, and spinach pie bites:

roast lamb:

Chicken again, and charoset:

Of course we had chicken soup with matzoh balls, but I forgot to take pictures. This year, I decided to try using seltzer in the matzoh balls, which is supposed to make them light and fluffy. It worked a little too well, and about half of them fell apart! I’ll probably go back to the can recipe next year, and just take my chances. 

Yes, I was worried there wasn’t enough dessert: 

I did the same thing I did last year with the sponge cake, and squeezed fresh lemon and orange juice, then forgot to add them. So I made a syrup with half the juice, poked a bunch of holes and let it soak in; and then I made a glaze with the rest and poured it over the top. Pretty nice. 

Several of the big kids were able to come over, the other kids brought a guest, and we had a lovely seder, even though we never did find the beautiful illustrated haggadahs. Here is Corrie reading the four questions: 

Then we went to the Easter Vigil, which was three hours long and very beautiful and threeeeee hours long. Got home, set out the kids’ baskets, and went to sleep. I spent most of Easter Sunday in bed and I didn’t even feel bad about it. 

We kind of muddled through the rest of the week with leftovers, Aldi pizza, and bagel sandwiches. Then Wednesday I chopped up and heated up the leftover lamb and leftover chicken from Passover,

and I made some pita and we had extremely delicious gyros. Some of the pita turned out a little . . .unpuffy . . but it was still an excellent meal, which we ate with the pita still hot from the pan. I had mine with lamb, red onion, yogurt sauce, feta, tomatoes, and hot sauce. 

Scrumptious.

Then yesterday morning, I quick pickled some carrots and got some pork marinating with onion, garlic, sugar, pepper, and fish sauce, and roasted that up right before supper 

and we had banh mi on toasted baguettes, and some of us added chopped liver. Banh mi is already the queen of all sandwiches, and the chopped liver puts it right over the top. 

Insanely delicious. 

Not sure what we are having today, but it is MEATSTER, so I may spring for some hamburgers or something. 

And that’s-a my story!

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 463: Wiggly eggs and other perverse urges

Happy Friday! We’ve had kind of a nutty week that I can only describe as RIFE WITH INTERPERSONAL COMPLEXITY. By which I mean I’ve changed my mind, and from now on I’m going to clean school buses for a living, and raise mushrooms instead of children, and possibly stop speaking entirely, like . . . 

Well, I couldn’t think of a good example, so I googled “vow of silence who took” and this is the first result that popped up:

And now I feel better! Also we’ve had ABOVE FREEZING TEMPS all week, and dang, it’s nice. Water flowing, grass showing, fewer ice patches, more mud puddles. Good stuff. 

Okay, here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Pretty luxurious leftovers

Look at this! 

Leftovers get a bad rap, but that’s just because they haven’t had Saturday night at my house. I wish there were, like, some hungry seminarians who lived next door or something. Or maybe we should buy a goat. 

SUNDAY
Meatball subs, curly fries, birthday cake

Sunday we celebrated a birthday, and the kid in question requested meatball subs, curly fries, and a chocolate cake with Kit Kats and Reece’s Peanut Butter cups, and not too much frosting. 

I made the meatballs with ground beef and ground pork, eggs, panko bread crumbs, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, and Worcestershire sauce, and cooked them on a rack in a hot oven, then transferred them to the crock pot with jarred sauce. 

I did a three-layer box cake, but made the frosting from scratch. I creamed together 1.5 sticks of butter and 4.5 cups of powdered sugar, then a little salt and three ounces of melted, unsweetened chocolate. Then I just added milk until it was the consistency I wanted. 

The cake turned out . . . fancy! 

The design on top is the logo he uses to sign his artwork. 

Twenty-two candles, and it was a hit. 

The kids were trying to work out how many birthday cakes I have made over the years, and I really don’t know. Ten kids, and the oldest is 27, so you can work out that formula; except some of them had multiple cakes in a year, and occasionally they would request tiramisu or something instead. Anyway, it’s a number that’s so high, you’d think I’d be better at decorating by now! I always give it my all, anyway. Never an unenthusiastic effort; this is my pledge. 

MONDAY
Chicken ranch wraps, chips, raw vegetables

Just chicken tenders on tortillas with shredded lettuce, shredded pepper jack cheese, and ranch dressing. I actually love this and would make it every week if I could get away with it. I love wraps of all kinds. 

I am working on increasing my vegetable consumption. I’ve been serving big platter of raw veggies early in the week, and then I will have them ready to snack on for the rest of the week, and I have actually been doing it. I don’t even have any illusions of losing weight at this point; it’s just a matter of self respect. Hard to respect self that is coated in orange cheez dust. 

TUESDAY
Chicken biryani, naan

I had four big chicken leg quarters that were on sale, and I really never know what else to make with them besides chicken biryani, which Damien and I happen to love. They get seasoned and then seared. 

Then you take the meat out of the pan and start building up the rest of it: First ginger and onions, then your spices, then the raw rice, plus cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, and blond raisins. 

I have begun to play pretty fast and loose with the seasonings, but I more or less followed this recipe, except that after I put the meat back in and add the broth, I immediately move it all to the slow cooker, and let it cook all day. That is the only way I’ve ever been able to actually get the rice completely cooked. 

Before I left for the afternoon drive, I made a double recipe of naan dough from King Arthur, except I was out of yogurt so I used sour cream.  I make a double recipe, which should make 16 pieces, but I only make eight, so they come out nice and big. 

Doesn’t look big here, but this pan is huge. 

I keep a wet cloth ready and wipe the burnt flour out of the pan in between frying each piece, and they turned out yummy. Nice buttery taste, and chewy but not tough on the inside, with a little crispness on the edge. Brushing them with melted butter at the end really makes them special. 

I served it all with mint chutney, and some cilantro and some almonds that I pretty much burnt, but it was really tasty meal. I burnt the almonds because I made them in the oven and they burn REALLY fast. Next time, I’ll go back to toasting them in the microwave like I usually do. Although the microwave has reverted to one of its old habits of turning on any time the door is closed, so I get nervous using it, wondering if the next trick is going to involve flames or what (there is always a next trick with our appliances. They can’t just die quietly; they have to be on fire). 

WEDNESDAY
Spicy chicken soup with corn chips and guacamole

Wednesday I had about six chicken drumsticks I forgot to cook last week, and the original plan was chicken tortilla soup, but that calls for chicken breast, which I think is an inferior chicken part for soup anyway. So I roasted the drumsticks with oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, and chili powder and pulled the meat off. 

Then I started throwing stuff in the food processor to make the soup base. I put in two onions, 6 cloves of garlic, a jalapeño, a bunch of cilantro, and about a pound of tomatoes. I whirred that to a pulp, then cooked it in the pot in hot oil to thicken for about ten minutes. Then I put the meat back in and added a bunch of chicken broth. 

The recipe I usually use calls for chiles and adobo sauce and tortilla strips, but I realized I’m really the only one who likes tortilla soup anyway. I offered to the kids that I could make crunchy chili lime tortilla strips, or corn muffins, or even quesadillas, but they didn’t want any of that. So I made a nice bowl of guacamole

and served the soup along with some of those oversized “street corn” corn chips from Aldi, with a little sour cream and cilantro on top of the soup, and it was a highly delicious and nourishing meal. 

The soup was thick and very spicy, and I liked the corn chips much better than tortilla strips. I might have also added some corn and/or beans to the soup if it were just for me, but it was really good as it was. Also I couldn’t find the can opener. 

In situations like this, where the kids just do not want any part of dinner, they generally just go fix themselves whatever they want. They’re all old enough to cook, and they have some general idea that protein=good. Often this means they make omelettes, which is great; but sadly, on this day, what they all wanted was things in cans, and the can opener had really gone thoroughly missing. They were all mad at me about this, for some reason, even though I, too, frequently wish to open cans, and had not hidden the can opener for my own perverse reasons. Anyway,  I guess they all found something, and I have gotten so much better about not caring what they eat, and I enjoyed my soup and guacamole! We did have some bleeding when one kid tried to open a can of Spagehtti-o’s using the stabbing method, but it wasn’t a deep cut, and we did have bandaids in the house for once. Maybe next week, I’ll just serve bandaids. Bandaid omelettes. 

Now that I think of it, I think I actually made the soup on Tuesday, while I was making the biryani, because I knew I was going to be busy the rest of the week. I remember people coming in and asking what was cooking, because it smelled like so MANY kinds of things. 

THURSDAY
Chef’s salad, fresh bread

Thursday I had some apprehension about the meal I had planned. I talk big about not caring about what the kids eat, but obviously I actually care deeply. However, I have to balance food the kids enjoy with food I have time to make and food that isn’t outrageously unhealthy and food we can actually afford in This Golden Age of America, and it’s not always obvious what to make. So I was starting to have my doubts about the chef’s salad. 

Again, to me, this is a pleasant and yummy meal that I’d be happy to eat every other day. I did my best to present it in an attractive way. I even cut the hard boiled eggs with a special wiggly cutter!

Isn’t that cute? There’s a big bowl of greens in the back. Two kinds of cheese, two kinds of meat, cute li’l grape tomatoes. I would have gone ape over this when I was a kid. I even put out some of those crunchy onions that come in a can.

But I still thought maybe it needed to be bulked up a little, qua a meal. So I made some bread, following the King Arthur hearth bread recipe, which is apparently an old classic, but which I have never made before. It was going great, but I started it at the wrong time, and ended up leaving it for the second rise for way, way too long while I was driving around. So by the time I baked it, the loaves had overinflated and then slumped pretty badly. I baked them anyway, and you know what? It was nice bread!

Wonderfully crackly outside and soft and chewy inside. I was pleased, and will definitely make this again, just timed better. I liked the whole meal. 

And I got my dang vegetables. I also got a new can opener, and I’m pretty sure some people had Spaghetti-o’s for supper.  

You know what, though, these kids do like bread with all kinds of nuts and seeds and stuff in it, and I bet this hearth bread can be adapted pretty easily that way. I’m enjoying the novelty of just making single recipes of things, these days. I’m starting to realize how much my cooking has been affected by quantity. Like, there are meals that seem incredibly laborious and/or expensive to me, but that’s because I was serving twelve for so many years. It now feels very freeing to just . . . follow the recipe, as written. It feels like cheating!

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just regular pizza, no tricks!  And Damien and I are planning to be very kind and gentle with ourselves this weekend. It’s been a hell of a year, honestly, and that goes for just about everyone I know. I would bake you all some nice bread if I could.

Anyway, spring is coming, birds are returning, snow is melting, can opener is with us again. I think we’re gonna make it. Poopsmith out! 

What’s for supper? Vol. 460: It was the shroopiest of times, it was the doopiest of times

Happy Friday! The other day I thought of a really clever pun for this week’s food post title, and decided not to write it down because I would definitely remember it later. Now it is later, and, well.

It’s just as well. These things are always disappointing. One of my kids once had a dream about a fiendishly clever new advance in technology that would revolutionize the way we fight wars, and she woke and and DID write it down so she’s remember it. In the morning, she looked at her notes, and it said “bag of bees.” 

Anyway, I’m sorry it’s the first Friday in Lent and this post is gonna be full of the yummy things we ate for Valentine’s Day and for Mardi Gras and also because I’m a cooker of yummy things. Some years I come up with a putatively clever gimmick to shield the viewer from graphic (=meat) content, but we are solidly in bag of bees territory here, mentally. All buzz, no honey. I don’t know. Well, here is what we ate:

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizza

Saturday was shopping day, and I had the pleasure of paying for it almost entirely in cash earned from selling cheesecakes. That felt pretty good. 

Saturday was, of course, Valentine’s Day, so along with frozen pizza, I also got corn dogs as a romantic gesture, because only Damien and I like them. We didn’t eat a single corn dog like in Lady and the Tramp or anything. Don’t get the wrong idea. 

We all gave each other chocolate and candy, and for dessert, I decided to try my hand at one of those fancy decorated swiss rolls. I followed the directions from The Squeaky Mixer, which were nice and clear. (I see she also has a post for a master guide on decorated swiss rolls!) It was very pleasant using a small bowl and whisk for a change. I love my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but it was nice to move more slowly. 

This recipe requires a very tender cake, so you can’t over mix anything. I did use the standing mixer to make stiff egg whites, which get folded into the batter. 

After you do that, you set aside a little bit and color it, and put that into piping bags (well, sandwich bags). The trick of putting the bags in cups and folding back the tops over the rim before filling them is SO helpful, especially if you just have a small amount in each bag

Then you grease and line a cookie sheet and pipe your design onto it. It opted for the old classic Valentine message: Shroopy doo.

Origin story: 

I wish I had spent a little more time coming up with an actual design, but I did manage to get the letters all backward! Then you freeze the design for a bit, to help it stay intact. 

Then I used a large bag to pipe the rest of the batter over the design. I took a pic just before I covered up the decorated part with plain batter.  

Here is where I made my first mistake. The pan is a rectangle, and you only decorate one half of it, because the other half is going to get rolled up and no one will see it. But I decorated the long half, rather than the short half. So at this point, I was locked into rolling a long, thin roll, rather than a short, stout swiss roll. Not necessarily a mistake, I guess, but not what I intended.

So you bake it for a short time (it’s a very thin cake), take it out of the oven, turn it out of the pan, and carefully peel the parchment paper off the bottom, revealing the baked-in design. I took a video of this part, and you can hear me breathing heavily. 

 

Here is where I made my second mistake, and this one was a doozy. I sprinkled the cake lightly with sugar and covered it with a damp towel and carefully rolled it up. 

The wrong way.

I rolled it so the design was on the inside. And I didn’t notice until it had cooled for about twenty minutes. So I unrolled and re-rolled it the other way, but of course it cracked, which is the one thing you’re trying to avoid with a swiss roll! 

I was annoyed at myself, but not devastated, because if something is going to go wrong, it’s best when the mistake is super obvious and super avoidable in the future. One has simply not to be a bonehead, and it will work out better next time!

So while it was cooling, I whipped the heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla, carefully unrolled the cake, spread it with the cream, and rolled it back up again, and let it finish cooling. 

It was, indeed, the shroopy doo-est of cakes. 

You can see that I festooned it with leftover molded chocolate from another project, and that really shrooped things up, I think. 

I actually used double the amount of cream filling, because, I don’t know, I like cream filling. When I sliced the roll open, it had a decent spiral, considering it was a long, skinny cake. (I know from watching Great British Baking Show that the spiral is very important.)

It was so bland, though. Next time I make one of these, I will do a layer of something with a stronger flavor on the inside along with the cream, and will  probably dress up the outside, as well. But honestly, I considered this project a success, because everything turned out well except for two things that are easy to correct next time. We live to roll another day. 

In the afternoon, we watched Yojimbo, and in the evening, we watched Moonstruck. Each perfect Valentine’s Day movies, in their own way. 

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips, king cake

Sunday our old friend Elijah was over, and it was another weekend where I felt powerless to resist making a bunch of big hamburgers (I had bought a bunch of ground beef while it was still on super bowl prices). I also got a sudden urge to make a king cake before Lent descended. I found a King Arthur Baking recipe and thought, oh yeah, I’ve used this recipe a few times before. Started putting it together and I was like . . . mmmmmm I don’t think I have used this recipe before. It calls for dry milk, which I didn’t have any of. It also calls for lemon oil or zest, which I also didn’t have, so I used orange zest. Then I tried to figure out what I could possibly use as a substitute for dry milk. You’d think wet milk is the answer, but that only works if you decrease the other liquid, which it was too late to do. I don’t even remember how I resolved it, but the dough I ended up with was less “soft and silky” and more “disgusting” and “something I don’t want to touch.” 

It requires two rises, and, by adding plenty of flour, I managed to coerce it into a reasonable shape. I added the cream cheese filling and then discovered there was a jar of homemade strawberry topping left over from cheesecake, so I spread that on, too.

Things are looking up! Many of us have untidy back stories, but we turn out well anyway! So why. not this king cake! All I had to do was fold over the margins and pinch them together, and carefully place the whole thing into a bundt pan. 

Well , . ., ,,,

I got the fuckin thing in the pan. Possibly the ugliest transfer possible. If there were king cake police, I’d be in jail for life for what I did to that dough. 

ANYWAY, I baked it, and it actually came out of the pan more or less intact, and I shoved a baby-sized rubber alien up in there, and drizzled it with three colors of icing, and threw some edible gold flakes on top because why not. 

It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. I did overbake it, so it was a little dry, but it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t filled so much as infiltrated with cream cheese and strawberry.

I was cutting it up and passing out pieces, and Damien’s piece was last, with the rubber baby clearly visible. He was in the other room, so the kids and I declared that whoever gets the baby has to buy everyone ice cream, and then we gave Damien his piece. In other words, we shrooped his doo. Shrooped it good. 

MONDAY
Pork vindaloo, basmati rice, naan, mango

Monday I salvaged my good name in the kitchen. This meal turned out absolutely delightful, and I was very pleased with myself. 

In the morning, I assembled my spices for this pork vindaloo recipe from Bon Apetit. 

Then you just pulverize them all together and marinate chunks of pork in the resulting paste. The recipe calls for pork shoulder and pork belly, but I just used a rather fatty loin, and it was fine. I only used half the number of guajillo chiles it called for, and it was still quite fiery. I would do it that way on purpose. Hot enough to really light up your head, but not enough to make it hard to taste anything else. 

So I set the meat to marinate

cut up the mangoes, set up the rice, and made the dough for naan. I used the King Arthur Baking naan recipe, and this time I really had made it before. I decided I would get fancy and weigh the flour, rather than measuring it by volume like I usually do. Well, I had to add so much extra flour to get the texture right, I don’t know what the point was! 

But they turned out so, so good. I made a double recipe, which should yield 16 flatbreads, but I divided the dough into only eight pieces, so they were a nice, generous size. I cooked them in a very hot iron frying pan, wiped it out with a damp cloth in between fries, and brushed the pieces of naan with melted butter on both sides when they came out of the pan. PERFECT. 

They were SO soft and nice, I was just delighted. Probably the best naan I’ve ever made. 

The whole meal was delightful. 

I got a little ramekin of yogurt to sooth my mouth when the meat got too hot. I want to make this again right away, but it doesn’t feel very Lenten!

TUESDAY
Mardi Gras

I have such mixed feelings about Chili’s having somehow become our traditional final place of debauchery before Lent. The restaurant was practically empty, but they seated us next to the bathroom anyway. It was fine. I ordered some kind of chipotle chicken bowl and it was perfectly fine. Then we followed up with our other, equally dubious tradition and headed over to Price Chopper to pick out individual tubs of ice cream.. I got a Ben and Jerry’s thing with a caramel core and pieces of blonde brownie. Damien was sick and Elijah was working, so we brought them to-go boxes. And that was our festal meal! Shroopy doo.

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and salad

On Wednesday I was the one who was sick, so Damien brought the kids to Mass. I spent the afternoon ruthlessly decluttering the dining room (four bags of trash, yay!), and for supper we had spaghetti and salad, and, just to round out the church basement dinner vibes, white bread with butter.

THURSDAY
Roast drumsticks, mashed potatoes, roast butternut squash

Thursday I was busy all day, and for the life of me, I can’t remember what with. So I threw together supper at the last minute. I just sprayed the chicken drumsticks with cooking spray and seasoned them heavily with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder. I roasted them and then put them in a covered baking dish in a low rack in the oven to stay warm, so I could use the broiler to make the butternut squash. I peeled and sliced up two squashes and laid the disks in a pan on parchment paper. I may or may not have sprayed them with cooking spray, but I definitely put a little heap of brown sugar on each one, and then sprinkled them pretty heavy with a lovely biryani masala by Spicewalla. 

I had a five-pound bag of potatoes, and the original plan was to bake them, but you really cannot make baked potatoes for seven people when two of them look like this:

Five potatoes total in the bag! I used to buy potatoes like this on purpose, and slice them into these ludicrously long french fries; but it was definitely not a deep frying kind of night. I just boiled them and mashed them, and I did a pretty poor job, too. Very lumpy. The squash was great, though!

I just adore Indian spices on squash. Really tasty and interesting. 

It turned out to be a pretty good meal despite the potatoes. 

And that’s-a my story. 

FRIDAY
Grilled cheese and tomato soup

I’m actually really looking forward to this meal. I may even throw some leftover rice into the tomato soup. The kids got an early release from school because there is a big storm coming. I saw the highway department pre-salting the roads before the snow even started, so I guess it’s gonna be a doozy. 

I guess we are gonna try our Fisher Family Mandatory Lent Film Party again this year. Damien and I are both exhausted and couldn’t come up with anything creative, so we’re going to watch Spartacus, which I haven’t seen in many years. I remember it being very sweaty. The kids have been lots of fun to talk about movies with lately, though, so I have medium-high hopes. 

In conclusion, you will have a lizard in your pocket. Be you. Shroopy doo. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 456: Please hold

Happy Friday! Let’s talk about food, all the food, and nothing but the food. Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizzas

Just a regular day of shopping and errands. I forgot to buy frozen food to accompany the Saturday leftovers, so instead we ate the frozen food I had bought for the kids’ lunches. And that’s how you get to be a professional cooking blogger! 

SUNDAY
Burgers and chips

Elijah usually comes over on Sundays, and even though in reality he’s an adult and taller than me, in my head he’s still the little guy who once woke up from a nap trembling, and didn’t stop trembling until we gave him a hamburger. So I try to make sure he gets lots of hamburgers. 

Ground beef was on what passes for sale these days – $3.49 a pound – so I stocked up a bit. Maybe we’ll have burgers next week, too!

I like my burgers absolutely slobberingly smothered with ketchup and mustard, and piled up with pickles. 

MONDAY
Waffles and home fries

Monday was, of course, MLK Jr. day. It’s only in the last few years that NH made this a holiday. We used to mark MLK day by stopping for fries or something on the way home, because I would feel bad about forgetting that the schools were open but the library was closed, so the kids would spend 40 minutes after school shivering on the library steps before I got them, ever MLK day. Thanks a lot, Martin. But this time we didn’t have school! So nobody got fries. Damien went to Moe’s house to work on his car, and the rest of us had waffles and home fries. 

The waffle recipe:

For the home fries, I peeled potatoes, cut them into wedges, drizzled them with oil and seasoned them with salt, pepper, chili powder, and garlic powder, and roasted them in a hot oven until they were browned. I didn’t turn them, because I like having a roasty, crackly part on the bottom and a golden toasty part on the top. 

Also I forgot. But they did turn out nice. 

Waffles were okay, not the greatest, not sure why. 

It’s possible that waffles are only really good if you have a third thing with them, like meat or even just fruit, or eggs. Anyway, it was a filling meal.

On Sunday, I tried making some chocolate strawberry hearts I saw online (and I truly looked for the reel to link back, but I can’t find it. It’s by Foodbites). You cut the strawberries into heart shapes with a cookie cutter, then make a base with melted chocolate, stick the strawberry on it, and embellish it with more chocolate. Like this:

Pretty and simple!

Well . . . 

AN ATTEMPT WAS MADE.

The good news is, we live in a very pretty place. I truly would rather live where there’s ice and there’s snow and the whalefishes blow, but it’s not dull! We get these dazzling, exhilerating skies.

I mean also, I hardly ever shovel anymore, so that definitely helps my attitude toward winter. 

TUESDAY
Chicken quesadillas, fake Doritos

Tuesday I spent most of the day driving here and there and there and here, including out to Nelson with my apple pie money to buy a used mini refrigerator from FB Marketplace. Actually, it’s a beverage refrigerator, which makes it the perfect size for, say, four cheesecakes.

[Here, there should be a photo, but my heart quailed at the prospect of letting even such a friendly crowd see how gross my floors are right now. It’s just been super icy, so we have to put down a lot of dirt and salt outside, and guess where that ends up? Boo! Oh well. Imagine a nice little fridge with perfect shelves inside.]

All my adult life, I have wanted a little spot just to store my baked goods where no one will disturb them, and now I have it! I also had a wonderful chat with the seller, a kindred spirit who loves being in the kitchen and hates being at Market Basket. She had a lot of kitchen supplies for sale because the person who is not allowed in this post withdrew funding, and her culinary school got shut down. We chatted for a while in her spectacularly organized basement, she gave me a couple of springform pans for free, and I left feeling motivated to organize my life. (This did not happen, but I enjoyed the feeling while it lasted.)

For supper we had chicken quesadillas using the chicken left over from last week’s subpar enchiladas. I goosed them with some, I don’t know, chili powder, salt, and cumin, or something like that, and they were fine. I threw some jalapeños in mine, too. 

Everything is fine. 

WEDNESDAY
BLTs, party mix

Wednesday we had BLTs purely because my menu thus far was so thrifty, and I felt like a-splurgin’. I made a second attempt (the first one was about three years ago, and ended in tragedy) to toast the bread all at once in the oven, using that technique where you put the two oven racks close together and use the top one to hold the pieces of bread upright.

This time it worked! The secret, as any halfwitted housecat could have explained, is not to move the racks after the bread is in place. My mistake in the past was pulling the racks out so I could reach them easily, and then carefully putting the bread in there, and then trying to slide it all into the oven, and of course all the bread slithered down into the pan, defeating the entire purpose. Instead, you have to leave the racks where they are and carefully stick your hand into the oven to put the bread in. Then it works. 

This is yet another one of those things that I finally got the hang of only once it became less urgent. When we had twelve people in the house and I was trying to toast 24 pieces of bread at once, this would have been a handy hack indeed! Too soon old, too late schmart. Anyway, we delivered the bomb. I mean we had yummy sandwiches.

I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out why I like party mix so much.  I got the store brand, so none of the individual elements were that good. The pretzels and corn and tortilla chips were stale, and the cheetos, while pleasingly caveman club-shaped, were undeniably greasy. I guess it’s because of the variety that it seems like a treat. Also, it’s called “party mix.” I guess if they called it “Stale But Miscellaneous,” I would be less avid a fan. 

This is why I haven’t been writing a lot lately. My brain just stands there, ruminating slowly over little bits of straw, like an elderly cow who has forgotten how to leave the barn. I’m . . . it’s January. We’re fine. 

THURSDAY
Gochujang bulgoki, rice,  seaweed, sesame chicken

It’s been a while since I”ve made this excellent meal! Pretty often, I will just marinate pork ribs in the marinade, and then grill or broil them. But this time, I decided to go Full Bulgoki. Here’s the marinade:

Jump to Recipe

You can make this with beef, but I prefer it with pork. 

So in the morning, I sliced up a couple of onions and shredded a bunch of carrots in the food processor, and sliced a bunch of boneless pork ribs as thinly as I could, and set that to marinate together. Then I set up the Instant Pot with rice and water, cut up the broccoli, and even located the sesame oil and sesame seeds, which sometimes wander off to parts unknown right when I need them. 

I don’t even know what I did the rest of the day, but I was — oh wait, I do! Starting back in mid-December, I have trying to finish this complicated application for a thing, but they sent it back and said their new policy is that they need copies of everyone’s social security cards. Lucy’s has, of course, gone missing. So we went to get a replacement, and it turns out you need a government-issued ID for that. Which we don’t have, because I haven’t gotten around to finishing teaching her to drive yet. So we decided to go for a non-driver ID, and to get THAT, you need. . . .your social security card. Tra la la! Your call is very important to us! Have you signed in at the kiosk? The kiosk is only for individuals with an appointment! Appointments cannot be made online, but must be made by phone. Please have your social security card ready before calling. 

Well eventually we rustled up some backups, and I vouched for her, and she got the thing, and I got the thing, and I sent off the application, and all manner of things shall be whatever. 

This is a long way of saying that, when I got back home, I was extremely glad that all I had to do was press the rice button, pan fry the meat mixture, and throw the broccoli in a hot oven with sesame oil, soy sauce, and sesame seeds, and in about 25 minutes, we had a meal that was completely yummo. 

The bulgoki is often eaten wrapped in lettuce, which is also delicious, but I like using seaweed. You tear off a bit and use it as a scoop to grab up a little rice and meat

It’s just so good. I think bundles is the superior form of food. 

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle

The kids asked for this, and I wrote it down on the menu, but I will probably kidnap Damien into a pizza place. I was going to be kind and make the tuna noodle for the kids, but they are all in the kitchen right now, being SO loud, and also they were hogging both bathrooms this morning, so I feel like I need to do something. Vive le resistance. They can make their own casserole. 

Like much of the country, we are expecting anywhere from one to two feet of snow, and — again, speaking as the lady of the house who has been promoted to “you stay inside; we’ll handle the shoveling” — I’m all for it. We were in a drought for most of last summer, and my pumpkins really felt it, so I hope all this snow will replenish the water table. I hope a lot of things. Please hold. Your hope is very important to us. 

5 from 1 vote
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Gochujang bulgoki (spicy Korean pork)


Ingredients

  • 1.5 pound boneless pork, sliced thin
  • 4 carrots in matchsticks or shreds
  • 1 onion sliced thin

sauce:

  • 5 generous Tbsp gochujang (fermented pepper paste)
  • 2 Tbsp honey
  • 2 tsp sugar
  • 2 Tbsp soy sauce
  • 5 cloves minced garlic

Serve with white rice and nori (seaweed sheets) or lettuce leaves to wrap

Instructions

  1. Combine pork, onions, and carrots.

    Mix together all sauce ingredients and stir into pork and vegetables. 

    Cover and let marinate for several hours or overnight.

    Heat a pan with a little oil and sauté the pork mixture until pork is cooked through.

    Serve with rice and lettuce or nori. Eat by taking pieces of lettuce or nori, putting a scoop of meat and rice in, and making little bundles to eat. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 453: Eat Pray Ugh

Happy new year! I remember once reading a guide to confession that said if you aren’t sure if a sin is venial or mortal, just tell the priest, “I am unable to judge the severity of my actions.” So that’s where we are, except with food. Except that I am very able to judge it; I’m just too busy licking icing off my chin to decide what to call it. 

If you don’t mind, I’ll just do a highlights reel of the last few weeks, rather than the typical day-by-day account. My camera roll is a mess, I have put on 924 pounds, and I made so much cheesecake, I blew out the oven door. More on that later!

Okay, here’s some yummy food!  

We’ll start with a cozy little pot of applesauce I made during Chanukah. I put a bunch of cut-up apples (including peels and cores) in the Instant Pot with some water and cooked them, then ran the collapsed apples through the foley mill to get rid of the debris. Cooking them with the peels on makes the color lovely and pink. Then I added some cinnamon and a little butter, and continued cooking it down in a pot. Lovely color, didn’t need any sugar. 

This was, of course, to accompany POTATO LATKES, the sine qua non of Chanukah. I had shredded the potatoes in the food processor the night before, and stored them in a bowl of water in the fridge to keep them from turning brown. If you put the shreds in cold water immediately and let them sit for a bit, they remain mostly white even after you take them out of the water again! 

I more or less followed the NYT latke recipe, which calls for eggs, flour, salt, baking powder, and pepper. It results in a puffy latke that is absolutely delightful. 

We had these for dinner as a side dish, but I can’t remember what the main was. 

Later in Chanukah, I made sufganiyot: Little jelly donuts. I’ve tried different recipes, but this time I went for the Smitten Kitchen one, which has you rolling out the dough and cutting it into rounds, rather than dropping dollops of batter into the hot oil. If I remember, I made the dough the night before, then cut it out and fried it. The recipe includes an option for filling them with jelly and THEN frying them, but I opted to fry and then fill. 

Absurdly delicious, and beautifully plump. Definitely doing this recipe from now on. 

I also, for reasons I can’t clarify, decided to make blintzes this year. (Well, last year, I guess.) I have a very old memory of my grandmother (the mean one) making blintzes when she moved into our house. Nobody was allowed in the kitchen, and I could hear her violently whacking the frying pan on the table to get the wrapper out of the pan.

I did not find it necessary to do that! Making the wrappers was a pretty steep learning curve, though, and I absolutely had some misfires, and probably my wrappers were a little too thick. (They are essentially slightly undercooked crêpes — undercooked because you fill them and then fry them.) The classic recipe calls for farmer’s cheese/pot cheese, but I used ricotta, which is very close. 

I followed Smitten Kitchen’s recipe, and they turned out wonderful. 

And yes, when I took my first bite of that combination of flavors I haven’t had since I was about six, I wept a tiny bit. My poor mean grandmother, what a life she had. Poor her, poor them, poor everybody. At least we have blintzes. 

I made a simple cherry sauce from frozen cherries. Can’t find the recipe, but it was just, like, a cornstarch, lemon juice, sugar, water kind of thing. 

INCREDIBLE. 

I do believe next Chanukah I will make EITHER sufganitot OR blintzes, but woof, everything was so good, I don’t really have regrets.

And we played dreidel! I miraculously remembered to get chocolate coins to bet with, and Sophia surprised everyone with gift cards to a local bookshop.  

I think we managed to light the candles 6 out of 8 days, and we lit the Advent candles more than half the time,

which is not a bad record for this vicinity. 

On Christmas eve, I decided I wanted to try that cinnamon star pull-apart bread I see everyone making, rather than my normal cinnamon rolls. I followed the Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe, and I even watched the video. I formed the stars and then put it in the fridge overnight, and it looked promising!

In the evening, we decorated the tree. Usually I put up lights outside the house and set up the nativity scene in the beginning of Advent, then add lights inside on the third Sunday, and then we decorate the tree on Christmas Eve. 

We went to Midnight Mass That Is Actually At Midnight, Which In Theory I Love But Also Zzzzzzzzz, and Benny was serving, and it was lovely and beautiful, but also there was enough exhaustd and overstimulated weeping and lamenting from certain quarters that I decided not to even try taking pictures in the church. But many of the kids looked very nice. We did take a few pics at home. 

We staggered home with the addition of Elijah, who spent the night on the couch. We lugged all the presents and stockings out and sprinkled candy around according to tradition, and got into bed by 2:30. I left a note for the kids to please take out the cinnamon bread and let the dough warm up when they get up. (They are allowed to get up whenever they want and open their stockings, which have candy and a few small presents; but they can’t wake us up to open the rest of the presents until 8:00.)

So I got up and baked the bread, and it was not great! Just didn’t keep its shape, and I thought there was too little cinnamon and sugar for the amount of bread.

No one really complained, though. we had tons of bacon, oranges, grapes, and pomegranates, orange juice and eggnog, and candy and chocolate galore. The kids gave each other such excellent presents. 

Moe joined us via video (he’s currently working two jobs and couldn’t get here in person, alas), Clara came over in the morning, and Lena came by later in the day. So a lovely day all around, much laughing and goofing around. Later, we had our traditional takeout Chinese feast

and all was well.

I haven’t yet mentioned that, right before Christmas, I baked and sold a large number of cheesecakes. I think a total of 14? It’s possible this is a legal gray area, but they were delicious and nobody arrested me, so we have that going for us. I even sold the one that got caught on the oven rack and half the top got ripped off.

I gave the lady a discount and showed her a photo of how it was damaged, but check out how I fixed it:

I do like making pretty food! I also offered strawberry sauce and blueberry sauce. 

After Christmas day was a bit of a blur. Like lots of other people, we ate a lot of candy and hung around in our pajamas and watched movies. We watched Stranger Things (still have to see the final episode), which we enjoyed with some heckling, and Wake Up Dead Man, which we all LOVED. At some point I made a double batch of buckeyes.

This is a recipe that I used to have to assemble all my montessori powers so I would be cool with the kids rolling the dough into balls with their grubby hands and coming out with buckeyes of all uneven sizes, and then not freaking out when they splattered hot melted chocolate all over the place while dipping them. Oh how times have changed! This time, I made the dough and nobody felt like making buckeyes. So it stayed in the fridge for several days, until I finally got tired of looking at it. The dough was a little dry, so rather than rolling it, I scooped half-balls with a melon baller

and rather than dipping it in chocolate, I just drizzled melted chocolate over the top. 

The kids called them “gentrified buckeyes.”  The only downside to this model is that, when you refrigerate them, it’s super easy to flick the chocolate off and eat the plain candy underneath, if for instance you can’t each chocolate but you certainly can eat 927 plain balls of peanut butter, butter, sugar, and vanilla. I’m just saying, if they’re completely robed in chocolate, you have to work harder to denude them, and you only eat maybe 600 of them. 

Eventually, we wobbled our way toward eating actual food again. I made beef barley soup and challah one night.

Here’s my soup recipe:

Jump to Recipe

and here’s my challah recipe:

Jump to Recipe

I did one loaf with sesame seeds, one with “what the hell happened to my bagel?” seasoning, or whatever the off-brand is called

Honestly they were a little dry and not as chewy as you want challah to be, but still nice. Can’t beat freshly-baked bread. 

Another night we had just plain old broiled pork ribs, seasoned with salt and pepper and shoved up under a hot broiler, turned once. This remains one of my favorite ways to serve pork ribs. 

Looks like we had mashed potatoes, too. Aren’t you glad I’m here to narrate this perplexing imagery? 

The other night, we had oven-fried chicken and some bare-bones pasta salad. 
 

Here’s my recipe for oven-fried chicken:

Jump to Recipe

As you can see in the background, I had started my next goofy project, which was Sophia’s birthday cake. She once again requested to be surprised, which is honestly the one thing I can guarantee, with my cakes. She did ask for a strawberry cake with lemon cheesecake frosting, and I was feeling ambitious for some misbegotten reason, so I decided to make a fresh strawberry cake without artificial strawberry flavoring. I once again turned to Sally’s Baking Addiction, and followed this recipe, which has you puree strawberries and then simmer them until the volume is reduced by half. The idea is that you impart strawberry flavor into the batter without making it too runny. 

Well, I will cut the suspense and tell you the cake did not turn out great. It did taste like strawberry, but it was really dense and a little gummy. I don’t know if this is my fault — cakes are not my forte — but that is how it turned out. I did bake it in a bundt pan, because I wanted that shape, but I don’t think that was the problem. However, since I did have a cake with a hole in the middle, I did what any red-blooded American would do: I filled it with Skittles. 

But first I made a lemon cream cheese frosting, using this recipe from Sugar Spun Run, and it was absolutely delicious. Fluffy and creamy and perfectly sweet-tart.  

Anyway, back to the surprise part! Sophia loves Conan Gray, so I decided to model the cake after his newest album cover.

 

So I ended up with a vaguely hat-shaped cake (I used a second pan to make the top part) with a slightly blurry little fondant sailor perched on the brim. 

You can’t really tell, but one of his wee hands is curled up so he can clutch one of the candles. Here he is before I added the water or sky or whatever

Did I mention the frosting was delicious? I don’t know, little kids are much easier to please! Anyway, Moe had come over to stay for a few days, and Clara and Elijah came by, and we all had lovely calzones

Here’s my basic calzone recipe. (I just use premade pizza dough.)

Jump to Recipe

And then, after presents and cake, the youngest and the oldest in the family shuffled off to bed and left the birthday girl and pals to watch Zoolander and eat this charcuterie board I made:

That’s pretty, right? I was pleased with it. I made the chocolate leaves when I was drizzling the buckeyes, and had leftover chocolate. I just piped them onto parchment paper and stuck them in the freezer until it was time to use them. And I realized I now know how to make pie crust roses, strawberry roses, AND salami roses. 

This birthday was actually Jan. 1, which means I didn’t mention our New Year’s Eve! Which is, you’ll be surprised to hear, food-centric. We had sushi and pork dumplings. I usually make the pork dumplings from scratch, but couldn’t find dumpling wrappers anywhere in town, so I just bought some frozen ones. 

For the sushi, I got some good rice and made a pot of seasoned rice.

Jump to Recipe

I got tons of nori sheets, and . . . let’s see. Smoked salmon, raw ahi tuna, steamed shrimp, avocado, mango, red caviar, cucumber, carrot matchsticks, fried SPAM, and an assortment of sauces, hot mustard, and so on. Sesame seeds and furikake. I forget what else. 

and everyone made sushi and we had fun! Oh, and Benny made taiyaki filled with nutella and jelly. I was honestly just crushingly tired by this point, so I don’t have much in the way of photos. I do have a short video I took by accident, and I watched it six times before I figured out what the hell I was doing. Then I realized I was cleaning off my phone’s camera lens with a napkin, frowning at it, LICKING it, and cleaning it off with a napkin again. If you send me $900 I will share the video. 

That night, we watched It’s A Wonderful Life, which we saved for when Moe was here, and then we counted down to midnight, shot off the cheapy little confetti guns I got at Walmart, had some sparkling cider in plastic cups

and staggered off to bed. 

The very last thing Damien did in the year 2025 was to go down in the basement and thaw out the bathtub pipe, which had frozen even though we left it running a trickle; and then on the very first day of 2026, the oven door broke. I was actually just peeking at the calzones to see if they were done, and the glass inside the oven just kind of fell apart and slid off the door. It didn’t look to me like it had exploded at all, so I uhh went ahead and fed those calzones to my family, and they enjoyed them, and nobody died. 

Then today, Jan. 2, our new dryer arrived (Damien has been going to the laundromat for the family for over a week now), and he is taking out the old one and putting in the new. Because of my past cleverness, this involves unscrewing about forty screws with which I attached plexiglass to the laundry room door last summer to keep the rain from getting in, and also dismantling the makeshift greenhouse I set up on the back steps to keep my pomegranate trees from freezing. SO YOU SEE, marriage isn’t 50/50, if you want it to work. It’s 100/100. He puts in 100% of the work actually keeping the household functional, and I mess around with fondant and pomegranates, 100%. And that’s our secret!  Anyway, don’t forget about the video. $900 firm. I know what I got. 

   

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Beef barley soup (Instant Pot or stovetop)

Makes about a gallon of lovely soup

Ingredients

  • olive oil
  • 1 medium onion or red onion, diced
  • 1 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 3-4 medium carrots, peeled and diced
  • 2-3 lbs beef, cubed
  • 16 oz mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
  • 6 cups beef bouillon
  • 1 cup merlot or other red wine
  • 29 oz canned diced tomatoes (fire roasted is nice) with juice
  • 1 cup uncooked barley
  • salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Heat the oil in a heavy pot. If using Instant Pot, choose "saute." Add the minced garlic, diced onion, and diced carrot. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions and carrots are softened. 


  2. Add the cubes of beef and cook until slightly browned.

  3. Add the canned tomatoes with their juice, the beef broth, and the merlot, plus 3 cups of water. Stir and add the mushrooms and barley. 

  4. If cooking on stovetop, cover loosely and let simmer for several hours. If using Instant Pot, close top, close valve, and set to high pressure for 30 minutes. 

  5. Before serving, add pepper to taste. Salt if necessary. 

 

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Challah (braided bread)

Ingredients

  • 1.5 cups warm water
  • 1/2 cup oil (preferably olive oil)
  • 2 eggs
  • 6-8 cups flour
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1.5 tsp yeast
  • 2 egg yolks for egg wash
  • poppy seeds or "everything bagel" topping (optional)
  • corn meal (or flour) for pan, to keep loaf from sticking

Instructions

  1. In a small bowl, dissolve a bit of the sugar into the water, and sprinkle the yeast over it. Stir gently, and let sit for five minutes or more, until it foams.

  2. In the bowl of standing mixer, put the flour (starting with six cups), salt, remaining sugar, oil, and eggs, mix slightly, then add the yeast liquid. Mix with dough hook until the dough doesn't stick to the sides of the bowl, adding flour as needed. It's good if it has a slightly scaly appearance on the outside.

  3. (If you're kneading by hand, knead until it feels soft and giving. It will take quite a lot of kneading!)

  4. Put the dough in a greased bowl and lightly cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap. Let it rise in a warm place for at least an hour, until it's double in size.

  5. Grease a large baking sheet and sprinkle it with flour or corn meal. Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Roll three into "snakes" and make a large braid, pinching the ends to keep them together. Divide the fourth piece into three and make a smaller braid, and lay this over the larger braid. Lay the braided loaf on the pan.

  6. Cover again and let rise again for at least an hour. Preheat the oven to 350.

  7. Before baking, make an egg wash out of egg yolks and a little water. Brush the egg wash all over the loaf, and sprinkle with poppy seeds or "everything" topping.

  8. Bake 25 minutes or more until the loaf is a deep golden color.

5 from 1 vote
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Oven-fried chicken

so much easier than pan frying, and you still get that crisp skin and juicy meat

Ingredients

  • chicken parts (wings, drumsticks, thighs)
  • milk (enough to cover the chicken at least halfway up)
  • eggs (two eggs per cup of milk)
  • flour
  • your choice of seasonings (I usually use salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, and chili powder)
  • oil and butter for cooking

Instructions

  1. At least three hours before you start to cook, make an egg and milk mixture and salt it heavily, using two eggs per cup of milk, so there's enough to soak the chicken at least halfway up. Beat the eggs, add the milk, stir in salt, and let the chicken soak in this. This helps to make the chicken moist and tender.

  2. About 40 minutes before dinner, turn the oven to 425, and put a pan with sides into the oven. I use a 15"x21" sheet pan and I put about a cup of oil and one or two sticks of butter. Let the pan and the butter and oil heat up.

  3. While it is heating up, put a lot of flour in a bowl and add all your seasonings. Use more than you think is reasonable! Take the chicken parts out of the milk mixture and roll them around in the flour until they are coated on all sides.

  4. Lay the floured chicken in the hot pan, skin side down. Let it cook for 25 minutes.

  5. Flip the chicken over and cook for another 20 minutes.

  6. Check for doneness and serve immediately. It's also great cold.

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Calzones

This is the basic recipe for cheese calzones. You can add whatever you'd like, just like with pizza. Warm up some marinara sauce and serve it on the side for dipping. 

Servings 12 calzones

Ingredients

  • 3 balls pizza dough
  • 32 oz ricotta
  • 3-4 cups shredded mozzarella
  • 1 cup parmesan
  • 1 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 tsp oregano
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1-2 egg yolks for brushing on top
  • any extra fillings you like: pepperoni, olives, sausage, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400. 

  2. Mix together filling ingredients. 

  3. Cut each ball of dough into fourths. Roll each piece into a circle about the size of a dinner plate. 

  4. Put a 1/2 cup or so of filling into the middle of each circle of dough circle. (You can add other things in at this point - pepperoni, olives, etc. - if you haven't already added them to the filling) Fold the dough circle in half and pinch the edges together tightly to make a wedge-shaped calzone. 

  5. Press lightly on the calzone to squeeze the cheese down to the ends. 

  6. Mix the egg yolks up with a little water and brush the egg wash over the top of the calzones. 

  7. Grease and flour a large pan (or use corn meal or bread crumbs instead of flour). Lay the calzones on the pan, leaving some room for them to expand a bit. 

  8. Bake about 18 minutes, until the tops are golden brown. Serve with hot marinara sauce for dipping.  

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Sushi rice

I use my Instant Pot to get well-cooked rice, and I enlist a second person to help me with the second part. If you have a small child with a fan, that's ideal.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups raw sushi rice
  • 1 cup rice vinegar
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 Tbsp salt

Instructions

  1. Rinse the rice thoroughly and cook it.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the rice vinegar, sugar, and salt, and cook, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved.

  3. Put the rice in a large bowl. Slowly pour the vinegar mixture over it while using a wooden spoon or paddle to fold or divide up the cooked rice to distribute the vinegar mixture throughout. You don't want the rice to get gummy or too sticky, so keep it moving, but be careful not to mash it. I enlist a child to stand there fanning it to dry it out as I incorporate the vinegar. Cover the rice until you're ready to use it.

What’s for supper? Vol. 451: Lasagna in the highest

Happy Friday! We are just over a week away from the shortest day of the year, and then we start getting more light. Hooray! 

I hope your Advent is going well, for those of you who observe it. I’m having a freakishly efficient month. Finished Christmas shopping a few days ago, doing tons of cleaning and decluttering, and I’m currently not behind on any paid work. We’ve been managing to light the Advent candles and do the Jesse tree ornaments and readings about half the time, which is not a bad record for this vicinity.

We’ve even mostly been adhering to our screen-free Advent evenings. In the past, we’ve done 7-9:00 Monday through Friday, but this year we’re doing 7:00 onward Monday through Thursday, and then shooting for a movie (rather than endlessly rewatching the same TV shows) on Fridays. The kids have been reading, drawing, and playing games, but mostly hanging around yacking. I have been falling asleep on the couch. Oh, such naps I’ve been having. Yesterday evening’s nap was a real drooler!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and popcorn chicken

We ended up making tons of extra trips along with shopping because we had to pick up this and that, and also we got our asses to confession, which is #1 on my must-do Advent list. The confession line was possibly the least efficient thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I discovered that I’ve completed the transformation into the cheerful, bossy middle-aged lady who tells everyone where to sit. There is NO REASON for the confession line to be so confusing. All there needs to be is a sign on the wall telling people where to line up! Or one of those paper number machines like they have at delis! Or a fluorescent pink conical hat that says “LAST PERSON IN LINE” and it gets passed from person to person as they trickle in! But we can’t have this. We have to have a confused blob, and everyone has to be anxious and upset about it. So I became That Lady. Anyway, we went to confession, and then resumed shopping. 

The shopping turn kid chose popcorn chicken, which I agreed to because I forgot the oven was still broken. I also picked a variety where the chicken was uncooked. So I ended up doing it in five ten-minute batches in the little air fryer, and it was delicious, but does not figure into the “very efficient December” thing I referenced above. 

I also made a batch of dough to make cookies on Sunday.

Jump to Recipe

That was efficient!  Also, we stopped at a thrift store and I happened to find a cake pan that was exactly the shape I was looking for! Efficient and lucky! 

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, fake doritos, pickles

After Mass, Corrie and I went to Lena’s apartment, and Corrie and Lena worked on a birthday present for Benny, and I borrowed Lena’s oven to make cookies and cake. I brought everything I could think of that I might need, including cake mix, eggs, and oil,  parchment paper, toothpicks for detail, all kinds of decorating supplies, and a big pan. But I forgot the cookie dough. So I had to start over, and ended up having a very pleasant afternoon listening to my oldest and youngest daughters working happily together while I baked. 

It was Benny’s birthday we were preparing for, and she asked for a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, and she asked to be surprised with the theme. I settled on Merlin, the BBC show they watched recently. This show is pretty, pretty terrible unless you watch it through the eyes of a young teenage girl!

My original plan was to make cookies of Merlin, Arthur, Guinevere, Excalibur, Gaius, Uther, and the Dragon, and possibly John Hurt, but that was too ambitious, and I kept wrecking the Gaius cookie in various ways. So I settled for Merlin, Arthur, Guinevere, and the dragon. When I got home, I made two more attempts to make a Gaius cookie. First I tried the air fryer, and probably you can make this work, but I could not. Then I tried just broiling it in the oven, and you’ll never guess what happened. 

So, Damien suggested I make it Gaius who has been burnt up by the dragon (not a thing that actually happens in the show, but it’s funny). The main thing about Gaius is this goofy face he makes with one eyebrow raised, so here’s his cookie:

Anyway, I spent such a long time decorating those cookies, and every last one of them turned out weeeird! (Another thing I forgot was black icing, so that was a challenge.) And I still hadn’t figured out what the cake itself would be.

But wait, I had bought that thrift store cake pan, which was a castle shape. So I opened the box feeling lucky and efficient . . .  and it turned out to be a large number of plastic towers and turrets and plastic doors and windows. No pan at all. I guess you are supposed to smear frosting on the plastic, bleh. 

(This is an eBay listing. I think I spent $4 on it.)

I have this dumb thing where I really want everything on a cake to be edible, even if no one in their right mind would actually eat it. But time was passing by, so I let yet another pointless personal standard slip through my hands, and I made a cake that was part plastic. I scored the frosting to make it vaguely brick-like and then sprayed it with edible silver spray, and sprinkled some rock candy around, for purposes of . . .I don’t know, magic?

 Kind of makes you wonder why everyone thought Camelot was so great, but those were different times, I guess.  

While Corrie and I were at Lena’s house, Damien was at home doing all the prep for his amazing incredible lasagna. Then we got home and I quickly made some grilled sandwiches.

And then I do believe I feel asleep on the couch. 

MONDAY
Birthday lasagna, birthday cake

On Monday, first we went to Mass for the feast day, and then the part for the oven came, and Damien installed it right away so he could bake the lasagna. And then, literally right immediately then, the dryer broke. Poor Damien has gotten really good at fixing all kinds of appliances, so off he went with the autopsy, while I finished this ridiculous cake, and then I decorated the front door. 

I cut a bunch of greenery from the yard and attached it and some fake berries to a broken Swiffer with zip ties, and then zip tied that to the trellis. 

Not the most lush or symmetrical garland imaginable, but it was COLD out there, with wet snow falling faster and faster, and I did not want to go out again!

Then I strung lights back and forth and back and forth inside the trellis, and hung a wreath on the door. By the time the kids got home, it was dark enough for the lights to show up, and they were properly impressed. 

And nobody noticed that I got the plug ends backwards like I do 100% of the time, and I had to run an extension cord over the step.

The lasagna was superb, as it always is. He actually made two. Here is the larger one, right before we devoured it:

I am deeply suspicious of lasagna that stays together in a neat stack when you cut it. 

Oh man, it was so good. Oh I ate so much. 

Then we had presents and cake. Sweet Benny was absolutely delighted by this bizarre cake, which I ended up holding together with skewers. 

Benny is also a big fan of The Office, so I made an “IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY” banner, and then someone smudged the letters. The original plan was to have the dragon breathing fire onto Gaius, but I ran out of time and, frankly, enthusiasm. So here was the finished (?) Merlin cake: 

But like I said, she loved it. Her favorite was the Guenevere cookie, which I have to admit was pretty, even if it doesn’t look much like the actress.

She also loved all her presents. The one from Corrie was a Barbie doll that she transformed into a FMA Edward Elric doll.

Corrie did the hair and some of the clothes, and Lucy made the coat, and Lena did the face. 

Lucy knitted a Merlin doll for Benny, which she was, if possible, even more delighted with

and it was a pretty good doll! My kids are so talented.

She got a number of other thoughtful presents and she had a wonderful day, and everyone was happy for her. She’ll be having a party with her friends at some later date! 

TUESDAY
Chicken and chickpeas, onion salad, yogurt sauce, fresh pita

Tuesday I pushed really hard to clean, declutter, and rearrange the living room, to get ready for the Christmas tree. Most years we end up dragging a wet tree into a chaotic house and then scrambling to make room for it, but NOT THIS YEAR. 

Tree-ready. 

I made a stab at getting the rest of the Christmas decorations out of the attic, but it turns out I consolidated them all into a giant tub last year, for the sake of efficiency, and then shoved them through the second-floor attic access door — and then, while rearranging Corrie’s room, moved a heavy old bunk bed in front of the door, and then a certain adult child stacked that up with tubs and tubs of things that don’t fit at THEIR apartment. This Christmas tub is too big to fit down the other access door, which is one of those drop-down ceiling ladders. So I don’t know, maybe Christmas is cancelled. At least I vacuumed. 

Oh anyway, we had chicken and chickpeas for supper. We haven’t had this dish for a while, and it’s yummo. Here’s the recipe

Jump to Recipe

I got a big tub of Greek yogurt and used half to marinate the chicken, and made the other half into dipping sauce with fresh garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and a little salt. Then I made a nice bowl of red onion salad with lemon juice, salt and pepper, and cilantro. Maybe a little olive oil, I forget. 

and then I made a batch of dough for pita. I have tried so many recipes, but have returned to this one from The Kitchn, which makes soft, tender breads you can make all at once in the oven. You can also make the dough, let it rise, punch it down, and then pause it in the fridge until you’re ready to finish it, which works out perfectly with my afternoon schedule. 

So when the chicken and chickpeas were almost done cooking, I got the dough out of the fridge, rolled it out, turned up the oven a bit, and baked eight pieces. They turned out lovely. 

When you bake them in the oven, you get a softer, puffier pita, and you don’t get those characteristic flattened bubbles like if you’re frying them on the stovetop, but I honestly prefer it this way, especially for the purposes of this meal. 

I skipped the onion that’s supposed to go along with the chicken and chickpeas, and didn’t really miss it. 

I was so so hungry and it was a very tasty meal. 

If you are a chicken skin appreciator, you will want to try this marinade. Look at how crackly and savory the skin turns out. 

The meat underneath stays nice and moist. I don’t think I’ve ever had this meal turn out bad. 

WEDNESDAY
Second lasagna, garlic bread

Wednesday we were supposed to get the tree, but it was SO bitterly cold and windy, nobody wanted to go outside more than necessary. So I heated up the second lasagna Damien made, and made a bunch of garlic bread, and everybody was happy. 

THURSDAY
Meatball subs, vegetable platter

On Thursday Damien fixed the dryer! He’d been working on it every day, but he does also have a full-time job. Such a hard worker.

In the morning, I made a big vegetable platter and some meatballs, then moved the meatballs to the slow cooker and spent most of the rest of the day in the car, because people needed to be here and there and here and there. It happened that Clara also needed a ride, and she repaid the favor with a big sack of  fresh baguettes from the bakery where she works! So I had been planning meatball subs on boring old Aldi rolls, but we got an upgrade. 

The meatballs were nothing to write home about, but the fresh bread more than made up for it. 

On Thursday Benny and I did venture out over the ice in the dark and got a tree from the Lions or Rotary or whatever, and it is now lying in state in the living room. We still haven’t figured out how to get the rest of Christmas out of the attic, so it’s not in a tree stand yet. We’ve got time! Surely! Due to my prior efficiency!

FRIDAY
Tuna boats, fries

I discovered halfway through the week that I had never figured out what to make for supper on Friday, so we are having tuna boats and fries. I actually love tuna sandwiches, so no complaints from me. No complaints from me about anything right now, actually. What do you know about that? 

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No-fail no-chill sugar cookies

Basic "blank canvas"sugar cookies that hold their shape for cutting and decorating. No refrigeration necessary. They don't puff up when you bake them, and they stay soft under the icing. You can ice them with a very basic icing of confectioner's sugar and milk. Let decorated cookies dry for several hours, and they will be firm enough to stack.

Servings 24 large cookies

Ingredients

  • 1 cup butter
  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1-2 tsp vanilla and/or almond extract. (You could also make these into lemon cookies)
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 3 cups flour

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350.

  2. Cream together butter and sugar in mixer until smooth.

  3. Add egg and extracts.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt, and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter and sugar and mix until smooth.

  6. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch. Cut cookies.

  7. Bake on ungreased baking sheets for 6-8 minutes. Don't let them brown. They may look slightly underbaked, but they firm up after you take them out of the oven, so let them sit in the pan for a bit before transferring to a cooling rack.

  8. Let them cool completely before decorating!

 

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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

  1. 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:

  1. 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.