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What’s for supper? Vol. 433: Psych!

Happy Friday! In haste! In ultra haste! For I gotta do this and that and these and those, and then get a kid to a party and go to adoration. Here’s what we ate this week:

Oh, but first, last Friday Corrie made her first pie dough. She is a giant rhubarb fiend and wanted to make something with it, and everybody should know how to make a pie. 

My pie crust recipe

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includes freezing the butter for at least 20 minutes, then grating it into the flour. Which is great work for people who enjoy complaining. 

And then you scrumble it around with your fingers until it’s just barely incorporated, then sprinkle cold water on top and encourage it to become a ball. 

SATURDAY Leftovers and hot pretzels (?) 
Strawberry rhubarb pie with streusel topping

Saturday we had our usual leftovers, and honestly I was pretty sick that night, which leads me to believe we need to be a little careful about how long we keep leftovers around. Duh. 

But anyway, Corrie picked some rhubarb from the garden, washed and cut up a bunch of strawberries, and made the pie filling using this recipe. 

Then she rolled out the pie dough on parchment paper and laid it in the pan, and trimmed the edges

filled the pie shells

and then opted for a streusel topping. She had wanted to make a woven crust, but we ran out of pie dough. So for the streusel topping, we just took a package of yellow cake mix, poured a stick of melted butter on top, and scrunched it into big crumbs, and sprinkled those on top of the fruit filling.

baked ’em and they were great! Very successful. 

and you can trust that she really truly did it herself, because boy did she get mad at me when I tried to help. This is the secret to raising independent children: They get mad at you. 

SUNDAY
Beach day (PBJ for me)

Sunday I was really feeling terrible, so Damien took the kids to Hampton by himself. We’d been planning this beach trip forever, so even though the forecast was for rain, they forged ahead.

Hardly anybody else was there, because honestly the water is pretty dang cold even on a hot day. The kids did eventually go in the water in their swimsuits, because they are New England kids. Then they went to the arcade, and then to McDonalds. Moe sent me this pic of Corrie waiting for her burger, wearing one of her arcade prizes. 

I myself had a PBJ sandwich, which I have once a year or so. Pretty good! 

MONDAY
Buffalo chicken wraps

So all summer I’ve been telling myself I have two big writing projects, and one was due in July and one was due in August, so as long as I paced myself, it would be okay. 
In fact, one was due July 28 and one was due August 1. Also I did not pace myself. So I was not okay. I spent the week writing furiously, and one project turned out really well, and one did not, and also I didn’t finish it. So I am feeling like a giant loser moron, but what are you gonna do. 

On the bright side, everybody likes buffalo chicken wraps. I had mine with buffalo chicken, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, crunchy fried onions, and blue cheese dressing. 

That night, I pitted six pounds of cherries, in preparation for some long-anticipated visitors the next day! 

When I have a lot of cherries to pit, I always start out by putting them on top of a bottle with a narrow neck, and stabbing the pits out with a chopstick.

After a pound or so, I get annoyed with this technique and just start ripping their hearts out with my fingers, which is honestly just as fast. 

I also made two batches of vanilla ice cream. Two eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 cups of heavy cream, and one cup of milk per batch.

TUESDAY
Smoked pork ribs, cole slaw, grilled corn, chips, cherry berry crisp with homemade ice cream

Tuesday afternoon our guests arrived! My oldest sister, her son, one of her daughters, and her three kids, whom I have never met! Absolutely lovely kids (ages 3, 2, and 3 months) and we had a really wonderful visit.

Damien smoked three racks of pork ribs, I made a bowl of simple cole slaw, and we had chips and watermelon, and corn grilled in the husk. Absolutely scrumptious. 

I never get good pictures of the best foods, because I’m in such a hurry to eat it up. So this is the best pork photo I got, but take my word, it was smoky, spicy, sweet, juicy, and insanely tender. 

I bought something called a black watermelon, which turned out to be just a watermelon with a dark green outside, and inside it was extra juicy and had a kind of vanilla taste? Interesting, not outstanding. The kids had fun watching what happens when you offer watermelon to a duck (mayhem). 

I didn’t get a pic of the cherry-blueberry crisp with ice cream, but it was yummy. I used this recipe, except I omitted the coconut from the topping. I, uh, made a quintuple recipe. 

My nephew, who is a very good sport, especially where goober dogs are concerned, spent the night, and the rest of them stayed in a hotel.

WEDNESDAY
Oven fried chicken, raw vegetables, chips, fruit salad

The next day my visiting family had a complicated day of other things to do and places to be, but we saw them again in the afternoon, this time with the addition of another niece I also haven’t seen in quite a while!

We had oven fried chicken,

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raw vegetables, chips, fruit salad (watermelon, strawberry, and mango)

I had been planning mashed potatoes and maybe biscuits, but it was tooooo hot, and a simpler meal was the right call. Nephew spent the night again, and they all left in the morning. 

So at one point I said to my niece (remember, she has three kids aged three and under) that she is doing such a great job, and she is such a natural mother. She said, “Oh, well you are seeing me with lots of adults around me to help” — implying that the way she REALLY is as a mother, when she’s alone with the kids, is not so impressive. 

Hey! Hey mothers!!! You are supposed to have help! That’s supposed to be the normal thing! Mothers are not supposed to be alone with little kids all day long, doing everything themselves without any other adults! I don’t know what can be done about it, and I sure wish I had had some help myself when I was drowning in babyland. But if that’s you, at least you should know that it’s not how it’s supposed to be, and if you’re struggling, it’s because it’s ridiculously hard. Of course it’s so rewarding and we love our kids so much and we have no regrets, but it’s HARD, and doing it mostly by yourself isn’t what’s best for anyone. So there. 

THURSDAY
Sloppy Joes, Psych fries, banana splits

Thursday was the day we had the third installment of Kids Make Supper, and Lucy opted to make the crazy stuffed twice-fried pub potatoes they had on Psych, which they’ve been watching this summer. (Which I have never seen, and which turns out to be a surprisingly entertaining show.) I guess they are called “Fries Quatro Queso Dos Fritos,” and I haven’t actually seen the episode, but SOMEBODY ELSE WAS MAKING SUPPER, so I was in favor of it. She found the recipe on Reddit, I think. 

Here’s the potatoes with their insides scooped out, stuffed with cheeses:

and I guess you fry them once, and then coat them in something and fry them again?

She forgot to add bacon to the insides, but she did serve them with some kind of peppery sour cream dip. 

She wasn’t sure what to make for the main course, but the general vibe seemed to call for Sloppy Joes. Now, Damien and I both grew up avoiding Sloppy Joes with all our might. It was a cafeteria food that you’d see on the weekly menu and decided to bring a bag lunch that day. But I guess Lucy had it at a friend’s house, and was smitten. So I got a few cans of Manwich Sloppy Joe Sauce (HAD TO GO TO THREE STORES FOR THIS DELICACY) which is, as far as I can tell, ketchup. Anyway she fried up some ground beef and mixed in the sauce, and we had kaiser buns. 

and I had to admit, it was a . . . .well, it was an insane meal, but actually quite tasty!

I still don’t think I would ever seek out a Sloppy Joe, but it’s not terrible that I know the kids like it, and would be happy to eat it for supper again. 

I will be honest, the Psych potato things were kind of underdone, which is an achievement, because of the “twice fried” thing. The concept was there, and they looked good, but the execution was a little off, which is understandable, because it’s an insane recipe. I don’t know if she will make them again, but, hey, KIDS MADE SUPPER. 

We don’t usually have dessert during the week (well, unless we have guests), but I suggested banana splits, just because the rest of the meal seemed so absurdly American. So we had chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream, topped with something Aldi was calling “Neapolitan bark.” 

And that was that!

FRIDAY
French toast casserole and eggs? 

We have lots of leftover bread in the house, so this seemed wise. 
OH it’s so late and I have to go! Goodbye! I love you!

5 from 1 vote
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Basic pie crust

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 from 1 vote
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sugar smoked ribs

the proportions are flexible here. You can adjust the sugar rub to make it more or less spicy or sweet. Just pile tons of everything on and give it puh-lenty of time to smoke.

Ingredients

  • rack pork ribs
  • yellow mustard
  • Coke
  • extra brown sugar

For the sugar rub:

  • 1-1/2 cups brown sugar
  • 1/2 cups white sugar
  • 2 Tbsp chili powder
  • 2 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 1 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1 tsp paprika
  • 2 Tbsp salt
  • 1 Tbsp white pepper

Instructions

  1. Coat the ribs in yellow mustard and cover them with sugar rub mixture

  2. Smoke at 225 for 3 hours

  3. Take ribs out, make a sort of envelope of tin foil and pour Coke and brown sugar over them. close up the envelope.

  4. Return ribs to smoker and cook another 2 hours.

  5. Remove tinfoil and smoke another 45-min.

  6. Finish on grill to give it a char.

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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What’s for supper? Vol. 432: S’more licht

Happy Friday! Let’s hop to it! Here’s what we had this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers and pizza pockets

Just a regular Saturday, chores and leftovers. I will say, first I had to spend fifty years being an undisciplined slob, but I am finally, finally learning the charms of doing little mundane things the same way at the same time every day — just stuff like feeding the animals, watering my garden, lifting weights, saying my prayers — rather than letting everything slide and then scrambling to catch up in a panic. Not that everything is neat and tidy and under control around here. But I guess I’m feeling like I’ve hit my stride a bit, and it’s really nice! 

SUNDAY
Tuna noodle for kids, pub food for grownups

For my birthday back in December, Damien gave me tickets to see the incomparable Samantha Crain, and Sunday was the day! So around noon, we took off, and set up a tent in a campground in the DAR State Forest in Goshen. 

Actually we set up the tent, started driving to the concert, suddenly realized we had set up in the wrong site,

and sheepishly dragged the tent over to the right spot.

And THEN we went to the concert. It was at The Iron Horse in Northampton, MA, and we had a great dinner. I had some kind of tasty pulled chicken sandwich and fries, and then the show was SO GOOD. The photo I took made it look gross, though, so instead, here is a picture of the wall.

Samantha Crain is the greatest. She is just a tremendous song writer, a tremendous musician, a tremendous singer. She rocked pretty hard for the first part of the show,

and then the drummer and bassist left the stage and she switched gears into a more indie mode.

Both halves of the show were great, just banger after banger. And she sang “Elk City” for the encore, which is the first song I ever heard by her, and it just about wrecks me every time. 

I really enjoyed the way The Iron Horse is set up. It’s spacious enough so you don’t feel stifled, but small enough that there aren’t, I don’t think, any bad seats. Acoustics are great, but you also feel like it’s okay to move around and eat your food without being disruptive. 

So then we got back to the campsite and decided to walk down to the lake and look at the stars, maybe catch some Perseids. We did see a lot of stars, and then we heard a weird kind of blowing/screaming noise coming from the trees. We weren’t even sure what animal it was, but it was very clearly saying “GO AWAY OR ME KILL YOU” so we scuttled back to the tent! (Pretty sure it was a buck.)

Then we went to bed, and this is the part where we are fifty years old, and I hadn’t been tent camping in about thirty years, and Damien had never been tent camping before, and we were both like, Boy, we are really lying on the actual GROUND, here. The hard, hard, really, really hard, hard actual ground. We had brought three yoga mats and an extra sleeping bag to lie on, but we had underestimated . . . how necessary beds are, I guess. So not a lot of sleep was gotten. But it was still extremely pleasant to start the day in a cool, breezy tent with leaf shadows drifting back and forth overhead, and birdsong all around.

We had brought a coffee machine and battery pack, but couldn’t get it to work, so I sat in the car like a bleary, smelly princess while Damien packed everything up, and we drove off in search of coffee. Stopped at Shelburne Falls and got coffee and muffins, and Damien and I both felt like if we stayed there a minute longer, some crusty old-timer in bib overalls and crinkly smiling eyes was gonna give us a life lesson whether we wanted it or not, and there was a good chance we would get welcomed right off the premises with garden shears or possibly a falling church tower. Good coffee, though.

Despite the terrible sleep, we both enjoyed it enough that we want to go tent camping again soon! As soon as we get a really good air mattress. 

MONDAY
Cobb salad

Good thing I took pictures of Monday’s meal, because the whole day is a blank to me. We apparently had Cobb salad: Roast chicken in chunks, bacon, tomatoes, lettuce, red onion, hard boiled eggs, and avocado in chunks. I substituted shredded cheddar cheese for blue cheese. 

Very popular meal. 

I think I had mine with ranch dressing, but possibly blue cheese dressing. Keep reading for more thrilling details like me not quite remembering what kind of salad dressing I chose!

TUESDAY
Smoked pork shoulder, tater tots, grilled corn

Tuesday Damien had to get up early to do his weekly radio spot, so he started a pork shoulder smoking in the morning. I think he ended up smoking it for six or eight hours, and my dears, it was TREMENDOUS. 

 
Sadly, there is not a recipe for this; he just followed his heart with some kind of sugar spice rub and a spray bottle of cider vinegar. He used charcoal and apple wood chunks and babied this thing all day, and it was SO juicy and tender and packed with spicy, smoky flavor inside, with spicy, sweet, sticky charred crust. Amazing. 

I had mine on a sandwich with red onions and just a tiny bit of BBQ sauce, which I was hesitant to use because I didn’t want to miss the flavor of the meat. 

He grilled a bunch of corn in the husks, and cooked a bunch of tater tots, and this was a VERY popular meal. 

That evening, we made the world’s smallest s’mores: Mini marshmallows, chocolate chips, and Teddy Grahams, carefully toasted over a birthday candle. 

Irene came out, saw what we were doing, and goes, “Okay, be honest. How poor ARE we??” Irene has been making me laugh since before she was born. 

But the tiny s’mores party was lots of fun! Clara came by and it was lovely. 

and the s’mores were indeed tiny. 

I don’t even like s’mores, but gosh, and I love my backyard, and I love my family. 

Later in the week when I was at the store, I got normal sized marshmallows, regular graham crackers, and regular chocolate bars, so we can proceed on to normal sized s’mores.

Naturally, the kids are now expecting the next week to feature the world’s biggest s’mores, and there is a very big part of me that wants to pull it off somehow. We did get one of those surprise EBT cards in the mail (even if you don’t qualify for food stamps, they send you a card for summer food expenses if you qualify for free or reduced lunch at school, even if the school your kids go to doesn’t offer lunch anyway, which ours doesn’t!) But the state of the country is such that I kind of want to blow the whole thing on enormous s’mores. Waste, fraud, and abuse s’mores. Abus’mores, if you will. I know there are recipes out there for homemade marshmallow, and a giant graham cracker can’t be too hard to make. Not sure what to do about the giant chocolate. Probably I could just melt a bunch of chocolate into a baking sheet, actually. HMMMM. 

WEDNESDAY
Pork quesadillas, pico de gallo 

The pork shoulder I bought was so big, I knew we would get at least two meals out of it, so meal #2 was pork quesadillas. It turned out only Damien and I and two of the kids actually wanted this. Which is nuts, because it was SCRUMPTIOUS. The melted cheese with the smoky meat was just meltingly delicious. 

As you can see, I made pico de gallo. Diced tomatoes and onions, lots of cilantro, lots of fresh lime juice, some minced jalapeños, and some kosher salt. So good. 

I cut up a whole onion, but only used about 3/4 of it, so I put the rest in a sandwich bag and thought someone could use it later. Then I put the rest of the ingredients in, and then I was like, “Oh look, there was a bag of onion already cut up! I should have just used that instead of cutting up a whole onion.” 

I tell you, life is full of surprises when you spend every day playing hide and seek with your own brain. 

THURSDAY
Stuffed shells and french bread

Thursday I had a million things to do, but it was also the day we had planned for Benny to do her Kids Make Supper turn. Last week, Corrie made oven fried chicken and mashed potatoes; this week, Benny picked stuffed shells and french bread. She did so great! We started off the bread dough in the early afternoon. Here is my recipe

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and let me tell you, when you are watching a novice use one of your recipes, it really brings home how terribly written your recipes are. I guess they are really more suited for people who are used to kind of winging it in the kitchen. Sorry about that! 

Anyway, like I said, she did great anyway. 

Got four nice long loaves rising, and only one of them was shaped really weird, which is about my record, as well. 

Then we started on the stuffed shells, and dang, the way I wrote the recipe was messed up! I fixed it (I hope), so here is that:

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She did use fresh basil instead of dried, which is vastly preferable.

I showed her how to stuff the shells, and then I ran out to pick up Corrie from her friend’s house. I didn’t want to be late, so I didn’t stop for gas, even though the “empty” light was on. Smart! So I get there, and it’s further out in the country than I remembered, so I’m like, hmm, I should get some gas. So I ask the map app where there is a gas station, and it’s even further out in the country. At this point, I’m coasting, and I finally get there, and . . . .there is no gas station. It’s just someone’s house. So I retrace my steps, coasting like CRAZY, but at this point Corrie is in the car, so of course we’re talking about what it might mean to switch bodies with a dog, so I was a little distracted and suddenly realized I was in Gilsum. Which is a very pretty town, but really falls down in the area of having gas stations. 

But it was gorgeous weather, I don’t have a baby, my phone was charged up, and I was just . . . so unbothered. We did actually make it to a gas station in Keene eventually. I guess this isn’t really a story, huh? It’s kind of an anti-story. Ten years ago, something like this would have ended up with lots of crying, several people wetting their pants, and some kind of encounter with law enforcement, if not a murderous deer. But as it was, we just got home late. 

And Benny was just finishing up stuffing the shells! So I cranked up the oven and we baked them for half an hour instead of 45 minutes, and it was absurdly late by the time we ate, but it was very delicious. And she was rightly proud of herself. 

Bread was great. We have a pressurized water sprayer Corrie uses to keep up the humidity levels in her turtle tank, and it’s very useful for putting some moisture into the oven when you’re baking french bread. Check out this lovely little fragile crust on the bread. 

She did so great! The cheese filling was rich and creamy. The other kids are starting to get enthusiastic about their meals, coming up. I’m very happy with this plan. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just regular old pizza. 

Last Friday, though, I made macarona bil laban and I loved it. I think one of the kids liked it, and a few thought it was okayish, and everyone else had plain noodles. So I probably won’t make it for the family again, but I thought it was so tasty, and it came together in like twelve minutes. 

Most of the recipes I found called for meat, so I just read a bunch and winged it. I cooked a few pounds of farfalle, and browned up a bunch of minced garlic in a lot of butter. I added the garlic butter to the yogurt sauce and stirred in some lime juice, aleppo pepper, and green za’atar, which is kind of a weird combination, but it worked! So I drained the noodles and mixed them up with the yogurt sauce, and then topped the whole thing with the toasted pine nuts (dry toasted in the microwave) and more chopped mint. 

Absolute comfort food. So yummy.

My mother would have adored this dish. I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t really get into experimenting with cooking until after my parents died, because they really would have liked some of these dishes! We did have my father over for dinner shortly before he died, and we had some kind of shrimp scampi, which I remember him loving. You can have a really complicated relationship with someone and still get a lot of pleasure out of cooking them a meal.

Heck, you can get a lot of pleasure out of cooking a meal that a dead person with whom you’ve had a complicated relationship would have enjoyed, for some reason. What do you know about that? Oh death. O life! Mehr licht. S’more licht, if you will. 

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French bread

Makes four long loaves. You can make the dough in one batch in a standard-sized standing mixer bowl if you are careful!

I have a hard time getting the water temperature right for yeast. One thing to know is if your water is too cool, the yeast will proof eventually; it will just take longer. So if you're nervous, err on the side of coolness.

Ingredients

  • 4-1/2 cups warm water
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 2 Tbsp active dry yeast
  • 5 tsp salt
  • 1/4 cup olive or canola oil
  • 10-12 cups flour
  • butter for greasing the pan (can also use parchment paper) and for running over the hot bread (optional)
  • corn meal for sprinkling on pan (optional)

Instructions

  1. In the bowl of a standing mixer, put the warm water, and mix in the sugar and yeast until dissolved. Let stand at least five minutes until it foams a bit. If the water is too cool, it's okay; it will just take longer.

  2. Fit on the dough hook and add the salt, oil, and six of the cups of flour. Add the flour gradually, so it doesn't spurt all over the place. Mix and low and then medium speed. Gradually add more flour, one cup at a time, until the dough is smooth and comes away from the side of the bowl as you mix. It should be tender but not sticky.

  3. Lightly grease a bowl and put the dough ball in it. Cover with a damp towel or lightly cover with plastic wrap and set in a warm place to rise for about an hour, until it's about double in size.

  4. Flour a working surface. Divide the dough into four balls. Taking one at a time, roll, pat, and/or stretch it out until it's a rough rectangle about 9x13" (a little bigger than a piece of looseleaf paper).

  5. Roll the long side of the dough up into a long cylinder and pinch the seam shut, and pinch the ends, so it stays rolled up. It doesn't have to be super tight, but you don't want a ton of air trapped in it.

  6. Butter some large pans. Sprinkle them with cornmeal if you like. You can also line them with parchment paper. Lay the loaves on the pans.

  7. Cover them with damp cloths or plastic wrap again and set to rise in a warm place again, until they come close to double in size. Preheat the oven to 375.

  8. Give each loaf several deep, diagonal slashes with a sharp knife. This will allow the loaves to rise without exploding. Put the pans in the oven and throw some ice cubes in the bottom of the oven, or spray some water in with a mister, and close the oven quickly, to give the bread a nice crust.

  9. Bake 25 minutes or more until the crust is golden. One pan may need to bake a few minutes longer.

  10. Run some butter over the crust of the hot bread if you like, to make it shiny and even yummier.

 

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Stuffed shells

Just a basic recipe. You can add meat to the sauce or spinach to the cheese, or anything that strikes your fancy. Serves about 10.

Ingredients

  • 2 12-oz boxes jumbo shells
  • 2 32-oz tubs ricotta cheese
  • 8 oz grated parmesan cheese
  • 4 cups shredded mozzarella, divided
  • 4 eggs, beaten
  • 1 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 Tbsp dried basil
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 1 tsp pepper
  • 1/2 tsp nutmeg
  • 4-5 cups pasta sauce

Instructions

  1. Cook the shells in salted water, drain, and rinse in cool water. Mix them up with a little olive oil so they don't stick together. Or if you will be using them soon, let them stay in the pot of cool water.

  2. Preheat the oven to 350. Mix into the ricotta cheese all the seasoning, the beaten eggs, the parmesan, and 3 of the cups of mozzarella, setting aside the rest of the mozzarella.

  3. Spread a little sauce in the bottom of an oven-proof pan or dish. Spoon a few tablespoons of the cheese filling into each shell and lay the stuffed shells close together.

  4. Top with the rest of the pasta sauce, and sprinkled the remaining mozzarella on top of that. Cover loosely with foil and cook for 45 minutes or longer, until it's bubbly. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 431: Not a bad record for this vicinity

Happy Friday! This week, we launched something I’ve been wanting to do for years: Kids Make Supper. That’s the snappiest name I can think of, but the concept is sufficiently thrilling to me. The kids all kinda sorta know how to cook and bake, but I wanted them know how to to plan and make an entire meal for the family. So this week, we started! With Corrie, whose natural habitat is the kitchen. 

SATURDAY
Leftovers with French bread pizza

I honestly have no memory of Saturday. I suppose we went shopping. I remember making like three extra stops, but I forget why. 

Oh you know what, we had a great dessert, though, because I planned in advance! We had cherry-blueberry crisp with rhubarb ice cream. 

Now I do remember. On Friday I harvested my first rhubarb from my beloved rhubarb plant, which I put in the ground a few years ago, and whose mother plant is a descendent from a plant the nursery guy’s grandfather brought over on a boat from the old country. 

It never turned red, but it was definitely ripe. I made two batches of rhubarb ice cream more or less following this recipe from Zoë Bakes, except rather than reserving some of the rhubarb mix as a sauce to pour on top, I just folded it in to the ice cream after it came out of the machine. 

I also pitted a bunch of cherries. I had bought something like eight pounds of cherries because they were $2.49 a pound and I was powerless to do otherwise. 

Here’s what your hands look like if you’re having a good July: Garden dirt under your nails, cherry juice on your fingers. 

In retrospect, maybe I should have cleaned my nails before I started pitting cherries, but ah, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? (P.S. this line expresses one of the dumbest ideas ever. I just want that on the record.) 

So I did those things on Friday night, and then on Saturday afternoon, it was super quick to put together a cherry-blueberry crisp. The last few times I attempted a fruit crisp, it was definitely fruit, but definitely not crisp; so I tried a recipe with oats, and it turned out GREAT. 

The recipe calls for shredded coconut on the topping, but not everyone here likes coconut, so I skipped that. It was perfect as is. Mayyyybe a tiny bit too sweet, but nobody was complaining. The tart rhubarb ice cream really set off the juicy, syrupy fruit, and it was truly everything a summer dessert should be. I was very pleased. 

There’s enough rhubarb left on the plant to make one other thing, but I haven’t decided what, yet. 

I see from my camera roll that we also went to the pond on Saturday! Here is Benny catching a water lily I tossed to her. 

Oh what a life. 

SUNDAY
Grilled pork chops, smoked chicken wings, grilled corn on the cob

Damien is still learning the ropes of his new (to him) grill, which has a charcoal part, a propane part, AND a smoker. AND it’s next to the patio, which is nice! His old grill (the late great Interchangeable Cinder Block Meat Altar Situation) was marooned way off on the other side of the yard under the trees, and it was lonely. 

It’s under a tarp here, but you can see the new location. And see my pretty patio! Lots of stuff blooming, including a bunch of violas that seeded themselves in the cracks between the bricks; and lots about to bloom. 

Sunday we were supposed to go to the ocean, but one kid after another got sick. And each one was sick with a separate thing! Amazing. So we decided to be smart and stay home, and Damien grilled and smoked a bunch of meat and corn in the husk. 

I don’t think I’ve ever had grilled pork chops before. Man, they were delicious. Excellent spicy crust outside, juicy inside. 

For the pork, he made a marinade of apple cider vinegar, olive oil, and a few tablespoons of brown sugar, garlic powder, salt an pepper. 
For the chicken wings, he made a sugar rub with lots of cayenne pepper and paprika, and then smoked them for a few hours; then he slathered them with BBQ sauce and grilled them long enough to make them sticky. SO GOOD. 

On Sunday, we also set up the tent Damien got last year for $5. It hadn’t been out of the bag yet, so we had no idea what to expect. 

It’s very nice! Much more spacious on the inside than it looked like it would be, and it’s just a very pleasant design, and does not smell weird or anything. 

It does have a rain fly; we just hadn’t put it on yet in this picture. Damien and I have both been tent camping before, but not together, so we’re going to do that this weekend. 

MONDAY
Oven-fried chicken, mashed potatoes MADE BY CORRIE

Corrie’s big cooking day! She really did it 90% on her own. I just supervised and clarified, and occasionally demonstrated.

First she made an egg, milk, salt, and pepper mixture for the chicken, and let that soak for a while. 

Several hours later, she peeled a bunch of potatoes, cut them into smaller pieces, and left them in a pot of cool water. Then she preheated the oven and put a stick of butter and a cup of oil in it.

Then she added spices to flour and dredged all the chicken in it

and carefully added the floured chicken, skin side down, to the hot pan of butter and oil. Then she started boiling the potatoes. 

About half an hour later, when it was sufficiently browned on the bottom, she flipped it. 

She did need some help for this part, because we were making so much chicken that you really had to get your whole arm into the hot oven, and it was tricky. 

While the other side of the chicken was cooking, she drained the cooked potatoes (again, I helped with this, because she’s just ten and that was a big pot!) and added milk and butter, salt and pepper to the potatoes, and mashed them.

And then the chicken was done, and she served her meal!

She was very proud of herself, and rightly so. Everything was delicious. And because it was her meal, we had No Vegetable. 

We went to the pond Monday evening, too! Lovely spot, and there was only one other family there, and for some reason they left when it started raining. 

TUESDAY
Koren beef bowl, cucumber salad

Tuesday we somehow had three separate medical appointments that couldn’t be rescheduled, so we divode and conquered. More or less. 

Got home, made a quick and tasty meal of Korean beef bowl

Jump to Recipe

over rice in the Instant Pot, and a simple cucumber salad. 

Jump to Recipe

and it was nice. I did take the time to use fresh garlic and ginger, which really pays off. 

This photo was taken on top of the hamper in my bedroom, which leads me to believe I was hiding from my family. 

WEDNESDAY
BLTs, salt and vinegar chips, sharky fruit salad, ice cream pie

A birthday! A birthday for Lucy.  She and Sophia and Irene made a couple of ice cream pies. One was a pineapple, for the TV show Psych (?) and I guess one was Homer 

and because she didn’t want a cake this year, I decided to make the most festive fruit salad I could think of:

I tried to make those banana dolphins, but the bananas were so ripe, the snouts kept falling off. She still liked it, though. 

All the kids got her weird and thoughtful presents and feted her throughout the day, and it was a nice time. 

Happy birthday, my deary dear. 

Wednesday night, we had a little tragedy, though. Bebe the duck never came home with the others. We tromped around in the dark for a while looking for her, but there was no trace. We hoped maybe she just wandered too far and was holing up under some leaves somewhere, but it did not seem likely.  

THURSDAY
Caprese chicken burgers, chips

Thursday we looked again for Bebe, but I guess she’s just gone. Probably a coyote took her. Poor Bebe, she was my favorite. All ducks carry on and make a ruckus for no reason, but Bebe elevated this to incredible levels. She was the loudest, rowdiest, silliest, bossiest, nuttiest duck ever, and I will really miss her!

Here she is, executing a classic Bebe move of wandering off from the flock, yelling at them, getting stuck in some branches, and then falling into the water. 

 

I hope she bit the hell out of whatever caught her. 

So on Thursday, I drove out to Spofford to pick up some SLATE. I am still a brick girl at heart, but gosh, slate is beautiful. 

I am going to use it to pave the area in front of the front door. It’s a similar process to laying bricks for the patio, but it’s a much smaller area, and the pieces of slate are much bigger than bricks, so I’m lying to myself that it’s going to be a simple and fast project. 

While I was gone, Damien and the kids got supper together. My garden is making SO much basil, it’s wonderful. 

I thanked Damien for always being so supportive of my projects, and he said, “I love your projects. Everything you do either increases the property value, or makes it completely unsellable.” And he’s right! Sounds perfect to me. 

I forgot to put the fruit salad away overnight and it’s been incredibly hot in the house all week, so I just fed the leftovers to the ducks. They were understandably slow to warm up to it., but eventually they ate it. The thing about ducks is, eventually they will eat everything. 

FRIDAY
Macarona bil laban 

Something new! I saw a reel of this and it looked tasty. I haven’t settled on a specific recipe yet, but it’s pasta in a garlicky yogurt sauce with fresh mint, with toasted pine nuts on top. It’s often served with spiced ground beef, but I’m just doing the meatless version for today. Prolly gonna make some plain pasta, too, so people have options. 

We had an exciting moment when my daughter texted us about a lost duckling at a local store

but by the time we texted back to say we would take it, Fish and Game had located the rest of the flock and reunited the family. Which is obviously the best outcome, but we’re a little disappointed. But then Damien pointed out that it’s a wild duck and would just fly away when its wings grew in, anyway! Our domesticated ducks are not built to fly, so we don’t have to clip their wings or anything. So, all for the best. Still. Le sigh. That is the other thing about ducks: Ducks come, and ducks go. Le sigh. 

Anyway, I think I’m gonna try digging up my garlic and see if it’s done yet. If it is, I’ll make supper with it! What a joy to cook with home-grown food. 

Also, wish us luck for our camping trip on Sunday! And look at us, trying new things in our old age! I didn’t expect that, but I’m digging it. But yes, we are going to bring a power pack and a coffee machine. Because we are old. 

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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Korean Beef Bowl

A very quick and satisfying meal with lots of flavor and only a few ingredients. Serve over rice, with sesame seeds and chopped scallions on the top if you like. You can use garlic powder and powdered ginger, but fresh is better. The proportions are flexible, and you can easily add more of any sauce ingredient at the end of cooking to adjust to your taste.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup brown sugar (or less if you're not crazy about sweetness)
  • 1 cup soy sauce
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes
  • 3-4 inches fresh ginger, minced
  • 6-8 cloves garlic, minced
  • 3-4 lb2 ground beef
  • scallions, chopped, for garnish
  • sesame seeds for garnish

Instructions

  1. In a large skillet, cook ground beef, breaking it into bits, until the meat is nearly browned. Drain most of the fat and add the fresh ginger and garlic. Continue cooking until the meat is all cooked.

  2. Add the soy sauce, brown sugar, and red pepper flakes the ground beef and stir to combine. Cook a little longer until everything is hot and saucy.

  3. Serve over rice and garnish with scallions and sesame seeds. 

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spicy cucumber salad

A spicy, zippy side dish that you can make very quickly. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 cucumbers, sliced thin (peeling not necessary)
  • 1/4 cup rice vinegar or white vinegar
  • 1+ tsp honey
  • 1 tsp sesame seeds
  • 1 tsp sesame oil
  • 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1/4 tsp kosher salt

Optional:

red pepper, diced

  • 1/2 red onion diced

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Serve immediately, or chill to serve later (but the longer you leave it, the softer the cukes will get)

What’s for supper? Vol. 429: Bao chicka bao bao

Happy Friday! The heat has broken and we are all back in humanform, more or less. Hope you are same. 

It was the second full week of my car being in the shop. I have hope of getting it back Monday, which may or may not make me less crazy.

Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers, pork fried rice, mozzarella sticks

I had a ton of pork left over from last week’s char siu, so I chopped up about 1/2 of it and put it in some quickie fried rice. Here is my basic fried rice recipe:

Jump to Recipe

I did use fresh ginger and garlic, which is always worthwhile, and also chopped up some sugar snap peas. Corrie helped me make it, and confided in me that she likes cooking because she just likes being in the kitchen. ME TOO. 

The shopping turn kid chose mozzarella sticks for the frozen food supplement, and it looks like we had that, fried rice, reheated quesadillas, and a smidge of spaghetti carbonara. 

Very important to stay carbohydrated in the summer, ho ho. 

SUNDAY
Pork buns, rice, watermelon, spicy cucumber salad

Sunday was when it really got hot in earnest. Our parish had a Corpus Christi procession after Mass, which I dearly love, but last time we did it, one of our kids fainted, and this time, I’m wearing an air cast, and one kid was already melting down and the rest of us were just sort of melting in general; and you can tell yourself, “Hey, if the priest can do it in several layers of synthetic fabrics, I can, too!” and that’s true, but that doesn’t mean it’s smart. So we went home. 

I gathered up all the fans we could spare and tried a new recipe: BAOZI. Pork buns! You know that feeling of sitting in a Chinese restaurant and they bring the bamboo steamer over just for you, and you take the top off and inside, all snuggled together, is happiness in bun form? I wanted that. 

So I chopped up the last bunch of leftover char siu

(THREE MEALS with this pork! I’m gonna do this more often — cook an extra bunch of char siu and save the rest for another meal or two. Here’s the char siu recipe I used, by the way) and then started making the dough. 

I returned to dear Nagi for the bao buns recipe. It’s a very different kind of dough from anything I’m used to making: It calls for a cup of corn starch per two cups of flour, and then you let it rise for two hours, and then you mix in baking powder. This results in a really pillowy soft and tender dough.

I was doubtful I had chopped the pork filling up small enough, because it seemed kinda soupy, so I threw it in the food processor, and it came out a bit more cohesive. 

It wasn’t until later that I realized I completely forgot to cook the filling! Duh! Don’t ask me why I thought a mixture with cornstarch in the sauce didn’t need to be cooked. I guess I figured it was already such a weird recipe, all bets were off. This is the kind of thinking that led me to do what I thought was just shrugging my shoulders and trusting the directions when I was in seventh grade in Mrs. Dakin’s sewing class, and I was making my very first skirt and I had cut out two bell-shaped pieces of fabric, and it said to sew the long edges together. That’s what it said!

So . . . I sewed the long edge to the long edge on one piece, and then I sewed the long edge to the long edge on the other piece. And ended up with two extremely skinny skirts. THAT’S WHAT IT SAID, MRS. DAKIN. So that’s what I did.  

Anyway, that’s how I learned how to use a seam ripper. 

Anyway, I watched the video of how to shape the buns a few times, and then did my best. Some of them turned out nice

Some of them less nice! But I made a double recipe and ended up with 24 good-sized, if not good-shaped, buns. 

I did make a couple of videos showing the process — one in normal time, one speeded up), if you want to see what it looks like when someone is making bao buns for the very first time! It would absolutely have been easier if the pork mixture had been cooked properly, but it wasn’t super hard.

For some reason when I use my bamboo steamers, every other single time, I have put off making liners until the kitchen is already steamy and I’m a little hysterical, and I end up just smashing something in there, and it doesn’t go well. So this time, I didn’t do that! Earlier in the day, I traced the steamers onto parchment paper, cut the circles out, and then folded them like paper snowflakes and snipped out steam holes. So the whole process went better. 

I have two large steamers and one small one, each with two layers, and I was able to steam all 24 buns in at the same time. 

Ladies and gentlemen, they were excellent. EXCELLENT. 

They were cooked perfectly, incredibly light and fluffy inside with a beautifully tender, satiny outside. 

The ones in the smaller steamer were, predictably, a little crowded, but they still steamed up fine. 

The only photo I got of the inside is not actually a great example; it’s one that got a little squished. Most of them were loftier than this. 

It does show that there’s not quite enough filling, though, which is the only thing I will do differently next time (besides actually making the filling right!). I think everyone liked them, and it was overall a great success. Yay!

As you can see, I also made rice, cut up some watermelon, and made a quick cucumber salad. Great meal. 

The cucumber salad is a super easy side dish that I really like. It’s piquant and refreshing, and you can make it as sweet or spicy as you like.

Here’s that recipe: 

Jump to Recipe

And that’s my story! Yay bao buns! Yay for future us, who will definitely be having more bao buns. 

MONDAY
Honey mustard kielbasa, potato, and brussels sprouts 

Monday was actually so terrible. I think it was in the high nineties, and I understand that’s normal for some of you, but our houses are not designed for that, and our bodies are not used to it, and also the air conditioner was stuck in the attic for various stupid reasons. So we sat in front of fans and ate ice pops and went in the pool, which, now I’m embarrassed to say that it was a terrible day, because that doesn’t sound so bad! 

What happens is, when it gets hot, my brain scrambles, and I get tearful and irrational and just generally intolerant of life. It’s not great. I did make supper, however. I made a kielbasa, red potato, and brussels sprouts one-pan meal. 

Here’s that recipe: 

Jump to Recipe

The recipe says “cabbage,” but I finally wised up that I’m the only one who likes cabbage, so now we have it with brussels sprouts. 

I made the honey mustard sauce, cooked the food for about 15 minutes, then drizzled the sauce over it and shoved it back in. Usually I stir up the food before or after adding the sauce, but it was so dang hot, I just let it be. It turned out so much better that way! The sauce had more of a chance to permeate the food where it was, and it developed a really lovely little glazed situation, with the outer leaves of the brussels sprouts getting a little crunchy char. 

Delicious. 

Eventually I will get around to updating the recipe card.

You can also make this with broccoli for the vegetable. It’s your life! 

TUESDAY
WHATEVER WHATEVER WHATEVER

Oh mercy it was so hot. It was one of those days when you go in for a five-minute check-in with your kid’s therapist and 30 minutes later, she’s handing you tissues and reassuring you that parents’ mental health is a legitimate part of the treatment plan. SIGHHH. 

For supper, I decided I would cook some chicken in the Instant Pot, because that doesn’t heat up the kitchen much. But guess what! I plugged it in, and all the lights started flashing and it started beeping in a really ominous way. It’s probably just a sensor that needs to be cleaned, but that involves taking the bottom off and messing with electronics, which is not recommended when you’re suffering from profound brain scramble.

So Damien said he would come home with charcoal and grill the chicken  when he got back. But guess what! I had stuffed the freezer with so much ice pops and bananas and stuff that there was no room for the meat, so I left it in the fridge, and when I opened it, I discovered it had gone bad.

No matter, I could switch to pork.

But guess what! The pork had also gone bad. 

You know, I feel that you should be able to buy pork and chicken on Saturday and keep it in the fridge until Tuesday, and it should not go bad. I don’t feel like that’s unreasonable. But nevertheless. 

So, we did something I almost never do: I told everyone to just find something for supper. I myself had a couple of PBJ sandwiches, and I truly don’t know what everyone else ate. I was grateful the kids are old enough that I can do this, but mainly I was just miserable because it was so hot. 

I think it was that evening that Elijah pushed through our various personal difficulties and got the air conditioner unstuck, and Damien got that set up in the living room, and WHEWWWWWWWWW. 

WEDNESDAY
Grilled pork ribs and chips

Wednesday Corrie had her pal over, and while they played in the pool, I got caught up on some gardening. It had dropped down to a temperature where I had to take breaks and drink water in the shade every half hour or so, but it didn’t feel like the sun was screaming at you as soon as you stepped out the door, so that was nice! 

Then when Damien got home, he brought pork chops and grilled them. Here is the dog, acting as Remote Supervisor with Extreme Longing. 

I just seasoned the chops heavily (and I mean HEAVILY) with salt and pepper, and Damien grilled them to perfection. 

I think we had chips for a side. Perfect. 

THURSDAY
Roast chicken and pasta salad

Thursday I had a post-heat-wave surge of energy and did I guess a landscaping project in the front of the house, although that seems like too professional and grandiose a description for what I did.

I had a wheelbarrow full of day lilies I had dug up several weeks ago. Every week or so, I threw a little water on them, and let me tell you, those mofos are tough. They actually produced flowers while they were in the wheelbarrow, without any soil besides what was clinging to their roots. So I did truck up a bunch of compost from the back yard and spread it on a bare spot, but I realized that might be overkill, so I just basically threw the lilies onto the spot where I want them to grow (one side of where the porch used to be), and I think they’ll be fine. 

Then I dug up a bunch more lilies and also moved them. Then I dug up and moved a bunch of rocks, and then, without a real plan, I dug up a giant concrete block that used to be in front of the porch, and was just sort of hanging out in front of the porchless house. 

You can see that, since we tore down the porch and then I realized we couldn’t afford a sunroom, we’ve been using a pallet on cinder blocks as a front stoop, which is a little demoralizing. And meanwhile, this cement block is marooned next to the driveway, getting tripped over. 

I could budge it with my shovel, but I most definitely couldn’t move it myself. So I bribed two teenagers and slowly, tediously, maddeningly inefficiently, WE MOVED IT. 

First I levered it up with a shovel, and one of the kids would jam a rock under it. 

Then I levered it up from the rock, and they would stick more rocks under it. Then two of us would lever it up from those rocks, and the second kid would stick more rocks in. It was just a couple inches at a time, and I’m so incredibly impressed at how much these kids mostly kept their remarks to themselves until I had my back turned. They are really very great kids, and this was a really dumb and dangerous project!

So eventually we managed to lever it up until it was nearly vertical, and I dug a little trench on the other side, and then we hooked a strap around it and the two kids pulled on one side and I pushed on the other, and we flipped it.

You can see by the rocky bottom that no one has ever moved this block before, and it was poured directly onto the ground when they made it. Which is the normal and sensible way to do things. 

So we all took a little break and then we repeated the process, and flipped it again, so this time it was right side up.

I DID measure it, and I was aware that it wasn’t high enough to make a step to get to the door. But I figured it would be better than what we had before. 

What I didn’t anticipate is how far from the door it would end up. Even though we had spent the last hour or so straining our muscles to the limit to move it as far as we did, I was convinced we could just sort of nudge it into place to get it the final ten inches or so.

I was wrong! It’s that freaking last mile problem! 

But it was already 4:45, so I just shoved some cinder blocks in there so no one would break an ankle in the gap, and ran inside to make supper. I put some chicken drumsticks and thighs on a pan, drizzled them with olive oil, and seasoned them with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and cumin, and roasted them at 450. 

Again: Usually when I roast chicken parts, I will put it on a rack and flip it halfway through cooking. Instead, I elected instead to take a shower and just let the chicken cook. And guess what, it was perfect. The meat was super juicy, the skin was wonderfully crisp, and yeah, I’m gonna do it that was from now on. 

I also made some unremarkable pasta salad. I cooked some farfalle, drained and cooled it under cold water, and dumped on a bunch of Italian salad dressing, some crumbled feta, and some basil from the garden. Perfectly adequate. 

Sad to say, I didn’t find anything especially interesting in the dirt where we were digging. There are usually some vintage beer cans or sometimes a limb from some long-defunct cartoon show

or some mysterious bits of hardware or old-fashioned tools or pottery. Once one of the kids found a key from a door on a ship! This time, all we got was a knife and two spoons.

So, I totally understand forks and whatnot ending up in the back yard. You were eating out there, kids were playing, you were shaking out a tablecloth, and so on. These things happen. What I don’t get is how they end up in the front, where there is very little besides a driveway and then the road. What happened? What was the mechanism? I can only imagine a George Booth-type guy going, “It’s a beautiful night, hon. Want to step out front and throw some cutlery around?” Maybe it was really hot. Things happen. 

In any case, by evening, it was so chilly, I wore a sweater to water my garden. New Hampshire weather needs to access its uncrazy side. 

My gardens are doing okay, considering I wasn’t planning to do any gardening this year. 

Corn, pumpkins, and rhubarb:

I have since planted some more corn, since this came up kind of sparse!

Here’s my poor strawberry patch, that I really neglected and it shows:

and we have garlic, onions, basil, and potatoes over here, with two peach saplings in buckets:

and a few eggplants I threw in late, and which I couldn’t find any more fence to protect, so they look like dangerous criminals in an old dog crate:

and my mostly-marigold mixed seeds are chugging along. This is about half of them:

and I planted tons of zinnias, nasturtiums, and tithonias in pots, and some other stuff that I can’t remember. I also planted some broken peony roots and a bunch of lupine seeds, with no luck yet. They may just need a while, so I’ll keep watering them. 

The two $2 dry pomegranate sticks I got on clearance at Walmart are leafing out nicely! Kind of excited about that. 

Pretty good year for all the old stand-byes, the mock orange, the stella d’oro, the roses, the hydrangeas,

and the catmint. I managed to wreck all the sunflower seeds I had saved, but I got a volunteer anyway!

I will resist giving a report on the rest of my flowers, as I’m even boring myself at this point. I do have a little mystery on my hands, though, that maybe some of you knowledgeable folks can help with. The little tree in front, that grew up from the root stock after the apple tree got eaten? I still don’t know what it is. 

My best guess is Red Baron Crabapple. It did have deep pink blossoms in the spring, and the leaves were dark red in the spring, but I don’t recall it turning orange in the fall. Also the fruit is kind of inconclusive. 

I tried cutting it open to see if it has five chambers or a pit, and it was, as I say, inconclusive. I guess we’ll find out! 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Regular old, begular old pizza. Goodness, what a long post this turned into. And a long week. But it’s Friday! Last Friday, I managed to complain about someone else in adoration in such a way that my neurodivergent friends are mad at me and Facebook took my post down for threatening violence. So that’s the bar to clear this week. Excelsior. 

 

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Basic stir fried rice

This is a very loose recipe, because you can change the ingredients and proportions however you like

Ingredients

  • cooked rice
  • sesame oil (or plain cooking oil)
  • fresh garlic and ginger, minced
  • vegetables, diced or shredded (onion, scallion, peas, bok choy, carrots, sugar snap peas, cabbage, etc.)
  • brown sugar
  • raw or cooked shrimp, or raw or cooked meat (pork, ham, chicken), diced
  • soy sauce
  • oyster sauce
  • fish sauce
  • eggs

Instructions

  1. In a very large pan, heat up a little oil and sauté the ginger and garlic for a few minutes. If you are using raw meat, season it with garlic powder and ginger powder and a little soy sauce, add it to the pan, and cook it through. If you are using shrimp, just throw it in the pan and cook it.

  2. Add in the chopped vegetables and continue cooking until they are cooked through. If you are using cooked meat, add it now.

  3. Add the brown sugar and cook, stirring, until the brown sugar is bubbly and darkened.

  4. Add in the cooked rice and stir until everything is combined.

  5. Add in a lot of oyster sauce, a medium amount of soy sauce, and a little fish sauce, and stir to combine completely.

  6. In a separate pan, scramble the eggs and stir them in. (Some people scramble the eggs directly into the rest of the rice, but I find it difficult to cook the eggs completely this way.)

  7. If you are using cooked shrimp, add it at the end and just heat it through.

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spicy cucumber salad

A spicy, zippy side dish that you can make very quickly. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 cucumbers, sliced thin (peeling not necessary)
  • 1/4 cup rice vinegar or white vinegar
  • 1+ tsp honey
  • 1 tsp sesame seeds
  • 1 tsp sesame oil
  • 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1/4 tsp kosher salt

Optional:

red pepper, diced

  • 1/2 red onion diced

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Serve immediately, or chill to serve later (but the longer you leave it, the softer the cukes will get)

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One-pan kielbasa, cabbage, and red potato dinner with mustard sauce

This meal has all the fun and salt of a wiener cookout, but it's a tiny bit fancier, and you can legit eat it in the winter. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 lbs kielbasa
  • 3-4 lbs red potatoes
  • 1-2 medium cabbages
  • (optional) parsley for garnish
  • salt and pepper and olive oil

mustard sauce (sorry, I make this different each time):

  • mustard
  • red wine if you like
  • honey
  • a little olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • fresh garlic, crushed

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400. 

    Whisk together the mustard dressing ingredients and set aside. Chop parsley (optional).

    Cut the kielbasa into thick coins and the potatoes into thick coins or small wedges. Mix them up with olive oil, salt, and pepper and spread them in a shallow pan. 

    Cut the cabbage into "steaks." Push the kielbasa and potatoes aside to make room to lay the cabbage down. Brush the cabbage with more olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. It should be a single layer of food, and not too crowded, so it will brown well. 

    Roast for 20 minutes, then turn the food as well as you can and roast for another 15 minutes.  

    Serve hot with dressing and parsley for a garnish. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 428: There must be … fifty ways to stretch a meatball

Happy Friday! Let’s hop to it! Here’s what we ate this week: 

Oh, but first, last Friday I made something I don’t normally: French bread pizza. I got store-bought bread but made homemade mozzarella , which is very soft and mild. 

The kids love frozen french bread pizza, so I thought the homemade version would be popular. I WAS WRONG. Why? Who knows. Oh well! 

SATURDAY
Leftover buffet (?) 

I have no memory of Saturday’s dinner. Damien and I went to the No Kings rally, and I must have made supper at some point?  Here’s a collection of signs I saw. 

Possibly my favorite:

Huge crowd, great energy, no violence or litter or unpleasantness, just an extremely diverse crowd of people, including lots of people who were pretty clearly at their first protest. I got my picture in the local paper!  We’ll definitely be going again. 

SUNDAY
Chicago-style hot dogs, fries

Sunday I went shopping and then we had a low key father’s day, with a few of the big kids coming over for supper. We had Chicago-style hot dogs, which are supposed to be on poppy seed buns, which I couldn’t find; but we had mustard and then “dragged them through the garden” with pickle spears, fresh tomatoes, chopped onions, pickled peppers, and celery salt. I skipped the pickle relish because I didn’t think anyone would eat it. 

Looks like I ran out of room before I put any peppers on, actually. 

I made some brownies from a mix (and the kids did not miss their chance to torment me about having bought brownie mix on purpose for the first time in my life, after a long and tragic history of being incredibly stupid about brownie mix for some reason). Ice cream on warm brownies topped with hot fudge sauce, mini M&Ms, whipped cream from a can, cherries. 

Unsophisticated and delicious. Americans really get some things right. 

MONDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, raw vegetables

Monday I suddenly found the giant pile of scrap wood in front of the house intolerable, so I flung it onto the other, even gianter pile of scrap wood on the side of the driveway. Follow me for more curb appeal tips. I’ll fling you, too. 

In the afternoon, I started some pork marinating for Tuesday. Corrie helped with this. This recipe has a certain appeal for her:

namely, that I used an entire tube of red food coloring. Walmart was selling sets of food coloring for like fifty cents, so I bought uhhh all of them. In anticipation of the day when food coloring becomes outlawed but we won’t have the energy to fret about birthday cakes colored with beet juice because we will all have polio!

Then we had grilled ham and cheese and veggies. 

Also on Monday, Clara stopped by to pick up Benny for play practice, and dropped off a sample of the tarts she had made for the cast. 

It is a graham cracker poppy seed and ginger crust filled with grapefruit curd tart and topped with basil-infused whipped cream. All made from scratch, and, as far as I can tell, a recipe she invented.  I’ve been off sugar all month, but I made an exception, yes I did. I nearly wept at the marriage of flavors. It was like, I don’t know, pirouetting through a garden.

TUESDAY
Char siu, rice, pineapple

Tuesday I was still in a bit of “MUST ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING ACCOMPLISHABLE” frenzy, so first I sternly informed myself that, if I were really ever going to upcycle all those animal feed bags, I would have done it before we had eighteen of them. 

So I listed them on a “buy nothing” group, and a capable-looking woman claimed them right away. These are actually really useful items! You can use them to insulate your bird coop, lay them down for a weed barrier, use them to line a compost bin, fill them with dirt and grow potatoes, use them for outdoor trash bags (I actually do this), or make a few modifications and turn them into sturdy tote bags. Or you can just list them on Marketplace and say hail and farewell. 

I also sorted through a couple of bags of seeds I saved last summer. It was mostly marigolds, but also zinnia and something I couldn’t identify, plus lupines, and some rose hips I gathered on the island we visited last summer.

I broke open the lupine pods and set the seeds to soak, and I cut open the rose hips

and put the seeds in a bag in the fridge. Then I took my vast collection of plant pots and filled them with compost, and planted all the rest of the seeds, and sternly instructed them to grow. Accomplishable!

I actually forgot about the lupine seeds until this minute, so I hope they haven’t soaked too long. 

Speaking of soaking, though, I was extremely pleased to remember I had been marinating that pork for 24 hours. I had followed this char siu recipe from Recipe Tin Eats which has you basting the meat every half hour or so. It turns out MAGNIFICENT. 

Just perfect. Super easy, and mainly an investment of time. The pork is tender and juicy, but not shreddy like pulled pork. Just lovely in thin slices. I cut up a few pineapples and cooked a big pot of rice, and it was a great meal. 

There is quite a bit of leftover pork, so get ready for pictures of leftover pork. 

WEDNESDAY
Meatball subs, cheezy weezies

Wednesday, I spotted the glorious spectacle of one of my teenagers planning a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the two youngest kids. I’m trying to be better about not sharing too many photos of them, but believe me, it melted my gorgon heart. My kids are turning out pretty great. 

In sadder news, we are at the point in our history where it’s exciting when ground beef falls to $3.49 a pound, and we still have eight people in the house. So I put on my thinking cap and combined a few pounds of ground beef with a few pounds of ground turkey that is cheap at Aldi, plus some breadcrumbs, which I normally use in meatballs, plus a bunch of leftover cooked rice. (I also mixed in a bunch of beaten eggs, a ton of Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder.) I got fifty good-sized meatballs out of it. 

I documented it because I’ve never stretched meatballs with rice before. So here is a picture of raw meatballs with rice. 

I’m giggling at how not-round they are. What the heck was I doing? Probably thinking about some other food. I’m always thinking about food. 

Anyway, unless I’m being fancy, I generally bake meatballs in the oven on a rack. Then I put them in a crock pot with sauce and keep them warm until supper. 

They turned out great! You really couldn’t taste the rice. You could see it

but otherwise they were completely normal meatballs. So, phew! Take that, expensive ground beef!

I spent the rest of the day tearing around doing various tasks I’ve been putting off, culminating with sorting through every last one of Corrie’s stuffed animals, packing up half to put in the attic, moving a dresser from the dining room into her newly-clean closet, and hanging a net for the rest of the stuffed animals. 

And here was my vibrantly-colored reward.

You can see in the background the trash can, brimming with exactly four items I was allowed to throw out: A pilled dollar store Christmas stocking, an especially ratty snake, a box with a shattered plastic lid, and a one-legged dinosaur with no head. Everything else Must Be Saved. I really can’t blame any of my kids for being pack rats, because I honestly had a really hard time throwing away that dinosaur. It was a dinosaur with :::memories::::. 

The super glue is to hold my brain in. Keeps falling out. 

Oh, but this made me laugh. I did Google how to stretch ground beef, but I made a small but significant typo, resulting in this response:

Normally I loathe and despise anything AI, but this time I felt kind of bad for it. It tried so hard to make sense of my question. “It seems there might be a slight misunderstanding . . . ” Story of my life, pal. 

THURSDAY

Spaghetti carbonara

Thursday it suddenly got really hot, and I was having some doubts about my plans to serve carbonara. Then it turned out three of the kids were going out for dinner with their friends, and one kid was at work, and of the two kids at home, one doesn’t like carbonara and one is neutral on carbonara, if you can imagine. To me, carbonara is still one of those things you go around telling people about, and possibly making them come over and admire!

So I was a little flummoxed about how to proceed. Was it sweating over a frying pan and steaming up the kitchen for a meal that only a few people even wanted?

The answer is: Yes, if it’s carbonara. I ended up saving out several pieces of bacon for the weird kid who doesn’t like it at all, and making two pounds of spaghetti with the rest. And you know what, it was the best carbonara I’ve ever made, and everybody liked it! 

And I had mine outside, feeling very wealthy indeed. Earlier in the week, I broke the mower and Damien fixed it and then I broke it again and he fixed it again, so I had done a bunch of mowing and weeding and mulching over the week, and dang, it’s so pretty out there in June.

And it was not too hot for carbonara! For some reason pasta with tomato sauce feels like a cold-weather dish, but you can be sweating all your limbs off and still feel good about eating carbonara. 

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa

Regular old quesadillas, perfectly fine.  I’m hoping against hope that the mechanic will finish my car today. It’s been in the shop all week and I truly don’t know if the bill is going to be a “well, we’ll just tighten our belts for the rest of the month” situation, or more of a a “Merciful Lord, please make someone dumb enough to give me a loan” deal. Oh the suspense! At least we have June. And leftover pork! 

Print

Meatballs for a crowd

Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs. 

Ingredients

  • 5 lbs ground meat (I like to use mostly beef with some ground chicken or turkey or pork)
  • 6 eggs, beaten
  • 2 cups panko bread crumbs
  • 8 oz grated parmesan cheese (about 2 cups)
  • salt, pepper, garlic powder, oregano, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400.

  2. Mix all ingredients together with your hands until it's fully blended.

  3. Form meatballs and put them in a single layer on a pan with drainage. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or more until they're cooked all the way through.

  4. Add meatballs to sauce and keep warm until you're ready to serve. 

Print

Spaghetti carbonara

An easy, delicious meal.

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs bacon
  • 3 lbs spaghetti
  • 1 to 1-1/2 sticks butter
  • 6 eggs, beaten
  • lots of pepper
  • 6-8 oz grated parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Fry the bacon until it is crisp. Drain and break it into pieces.

  2. Boil the spaghetti in salted water until al dente. If you like, add some bacon grease to the boiling water.

  3. Drain the spaghetti and return it to the pot. Add the butter, pieces of bacon, parmesan cheese, and pepper and mix it up until the butter is melted.

  4. Add the raw beaten egg and mix it quickly until the spaghetti is coated. Serve immediately.

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 427: PRODUCE!!!

Happy Friday! If you read closely, you will notice that pizza shows up not once,

not twice,

but three times

this week. The reason for this is that pizza is delicious [winks and says bon apetit]

But there were a few days we managed to escape its saucy and seductive charms, and so the other major theme of the week is FRESH FRUITS AND VEGETABLES. That is to say, produce! Because it is spring! And also, I have a little story to tell. 

One afternoon, I was parked along the street, waiting for a kid to come out of school. It was a fine, sunny afternoon, and I had a bunch of other kids in the car, including one who was learning how to read. She saw a delivery truck with letters on the side, and asked, “Mama, what does ‘p-r-o-d-u-c-e’ spell?” So I turned my head to say, in a loud voice so she could hear me in the back of the van, “Produce.” But it happened that a teenage boy was passing by my open window right when I turned my head, so I startled him by inexplicably shouting “PRODUCE!” right in his face. 

He jumped and scurried away, and I laughed pretty hard at this poor kid, and kept on laughing about it as we drove around town picking up kids and dropping them off and doing this and that. 

And then.

We got everything done and were finally headed home, and as I passed through the downtown, you’ll never guess who I saw. Yes, it was that same poor baffled kid whose face I had yelled in half an hour before. So I did the only thing my heart would allow me to do do: I drove up next to him, rolled down the window, and screamed as loud as I could “PRODUCE!!!!!”  

I should be sorry. But I’m not. That poor kid. 

Anyway, we sure did eat a lot of fresh produce this week. Produce!

SATURDAY
Leftover Delite and pizza

Okay, no produce on Saturday, but that’s not what Saturdays are for. There were not tons of leftovers, especially since I was setting aside the leftover chicken for Sunday; so we got a couple of Aldi pizzas and all was well. 

But speaking of leftovers: Before I went shopping, I had a little tantrum about how much the car smelled like garbage, so I did a thorough investigation, and it turned out to be garbage. See, last time I was at Millie’s house, her son said he was gonna throw out anything I didn’t want, so I emptied her pantry into a laundry basket, and then I ran out of room, so I emptied the rest into what I thought was a clean trash can. I was planning to bring them to Vincent de Paul, but instead of course I drove around with them in the heat for a week, and guess what? That trash can wasn’t empty! It had garbage at the bottom. Which turned into juice and leaked out all over the back of my car. 

So I got a knife and cut the carpet out, and I have no regrets. I also used baking soda and soap and hot water and bathroom tile cleaner with bleach, and scrubbed the hell out of it, and if you’ve ever done a job like this, you will know that . . .it still smells a little bit like garbage. But less every day. 

Anyway, one thing made me laugh: No disrespect, not even a tiny little bit, but here are some of the foods I found in her pantry:

It’s like she was shopping at some special Old Lady Market that you don’t get admitted to until you’re at least seventy years old. Cheddar cheese soup. CREAM OF SHRIMP. DID YOU EVEN KNOW THIS EXISTED? Bless, as my southern friends would say. 

SUNDAY
Chicken quesadillas, chips

Like I said, on Sunday I used the shredded chicken which was leftover from last week’s “enchilada bowls” to make quesadillas with. I also went to the flower farm and used my mother’s day gift certificate, did a bunch of yard work, made supper, and then sorted all the clothes Corrie dragged out of her room last week, and also, yes, brought the non-garbage-smelling basket of food to Vincent de Paul. so I felt pretty accomplished by bedtime. 

MONDAY
Pasta primavera

Here comes the produce. 

I more or less followed this recipe I found on Reddit “from Sirio Maccioni’s Le Cirque.”  It wants you to blanch the broccoli, zucchini, asparagus (from my garden!!), green beans, peas, and sugar snap peas individually. I can see the sense in this, because vegetables are different densities and take different lengths of time to blanch properly. 

On the other hand, I didn’t wanna. So I just dunked it all in boiling water for three minutes, and then dumped it in ice water, then drained it. 

It truly is a pain in the ass of a recipe, and you end up using four different pots and pans. Truly a dinner for which you will want to bring all your mise en place skills into play. 

But dang, it was delicious.

I had half-and-half instead of heavy cream, so I just made a little flour roux, and that worked fine. The vegetables I blanched together all willy-nilly turned out great. Nothing was overcooked or undercooked, and I had zero regrets. This recipe calls for toasted pine nuts, and that was a very pleasant little subtle addition. 

I think maybe one of the kids ate it, but that’s about what I was expecting. I just have to make this dish every 2-3 years and get it out of my system. 

TUESDAY
Waffles, sausage, eggs, fruit salad

Even though I have started selling duck eggs on the side of the road and sometimes make as much as $4 a week, I still have a surfeit of duck eggs; so I used a bunch of them for homemade waffles. 

Some decent breakfast sausages were on sale, and I cooked those, fried up a bunch of eggs, and made a fruit salad with watermelon, strawberries, grapes, and blueberries. 

A very pleasant meal. The fried eggs are chicken eggs, because that’s what the people want. 

WEDNESDAY
Greek chicken salad, cram

I guess the pasta primavera made me feel like it was the 80’s again, which got me thinking about Greek salad, but I got mixed up with the endless salad bar at Papa Gino’s, and narrowly avoided bringing home sesame seeds, orange jello with mandarins suspended in it, cottage cheese, and rock-hard croutons. 

Instead, I heavily seasoned some chicken breasts with lemon pepper seasoning and garlic salt, roasted that, and cut it up, and served it on salad greens with kalamata olives, feta cheese, and cherry tomatoes. And ranch dressing, because I forgot to get anything else. 

It was fine. You know what would have made it a really nice meal? Some soft, puffy, golden pita bread.

You know what I made instead? Cram. 

You KNOW I’ve made pita bread before. I have no idea what happened this time, but yowza, it was terrible. It was Corrie who said it tasted like cram, and I can’t argue with that. It sure wasn’t lembas cake. 

Anyway, here’s my salad bar and cram dinner. 

It was fine. I’ve had worse. 

THURSDAY
Rubber chicken/pizza

Thursday was pizza #2, because Damien and I went to the NH Press Association dinner and left pizzas at home for the kids. And Damien won TWO awards, first place for Investigative Series and second place for Community Service journalism. I am so proud of him!

They serve the same buffet every year: salad and rolls, butternut squash ravioli, roast potatoes, green beans, and chicken, with some kind of cream cake for dessert. I’m not complaining; I just think it’s kind of funny that someone decided this was the ideal menu and must never be altered. Someone’s grandparents never took them to the Papa Gino’s endless salad bar, and it shows. 

This being a collection of journalists, I was sitting next to someone with a flask of Irish whiskey in his breast pocket, but I settled for a can of ginger ale. This was after two weeks of no sugar, and it absolutely kicked my ass. I fell asleep on the way home and woke up very confused and sick, and went to bring my eggs in from the roadside cooler and one pack was missing! I was so mad that someone would steal my eggs! Who does that?!? Then I realized someone had also left money in the money jar. So, like, someone bought some eggs. This doesn’t happen often, and it took me by surprise. 

The next day I woke up with a terrible ginger ale hangover. All are punish’d.

FRIDAY
French bread pizza

YES, PIZZA. I bought several baguettes and some sauce, and any minute now I’m gonna get up and make a batch of mozzarella, and make pizza with that. Today was the last half day of school for all but one kid, who has one last lingering orphan day on Monday, for some reason. This morning I dropped off the kids and then went to the doctor to see what the heck is wrong with my ankle, because it turns out hoping it will go away by itself for six months is not best practice, even if you ice it at night. 

I got X-RAYS, which I LOVE. I just like seeing my bones. They’re so beautiful! I asked the x-ray tech if I could see them, and he was very pleased to show them to me. He said he thinks bones are beautiful, too, and he just thinks it’s really neat that he can see people’s skeletons, which is how I would hope an x-ray tech would feel. 

As maybe you can see, there is no fracture, hooray! The doctor said probably a sprain that triggered achilles tendinopathy, and I just need to wear a brace for 4-6 weeks, which is fine. She didn’t say “go away, you giant dumb baby, and stop wasting everyone’s time,” which is what I always assume all doctors are going to say. 

Anyway, I picked up the kids and we got home and I basically insisted they watch the dumbest TV show they could think of, because it is summer vacation. I feel like I had something funny to tell you, but I didn’t write it down, so now it’s gone. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 426: You may want to write this down

Happy Friday! I didn’t have anything extra on my calendar this week, and it was sunny every day, so I was able to just . . . do the things I am in charge of, and it was immensely satisfying. 

You know what else is satisfying? Food! Especially when you are hungry! I don’t know if other people have made that connection, or if I just invented it.

Here is what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftover Delite and taquitos

Looks like some bo ssam, spiedies, chicken pie, and pizza pockets, plus of course taquitos. 

Note the peppers! A bona fide vegetable!

The family is not nearly as enthusiastic about Leftover Buffet Saturday as they were when I inaugurated it, but I still absolutely love it as a weekly staple. It saves money (I generally spend less than $10 on Saturday meals), it saves time and mental energy (I always know what’s for supper!), and it doesn’t force me to clean out the fridge once a week, but it sure encourages it. And I have a much easier time throwing out Perfectly Good Food if it’s been given a second chance and still didn’t get eaten. Very Marie Kondo, with a lot fewer nameless ziplock bags of sludge lurking in the back of the fridge. So I’m pretty proud of this new thing I invented: Eating leftovers. Feel free to copy this idea. 

SUNDAY
Omelettes and hash browns

Sunday I did the thing I’ve been threatening to do for weeks now: I cleaned Corrie’s room. First I sent her up to bring down one big bag of trash and as many clothes as she could find, and try to put all the books in one spot. Then she went to a birthday party and I went in and did the fling zone method I invented, and I listened to the first two of “The Fall of the Aztecs” episodes of The Rest Is History. I’m not a big podcast person, just mainly because I’m a late adopter in general, and don’t want to rush into any new fads. But The Rest Is History is FANTASTIC. Incredibly entertaining and compelling episodes about people, places, and events you may never even have thought to wonder about, and all rigorously researched and frequently very funny. Damien often plays it in the car when it’s his turn to bring the kids to school, and it is not exactly PG, but in general I would be comfortable playing it for kids ages 10 and up. 

So that took probably three hours, including removing the old bunk bed and putting a single bed in. Well, first I had to repair the bed, because it was Millie’s old bed (it’s a really pretty white wooden bed with spindles at the head and a sea shell carved on it), and I couldn’t get it out of her house, so I ended up uh sawing it in half. The actual repair was fast, but it took me FOREVER to figure out which piece went where, somehow. (There were four pieces. I’m just. . . not good at some things.) 

I knew this would take all day, so I planned a quick meal: Frozen hash browns and omelettes with your choice of cheese, Canadian bacon, and mushrooms. Nobody picked mushrooms. 

I use about three eggs per omelette, but I speed it up by cracking all the eggs into a bowl and beating them, and then measuring out about half a cup of beaten egg per omelette.

They were not delicate and beautiful, because I was TIRED, but they tasted fine. 

Perfectly fine. I lay down for a while and kept thinking about how tomorrow, I was going to put together a pen for the new ducks, so they wouldn’t keep getting stuck in the stream and need Damien to come get them, but then freak out like lunatics when he does come get them. Eventually I realized I was expending so much mental energy thinking about it, I might as well go ahead and do it.

We have an old trampoline frame, which I put together upside-down and then stretched chicken wire around it and fastened it with zip ties. Easy peasy. By the time they ducks are big enough to jump over the fence, they’ll be big enough to roam freely but still come home at night, and we won’t need the pen. I highly recommend having an old trampoline frame in your yard! You can use it to make an enclosed garden, too. 

MONDAY
Pizza

Monday I planted a ton of flower seeds finally, and I potted a bunch of pansies in hanging buckets from Aldi, and made a little flower area — a garden, I suppose you could call it. This week, you may have noticed, I’m in the business of inventing things that definitely haven’t already existed for millennia — in front of the deck

Daisies and day lilies transplanted from elsewhere in the yard, and clematis seeds in the pot on the left. I feel like I also planted some kind of seeds between the lilies, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see. Life is so exciting when you routinely hide your own actions from your conscious mind. Either way, it won’t matter, because any seedlings I plant will get eaten by rabbits.

But I had fun. I finally got to use my new Japanese weeding sickle I got for Christmas, and dang, that thing is useful in about six different ways. It’s also one of the few tools I put the little plastic sheath back onto when I’m done, because dang, that thing is sharp. (Yes I cut myself.) I’ve also been using my hori hori knife a lot. I really think the Japanese are onto something. 

Monday I also found a NIB electric rotisserie on the side of the road, plus a vinyl countertop in great shape! Corrie also got some kind of wooden shelf thing that she feels will be useful. I don’t know where she gets these garbage-picking ways. Some people are just born pack rats. Probably a recessive gene. 

So, a ROTISSERIE. Just think of the meat we can slowly turn. We can eat like Hobbits! We can eat like Henry VIII! I can make SHAWARMA WITH THAT LAMB I’VE BEEN SAVING IN THE FREEZER. I remember when the kids were little, we would go shopping, and the three exciting things were: Free cookie, lobster tank, and “the chicken ride.” And now we shall have a chicken ride of one’s own. 

I also remember going shopping with my son, who was so incredibly terrible in the store that every time I got back I would tell my husband “I am never taking him out of the house again.” And now he is a children’s librarian. You never know. 

TUESDAY
Musakhan and taboon

On Tuesday, I got some chicken marinating in the morning and measured out the ingredients for bread, wrote a ton, and then did some extensive cleaning out of old flower beds. Then, with the gracious permission of Millie’s family, I dug up a white peony and a purple lupine from her yard and moved them into my yard.

The peony is doing great, as peonies tend to do. The lupine is not super happy about the move, but I think it will pull through. I had bought a bunch of crazy cheap perennials from the local garden club, and added those to this garden, so now it has tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, and crocuses in the early spring, and then alliums, speedwell, some asiatic lilies, purple lupines, white and pink peonies, pink dianthus, purple garden phlox, siberian blue irises, and shasta daisies for the late spring/summer. I hadn’t really planned a pink, white, and purple summer garden, but it just worked out that way, and soon it will have a background of goldenrod, so that works out! 

The chicken was mousakhan, or Palestinian chicken. I use this Saveur recipe and I was a little sad because I was a short on sumac, which is an important flavor in this dish, giving it a wonderful sour-bright tang. I subbed in a bunch of lemon pepper seasoning, and it wasn’t quite the same, but not a terrible idea. 

Got home from the afternoon run and made the taboon dough. Here is that recipe:

Jump to Recipe

It has to rise for an hour, so while it was doing that I put the chicken in the oven and did a little more gardening. Then I rolled out the dough and stretched it onto a giant pan and baked it for about 12 minutes.

It was a little bit gummy, to be perfectly honest. I think I rushed mixing the dough. But still, piping hot bread with savory chicken on top, sprinkled with sizzling hot pine nuts and fresh parsley. Pretty, pretty good.

You just tear off what bread you want and then help yourself to chicken, and the juice from the chicken seeps into the bread and it’s pretty great.

I had mine outside. 

And then I went inside and had some more!

WEDNESDAY
Regular tacos, chips and salsa

Wednesday I decided to mow, and gave the pull string thing a mighty yank, and yanked it right out of the lawnmower. So instead of mowing, I tackled the area with the potting table (or, as I absentmindedly called it much to Corrie’s delight, “my plant desk”), where I have just been flinging basically everything yard-related all year. I threw out three bags of rotten crap, tossed some disreputable wood onto the scrap pile, organized my extensive collection of empty flowerpots, dragged a lot of old chickenwire out of the tall grass, and reconfigured the whole thing using that countertop I picked up. 

Pretty swanky! I need to slap something on the underside of the counter to seal the wood and make it last a little longer. There is, in fact, wood sealant in this photo, and it is a thing I may actually do, because it’s June, which is the month when I actually do things. 

Then I quickly made some very boring tacos. I had a “chub” of ground beef — the kind that is wrapped in plastic printed with a photo of meat, which is not as reassuring as they think — and added salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, paprika, and cayenne pepper, and we had shredded cheddar, salsa, and sour cream, and tortilla chips. Basic but fine. I was HONGRY. 

THURSDAY
Chicken enchilada rice bowls, black beans with spinach

Thursday it suddenly got quite hot. When I get hot, I get angry, and suddenly the things I’ve been ignoring become intolerable, so I often end up doing gross and heavy jobs on the hottest days. Hey, it’s an ethos.

This time, I cleaned out the fire pit, which was all overgrown and kind of foul (SOMEBODY had pulled the old straw off the strawberry bed and just dumped it, and it was rotten and stinky and full of slugs); and then I was so sweaty and grubby I figured I might as well face the six tubs of broken bricks and gravel that I had deserted on the side of the patio when I made the patio uh two years ago and have been avoiding thinking about ever since. 

I thought maybe I could use the sand to fill in some eroded spots in the driveway, which is unfortunately uphill and on the other side of the house. So I did one load, then another, and then another, and then decided, you know, death comes for us all eventually, things fall apart, the driveway will erode, and what can one do, really. Definitely not drag any more of this shit up that hill, I don’t care what Kate Bush says. 

I complained about this problem I had invented until Damien suggested maybe the fire pit could use some gravel and sand, and that happens to be downhill. That man is brilliant. 

I also dragged the old plastic play house out of the blackberries and across the yard to the duck house

and was extremely proud of myself for inventing a system where you could store hay in a special little house that’s sheltered from the rain and conveniently located next to the animals, until a friend pointed out that this what’s commonly known as a “barn,” and I didn’t actually come up with it. Then Damien reminded me of the time when I was pretty, pretty tired and came up with the idea of plastic bowls.

Whatever! I am living life fully over here, enjoying my specially curated grass-adjacent flower area, my outdoor plant desk, and my weather resistant hay house, and if you people keep pushing me, I won’t tell you about the incredibly convenient portable food I once invented, which you can carry with you by, get this, affixing it to a piece of bread. It has lots of protein in it, because it is made of nuts, of all things, that you process in some way. I haven’t worked out the kinks yet, but I am thinking they could be blended up into something almost resembling butter. So it would be spreadable! Wouldn’t that be handy? I bet it would taste good, too. 

(This is a faithful rendition of an idea I actually had one time, when I was, yes, pretty tired, and invented peanut butter. You’re welcome.) 

Anyway, on Thursday I invented chicken enchilada bowls. I took some chicken breasts and seasoned them with Tony Cachere’s seasoning, on the principle that, if it’s orange and sprinkly, it’s probably more or less Mexican or whatever. I browned the chicken slowly in oil in a pan, and then shredded it in the standing mixer. Then I sliced up a ton of onions in the food processor and browned them slowly in the pan that I had cooked the chicken in. Then I mixed the chicken and onions together with a can of red enchilada sauce and put that all in the slow cooker. 

I also made a batch of black beans, and I threw some spinach in there, and left that to cook all day. 

Jump to Recipe

Late afternoon, I made a big pot of rice, and we had rice with the saucy, oniony chicken, beans, shredded cheese, sour cream, and corn chips, with lime wedges. PRETTY GOOD. 

I was pretty pleased with myself for inventing this entirely new dish. As I was writing it up just now, I went to add the new tag “chicken enchilada rice bowls” and discovered that I had already used that same tag.

Do you know what this means? I INVENTED IT TWICE. Science should study me. That’s how good I am. 

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle casserole 

Sophia volunteered to make dinner and this is what she wants to make, so I am not arguing. 

And that’s my week! Last night I dreamed I had signed a contract for a new book, and I came up with this brilliant plan of taking every essay I had already sold to this publisher, and just billing them for it again. Toward the end of the dream, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that this wasn’t how you do it, and then I woke up. 

I tell you, between me and the ducks, there’s just not a lot of brain action around here lately. But it is Friday!

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taboon bread

You can make separate pieces, like pita bread, or you can make one giant slab of taboon. This makes enough to easily stretch over a 15x21" sheet pan.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups bread flour
  • 4 packets yeast
  • 3 cups water
  • 2 Tbsp salt
  • 1/3 cup olive oil

Instructions

  1. Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.

  2. While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.

  3. Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.

  4. Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.

  5. If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.

  6. Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.

  7. Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.

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Instant Pot black beans

Ingredients

  • 2 tsp olive oil
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 6-8 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 16-oz cans black beans with liquid
  • 1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
  • 1 Tbsp cumin
  • 1-1/2 tsp salt
  • pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. Put olive oil pot of Instant Pot. Press "saute" button. Add diced onion and minced garlic. Saute, stirring, for a few minutes until onion is soft. Press "cancel."

  2. Add beans with liquid. Add cumin, salt, and cilantro. Stir to combine. Close the lid, close the vent, and press "slow cook."

What’s for supper? Vol. 424: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fire Cherry Bomb Pop eXtremes: Spice to Nice

Happy Friday! We are having a COUSIN day, which happens all too infrequently. My brother is up with two of his sons, and they and Corrie are happily working out the rules of some complicated board game. 

SATURDAY
Japanese food

Saturday was an uncharacteristically sociable day for the Fishers. Corrie had a birthday party, Lucy had her senior prom, for which she dressed in the way she saw fit:

and Damien and I went Out. Lena had bought tickets to Stephen Malkmus, but couldn’t make it, so she gave them to us. First we went out to eat at the new Japanese restaurant in town, and had some very delicious steak tips

then we got gelato and strolled around

and then it was concert time! Super fun. 

It has taken me almost 30 years, but I have finally warmed up to Stephen Malkmus/Pavement (whereas Damien has been a longtime fan). I do think about an hour was as long as I want to hear it at one time, though. It escaped me, previously, how sad some of the songs are. Being there live and letting the layers of sound reverberate around and seep in was really quite moving. What do you know about that!

Lucy’s prom was on a boat on a lake (they opted to spend their money on boat tickets, rather than on a bunch of balloon arches and streamers and bubble machines, and I think that was brilliant), and it rained and thundered the whole time, but they had a good time. We all had a good time! 

SUNDAY
Chicken on salad, strawberry rhubarb pie

Sunday I had to go shopping, and also did a bit of gardening. The original plan was to make a salad with chicken, almonds, and strawberries, but I had the first rhubarb of the season from my garden, so instead, I made some croutons to bulk up the salad (greens, chicken, toasted almonds, feta cheese, and croutons)

and then used the strawberries for a pie. I never have the proportions that any strawberry-rhubarb pie calls for, but it doesn’t really matter. I can’t find the recipe I followed, but it was a pretty simple one. I think it just used flour to thicken it. 

I made a big batch of pie crust

Jump to Recipe

and made one really big pie, with a very sloppy lattice crust

Not bad! I took this picture to show that you can leave the rhubarb in much smaller pieces than I previously realized, and it still tastes good. 

I love rhubarb so much. 

MONDAY
Pokish bowls

I had shrimp from something or other that I had defrosted but didn’t cook, so I wanted to use it today; but most of the family (bafflingly) doesn’t like shrimp. SO I bought some ahi tuna for poke bowls, which just about everybody does like. 
BHUT, I realized that the kind of tuna I’ve been serving raw is maybe not super duper the kind you are supposed to eat unless you’re trying to acquire a really close and personal group of friends, by which I mean parasites. Oops. 

So I looked up how to cook tuna, and it turns out you’re just supposed to sear it really quickly. I truly do not understand how this is safer than eating it raw, but this is what all the pictures looked like. (The kids requested just plain, no seasonings crusting the outside.)

However, I don’t see any signs that we have worms or anything, so I guess it’s fine? I don’t know. 

I also sauteed up the shrimp really quickly with a little Taijin seasoning, and I made a big pot of rice, and we had the fish and shrimp and rice, plus salt and pepper cashews, sugar snap peas, and mangoes, and sesame seeds. 

Delicious. I see that I also got some frozen pot stickers, which I don’t really remember, but that’s why I take pictures!

TUESDAY
Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches

Tuesday was the day I decided to Do Something About The Egg Situation. We have a huge backlog of duck eggs, which the kids will eat if they’re baked into something, but if they’re still eggform, they don’t like them. 

So I cleaned out an old broken mini fridge, set it up on the side of the road with an ice pack, printed out and framed my PayPal and Venmo QR codes, and painted a big sign:

I am selling them six for $4 and $7 for a dozen, which is pretty cheap considering how big they are, but I sure have a lot of eggs! I’ve gotten a few sales, and I feel pretty good about it. 

For supper, Corrie helped me fry up a few pounds of bacon

and I fried up a bunch of chicken eggs in the iron frying pan. I rustled up a bunch of mason jar rings and sprayed them with cooking spray, just to keep the eggs a little bit contained. It worked pretty well!

I let them cook most of the way, plucked the rings off, and then flipped them briefly. 

Yummy sandwiches. 

Mine had American cheese, because sometimes that’s exactly what you want. 

WEDNESDAY
Carnitas, tortilla chips, beans and rice

Wednesday I made the fastest carnitas ever. I used this great recipe

Jump to Recipe

except I used Diet Cherry Coke and tangerines, and it’s such a great recipe that it still turned out great. I actually just let the tangerine peels cook right down and then mashed them into the meat, rather than fishing them out, and it was great. I spread the meat out on a tray and threw it under a very hot broiler for a few minutes, and oh man. Good stuff. 

We had a bunch of leftover rice from the poke bowls, so I sauteed up some garlic and onions, then a whole bunch of spinach, a can of kidney beans with the liquid, and a bunch of jarred salsa, plus cumin and chili powder and maybe some paprika. It was excellent. 

I had my carnitas with sour cream, salsa, and plenty of cilantro, and it was such a nice meal, I skipped the chips. 

THURSDAY
Oven fried chicken, corn on the cob, chips, strawberry shortcake

Thursday two of my brothers came over! I haven’t seen them for such a long time. 

We had oven fried chicken, corn on the cob, chips, and strawberries on angel food cake with whipped cream. I forgot to take any pics of dinner, but it turned out pretty great. Very satisfying on a cold, drizzly day. Here’s the chicken recipe:

Jump to Recipe

and it was definitely the right call to do store-bought cake and canned whipped cream, so I could use up all my energy yucking it up with my brothers. 

I also got a fairly insane alternate dessert from Aldi: 

Fire Cherry Bomb Pop eXtremes: Spice to Nice. I don’t even know what this could be, but I’m anticipating some kind of cinnamon situation, like Atomic Fireballs? We haven’t eaten them yet, so I will report back. I am grateful that I don’t have the job of coming up with completely new kinds of food every six weeks, though. 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

My brother and his kids were very good sports about camping out in the living room with the dog, who is hysterically in love with them, but mostly my brother, and the dog is . . . well, he’s getting confused about what kind of emotions he’s feeling, but they are quite intense. So that’s exciting for everybody. 

And in the time it took me to finish this post, the game has gone the way of so many board games, alas. Maybe we need some Fire Cherry Bomb Pop eXtremes: Spice to Nices to smooth things over. 

5 from 1 vote
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Basic pie crust

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Carnitas (very slightly altered from John Herreid's recipe)

Ingredients

  • large hunk pork (butt or shoulder, but can get away with loin)
  • 2 oranges, quartered
  • 2-3 cinnamon sticks
  • 4-5 bay leaves
  • salt, pepper, oregano
  • 1 cup oil
  • 1 can Coke

Instructions

  1. Cut the pork into chunks and season them heavily with salt, pepper, and oregano.

  2. Put them in a heavy pot with the cup of oil, the Coke, the quartered orange, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves

  3. Simmer, uncovered, for at least two hours

  4. Remove the orange peels, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves

  5. Turn up the heat and continue cooking the meat until it darkens and becomes very tender and crisp on the outside

  6. Remove the meat and shred it. Serve on tortillas.

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Beans and rice

A good side dish, a main course for meatless meals, or to serve inside carnitas, etc.

Ingredients

  • 3 cups uncooked white rice
  • 1 15-oz cans red or black beans, drained
  • 1 20-oz can diced tomatoes with some of the juice
  • 1 diced jalapeno
  • 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped roughly
  • 1 small red onion, diced
  • 2 Tbsp minced garlic
  • chili powder
  • cumin
  • salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Cook rice. Add rest of ingredients, adjusting spices to taste. If it's too dry, add more tomato juice. 

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.

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 422: Habemus papam! Let’s eat!

I can’t even think of a lame food pun for the title, that’s how excited I am! But before we get back to chattering about the pope, here is what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizza

Not a very sumptuous collection of leftovers,

so I splurged a bit on these frozen pizzas that everybody likes. Damien and I also polished off the last of the butter chicken, and I can report that it used its time in the fridge very well, just getting more delicious. 

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, vegetables

Honestly it says “vegetables” on the blackboard menu, but I don’t think that really happened. My personal vegetable consumption has gone way, way up, but I haven’t managed to drag most of the rest of the family into that, yet. 

I did have my first asparagus harvest, though! 

You’re supposed to wait three years before you start to pick it, so that’s what I did. Now I’m wishing I had planted more! But I’m very glad I got this started. When I first started gardening, I was all about bright, showy annuals. Then I started investing a little more in perennials. A few years ago, I started thinking about what I really wanted out of life, and laid in some long-term beds. It’s just a garden, but, yanno. 

Also Sunday, I spent a few hours lopping off blackberry canes and brambles. Of which we have thousands and thousands. Wicked, wicked things. 

I comforted myself by making some rice pudding. We had quite a bit of leftover basmati rice from last week, so I excused it from Leftover Day and basically followed this recipe except I skipped the raisins

because the kids don’t like cooked raisins. I should have left them in, because I DO like cooked raisins, and I was the one who ate most of the rice pudding. I mean I ate so much that I think I shouldn’t make it again for a year or so, until I grow up. But it was wonderful pudding. All four adult duck ladies have been laying every day, and duck eggs are SUPERB for baking. 

Speaking of superb, the new ducklings have been doing just great. They’re growing insanely fast — I mean like I leave the house for two hours and they’re visibly bigger when I get back.  Lots of videos on my Facebook page if you want to see their shenanigans! 

MONDAY
Chili verde, tortilla chips

Monday was Cinqo de Mayo, which is something I didn’t even know anything about until I was in college, and it felt very global and cosmopolitan to celebrate this exotic holiday by going to Applebee’s and encountering my first avocado. Then I started to hear about how “uhhhh, no, it’s not Mexican fourth of July, STUPID” and I was like, oh, sorry. Now apparently it’s considered kind of culturally gauche to mark it at all? I truly don’t know. I saw this and felt a kinship:

The moral of this story is, cultures may shift, but ham is forever.

We had no ham or cigarettes or Aquanet in the house, but I did take May 5th as an opportunity to make chili verde, which Damien and I love and no one else does, oh well. I roasted up the tomatillos,  peppers, onions, and garlic, and then put them in the food processor with cilantro, and because I hadn’t put on my contact lenses yet, I REMEMBERED TO WEAR GLOVES. 

This is half-dumb, because yes I protect my fingers from getting peppery, but if I’m not wearing contact lenses, my eyes water because of the onions; but it’s also half-smart, because if I’m wearing glasses, I can take them off and actually read the recipe. You may THINK that the solution would be to put on contact lenses to protect eyes from both peppery fingers and oniony fumes, and then to add reading glasses to I can also see small print. However, this is not taking into account that I have lost every single one of my reading glasses, and I’m really just not ready for a beaded lanyard tethering me to the necessary glasses nestling on my bosom all day like some kind of cartoon librarian. I’m not ready!

Anyway, here is the recipe:

Jump to Recipe

I made a slight tweak: I roasted the garlic in its skin, and then just squeezed the soft insides out into the food processor. It was a bit faster than peeling all that garlic before roasting it, and the taste was great. 

I cooked the chili all day and it turned out fab. It’s been chilly and rainy all week, and this wonderfully spicy meal was very warming, and produced a decent amount of broth without me having to add any beer or extra broth. 

Served it with cilantro, shredded pepper jack cheese, sour cream, lime wedges, and tortilla chips.  

Yum. I think the kids had Spaghetti-o’s. 

TUESDAY 
Pizza

Tuesday were two rather draining appointments and then day 2 of digging out blackberry root balls. Again, I say: HORRIBLE plants. See how bare the dirt in in the area where I was digging? 

That’s because blackberries won’t let anything else grow! Even wild mint, which is every gardener’s invasive nightmare, got chased out of this area. 

However, eradicating blackberries is great for working out any pent-up emotions you might be harboring. I had my shovel, my Japanese gardening knife, my pickaxe, and my heavy duty tarp, and by the time I put them away for the day, I was way to tired to feel anything except hungry. 

Happily, I had made three pizzas in the morning: One plain, one pepperoni, and one black olive. Sooner or later I will have to face the fact that we’re on the cusp of becoming a two-pizza family. I used to make SIX extra large pizzas. I do make more than we will eat for one meal, because the kids like leftover pizza; but we’re not keeping up, harrrrooo. (That was just a crooning sound of sorrow for the march of time.) 

Tuesday I also made a new garden bed! Look at that tremendous soil. 

This area is near the stream and also next to the compost heap, so you could probably live off the soil alone, without even planting anything. However, I am going to plant corn this weekend. 

WEDNESDAY
Hot dogs, cheezy weezies

Wednesday I cleared out my pumpkin patch and heaved a bunch of compost onto it,

and then I worked on the new fence a bit, and then I dug out more compost and ferried that over to the soon-to-be corn patch. 

I would apologize for filling a food post with so many photos of dirt, but I know you guys! You like looking at pictures of dirt! Also you can see that my wattle fence held up just fine over the winter. I would like to add more this summer, but I don’t know if I will have time. I suddenly have lots of projects planned. 

Speaking of projects, of course Wednesday was the beginning of the papal conclave! I got to watch the cardinals all taking their oaths in the Sistine Chapel, and that was very cool. We Catholics are so good at drama. 

On the way home from school, one of the kids wanted to open a bank account, which always takes a million years longer than I expect. But at least we finally got it done. And I did snap this attractive photo of the bank office, with a somewhat disconcerting corporate poster. 

They’re as stable as a squirrel, great. I couldn’t really complain, because it turned out the kid didn’t have any actual cash for the $10 minimum deposit to launch the account, and neither did I, and then they said well maybe it only needed to be $5, and then they said probably a dollar would be okay, so I found some change, and she deposited that. I made sure she understood that was her Christmas present this year. 

We just had hot dogs and cheezy weezies for supper, and again I had worked up quite an appetite with my pickaxe and my buckets! Crazy how delicious a hot dog can be when you’ve been working outdoors, not to mention watching a conclave and looking for spare change. 

Wednesday night, I started marinating the meat for Thursday’s dinner, because I knew it was gonna be a busy day. Damien has been sick all week, and when I say “sick,” I mean he’s LETTING ME DO THINGS FOR HIM and SLEEPING and TAKING MEDICINE. So you know it’s pretty serious. I think it’s bronchitis, and he’s starting to feel a bit better, but it’s rough. 

THURSDAY
Chicken shawarma, fresh pita, tiramisu

Thursday was when we were celebrating Moe’s birthday, which was actually the day before. In the morning, I started the tiramisu, which is usually one of Damien’s signature dishes. I followed the  recipe he uses, except maybe I can blame the conclave, because I got distracted and mixed together the custard and the whipped cream! So rather than six layers, there were only four. Gutted, as the brits say. 

All I could do was sift some cocoa powder over the top, put it in the fridge, and hope for the best. Then I prepped all the shawarma fixings, made some garlicky yogurt sauce, and that’s when the white smoke came out! Most of the kids were at school and Damien was still conked out, so I made the ducks watch with me.

This is very exciting for Shaq, Zippy, and Tulip, because they were born in that time period when everyone was briefly a sedevacantist, so they’d never had any pope before, much less one from Chicago with Hatian grandparents and a special affection for the poor in Peru!

I did drag Sophia, Elijah, and Damien in before Leo appeared on the balcony, and wow, that was exciting. Wow, wow, wow. Here’s my camera roll, when I found it needful to take multiple photos of the TV screen, because where else am I going to find a blurry picture of the pope?

Anyway, boy, that was a thrill! Still had to make supper, though, so quick quick I started the pita dough before I had to run out for the afternoon drive (and you can see I got a couple more pictures of our local church, which had already switched from black to yellow and white bunting).

I still haven’t really settled on a good pita recipe. I ended up using this recipe from Food By Maria, and no, I didn’t read it all the way through, what do you take me for. So I was a little dismayed to find that you have to let it rise twice, and the second rise is a full hour, and that each pita bread takes six minutes to cook. Actually I think I’ve made this recipe before, and probably found it by googling “simcha fisher pita,” but I still had no idea what it said. 

I started the meat cooking about an hour before dinner, and Moe and Clara came over and chatted with me while I fried the pita, and honestly, everything turned out great. 

Shawarma was delicious. I was out of red pepper flakes, so I put Aleppo pepper in, and also I couldn’t find the garlic press, so I put the garlic cloves in a bag and hit them with a meat tenderizer, and put in big smashed chunks. When I took the chicken out of the marinade, I fished out all the garlic and strewed that over the top, along with the red onion quarters. I think I’ll do all those things from now on! 

It was completely delicious. The chicken was so tender, it didn’t need to be cut up, but had turned itself into lovely little bite-sized chunks, and the generous onion quarters sort of cuddled themselves around the chicken, and it was just a real treat all around. 

The pita was also quite good. It did not separate into two layers, but it was chewy on the outside, fluffy on the inside, and had a good, rich flavor. 

I’ll probably use this recipe again, even though it was a bit of a hassle. I did two pans at once, so it took me about half an hour to fry up twelve pieces. 

Supper was very jolly! I wish everybody could have made it, but it was a good crowd. 

Then we had the tiramisu, and it was not a failure! I was afraid that, because the cream was mixed into the custard, the sweetness would be too diluted and it would taste bland; and I was afraid that I had mixed it so much that all the air would be knocked out of the cream and it would be thick and dense. Neither thing happened!

Pictures of tiramisu always look a little ghastly, for some reason, but here’s the inside:

Just so you can see how the lack of layers worked out. But it did set up nicely. Anyway, everyone liked it and I was so relieved.

Today is Moe’s awards ceremony, then tomorrow is his graduation, and then Sunday he’s moving to his new apartment, and Monday he starts his new job! Glad I got one last shawarma into the boy before off he goes. Harrrooooo. 

If you couldn’t tell by the Frog and Toad shirt and the Ferdinand the Bull tattoo, he’s going to be the new youth librarian at a public library. That was my father’s first professional job, too. He would have been very proud of Moe! I am. I’m proud of all my kids. 

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese

I have already made the mac and cheese, and we are out of milk so I made it with leftover heavy cream from the tiramisu, and I used so much cheese, I think it may be illegal. 

So, like I said, habemus papem! I don’t like every last thing I’ve heard and read about him, but I like an awful lot of it, and overall, I’m incredibly hopeful and excited. The way he speaks and the way he has comported himself so far is immensely appealing. I’m so ready for some good things to happen. And if it doesn’t, well, at least we have food. 

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Spicy Chili Verde

You can decrease the heat by seeding the peppers, using fewer habañeros, or substituting some milder pepper. It does get less spicy as it cooks, so don't be alarmed if you make the salsa and it's overwhelming!

Ingredients

  • 5 lbs pork shoulder
  • salt and pepper
  • oil for cooking
  • 2 cups chicken broth or beer (optional)

For the salsa verde:

  • 4 Anaheim peppers
  • 2 habañero peppers
  • 4 jalapeño peppers
  • 4 medium onions, quartered
  • 12 tomatillos
  • 1 head garlic, cloves peeled or unpeeled
  • 1 bunch cilantro

For serving:

  • lime wedges
  • sour cream
  • additional cilantro for topping

Instructions

  1. Preheat the broiler.

  2. Pull the husks and stems off the tomatillos and rinse them. Cut the ends off all the peppers. Grease a large pan and put the tomatillos, peppers, and onions on it. Broil five minutes, turn, and broil five minutes more, until they are slightly charred.

  3. When they are cool enough to handle, you can at this point remove the seeds from the peppers to decrease the spiciness, if you want. If you roasted the garlic in its peel, just squeeze the insides out and discard the peels.

  4. Put the tomatillos, peppers, garlic and onions in a food processor or blender with the garlic and cilantro. Purée.

  5. In a heavy pot, heat some oil. Salt and pepper the pork chunks and brown them in the oil. You will need to do it in batches so the pork has enough room and browns, rather than simmering.

  6. When all the meat is browned, return it all to the pot and add the puréed ingredients.

  7. Simmer at a low heat for at least three hours until the meat is tender. If you want thinner chili verde, stir in the chicken broth or beer. If you don't want the pork in large chunks, press the meat with the back of a spoon to make it collapse into shreds.

  8. Spoon the chili verde into bowls, squeeze some lime juice over the top, and top with sour cream and fresh cilantro.

5 from 2 votes
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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.

5 from 2 votes
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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

  • 32 oz full fat Greek yogurt
  • 5 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 3 Tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp pepper
  • fresh parsley or dill, chopped (optional)

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Use for spreading on grilled meats, dipping pita or vegetables, etc. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 421: Spwing gets sewious

Happy Friday! If you follow me on social media, you know this week was DUCKLING WEEK. Over three weeks ago, we put six eggs from our flock in the incubator (the first batch having failed). Our attempts at candling (holding the eggs over a light to see what’s inside) were inconclusive, and to be honest, I figured we were just drearily waiting out the clock and then we’d throw them away, because obviously they weren’t going to hatch and everything is terrible and nothing turns out. Very sad. 

But I was WRONG AGAIN. 

I’ll tell you all about it! But first, here is what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftover buffet plus hash browns

Some very fine leftovers, too. The oven-fried chicken from last week was still great, even if it looks a little gnarly in this photo. 

Looks like we finally polished off the last of the lamb, too. 

SUNDAY
Butter chicken, basmati rice, cucumbers, naan

Sunday I was planning a bunch of yard work, but it was cold and drizzly, so all I managed was to prune my peach tree. 

Peach trees are supposed to be shaped like cups, so first I clipped off all the growth in the center, so it would get plenty of light and airflow; then I clipped off anything that seemed dry or damaged. Then I lopped off some really high or heavy branches, to encourage it to make fruit where I could reach it, and not to get too weighed down. I really hate pruning, but it has to be done! I probably could have been a little more aggressive, but it’s definitely an improvement, and I’m less worried that the tree is going to split this year. I dearly love this tree and want to take good care of it. 

It really was nippy out, though, and starting to rain in earnest, and the warm kitchen was calling. I have been using this butter chicken recipe from Recipe Tin Eats, and it’s just about perfect, so I haven’t tried any other. The only change I made was to use my fancy garam masala that was a gift, and mmmmm it was nice. 

I love this butter chicken so much.

Somehow makes me nostalgic for my childhood back in India.

I made a big pot of basmati rice to go with it, and then felt it would be a shame not to have some fresh naan, as long as I was in the kitchen and had already wrecked the place up, not to mention it was chilly and drizzly, not to mention I really really love naan.

I generally use the King Arthur Flour recipe, and although it never rises as much as the recipe says it will, it comes out tender and pleasant. 

I made a double recipe, which is supposed to yield 16, but I cut the pieces bigger, so I got 12. I use an iron frying pan and cooking spray, and I wipe the burnt flour out of the pan with a wet cloth in between each piece. I also brushed them with melted butter before throwing them in the oven to stay warm. I sometimes don’t bother with this step, but it really makes them extra lovely. 

I was gonna make some kind of peanutty-coconutty cucumber dish, but considered my audience and just served plain cucumber slices. The butter chicken is not really spicy but it’s VERY rich, so it’s nice to have a cooling accompaniment with it. Excellent meal altogether. 

MONDAY
Chicken quesadillas, chips and salsa

Monday morning, Damien discovered how to make me get out of bed in two seconds, rather than my customary 46 minute slither: He said one of the eggs was shaking! Sure enough, there was a little chipped section and you could even see a silly little orange bill poking out from time to time. 

I was just so amazed. I really thought those eggs were done for, but no! Most definitely somebody inside, trying to get out and get going. 

Here’s a short video of that stage. You can hear the duckling peeping from inside the egg, and you can hear little answering peeps from the other eggs!

It took quite a while. After about six hours of very slow progress, the tiny prisoner finally managed to crack the shell in a long line, and you can see the little yellow feathers sticking out (so we knew it would be a pekin, rather than a Swedish black cross. The only drake is a pekin, and two of the ladies are pekins and two are Swedish blacks). The hatching process was flurries of activity as the bill pokes out over and over, and then some long periods of just sort of pulsing and breathing, and then long periods of quiet resting, followed by another spasm of activity. Hard work!

Then fiiiiinally, finally, the little dude managed to get free! Poor little thing, he was exhausted. 

But he immediately wanted to be up and staggering around, with plenty of toppling over, extravagant stretching, and resting his poor head on the incubator floor. Elijah and Sophia were home and named him “Shaq,” because he is so mighty and powerful.  

The ducklings stay in the incubator for 24 hours after they hatch, to keep them warm and in a humid environment. It was lots of fun watching his down dry out and fluff up as he got stronger and steadier and more able to hold his head up. Within a couple of hours, he was helping himself to a little snack of his own discarded and rather goopy eggshell, bleh!

Eventually I had to make supper, and, feeling a little awkward with the duckling right on the kitchen island, I shredded up a rotisserie chicken and made quesadillas. 

Two other eggs had started to crack by this point, and we kept waiting for them to hatch, but after many hours of no apparent progress, we finally went to bed.

Here is Shaq, patiently waiting for some siblings to come out and play. 

TUESDAY
Bagel, egg, cheese, and sausage or ham sandwiches

Got up Tuesday morning and saw a ball of black fluff lying still in the incubator, and  it sure looked dead. But it wasn’t! It hopped up and started to muscle its way around! What a relief. Two ducklings!

We were expecting a Swedish black from this one, because the egg was somewhat smaller, and we were correct. I was thinking that his silly black and orange feet and black and orange bill were cross-breed colorations, but actually now I think those are within the normal range of Swedish black coloration. Anyway, he is definitely silly-looking. 

Corrie named him “Zippy,” and he is a bit of a punk and a troublemaker. 

The third egg was still slowwwwwly getting chipped away, and we could hear plenty of peeping, but it was starting to get a little nerve-wracking, and I was really worried that it would tire out before it could break through. But then FINALLY, finally, just before dinner time, baby #3 emerged. We actually got to see this one break out of the shell right in front of us. 

Another pekin! But he looked poorly, quite weak and tired from that long struggle. Also Zippy kept nipping and pecking at him, so I pulled Zippy out a few hours ahead of schedule and put him in the brooding box with Shaq. (The red light is from a heat lamp. Looks a little weird, but keeps them toasty warm.)

Dinner was bagel sandwiches, 

and once again I felt rather boorish, frying up a panful of fresh duck eggs about a yard away from a close relative.

Just all part of the rich tapestry of life. Good sandwiches, too. 

I was still worried about the third duckling. He was looking a little sturdier, but his eyes were still kind of swollen and he seemed like he needed to rest a lot more than the others did, so I fed him a little warm sugar water from a spoon before bed. 

and that is pretty much the cutest thing I’ve ever been a part of in my life. Then we went to bed and hoped for the best.

WEDNESDAY
Caprese chicken burgers, tater tots

Wednesday morning, three healthy ducklings! Shaq and Zippy had worked out their differences and were snuggling happily, and #3 was looking fluffy, alert, and wonderful. 

He’s such a sweetie. It had been determined that this duck was Benny’s to name, and so when the kids got home, she settled on “Tulip,” which is perfect. 

Wednesday was a rigamarole as usual, but it turned out there was no catechism, so I got home not insanely late, and we had tater tots and chicken burgers, which I gussied up with tomato, basil, and cheese on baguettes with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. We had sliced provolone and also a bit of that homemade mozzarella left, which was yum. 

AND I ATE MINE OUTSIDE. I think this is the first time it’s been warm enough for that. Quite delightful. Except that I had a chance to take a good long look at the space between the patio and the house, and I couldn’t help but notice that there were three Christmas trees there. Which is not very House & Garden of me. Also, way more blackberry bushes than I wanted to be seeing. 

THURSDAY
Gochujang pork ribs, rice, quick pickled carrots

Thursday it was warm and lovely, and after I got supper started, I decided it was time to wage serious war on the blackberries. Wild blackberries are good to eat, but they’re aggressively invasive, and they choke out anything else you want to grow; and the canes are absolutely bristling with really wicked thorns, and even if you avoid them, they reach out and grab you as you pass by., and I’m not making that up! They reproduce by seed, cane, suckers, tip layering, and by any passing idle thought, and anything you to do them just makes them stronger and angrier.

I tell you, between this and the ducklings, and the dog getting millions of ticks on him, and the cat going berserk for reasons of his own (mouse in the house, plus general neurosis. He did catch the mouse eventually; neurosis still flourishing) it’s been quite a week of nature in all her wondrous works! Quite a week.

I had done a bit of blackberry lopping on Wednesday, but I devoted several hours to it on Thursday. It really is more a matter of control than eradication, but if I manage to get them to grow more in a different spot and less right next to the patio, I’ll be happy. My plan is to dig up as many root balls as I can, and then keep clipping them throughout the spring and summer whenever they come up, and then to put down a tarp in the fall, and starve them of light and moisture. It won’t work, but that’s what I’m going to do. (I’m not opposed to herbicides in the right situation, but this area is too close to my gardens and the ducks.) 

I’m sure this is way more than you want to know about blackberry suppression, but the truth is, I can’t find my reading glasses, so I really don’t know what I’m writing. It’s anyone’s guess. 

Anyway, for supper I made a gochujang marinade for a bunch of boneless pork ribs

Jump to Recipe

and set that to be saucy, and then I got some carrots pickling. I can’t find the cutting disk for my food processor, and all I had were baby carrots, so I was reduced to hand-shredding baby carrots on the grater, and it was not ideal. I ended up chucking them in the food processor and pulsing it a few times, so we basically had pickled carrot nubbins. STILL DELICIOUS.

I have a recipe for pickled vegetables,

Jump to Recipe

but I didn’t bother looking it up. I put together 1.5 cups of water and 1.5 cups of white vinegar and 1/4 cup sugar and probably 1/2 tsp salt, and heated it up and stirred it until the sugar dissolved. Then I let it cool, then added the carrots. 

Before supper, I got a pot of rice cooking, drained the vinegar off the carrots, and broiled the pork. I turned it once and basted it with the leftover marinade, and oh man, that pork turned out spectacular. No camera filter here; just the afternoon sun and the glory of gochujang. 

Sweet and spicy and a little sticky on the outside, and really juicy on the inside. I found some crunchy noodles and it was a very nice meal. 

Then I suddenly got clobbered by an inescapable nap. The kids had gone to a movie and when they came home, I was just waking up, and they asked if there was any pork left. What? Yes, definitely?? There were like ten ribs left over. 

But wait. Had anyone cleared that plate of ten succulent pork ribs off the table after dinner?

Yes! Someone had.

And you’ll never guess who that someone was. 

Ah well. So the kids went back out to get themselves some frozen pizza, and we all agreed that Sonny is a very charming and winsome guy, so we won’t murder him. Then we pulled some more ticks off him and took the ducks out for a little frolic, and I dunno, guys. Maybe it’s just the nap talking, but I think it’s a beautiful life. 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

Today we’ve had multiple doctor appointments, unrelated to the violent stomach bug that seems to have come for a visit.

However, the apple trees are flowering, the tulips I planted are about to join the daffodils, my strawberries, asparagus, rhubarb, and garlic are all coming up nicely, and I’m thinking of putting in basil, pumpkins, eggplant, and maybe corn and potatoes this year. I got a free bench off Facebook marketplace, and I’m going to give it a nice coat of paint and drag it down to the stream this weekend. I’m hoping to get back to the treehouse this weekend, and I have some exciting plans for a shade garden in the front of the house. 

And did I mention? we have ducklings!

All three apparently healthy and fit. Even though I’ve seen it twice before, I cannot believe how fast they are growing. We have put the incubator away for the year, because that was quite enough excitement for one spring. 

Peep peep! 

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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. 

5 from 1 vote
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quick-pickled carrots and/or cucumbers for banh mi, bibimbap, ramen, tacos, etc.

An easy way to add tons of bright flavor and crunch to a meal. We pickle carrots and cucumbers most often, but you can also use radishes, red onions, daikon, or any firm vegetable. 

Ingredients

  • 6-7 medium carrots, peeled
  • 1 lb mini cucumbers (or 1 lg cucumber)

For the brine (make double if pickling both carrots and cukes)

  • 1 cup water
  • 1/2 cup rice vinegar (other vinegars will also work; you'll just get a slightly different flavor)
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 Tbsp kosher salt

Instructions

  1. Mix brine ingredients together until salt and sugar are dissolved. 

  2. Slice or julienne the vegetables. The thinner they are, the more flavor they pick up, but the more quickly they will go soft, so decide how soon you are going to eat them and cut accordingly!

    Add them to the brine so they are submerged.

  3. Cover and let sit for a few hours or overnight or longer. Refrigerate if you're going to leave them overnight or longer.