Happy Friday! This is the time of year when I recall that you can take the family out of homeschool, but you can’t really take the homeschool out of the family.
Maybe you think I mean that we’re all still hotly in pursuit of wisdom and wonder and the free exploration of the wide world of ideas, but actually it’s just that we all still feel that going anywhere is optional. So this week, we sure had a lot of no school and half school and why bother going back to school days. I just cannot bring myself to care. They can all read and some of them can drive, and I think they even brush their teeth.
SATURDAY
Leftover delite
Featuring last week’s chicken noodle soup and chicken biryani, and frozen buffalo chicken.
I am really, really struggling with how much food to make these days! We have anywhere from five to nine people at dinner, and the best I can do is have plenty of snacks on hand if I didn’t make enough, or attempt to serve everything twice if I made too much, and then be at peace with throwing stuff away and/or ignoring people who are huffy about whatever. The ducks and dogs have also had quite a varied diet lately.
SUNDAY
Steak, mashed potatoes, asparagus
They were selling whole eye of round roasts for cheap again, so I got the biggest one I could find, and thought possibly we could squeeze three meals out of it. Meal #1: Steaks. Because it was Laudate Sunday or Gaudate Sunday or HowBowDah Sunday, and Damien makes really good steaks.
I also made five pounds of mashed potatoes and two pounds of asparagus. I made the asparagus in the oven under the broiler. I spread it in a pan and drizzled it with olive oil and sprinkled it with salt, and just gave it about eight or ten minutes, until the stems were slightly soft and the tips were frizzled. Served with lemon wedges, absolutely delicious.
MONDAY
Steak salad
Monday Damien cooked the rest of the meat and sliced it, and I served that over salad with strawberries, crumbled blue cheese, and toasted almonds. I also found a little bit of leftover homemade mozzarella, so I cut that up and served it, too. Slightly weird combination (my preferred fruit to go with steak is either pears or peaches), but I was trying to use up what we had in the house + what was on sale.
I served it with biscuits from a can and those were pretty popular. The bag of green material you can see on the left is a sandwich bags of pepperoncini that I had in my purse for reasons.
Sophia got home from visiting a friend in the evening, so I went to pick her up at the Amtrak station.
And there is still nothing more exciting than hearing a train come in. Trains are one of humanity’s greatest inventions, and I wish I were on one right now.
That evening, it was day 7 of the duck egg incubation period. They are in a sort of sci fi-looking heated dome.
The tray under them rotates occasionally, so they get turned like a mother duck would do for them if ducks were good mothers, which they are not; and they are fed by tanks of water to keep the air humid. After seven days, you set them on a light and see if you can spot developing ducklings.
All four were duds!
You’re supposed to be able to see veiny patterns developing, but all we could see was a shadow lump. Either these eggs were never fertilized, or they didn’t start developing for whatever reason. So we tossed them, and started over the next day.
I was a little more upset about this than I expected to be! Things are just . . . not turning out, lately. No ducklings, no money, no sun porch, car still broken, entire country in flames, and so on. I don’t think the peach pits or garlic or carrots I planted in the fall are coming up. But of course alles fleisch ist wie Grass anyway, so what do you expect. I did get back to my weird little caryatid
She’s sadly not as zaftig as her ancient sisters. Somebody give that girl a chicken cutlet with extra cheese. Anyway, I’m trying to actually finish projects, lately, rather than do 80% of them and then get another idea, so I’ll keep chipping away at her. Maybe I’ll make her into a creepy lamp.
TUESDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa
Tuesday I faced the reality that we had eaten all the meat, so we just had quesadillas with cheese and optional jalapeños. I guess I didn’t feel like that was photo-worthy, so one must imagine a quesadilla and me, happy to eat it.
On Tuesday, I baked a cake for Irene’s birthday the next day! The cat did step on it a few times, but only after I had wrapped it in plastic, which I thought was very gracious of him. Damien also cut and pounded the chicken for Wednesday’s dinner.
WEDNESDAY
Chicken cutlets, birthday cake
We had yet another doctor appointment, and now we are all freaking all caught up with our freaking shots and meds and everything! While we were out, Damien made a huge batch of his magnificent chicken cutlets and sauce. You pound the chicken, dust it in seasoned flour, dredge it in egg, and then coat it in breadcrumbs and parmesan, gently fry it in oil, and then put a basil leaf on each piece, cover the basil with a slice of provolone, and then top that with a scoop of hot marinara sauce, so it all melds together into one scrumptious, savory treat.
The sauce was absolutely tremendous. You know when marinara sauce gets that kind of purple underglow, deep down? That’s what this one had. So good.
Irene had requested a Batman cake, and I showed her a few pictures, and she said this one looked good:
but could I make it look kind of Van Gogh?
Just kidding, she did not say that. But I did it anyway!
I really just do not have the hang of fondant. I do okay with small pieces that I can cut or mold, but the part where you roll out a smooth sheet and lay it over a cake and it comes out looking all crisp and level? That part is so hard!
I did happen upon a new idea for cake decor, though. I wanted to have the bat logo standing up, but the cake was already starting to slump, and I was afraid it would collapse under anything heavy, and I didn’t have any candy or cookies or extra cake to build it up, anyway. We did, however, have some of those baby rice rusks in the house. They are very light, and if you’re careful, you can shape them. So I broke apart a few to form an oval
and welded it together with candy melts. Then I made the bat logo with fondant and stuck it on with water, and to the back I added a couple of supports with more rice rusks and candy melts.
The bats are also fondant, obviously, stuck onto skewers with little blobs of candy melt. Eight bats and eight stars, because she is 16.
She liked it!
Whew. She liked all her presents and we had fun. Whew.
THURSDAY
Leftover chicken cutlets
Thursday, oh man did we have leftovers. The plan was to make spaghetti and serve the leftover chicken on top, but there was SO much, it didn’t feel necessary to add pasta.
I just covered them with tinfoil and heated them in the oven to remelt the cheese, and it was extremely delicious.
Yum.
FRIDAY
Fish tacos
So far, Friday is my day to see how many different medical supply companies I can talk to, but the catch is, nobody can help me or will admit to having heard of me. But I have plenty of other stuff to think about. I did go stomping around in the woods and figure out which trees will work for Corrie’s treehouse.
I ordered a used copy of Tree Houses You Can Actually Build, which is an encouraging title. I was talking to Damien about the DIY videos I had been watching, where guys are like, “oh yeah, you just have to dig down four feet and use pea gravel after you anchor the truss lines to equilibriate the torque, so your cantilevers are all flush with the joist retaining extrusions, and then you can start to put in the floor.” I was like, “Ohhh, these are people who DON’T want their kids to fall out of the tree” and Damien was like, “But there are lots of things I don’t want our kids to do” So yes, I bought the book, but we shall see.
Also, now that the sun porch plans went kaput, I realized that I only wanted a sunporch in front because I felt like I needed to replace the porch we tore down. And we need a place to store a few things, and I thought it would be nice to also get a place to start plants, and maybe even a place to hang out when it’s too cold to be outside.
But when I had time to think about it, I realized there’s just not a lot of sun on that side anyway. So HOW WOULD IT BE if we just build a simple little portico in front, maybe put in a nice little path and some flowers, and then build a greenhouse in the back, where there IS sun, and where the building code would be less stringent because it would just be a little freestanding structure, and not part of the house???? Maybe I’ll do that! Maybe I’ll put a hot tub in it! Maybe I’ll fall out of a tree! Maybe the medical supply company will actually call me back. Maybe I’ll stick myself back together with candy melts. Maybe I’ll just get on a train, and that will be that.
