Happy Friday! Come along with me and I will tell you about an incredible new invention I have made, which will revolutionize baking forever.
But first, a little background. I think I’ve told this story before, but I’m still perversely proud of how stupid it is. It was several years ago, and I was probably pregnant, and definitely sleep-deprived. I had to leave the house, but suddenly realized I had forgotten to eat. I thought I would grab some toast, because that’s portable. Then I thought, no, I need something with more protein. What has protein? Um. . . nuts! Yes, peanuts. Perfect. But I wish there were some way I could affix them to the toast, so I could carry it with me. Perhaps if there were some way to crush the nuts onto the bread . . .
So yeah [looks down modestly] I invented peanut butter.
I honestly thought this was going to be the peak achievement of my life, and truly, it would have been enough! But in fact peanut butter was only a foothill in comparison with the immense heights I summited last night. And I thank you for being here with me as I reveal my latest achievement.
Friends, last night I invented . . . THE OVEN.
I’ll explain in a bit. First, here’s what else we ate this week!
SATURDAY
Leftovers and something
I have very little memory of Saturday, except that Damien spent his afternoon driving me around to various stores so I could do my own grocery shopping for the week. I had attempted driving a few days before, when I was still taking Keppra, and he wasn’t crazy about, for instance, the way I hit Sophia’s car. What a fussy man. Anyway, I was tapering off Keppra at this point, and it made me extremely dizzy, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t driving! I think I went home and napped for the rest of the day.
SUNDAY
Chicken enchiladas, beans and rice
I DID get to Mass on Sunday, then ate banana bread that Corrie baked, drank cappuccino that Damien made, and then did some more advanced-level napping.
There was lots of leftover chicken from Thursday’s Ina Garten roast chicken, so when I got up, I shredded that and made a bunch of enchiladas. First I slowly fried a bunch of chopped onions, then I added in the shredded chicken with a bunch of cumin, salt, pepper, and chili powder. I heated up some enchilada sauce, dipped tortillas in the sauce, and rolled them up with the chicken and onion mixture and some diced tomatoes and shredded cheese. Then I put them in a baking dish on top of a layer of sauce, topped them with more sauce, more cheese, and more chili powder; then baked them until they were bubbly.
Is this the authentic way to make enchiladas? Nah. But they were freaking delicious. I made a pot of beans and rice, and had my enchilada with a scoop of sour cream.
Yum.
MONDAY
Harvest chicken salad
On Monday, I assessed last week’s timid foray back into the world of lettuce, and I decided it was probably fine or whatever, mainly because I really miss salad. So I roasted a bunch of chicken breasts with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and served it sliced on mixed greens with an assortment of vaguely Octoborish stuff from Aldi: Dried cranberries, “pumpkin spice almonds,” green apples (cut up ahead of time and tossed with lemon juice to keep them from browning), cucumbers, and parmesan crisps.
I also made a batch of croutons using old hamburger buns, cubed and tossed with lots of butter, salt, pepper and garlic powder, toasted slowly in the oven.
My original plan was to finally get around to digging up some potatoes from the garden and making baked potatoes, but I ran out of energy; and luckily, it was a hearty enough salad on its own.
I had mine with Italian dressing. It wasn’t fabulous, but it was nice enough, and filling. I do like a really big salad.
And Monday was my very last dose of Keppra! The doctor said it would take 24-48 hours to get out of my system, and she was right.
TUESDAY
Ham, cheese, and onion omelettes, hash browns, salad, OJ
Tuesday, I was still feeling pretty dizzy, but the forecast said there would be a frost that night, so I picked the last of the tomatoes, decided I didn’t care about the rest of the basil, because I had already frozen a bunch, and went to check on the pumpkins. There are about a dozen, and they didn’t get very big, but I figured there was plenty of time for them to grow.
OR WAS THERE.
Look at that! Every single pumpkin looked like this. Some gnawing little bastard beat me to the pumpkin patch. OH WELL. My poor garden just wasn’t having its best year this year. I do not have a great feeling about my potatoes, which are the absolute last things I haven’t harvested yet. But maybe I’ll be surprised.
Speaking of surprises, Tuesday is also the day the oven exploded. I was standing there happily making some messy omelettes with ham, onions, and cheddar cheese, and warming up a bunch of frozen hash browns in the oven
when suddenly there was a deafening buzzing sound and a roaring, the overhead lights flickered off and on several times, and the oven was filled with flames! Which is not my normal recipe!
So I turned the oven off and — okay, look, I’m not exactly proud of this, but I pulled the hash browns out and served them. They looked fine. The bottom of the oven where the heating element plugs in had a little blackened hole blown in it, but the hash browns looked fine! The kids were really excited about hash browns, and they’ve been through a lot lately, so I went ahead and — okay, I’m not exactly proud of this, either, but I also continued using the stovetop to finish making omelettes, and it was a lovely meal. With orange juice, and salad!
The salad was really good, too. I’m not on trial here.
So, Damien is really good at watching YouTube videos and figuring out how to fix all kinds of stuff, but this one looked like it included both electrical work and welding, and this oven is so old, I don’t even remember when we got it. I remember when one burner decided it would only do “high” from now on, and I remember when the glass door broke, and I remember replacing the door handle with a growing wad of duct tape and then eventually pvc pipe. So I guess we fed Mr. Frigidaire one last meal of hash browns garnished with a subtle dusting of combustion residue, and now it can go in peace. So long, venerable oven, and thanks for all the cheesecake.
WEDNESDAY
Hamburgers, chips, steamed broccoli
On Wednesday, as you may recall, we had no oven, so Damien cooked the burgers on his grill. I steamed some broccoli, and we had the burgers with tomatoes from the garden, and the second jar of refrigerator pickles.
You can see I got some pickled dill and garlic on my burger along with the pickles, and I wasn’t mad about that!
Oh, Wednesday was also the day I tried driving again! I went to pick up the kids after school and Lucy after work, with Damien in the passenger seat, and this time it went much better. I did almost hit someone, but it was on the way out of the church parking lot where we pick up high schoolers, and it’s just generally accepted that people are going to hit each other.
THURSDAY
Homemade meatballs and sauce and bread
Thursday I ended up sleeping really late because I had been up most of the night with TONGUE ZAPS. I’m sorry I keep complaining. I really am healing steadily, if not gracefully! Complaining is just an essential part of my healing process.
Anyway, when I finally got up, I wanted to take a shower, but I thought about how I hadn’t cleaned the bathroom since before surgery, and I reeeally wanted to clean it, and it makes more sense to shower after you clean. And then I thought, well, if I haven’t showered yet, I might as well make supper first, and then I can shower away food smells, too. The plan was some kind of Korean meatballs with an apricot glaze, plus rice and maybe some roasted delicata squash.
But! Then I remembered, again, that we didn’t have an oven. So I figured I could still make meatballs, but just pan fry them rather than making them in the oven like I usually do. And as long as I was gonna go to the trouble of pan fying them, I might as well make them nice meatballs, with olive oil, and minced garlic and diced onion.
And they were nice! I made probably eighty meatballs, because I had bought a bunch of ground beef on sale, but forgotten to freeze it, so it was now or never.
Then I discovered we didn’t have any more jarred sauce. Which was fine, because they were such nice meatballs, they deserved a homemade sauce. More onion, more garlic, some freezer basil, some tomato paste, a bunch of chopped-up tomatoes from the garden, a little sugar, some salt and pepper, and I let that simmer in the olive oil left over from browning the meatballs. Mmmm.
Then I was like, gee, this is such a nice meal, it deserves some freshly-baked bread! So I made some dough, let it rise, and rolled eight little loaves of french bread, and set them for a second rise.
And then. AND ONLY THEN. Did I remember again that we
do
not
have
an oven.
I thought about the microwave. No, obviously not. Thought about the air fryer, which, maybe, but it’s a very small air fryer, and I’d have to cook each loaf individually. Do not want. I thought about the Instant Pot and the slow cooker, but again, the size they are, I’d have to re-form the loaves into a single loaf, and it would almost certainly turn out damp and rubbery. Also, I had already put the meatballs and sauce into the slow cooker and washed all the pots and pans, and the idea of transferring all that food into another receptacle just made me . . . I don’t know, it was like putting a golden seal of stupidity on the whole enterprise. And I didn’t want to do that!
So I put a a double layer of tinfoil on one compartment of Damien’s grill, and he cranked up the compartment next to it. I waited about ten minutes, and then I put those poor loaves in, and put the top down.
Then I went to bed and felt sorry for myself for a while. Why? I don’t even know. I was just really sad about how terrible the bread was going to turn out, and how dumb I was, and how I couldn’t even blame it on the drugs, because I’m not on drugs anymore, and somebody ate my pumpkins, and my tongue is weird, and my head itches but I can’t scratch it because it’s still numb, and probably my potatoes are going to bad potatoes, and so on.
Eventually I realized about 40 minutes had gone by, and it was going to be time to exhume whatever wretched, inedible parody of bread I would find inside the grill.
So I slogged outside, gingerly opened the top, and . . .
Actual bread, baked kind of perfectly!
Absolutely could not believe my eyes. HOW could anyone have predicted that heating up an enclosed metal box, placing unbaked dough inside, and then waiting a while while it continued to stay hot, could have resulted in BAKED BREAD? THIS IS LIFE-CHANGING.
Told you. I invented the oven.
Well, that’s just what I’m calling it now, until I come up with a snazzier name, like “Hotsybox” or “Transform-a-bread.” Or heck, can you really beat “Funcooker?”
So now we have a mechanism for producing baked bread, and you’re welcome. We have a method for making protein adhere to that bread, and you’re welcome again. But I’m not done! My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives, and I think I will focus next on a new technique for transforming common fruit into some sort of spreadable yet palatable material, and I don’t mean to outpace myself here, but I think . . . the three elements may just go together. I think — and this is only if it works out, which is a big if! — I will call it “JBP.” Or maybe “BPJ.” I don’t know. Let me know what you think.
Har, har, okay, I got that joke out of my system. But seriously, this bread was so nice. It had a faint smoky flavor on the outside, and it was soft and lightly chewy inside.
Piled on the saucy meatballs, which were extremely tasty.
And everyone liked it! So, I stopped feeling sorry for myself! Potential potatoes be damned.
Oh, also, I DID clean the bathroom. Did a very thorough job, and then I had a very nice, very hot shower, compliments of Damien, who fixed the water heater.
Also on Thursday Moe moved into his new apartment, which is nice for him, and nice for Damien, who gets his office back! Happily, Moe is not too far away, so I hope we still see him a lot. Once he’s settled in, he’s going to pick up Maggie. She has been with us for just over a year, and God bless her, she never compromised on her steadfast hatred of this house, this family, and most of all, this freaking dog.
FRIDAY
Tuna noodle?
Or tuna noodon’t. Damien is not a fan of tuna noodle casserole, but I planned it thinking he was going to be away at dinner, but now I’m not sure. And also, uhhhh we
don’t have an oven. We are ordering one tonight! Damien is actually, at this moment, at an awards ceremony where he just won an award for his journalism AGAIN, and this one comes with cash, of all things! I’m so proud of him. He writes award winning stories while also constantly doing things like fixing the water heater, driving everybody everywhere, and rescuing me from corners I painted myself into for no reason at all.
In the mean time, we’ll just keep grillin’. For tonight, though, I think perhaps we will just have tuna sandwiches and chips. Or maybe I’ll treat everyone to a good old fashioned BPJ.