Tag: desserts with fruit

What’s for supper? Vol. 395: Agrodolce

In haste! In haste! For this has been the week of countless appointments (well, seven: doctor, pediatrician, ob/gyn, neurologist, and three dentist) but only one car, plus Cub Scouts, and the school just called to say that one child forgot her lunch. I thinks she’s just gonna have to develop a sudden liking for school pizza. 

But still, happy Friday! Friday is Friday. Here is what we had this week:

SATURDAY
Chicken wraps and chips

This is a meal that started out decent and has slowly devolved, and I think this is about as low as it can go before it turns into absolute bachelor chow. The first iteration was delicious crunchy saucy buffalo chicken tenders, shredded lettuce, blue cheese, and ranch dressing. Then I started getting non-buffalo chicken tenders, which are cheaper, and adding the buffalo sauce, and skipping the blue cheese because not everybody likes it. This time, I got those awful frozen “chicken fries,” sloshed on some ranch dressing, and then didn’t realize the buffalo sauce didn’t have a little hole, and got a buffalo flood. 

It was honestly still pretty good, and I’m only pretending I’ll do better in the future. It’s hard when your kids don’t like hot dogs. What are you supposed to do on weekends? Nobody knows. Thow some scallions on there. 

SUNDAY
Ragu on pasta, zucchini agrodolce, bread, salad; cheesecake with peaches

Sunday, Clara and her boyfriend came over, so we did make a nice meal. I made zucchini agrodolce (= “sour sweet”) following this recipe from Sip and Feast. It’s a leetle bit time consuming, but so worth it; and it’s good cold, and great the second day, so you can make it ahead of time. 

You make a little sauce with red wine vinegar, water, sugar, red pepper flakes, chopped garlic and sliced red onions. Then you fry up the zucchini pieces in olive oil and sprinkle them with kosher salt

and then you mix it together, cool, and chill. Wish I had fried them a little browner, but oh well. 

Delicious. I’m not a huge zucchini fan, but I love this dish. You should make it before summer weather is over, because it’s a really great side.

Damien made his amazing ragù using the recipe from Deadspin. He used ground veal and pork, and it was savory and scrumptious as always. 

We had a little miscommunication vis-à-vis bread, and I bought some, Damien bought some, and Clara brought some from her new job, which is at a bakery. 

FINALLY ONE OF MY KIDS WORKS AT A BAKERY. 

Lovely meal. (We also had a green salad, but I don’t think anyone ate it.) She also brought a bunch of bialys, which I haven’t had a bialy in probably thirty years. So nice. 

For dessert, we had cheesecake, which I actually started on Friday, kinda. 

So, the cheesecake! This is not a fluffy, airy cake; it is a rich, creamy, heavy extravagance. This is a proprietary recipe which I am not at liberty to disclose, and I understand why, because this cheesecake is a truly spectacular beast, and may not be safe to unleash on the general public. But I can give you some of the tips that were shared with me. 

-First is that you put your ingredients out the night before you bake them. So in my case, I put them out Friday night, baked it Saturday night, and we ate it Sunday night. 

-Do not over-beat the ingredients, because that will introduce air in. 
But do scrape the bowl out a few times, including the bottom, as you mix it; or else you can pick it up on and drop it on the counter a few times after adding ingredients, to knock out any air. 

-Wrap the pan in two layers of heavy duty foil and bake it in a water bath. Keeping the oven humid will reduce the chance of cracking.

-When it’s done baking, turn the oven off and leave the cheesecake in there until the oven is cool. Don’t peek; temperature changes cause cracks. Then wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it overnight (I leave it in the springform pan overnight).

I was exceedingly frazzled and distracted, so I made some errors, but behold: One little crack (and a few moon craters). Not bad. Last time I made this recipe, I over-baked it, but this time it turned out nice and pale and even. (This is a matter of taste; some people prefer a darker little skin on top.)

Sumbitch held up really well when I took the sides off the pan. 

I wanted a peach topping, and I am down to frozen peaches now. Here is where I wish I had take the extra time to put in a little lemon juice or something to preserve the color when I was processing a million fresh peaches; but I didn’t, so we had darker peaches that were honestly a little bit mushy, because I left too much moisture in the bag and froze each batch in one clump, rather than chilling the pieces individually before freezing them longer term. 

I more or less followed this recipe (just the peach topping part), which calls for pieces of peaches and also peach puree. I think maybe I made it the night before, so it could chill. Turned out quite good. It is not quite as thick as pie filling, but thicker than — well, a lot of things I make when I think I don’t need a recipe. 

All in all, I was pretty proud of this whole project. It wasn’t too sweet, but full of flavor, and the texture was, frankly, immaculate. 

Turns out Clara’s boyfriend doesn’t like cheesecake, though! It’s okay, we like him anyway. He brought us some cedar scraps, and I’m seriously thinking of taking up wood carving this winter. Maybe make some picture frames, or weird little ornaments that nobody wants. 

MONDAY
Bruschetta with leftover ragu

Monday I knew we were gonna have leftover ragù, so I cut up a few baguettes, drizzled them with olive oil, and sprinkled them with salt, and toasted them in the oven. I heated up the ragù and set out the leftover cheese, and it was delightful. 

Long live ragu!

I think Monday was the day my car started making horrible scronching noises.

TUESDAY
Roast chicken and baked potatoes

Monday night I got sick with awful vertigo, nausea, headache, and muscle pain, and I could barely get out of bed on Tuesday, which sucked. Damien did everything, including taking kids to appointments and roasting a chicken and baking some potatoes. I was too sick to eat, but it smelled good. I believe he roasted the chicken with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and a couple of lemon halves stuffed in there. 

WEDNESDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, veg and dip

Wednesday I was up again and decided we all needed many more vegetables in our life, so I made a giant tray

and then I made a bunch of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. I usually use sourdough bread, but the store was out, so I did ciabatta rolls, which I think I prefer. I like knowing exactly where the sandwich ends. I used provolone, and put a little skim of mayo on the outside and fried them in butter

and them put them in a warm oven for ten minutes to make sure the cheese was all melted. I was absolutely starving by dinner time, so this tasted like an olympian feast. 

Frickin ham and cheese, can’t beat it sometimes. Especially with pickles.

THURSDAY
Mexican beef bowl 

Last week, top round roast was on sale, so I bought an extra for this week. Cut it thin and marinated it for several hours in this tasty little marinade

Jump to Recipe

I made a big pot of rice in the Instant Pot and quickly cooked the meat in a pan on the stove. 

Sometimes I go all out with a million toppings for these rice bowls, but this time we just had the rice and meat, some corn and cilantro, sour cream, and corn chips. I think I also put out shredded cheese. Oh, and lime wedges.

A very fine meal. 

I always spoon some of the juice from the meat over the rice, and it’s so good. This is a meal you can prep ahead of time and then throw together in fifteen minutes right before dinner time (well, if you have an IP or rice cooker). As I mentioned in my meal planning post, this kind of meal strikes the right balance between effort and convenience, for me. I almost always have more time and energy in the morning, so I do as much as I can then, and then supper is quick and easy, but doesn’t feel crappy.  

FRIDAY
Salmon tacos with guacamole

I have some frozen salmon fillets that were super cheap at Aldi, and I sure wish someone would come over my house and cook them, but that seems unlikely. Probably I will just pan fry them with maybe some Tajin or whatever. I have some avocados, but I don’t know what state they’re in (I mean existentially, not geographically), so we’ll see if the guacamole materializes or not. I forgot to buy cabbage. I do have more cilantro and some salsa and sour cream.

People’s expectations are pretty low, and I feel a little bit like I have been put in a bowl and dropped repeatedly, to get all the air bubbles out, but not in the fun way. It’s just been an exhausting and discouraging week, and I’m not even the one has to go lie down in the driveway and look at . . . warped rotor drums, or whatever it is. I am simply too delicate for that sort of thing, and instead practice the womanly art of frying things in mayonnaise. 

P.S. If you are my editor and are reading this, I am working on the things. I have been, and I am. I’m gonna sprinkle some cilantro on top and it will be great. 

P.P.S. Damien brought in the forgotten lunch, because he’s a much nicer mom than I am. 

P.P.P.S. Yes, it finally occurred to me that we might actually have covid. We do mask in medical settings, and the kids mask at work, so there’s that. Welp. Tomorrow will be kinder. 

Agrodolce, indeed. 

Print

Beef marinade for fajita bowls

enough for 6-7 lbs of beef

Ingredients

  • 1 cup lime juice
  • 1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • 1 head garlic, crushed
  • 2 Tbsp cumin
  • 2 Tbsp chili powder
  • 1 Tbsp paprika
  • 2 tsp hot pepper flakes
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 2 tsp pepper
  • 1 bunch cilantro, chopped

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together.

  2. Pour over beef, sliced or unsliced, and marinate several hours. If the meat is sliced, pan fry. If not, cook in a 350 oven, uncovered, for about 40 minutes. I cook the meat in all the marinade and then use the excess as gravy.

What’s for supper? Vol. 394: So peach goes down to grape

Nothing gold can . . . ape. 

Happy Friday! Here’s what we had this week: 

SATURDAY
Rotisserie chicken, salad, bread

Saturday I did the shopping and got started late, so I decided I would splurge on rotisserie chicken so I could relax and have an easy meal afterward. Got home, started unloading the groceries, realized it’s hard to have a relaxing chicken experience withouten any chicken. 

So I went out again in great sadness and bought some chicken, but! they had just put out some freshly baked baguettes, still warm! So it all worked out. 

I got a couple of those caesar salad kits from Aldi, and it was a very pleasant little meal, and yes, easy. 

Saturday night, I made a batch of streusel using the King Arthur Flour recipe, which is only just barely a recipe. You mix boxed cake mix with melted butter, scrunch it into streusel lumps, and bake it until it’s a little bit crunchy. 

Turned out great. I know basic streusel is super easy, but I have mixed success with it anyway, and this method has pretty great possibilities, considering you could use any flavor of cake mix. You can freeze it and have it ready to sprinkle on muffins or cakes or ice cream or cheesecake or whatever. Mein gootness. 

SUNDAY
Bacon cheeseburgers, chips

Sunday after Mass, I picked the very last of the peaches. 

I don’t know why Corrie stood on a chair to take this picture, but I cannot argue with the flattering angle! Makes me realize that when Damien says I look good, he probably really means it, because this is essentially his viewpoint. I’m all boobs and eyes from up there. And sometimes peaches. 

We had freshly ground beef and bacon from Sally Wilkin’s homestead, and I thought that much tastiness deserved to stay together. So Damien fried up the bacon and made burgers on the grill, and OH IT WAS GOOD. 

Bad picture, but there’s a reason people pay more for local meat. Mmmm. 

I cut up the peaches and left the skins on this time, which was so much faster and easier than blanching and peeling them. I basically followed the peach part of the recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, but since I wasn’t using a streusel with cinnamon in it, I put some into the filling. 

Lovely, lovely.

I had meant to serve this with ice cream, but forgot to put the bowl in the freezer, so I just whipped up the heavy cream instead, with a little sugar and vanilla. 

Fabulous. So meltingly sweet and creamy and lovely. 

Corrie said there was a frost when she woke up, so that means it was time to pick the grapes! There wasn’t a huge harvest this year. There were plenty of grapes, but they weren’t very big, and they were especially tart this year (even for Concord grapes). 

Benny and Corrie and I picked them until we got tired of it

and this time, I smartened up and wore GLOVES for the sorting process. 

It only took me three consecutive years of being baffled and amazed to find that grapes make my skin itch and burn! I can learn! Actually this photo shows two lessons learned: Wearing gloves, and having gloves in the house in the first place, because my kids simply cannot abide having natural colored hair, so I finally wised up and started buying gloves in bulk.

It took probably three hours to sort all the grapes. I ended up with I think 32 pounds.

and I really didn’t have space to refrigerate them, so I decided to forge ahead and make the juice that evening. In the past, I’ve made grape jelly, but it turns out nobody really likes it; and grape sorbet, which really only I like. Those kids do like their juice, though. 

Making juice is very simple. You sort out all the stems and unripe and rotten grapes, rinse the good grapes, and put them in a stock pot and mash them with a potato masher somewhat, to release the juices.

Then you just heat it up slowly, skins and seeds and all, until it’s simmering, and let it simmer for ten minutes.

You can mash the grapes again while they’re simmering, to make sure they all get juiced. 

Then you pour the hot grape mash over cheesecloth (I like to use a few layers of cheesecloth in a colander, just in case anything slips out, because it’s HOT) and let the juice strain through. 

And that’s it. You can add sugar at this point, if you want. 

This year, I put about two thirds into the huge stock pot and the other third into a smaller pot. THEN I BURNED THE HUGE POT. I tried to convince myself that the burned taste hadn’t permeated the whole batch, but it certainly, certainly had. Then I tried to persuade myself there was something else I could do with a giant batch of hot burned grape mash, but my friends, there wasn’t. So I sadly dumped it in the compost heap. 

I did get three quarts of juice from the remaining pot

and GOOD HEAVENS IT IS TART. The kids have been mixing it with sugar, and still only drinking small portions. 

So that was a bit of a sad grape story for me this year. But at least they’re not hanging on the vine, begging to be picked while they’re slowly nibbled to death by yellowjackets, and at least I don’t have a giant batch of half-processed grapes slowly fermenting and attracting fruit flies. The only bug around here is me, and I’m used to me. 

And I had the fun of taking my annual Judith cosplay photo:

The last thing I did on Sunday was clean off a few dozen peach pits from that final batch, and set them to dry on a rack.

I am following instructions from The Philadelphia Orchard Project.

Yes, I am going to try to grow some more peach trees. A few people have expressed surprise that I would put the words “peach” and “more” in the same sentence, which makes me think I have been misrepresenting my attitude toward peaches. Of course I want more peaches! They are peaches! I don’t know how else to explain it. (But actually if I do manage to grow a dozen baby peach trees, I will probably give them away or sell them. But the main thinking here is: MORE PEACHES. You are talking to a mother of ten; I don’t know what you expected.) 

MONDAY
Pizza

Just regular begular no fancy tricks pizza, one plain, one olive, one pepperoni. Oh, actually I put some leftover bacon (WHICH TELLS YOU HOW SMALL OUR FAMILY IS NOW BECAUSE WE HAVE LEFTOVER BACON) on the pepperoni one, and it was, of course, delicious. 

TUESDAY
French toast casserole with fried apples, peach butter, grape juice; deviled duck eggs

Tuesday was primary day in NH, so Damien was going to be out; so I made a meal he’s not crazy about. We had tons of leftover hot dog and hamburger buns in the house, and they make great french toast casserole. I don’t really have a recipe for this, but you just mix up eggs and milk and add some sugar and maybe some vanilla, and pour it over some torn-up bread and mix it up. Butter a pan, pour the bread mixture in, and top it with some sugar and cinnamon if you like. Bake at 350 until it’s a little toasted on top, and not too damp inside. 

We had a giant backlog of duck eggs. The kids don’t really like duck eggs, partly because they don’t like the ducks, and partly because they don’t like their eggs, which pretty much covers it. But they do very much like deviled eggs, which I hardly ever make, because it’s a hassle. I thought I might lure them into eating duck eggs this way. 

Welp, I forgot that, because they are so much bigger than store-bought chicken eggs, you need to boil them longer. So they were really soft boiled eggs. I went ahead and mixed up the yolks with mayo and a little mustard and salt, and even I had to admit they were kind of gross.

It was kind of cool to see a cooked double yolk egg, though. 

We get lots of double-yolkers! It’s weird. I looked it up, and these eggs would not necessarily develop into twins born from one egg, because there’s not really enough room in there, so one chick would win. It’s possible both would develop and survive, but it’s rare. Nature, man.

We are planning to incubate some eggs in the spring, though, just for the hell of it. When Corrie was in first grade, her class was incubating eggs, and then she got sick and missed seeing them hatch (she is a covid baby, and you had to stay home for several days if you had basically any symptoms of anything, at the time). Missing this has formed a Core Sadness for her, which is understandable! So we’re gonna try and ameliorate that a bit. 

Oh, also, I remain TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE at peeling hard boiled eggs. 

I know there are methods where they slip out of their shells perfectly every time, but I do not wish to do them. Science cannot explain this; it’s just how I am. I just enjoy having traumatic flashbacks to the time I was working with the boss at Todafrali’s Deli and we had to peel a few hundred hard boiled eggs for a catering job, and boy, she was so MEAN about this poor lady who wanted a tacky dish like deviled eggs at her wedding. SO mean. Oh, there was so much cocaine in the back room of that kitchen. Mein gootness. 

Anyway, I was just gonna serve the french toast casserole with peach butter and maple syrup, because that was a lovely combination with waffles last week, but I noticed we had a bunch of apples that had gone soft and sad while we were busy eating peaches, so I cut them up and fried them in butter with a little brown sugar and cinnamon and a tiny bit of salt. 

Absolutely delicious. 

Was I proud of myself for serving a meal made with leftover bread and eggs from our ducks, peach butter from our peaches, and grape juice from our grapes? Yes. Insufferable, even. But it was a really good meal! Except for the eggs. And the juice. 

WEDNESDAY
Steak quesadillas with peach salsa

When I picked the last of the peaches, I used the ripest ones for the peach crisp, and set aside the others. By Wednesday, they were perfectly ripe, not too soft. I diced them up with the skins on and mixed them up with a diced red bell pepper, about half a red onion minced, some fresh lime juice, chopped cilantro, half a minced jalapeño, and a little salt. 

The picture shows garlic, but I don’t actually remember if I put garlic in there or not. I’m leaning toward not, and I think it was hanging around because I had made some marinade for the beef. 

It’s a great marinade, always popular. Lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic, with a few other ingredients. So nice and lively. 

Jump to Recipe

I sharpened my knife and cut the roast as thinly as I could,

and let it marinate most of the day. Then I pan fried it and made quesadillas with it.

Served with the peach salsa, sour cream, and tortilla chips.

Dang, that was a tasty meal. I don’t know why I never thought of beef quesadillas before, but I’m happy to welcome into the rotation another meal in that uses relatively small amounts of beef. When beef goes on sale, it’s still pretty expensive, so just a straight up roast isn’t usually an option. 

The peach salsa was fantastic. I really liked having the softer peaches along with the crisp red pepper, and the sweet peaches were so nice with the lime juice and a little bit of spice. Just a really playful, zippy salsa that went really well with the meat. It would be great with chicken or shrimp or probably pork, or just plain quesadillas. 

Wednesday evening, Corrie and I extracted the seeds from the dried peach pits. (Obviously peaches can grow spontaneously from pits that haven’t been split open by humans, but I assume this gives them an advantage, and makes them more likely to grow.) The directions said you could use a nut cracker, but this didn’t work for me at all, because the pits were so hard. 

Corrie developed a screwdriver and sledgehammer technique, but I had better luck using tile nippers. I nipped the seam off until there was an opening, and then pried it apart with the tip of a knife. The peach seeds look like small almonds, 

and yes, they contain amygdalin, which, when digested, breaks down into cyanide (same with apricots, cherries, and plums). You can eat a few without hurting yourself, or apparently you can boil them for half an hour and then safely eat them; but life is exciting enough around here without doing any poison experiments on purpose. 

We noticed a strong almond smell from the seeds. It turns out they are related to almonds, and in fact almond extract is often made from peach seeds. In fact, it tastes more strongly almond-y than almond extract made from almonds! I have now reached the point where the word “almond” sounds weird and foreign to me, so I guess that’s the end of this paragraph. 

THURSDAY
Restes ala purée de pommes de terre

Thursday I got another flat tire.

And I’m glad I compulsively take pictures of everything, because that helped me confirm this is a different tire from the one last week! 

I’ve had a slow leak for quite some time, and concerned dads keep coming up to me and apologetically telling me that I probably know this, but my tire is pretty flat, and then I make them feel bad by telling them I do already know. (I think this is related to #metoo, or possibly regional, not sure.) Then I go put air in my tire and pretend that’s a responsible way of dealing with it, because air machines scare me, and if it’s scary, it must be hard, and if it’s hard, it must be responsible.

So actually it was kind of a relief when the tire finally completely crapped out. Sadly, it doesn’t look patchable like the other one, because I’ve been driving around on the sidewall like an idiot, so we’re going to have to take the extreme measure of buying a new used tire. 

For supper, I was planning to make chicken drumsticks roasted in butter and Old Bay seasoning, but the chicken had gone bad. The afternoon had already devolved into a series of increasingly pathetic attempts to find non-moldy hay for the ducks (I do have a good lead for this weekend! This shouldn’t be hard! We’re pretty rural!), so by the time it was dinner, I was pretty dead set against going to the store one more time. 

So we had whatever. Hot pans of whatever, and cucumbers I didn’t even take out of the bag. 

I made up a big bowl of instant potatoes, and everybody had hot food. Yay! It’s probably self care or something. I do like potatoes. 

We were supposed to go to Corrie’s first Cub Scout meeting, but she was sick with a bad cold and sore throat, and turning up with that seemed like a bad way to introduce ourselves to a bunch of new families. She asked if she could make up for the disappointment by watching Frasier, and in the name of self care, I said yes. 

She really hates the taste of cold medicine, so I suggested she have a shot of grape juice to get the taste out of her mouth, and it worked, but then she needed a cookie to get the taste of grape juice out of her mouth. I tasted it and she was not kidding. That stuff is intense! By which I mean disgusting! 

FRIDAY
Regular spaghetti

Regular old begular old spaghetti with sauce from a jar.

But! Clara and her boyfriend are coming over on Sunday, so I did do step one in my Transcendent Cheesecake Recipe, which is to set out the ingredients for 24 hours so they really truly achieve room temperature for real. 

Oops, I gotta put out eggs, too. I’m going to bake it tomorrow and then let it ponder life in the fridge overnight, and by Sunday it will be wonderful. I’ve made this recipe before, and it does not mess around. 

And what am I going to put on top of this cheesecake?

Do you really need to ask?

I may have picked and cooked the last of the fresh peaches, but maybe you are forgetting that my freezer looks like this:

And I’m gonna plant those peach seeds today. 

Peach season is over! Long live peach season!

 

Print

Beef marinade for fajita bowls

enough for 6-7 lbs of beef

Ingredients

  • 1 cup lime juice
  • 1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • 1 head garlic, crushed
  • 2 Tbsp cumin
  • 2 Tbsp chili powder
  • 1 Tbsp paprika
  • 2 tsp hot pepper flakes
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 2 tsp pepper
  • 1 bunch cilantro, chopped

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together.

  2. Pour over beef, sliced or unsliced, and marinate several hours. If the meat is sliced, pan fry. If not, cook in a 350 oven, uncovered, for about 40 minutes. I cook the meat in all the marinade and then use the excess as gravy.

What’s for supper? Vol. 392: I hope you guys like hearing about peaches

Happy Friday! Today’s post will be a good one for people who enjoy color. Especially peach color. And peaches!

Oh yes, peaches. I couldn’t stand it any longer, and finally started picking. And picking, and paying kids to pick, and picking some more. I estimate at least 130 pounds so far, and there are still hundreds of peaches on the tree. Just one little tree! What a champ.

This is also our first week back at school, and so far, I’m not a fan. Much rather sit and home and eat peaches.

SATURDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, strawberry shortcake 

Shopping day with Corrie, plus a side quest to SPIRIT HALLOWEEN, which now opens in early August and hasn’t gotten any less silly. Damien made yummy sandwiches while I recovered.

Benny prepped the strawberries with sugar and a little vanilla. I just got pre-made cake shells for dessert, and squirty whipped cream from a can. Not shortcake per se, but who doesn’t like this. 

We were planning a little outing on Sunday, so Satuday evening I prepped a bunch of peaches and a streusel topping ahead of time, so I could put it together when I got home. Benny and Corrie helped with blanching the peaches

and we had sort of mixed success peeling them.

I got better at this over the course of the week! My process now is to rinse the peaches, score the bottom in an X, dump them in boiling water for a full two minutes,

and then fish them out and dump them in ice water. Lots of recipes said thirty seconds in boiling water, but the skin just doesn’t slide off like it’s supposed to when I do it that way. Maybe it varies by peach or by ripeness, but that’s what I’ve found. 

I also made a batch of vanilla ice cream, and didn’t notice that the dasher got hung up, so it ended up not terribly smooth, oh well. 

SUNDAY
Deli sandwiches, peach cobbler

Sunday after Mass, it was the very last day everybody was still on summer vacation, so we went to Trap Falls in Ashby, MA. This is a place we discovered several years ago when the kids were little and I dragged everybody on a yurt camping trip. The lake in the campgrounds was closed because of cyanobacteria or something, so we drove around looking for an alternative, and stumbled across this — not quite paradisal, but extremely lovely spot

We’ve been back several times, and it’s almost always a good trip. When the kids were little, it was glorious. Now it’s just merely pleasant. But I’ll take it!

We brought the dog along, and he enjoyed himself, which he always does, everywhere, in every circumstance, including when he went with Damien to go find oil for my car when it abruptly ran out of oil, but especially including when we stopped for ice cream on the way home. 

Got home and ate the deli sandwiches I got at Market Basket, and made the peach cobbler, which turned out . . . juicy.

I really should have drained those peaches! In retrospect, the oven slowly dying was also probably partly to blame, but I didn’t realize it yet. But it was still a delicious dessert, especially topped with ice cream. 

I made a huge amount of streusel topping and saved half of it, thinking I would make cobbler (or crisp or whatever) at least a few more times. Then I ate a bunch of it, and I’m not even sorry. Butter, flour, cinnamon, and sugar. I’m a monster and I don’t care. 

MONDAY
Mussakhan and taboon 

Monday the Catholic high school kid and the college kid started school, and I had a little errand in a different town, and Damien started covering a hearing in Concord; so the driving was . . . extensive. 

But I was determined to stick to the rather ambitious menu I had planned, so I made mussakhan (Palestinian roast chicken) and taboon. Here’s the mussakahn recipe from Saveur that I use; and here is the taboon recipe:

Jump to Recipe

The oven breathed its last just as the chicken finished cooking, which was a mercy! Ten minutes earlier and we would have been in trouble. 

Sadly, the bread has just started baking, and it does bake quickly, but not quickly enough, so I was in a bit of a pickle with that. Just the bottom heating element broke, though, so I broiled the bread, and it was not amazing, but edible. 

It really is a great meal in general, though. The chicken is so juicy, and I adore that sour-bright, earthy sumac flavor. I even splurged on pine nuts, which I don’t always do, and they get toasted up in oil and then sprinkled over the hot chicken. Spectacular. 

I had timed things down to the minute, but didn’t factor in an “oh crap, the oven broke” eventuality, so I ended up eating my dinner in the car. 

Which is just as well, because this allowed me to shamelessly gnaw on the bones like a neanderthal. 

That night, a child who shall remain nameless decided to bleach and dye her hair, which is fine, but it’s less fine to get bleach in your eye, especially when your mother is not home. So I GOT home as fast as I could, and we went to the ER, where they hooked said child up with a kind of contact lens device attached to a tube with a bag of fluids, which flushed the eye out. No eye damage, thank God!

It’s a very damp process, though, especially when you haven’t rinsed the blue out of your hair yet. 

The doctor reassured us that far, far worse things had happened to that sheet. And then we got home and collapsed like bunches of broccoli. 

TUESDAY
Bagel, egg, cheese, sausage sandwiches

Tuesday was the public high school kid’s first day, and I also promised Corrie I would get her a professional haircut to correct the alleged malicious violence I had done to her hair last month when I gave her the exact haircut she asked for. 

Very cute!

Dinner was nice and easy. Tasty, despite the horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you.

The yolk of a duck egg is a powerful thing.  

I also bleached and dyed the tips of Benny’s hair. I actually bleached it twice, because the first time I was like, “Aw, I’ve done this a million times, I don’t need to read the directions,” but it turns out I do. So I sent Elijah out for more bleach, and we got it done. 

You there, boy! What year is it?
Why it’s 1983, sir!

I paid the girls to pick a bunch of peaches for me, and I blanched about mmm fifty pounds of them. 

(If you are wondering, a box that you definitely are going to return to the post office has a tare weight of 1.84 lbs.)

I cut them up and put them in gallon bags and stuffed them in the freezer.

I didn’t add anything. You can add lemon juice to preserve the color, but these will be for baking anyway, so it didn’t really matter. I also didn’t mind if they froze in one big clump, for the same reason; so I didn’t bother doing any individual freezing tricks to keep them separated.

WEDNESDAY
Butter chicken and rice

Wednesday was the first day for the elementary and middle school kids, which were the last batch of kids. They had half days, but not, of course, the same half; so I was kind of mad at myself for again planning a slightly complex meal on a day when I was gonna be in the car all day; but, on the other hand, BUTTER CHICKEN. Can’t be mad when you’re eating butter chicken, or really even when you’re making it, because it’s so pretty. I use this recipe from Recipe Tin Eats. 

I started marinating the meat around noon, and then it does come together very fast if you have all the ingredients prepped. I had splurged on a big sack of basmati rice a few months ago, so I started a big batch of that in the Instant Pot (2 cups of water for each cup of rice, and then just press the rice button, and fluff it with a fork when it’s done — turns out great), and cooked up the chicken in the lovely marinade

then added the pureed tomatoes and cream

and let that simmer for about half an hour.

Oh, it smells so good.

While that was cooking, I prepped some pork for Thursday’s dinner. I am so smart! Sometimes I am so smart. 

It was really too hot for butter chicken, but at the same time, it’s always a good day for butter chicken. 

Just threw a little cilantro on top. I went back for more rice and more sauce. So very cozy and delicious. 

THURSDAY
Bo ssam with gochujang peach sauce, rice, cucumber salad, crunchy rice rolls

The replacement heating element for the oven is ordered, but won’t be here until next Wednesday, so I made the bo ssam in the Instant Pot, following the bare bones of this recipe. I really need to remember to do it this way (in the IP) every time, rather than in the oven, because it turns out spectacular. I just hucked the pork into the pot and pressed “meat.” It said “burn” after a while, so I vented it, checked that it wasn’t actually burning, and pressed “meat” again. 

Then I made a dipping sauce with — I swear I wrote this down, but now I can’t find it. Well, it was about eight pitted peaches with the skins on, two tablespoons of brown sugar, a heaping tablespoon of gochujang, half a red onion, and a tablespoon of soy sauce, if I remember correctly, which I never do. 

Put it all in the blender

and it made a really nice dipping sauce, sweet and fruity (obviously) with just a little kick from the gochujang.

It went very, very well with the salty meat. I probably could have skipped the onion, though. I’m not crazy about raw onion unless it’s minced or diced. Something slightly unpleasant about pureed raw onion. But there wasn’t a ton in there, so it didn’t ruin it. 

I also made a cucumber salad with — I dunno what. Rice vinegar, water, red pepper flakes, white sugar. That sounds plausible. Maybe lime juice. 

Ten minutes before dinner, I made a paste of brown sugar, cider vinegar, and salt and spread that on the meat, which was absolutely falling apart by this time, and put it under the broiler.

I served it with Boston lettuce to wrap the meat in, and the sauce to dip; plus the cucumber salad, and crunchy rice rolls. And a dish of plums, just to shake things up. 

The meat came out SO NICE, and everything complemented each other so well. 

Completely excellent meal. 

That evening, I headed back to the peach mines and blanched another thirty-plus peaches, and made peach butter. 

I followed this recipe, kind of, except I used far less brown sugar than she said, and bumped up the spices a bit. I love that it has cardamom.

You cook the peaches in pieces for a while,

then run it through a blender, then cook it some more. She says to cook it down for 10-15 minutes for the second cook, which I knew was going to be nonsense. I set it to a very low simmer and just let it go, uncovered, for something like three hours, stirring it occasionally. 

Then I poured it into jars

and put it in the fridge. I think it’s already all spoken for, so I’ll have to make some more! It’s the consistency of thick applesauce, loose but spreadable. It will be so nice on toast. It would be spectacular on french toast, or hot scones, or bread pudding. 

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle

Sophia, who is not back to school because she is taking a gap year to work and save up money, volunteered to make tuna noodle. I’m hoping and praying the dang jury reaches a verdict today so we can see Damien again someday! Maybe we’ll ditch the kids and go out for pizza tonight. 

I plan to spend the weekend making as many stovetop or Instant Pot peach recipes as I can find — more peach butter, definitely; and peach salsa sounds tasty, and I am determined to make that peach-tomato-basil -burrata-prosciutto salad, and perhaps I will make more ice cream and grill the peaches. And eventually the oven will work again, and then I’ll — let’s face it, I’ll make more streusel because I will have eaten my stash, and then I’ll make another peach cobbler, and see if I can come up with something a little more solid. Or not. And peach muffins, and peach cheesecake! 

I also dropped off bags of peaches with a few people, and called Vincent de Paul to see if they want peaches, Because, I don’t know if you guys realize this, but I have a lot of peaches. 

This is the tree right meow, still:

Not suffocating under obscenely heavy clusters of fruit like it was before, but still, plenty of peaches!

And I’m sort of nervously keeping an eye on this situation:

But not yet! It’s not time to worry about that yet. 

I . . I did plant another grape vine yesterday. Because what if we run out of fruit? WHAT IF WE RUN OUT OF FRUIT????

Oh, here is a photo of last Friday’s poke bowl, which turned out rather pretty.

Rice, ahi tuna, salt and pepper cashews, pea sprouts, sugar snap peas, and pickled mango on top, and watermelon and some kind of weird wafer cookies from Aldi on the plate. (They were supposed to be coconut wafers with caramel and sesame seeds, if I recall, but they were just sort of neutral wafers with caramel. Not bad, but not quite as exotic as the package promised.)

The pickled mango was a mistake! It was violently salty and spicy and not much else, with big chunks of rind. I was thinking it would be a sweetish chutney, but it was not! Live and learn. 

And since I mentioned color at the top, check out this beaut.

I have about a dozen pumpkins growing nicely, but this is the biggest, brightest one. It took me 49 years to figure out what I’m really good at, and that thing is: Growing pumpkins. I’ll take it!  I saved seeds from last year’s biggest jack-o’-lantern and planted them in composted soil, and that’s my whole secret.

The rest of it is just good soil. Good, good soil. I can’t take credit for it, but I’m glad.

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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.

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 382: All hands on deck

IS it Friday? Apparently it is Friday! Happy Friday. Today, the last kid has her last day of school (the other schools let out last month, last week, and earlier this week, respectively).

We’ve had hot, sunny weather all week, and countless numbers of ceremonies and little parties and I don’t even know what else, and I’ve been spending every spare minute working on the pool deck, and it just this minute started raining. Which is good, because I have been neglecting my garden in favor of working on the deck. 

We had some quick but delicious meals this week, with a real summery feel to them. Here’s what we had:

SATURDAY

Saturday was Sophia’s graduation! Little Baby New Year, all done with high school. 

Our first kid to graduate from Catholic high school. And that’s six out of ten kids done with high school!

After graduation she went to a friend’s party, and then we went out to eat, to the restaurant of her choice. Which was CHILI’S, because we have raised her right. Then we got ice cream, and I picked ginger ice cream, which is now on my list of things to make this summer. So refreshing. I want to make ginger ice cream with coconut, and mango ice cream with pecans, or some combination like that. 

SUNDAY
Roast beef sandwiches with swiss and chimichurri

Sunday after Mass I made some chimichurri

Jump to Recipe

and got started on the deck, and Damien cooked the roast beef. I attached three legs with carriage bolts on one side and screwed a big X, to reinforce it.

I didn’t bother trying to make the legs even because the ground is so uneven. Just literally leaning into that whole situation.

I’m using all salvaged wood, so a lot of the work is removing old nails and screws and extra bits of wood, and also I’m determined to do as much by myself as possible, so everything took a million billion years, and I truly don’t know what I’m doing, andI disturbed an awful lot of angry ants, so by the time it was dinner, boy oh boy, did that sandwich taste good.

Damien cooked the meat by seasoning it very heavily, like absolutely crusty, with salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and then he sears it in hot oil with a bunch of whole garlic cloves. Then he roasts it at 350 for about 45 minutes, and begins checking it for doneness. We like it quite rare, and it turned out juicy and tender and perfect. 

The chimichurri was also excellent.

Jump to Recipe

It’s like the flavor equivalent of if a toddler who just took a bath and escapes from his mother and goes and rolls around in the newly-mowed grass, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to him. 

MONDAY
Scrambled duck eggs with sausage on homemade biscuits

I prepped the biscuit dough in the morning, mixing the dry ingredients in one bowl, and the eggs and milk in another, and I shredded the butter on a box grater and then froze it. (If I’m going to make the dough right away, I freeze the butter first, and then grate it directly into the dry ingredients.) 

Jump to Recipe

Spent some more time on the deck, drilling out the holes for the leg bolts. I couldn’t put the legs on yet, because the deck still needed to be flipped, and I didn’t want it to be too heavy. I also worked on leveling out the ground to seat the post bases, close enough so you can jump off the deck into the pool, but not so close that it damages the pool. 

As I dug and measured and dug again and measured again and cussed and dug, I started having some massive flashbacks of the neverending pool prep we did a few years ago, when we kept digging and digging, trying to find some magical, mystical strata of ground that was not rocky (so it wouldn’t ruin the pool floor) but level (so the pool wouldn’t tip over), and every time we removed a rock, it turned out to be a GIANT ENORMOUS BOULDER, and when we got it out, ope, look at that, the ground wasn’t level anymore. And we DID truck in sand to level it off, but somehow it wasn’t that simple, and I remember it taking something like seventeen years to finish. So that’s why I want to do the deck myself! Because if I’m gonna suffer, at least I’ll only have one person mad at me (myself). 

So about half an hour before dinner I rushed in started sausages cooking, and threw the biscuit dough together, and baked twelve enormous biscuits. They turned out with a wonderful texture, just pillowy soft inside with a thin, crackly, buttery shell on the outside

but they tasted like straight baking soda. I have no idea what happened. Same recipe I always use. Is it because I broke up the assembly process? Is it because the butter was frozen? No idea. But I scrambled up a bunch of eggs and had the kids make orange juice, and it was a good enough meal.

After dinner I did get the kids to help me flip the deck over into the bases, and then while they held it, I attached the other three legs. 

Not! Quite! Straight! But pretty close. And, unlike me, more stable than it looks. 

TUESDAY
Tacos

Totally Unremarkable Tacos.

I took this picture of my taco resting on the arm of the living room chair, and you can see the piles of projects the kids brought home and boxes of miscellaneous stuff cleared out of the laundry room so Damien could work on the dryer and the living room not having been cleaned because I have been working on my deck and not yelling at people to clean more, and just THINGS AND STUFF EVERYWHERE. It’s fine. All manner of things shall be fine. But as you can see, it seemed like too much work to put salsa on. Startin to get a little tired. 

WEDNESDAY
Italian sandwiches, chips, watermelon, birthday cake

Tuesday, Dora and her friend came over to belatedly celebrate her birthday. I scurried around getting the sharpest wood scraps out of the yard, and made a bunch of meat and cheese platters

and we had nice sandwiches

and Clara made a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. Sadly, she ran out of time and wasn’t able to complete her plan, which was to recreate the Carvel cake that Kelsey Grammar and Jenna order to pull the misspelled cake refund con. So the cake just said FRAJER and we all had to just sort of sit with our choices in life. 

I heard it was delicious, though, unsurprisingly. Clara’s very good. 
And if I may toot my own horn for a mo, I’m sometimes pretty good at buying birthday presents

It was a book from her childhood, which we have been trying to remember the name of for years and years and years.

It’s about an alligator, and whenever I described it, everyone always thought I was talking about Lyle Lyle Crocodile. No! Not Lyle! I know I sound like the guy who is convinced there is a little mouse with a big hat, and he goes very fast, but no, NOT Speedy Gonzales. He’s a mouse! Anyway, she liked her present. Phew. 

I also did some laughably bad work on the deck, reinforcing the legs on the other long end

It was just one of those “all it has to do is not fall down” moments, and I think I arrived. The X I made on the first side has one plank on the inside of the legs crossing over the plank on the outside , but this second side of the deck is too close to the pool wall, so it had to — you know what, never mind. I’m the one who has to live with this; why should you get involved? It’s fine. 

THURSDAY
Poke bowls, potstickers

Thursday I attached a ladder to the short end of the deck

and reinforced the legs a bit more, replaced a few planks on top, annnnd started removing the side of the existing lifeguard station thingy on the other short end, with the intent of making it all into one big deck. Which wasn’t the original plan, but what is, these days? 

This may or may not work out. But it may! I added a fairly chimpy joist to join the two platforms, and now I need to buy some hardware to reinforce that, and then I can start adding to the floor, and putting up a railing. 

I haven’t yet decided what to do with the one long end that you see when you look straight at the pool. I have some pallets I could just attach to it, to make it more finished, kinda like this, but two of them

Or I could just attach some kind of other wood. I’m really trying to use just salvaged wood and only buy hardware, so I dunno. I may just save it for another year. My plan is to build steps to replace the ladder next year, and I’m going to stain it when I’m done building this year. 

Dinner was blessedly simple. I had remembered to take the ahi tuna out of the freezer in the morning, and although the cat did find it and start nefariously dragging it across the house like an absolute cartoon character, it was double bagged, so it survived. I started some good rice in the instant pot, got Clara to cut up a bunch of mangos, chopped up some sugar snap peas, and diced up some ahi tuna. So we had rice, tuna, mango, pea sprouts, sugar snap peas, and those spicy chili lime cashews from Aldi, and also the hot sweet Polynesian sauce from Aldi. 

It was SO spicy, but incredibly tasty. What an entertaining treat this meal is. 100% mouth party time.

I wasn’t sure there would be enough food, so I grabbed a couple of bags of frozen potstickers from Alid and just boiled ’em. Everyone was pleased. 

FRIDAY
Not actually sure

Last Friday (after I shared last week’s food post), I made lemon garlic shrimp on pasta, and it turned out spectacular.

I used this Sip and Feast recipe and I’m probably gonna make this exact thing again this Friday, because this time the other store had a sale on shrimp and I’m not made of stone. The recipe has a couple more steps than I would do if I were just throwing it together on intuition, but it’s totally worth it. Every flavor just popped right out, and the texture of the shrimp was absolutely perfect. 

Sophia is talking about celebrating the honest-to-goodness start of summer by taking the other kids out for pizza, and if that doesn’t pan out, there is tuna in the house, so there will be something for every palate. 

Oh, last Friday was also the feast of the Sacred Heart, so I also made something I’ve had my eye on for a while: Coeur à la Crème, following this recipe from Mon Petit Four. It was really quite easy, and I think I will make it every year for the solemnity. I need to work on the presentation, but I did achieve that Catholic What-The-Hell-Am-I-Actually-Eating feel.

and everybody thought it tasted good. I thought it would be like cheesecake, dense and heavy, with a light garnish of fruit, but it was actually kind of reversed: A thick, intense fruit compote on top of an airy, not-too-sweet creamy heart. Very pleasant. 

I didn’t have blackberries the recipe called for, so instead I made a compote with about a pound of strawberries and a pint of blueberries, to which I added two or three tablespoons of sugar and two tablespoons of water.

I simmered it for a bit and mashed it from time to time, and then mixed in a good slug of lilac jelly; and then I spooned out some of the liquid and mixed it with a few tablespoons of cornstarch, and added that back into the sauce, cooked it for a bit longer, and then took it off the heat and let it cool until dessert time. 

I don’t think I mentioned what the lilac syrup tastes like! It’s lovely. It does taste floral, but different from rosewater (which I don’t really like). It is sweet, of course, and a little bit citrusy, but not cloyingly sweet, and it just has a bright, lively but not too intense flavor, faintly like blueberry but brighter. I really like it, although it never completely gelled and is more like a very thick syrup than jelly. I think next year, I will put some of the lilac petals into the food processor and put them into the jelly, to give it a little more body. 

Oh, so I made a double recipe of the cream part, and one was in a large silicone heart mold, lined with cheesecloth as the recipe suggested. The rest, I made in small heart molds sprayed with cooking spray, and they did not come out at all. We had to spoon them out. Lesson learned! 

I also learned you can help your cream cheese achieve room temperature by not going shopping until the very last minute, and panicking a bit on the ride home

But like I said, it was hot and sunny!

And now, like I said, it is raining, so I can’t work on the deck, but can only sit here and think happily about not having to water my poor, neglected garden. I think I put 500 miles on the car this week, just to-and-fro-and-to-and-fro, and I’m so happy about today finally being the last day of school, you cannot imagine. I bought Corrie a wooden crow call for some reason, so we have that going for us. 

While I have been doing my completely voluntary deck and bridge projects, Damien has been incredibly busy with far less glamorous projects: The dryer, of course, and his car, and my car, and Moe’s car, and Lena’s car, and now today the dishwasher, and I’m almost certainly forgetting some stuff. The things that man has taught himself how to do just blows my mind. Somebody should make him some shrimp, at the very least. 

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Chimichurri

Dipping sauce, marinade, you name it

Ingredients

  • 2 cups curly parsley
  • 1 cup Italian parsley
  • 1/4 cup dried oregano (or fresh if you have it)
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes
  • 2 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 1 tsp pepper
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
  • 1 cup olive oil

Instructions

  1. Put all ingredients except olive oil in food processor. Whir until it's blended but a little chunky. 

  2. Slowly pour olive oil in while continuing to blend. 

 

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moron biscuits

Because I've been trying all my life to make nice biscuits and I was too much of a moron, until I discovered this recipe. It has egg and cream of tartar, which is weird, but they come out great every time. Flaky little crust, lovely, lofty insides, rich, buttery taste.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups flour
  • 2 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 8 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp cream of tartar
  • 1-1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, chilled
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

  3. Grate the chilled butter with a box grater into the dry ingredients.

  4. Stir in the milk and egg and mix until just combined. Don't overwork it. It's fine to see little bits of butter.

  5. On a floured surface, knead the dough 10-15 times. If it's very sticky, add a little flour.

  6. With your hands, press the dough out until it's about an inch thick. Cut biscuits. Depending on the size, you can probably get 20 medium-sized biscuits with this recipe.

  7. Grease a pan and bake for 10-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

What’s for supper? Vol. 381: Excuse me, stewardess. I speak chive.

I don’t know if you guys realize this, but June is, in fact, bustin’ out all over.
The feeling is getting so intense!
And the Fishers are so busy
That I’m always in a tizzy
But I still have time to make a wattle fence!

Because it’s Junnnnnnne!

And I do what I wannnnnnnt! Overall. 

I do apologize for how dead the site has been lately. I honestly have been writing, and I hope to have more up next week! I also think I have fixed the issue with the com box. If you left a comment last week and it didn’t show up, it’s because I had a leetle spam problem and still have to manually sort through almost 6,000 comments, which, honestly, I might just . . . not do. But like I said, I think I fixed it!

Here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, watermelon

Shopping day, uff cawse. I had planned grilled ham and cheese last week, but didn’t make it, so we had plenty of sourdough and sliced cheddar and ham. Easy peasy, and it was a good thing, because one kid had a party to go to (and a present to buy), two kids needed to be at work, and there was an art thing downtown and the non-working kids were helping the other kids set up, and I realized that meant the other kid was gonna be alone all day, so we invited a friend over for her, which turned into her meeting the friend at the beach (not that beach, the other beach) and then coming here, and then everyone needed to be picked up from their parties and jobs and arts and confession and whatnot, and, long story long, we had grilled cheese. 

Kids had a fire and made s’mores after dinner. I will eat many, many disgusting things, but I draw the line at s’mores, for some reason. 

A few months ago, when I still thought we had a 50/50 chance of seeing the parousia before June, I signed up to make dinner for the youth group. But I lost that bet, so on Saturday night I started hacking up pork shoulder and browning it.

I had bought some ludicrous number of pounds of pork, too much to fit in the slow cooker, so I put it in a giant casserole dish and covered it tightly with tinfoil and cooked it in the oven at 225 for about five hours. 

Here’s my pulled pork recipe.

Jump to Recipe

I bumped up all the seasonings a bit, used jarred jalapeño instead of fresh (without the juice), and added a heavy hit of liquid smoke. Oh my dammit, it smelled amazing. I thought I’d have to leave it cooking slowly overnight, but it was shreddy betty and so good. 

SUNDAY
Pulled pork sandwiches, chips, broccoli slaw, watermelon

Sunday was Corpus Christi, which I love so much. My 90-year-old friend has been coming to Mass with us, which is excellent, but of course she wasn’t quite up for a long walk in the blazing hot sun afterward, so I brought her home while the rest of the family joined in the procession. Found out later that Benny, who is not even 90, fainted! Just too much sun and not enough water, and plus we had stayed up late to watch Godzilla Minus One the night before. So down she went, and bopped her head on the pew when she fell. SHE IS FINE. But it was a worrisome day, because we have some medical nonsense in this family to worry about. But she was just very dehydrated. 

It turns out everyone else in the parish is also super busy in early June, so the youth group was a very small group, and even taking that into account, I absolutely CLOBBERED them with food. One smart thing I did, though, was realize that a cooler isn’t just for ice, but will also keep hot food hot. So I didn’t have to muck around with cooking in the church basement and trucking the food over to the other building this time, but just heated everything up at home and then brought it straight to the yoot. 

We had kaiser buns and pulled pork and two kind of BBQ sauce on the side, but the meat truly didn’t need it. Bunch of sliced onions and some of that hot cheese sauce I love so well for the sandwiches, tons of potato chips, tons of watermelon cut into chunks, and tons of soda. At the last minute I also made some broccoli slaw just to have something green.

I threw the broccoli into the food processor and then jammed some carrots in, but I wasn’t thinking clearly, and ended up with basically minced broccoli and discs of carrots. Which is fine, but it looked . . . dated. Can’t explain it, but it looked like someone’s elderly aunt had brought it to a birthday party and called it her famous slaw.

Anyway, I made the dressing from this coleslaw recipe, which calls for mayo, dijon mustard, maple syrup, celery seed, salt, and pepper. I skipped the celery seed and didn’t even notice it called for dijon mustard until about the middle of this sentence. Then I threw in some sliced almonds, and probably would have put in dried cranberries if we had had any. Considered sunflower seeds and realized I’m at least allegedly feeding teenagers, not chipmunks. 

Look, I took a few gummies last night to help me sleep, and I’m feeling too dumb to write short paragraphs, so you’re just gonna get the whole . . . pork. I don’t know. 

Anyway, there was SO much dang pork. Which is not a bad thing! I thought the addition of the liquid smoke was excellent, so I’ll be adding that from now on. 

MONDAY
Roast pork ribs, flavored rice, watermelon, broccoli slaw

Monday I wasn’t ready to look at pulled pork again yet, and I had arranged my day so that I was somehow doing errands for strangers much of the day? I live like I have a personal assistant who has a grudge against me. Anyway I got it all done, and got supper started at like five o’clock. Not pulled pork but roast pork ribs, because they were 99 cents a pound and I’m not made of stone. 

Pork ribs sprinkled heavily with salt and pepper and thrust under a hot broiler, turned once; leftover watermelon (did I mention that watermelons were on sale so I bought four?), leftover broccoli slaw, and something the kids covet ardently and I should probably make more often: Rice cooked in chicken broth. Truly, your jaw would drop if you saw how excited they were about this faintly yellow rice. 

And you know what, it’s good. Tastes like chicken. 

I don’t think I mentioned how the broccoli slaw turned out. The dressing tasted WONDERFUL when I made it, really zippy and nice; but it was one of those mysterious recipes that went flat right away, and got flatter every hour thereafter. So it was quite, quite bland by Monday. I was still happy to have something cool and vegetabally, but it was not exciting. I did like having the crunchy almonds in there. 

TUESDAY
Pizza with chive blossoms

My chives peaked over the weekend, and I had been meaning and meaning to fry the blossoms, but I just did not have time. So I made some pizzas on Tuesday: One pepperoni, one plain cheese, and one with black olive and leftover peppers and onions sauteed up, and then when it came out of the oven, I threw chive blossoms on top of it. 

Kinda wish I had put some of them on first before baking, because I think they would have been nice with a little frizzled, but they were good as they were. Kinda cute, not mindblowing.Tasted like chives. So now I know! 

WEDNESDAY
Pork tacos, watermelon

Wednesday I had to face the fact that I had forgotten to put the leftover pulled pork in the freezer, so it was do or die. Pork or die.

It was supposed to be taco day, so I just heated up the pork and served that with taco fixings. Did not adjust the seasoning or anything, and guess what, it was yummy. 

Or maybe I was just starving because I was going crazy with yard work, but I thought they were great. 

Wednesday I also culled baby peaches. Last year we had a late frost that killed all the buds, and we had zero peaches. This year we have . . . I honestly think over a thousand, on just the one tree. It just went berserk with pent-up peachiness. At first I was delighted, and then I realized that letting that many peaches grow to maturity would yield a bumper crop of small, tasteless peaches, and would probably also split the tree when they got heavy.

I HATE thinning baby plants. It’s not as bad as pinching off blossoms, but it’s pretty rough. Just feels so brutal and wrong. But I want to take care of my tree, so I spent a LONG time plucking off baby peaches, and after about an hour of staring up into the sun between the leaves, calculating six inches between peaches, and repeatedly getting a face full of crispy old peach blossom debris and picking baby peaches out of my cleavage, that particular emotional knife had been blunted quite a bit. 

Here’s what they look like. They’re the size of large olives, and they are too young to have pits. 

I have filled two gallon ziplock bags and I’m maybe 1/4 of the way through the tree. It turns out you can pickle baby peaches. This lady says they don’t taste like much, so they take on whatever flavor you put in the vinegar solution. I told myself I was going to try this, but honestly I think I’ll offer them on buy nothing and let them be someone else’s broken dreams this year. Or maybe just feed them to the ducks. Ducks have no dreams. 

THURSDAY
One-pan garlicky chicken thighs with potatoes and zucchini

Thursday was the first day this week I deliberately cooked something specifically for that day, rather than just dealing with whatever nonsense that hostile PA had set up for me. Samantha, or Simba, or whatever her name is.

What I had was a bunch of chicken thighs that were on sale, and zucchini that reminded me that I once made a zucchini dish that everybody liked, and it was on a week we were replacing the bathroom floor, so I figured it must be easy. So I made it again! Yay!

Got the chicken marinating in the morning. It’s a simple marinade, just olive oil and balsamic vinegar and apple cider vinegar, plus garlic powder, onion powder, salt and pepper, and fresh basil and garlic. I prepped the garlic by peeling it, putting it in a sandwich bag, and bashing it with the end of a rolling pin, so it was it kind of flattened fragments. I don’t know if there’s a name for this form of garlic, but I find it very useful in marinades, because it imparts garlic flavor to the whole thing, but also has little bits of garlic you can bite into.

So that marinated all day. I forgot to buy summer squash, but I cut up about four pounds of potatoes (skin on) and two large zucchini, also skin on. I cut them into thickish quarter-round wedges, and put them in a bowl covered with cold water to keep them from browning.

Later that day, I was worried they’d be getting soggy, so I drained the water off, recalling that I have heard that potatoes that have been doused with cold water will not get discolored even if you drain the water off. I wish I had done this sooner, so I’d have a better idea of how long you can do this in advance of cooking them, but I can say that they will go at least two hours after draining the water off without turning brown. Nice.

I sprayed a couple of giant sheet pans, put the chicken on, and then arranged the potatoes and zucchini in between the chicken. I didn’t pour all the marinade in, but I did fish out the basil and garlic with a slotted spoon and spread that over the chicken. Then I sprinkled the potatoes and zucchini with more garlic powder, onion powder, and salt, and just cooked it undisturbed for about forty minutes. 

It doesn’t look glamorous, but it’s really delicious. Probably wouldn’t have hurt to stir up the potatoes and zucchini 20 minutes in, so they’d be more brown on the top; but they had a great little crust and wonderful flavor on the bottom, so no complaints.  

 

The fresh garlic and basil are really pleasant and summery, and the chicken came out super juicy. I’m not a giant zucchini fan, but I remembered to cut it into big enough wedges so it didn’t get slimy, and it was really tasty with the slightly sweet, sharp marinade. Would have been good with some crusty bread to sop up the extra sauce. 

If you’re looking for an easy, one-pan meal that’s nice and summery, this is the one!

If you’re looking for something really fantastic to do with zucchini, I recommend this zuchhini agrodulce recipe from Sip and Feast. It’s quite a hassle, but holy wow, it is fantastic. I hope I have time to make this when vacation starts. 

FRIDAY
Lemon garlic shrimp pasta

This bag of shrimp I got on sale a few weeks ago has been in the freezer long enough. I had kind of a long argument with the kids wherein they accused me of CONSTANTLY serving shrimp lo mein, which I KNOW is not true, and even if it were, WHO COMPLAINS ABOUT SHRIMP LO MEIN. They were, of course, just yanking my chain, but I just dangle it out there all the time, begging one or more of our innumerable chain-yankers to come yank it. 

ANYWAY, I’m not going to make shrimp lo mein. I’m going to make lemon garlic shrimp pasta from Sip and Feast, who claims that it is easy and impressive. I like all those words (lemon, garlic, shrimp, pasta, easy, and impressive, not to mention sip and feast), so I don’t see how this can be bad. The jerks can eat plain pasta with butter, which I will admit is also delicious. 

This week the main things I’ve been working on are — well, Millie’s garden and Millie’s fall alert system, to be honest, and also my garden (got the last bits filled in with collard, hooray!) and adding legs to the final piece of salvaged platform, so we can have a little pool deck. I’ve only been to Home Depot three times so far, and I know that’s not going to be enough to satiate the project gods.

Oh, I also did some more work on my wattle fence, which is my pride and joy. It’s very possible it looks stupid and nobody wants to say anything, but I just love it so much. Any time I have more than half an hour free, I get the giant clippers and call the dog, and we go out to the woods and cut down as many saplings as I can drag. Then I sit and trim off all the green and all the twigs, and then I weave what’s left into my fence. It’s deeply satisfying.

I also have an ongoing project that’s less satisfying, and that is putting a lot of energy into not dealing with or even seeing the five trash bags of foam fragments that are in the dining room, which used to be in Corrie’s oversized bean bag chair, and which . . . hey, is there a violent stomach bug going around where you are? Because there is here. All I’m gonna say about that is: If you have a kid who is going through a picky stage and only eats rice for dinner? SOMETIMES THAT’S NOT A BAD THING. 

Anyway, we have ONE WEEK OF SCHOOL LEFT, the peonies all burst open the other day, Merlin says there is an indigo bunting somewhere in my yard, and I’m gonna get those legs on that deck if it kills me. And it will! But I plan to die at home, doing what I love (eating pork). 

Oh, today is the feast of the Sacred Heart, and I’m thinkin of making this Coeur à la Crème with Blackberry Sauce. I’m thinkin about a lot of things. 

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Clovey pulled pork

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

  4. When pork is tender, shred.

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One-pan garlicky chicken with potatoes, summer squash, and zucchini

Ingredients

  • 12 chicken thighs
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
  • 1/4 cup cider vinegar
  • 6 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
  • 2 tsp ground pepper
  • 1 Tbsp onion powder
  • 1 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • fresh basil, chopped
  • more salt, garlic powder, and onion powder for sprinkling
  • 4 lbs potatoes, scrubbed and sliced thickly
  • 6 assorted zucchini and summer squash, washed and sliced into discs with the skin on

Instructions

  1. Combine the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cider vinegar, garlic, garlic powder, onion, powder, salt, pepper, and fresh basil. Marinate the chicken thighs in this mixture for at least half an hour.

  2. Preheat the oven to 400.

  3. Grease two large baking sheets. Arrange the chicken, potatoes, and vegetables on the sheet with as little overlap as possible.

  4. Sprinkle additional salt, onion powder, and garlic powder on the potatoes and vegetables.

  5. Cook about 40 minutes or until chicken is completely done and potatoes are slightly brown on top.

What’s for supper? Vol. 358: In which we end strong (thinkin about beans)

Heyy! Merry Christmas! Happy goodbye old year. Happy indeed. Let’s end strong with FOOD. 

It’s been a bit since I’ve done a WFS, so I’ll just do a highlight reel of the last few weeks.

I published the last one before I finished making my VERY FIRST PAVLOVA. Turns out to be very easy. I used this recipe from Natasha’s Kitchen. You beat up a bunch of egg whites and sugar, then mix in lemon juice, corn starch, and vanilla. Then you just glop it onto a pan with parchment paper and bake it in a low oven for an hour; and then you turn the oven off and let it cool down verrry slowly. 

Then you whip some cream and sugar and plop that on top, and then you throw berries on it. That’s it!

I forget exactly what boneheaded thing I did, but I ended up putting the pavlova into an oven that was warm, but not actually turned on; and I didn’t notice for something like forty minutes. So then I turned it on for a while, and then I turned it off for a while. Guess what?? The pavlova still turned out fine! 

I was skeptical that I would want to eat this much meringue, but it’s got more to it than meringue, and was very pleasant, and not as blindingly sweet as I expected. I think the outer crust was a little tougher than it’s supposed to be, but it was still delicious. The outside is sweet and glossy and crisp, and the inside has a marshmallowy, almost custard-like flavor. It’s supposed to have more cream on top than you see here, but the whipping cream had frozen, so I didn’t have a lot to work with. 

As you can see, I put blackberries, blueberries, pomegranate arils, kiwi slices, and mint leaves on mine. That was a very pleasant combination. I thought the mint would taste weird, but it was very nice having that green freshness along with the hot sugar taste. Some people make wreath shapes, which would be very pretty. I also made a bunch of individual pavlovas. Lots of possibilities. Many more pavlovas in our future!

One of my birthday presents was this wonderful cookbook: Classic Indian Cooking by Julie Sahni.

That week, I ended up using a lot of odds and ends of meat we already had in the freezer, so my budget had a little room, and I splurged on a giant hunk of lamb. I cut it up and divided it, and froze 1/3 of the pieces along with the bone.

The first portion, I made into lamb braised in aromatic cream sauce (rogani gosht). You can see that recipe here. You can also make this dish with beef, which I’m sure I will end up doing, because it was fab. Fab fab fab.

Eating a hot bowl of rogani gosht is like being cuddled by a gigantic, affectionate, fluffy cat (that’s the fragrant cream part) who keeps licking you with its rough tongue (that’s the warming spice part). I know that’s weird, but normal descriptions just won’t DO for this dish. It’s not super spicy, but enough to get your attention, and the meat was insanely tender. It just fell apart with the merest nudge from a spoon. 

I also made a giant taboon bread. I wanted naan, but it was too late to get it started, so I went with this recipe, which is so easy, and you bake it in the oven all in one big slab.

Jump to Recipe

The only thing I forgot was to dimple the dough with my fingertips, and it had already been baking for 7-8 minutes, so like an idiot I stuck my hands in the hot oven and attempted to dimple it anyway. Did not get very far. 

But the meal was worth a little burnt fingers. I made a pot of rice in the Instant Pot and we had a really wonderful meal. 

The braised lamb doesn’t look like much, but I’m telling you. IT WAS MUCH. My goodness, what a treat. 

Let’s see, what else? 

For the last day of school, which was December 22 (ridiculous), I made cookies for Benny’s class party. Just good old reliable no-chill sugar cookies,

Jump to Recipe

which I cut out with little holes, and then filled the holes with crushed Jolly Ranchers, so when they baked, they had little candy windows in them.

We frosted them with royal icing and whatever miscellaneous decorations I could find in the cabinet,

and they turned out looking like a bit of a crime scene, but we did have fun. 

Another nice meal: Pulled pork on tater tots with red onions and corn. Maybe I was just hungry, but this meal was so freaking delicious.

I made the pulled pork using the apple cider vinegar and cloves recipe I have developed

Jump to Recipe

and it was just so dang tasty. 

Oh, and then we had this over-the-top bacon risotto for the last day of school. Heavy cream, egg yolks, bacon, salami, freshly-grated parmesan, white pepper, and so much butter . . .

I knew it was gonna be amazing, and it was. I didn’t even make anything else for dinner, and nobody complained. I had arborio rice in the house, leftover from the suppli I made for our anniversary, and now I don’t think I’m gonna be able to go back to my old cheap regular rice risotto ways. It was just so luxuriously creamy and rich. 

I think people will be asking for this dish for their birthdays. It’s really special.

On Sunday, it was finally Christmas eve! We went to Mass in the morning at our normal time, because Benny was altar serving. Then I got everybody to clean up the house. We weren’t expecting any guests, but we had SO much incredible extra clutter in the house — giant cartons of things, random baskets with other random baskets on top and wads of torn-up leggings flopping around, extra pieces of furniture, dying plants, half-finished crafts, and of course a million Amazon boxes, and of course all the cartons of Christmas decorations that I didn’t manage to put up. And there was this TREE in the living room, and some idiot had strung garlands all over the place, and the line between “merry merry” and “mental breakdown” was getting a little thin. The thought of starting with this mess and adding dozens and dozens of presents and half an acre of discarded wrapping paper and forty six tons of candy wrappers with little wet wads of candy still stuck to them was more than I could deal with. 

So I cracked the whip a bit, and we all cleaned that shit up. Even though we weren’t having guests! Then I made everyone take showers, and then we had supper, and then we decorated the tree, and then I started Alton Brown’s overnight cinnamon rolls.

I made a triple recipe

and had some help from Corrie spreading on the cinnamon sugar, rolling them up, and cutting them out. 

and then they got wrapped up and put in the fridge to rise slowly. 

Midnight Mass was lovely. They’ve started having it at actual midnight in the last few years, which is not so hard when your kids are older, and also it’s been warm out, so there wasn’t that horrible “venture out into the icy wind with your flimsy little spangled dress on” challenge. Corrie immediately went to sleep with her head on my lap, so I was tragically forced to sit down the entire time. 

We had the foresight to take pictures at the beginning of Mass, rather than at the end. Here are the goons (some of them still in the Covid window, UGH):

and Ma and Pa Goon:

Got home, Damien and I put allll the presents and stockings out

and then we tottered off to bed at around 2:30 a.m. 

Dora and Moe came over for Christmas, and we had an excellent Christmas day. We had cinnamon buns and bacon, orange juice and eggnog, and plenty of fruit. Several of the kids made each other homemade presents, and everyone just went above and beyond with thoughtful and amusing gifts.

 

For dinner, we had our traditional Chinese takeout, acquired in the correct volume by pretending to be four different people (it’s a long story); and Irene got her traditional Jersey Mike’s sub because Chinese food makes her throw up; and then we all played with our new toys and ate lots of candy and then eventually we went to sleep and slept SO HARD. 

The next few nights, we had easy dinners: Leftover Chinese food one day, and Italian sandwiches the next, and then we watched Baahubali: The Beginning. 

This is one of the most gorgeous, violent, insane, joyfully ridiculous movies I have ever seen, and the very last thing that happened on screen made me go, “WHAT???????” So we’ll be watching part 2, believe me! In the mean time, I went back to my Indian cookbook and pulled the rest of that lamb out of the freezer, and this time I made a curry with tomatoes and potatoes, and also a big pot of rice and some spinach yogurt salad. 

Sahni describes this curry as having a “garnet-colored sauce” and that’s just what it is. It’s so rich and the spices blend so nicely, I just don’t even know how to tell you how tasty it was. 

I had my doubts about the spinach salad (you cook some spinach, squeeze it out and chop it up and mix it into some heavily seasoned yogurt and sour cream), but it was a completely delightful accompaniment to the curry, very cooling and refreshing along with the savory meat. 

I think one kid ate the curry or the yogurt salad. The rest of them had leftovers or eggs. Too bad! Damien and I both had seconds and it made us very happy. 

I chose this meal because the recipe called for stuff I already had in the house, but I am so hyped about making more recipes from the book. Her style is nice and clear, and I’m excited!

And that’s it! That’s the year. We have New Year’s Eve coming up, and we usually have a DIY sushi party; then New Year’s Day is Sophia’s birthday, and then we have Benny’s birthday party that we had to postpone because we all got Covid, and then it’s Damien’s birthday, all in the first eight days of the year. I may just make a series of pavlovas. I can see it now: Turning the oven on, turning it off again, turning it on again, turning it off again, whipping more cream, eating more whipped cream, turning the oven on . . . .

I can think of worse fates. 

Oh, one last thing: Benny got a taiyaki maker for Christmas.

She made her first batch with Nutella filling. If you’ve had yummy taiyaki, what filling did it have? I’m thinking of red bean paste for New Year’s Eve, if I can find the right kind of beans. 

That’s it. That’s my final words of 2023: IF I CAN FIND THE RIGHT KIND OF BEANS. If the world ends and this is my legacy, estoy contenta.

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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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No-fail no-chill sugar cookies

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

Servings 24 large cookies

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350.

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

  3. Add egg and extracts.

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

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

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

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

  8. Let them cool completely before decorating!

 

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Clovey pulled pork

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

  4. When pork is tender, shred.

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 349: Take that, Fürst-Pückler

Happy Friday!  Today I am knee-deep in Dalekanium. This week, we had our big anniversary party (our anniversary is Oct. 25, but we had a party on the 15th), and now I’m buckling the heck down with Halloween costumes. First I managed to get incredibly sick for 24 hours, but I’m working my way past that now and made some progress on Dalek Sec:

This may look primitive to you, but I think my budget is roughly the same as what the BBC had to work with in 1963, so it’s fine. 

This is for Corrie. Last year, she was Duck from Sarah and Duck, and Benny was Sarah. 

Benny is a little fed up with being civil and well-behaved, and this year she’s going as Classic Green Goblin. More on that later!

So this week, we kinda front-loaded all the good food, and then I collapsed like a bunch of broccoli. We did not, however, have any broccoli. I just don’t like it very much, except one time when I was litle, my father took us to to a Japanese restaurant in New York City, and I didn’t know what to get, so they picked a tempura dish for me, and there was a single piece of each thing. I shall never forget that tempura broccoli.

Here’s what we did have: 

SATURDAY
Aldi pizza

Saturday I was busy cracking the whip, forcing my poor beleaguered children to do foolish things like sweep the hallway and clean under the couch cushions even though the guests might not even look under the couch cushions. 

On Saturday I made two kinds of ice cream, the panna cotta, and the suppli.

I was planning pistachio ice cream, and I followed this recipe, which is a copy cat Ben and Jerry’s recipe. I only made one teeny error: I uh bought cashews instead of pistachios. In my defense, “cashew” has an “sh” in it, and “pistachio” has a “ch.” I honestly think that was what confused me. It doesn’t take much, on a good day, but on Saturday I had a migraine and I was more than half zombie. (Did I tell you I finally got a referral to a neurologist??)

My original plan, you see, was Neapolitan ice cream, which is supposed to be pistachio, vanilla, and strawberry, to kinda get the colors of the Italian flag, although AKSHULLY: “The first recorded recipe was created by head chef of the royal Prussian household Louis Ferdinand Jungius in 1839, who dedicated the recipe to Fürst Pückler. To this day, the German name for Neapolitan ice cream is Fürst-Pückler-Eis.”

Soo, I forged ahead with cashews. Take that, Fürst-Pückler. I added some almond extract and, at the last minute, threw in some white chocolate chips. 

The other ice cream I made on Saturday was chocolate, and I just followed the Ben and Jerry’s recipe from their Ice Cream book. 

Jump to Recipe

They actually have three chocolate ice cream recipes. This one uses both  unsweetened baker’s chocolate and cocoa powder. 

Then I made the panna cotta, and I made my second dopey move. I used this vanilla bean recipe, which I had made last time and it turned out so nice. So I infuse the cream, I make the special vanilla-rubbed sugar, I slowly bring the cream to the right temperature, I bloom the gelatin, I chill the cream, I’m going along, I’m going along, and I’m tasting it from time to time as one does, and every time I taste it, I think to myself, “Wow, it’s not very sweet, is it?” And every time, my entire response to this is, ” . . . . huh.” So I clear out the fridge and pour the panna cotta into styrofoam cups in muffin tins and close the door and feel very acccomplished, because that’s done . . . 

. . . and then I see the bowl of sugar, still sitting there. That’s why it wasn’t very sweet! Light dawns on blockhead. I was in quite a panic, because I didn’t know what could be done; but a Facebook friend clued me in that you can re-heat gelatin, as long as you do it gradually. So I put the sugar into the pot, added one or two of the cups of cream mixture and made a little slurry and heated that a tiny bit, and then slowly added and very slowly heated and stirred the rest of the cream back in, until the sugar was dissolved. Then I put it back in the cups and back in the fridge. Whew. 

Then the suppli!

Suppli, also sometimes called arancini, are breaded, deep-fried balls of risotto with a center of melted mozzarella. We ate them just about every day in Rome for lunch, where you could get them for 1,000 Lire (about a dollar) in 1995, which is when I spent a semester in Rome (Damien’s class was a couple years after mine). 

It’s a time-consuming recipe, but eminently worth it.

Jump to Recipe

I sprang for arborio rice, which I don’t always do, and the risotto came out so mild and creamy, I could weep. I let it chill, added egg, and then formed it into balls with little cubes of fresh mozzarella inside, then rolled them in panko crumbs. They sort of slumped because the risotto was so creamy; but I chilled them overnight and by the time it was time to fry them, they held together nicely. 

Then that was enough for one night. 

SUNDAY
Antipasto platters, suppli, fettuccine and ragu, bread, ice cream, panna cotta with berries

Sunday Damien made the ragù using this amazing Deadspin recipe. It was heavy on the veal this time, and it was superb, as always. 

I started the other two kinds of ice cream in the morning: The cherry vanilla (just vanilla ice cream with maraschino cherries thrown in, plus some almond extract and a little of the syrup from the cherries), and the grape sorbet. I had frozen some grape mash from when we processed all those millions of Concord grapes and all week I have been trying to think of a joke for this picture, but I got nothing

Feel free, like if you want to show it to your doctor or something, I don’t know. 

Anyway I managed to make the grape sorbet and the cherry ice cream without incident, and stowed them in the freezer to firm up for evening. Then the only thing I had to still make was the bread. Easy! I can make bread!

Jump to Recipe

I decided four loaves would probably be enough, so I made a big batch of dough, and, because it was a little chilly in the kitchen, I turned on the oven for a few minutes, then turned it off and put the dough in there to rise. 

Then I forgot I had done so. 

Then

I asked Damien

to preheat the oven for me,

so I could bake the bread. 

AND THAT IS NOT HOW YOU MAKE BREAD. I realized ten minutes into it what I had done, and it was definitely too late. The only good thing I could think was that this was the third idiotic thing I had done (first the cashew pistachio ice cream, then the sugarless panna cotta, and now the half-baked bowl of dough), and three is the magic number, so surely I was done being stupid! 

I had a tiny little bit of stupidity left in me, though, so I thought, “Well, as long as I have this dough, it couldn’t hurt to try baking it and see what happens.” So I clawed out the part that was still dough-like and made it into balls and baked it like rolls. 

When I say “like” rolls, I mean . . . well . . . 

In my defense, that’s about what I expected. And I did throw them away! Didn’t even feed them to the ducks. 

By this time, it was starting to smell pretty great in the house because of the ragù, and it was time to sit down and have some fun making antipasto trays. I don’t even know what-all I got. Just this and that, some cured meats and olives and fresh and pickled vegetables and various cheeses. 

and breadsticks, and a bunch of grapes and clementines

and I made a bunch of bruschetta out of store-bought bread, and all the kids came and brought more bread just for eating, and they brought flowers, too.

The suppli fried up REAL nice (I think I ended up with about 30) 

Our friends Sarah, Tiffany, and Theresa came and we all got to just sit around and eat and talk and laugh and it was so nice. 

Oh, and the panna cotta turned out fine! Everyone liked it. I meant to macerate the berries, but I forgot, so I just threw them on top, and it was great. 

So, happy almost anniversary to us. I wish I had gotten more pictures!

As long as I’m going on and on and on, I might as well tell you about my patio chairs. I got them FREE on the side of the road, and then I found cushions at Walmart on clearance, and don’t they look nice?

Whew. 

 

MONDAY
Leftover pasta and ragu

Monday, naturally, we had tons of leftover food, so I bought some more pasta on the way home and we had ragù again, which no one was mad about, believe me. It’s so good. 

TUESDAY
Aldi pizza again

Tuesday was when I had to admit I wasn’t just tired after the party, I was really sick. I dropped Corrie off at school and realized I wasn’t in any shape to drive home, so I parked in the school lot and fell asleep in the car for forty minutes, then crept home and slept most of the next 24 hours. Damien got pizza and managed everything else.

WEDNESDAY
Rotisserie chicken, salad, and leftover antipasto

Wednesday I felt half human, so I just napped a bit and then picked up some rotisserie chickens and cut them up, and pulled the rest of the leftover antipasto elements out of the fridge

and I had a nice little girl dinner 

Do you see how thick they cut the prosciutto, though? I forgot about this. I wasn’t watching, and they cut it like ham! I was so annoyed. I had been planning to make some kind of prosciutto-wrapped fruit slices for the party, but when I opened the package, it was impossible. Oh well. Pickled vegetables make everything better. 

THURSDAY
Burgers and chips

Thursday I was like, oops, the person who is me has still not gone shopping this week; so I got some hamburger meat, and we had burgers. 

Look at me, I had sugar snap peas instead of chips. I’m kind of furious at how slowly I’m losing weight, but it is coming off. Slowly. (Don’t ask me how I can eat panna cotta and prosciutto and still be furious about how slowly I’m losing weight. I just can, okay?) 

FRIDAY
I have no idea. Noooooo idea. I don’t even know what food is. I should have saved those rolls. 

I would seriously rather eat those than come up with something new for nine people to eat. Take that, Fürst-Pückler.

Oh, you know what? I never said, but the cashew white chocolate ice cream was really good. I may make it on purpose sometime.

 

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Suppli (or Arancini)

Breaded, deep fried balls of risotto with a center of melted mozzarella. 
Make the risotto first and leave time to refrigerate the suppli before deep frying. 

Ingredients

  • 12 cups chicken stock
  • 8 + 8 Tbs butter
  • 1 cup finely chopped onions
  • 4 cups raw rice
  • 1 cup dry white wine
  • 1 cup grated parmesan cheese

To make suppli out of the risotto:

  • risotto
  • 1 beaten egg FOR EACH CUP OF RISOTTO
  • bread crumbs or panko bread crumbs
  • plenty of oil for frying
  • mozzarella in one-inch cubes (I use about a pound of cheese per 24 suppli)

Instructions

  1. Makes enough risotto for 24+ suppli the size of goose eggs.


    Set chicken stock to simmer in a pot.

    In a large pan, melt 8 Tbs. of the butter, and cook onions slowly until soft but not brown.

    Stir in raw rice and cook 7-8 minutes or more, stirring, until the grains glisten and are opaque.

    Pour in the wine and boil until wine is absorbed.

    Add 4 cups of simmering stock and cook uncovered, stirring occasionally until the liquid is almost absorbed.

    Add 4 more cups of stock and cook until absorbed.

    If the rice is not tender by this point, keep adding cups of stock until it is tender. You really want the rice to expand and become creamy.

    When rice is done, gently stir in the other 8 Tbs of butter and the grated cheese with a fork.

  2. This risotto is wonderful to eat on its own, but if you want to make suppli out of it, read on!

  3. TO MAKE THE SUPPLI:

    Beat the eggs and gently mix them into the risotto.


    Scoop up about 1/4 cup risotto mixture. Press a cube of mozzarella. Top with another 1/4 cup scoop of risotto. Roll and form an egg shape with your hands.


    Roll and coat each risotto ball in bread crumbs and lay in pan to refrigerate. 


    Chill for at least an hour to make the balls hold together when you fry them.


    Put enough oil in pan to submerge the suppli. Heat slowly until it's bubbling nicely, but not so hot that it's smoking. It's the right temperature when little bubbles form on a wooden spoon submerged in the oil. 


    Preheat the oven if you are making a large batch, and put a paper-lined pan in the oven.


    Carefully lower suppli into the oil. Don't crowd them! Just do a few at a time. Let them fry for a few minutes and gently dislodge them from the bottom. Turn once if necessary. They should be golden brown all over. 


    Carefully remove the suppli from the oil with a slotted spoon and eat immediately, or keep them warm in the oven. 

 

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Jerry's Chocolate Ice Cream

This is the more textured chocolate ice cream from the Ben and Jerry's ice cream recipe book. It has a rich, dusky chocolate flavor and texture. Makes 2 quarts. This recipe requires some chill time before you put the cream mixture into the machine.

Ingredients

  • 4 oz unsweetened chocolate
  • 2/3 cup cocoa powder
  • 3 cups milk
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 2 cups heavy or whipping cream
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions

  1. Melt the unsweetened chocolate. I used a double boiler, but you can use a microwave if you're careful. Whisk in the cocoa and continue heating until it's smooth. It's okay if it's clumpy. Continue heating and whisk in the milk gradually until it's all blended together. Remove from heat and let cool.

  2. In another bowl, whisk, the eggs until light and fluffy. Gradually whisk in the sugar and continue whisking until completely blended. Add in the cream and vanilla and continue whisking until blended.

  3. Add the chocolate mixture into the cream mixture and stir to blend. Cover and refrigerate for about three hours, or until it is cold.

  4. Use the cold mixture in your ice cream machine. I used my Cuisinart and let it churn for thirty minutes, then let it cure overnight.

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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.

What’s for supper? Vol. 336: Aubergine positivity

Happy Friday! All this week, a certain child has spent most of her day at farm camp, and I’m not going to say I’ve gotten a tremendous amount done and slept extremely well all week because of that, but I will say I’m marking next year’s calendar to make sure we get a slot. Some people need farm camp, and that’s a fact. 

Here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Gochujang smoked chicken thighs, rice, raw string beans

Usually Saturday meals are pretty feeble because I’m shopping and not cooking, but we had chicken thighs in the freezer, so I started marinating them in the morning and Damien started smoking them around noon.

The marinade was, more or less:

About 1 cup gochujang
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup soy sauce
about a head of garlic, minced 

marinated several hours, and he smoked ’em good. I made a big pot of white rice (I made extra, anticipating a meal later in the week), and just served fresh string beans raw, which is my favorite way to eat string beans.

Very good indeed. 

I looked into making my own gochujang, because it’s a little expensive to buy around here. I am growing ghost peppers in my garden, because, I don’t know why, and I thought maybe I could make gochujang with them. But it’s not the right kind of pepper (you want something sweet as well as hot), and you also need other ingredients which would also be expensive to buy around here, and maybe I’ll just . . . not. I like the little red tubs gochujang comes in, anyway. 

SUNDAY
BLTs, root beer floats, strawberry galette with candied basil

Sunday was Lucy’s birthday (party and cake later), and she requested BLTs and root beer floats. Can do. 

The strawberry basil galette was just something I wanted to make. I spotted the recipe on America’s Test Kitchen, and if it interests you at all, save the recipe on your first view, because they will want you to register for a free trial and you know how that ends up. For dumb reasons, I ended up going to a second site to find a recipe for the dough, and it’s a fine recipe, but I was extremely hot, which make my IQ and reading comprehension plummet; result being that I chilled the dough way too long, and when I tried to roll it out, it got VERY RUSTIC INDEED. I think the recipe was fine; I just should have let it warm up more before I tried to manipulate it. 

The galette really is an easy recipe, though, albeit with several steps. You  hack up the strawberries and then microwave them with strawberry jam and few other things, and the dough is also just a few ingredients, mostly butter. You heap the filling on the rolled-out dough and then bundle up the sides. A trained bear could do this. 

The thing that makes this recipe special are candied basil leaves, which you also make in the microwave

and a sweet balsamic reduction drizzle

None of this is hard, per se, but I am telling you that I was extremely hot and getting dumber by the minute, and I still had to fry six pounds of bacon. So by the time it was time to put dessert together, I made a few poor choices,  including but not limited to leaving the balsamic reduction in a little glass on the counter, without telling anyone what it was. And of course it looks like motor oil, so the kid on dish duty just went “ew” and washed it out before dessert time. 

SO, tragically we had Rustic Overheated Trained Bear Strawberry Galette Without Any Balsamic Reduction Drizzle

Actually I made two, and the other one looked even more like it had been dropped out of a high window. But the pastry was flaky and buttery, the strawberries were tender and sweet, and the candied basil was so good with the fruit, it made me mad that I’ve spent my whole life not eating basil with strawberries. Will definitely make again, although probably when it’s cool enough that I can retain my human form. 

MONDAY
Blueberry chicken salad

Monday I ended up running around all day doing I don’t even know what, so Damien roasted the chicken breast and cut it up, and we had mixed greens with chicken, blueberries, toasted almond slivers, crumbled feta, and diced red onions.

I had mine with balsamic vinegar. This is a great salad, with A#1 Hearty Salad Debris left at the bottom after you’ve dutifully eaten all your greens. 

TUESDAY
Regular tacos

Tuesday was another crazy-go-nuts day, and we have some minimalist tacos for supper, without even chips, because I forgot to buy any

but then we got the kids going on a Doctor Who and Damien and I finally took our new-to-us kayaks out, which we haven’t had a chance to do all summer.

The sky was hazy with humidity and some wildfire smoke from Canada, but the air over the water felt clear and cool, and we zooped right out to the middle of the pond. 

Fish were leaping, loons were lamenting, and water bugs bopped and skated everywhere.

We could nose right up in among the waterlilies and weeds to see what was going on on the other side (just pond things, plus more frogs).

And we had about an hour out on the water, just doing nothing at all, besides being in boats.

Kayaks are so good. I know you can learn a lot about kayaking and get really good at it, but you can get competent at kayaking on still or calm water in about ninety seconds. 

So that was pretty sweet! Must do that again soon. 

WEDNESDAY
Hot dogs, chips

Wednesday I set up a meat race, and whoever defrosted first got to be supper. 

I know there are ways to defrost meat quickly, but my actual goal was to put off having to think about dinner for a while, so this was the way to go. 

Hot dogs won. What a surprise! Oh well, I guess I just have to make hot dogs for supper. 

THURSDAY
Roasted pork ribs, stuffed grape leaves, fried eggplant

Thursday I finally hauled out the extra rice I had cooked earlier in the week, and Benny and I harvested a few dozen of the biggest, juiciest grape leaves we could find, and a big bunch of wild mint.

There are many theories on how to make stuffed grape leaves, and generally you will not start with already-cooked rice, but I wanted to see if I could go from untouched kitchen to finished grape leaves in as short a time as possible, so that’s what we were trying this time. So we just started throwing stuff in a bowl of cold rice. We added a ton of chopped mint, quite a lot of salt, and oregano, freshly-ground pepper, a generous amount of sumac, a diced onion, and several glugs of olive oil. 

Then I tried what would happen if we rolled up the rice in uncooked grape leaves. What happens is the leaves crack when you roll them, and sproing open when you put them down. So I boiled some water, dunked the leaves in for a few minutes, and then put them in ice water, and then we rolled them. Or I rolled a few and then dashed out to pick up Corrie, and Benny rolled most of them. 

First we consulted this video we made a few years ago, when we made dolmas for the first time. (If you have an ad blocker on, you will not be able to see the video, because it does make you watch a short ad first, sorry!)

Anyway the method is: You place the leaf on the table face down (veins up), with the point toward you. Put a scoop of rice in the middle, fold in the sides, and then fold up the bottom over the rice, and continue rolling it up to the top, and put it on a pan, seam down, to be cooked later. Easy peasy. 

It was definitely trickier working with cold, cooked rice than with a warm, sticky rice with cooked onions and such, but it was possible to do it this way. I lined a pot with parchment paper (you can also use a few layers of grape leaves), stacked the grape leaves in it, and added a few cups of chicken broth and threw some slices of lemon in there, and simmered it for about half an hour. 

While that was cooking, I broiled the boneless pork ribs with salt and pepper. I had been planning something a little more mediterranean, some kind of kebabs or something, but I was straight up out of time, and sizzling hot pork ribs with salt and pepper are never a bad choice as long as you don’t overcook them. 

Earlier in the day, Benny and I had prepped the eggplant. I had two eggplants, one from the supermarket

and one ichiban eggplant from my garden 

Now look, ichiban eggplants are supposed to look like that. They are sweet, the skin is thin and tender, and they grow quickly and you get several on a plant. But the two together did kinda look like I was setting up some kind of MLM photoshoot. 

Hey bestie! These days are gettin hot hot hot, sun wearing sunglasses emoji! that’s why I’m so grateful I have GloVolve CLEEN/ION LYFEpowdr on my side, heart eyes emoji! Just shake up a little tasty breakfast dust for myself, dynamite emoji, and this trim mama is ready to go, running woman emoji! DM me for details if you want to get in on this disgusting bullshit.

RESULTS DON’T LIE GIRLFRIEND 

Anywurrrrr, we cut them both up, skins on, salted both sides, and let them sweat it out between layers of paper towels. (This is to get the excess moisture out, and you can do it the night before or in the morning or just half an hour or so before you plan to fry the eggplant.) 

Right before supper, I made some batter, dragged I tweaked the recipe a bit, and I’m very happy with it. The texture is fantastic, very light with a crisp, shiny or knobby shell on the outside, depending on how hot the oil is

and it tastes mild at first, but has a nice spicy kick. 

The only difference I could discern between the two kinds of eggplant was that the big one was big and the little one was little. Both had their charms!  

I was very proud of myself for steaming grape leaves and frying eggplant while the meat was broiling, and I unironically consider it one of the major accomplishments of my life, to produce three hot foods cooked three ways at exactly 6:00. 

It was just such a good meal. I set out more lemon slices to squeeze over everything, and it was fab. 

Okay, YES, some kind of spicy tomato-based dipping sauce would have put it over the top and tied everything together, but it was still an excellent meal. 

Oh, so the cheater’s grape leaves were good! I’ll probably go back to consulting a recipe and doing it in some approved way next time, but just crashing everything together worked well enough and I feel like I have officially made stuffed grape leaves for the year. And it was pretty nice to have a meal with three ingredients from our own yard.

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just reglar ol pizza. No complaints from me!

Oh, our local little market is now selling goat meat! It’s pricy but I can swing a few pounds, anyway. I love goat meat. Who has ideas for what to make? Something juicy and Indian. My mortal and pestle want to know. 

 

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Fried eggplant

You can salt the eggplant slices many hours ahead of time, even overnight, to dry them before frying.

Ingredients

  • 3 medium eggplants
  • salt for drying out the eggplant

veg oil for frying

3 cups flour

  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 Tbsp cumin
  • 1 Tbsp paprika
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes
  • 2-1/2 cups water
  • 1 Tbsp veg oil
  • optional: kosher salt for sprinkling

Instructions

  1. Cut the ends off the eggplant and slice it into one-inch slices.
    Salt them thoroughly on both sides and lay on paper towels on a tray (layering if necessary). Let sit for half an hour (or as long as overnight) to draw out some of the moisture. 

  2. Mix flour and seasonings in a bowl, add the water and teaspoon of oil, and beat into a batter. Preheat oven for warming. 

  3. Put oil in heavy pan and heat until it's hot but not smoking. Prepare a tray with paper towels.

  4. Dredge the eggplant slices through the batter on both sides, scraping off excess if necessary, and carefully lay them in the hot oil, and fry until crisp, turning once. Fry in batches, giving them plenty of room to fry.

  5. Remove eggplant slices to tray with paper towels and sprinkle with kosher salt if you like. You can keep them warm in the oven for a short time.  

  6. Serve with yogurt sauce or marinara sauce.

What’s for supper? Vol. 242: Vindaloo! Couldn’t escape if I wanted to!

Hey! Didn’t get a food post out last week, but I have a decent excuse this time: We got about forty inches of snow

and lost power for three days. We had a drought this summer, so the trees are brittle, and tons of them fell on power lines, including the ones right across the street from us.

We have a well, which is run by an electric pump, so that means we also didn’t have water for those days, and that means we had to buy water (in the next town, because the stores here were closed, because the power was out) to flush the toilets.  Yes, you can melt snow to get water to flush toilets, but if you’ve actually ever done this, you’ll know it takes about a roomful of snow to melt down into about three cups of rather smelly water, which is not enough to flush two toilets that ten people have been using; and also, if you are trying to keep your house warm, I do not recommend bringing in a roomful of snow to melt, with a heat source that you do not have! Everything was like that: Yes, there is a sort-of kind-of solution, but is it better? Unclear. The dog, at least, had a wonderful time. He always has a wonderful time.

Anyway we survived by the light of candles and light sabers,

and we didn’t have any babies or toddlers, so that made it easier. I had just bought a ton of comforters on clearance, so we had plenty of bundling material. We even lucked out in that I hadn’t done the weekly shopping yet when the power went out, so all we lost was a pack of ground beef. And we are now the proud owners of a small but decent generator, and all my baby trees survived, and we’re very, awfully tired of board games and turkey sandwiches. 

The power came back on last Friday, which was St. Patrick’s day, and our bishop did give a meat dispensation, so we popped out and put together a nice meal for that: Irish breakfast with all the parts we actually want, so no blood sausage or anything dyed green, but sourdough toast, fried mushrooms, beans, roast tomatoes, roast potatoes, bacon, and eggs fried in bacon fat. 

Very tasty, because how could it not be. I got cherry tomatoes this time, rather than attempting to roast slices of large tomatoes, which are insanely fragile. I mean who isn’t these days, but the cherry tomatoes was a good idea. 

SATURDAY
Hot dogs and smile fries 

I actually love hot dogs. The kids act like it’s some terrible thing when we have hot dogs for dinner, because they are barely American, possibly barely human. 

SUNDAY
Antipasto plate, pasta and ragu, garlic bread, vanilla bean panna cotta with fresh fruit

Sunday was St. Joseph’s day. We usually have a big Italian feast with several courses, but we were still sort of in shambles from the power outage, so we kept it on the modest side. I put together two big antipasto plates with various cheeses, cured meats, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and fruit

and yes, I was worried I hadn’t bought enough food. 

But I had.

Damien made a wonderful ragù with veal, pork, and pancetta. Wow, it was good. Like especially good. He uses this recipe from Deadspin, but it comes out different every time, and it was so savory and lively. 

We had a bunch of bruschetta for the antipasto, and garlic bread for the pasta. And Italian ices, and then also for dessert, I made something I’ve been wanting to try forever: Panna cotta. I used this recipe from Serious Eats and started infusing the cream and milk with vanilla bean pods the night before. 

You rub the vanilla bean seeds into the sugar, which feels very fancy. Then in the morning, I bloomed some unflavored gelatin powder in milk with vanilla extract, warmed up the cream, scraped the insides of the vanilla bean pods into it, and whisked in the gelatin mixture and the vanilla sugar. Then I just poured it into ramekins, covered them with plastic wrap, and let it chill for the rest of the day. 

Shortly before dinner, I mixed a little sugar with blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. I didn’t want them to break down a lot, so I didn’t do this far ahead of time. When it was dessert time, I ran a knife around the inside rim of the ramekin and then slammed them upside down on a saucer, and they came out well. Topped with the sugared fruit, plus some slices of mango, and oh it was so pretty

We also had some kind of fragile almond cookies on the side, I forget what it was called. 

I’ve never had panna cotta before, but it was a wonderful texture, silky smooth, and very creamy and refreshing. The vanilla bean specks had gathered at the bottom, so they were strewn all over the top of the glossy turned-out panna cotta and looked very elegant. 

Some of the kids opted to keep theirs in the ramekin and just eat them like cup custards. This is also a normal way to serve them, although people like to make them in glass containers, even wine glasses, if they’re going to serve them this way. 

So, very pleased with this foray. Damien, who isn’t a big fan of custards and such, thought they were great. I see many kinds of panna cotta in our future! You can put whatever you want in there. 

MONDAY
goblin food

Monday I served a truly terrible meal of very burnt chicken nuggets, a wad of very underdone hash browns, and dried-out leftover pasta. 

This kind of meal can be made more appealing by taking pains to make the table attractive. You can achieve this look by not clearing away yesterday’s dessert trash. Follow me for more etc. etc. 

TUESDAY
Reubens, chips

Tuesday there was still corned beef on sale, so I threw a few hunks in the Instant Pot for a few hours, and we had the meat sliced on toasted marbled rye bread with thousand island dressing, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut. 

Wish I had run the whole sandwich under the broiler to melt the cheese, but it was still quite delicious. I really don’t miss boiled dinner at all. Corned beef is great, but it needs to be squashed in among other tasty things, not just lying there like a cadaver. 

WEDNESDAY
Pork vindaloo and rice, pineapple

I was having a conversation about real mindfulness with my family — about the experience of deliberately standing as nothing but a witness — and the tremendous sense of gratitude that often arises when you’re able to shift into this mode. I realized this happens to me often while I’m cooking, which explains why this isn’t really a recipe blog, per se, but more of a food experience appreciation blog (as well as a big family slice of life blog). And it explains why I often forget to taste while I’m cooking, which I have frequently felt very guilty and stupid about. It’s because I’m not thinking about the end result, but just feeling overwhelmed with the beauty of the things passing through my hands, the colors and sensations and smells and patterns. This does not make for the best food, necessarily, but it makes my life better!

Anyway, Indian food is very conducive to this kind of experience. Just assembling the ingredients almost always puts me in a different frame of mind. Everyone had been sick for several days with a nasty head cold one of the kids brought home, and I was very optimistic about knocking that out, at least while we were actively eating, when I saw what was going into the marinade for this pork vindaloo

This isn’t even as many peppers as the recipe called for (I was doubling it), but it was all I had. So it’s guajillo peppers, garlic, ginger, cinnamon sticks, tamarind paste, cumin seeds, cloves, peppercorns, and turmeric, sugar and kosher salt. The recipe calls for white vinegar, but I only had cider vinegar. 

It’s quite easy. You just make a paste out of all the ingredients above. You just bash them all together until they’re a sticky paste, and then marinate cubes of pork in it. The recipe calls for pork butt and also pork belly, but I just went with the butt. As I often etc etc.

Marinate a few hours

and then add some water and simmer it up along with sliced onions for a few more hours, and then that’s it. You serve it with rice, and throw some cilantro on top. 

OH IT WAS GOOD.

Immensely tender, and the sauce was spicy, yes, but not blast-your-head-off spicy. Just enough to make your nose tingle. It was also tangy and a little bit fruity and a little earthy, and wonderfully nourishing and warming. 

I had a second helping of rice with just the sauce with little fragments of meat it in, and it was a joy. Wonderful recipe. The kids liked it! This may have been because I really talked it up ahead of time, and purposely acted very excited and happy about it, and mentioned many times that it was called “VINNNDALOOOOO,” but it’s not the kind of thing that they usually like. 

I also cut up a few pineapples that were hanging around, and that was not the absolute ideal side, because they were extremely acidic. Mango or something a little more mild would have been better. But it was a wonderful meal all the same. Vindaloo! Knowing my fate is to be with you! 

If you use the recipe, be sure to save it, as Bon Appétit only gives you a certain number of free views.

THURSDAY
Chicken enchilada bowls 

Thursday we had school conferences right before dinner, so I prepped everything ahead of time, and we had an unsophisticated but tasty hot meal waiting for us, and everyone liked it. 

I dumped a bunch of chicken legs in the Instant Pot with a can of red enchilada sauce and some diced tomatoes and chiles, and pressed the “poultry” button. When it was done cooking, I fished the chicken out, pulled the meat off the bones, and transferred it to the slow cooker along with the tomatoes and enough of the sauce to keep it from drying out. 

I chopped a bunch of scallions and cilantro, sautéed some frozen corn in olive oil to give it a little char (it’s dumb, but everyone loves it this way) and put that in a bowl, and set out shredded pepper jack cheese, sour cream, corn chips, hot sauce, and Taijin seasoning. Then I set up the Instant Pot again with rice and water. When I was on the way home, I texted one of the kids to press the “rice” button, and when I got home, I heated the corn in the microwave. 

Boom, hot dinner, with cheese.

One of the kids told me, “Jolly good meal, mother. I said that in a silly way, but I meant it.” When a kid stops to make sure you know they’re sincere, you know they’re sincere. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just pizza. No tricks!

And I still haven’t written up Corrie’s under the sea cake! I think I will have to give it its own post, as it was quite a journey. It is the reason I happened to have unflavored gelatin in the house for panna cotta.

Oh, one more thing, I got a big sack of flattened rice, something I just found out about (by seeing it on the shelf), which I haven’t had a chance to use yet, but I’m pretty excited about it.

Apparently it is parboiled, so you barely need to cook it, and Indians use it for all kinds of things: A quick, cozy breakfast, savory or sweet, a side dish with vegetables and potatoes, or you can fry it, or you can do whatever you want. It’s healthier than white rice because it hasn’t had as many nutrients polished away. 

The Stupids buy an ice cream machine

I know it’s just about the end of summer, but I promised a homemade ice cream report in my last What’s For Supper, so here it is!

First of all, this is the machine I got: A Cuisinart ICE-20P1.

It is about $70 new, but I got mine on Facebook marketplace for much cheaper.  There is a newer model of this same basic machine, the ICE-20P1. There seem to be lots of like-new ice cream machines for sale for cheap, probably because people get them as unwanted presents, or decide they’re not worth the counter space. I have decided no such thing. I love making ice cream.

The other kind of machine in my price range were hand-cranked ones that require salt and ice and tend to have a much larger capacity. The smaller, automatic ones are smaller, but they are automatic (no, I don’t have a writing agent, why do you ask?), and I am definitely at a point in my life where I want to push a button and walk away for a while.

The machine is very simple. The bowl has liquid inside its walls, and you put the bowl in the freezer for many hours, preferably 12 or more, until the liquid is completely frozen. When you’re ready to make ice cream, you fit the bowl onto the machine, put the dasher inside the bowl, fit the large plastic guard over both, turn it on, and pour your ingredients in while it is running. And that’s it. The machine turns the frozen bowl and the dasher stays in place, so the ice cream freezes and gets churned.

You can peek in the top and watch it churning, and maybe even stick a spoon in and grab a taste. 

After about 25 minutes, the ice cream is like soft serve and you can eat it that way if you like. If you want harder ice cream, you pour it into a container and return it to the freezer for another 4-6 hours. (If you are going to leave it in the freezer longer than that, cover it with wax paper.) 

The machine makes 1.5 quarts of ice cream, which is about as much ice cream as one of those oblong cartons from the supermarket.

In theory, you can make one batch, empty it into a container, and re-use the still-frozen bowl to make a second batch of ice cream. But every time I try this, it just doesn’t freeze properly, probably because my kitchen is just too hot and the bowl thaws out too much. So I bought a second bowl on eBay (the same size works for the older and newer model of Cuisinart), so I can make one batch after another. They do take up room in the freezer, but nobody has complained yet. 

Okay, on to the ice cream! Here is what we have made so far:

VANILLA

My first foray. I just used the recipe in the Cuisinart booklet, which is:

Whisk together 1 cup of milk and 3/4 cup of sugar. 
Stir in 2 cups chilled heavy cream. 
Add in 2 tsp vanilla extract. 
Pour into machine and mix 25-30 minutes. 

We ate it right out of the machine, so it was soft serve consistency. It was delicious, but it was then that I discovered that 1.5 quarts was not as much as I thought. 

PEACH

I followed the recipe from Like Mother Like Daughter. (Totally different mother and daughter, FYI. She doesn’t even yell at you or try to sell you a set of expensive books while reminding you that working women inevitably raise crack whores; she just gives you the recipe for peach ice cream. Who knows, maybe it’ll catch on.)

Nice and easy. You peel and chop fresh peaches and macerate them in sugar, then throw them in the food processor, then mix the blended peaches with a standard mixture of milk, cream, vanilla, and more sugar, and then churn and freeze.

It came out very pleasant and peachy with little bits of fruit all through it, and the ice cream itself was mildly peach flavored. This time, I let the ice cream harden up, but I served it in wedges, which blunted its appeal somewhat. It also didn’t help that it was on the plate next to this– well, you’ll see.

Buying an ice cream scoop and being able to serve nice curled-up scoops of ice cream made a big difference for how well the ice cream was received. I might make this recipe again with a little cinnamon and/or ginger or maybe rum, especially when the peaches on our tree ripen up. 

BLUEBERRY GINGER MINT SORBET I GUESS

So I made one batch of peach ice cream and wanted to make a second batch of something contrasting to go with it. I found this amazingly, suspiciously simple recipe for a blueberry mint ginger lime sorbet. My spidey sense told me the website looked hinky, but as you may know, my specialty is forging ahead through hinkiness, for no reason at all. 

Yeah, so, it turned out terrible. It was kind of gritty and pulpy and much too gingery, and it certainly didn’t freeze right, so it was kind of like a very chilly . . . relish. The crazy thing is, I can’t find the recipe at all now. I can’t find it online, and it’s somehow not in my search history. I swear I did not hallucinate this dreadful recipe, and yet. Let’s just move along. 

NEAPOLITAN TRAIL MIX

After the blueberry relish debacle, I promised the kids something yummy and fun would be next. Aldi had these bags of trail mix with chocolate chips, vanilla chips, strawberry chips shaped like ice cream cones, cashews, almonds, and freeze-dried strawberries. 

What really sold me was the ice cream cone-shaped chips. I really needed it to be crystal clear that this was ice cream we were dealing with. Ice cream!

By this time, my Ben and Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream and Dessert Book had arrived

so I used the recipe for Sweet Cream Base 1, which is what they recommend for fruit, cookies, and candy. It is similar to the recipes I’d used before, except it has eggs. The recipe:

Whisk 2 eggs for 1-2 minutes. Gradually add in 3/4 cup sugar and continue whisking for another minute. Add in 2 cups heavy cream and 1 cup milk and blend. This makes a quart of ice cream.

I churned up a double recipe of this and then stirred in the trail mix, which I had been keeping in the freezer. This turned out just excellent. I built in time to let it sit in the freezer for four hours before dinner, and I even bought an ice cream scoop, so it came out just like “real” hard pack ice cream.

Very rich, smooth, and creamy. I was afraid the whole nuts would be too big and I should have chopped them up, but they were just right. The only flaw was the freeze-dried strawberries, which were somewhat hard to chew, being both freeze-dried and frozen. But everyone liked this ice cream and said I should make it again. 

By this point, I was in the habit of washing out the freezer bowls, drying them off, and returning them to the freezer as soon as the ice cream was done churning. 

LEMONADE SLUSHIES

On a whim, I made a big pitcher of lemonade (water, bottled lemon juice, and sugar), and dumped it into the machine and let it go for 25 minutes. It came out just a tiny bit more watery than a frozen drink you’d get at the 7-11 or whatever, but there were no complaints. There was a bit left over, which I poured into a cup and froze. Voila, an Italian ice with which to bribe an intractable child the next day. 

My only sadness is that no one in this house is young enough to call them “Flushies” anymore. 

GINGER ALE SLUSHIES

Next day, we tried the same thing with ginger ale, and it did not work at all! The dasher froze to the bottom of the machine, and we just ended up with very cold ginger ale with some drifts of slush floating in it. I have no idea why this happened. 

SAFFRON ROSEWATER PISTACHIO (BASTANI) 

Back on my bullshit. You can see, I have been alternating between cute, fun, summery, silly ice cream, and effete, exotic, difficult frozen confections. Time for something difficult!

There were many recipes for this ice cream, which is Persian and is called “bastani,” so I listened to my heart and chose the one from the site called The Delicious Crescent. One mark against it is that you have to stand there whisking a custard for a long time until it thickens up. Most people can manage this, but I have custard problems, and it always takes eleven times longer than normal, if it thickens at all. 

One mark in its favor was that it has you grind up saffron with salt using a mortar and pestle, which I got for mother’s day and haven’t had a chance to use yet. That was fun! Here is a nice handful of saffron threads

and here it is, all ground up in the mortar with a little salt

You make a simple custard and chill it in an ice bath, and then soak the ground saffron in rosewater

then stir that into the custard along with cream, and chill that in an ice bath. Lots of exciting changes in color along the way!

Then you pour the final chilled saffron rosewater custard into your ice cream maker and churn it. You add the pistachios in afterward, and then continue freezing. The recipe called for unsalted pistachios, but I had salted, and I thought they were great. I also omitted the vanilla that the recipe called for, and did not miss it at all.

I made a triple batch of this recipe and to me it seemed like the most successful yet. Wonderful, silky, creamy consistency, and a very rich flavor.

Many of the kids just didn’t like it, because saffron and rosewater, but I thought it was lovely. I don’t know how to describe it, because nothing else really tastes like saffron or rosewater. The flavors intensified over time, especially the rosewater, which I discovered because I kept going back for more over the next few days, and I did valiantly eventually manage to eat the whole thing. 

Next! Orange slushie!

We gave slushies another chance, this time with orange soda, and it worked great. 

Nice and frozen, very refreshing. It comes out more frozen along the edges, and you stir it up to even it out the consistency before ladling it into cups. I like knocking on kid’s doors and they groan, ” . . . whaaaaaaat” thinking I’m going to say “Can you please take the garbage out?” but instead I say, “Do you want a little orange slushie?” They do!

VANILLA M&M

Yesterday morning, I made a double recipe of Ben and Jerry’s basic cream base plus a little vanilla, and threw in a bag of M&M’s when it was done churning. The M&M’s got a little blurry as I stirred them in, and gave the ice cream a kind of swirly pastel effect, which wasn’t terrible, but it was a little unexpected. I think I could have prevented this, and kept the M&M’s more intact, by freezing them for an hour or so. I just forgot to do that, and they were probably pretty warm from sitting on the shelf.

I put the churned ice cream back in the freezer for about four hours, and it came out somewhere between hard pack and soft serve. Solid enough to cut into wedges, but a tiny bit softer than I would have liked for our purposes. Benny made chocolate chip cookies, which she spread into pans and cut into bars, so people could make ice cream sandwiches.

I didn’t taste either, because me and chocolate don’t get along, but everyone said it was good, except for one kid who was inexplicably complaining about HOMEMADE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE M&M ICE CREAM SANDWICHES. It’s hard to believe a child of mine would turn out to be a complainer, and yet here we are.

NEXT! 

Next up: My plan is white chocolate chips, maraschino cherry halves, and cashews. Eh? Eh? I think that sounds like party ice cream, and yes it will give me a headache, but probably not a migraine. Gonna remember to freeze the white chocolate chips this time. 

I have also bought a few bars of baker’s chocolate, so I can make some chocolate ice cream. It is absolutely time to start experimenting with something besides the basic sweet cream base. 

I’m also looking, heaven help me, at recipes for Lucky Charms ice cream. They have brought home a box of actual store brand Lucky Charms and requested that I made it into ice cream. All the recipes require you to make a bowl of Lucky Charms-infused milk, run it through a sieve, and then make a custard out of that, and hey ,why not make your own bespoke marshmallow fluff as long as you’re insane? and for some reason I’m thinking about how much fun it would be to clean the dusty grease off the top of the refrigerator, instead. But I guess if I can make rosewater bastani, I can make Lucky Charms ice cream. 

I actually have a kid who works in an ice cream shop, and the other day a customer was asking about various toppings, and she was trying to explain that one of the choices was Fruity Pebbles; but having been brought up in dire poverty, she kept saying “Fruity Dyno-Bites” instead, and they had to call the manager over the clear up the confusion. You know, people are always going on and on about lead paint and predatory landlords and no running water, blah blah blah, but you never hear about the devastating hardship of growing up so poor that, when you talk about cereal, you speak Malt-O-Meal, and nobody knows what you’re talking about. O, the humanity!

I’m also looking at my grapes.

This is the view from my murderboat, which has been utterly consumed by grapes in the last few years.

Last year, we made grape jelly, for reasons that are kind of unclear, because we don’t super duper like grape jelly, and we sure did make a lot of it. I’ve been promising the kids we would just make grape juice this year, which people actually want to consume. But I’m thinking grape gelato could be pretty wonderful. We’ll see! And the war between fun and effete wages on. Maybe I should buy a second ice cream machine.