Tag: doner kebab

What’s for supper? Vol. 478: Accidental pork fried candy

Happy Friday! This was not an illustrious week for us, food-wise, or really in any way, but at least it’s Friday. 

FRIDAY
Ice cream, then tuna noodle

Friday we did go see the Bellows Falls petroglyphs in the late afternoon, as planned. I’m more skeptical than I was that they are really ancient — at very least, I’m quite sure they’ve been touched up by more modern hands — but they’re still mysterious and beautiful, and we had a great time.

Irene, as usual, discovered a more direct route, while Benny, Corrie, Damien, and I wandered around and ended up having to scramble up a ridiculously steep rock face to see the glyphs.

We hung out for a while and enjoyed being there and seeing stuff. Benny did briefly make her Blue Steel face, but I am not authorized to share it, so instead here is us looking normal on the rocks.

Then the first group also found an easier route back up to the road, while Damien, Corrie, and I uhhhhh kind of almost died trying to force our way through a more direct path.

We all earned some ice cream, so we stopped at Dari Joy, then made our way back and had some tuna noodle or frozen pizza. 

SATURDAY
Leftovers and taquitos

Saturday turned into the world’s longest shopping trip, and I forget why. I guess Benny needed clothes and Lucy needed to be picked up from work and I needed to go to confession, AND we needed food. Yeah, that’s what did it! 

Leftover delite, plus taquitos. That night, I baked Lucy’s birthday cake so I could decorate it on Sunday. 

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips; birthday cake

After Mass, I went on a spur-of-the-moment quest for a FREE SPINNING WHEEL.

I am not 100% sure if it’s an actual spinning wheel or a decorative replica. If it is real, it obviously has some pieces missing. But the wheel moves smoothly and it has been put together with care and without the use of metal hardware, so it’s a lovely piece regardless. This will be for Clara, so she can spin straw into gold, and/or donate it to the local theater troupe as a prop. Yay!

Then I made another batch of frozen coffee in the slushy machine. I think we have settled into a routine where Damien makes cappuccinos on Sundays through the winter, and I make coffee slushies on Sundays through the summer. This is called complementarity, and speaking of which, happy NFP awareness week to you. I am celebrating by not reading any of the articles where people daringly reveal the brand new information that NFP is HARD, because of CIRCUMSTANCES, and some people are simply brave and strong enough to choose a DIFFERENT PATH, and where is their TROPHY. 

Anyway, on Sunday afternoon, fueled with plenty of caffeine and sugar, I  finally got around to cutting Benny’s hair, which she’s been begging me to do. She claims this is her second ever haircut! I feel like that can’t possibly be true, but on the other hand, she sure had a lot of hair. 

Turned out super cute, but am I allowed to take a picture, no I am not. 

I also realized my cucumbers were languishing in their current position. Not getting enough water or light, and in constant danger of being smothered by galumphin’ pumpkins. So I dragged out that terrible bench I never got around to fixing, and now it’s a cucumber and dill bench, ta dah!

Lucy went to the beach with her friends for her birthday, and I decorated her cake, and then for supper, we had verily the worst grilled ham and cheese I’ve ever made. I don’t even know what happened. It was like one of those dreams where your hands don’t work and gravity is weird and everything keeps swooping around in front of you. It tasted okay, though. 

And the cake turned out cute! Here is the pic she sent me for inspiration:

and here is the cake I made:

It’s not often that some aesthetic style you’re trying to imitate lines up perfectly with your skill level!  She liked the cake, liked her presents, whew. 

MONDAY
Burgers, corn, french fries, watermelon

Monday is a bit of a blur. Corrie made some banana bread, which she’s been doing a few times a week this summer. It’s honestly the best banana bread I’ve ever had. Nothing fancy, just fluffy and moist and sweet, with a nice buttery crust. 

Here’s the recipe she uses:

Jump to Recipe

On Monday I went to Home Depot to buy sixteen bolts to replace the ones I installed on my clothesline, which are somehow a few inches too short, so the pipes are wobbly. I had put a sample bolt in my pocket so I would be able to compare it to the new ones, so I would definitely get the right size and not have to go to Home Depot again.

Then I changed pants, got to Home Depot, reached in my pocket, and sighed a big sigh. 

A BIG SIGH. 

However, while I was there, I got a sack of soil to firm up my gladioli, which had popped right out of the ground, and I also saw they had some non-poo lettuce for sale, so I snapped that up. They also had tomato plants for $1 each, and even though I swore of growing tomatoes long ago because it always just leads to heartache, I bought six of them, because, yanno, mother should I trust the government? (No.)

Got home and moved some basil around and got the lettuce in. 

I didn’t quite have room for six tomato plants, so I dug up the rest of my garlic a little bit ahead of schedule, and it looked good and ready. 

Certainly an improvement over last year’s garlic harvest, anyway!

I forced myself to do a little thinning on my carrots, but I know I didn’t do enough, oh well. I fed the tomatoes and made some quickie stakes for them. I had heard that you can trim suckers off your tomato plants and just stick them in the soil and they will turn into new tomato plants. So I did that, and they immediately died. 

Then I checked the four shoots on my peach tree that I was trying to propagate by air layering, and they were all also all dead. I was mostly relieved, to be honest, because I got a 99 problems, but a dearth of peaches is not currently among them. 

I guess we had hamburgers for supper. We’re still working our way through the frozen patties I got for July 4th. I hope I remember this when I’m shopping for next year’s party! I truly bought twice as much food as we needed, which is insane. 

We also had corn, fries, and watermelon. Nice summer meal, but I’m REALLY looking forward to being able to eat the corn I grew! 

Look: Tassels! We have tassels!

TUESDAY
Fire chicken, rice, roast string beans

Tuesday is “everybody has an appointment” day around here lately, so probably not the best day to try a new recipe. Definitely not the best day to try a new recipe that you don’t actually have, but which you need to buy a subscription to get, and then you get in a dumb little fight with someone about whether it’s morally worse to use AI to generate a recipe or to ask someone to give you a recipe that you haven’t paid for. The upshot is that I WINGED IT. 

What I wanted to make was the Milk Street recipe for fire chicken where all you have to do is broil the chicken in the oven, then move the pan onto the stove top and keep cooking it until the sauce reduces. The technique is pretty self-explanatory, but I didn’t have the proportions for the ingredients. So I just kinda threw a bunch of spicy things into a pan with some boneless, skinless chicken thighs, then broiled it for a bit, and then cooked it on the stovetop for a bit, hoping it would get thick and sticky, which it did not. 

Yes I crowded the pan. Of course I crowded the pan. I also burned it a little bit, which kind of aeorsolized the gochujang, which is not a thing you want to do unless you enjoy coughing. 

I made a pot of rice and briefly considered making tempura string beans, but most of the kids said they wouldn’t eat that, and my will to live was ebbing away anyway. So I roasted them with some sesame oil, salt, and garlic powder, and threw some sliced almonds in there. 

And it was not very good! The chicken was okay, and the string beans were pretty bleh. 

I did not ruin the rice, hooray! And that was supper. Cough cough cough.

WEDNESDAY
Pork fried rice, potstickers

Wednesday I actually got a fair amount of writing done, and then Damien, Sohpia and I went to see The Odyssey in the afternoon. I reviewed it here. 

Before I left, I prepped a bunch of stuff so I could make fried rice when I got home. I chopped up leftover string beans and some zucchini and red onion and minced up a bunch of garlic and onion, and I found a bag of frozen pork, already cooked and chopped, in the freezer. I even pre-scrambled four eggs. Packed up everything in handy little mise en place dishes, covered them, and stuck it all in the fridge. 

That was a LONG movie, and then we had to stand in the parking lot and complain about it for a while, and then we had to get Corrie, whom we had dropped off at the library; so it was already after 7:00 when we got home. Turns out I forgot to tell the kids at home what the plan was, at all, so they were all in the kitchen hungrily yelling at each other, and Irene (remember what I said about Irene always finding the direct route) was grimly heating up some rice. It turns out they all thought (a) I was expecting them to make supper and (b) fried rice tastes like that because the flavors from the meat sort of seep into it, and you don’t have to add anything for a sauce. 

Here is my actual recipe for fried rice:

Jump to Recipe

and my technique is to lightly cook the garlic and onion, then add the vegetables, then the meat, then brown sugar and let that bubble and brown for a bit, then add the rice, and then finish it with soy sauce, fish sauce, and oyster sauce. My technique is not to dump everything in a pan and then stand there yelling. 

To be fair, it is entirely my fault for not communicating better, or at all, but I was a little distraught to have a pan full of hot, oily rice, raw garlic, ginger, and onion, and cold meat, plus cold vegetables that another sister had forcibly added to the pan despite the resistance of siblings.

So I did what any idiot would do: I told everyone to go away, then dumped a bunch of brown sugar on top of all of it, and heated it up, then shook some oyster sauce over it, and kept stirring. I thought it was working, too, until, as I sttirred, I started to hear a distinct clanking noise. Yes, there is was again: My fried rice was clanking. 

And that is how I made fried rice candy.  The sugar did melt a little bit, but then quickly crystallized into savory little chunks, and these got distributed all through the rice, and picked up some garlic and onion as they went. And I have to admit, the flavor of the meat sort of seeped into it!

I fished out as many clumps as I could find, and yes, I ate them. I was so hungry! Then I quickly boiled some frozen pot stickers, threw it all on the table, and ran away with my plate of food. 

The kids did ask later what those rocks were in the rice, and I told them it was a lucky prize, and they didn’t ask any more questions. And that was supper! 

Honest to goodness, it was not the worst fried rice I’ve ever had. I was hungry, though. 

THURSDAY
Ground beef doner kebabs, pita, yogurt sauce, tomatoes

Thursday was a bunch more writing. Moe was making supper, and we had some fairly elaborate plans, but you know, the cucumbers went bad, the herbs might have parasites, we ran out of time to make pita, and it turns out I didn’t super duper follow a recipe last time I made ground beef doner kebabs, and Moe was willing to do his best, but he’s never even seen doner kebabs, so it would be hard to fake it. So I tossed this recipe at him and told him to just skip the vegetable part, so he did it and also ran to the store for pita, and we had yogurt sauce and sliced tomatoes, and it was delicious. 

I am once again urging you to try the ground beef doner kebab thing, if you haven’t yet. It’s so easy and delicious. 

We watched The Sheep Detectives that evening, and it was entertaining and amusing. I’m not a huge fan of let’s get kids to confront death when they don’t want to stories, but this was sufficiently warm and reassuring that they pulled it off.  They did make a few irreverent jokes about God, but it’s not a huge feature of the story, and it does sort of balance it out with a plot point where the church saves babies in danger, and a priest humbly acknowledges that, because he took advantage of someone vulnerable, he considers himself “a bad shepherd.”  It was a little scary in parts, with the sheep being approached in the dark by frightening animals, and then being chased by dogs, but overall it was wholesome and well-crafted, with themes of self-sacrifice and devotion, and protecting the vulnerable and the outcast. It was a decent mystery, too, and I was surprised when the murderer was revealed. No deep thoughts, I just liked it well enough! The dialogue was better than The Odyssey. Which isn’t saying much. 

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, tortilla chips, watermelon

Corrie just showed me the eggplants are finally growing!

Little cuties. 

We have yet another appointment to get to today. We have an ailing duck living in the laundry room. We have plans for Opera Nite and a day at the ocean coming up. And I hope we have tortillas, because we’re supposed to have quesadillas for supper. Wish someone were in charge of planning meals and buying the necessary food items, OH WELL. 

Print

Banana bread or muffins

adapted from Quick Breads, Soups & Stews by Mary Gubser

Ingredients

  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 3 ripe bananas, mashed well
  • 1/2 cup chopped nuts optional

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 375.

  2. In one bowl, sift flour, baking soda, and salt together.

  3. In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well in between. Add mashed bananas and mix well.

  4. Gradually add the dry ingredients and blend well. If you're adding nuts, fold them in.

  5. Grease 12 muffin tins or a loaf pan and pour the batter in.

  6. Bake 20 minutes or longer, until the top is slightly browned.

 

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Basic stir fried rice

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 473: O tempura! O mores!

Happy Friday! I don’t know what got into me, but we had quite an adventurous week in food. I hope you guys like hearing about food! Here is what we had: 

SATURDAY
Meatball subs, salad, cheesecake

Saturday is usually leftover day, but a friend of my mother-in-law very kindly brought over a huge amount of delicious food — so much that we ate it for two days, and I still have some fancy pasta to cook at a later date. She also brought fruit and flowers. Thank you, Marian! 

After shopping, I did a bunch of gardening. I weeded out a whole bunch of beds and planters, composted them, and got a bunch of seeds in the soil. I used almost exclusively seeds I had saved from last year, and basically if you had to choose one thing to write on my tombstone, that would be it. I’m so proud of myself. I planted zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, forget-me-nots, phlox, sunflowers, tithonia, chicory, allium, and misc. If anything actually comes up, I will be insufferable. 

Anyway, it was a ton of work and I was so delighted to sit down to a yummy and hearty meal made by someone else. 

The kids have been snacking on the meatballs all week. 

In the evening, when I lay down to rest my heavy head and watch stupid reels on Facebook, I heard a desperate peeping, just outside my window, saw that the ducklings — really teenagers now — had escaped from their pen and were trying to throw themselves into the trash. 

If I were new to ducks, I would say I hope they get smarter when they reach adulthood, but I am not new to ducks. 

SUNDAY
Leftovers, strawberry shortcake

Sunday after Mass, the junk guy came by to give me an estimate for how much it would cost to haul away all our crap. We had a dryer and two loveseats lurking about, which is pretty standard for us (we do go through loveseats), but there is also a bunch of porch and roof debris, and also a Regret Pile, which is stuff I dragged home because it was free, and now it has sat there for long enough that I am ready to admit I’m never going to use it. The estimate was fair but considerably higher than I expected! So we agreed he would just come get the Regret Pile, mainly because it is full of rusty nails, and I would pay the amount of money I am getting from a different guy in exchange for our two junk cars. I guess this is that girl math I’ve been hearing about. 

Then it was time to get some planting done! Time was a-wasting! 

I dug out a ton of compost from my heap, and spread it out and planted a long line of sunflowers in front of the house and down the road, hoping that the traffic will prevent bunnies from gobbling up all my seedlings this time. I also got a bunch more marigold and cosmos seeds in.

Then I pictured the yard without the Regret Pile, and acknowledged it still looks like crap, and when the flowers bloom, it will just look like flowers near crap. So I trotted around and did a big clean-up, including cutting up the old torn pool liner, which was too heavy for me to move in one piece. I did salvage some roughly rectangular pieces to use as weed barriers around my pumpkin garden. There are a lot of wild blackberries in that spot, so I need all the help I can get!

Here you can see the pumpkin bed in the background, with the rest of the pool liner in the foreground. 

By dinner time I was again very happy to have an easy meal of leftovers, and the shopping kid had chosen strawberry shortcake for dessert, and I was also happy to have sensibly bought a ready-made angel food cake and squirty can whipped cream. 

And everyone was happy.  

MONDAY
Spicy chicken sandwiches, raw vegetables and dip

Monday I returned to an old favorite: Spicy chicken sandwiches with peppers, onions, and cheese. I cheaped out and did not buy shishito peppers, which are nice because you can just cut the tops off and then cook them like that. Instead, I got some colorful bell peppers and trimmed the seeds and membranes and cut them in half. I cooked them in the pan I had used to cook the chicken, and they took FOREVER. Pretty, though. 

While they were cooking, the cheese was melting onto the chicken thighs, and then it was just a matter of piling it all onto toasted rolls and adding red onion and BBQ sauce. So delicious. 

Raw broccoli and watermelon chunks for sides. I am once again trying to pull away from always serving carbs for a side!

TUESDAY
Pizza

Tuesday I fell into garden despair.  Nothing I planted will grow. It will all just be arid, sterile trash dirt forever and all my efforts will have gone to waste, because I did everything wrong. This is a normal stage of gardening, at least for me, and I always feel this way at some point. 

However, Damien took a close look at the pond I dug and never finished and also was despairing about, and it is full of tadpoles! So at least one frog thought it was good enough, anyway. Damien brought some babies in to admire for a bit

Then he put them back in the pond. One summer we had a jar with a tadpole in it on the table for weeks and weeks, and it was terrible. The poor thing grew one leg and then stopped, and it was NOT GREAT. Not making that mistake again! We learn!

We had pizza for supper, plain and pepperoni. 

WEDNESDAY
Peanut chicken wraps, tempura chive blossoms, crunchy rice rolls, string beans

Wednesday, I had been planning a meal that I thought possibly only I would like, but I was pretty excited about it anyway. I made a peanut sauce from this recipe and added it to a pre-shredded mix of cabbage and carrots.

and then I went out and chopped off 3/4 of my chive blossoms.

I only recently found out that if you chop down your chives after they bloom, they will bloom again. I have a VERY hard time pinching and culling and all the things you need to do if you want more growth later, but I figured I’d be more motivated if I did something with the flowers I chopped. 

One year I put them on pizza, and that was not a hit. So I started some infused vinegar with some of them. You just wash the blossoms and stuff them in a jar, then warm up some white wine vinegar, pour it over the blossoms, let it cool, then cover it and put it away for a few weeks. 

It’s supposed to turn an even deeper pink over time. Then I washed and trimmed the rest of the flowers, and set them to dry thoroughly. For I was planning to DEEP FRY THEM. 

When it got close to suppertime, I started heating some oil in a pot, then started some chicken tenders cooking, and made a simple tempura batter using flour, corn starch, and seltzer. I was following the recipe from Woks of Life. They recommend cutting off the entire stem and using a fork to dip the blossoms in batter and fry them, but I left a few inches of stem and left that as a handle for dipping. Then I tossed them in the hot oil, just a few at a time. Tempura needs space!

This is possibly the most exciting frying I have ever done. I made a video of one batch, and the sound alone is thrilling. If you’re into that kind of thing! 

 

They fry up extremely quickly, and then I fished them out and gave them a little sprinkle of salt. 

They taste sharp. Not like onion and not exactly like chives, but just kind of brightly bitter and wild. HOWEVER, the tempura batter clings to every tiny petal, and each blossom is an exquisitely fragile, crackly little explosion in your mouth.

Absolutely fantastic. Like onion fireworks. I dipped some in the dipping sauce that the recipe calls for (except I didn’t have mirin, so I used rice vinegar and some honey), and they were excellent with and also without. Like popcorn for the emperor. 

Corrie and Damien were enthusiastic about them; the other kids, not so much. I had made a lot of extra batter, and the oil was still hot, so I made some tempura string beans for the heck of it.

Corrie was really egging me on at this point. She and I feel the same about food. We just love every single thing about it, from choosing it at the store to prepping it, to cooking it, to plating it, to eating it. She watched me intently as I tried my first chive blossom, and then breathed intimately, “Now try it with the sauce.” The upshot of this encouragement was that I started to show off a little, and so ooops, started a small to medium fire on the stovetop, and was able to demonstrate how to put out a fire with salt, so that was a win as well. Someone who loves cooking that much is going to need to know how to put out a fire. 

I cooked a whole bunch of chicken tenders, so the people who just wanted chicken on wraps could have that, and those who wanted the whole peanut slaw chicken thing could have that. 

Holy moly, it was a good meal. Enough people liked the peanut sauce that I’ll be making these wraps again. It was super easy, especially with the shortcuts of pre-shredded cabbage and frozen chicken, and the flavor and textures were very pleasant. 

I may or may not make the chives again. Maybe if Lena is over. She would appreciate them! But what a delight to discover how easy tempura is to make! Corrie and I agreed that broccoli should be our next tempura. The string beans were okay, but something with a lot more texture would be much more exciting. 

THURSDAY
Ground beef doner kebabs

Thursday I tried a second recipe I’ve had my eye on for a while: That viral ground beef doner kebab thing. Of course real doner kebab is shaved off a rotisserie-cooked hunk of meat, but people keep telling me this oven recipe is really good. So I skulked around a few recipe sites and got the general idea. I think I ended up putting in kosher salt, black pepper, aleppo pepper, cumin, green za’atar, and some grated onion and some Greek yogurt. 

You divide the meat into lumps and roll them out thinly between two sheets of parchment paper. 

Then you peel the top sheet off and loosely roll up the bottom sheet with the meat mixture inside.

I did this with about three pounds of meat, and then set them aside and made a garlic yogurt sauce and chopped up some tomatoes and cucumbers and parsley. 

Then I went outside and sternly told myself it was time to stop averting my eyes every time I pass by my potting table. It was truly disgusting, and so heaped up with miscellaneous gardening stuff that it was unusable. There were lots of pots and bins half-full of soil that I had meant to use for cold sowing and never did, and they had collected months of rain water, and then people (me) had put trash on top of it all, so it smelled TURRIBLE.

Well, I cleaned it up! Yay!

You’ll have to take my word for it that this is a vast improvement. You can see from the bare spots in the grass that the mess was not confined to the table!

Also, my pumpkins are most definitely growing, double yay! Many pumpkin yay!

I mean of course they are growing. I did everything right, and they always grow. I just thought they wouldn’t this year, that’s all. Corrie asked if I had read poems to them and sang songs to them, and maybe I did. That’s my business. 

Behind the pumpkin bed you can see the Regret Pile, which is much bigger than it looks here, and has gotten all overgrown with Virginia creepers and wild blackberries, which is another reason this is the one we are paying someone else to deal with. When that’s gone, I’m gonna mow all that growth down and turn it into a little hill garden. There are already some really stalwart irises there. Lots of possibilities! And it will be visible from my bedroom window. This is my current view:

Not unbearable, but flowers would be nicer. Not to be dramatic, but I am expecting to be in bed for a while in the fall, and I will be very grateful to myself if I can look at flowers while I recuperate. 

I trimmed the trees that had grown up in front of my protest sign, and I weeded a bit, and then mowed the heck out of the yard for a good forty minutes, and then I cleared up the side of the house where there was still some roof debris. Damien has been doing a lot of dump runs, and the yard is already so much better than it was. Feels great. My goal is to be able to go into the back yard and look around without wincing about anything I see. 

When we got home from the afternoon whatnot, all I had to do was cook the rolled-up meat for about half an hour, and then unfurl it. 

They all came out just lovely. More crisp on the edges, more juicy in the middle, and it smelled incredible. I broke the sheets of meat up a bit and put them back in the oven for a few minutes

but basically just served them as is, and people tore off what they wanted. I put out some black and kalamata olives, and oh man, it was good stuff. 

I went for store bought pita, because it was just too dang hot to make even quick-baking flat bread. I’m definitely making this meal again. (Ground beef was $2.99 a pound last week, so I bought about 18 pounds of it and put it in the freezer!) 

The only thing I would change is I would line the pan with more parchment paper, under the rolls, to make the clean-up easier. Also you are supposed to drizzle the cooked meat with lemon juice, which I did squeeze and set aside but then forgot about. Also maybe I would put a little hot sauce on top. Oh, and next time I will be sure to roll the meat right up to the edge of the parchment paper, so more of it gets crisped up. But even if I don’t do any of this, it was an excellent meal, and popular. I think only one kid had pop tarts for supper, which is a pretty good record for this vicinity. 

FRIDAY
Tuna sandwiches and chips

Damien and I are probably gonna get out for some sushi or something, while the kids have tuna at home. He has been working SO much lately, including lots of trips out of town, and I barely remember what he looks like. That is a lie. I have every detail memorized forever. Still, it will be nice to go out! 

We have declared the ducklings old enough to start spending their nights outside. They have been outdoors all day, but we bring them in at night, and everybody hates this process. Coin has very much decided that he is in charge of them, so I think they will be fine. 

Clara has moved to Boston. Benny will be graduating from 8th grade this coming week, and Lucy will be graduating from high school right after that. It’s been nonstop field trips and field days and special events, but there are just a few more weeks of school for everybody. AND, for a few weeks from now, Damien reserved a rustic campsite for two nights for us. We will be kayaking in! I am EXCITED. 

I have three, count ’em, THREE wonderfully healthy peony plants that are fixin to bloom. Probably in about a week. 

Oh the suspense! Oh the everything.