Tag: garlic

What’s for supper? Vol. 479: It is Monday, my dudes

Sorry for not getting this out on Friday! But I assure you, it is Monday. I can tell because I’m on my backup to the backup computer, and it took my all weekend to figure out how to persuade it that I UNDERSTAND simchafisher.com is a suspicious website, but I really do want to go there anyway. Hope this finds you same.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m living in a somewhat preachy folk tale where the slovenly vegetable-hating housewife gets taught a lesson by the fairies, and, through a complete deprivation of fresh vegetables, she comes to understand just how much she really actually enjoyed fresh vegetables. Except the fairy in this case is RFK Jr., and, instead of magic, he uses, well, sorry about that mental image. What I’m trying to say is, I picked some lettuce from my garden and I’m going to eat it for lunch, and I am EXCITED.

It alternated between very hot and pouring rain last week. It turns out that when it’s really hot outside, and I can’t make salads, I just make various kinds of sandwiches. Here is what we had last week: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers plus pizza and loaded potato skins

‘Twas another super long shopping turn with multiple side quests and pick-ups and drop-offs, but I must have had some steam left when we got back, because I did a little harvesting of the last of the rhubarb, plus some lupine seeds from my most magnificent lupine beast, and some zinnias and wildflowers. 

Big year for Queen Anne’s Lace! It is everywhere, and very tall. 

I also dug up the rest of the garlic, because I was tired of thinking about it. 

We lost a duck on Saturday. It was poor little Dolly, the one who struggled to get out of his egg, and who never really caught on how to live right. Poor thing! He did have lots of companionship his whole life and had a fine share of sunshine, grubs, green grass, fresh water, and butterflies. Vaya con Dios, Dolly, you little dope. Sorry we thought you were a girl when we named you. 

A few days later, another duck went missing. Sometimes they go on adventures and spend the night outside, but this one hasn’t come back yet, so it’s not looking hopeful. These are the perils of having free range ducks. I think it’s still the best life for them, because they have the stream and the woods and so much mud and tasty bugs at their disposal, but there are perils! 

That evening, Benny and I went paddling out on the pond. I left my camera in the car, so just imagine the New Hampshirest thing you can imagine as the sun goes down.

We were planning to explore the little St. Francis chapel on the other side of the water, but someone was doing a maternity photo shoot, which I was fairly slow to catch on to, oh well. Sorry, lady. 

SUNDAY
Chicken caprese sandwiches, chips

Sunday after Mass I finally got the rest of the garlic hung up to cure

and chopped up and froze the rhubarb. This time I remembered to string it first!

Then I made a little progress on Corrie’s treehouse! This is probably the closest I’ve ever come to real carpentry. A treehouse built around a single tree needs four diagonal braces to support the platform, and the braces need to be cut to fit inside the corner of the frame.

This is my first one. I ended up getting better as I went! But they all seem to be doing the trick. I used my little Japanese pull saw, which I love. 

It looks a little Dr. Seussy, but that’s to be expected. (I did add some nails to the bottom end after I took this picture!) 

For supper, I asked Elijah to roast some chicken breasts with olive oil, salt and pepper, and Irene to cut up some tomatoes, and then I picked a bunch of basil and made a balsamic vinegar reduction — super simple, just two cups of balsamic vinegar and one cup of brown sugar, simmered until it was about half the volume. 

Cut up some mozzarella and some baguettes, and it was yummo.

I hope I remember to do a balsamic reduction and grill some peaches, when the peaches are finally ripe! That will be lovely with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

Gosh, I was busy on Sunday. At some point during the day, I baked some brownies and some lemon squares, because after supper, when it got dark, it was OPERA NITE. We watched the 1987 Met production of Turandot, which none of us has ever seen before. It has Luciano Pavarotti and is conducted by James Levine, with incredibly lush, intricate sets by Zeffirelli. I didn’t recognize the other names, but it was Eva Marton as Turandot, and her voice and presence were wonderful; but even with the spectacular costumes, we struggled a bit with accepting her as the most beautiful princess in the world. But Leona Mitchell as Liu was heartbreakingly good. 

Unfortunately, my kids are simply too Gen Z to be able to tolerate the whole “Ping, Pang, Pong” thing going on in Turandot, and they also felt like Turandot was justified in killing everybody and keeping all her subjects in fear of torture constantly? So it was not especially well received. Oh well! They did like the snacks, and we watched it outside on the projector, which is fun. The actual moon, nearly full, was rising just as they were singing, “Perché tarda la luna?” so that was lovely.

We watched Act One, had a break for cheese and crackers

watched Act Two, had a break for brownies and lemon squares

and watched Act Three. It’s only about two hours in total. And that was Opera Nite! Another summer goal checked off the list. 

MONDAY
Beach food and McDonald’s

Monday we went to the ocean! Everyone made a sandwich and I packed up a bunch of chips and cherries, cookies and soda, and we went to dear old Hampton Beach. Perfect weather, sparkly water, decent waves. Everyone went in, and Corrie and I stayed in, and then uhhhh we almost drowned. This has actually been causing me a medium amount of anguish, because I’m having trouble sleeping because my arm hurts, and while I’m awake, my mind keeps replaying the scary part in the water over and over. I’m making progress! My siblings gave me some good tips for how to integrate what happened into my life, so it’s not just this chaotic scary thing that I can’t handle, but something that happened and turned out okay. But still, yeesh. 

What happened is we were out past the breakers, still shallow enough where we could touch bottom, and we were having a lovely time, bobbing up and down with the waves and periodically checking our position to make sure we weren’t getting pulled past this outcropping of jaggedy rocks. I truly felt like a little kid again, and was so happy and carefree, and Corrie was just in absolute bliss. Then suddenly Corrie goes, “Hey, the rocks are right there!” and dang, they were, and dang, we were suddenly a lot closer to them than we had been, and DANG, we COULDN’T GET AWAY FROM THEM. 

Corrie had a boogie board, so I grabbed her hand and told her to hold on to the board, and we kicked together. Every time a wave came, I shouted, “Let’s kick!” and we did, but we didn’t make any progress at all. My feet and hands were hot and I started panting and swallowing water, and I was getting tired so, so fast. Corrie was just excited and having a good time, and I didn’t want to freak her out, so I just kept saying, “We need to kick!” I waved my arm in between waves while holding her hand with the other one, but I kept swallowing water, and every time I turned around, the rocks were closer. 

THEN, this beautiful, serene water nymph in red appeared. She put an orange torpedo buoy in my hands and told me to hang on, and someone else was on the way. Then yes, a second beautiful, serene water nymph appeared and put a buoy in Corrie’s hands. And they just towed us right in. They kept telling me to hold on with both hands, but I could not get myself to let go of Corrie. I have had this dream, you see, probably twenty times over the last few decades, where I am with a child in the ocean, and we’re holding hands, and a wave comes, and … I let go. Then the wave recedes, and it leaves a shining empty beach, and the child is gone.

So, sorry, ladies, I did not let go, and probably that impeded our rescue, but anyway, this time I didn’t let go. 

Feaking ocean. I still love you, but sheesh. I guess that was a rip current. I’ve read this sign many, many, times

but when we were in the middle of it, I wasn’t thinking “oh, this must be a rip current. Good thing I know my options!” I was thinking “AGGGGGGGGG ::splut splut:: Oh AIEEEEEEE ::spit sputter:: AUGGGGGGG.” So, thank God for those lifeguards! They really appeared out of nowhere like divine apparitions, and they were so calm and kind, and as soon as we were on our feet and made sure we were okay, they just went back to work. 

Corrie just thought the whole thing was neat. I let Damien put me in a chair and wrap me in a towel and I cried a bit, then ate a bunch of cherries. I was so shaken up. I’ve been struggling a bit with “but what if I die?” thoughts lately, because of my upcoming surgery, and this did not help! 

Anyway, we went to the arcade and then got some beach snacks (I opted for a snow cone)

In the pic, I am wearing the bracelet Damien won for me at Ski Ball. Then we drove part way home, stopped for McDonald’s, and went the rest of the way home. What a to-do, my goodness. 

TUESDAY
Burgers and fries

Tuesday it rained most of the day, and I was so glad we had gotten to the beach while the weather was good. I spent a good long time sorting Benny and Corrie’s outgrown clothes. Bagged ’em up and immediately found someone on a buy nothing group who wanted them. 

Usually we are kind of the end of the line, clotheswise, and by the time we’re done with something, absolutely nobody wants anything to do with it; but Benny had a LOT of clothes! I didn’t even recognize some of them. Clothes just flow through our house in a never ending river.  

Even though it was raining, Damien grilled the burgers, and I just made a big batch of frozen fries, and I took this ultra glamorous photo

And that is finally the very last of the burgers I got for July 4th! Phew. That was a lot of burgers. 

WEDNESDAY
Buffalo chicken wraps, corn and zucchini salad

Wednesday it was absolutely pouring rain all day. Tremendous amounts of rain. I had a doctor’s appointment that was like “you are taking your meds wrong and are just asking for uterine cancer, and your blood pressure has crept up again, and we are out of meds for your reflux so I’ll order an endoscopy, but not until after your brain surgery, but in the mean time, here is a PT referral for your frozen shoulder.” I didn’t even get a sticker! Oh well, at least I didn’t drown. 

So I got home and heated up some chicken tenders, and for a side dish I made a little salad. I cut up a few zucchini into spears and seared them in olive oil

then did the same for some leftover corn cut off the cobs. Then I mixed it with Taijin seasoning and red onion. 

Really could have used some fresh cilantro, but it was pretty good. 

I took a truly terrible picture of supper (we had the chicken with buffalo sauce and pepper jack cheese on tortillas)

and that was Wednesday. 

THURSDAY
Pulled pork sandwiches, baked potatoes, watermelon

It being the end of the month, I suddenly realized I have a job, and spent most of the day writing furiously. In the morning, I hacked up a pork shoulder and started pulled pork cooking in the Instant Pot. Here is my recipe for that:

Jump to Recipe

I didn’t find the apple juice, so I used ginger ale, and it turned out nice. This is your reminder that you can use your standing mixer to shred cooked meat, and it takes about four seconds.

An hour before supper, I threw a bunch of potatoes in the oven. When they were done, I toasted some buns, cut up some red onions, cut up a bunch of watermelon, and we had yummy sandwiches. 

Not sure if you can tell, but it was still raining. I was sitting under a tree and just decided to be wet. It is summer and I am going to eat outdoors, dammit!

FRIDAY
Pizza

I also spent Friday furiously writing, and miraculously got everything turned in that I really needed to! I did forget to take the pizza dough out of the freezer, so after adoration I just bought some thawed pizza dough and, this may surprise you, but then I made some pizza. And very good it is, pizza. 

Okay, phew that’s it!

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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. 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. 

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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. 477: Parasite by the dashboard light

Happy Friday!

Today I am working outside

and feeling pretty lucky about it! But also pretty abashed that I haven’t gotten a food post done in A WHILE. I am sorry! We had our huge July 4th (well, 5th) family party,

 

My niece brought me something like fifteen different perennials from her garden, and I gave my BIL a peach sapling and his sister some potted mint, and I really love the plant swap as a new tradition. Also, at my sister’s suggestion, rather than reading the Declaration of Independence, we read the bishops’ beautiful prayer of consecration of the country to the Sacred Heart. And we had sparklers and pop-its and fireworks, glow sticks and temporary tattoos, tons of food, patriotic Jell-o, and most importantly, lots of family, and anyone who had an instrument brought it and played together. Just lovely. 

Then we had guests off and on for a week, and there have been . . . I don’t know, FAMILY SITUATIONS. Just all sorts of situations. God is merciful but life is complicated.

And now food is complicated, too! I sure wish I had decided to grow lettuce this year! But I didn’t! Oh well! 

Anyway, the week after the party, we just basically had hot dogs, hamburgers, smoked chicken wings, potato salad, watermelon, and chips in different combinations over and over, and honestly, nobody was mad about that. When we eventually ran through all the party leftovers and I was forced to actually make new food again, here’s what we ate: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers plus loaded potato skins

Looks like I had mac and cheese, potato skin, and a smoked chicken wing (and this was BEFORE they said not to eat vegetables. I did this of my own free will). The chicken, courtesy of Damien, was especially yummy. 

SUNDAY
Spiedies, cole slaw, guacamole

I think Sunday was when I became vaguely aware of some kind of food problem in the news, but I went ahead and made coleslaw with a bagged salad mix anyway. I also had some avocados that were rapidly aging, so I made guacamole, and we had kind of a weird combination of foods. 

My stupid arm is still being stupid, so I had Corrie do the heavy lifting — i.e., crushing the garlic for the marinade. 

Here is my spiedie marinade recipe

Jump to Recipe

The wild mint is plentiful, so I was generous with that. I also accidentally added four tablespoons of red pepper flakes instead of four teaspoons, and I fished out some, but then just decided to let it be hot, and that was a good choice. 

For vegetables, I cut up a bunch of sweet bell peppers, a few red onions, and a zucchini, and added it to the marinated meat chunks before broiling it. 

Usually I cook zucchini once a year, even though we don’t really like it, because there are only so many times you can walk past a vegetable that is SO CHEAP without putting it in your cart. But it was really good! Maybe I’ll make it twice this year. 

I toasted my roll and spread it with mayo before piling on the meat and veggies, and dang, it was delicious. 

Pork butts were 99 cents a pound, and this is a really great recipe for a cheap cut of meat. The marinade makes it beautifully tender, and it’s tasty and so easy. I make this with whatever vegetables are available, and it’s a rare dish that includes cooked vegetables but still tastes summery and (relatively) light. It’s a shame my family growing up didn’t (presumably) know about spiedies. I think my parents would have really dug them!

I also made the first ice cream of the summer, finally! I made a double batch of Ben and Jerry’s strawberry ice cream, but upped the amount of strawberries by 50%, and that was a good idea. 

Jump to Recipe

I also remembered that ice cream makers work a lot better when they’re not in a hot kitchen — or, if that’s the only spot available, if you run them inside coolers. 

It’s not stupid if it works!

Good ice cream. I want to make more, but there was a sale on ground beef, so that’s what’s currently using all the freezer space right now. 

Oh! But speaking of frozen things! For the past few years, I have rented a cotton candy machine for the July 4th party, because there are lots of little cousins, and cousins like cotton candy. Could not find one available for the life of me this year, and so I thought I’d rent a snow cone machine instead. Also all rented up! I finally found one forty minutes away, and kind of expensive, and I was on the verge of reserving it when I suddenly realized I could just . . . buy a slushy machine, for about the same price, and then we would have a slushy machine. So that is what I did! 

I did a bunch of research and what I really wanted was one of those absurdly huge double-barreled Ninja slushy things that makes a multicolored vat of slushy you can swim around it, but those are like a mortgage payment. So I settled on the 68-oz Iceman Shush-Ease, and although it makes less than I was hoping, we’ve all been pretty happy with it, and the kids have been using it nearly every day for weeks now.

I adore slushies, unreasonably much. The only thing I didn’t realize is that they will not freeze without sugar, so my daydreams of becoming effortlessly slim by existing mainly on frozen drinks all summer did not play out. (I have bought some allulose, which is the one sweetener that’s supposed to work in slushy machines, but I haven’t tried it yet.) The machine itself is very simple to use, and you can wash the sticky parts in the dishwasher, which I appreciate. So I was already quite happy with this purchase. 

Then on Sunday, I brewed a big pot of coffee and then chilled it for a while, then mixed it with half-and-half, sugar, and vanilla, and made a truly delightful drink. It was 3 cups of coffee, 1-1/2 cups of half-and-half, 1/2 cup of sugar, and 2 tsp vanilla, and that was the maximum amount that would fit in the machine. It turned out SO GOOD. Look how happy I am!

I went around feeling remarkably elated for quite a while after drinking this, and eventually realized that the extra caffeine and sugar in the middle of the day MAYBE had something to do with that. But also I just like slushies. I really do!

MONDAY
Chicken burgers, pesto pasta

Monday was when I realized, dang, we need to pay attention to this poo vegetable nonsense. Happily, my basil was overdue for a little harvest, so I picked a big bunch

and shoved it into the food processor with a few cloves of garlic, a stray garlic scape, some salt and pepper, a good amount of grated parmesan, and quite a bit of olive oil. Possibly red wine vinegar, but I don’t remember. Cooked a bunch of pasta, rinsed it cool, and mixed it up with the pesto, and it was tasty. 

I had my chicken burger with horseradish sauce, which is an underrated combo. 

This summer, we are having the kids make meals for the family again. It has been pretty gratifying to know that my adult kids all know how to cook and bake, and that they often google my recipes! I also frequently google my recipes! Because I can’t remember anything at all!

Corrie wanted to make bo ssam, and she was pretty delighted when she found out how to make the first part: You combine a cup of sugar with a cup of salt, and rub that all over the pork. 

I have to admit, it’s fun! She had less fun scrubbing the work area down afterward, but now she knows about trichinosis, anyway. 

Actually, she’s made bo ssam before, I think last year. I guess we both just forgot. 

TUESDAY
Bo ssam, rice, mashed carrots

Here is my recipe for bo ssam. 

Jump to Recipe

Corrie got the meat into the oven around noon so it could cook for six hours. We usually have this dish with rice and lettuce, with raw fruits or vegetables on the side, but I was feeling pretty skittish about that. So we went through all the available vegetables one could cook, and she settled on . . . mashed carrots. 

I’m not gonna lie, they were not great. She boiled them until they were tender, mashed them, got tired of mashing and stuck them in a blender, then added some butter and cinnamon, then threw some sugar around with the greatest of ease, then remarked that she understands why I make other people clean the kitchen, because it sure gets messy. In conclusion, kids learn best when you let them discover things on their own. 

I was out doing something or other, (not cleaning the kitchen, apparently) but Damien sent me this dinner photo

The meat and the rice turned out great! The carrots were worse than they look!

WEDNESDAY
Oven-fried chicken, corn dip and chips, watermelon, plum clafoutis

On Wednesday, Moe made supper. He opted to do oven fried chicken, which I was pretty happy about

Jump to Recipe

and also some corn dip, which is his recipe. I believe it is steamed corn, goat cheese crumbles, a little mayo, diced red onion, and “elote seasoning,” which I think is cumin, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, brown sugar, cayenne pepper, and paprika, or something along those lines. It was great! Very pleasant. Served that with tortilla chips, and I scrubbed the heck out of a watermelon and then cut it up. Very yummy meal. 

I had bought a big bag of plums but felt ooky about them, so I cut them into quarters and made some clafoutis. If you have fruit in the house that you’re not feeling confident about eating raw (I know the recent guidelines are mainly to avoid lettuce, but FOR SOME REASON I don’t feel confident that we’re definitely getting the best advice right now about how to live our lives), then clafoutis is a wonderful solution. 

Clafoutis is just a baked fruit custard, no crust or anything. It’s super easy (takes literally five minutes to throw together, then about half an hour to bake) and uses only a few commonplace ingredients, and my family really likes it. Baked in-season plums are criminally underrated. They were SO sweet and tart, and absolutely gorgeous nestled in golden custard. I used almond extract, rather than vanilla, and that was a good idea!

I took the opportunity to use my big box of mini tart pans I got at the thrift store. I sprayed them with cooking spray and the mini clafoutis popped right out of the pans, no problem. I whipped up some heavy cream with sugar and vanilla and holy cow. So nice. 

I made a double recipe and baked the rest in its traditional shape, in a pie plate. 

Just excellent. 

Then the kids watched The Three Amigos outside on the projector screen, and it was a nice day altogether. 

I can’t remember if I told you guys about the projector. We aren’t doing any trips or big vacationy things or camp or anything this year, so I splurged a bit on this movie projector. We had to get a special adaptor cable so it would work, and I ordered this screen, and they all work great. I wish I had ordered different speakers, though. The ones I got are meant for a small space. But they work well enough for our purposes. Overall, I’m happy with this purchase, and the kids are using it frequently. I have mixed feelings about how much of a treat they consider sitting outside and watching Frasier, but I guess it could be worse. Frasier is a great show, don’t get me wrong! It’s just, I don’t know. They’re so avid about it.

THURSDAY
BLT’s, ice cream pie

Thursday was Lucy’s birthday, and she requested BLT’s. My first thought was to get safe lettuce by buying it from the local nursery, but they didn’t have much. So I just got some iceberg lettuce, stripped off the top five layers, washed the rest throughly in soap, rinsed it eleven times, and kissed it up to God. Also washed the tomatoes in soap. So I guess we’ll see how that turned out. 

I’m a little embarrassed at how much mayo I put on my sandwich. I guess I was mad about having to wash tomatoes with soap, so I addressed that by slapping on a lot of mayo. Follow me for more tips of healthy living in body and mind. 

Lucy and her sisters made a couple of ice cream pies with coffee and black raspberry ice cream, gummy worms, marshmallows, and M&M’s.

Another birthday, my goodness. She’s gonna have a little party with friends on Sunday, and I’ll make some kind of goofy cake for that. 

FRIDAY
???

The original plan for supper was tuna noodle casserole, but we are going to go to adoration and then over to Bellows Falls to see the mysterious petroglyphs!

Only a few of the kids came with me last time, when we first went to check them out, but this time, I’m hoping to bring more people. And, uh, hoping I can remember where they are. AND, I am hoping to have supper at Dari Joy afterwards. Maybe we will have ice cream for supper. 

Oh man, I have a ton more photos that I meant to include in this post. Let’s just do a quick round-up of Other Stuff This Week!

First up: Leetle babbby cucumbers! I have about ten cucumber plants and they are finally making cucumbers. They’re so fierce and prickly when they’re tiny. 

Next, here are my corn and potatoes. The corn is so tall and robust this year. The potatoes leaves are starting to die back, which means they’re putting all their effort into the actual potato, rather than the greens. EXCITED. 

I planted a bunch of dill as companion plants with the cucumbers so we could make pickles, but I forgot how fast dill grows, and it’s probably gonna be all done long before the cucumbers are ready to pick. So I picked a bunch of it and put it in a jar of vinegar, and I’ll just use that to make brine when the cucumbers are ready. 

Here’s the first garlic! About a third to half of it looked like it was ready to dig up, and I was getting so impatient, so I went for it. Looks pretty good! I just need to dust it off a bit and then let it cure for a few weeks. I am kind of hoping the rest is bigger than these, but these are good. The individual cloves are nice and big, which is what matters. I hate when you have a big head of garlic made of little slivery cloves. 

Here’s one of my flower gardens. I totally forgot that I had planted some bright pink bee balm last year, so that was a pleasant surprise!

My galumphin’ pumpkins. Tons of flowers and a few little pumpkins starting to pop up. EXCITED. 

I gave blood, woo!

Well, this next one is me checking out how goofy my hair looks in two buns. I decided (a) it does look goofy and (b) I don’t care. It’s less pressure on my head than a single bun or ponytail, and I can do what I want. 

Ugh, this is the sky in the morning the other day. We got tons of smoke from Canadian wildfires this week. The sky has returned to blue today, though, thank goodness. 

Here’s a very important photo demonstrating, if you missed this viral hack from like eight years ago, how to make a large amount of toast in the oven. 

And finally! One of many, many slushies I consumed this month. This one is made from a bottle of spicy lemonade I got at Aldi, and guess who likes it? JUST ME. 


And that’s-a my story! 

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pork spiedies (can use marinade for shish kebob)

Ingredients

  • 1 cup veg or olive oil
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup red or white wine vinegar
  • 4 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 2 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 cup fresh mint, chopped
  • 8-10 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 4-5 lbs boneless pork, cubed
  • peppers, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, cut into chunks

Instructions

  1. Mix together all marinade ingredients. 

    Mix up with cubed pork, cover, and marinate for several hours or overnight. 

    Best cooked over hot coals on the grill on skewers with vegetables. Can also spread in a shallow pan with veg and broil under a hot broiler.

    Serve in sandwiches or with rice. 

 

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Ben and Jerry's Strawberry Ice Cream

Ingredients

For the strawberries

  • 1 pint fresh strawberries
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1-1/2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

For the ice cream base

  • 2 eggs
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 2 cups heavy or whipping cream
  • 1 cup milk

Instructions

  1. Hull and slice the strawberries. Mix them with the sugar and lemon juice, cover, and refrigerate for an hour.

Make the ice cream base:

  1. In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs for two minutes until fluffy.

  2. Add in the sugar gradually and whisk another minute.

  3. Pour in the milk and cream and continue whisking to blend.

Put it together:

  1. Mash the strawberries well, or puree them in a food processor. Stir into the ice cream base.

  2. Add to your ice cream maker and follow the directions. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes, then transfer the ice cream to a container, cover it, and put it in the freezer.)

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bare bones bo ssam

If you really want to knock people's socks off, look up My Korean Kitchen bo ssam, and make all the sauces and sides. This is a pared-down version, and I use this meat in many ways. Mostly, I just serve it with lettuce and rice and some kind of simple fruit of vegetable for a side, and it's fabulous. Start it the night before, let it cook all day, and you get maximum flavor for minimum effort.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1 cup salt
  • big pork shoulder, preferably with a a bone and a nice fat cap
  • 7 Tbso brown sugar
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 2 tsp cider vinegar

Instructions

  1. Mix together the cup of sugar and cup of salt, and rub it all over the pork. Let this brine at least six hours. I usually do it overnight, and put it in a ziplock bag in a bowl in the fridge.

  2. Turn the oven to 300. Put a double layer of tin foil over a pan, to make clean-up much easier. Set the pork on the pan, fat side up, and cook it, uncovered, for about six hours.

  3. Combine the brown sugar, cider vinegar, and Tbsp of salt. In the last ten minutes of cooking, crank the oven up to 500, take the pork out, and spread the brown sugar mixture on top. Put it back in the oven and cook it until it's got a glistening crust.

  4. Serve with lettuce and rice to make little wraps.

 

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Oven-fried chicken

so much easier than pan frying, and you still get that crisp skin and juicy meat

Ingredients

  • chicken parts (wings, drumsticks, thighs)
  • milk (enough to cover the chicken at least halfway up)
  • eggs (two eggs per cup of milk)
  • flour
  • your choice of seasonings (I usually use salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, and chili powder)
  • oil and butter for cooking

Instructions

  1. At least three hours before you start to cook, make an egg and milk mixture and salt it heavily, using two eggs per cup of milk, so there's enough to soak the chicken at least halfway up. Beat the eggs, add the milk, stir in salt, and let the chicken soak in this. This helps to make the chicken moist and tender.

  2. About 40 minutes before dinner, turn the oven to 425, and put a pan with sides into the oven. I use a 15"x21" sheet pan and I put about a cup of oil and one or two sticks of butter. Let the pan and the butter and oil heat up.

  3. While it is heating up, put a lot of flour in a bowl and add all your seasonings. Use more than you think is reasonable! Take the chicken parts out of the milk mixture and roll them around in the flour until they are coated on all sides.

  4. Lay the floured chicken in the hot pan, skin side down. Let it cook for 25 minutes.

  5. Flip the chicken over and cook for another 20 minutes.

  6. Check for doneness and serve immediately. It's also great cold.

What’s for supper? Vol. 466: Oh toum, where is thy victory?

Happy Friday! I don’t think there was a single day this week when I knew what day it was. Which is why I put every single thing down in my calendar, so I don’t get confused. Unfortunately, I have an incredible knack for entering things on the right day of the week, but the wrong month. So I’m constantly getting notifications like, hey, remember that scholarship deadline? Yeah, that’s gone. Yo, happy one month anniversary of the time you said you’d bring in muffins and didn’t! Also, alert: that lab order has officially expired, and unfortunately you are now dead.

The good news is, these notifications don’t bother me at all, because I somehow accidentally turned off my ringer and the battery died, and my phone is carefully tucked in between some dish towels where I set it down for a second and then just walked away

Did I mention I don’t have any cognitive impairment? This is just what I’m like. This is what peak Simcha performance looks like!

But seriously, I so, so appreciate all the many kind messages, prayers, and donations folks have been sending. We are all doing pretty much fine and chugging along. My special intractable schwannoma headaches are ramping up again, but what can one do. Oh actually, probably surgery. I’m waiting to hear back about that! 

And here is what we had for supper this week!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and stuffed potato skins

Just a regular day of chores and shopping. I also did a big Egg Reconciliation. Duck eggs can sit on the counter unrefrigerated for quite some times, as long as you leave them unwashed; but I was running out of counter space! So I scrubbed them all

and then carefully dropped them into a pitcher of water. The ones that sank and lay flat were the freshest, so I boxed those up and sold them to the Chinese restaurant down the road.

None of them floated (which they do when they’re really stale), but about half of them tipped up a bit on one end, which means they’re not super fresh, but still edible. So I separated those and froze them

, without any specific goal except to stop thinking about eggs for a while. Perhaps I will make a pavlova for Mother’s Day. I really like pavlovas!

The shopping turn kid chose stuffed potato skins for the leftover supplement, and there was tons of other food leftover.

I also heated up the last of the chicken soup with matzoh balls, and it was yummy one last time. 

SUNDAY
Pizza

Actually I must have done the egg thing on Sunday. Anyway I remember hoping to get some other kind of big project done on Sunday, and then not doing it. I did make a yummy pizza. 

I spread half the cheese on the pizza, then adorned it with prosciutto. Then I put the rest of the cheese on and baked the pizza, then topped it with arugula dressed with lemon juice and pepper. Yummo. 

MONDAY
Buffalo chicken drumsticks, garlic knots, raw veggies and dip

Monday I just roasted a bunch of drumsticks with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then tossed them in bottled buffalo sauce and put them back in the oven to reheat saucily while I made some garlic knots with the leftover pizza dough. (I bought three balls of pizza dough out of habit, but there were only FOUR people home for supper, so I made a mere two XL pizzas.) And a nice robust vegetable platter. 

I was gonna roll the baked garlic knots in melted butter, but everyone was super hungry, so I just served them right out of the oven. 

Solid little meal, easy peasy. 

TUESDAY
Pulled pork on waffle fries, raw veggies

Tuesday was a very drivey day, so I started the pulled pork nice and early. Here’s the recipe. 

Jump to Recipe

I found a replacement Instant Pot for cheap on Marketplace, so we are pressure cookin’ again, hooray!

Sonny and I got some stream time. Poor Sonny, he drives me absolutely bonkers when he’s inside. He’s just so gross and smelly and dumb and in the way. But we get along so well outside. He chills out and becomes a noble and sedate enjoyer of nature, and also yearns to protect me from biting ducks, which is endearing. I guess he has just learned to accept that I kind of hate him when he’s inside, but when we’re outside, we’re best friends, and that’s just how it is. 

Anyway, it sure is purty down there. We’ve had a lot of sudden bursts of rain lately, so a pretty good haul of pottery and bottles had washed up on the banks. I like to collect these and put them in a pile by a tree, and admire lichen. I guess probably I’m the one who chills out when I get outside. 

In the afternoon, I gave a kid a driving lesson, and we set a new record for how close you can zoom past a tree without actually hitting it. Also thrilling in its own way, a new light came on on the dashboard. Alas. 

But supper was delicious. I cooked a bunch of waffle fries and sliced up some red onions, shredded the meat, set out some BBQ sauce, and we had tasty pork bowls.

I’m not too proud to tell you that I think this would have been even tastier with some horribly orange, dangerously salty fake cheese melted, or possibly extruded, over the top. But it was very good without, as well. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken shawarma, pita, toum 

Wednesday I spent almost all day cooking, for some reason. I was planning two meals with chicken thighs, but had thriftily bought ones with bone and skin, so I spent a good long time processing about eight pounds of thighs, much to Sonny’s intense interest. (Unfortunately this was Inside Dog, so I hated him, and did not give him any chicken. Also, even though I hate him, I had actually given him some pork yesterday, which he promptly threw up, and I HATE that.) I set aside eight of the most intact ones for the next day, and set the rest to marinating. 

Yes, oh yes, it was SHAWARMA DAY. Here is my oven shawarma recipe

Jump to Recipe

Then I made a double batch of pita dough. Last week’s pita was a little disappointing, so I reverted to this recipe, which is a little more labor intensive (more ingredients, and the frying process is longer and slightly more complicated), but it’s really worth it, and easy enough once you get into the rhythm. Anyway I made the dough and let it rise for an hour and a half, and then I put it into the fridge because it was too early to do the second rise. 

AND THEN, I made some TOUM. I have never heard of this Lebanese garlic sauce before, but I saw a video and it looked magnificent. I settled on the Serious Eats recipe, which calls for a cup of garlic cloves. This turned out to be about two-and-a-half heads of garlic, which I peeled with the aid of one of those little silicone tubes lined with nubbins. 

The recipe says you should split each clove open and cut the germ out, but life was passing me by, so I skipped that. You pulse it up in the food processor with some salt, and then add some lemon juice and make a paste. Then, with the food processor running, you start slowwwwwly adding three(!) cups of oil,

alternating half cups of oil with the rest of the lemon juice and then with ice water.

I’m so bad at adding things slowly, and even though I read the little explanation about emulsification and whatnot, I really just wanted to dump the whole amount in. I just had to keep thinking about that part in The Witch of Blackbird Pond where Kit gets mad and dumps all the cornmeal into the pudding at once, and the family has to eat lumpy corn pudding and that was all that was for dinner, and she feels so bad; and that gave me the fortitude to keep it at a slow drizzle. In this way, I avoided the harsh approbation of my dour and exacting uncle, at least for one more day. But oh, ’tis a weary task. What would grandfather think, to see me this way? 

Well, I whipped it and whipped it, but it was still kinda soupy, and even though I’ve never had or seen toum, I was pretty sure that wasn’t right. Happily, the recipe says if this happens, you can just pull most of the toum out of the food processor, whip up the rest with an egg white until it’s fluffy, and then add the rest back in. Worked great!

I can’t really think of anything with a similar texture. It’s light and fluffy, but . . . I guess unguent is the word? But not really. It’s definitely not greasy, and not exactly creamy. One thing we can all agree about: It is GARLICKY. One little dab of it lights your whole head up like an emergency flare. Wow! I was delighted. 

Then I made some normal yogurt sauce (Greek yogurt, lemon juice, crushed garlic, salt), because People Don’t Like Change, and they had been looking forward to this meal and I didn’t want anyone to be sad. Then I put a bunch of stuff in bowls.

and heaved my sorry self outside to deal with the giant smashed window. NOT a window of the house, I hasten to add. Just one of those gigantic windows I lugged home last year — or was it the year before? — to make into a sunporch, and then didn’t do that. I had dragged one into the back yard and leaned it up against the old bunkbed,

thinking I would surely figure out some way to make this into a little greenhouse. Then came a mighty wind, and we got this:

The good news is, it is safety glass, so there were not super sharp shards of glass everywhere. The bad news is, broken safety glass collapses into millions of teeny little bits when you so much as breathe on it, even if you don’t have ultrasonically powerful garlic breath. Also, I had set this up on an area of the yard where I had made an attempt to do some landscaping, by which I mean I dumped thousands and thousands of little rocks there, back when we were digging up the ground for the pool and had to move thousands and thousands of rocks.

I did kind of enjoy this “mighty whale breaching out through the arctic ice” effect

but most of the rocks are much smaller, very effectively trapping the glass bits in between them, so the glass sinks into the dirt buuuuut you can’t reach it. 

So . . . I’ll just say I tried lots of different ways to clean it up easily, and there is no such thing. And I’m not gonna rent a shop vac, because the only thing that would make this project worse would be spending money on it. So I settled for putting on my goatskin gloves and just gloomily grabbing up handfuls of glass and throwing them in a tub, over and over and over and over again. I did this for quite some time, and there is still a lot of glass out there. And of course in my foot.  

I’m gonna have to get out there with a shovel and excavate the whole thing, which I’m not super excited about. Also, it has since rained very hard a couple of times, so the tub and bag full of glass bits are also now full of water. 

HOWEVER, after the school run I got home, cut up the pita dough and started it on its second rise, cut up a bunch on onions and sprinkled them over the meat and got that cooking, and ALL WAS WELL. BY WHICH I MEAN DELICIOUS. 

The method for this pita recipe is to fry on one side for 30 seconds, then on the other side for 30 seconds, then brush both sides with olive oil and continue cooking for five minutes, flipping it every minute or so. I made eight pieces (I doubled the recipe and just made really big pita), and it did take quite a while, but man, they were yummy. 

They puffed up so nicely in the pan, and came out really fluffy and chewy, with little crisp bits and a rich flavor. Excellent. 

It was all excellent. 

 
Sadly, nobody else would even try the toum! (Nobody except Damien said the food was good, either, but I’ll kill them about that later.) So I ended up with quite a bit of it leftover. It took so much time and effort to make, I decided to go ahead and offer it on my town Facebook page, and it got snapped up right away! So that was nice. The woman who picked it up even gave me a dozen eggs from her chickens, and several heads of garlic from her garden. I’m growing garlic this year, but it’s nowhere near ready to harvest.

Anyway, the meal was just great and I was very proud of myself. A very satisfying way to turn the day around. 

THURSDAY 
Spicy chicken pepper sandwiches, cheese curls

Thursday I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about one of the bedrooms upstairs. I knew supper would be easy, so after I did my calisthenics (I’ve been doing calisthenics lately, I don’t know why) I lumbered upstairs with a bunch of garbage bags and tore into the mess. Six bags of laundry and three bags of trash later, it looked a little better up there! I was powered by the sound of Tom Holland’s spectacularly horrible southern accent. I will never, ever, ever once again be embarrassed when an American tries to do a British accent. Seriously, it will make you feel like you are going insane. 

Damien volunteered to pick up the kids, and he also got a bunch of cleaning supplies and my prescriptions, and I was able to stay home and push through to start scrubbing the walls and ceiling (don’t ask), and I got so much done. 

Eventually I called it a day, took a shower, and then threw together some chicken sandwiches with the thigh meat I had prepped the day before. It’s basically this recipe from Sip and Feast, except I use Tony Chachere’s, and I had cubanelle peppers instead of shishito, and kaiser buns instead of brioche rolls. Neither one is necessarily an improvement; it was just what I happened to have. This is a wonderful sandwich, though, and I think you should make it soon. 

 
With some pointed prompting, the child thanked me for cleaning her room, and then I slithered off to bed. Well actually first I handwashed some dishes, because the stinking dish washer broke. But then Damien fixed it! I guess it was some food and grease had gotten into the control panel or something, which is strange, because the children certainly always rinse the dishes before loading them, as they have been instructed to do. A mystery. 

While I was cooking the chicken, the dog came over and horked up a Brillo pad. Then he lay down and looked regretful for a while, then he went back to hoping intensely for some chicken. Which I did not give him, because, dude.

FRIDAY
Tuna sandwiches, possibly risotto

Today Damien is working on my car, and he also got a new coil or something for the water heater (we’ve been taking lurkworm showers for a while now, which is kind of discouraging), and also a pipe for the basement, because when the kitchen sink pipe broke, it leaked dirty kitchen water into the dirt basement floor and you know what, that is probably why we have so many flies. HOWEVER. We’re gaining on them, I feel. The flies, the appliances, the children, the mess, the everything. Superabimus, or something like that. Anyway, when I was cleaning I found six pairs of scissors. 

Not to get too edifying on your asses, but I did realize that, as long as I’m going to be digging up a big swath of dirt to clean up all that glass near the patio, I might as well plant something there. It gets TONS of sun, and I might just get one of those giant pouches of mixed seeds and dump it in. Gotta have some fun somehow! 

Don’t forget, make the sandwich!

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Clovey pulled pork – 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 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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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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Chicken shawarma

Ingredients

  • 8 lbs boned, skinned chicken thighs
  • 4-5 red onions
  • 1.5 cups lemon juice
  • 2 cups olive oil
  • 4 tsp kosher salt
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp pepper
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes OR Aleppo pepper
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 entire head garlic, crushed OR bashed into pieces

Instructions

  1. Mix marinade ingredients together, then add chicken. Put in ziplock bag and let marinate several hours or overnight.

  2. Preheat the oven to 425.

  3. Grease a shallow pan. Take the chicken out of the marinade and spread it in a single layer on the pan, and top with the onions (sliced or quartered). If you kept the garlic in larger pieces, fish those out of the marinade and strew them over the chicken. Cook for 45 minutes or more. 

  4. Chop up the chicken a bit, if you like, and finish cooking it so it crisps up a bit more.

  5. Serve chicken and onions with pita bread triangles, cucumbers, tomatoes, assorted olives, feta cheese, fresh parsley, pomegranates or grapes, fried eggplant, and yogurt sauce.

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

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

SATURDAY
Leftovers with French bread pizza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh what a life. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY
Oven-fried chicken, mashed potatoes MADE BY CORRIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY
Koren beef bowl, cucumber salad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy birthday, my deary dear. 

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

THURSDAY
Caprese chicken burgers, chips

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Macarona bil laban 

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

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

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

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

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

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Oven-fried chicken

so much easier than pan frying, and you still get that crisp skin and juicy meat

Ingredients

  • chicken parts (wings, drumsticks, thighs)
  • milk (enough to cover the chicken at least halfway up)
  • eggs (two eggs per cup of milk)
  • flour
  • your choice of seasonings (I usually use salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, and chili powder)
  • oil and butter for cooking

Instructions

  1. At least three hours before you start to cook, make an egg and milk mixture and salt it heavily, using two eggs per cup of milk, so there's enough to soak the chicken at least halfway up. Beat the eggs, add the milk, stir in salt, and let the chicken soak in this. This helps to make the chicken moist and tender.

  2. About 40 minutes before dinner, turn the oven to 425, and put a pan with sides into the oven. I use a 15"x21" sheet pan and I put about a cup of oil and one or two sticks of butter. Let the pan and the butter and oil heat up.

  3. While it is heating up, put a lot of flour in a bowl and add all your seasonings. Use more than you think is reasonable! Take the chicken parts out of the milk mixture and roll them around in the flour until they are coated on all sides.

  4. Lay the floured chicken in the hot pan, skin side down. Let it cook for 25 minutes.

  5. Flip the chicken over and cook for another 20 minutes.

  6. Check for doneness and serve immediately. It's also great cold.

 

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Korean Beef Bowl

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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spicy cucumber salad

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

Ingredients

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

Optional:

red pepper, diced

  • 1/2 red onion diced

Instructions

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

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

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

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizza

Not a very sumptuous collection of leftovers,

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

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, vegetables

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

I did have my first asparagus harvest, though! 

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY
Chili verde, tortilla chips

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

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

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

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

Anyway, here is the recipe:

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY 
Pizza

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Hot dogs, cheezy weezies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THURSDAY
Chicken shawarma, fresh pita, tiramisu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese

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

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

5 from 1 vote
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Spicy Chili Verde

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

Ingredients

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

For the salsa verde:

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

For serving:

  • lime wedges
  • sour cream
  • additional cilantro for topping

Instructions

  1. Preheat the broiler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chicken shawarma

Ingredients

  • 8 lbs boned, skinned chicken thighs
  • 4-5 red onions
  • 1.5 cups lemon juice
  • 2 cups olive oil
  • 4 tsp kosher salt
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp pepper
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes OR Aleppo pepper
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 entire head garlic, crushed OR bashed into pieces

Instructions

  1. Mix marinade ingredients together, then add chicken. Put in ziplock bag and let marinate several hours or overnight.

  2. Preheat the oven to 425.

  3. Grease a shallow pan. Take the chicken out of the marinade and spread it in a single layer on the pan, and top with the onions (sliced or quartered). If you kept the garlic in larger pieces, fish those out of the marinade and strew them over the chicken. Cook for 45 minutes or more. 

  4. Chop up the chicken a bit, if you like, and finish cooking it so it crisps up a bit more.

  5. Serve chicken and onions with pita bread triangles, cucumbers, tomatoes, assorted olives, feta cheese, fresh parsley, pomegranates or grapes, fried eggplant, and yogurt sauce.

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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 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. 367: I knead you so badly

Happy Friday! We’ve been eating a little too well for Lent. Don’t tell my bishop. Or, actually go ahead and tell him. I went and got fired from the diocesan magazine already last week, so do your worst. (I don’t really know why it happened, other than that I am annoying. It’s fine. Something else always turns up, and I can go be annoying to a slightly different subset of readers, inshallah.)

Anyway, here’s what we had this week, which was February vacation for most of the kids:  

SATURDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips

Usually, for grilled cheese, I buy a few loaves of sourdough bread that comes in very large pieces, but they were out of them at Aldi, so I got some pleasant-looking Italian loaves that seemed likely. Dinner time comes along, I open the bag, and here is what the individual slices look like:

and I’m like, huh. Possibly I’m a pervert, but this feels slightly awkward. Maybe they will look more normal if I put mayonnaise on them

Ah well, we’ll just call it theology of the body and fry ’em up. 

Yes, they all looked like this. 

So everyone got one and we also had pickles and let us never speak of this again. Definitely not to the bishop. 

SUNDAY
40 garlic whole chickens, orzo al limone

I have mentioned in the past how allergic I am to cooking whole chickens, because we had them SO often when we were super poor and they used to be like 49 cents a pound, and I just feel so gloomy and oppressed by whole chickens now. But I’m trying really hard to shop the sales, so I made a tremendous penitential Lenten effort and bought two whole chickens for cheap, which I prepared using this recipe for 40 garlic clove chickens. 

You melt butter and oil in a dutch oven and brown the chickens on all sides, take out the chicken and drain off some of the fat, and stir in the garlic cloves. Yes, we peeled 80 cloves of garlic.

In fact, it was after we peeled about 65 cloves of garlic that I more carefully read the recipe I was going to use, and discovered that it calls for unpeeled garlic. So I quickly switched to the recipe I linked above, which doesn’t specify. No, I will not read to the end of a recipe before starting it! You can’t make me!!

So then you put the chicken back in along with a little water, and lemon juice, salt, thyme (it calls for dried but I had fresh), and pepper, cover the dutch oven, and bake it in the oven for 90 minutes.  I don’t actually have a dutch oven, so I browned the chicken in a pot and then transferred it to a giant oven pan, covered it with tinfoil, and then put a second pan on top. 

Good enough! When I opened it up, the chickens were [Danny Kaye doing his drooling Clever Gretel voice] nicely cooked. 

I cooked them breast-side-down in “humble frog” position, because I knew the skin wasn’t going to be the star of this chicken anyway, and I really wanted the meat to be juicy. It was not the most visually stunning chicken I have ever met, but it was extremely juicy and full of flavor. I actually used quite a bit more lemon juice than it called for, and I have no regrets.

Before I made the chicken, I started on the orzo. I was using this recipe from delish, and if it sounds tasty to you (and it will), I recommend taking a screenshot, because they limit how many free page views you get. I assemble the ingredients and knew this would be a winner. Just look:

It’s basically the same as risotto. Sauté some garlic, then lemon zest, and oops, I threw my chives in there too soon 

then add your orzo with salt and pepper and toast it a bit. Then you add chicken broth, a bit at a time, so the orzo slowly absorbs it.

Yeah man. 

When it’s cooked, stir in the cheese (it called for Pecorino Romano, but I had parmesan) and the parsley, lemon juice, and chives. 

I actually cooked the orzo first and then put it in the slow cooker, and then got to work on the chicken.

They were SO nice together. 

Some asparagus or spinach would have put this meal over the top, but it was pretty great as it was. The cloves of garlic were as soft as boiled potatoes, so what I did was just fork-mash them onto my chicken 

and we were all in garlic heaven. “We” being the chicken and the orzo and me. 

The orzo is amazing. I loved it so much. It was rich and creamy and cozy, but also piquant and sharp with the garlic and lemon and herbs. Some of the kids did not like the texture, probably because they are used to risotto and it’s not the same. But Damien and I thought it was great. 

On Sunday, I also did some winter sowing, which is something I only recently discovered. The idea is that you can start seeds outdoors in late winter even if it’s cold and snowy out, because you’re planting in milk jugs that act as little greenhouses; and then when the frost is past and your seedlings are big enough to transplant into the ground, you don’t have to harden them off, because they’re already acclimated. I have never successfully hardened seedlings off, because I take it too personally and all I can think is that nobody ever carried me in and out and in and out because my little leafies might get cold. 

You cut the milk jugs about four inches up from the bottom, leaving the last bit intact for a hinge. Fill the bottom with seed starter material, plant your seeds, water, and put the top back and tape it shut. That’s it. 

I was delighted to find a sack of seed starter I had bought on clearance last year, so I got out my saved seed stash and did three jugs of eggplants, three of pumpkin, and two butternut squash; and I did two jugs of morning glories for my friend Millie, who is in the nursing home again. And I got some more spiles and tubing for maple sugaring! But I used up all the milk jugs, so we have to build up some more supply before I can get going on that.

MONDAY
Spicy chicken sandwiches, fruit salad

Monday I went to see Millie in the morning. If you could keep her in your prayers, please, I’d appreciate it! She’s going to be 90 the first week in March and she’s hoping to be able to get back to her house and garden soon. 

I had some boneless, skinless chicken thighs I had stashed in the freezer when they were on sale a few weeks ago, and I made these wonderful sandwiches that everybody likes. They come together really fast. You just season the chicken thighs with Cajun seasoning — actually I used Tony Chachere’s, which is creole, but close enough — and then pan fry them on both sides. While they are cooking, you cut up some shishito peppers (just cut the tops off) and slice some red onions. When the chicken is done, you blister up the peppers in another pan, and lay some American cheese on top of the chicken and put a lid on it so it melts. 

(I didn’t actually cook the chicken this close together; I used two pans, and then transferred the chicken to one pan for the cheese treatment.)

Layer the chicken, peppers, and onions on brioche buns, with BBQ sauce top and bottom. Boom, amazing sandwich.

I just love this sandwich because it’s so SIMPLE. One bottle of spice, one step with the peppers, easy sliced cheese, bottled sauce. You really couldn’t improve it if you made it complicated and fiddly (although I’m sure Sam Sifton would like to try). 

You can see that I made a fruit salad, which we haven’t had for a while. Strawberries, blueberries, grapes, and kiwis. Nice to have some color. 

TUESDAY
Beef barley soup, french bread

Beef was on sale, so I got a likely-looking hunk and made some soup. Garlic, onion, and carrots, chunks of beef, tomatoes, beef broth, mushrooms, and barley, and plenty of pepper. So good. 

Jump to Recipe

This is the soup I sometimes make in my head when I can’t sleep. 

While that was simmering, I thought it was high time to test out my lovely new marble countertop, which I purposely installed lower than the rest of the counter, to make it easier to knead dough. (I’m kind of short; I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this.)

IT WAS PERFECT. Made such a difference. I never realized I was struggling with dough on the higher countertop, but now that I have a lower one, it was so much easier. 

Here is the simple french bread recipe I use:

Jump to Recipe

It makes four long loaves — or, in this case, three long ones and three shorties, because I was sending some food over to one of the kids. 

I do love rolling the loaves out. Zoop!

Then I set them for a second rise and managed to drop BOTH pans as I was moving them, so they got kind of wadded up, but they baked up well enough. 

They had a really nice thin little shattering crust on the outside, and they were soft and tender on the inside. Good stuff. 

So we had the soup and the bread

and at this point I’m just dragging the narrative out because I have more pictures. 

And now I’m done!

WEDNESDAY
Korean beef bowl, rice, raw veg, crunchy rice rolls

Wednesday we had a bunch of errands – haircuts and what have you – and I started supper late, but it was a quickie: Good old Korean Beef Bowl. I had bought extra ground beef when it was on sale for the Super Bowl, and this is a fast, easy recipe, even if you do go for fresh garlic and fresh ginger, which I did. 

Jump to Recipe

So I put the cooked beef in the slow cooker, and made some rice in the instant pot, cut up some cucumbers and took out the packages of crunchy rice rolls I had been saving. 

Tasty little meal. The beef has sesame seeds and chopped scallions for garnishes. I don’t know why I feel the need to point that out, but there you are. 

On Wednesday I cut up the leftover chicken and made a simple chicken salad (just mayo, I think maybe lemon juice or cider vinegar, salt and pepper, celery, and green apple), and then I made soup with the rest of the carcasses, just so as not to waste it. I had a brainwave and realized I could freeze it all and get a jump start on Passover cooking this year! I really hate making the chicken soup some years, so I’m delighted to have this already done. I will need to add parsley and dill, but it already has the chicken, carrots, celery, and onion in it. 

THURSDAY
Pizza

The kids had mainly been playing board games all week (including Dixit, which was a Christmas present, and turned out to be a hit) for vacation week, but I did promise/threaten a trip to an art museum; so five of the kids and I went to the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester. Great stuff. Admission is reasonable (one adult, two students, two youth, and a kid got in for $35) and their descriptive cards are good, providing enough context and explanation to help you see, but without leading you too much. They have a really solid, varied collection for a small museum.

Interesting things happening in the contemporary art world! There is still a certain amount of “hoo HOO, I bet THIS transgressive bit of plastic really pushes your conventional little buttons, DOESN’T IT??” getting churned out, but also some far more interesting stuff. (Yes, I realize I opened this post with some penis sandwiches, so maybe I should shut my yap about who’s childishly transgressive. On the other hand, they were just sandwiches.) I was especially taken with two large works by Kara Walker, who will have an entire exhibit there soon, but there were other thoughtful, skilled, intriguing, moving contemporary pieces as well. I shared a few images on Facebook:

It is a small museum, so we did a thorough tour in two hours. Then we hit a few thrift stores just for fun, and then we got pizza and talked about art. Lovely day with my lovely kids. On the way there, they played an ice breaker game (“If you were an animal, what kind would you be? What is your favorite movie” etc.), but they played as different characters, so everyone had to guess who they were. Let me tell you, if we had run out of gas, we could have made it home under the sheer white hot heat of the quantity of in-jokes flying around. I had no idea what was going on, but they had fun. 

FRIDAY
Tilapia tacos and guacamole

I don’t really have a solid plan for this fish, but I’m tired of having it in my freezer. It was on clearance at Walmart quite some time ago, and I don’t want to look at it anymore. Hoping the avocados I got aren’t totally overripe by now. 

And I need to make a cake! A Squirtle cake! For tomorrow is Corrie’s birthday party. It’s going to be Pokémon-themed, and Sophia is making a treasure hunt and Irene is making a piñata. This has honestly been one of our nicest February vacations, despite some trials which, nay, I shan’t mention. Love seeing my kids enjoy being with each other. 

My other thing is that I’m a little frustrated with yoga lately, partially because I managed to injure both knees (one by falling on the ice, one by doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING; the little fucker just started hurting for no reason, and now I go up and down stairs looking like I imagine Strega Nona would, on stairs), so I have started pilates. I kind of hate it, but it keeps my attention because you have to be SO SPECIFIC about what muscles you’re using, so at least it’s not boring. I did one random class on YouTube and then I found this lady, Banks (that’s how she refers to herself, as “Banks”), and I have done three of her thirty-minute core classes for beginners. Tough stuff, but I’m hanging on. She is very specific about what you’re supposed to be doing and how it’s supposed to feel, which I appreciate, and she’s not especially annoying. So, now you know everything I know. 

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Beef barley soup (Instant Pot or stovetop)

Makes about a gallon of lovely soup

Ingredients

  • olive oil
  • 1 medium onion or red onion, diced
  • 1 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 3-4 medium carrots, peeled and diced
  • 2-3 lbs beef, cubed
  • 16 oz mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
  • 6 cups beef bouillon
  • 1 cup merlot or other red wine
  • 29 oz canned diced tomatoes (fire roasted is nice) with juice
  • 1 cup uncooked barley
  • salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Heat the oil in a heavy pot. If using Instant Pot, choose "saute." Add the minced garlic, diced onion, and diced carrot. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions and carrots are softened. 


  2. Add the cubes of beef and cook until slightly browned.

  3. Add the canned tomatoes with their juice, the beef broth, and the merlot, plus 3 cups of water. Stir and add the mushrooms and barley. 

  4. If cooking on stovetop, cover loosely and let simmer for several hours. If using Instant Pot, close top, close valve, and set to high pressure for 30 minutes. 

  5. Before serving, add pepper to taste. Salt if necessary. 

 

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French bread

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

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Korean Beef Bowl

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 363: Do you reject garlic and all their little paperwork?

Happy Friday! Happy February, finally! Let’s get hoppin.

SATURDAY
Beer brats, fries

Saturday and Sunday were unusually busy for us. I went to one of Danielle Bean’s very fine You Are Enough day retreats in Plymouth and got home in the late afternoon, so I didn’t have time to shop. Damien bought and made beer brats (brats boiled in beer and onions and then grilled), which we haven’t had in quite some time. Yum yum. 

A retreat! A long chat with my friend! A dinner made by someone else! What a Saturday. 

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips

Sunday we had a QUITE long family “retreat” for the faith formation. Our parish has switched to the family model, which means that the parents come in for regular lecture and discussion sessions, and then we go home and teach our kids; and there are also all-family events. It’s good stuff, and I see the benefit, especially when there are parishioners coming from all different backgrounds and different levels of . . . having been catechized. (I can’t figure out how to say that better.) But man, some of the events are long. 

So we did get home late, but Damien had had the foresight to make burger patties the night before. So I just broiled them up, so that was easy. 

I was going to clear off the island for this picture, but this is how it be. 

MONDAY
Smoked pork ribs, coleslaw, salad, loaded baked potatoes; king cakes

Monday we had a GUEST. Fr. Matthew from Louisiana, who comes for an annual visit while visiting family up north. I briefly considered making an authentic Louisiana meal, but I remembered the video where Gordon Ramsey confidently gives some pad Thai to an actual Thai chef.

and I don’t need anybody looking at me like that, even internally. So Damien dug out the smoker and made some of those luscious ribs, which I would defend with my life no matter where you’re from.

Jump to Recipe

He smoked them for about five hours and then finished them in the oven. I baked a bunch of potatoes and kept them warm in the crock pot, which I forgot you could do. I mean, then I remembered, and I did it. I served them with crumbled bacon, shredded pepper jack cheese, sour cream, and scallions. I also made some simple coleslaw and a nice salad.

When we were eating. Fr. Matt (who loved the ribs) asked what I call the coleslaw. I said “coleslaw.” He said okay, because he was once at a Mardi Gras dinner where they served something they were calling “Authentic Louisiana Cabbage Salad,” and he wanted to know if I had ever heard of such a thing. I had not! But that’s why I decided not to make gumbo or étouffée or something! I know my limits!

OR DO I. I decided to make a couple of king cakes, because I asked around and learned that, even in New Orleans, there are a million variations, and sometimes real live cajuns will make king cake out of refrigerated cinnamon rolls.

So I made a triple recipe of just the dough for Alton Brown’s Overnight Cinnamon Rolls (which is the recipe I use at Christmas every year, so I know it turns out well) and also a triple recipe of just the cream cheese filling from this King Arthur king cake recipe. I divided the dough into two and rolled each one into a long rectangle. 

The first one, I made a very long, thin rectangle and just spread the cream cheese filling down the middle of it, and then sprinkled a bunch of brown sugar and cinnamon on top of that. Then I just sort of rolled it up into a big tube with the cream cheese in the middle and pinched the long seam shut, and uncomfortably wrestled the whole thing onto a greased pan and squashed the two open ends together, so it was a ring shape, sort of. It was leaky as heck and not round in any meaningful way. 

I was getting pretty strong “this can’t possibly be the way to do it” alarms in my head, but without any accompanying “you should actually look up how to do it” signals; so for the other cake, I rolled a less skinny rectangle, spread on the rest of the cream cheese filling and the contents of a can of strawberry pie filling I found, and then rolled it up in a spiral like I do with cinnamon rolls. This one, I rolled out on parchment paper, so I carefully squashed the open ends together and then just slid the whole thing on the paper onto a pan. This one was more respectable looking. 

I covered the cakes and refrigerated overnight, and took them out in the morning to get up to room temperature; and then I baked them at 350 for . . . a while. I lost track of how long they were in there, because I was so nervous they’d be doughy and underbaked, I kept adding 3-4 minutes. Probably 35 minutes all together. 

Then when they came out, I poured cream cheese icing over them and sprinkled on some colored sugar-sprinkles. The icing was not exactly a recipe, because I forgot to buy powdered sugar, so I ended up just whipping up a bunch of sugar, a little butter, some vanilla extract and a little lemon juice, a tiny bit of salt, and then a bunch of warmed-up cream cheese when I realized it was too runny. They came out so pretty!

The center of the ring disappeared, though, and it was really just a big dome that was kind of crinkly in the middle. To my vast relief, though, both cakes were thoroughly baked. 

ctually a little over-baked, as you can see by the browned bottom. But the somewhat dry crumb was rescued by the abundance of creamy filling, which was delicious. The spiral-rolled one didn’t turn out discernibly better than the one that was just a stuffed snake, except that the shape was a little more regular. 

So now I know how to make very respectable king cakes! At the last minute, I remembered to shove some “babies” in (what we could find was a couple of plastic figurines on loan from Elijah). We didn’t find them until the next day.

I guess traditionally, whoever gets the baby has to buy next year’s king cake, and I’m the one who found it anyway, so I suppose that can be arranged. Definitely one of those things that I got all worked up over for no particular reason. But with a happy ending, because we had cake. 

TUESDAY
Walmart pizza

Oh no, it was Tuesday and I still hadn’t gone shopping! I got some pizzas from Walmart because I developed a sudden aversion to going to Aldi.

WEDNESDAY
Nachos

On Wednesday I dropped off the van at the mechanic and was astonished to discover that I still hadn’t gone shopping? So I took Damien’s car and went to Aldi and did shopping for one day, because apparently I was determined to save myself the trouble of going shopping, and instead wanted to go shopping. 

For nachos, I usually make 2/3 spicy meat and 1/3 plain, in two separate pans; and I got two bags of “hint of lime” tortilla chips, and one bag plain. But then I was seized with a sudden doubt, and had a long, inadvisable, circular conversation with the kids about whether a desire for spicy meat matched up with a desire for seasoned chips, and if so, how many people experienced that desire, and if not, how many people felt strongly about not experiencing that desire, and so on. I’m not exactly a people pleaser, but I don’t like getting yelled at about nachos, so I really tried to narrow in on what they wanted. I was starting to get a pretty clear picture about what I should do, when the chief kid I was interrogating said, “Actually, I don’t like nachos.”

So I ran them over with my van! Just kidding, the van is in the shop. I made two pans of nachos, with jalapeños on the spicy meat and lime chip one

and ate mine in the kitchen.

Then I ate the last piece of king cake. 

THURSDAY
Chicken shawarma

Thursday, you’ll never guess what I did: I went shopping. But this time, I, genius, bought enough food for TWO days. We had chicken shawarma on Thursday, with pita, yogurt sauce, olives, feta, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

I was in a bit of a rush while I made the marinade, and my recipe

Jump to Recipe

calls for crushing an entire head of garlic. Which is fine if you have nice garlic with big, swollen cloves and loose skins. But what I had was that triflin’ little shrinky dink garlic from Aldi, which has puny, miniature cloves and tight, sticky skin. Then I remembered it was my kitchen and I could do whatever I want, so I put the head of garlic in a mug with about half a cup of water, microwaved it for two minutes, and then just pulled that garlic right out of its skin. It’s not really cooked, but it’s soft and loose that way. Then I put the skinned cloves in a sandwich bag and beat the hell out of them with a meat tenderizer. And that’s how you do it when nobody is looking. 

Oh, the title comes from a funny tweet I saw 

and that’s how I always think of it now. Sometimes it can be a satisfying, meditative little task; sometimes you just don’t have time for all the effing paperwork. (Yes, I know you can crush garlic with the skin on, and then pick the skin out, but I hate and resent doing this, for reasons I can’t really explain.) 

Then I remembered I also needed to put garlic in the yogurt sauce, as well, so I was like HEY GARLIC POWDER EXISTS. 

Anyway, the meat turned out great

and everyone was happy

Really no way to be unhappy with a plate like this. 

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle

This was actually Damien’s idea, even though he not only dislikes tuna noodle, he can’t stand the smell of it. But I did manage to buy the ingredients yesterday, so at least nobody has to go to the fwiggin store. As I write, the plan is for him to make himself a grilled cheese, but maybe I can pull rank and insist on some supermarket sushi or something. OR, I think there is a bag of shrimp in the freezer. So we shall see. 

I just remembered I also have a ton of egg whites in the fridge. The cinnamon bun recipe called for an awful lot of egg yolks, and I didn’t want to just throw the whites away. How long would you trust egg whites to keep in the fridge, and what should I do with them? Maybe a pavlova. Maybe a SHRIMP pavlova. Maybe I’ll ask Gordon Ramsey what he thinks.

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sugar smoked ribs

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

Ingredients

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

For the sugar rub:

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

Instructions

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

  2. Smoke at 225 for 3 hours

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

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

  5. Remove tinfoil and smoke another 45-min.

  6. Finish on grill to give it a char.

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Chicken shawarma

Ingredients

  • 8 lbs boned, skinned chicken thighs
  • 4-5 red onions
  • 1.5 cups lemon juice
  • 2 cups olive oil
  • 4 tsp kosher salt
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp pepper
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes OR Aleppo pepper
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 entire head garlic, crushed OR bashed into pieces

Instructions

  1. Mix marinade ingredients together, then add chicken. Put in ziplock bag and let marinate several hours or overnight.

  2. Preheat the oven to 425.

  3. Grease a shallow pan. Take the chicken out of the marinade and spread it in a single layer on the pan, and top with the onions (sliced or quartered). If you kept the garlic in larger pieces, fish those out of the marinade and strew them over the chicken. Cook for 45 minutes or more. 

  4. Chop up the chicken a bit, if you like, and finish cooking it so it crisps up a bit more.

  5. Serve chicken and onions with pita bread triangles, cucumbers, tomatoes, assorted olives, feta cheese, fresh parsley, pomegranates or grapes, fried eggplant, and yogurt sauce.

What’s for supper? Vol. 288: Paneer, and yet so far

I do believe I’ve picked up some new readers! Welcome. Also welcome to a few people who are fasting and praying for my conversion, what the heck. To everyone who’s here for whatever reason, I usually do a Friday food round-up, with photos and recipes of the meals we cooked for our large family for the week. Except I didn’t get around to it yesterday, or last Friday. So here’s a little catching up:

Oh, but first, there was the Friday before that! I was threatening to make those San Francisco Vietnamese garlic noodles from the NYT. A few friends warned me they were rather bland, despite the garlic — kind of a lot of garlic, if you’re tripling the recipe —

 oyster sauce, and fish sauce, so I decreased the amount of pasta and increased the sauce ingredients, and I thought it was tasty. (I also used asiago rather than parmesan, because they are both triangles and I can’t read.) A nice combination of savory and creamy with a tiny bite, not overpowering, but a little off the beaten path.

It didn’t knock my socks off, but I’ll probably make it again, as I usually have these ingredients in my house. And sometime when it’s not Lent, I’ll add caviar as suggested, or maybe scallops.

We also had our Italian feast for St. Joseph’s day with a nice antipasto of whatever wasn’t too expensive at Aldi, and whatever hadn’t expired in the back of my cabinet:

Looks like some fresh mozzarella, some various salamis and other cured meats, pickled vegetables, and tomatoes. I think there were some pickled hot peppers with some kind of cheese filling. And cantaloupe. If you ever had a job prepping breakfast in a hotel while you were pregnant, and the smell of rotten cantaloupe was the most miserable thing you ever inhaled, and you were wondering how many years it would take you to get over it and enjoy cantaloupe again, the answer seems to be [feverish calculations] twenty-five. 

So Damien made spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread, Lucy made suppli, or arancini (breaded fried risotto balls with melted mozzarella in the center)

Jump to Recipe

and Clara made zeppole. Must hunt down her recipe, because they were fab.

And I just sat there and ate. Buona Festa, San Giuseppe!

Looks like that week we also had a pretty chicken salad with toasted almonds, strawberries, and croutons that I did NOT BURN FOR ONCE

That would be mixed greens, grilled chicken breast, fresh strawberries, feta cheese, diced red onion, and toasted almonds, and croutons made of stale hot dog buns, with red wine vinegar.

(And here’s my periodic reminder that the easiest way to toast nuts, to make them crunchy and bring out their flavor, but not to burn them, is to spread them on a plate and microwave them for a few minutes. You can do it in the oven, but there’s no real advantage, and they’re very easy to burn.)

. . . and it looks like I finally got around to putting fennel on a pizza, like I’ve been threatening to do for some time. This one had fennel, fresh garlic, anchovies, feta, fresh parmesan, and artichoke hearts.

What a stupendous pizza. I sliced the fennel in rings, which I feel isn’t quite right, but it tasted great. No ragrets.

Ooh, then on Friday, it was the Annunciation, which is a meat Friday in Lent, so we had roast beef sandwiches with provolone and horseradish sauce on toasted buns,

and a side of caprese salad, which is always nice. 

The roast beef, Damien made by crusting it with I think salt and pepper and garlic powder and searing it in olive oil with lots of garlic cloves, and then roasting it at 350 for about 45 minutes, and then he starts checking it. He lets it rest for a while before slicing it. 

The caprese salad is just fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, olive oil and balsamic vinegar, freshly ground salt and pepper. I didn’t bother reducing anything.

Okay! Caught up. Now for the week we just finished:

SUNDAY
Chicken quesadillas

Nothing to report. Chicken, cheddar cheese, jalapeños in the quesadillas, salsa and sour cream on the side. 

I do remember that I went shopping and had made up my mind that I was finally going to buy one of those giant smoked turkeys they had at Aldi, that I had been thinking about for several weeks, and that I had planned at least two meals around it. Got there and . . . they were just regular frozen turkeys. Note even a good price. I tried to persuade myself that I wanted to do  Thanksgiving in the middle of the week in March, but it turns out I very much did not. So I wung it. 

MONDAY
Ham, garlic parmesan mashed potatoes, salad, rolls

Meal number 1 that I wung: A “join us for dinner in the church basement”-style dinner. Nothing wrong with that! I did not make an ambrosia salad, however, because that’s an abomination. 

My only tip is that, if you’re not planning to glaze the ham or stick pineapples to it or anything, you can slice it ahead of time and then heat it up, and it makes an easy meal even easier. 

Oh, here’s my recipe for garlic parmesan mashed potatoes. I made five pounds and warned everyone not to go nuts, because there were only five pounds, and they acted like it was death camp rations. That is nearly half a pound of potato per person, not counting the butter, milk, and parmesan! I guess we burn all those extra calories by making an ungodly fuss about everything all the time. 

Jump to Recipe

TUESDAY
Gochujang pork chops, sesame broccoli, rice

Now this was a tasty meal with minimal effort. I started the pork chops marinating in the morning with this sauce

Jump to Recipe

made of gochujang, honey, sugar, garlic, and soy sauce. I heated up the broiler nice and hot and shoved the chops right under it, and turned them once. They were on the thin side, so I was careful not to overcook them. 

I also love using this marinade on pork ribs and giving them to Damien to cook outside, but the chops turned out great. (It’s also wonderful for gochujang bulgoki, when you include matchstick carrots, sliced onions, and slice the pork before marinating, and you serve it with nori. It’s really just a fine, fine marinade.)

I made a big batch of basmati rice in the Instant Pot, and a big tray of toothsome sesame broccoli

which there is a recipe for

Jump to Recipe

but it’s easy as can be. You just drizzle the broccoli spears with sesame oil and soy sauce, salt, pepper, and sesame seeds, and send them for a short ride under a hot broiler to turn bright green with a tiny bit of char. 

Delicious meal, very easy, minimal cook time. 

WEDNESDAY
Bagels sandwiches with egg and cheese, choice of ham or sausage; OJ

Nothing to report. Well, I employed the very healthful method of frying the eggs in a truly ludicrous amount of butter, and not flipping them over, but cooking the tops by spooning melted butter repeatedly over the yolk, which causes the white to bubble up around the yolk and sort of support it, so you get a little film over the top of the yolk, but it’s still runny on the inside. 

THURSDAY
Nachos

This was the second meal (wait, third?) I planned on the fly, and Damien offered to make it while I was doing . . . something or other. Probably crying. It was an insane week with about 60% more meetings and driving and assignments and complications and drama than necessary. I cooked some ground beef with garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, chili powder, and cumin, and he made one tray with just that, and one tray with that and also jalapeños, and leftover roast beef, and leftover chicken, and of course cheese. 

Maybe it was just the “somebody else made dinner” talking, but I thought it was delicious. 

FRIDAY
Saag paneer, naan

Well, this was a semi-tragic finale to an exhausting week. All week, I had been looking forward to trying this Instant Pot recipe (it also has stovetop instructions). I love Indian food, I love spinach, I love creamy things. I figured the kids wouldn’t like it, but they can go to hell, I mean make themselves toast. I did have an extremely busy schedule, but I got up and finished up some editing and sent off some articles and wrote some interview questions, then briskly set to work prepping all my saag paneer ingredients and making the dough for naan. 

Or, well, I was going to, but we were out of yogurt, and so was the only convenience store in town. So I zipped into the next town because I needed paneer, anyway. I was still sort of unclear about what paneer was, exactly. I made some inquiries, and learned that it is cottage cheese, sort of, but not really. And it has been a kind of trying week, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask social media a cheese question. I just wasn’t feeling up to it. So I went to the international market, and they had one kind of paneer, so that settled that. Bought two blocks and zipped home.  

I cooked the first part of the saag paneer with all the vegetables, and of course it smelled great

— and here I had a little larf to myself, because I experienced Spinach Panic, where you follow the directions for cooking a pound of spinach but it still seems like THIS CAN’T POSSIBLY BE RIGHT

but it is right, it’s just cooking with fresh spinach. Two minutes later, it was fine:

Did a little more work, went to adoration, went to pick up the kids from school, and then got back to finish up this meal, with the house already smelling most excellently. 

I open the Instant Pot top, and it’s going along great, and then I get up to the part where you add the little blocks of paneer. Which I did. And I waited for them to melt, and they did not. I stirred, I adjusted the heat, I pressed on them, I stirred some more, I did everything I could think of. They remained intact. 

Okay, if you’ve ever cooked with paneer, you know what the problem is: The problem is, I’m an idiot. Paneer is not supposed to melt. Because it’s . . . cottage cheese, sort of. And I would have known this, if I had asked social media, or . . . READ THE RECIPE. Which clearly states, “Add Paneer cubes and Garam Masala to it. And cook it further on saute mode for about 5 minutes. Your Palak Paneer is ready.”

Why did I think the paneer would melt? I have no idea. The recipe also included a photo of the finished dish, clearly showing the green puree with the white paneer cubes bobbing merrily around on top. This made no impression on me whatsoever. I was still angrily prodding the paneer with a wooden spoon, trying to force it to melt, because it is cheese!  So I finally poured the whole thing into the food processor and whirred it until it was all blended, and I put some more salt and garam masala and chili powder and lemon juice in, heated it up again, and that is what I served. 

It was actually really good. Very hearty, lots of flavor. Just . . . not really saag paneer.

The good(?) news is, I have a whole other block of paneer, and lots of leftover saag paneer with paneer blended up in it, so if I wanted to, I could make ultra paneer saag paneer! If I wanted to. Or I could just draw a veil over this whole episode and have my husband take me out for Chinese. 

Hey, the naan turned out great. It was tender and pleasant to eat. I made 32 pieces, which is kind of a miracle, considering I was frying it one piece at a time at the end of the day at the end of the week while having a mental breakdown over the fucking paneer. 

So, for the naan, I used this King Arthur recipe, which is nice and simple. It takes about an hour to rise, and then you just cut it up, let it rest, roll the pieces out, and fry them in a hot pan. I used the standing mixer to knead the dough and it turned out a little stickier than it was supposed to, so I used lots of flour when rolling the pieces out. I found it was helpful to keep a wet dishtowel by the stove to wipe out the burnt flour the accumulated in the the pan, in between frying. I tried both an iron frying pan, as the recipe called for, and a T-Fal double wall stainless steel frying pan, and didn’t notice any difference. 

This is a picture of last time I made naan. I have a new picture of the new naan, but I lost my phone. I can hear it dinging somewhere in my bed, but I can’t find it. 

And now we are all caught up. If you have any tips about cooking, please keep them to yourself, as my brain has completely smoothened over and is not accepting new information at this time, thank you. 

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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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Garlic parmesan mashed potatoes

Ingredients

  • 5-6 lbs potatoes
  • 8-10 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
  • 8 Tbsp butter
  • 1-1/2 cups milk
  • 8 oz grated parmesan
  • salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Peel the potatoes and put them in a pot. Cover the with water. Add a bit of salt and the smashed garlic cloves.

  2. Cover and bring to a boil, then simmer with lid loosely on until the potatoes are tender, about 25 minutes.

  3. Drain the water out of the pot. Add the butter and milk and mash well.

  4. Add the parmesan and salt and pepper to taste and stir until combined.

 

5 from 1 vote
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Gochujang bulgoki (spicy Korean pork)


Ingredients

  • 1.5 pound boneless pork, sliced thin
  • 4 carrots in matchsticks or shreds
  • 1 onion sliced thin

sauce:

  • 5 generous Tbsp gochujang (fermented pepper paste)
  • 2 Tbsp honey
  • 2 tsp sugar
  • 2 Tbsp soy sauce
  • 5 cloves minced garlic

Serve with white rice and nori (seaweed sheets) or lettuce leaves to wrap

Instructions

  1. Combine pork, onions, and carrots.

    Mix together all sauce ingredients and stir into pork and vegetables. 

    Cover and let marinate for several hours or overnight.

    Heat a pan with a little oil and sauté the pork mixture until pork is cooked through.

    Serve with rice and lettuce or nori. Eat by taking pieces of lettuce or nori, putting a scoop of meat and rice in, and making little bundles to eat. 

 

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Sesame broccoli

Ingredients

  • broccoli spears
  • sesame seeds
  • sesame oil
  • soy sauce

Instructions

  1. Preheat broiler to high.

    Toss broccoli spears with sesame oil. 

    Spread in shallow pan. Drizzle with soy sauce and sprinkle with sesame seeds

    Broil for six minutes or longer, until broccoli is slightly charred.