Tag: meatballs

What’s for supper? Vol. 457: The Great Cornballio

Happy Friday! I am not, nor have I ever been, a Beavis and Butt-Head fan. Nevertheless, I am a Gen Xer and certain things are in my head for good. Uh-heh-heh-heh-heh. 

Well, here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers with buffalo chicken

The kid whose shopping turn is an absolute buffalo chicken fiend. Whatever else we had this week, just assume she was slathering it with buffalo sauce. 

She is also a thrift store fiend, and we ended up going to three of them, along with the regular shopping stops. I got a nice haul of neat stuff which I can’t remember right now. Not this:

or this:

but I do recall I got one of those clear bird feeders with suction cups, and also an intriguing pan. 

Got home and realized it was for cake pops. I don’t really approve of cake pops. I’ve never actually eaten one, but I don’t even really like regular cake, and they seem like the gross version of cake. Although I do remember being asked, several years ago, to make a Dragon Ball cake, and this pan would have been an improvement over ye olde cabbage methode. 

This was just while the balls were drying. There was an actual cake, not just a cabbage!

The balls were made of rice krispie treats and candy melts. Like Disney says (or I guess used to say), it was wrong then and it’s wrong now. Oh well. 

Anyway, my obvious task now is to encourage someone in the house to get into Dragon Ball, so I can use my new pan. Either that, or . . . what else has balls? Not the democratic party, heyyyo. 

I also wonder if I can use this pan as a Jell-o mold. I’m not sure if the two halves fit together tightly enough. I’m also not sure why I would need Jell-o balls, but you never know. 

SUNDAY
Chili verde, corn balls

Sunday as we got out of Mass, the Big Snow began to fall. I had already planned to spend the day cleaning the landing (after cut up and expelled the bunk bed a few weeks ago), and I had lots of argy-bargy energy to work off, so that worked out well. I emptied a closet, sorted everything in it and bagged it all, cleaned the closet, filled it back up with one kid’s art supplies and another kid’s please-come-get-your-stuff stuff; bagged and stuffed another kid’s stuff into the newly accessible attic, threw out seven bags of trash, listed a couple of desks on a buy nothing group, put a shelf back together, told Corrie she can have my father’s old glockenspiel, and organized the hell out of what was left. Much of which was EXTREMELY misc. in nature.

So the area doesn’t look beautiful, but you can now walk through it, and you can open the attic door again, which meant I could finally put away the Christmas stuff, which had been taking up half the dining room table since Epiphany. Of course now we have a haunted glockenspiel downstairs, but you can’t have everything. 

Before I tackled that, I got supper started. The rest of the family was managing the shoveling (once the snow started, it just kept coming, and we eventually got about two feet), so I thought spaghetti and meatballs would be a good, hearty meal; buuuuut I forgot to defrost the meat. No matter! Chili verde is also nice and warming.

Here’s my recipe for that:

Jump to Recipe

I seasoned and browned the chunks of pork, and roasted up the assorted peppers, the onions, and the garlic and tomatillos

made a nice green salsa in the food processor with the vegetables plus some cilantro, and then put the meat and the salsa in a pot to simmer the rest of the day. 

When it got close to supper time, I made a big pot of rice and realized, to my delight, that I could use my new pan to make CORN BALLS. Here’s my corn bread/muffin recipe:

The pan is in two pieces, and it’s supposed to have silicone clips or clamps to hold it together during baking, but those were missing; so I used those metal clips on rings that are designed to hold cafe curtains. Worked fine. I very slightly overfilled the cups, filling each one a little more than halfway (a single recipe made more than enough for 18 balls), but this just resulted in each ball having a cute little baked cap on top, which was easy to pop off and eat. 

I opened the pan and used a spoon to carefully pry the corn balls out, and was able to get most of them out intact. 

If I had baked them a few minutes less, probably they would have been the same color top and bottom. But aren’t they so cute? I loved them. I like the top crust of corn muffins, and these were encased in top crust, with piping hot, tender corn bread inside. 

So we had rice and chili verde, with sour cream and fresh limes, with corn balls. 

I had somehow lost the extra cilantro I set aside to top it, but that’s okay. The chili was delicious, very spicy and savory. Damien and I and the dog were the chief corn ball appreciators. I feel like, when I was a kid, I would have KILLED for corn balls, but kids these days are built different, I guess. 

MONDAY
Onion soup with croutons; ham, egg, and cheese sandwiches

School was cancelled as it continued to snow and snow and snow. The ducks did not care at all. They just wallowed around yammering, same as they do the rest of the year. 

The snow eventually got too deep for them to get to the stream, though, so I had to give them hot water in a pot, which they also yammered about. If you ever want some top-notch yammering, I do recommend ducks. 

In the morning, I started cooking a big pot of onion soup. Here’s my recipe, which is very basic, and you can adjust the proportions as you like. 

Jump to Recipe

By the way, if you’re cutting onions, all you need to do is breathe through your mouth and not your nose, and your eyes won’t water. I don’t know why it took me my whole life to learn this, but it’s true. 

I made a bunch of croutons with stale deli rolls, lots of melted butter, and salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and toasted them slowly in a 300-degree oven. 

Li’l hot crouton action shot for you, uh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

For the main dish, I had found a new recipe I was kind of excited about: No Washing-Up Ham, Egg, and Cheese Bowls from Recipe Tin Eats. You cut the top off a roll, hollow it out, line it with ham, crack an egg inside, top it with cheese, put the top back on, wrap it in tinfoil, and bake it until the egg is as cooked as you like.

I had bought some nice rolls, but they were stuck together enough that I figured I could get away with baking them in twos, so I made eight big ones, uh-heh-heh-heh. I cut them like subway sandwiches, and cracked two eggs into each sandwich. There was a tiny learning curve when I realized I need to angle the cut in such a way as to keep the egg inside, but it was easy to correct the ones I did wrong (I just cut off a little wedge of bread and stuck that under the ham). Forgot to take a pic where you can see the eggs, but they are under the cheese:

It took CONSIDERABLY longer for the egg to cook than the recipe said; but she does say that the cooking time will depend on how thick you cut your bread. Also I think my oven runs a little cold. So I kept peeking and peeking inside the tinfoil, and finally after probably 40 minutes, the whites of the egg were cooked, and the yolks were set. 

I thought these sandwiches were SO GOOD. The bread was hot and crisp around the edges and top and soft inside but not soggy, the egg was cooked perfectly, and the cheese has oozed and baked onto everything. Heartier than a typical breakfast sandwich, but not greasy like grilled cheese. LOOK at that jammy yolk. 

And, as the name says, there is no clean-up, because each sandwich is wrapped in tinfoil. You can also prep these sandwiches ahead of time, because the ham prevents the egg from touching the bread, so this would be perfect for, say, a sleepover breakfast, or brunch for a crowd. 

To my great sorrow, the rest of the family thought they were okay at best. One reviewer pronounced them “nice and hot.” Oh well! You’ll never know if you don’t try. The onion soup was pleasant, and it was a filling and warming meal, if not a group favorite. 

Damien forbade me from shoveling, presumably because I’m just too pretty. He had the kids shovel in teams, 20 minutes at a time, and he got hot chocolate and cookies for everybody, and everyone was actually really cheerful and upbeat all day. Including the dog. Especially the dog. 

TUESDAY
Roast chicken with optional buffalo sauce; big salad; cheesecake

Tuesday there was a two-hour delay for school. People were still digging out from the snow, and it was just so dang cold. I don’t remember what I did all day. It’s possible I did some writing, which is a thing I’ve been hoping to break into, but it’s very hard. 

I roasted up a bunch of chicken drumsticks with olive oil, salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder

One of the kids mentioned it would be nice to have a big, beautiful salad, so I was happy to oblige. We don’t have tossed salad very often — I’m a big believer in setting out individual bowls of this and that, so people can build their own plates —  but this was pretty popular, so maybe I’ll do this more often. 

Revolutionary, I know. “I served a tossed salad to my family, and they ate it!” food blogger marvels. But seriously, it’s so easy to get stuck in routines, and it didn’t even occur to me that people might like a regular old salad. 

So, not a groundbreaking meal, but tasty and nice. We had plenty of leftover croutons from the onion soup, too. 

I had my salad without dressing because, even though I am currently Quite Fat, I think there’s a possibility that someday in the future, I might take a crack at being Somewhat Less Fat Again, and I don’t want to ruin plain salad for myself. I like plain salad perfectly fine, and don’t feel like it needs dressing, and that may come in handy. Look, if you didn’t want crazy talk, you should have skipped this entire post. 

I think I forgot to mention that we also had a heart-shaped cheesecake with chocolate-dipped strawberries at some point. I was trying different decorations and things, to see what might sell for Valentine’s Day, and this one came out looking kind of dumb, so we ate it. 

Out of curiosity, I weighed it first, and

I think I need to start charging more. That’s a lot of cheesecake! Uh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs

Wednesday, Benny took a tour of the Catholic high school to see if she likes it for next year. Facebook memories showed me that, on this day seventeen years ago, we also took a tour of the Catholic school. Back then, we were still homeschooling, and just starting to consider other possibilities. In the last seventeen years, the Catholic school has changed leadership several times, and our family is . . . honestly, me from seventeen years ago would find us unrecognizable. I don’t even know. Some of the changes are good, some are not. Whatcha gonna do. Anyway, she took a tour and found it “fine” and “nice and hot.” Just kidding, she just said it was fine. Gonna check out a newish charter school next, and we shall see. Maybe it will just keep snowing, and we will all just stay home forever. 

I finally got around to updating my meatball recipe, although it’s still pretty basic and, like so many things, adjustable according to tastes and needs. 

Jump to Recipe

I skipped the parmesan cheese (I saved it for topping) and had a pretty heavy hand with the Worcestershire sauce, and they were tasty. 

And that’s-a my meatball story. 

THURSDAY
Chicken wraps, baked potatoes, brief thought of salad

Thursday I got up and it was 47 degrees in the house, which is not ideal. We knew we were a little low on oil, but all this week we were overtaken by events, and boop, we ran out of oil. I stayed warm by going into a bit of a cleaning frenzy. There are several things (besides the general insanity in the news) that are making things pretty arghy inside my head right now, and honestly, that is the only way cabinets get cleaned out and wiped down, or grout gets scrubbed. 

I also baked six mini cheesecakes with pretty pink and red borders, and thennnnn dropped them. 

Happily, I had already planned a nice, easy dinner, which was just frozen chicken tender wraps with shredded pepper jack cheese, shredded lettuce, and ranch dressing. I baked a bunch of potatoes and served them with some fake bacon bits I had bought on a whim. 

I haven’t had fake bacon bits in decades, and oof, they were not good. One of the kids said they taste like dog treats, and I was gonna say, “How do you know?” but then I realized I was thinking they taste like Play Doh, and, well. Anyway, the kids did like them, so I guess that’s a win. I liked my wrap. 

I did get another cheesecake order, just a plain one with blueberry topping, and I managed to bake that without accidentally throwing it out the window or dropping an anvil on it anything.  

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese

Just regular old mac and cheese. I will probably squirt some hot sauce in there Uh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh

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.

5 from 1 vote
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Simple French onion soup

Serve with a piece of toasted baguette at the bottom of each bowl. Finish with cheese on top.

Ingredients

  • 4 Tbsp butter
  • 4 cups onion, thinly sliced
  • 1 Tbsp flour
  • 1 tsp white sugar
  • 4-6 cups beef broth (can also use chicken broth or a combination of water and white wine)
  • pepper
  • parmesan or mozzarella cheese

Instructions

  1. In a heavy pot, melt the butter and then add the onions. Cook very slowly over a low heat for about an hour, stirring occasionally, until the onions are very soft and somewhat darkened.

  2. Stir in the sugar until dissolved. Stir in the flour and mix to coat.

  3. Add the broth (or water and wine). Add pepper to taste and simmer for at least 30 minutes, preferably longer.

  4. Serve with a hunk of toasted bread in the bottom of each bowl. Sprinkle cheese on top, and if you have oven-safe dishes, brown under the broiler to form a skin on top of the soup.

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Meatballs

Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs. 

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs ground meat (I like to use mostly beef with some ground chicken or turkey or pork)
  • 4 eggs, beaten
  • 2 cups panko bread crumbs
  • 4 oz grated parmesan cheese (about 1 cup)
  • 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • salt, pepper, garlic powder, oregano, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400.

  2. Mix all ingredients together with your hands until it's fully blended.

  3. Form meatballs and put them in a single layer on a pan with drainage. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or more until they're cooked all the way through.

  4. Add meatballs to sauce and keep warm until you're ready to serve. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 451: Lasagna in the highest

Happy Friday! We are just over a week away from the shortest day of the year, and then we start getting more light. Hooray! 

I hope your Advent is going well, for those of you who observe it. I’m having a freakishly efficient month. Finished Christmas shopping a few days ago, doing tons of cleaning and decluttering, and I’m currently not behind on any paid work. We’ve been managing to light the Advent candles and do the Jesse tree ornaments and readings about half the time, which is not a bad record for this vicinity.

We’ve even mostly been adhering to our screen-free Advent evenings. In the past, we’ve done 7-9:00 Monday through Friday, but this year we’re doing 7:00 onward Monday through Thursday, and then shooting for a movie (rather than endlessly rewatching the same TV shows) on Fridays. The kids have been reading, drawing, and playing games, but mostly hanging around yacking. I have been falling asleep on the couch. Oh, such naps I’ve been having. Yesterday evening’s nap was a real drooler!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and popcorn chicken

We ended up making tons of extra trips along with shopping because we had to pick up this and that, and also we got our asses to confession, which is #1 on my must-do Advent list. The confession line was possibly the least efficient thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I discovered that I’ve completed the transformation into the cheerful, bossy middle-aged lady who tells everyone where to sit. There is NO REASON for the confession line to be so confusing. All there needs to be is a sign on the wall telling people where to line up! Or one of those paper number machines like they have at delis! Or a fluorescent pink conical hat that says “LAST PERSON IN LINE” and it gets passed from person to person as they trickle in! But we can’t have this. We have to have a confused blob, and everyone has to be anxious and upset about it. So I became That Lady. Anyway, we went to confession, and then resumed shopping. 

The shopping turn kid chose popcorn chicken, which I agreed to because I forgot the oven was still broken. I also picked a variety where the chicken was uncooked. So I ended up doing it in five ten-minute batches in the little air fryer, and it was delicious, but does not figure into the “very efficient December” thing I referenced above. 

I also made a batch of dough to make cookies on Sunday.

Jump to Recipe

That was efficient!  Also, we stopped at a thrift store and I happened to find a cake pan that was exactly the shape I was looking for! Efficient and lucky! 

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, fake doritos, pickles

After Mass, Corrie and I went to Lena’s apartment, and Corrie and Lena worked on a birthday present for Benny, and I borrowed Lena’s oven to make cookies and cake. I brought everything I could think of that I might need, including cake mix, eggs, and oil,  parchment paper, toothpicks for detail, all kinds of decorating supplies, and a big pan. But I forgot the cookie dough. So I had to start over, and ended up having a very pleasant afternoon listening to my oldest and youngest daughters working happily together while I baked. 

It was Benny’s birthday we were preparing for, and she asked for a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, and she asked to be surprised with the theme. I settled on Merlin, the BBC show they watched recently. This show is pretty, pretty terrible unless you watch it through the eyes of a young teenage girl!

My original plan was to make cookies of Merlin, Arthur, Guinevere, Excalibur, Gaius, Uther, and the Dragon, and possibly John Hurt, but that was too ambitious, and I kept wrecking the Gaius cookie in various ways. So I settled for Merlin, Arthur, Guinevere, and the dragon. When I got home, I made two more attempts to make a Gaius cookie. First I tried the air fryer, and probably you can make this work, but I could not. Then I tried just broiling it in the oven, and you’ll never guess what happened. 

So, Damien suggested I make it Gaius who has been burnt up by the dragon (not a thing that actually happens in the show, but it’s funny). The main thing about Gaius is this goofy face he makes with one eyebrow raised, so here’s his cookie:

Anyway, I spent such a long time decorating those cookies, and every last one of them turned out weeeird! (Another thing I forgot was black icing, so that was a challenge.) And I still hadn’t figured out what the cake itself would be.

But wait, I had bought that thrift store cake pan, which was a castle shape. So I opened the box feeling lucky and efficient . . .  and it turned out to be a large number of plastic towers and turrets and plastic doors and windows. No pan at all. I guess you are supposed to smear frosting on the plastic, bleh. 

(This is an eBay listing. I think I spent $4 on it.)

I have this dumb thing where I really want everything on a cake to be edible, even if no one in their right mind would actually eat it. But time was passing by, so I let yet another pointless personal standard slip through my hands, and I made a cake that was part plastic. I scored the frosting to make it vaguely brick-like and then sprayed it with edible silver spray, and sprinkled some rock candy around, for purposes of . . .I don’t know, magic?

 Kind of makes you wonder why everyone thought Camelot was so great, but those were different times, I guess.  

While Corrie and I were at Lena’s house, Damien was at home doing all the prep for his amazing incredible lasagna. Then we got home and I quickly made some grilled sandwiches.

And then I do believe I feel asleep on the couch. 

MONDAY
Birthday lasagna, birthday cake

On Monday, first we went to Mass for the feast day, and then the part for the oven came, and Damien installed it right away so he could bake the lasagna. And then, literally right immediately then, the dryer broke. Poor Damien has gotten really good at fixing all kinds of appliances, so off he went with the autopsy, while I finished this ridiculous cake, and then I decorated the front door. 

I cut a bunch of greenery from the yard and attached it and some fake berries to a broken Swiffer with zip ties, and then zip tied that to the trellis. 

Not the most lush or symmetrical garland imaginable, but it was COLD out there, with wet snow falling faster and faster, and I did not want to go out again!

Then I strung lights back and forth and back and forth inside the trellis, and hung a wreath on the door. By the time the kids got home, it was dark enough for the lights to show up, and they were properly impressed. 

And nobody noticed that I got the plug ends backwards like I do 100% of the time, and I had to run an extension cord over the step.

The lasagna was superb, as it always is. He actually made two. Here is the larger one, right before we devoured it:

I am deeply suspicious of lasagna that stays together in a neat stack when you cut it. 

Oh man, it was so good. Oh I ate so much. 

Then we had presents and cake. Sweet Benny was absolutely delighted by this bizarre cake, which I ended up holding together with skewers. 

Benny is also a big fan of The Office, so I made an “IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY” banner, and then someone smudged the letters. The original plan was to have the dragon breathing fire onto Gaius, but I ran out of time and, frankly, enthusiasm. So here was the finished (?) Merlin cake: 

But like I said, she loved it. Her favorite was the Guenevere cookie, which I have to admit was pretty, even if it doesn’t look much like the actress.

She also loved all her presents. The one from Corrie was a Barbie doll that she transformed into a FMA Edward Elric doll.

Corrie did the hair and some of the clothes, and Lucy made the coat, and Lena did the face. 

Lucy knitted a Merlin doll for Benny, which she was, if possible, even more delighted with

and it was a pretty good doll! My kids are so talented.

She got a number of other thoughtful presents and she had a wonderful day, and everyone was happy for her. She’ll be having a party with her friends at some later date! 

TUESDAY
Chicken and chickpeas, onion salad, yogurt sauce, fresh pita

Tuesday I pushed really hard to clean, declutter, and rearrange the living room, to get ready for the Christmas tree. Most years we end up dragging a wet tree into a chaotic house and then scrambling to make room for it, but NOT THIS YEAR. 

Tree-ready. 

I made a stab at getting the rest of the Christmas decorations out of the attic, but it turns out I consolidated them all into a giant tub last year, for the sake of efficiency, and then shoved them through the second-floor attic access door — and then, while rearranging Corrie’s room, moved a heavy old bunk bed in front of the door, and then a certain adult child stacked that up with tubs and tubs of things that don’t fit at THEIR apartment. This Christmas tub is too big to fit down the other access door, which is one of those drop-down ceiling ladders. So I don’t know, maybe Christmas is cancelled. At least I vacuumed. 

Oh anyway, we had chicken and chickpeas for supper. We haven’t had this dish for a while, and it’s yummo. Here’s the recipe

Jump to Recipe

I got a big tub of Greek yogurt and used half to marinate the chicken, and made the other half into dipping sauce with fresh garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and a little salt. Then I made a nice bowl of red onion salad with lemon juice, salt and pepper, and cilantro. Maybe a little olive oil, I forget. 

and then I made a batch of dough for pita. I have tried so many recipes, but have returned to this one from The Kitchn, which makes soft, tender breads you can make all at once in the oven. You can also make the dough, let it rise, punch it down, and then pause it in the fridge until you’re ready to finish it, which works out perfectly with my afternoon schedule. 

So when the chicken and chickpeas were almost done cooking, I got the dough out of the fridge, rolled it out, turned up the oven a bit, and baked eight pieces. They turned out lovely. 

When you bake them in the oven, you get a softer, puffier pita, and you don’t get those characteristic flattened bubbles like if you’re frying them on the stovetop, but I honestly prefer it this way, especially for the purposes of this meal. 

I skipped the onion that’s supposed to go along with the chicken and chickpeas, and didn’t really miss it. 

I was so so hungry and it was a very tasty meal. 

If you are a chicken skin appreciator, you will want to try this marinade. Look at how crackly and savory the skin turns out. 

The meat underneath stays nice and moist. I don’t think I’ve ever had this meal turn out bad. 

WEDNESDAY
Second lasagna, garlic bread

Wednesday we were supposed to get the tree, but it was SO bitterly cold and windy, nobody wanted to go outside more than necessary. So I heated up the second lasagna Damien made, and made a bunch of garlic bread, and everybody was happy. 

THURSDAY
Meatball subs, vegetable platter

On Thursday Damien fixed the dryer! He’d been working on it every day, but he does also have a full-time job. Such a hard worker.

In the morning, I made a big vegetable platter and some meatballs, then moved the meatballs to the slow cooker and spent most of the rest of the day in the car, because people needed to be here and there and here and there. It happened that Clara also needed a ride, and she repaid the favor with a big sack of  fresh baguettes from the bakery where she works! So I had been planning meatball subs on boring old Aldi rolls, but we got an upgrade. 

The meatballs were nothing to write home about, but the fresh bread more than made up for it. 

On Thursday Benny and I did venture out over the ice in the dark and got a tree from the Lions or Rotary or whatever, and it is now lying in state in the living room. We still haven’t figured out how to get the rest of Christmas out of the attic, so it’s not in a tree stand yet. We’ve got time! Surely! Due to my prior efficiency!

FRIDAY
Tuna boats, fries

I discovered halfway through the week that I had never figured out what to make for supper on Friday, so we are having tuna boats and fries. I actually love tuna sandwiches, so no complaints from me. No complaints from me about anything right now, actually. What do you know about that? 

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No-fail no-chill sugar cookies

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

Servings 24 large cookies

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350.

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

  3. Add egg and extracts.

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

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

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

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

  8. Let them cool completely before decorating!

 

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Cumin chicken thighs with chickpeas in yogurt sauce

A one-pan dish, but you won't want to skip the sides. Make with red onions and cilantro in lemon juice, pita bread and yogurt sauce, and pomegranates, grapes, or maybe fried eggplant. 

Ingredients

  • 18 chicken thighs
  • 32 oz full fat yogurt, preferably Greek
  • 4 Tbsp lemon juice
  • 3 Tbsp cumin, divided
  • 4-6 cans chickpeas
  • olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • 2 red onions, sliced thinly

For garnishes:

  • 2 red onions sliced thinly
  • lemon juice
  • salt and pepper
  • a bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
  • 32 oz Greek yogurt for dipping sauce
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced or crushed

Instructions

  1. Make the marinade early in the day or the night before. Mix full fat Greek yogurt and with lemon juice, four tablespoons of water, and two tablespoons of cumin, and mix this marinade up with chicken parts, thighs or wings. Marinate several hours. 

    About an hour before dinner, preheat the oven to 425.

    Drain and rinse four or five 15-oz cans of chickpeas and mix them up with a few glugs of olive oil, the remaining tablespoon of cumin, salt and pepper, and two large red onions sliced thin.

    Spread the seasoned chickpeas in a single layer on two large sheet pans, then make room among the chickpeas for the marinated chicken (shake or scrape the extra marinade off the chicken if it’s too gloppy). Then it goes in the oven for almost an hour. That’s it for the main part.

    The chickpeas and the onions may start to blacken a bit, and this is a-ok. You want the chickpeas to be crunchy, and the skin of the chicken to be a deep golden brown, and crisp. The top pan was done first, and then I moved the other one up to finish browning as we started to eat. Sometimes when I make this, I put the chickpeas back in the oven after we start eating, so some of them get crunchy and nutty all the way through.

Garnishes:

  1. While the chicken is cooking, you prepare your three garnishes:

     -Chop up some cilantro for sprinkling if people like.

     -Slice another two red onions nice and thin, and mix them in a dish with a few glugs of lemon juice and salt and pepper and more cilantro. 

     -Then take the rest of the tub of Greek yogurt and mix it up in another bowl with lemon juice, a generous amount of minced garlic, salt, and pepper. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 434: Shawarmageddon

Happy Friday! Hope this finds you well. It finds me listening to Mozart Piano Sonata No. 5 in G and then suddenly AN AD FOR FREAKIER FRIDAY, which is essentially a war crime. Not to mention the Lay’s potato chip ad, which features someone loudly chomping on a chip right into the microphone. WHO WANTS THAT?

Anyway, so, here’s what we had this week. Some pretty good summer meals, a new recipe, and another successful kid-made meal! To wit: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers, onion rings

Saturday is a blur. I vaguely remember angrily cleaning the refrigerator out. Don’t know if I’ve ever cleaned the fridge out without being angry. 

SUNDAY
Parking lot pizza

Sunday we went to Canobie! I got an unexpected royalty check and it was enough to pay for most of the trip, so I was feeling pretty triumphant about that. I was riding the migraine train all weekend, but I medicated and caffeinated myself to the max, and when we got there, Damien gave me his sunglasses, sent the kids away, and put me on an inflated tube, and we floated around the lazy river together until I felt a little more embodied. 

We stayed for seven hours and it was a pretty great day. I have no regrets about having all those babies, but DANG life is easier without babies.

I posted some pics here if you want to take a look. 

We left the park at nine and chose the nearest pizza spot that was still open, which turned out to be the elegantly-situated Salem House of Pizza. 

All your bodily needs, from the lashes of your eyes to the soles of your shoes, catered to in one spot. I was kind of fascinated by “Bread Makery.” If only there were a word for that! We have a local business called “Jenna’s Butcher” and we used to have a “The Barbery.” I feel we should RETVRN to . . . I don’t even know, whatever. Just, everyone, before doing anything, ask me. 

On the other hand, I’m the one who was very excited to have found this very old penny with a rare misprint on it. It says “ONE CENT” backwards!

So I posted about it on Facebook and started thinking about how valuable it might be if it were cleaned up, and maybe it would even pay for a new roof, and I showed it to Damien, and he gently pointed out that it was a regular penny that I was holding upside down. 

Yeah, well. I’m still starting a roof repair fund. So far, I have one cent. 

Anyway, this pizza place closed at 10 and we got there at 9:15, but they were still pretty mad! So most of us skulked outside while the pizzas cooked, but Corrie opted to have a seat inside, and have a chat with her favorite person

and I have to admit, that pizza was frickin delicious. Possibly because it was the freshest possible pizza imaginable, as they essentially pulled it out of the oven and threw it at us. But it was also very late and we had all logged our 10K steps and then some; but it was also just good pizza. We ate it on the car hood and it was fab. 

I fell asleep a few times on the way home. Sadly, I was driving. But I did wake up again right away, and filed the experience away to my “maybe we are getting too old for this kind of thing” folder. 

MONDAY
Salad with chicken, blueberries, almonds

Monday was a bit of a blur, but I did get supper on the table. Roast chicken breast over salad greens, with blueberries, minced red onion, crunchy onions from a can, and sliced almonds (toasted in the microwave). 

This salad is good with feta or blue cheese, but I didn’t buy any. I think I had blue cheese dressing on mine, and it was good. The blueberries are sweet this year. As you can see, we also had watermelon, and it was another massively juicy one. 

TUESDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, pickles

Tuesday the new swing I ordered (after the old swings broke mid-swing) arrived, and Corrie put it together herself,

and now she lives on the swing. 

Seriously, I thought she would probably like it, but I did not anticipate she would be on there 23 hours a day. We had a tire swing when we were growing up, and it was The Place, so I get it. I still remember the smell of the rubber tire, the sound of rainwater sloshing around in the bottom, the prickle of the frayed rope, the sway of the ground passing by. Dragging your fingertips over the roots of the tree as you drift through leafy shadows. Ah, summer. 

We had a blessedly easy dinner of grilled ham and cheese, with chips and pickles. 

Last night I dreamt I was in college again, and it was pretty terrible. I was carrying hay-bale-sized rolls of toilet paper upstairs for the whole dorm, and nobody even said thank you, and my friend Dena from elementary school was there, and she didn’t like me anymore.

The dream did not include one of my actual greatest college experiences, which was getting drunk as a skunk at Penuche’s, and then staggering next door to Jesus Grocery and asking for a hot dog, and the polite Pakistani cashier gently explaining they didn’t have hot dogs, but he could make me a chhham and cheese for a dollar twenty-five. Best chhhham and cheese I’ve ever had. But this one was pretty good, too. 

Tuesday evening, Sophia started prepping for her marvelous Kid-Made Meal of the week. First she shopped for and then made tiramisu, following this recipe, and she made the exact same mistake I made last time I made tiramisu, and mixed the egg custard and the cream parts together, rather than having them as separate layers. I was happy to be able to reassure her that it wasn’t a disaster and everyone would love it anyway.

I also showed her how to skin and bone chicken thighs, and she did that and made the marinade and got the chicken marinating for the next day. And cleaned up! 

WEDNESDAY
Shawarma, pita, tiramisu

AND OH WHAT A SHAWARMA IT WAS. Here’s my oven shawarma recipe.

Jump to Recipe

I still hope to use that rotisserie spit I got at my favorite store, but this recipe works great, especially if you give the meat plenty of time to marinate. 

Sophia also made pita, using this recipe. Guys, it was so much better than any pita I’ve ever made. I’m so impressed. Also, her yogurt sauce was better.

Jump to Recipe

Also, the shawarma was better! I don’t know what she did (and when I asked, she said she just followed my recipes!), but it was a completely fantastic meal. 

Served with tomatoes, cucumbers, feta, black and kalamata olives. We lost the parsley, but didn’t miss it. 

Amazing. I know shawarma is supposed to be in little bits, but the chicken was so tender, we didn’t bother. 

The tiramisu was also splendid. I didn’t get a picture, because I was too busy arguing with myself that I would rather have tiramisu than get a gold star in food today (yes, I have a sticker chart, and yes, I give myself a gold star if I stick to my calorie goal. And yes, the tiramisu was a good trade). 

THURSDAY
Vietnamese-style meatballs, rice, peas, cherries

New recipe! I ended up using just ground beef, rather than beef and pork; I had lemon zest rather than lime, and I didn’t make the sauce. Still super delicious, very flavorful, with all the good stuff: Fresh garlic and ginger, cilantro, fresh mint, fish sauce, and of course the citrus zest, plus red pepper flakes and scallions. And eggs and panko crumbs, as long as I’m listing all the ingredients. I made a double recipe and ended up with about 75 meatballs, which means I made them smaller than they were supposed to be, but I thought it was a good size. The fish sauce makes them quite salty, so smaller is good. They are baked in the oven, so that’s easy. 

I made rice on the stovetop like an absolute peasant, because I completely forgot about fixing my Instant Pot, which just flashes and beeps and does nothing else. We had just plain peas, which some of my kids are weirdly enthusiastic about, and cherries. 

So kind of an odd but satisfying meal. I’ll probably make the meatballs again, and will probably make the spicy sauce, which calls for peanuts, yum. 

I also started phase 1 of  Project Enormous S’mores, which was homemade graham crackers. I made a triple batch of dough from this recipe, and put it in the fridge to chill

and I was going to make a giant slab of marshmallow, but the recipe was pretty adamant that you don’t want to make homemade marshmallows when it’s humid out, which it sure was. I think I’ll try again on Saturday. Benny is the chief S’mores lover, and she will be out of town on Saturday, so it would be fun to have all the stuff ready for Sunday.

For the giant chocolate bar element, I just keep buying bags of chocolate chips (not all at the same time, because that would be expensive. Instead, I am buying them a few at a time, which is thrifty. In some way), and I’m probably gonna melt them in a double boiler with some Crisco, and then spread that in a pan lined with parchment paper, and put it in the fridge to set. That should work, right? 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

Or, as one of my kids used to call it, “pigsnetti.”

What did your kids call spaghetti? Tell me cute things! Right now, I don’t have anyone in my house who mispronounces things in a cute way. I do have a bunch of teenagers who started out saying things like “kway-sa-DILL-a” and “GWACK-a-mole” to be funny, but now it’s just habit and they just say it that way automatically, and some day they’re going to be very embarrassed in front of someone they care about. But that’s not my problem! 

The summer really is wrapping up, and I didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted to, yet. I have to get back to Corrie’s treehouse (which is still just two planks bolted to a tree!), and I haven’t made any progress on the front walkway at all. I honestly wouldn’t feel bad if I just set that project aside for the spring, but I do want to make that treehouse. We are planning one more ocean trip, but man, it went by fast!  So fast. We have a kid starting college in a few weeks, and, sighhhh, also a kid moving out into their first apartment. Yeah, I gotta get that treehouse done. 

Anyway, tell me the cute way your kid says spaghetti. 

5 from 2 votes
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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. 428: There must be … fifty ways to stretch a meatball

Happy Friday! Let’s hop to it! Here’s what we ate this week: 

Oh, but first, last Friday I made something I don’t normally: French bread pizza. I got store-bought bread but made homemade mozzarella , which is very soft and mild. 

The kids love frozen french bread pizza, so I thought the homemade version would be popular. I WAS WRONG. Why? Who knows. Oh well! 

SATURDAY
Leftover buffet (?) 

I have no memory of Saturday’s dinner. Damien and I went to the No Kings rally, and I must have made supper at some point?  Here’s a collection of signs I saw. 

Possibly my favorite:

Huge crowd, great energy, no violence or litter or unpleasantness, just an extremely diverse crowd of people, including lots of people who were pretty clearly at their first protest. I got my picture in the local paper!  We’ll definitely be going again. 

SUNDAY
Chicago-style hot dogs, fries

Sunday I went shopping and then we had a low key father’s day, with a few of the big kids coming over for supper. We had Chicago-style hot dogs, which are supposed to be on poppy seed buns, which I couldn’t find; but we had mustard and then “dragged them through the garden” with pickle spears, fresh tomatoes, chopped onions, pickled peppers, and celery salt. I skipped the pickle relish because I didn’t think anyone would eat it. 

Looks like I ran out of room before I put any peppers on, actually. 

I made some brownies from a mix (and the kids did not miss their chance to torment me about having bought brownie mix on purpose for the first time in my life, after a long and tragic history of being incredibly stupid about brownie mix for some reason). Ice cream on warm brownies topped with hot fudge sauce, mini M&Ms, whipped cream from a can, cherries. 

Unsophisticated and delicious. Americans really get some things right. 

MONDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, raw vegetables

Monday I suddenly found the giant pile of scrap wood in front of the house intolerable, so I flung it onto the other, even gianter pile of scrap wood on the side of the driveway. Follow me for more curb appeal tips. I’ll fling you, too. 

In the afternoon, I started some pork marinating for Tuesday. Corrie helped with this. This recipe has a certain appeal for her:

namely, that I used an entire tube of red food coloring. Walmart was selling sets of food coloring for like fifty cents, so I bought uhhh all of them. In anticipation of the day when food coloring becomes outlawed but we won’t have the energy to fret about birthday cakes colored with beet juice because we will all have polio!

Then we had grilled ham and cheese and veggies. 

Also on Monday, Clara stopped by to pick up Benny for play practice, and dropped off a sample of the tarts she had made for the cast. 

It is a graham cracker poppy seed and ginger crust filled with grapefruit curd tart and topped with basil-infused whipped cream. All made from scratch, and, as far as I can tell, a recipe she invented.  I’ve been off sugar all month, but I made an exception, yes I did. I nearly wept at the marriage of flavors. It was like, I don’t know, pirouetting through a garden.

TUESDAY
Char siu, rice, pineapple

Tuesday I was still in a bit of “MUST ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING ACCOMPLISHABLE” frenzy, so first I sternly informed myself that, if I were really ever going to upcycle all those animal feed bags, I would have done it before we had eighteen of them. 

So I listed them on a “buy nothing” group, and a capable-looking woman claimed them right away. These are actually really useful items! You can use them to insulate your bird coop, lay them down for a weed barrier, use them to line a compost bin, fill them with dirt and grow potatoes, use them for outdoor trash bags (I actually do this), or make a few modifications and turn them into sturdy tote bags. Or you can just list them on Marketplace and say hail and farewell. 

I also sorted through a couple of bags of seeds I saved last summer. It was mostly marigolds, but also zinnia and something I couldn’t identify, plus lupines, and some rose hips I gathered on the island we visited last summer.

I broke open the lupine pods and set the seeds to soak, and I cut open the rose hips

and put the seeds in a bag in the fridge. Then I took my vast collection of plant pots and filled them with compost, and planted all the rest of the seeds, and sternly instructed them to grow. Accomplishable!

I actually forgot about the lupine seeds until this minute, so I hope they haven’t soaked too long. 

Speaking of soaking, though, I was extremely pleased to remember I had been marinating that pork for 24 hours. I had followed this char siu recipe from Recipe Tin Eats which has you basting the meat every half hour or so. It turns out MAGNIFICENT. 

Just perfect. Super easy, and mainly an investment of time. The pork is tender and juicy, but not shreddy like pulled pork. Just lovely in thin slices. I cut up a few pineapples and cooked a big pot of rice, and it was a great meal. 

There is quite a bit of leftover pork, so get ready for pictures of leftover pork. 

WEDNESDAY
Meatball subs, cheezy weezies

Wednesday, I spotted the glorious spectacle of one of my teenagers planning a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the two youngest kids. I’m trying to be better about not sharing too many photos of them, but believe me, it melted my gorgon heart. My kids are turning out pretty great. 

In sadder news, we are at the point in our history where it’s exciting when ground beef falls to $3.49 a pound, and we still have eight people in the house. So I put on my thinking cap and combined a few pounds of ground beef with a few pounds of ground turkey that is cheap at Aldi, plus some breadcrumbs, which I normally use in meatballs, plus a bunch of leftover cooked rice. (I also mixed in a bunch of beaten eggs, a ton of Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder.) I got fifty good-sized meatballs out of it. 

I documented it because I’ve never stretched meatballs with rice before. So here is a picture of raw meatballs with rice. 

I’m giggling at how not-round they are. What the heck was I doing? Probably thinking about some other food. I’m always thinking about food. 

Anyway, unless I’m being fancy, I generally bake meatballs in the oven on a rack. Then I put them in a crock pot with sauce and keep them warm until supper. 

They turned out great! You really couldn’t taste the rice. You could see it

but otherwise they were completely normal meatballs. So, phew! Take that, expensive ground beef!

I spent the rest of the day tearing around doing various tasks I’ve been putting off, culminating with sorting through every last one of Corrie’s stuffed animals, packing up half to put in the attic, moving a dresser from the dining room into her newly-clean closet, and hanging a net for the rest of the stuffed animals. 

And here was my vibrantly-colored reward.

You can see in the background the trash can, brimming with exactly four items I was allowed to throw out: A pilled dollar store Christmas stocking, an especially ratty snake, a box with a shattered plastic lid, and a one-legged dinosaur with no head. Everything else Must Be Saved. I really can’t blame any of my kids for being pack rats, because I honestly had a really hard time throwing away that dinosaur. It was a dinosaur with :::memories::::. 

The super glue is to hold my brain in. Keeps falling out. 

Oh, but this made me laugh. I did Google how to stretch ground beef, but I made a small but significant typo, resulting in this response:

Normally I loathe and despise anything AI, but this time I felt kind of bad for it. It tried so hard to make sense of my question. “It seems there might be a slight misunderstanding . . . ” Story of my life, pal. 

THURSDAY

Spaghetti carbonara

Thursday it suddenly got really hot, and I was having some doubts about my plans to serve carbonara. Then it turned out three of the kids were going out for dinner with their friends, and one kid was at work, and of the two kids at home, one doesn’t like carbonara and one is neutral on carbonara, if you can imagine. To me, carbonara is still one of those things you go around telling people about, and possibly making them come over and admire!

So I was a little flummoxed about how to proceed. Was it sweating over a frying pan and steaming up the kitchen for a meal that only a few people even wanted?

The answer is: Yes, if it’s carbonara. I ended up saving out several pieces of bacon for the weird kid who doesn’t like it at all, and making two pounds of spaghetti with the rest. And you know what, it was the best carbonara I’ve ever made, and everybody liked it! 

And I had mine outside, feeling very wealthy indeed. Earlier in the week, I broke the mower and Damien fixed it and then I broke it again and he fixed it again, so I had done a bunch of mowing and weeding and mulching over the week, and dang, it’s so pretty out there in June.

And it was not too hot for carbonara! For some reason pasta with tomato sauce feels like a cold-weather dish, but you can be sweating all your limbs off and still feel good about eating carbonara. 

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa

Regular old quesadillas, perfectly fine.  I’m hoping against hope that the mechanic will finish my car today. It’s been in the shop all week and I truly don’t know if the bill is going to be a “well, we’ll just tighten our belts for the rest of the month” situation, or more of a a “Merciful Lord, please make someone dumb enough to give me a loan” deal. Oh the suspense! At least we have June. And leftover pork! 

Print

Meatballs

Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs. 

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs ground meat (I like to use mostly beef with some ground chicken or turkey or pork)
  • 4 eggs, beaten
  • 2 cups panko bread crumbs
  • 4 oz grated parmesan cheese (about 1 cup)
  • 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • salt, pepper, garlic powder, oregano, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400.

  2. Mix all ingredients together with your hands until it's fully blended.

  3. Form meatballs and put them in a single layer on a pan with drainage. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or more until they're cooked all the way through.

  4. Add meatballs to sauce and keep warm until you're ready to serve. 

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Spaghetti carbonara

An easy, delicious meal.

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs bacon
  • 3 lbs spaghetti
  • 1 to 1-1/2 sticks butter
  • 6 eggs, beaten
  • lots of pepper
  • 6-8 oz grated parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Fry the bacon until it is crisp. Drain and break it into pieces.

  2. Boil the spaghetti in salted water until al dente. If you like, add some bacon grease to the boiling water.

  3. Drain the spaghetti and return it to the pot. Add the butter, pieces of bacon, parmesan cheese, and pepper and mix it up until the butter is melted.

  4. Add the raw beaten egg and mix it quickly until the spaghetti is coated. Serve immediately.

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 416: San Salami

Happy Friday! I went HOMEMAKER BERSERK this week. I know it’s Lent, but I can’t help it. It’s spring, there are a ton of feast days and birthdays, and I’m just being muscled around helplessly by the general optimism in the air like a mouse by a cat. Look, if you didn’t like that sentence, you can have your money back.

Last Friday I collected the last of the sap from the maple trees, tromped around in our tiny woods and collected a ton of dead branches, and started boiling sap. 

And I do mean started. I was using Damien’s little wood stove that he used to have in his “office” (a converted ice fishing shack), and I guess it would work to heat up a small, enclosed space, but it did not do a great job boiling sap.

I sat out there for over three hours feeding dry wood into the stove, and I never got the sap to boil. (I know it has a large surface area, which makes it slower to boil, but that’s the point: You’re trying to evaporate as much as possible, so that’s why it’s in a pan instead of a pot! I did cover it until it started to steam.)

It was pretty nice out there, anyway, but I was a little disappointed. I packed the remaining sap into some snow and put the batch I had heated into the fridge. 

SATURDAY
Leftovers?

Saturday Damien and the girls were still in NYC, so I was pretty busy doing chores. I actually went a little crazy (by which I mean I attempted to reach levels of cleanliness that other people consider a baseline) and took apart the recycling bins and scrubbed them out, scrubbed the wall and floor in the kitchen where they sit, and also took two large baskets of rusty ice skates to the dump. I had put them on the side of the road in the fall when we tore down the porch, but astonishingly, nobody wanted two large baskets of rusty ice skates, and while I was working on admitting this to myself, it snowed and kept on snowing, soooo they’ve been frozen in place until this past week. Phew, that felt good. 

On Saturday the door to the duck house fell off. We knew it was going to happen eventually, so that was a bit of a relief, too. But I forgot to buy bigger hinges, so we had to just sort of barricade the door back on in the evening

creating the impression that we are terrified of ducks. Which is not completely off base. 

SUNDAY
Chicken Caesar salad

Sunday after Mass, I took Benny and Corrie to the second largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in the state, which was, well, it’s a small state. It was a cute parade, and it even stopped raining for most of it. 

Then I made my second attempt to boil sap, this time on the propane fire pit on the patio. This was equally unsuccessful, and then I ran out of propane anyway, and it started raining again, so I put the sap back in the fridge again, and worried about the outdoor sap buckets because it was getting pretty warm and some of the sap was getting pretty old. 

However, we got an egg! Our first duck egg of the year. They started laying MUCH sooner last year, but who knows why a duck does what she does. Definitely not the ducks.

First egg was a doozy:

It was a double-yolker, and I used it to make caesar salad dressing.

Jump to Recipe

I roasted some chicken breast and grated some parmesan cheese, and made a bunch of croutons with stale bread cubes toasted with melted butter, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and pepper. 

A fine meal. That dressing will wake you up!

MONDAY
St. Patrick’s Day and Syrup Day!

Monday was actual St. Patrick’s Day. We decided to do corned beef, cabbage, carrots, and potatoes this year, rather than the full breakfast for dinner we do sometimes. This meal is more Irish American than Irish Irish, but so is St. Patrick’s Day, so there you go. (Apparently in Ireland, it was common to have cabbage with bacon, and the corned beef was for export, I think? But when they came to America, the Jews had lots of tasty corned beef brisket for cheap, so they went with it. Likely the Irish immigrants were eating imported Irish beef. 

I, for my part, decided to do this:

This is me wanting desperately to boil my sap, but also not wanting my newly-scrubbed kitchen to get all sappy. People will fight me and say that it’s not sap that condenses on the walls and runs down in light brown rivulets; what’s in the air is water vapor, and what I’m seeing is rivulets of my own kitchen filth. And they’re probably right! but either way, I didn’t want to see it; so I put up plastic and set a fan in front of the window and got to berlin’.

Actually first I strained the sap through some cheesecloth, to get the bugs and scraps of bark and whatnot out. Here you can see how clear the fresh sap is. It looks just like water.

And here is the bucket I was worried about:

If you are serious about syrup, you will not boil old, cloudy sap. It’s not dangerous (although the cloudiness is caused by bacteria); it’s just not gonna taste right. Some people will mix a little old sap in with new sap, and that masks the flavor. I decided to hang onto it and boil it separately, to see what happened. 

So here is the good, clear sap, after about eight hours of boiling. You just boil and boil and boil it, and keep adding more sap in as it evaporates and makes space:

Here is the finished syrup:

Lovely and absolutely delicious. It thickened up as it cooled. The dark spots are just coagulated syrup, which serious people strain out, but I do not. 

Then I boiled the bad sap up (I only had about five gallons, so it only took about three hours), and it did thicken up and get sweet, but has a faint, I don’t know, library paste taste to it? I am going to use it to make sticky maple walnut buns, I think. 

I didn’t get a good pic of the final syrup, because it was dark out by that time. But I decanted it into six jars, four for the older kids, one for us, and one for Millie, about four ounces each; and then about six ounces of second-rate syrup in a big jar. It needs to be refrigerated, because I didn’t do the whole sterile canning process. 

SATISFYING. So satisfying, altogether. I frickin did it. From tree to jug to bucket to pan to jar. I will probably make waffles this weekend for the nice syrup. Or, it’s, sigh, supposed to snow today and tomorrow, so maybe we will do sugar on snow. 

ANYWAY, I eventually got around to making dinner, and didn’t want to give up the stove space, so I made it in the oven. I just hunked the meat, five pounds of red potatoes, three pounds of carrots, and one cabbage in wedges, into a giant pan with some water, covered it loosely with foil, and cooked it at like 400 for about an hour and a half, which is not long enough, but corned beef is corned beef. 

There is plenty of leftover meat, so I will probably make Reubens this weekend.

TUESDAY
Chicken spinach quesadillas, chips and salsa

On Tuesday, I decided to prep Wednesday’s dessert. Wednesday was St. Joseph’s Day, and St. Joseph is our family’s patron, and I love him, and wish to cook and bake for him (us).

I decided to try a new-to-me recipe for Zeppole di San Giuseppe from Sip and Feast, a site which has given me so many great recipes. I remember the first time I made a choux pastry (this is before I ever saw The Great British Baking Show), and I was sure I had messed it up, because it’s so rubbery. 

But that’s how it’s supposed to look! I’m very glad to know you can make this ahead of time. I put it in a ziplock bag and tossed it in the fridge. 

Then I made the vanilla custard, and I used duck eggs, which are so rich and bright. 

Covered and refirgerated that, too. Duck eggs are big, and the yolks are proportionally bigger compared to the whites, so you can easily use two ducks for three large chicken eggs. 

Zeppole, if you are wondering too, is probably ultimately from the Latin “zippulae,” a little treat. There is a legend that, in Egypt, Joseph supported the family by selling nice little pancakes. There’s also a theory that “zeppole” comes from “zeppa,” meaning “stump,” or wedge of wood, and Joseph, carpenter, I dunno. Or possibly from “serpula,” like a coiled snake, and you make these pastries in a coiled pattern. I actually kind of love how etymology is often just a bunch of educated guesses, because people are weird and go wandering around the world making pancakes as they go, and talking about it to people who may or may not speak the same language. 

We were having chicken quesadillas for supper, and I made the chicken thighs in the Instant Pot. Just threw them in with some water and pressed the “poultry” button. When the meat was cooked, I drained and shredded it and added cumin, paprika, chili powder, and salt. 

I had my quesadilla with chicken, cheddar, and spinach. 

You can see how I was rushing – the cheese is barely melted! But I was starving, so they tasted great. Do you know, I had my first quesadilla when I was over twenty years old. I remember saying, “What’s THAT?” in a loud, obnoxious voice. It was guacamole, and I thought it looked horrible.  I hate to think what would have happened if I had been hanging around Abu Simbel and this bearded guy with a cute baby tried to sell me some pancakes. I would have been so rude. 

WEDNESDAY
St. Joseph’s Day!

The feast day began with three dentist appointments. We have been going to this dentist for something like eighteen years and I love her to pieces. I think it’s so smart to put a fun-house mirror in the waiting room. The kids find it very entertaining, but nobody has to touch it with their grubby hands. 

When we got back, Benny and Corrie helped me pipe the zeppole. 

The recipe says: “Pipe 3-inch circles in two layers, starting from the inside on the first layer. Leave a hole in the top of the second layer for the pastry cream. Make sure to leave at least 3 inches of room between each because they will expand during baking.” We made ours a little too small, but that just meant slightly daintier zeppole, and more of them!

While the zeppole were baking, the kids went to play outside WITHOUT JACKETS, because it is SPRING, and I got out the cheese-making kit Lena gave me for Christmas. 

I was a little nervous about the milk. It doesn’t have to be fancy organic milk or anything, but it’s not supposed to be ultrapasteurized, which is when they bring the milk to a higher temp than just for pasteurizing. I had one gallon of Aldi whole milk and one of Hannaford, and they just said “pasteurized.” They both turned out to be fine. 

And cheese-making turns out to be easy! There are a lot of steps, but nothing difficult. You just need to pay attention with the timer and the thermometer. Basically you heat up some milk, add some rennet (a tablet dissolved in water) and some citric acid at some point, I forget when; heat it up some more, and then let it sit. While it’s sitting, it magically separates into curds and whey!

Then you cut up the curds  

and slowly stir it while heating it again. 

drain the whey off

and heat and drain the curds it a few more times. I did it in the microwave, but you can also use a water bath. 

And then YOU HAVE CHEESE. You’re supposed to add salt and then stretch it like taffy and then shape it and put it in cold water, but I got confused and put it in cold water before I shaped it, so the first batch was shaped, uh, like this:

But very clearly cheese! Magic!!!!

Meantime, the first batch of zeppole came out of the oven and I was DELIGHTED with the results. So light and puffy! 

and they left these cute little rosettes on the parchment paper. 
 

I made a second batch (bigger ones this time) and put them in the oven, and then started a second batch of cheese. This one turned out prettier!

I think I needed to be a little faster stretching it, to get those little bumps out, but I was still delighted with the results. 

Benny and Corrie made some antipasto platters, and I showed them how to make salami roses. You just fold the slices of salami over a narrow-mouthed drinking glass, overlapping the slices, and then gently upend the glass and slide the salami rose off. 

If we have another baby, I shall name her Salami Rose. 

Didn’t they do a lovely job with the platters? Benny did the green ones and Corrie did the red. 

Damien, meanwhile, made probably the best sauce I have ever had. And I lived in Rome for three months. I truly cannot tell you how savory and delicious it was, and I’m very sad I didn’t get good pictures. He also made some tremendous meatballs, using this recipe, and sausage, and we had that with spaghetti. 

Dang, it was so good. A sauce to savor. Meatballs to remember. A dinner to dwell on. 

Lena and Moe came over for supper, which was super fun! Those big kids are turning out so great.

After we ate, I filled the zeppole with the cream filling, dusted them with powdered sugar, and topped them with fancy cocktail cherries, which were dark red and had a somewhat sour taste, very nice. 

I was pretty proud of these. 

For comparison, here is my first attempt at zeppole, a few years ago:

 Getting a star tip for piping sure makes a difference. And the Sip and Feast recipe is vastly superior to whatever I did the first time. I think those ones were also filled with instant vanilla pudding. But you know what, I remember being way to busy and tired to make zeppole, and I did it anyway. Yay past me! Yay present me! (Future me is on her own, though.)

I had some leftover pastry dough, so I piped this rather silly St. Joseph logo

and dusted that with powdered sugar, and we ate that, too! Buona festa! It was all great, all of it. Oh, I also made five loaves of garlic bread, because we are not savages. 

THURSDAY
Hot dogs and chips

Because Mama needs a break.

I actually love hot dogs. Mustard and sauerkraut, mmm. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

I’m a little torn with the pizza, because we have lots of yummy things in the fridge left over from St. J day — marinated peppers, artichoke hearts, fancy olives, nice parmesan, not to mention that wonderful mozzarella. Obviously I won’t be putting meat on, but I’m conflicted about the rest of it, because despite appearances, it is a Friday in Lent. 

Oh, but that reminds me, I didn’t tell you how the mozzarella tastes! It tastes great! Fresh and flavorful and creamy and light. You can make it firmer or softer, and you can skip the salt, and you can add all kinds of things to it (basil, prosciutto, etc.) when you’re shaping it, and make a log, or little pearls, or even cheese sticks. I’m so delighted with this kit. It comes with five or six rennet tabs, and you only use a quarter of one per gallon of milk. A gallon of milk makes, well, I forgot to weigh it, but it looked like over a pound of cheese to me. Anyway I see soooo much cheese in my future. The whole thing took like half an hour to make, and it was easy and entertaining. You can also make ricotta with this kit, which I haven’t tried yet. 

And that’s-a my story. Oh, except also I just ordered sighhhhh an incubator, because a certain child once missed seeing an egg hatch at school because of Covid a few years ago, and this has been an enduring and understandable sorrow, so Promises Were Made. I think if we do manage to hatch out some ducklings, we’ll have to name at last one of them Salami Rose. The rest can all be Joe.

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caesar salad dressing

Ingredients

  • 1 cup vegetable oil
  • 6 cloves garlic, minced
  • 12 anchovy fillets, chopped
  • 1 Tbsp kosher salt
  • 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (about two large lemons' worth)
  • 1 Tbsp mustard
  • 4 raw egg yolks, beaten
  • 3/4 cup finely grated parmesan

Instructions

  1. Just mix it all together, you coward.

What’s for supper? Vol. 412: Food of America

Happy Friday! Happy Valentine’s Day! Damien and I are GOING OUT DANCING! Or, well, we are taking our kids to the school dance, presumably to watch the girls text each other and giggle, and the boys shove each other, and the little kids chase each other under the tables. I was discouraged (by my kids) from bringing in food, so none of this, this year:

I went to a Valentine’s Day dance in middle school, which was such a long time ago, it was still called “Junior High.” It was my first dance ever, and I had read a lot of Archie Comics, so I borrowed my sister’s bright pink dress with the flared skirt, paired with a wide, glossy, black plastic belt with a gold heart-shaped clasp, and a pair of pink heart earrings. I nervously crept through the door of the gym, and a teacher chaperone immediately cried, “Oh, don’t you look nice!” Which is how I knew I had worn the Wrong Thing. 

Thanks, brain, for remembering that in excruciating detail. So important.

Anyway, boy am I glad to be an adult. And you know what is important? Food! Here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftover buffet with dino nuggets

The forecast warned us of a big storm Saturday night, so we went to the vigil Mass. But first it was the shopping turn of a child who made me very proud by picking out the things SHE WANTED, and steadfastly rebuffing the howls of complaints from her older sisters. For her frozen food supplement to leftover day, she picked dino nuggets because that’s what sheeee wanted. 

They also gave her a hard time about the weekend cereal and the desserts she chose, but she didn’t crumple. For real, being a teenage girl and actually expressing what you want, and sticking to it when your peers don’t like it, is almost heroic.

Also heroic was the leftover coconut chicken curry. I ignored all the other leftovers and just stuck with the curry, and oh my dammit, it was amazing.

Next time, I may make curry ahead of time just to have it several days old on purpose, because it was really great the first time, but as leftovers, it was MAGNIFICENT. 

SUNDAY
Buffalo wings and blue cheese dip, Doritos, hot pretzels, raw veggies

The big snow came as forecast, and in the midst of all that brilliant white, my pesky lingering headache turned into a full-blown migraine, so I noped out of shoveling and went back to bed. Bless Damien for making me feel like this was a reasonable thing to do. 

But I was feeling better by the afternoon, and it was, of course, the Super Bowl. We didn’t care about either team, but we do like hot salty football food, so I made some hot pretzels using the King Arthur recipe.

I’ve made it before, and it’s pretty easy, and they come out delicious, although they never really look like the picture, probably because I’m too impatient to roll the dough out into long enough snakes before shaping them. (And no, I never did get dressed, as you can see.) 

Anyway, you make the dough and let it rise (I used the slow cooker on “keep warm”), then cut the dough into lumps

And by the way, this is around the time of year last year I got my new-to-me cabinet and marble countertop from Marketplace, and it’s been SUCH a boon. I set it slightly lower then the other countertops, so it’s very convenient for things like kneading dough or decorating cakes. I have short legs, whatcha gonna do. 

Here’s what my workspace looked like before the new countertop:

and here how it looks right now:

If you look closely, you will see that I have discovered PVC pipe as the universal solution. 

So I have been continuing my decluttering tour, which launched, hmm, right around the time of the inauguration, for some reason. It’s turned less maniacal now and a little more grim this week, but I’m determined to deal with all the worst spots in the house by the end of February. So far I have cleared out the landing and turned it into a playroom, cleared out the laundry room, fixed and cleared out the white cabinet/craft area, re-hung the curtains in front of the gaps in the kitchen cabinets, and done lots and lots of scouring and scrubbing in both bathrooms and the oven, and also stuff like replacing a bunch of old smoke alarms and whatnot. And, I bought my very first Swiffer. 

Yesterday, I decluttered the hutch.

Before:

and after:

I have come to loathe this piece of furniture, and will replace when I can. But organizing it it led to shifting around some other stuff in other parts of the kitchen, and I had the revelation that the kid’s water bottles can go LOW DOWN ON THE BOTTOM SHELVES, and my seltzer and Damien’s soda can go AT WAIST HEIGHT because WE ARE OLD and OUR BACKS HURT. A lot of stuff in this house is still set up to keep meddling toddlers out of stuff, and we may have some problems right now, but not that! 

Okay, so anyway, the pretzels turned out nice! You brush them with melted butter when they come out of the oven, and they’re super soft and chewy and rich. 

Damien made a big pile of his excellent hot chicken wings with blue cheese dipping sauce. Here’s that recipe:

Jump to Recipe

He actually made some hot, some with BBQ sauce, and some plain; and I had the kids chop up a bunch of veggies, and I bought NAME BRAND Doritos. 

An extremely delicious meal. 

We scored some points with the teenagers by enjoying the halftime show, too, and I liked that guy’s pants. 

MONDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs

Every year when I do the shopping around Super Bowl Sunday, there is, of course, lots of football-priced ground beef available(it was $2.99 a pound here), and I cleared out the freezer a bit so I could stock up on that. And something about buying all that beef shifts my food thoughts into irresistibly American channels, so we had some of the saltiest, meatiest, least ethnically diverse meals imaginable this week. The kids have been pretty happy. 

Monday, spaghetti and meatballs. Here is my meatball recipe

Jump to Recipe

demonstrating my less-mess technique of baking or broiling the meatballs in the oven on a rack, so they keep their shape, and the grease just tidily drains off. 

And very good it was, spaghetti with meatballs. 

TUESDAY
Pulled pork, tater tots, corn

Tuesday we had a thing in the morning, so I started pulled pork early. Here is my tasty pulled pork recipe:

Jump to Recipe

Came out of the pot niiiiiice and tender. 

so I shredded it up

and put it back in the pot with the juice, to stay warm, while I cooked the tater tots, and also one bag of hilariously overpriced heart-shaped potato . . . things. I guess I was planning to serve this on Valentine’s Day, but this was Wednesday, I dunno. They were actually pretty good. Basically mashed potato in a crisp skin, same as those smiley fries. 

The kids had pulled pork sandwiches in deli rolls, but I had my preferred mode: Hot Pork Heap. Tater tots, then pulled pork, then corn, then red onion, the BBQ sauce. You can spot the potato hearts over to the left. 

This is also really good with some of that disgusting melted yellow cheese stuff that comes in a jar, but some of us are watching our figgahs. 

WEDNESDAY
Pizza

Wednesday I actually did some writing for once in my life, and completely lost track of time and had to ask Elijah to make the pizzas. Got home around 5:30 and finished them up, using, as you can see, the leftover meatballs, with pepperoni in between. 

Yum. 

THURSDAY
Burgers and chips

Just regular hamburgers, which I make in the oven on a rack like the meatballs, but right up under a hot broiler. 

On Wednesday, one of the schools called a snow day for one school on Thursday, and the two other schools said it would be a two-hour delay. Damien proposed a Fisher Flop-Out. I’m not saying I married him because of his ability to make up names that don’t quite mean anything but make me laugh, but I will say that this is the man who once called his kids “a bunch of freshwater jerks,” and THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE. So Thursday came and, while we slept, the other schools decided it made more sense to have a full snow day, so there you go. Fisher Flop-Out!

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa

I guess the kids at home can fend for themselves, actually, because as I mentioned, we will be out dancing our fool heads out, or anyway watching teenage girls texting each other while standing next to each other. It’s a pretty sweet life, even without the yellow melty cheese. 

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Hot chicken wings with blue cheese dip (after Deadspin)

Basic, tasty hot wings with blue cheese sauce

Ingredients

  • chicken wingettes
  • oil for frying

For the hot sauce:

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1/8 cup tabasco sauce
  • 1/8 cup sriracha sauce
  • salt
  • vinegar (optional)

Blue cheese sauce:

  • sour cream
  • blue cheese
  • optional: lemon juice, mayonnaise
  • celery sticks for serving

Instructions

  1. Fry the wingettes in several inches of oil until they are lightly browned. Do a few at a time so they don't stick together. Set them on paper towels to cool.

  2. Melt the butter and mix together wit the rest of the hot sauce ingredients. Toss the wings in the hot sauce.

  3. Mix together the sour cream and crumbled blue cheese. Use a food processor or whisk vigorously to break up the blue cheese. You can add lemon juice or a little mayonnaise to thin it.

  4. Serve with blue cheese dip and celery sticks.

 

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Meatballs

Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs. 

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs ground meat (I like to use mostly beef with some ground chicken or turkey or pork)
  • 4 eggs, beaten
  • 2 cups panko bread crumbs
  • 4 oz grated parmesan cheese (about 1 cup)
  • 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • salt, pepper, garlic powder, oregano, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400.

  2. Mix all ingredients together with your hands until it's fully blended.

  3. Form meatballs and put them in a single layer on a pan with drainage. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or more until they're cooked all the way through.

  4. Add meatballs to sauce and keep warm until you're ready to serve. 

 

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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. 378: In which nobody goes to the emergency room

In haste! In haste! For today is a half day, and I have to go get my punkass kids. It is the final day of teacher appreciation week, and I love that they’re topping it off by making all the kids go away. Truly the gift from the heart. 

Speaking of gifts from the heart, this week having been mother’s day week, I decided to make all foods that I like this week. It was a very tasty week! But also very stupid, as you will see. 

SATURDAY
Hot dogs, chips

Well, I do like hot dogs, but this was more about convenience on a shopping day. But I do like hot dogs. And convenience!

SUNDAY
Italian sandwiches, fries, lemon meringue pie with strawberry compote

Damien shopped for and put together these excellent sandwiches (toasted baguettes with red pesto, olive oil, and vinegar, with provolone, prosciutto, capicola, sandwich pepperoni, tomatoes, and fresh basil), and made fries

and Clara made some wonderful pies, using my pie crust recipe

Jump to Recipe

and the filling and meringue from Sally’s Baking Addiction,

plus, as you can see, a layer of homemade strawberry compote between the lemon and meringue

Absolutely splendid. Perfect. I wish I had gotten pictures from the morning, when she made it, because by dessert time it had gone the way meringues tend to go, but it was still airy and wonderful. 

All the kids came over, and showered me with thoughtful and delightful presents. I spent most of the day following my heart, which meant working on my bog bridge. I worked on it off and on throughout the week, when I had 45 minutes to spare and it wasn’t raining, and it’s almost ready to put in place! I AM VERY EXCITED. In fact, at one point I got a little over-excited. As you will see. 

MONDAY
Fajita beef bowl, pineapple

London broil was on sale, so I got a bunch and sliced it up thin and marinated it most of the day in this yummy marinade

Jump to Recipe

I did all the prep work in the morning: Sauteed some sweet peppers, roasted some corn, chopped cilantro, cut up some limes, and found the shredded cheese, sour cream, and corn chips, and I prepped the rice in the Instant Pot. Sometimes we also have black beans with this dish, but we just had them last week and I just wasn’t bean ready yet. We also usually have chopped scallions, but I forgot. 

Before dinner, I cranked up the broiler and (to be honest, slightly over)cooked the meat

and I piled up my bowl with rice and meat and toppings and ate outside with the birdies. 

Oh, I also cut up the pineapple I meant to serve last week. Lovely meal, very popular. 

TUESDAY
Two pizzas, not three

On Tuesday, I was super busy all day with I don’t even remember what, so I as soon as I got home in the afternoon, I made three pizzas very fast. One olive, one half plain and half Hawaiian using the leftover pineapple from Monday, and one pepperoni using leftover pepperoni from the Italian sandwiches. We had a lot of pepperoni left, so I was pretty lavish with the toppings on this.

Feeling very brisk and accomplished, I preheated the oven, set the pizzas on the counter, and asked Elijah to put them in at 5:10. Then I went outside to work on my bridge. 

I was slapping wood stain on as fast as I could, and even though I was increasingly covered with wood stain and blackfly bites, feeling pretty great about life in general, when Elijah comes out and says, “You don’t have to come inside or anything, but how many pizzas are there?”

I say there are three. I’m the tiniest bit annoyed, because it’s not like it’s a big kitchen or something. Three extra large pizzas, pretty much front and center, can’t really miss them. Definitely three pizzas. 

He says, “Okay, I can only find two. And there is an empty pan.” 

So of course I go inside, and he is correct. Two pizzas which are now in the oven, and one pizza pan, still on the counter, with smears of grease and flour on it.

WHAT COULD HAVE POSSIBLY HAPPENED TO IT? 

What indeed.

Now, you know I’m sharing this story because the dog did not die. I will also confess that we did not take him to the vet. If we took that dog to the vet every time he ate something stupid, we’d be investigated by GoFundMe for an implausible number of emergencies. 

And to be honest, we weren’t 100% convinced it was the dog who made the pizza disappear. First we searched all over the house in case it somehow . . . left. Which sounds dumb, but it was very strange! The pan was there, the pizza was gone. We thought of the cat, who does steal whatever food he can carry and has no conscience at all. And we thought of, uh, other possibilities

And the dog seemed fine! He wasn’t bloated or uncomfortable or acting like his butt was any more haunted than usual.

But we couldn’t think of any other place the pizza might have gone, besides down his gullet. He does have very poor impulse control, even for a dog. 

The danger is that the dough would expand in his tummy and do terrible twisty things to his innards, or that it would produce alcohol and poison him from the inside out. Soooo Damien stayed up until 2 a.m. observing him. That makes nine full hours after the dog apparently ate the raw pizza. He did burp. And that was all. 

Friends, this is the almighty power of a boxer’s digestive system. You can judge us if you want for not taking him to the ER, but Sonny himself would give you some side eye for that. 

Well, maybe not a side eye, because his eye placement doesn’t really allow for that, but he would do his best. Sonny always does his best. As do we all. 

WEDNESDAY
Sweet spicy Korean meatballs, sweet pepper lo mein

New recipe! I came across this recipe for gochujang meatballs with apricot glaze and couldn’t look away. I followed the recipe exactly, except that I used fresh ginger instead of powdered. Super easy, and it was fab. Tasted like party food. You just mix up the meatball ingredients and bake them, and then roll them around in the heated glaze which is just three ingredients, and serve.

I had already served rice that week and I was planning to do it agin, so rather than making rice as a side, I made a vegetable lo mein, as you can see. I usually make lo mein with linguine or fettuccine, but this time I had some very thin Chinese noodles I had grabbed at the International Market. They boiled up in no time, like two minutes, which was fun. I did my easy lo mein sauce

Jump to Recipe

I sauteed up some minced ginger and garlic, then added the leftover sweet peppers, then a little mirin, then the noodles and sauce and heated it all up. Delicious. The whole meal came together, start to finish, in like 45 minutes (moving fast). 

Definitely making these meatballs again. They tasted like party food. They would also be good, maybe even better, with ground turkey.

THURSDAY
Chicken biryani, giant taboon

I’ve had biryani on my mind for a few weeks, so today was the day. This recipe calls for chicken thighs, and that really is the superior kind of chicken for it, but what was on sale was chicken ribs, so that’s what I used. 

I also used actual basmati rice, which I sometimes am too cheap for. I had forgotten this, but it cooks up much faster than short grain white rice; so if you struggle with getting the rice cooked all the way through with biryani, it definitely helps to have the right rice! Anyway I anticipated undercooked rice, so I made the biryani in the morning and put it in the slow cooker for the rest of the day, which generally takes care of any chompy rice by dinner time. 

Turned out great. This being Mother’s Choice week, I did not omit the golden raisins, which the kids don’t like. But they’re easy to pick out, so that’s what they did.

And maybe I went around after dinner and ate up all the little plump, savory, leftover golden raisins on their plates, who can say. Maybe I’m the one who ate the pizza!

(I did not.) So, the chicken breast was a little bit dry, as I expected. Still a wonderful dish. I keep thinking I might try a different biryani recipe, but everyone likes this one, so why. 

At the last minute, I decided to make a Giant Taboon. My naan is kind of hit or miss, mostly miss, and it was too late to start it anyway, but taboon is fast and easy and delightful. Five minutes to put the ingredients together, an hour to rise, ten minutes to rest the dough, and 10-15 minutes to bake. I called everyone down for supper, and then I pulled this lovely pneumatic lady out of the oven:

I made it with a big rolled lip out of force of habit, because I usually make tabboon to go along with mussakhan (Palestian chicken with sumac and red onions) and you serve the chicken right on top of the bread

and I like to make a little lip to keep the juices in. Aghh, I gotta make mussakhan again. It’s so good. 

Oh, I’m almost at the end of the week and I didn’t tell you about my leetle misadventure with wood. The short version is that I had already cut away the rotten wood, replaced it with sound wood, and attached cross pieces on, and stained the underside; and also retrieved the pieces I already laid into the swamp before I realized I really needed to stain them. So then I wanted to flip the two long pieces over so I could stain the other side; but I couldn’t do it the horizontal way, which is easier, because I didn’t want to snap the cross pieces off

So I did what any mother would do: I dragged the kids into it. Four of us hoisted up one short end and carefully walked our hands down until it was basically standing on its end. Then I was like, “Okay, now just me and Lena, and everyone else get out of the way, and Lena, you stand to the side, because it might leap out!” 

You know this is a dumb story. Dumber than the dog eating the whole raw pizza, because his excuse is that he is a dog, whereas I am a college graduate and this was a very dumb idea. 

So we gave it a big shove, and of course it did leap out, but not like I expected, and it thwacked both me and Lena so hard that we both fell down and its fwiggen lucky we didn’t both have multiple broken bones. Do you want to see my leg?? 

Well, I just spent kind of a long time trying to figure out how to insert some code for one of those “click to see image” things, but I’m too full of raw dough, I mean I can’t figure it out, but for some misbegotten reason I really want to show you my leg, which isn’t even that bad. Lena’s is much worse. I’ll put the image at the end of the recipes, and if you are really motivated, you can scroll all the way down and see my leg. I find bruises fascinating, and this one kind of looks like a leaping rabbit. Madeline would be proud.

Oh, so then the long piece was somehow suspended in the air like this

I slapped a bunch of stain on it and dragged a tarp over it just as it began to rain, because I may be an idiot, but I’m not really sure how this sentence is supposed to end.

Damien promised that, when I was ready to flip the second long piece over, I should call him and he he would come over and say, “No, not like that! You’ll get hurt!” (He also said he would help flip it over.) This is what you call traditional marriage roles, and I didn’t even have to become a football player to figure it out. 

P.S. The dog did go to the vet today for his shots, and they confirmed that he is fine, and just likes pizza. Who among us. 

FRIDAY
I don’t know. 
I was planning tuna boats, but Moe and Eliora are coming over, so maybe I will take it up a notch. Or maybe not! Maybe I will throw some wood at them and pretend I thought they ate the pizza. This is MY WEEK, and I can do what I want! Which always turns out well. 

 

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Beef marinade for fajita bowls

enough for 6-7 lbs of beef

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together.

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

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Basic pie crust

Ingredients

  • 2-1/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1-1/2 sticks butter, FROZEN
  • 1/4 cup water, with an ice cube

Instructions

  1. Freeze the butter for at least 20 minutes, then shred it on a box grater. Set aside.

  2. Put the water in a cup and throw an ice cube in it. Set aside.

  3. In a bowl, combine the flour and salt. Then add the shredded butter and combine with a butter knife or your fingers until there are no piles of loose, dry flour. Try not to work it too hard. It's fine if there are still visible nuggets of butter.

  4. Sprinkle the dough ball with a little iced water at a time until the dough starts to become pliable but not sticky. Use the water to incorporate any remaining dry flour.

  5. If you're ready to roll out the dough, flour a surface, place the dough in the middle, flour a rolling pin, and roll it out from the center.

  6. If you're going to use it later, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap. You can keep it in the fridge for several days or in the freezer for several months, if you wrap it with enough layers. Let it return to room temperature before attempting to roll it out!

  7. If the crust is too crumbly, you can add extra water, but make sure it's at room temp. Sometimes perfect dough is crumbly just because it's too cold, so give it time to warm up.

  8. You can easily patch cracked dough by rolling out a patch and attaching it to the cracked part with a little water. Pinch it together.

 

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basic lo mein

Ingredients

for the sauce

  • 1 cup soy sauce
  • 5 tsp sesame oil
  • 5 tsp sugar

for the rest

  • 32 oz uncooked noodles
  • sesame oil for cooking
  • add-ins (vegetables sliced thin or chopped small, shrimp, chicken, etc.)
  • 2/3 cup rice vinegar (or mirin, which will make it sweeter)

Instructions

  1. Mix together the sauce ingredients and set aside.

  2. Boil the noodles until slightly underdone. Drain and set aside.

  3. Heat up a pan, add some sesame oil for cooking, and quickly cook your vegetables or whatever add-ins you have chosen.

  4. Add the mirin to the pan and deglaze it.

  5. Add the cooked noodles in, and stir to combine. Add the sauce and stir to combine.

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taboon bread

You can make separate pieces, like pita bread, or you can make one giant slab of taboon. This makes enough to easily stretch over a 15x21" sheet pan.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups bread flour
  • 4 packets yeast
  • 3 cups water
  • 2 Tbsp salt
  • 1/3 cup olive oil

Instructions

  1. Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.

  2. While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.

  3. Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.

  4. Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.

  5. If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.

  6. Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.

  7. Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.

 

WATCH OUT, HERE COMES A PICTURE OF MY LEG 

Probably not as bad as you were expecting, with all that build-up. But doesn’t it look like a rabbit? 

What’s for supper? Vol. 370: Meatball style

Happy Friday! I’m sitting outside the library typing in my car, because it has been and continues to be That Kind Of Week. Despite the week’s worst intentions, we did manage to have a few tasty meals, though. Read on!

SATURDAY
Hot dogs and chips

Into every life, a little hot dog must fall. I happen to love hot dogs and would serve them once a week if I could get away with it. Alas. 

But piping hot, natural casing hot dogs are just so good. The only thing that could make this better is a little sauerkraut and the square kind of bun with the ends all torn up and inhabiting a space just barely this side of food, rather than some kind of cotton batting. And the bun should be steamed like at a baseball game. And I guess maybe a plate, but that is negotiable.

SUNDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread, salad

On Sunday, I faced my fate and made dinner for the youth group. Actually I made the meatballs Saturday night, because everything always takes longer than it should, and I wanted to have that part squared away. 

As you can see, I put them on baking racks and cooked them in the oven, which is the fastest and tidiest way to make a large amount of meatballs. 

On Sunday, I chopped up a bunch of carrots and cucumbers and made a bunch of garlic bread and a quadruple batch of brownies, and then I dragooned Clara into helping me lug it over to the church basement, where I started a giant pot of water heating up, and prepped everything. 

It was completely delightful to be back in an industrial kitchen. The dank smell of propane and the sharp smell of stainless steel, the faint milky stank of the giant refrigerator, the no-nonsense aprons, the vast rolls of plastic wrap, the capacious ladles, the quantity of tongs. I don’t even know how many kitchens I’ve worked in, but it’s a lot! My natural habitat. 

HOWEVER, it’s been a while, and I did forget just how long it takes for one of those massive pots of water to boil. It was a nail-biter (not literally. We are very sanitary here, and we keep our paws out of our mouths), but I did get the pasta cooked just in the nick of time.

The church hall, where the kitchen is, has some bathroom issues they’re working on, so the group was eating in a separate building on the second floor, rather than next to the kitchen. So we lugged over a big pot of sauce and meatballs, a big bowl of spaghetti, the pans of garlic bread, the salad, several jugs of juice, salad dressing and grated cheese, and a big platter of frosted brownies. They offered to have us eat with them, but we decided instead to skulk back to the kitchen and clean it in peace, and then we went home to eat. I did sign up to make another meal in a few months, but I think I’m gonna serve something cold next time. I can cook or I can lug, but I don’t want to do both. 

I had also made spaghetti and meatballs for the people at home, and the best way to describe the situation we found ourselves in at the end of that day is: That sure was a lot of meatballs.  

MONDAY
Meatball subs, raw vegetables

Truly, a lot of meatballs. I had been planning to make spiedies this week, but I put the pork back in the freezer and used the rolls for meatballs subs. 

And I made a giant platter of raw vegetables, because I’m half rabbit these days. 

TUESDAY
Pizza

Tuesday I had a longish trip in the morning and came back feeling pretty floppy, so Damien made these pizzas: One pepperoni, one cheese, and one, you’ll never guess, or maybe you will guess: meatball. 

This may or may not have been the last of the meatballs. Either the last of them went on the pizza, or the last of them pissed someone off and they threw them away. Doesn’t matter which one. I feel like justice was served, meatball style. 

Also on Tuesday, I started boiling my maple sap. I made some dumb mistakes storing it, and I don’t want to talk about it, but I found myself at a crossroads, so it was boil or nothing, and for various other reasons that I also don’t want to talk about, it was also boil inside or nowhere. I started out with about four gallons

and let them simmer for several hours, until it was time to go to bed, and I had this:

and then the next morning, I started boiling it again until it reached 220 degrees, and I got this:

Nice color, intense flavor, plenty thick, not much of it! I’m still collecting sap and hope to have a second boil this weekend, and I’m thinking of making what I’ve got into maple walnut ice cream. 

WEDNESDAY
Italian wedding soup, pumpkin muffins

And now for something completely different! A  . . . different kind of meatball!!!!

Ground turkey was $3/lb., so I made a one-and-a-half recipe of this Sip and Feast version of Italian wedding soup. The changes I made were: Skipped the celery because I accidentally ate it all (see: rabbit), I used kale instead of escarole because I remembered the recipe wrong when I was shopping, and I used orzo because I did buy acini de pepe specifically for the soup, but it disappeared when it came home and nobody knows how. 

It’s oh such a pleasant, nourishing soup, though. First I made the meatballs, which I baked on parchment paper. Then you chop and sauté your veggies. (I threw the onion and carrots in the food processor, which doesn’t make the most elegant results, but it does the job.)

Then add chicken stock. You’re supposed to add the pasta now and then the meatballs and then serve, but I was making soup in the morning and didn’t want the pasta to get mushy, so I put the meatballs in and let it simmer all day, and then added the orzo shortly before dinner. Turned out perfect. Lovely, lovely soup. 

It would have been great with hot, crusty bread or some garlic knots, but what I had on hand was muffin ingredients, so I made a batch of these pumpkin muffins 

Jump to Recipe

This recipe makes two loaves or 18 muffins, and I have made dozens of times, and it only turned out bad one time that I can recall. 

They are just tender and pleasant, nothing earthshaking, but reliable and a great way to round out a meal. 

Sometimes you want something that is the same all the way through. No tricks! Just muffin. 

I had a little more parmesan cheese to top the soup (the meatballs also have grated parmesan in them) and it was a very fine meal. 

Also MILLIE came home on Wednesday! so I brought her a few muffins and she gave me a sewing machine. So nature has been restored. 

THURSDAY 
Japanese chicken thighs, rice, cucumbers; strawberry rhubarb pie and peach pineapple pie

Thursday some of the kids had dentist appointments, and the driving situation was such that I decided it made more sense to just keep those kids home for the rest of the day. Which they thought was a great idea until the middle schooler realized she was missing the Pi recitation contest at school, because March 14 is Pi Day, and she hadn’t exactly been working hard to memorize pi, but she had definitely been stressing out about it, and now she was missing it. So I was more or less forced to make a couple of pies. 

The truth is, I’m almost always on the verge of making pies, and it takes very little to push me over the edge. 

First I made a sauce for the chicken, though. It’s nice and easy – you just throw everything into a pan and get your resident nine-year-old to stir it for you until it thickens up. This particular child approaches cooking just like I do: Recipes are all very well, and of course it would be nice to end up with something that tastes good, but the main part is staring at the pan and thinking about why bubbles are like that. 

This is the recipe I used, which is intended for chicken yakitori, which is pieces of chicken on skewers. Someday I will actually make that, but in the mean time, the sauce is top notch. I actually double the amount of fresh garlic and ginger, and I stand by that. When it was close to dinner time, I lined a pan with parchment paper, tossed the chicken thighs in the sauce so they were all coated, and just cooked them in a 350 oven for maybe thirty minutes. 

Juicy and delicious. If I had been cooking the chicken by itself, I probably would have turned the heat up, and maybe broiled it at least at the end, but I was also baking some pies, so we all had to make some compromises. The chicken was great, I just would have liked the skin a little more crisp. 

The flavor was tremendous, though. As you can see, I made some rice and cut up a bunch of plain cucumbers. I had made a triple batch of the sauce and saved out a third of it, and served it on the side for dipping and for the rice.

Make the sauce! It’s so good.

So now the pies. I made a double recipe of this pie crust

Jump to Recipe

and made the mistake of thinking to myself, “My pie crust always turns out so good. I should make a video to show people how I do it.” So of course you know what happened. The frickin’ stuff would not hold together, and it was just a crumbly mess. No idea why. (I do know why:  Not enough water. The mystery is, why didn’t I add more water? I don’t know.)

I managed to roll out two bottom crusts and get them in pie plates, and then I had to figure out the filling. I did NOT want to go to the store, so I found a can of sliced peaches and a can of crushed pineapple in the cabinet, drained them, and added a cup of sugar, half a cup of flour, some cinnamon, a little lemon juice, a little vanilla, and some butter on top

You can see the raggy-ass crust I was dealing with here. I did manage to piece together a lattice top, which looks difficult but is super forgiving once it’s baked, especially if you brush it with egg and sprinkle it with sugar. 

Then I dragged out the rhubarb I threw in the freezer last summer and chopped that up.

I toyed with the idea of a rhubarb pear pie, and I still think that sounds good, but also like a good way to go to a lot of trouble making a pie that only you eat, which doesn’t serve anybody’s purposes, except possibly — no, really nobody’s. 

So I settled on strawberry rhubarb, and asked Damien to bring home some strawberries. This does not count as going to the store, because we also needed milk, and half-and-half, and various things, and a little Spongebob figurine for the sea monkey tank, and so on. I more or less followed the Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe for the filling. I have such mixed feelings about old Sally. She gives you SO much detail, and she’s so bossy about every little thing, but on the other hand, she indisputably knows what she’s talking about. I bet she never gets stuck with meatballs for four days.

I only had a little crust left because, well, I had eaten a lot of the dough. So I rolled it out and, remembering how pretty the elite pita turned out last week, I used the swirly embossed rolling pin, thinking it might turn out decorative and ornate, maybe? 

Probably if the dough had been more supple, I would have had something, but as it was, the crust just came out looking less decorative, and more like I don’t know how to make pie crust, which allegations I cannot beat. 

Blorp.

It was delicious, though. Sweet and tart and tender, and honestly the crust was great. Not beautiful, but very flaky and tender. 

The peach pineapple one came out looking a little more respectable, except I overbaked it by a few minutes

And it tasted . . . exactly like what it was. If I were trying to sell this recipe, I’d say it was a nostalgic throwback to those cans of fruit cocktail that mom used to serve for lunch. Not bad! Just not terribly sophisticated. No regrets, because we had pie. 

My other big excitement on Thursday was that I got a big load of pressure treated wood from Facebook Marketplace. I’m really gonna make that walkway across the marsh!

Here’s the spot I want to span:

and here’s the two piles of wood I have to work with:

Some of the short pieces are pretty thick, so I might be able to use them as supports to go underneath; or I might scout around and see if I can find a fallen tree, and cut that into sections; OR, I might get some barrels and use those. It’s about sixty feet of space and I really think I can do this, and then the stream will be so much more accessible. Right now it’s an adventure with thorns and muck, and it’s worth it, but sometimes you just can’t make yourself do it. 

But imagine if I had a lovely wooden walkway, and maybe a string of lights and a birdhouse or two? Maybe.

FRIDAY
Tuna burgers, tater tots

There is some kind of terrible dance recital this evening. I would really just as soon stay home with the kids and make precious memories of watching TV, but that’s not how you get a free T-shirt, so I guess we’re going. 

If I have time, I will make tuna burgers, which is one drained can of tuna, one egg, and half a cup of breadcrumbs, plus whatever seasonings you want, and then you form them into four patties (or possibly two, per can? I haven’t made this in a long time), and fry them gently in oil until they are brown on both sides and hot all the way through. I think exactly two people in the family like tuna burgers. I did buy tater tots, so that should get me something. 

This will only be possible if we can get the car started, though. I’m currently outside the library sitting in a dead car, waiting for Damien to come rescue me again. Such. Is. Life. At least we had plenty of meatballs.

2 from 1 vote
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Pumpkin quick bread or muffins

Makes 2 loaves or 18+ muffins

Ingredients

  • 30 oz canned pumpkin puree
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup veg or canola oil
  • 1.5 cups sugar
  • 3.5 cups flour
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • 1.5 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/2 tsp ground cloves
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger
  • oats, wheat germ, turbinado sugar, chopped dates, almonds, raisins, etc. optional

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter two loaf pans or butter or line 18 muffin tins.

  2. In a large bowl, mix together dry ingredients except for sugar.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix together wet ingredients and sugar. Stir wet mixture into dry mixture and mix just to blend. 

  4. Optional: add toppings or stir-ins of your choice. 

  5. Spoon batter into pans or tins. Bake about 25 minutes for muffins, about 40 minutes for loaves. 

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Basic pie crust

Ingredients

  • 2-1/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1-1/2 sticks butter, FROZEN
  • 1/4 cup water, with an ice cube

Instructions

  1. Freeze the butter for at least 20 minutes, then shred it on a box grater. Set aside.

  2. Put the water in a cup and throw an ice cube in it. Set aside.

  3. In a bowl, combine the flour and salt. Then add the shredded butter and combine with a butter knife or your fingers until there are no piles of loose, dry flour. Try not to work it too hard. It's fine if there are still visible nuggets of butter.

  4. Sprinkle the dough ball with a little iced water at a time until the dough starts to become pliable but not sticky. Use the water to incorporate any remaining dry flour.

  5. If you're ready to roll out the dough, flour a surface, place the dough in the middle, flour a rolling pin, and roll it out from the center.

  6. If you're going to use it later, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap. You can keep it in the fridge for several days or in the freezer for several months, if you wrap it with enough layers. Let it return to room temperature before attempting to roll it out!

  7. If the crust is too crumbly, you can add extra water, but make sure it's at room temp. Sometimes perfect dough is crumbly just because it's too cold, so give it time to warm up.

  8. You can easily patch cracked dough by rolling out a patch and attaching it to the cracked part with a little water. Pinch it together.

What’s for supper? Vol. 362: Add sugar and stir

Happy Friday! I just ordered oil (we are out), set up a car inspection (it is trash), started some evaluation forms for some of the kids (just plain nuts), and I bought new batteries for my hungry hungry ClearBlue monitor, and wrote a RATHER DIRE scripture reflection about how if you are faithless, your children are gonna get burned up in demon fire; so I’m all ready to have a nice weekend now. How are you? I’m thinking of getting into winter sowing. I know there will be flowers because I’m planting seeds blah blah blah. Well, there will be squash, anyway. And I just got new glasses, and I feel like someone cleaned out my tank. 

We had some decent food this week. One new recipe and a few variations on old recipes. Read on, and please applaud for how much leftover food I thriftily used up!

SATURDAY
Rotisserie chicken and pizza rolls for kids; Mexican food for grownups

First, before getting thrifty, we all needed a little break, so I got some kid-pleasers for the kids, and Damien and I went to the local Señor Tadpole’s, where we were seated quickly, but they seemed to be a bit understaffed. About half an hour later the waitress brought over my taster’s plate and part of Damien’s order, and nervously explained that someone else had taken his fajita.

Which was unfortunate, because he had actually ordered a chimichanga. ANYWAY, eventually he got his food, and fellas, let me tell you something: A hungry man being kind and patient and understanding toward a harassed waitress is a really good way to impress a lady, for instance your wife. 

SUNDAY
Chicken cutlet sandwiches, chips

The plan for Sunday was caprese chicken burgers, easy peasy lemon squeezy; but they were out of chicken burgers, difficult difficult lemon difficult. But chicken breasts were on sale, and I was determined not to blow the budget this week, so I somewhat grumpily bought some chicken breasts, sliced them, pounded them flat, egged and breaded them, and oven fried them. 

Jump to Recipe

They turned out good, maybe a little greasier than I would like.  

Actually I tried a slightly different technique this time. I was a little short on breadcrumbs, and I was afraid the chicken might be bland; so rather than seasoning the breadcrumbs, I heavily seasoned the meat itself, and sort of massaged it in with a rubber spatula. Then I dipped it quickly in the egg mixture so the seasonings would stay on, and breaded it.

It worked great! I don’t know if it would work with chicken that has the skin on, which is what I usually use for oven frying; but chicken breast, especially if it’s been tenderized with a mallet, is basically a sponge for flavor, so why not. Get them spices in there.

I sliced up a bunch of baguettes and served the chicken with sliced tomatoes and basil, sliced cheese, and olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and it was a pretty popular meal. 

MONDAY
Japanese chicken thighs, sesame broccoli, rice 

I have this nice recipe for yakitori chicken, which is pieces of saucy chicken on a skewer. I had a bunch of thighs and definitely didn’t feel like de-boning it and threading it on sticks, but I did pull the skin off and make this lovely, easy sauce.

I divided the sauce, and coated the chicken in some of it and broiled it, and used a bit more to brush on when it was halfway cooked. I added sesame seeds and chopped scallions when it came out of the oven.

Savory, sweet and sticky, and really good! I sure wish I had thought to line the pan with parchment paper, though. But the chicken came out moist and delicious. I’ve made this recipe with the chicken grilled outside, and that’s even better; but the broiler did a pretty good job. 

The other part of the sauce, that I saved out, I put into the amazing gravy boat/pitcher/pouring vessel Clara made for me. Check it out:

But wait, check out the inside:

Boogie boogie boogie! I heartily recommend having artistic children with ancient tastes, to dress up your Japanese chicken. 

 

 

I made a tray of quick sesame broccoli

Jump to Recipe

and it was a good little meal, with just a little prep work and tons of flavor. 

The sauce was really great on the rice and broccoli, too. I may make a big batch of it and just keep it on hand for all-purpose Asian use. 

TUESDAY
Pork meatball soup, fried rice, steamed buns

Tuesday, I was set to give blood, so I did my cooking in the morning. I’m sorry if this is pushy and obnoxious, but PLEASE GIVE BLOOD IF YOU CAN GIVE BLOOD. There’s a horrible shortage and there’s just . . . not a substitute for blood. 

Anyway, I took the leftover pork dumpling filling out of the freezer, where I put it on New Year’s Eve. Here’s the pork dumpling recipe, and I discovered that if you forget to drain the extra moisture out of the cabbage, it still turns out fine, so you can probably skip that step. Just another service I provide by being dumb!

So I had decided I didn’t have time to make dumplings, but I did have time to fry up little meatballs. But I had used up all the breadcrumbs making the chicken cutlets, so they were a little slumpy, and not really “balls” in any meaningful sense. 

Still tasty, though, and that’s what counts. I made the soup more or less following this recipe using the leftover matchstick carrots from last week’s gochujang bulgoki. I’m determined to use up more leftover food and not throw so much out.

When the soup was simmering, I started on the fried rice. I’m so smart, I deliberately made extra rice for the previous day’s meal, so I would have some leftover for this day. I had also saved last week’s ham, which I diced up. I chopped up some carrots and the white part of the bok choy (the greens went into the soup) and a bunch of ginger and garlic, and sauteed it up in sesame oil.

Then I dumped on some brown sugar and continued heating and stirring until the sugar got a little dark

then I threw in the diced ham and the leftover rice, and then I sloshed on a lot of oyster sauce, a medium amount of soy sauce, and a little fish sauce. I also scrambled up some eggs and threw those in, and some leftover scallions. 

This is very much American Chinese food. Sometimes that’s what the people want! It’s delicious. 

Then I ran around trying to catch up with my dumb schedule, and I almost decided to just leave the meal at that, but at the last minute I decided to go ahead with my plan to make steamed buns, partially because I had bought a bamboo steamer at a thrift store. Yes, this is my third bamboo steamer, what of it? Some people use heroin, I collect bamboo steamers. 

I followed this recipe, which using baking powder instead of yeast.

And I suddenly realized I’ve been using my steamers wrong, slightly. I’ve been setting them inside larger pots or skillets of water, but really they should be on top of a vessel with a smaller diameter than the steamer, so all the steam goes into the steamer. Duh! So I did that.

The buns turned out. . . goodish? The kids liked them. The dough did not get as tender and soft as the recipe said it would, and I definitely didn’t make them as round and smooth as you’re supposed to. I think they were a little too dense; but they did get cooked all the way through (I was afraid they’d be wet and doughy). This was one of the smaller ones; some of them were puffier: 

They are sweet (but you can decrease the amount of sugar if you want) and I think it’s fair to describe them as tender. They have a lot of cornstarch in them, which gives them a silkier texture, so they’re not biscuit-like. Definitely easy, and you just have to let the dough rest for a bit, not do a full rise, so you can make it late in the day. I dunno. Will probably take another shot at them at some point. [Verna Maroney voice:] I GOT THE STEAMERS.

So all in all, a good meal, especially considering I was out of the house most of the day. 

I don’t think I said anything about the soup. It was pretty good. The meatballs were a little soft, but all the flavors were there. I left the ginger in, so it was beautifully gingery. Just a sort of non-specific Asian soup, hey. 

 

WEDNESDAY
Deli sandwiches, potato puffs, veg and dip

Wednesday, I don’t even know how we arrived at this point, but I had a strange combination of deli meats and some brioche buns, so that’s what I served. I also, as you can see, cooked some tater tots, and cut up a bunch of raw vegetables. 

And that’s my story! Thursday turned out so stupid in the afternoon, I was ridiculously consoled by those ketchup-drenched tater tots. 

THURSDAY
Chicken quesadillas, HINT OF LIME chips and salsa

You’ll never guess: Thursday was also stupid. But I did remember to take the bag of shredded chicken out of the freezer (leftover from that nice Persian chicken barley soup from two weeks ago), and fried up a bunch of chicken quesadillas.

The real kicker was the Hint of Lime tortilla chips, which for some reason are rarely available around here. I don’t know why they’re so good, when they’re clearly just doused with some kind of horrific citric acid solution. But they’re just so good. 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti with Marcella Hazan red sauce

I haven’t started it yet, but here’s the stupid-easy, three-ingredient recipe:

Jump to Recipe

or if you like it in picture form, here’s that:

Last time I made this, I did it in the Instant Pot, forgetting that you really need this to simmer and reduce on the stove; so it came out really thin and soupy, rather than rich and savory. Oh well! You live and learn, and then forget, and feel bad about it, take it out on the dog, try again, and eventually end up with some decent pasta. 

I am going to try to go to this women’s retreat in Plymouth with Danielle Bean, which is … tomorrow. Ooh, that snuck up on me! It looks like there are still spots, though, so maybe if you’re nearby, you can come? That would be nice. Danielle is the real deal and I haven’t seen her in quite a while. 

I also finished a thirty-day plank challenge. It took me forty-three days, but did you hear that I FINISHED it? I started a little Facebook group to support and encourage each other, very low-key, no pressure. I’m thinking about starting a new challenge, but if you’re interested, you can take a look at the group, and join if you want to know when the next challenge starts. These things are always so much easier to stick with when there’s other people also suffering, I mean supporting and encouraging each other. 

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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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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. 

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Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce

We made a quadruple recipe of this for twelve people. 

Keyword Marcella Hazan, pasta, spaghetti, tomatoes

Ingredients

  • 28 oz can crushed tomatoes or whole tomatoes, broken up
  • 1 onion peeled and cut in half
  • salt to taste
  • 5 Tbsp butter

Instructions

  1. Put all ingredients in a heavy pot.

  2. Simmer at least 90 minutes. 

  3. Take out the onions.

  4. I'm freaking serious, that's it!

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 352: I’ll die with a challah in my hand, Lord, Lord

Happy Friday! Happy Veteran’s Day, sort of! My kids have the day off and they are celebrating by standing around in the kitchen, shouting. HOWEVER, my trip to the neurologist last week was very fruitful, at least potentially. He took me off one of my “feel terrible” drugs, confirmed that another “feel terrible” drug was stupid and useless and I was right to stop taking it, and gave me a prescription for monthly injections I can do at home. The insurance company is still consulting their in-office oracle to see if I’m worthy, but SOON I should be able to start. So I’m excited! I also started using those no-snore nose strips at night, so Damien and I are both sleeping a little better, and I finished Alba Avella’s thirty day yoga for flexibility challenge, and it only took me like ninety days. And I went to confession and I bought a giant bottle of Vitamin D and I’m actually taking it this time, and basically I’m kicking November’s ass. Potentially. 

The cold weather has started in earnest, brr. We’ve had some frost and snow, but I managed to get some last final bulbs in the ground and get my perennial beds prepped for winter before the ground froze, which makes me feel amazing. I trimmed my strawberries and asparagus and covered them with straw and secured it with plastic fencing and bricks, and I made a lovely compost ring around my baby rhubarb.

This is my first time digging into my compost heap, and I didn’t know what I was going to find. I didn’t do anything you’re supposed to do – no turning, no mixing, no careful layering. I just dumped soil and kitchen scraps and duck bedding on it, and sometimes drained the duck water into it. 

So, inside toward the bottom, it is SO RICH. I was afraid it would be, like, just some banana peels and eggshells just hanging out undisturbed, looking at me, like “What?” But everything has decomposed really nicely, and the soil is like chocolate. Amazing.  What a world. 

I also gathered up the last of the marigold, cosmos, and sunflower seeds. I’ve been saving, drying, and storing flower and vegetable seeds for a few months, and it feels better than money in the bank.

Which is good, because there is no money in the bank. But I’m going to have a wonderful garden! 

Anyway! Back to food. I did make a lot of yummy cold-weather food this week. Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Pork ribs, rolls, green beans

Church basement ass kinda meal, but I got home super late from shopping, so we get credit for putting hot food on the table. I thought I was buying frozen peas, but they turned out to be green beans, oh well. 

Ribs just seasoned with salt and pepper and roasted quickly under the broiler. The green beans were delicately flavored with salt. No complaints. 

SUNDAY
Quiche, challah, onion soup, pomegranates

Sunday, nobody had to GO anywhere, and Damien and Moe were working on Moe’s car, and the kids were yakking about challah, so I offered to show Sophia how to make it. We each made one batch of dough, and we did a little John Henry thing and I made mine with the dough hook in the standing mixer, and she mixed and kneaded hers by hand. Here’s the recipe:

Jump to Recipe

I ended up using more flour in mine to get it to the elastic texture I wanted, so my loaf turned out a little bigger. I’m not sure if that was the only reason it was bigger, or if it also rose differently? Anyway they both turned out good!

Sophia put sesame seeds on hers

Isn’t it lovely? Not bad for her first challah!

and I just left mine plain

Like I said, it was a little bigger, and I wish I had let it bake longer because it was a little damp inside. 

So hers actually turned out better!  I do love challah. I’m not about to start kneading stuff by hand, though. Gotta save my wrists for Crow Pose.  

I also made a couple of quiches. I used to make quiche all the time, and people got pretty burnt out on it, but it’s been years, so I figured it was time. I bought premade pie shells, which I blind baked. Then in one I put baby spinach, crisp bacon and . . . some kind of cheese, which I tragically cannot remember the name of. It was flavored with rosemary. 

In the other quiche, I put crumbled hot sausage and sauteed mushrooms, and more cheese. 

I basically followed this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, except it calls for half milk and half cream, so I used .. . half and half? I’m no mathemagician, but I think that makes sense. 

They did turn out lovely.

The bacon and spinach one was vastly more popular than the mushroom and sausage one, because bacon. Next time, I’ll just make two bacon.

Then I decided it was cold enough that we really needed soup, so I made some simple onion soup. 

Jump to Recipe

So we had the soup, the quiches, and lots of challah, and it was a cozy, cheerful meal for a cold day.

As you can see, I had a few pomegranates to serve, as well. Pomegranates have many good qualities, not least how you can frighten people who wander into the kitchen and not instantly realize you’re just prepping dinner, and not settling scores

Moe and Eliora came over, and Benny and Corrie made appetizers out of a Halloween kit I bought on clearance. 

Very chic:

I’ll tell you, I got invited to some kind of fancy salon dinner thingy in NY, and if they’re not serving sticky clearance ghost pops, I’m leaving. 

MONDAY
Garlicky turkey meatballs, pork fried rice, kiwi

Monday, ground turkey was still on sale (cheaper than ground beef), so I made Vaguely Asian Meatballs, which Damien and I really like. 

Jump to Recipe

The key is using fresh ginger and garlic, and you can make these with beef, but I vastly prefer the lighter texture of turkey or chicken. This is a great, easy dish to prep in the morning and then quickly cook before dinner. 

So I made meatballs, and then used the leftover pork to make pork fried rice, which I don’t really have a recipe for. I just chop up whatever aromatics and vegetables I’m using and saute them in sesame oil, then dump on some brown sugar and let it get bubbly and dark. This time I threw in some shredded cabbage and carrot and some leftover diced red onion from something or other

Then the diced up meat, then you add your cooked rice, slosh on a lot of oyster sauce, a medium amount of soy sauce, and a little fish sauce, and then I stir in the scrambled eggs. 

Is this how you make fried rice? It’s how EYE make fried rice, and it was pretty popular. I thought it was to sweet, but people liked it. 

I cut up some kiwis and put out some sweet chili sauce for the meatballs, and it was a great little meal, and I used up a lot of leftovers.

TUESDAY
Salad with beef, pears, and goat cheese

Tuesday’s meal was a bit of a disappointment. I had a big hunk of roast beef and I meant to cook it rare and slice it up to serve over salad. I started off okay, by seasoning it heavily and searing it in hot oil, but then I got confused and, rather than roasting it in the oven in red wine where I could keep an eye on it, I chucked it in the Instant Pot and let it cook for way too long. I forget why I did this. Original sin, no doubt. 

So it came out kinda stewed, which is not what I was going for at all. Oh well. So the salad was just mixed greens, your choice of feta or goat cheese and sliced pears, plus some buttery croutons I made with the leftover challah.

It wasn’t a bad meal, but I grieved over what could have been. I adore rare roast beef with greens and pears and cheese. 

WEDNESDAY
Batter fried fish sandwiches, coleslaw, chips

Wednesday I had to face the tilapia again. They keep having this insanely cheap tilapia at Walmart, and I keep trying to find a way that the kids will like it. I figured everyone likes batter fried food, so even though it was a bit of a hassle, I made batter fried tilapia using this recipe . It’s quite simple and if you don’t crowd the pan, it comes out crisp and golden 

I even got nice brioche buns to sweeten the deal, and I served the sandwiches with coleslaw and chips, with lemon and mayo for the fish

I think four people ate it. OH WELL.

I had a lot of leftover batter, so I decided to fry it up as a wad,

and one child who shall remain anonymous sat there eating the fried batter wad despite all warnings that human tummies were not made for such things, and then said child did indeed throw up. On the stairs.  This is honestly my fault, because why would I fry a wad so nice and golden and crisp, and then tell people not to eat half of it? Anyway I cleaned the stairs. 

The good news is, I still have plenty of tilapia in the freezer!

THURSDAY
Nachos, beans and rice with collards

Thursday was just plain old nachos. I made one pan with chips, unseasoned beef, and cheddar cheese, and one pan with chips, seasoned beef (I think salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, chili powder, and paprika), cheddar cheese, pepper jack cheese, jalapenos, scallions, and a little chili powder on top. 

I noticed we had some leftover plain cooked rice from the fried rice, so I decided to make beans and rice

Jump to Recipe

Just very quickly, but I thought it was tasty. I just used the Instant Pot to saute some chopped onions in oil with salt, pepper, garlic powder, some chili powder and lots of cumin, and then I threw in the rice, a can of black beans, and a can of tomatoes with chili peppers. Then I remembered I still had some collard greens in the garden, so I chopped up a bunch of those and threw them in as well, along with a little liquid smoke, and just let it mingle for a while. Not bad at all. 

I’m not crazy about nachos, at least not the way I make them. They’re kind of “neither fish nor fowl” food. I like either having a readily identifiable portion of food, like a chicken thigh or a stuffed shell or something; or else if it’s going to be just a sort of food area that you can scoop from, I want it to be the same all the way through, like soup or casserole. But nachos are so disorganized and variable. They’re just a mess. I’d rather have a taco, and I don’t even like tacos that much. I did like that beans and rice with collards, though. I’m totally sold on liquid smoke. I used to feel like it was cheating somehow, but now I just feel like I like liquid smoke. 

FRIDAY
LOBSTAR? 

LOBSTAR INDEED. Dora is the manager of the fish counter at the supermarket, and she’s been promising anniversary lobsters, but her roommate got covid, so it got postponed. But this morning, she delivered! They’re scrabbling around in the fridge right now. The kids will have tuna boats and potato puffs, and Damien and I will have steamed lobsters and let’s face it, potato puffs. Potato puffs with drawn butter and fresh lemon, how bow dah. 

Oh, so I gathered up the last of my butternut squash. 

We do like it mashed, and we do like it roasted with other vegetables (maybe brussels sprouts, which is the very last thing left in my garden still to be harvested). I haven’t made butternut risotto in a while, but that’s good stuff. Maybe this year is the year I’ll finally make butternut bisque. But I would love to hear your suggestions! 

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Challah (braided bread)

Ingredients

  • 1.5 cups warm water
  • 1/2 cup oil (preferably olive oil)
  • 2 eggs
  • 6-8 cups flour
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1.5 tsp yeast
  • 2 egg yolks for egg wash
  • poppy seeds or "everything bagel" topping (optional)
  • corn meal (or flour) for pan, to keep loaf from sticking

Instructions

  1. In a small bowl, dissolve a bit of the sugar into the water, and sprinkle the yeast over it. Stir gently, and let sit for five minutes or more, until it foams.

  2. In the bowl of standing mixer, put the flour (starting with six cups), salt, remaining sugar, oil, and eggs, mix slightly, then add the yeast liquid. Mix with dough hook until the dough doesn't stick to the sides of the bowl, adding flour as needed. It's good if it has a slightly scaly appearance on the outside.

  3. (If you're kneading by hand, knead until it feels soft and giving. It will take quite a lot of kneading!)

  4. Put the dough in a greased bowl and lightly cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap. Let it rise in a warm place for at least an hour, until it's double in size.

  5. Grease a large baking sheet and sprinkle it with flour or corn meal. Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Roll three into "snakes" and make a large braid, pinching the ends to keep them together. Divide the fourth piece into three and make a smaller braid, and lay this over the larger braid. Lay the braided loaf on the pan.

  6. Cover again and let rise again for at least an hour. Preheat the oven to 350.

  7. Before baking, make an egg wash out of egg yolks and a little water. Brush the egg wash all over the loaf, and sprinkle with poppy seeds or "everything" topping.

  8. Bake 25 minutes or more until the loaf is a deep golden color.

 

5 from 1 vote
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Simple French onion soup

Serve with a piece of toasted baguette at the bottom of each bowl. Finish with cheese on top.

Ingredients

  • 4 Tbsp butter
  • 4 cups onion, thinly sliced
  • 1 Tbsp flour
  • 1 tsp white sugar
  • 4-6 cups beef broth (can also use chicken broth or a combination of water and white wine)
  • pepper
  • parmesan or mozzarella cheese

Instructions

  1. In a heavy pot, melt the butter and then add the onions. Cook very slowly over a low heat for about an hour, stirring occasionally, until the onions are very soft and somewhat darkened.

  2. Stir in the sugar until dissolved. Stir in the flour and mix to coat.

  3. Add the broth (or water and wine). Add pepper to taste and simmer for at least 30 minutes, preferably longer.

  4. Serve with a hunk of toasted bread in the bottom of each bowl. Sprinkle cheese on top, and if you have oven-safe dishes, brown under the broiler to form a skin on top of the soup.

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Vaguely Asian meatballs with dipping sauce

Very simple meatballs with a vaguely Korean flavor. These are mild enough that kids will eat them happily, but if you want to kick up the Korean taste, you can serve them with dipping sauces and pickled vegetables. Serve with rice.

Servings 30 large meatballs

Ingredients

  • 2.5 lbs ground beef
  • 1 sleeve Ritz crackers, crushed finely
  • 1/3 cup soy sauce
  • 1/2 head garlic, minced
  • 1 bunch scallions, chopped (save out a bit for a garnish)
  • 1 tsp kosher salt
  • 1 Tbsp ground white pepper

For dipping sauce:

  • mirin or rice vinegar
  • soy sauce

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 425.

  2. Mix together the meat and all the meatball ingredients with your hands until they are well combined. Form large balls and lay them on a baking pan with a rim.

  3. Bake for about 15 minutes.

  4. Serve over rice with dipping sauce and a sprinkle of scallions.

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Beans and rice

A good side dish, a main course for meatless meals, or to serve inside carnitas, etc.

Ingredients

  • 3 cups uncooked white rice
  • 1 15-oz cans red or black beans, drained
  • 1 20-oz can diced tomatoes with some of the juice
  • 1 diced jalapeno
  • 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped roughly
  • 1 small red onion, diced
  • 2 Tbsp minced garlic
  • chili powder
  • cumin
  • salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Cook rice. Add rest of ingredients, adjusting spices to taste. If it's too dry, add more tomato juice.