Tag: projects

What’s for supper? Vol. 468: In which we feel the (freezer) burn

Happy Friday! The world hasn’t ended yet, so let’s talk about food. 

This week we found ourselves in a bit of an Oops No Money situation, so I cleaned out the freezer and built my menu around what I found, which is good practice anyway, from time to time. It was a little weird, and the predominant flavor of the week was “freezer,” but it was not terrible overall, and I’m happy to have more space in my freezer!

Here’s what we had:

SATURDAY
Leftovers, Hot Pockets

On Friday, I had gone to try to pick up a free clothesline set-up someone was giving away. I’ve been wanting a new clothesline situation for a while! I love hanging up clothes to dry in the warm weather, but I’m a little fed up with my current set-up, which is rope stretched from the swing set to the apple tree, with involvement by the grill. So that Fresh Linen scent always had a faint undertones of Old Hamburger. 

Here is the one I was picking up. 

Nice, right? I’m going to set it up in the spot way off to the side of the yard, where we used to have a garden. That was back when we had a bunch of little kids, and my main priority was keeping the main yard clear so they could run. That spot has since returned to weeds and brambles, but a good mowing should clear it fine. 

I brought some lubricant spray and a set of socket wrenches, but was not able to get it taken apart, except for sawing the wood base off. So I sprayed the joints again and promised to be back the next day. 

On Saturday, I went shopping and then went back for the clothesline, with an obliging Damien, who brought more tools. He couldn’t get it apart, either, but realized it would actually fit on top of the car, if’n we don’t drive too fast. So that is what we did. Yay! 

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips, peas

Sunday a bunch of us were coughing too much to go to Mass, so I slept in, and then tragically dragged myself over to the Area of Broken Dreams, I Mean Glass. Spent a couple hours vacuuming. Got glass in my hands and feet.  Eventually decided the ground was glass-free enough for the likes of us, and turned my attention to the remaining blackberry canes between the patio and the house. I did something I rarely do: I used Round Up. It was a sunny, breezy day, and I kept it far away from anything we or the animals might eat, and it was very satisfying! Sometimes you just have to get the jug of poison out. 

I also managed to lose my phone pretty early on in the day. I am a shameful phone addict, and it was very disconcerting! Everybody was looking everywhere, and we just could not find the thing, which was crazy because I hadn’t gone anywhere, except trotting back and forth and back and forth in the yard. I knew the ringer was on because I had been listening to music. The screen is pretty badly cracked, so by the time I went to bed, I assumed that even if I eventually found it, it would be a goner. 

But I had a really nice afternoon because Elijah came over, and he sat and chatted with me while I murdered blackberries. It’s awfully nice when your big kids come back and chat. 

MONDAY
Fish or shrimp tacos, chips and salsa

Monday morning I made one last futile search for my phone, and, just so I could say I looked everywhere, I ripped open up a bag of wet dirt and broken glass. It was, of course, not in there.

Then I dragged that out and ripped open a second bag of wet dirt and broken glass underneath the first one, and . . . there was my phone. AND IT STILL TURNED ON. It’s not even in a case! I am very impressed. 

It was April vacation this week for most of the kids, so after I got some work done in the morning, Benny and Corrie and I went to the park. This is a lovely park with a playground, and also big rocks to scramble around on, a fishy pond to look at, and, to my sorrow, a big hill with an intriguing area at the top.

So we went up the hill and got a neat view of the town, and discovered there is some kind of secret grassy amphitheater situation up there. I had no idea!  We goofed around a bit and took turns trying to roll a tire all the way down and up again without it tipping over. I’m describing this because these world-weary children, alas, will not let me share pictures of them anymore. But we had fun, and it was sunny and lovely, very late April. 

Came home and made some guacamole, heated up some venerable frozen fish, and then I sauteed some rather elderly frozen shrimp. I guess I minced up some garlic and sauteed that, then added the shrimp and I’m guessing lemon juice, salt, hot pepper flakes, and it looks like some cilantro. 

I don’t remember, but it was tasty. 

I had mine with shredded cabbage, more cilantro, guacamole, and lime juice. I really love shrimp tacos. Yum yum. 

Then Damien got the glass out of my foot, phew. The number of things he has gotten out of my foot, my word. 

TUESDAY
Pork empanadas, cassava fries, rice

Tuesday we had an appointment in the morning, and we were running late because I had to take a phone call just as we were leaving. Then my car wouldn’t start! This stuck in my craw a bit because we had just gotten it back from the garage, where we had dropped $840. It’s just sad, that’s all. Oh well. Oh well! oh well.

I was already fretting a bit because the upshot of the phone call was that a big story I’ve been working on fell through. Blah. But I had to go, so I took Damien’s car, and when I got home, I moped a bit, and went down to the stream to see what I could find. The water is low, and there’s all kind of interesting stuff lodged in the banks. 

I have a growing collection of porcelain and interesting glass, and absolutely no plans for it. I just like collecting it. Check this thing out: 

I don’t know what it is, but it’s clutching a marble!

Then I prepped supper. First I started thawing the frozen cassava, then I cooked up some ground pork for empanadas. 

I myself would have gone for a version with olives and capers, but I was hoping to not be the only one in the family who ate supper, so I stuck with a more tame version. I kinda based the seasoning off this recipe, but I didn’t have everything, so I just wung it. I rolled out each dough disc a bit, added a couple of spoonfuls of seasoned meat and a little shredded mozzarella (because that is what we had! Don’t @ me!)

wet the edge of the dough and crimped it shut. I made 18. Then I cut up the thawed cassava into fries and rolled them up in a towel to get them really dry. 

I was feeling a little argy bargy about various things, so it seemed like a good time to throw together a new garden bed. This is a spot that gets a good amount of sun, but I’ve never tried to grow anything here before, and I really didn’t feel like digging. So I decided it would be a hugelkulturish garden. I lugged over a bunch of fallen trees and scrap wood for a border, then laid down some cardboard on the weediest spots and piled on some old logs and branches

then a bunch of dry stalks from last year’s sunflowers, and then I cleaned out the duck house. We have been doing the deep litter method over the winter, which basically means you just keep adding fresh layers without cleaning out the old ones, and then clear it all out a few times a year. So let me tell you, the smell was SPECTACULAR. 

So I heaped all that shit up on top of the other material, and I think if I dump a little soil on top, I should be able to grow something here. 

My original plan was to plant corn there, but I think that will need a more stable base to support tall corn stalks, so I will probably do pumpkins instead, or something else that doesn’t mind lying down. 

I couldn’t quite bring myself to take a shower before deep frying, so I just changed my clothes and washed my arms real good, and starting deep frying the empanadas. They did turn out crisp, flaky, and yummy, 

and the cheese inside was melted. They did end up tasting unexpectedly Italian. Disconcertingly similar to Hot Pockets, really. But I thought they were pretty good. I served them, and then used the same hot oil to fry all the cassava.

I have never eaten cassava, don’t know how to prepare it, and don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like. I still don’t! These cassava fries were . . . fine. They tasted somewhere between potatoes and, I don’t know, zucchini. Very fibrous and starchy, without much flavor. I salted them when they came out of the pan, but the salt just kind of bounced off. I ate it because I had gone to the effort to make it, but I think my relationship with cassava ends here.

Anyway, it was definitely hot food, and I sure was hungry. 

Then I took a shower! Phew. 

WEDNESDAY
Penne with meat sauce, garlic knots

Wednesday the tow truck came to drag away my poor old car. I had another meeting, so I took Damien’s car and got back feeling fairly argy-bargulous again, so I assembled some tools, and Corrie and I managed to get most of the old bolts off the clothesline base, and then knock the remaining rotten wood off with a sledgehammer I think I will need to cut the remaining three bolts off, and I do need to buy new bolts, so that was as far as we could get for the day.

Then I turned my attention to Corrie’s tree house, which so far consists of some pieces of wood stuck to a tree.

I made an attempt to drill some holes so I could secure the planks with lag bolts, but the drill bit was very warped, and I didn’t get anywhere. 

Instead, I got a shovel and started digging up some stuff to fill in my garden in front. It’s less shady than it used to be, because the porch is gone, but it’s still in shadow a lot of the day. I got some false hellebore, two kinds of ferns, and a patch of pretty pink and white wood anemone and crammed them into the ground. The lupines I planted last year made it through the winter, and I think this will be a really pretty spot in a year or so!

For supper, I just cooked up some more pork (I forget why I had so much ground pork in the freezer, but I sure did) and threw it in some jarred sauce, and cooked up a bunch of penne.

I also found a stray ball of pizza dough, so thawed that and made it into garlic knots. I baked them and then tossed them with melted butter, garlic powder, salt, and parmesan cheese. 

They were a little rubbery, but who the heck knows how old that dough was, so it was whatever. They got et. 

That night, the kids asked if they could have a fire, and I told them I had used up all the firewood to make my garden, and also felt incapable of getting up. So they went into the woods and gathered more wood, and built themselves a fire, roasted marshmallows, were nice to each other, and even presumably put the fire out afterwards! 

THURSDAY
Pork ribs, roast butternut squash

Thursday, you’ll never guess, I had a meeting, for which Sophia kindly let me borrow her car. And I just did not get a lot else done. I was really, really tired. Damien was out of town all day, and Sophia took Lucy to a job interview and Benny and Corrie to the movies. I thought I was alone in the house, but just spent my wild and precious hours of solitude eating pop tarts like a goblin and making trouble on Facebook, and sort of slogging around getting very small things done, like filling my weekly pill box and moving clutter around. I feel bad it was such a boring, at-home vacation, but at least the weather has been nice. Whatcha gonna do. I did fix Corrie’s swing. Oh, and she gave herself an amazing haircut, and then her sisters helped her dye it blue. 

For supper, I defrosted and roasted some butternut squash from ages past, and then I roasted some pork ribs with salt and pepper. Damien got home and we ate dinner together, at the table. Then I realized that, oops, Irene has been home all this time. She was just upstairs. All afternoon I was remarking to myself, boy, those cats are so noisy up there, and you would think it was actually a person up there, boy! Sorry, Irene. 

Thursday evening, Damien noticed all six duck eggs were starting to crack! Very exciting. It’s hard work and takes a long time, and there was not much progress by bedtime, so we moved the incubator into our bedroom, because it would be a shame if the only ones there to welcome them when they hatched were a couple of naughty cats. 

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese and broccoli

No duckling action yet! Today is day 28, but as anyone who has waited for a baby knows, these things run on their own schedule. The cracks are a little crackier this morning, and Damien and Benny have both heard some muffled peeping. Just gotta be patient. 

Damien just fixed the kitchen sink pipe, and next on his list is the water heater and a third thing, I forget what. I still don’t have a surgery date. The axolotl is healthy and happy. I think we will have lots of peaches and lilacs this year. And that’s-a my story! 

What’s for supper? Vol. 4SIX SEHHHHHHVEN

Happy Friday! A couple of days ago, I thought of a really witty pun title for this week’s post. Then I thought, “I don’t need to write that down. It’s so good, there is no way I will forget it.” Then a great river went rushing through my mind, and left behind 

–okay, now here I broke away for a bit to try and hunt down an authentically ancient description of what it looked like when the Augean Stables got cleaned out, and I got as far as people singing “ting-a-ling” in praise of Herakles afterward

and I decided it wasn’t really that funny. So please just imagine that my mind is sparkling clean, and also quite empty. And I have a middle schooler. So that explains the title. 

Well, here is what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers and pizza pockets(?) 

I remember being super busy on Saturday, but I can’t remember why. 

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips, steamed broccoli

Sunday after Mass, I did part 2 of cleaning the kid room that needed a drastic overhaul. This is the project that’s been preventing me from getting anything done outside! This task has been looming in my mind, so it’s a huge relief to get it done. We are hoping to paint over April vacation. 

I have soooo many projects I have to get to outside. Gotta build Corrie’s tree house, prep the gardens for planting and start a new spot for corn, replace the grape arches that fell down over the winter, plant the new grapes I got on clearance at Walmart, maybe build a second brick step/stoop in front, finish the duck pond, finish the garden I started building on the side of the back steps to maybe prevent people from dropping crap there, and, less glamorously, finish up the new roof we put on in the fall, and take a million pounds of trash and scraps to the dump. And fix the mailbox. But knowing that bedroom inside was such a wreck was making it impossible to commit to anything outside. So now I can!

Well, the truth is, I am waiting to hear back about if I will be having surgery soon or in several months, so everything is very much up in the air. But a girl can dream. 

So then we had hamburgers, chips, and steamed broccoli for supper. 

I’ve been on a huge steamed broccoli kick lately. Just something very satisfying about the two different textures in each bite Nobody else is that crazy about it, so I’ve been eating leftover all week for a snack, and that is how I keep current with my fart schedule. 

It snowed. 

MONDAY
Turkey bacon wraps, hot pretzels, fruit salad

Monday I had a meeting and then a boring pharmacy adventure, and then it snowed. I compensated by making a very bright and cheerful dinner, kind of 90’s brunch style or something. Deli turkey and bacon, tomato, lettuce, cheese, and honey mustard wraps, hot pretzels, and fruit salad. 

While the bacon was cooking, I started making the fruit salad, and it was so pretty in layers, I left it that way, rather than mixing it. 

Color! Must have color! 

I absolutely love this kind of meal. It’s like something your grandparents would buy you at a hospital cafeteria. 

Possibly you will even get to pick out an eraser shaped like an ice cream come at the gift shop, if you are good. 

TUESDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs, salad, hearth bread

Tuesday I got some lab work done on the way home from the school run, and I was so reluctant to do anything else when I got home, I ended up making a slightly more elaborate meal than I had planned. It was just meatballs,

Jump to Recipe

but I usually bake them in the oven on a rack, because it’s so much easier and less messy. This time I browned them in a pan, and it did take quite some time!

I also made King Arthur Hearth Bread. Last time I made this recipe, it was decent, and had a nice crackly crust and chewy inside, but didn’t hold its shape, and was much flatter than the picture in the recipe. So I tried it again, paying closer attentions to the rising time, and the exact same thing happened. But I did recall that you can improve the appearance of a weird loaf of bread by serving it already cut in pieces, so that is what I did. 

Made a little salad with the leftovers from the wraps

and it was a yummy meal. Ground beef was $2.99 a pound, for some reason (usually that’s Superbowl prices), so I bought as much as I could fit in the freezer 

WEDNESDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, veggies and dip

Wednesday is when I had to admit to myself that I was really sick. I was hoping it was just allergies from the dust I stirred up while cleaning, but really I had succumbed to the respiratory ick that is circulating around the family. I really hardly ever get sick anymore since I started taking big doses of vitamin D for the dark months of the year! But this one got me. I slept most of the day and we had grilled ham and cheese for supper, and I did not take a picture of it. 

THURSDAY
Bibimbap sort of 

Thursday I was still sick, but I was so mad about being sick when the weather was finally warming up, I decided to pretend I wasn’t sick. This usually doesn’t work, but I got away with it this time.

It was sunny and breezy, so I hung out a bunch of laundry to dry, then started picking at the broken glass debacle in the back. To refresh your memory: Through a completely avoidable bit of stupidity on my part, one of these windows

now looks like this

and after spending two good long sessions gloomily cleaning, there are still millions of bits of broken glass on a probably 4×8′ area that is covered with small rocks that you can easily move, and large rocks that are fully embedded in the ground, and every day that passes makes it harder to clean up the glass because things are starting to grow in the cracks. The good news is, all of this is entirely my fault, so I can think about that while I clean! 

I have now tried every  conceivable method for cleaning up this glass, including using different sizes of soup spoons, and nothing was getting me anywhere. The only thing I know would work is if some friendly mice and sparrows got busy and, with a rush and a twitter, made it spic and span for me in no time. But I would have needed to start that several months ago (i.e. leaving treats for them so they would befriend me and come to my aid in my hour of need), and while it is true that, in a certain sense, we do routinely leave snacks for the mice, the overall tenor of our relationship remains hostile. So that was out. 

So I bowed to my fate and inquired about a used shop vac on Facebook Marketplace. Then, because I had sort of done something about the glass, I felt clear to tackle the blackberry bushes that are encroaching on the spot between the patio and the house, which is where I want to plant wildflowers.

Every time I mention getting rid of wild blackberry, somebody goes, “oohhhh, I wish I had that problem!” Fine! I believe you! Please come and get them. Take all you want. We have 423 million of them, and they have sent root systems snaking around all over the property, and the one thing they hate is for anything else to grow. But maybe I’m wrong, and it’s actually quite nice to have them. Like I said, come on over. 

But it really was incredibly satisfying to sit in the dirt and dig and scrabble and uproot, even knowing that it was only slowing them down at best. I listened to the last two parts of The Rest Is History series on the KKK, and started on their series about Samurai before I had to call it quits for the day.

Got a quick shower, got a CT scan (this was to confirm that I don’t have an aneurism and that the schwannoma is not strangling my carotid artery, and I’m happy to say that I don’t and it isn’t), picked up the shop vac, and went home to make supper. I was extremely proud of this supper, because I really had only a concept of a plan, and it turned out very tasty. 

First I got some rice cooking in the Instant Pot. Then I started broiling some pork ribs with salt and pepper. While the first side was cooking, I made a thick sauce from brown sugar, corn start, soy sauce, garlic powder, and some hot chili paste. I flipped the ribs over and brushed the sauce on the other side and let them finish cooking. I found some spinach and crunchy noodles. and quickly sauteed some mushrooms. Then I started some eggs frying and called people to supper, and by the time everyone was assembled, the food was all hot 

Ribs turned out great! The sauce was really good and sticky. Of course I didn’t write down the proportions, except that I used way more sugar and corn starch than I meant to, so that was probably the secret. 

It was warm enough to eat outside — first time this year — so I had a lovely meal while my companions, the ducks, happily rooted around in the compost heap.

The table doesn’t super duper have a top yet, but it has enough decorative wrought iron that you can use it if you don’t move around a lot. Whatever, it’s on my list. Anyway, I used up the last of the fresh eggs that lady gave me in exchange for my excess toum, and it was a tremendously yummy meal. 

FRIDAY
Tuna sandwiches or broiled salmon

Last Friday I ended up making tuna sandwiches for the kids, Instant Pot risotto

Jump to Recipe

for everybody, and sesame-crusted ahi tuna for me and Damien. It was very tasty, although I was sad to see that the cheapo sack of ahi tuna from Aldi now only has three pieces of tuna in it, rather than four. 

As far as I can recall, I marinated the tuna in sesame oil and soy sauce for about ten minutes, then pressed them into a mixture of sesame seeds, brown sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, and salt, and then seared them in oil. Served it with the risotto and really needed a vegetable, but the closest I could find was some furikake.  So we had that, and it was yum dot com. 

I ended up sort of flaking the tuna into the risotto, and it all melded together deliciously. 

So tonight we have some equally cheapo frozen salmon, and I’m not sure what I will do with it. Maybe just broil it, and serve it with, like, potato chips and an old apple. Maybe some friendly sparrows will come and help me. Maybe!

Oh, I forgot! We got an axolotl.

This is Benny’s pet. Lena knows someone who works for a vet, and they found themselves with that common problem, Too Many Axolotls, so obviously Damien went and got one. Benny is currently calling him Mordred, but she originally suggested “Ravioli,” and I like that much better, because it scans exactly like axolotl:  ˘˘/˘.  He’s a nice little guy, very chill. 

I haven’t tried my new shop vac yet, because if it doesn’t work, I just don’t know what I’m gonna do. Pave the whole back yard, maybe. Or reroute a river and just wash the whole thing away. Ting-a-ling! At least that’s what it says here. 

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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Instant Pot Risotto

Almost as good as stovetop risotto, and ten billion times easier. Makes about eight cups. 

Ingredients

  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp ground sage
  • 3 Tbsp olive oil
  • 4 cups rice, raw
  • 6 cups chicken stock
  • 2 cups dry white wine
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • pepper
  • 1.5 cups grated parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Turn IP on sautee, add oil, and sautee the onion, garlic, salt, and sage until onions are soft.

  2. Add rice and butter and cook for five minutes or more, stirring constantly, until rice is mostly opaque and butter is melted.

  3. Press "cancel," add the broth and wine, and stir.

  4. Close the top, close valve, set to high pressure for 9 minutes.

  5. Release the pressure and carefully stir in the parmesan cheese and pepper. Add salt if necessary. 

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

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

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

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

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

And here is what we had for supper this week!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and stuffed potato skins

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUNDAY
Pizza

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

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

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

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

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

Solid little meal, easy peasy. 

TUESDAY
Pulled pork on waffle fries, raw veggies

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Chicken shawarma, pita, toum 

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was all excellent. 

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

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

THURSDAY 
Spicy chicken pepper sandwiches, cheese curls

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Tuna sandwiches, possibly risotto

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

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

Don’t forget, make the sandwich!

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Clovey pulled pork – fatty hunk of pork – salt and pepper – oil for browning – 1 cup apple cider vinegar – 2/3 cup apple juice – 3 jalapeños with tops removed, seeds and membranes intact – 1 onion, quartered – 2 Tbsp cumin – 1 tsp red pepper flakes – 2 tsp ground cloves 1) Cut pork into hunks. Season heavily with salt and pepper. 2) Heat oil in heavy pot and brown pork on all sides. 3) Move browned pork into Instant Pot or slow cooker or dutch oven. Add all the other ingredients. Cover and cook slowly for at least six hours. 4) When pork is tender, shred.  

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Clovey pulled pork

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

  4. When pork is tender, shred.

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Chicken shawarma

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

  2. Preheat the oven to 425.

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 449: In which certain patterns emerge

Happy Friday! The last Friday before Thanksgiving. I haven’t even thought about our Thanksgiving menu this year, except that I have a new roll recipe I’m pretty excited about. Oh, and I may ditch the cranberry orange muffins and make cranberry lemon bars instead. 

So I guess we’ll have . . . 

Mulled cider
Spanakopita
Turkey with stuffing and gravy. Some years we make oyster sausage stuffing, but I think mostly I’m the one who likes it. 
Cranberry sauce from a can
Mashed potatoes
Dinner rolls
Maybe a mixed roast vegetable and bacon dish, or maybe candied sweet potatoes
Lemon cranberry bars
Apple, pumpkin, and pecan pie, maybe cranberry curd tart
Maybe ice cream. One year I made butternut squash ice cream with candied pecans, and it was pretty dang good, but you really can’t beat vanilla with pie. 

There, I guess I made the menu! I collected a bunch of those recipes here. We are only having immediate family over, and I have asked the kids to pick a poem to read after dinner and before dessert. We started this last year and it was more or less a success. 

Okay, on to this week’s food! 

SATURDAY
Leftovers for kids

and the grownups went out on a DATE. It was our intention to try the new banh mi place in town, which is supposed to be fantastic, but we got there at 5:45 and it was already closed! So we went to the newish Buba Noodle Bar. I had a short rib bao bun and bugoki yaki udon. Both completely scrumptious and super fresh, and even though it was very busy, the service was fast and friendly. The waiter strongly encouraged us to try the coconut ice cream, but I explained we were going to the movies and I wanted to eat a tremendous amount of popcorn, and he understood. Clara and Wesley turned out to be at the theater, too, and we yakked for a while, and then found seats on opposite sides of the theater, as is fitting. 

We saw Frankenstein! We both enjoyed the heck out of it. Just every little bit of it was delicious and gripping and exactly what movies were meant to be. I feel like maybe this is the movie Guillermo del Toro has been trying to make all along. If you have a chance to see it in the theater, do! It’s long, but nothing feels extra or slow. My only quibble was I couldn’t understand everything Elizabeth was saying. But I got the general gist. Anyone who complains about this movie is living their life wrong. If you can’t see it in the theater, it’s definitely still worth watching on Netflix. 

And I did eat a tremendous amount of popcorn, and also Mike and Ikes and lemonade. What a lovely night. 

SUNDAY
Pork chops, risotto, Brussels sprouts slaw

Sunday after Mass, Damien and I went to two different pharmacies trying to get Covid and flu shots (the kids got theirs last week), but it kept not working out, so we went home unjabbed. 

I started some pork chops marinating, using this marinade from Recipe Tin Eats (In that sentence, I had the choice of either saying “marinating” and then “marinade,” or else “recipe” and then “Recipe.” Because if I don’t think about things that don’t matter, who will? And the answer is: Guillermo del Toro).

I had a pound of Brussels sprouts left over from last week, and they were right on the edge of going funky, so I really had to use them. So I made a Brussels sprouts slaw, and I thought it was quite nice, fresh but autumnal, with toasted almonds and dried cranberries, yum yum. In fact, if you are looking for a vegetable for Thanksgiving, this is more substantial than a green salad but less heavy than green bean casserole or whatever. Which I have never actually eaten, because it just doesn’t look good. 

I sliced up the Brussels sprouts in the food processor. I forgot how dainty Brussels sprouts can be when you slice them thin. They leave their peasant cabbage ancestry behind and turn into little green doilies, very pretty. 

I skipped the red onion. The dressing has maple syrup and dijon mustard in it, but it still tasted pretty bland to me, so I squirted in a ton of honey before I mixed it all together. 

Then I realized that, honey or no, the kids were not going to be happy with just pork chops and slaw for supper, so I made some Instant Pot risotto and kept it warm in the Instant Pot, which is not ideal, but still, risotto. 

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Then I roped a couple kids into helping me put the dang trellis up. Ye Ongoing Tragicke History of ye Dange Trellis. It’s not . . . the most secure engineering imaginable. But it is up!

See? Demonstrably not lying on its side in the dirt. Really, sincerely, thanks to everyone who was sympathetic and encouraging in the comments last week. It helped a lot, because I was not only discouraged about the project, I was embarrassed at how discouraged I felt. So, we got it up! 

When it was close to supper, I put the pork chops on a pan, poured the rest of the marinade on top, and broiled them; and we had a nice little meal. 

The recipe calls for grilling the pork chops so they get a crust, and broiling does not achieve that; but they still have a wonderful savory flavor and are incredibly juicy. I was very pleased with this meal altogether. It was just a very successful combination of flavors and textures. 

MONDAY
Ham, peas, mashed potatoes

Monday, Damien and I got in for an appointment to get our shots, and it was a relief to get that done. The pharmacist complimented me on thinking to wear a tank top under a cardigan, so he could reach my arms easily. I guess a lot of people turn up in turtlenecks or wetsuits, and then they’re surprised they have to strip down in the middle of the supermarket.

I discovered the ham I had bought on sale was one of those fancy spiral-cut hams, with the glaze and everything, hoo de hoo hoo. So I set that up to go into the oven, and I made five pounds of mashed potatoes and put those in the slow cooker to stay warm. 

And then I realized that, despite obsessive searching for weeks, I wasn’t getting anywhere trying to find free bricks on Marketplace, and it was only a matter of time before we got some real snow. So I went to Home Depot and bought 130 bricks, plus several bags of gravel and several bags of sand.

Damien got the ham in the oven while I was out, and when I got back, all I had to do was heat up some peas.

The kids were all pleased about supper, even though something weird happened to the mashed potatoes and they were kind of soupy and gummy by supper time. I really don’t know why that happened! They tasted fine; the texture was just really off. I dunno. 

Actually, I do know. I get frustrated that my mashed potatoes always have lumps, so I made these in the mixer, rather than mashing them by hand. I had it in my head that there was some arcane chemical reason not to do it this way, but they looked fine. But I guess I must have overmixed them, because they were not great! Oh well. Lumps it is. Maybe I am not cooking them long enough before I mash them. 

TUESDAY
Chopped Italian subs, fries

Tuesday I unloaded all the bricks and sand and stuff from Damien’s car, and the I figured, what the hell, as long as they’re out and I’m all gritty, I might as well do this project. 

I already had the area squared off, that I wanted to brick. So I 

. . . now look. If you are one of those people who does things the right way and can’t understand why anyone would not do things the right way, these next few paragraphs may not be for you. All right. 

So you’re supposed to dig eight inches down, then level and compact the dirt, then lay gravel, level and compact that, lay sand, lay bricks, and then sweep more sand in between the joints. 

I did . . . some of that. Okay? I dug down a certain number of inches

and I leveled it off, in a certain sense. You are supposed to set up stakes and stretch string in between them so you can maintain an even slope, and I went so far as to go inside and find some string and bring it outside.

All right? And then I spread gravel on and sort of rubbed it around with a plank of wood, and then I put a rubber mat on it and jumped up and down on top of it, which you really cannot claim didn’t compact it somewhat. And I’m sure anyone heading east on 101 around noon enjoyed the show.

Then I started laying bricks, and if they didn’t look straight, I hit them with a mallet. Then I put some more sand on top and swept it until my arms were tired.

And you know what? It looks . . . better! It really does. 

I swept in as much sand as I could into the cracks and then left it to settle. 

And I actually felt not-terrible about it. It’s starting to come together! We need to patch that gaping wound in the siding over the door, and wash the siding, and fix the parts of the trellis I broke, and there are other various things that need to be done. But it’s better, and there is less of a slope in front of the door, which will be very helpful when it gets icy out there. And the mail lady has a spot to leave packages (she has been putting them in the wheelbarrow), and most importantly of all to me, I will have something to decorate for Christmas. 

Here’s a before and after, so far:

and I’m laughing to myself because it sure does look different! I am not at all convinced that it’s an improvement! But it looks different! Well, there is no chipmunk living under the porch anymore, anyway, because there is no porch. So we’ve got that going for us. And there’s a heck of a lot more light in the dining room and kitchen. 

It’s just a long project, that’s all. A long project. It will pay off eventually. Or not. 

Anyway, after laying the bricks I suddenly got reeeeeeeally tired. I guess it was the vaccines settling in. Just really dopey and slow and creaky, like way more than usual, even taking brick-laying into account. So I was glad I had already prepped supper. 

I tried that thing that was trending on TikTok like four years ago: Chopped Italian sandwiches. I chopped up a bunch of ham and salami, peppered salami, and pepperoni, and provolone, tomatoes, and lettuce. I tried using the giant cleaver I bought on clearance when the International Market closed, but I guess you need to sharpen it, because it sure didn’t chop very much. So I just used a knife. 

You’re supposed to mix everything together with some kind of Italian dressing, but I knew the kids were going to be skeptical of something new anyway, so I just did meats in one bowl, cheese in another, and so on, and let people dress it as they liked.

For mine, I mixed all the stuff together with some of that hotsy totsy sandwich pepper spread, and I put it on a toasted bun.

I thought it was DELICIOUS. It was, of course, just an Italian sandwich, but it was just more fun to eat. I did manage to contain the filling more after I took this picture, and got it all shoved into the roll, and used plenty of the hot sandwich spread.

And then I fell asleep, and it was the greatest nap the world has ever seen. Just pure delight. It was worth getting vaccine autism and tentacle creature blood clots just for that nap. So nice. Then I woke up for a while, and then I went back to bed. 

WEDNESDAY
Hamburgers, chips, vegetables and dip

Wednesday it was Damien’s morning to get up with the kids, and I was sooo deep asleep and having a really dumb dream when I finally became aware that (a) my phone was ringing and (b) this is something I needed to respond to in some way. 

It was Damien. What happened was, when he tried to turn onto School Street, he felt a pop and the steering went out, and he had to wrench the car off onto the side of the road. So he had the big girls walk the little girls to school, but he needed me to come get him.
 
So I got up and while I was scraping the windshield, I locked the keys in the car. But I found a spare and drove out and picked the big kids up, and also the dog who was also there because of course he was, and brought Damien his wallet, which he forgot, and he called AAA and I went to bring the kids to the other school, but! A giant construction vehicle was tipped on its side in the intersection.
 
 

So we took a detour and ended up in an unfamiliar neighborhood and then, with no warning, the road ended in a foot bridge over a stream! So we turned around and this time we went way, way, way around, and I dropped the kids off and emailed the school about why they were late, and got coffee and went home. Apparently it was a single nut in the steering that broke.

So I was sitting in the living room telling Sophia about our crazy morning and Damien texts me, “Are you coming?” Ahh crap. Turns out he thought I was coming to meet him in Keene, and I thought I was meeting him in Marlborough at the mechanic. So I run out the door, and then he texts me never mind, he will meet me at the mechanic. But by this time I am already in Keene, so I turn around and go back, and  . . . eventually I and my car and Damien and his car and the tow truck and the dog all ended up in the same place, and then we went home. 

Greatest day of Sonny’s life. Every day is the greatest day of his life, but this was outstanding. 
 
I don’t really remember the rest of the day. They fixed the car. We had hamburgers, chips, and a vegetable platter with dip for supper. And that’s-a my story. 
 

THURSDAY
Omelettes and homemade dinner rolls

Thursday I was planning to make omelettes and biscuits, but I’m really the only one who is enthusiastic about biscuits. So I thought I might test out a dinner roll recipe I saw, and if it was good, I could use it for Thanksgiving. It is this recipe from Handle the Heat.

Speaking of heat, I went to grab the cooking spray to grease the bowl to set the dough to rise, and I was wondering why the cap was so hard to get off. Here is why:

I didn’t even know we had butane in the house! And I don’t know why it was on the counter next to the cooking spray! But I am pretty glad the cap was hard to get off! Yeesh. 

Anyway, paying slightly closer attention to life in general after that, I followed the directions scrupulously, made the dough, set it to rise for ninety minutes, formed the rolls, and then put them in the refrigerator. 

You don’t have to refrigerate them — you can just let them rise a second time and then bake them — but its very convenient to be able to pause the recipe this way. She said letting them do a slow second rise in the fridge actually improves the flavor; and this way, I could bake them right before dinner. So I took them out of the fridge again around 4:00 when we got home, preheated the oven, and brushed them with egg. Looking very promising, right? 

Into the oven they went, for about 25 minutes. 

You guys, they turned out SO GOOD. 

You brush them with melted butter when they come out of the oven, and they’re incredible. Soft, rich, and lightly chewy on the inside,

with this tissue-thin fragile buttery crust on the outside, with a little crunch on the bottom. Absolutely perfect dinner rolls. 

I made omelettes to order (I had leftover ham, tomatoes, and shredded cheddar in mine) and we had that with the hot rolls, and it was delightful.

The omelettes were a complete mess, but they tasted good. 

So, these rolls are definitely going on the menu for Thanksgiving! I have never found a roll recipe I really like, so this is awesome. 

I spent most of the day working on the Christmas present suggestion list, and I’ll have that up soon, probably Sunday. I tried to get the kids to remind me of presents they had gotten each other, so I could include them too, because I remember that some of them were so creative and wonderful. They reminded me they were mostly things like a 2002 Buffy the Vampire Slayer calendar they had found at Puggy’s. Truly thoughtful and very well-received, but not necessarily presents you’d recommend to anyone who is not a Fisher. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

I bought two balls of pizza dough. Two! I didn’t even know they came in such a low number! Here’s the amount of pizza I was making just five years ago:

I feel like there’s no way two pizzas is gonna be enough food, but deep in my heart, I think it probably is. Or maybe we will starve! Always a possibility. 

The plan for today was to go pick up a load of free bricks around 11:00.

Oh yes, a big load of free bricks, the beautiful old clay kind, came available in a nearby town immediately after I finished laying the Home Depot ones I bought! So I’m getting them and I don’t even know what for. I’ll think of something! Maybe we’ll eat them if we run out of pizza. 

Update: Damien’s car has gone bad again, and my car is in no shape to carry a load like this. Dang it. I told the lady she should let the next person in line have them, and I haven’t gotten up to the part where I’m relieved because I didn’t really have a plan anyway, but I’m sure I’ll get there soon. Another long-term project! We’ll get there.

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Instant Pot Risotto

Almost as good as stovetop risotto, and ten billion times easier. Makes about eight cups. 

Ingredients

  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp ground sage
  • 3 Tbsp olive oil
  • 4 cups rice, raw
  • 6 cups chicken stock
  • 2 cups dry white wine
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • pepper
  • 1.5 cups grated parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Turn IP on sautee, add oil, and sautee the onion, garlic, salt, and sage until onions are soft.

  2. Add rice and butter and cook for five minutes or more, stirring constantly, until rice is mostly opaque and butter is melted.

  3. Press "cancel," add the broth and wine, and stir.

  4. Close the top, close valve, set to high pressure for 9 minutes.

  5. Release the pressure and carefully stir in the parmesan cheese and pepper. Add salt if necessary. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 448: November, no cry

Happy Friday! I’m in a bad mood, but I still made some good food! 

SATURDAY
Leftovers + taquitos 

Just a regular shopping day. Shopping just gets more and more stressful because everything is so expensive, plus I think it was Saturday that a lot of people got their EBT cards refilled after a long delay, so the store was insanely mobbed. I think people were justifiably afraid their accounts were going to get emptied again without warning, so everyone was stocking up, and the mood was just . . . distinctly un-merry. Un-merry indeed. But we got it done and came home intact, and ate taquitos.

SUNDAY
Tacos al pastor, black beans, pomegranates

On Sunday, when we got home from Mass, I started some meat marinating for tacos al pastor, and then I made a quadruple batch of these apple cider sea salt caramels I keep thinking about, from Smitten Kitchen. 

 You just boil the cider down until it reduces to a syrup, then add white sugar, brown sugar, heavy cream, and butter, and then boil it again. I used an entire gallon of cider, so it took longer, but it wasn’t difficult at all.

Then you stir in sea salt and cinnamon, and pour it into a lined pan. She says in the recipe that you need to get all your stuff ready to go when it reaches the right temperature, and she is not kidding! But it’s pretty straightforward, as long as you can read a candy thermometer.

 You can see that the pan was too big, so I made a little dam out of tinfoil, and that worked fine.

Then you let it cool and harden, and then you can cut it up. 

Scrumptious. Caramel and apple are two of my favorite flavors, and these taste deeply of both, and they are very chewy and creamy. They do lose their shape at room temperature. I portioned them out into mini cupcake papers put them in the fridge, and that worked well. I might cut them into bits and make ice cream at some point, and I might make another batch to give out as little Christmas presents.

Then, as I had repeatedly warned the kids we were going to do, we did a big giant horrible outdoor clean-up, front and back, and let me tell you, it is a long time since I have been glared at that much. I was glaring at myself! It was not fun! It was cold and muddy out there, and there was a lot of roof debris, and there was one spot in the yard where some kid was spray painting a Halloween costume, so there was a silver circle on the grass, and one of the ducks pooped right in the middle. I was the only one who thought it was funny. But we got it done, and now we are — not ready for snow, but not in a situation where the first snowfall will make me feel like a failure as an adult or a homeowner or a yard-haver or whatever. (We have had a few bits of snow, but not a heavy blanket of snow yet.)

Clara and her boyfriend invited us out to dinner, but we were too exhausted to go out, so instead we invited them over. I Was Afraid There Wouldn’t Be Enough Food (and if I ever write a cookbook, that will be the title, maybe with a little smiley face to show that it’s okay, this is not a book about famines.. Or maybe I won’t call it that), so I made a pot of black beans and cut up some pomegranates, and there was plenty. 

I followed this recipe pretty much exactly

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except I didn’t cook the second pineapple, but just served it raw in chunks. I don’t have a strong preference for either way. It was good! The meat came out nice and tender, with that good spicy, smokey taste

and it was a tasty, pleasant meal after a long day outside. 

Oh, the beans were pretty good, too, although maybe I used too much cumin. Here’s my recipe for that

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and I also chopped up a bunch of fresh spinach and threw that in there, even though the people in our family who most need Secret Spinach don’t eat beans anyway. 

I ate more cider caramels than I choose to remember clearly, but there were still lots and lots left over, so, feeling competent and motivated, I packaged up a bunch to be mailed to various people. Take that! 

MONDAY
Chicken quesadillas, chips, beans

On Monday, Clara’s boyfriend came over and fitted up the new roof area with eaves and soffits and whatnot. It looks fantastic. We have to redo the drip edge and put some siding back and paint the eaves, but it’s basically done. What a long, drawn-out ordeal, but it feels great when it’s rainy and windy outside and we can just sit in the living room and fully expect not to get dripped on. 

Monday evening I cut up a rotisserie chicken and made quesadillas (plus jalapeños for me and Damien) and served that with chips, salsa, sour cream, and the rest of the beans. 

Quesadillas is another thing I never ate or even saw until I was in college. It’s a shame they weren’t on my family’s radar, because my mother would have really loved them. It’s funny to think that, just a few decades ago, there just . . . wasn’t non-American food where I lived. There was a Chinese restaurant where you could get pupu platters and wonton soup and chicken fingers, and maybe if you were willing to drive, you could get Italian. My father had an authentic Chinese cookbook for when he was feeling ambitious, and my parents retained a few middle eastern dishes from when they lived in Israel, but other than that, the most exotic thing I ever encountered growing up was a banana. Maybe some parsley. It’s just funny how quickly things changed!

TUESDAY
Maple roasted chicken with potatoes, carrots, and Brussels sprouts

The kids were home for Veteran’s Day, and I left them alone (they made popcorn and watched the Lego Ninjago movie; very satisfactory) and I got the meat marinating for this new-to-me recipe, maple roasted chicken from Sip and Feast.

Then I started putting together the trellis/pergola/arbor thingy I bought a while ago. If you’ve been following the sad, sad story of our front entrance, we tore down the porch last summer, planned a sunroom, then downgraded plans to a small porch, then to a portico, then to an awning, and then I bought this trellis thingy because we’re about to start getting a million packages for Christmas, and I don’t want them to sit on the front step and get wet. Also I’m tired of the house looking like its front was chopped off, which it was. Also I want to have something to put Christmas lights on! Reasonable desires, and a cheap trellis thingy seemed like a reasonable solution. I was even thinking of rambler roses and whatnot, and getting kind of inspired at what a beautiful, cottagey look I could achieve. 

So I started putting this thing together and immediately realized they hadn’t cut out half of the slots to make it fit together. That’s okay! I’m competent and motivated, so I used a hacksaw and a chisel and cut new slots, and even painted them so it wouldn’t be raw wood exposed to the elements.

Got the thing put together pretty quickly, and even realized before it was too late that I should move it out of the kitchen before I put it completely together, or else it would not fit out of the kitchen! I was really feeling on top of the situation, and figured I would just drag it outside, and then in the morning I could just zip zip zip set it up and we would have a beautiful house. It felt so good to finally be making progress on this interminable project. 

Supper was really good! It’s pretty simple. You just marinate the chicken (I had drumsticks and thighs), then roast the vegetables and potatoes for a while, then put chicken and marinade on top of that and roast it some more. It has you cutting the tops off some entire heads of garlic, and roasting that along with the rest, which is always pretty

The recipe calls for parsnips, but I skipped that and just did fingerling potatoes, baby-cut carrots, and Brussels sprouts. I made a SINGLE RECIPE, and it was plenty of food, which kind of blows my mind, but it happens more and more often these days. Teeny tiny little family of seven. 

Anyway, the dish turned out great, and it’s a wonderful fall or winter dish, with the maple flavor. 

Very photogenic, too.

Another win for Sip and Feast!

WEDNESDAY
Marcella Hazan sauce with sausage on pasta

Wednesday I started this super-simple sauce going. I don’t think I’ve harassed you lately to try this sauce, but you really should. Can you open a can of tomatoes and put it in a pot with some butter and an onion? Then you can make something wonderful!

Okay, this picture is a little misleading because loose Italian sausage was on sale, so I cooked that up and added it to the sauce. But even without sausage, it’s incredibly rich and savory. The recipe

Jump to Recipe

has you take the onions out before serving, but I generally leave them in, and people (including me) just eat them. I only had red onions, and it still turned out great. 

I think only one kid made Cup O’ Noodle, so that’s a win. 

I did go on a bit of a cleaning rampage during the day, and attacked the bathroom walls and ceiling and grout with a mop, a swiffer, a Magic Eraser, a scrubbing brush, baby wipes, CLR, and Concrobium. They look better, but not as good as you would have expected if you had witnessed the fury with which I scrubbed. I also dripped a little cleanser into my eye when I was doing the ceiling, but it’s the eye that already has a giant brown floater in it, so I thought perhaps it would cancel that out. Which will tell you something about my state of mind. 

With my leftover fury and mental clarity, I went outside and attached a little roof to the trellis thingy. We have a lot of sheets of corrugated polycarbonate — really, more than most people — so I found a piece that was the right size and screwed it on, easy peasy. 

This is one of several pictures I took before I attached anything, intending to ask Facebook which roof material looked best, but then I got mad about . . . something, I forget what, and decided I could figure it out for myself. 

Then I spent KIND OF A LONG TIME attempting to set the friggin thing up. I couldn’t get it high enough, level enough, centered enough, or close enough to the house, and also I hadn’t really accounted for the outdoor light, and I dropped it multiple times and broke three different parts of it, was incredibly unkind to the dog, and then ran out of daylight. But, I did not impale myself on anything, or hit myself in the face with a hammer, and nobody called the police on me, so we’ll call that a win. I still had high hopes that I, being competent and motivated, could get it done the next day.

THURSDAY
Chicken burgers, puffed corn, broccoli

Thursday, I was absolutely determined to get that trellis up. Just get it up. It’s not a hard project! It should be an easy project! I just needed to push through! I am competent! and motivated!

I decided that, rather than building it up from the ground up and then securing it to the house, I would affix it to the house first, and then shore up the bottom. This involved two ladders, two drills, two kinds of screws, and some carriage bolts I had bought for the tree house I never built but I definitely will, plus some of the most appalling work with a circular saw I’ve ever seen, and I’m afraid the dog was again spoken to in ways he didn’t fully deserve, except in a kind of cosmic sense.

Eventually I conceded that I couldn’t do it myself, so Damien helped me get the trellis thing up there, and GUESS WHAT? It looked ridiculous. It was centered and level, but much too high, and looked absurd. And also, the whole rest of the house is terrible. And everything is terrible. 

So now there are three different pieces of wood stuck to the house at various heights, and the trellis is still lying on the ground, and it is cracked in three spots. But I wasn’t even ready to throw in the towel until I realized I was standing on tip toe on a stack of cinder blocks in the rain, using a hammer to hit a screw as hard as I could, and then the very last rational cell in my brain gathered its courage and told me to go inside and give up for the day. So I did. 

I just wanted something to put a string of Christmas lights on, and now it seems like even if I manage to get the thing attached, the rest of the house is just so much grosser and dirtier and shabbier than I realized. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that people have been driving past the house and laughing at me, but yesterday that felt very true. I don’t know. It’s just friggin November and everything is the worst. I fully recognize that I am feeling more discouraged about not getting a trellis up than the situation really warrants, but I’m sure you can see this is one of those freighted problems. It’s not really just about the trellis! But at the same time, getting that freaking thing up would help, a lot. 

Anyway we wrapped up the day with a fairly squalid supper. I took this photo just so I would remember what we ate, but it’s pretty illustrative of the day in general. 

Splort. I did take down the sunflower head that’s been drying for several weeks and got all the seeds off it, and bag them for the spring, so that’s something. 

I attempted to make a little ASMR-style video about it, but actually I took a video of myself dropping the camera. AND THAT WAS FRIGGIN THURSDAY. 

You know what, I did drop off three bags of dresses at the thrift store, and I did mail three packages, and I did do some pretty okayish writing. Also, Damien and I are gonna see Frankenstein this weekend. And my car ran out of oil somehow (a leak, obviously), but I stopped and got new oil right away before anything exploded, and I didn’t even get oil all over my pants, so we’ll call that a win, too. And I cleaned my room.

And, for probably the biggest win of all, I didn’t eat any caramels all week, even though there are about 400 pieces left. I’m gonna eat some tomorrow, though! Watch out, caramel! 

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle?

I asked the kids what they wanted, and that is what they said. Excelsior! November has to end eventually, and when it does, I’ll be there. Possibly tottering on a pile of cinderblocks with a hammer in my hand, but I’ll be there. 

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Tacos al pastor

Ingredients

  • 8-10 lbs pork butt or loin

For the marinade:

  • 2 pineapples, cut into spears (one is for the marinade, and set the other aside for cooking separately)
  • 3 onions quartered
  • 1.5 cups orange or pineapple juice
  • 3/4 cup white vinegar
  • 1/3 cup ancho chili powder
  • 1 entire head garlic
  • 3 chipotles in adobo
  • 1-1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 Tbsp oregano

For serving:

  • flour tortillas
  • sliced red onion
  • chopped cilantro
  • lime wedges

Instructions

  1. Thinly slice the pork.

  2. In a food processor or blender, combine one of the pineapples and the rest of the marinade ingredients. Blend until smooth. (You will probably have to do it in batches.)

  3. Marinate the sliced meat in the marinade for at least four hours.

  4. Pan fry, grill, or broil the meat and the spears of the second pineapple. Roughly chop cooked meat and pineapple.

  5. Serve pork and pineapple on tortillas with sliced red onion, chopped cilantro, and lime wedges.

 

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Instant Pot black beans

Ingredients

  • 2 tsp olive oil
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 6-8 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 16-oz cans black beans with liquid
  • 1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
  • 1 Tbsp cumin
  • 1-1/2 tsp salt
  • pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. Put olive oil pot of Instant Pot. Press "saute" button. Add diced onion and minced garlic. Saute, stirring, for a few minutes until onion is soft. Press "cancel."

  2. Add beans with liquid. Add cumin, salt, and cilantro. Stir to combine. Close the lid, close the vent, and press "slow cook."

 

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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. 445: Follow the fellow who fixes your roof

Today’s food post will be mainly a roof post! That’s how it be sometimes. 

So, here we have a representative sample of some of the wood we pulled down from the roof. Just in case you were wondering why it seemed so urgent to do this project.

We’ve had a leak for quite a while, but we had a storm a few weeks ago and it busted right through the living room ceiling. So off we went. 

We started on Thursday of last week, and pulled off the old shingles, edge, and flashing, and opened up the eaves to see how bad the damage was. It was actually not as bad as we feared! But we did have a bit of a tough moment when we discovered that 2x4s are not actually two by four inches. I guess maybe you knew that, but we didn’t — mainly because the existing trusses were rough-cut wood that actually does measure 2×4.

So that added a few trips to Home Depot, and a lot of staring up at the roof and saying, “But . . .what? What??” 

This is a roof over the first story of the house only, but there is quite a steep drop-off in the ground on one side. I stuck mainly to the less-scary side, and Damien worked on the more-scary side. He discovered that whoever fixed the roof last ran out of flashing and used a bunch of metal newspaper printing plates from 1976, so that was kind of neat. 

There have been a few other spot repairs on the roof, we discovered as we tore layers away. Some of them looked vaguely familiar; some of them had clearly been done by other boneheads. I think it was on Friday that we realized we have been living in this house for almost 20 years, and it was really time to stop calling the previous owners “they.” As in, “I can’t believe they did it this way” and “I can’t believe they just left it like that.” Because, like I said, for twenty years, it’s been us. There is no they. They are we. 

I masked up and clambered around pulling all the horrible old moldy, mousy insulation out

It was also very much we who did a terrible job putting tarps down, so there were rusty nails and scraps of rotten wood and bits of chewed-up insulation all over the place, in among the tall grass and wet blackberry thorns and whatnot. So I wandered slowly and furiously around with a magnet for a while and got most of the nails and crap cleaned up, and redid the tarps, so there. I’m making it sound like I did most of the work, but actually Damien did most of the work. 

SATURDAY

Saturday, Clara’s boyfriend came over and did a ton of work replacing and shoring up trusses and laying down new decking, and talking us through the rest of the project. Then I went back to Home Depot for some more wood and dropped a 8×10 sheet of plywood on my foot and broke my little toe, which is something I like to do from time to time. My toe is now more or less pierogi-shaped and permanently grey, and the toenail grows in three distinct pieces. All just part of my feminine mystique. Then I went to Home Depot a few more times and also got pierogis, and we had that and leftovers for supper. 

I was a little bummed to be missing the No Kings rally, so I went out with a staple gun and gussied up my skeletons. 

So there. 

I think it was on Saturday that Damien fell off the ladder. He tumbled really well, and didn’t hurt himself, thank God. But it was a good wake-up call for us to both be super super careful! 

SUNDAY
Beef barley soup and pumpkin muffins

Sunday we went to Mass of course, and then stopped at the store for some meat and milk and whatnot to help us limp through the week without actually shopping.

Corrie has been aching to learn how to make her favorite meal of soup and muffins, so I gave her a very little bit of direction, and off she went making beef barley soup

Jump to Recipe

very much enjoying the process

My recipe calls for diced tomatoes, but she doesn’t like that, so she skipped it. 

Then she started on the muffins

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and everything turned out great!

Nothing like sitting down to a delicious meal you made yourself. 

Damien spent the day fitting plywood onto the roof for decking. It is, like everything else in our house, oddly shaped, so it took a long time! But he got it done and then absolutely swaddled and taped the heck out of it, because the rain was on the way. And it rained all night and into the next day, and man, that was nerve-wracking, listening to the rain fall. We both kept looking up at the ceiling, hoping and praying everything would stay dry. 

MONDAY
Roast chicken, peas, noodles

It did stay dry! Wonderful. While Damien worked on the eaves or something, I went back to Home Depot for nails or something. I think it was also Monday that we got the drip edge on. The days really blurred together this week. I did see a nice rainbow at Home Depot, so that was something. 

I roasted the chickens following Ina Garten’s super easy recipe. I didn’t have all the ingredients, so I just threw the garlic and lemons in there, and had the seasoned butter on the top, and they turned out absolutely scrumptious. No searing or flipping or basting or anything. They did take a little longer than expected, but it was worth the wait. 

We didn’t have much in the house for sides, so I just cooked some egg noodles and served them with butter, and heated up some frozen peas. Unsophistication at its best. 

I was looking at this plate and trying to think what it reminded me of. Then I realized: Toy food. It looks like toy food. 

Not a thing wrong with that! 

TUESDAY
Chicken quesadillas

I guess it was Tuesday we got the drip edge on. I don’t know. I’m probably forgetting a bunch of things we had to do. Damien had a bunch more carpentry to do, because the eaves and soffits and whatnot are in tough shape in spots. While he wrestled with that, I went upstairs and caulked the frame of the window (we suspect water is getting in under the siding from the window frame) and loosened up the siding around the window, much to the consternation of Maggie the Cat, who mostly lives in that room.

Then I swept all the crap off the roof, which was harder than you’d think! I don’t know if you’ve ever swept a sloped surface above your head, but it makes you feel like your arms are just about useless.

Then, o then, we finally started on the water and ice shield! This was exciting, because it meant the structural part is basically done, and also because it was going to rain again. It is fancy self-adhesive stuff, and BOY IS IT ADHESIVE. I guess I would kind of like to draw a veil over Tuesday, but the upshot is that we went up and down the ladder 923 times

and we kept at it and kept at it, and by gum we got that roof and part of the wall covered with high quality water and ice shield. 

and then it DID rain again that night, and the roof did stay dry. WHEW.

The kids made chicken quesadillas for supper. I purposely made two big chickens so there would be leftovers for that, and the kids did great. 

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday Damien and I were both just so freaking exhausted, we decided to just stick to our day jobs on Wednesday, and we both got some writing done. Damien has been going back and forth from working on the roof to doing all his regular work all this week – pretty amazing. That evening, we dressed up and drove to Concord for the tenth anniversary party for In Depth, which is one of the papers Damien writes for. The snacks were quite good, but we decided to stop at Burger King on the way home anyway. 

I had bought sandwiches, popcorn, and Swiss Rolls for the kids at home, so they didn’t have to cook. I think they spent the evening working on Halloween costumes. We got home late and collapsed. 

THURSDAY

Thursday we had school conferences, which I went to 

while Damien started in on the tar paper layer.

In the morning, I had fried up a bunch of Italian sausages, cut them up, and put them in the slow cooker to stay warm all day. So when we got home around 5, all I had to do was cook some spaghetti and then discover that yes, I had turned on the slow cooker, and yes, I had plugged it in, but! the power strip I had plugged it into was not plugged in. No.

I didn’t really think we needed to dine on All Day Room Temperature Sausage, so we just had plain spaghetti, and it was a little sad. But at least we had tar paper. 

FRIDAY

Friday Damien finished the tar paper and we started in on the step flashing between the roof and the house wall. For whatever reason, I got the heebie jeebies and couldn’t get myself to get up on the roof, so Damien ended up doing most of it.

Then we ran out of flashing, briefly considered putting the newspaper plates back up, and decided we should just go back to Home Depot. So I’m gonna do that after adoration, and he’s gonna finish putting them on, and we may or may not be able to get the waterproof tar sealant stuff on tonight. I don’t now what’s for supper, and I’m struggling to feel like this is my problem. I will probably pick up some tuna. 

AND THEN, the only thing left is to put the shingles on! And of course reattach the siding. And rebuild the soffits and fascia boards, and a few other miscellaneous things, and of course haul away all the debris. I’m sure in a few weeks, when it’s really truly done, we’ll feel proud and relieved, but man, this project has really taken it out of us. It’s only about 115 square feet of roof, and we’ve been thinking it would be sort of a test project to see if we could fix the whole main roof on the rest of the house in the spring, which, I don’t know. Maybe. It’s pretty high up there. Lotta roof. Much ladders. Keep hitting our thumbs with hammers. You know. 

It’s our 28th anniversary tomorrow, and you’ll never guess, it looks very much like we will be spending most of it on the roof. Better than in the grave!

Well, goodbye! 

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Beef barley soup (Instant Pot or stovetop)

Makes about a gallon of lovely soup

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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


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

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

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

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

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. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 444: And don’t forget to put garlic on my grave

Happy Friday! in haste, in haste, for this is day two of me and Damien putting in a new roof, which we hope to finish by Sunday. It’s a small area, about 115 square feet, and only one storey up, but it’s something we’ve never done before, so I’m pretty impressed with us so far. (If you are wondering how one motivates oneself to take on a project like this, it helps to have no choice, and that’s my whole advice.)

Here is what we ate this week!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and I think pizza pockets

I myself had leftover chicken biryani with extra raisins and almonds, and it was yum dot com. 

SUNDAY
Vermonter sandwiches, fries

Sunday we made our annual trip to Wellwood Orchard in Vermont, and first we stopped at the cemetery to visit my parents’ grave. We said a decade and I planted some crocuses (I’ve planted various things over the last few years, including roses and lilacs, and they keep mowing them down. It’s very Claremont) and, just because I thought it was funny, some garlic. My parents didn’t agree on lots of things, but they certainly had similar views about garlic. (= It is good.)

We had a lovely time picking apples. Bunch of photos here: 

 

The kids are old enough that nobody insisted on each having their own separate little bag, so we got two half-bushel bags and filled them up, which is the same amount of apples as lots of little bags for about half the price. It’s a little late in the season, so there weren’t tons and tons of apples, but we did get some nice big ones. Nothing like a very in-season apple! It’s like a different fruit from what you get the rest of the year. 

For supper, we had Vermonter sandwiches, which is toasted sourdough bread, sliced chicken or turkey, sharp cheddar, green apple, bacon, and honey mustard. The meat I had was an entire frozen turkey breast (99 cents a pound, could not turn it down), but I made the mistake of slicing it first and then roasting it, rather than the other way around, so it kinda tried up. It was still semi-frozen in the morning and I really wanted to prep it ahead of time so we could eat as soon as we got back. But we all came home hungry, so it was fine. 

MONDAY
Honey soy chicken wings, coconut rice, sesame broccoli 

Monday the kids had the day off for Indigenous People’s day, and I fulfilled my promise to get to work on Corrie’s Halloween costume. 

Any guesses what this is going to be? She made the mask/head (not pictured) herself. 

She also made this unrelated mask

and was somewhat offended when I jumped in alarm, but then I showed her the picture, and had to agree, it was alarming. 

Supper was a great plan but turned out a tiny bit disappointing. Chicken wings were on sale (1.99/lb) so I got a bunch and made this marinade from Recipe Tin Eats. She specifically mentions that they are sticky, and that it can be very disappointing when chicken wings don’t turn out sticky, so she shows you how to achieve stickiness (pouring off the liquid from the cooked chicken, and then basting it with the marinade three times). I followed the directions exactly, but they really just didn’t turn out sticky. 

They were fine, just not amazing. 

I also made a bunch of coconut rice, also using a Recipe Tin Eats recipe. In this one, she promises it will be fluffy, not gluey, and I’ve made this recipe before and it really does turn out good. You make it in the oven. Then I made a tray of broccoli (just some sesame oil, soy sauce, I think garlic powder, and sesame seeds) and I didn’t really plan who was going to be in the oven when at what temperate, so it kind of baked, which is not ideal.

So overall, a decent meal, but I was bummed because I was expecting it to be spectacular. I made up for it by eating about a cubic yard of coconut rice. 

TUESDAY
Pizza

Tuesday I don’t even remember what I was doing — I think maybe I picked up a big bunch of materials at Home Depot, among other things — but I was completely exhausted by the time we got home from school, and I was so delighted with myself for having made three pizzas in the morning. So then I just about wept when Corrie reminded me there was an open house and pumpkin carving at the school at 5. But I got myself together and put my shoes back on and we went, and it was actually lovely.

 

I finally met her new teacher, who turns out to be a former homeschooler, so that explains a thing or two! (Like why they are reading Beowulf and why Corrie was researching the history of the Angles).

Damien got the pizzas in the oven and it was hot and ready when we got home, and then I collapsed like a bunch of broccoli. 

WEDNESDAY
Burgers, chips, raw vegetables

Wednesday I did a bunch of fall yard work. I composted some of the garden beds, planted a bunch of seed garlic and the nine peach pits we prepared, and mulched it all with duck hay. Still gotta mulch the strawberries, peach saplings, and rhubarb. Here’s a picture of what I did, because this post is kind of low on pictures!

Oof, it’s getting so grey and drab and chilly out there. 

I also did some more chimpy hardscaping in front, and planted a ton of spring bulbs in front and in back — daffodils, tulips, crocuses, alliums, and some kind of purple and orange fluttery-looking flower, I forget what it’s called. And mulched it all. 

Oh, do I hate planting bulbs in the fall. You’d think it would be an encouraging act of hope, staking out a claim for tomorrow, doing what you can to put your trust in a brighter future and so on. And it is that, but it feels awful, just futile. Fall is just tough. Everything is dead or dying, everything smells old and rotten, the birds are leaving, everything is leaning and weary and worn out. Plus I always manage to kneel in dog poop while I’m planting, and this year was no exception. But I got those mofos into the ground, and maybe they will even grow, who knows. 

I knew Thursday was going to be super busy, so I made supper Wednesday evening. 

Looking very promising. The recipe calls for boneless, skinless chicken thighs, but I was using turkey breast (the second whole turkey breast I got. This one was more suited for my purposes). 

THURSDAY
Chicken and dumplings

So Thursday we started on the roof. We didn’t completely know how damaged it was under the shingles, so I was pretty nervous about what we might find. We spread some tarps on the ground, climbed up, and started pulling the shingles and flashing away. It was nippy up there! Sunny but windy. 

About an hour into it, I heard traffic slowing down, and saw that cars were having to avoid my giant inflated fried egg that had blown into the road, and we decided that we are dumb enough to think we can do roofing, but we don’t need to compound that by getting sued by some driver who has whiplash because of our escaped inflated egg. So I climbed down and YOU KNOW WHAT? Climbing up a ladder is kind of scary, but nowhere near as scary as climbing down a roof and turning yourself around to get onto a ladder to climb down it! But I retrieved the egg, and we got all those shingles off

The roof underneath turned out to be rotten in the spots we expected, but quite a bit of it is sound. We talked to my brother, who is a builder, and he affirmed that we can definitely do this thing, and gave us some good advice about where the water is probably coming in and what to do about it. Very encouraging! I won’t share any pictures because I’m in no frame of mind for the internet to tell me we’re doing it all wrong.

I went out to pick up some more caulk and a tool to remove siding, and some more tarps, and then I picked up the kids while Damien started in removing the rotten wood. When I got home, I heated up the chicken I had made the previous evening.

I guess you would call it a chicken stew. It is this chicken and dumpling recipe from Sip and Feast, and when I got back, I made the dumpling dough, which calls for butter, milk, AND sour cream. This is an insanely rich recipe, and my only complaint is that I cooked the dumplings at least twice as long as recommended, and they still didn’t completely cook through, and were kind of damp. 

But I just had to serve it eventually, and it really was delicious

and, as I hoped, a very tasty, cozy, and nourishing meal after a chilly day on the roof. Damien and I thought it was great, although if I make it again, I may skip the peas. The kids were not impressed, and most of them didn’t even try it. Oh well! At this point, I’m storing up recipes to make again when it’s just me and Damien in the house. 

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese

Damien just went off to Home Depot for lumber, and when he gets home, we’re gonna start pulling out old mousy insulation, pulling off siding, waterproofing and caulking, and start rebuilding trusses and decking. We got our hands on a roll of high-end self-adhering water and ice shield, and, well, we are at the age when we’re pretty excited about that.

I also have a doctor’s appointment so my stupid doctor can tell me it’s okay to keep taking my medicine, because look at me, I’m still alive, which we definitely wouldn’t be able to determine vie telehealth. In anticipation of this visit, I have carefully arranged to gain ten pounds since our last visit, so I’m looking forward to this. 

I did find one final head of garlic in the garden, which I missed before. So, in answer to your question: Yes, I do think I’m the queen of the underground, but at least I’m willing to help with the insulation. And occasionally make undercooked dumplings. 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 443: Take heart, for the Lord hath not focaccia

Happy Friday! And dang, it is COLD out there. I know some of you live in an alternate universe where it’s still summer weather, but here it is officially NIPPPY.

And you know what that means: Time to eat! (Same as warm weather, but I’m not on trial here.) 

Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers with chicken three ways and burritos 

Sophia took Lucy, Irene, Benny, and Corrie to a con and they were gone all day, but Elijah (who moved out a few months ago) needed to go shopping, so we had a good old fashioned Elijah Shopping Turn. That was nice! I really love hanging out with my older kids.

The leftovers included a lot more chicken than I remembered cooking (fried chicken, chicken tenders from wraps, and garlic butter chicken bites), but it was all good. 

Because all the kids were out, I got to choose dessert. I grabbed some kind of disgusting spooky chocolate Twinkies for Saturday, and then I used some empanada dough discs I found in the freezer to make apple hand pies for Sunday. I did that Saturday night, because I knew we’d be gone during the day. 

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, Actual Doritos; apple hand pies and ice cream

But first, after Mass, Damien and I went on a two-hour drive to pick up Miss Maggie.

Her owner has a roommate situation that’s not working well with cats, so we’re fostering her for the long-term until that changes. She is absolutely gorgeous, and extremely chatty. 

Sonny thinks she is AMAZING, and misunderstood pretty badly when she hissed at him, and then she swiped at his face, and he thought that was ALSO AMAZING, and he continues to be AMAZED by her. Friday is a lot more cautious, and mostly just stares at her in awe, while she gazes at him with queenly contempt. 

When Maggie is upstairs, Sonny and Friday dash around the house like giant goobers, and then when she comes down, they suddenly get all awed and respectful. So I guess they’ve sorted it out? I hope they all learn to relax around each other eventually! But they’re not fighting, so that’s good. 

For supper we had grilled ham and cheese, plus brand name Doritos which were on sale. 

I also got a bag of taco seasoning flavored Doritos, and they tasted exactly like that. 

I baked the apple pies, and they truly didn’t turn out that great. The dough was pretty old, and I should have baked them at a higher temp, and the apples were also pretty old and squashy. Oh well! People ate it and no one complained. Just not my best effort. The ice cream helped. 

And that was the weekend! 

MONDAY
Chicken biryani, mango

Monday I really wanted to make some progress on the duck pond before it freezes, so I spent quite a bit of time hauling rocks from the stream to hold the liner in place. But first I got supper going. Chicken leg quarters were on sale, and there are VERY few things they are good for unless you’re holding a low rent Renaissance Faire or something; but they work great for biryani. 

I more or less follow this recipe, which yields a tasty but quite mild version. Except that I was out of ground cardamom, so I opened up a bunch of pods and ground up the kernels in my mortar and pestle. So one minute I tell Damien I’m just doing a quick easy meal, and then he comes in and I’m grinding spices like Strega Nona. 

Anyway, I followed the recipe as written, and then I moved it to the slow cooker. This is my big secret for success with biryani: You let it slow cook all day. I’ve never been able to get the rice and liquid proportions right otherwise! I also cut up a bunch of mangos. 

When I was really tired of hauling rocks, I went to the front of the house and dug out the dirt under the granite step. It was more or less where I wanted it, but it was wobbly and too far from the next step, so I got that squared away. 

So here’s the front entrance situation. I am in talks with the redoubtable Wesley to revisit the idea of building a portico.

I got that trellis for free at my favorite store, The Side of the Road. 

Then I scurried around doing little bits of yard work, and I finally cut the head off my one solitary sunflower, which was a volunteer. 

and an overachiever! You can bet I’m saving those seeds. 

Speaking of volunteers, did I show you this poppy that’s growing by the back steps?

No idea where it came from! I’ve tried to grow poppies in my garden many times, with no success, but I’ve never even tried to grow this color. I guess it just came from heaven. Or rabbit poop or whatever. Either way, I’m gonna save those seeds, too. 

So then finally it was supper time, and oh man, it was delicious. 

I was so hungry, I just took one quick photo, which, as you can see, was actually a video, oops. So here is a still from the delicious short film titled “Get In Mah Belleh.” 

TUESDAY
Garlic pork chops, baked potato, string beans

Tuesday I was planning to make soup and bread, but then I looked at the weather report and saw it was going to rain (finally! We are still in a drought) on Wednesday, so that would be a better day for soup and bread. But I knew I was going to be too busy Wednesday to make bread. So then I changed my mind another 523 times and eventually ended up making two full suppers on Tuesday. 

For Tuesday supper, we had pork chops, baked potatoes, and string beans that I just served raw, because I couldn’t get a straight answer on how people would like them cooked. 

I just broiled the pork chops, but I marinated them in the morning, more or less following the recipe for this marinade from Recipe Tin Eats, except I was rushing so I used garlic powder instead of fresh garlic, and I didn’t super duper measure anything, so it ended up tasting heavily of Worcestershire sauce, so I dumped in a bunch more brown sugar. 

Well, they turned out great. Probably could have been in the oven a few minutes longer to give them a little caramelization, but they were really tasty. I’m so happy I found this marinade, because I have struggled my whole life to cook pork chops in a way that is easy but doesn’t make them dry and tasteless. This is it! 

Because it was gonna rain the next day, I pushed to get some more outside work done. I continued building up the retaining wall/heap behind the flower bed with cinder blocks and dirt, and I filled in the trench I had dug to level the granite step, and transplanted a bunch of flowers. 

I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this! I guess partly so, someday, I can reread these posts and fondly remember a time when I could still lug stuff. I do like lugging stuff. I feel like I’m my true self, when I’m lugging stuff. 

I hung up the sunflower to dry, because the seeds seem a little juicy still. This has resulted in some interesting vignettes when people sit in that spot. 

She looks like she’s getting a revelation, or possibly taking a shower. 

On the way home from school, I bought some bread flour and then made this focaccia dough, and put it in the fridge overnight. 

WEDNESDAY
Italian wedding soup, focaccia

Wednesday we had three dentist appointments plus something else, I forget what, and it didn’t actually rain all day like it was supposed to! But I was still happy to have a giant pot of soup all ready. I had made a double recipe of this Italian Wedding Soup from Sip and Feast, except I had ground chicken instead of ground turkey for the meatballs, and I skipped the escarole. If you ask me what escarole is, I could probably come up with a plausible answer, but it’s definitely not a piece of knowledge that I keep in the front of my brain. 

About four hours before supper, I greased up a pan and schlorped the cold focaccia dough onto it, and sternly warned everyone not to touch it even a little bit, not even for a funny joke. 

Shortly before supper, I finished the soup with the acine de pepe and the spinach, and I gently encouraged the focaccia dough to cover the rest of the pan (it was already almost there). I oiled it, dimpled it, and then attempted to make a design on it with tomatoes, onions, and parsley, but it was such a spectacular failure that nobody even realized it was supposed to be a design, so pretend I never said that!

Anyway, it turned out FANTASTIC.. 

Absolutely scrumptious, with a crackly bottom, airy inside, and a thin, chewy top. 

I’m a little ashamed at how much I ate, but it was really the best focaccia I’ve ever had. Most definitely using this recipe again. 

The soup was also very nice. 

An excellent meal overall. 

THURSDAY
Spaghetti with sausage sauce

Thursday I could really feel the cold coming, so I hustled to put together a cold frame for my two pomegranate plants. 

Look at them, enjoying their sunny little spa on the back steps! 

Here’s the side view. 

So luxurious. I had all these fricken windows I got when I was planning to make a greenhouse, so I’m glad to be using a few of them, anyway. Eventually my house is going to be 100% things I found on the side of the road and things I got for free from Facebook Marketplace, and then I can die happy, or anyway, die. 

Then I dragged Damien out to the duck pond and demanded he explain to me how to fix it. 

I could see that I dug it unevenly, but I was having one of those moments when I know there’s a really simple answer, but it’s, like, sealed in one of those blister packs and you can’t find scissors, and you end up gnawing on it and just making it worse. Mentally, I mean. You guys gnaw mentally, right?  

So he suggested I move the rocks on the far edge, lift the liner, and dig more — not wider, just lower; and then put the liner and rocks back. Which was obviously the answer. I just have some kind of obvious spatial awareness deficit disorder or something (O-SADD), and I couldn’t figure it out on my own! (Actually first he assured me he totally understood not being able to work out a simple problem, and he has offered repeatedly to dig it for me and lug rocks for me, but he’s been wrestling with car repairs for two weeks straight, so I’ve been trying to keep my project bullshit to myself.) 

So anyway I did dig, for quite a long time, until I had to acknowledge that there was a bunch of water in there, and my efforts to make the pond deeper were resulting in that water flowing into the spot where I was digging, which is what I WANTED, but, well. So I set up the pump, which promptly stopped working. So that was the end of that for the day. 

By this time I was all hyped up and desperate to accomplish something, and I found myself I guess building a new step for the front of the house. 

If I can pull this off, it will actually be great, because with the porch gone, it became evident that the front of the house actually slopes quite a bit, and when that freezes, we’re all going to slip and die anytime we try to go in or out. (Obviously we can shovel it and salt it, but it’s hard to keep up with. You will have to trust me; we will die.) 

So right now I’m batting around various ideas of what to make the new step out of. Possibly pea gravel, but probably bricks or pavers. I did go to Home Depot and price out pavers, but I don’t want to spend that much, and this whole project has cost me zero doll hairs so far, so I’d like to keep it that way. So I’m back to haunting Facebook Marketplace for freebies. I did find a good used pump for $20, and I’m getting that today, yay!

You may have noticed that the long granite step is not level. My plan for that is to pretend it’s not. 

Anyway, I made a quick and easy meal of loose Italian sausage added to jarred sauce over spaghetti, with leftover focaccia. 

Yum yum. 

FRIDAY
Bagel egg cheese sandwiches, OJ

Gotta bring a kid in for a job interview and then get to adoration and get the other kids, and then we have a lovely three-day weekend, which we desperately need! It’s supposed to rain, which we also desperately need, but I’m a little bummed because we were supposed to go apple picking. Maybe we’ll just pick wet apples.

Anyway, pray for me and I’ll pray for you! And let me know if you hear about any free bricks. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 440: Thank you for your attention to this batter.

Happy Friday! We had so much yummy food this week, and I can’t wait to tell you about it! So I won’t! I mean I won’t wait! Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers and pizza pockets for kids, steak dinner for adults

Saturday Damien and I went tent camping! It wasn’t that far from home, but it was rural enough that there was no cell phone or internet service. So I put my phone in my purse and I didn’t take it out again for twenty hours. (If you felt a disturbance in the universe, that’s probably what it was.) So I have zero pictures, and zero regrets about that. 

It was glorious. It felt like my brain was being bathed in cool, refreshing water. We just slowwwwed down and did very little. Well, I did very little. Damien did all the packing and made all the arrangements and blew up the air mattress and set up the tent, and he also shopped for and cooked a wonderful meal: Good cheese and good bread and fresh berries for starters, and then he cooked two steaks over the fire. We had some good sharp ginger beer along with it. After we ate, we just sat and stared at the fire, and then we walked to the nearby field and looked at the stars for a bit, and then we went to bed. Magnificent.

The only sour note was the way acorns kept falling from the trees. I know that sounds like a very basic bitch thing to complain about (very “scenery is not breathtaking”), but these were the biggest acorns I have ever seen, and they were firing down from the trees like artillery. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I was genuinely afraid of getting hit. The weirdest thing was, I couldn’t figure out which tree they were coming from! We were surrounded by maples and evergreens, but there was still this invisible oak tree trying to kill us all night. It was truly alarming, and it actually woke me up about fifteen times. But even so, the first thing I thought in the morning was, “We have to do this again soon.” I really love sleeping outside, even if I barely sleep. 

Last time we went camping, we brought the coffee machine, but the battery pack turned out not to be strong enough to power it. This time, we brought a little propane camp stove and a French press, and Damien made coffee and toasted some bagels and fried some bacon over the fire, and brought me a lovely breakfast in tent. 

These are campsites that you park at, and there are other sites fairly close by. The guy across the road from us, for instance, was chopping and sawing wood when we arrived, and he continued to chop and saw wood for hours. And hours. He just kept chopping and sawing and stacking wood, chopping and sawing and stacking wood. Sometimes he would take a break for a while, and then we’d hear the saw start up again. So of course every time, we muttered, “He’s at it again!” and “Lass ihn, lass ihn!” but it was just weird. We figured maybe he promised his wife they could absolutely talk about The Thing, definitely, babe, as soon as he got some wood chopped. Just gotta chop some wood first. What, does she want them to freeze? Then she wakes up the next morning and the entire forest has been felled, and he’s still chopping. 

Anyway, we were thinking next time we might go to a more remote spot. They have campsites with platforms and I think maybe even pit toilets, but you have to hike to them — so no backing up to your site and unloading a million supplies onto a picnic table, but you have to carry it on your back. I think we can do it! Probably won’t be bringing fresh blackberries and a french press, but maybe we will. 

SUNDAY

So we went to Mass at a local church, and the kids at home were all sick, so they stayed home. We were both pretty tired when we got back, but Damien did a million jobs anyway — he did some work on some rotten soffits, and I think he worked on someone’s car,  winterized the pool, set some traps, and yes, he chopped some wood. For the wood stove in his office! Just a normal amount of wood. 

I got busy with the pressing task of rearranging my skeletons. I had an ambitious idea of setting them up on one of those see-saw swings, suspended from a tree, but blah blah blah it was harder than I thought; so I ended up just perching three of them together up in a tree, and they do look like they’re having fun. This year’s new skeleton, Mortadella, I arranged on top of one of our defunct cars, with a young skeleton on his shoulders. I’m not completely happy with them right now, so I’ll probably rearrange them. Anyway, Instacart never has trouble finding our house anymore. 

I truly forget what we had for supper. Oh wait, it was chicken quesadillas. I bought a rotisserie chicken for this because I figured we’d want something quick and easy, and I was right! 

MONDAY
Ziti with sausage and Alfredo sauce

Monday I made my very first Alfredo sauce. I can’t understand how it is that I’ve never made it before, but wow, it is delicious and easy. I followed this recipe from Sip and Feast, and all you do is put butter, cheese, and cream in a bowl (the cream makes it not 100% authentic, but oof it was good), dump your cooked pasta on top of it and mix it up with a little reserved hot pasta water. 

I cooked up a bunch of sausages and added those in with the pasta, and it was fantastic. Totally worth grating some cheese fresh while the pasta is cooking. (Those wedges of parmesan from Aldi have changed my life in a minor but undeniable way.)

Note, I was eating outside with a book. I have been trying to prolong the no-phone brain-rinse effect as much as possible. 

The kids were not impressed with the Alfredo sauce, and I anticipated this, so I made a pound of plain pasta and set aside some plain sausages and grated cheese. And all was well. 

Also on Monday, I finally managed to finish cleaning the pot I burned last Saturday making applesauce! I soaked it for the longest time and attacked it with every tool I could get my hands on, but it still looked like this:

so I dumped in a bunch of baking soda and water and dish soap and let that simmer for several hours. I actually forgot about it and it cooked itself dry, so I ended up having to scrub the baked-on soapy baking powder as well as the burned-on applesauce, but I did it. 

Phew. I really liked that pot. I got it on the side of the road, along with two other very big pots. The only thing I don’t like about them is that they’re so big, it’s hard to find a spot for them. WHICH IS NO LONGER A PROBLEM, AS YOU WILL SEE. 

TUESDAY
Pulled pork, tater tots, roast butternut squash rings

Tuesday I got a pork butt cooking in the morning for pulled pork.

Jump to Recipe

Cut it up, heavy salt and pepper, sear it in a pan, and then dump it in the Instant Pot with cider vinegar, apple cider, cumin, ground cloves, jalapeños, red pepper flakes, and a quartered onion. I think I cooked it for 18 minutes on high and then let it just keep warm the rest of the day.

When it was close to suppertime, I pulled the meat out of the liquid and shredded it in the standing mixer

 

and then added back a little bit of that savory broth it was cooking in. 

My knock-off Instant Pot (I think it’s called Potastic or something) is doing great, by the way. And now the silicone ring smells permanently like cumin and onion, so it’s officially mine. 

I made a few bags of tater tots and a pan of butternut squash rings. It being squash season, I will remind you that it’s way way easier to peel and cut butternut squash if you cut off the ends and/or jab it all over with a fork, and throw it in the microwave for three minutes. Comes out way more compliant!

So I cut the peeled squash into circles and rings (I sliced it into rings first, and then  removed the seeds and pulp by pressing them hard with a mason jar ring), laid them on a pan on parchment paper, and drizzled it with honey, olive oil, cumin, cinnamon, and salt. I just roasted it under the broiler, and it came out lovely. 

I also indulged in some incredibly vulgar jarred cheese product to top it all off. So I had a heap of tater tots, shredded pork on top of that, and topped with BBQ sauce and hot cheese sauce, with squash on the side. 

It was so good. The only thing that would have made it better would have been to eat it out of a little cardboard boat with a plastic fork. I did eat it outside, anyway. Getting as much outdoor time as possible as the temperatures drop. 

The squash was great, too! I do love squash, ever since I ate it for the first time in the hospital a few hours after giving birth to Corrie, who also loves squash. 

WEDNESDAY
Nachos

You know it’s gonna be a top notch meal when I defrost The Chub.

You know which one: The one with the opaque wrapper with a photograph of meat on the outside, and a picture of a cow.

I made two trays of what I am recklessly calling “nachos” — one with just tortilla chips, unseasoned ground beef, and shredded cheese on top, and one with chips, seasoned meat (salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, paprika, chili powder), jalapeños, shredded cheese, and the rest of that horrible yellow cheese sauce.

They were magnificent nachos, just like 7/11 used to make. 

I think it was also Wednesday that I suddenly got really mad and cleaned out the refrigerator. It was truly foul, and it’s so unnecessary for it to get that way! I have this wonderful system where all the jars and bottles go in the two tubs in the bottom (I long ago replaced the cracked and shattered original vegetable drawers with plastic bins from Walmart), and all the vegetables and herbs go in the door. IT’S SO EASY. Everything is visible and accessible, and I have one tub for dairy products that come in cartons, two tubs for cheese, and one for deli meat; and I let them put leftovers in ZIPLOCK BAGS. Could not be easier. But they insist on putting tops on halfway and laying things diagonally on top of a bag of spaghetti, so everything drips and drools and oozes downward, and the bottom of the fridge slowly fills up with a sticky, unspeakable sludge. Oh, I was so mad. I’ve been mad about this for almost thirty years, and I’m not done yet! Anyway, I cleaned the fridge. 

To clarify: I do clean it more frequently than every thirty years. You know what, let’s move along. 

I also picked the last of the peaches. They were so ripe that I didn’t have to blanch them to pull the skins off. I cut the flesh into chunks, threw it in the blender, and then simmered the pulp. Oh, what a color!

Then I realized I’m really big on burning things these days, so I transferred it to the slow cooker and set it to keep warm, and let it cook the rest of the day.  This will be for today’s dinner.

And that’s the end of peach season! It’s definitely a B year for my peach tree. Next year I expect to have a whole lot more fruit. 

Oh, I also cut up the second pork butt I bought (I forget the exact number, but it was a heck of a sale) and started it marinating for Thursday. 

THURSDAY
Banh mi

Thursday morning, I was like, “Okay, stupid, it’s time to put away that wood that’s been sitting on the dining room table all week. You had your chance to finish building those shelves, and you’re clearly not gonna do it, so just put the freaking wood away.” But then I was like, “But, let’s just see.”

And it turns out I finished building the shelves! Hooray! 

This looks very grimy and broken-in because I used wood we already had lying around. That’s right, I DIDN’T GO TO HOME DEPOT. I made some clownishly scalloped edges and absurdly crooked screws, but! this is a space that was once just a musty, greasy void, where springform pans and sifters went to die, and now it’s a three-layer built-in shelf that goes all the way back

so it’s not gonna fill up with irretrievable measuring spoons and onion skins and candy thermometers. And I finished it in time to pick up the kids who had a half day. So I feel pretty great about it all. 

The top shelf is very narrow because it’s just for pizza pans and cutting boards, which tend to get lost; and the bottom shelf is very tall because it’s just for my beloved giganto stock pots. Hope springs eternal! I also attached the bottom shelf with just a few screws, so we can take it out if there’s a leak or something, and we need to get in there. Eventually I will line the shelves with linoleum or something, and I’m gonna sand and stain the wood. In theory. Why rush? Maybe I’ll just think about it for thirty years. 

So the day before, as I said, I had made the marinade and sliced up the pork for banh mi.

You can see that I double bagged it, because it has a lot of garlic, onion, and fish sauce in it. I was actually a little short on fish sauce, so I supplemented with soy sauce, but didn’t notice any difference.  Still plenty stinky. 

Here’s the recipe for that: 

Jump to Recipe

In the afternoon, I made a big batch of quick-pickled carrots

Jump to Recipe

chopped up a bunch of cucumbers and cilantro, and sliced a bunch of baguettes. I took the meat out of the marinade and spread it on a pan on parchment paper, and shoved it right up under a hot broiler. It doesn’t take long to cook, because it’s cut thin and I had marinated it over night. 

Oof, it was so tender and so savory. I put out jalapeños and mayonnaise with the carrots, cukes, and cilantro, and toasted the buns in the last few minutes as the meat finished cooking, and hoooo boy. What a sandwich. 

I probably won’t be making this again for quite a while, because some family members really truly do not like the smell, and we all gotta live here. But I enjoyed that sandwich. 

FRIDAY
Peach waffles, eggs, OJ

Today, we’ll be having homemade waffles, which — dang, I thought I had made a recipe card, but I guess not. Well, it’s basically this

and for anyone who wants it, I will make peach-filled waffles. I mean anyone who lives here, sorry.

You grease the waffle iron, put a thin layer of batter on, then add the filling

then top it with a little more waffle batter and close the iron. This is a picture from  last year, made with what was basically peach pie filling;

This time, I just have the cooked-down peaches, and I didn’t add anything, because they’re so sweet. Sweet and fleet! That’s peaches. 

I bought a huge amount of eggs, and I can’t remember why, so I guess I’ll make a big batch of scrambled eggs for supper, and orange juice. 

Speaking of eggs, one of our newbie duckies has started laying! Did I already tell you that? I’m not sure if it’s Shaq or Tulip, but we got three eggs in one day, and there are only two adult females (Annie and Ray), so there you go. See if you can guess which egg was laid by the beginner. 

Ducks so crazy. 

Well, I also have some very cool news to tell you about, but it’s not 100% official yet, so I’ll hold off! But you know what, God is being really sweet to me this week. There have been at least three separate things that I’ve been like, “Ughhhhh, I have to do this hard thing. Okay. Okay. I can do it. I’m gonna do it, in a minute. But it’s harrrrd!” and then suddenly I get a little help, something that makes me want to do the thing. Amazing! 

And now, Damien’s covering adoration for me so I can get caught up on writing. So that is what I’m gonna do! Smell ya later. 

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Clovey pulled pork

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

  4. When pork is tender, shred.

 

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Pork banh mi

Ingredients

  • 5-6 lbs Pork loin
  • 1/2 cup fish sauce
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 minced onion
  • 1/2 head garlic, minced or crushed
  • 2 tsp pepper

Veggies and dressing

  • carrots
  • cucumbers
  • vinegar
  • sugar
  • cilantro
  • mayonnaise
  • Sriracha sauce

Instructions

  1. Slice the raw pork as thinly as you can. 

  2. Mix together the fish sauce ingredients and add the meat slices. Seal in a ziplock bag to marinate, as it is horrendously stinky. Marinate several hours or overnight. 

  3. Grill the meat over coals or on a pan under a hot broiler. 

  4. Toast a sliced baguette or other crusty bread. 

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quick-pickled carrots and/or cucumbers for banh mi, bibimbap, ramen, tacos, etc.

An easy way to add tons of bright flavor and crunch to a meal. We pickle carrots and cucumbers most often, but you can also use radishes, red onions, daikon, or any firm vegetable. 

Ingredients

  • 6-7 medium carrots, peeled
  • 1 lb mini cucumbers (or 1 lg cucumber)

For the brine (make double if pickling both carrots and cukes)

  • 1 cup water
  • 1/2 cup rice vinegar (other vinegars will also work; you'll just get a slightly different flavor)
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 Tbsp kosher salt

Instructions

  1. Mix brine ingredients together until salt and sugar are dissolved. 

  2. Slice or julienne the vegetables. The thinner they are, the more flavor they pick up, but the more quickly they will go soft, so decide how soon you are going to eat them and cut accordingly!

    Add them to the brine so they are submerged.

  3. Cover and let sit for a few hours or overnight or longer. Refrigerate if you're going to leave them overnight or longer.

 

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 439: We put the “disgrazia” in . . . everything.

Happy Friday! Today’s post will be about food, and gardens, and home improvement projects, and that’s it. 

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Especially lavish leftovers, since, incredibly, we still had some steak from last week. I’m struggling mightily to cook less food now that we only have seven people in the house, but, like I said, I’m struggling. 

While I was out shopping, Corrie made two loaves of banana bread. She’s getting really great in the kitchen! It turned out scrumptious, tender and moist. 

Here’s the recipe. 

Jump to Recipe

Sophia has also been baking more, now that the cooler weather has arrived. She made some really intense apple cider muffins with cider buttercream topping later in the week, but I forgot to take a picture. But three cheers for kids who bake! 

I myself made some pretty lousy applesauce. We had these lousy apples 

from our elderly apple tree, Marvin, which the kids feel sentimental about, so every year I make applesauce.

I washed all the spiders off, cut the apples in half, and cut out as many bad spots as I could manage. I took this picture:

because this was an especially large and pristine specimen. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to this tree to produce better apples. I’ve tried nothing, and I’m fresh out of ideas. 

I put the apple halves in two stock pots with about 3/4 cup of water and set them to simmer. Then I burned one! But I did not burn the other. I let it cook until the apples were soft, and then I put the pot in the fridge. (This is not a necessary step in the recipe; I just didn’t feel like dealing with it anymore that day.) 

Oh, also on Saturday, I fulfilled my end of a contract and dyed Corrie’s hair bright pink. She’s happy with it, but less enthusiastic about having her photo online all the time (sorry, kids. I have regrets), so I will just show you a photo of the dye we used

It is Lime Crime Unicorn Hair, and the color is “Juicy.” The label is the most egregiously illegible thing I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve squinted at a LOT of hair dye. But I have to say, this stuff adheres really, really well. The color is exactly as advertised (I did bleach her hair pretty light first), and it’s staying put so far. 

SUNDAY
Roast beef sandwiches with smoked gouda, garden corn, chips

The beef round eye hunks were still on sale, so we got another one and Damien seasoned and slow cooked it in the oven, and it turned out perrrrrfect. Very juicy and delicious. Unfortunately, the pictures I took make it look like something the plumber would hold up while saying, “Well, HERE’S your problem,” so I’ll skip photos. 

I splurged on some smoked gouda from the deli, and I also bought a jar of hot pepper sandwich spread

and oh man, that was a great combination. 

I see now that my table is gross. I’m not deleting the picture as an act of humility and penance in the face of the way I acted yesterday on social media. Anyway, really great sandwiches.

I picked the second round of corn from the garden, and Damien cooked it in the husk on the grill, and it was sweet and juicy and delicious. Lovely meal. 

Then it was time to make the apple sauce, as I’d been promising! So I set out to look for the foley mill, which I only use once a year to make apple sauce, but for which there is no substitute. Couldn’t find it in the island cabinet, but I did find a bag of rotten potatoes, so I threw that away and scrubbed out the inside of the cabinet. Then I thought, well, the other cabinet could probably use some cleaning, too, especially since it’s not even a cabinet, it’s just a ghastly conglomeration of wire shelving and milk crates and spidery misc. So I started pulling stuff out, and I DID find the foley mill, but then I got to thinking how much I didn’t want to go through that again next year, and how it wouldn’t be that hard to replace this chaos with some actual shelving, so I started looking for scrap wood, and then I thought for once I would treat myself and take some measurements and actually buy some wood specifically for this project, so I went to Home Depot and got back and settled in among the musty old double boilers, dusty candy molds, fusty wedding cake pans and bottles of terrible vermouth, and greasy pencils and bent measuring spoons that had slithered down into the gap, and I got going with the saw and the drill

and Corrie comes in and said, ” . . . I thought you were gonna make apple sauce.” 

I was! I mean, I am! This is the process! For some reason. 

Well, it took seven hours, and it’s not quite done. My pride will not allow me to show you photos of what the new shelves look like. They are level, and made out of real wood, and not likely to fall apart soon, and they are better than what we had, so that’s a win. I just can’t seem to take a picture where they don’t look like they were built by a Dr. Seuss bird, and possibly photographed by a second Dr. Seuss bird who is the first bird’s enemy. But I did fill two cartons with stuff to throw away, which is always nice. 

In my defense, I have built things out of wood before, but I’ve never built something that has to fit inside something else, and it involved more precise  measuring than is . . . customarily my style. 

Anyway, we delivered the bomb. I mean we found the foley mill. I mean I built some shelves. I mean we started making some applesauce!

MONDAY
Garlicky pork chops, homemade applesauce, baked potato

So Monday I actually finished making the applesauce. I spooned the cooked apples, peels and cores and all, into the foley mill. If you’re not familiar with this device, it’s basically a pot with a strainer for a bottom, and in the middle is a crank. When you turn the crank, a tilted blade forces the apples (or whatever) through the strainer, so only the soft, edible parts get pushed through the holes. Turning the crank also makes a spindle scrape the underside of the strainer, depositing the applesauce (or whatever) into the bowl below. It also has three little brackets so the mill stays in place over the bowl while you crank it.

Actually I have a picture!

Just a nicely-designed device. Of course you can peel and core your apples before cooking them, and then you won’t have to strain them out afterward; but it’s so much easier this way (assuming you’re not using a recipe that includes a trip to Home Depot), and cooking the peels along with the insides gives you more flavor and color (if you have nice apples!). Apples that are red, for instance, will result in a lovely dusty rose-colored applesauce. 

When I got it all cranked through, I put the apple pulp into the slow cooker with some butter, white sugar, and lots of cinnamon, and let that go all day. 

Pork chops were on sale, and I really struggle with cooking pork chops so they’re not dry. I thought Nagi might have a solution, and she did! She has a recipe called “Just a Great Pork Chop Marinade,” and even though it’s made with soy sauce, brown sugar, and garlic, she promised it just tastes savory, not Asian, and she was right. It also has dijon mustard, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce. I marinated the chops for several hours, and then broiled them right up under the broiler (the recipe calls for grilling, which would have been nice). SCRUMPTIOUS.

I will absolutely be returning to this recipe. These are probably the juiciest pork chops I have ever made. 

I threw a bunch of potatoes in the oven for 40 minutes or so, and we had the pork, applesauce, and baked potatoes for a very fine fall meal. 

Someday the kids are going to have applesauce made from actual good apples, and they’re gonna realize . . . well, you know what, it doesn’t matter. They liked the applesauce, and this was a very popular meal. And I delivered the bomb. 

TUESDAY
Buffalo chicken wraps

Tuesday Damien and I and a kid spent all day on the road and at a largely useless and frustrating doctor’s appointment, so I was very glad I had planned an easy dinner: Buffalo chicken wraps. 

Or, I was glad until I realized I had planned it, but not actually bought any buffalo chicken. A small error! Damien gallantly zipped off to the store and bought some, and we had a late but popular meal: Tortillas with buffalo chicken, blue cheese or ranch dressing, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, shredded pepper jack cheese, and crunchy fried onions.

We still have a giant backlog of tortillas in the house, so get ready for more wraps. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken with chickpeas and piquant onions, Jerusalem salad, yogurt sauce, pita

Wednesday I made a dish I haven’t made for quite some time: Chicken with chickpeas. It’s a middle eastern-ish recipe and none of the steps are hard, but I’m always a little surprised at how many elements it has. I guess I have it in my head that it’s an INCREDIBLY SIMPLE meal, and it really isn’t. It’s just regular-easyish. 

Anyway, I got the chicken marinating, cut up the onions, and made the lemony onions side dish and the yogurt sauce and the Jerusalem salad. Tons of color!

I’ll put all those recipes at the end. Oops, I guess I don’t have a card for Jerusalem salad. Well, it’s just tomatoes, cucumbers, fresh cilantro and/or parsley, some olive oil, and lemon juice, salt and pepper. All of these dishes really want fresh lemon juice, if you can manage it. Bottled lemon juice always has kind of a stale stank to it, so if you’re going to use it in a dish that doesn’t get cooked, I always try to do fresh. 

Then when I got home, it really was very simple and easy to just chunk the chicken and chickpeas and onions into the oven. This recipe has you marinating the chicken in a spiced yogurt sauce, which makes the meat moist as heck, but even more importantly gives the skin a magnificent texture. 

The marinade kind of melds onto the skin and make it, like, chicken ultraskin. 

Sometimes I keep the chicken warm while giving the chickpeas some extra time in the oven to crisp up, but it was already super late and we were starving, so I just served it, along with some store-bought pita. I do like chickpeas with a little crunch, but soft and savory is also very good!

Really wonderful meal. 

On Wednesday I realized I had never picked the peaches from my tree, which is funny, because last year at this time, I was picking for the 476th time and blanching and freezing them as fast as I could, and still being neck-deep in peaches. I guess it’s pretty common for peach trees to be on a schedule like this. 

The peaches this year may be few but some of them are HUGE. 

This is not some kind of optical illusion photo. They’re the biggest peaches I’ve ever seen! They’re delicious, too, super juicy and nectar-y. I’m saving the pits from the biggest ones, and I’ll try to sprout them. Last year I used a method where you dry the pits for a few days, pry them open to get the inner seed out, and plant them in pots in the ground in the fall, so they get cold stratified and can sprout easily in the spring. 

I did this with six seeds, as I recall, and got two good seedlings, which are now in the ground and doing great. I have hopes of turning the side yard, which is currently overgrown with goldenrod and wild grapes, into a little orchard. Right now it has the apple tree, a very young peach tree, a valiant blueberry bush, and of course the ubiquitous wild raspberries. I would like a cherry tree, but I’ve struggled with fungus on cherry trees in the past, so maybe I will do a nut tree in the spring. Lucky me! Always something to look forward to. (The other new peach tree is by the duck pen, so eventually they will have some natural shade and, presumably, some windfall snacks. I’m not worried about them eating the pits because they routinely mooch around the existing peach tree, and they have figured out how not to eat pits! Which makes two things they have figured out. The first thing is screwing.)

THURSDAY
Rigatoni alla disgraziata with homemade cheese and homemade bread

Thursday I overextended myself, and I don’t even know why. I guess I was cooking my feelings, and also I had some pretty little eggplants from the garden that also wanted to be cooked. 

The plan was rigatoni alla disgraziata,

Jump to Recipe

which is a meatless but very hearty pasta dish. It is not difficult. You toast up a bunch of breadcrumbs in oil, and then take them out of the pan and fry up your eggplants in more oil. 

No need to peel them. But at this point I realized I didn’t have as much eggplant as I thought, so I added some diced onion. Then you add tomato sauce to the eggplant, then you boil up some rigatoni, mix the breadcrumbs into the eggplant sauce, and stir it all together with torn-up mozzarella, and top it with grated parmesan. I also tarted up the jarred sauce with some chopped tomatoes and fresh basil. 

I decided to make fresh mozzarella cheese for this, and that was a good idea, except I decided to make a double recipe, and I was unsure about the timing of the chemistry part of it when you’re making a double batch. I really struggled with getting the almost-finished cheese to a high enough temperature before stretching it. The stretching is what gives it that stretchy, string-like texture, but it’s really hard to stretch hot cheese without gloves! I don’t know why I don’t have gloves!

Anyway, the cheese tasted fine but was very grainy, because of the heating/stretching issue. 

I hope that, because it’s folded into the pasta and is supposed to melt a bit, it wouldn’t matter much, and it didn’t matter that much, but it was a little sad. I was a little sad. 

I decided to cheer myself up by making bread, and that was where I really went wrong. First the dough rose right out of the bowl and slopped itself all over the windowsill and floor, and then I decided to get cute and make twelve separate little loaves, and then I realized I was LATE, like “text your teenager and promise you have not forgotten them” late. So I zipped through the process as fast as I could, which, believe it or not, does not produce the highest quality of food.

The good news is, we ate so late, everyone was happy to see anything hot and ready. I did take some pictures, but they’re not great, and it was not a great meal. These are decent recipes which I recommend! Sometimes things just don’t come together, and we all live to fight another day. I did buy some gloves for future cheese. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just regular old pizza, no fancy tricks. And that’s-a my story. We live to fight another day. 

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Banana bread or muffins

adapted from Quick Breads, Soups & Stews by Mary Gubser

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 375.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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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. 

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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. 

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Rigatoni alla disgraziata

A hearty, meatless pasta dish with eggplant, breadcrumbs, and mozzarella

Ingredients

  • 2 lg eggplants with ends cut off, cut into one-inch pieces (skin on)
  • salt
  • 3/4 cup olive oil, plus a little extra for frying bread crumbs
  • 3 cups bread crumbs
  • 3 lbs rigatoni
  • 6 cup marinara sauce
  • 1 lb mozzarella
  • grated parmesan for topping

Instructions

  1. In a very large skillet or pot, heat up a little olive oil and toast the bread crumbs until lightly browned. Remove from pan and set aside.

  2. Put the 3/4 cup of olive oil in the pan, heat it again, and add the cubed eggplant. Cook for several minutes, stirring often, until eggplant is soft and slightly golden. Salt to taste. Add in sauce and stir to combine and heat sauce through. Keep warm.

  3. In another pot, cook the rigatoni in salted water. Drain. Add the pasta to the eggplant and sauce mixture. Add in the toasted breadcrumbs and the shredded mozzarella. Stir to combine. Serve with grated parmesan on top.

 

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French bread

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

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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