rice – Page 2 – SIMCHA FISHER

What’s for supper? Vol. 341: You’re tellin me a pork bought this dresser?

Friends, it is the end of an era. This blackboard that has served me faithfully for many years has finally gone irreparably kablooey.

It was in pretty tough shape already, and half the black part was scratched up and hard to write on, and the “wood” frame was all puckered and horrible. But I loved it so! It marked the moment when I first started to really plan my weekly menu out, and that meant making a detailed shopping list, and that meant looking hard every single week at my calendar and my bank account and the weather forecast and my energy levels, and it’s been an excellent lynchpin for organizing my life in general.

Luckily, I can just go out and buy another blackboard. I really liked this one, though, and I haven’t found one that’s set up the same. Pour one out for the menu blackboard, friends.

And here is what we ate on this, the last week of summer vacation:

FRIDAY
I’m including Friday because although belongs to last week, I started making Saturday’s food then: specifically, mango ice cream

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and a batch of Indian candy called coconut ladoo.

The mango ice cream I’ve made a few times, both with canned mango and with fresh mango. People liked both, but I vastly preferred the fresh. Canned mango has that syrupy, cloying taste that made me think I didn’t like mango for much of my life, because I only had mango flavored things, and never fresh mango. Anyway, this time I made it with the canned puree. I’ll give it this: The color is much more vibrant, and it’s definitely easier!

The coconut ladoo was a recipe I stumbled across by accident, and it had so few ingredients, I could’t resist. This one is just dried coconut, condensed milk, milk, ghee (but I used butter), cardamom, and red food coloring. The recipe says you can do it in the microwave in just a few minutes, but it took many, many minutes before it finally thickened up into the doughlike texture required. Probably the stovetop would have been faster. Possibly it took longer because I used butter instead of ghee, I dunno.

But you just heat and mix the stuff up and roll it into balls and then roll the balls in more coconut, and chill them. The perfect activity for when your big sister is staying up late to watch The Mummy and you’re too young for that but you can’t sleep without your big sister, but your mother is doing something interesting in the kitchen around midnight, and it’s still summer vacation, so nobody ever goes to bed, ever.

We made a double recipe and got a few dozen ladoo, and refrigerated them.

SATURDAY
Green lamb curry, rice, fried eggplant, watermelon; mango and coconut ice cream and coconut ladoo

Saturday I woke up SO much later than I meant to, and zoomed around the house and yard with my mug of coffee, picking mint from the yard and eggplant from the garden and getting a marinade made for the curry I was planning. I still had some lamb breast plate left over from that amazing sale they had a while back, and I had made this green masala curry with goat meat a few weeks ago and it was divine; so I thought it would be scrumptious with lamb, too.

I haven’t had a chance to glue my food processor pitcher back together yet, but my $20 thrift store Ninja blender did just fine with some pretty hefty ingredients:

and then I washed off all the eggplants I could find. I had two Ichiban ones that had been nibbled a bit by buggies, and a two Black Beauties that were small but pretty.

Got those sliced and salted to sweat, and got the lamb marinating.

Then, moving faster than I thought I could, I made a batch of coconut ice cream.

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And then juuuuuuust before I left the house, I chucked the lamb in the oven at a low temperature, I think maybe 250, and then I zipped up to Claremont to meet some of my siblings for our annual cemetery party. We are fun!

The lilac I planted is doing fine; the rose bushes are not thriving, but they’re not dead, so that’s nice. If I can get up there again before winter, I’ll bring some crocuses, which my mother always enjoyed. I think. I don’t know, I don’t remember anything.

I got back to the house around five and the lamb was heartbreakingly tender and succulent.

This is a VERY fatty cut, so there was more fat that you may want to see in your meat, but there was plenty of meat; you just had to be discerning. The curry is medium spicy, just enough to be entertaining but not too challenging. I love it.

I cut up a watermelon and found some mango chutney and mint chutney. I was planning to fry the eggplant, and briefly considered tweaking my recipe to make it more Indian, but it’s so tasty as is, with a more middle-eastern bent, I thought it would go well enough, and we’d just call it fusion.

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It comes together very fast, and as soon as I had the eggplant fried, we ate.

I also made a lovely tub of yogurt sauce, fresh garlic, freshly-squeezed lemon juice, kosher salt. Bu-huh-huh-huht, I give it a little taste to see if there’s enough salt, and . . . it was vanilla yogurt. So we did not eat that! But we ate everything else, and it was so good. I highly recommend this fried eggplant. The batter has baking powder in it, which gives it a kind of crisp, glossy little crust with a puffy inside. They turn out so well every time.

The REASON I was making a big meal on a busy day was because my sister Sarah came over, and spent the night! I didn’t get even one single picture, but we had an excellent time just hanging around and yacking. Everybody likes Sarah and it was just a delight to have her over without having to rush somewhere else, for once.

For dessert, we had the mango and coconut ice cream and the coconut ladoo.

Looks like the mango is melty, so I’m thinking maybe I made the coconut on Friday night and the mango on Saturday morning. That seems likely.

Anyway, I really liked the ladoo. They were chewy and creamy and buttery, and the addition of the spicy cardamom saved them from being overpoweringly sweet. Will definitely make again. Next time I will add more food coloring! There are all kinds of ladoo, apparently.

SUNDAY
Hot dogs, party mix, root beer floats

Sunday I was supposed to go shopping, since I didn’t do that on Saturday, but I didn’t get to sleep until after 3 a.m., and it turns out I am too old for that. So I got some hot dogs and called it a day.

MONDAY
Cheeseburgers, fries, raw veg

Monday I was like, huh, I am still extremely tired. Corrie had a friend over and that quickly felt like the main thing I could accomplish that day. So I bought some hamburger meat and Damien made burgers, I made fries, and we had that with some raw vegetables.

INCLUDING two cucumbers from my garden!

I completely forgot that I had planted cucumbers, so that was a surprise. Gardening is thrilling when you don’t really know what’s going on.

TUESDAY
Aldi pizza

Tuesday, I forget why, but I had big plans to check out a thrift store in Troy (a small town which is not named after the ancient city of Troy. It is named after Troy, New York. That seemed more interesting when I was writing it than it does now, so I went to Google to find another fact about Troy, NH, and the only other thing I now know is that somebody rated it one star. Pretty good thrift store, though), and the kids, who may not have had the most thrilling summer thus far, enthusiastically joined in. Then we picked up Elijah, got ice cream, and went to another thrift store, and then I dropped everyone off and finally went shopping for the rest of the week, and heated up some Aldi pizza.

WEDNESDAY
Blueberry chicken salad

On Wednesday I did the one other thing I’ve been meaning to do all summer: I cleaned out the middle room upstairs. Clara moved out of the house, Lucy moved from the middle room into the room Clara formerly shared with Sophia, and now Benny and Corrie have the middle room to themselves. Let me tell you, it was not . . . it was not nice, up there. I generally follow the policy of never, ever going upstairs, and if I can’t avoid going there, I don’t wear my glasses; but on Wednesday, I bit the bullet, found a bunch of trash bags, and implemented my just get it done protocol. It took four and a half hours, but I moved all the furniture and cleaned under it, threw out three full bags of trash, put hundreds of books back on the shelf, and generally made it look like a bedroom instead of a crime scene. High fives all around.

Lena grilled some chicken for me and we had salad greens with chicken, walnuts toasted in the microwave, your choice of leftover feta or leftover goat cheese, and blueberries.

I had mine outside, because I couldn’t stand to look at anybody or be with anybody or know about anybody.

The ducks came over to see what I was doing, so I threw some blueberries to them, and they were like, “What? What?” and the blueberries just rolled into the cracks.

They are so very dumb.

THURSDAY
Pork fried rice, egg rolls, rice rolls

Thursday we once again had to do, among other things, more back-to-school shopping (we usually do it all in one fell swoop, which is horrible and torturous, but this time I elected to do it in three separate trips, which was torturous and horrible) but then get home early to get to Clara’s play, so I threw some rice in the Instant Pot and threw bunch of sugar and salt on a boneless pork sandworm and put it in the oven at 325 before I left the house.

Got home and cut the pork into chunks, realized we didn’t have eggs, sauteed some diced onions and minced garlic in oil, put the pork in, put the rice in, threw in some frozen mixed vegetables, doused it with a ton of soy sauce, a medium amount of oyster sauce, and a little bit of fish sauce, and you know what? It basically tasted like pork fried rice, more or less.

We also had egg rolls and crunchy rice rolls, both from Aldi.

The fried rice thing needs refining, but it tasted fine, and I’m super glad to have another fast, easy meal that can be thrown together without a recipe.

Clara did great in her play! She was Ariel in The Tempest.

Very funny, and she has such a lovely singing voice. Corrie loved the part with the bees.

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese

Friday was a supremely silly morning wherein we discovered that a kid who had paid for a dresser and needed to pick it up today had actually bought two dressers, one of which he didn’t actually want; and also, I had the foresight to borrow Damien’s car, which is bigger than mine, to pick it up, but not the foresight to remember that the back door to that car doesn’t super duper open. And then while we were finding a measuring tape and scratching our heads, both the dresser kid and another kid were like, oh hey, I have to be at work now. And it was raining. And the lady at the store was like, “Don’t mix up the drawers! You have to keep them in order, or else you won’t be able to tell which one is which!” and I was like, I HAVE BEEN TO COLLEGE, I WILL FIGURE IT OUT.

Which we more or less did. I gotta make some mac and cheese, though, and get to adoration, then Damien and I are, going camping? I’m looking forward to it, but if there is some way we could arrange for another two hours per day, that would be helpful!

Oh, one more thing, Clara gave me some dried lotus seeds, and I haven’t had a chance to figure out what to do with them yet.

Who has an idea for me??

Mango ice cream

Ingredients

30 oz (about 3 cups) mango pulp
2 cups heavy or whipping cream
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 mango, chopped into bits

Instructions

In a bowl, whisk the milk, sugar, and salt until blended.
Add in the mango pulp and cream and stir with a spoon until blended.
Cover and refrigerate two hours.
Stir and transfer to ice cream maker. Follow instructions to make ice cream. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes.)
After ice cream is churned, stir in fresh mango bits, then transfer to a freezer-safe container, cover, and freeze for several hours.

Ben and Jerry's coconut ice cream

Ingredients

2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups whipping cream or heavy cream
1 cup milk
15 oz coconut cream

Instructions

In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs for two minutes until fluffy.
Add in the sugar gradually and whisk another minute.
Pour in the milk and cream and coconut cream (discarding the waxy disk thing) and continue whisking to blend.
Add to your ice cream maker and follow the directions. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes, then transfer the ice cream to a container, cover it, and put it in the freezer.)

Fried eggplant

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

Ingredients

3 medium eggplants
salt for drying out the eggplant

veg oil for frying

3 cups flour

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

Instructions

Cut the ends off the eggplant and slice it into one-inch slices.
Salt them thoroughly on both sides and lay on paper towels on a tray (layering if necessary). Let sit for half an hour (or as long as overnight) to draw out some of the moisture.
Mix flour and seasonings in a bowl, add the water and teaspoon of oil, and beat into a batter. Preheat oven for warming.
Put oil in heavy pan and heat until it's hot but not smoking. Prepare a tray with paper towels.
Dredge the eggplant slices through the batter on both sides, scraping off excess if necessary, and carefully lay them in the hot oil, and fry until crisp, turning once. Fry in batches, giving them plenty of room to fry.
Remove eggplant slices to tray with paper towels and sprinkle with kosher salt if you like. You can keep them warm in the oven for a short time.
Serve with yogurt sauce or marinara sauce.

What’s for supper? Vol. 339: Inshallah, I’ll take pistachio

Happy Friday! I see lots of you poor suckers are going back to school already. We, on the other hand, are still enjoying the last lazy days of summer, by which I mean frantically running around Doing Vacation Things and feeling terrible and panicked about summer being almost over, and also mortality (maybe that’s just me. I am fun).

I also made two wonderful culinary discoveries this week: Collard greens, and lamb breast plate. We had two days of rather elaborate meals and then a bunch of very much not so meals. Read on!

SATURDAY
Varia

On Saturday, the Fishers were uncharacteristically sociable. Lena was carousing with a friend in Boston, Clara met up with Dora and they went off to see The Mountain Goats; Sophia, Lucy, and Irene had tickets to see Ricky Montgomery; and Damien, after bowing to his fate and driving them to said concert, brought Benny and Corrie to see the new turtle movie. That just left Elijah, who had to work, and me, who had ten minutes at home COMPLETELY ALONE, which I spent eating TWO cartons of yogurt without explaining myself to anybody, and going to the bathroom with the door open, before going shopping. Then I picked up Elijah and, since it was just the two of us, we had dinner at Chili’s. I had some kind of salad with shrimp. I almost always order some kind of shrimp when I eat at a restaurant. It’s just good! Elijah had a burger, presumably for the same reason. We talked about Godzilla.

SUNDAY
McDonald’s

Sunday we got to the ocean! The sky was blue, the sun was hot, and the water was about twelve degrees. Seriously, that one year when we went a few miles further south with slightly warmer water has absolutely ruined me for frigid New Hampshire beaches. I did go in the water, out of sheer honesty, but I spent most of my time on the shore saying, “Whoa, that was a big one! Woo, look at you!” and wondering if it’s as much fun to be a seagull as it looks like.

Bunch of pictures here:

We chose Hampton Beach because, if you’re only going to have one day at the ocean, it should be ocean that has fried dough and skee ball. We packed sandwiches and fruit and Twizzlers for lunch, and hit the drive-thru on the way back for dinner.

MONDAY
Hot dogs, chips, corn on the cob

A little yellow dinner. Sometimes that’s just what you want. (And if that’s a thing on Urban Dictionary, I don’t want to know about it.)

TUESDAY
Nachos, pineapple

Damien mentioned that maybe the nachos I make could use a little more cheese, so I thought I would be fancy and buy a second KIND of cheese, and a Mexican one, at that.

Sadly, I am dumb, so I picked something called “queso fresco,” which is apparently known for its incredible ability to withstand heat. So we had tortilla chips with seasoned ground beef, cheddar that melted and queso fresco that did not, jalapeños, and some corn I shaved off the leftover corn from yesterday, and then sour cream and salsa. Pineapple on the side.

It wasn’t bad, but next time I’ll just buy extra cheddar for that “more cheese” experience.

I was feeling pretty good on Tuesday, though, because I got home from my annual physical knowing my blood pressure is NORMAL. I cannot tell you how good it feels to have that back under control, after it was so bonkers for so long. I also haven’t lost the weight I gained when I tried Lexapro, but I haven’t gained any more, and I been eating nachos, so that seemed fair. And I’m not anemic and my lungs seem more or less back to normal. I guess I had Covid, I don’t know. My OBGYN was trying to convince me to go on an IUD for medical reasons, and I was trying to tell her that I don’t have any ethical problems with getting one for medical reasons, but right now I have all my other symptoms like

and I don’t want to MESS with anything.

Anyway, we had nachos.

WEDNESDAY
Oven fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, collard greens, watermelon

This meal came about because a few months ago, I was looking for strawberry plants and they were sold out, but they had some collard greens on clearance, so I got a few plants and stuck them in my garden. Now they look like this

and everything else in my garden is making flowers or vegetables or something, but the collard greens are just getting bigger and bigger, so it was time to figure out what they heck they are for.

Chicken drumsticks and thighs were 99 cents a pound, so I figured chicken and collard greens sounded like a thing. First thing in the morning, I started soaking the chicken in milk and eggs (one cup of milk per two eggs) with salt and pepper.

Then I made some biscuits. I actually have an excellent biscuit recipe

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but it only turns out really well if you bake them right after you make the dough; or maybe if you refrigerate the dough and then bake it. I never remember this, though, and always make the dough and cut out the biscuits in the morning, when I have time, and then bake them in the afternoon, because I want hot biscuits, and so the butter has softened and the biscuits turn out flat. I swear, it’s a good recipe! Just don’t leave the dough out like I do.

Anyway, the chicken “recipe” I followed last time calls for putting a few inches of melted butter and canola oil (half and half) in a couple of roasting pans in a 425-degree oven and letting that heat up, but I had used up all the butter in the biscuits, and all I had in the house was olive oil, so OH WELL, I guess I had to use that.

So I put plenty of flour in a bowl and heavily seasoned it salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika and I think some chili powder. I put the chicken in the pans of oil, skin side down, and let it cook for about half an hour, then turned it and let it finish cooking for another 25 minutes or so, baking the biscuits at the same time.

And yes, I felt might accomplished pulling these two huge pans of hot food out of the oven.

But back to the collard greens! You can make them with bacon or ham hocks, but I didn’t have either one, so I poked around until, to my immense relief, I found the website that carried the information I was too shy to google directly: BlackPeoplesRecipes.com. This is the link for vegan collard greens, and it uses liquid smoke. I always feel like that’s cheating, but at what, I’m not exactly sure.

Anyway, you fry up some onions and garlic, smoked paprika and hot pepper flakes, and then add in some cider vinegar to sweeten the bitter collard greens.

I washed the greens very well (because I’ve been watering them with duck poo water) and then stripped the stems off

and cut them into strips, and put them into the hot onion mixture and cooked them down a bit, then added chicken broth (no longer a vegan recipe, but that’s what I had) and liquid smoke, and some salt and pepper. Then I moved it to the Instant Pot and set it on “slow cook” for the rest of the day.

They were magnificent.

Just a beautifully intense, smoky, savory dish. The closest flavor I can think of is kale, but the texture was much more tender, between cabbage and spinach. Damien and I thought it was just wonderful, and we’ll definitely be having this again.

Benny helped me make a giant pot of mashed potatoes (I saved out a little pat of butter for this purpose), and I made a pot of gravy with the chicken pan drippings and some flour and some leftover chicken broth from the collard greens.

OH WHAT A MEAL.

I didn’t even finish the chicken or the mashed potatoes, although they were very good, but I went back for seconds of the collard greens.

Okay, I had three biscuits, because I’m a monster.

But wow, everything was so tasty. The chicken was crisp on the outside and juice and tender inside, just perfect. It felt so good to cook a big meal from scratch, which I haven’t done in a while.

And it was nice having leftover baked goods in the house, which certain other people enjoy with jelly the next morning.

Also on Wednesday, I started some ice cream going for the next day. Mid-August, and I’ve barely made any ice cream! I made one batch of strawberry, using the Ben and Jerry’s recipe

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and one of mango-peach-nectarine, which less fancy than it sounds. I just couldn’t find any pureed mango in cans, which I usually use, so I ended up mashing up all the fruit in the house that was about the same color and just blending it together.

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When the ice cream was done churning, I put the freezer bowls back in the freezer, hoping to make at least another batch the next day.

THURSDAY
Lamb breast plate, stuffed grape leaves, yogurt sauce, taboon; strawberry, mango, and almond ice cream

Thursday was the day I was ready to find out what I had bought on Saturday. I can’t remember what the original plan was, but I got to Aldi and discovered several packs of something called “lamb breast plate” for $2.99 a pound.

Nothing lamb is ever $2.99 a pound, so I bought three three-to-four-pound packs of it, and then went back for a fourth pack later. I put two packs in the freezer and cooked two on Thursday.

Moses and his girlfriend were coming over, and I wanted a middle eastern meal, and I briefly, longingly considered a recipe where you slit the meat open to make a pocket, and stuff it with rice, dried fruit, nuts, and more ground lamb, and then sew it shut; but prudence prevailed, and I went with this recipe from I’mHungryForThat, because all you do is marinade it, cook it slowly, and then pour a little sauce on at the end.

The marinade is hot pepper flakes, cumin, sumac, pepper, brown sugar, minced garlic, vinegar, olive oil, and sea salt, all of which I had, and juniper berries, which I did not, but I substituted fresh rosemary.

Then I just rubbed it all over the meat and let it be.

So, you can see that lamb breast plate has little ribs and is quite fatty, and the meat is mostly in between the bones, plus there are sort of flaps of meat on the other side. Everything I read said that this is a severely underrated cut of meat, and is very tasty and tender as long as you prepare it properly.

While that was marinating, I went out to gather grape leaves. I usually only make stuffed grape leaves once a year, when they are flush and green and tender. This is mid-August, and they are somewhat past their prime, and many had succumbed to beetles, but were also twining all over the place, in places grapes have never been before (I have three Concord grape vines I planted, and several wild grape vines in other spots in the yard). I found one enormous leaf, the size of a dinner plate, sagging under the burden of two overgrown wild blackberries that had fallen under their own weight and half rotted already, too much for even the birds and bugs to keep up with, and I suddenly realized I was standing right next to the spot where my old garden used to be.

When we moved here, the whole yard was overgrown and formless, and I hacked and chopped and mowed and cleared, and dug and sifted and cultivated, and moved so many rocks around, and made a clear spot to grow my little patch of vegetables, and I kept it up for several years.

I have raised beds now, in a different spot, and the old garden spot has disappeared. It’s hip-high in green again, all overgrown and thorny, just wild grapes, wild blackberries, goldenrod, whatever. And it happened so fast.

I’ll tell you, people worry about not leaving a trace when they go out in nature, and they fret about disruptive hikers piling up rocks or disturbing the natural balance of things. They don’t want the world to know that they were ever here. They don’t want to be arrogant and intrusive. Let me tell you, “leave no trace” is going happen anyway, faster than you think. You pass through and it closes right up behind you, and that’s that.

Anyway, I got a good pile of leaves and went back inside. Washed ’em good to get rid of any leggy passengers, and dunked them in boiling water for two minutes to soften them up, and then left them in cold water.

Last time, we tried making stuffed grape leaves with leftover cooked rice, and it was pretty sloppy. This time, I used raw rice with a bunch of herbs and spices (chopped wild mint, salt and pepper, I think sumac, nutmeg, cinnamon, I think coriander and cumin, and I don’t know what, and minced onions) and rolled them. Corrie helped this time.

Not the absolute tidiest production, but we made plenty of them, and for once I ran out of grape leaves and filling at about the same time.

Then I line the Instant Pot with parchment paper, carefully piled the rolled grape leaves in it, threw some lemon slices in, and filled it about halfway up with chicken broth. Then I somewhat recklessly pressed the “rice” button.

I think they may have come out okay with this cooking method, but then I just left them there for quite a bit longer, and the end result was some rather overcooked rice. They were okay! Just kinda, well, you know what overcooked rice is like. I also wish I had used more of every kind of seasoning I put in. It was a good flavor, but I wanted more of it.

About two hours before dinner, I put the lamb into the oven, covered with tinfoil. I also made a batch of dough for taboon bread

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which I think I like even more than pita, and it’s easier, because you’re not trying to get a pocket to form. Sometimes, if I’m make a juicy meat dish, I’ll make a big slab of taboon bread and serve the meat right on top of it; but sometimes I made separate little pieces, and that’s what I did this time. This recipe is enough for twelve little loaves about 8-10 inches across. I love this recipe because it only has to rise once, and it bakes in about twelve minutes, so you can decide almost at the last minute that you feel like making bread after all.

Oh, and I made a bowl of yogurt sauce with fresh garlic and fresh lemon juice, and a little salt and pepper. I misread the lamb recipe, and you’re supposed to take the tinfoil off and finish cooking it and then pour some sauce on; but I poured the sauce on and then finished cooking it. (The sauce is chopped mint, lemon juice, and brown sugar.)

IT WAS STILL VERY GOOD INDEED.

Super juicy.

I would recommend getting some shears to separate the ribs, though. We struggled a little with cutting it, not because the meat was tough, but because it was so fatty. The meat itself was so good, though. Tremendously savory and tender. If you like lamb, this is a wonderful way to prepare it.

The bread and the lamb finished cooking at the same time, and I once again felt pretty pleased with myself for hauling out all these giant, laden pans of food onto the table.

I had hoped to make some kind of ice cream with at least a middle eastern nod, but I just ran out of time. People needed to be driven here and there and Thursday was the day the cat, as Damien put it, took his vows, and I went to drop off a kid at work and take another kid for a haircut, and I was like, I think that’s it? That’s all the people I’m responsible for right this minute? So I started to drive home, and then I remembered OH THE CAT.

Pretty rough day for the little guy. First the cut his balls off, then they forget to pick him up. To add insult to injury, we found out that this cat which we got a month ago, and who was allegedly eight weeks old at the time, is NOW eight weeks old. So he was only four weeks old when we got him, poor baby!

We knew he was younger than they claimed, but didn’t realize how much younger. No wonder he sucks on blankets. Anyway, today he is feeling frisk and fine and we just have to keep the dog away from his stitches for a week, which should be easy as pie, hahah ahaha hahahhaaa.

Anyway, I decided to make some almond ice cream, which is the same as the strawberry ice cream recipe, below, except you add a few teaspoons of almond extract, you skip strawberries of course, and you let the ice cream freeze for a few hours, and then stir in 2/3 of a cup or so of toasted almonds, and then let it finish freezing.

The kitchen was pretty hot by the time I got around to making this third batch of ice cream, so it didn’t really freeze up right. I don’t actually mind when this happens, as it results in a kind of ice milk with a pleasant crystalized texture. The flavor was great (I actually used 1 tsp of almond extract and 1 tsp of vanilla) and it was quite popular. It would be great with some bittersweet chocolate chips, but it was good on its own.

Here’s the three ice creams, looking dramatic:

I also discovered that, if I really wanted to make middle eastern ice cream, I would make something called booza, which has mastic in it and is stretchy. I am fascinated with this idea and would absolutely love to try some, but chances of me making it myself are pretty low, because anything that depends on being a certain texture is not my forte. Perhaps in paradise. The leaves will close over me, all traces will disappear, and Allah will appear in a blaze of glory and hand me a bowl of stretchy ice cream. That sounds pretty great. I’ll take pistachio.

FRIDAY
I believe we’re going to have scrambled eggs, maybe beans and rice, and leftovers. There MUST be leftovers in this house.

I leave you with one final image. This is the white board which I mounted to the front door, the door through which everyone goes when they leave the house. As you can see, it has the days of the week on it, and I BEGGED and PLEADED and IMPLORED and ABASED MYSELF to the kids, in the hopes that they might deign to write their schedules on it, so I would know before the last minute who needed to be where and when.

Here is that white board now:

Little bastards. Good thing I love them. Maybe I’ll make them some more biscuits, or some ice cream.

moron biscuits

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

Preheat oven to 450.
In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar.
Grate the chilled butter with a box grater into the dry ingredients.
Stir in the milk and egg and mix until just combined. Don't overwork it. It's fine to see little bits of butter.
On a floured surface, knead the dough 10-15 times. If it's very sticky, add a little flour.
With your hands, press the dough out until it's about an inch thick. Cut biscuits. Depending on the size, you can probably get 20 medium-sized biscuits with this recipe.
Grease a pan and bake for 10-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

Ben and Jerry's Strawberry Ice Cream

Ingredients

For the strawberries

1 pint fresh strawberries
1-1/2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

For the ice cream base

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

Instructions

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

Make the ice cream base:

In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs for two minutes until fluffy.
Add in the sugar gradually and whisk another minute.
Pour in the milk and cream and continue whisking to blend.

Put it together:

Mash the strawberries well, or puree them in a food processor. Stir into the ice cream base.
Add to your ice cream maker and follow the directions. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes, then transfer the ice cream to a container, cover it, and put it in the freezer.)

Mango ice cream

Ingredients

30 oz (about 3 cups) mango pulp
2 cups heavy or whipping cream
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 mango, chopped into bits

Instructions

In a bowl, whisk the milk, sugar, and salt until blended.
Add in the mango pulp and cream and stir with a spoon until blended.
Cover and refrigerate two hours.
Stir and transfer to ice cream maker. Follow instructions to make ice cream. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes.)
After ice cream is churned, stir in fresh mango bits, then transfer to a freezer-safe container, cover, and freeze for several hours.

taboon bread

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.
While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.
Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.
Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.
If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.
Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.
Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.

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

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

Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Gochujang smoked chicken thighs, rice, raw string beans

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

The marinade was, more or less:

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

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

Very good indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

and a sweet balsamic reduction drizzle

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

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

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

MONDAY
Blueberry chicken salad

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

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

TUESDAY
Regular tacos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Hot dogs, chips

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

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

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

THURSDAY
Roasted pork ribs, stuffed grape leaves, fried eggplant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and one ichiban eggplant from my garden

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

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

RESULTS DON’T LIE GIRLFRIEND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just reglar ol pizza. No complaints from me!

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

Fried eggplant

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

Ingredients

3 medium eggplants
salt for drying out the eggplant

veg oil for frying

3 cups flour

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

Instructions

Cut the ends off the eggplant and slice it into one-inch slices.
Salt them thoroughly on both sides and lay on paper towels on a tray (layering if necessary). Let sit for half an hour (or as long as overnight) to draw out some of the moisture.
Mix flour and seasonings in a bowl, add the water and teaspoon of oil, and beat into a batter. Preheat oven for warming.
Put oil in heavy pan and heat until it's hot but not smoking. Prepare a tray with paper towels.
Dredge the eggplant slices through the batter on both sides, scraping off excess if necessary, and carefully lay them in the hot oil, and fry until crisp, turning once. Fry in batches, giving them plenty of room to fry.
Remove eggplant slices to tray with paper towels and sprinkle with kosher salt if you like. You can keep them warm in the oven for a short time.
Serve with yogurt sauce or marinara sauce.

What’s for supper? Vol. 328: A human doing and a human bebimbapping

Happy Friday! This week I seem to have broken away from recipes, and just free-wheeled a lot of stuff. I think everything turned out okay, but it’s possible I was just so busy that I was ravenous by supper time every day, and would have eaten anything.

SATURDAY
Nachos

Yea verily, I don’t remember Saturday. Somehow the week went by extremely quickly, and yet last Saturday was a million years ago. I remember people complaining that we just had nachos, and I said no, we just had tacos; this is different. It’s spelled different and everything.

My spice mix for tacos (or nachos, which is spelled different) is: Garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, chili powder, paprika, red pepper flakes, and salt. It tastes about the same as any packets you can buy and it’s not really easier to open packets than it is to sprinkle from a bunch of jars, so I stopped buying the packets. I don’t really miss the violent orange color.

Speaking of spices, this week I did buy a bunch of empty spice jars in an effort to Do Something About My Spices, which previously looked like this:

(My kitchen island is not always this wrecked up, but, sometimes it is, so there you go.) Well, after filling and labelling several jars, I admitted to myself that I had bought the wrong size. Too small. So I cussed a little bit and then went out and bought some mason jars, and got most of the contents of the rest of the bags and packets jarred up. It’s still cluttered and chaotic, and my kitchen is still wrecked up because I have had QUITE A WEEK, and I probably just need to bite the bullet and put in a new shelf. If it ever looks like anything, I’ll take a picture and show you!

SUNDAY
Italian sandwiches, grapes, strawberry rhubarb pie

Mother’s day! I spent the morning clamping my jaw through a migraine at Mass because I forgot my medication, so then I got home and took it and then took a nap for a while, and then I spent the rest of the day working on my patio, and only feeling slightly guilty that I wasn’t flying a kite or going on a hike, which is what the younger kids wanted to do. I will do those things! Just some other day.

Damien made tasty Italian sandwiches (I had prosciutto, a few kinds of salami, provolone, tomatoes, basil, and olive oil and vinegar)

and Clara made me some gorgeous strawberry rhubarb pies

and the kids showered me with flowers and plants and snacks and thoughtful gifts. It was a lovely day!

MONDAY
Chicken berry salad

I roasted up some chicken breasts, sliced it, and served it over salad greens with strawberries and blueberries, toasted almonds, and crumbled feta cheese.

A fine spring salad. Diced red onion would have been good, but we were out. Don’t forget, you can easily toast nuts in the microwave, and you don’t risk burning them unless you try really hard. Two minutes should do it.

TUESDAY
Meatball subs

I had five pounds of ground beef and dumped in a few grated onions, a ton of grated parmesan cheese, five eggs, two or three cups of panko breadcrumbs, and I don’t really remember what seasonings, but more than looked reasonable. Probably just salt, garlic powder, and oregano. The grated onion is a hassle but it really makes a difference in taste and texture.

I cooked the meatballs on a broiler pan in a hot oven for about 25 minutes and then moved them into the crock pot with some jarred sauce for the rest of the day. And that’s-a my meatball story.

WEDNESDAY
Bibimbap, pineapple

This was my favorite meal all week. I had a big pork shoulder or something, which I sliced into bite-sized slices and marinated in the basic magic: soy sauce, brown sugar, maybe three inches of fresh ginger, minced, and several cloves of fresh garlic, minced. I let it marinate all day.

When it was almost time to eat, I sautéed the meat along with all the marinade, because I wanted lots of sauce to go with this dish.

While it was cooking, I made a big pot of rice, and I chopped up a bunch of sugar snap peas and shredded some red cabbage, and just before supper I fried up a bunch of eggs in hot oil. And I stuffed a little bit of spinach into the bowl to wilt under the hot rice. LOOK HOW PRETTY.

I drizzled mine with a little of that Polynesian hot sauce from last week’s poke bowls and ladled some of the sweet marinade over it. I like to fry the eggs so they’re crispy on the bottom but still a little runny in the yolk.

Hot damn, it was delicious. I also put out some crunchy Chinese noodles and some fresh pineapple chunks, and it was such a good meal.

THURSDAY
Chicken nuggets, chips, cucumbers

All week was busy, but Thursday was an especially crazy-go-nuts day. I can’t even remember what-all happened, but I was just running around like a duck all day, until finally I did the final pick-up of the day after dinner, and I was so tired, I just pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine, and fell asleep in the car. BUT!!! The dog still had plenty of energy, and there was some kind of fluke accident where he got startled, and jerked on his lead so hard that it flew out of the wall of the shed, and the end of it hit the pool and split the seam, and water started gushing out. Sooooo it was time to wake up and have a little unscheduled dip, because the pool holds 9,000 gallons of water, and when there is a hole, you have to patch it from the inside as well as the outside.

We did have some Flex Tape in the house, but not enough, so Lena went to Walmart for more, and I got it more or less patched up. And you know what, we had a frost the other day, and it’s been in the 30’s at night, so that water was somewhat less than hospitable. The whole thing was so dumb, I couldn’t even bring myself to blame the dog for it. Very high levels of dumbness.

So what, it’s still spring. We have a Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal coming to our feeder (the dude stands on the fence and stares irately at the world while his wife has a snack) plus lots of purple finches and yellow finches, and I think I spotted a bluebird, so I hope there will be more, because they come in gangs. And hummingbirds! And my Karl Lagenfield peony that I planted a few years ago has some buds for the first time this year, and the lupines seeds I planted over a year ago finally decided it was safe to come up, which cheered up both me and my neighbor Millie, whose seeds they were.

I scavenged a bunch of felled aspen trees, and I’m going to use them as posts to hang strings of lights from, if I ever get my patio done. I’m so close to being done digging, and this weekend I’ll level it and order some gravel and sand, and then I can start laying brick! Very excited.

Do keep Millie in your prayers. She fell last weekend, and has been needing more help than she wants, so I’ve been driving her around a bit. I love spending time with her, but it’s frustrating for her. She just wants to be out raking and weeding, and instead she has to be at the doctor constantly. She is about 140 years old and starting to slow down a little.

FRIDAY
Seafood lo mein, steamed dumplings

Today, my brother is coming over, and also Moe and his girlfriend! All people who are either okay with the house and yard being a complete wreck, or else they aren’t gonna say anything about it.

I’m going to make a big batch of seafood lo mein, and steam some dumplings I got at the Keene International Market. Maybe I will get some more sugar snap peas or something. Or just, yanno, not.

basic lo mein

Ingredients

for the sauce

1 cup soy sauce
5 tsp sesame oil
5 tsp sugar

for the rest

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

Instructions

Mix together the sauce ingredients and set aside.
Boil the noodles until slightly underdone. Drain and set aside.
Heat up a pan, add some sesame oil for cooking, and quickly cook your vegetables or whatever add-ins you have chosen.
Add the mirin to the pan and deglaze it.
Add the cooked noodles in, and stir to combine. Add the sauce and stir to combine.

What’s for supper? Vol. 327: Yay, poke!

First, a word from Fay, Ray, EJ, and Coin: Peep! Peep-peep! Peep-peep-peepWONKpeep-peep-peep.” Yes, they have begun to quack. Just a bit, and it’s mostly Coin and EJ, and it’s more muttering than quacking, but it’s hilarious. They’re very good ducks, and I think you should get some. Or you can just check out my Facebook page which has been overrun with ducks.

And here’s what we ate this week!

SATURDAY
Sushi, etc.

On Saturday, Lena graduated from college! We are SO proud of her.

Most of the kids had various frozen foods for dinner, and Damien and Lena and I went and checked out the newish Japanese restaurant in town, Kurama Omakase. I had a salmon skin salad and tried some of Lena’s takoyaki, which is some kind of breaded balls of I-don’t-know-what with bits of octopus inside, deep fried and topped with some other I-don’t-know-what. Terrible pictures (dark restaurant) but the takoyaki was STUPENDOUS.

I also ordered the “Trust the Chef Lite” sushi and sashimi assortment, and it was lllovely.

Very nice place. The only other customers was some kind of gathering of a dozen or more men who didn’t already know each other, but were in the same business. Maybe car salesmen? After their meal they took a picture of all of their watches. After they left, I heard the waitress tell the bartender, “That wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” DO tip your waitress!

SUNDAY
Maybe burgers?

Sunday was fun! After a week of rain, the weather finally cleared, so I worked on digging up the ground for my patio, and Damien worked on the duck house. I paid kids to shake soil out of the sods for my new raised gardens, and there were plenty of worms for everyone

The dog had the greatest day of his life, AGAIN.

Damien grilled burgers, if I remember correctly.

MONDAY
Normal tacos

I didn’t shop on the weekend, because of the graduation, and did only a partial shop on Monday, because I didn’t feel like it, and came home with a wretched frozen log of beef that needed to be constantly scraped and flipped while it cooked.

I tried to tell myself it was sort of like when they have a leg of lamb on a spit and they’re shaving bits of meat off for shawarma, but no dice.

(I know there are various ways of defrosting meat, but honestly they’re only slightly less laborious than standing there scrabbling at the frozen wad as it fries, so you might as well suffer.)

TUESDAY
Bacon, egg, and cheese bagel sandwiches; OJ

Tuesday I went shopping again, for real this time. Destiny! Destiny! No escaping that for me!

Maybe by the end of the summer, we’ll have duck eggs! Or not. We don’t even know if we have girl or boy ducks yet. We definitely have ducks. Boy do we have ducks.

WEDNESDAY
Bo ssam, rice, pickled radishes

Pork shoulders were 99 cents a pound, and I had got a big, giant one, and started it with the salt and sugar rub on Tuesday night. I put it in the oven around 10:30 on Wednesday morning, and then right before dinner, I poured the extra little cider vinegar brown sugar sauce on:

and let it finish up. Truly a grisly yet magnificent beast basking proudly in the setting sun.

Everything the light touches belongs to you, bo ssam.

I also pickled some radishes and made a pot of rice, and cut up some romaine lettuce for wrapping. The meat shredded at the mere sight of a fork, the skin was intense and caramelized to the hilt, and it was a pretty good meal.

And only pretty good. This is the first time bo ssam hasn’t absolutely rocked my world, and I don’t know what happened. The pickled radishes were only so-so, too. Annnnd just now writing this, it occurred to me that I’m probably sick, and the food actually tasted fine, and it’s me. Crap. OH WELL.

THURSDAY
Poke bowls

As is our habit, we were talking about other food while we were at the restaurant, and we got to talking about poke bowls, which Damien and I have never had before. It certainly sounded like something we’d be into. Aldi carries ahi tuna steaks that are frozen at sea, so I bought a few packages of those (I think six little steaks in total), and also a pouch of raw shrimp that happened to be on sale. They also had some kind of Polynesian sweet hot sauce that looked likely, plus some chili lime cashews. I also got five ripe mangoes and two packages of sugar snap peas at Aldi.

Then at the other supermarket (when you shop at Aldi, there’s always going to be a second supermarket, and you must just accept this), I got pea sprouts and rice (Aldi rice cooks weird).

So I just basically chopped everything up, cooked up a big pot of rice, and cut the fish into half-inch cubes. I sautéed the shrimp with some minced garlic in chili oil, and then squeezed a lime over it.

(The glass with the root in it isn’t some exotic tincture; I’m just trying to keep a rose cutting alive after the plow knocked one of my flower beds all out of whack, and I haven’t gotten around to replanting it yet.)

I was planning to make sushi-style rice, but I didn’t have any rice vinegar, so I left it plain. I put out a jar of mango chutney and some red pepper flakes.

Here was my bowl:

Wow, it was delicious. Sweet mild fish and greens and rice, syrupy mango, and then the hot jangly sauce and nuts. Very satisfying and entertaining, kind of like the dinner version of an ice cream sundae — not in taste, of course, but in the experience. I threw some shrimp in there, too, just because I’m not gonna say no to shrimp.

I was surprised at how many of the kids liked the raw tuna! Everyone found something they wanted, even if it was just rice and mango, and I’ll definitely be making this again. Yay, poke!

Now tell me about your poke bowls. I understand there are countless variations. What are your favorite combinations?

FRIDAY
Pizza

Today has turned into a stupidly complicated day because a bad light came on in my car, but the mechanic can’t look at it until next week, and lots of people still have to be in lots of places, and Lucy needs to be trained on her new insulin pump system at the doctor which is an hour away, and I bought tickets to Peter and the Wolf which is also an hour away, but you’ll have to take my word for it that it all just doesn’t quite work out. But I’m gonna try! But I’m gonna make those pizzas right meow.

Ugh, I didn’t put any recipe cards. Do you want recipe cards? Tell me if you want some and I’ll put them.

What’s for supper? Vol. 11. Vol. 11!

It has come to my attention that I have been numbering these posts wrong. I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit down and figure out how long this has been going on, but somewhere along the line, I think months ago, I jumped the track and slipped back into the 200’s, when I should actually be halfway through the 300’s. I think. I don’t know, I don’t know! I just keep cooking food and they just keep eating it, and then I keep taking pictures of it, and they keep making fun of me, and I keep saying, “But people like it! Well, some people, anyway.”

For example:

SATURDAY
Hot dogs grilled outside

Don’t remember much about Saturday, ‘deed I don’t.

SUNDAY
Turkey bacon wraps

Sunday I was planning tacos al pastor, but by the time I got it going, I didn’t think the meat would have sufficient time to marinate, so I decided that would be tomorrow’s meal, and for now we would have wraps. Nothing spectacular, but tasty enough: Turkey, salami, bacon, and provolone with horseradish sauce.

And I had a nice little time working on the marinade. This is the recipe I use, and it’s rather time-consuming, but fantastically delicious. First you blister up the guajillo peppers

then you scrape the seeds out

and then you soften them up

and then you blend them up with a bunch of other ingredients,

including achiote paste, which I can never find, so I also make that out of a bunch of other ingredients

which you make into a paste

and then chuck it all into the food processor. Actually, I ran out of ground cumin, so I had to grind some up in my mortar and pestle. At this point I was starting to feel like it was possible this recipe was Too Much Work, but I was in too deep, so I went ahead and pestled it. And that was the last ingredient.

And then you can marinate the meat overnight, which I did. Whew. It felt a lot like finally getting a beloved but rather dramatic child to bed. (If you are planning to eat the child later, with sour cream.)

MONDAY
Tacos al pastor; pico de gallo and tortilla chips

Monday I made a big bowl of pico de gallo out of very sweet little grape tomatoes, onion, fresh lime juice, kosher salt, and cilantro.

Jump to Recipe

And when it was almost dinner time, I heated up a bunch of tortillas, and then set up two greased pans to broil: One with the marinated meat

and one with chunks of pineapple; and I switched them and stirred them up a bit, so they both got a little charred. (The pineapple takes several minutes longer than the meat to cook, which I always forget.)

And that’s it. I had mine with just a little sour cream on the tortilla, just the meat and the grilled pineapple, and a little cilantro, with pico and chips on the side.

Stupendous. The marinade has so much flavor, it’s ridiculous, and you will not want to add any hot sauce or salsa or anything. It’s got a tangy, nutty, smoky kind of sweetness that’s incredibly pleasing, and the meat is of course so tender from all that marinating. The pineapple turns almost candy-sweet on the outside when you grill it, and I am completely in love with the combination of the savory meat and the juicy pineapple with a little sour cream. It was not Too Much Work. It was Totally Worth It. I have made this recipe many times and it never even occurs to me to look for another one.

TUESDAY
Korean beef bowl with rice; cucumbers

Haven’t had Korean beef bowl for a while.

Jump to Recipe

It came out so nice. I used plenty of fresh garlic and fresh ginger, and what I’ve been doing is cooking the meat about 80% of the way through, draining the fat, and then adding the minced ginger and garlic and cooking it. The ginger and garlic bits stay really bright and pungent that way.

I served it over white rice, and just served plain cucumbers on the side. I briefly considered one of those cute little piquant cucumber salads with the rice vinegar and the hot pepper flakes, but sometimes I like to have mercy on the kids and just serve regular old cucumbers.

WEDNESDAY
Moussakhan and taboon

Always a popular meal. This time I had some especially good sumac from the International Market, and woof, it made my nose quiver. Lovely dark plum color, in glossy little flakes.

This is quite an easy recipe with a massive return on your effort, and you can serve it over rice or just eat it plain, or with pita, or whatever you want. I do like the dramatic presentation of the enormous platter of piping hot taboon bread, with all the chicken and its juice served on top of it, so everyone can help themselves to whatever pieces they want, and tear off some taboon to go with it.

I had a long tray of drumsticks and a half dozen thighs, and you slash the meat to the bone to get the marinade really deep in there, and then just marinate it for half a day or so.

I only had two regrets: One was that I ran out of lemons to juice, and decided to use lime juice, which wasn’t disastrous, but it’s not ideal; and the other was that I was working outside on moving my raised garden beds around and whatnot, and was so afraid I would get garden madness and lose track of time, so I checked the clock frequently and had it all worked out exactly when I had to put everything in the oven so it would be done on time, and I did work it out, down to the minute, but then I . . . . forgot to do it. And you know, it really just doesn’t cook well that way, I find, when you don’t actually put the food in the oven. Awfully slow.

But EVENTUALLY we did have supper, and it was delicious.

I made my Giant Pan o’ Taboon, which is quite fast to make, and only takes one rise, so you can start it about an hour and a half before you want to get dinner on the table, and that’s enough time.

Jump to Recipe

and I used the last of the big pouch of pine nuts I splurged on a while back. You toast them up in olive oil just before serving the meat,

and you put the chicken and onions on the bread, and sprinkle that with sizzling pine nuts and chopped parsley, and BOY is it good.

Just so good.

I decided that the taboon recipe as written had a silly amount of salt in it, so I decreased it, and you know, I just didn’t like it as much. I honestly don’t know if the amount of salt I wrote is a typo or not, but I like it that way, so I’m going back to a truckload of salt next time I made this. Salty taboon for all!

THURSDAY
Ravioli

The kids were on vacation all week, so most days this week, I have been rushing around doing a lot of pent-up yard work and gardening and whatnot. The ducks have been spending more and more time outside, and overall I like the looks of things around here, and I’m making slow but steady progress toward my patio area. Thursday Benny and I made a little trip into Massachusetts to get some used bricks,

and then she had a couple of pals over. Corrie had a friend over earlier in the week. Why is it so hard to have friends over! I guess it’s because we live far away from everything, and so does everybody. But having ducks helps. People do want to come see ducks, even if they have their own ducks.

FRIDAY
Aldi pizza

Friday Elijah and I climbed Mt. Cesar.

This is not a very big mountain, but it was steep enough to make me wheeze like a, like I don’t know what, a big wheezer. I’m not even in bad shape, it’s just my dumb lungs. Whatcha gonna do. Go to the doctor, I guess. But Friday was also the most important day all year in our little town: Rummage sale day!!! It’s not even a very good rummage sale, but there are people crowded outside the door waiting to get in. So we went and got our weird mugs and our dubious John Le Carré paperbacks and our little glass hummingbirds and our rusty scooter and then came home and,,, had some Aldi pizza.

And this is the kind of paragraph that makes me think it doesn’t really matter much which volume of What’s For Supper? it really is. It’s eleven. It goes up to eleven.

Pico De Gallo

quick and easy fresh dip or topping for tacos, etc.

Ingredients

2 large tomatoes, diced
1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced OR 1/2 serrano pepper
1/2 onion, diced
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
1/8 cup lime juice
dash kosher salt

Instructions

Mix ingredients together and serve with your favorite Mexican food

5 from 1 vote

Korean Beef Bowl

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

In a large skillet, cook ground beef, breaking it into bits, until the meat is nearly browned. Drain most of the fat and add the fresh ginger and garlic. Continue cooking until the meat is all cooked.
Add the soy sauce, brown sugar, and red pepper flakes the ground beef and stir to combine. Cook a little longer until everything is hot and saucy.
Serve over rice and garnish with scallions and sesame seeds.

taboon bread

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.
While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.
Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.
Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.
If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.
Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.
Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SATURDAY
Hot dogs and smile fries

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

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

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

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

But I had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY
goblin food

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

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

TUESDAY
Reubens, chips

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Pork vindaloo and rice, pineapple

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

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

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

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

Marinate a few hours

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

OH IT WAS GOOD.

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

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

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

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

THURSDAY
Chicken enchilada bowls

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

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

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

Boom, hot dinner, with cheese.

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

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just pizza. No tricks!

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 239: Spot the fiendish thingy

Happy Friday! Happy Friday indeed.

As if a long, rambling post about some stranger’s dinner weren’t entertaining enough, today’s post comes with a little bonus game: A scavenger hunt. Yeah!

One of these photos has something in it that doesn’t belong. Did I notice it while I was cooking? No, I did not. Did I notice it while I taking the the photo? Again, not at all. I will give myself credit for managing to notice something was amiss before any foreign objects went down my gullet, so I have that going for me. I remember when I swallowed a penny and the doctor said my mother had to, well, find it, and she was pretty mad.

You know, this is the only way to start off a food blog. The only way.

Anyway, the thing. The pearl of great price. The fiendish thingy. See if you can spot it! See if you can guess what it is! See if I care!

Here’s what we ate (and almost ate, before we were like, “agghhh, what is that??”) this week:

Oh wait, first, last week, on Friday we had pepper and egg sandwiches and fruit salad. Quite tasty. All I did was cut up two red and two green bell peppers and a sweet onion, fry them in olive oil until they were somewhat soft, and then scramble about ten eggs into it

and serve scoops of it on soft rolls with a little salt.

We had fruit salad as a side dish and it was a nice little meal.

Always glad to find another meatless meal that’s reasonably popular. You can definitely add cheese to this sandwich, but it didn’t need it to be hearty and filling. I had mine with a dash of hot sauce.

SATURDAY
Chicken burgers and chips

Busy day, easy meal. I had mine with bottled aioli. I took a picture but it looks gross, as anything dripping with aioli is likely to do.

SUNDAY
Hot wings, hot dogs, droopin’ onion; strawberry ice cream, chocolate M&M ice cream

Sunday was the Super Bowl, which we didn’t care much about, but it’s fun to make football foods. Except that we were all exhausted, so it was only a little bit of fun. I cooked up some hot dogs, Damien made hot wings with celery and blue cheese sauce

Jump to Recipe

which turned out very tasty indeed

and I made an onion blossom which turned out . . . edible. I have an onion blossom cutter that I use once a year. It’s usually a happy occasion, as you see here (you will not be able to see the video below if you have an ad blocker on):

because I am easily amused; but I dunno what happened this time. I lost the directions, I wasn’t paying attention, and I was just so freaking tired, so I cut the end of the first onion off, and of course there was nothing to hold the petals together, so it was just a loose collection of onion fringes.

Luckily, I had bought two onions, and I figured out my mistake with the second one. But don’t worry! I also managed to screw up the batter somehow, so even though the second onion got cut right

it definitely did not fry right

Ah well. I ate it! Don’t get me wrong, I ate it.

I also ate a bunch of hot wings, goblin style.

For dessert we had two kinds of ice cream, one batch of strawberry

Jump to Recipe

with additional sugared strawberries on top, which turned out well even though I wasn’t paying attention and used all cream instead of cream and milk

and one batch of chocolate M&M. I used the Ben and Jerry’s recipe for chocolate ice cream and, you’ll never guess, I messed that up, too! Everyone said it was good, but it’s really not supposed to have flecks of chocolate all through it. OH WELL. I’m the only one who was complaining.

MONDAY
Butter chicken and rice

Monday’s dinner went much better. I made butter chicken using this easy recipe from RecipeTin Eats. Or maybe all butter chicken recipes are easy, I don’t know.

Boneless, skinless chicken thighs were on sale, to my delight, so I cut them into bite-size pieces and marinated them in a marinade made of Greek yogurt, lemon juice, turmeric, garam masala, chili powder, cumin, fresh ginger, and fresh garlic.

Ghee is super expensive right now, so I used butter to cook it in (and you know, it’s not called “ghee chicken,” so there you go) (yes I know what ghee is). I melted a bunch of it in two pans, added in the chicken and cooked it through,

then stirred in a punch of tomato puree and heavy cream, a little sugar, and some salt. HOO HOO.

And that’s it! Such fun to stir the white cream into the brilliant yellow turmeric marinade and red tomato puree. You let it simmer for a while and then serve it over rice.

I know I bought some cilantro to garnish it, but it disappeared into the bowels of the refrigerator and has not emerged.

This is just a mild, cozy, warming, pleasant curry that about half the kids liked, which is pretty good. I thought it was completely delicious. Great comfort food.

So here’s an Indian food question for you: If I’m serving Mexican food and I want the whole family to eat it, I’ll make it mild, and people who like it hotter can add tobasco sauce or something similar to their portions. Is there something like this I can put on the table to hot up Indian food? Some of us really like spicy food, but I don’t necessarily want to make the whole thing spicy.

TUESDAY
Pork nachos

I was actually feeling a little gloomy about this meal. Pork was super cheap so I felt like I had to buy it, but I was not looking forward to producing something that smelled amazing but came out super bland. WEWLL, for once throwing random things into a pot paid off. And for once, I wrote down what I threw in.

Jump to Recipe

I cut the pork into chunks and seasoned them heavily with salt and pepper, and browned them in oil. Then I chunked them into the Instant Pot and added a can of Coke, three quartered clementines, a few bay leaves, about a tablespoon of cumin, and –here’s the key — three large, extremely occult-looking dried chipotle chili peppers I found in a bag.

I closed the vent and pressure cooked it on high for 24 minutes and hoo man. That meat was ready to collapse.

I picked out the bay leaves and orange peels and peppers, which, in retrospect, I could have cut open; but they were sufficiently spicy intact

pulled out the meat and shredded it, and made one pan of meat on tortilla chips with sharp cheddar cheese with jalapeños, and one without.

That meat was so good! Sweet and spicy and flavorful. I skipped the sour cream and salsa, because I just liked the meat so much. I was terribly pleased. Nothing sadder than flavorless pork, but that day, we were not sad.

Tuesday was Valentine’s Day but I had to take a rain check on Damien’s offer of dinner out because I’m on official band nerd and it was practice night. It was, however, very romantic when he replaced not one but two broken refrigerator door shelves, which somehow broke even though the Frigidaire company makes its components out out of only the finest eggshells held together with fairy spit. He glued one back together with Flex Paste, and the other one is just some random stick.

I guess it’s a PVC pipe? I cannot tell you how much it has improved my life to have these shelves back in my life, so everything isn’t all stuffed into the main body of the fridge, rolling around and crammed in sideways and upside and all horrible. It was like the third world in there.

WEDNESDAY
Kofta meatballs with yogurt sauce, Jerusalem salad, giant taboon

Ground beef was also on sale, on account of the football, but again I was feeling a little glum about my prospects with it. We’ve had hamburgers, and spaghetti and meatballs, and meatball subs, and meatloaf, and Korean beef bowl, and bleh, I’m just tired of it all.

SO, encouraged by my success winging it with the pork, I pulled out all the spices I could find that looked middle eastern

and dumped them into the ground beef, along with some eggs and panko crumbs. This time I didn’t write anything down, but basically if it smelled good, I shook some in, and if it smelled really good, I shook a whole lot in. I made about 40 large meatballs and put them on metal racks on a baking pan (to be cooked at 400 for about 25 minutes).

(Koftas are actually ground meat formed around sticks and grilled or roasted. My kids just simply absolutely cannot get over how turdly they look, though, so I make them in meatball form.)

Then I made some nice yogurt sauce with fresh lemon juice and fresh garlic and a little salt

Jump to Recipe

and a Jerusalem salad, with tomatoes, cucumbers, a little red onion, fresh lemon juice, salt and pepper, and fresh mint and parsley.

This was going to be the entire meal, just the salad and meatballs and sauce; but I kept thinking how nice it would be to have a piping hot taboon bread. But we didn’t have bread flour, and also I needed to make a few extra stops, so I didn’t think I would have time.

WEWLL, it turns out I can do my afternoon errands and run to the supermarket and get home at 4:15, wash up, start the taboon, and still get dinner on the table at about 6:15. How about that! The dough needs an hour to rise, and then it needs a little resting time, but especially if you are making one big slab of bread, rather than individual portions, it’s incredibly non-fussy. Especially if the people eating it are non-fussy.

Is this what taboon is supposed to look and taste like?

I HAVE NO IDEA. But it was 6:15 and I put out a piping hot flatbread and a tray of sizzling, savory meatballs, and by gum, people ate that supper.

Gosh, it was delicious. The meatballs were juicy and fragrant, the bread had a light, salty, tender crust and pillowy insides, the Jerusalem salad was fresh and piquant, and everything was set off beautifully by the cool, sour yogurt sauce.

I set out more chopped parsley and mint to sprinkle on top of everything. Just a joyful kind of meal.

THURSDAY
Pizza

I couldn’t remember how many pizzas we eat these days, so I made four. I made one pepperoni, two plain, and one with fresh garlic, a lot of feta, red onion, and spinach, and some olive oil drizzled on top.

Really good stuff. I love a pizza that has a softer cheese under a layer of mozzarella.

FRIDAY
Ravioli

At the kids’ request. Damien and I may sneak out for a belated Valentine’s taco or something. I’m very fond of him, you know.

So next week is vacation and Corrie and I are going to tap some maple trees.We have surprisingly few on our property, but there are a few. We’ve tapped trees before, back when we homeschooled. It’s fun, if you’re easily amused. We got some silicone tubing and you just drill a hole in the trunk and cram it in, and collect the sap in a milk jug over the course of days or weeks, depending on how many trees you have and how much you want. Sap is really just barely sweet. It takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup! Then you boil it down and evaporate most of the water, leaving the sugar, and that’s maple syrup. I expect to get about half a cup of syrup this year.

The other thing is, we looked around the house and thought the main thing that was lacking was four pekin ducklings, so Damien went out and ordered them. He’s going to start building a duck house this weekend, and we’re going to have a brooding box innnnnnn the bathroom, and we’re going to have a movable duck run, and, that is the plan! Get ready for a lot of viaduct jokes, although I will tell you right up front, I don’t really know vi.

Don’t forget the foreign object scavenger hunt! If this were a proper food blog, there would be a prize, but I think I’ve been pretty open about what kind of operation I’m running here.

Hot chicken wings with blue cheese dip (after Deadspin)

Basic, tasty hot wings with blue cheese sauce

Ingredients

chicken wingettes
oil for frying

For the hot sauce:

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

Blue cheese sauce:

sour cream
blue cheese
optional: lemon juice, mayonnaise

celery sticks for serving

Instructions

Fry the wingettes in several inches of oil until they are lightly browned. Do a few at a time so they don't stick together. Set them on paper towels to cool.
Melt the butter and mix together wit the rest of the hot sauce ingredients. Toss the wings in the hot sauce.
Mix together the sour cream and crumbled blue cheese. Use a food processor or whisk vigorously to break up the blue cheese. You can add lemon juice or a little mayonnaise to thin it.
Serve with blue cheese dip and celery sticks.

Ben and Jerry's Strawberry Ice Cream

Ingredients

For the strawberries

1 pint fresh strawberries
1-1/2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

For the ice cream base

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

Instructions

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

Make the ice cream base:

In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs for two minutes until fluffy.
Add in the sugar gradually and whisk another minute.
Pour in the milk and cream and continue whisking to blend.

Put it together:

Mash the strawberries well, or puree them in a food processor. Stir into the ice cream base.
Add to your ice cream maker and follow the directions. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes, then transfer the ice cream to a container, cover it, and put it in the freezer.)

5 from 1 vote

Pork nachos

Ingredients

3-4 lbs pork butt/shoulder, trimmed and cut into pieces
salt and pepper
oil for frying
2-3 oranges or clementines
3 chipotle chiles
2 bay leaves
1 Tbsp cumin
1 can Coke

Instructions

Heat the oil in a heavy pan. Heavily season the pieces of meat with salt and pepper. Brown the meat on all sides.
Transfer the meat to the Instant Pot. Add the Coke and the rest of the ingredients. Close the lid, close the valve, and cook on high pressure for 24 minutes.
Discard bay leaves and orange peels, remove meat from broth, shred, and serve.

taboon bread

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.
While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.
Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.
Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.
If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.
Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.
Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 237: Creative naan compliance

Look up! I just flew by! No, not in the Chinese spy balloon. I’m in an airplane, off for a quick visit to a very dear friend, and I’ll be back late Monday. Whee!

Meanwhile, here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Tacos

Or really tostadas without beans, because something happened that I honestly never thought would happen: We ran out of tortillas. We’ve had a ludicrous tortilla backlog for so long, I had truly forgotten that it was something you need to buy at some point. So I did not, and so a few people had soft tortillas with stale edges, and a few people had rather elderly crunchy tostada shells.

They were fine. We were hungry. And that has made all the difference.

SUNDAY
Chicken sorta-caprese sandwiches, chips

Chicken breasts were on sale, so I broiled them with olive oil, garlic powder, oregano, salt, and pepper, sliced them, and served them on baguettes with tomato and basil and miscellaneous cheese. The miscellaneous cheese part was tolerable, but then it turned out we were out of balsamic vinegar, which caused a stir. I had mine with olive oil and red wine vinegar.

It was fine. Honestly, I will eat just about anything on a baguette. I would eat a baguette sandwich, like bread on bread. Serve it in a bread bowl, I don’t care.

MONDAY
Monday, Damien and I had to go to a meeting at 5:30, so I set the kids up with lots of ramen and leftover chicken, crunchy noodles and a few vegetables and eggs and things, and told them to have what they wanted. We two went to Wendy’s, and I had some kind of burger with crunchy fried onions on it. My word, it was delicious. I rarely have a burger and fries at a fast food place, but every once in a while, yes.

TUESDAY
Chicken biryani and naan

Oh, now here we go. I’m thinking a lot about Indian food, but I wanted to get started with a recipe I’ve tried before, so I made this mild chicken biryani. As I remarked on Facebook, of all the cuisines I have attempted to cook, Indian food is the most straight up fun. All the colors, and of course all the smells. It’s just a good time.

So in this recipe, you sear the chicken thighs in oil, then cook up your onion and ginger, then turmeric and cardamom in the oil, then add the jasmine rice in, put the chicken back in, and add cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, golden raisins, and chicken broth. Cover it up and let all those beautiful flavors meld together as the rice cooks.

I know from experience that the rice is always still a little chompy at the end, so I make it in the morning and then move it to the slow cooker and keep it warm all day. (Full disclosure, I managed to slop a lot of the chicken broth out onto the floor, so there wasn’t really enough liquid in it and it turned out chompy anyway. But still delicious!)

I also really wanted to make naan, and I had pretty good luck with the King Arthur recipe last time. My bread flour had mysteriously disappeared, and I also mysteriously got it into my head that I wanted to knead it by hand, rather than using the stand mixer. I don’t know why, and I don’t know why I didn’t change my mind when it became apparent that it wasn’t going well, but that is what I did. I kneaded that dough forehhhhhhhver and it just didn’t get any smoother, but stayed all knobbly and mottled.

So eventually I gave up and set it to rise, and did this and that, and came back and cut it into 24 pieces, and decided I really didn’t have time to fry it before it was time to go.

And that was probably the first good decision I made with this naan, because waiting until just before dinner to cook it meant that Corrie was home, and she wanted to help. Guess what? She was genuinely helpful.

Naan cooks up really quickly, in less than two minutes, so you want to be rolling out one piece to get it ready while the first piece is frying. You throw it on a very hot, dry pan and watch for it to start forming these bubbles

and then flip it over and cook it for an even shorter time, and that’s how naan gets those characteristic brown circles. They are fried bubbles.

Anyway, Corrie was great at it. She has a wonderful feel for cooking, and doesn’t get flustered, and immediately figured out what to watch for and how to time it.

She brushed each piece of naan with melted butter as it came off the pan, and we had piping hot bread to go with the biryani, which we topped with toasted silvered almonds and chopped cilantro.

Splendid meal. Delightful.

What next for Indian food? I need more ideas! I get overwhelmed and I never know what to do next.

WEDNESDAY
Korean beef bowl

Wednesday was busy-busy-busy, and I didn’t have a chance to start dinner until it was evening. Korean beef bowl to the rescue.

Jump to Recipe

Even with fresh ginger and fresh garlic, it comes together super fast, all in one pot, and it’s just tasty and satisfying.

I made a pot of rice in the Instant Pot and chopped up some scallions, and there it was. It actually came together so fast that it was done by 5:00, and suddenly realized I could actually get a yoga workout in before dinner. Which I did, very grudgingly and wobbly-ly.

The worst part was, fresh off a workout, I only felt like eating one reasonable portion of food, and then I was completely satiated. Which is baloney. It’s propaganda, that’s what it is.

THURSDAY
Pork gyros

First of all, I would like to say that if I were a grocery store selling fresh SAGE, and some lady who has already been to two stores came in looking for fresh OREGANO, this is NOT HOW I WOULD PACKAGE IT.

Humph. Anyway, if anyone needs some sage, come see me. I don’t even like sage. Wanted oregano. Don’t care if it’s organic.

Nevertheless, I forged ahead and made a nice marinade

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with fresh garlic, fresh rosemary, DRIED oregano, red onion, honey, and olive oil, and got the pork sliced and marinating by 10:30. Sliced up some more red onions, cubed a bunch of feta cheese, made some yogurt sauce with garlic and fresh lemon juice,

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chopped up some mint leaves, and cut up a bunch of cucumbers. I briefly considered prepping some eggplant to fry, but that seemed like a bridge too far.

Dinner time hove around and I pan-fried the meat in batches

and cooked a few pans of seasoned fries, and set out the meat and fries and all my prepped toppings with pita bread. And some hot sauce.

SO GOOD. So tender and juicy. This particular recipe is a lot more herby and sweet than spicy, but you can add as much heat as you want with the hot sauce, and be generous with the garlicky yogurt sauce, and it’s fab. When I was done eating, I had to wipe off not only my phone but my glasses.

FRIDAY
Pasta with Marcella Hazan’s red sauce

At least I think so!

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Damien is shopping and cooking this weekend as I flit and float away like a giant balloon, but please do not shoot at me. I mean no harm. I promise to come home again.

5 from 1 vote

Korean Beef Bowl

Ingredients

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

Instructions

In a large skillet, cook ground beef, breaking it into bits, until the meat is nearly browned. Drain most of the fat and add the fresh ginger and garlic. Continue cooking until the meat is all cooked.
Add the soy sauce, brown sugar, and red pepper flakes the ground beef and stir to combine. Cook a little longer until everything is hot and saucy.
Serve over rice and garnish with scallions and sesame seeds.

honey garlic marinade for gyros

Marinate thin strips of pork for several hours, then grill or broil. This is a mild, somewhat sweet marinade that makes the meat quite tender.

Ingredients

4-5 lbs pork shoulder or butt, sliced into thin strips
6-8 cloves garlic, minced
1 red onion, diced
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup honey
small bunch fresh rosemary, chopped
small bunch fresh oregano, chopped

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

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

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

Put all ingredients in a heavy pot.
Simmer at least 90 minutes.
Take out the onions.
I'm freaking serious, that's it!

What’s for supper? Vol. 324: O tempora, o meatballs

What a weird week! Anyone else having a weird week? Just a weird ol’ week. But I just opened the curtains and there was a bluebird sitting on roof of the shed. First one I’ve seen this year. Bluebirds are neat. They’re a little bit boisterous, but very graceful, and they are happy to hang around in gangs at the feeder, without chasing other birds away. Very decorative birds, always a welcome visitor.

Here’s a slow mo video I took last year:

Anyway, here’s what we had while boistrously hanging around our feeder:

SATURDAY
Chicago style hot dogs, chips

These were not quite 100% authentic, which would require poppy seed buns, some kind of bright green relish, and sport peppers, but we did have tomatoes, pickled peppers, relish, mustard, pickle spears, chopped onion, and celery salt.

Really delicious. I got the idea for this from that meme that says the existence of a Chicago style hot dog implies the existence of an MLA style hot dog, which is a silly joke, but on the other hand, mmm, hot dogs.

SUNDAY
Steak, pork dumplings, cheesecake, strawberry ice cream

Sunday was my favorite husband’s birthday, so we had some of his favorite foods. He cooked steaks for everyone, pan fried in butter with garlic

(sorry, I know it’s Friday, sorry!)

and I used the pork dumpling filling I had stashed in the freezer from New Year’s Eve which is this recipe. I had seen one of those amazing videos where someone’s twinkling fingers forms dumplings into all kinds of beguiling shapes with a few simple pinches and folds, and woop! You have a dahlia and a lotus and a pinwheel. So even though I had dumpling wrappers that were fairly stiff and paper-like, and the video showed dumpling dough that was soft and pliable, I thought, “I CAN DO THAT.”

Friends, I could not.

But I gave it the old college try, and I did get some raw pork on my phone. And then I went back to using my dumpling press, which works great. So everyone had steamed dumplings while waiting for their steaks. In fact, I had leftover filling after I used up all the wrappers, so I added some panko bread crumbs and made little meatballs

so some people had little birthday meatballs.

I also made a bunch of strawberry ice cream

following the Ben and Jerry recipe, which always turns out light and sweet and lovely

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and I made a gigantic cheesecake. I have been sworn to secrecy about the particulars of this recipe, but LOOK AT MY CHEESECAKE

I think this is the first time I’ve achieved no cracks. I put all the ingredients out to come to room temperature the night before; I mixed it very lightly, so as to introduce as little air as possible, and scraped down the bowl often; and I baked it in a water bath, and then turned off the oven and let it sit in the cooling oven for a few hours before I took it out and started to chill it.

It was luscious.

I wish I had started 24 hours sooner, so I could have chilled it over night after baking it, but it was rich and smooth and lovely, and about a mile high.

MONDAY
One-pan garlic chicken thighs and roast veg

I used to make these one-pan chicken thigh meals a lot, and got kind of burnt out on them, so I backed off for a while. I guess it’s been long enough, because this was very popular.

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You can add whatever vegetables you want. My advice is to think about how long they need to cook, and try to cut them to the appropriate thickness, so they end up done at the same time.

I used about three pounds of potatoes with the skin on and few zucchinis and half a large butternut squash in wedges. In this variation, you season the vegetables, then lay the chicken on top and brush them (well, really smear them, as it’s pretty thick) with a garlicky brown sugar sauce, and then just chunk it in the oven.

Quite tasty. The sugar runs down into the pan and caramelizes the bottom of the potatoes, giving them a nice little crunch, and the chicken is juicy and the vegetables are tender.

TUESDAY
Meatball subs, fries

I wish I could remember what I did to these meatballs, because they were much better than my usual meatballs. Humph. I have become aware that I tend to underseason things, so possibly I just took a heavier hand with everything I sprinkled.

I briefly considered pan frying them, but then I remembered the shortness of life and just threw them on a broiler pan and baked them in a hot oven like I usually do, then transferred them to a crock pot with plenty of jarred sauce.

Good enough for the likes of us. O tempora, o meatballs.

WEDNESDAY
Chili verde, chips and pico de gallo, cornbread, pineapple, vanilla and peach-mango ice cream

On Wednesday, our friend Fr. Matt from Louisiana came for supper! My chili verde recipe

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is reasonably spicy, and calls for specific peppers. Well, the supermarket didn’t have those specific peppers. It just had bags of mixed peppers called “hot pepper combo” or something, and the label was one of those “may contain one or more of the following.” This is what I got:

I liked the looks of that, so I roasted them. I also tweaked my recipe a bit and roasted the onions and garlic along with them, rather than putting them onions and garlic into the food processor raw

then I puréed it all up with some cilantro, browned up a good amount of fatty, salted and peppered pork chunks in oil, and —

here is the point where I was already several hours behind schedule, because the school called to say that Benny had bruised her eyeball, and what should they do??? I had no idea, so I spent the new few hours calling various doctors and trying to get an appointment with the right person, and sending a kid to the store with a list of stuff I forgot to buy, and making other kids clean up the hideous house because we are really still in shock from Christmas and the house was looking PRETTY ROUGH, and by the time I got back to my chili, it was laaate. So I threw it in the Instant Pot, because it could tenderize the meat faster.

Unless, of course, the Instant Pot float valve is mysteriously missing. Which it was. So I put everything back in the regular non-instant pot, hoped it would cook fast enough, whizzed through making some corn bread (I just used the recipe on the package, which is fine)

and some pico de gallo

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and rescued the kitchen from complete squalor, and then one kid went to pick up some of the kids, and I called the school to tell them to tell Benny to wait for me to pick her up, and we went to the eye doctor and her eye is fine, thank God, just a little creepy; and when I got home, the chili was, if I may say so, perfect. The pork shredded readily with a wooden spoon

and when Fr. Matt got here, we had a lovely meal.

I made two kinds of ice cream: Plain vanilla, which is just two eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 cups milk, one cup heavy cream, and a dash of vanilla; and then I wanted to make mango, which I made for our anniversary baked alaska, but I couldn’t find mango pulp anywhere. (Here’s the recipe anyway, in case you can.)

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In theory, you can use your big brain and make mango pulp by pureeing mango, but I was being smart (even bigger brain time), and I knew that was a bridge too far. Just altogether too much work, and I definitely didn’t have time for that. So instead (tiny brain time) I went to the other store and bought some canned peaches, and pureed those, and also bought some fresh mangos and cut them up and macerated them in sugar with (possible big brain?) a little ground cloves.

The ice cream was . . . fine. I think peach and mango would have been fine, and peach and mango and cloves might possibly have worked, but peach, mango, cloves, and onion . . . now that really is a bridge too far. Yep, everyone was too polite to mention it, but I had cut the mangos up on the wooden cutting board and they had picked up an undeniable onion flavor (very tiny brain). Oh well! That’s why I made vanilla (big brain, with vanilla ice cream on top).

THURSDAY
Old Bay drumsticks, risotto, leftover cornbread

On Thursday I collapsed like a bunch of broccoli. I did something I almost never do: I got the kids to school (which took two trips, because one kid promised twice that she was awake, but then when it was time to go, she was just stumbling out of bed, so I had to come back for her) and then just went back to bed and conked out for another three hours. And then when I did get up, I was so dang dopey. Really the only thing I accomplished all day was to make risotto.

BUT WHAT RISOTTO. I was planning a butternut squash instant pot risotto, because I still had half the squash in the fridge left over from the chicken thigh meal; but oops, the instant pot pin was still missing. So I was tragically forced to spend a good amount of time slowly stirring ladles of chicken broth into the creamy rice and dreamily stirring it around, smelling the fragrant, buttery clouds of steam, and occasionally tasting it to make sure it was still, uh, I don’t know, I was just eating it.

Toward the end I threw in a giant mound of freshly-grated parmesan cheese and a big fistful of chopped parsley. You know what, no one complained that it didn’t have butternut squash in it.

The drumsticks were fine. I just roasted them in melted butter with plenty of Old Bay seasoning, and I set out the leftover corn bread.

We had to run off and get to an art show that the two high school girls had pieces in. Arty kids! We met the art teacher and warned her about the kid who’s coming next year. The general principle is that, if you’ve met one Fisher kid, you’ve met one Fisher kid, but this is especially true with Irene.

FRIDAY
Seafood lo mein

And finally Friday. Man.

I haven’t made lo mein for a while. It’s easy, and Damien and Lena and I and maybe one other person really like it, but no one else does.

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When I made the chili verde, I got some cup o’ noodle for the kids who wouldn’t want it, so I expect they’ll be returning to that well for this meal. I don’t insist that people eat what I make. They’re welcome to fix themselves something else, as long as they’re not rude about it and don’t make a huge mess. I aim to make foods that most of the family will enjoy for about five days a week, and then one or two meals can be things that people with more cultivated palates will enjoy. I have found that this no-pressure constant exposure to different foods is as good a way as any to introduce kids to a variety of foods, and pretty often, they start venturing into new territory of their own volition, just out of curiosity. But if they don’t (and some kids don’t), that’s okay, too. Because it’s just food. There are plenty of other things to fight about! I do care about food, a lot, but I care more about not making anyone miserable over food.

Guys, I’m trying so hard to bring this back around to bluebirds, but it’s just not working, so I’ll just say goodbye.

Ben and Jerry's Strawberry Ice Cream

Ingredients

For the strawberries

1 pint fresh strawberries
1-1/2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

For the ice cream base

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

Instructions

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

Make the ice cream base:

In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs for two minutes until fluffy.
Add in the sugar gradually and whisk another minute.
Pour in the milk and cream and continue whisking to blend.

Put it together:

Mash the strawberries well, or puree them in a food processor. Stir into the ice cream base.
Add to your ice cream maker and follow the directions. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes, then transfer the ice cream to a container, cover it, and put it in the freezer.)

One pan honey garlic chicken thighs with fall veg

Adapted from Damn Delicious

Ingredients

18 chicken thighs
2 lbs broccoli in spears
4-5 lbs potatoes in wedges, skin on if you like
1 butternut squash, peeled and cubed

sauce:

1/3+ cup honey
1/3+ cup brown sugar
3 tbsp dijon or yellow mustard
9 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp oregano
2 tsp dried basil
salt and pepper
6 tbsp olive oil
olive oil for drizzing

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400. Prepare the sauce.
In a large, greased sheet pan, spread the potatoes and squash. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
Lay the chicken thighs on top of the potatoes and squash. Brush the sauce over the chicken skins.
Roast the chicken for thirty minutes or more until they are almost cooked.
Add the broccoli, arranging it on top of the potatoes and in between the chicken. Return the pan to the oven and let it finish cooking another 10 -20 minutes so you don't die. The skins should be golden and the broccoli should be a little charred.

Mango ice cream

Ingredients

30 oz (about 3 cups) mango pulp
2 cups heavy or whipping cream
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 mango, chopped into bits

Instructions

In a bowl, whisk the milk, sugar, and salt until blended.
Add in the mango pulp and cream and stir with a spoon until blended.
Cover and refrigerate two hours.
Stir and transfer to ice cream maker. Follow instructions to make ice cream. (I use a Cuisinart ICE-20P1 and churn it for 30 minutes.)
After ice cream is churned, stir in fresh mango bits, then transfer to a freezer-safe container, cover, and freeze for several hours.

Spicy Chili Verde

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

Ingredients

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

For the salsa verde:

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

For serving:

lime wedges
sour cream
additional cilantro for topping

Instructions

Preheat the broiler.
Pull the husks and stems off the tomatillos and rinse them. Cut the ends off all the peppers. Grease a large pan and put the tomatillos and peppers on it. Broil five minutes, turn, and broil five minutes more, until they are slightly charred.
Take the pan out and cover the peppers and tomatillos with plastic wrap or tin foil for ten minutes. When they are cool enough to handle, pull the skins off the peppers and tomatillos. At this point, you can remove the seeds from the peppers to decrease the spiciness if you want.
Put the skinned tomatillos and peppers in a food processor or blender with the onions, garlic, and cilantro. Purée.
In a heavy pot, heat some oil. Salt and pepper the pork chunks and brown them in the oil. You will need to do it in shifts so the pork has enough room and browns rather than simmering.
When all the meat is browned, put it all in the pot and add the puréed ingredients.
Simmer at a low heat for at least three hours until the meat is tender. If you want thinner chili verde, you can add chicken broth or beer. At some point, if you don't want the pork in large chunks, press the meat with the back of a spoon to make it collapse into shreds.
Spoon the chili verde into bowls, squeeze some lime juice over the top, and top with sour cream and fresh cilantro.

Pico De Gallo

quick and easy fresh dip or topping for tacos, etc.

Ingredients

2 large tomatoes, diced
1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced OR 1/2 serrano pepper
1/2 onion, diced
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
1/8 cup lime juice
dash kosher salt

Instructions

Mix ingredients together and serve with your favorite Mexican food

Suppli (or Arancini)

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

Ingredients

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

To make suppli out of the risotto:

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

Instructions

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

Set chicken stock to simmer in a pot.

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

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

Pour in the wine and boil until wine is absorbed.

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

Add 4 more cups of stock and cook until absorbed.

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

When rice is done, gently stir in the other 8 Tbs of butter and the grated cheese with a fork.
This risotto is wonderful to eat on its own, but if you want to make suppli out of it, read on!
TO MAKE THE SUPPLI:

Beat the eggs and gently mix them into the risotto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

basic lo mein

Ingredients

for the sauce

1 cup soy sauce
5 tsp sesame oil
5 tsp sugar

for the rest

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

Instructions

Mix together the sauce ingredients and set aside.
Boil the noodles until slightly underdone. Drain and set aside.
Heat up a pan, add some sesame oil for cooking, and quickly cook your vegetables or whatever add-ins you have chosen.
Add the mirin to the pan and deglaze it.
Add the cooked noodles in, and stir to combine. Add the sauce and stir to combine.

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