Tag: sandwiches

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

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

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

Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers with chicken three ways and burritos 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that was the weekend! 

MONDAY
Chicken biryani, mango

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY
Garlic pork chops, baked potato, string beans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Italian wedding soup, focaccia

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

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

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

Anyway, it turned out FANTASTIC.. 

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

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

The soup was also very nice. 

An excellent meal overall. 

THURSDAY
Spaghetti with sausage sauce

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

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

Here’s the side view. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yum yum. 

FRIDAY
Bagel egg cheese sandwiches, OJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUNDAY

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

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

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

MONDAY
Ziti with sausage and Alfredo sauce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY
Pulled pork, tater tots, roast butternut squash rings

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Nachos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THURSDAY
Banh mi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the recipe for that: 

Jump to Recipe

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Peach waffles, eggs, OJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ducks so crazy. 

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

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

Print

Clovey pulled pork

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

  4. When pork is tender, shred.

 

Print

Pork banh mi

Ingredients

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

Veggies and dressing

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

Instructions

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

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

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

  4. Toast a sliced baguette or other crusty bread. 

Print

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

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

Ingredients

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

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

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

Instructions

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

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

    Add them to the brine so they are submerged.

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

 

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 432: S’more licht

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

SATURDAY
Leftovers and pizza pockets

Just a regular Saturday, chores and leftovers. I will say, first I had to spend fifty years being an undisciplined slob, but I am finally, finally learning the charms of doing little mundane things the same way at the same time every day — just stuff like feeding the animals, watering my garden, lifting weights, saying my prayers — rather than letting everything slide and then scrambling to catch up in a panic. Not that everything is neat and tidy and under control around here. But I guess I’m feeling like I’ve hit my stride a bit, and it’s really nice! 

SUNDAY
Tuna noodle for kids, pub food for grownups

For my birthday back in December, Damien gave me tickets to see the incomparable Samantha Crain, and Sunday was the day! So around noon, we took off, and set up a tent in a campground in the DAR State Forest in Goshen. 

Actually we set up the tent, started driving to the concert, suddenly realized we had set up in the wrong site,

and sheepishly dragged the tent over to the right spot.

And THEN we went to the concert. It was at The Iron Horse in Northampton, MA, and we had a great dinner. I had some kind of tasty pulled chicken sandwich and fries, and then the show was SO GOOD. The photo I took made it look gross, though, so instead, here is a picture of the wall.

Samantha Crain is the greatest. She is just a tremendous song writer, a tremendous musician, a tremendous singer. She rocked pretty hard for the first part of the show,

and then the drummer and bassist left the stage and she switched gears into a more indie mode.

Both halves of the show were great, just banger after banger. And she sang “Elk City” for the encore, which is the first song I ever heard by her, and it just about wrecks me every time. 

I really enjoyed the way The Iron Horse is set up. It’s spacious enough so you don’t feel stifled, but small enough that there aren’t, I don’t think, any bad seats. Acoustics are great, but you also feel like it’s okay to move around and eat your food without being disruptive. 

So then we got back to the campsite and decided to walk down to the lake and look at the stars, maybe catch some Perseids. We did see a lot of stars, and then we heard a weird kind of blowing/screaming noise coming from the trees. We weren’t even sure what animal it was, but it was very clearly saying “GO AWAY OR ME KILL YOU” so we scuttled back to the tent! (Pretty sure it was a buck.)

Then we went to bed, and this is the part where we are fifty years old, and I hadn’t been tent camping in about thirty years, and Damien had never been tent camping before, and we were both like, Boy, we are really lying on the actual GROUND, here. The hard, hard, really, really hard, hard actual ground. We had brought three yoga mats and an extra sleeping bag to lie on, but we had underestimated . . . how necessary beds are, I guess. So not a lot of sleep was gotten. But it was still extremely pleasant to start the day in a cool, breezy tent with leaf shadows drifting back and forth overhead, and birdsong all around.

We had brought a coffee machine and battery pack, but couldn’t get it to work, so I sat in the car like a bleary, smelly princess while Damien packed everything up, and we drove off in search of coffee. Stopped at Shelburne Falls and got coffee and muffins, and Damien and I both felt like if we stayed there a minute longer, some crusty old-timer in bib overalls and crinkly smiling eyes was gonna give us a life lesson whether we wanted it or not, and there was a good chance we would get welcomed right off the premises with garden shears or possibly a falling church tower. Good coffee, though.

Despite the terrible sleep, we both enjoyed it enough that we want to go tent camping again soon! As soon as we get a really good air mattress. 

MONDAY
Cobb salad

Good thing I took pictures of Monday’s meal, because the whole day is a blank to me. We apparently had Cobb salad: Roast chicken in chunks, bacon, tomatoes, lettuce, red onion, hard boiled eggs, and avocado in chunks. I substituted shredded cheddar cheese for blue cheese. 

Very popular meal. 

I think I had mine with ranch dressing, but possibly blue cheese dressing. Keep reading for more thrilling details like me not quite remembering what kind of salad dressing I chose!

TUESDAY
Smoked pork shoulder, tater tots, grilled corn

Tuesday Damien had to get up early to do his weekly radio spot, so he started a pork shoulder smoking in the morning. I think he ended up smoking it for six or eight hours, and my dears, it was TREMENDOUS. 

 
Sadly, there is not a recipe for this; he just followed his heart with some kind of sugar spice rub and a spray bottle of cider vinegar. He used charcoal and apple wood chunks and babied this thing all day, and it was SO juicy and tender and packed with spicy, smoky flavor inside, with spicy, sweet, sticky charred crust. Amazing. 

I had mine on a sandwich with red onions and just a tiny bit of BBQ sauce, which I was hesitant to use because I didn’t want to miss the flavor of the meat. 

He grilled a bunch of corn in the husks, and cooked a bunch of tater tots, and this was a VERY popular meal. 

That evening, we made the world’s smallest s’mores: Mini marshmallows, chocolate chips, and Teddy Grahams, carefully toasted over a birthday candle. 

Irene came out, saw what we were doing, and goes, “Okay, be honest. How poor ARE we??” Irene has been making me laugh since before she was born. 

But the tiny s’mores party was lots of fun! Clara came by and it was lovely. 

and the s’mores were indeed tiny. 

I don’t even like s’mores, but gosh, and I love my backyard, and I love my family. 

Later in the week when I was at the store, I got normal sized marshmallows, regular graham crackers, and regular chocolate bars, so we can proceed on to normal sized s’mores.

Naturally, the kids are now expecting the next week to feature the world’s biggest s’mores, and there is a very big part of me that wants to pull it off somehow. We did get one of those surprise EBT cards in the mail (even if you don’t qualify for food stamps, they send you a card for summer food expenses if you qualify for free or reduced lunch at school, even if the school your kids go to doesn’t offer lunch anyway, which ours doesn’t!) But the state of the country is such that I kind of want to blow the whole thing on enormous s’mores. Waste, fraud, and abuse s’mores. Abus’mores, if you will. I know there are recipes out there for homemade marshmallow, and a giant graham cracker can’t be too hard to make. Not sure what to do about the giant chocolate. Probably I could just melt a bunch of chocolate into a baking sheet, actually. HMMMM. 

WEDNESDAY
Pork quesadillas, pico de gallo 

The pork shoulder I bought was so big, I knew we would get at least two meals out of it, so meal #2 was pork quesadillas. It turned out only Damien and I and two of the kids actually wanted this. Which is nuts, because it was SCRUMPTIOUS. The melted cheese with the smoky meat was just meltingly delicious. 

As you can see, I made pico de gallo. Diced tomatoes and onions, lots of cilantro, lots of fresh lime juice, some minced jalapeños, and some kosher salt. So good. 

I cut up a whole onion, but only used about 3/4 of it, so I put the rest in a sandwich bag and thought someone could use it later. Then I put the rest of the ingredients in, and then I was like, “Oh look, there was a bag of onion already cut up! I should have just used that instead of cutting up a whole onion.” 

I tell you, life is full of surprises when you spend every day playing hide and seek with your own brain. 

THURSDAY
Stuffed shells and french bread

Thursday I had a million things to do, but it was also the day we had planned for Benny to do her Kids Make Supper turn. Last week, Corrie made oven fried chicken and mashed potatoes; this week, Benny picked stuffed shells and french bread. She did so great! We started off the bread dough in the early afternoon. Here is my recipe

Jump to Recipe

and let me tell you, when you are watching a novice use one of your recipes, it really brings home how terribly written your recipes are. I guess they are really more suited for people who are used to kind of winging it in the kitchen. Sorry about that! 

Anyway, like I said, she did great anyway. 

Got four nice long loaves rising, and only one of them was shaped really weird, which is about my record, as well. 

Then we started on the stuffed shells, and dang, the way I wrote the recipe was messed up! I fixed it (I hope), so here is that:

Jump to Recipe

She did use fresh basil instead of dried, which is vastly preferable.

I showed her how to stuff the shells, and then I ran out to pick up Corrie from her friend’s house. I didn’t want to be late, so I didn’t stop for gas, even though the “empty” light was on. Smart! So I get there, and it’s further out in the country than I remembered, so I’m like, hmm, I should get some gas. So I ask the map app where there is a gas station, and it’s even further out in the country. At this point, I’m coasting, and I finally get there, and . . . .there is no gas station. It’s just someone’s house. So I retrace my steps, coasting like CRAZY, but at this point Corrie is in the car, so of course we’re talking about what it might mean to switch bodies with a dog, so I was a little distracted and suddenly realized I was in Gilsum. Which is a very pretty town, but really falls down in the area of having gas stations. 

But it was gorgeous weather, I don’t have a baby, my phone was charged up, and I was just . . . so unbothered. We did actually make it to a gas station in Keene eventually. I guess this isn’t really a story, huh? It’s kind of an anti-story. Ten years ago, something like this would have ended up with lots of crying, several people wetting their pants, and some kind of encounter with law enforcement, if not a murderous deer. But as it was, we just got home late. 

And Benny was just finishing up stuffing the shells! So I cranked up the oven and we baked them for half an hour instead of 45 minutes, and it was absurdly late by the time we ate, but it was very delicious. And she was rightly proud of herself. 

Bread was great. We have a pressurized water sprayer Corrie uses to keep up the humidity levels in her turtle tank, and it’s very useful for putting some moisture into the oven when you’re baking french bread. Check out this lovely little fragile crust on the bread. 

She did so great! The cheese filling was rich and creamy. The other kids are starting to get enthusiastic about their meals, coming up. I’m very happy with this plan. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just regular old pizza. 

Last Friday, though, I made macarona bil laban and I loved it. I think one of the kids liked it, and a few thought it was okayish, and everyone else had plain noodles. So I probably won’t make it for the family again, but I thought it was so tasty, and it came together in like twelve minutes. 

Most of the recipes I found called for meat, so I just read a bunch and winged it. I cooked a few pounds of farfalle, and browned up a bunch of minced garlic in a lot of butter. I added the garlic butter to the yogurt sauce and stirred in some lime juice, aleppo pepper, and green za’atar, which is kind of a weird combination, but it worked! So I drained the noodles and mixed them up with the yogurt sauce, and then topped the whole thing with the toasted pine nuts (dry toasted in the microwave) and more chopped mint. 

Absolute comfort food. So yummy.

My mother would have adored this dish. I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t really get into experimenting with cooking until after my parents died, because they really would have liked some of these dishes! We did have my father over for dinner shortly before he died, and we had some kind of shrimp scampi, which I remember him loving. You can have a really complicated relationship with someone and still get a lot of pleasure out of cooking them a meal.

Heck, you can get a lot of pleasure out of cooking a meal that a dead person with whom you’ve had a complicated relationship would have enjoyed, for some reason. What do you know about that? Oh death. O life! Mehr licht. S’more licht, if you will. 

Print

French bread

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

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Print

Stuffed shells

Just a basic recipe. You can add meat to the sauce or spinach to the cheese, or anything that strikes your fancy. Serves about 10.

Ingredients

  • 2 12-oz boxes jumbo shells
  • 2 32-oz tubs ricotta cheese
  • 8 oz grated parmesan cheese
  • 4 cups shredded mozzarella, divided
  • 4 eggs, beaten
  • 1 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 Tbsp dried basil
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 1 tsp pepper
  • 1/2 tsp nutmeg
  • 4-5 cups pasta sauce

Instructions

  1. Cook the shells in salted water, drain, and rinse in cool water. Mix them up with a little olive oil so they don't stick together. Or if you will be using them soon, let them stay in the pot of cool water.

  2. Preheat the oven to 350. Mix into the ricotta cheese all the seasoning, the beaten eggs, the parmesan, and 3 of the cups of mozzarella, setting aside the rest of the mozzarella.

  3. Spread a little sauce in the bottom of an oven-proof pan or dish. Spoon a few tablespoons of the cheese filling into each shell and lay the stuffed shells close together.

  4. Top with the rest of the pasta sauce, and sprinkled the remaining mozzarella on top of that. Cover loosely with foil and cook for 45 minutes or longer, until it's bubbly. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 425: Two pies for Millie

Happy Friday! Before we get to the food, I want to acknowledge the passing of my beautiful friend Millie, age 90.

She had a rough couple of last months, but rallied so much at the end, everyone thought she was getting better. She visited her grandchildren and ate a lobster, and then she died in the night. 

I really loved her, and she loved me. I don’t know if you could say we knew each other deeply, but we felt strangely sympatico and enjoyed each other a lot. Please pray for Millie and her family! 

Okay, Millie would totally agree it’s time to talk about food now. Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers and pizza pockets

We had tons of leftover chicken because two of my brothers and two of my nephews had been over on Thursday. In fact they came back in the evening after dinner on Saturday, so we had them a total of three nights! I haven’t seen my brother Jake or his kids in years, and it was pretty great. Sonny has literally never been happier. I don’t know what it was, but he feel hysterically in love with Jacob and stayed dialed up to eleven the whole time he was here. They were incredibly good sports about it. 

The cat was not. I guess he felt left out, and sulked in the bathroom much of the time, and only started gracing us with his presence again a few days ago. It’s so funny. When I was growing up, cats were mainly decorative creatures that you didn’t interact with much. I was not prepared to even be aware of this much of the emotional life of animals! 

SUNDAY
Pork spiedies, fries, berry crumble

Sunday of course we all went to Mass, and then after we had some final donuts and the fellers started their long drive home, I got some pork marinating for supper,

Jump to Recipe

then roped the kids into moving some rocks around for me, and I started rearranging the garden in front of the house. This involved excavating and moving a giant granite post and digging up many dozens of day lilies, and I don’t really have a clear plan yet, but I certainly did dig up a lot of day lilies. 

The plan is to make the path diagonal to the door, rather than perpendicular to the house. I thinnnnnk I’m going to build a sort of permanent stone wall/planter under the double windows on the right, and then fill everything in with shade perennials. We do have a lot of rocks. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this.

Supper was spiedies. The pork is cut into chunks and marinated — and if you do this recipe, do try to get fresh mint, because it really makes a difference! — and then you roast or grill that along with a bunch of pepper and onion chunks. 

Actually I made two pans, and roasted the meat in one and the veg in the other, and then combined them. I mention this so you don’t think it’s okay to crowd the pan. 

Then you toast some rolls and spread them with mayo, and pile on the meat and vegetables. 

Ohhh. So good. 

It was ice cream sundaes for dessert, and I got a little offended at how much they wanted for a little bottle of caramel sauce, so I tried that Instant Pot recipe for caramel sauce. You take the labels and tops off the cans of caramel, cover the tops with tinfoil, put them on a trivet, and add water around the cans, halfway up. Then you close the lid and pressure cook for 40 minutes. You’re supposed to do a quick release, but I forgot I was making caramel, so it did a natural release. 

So, the important thing to know here is that one of these cans turned out to be fat free sweetened condensed milk. God alone knows what that could possibly be made of, but I certainly didn’t buy it on purpose. But when I read that you were supposed to take the labels off anyway, I surrendered to my fate and just cooked them both. 

When I took the tinfoil off, it was pretty obvious which was which. 

Or, it was pretty obvious that they were two different kinds of condensed milk. Hmm. 

Anyway, you let them cool for a bit, then add some vanilla and beat it up until it’s smooth. One was a little lumpier than the other and wasn’t getting smooth fast enough with fork beating, so I threw them both in the Kitchen Aid and whisked them together. 

And that was the most delicious caramel I’ve ever eaten. It tasted like Werther’s. I guess probably I’ll be just buying regular sweetened condensed milk, but I’ll definitely make this again. 

Note: When it cools, it gets a little blobby, so if you want caramel that oozes, you should warm it up. 

MONDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, vegetables and dip

Monday I sat myself down and sternly reminded myself that, harsh and unjust as it may sound, someone who wishes to call herself a writer, and in fact who wishes be paid for writing, must actually write something at some point. So I wiggled and whined and complained and got up to clean a bunch of stuff, but eventually ground out a couple of essays. 

It was Memorial Day and the kids were home, and there was lots of fresh whipped cream left over from the sundaes, so I figured I might as well make dessert with all the berries I got because they were on sale. I can’t find the recipe I used, but I seem to remember I fudged it anyway, and then I got confused with the struesel topping and didn’t use enough flour, and by the time I figured that out, it had already gone pasty, and was not going to be streuselly at all. 

However, you can’t really go wrong with blueberries and strawberries with something sweet baked onto the top. 

It turned out just about every person living in that house had been helping themselves to the big bowl of whipped cream in the fridge, which I can’t complain about because I didn’t tell them not to, and also because I ate about half of it myself, so there was only a little bit of fairly deflated cream left, and it was actually the perfect companion to my hot berry splat

It was splatty and DELICIOUS. Man, I love berry season. 

TUESDAY
Fish tacos, guacamole and chips

Tuesday we had a meeting, and it turned out that Damien and I were not actually needed, so we ended up just chilling in a waiting room for an hour, and it was actually lovely. 

Got home and made some quick guacamole 

Jump to Recipe

and we had fish tacos with batter-fried fish from frozen, sour cream, salsa, guacamole, cilantro, lime wedges, and — not shredded cabbage, because they didn’t have cabbage (#aldistyle), so instead I put out one of those bags of chopped Asian salads, which is mostly cabbage. 

We haven’t had fish tacos for a while, and they were great. 

Didn’t even notice the rogue carrot shreds. 

And yes, I wrote another essay. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken pie with bacon 

Wednesday was the day I found out Millie had died. I had been meaning and meaning and meaning to go see her, but I wasn’t even sure if she was home or at the nursing home, so I called her house and no one answered, so I called the nursing home, and they put me through to her room, but no one picked up. So I figured I would just go. But I didn’t want to come empty handed, so I made a couple of mini pies for her, hoping she’d be well enough to eat them. She loves chicken pie. 

Here’s my chicken pie recipe. It really outrageously savory and tasty. It has bacon, leeks, potatoes, and chicken. (I’ll put my recipe for pie crust below the chicken pie filling recipe.)

Jump to Recipe

I cut out little feathers for the top of the crust, brushed them with duck egg yolk, and baked them up. Very pretty. 

Then I went to the nursing home and they were like, yes, she’s here, no, we can’t find her name, no, she’s not here, we’re sorry, we don’t know. And I got a pretty bad feeling, so I called Millie’s daughter, and that’s when I got the news. She was so apologetic that they hadn’t called, if you can imagine — I’m just the neighbor! — but I think they actually did, and I didn’t pick up because I didn’t recognize the number. 

So, well, I pulled over to the shoulder of the highway and bawled for a while. Then I went to the chapel and said a decade for Millie. I still had time before I had to get the kids, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I mooched around a thrift store and found a Lady and the Unicorn tapestry pillow which I was pretty sure Clara needed, and I was right about that. 

It turned out she was still at work, so I traded her the pillow for a bunch of fresh baguettes, a day-old sourdough loaf, and some pastries. She went with me on the school run and I was pretty glad to have some company. Then we all went home and, well, ate bread steadily until it was supper time. Like it says in the Bible, when you are sad, eat bread, and then pie. I think it’s in Proverbs. 

The pie was gorgeous. 

The potatoes were a tiny bit underdone, though, so I put it back in the oven and finished it up. Man. Really nice crust, too – thin and flaky. 

It didn’t exactly hold together as a solid, but I don’t know if that’s what you want in chicken pie anyway. 

That evening, I was potting some flowers and some of Millie’s children came over with some beautiful handmade items from her house — a quilt, some sets of placemats, and two quilted bags. Lovely. They invited me to come in and pick out anything else I might want. So I went over and it turns out she had an entire room I didn’t know about, and it was absolutely stuffed with every conceivable kind of fabric. I had to laugh because she always talked about how cluttered her house was, and I always said it didn’t seem that cluttered to me; but I guess the whole time, even if she didn’t go in there, she could FEEL that other room. I know she had plans for all of that fabric, too. Quilts, bags, clothes for her grandkids, clothes for her grandkids’ dolls, and so on and so on. I have never met a more hardworking person in my life. 

Really wish I had gone to see her one day sooner. I really do. If there is someone you have been meaning to visit, please go ahead and do it now!

THURSDAY
Bo ssam, rice, steamed broccoli, pickled carrots and radishes

On Wednesday, I got a hunk of pork brining for bo ssam. On Thursday morning, I took a look at the schedule and realized it was going to be a DOOZY, so I started the pork cooking in the Instant Pot, rather than in a low oven. I also threw a bunch of carrots and radishes in the food processor and started them quick pickling. 

Then I duct taped myself to my computer and wrote another essay. Also got the kids to Mass (Ascension Thursday is still on Thursday in our diocese!), took a kid to a meeting at the school she’s transferring to, got cash for a field trip, went back to Millie’s house and got a dresser, and picked up the kids, and we had a schedule complication where a kid had to be at a place and she was okay with being early but not THAT early, so we launched Operation Kill Time Without Spending Money, and lurked about at the park for a while. I did lose Corrie, because of course I did, but then we found her, and got home. 

My friends, that house smelled of FEET. Very bad feet, like malevolent. Feet that want you dead and damned. I was kind of baffled, because the windows are open and yes, we have teenagers, but we also had teenagers yesterday and it didn’t smell like this yesterday. So I did some sniff-sleuthing, and figured it out. 

It was the pickled radishes. 

I have made pickled radishes before! They just smelled like vinegar! I have no idea what happened here, but BLURGH. 

I mean, yes, I ate them. In the car, on the way to the art gallery, because goodness knows it didn’t already smell bad enough in my car already. 

Also I had two hampers full of canned goods from Millie’s pantry, because I am gonna bring them to Vincent de Paul, but first I have to make sure they’re not eleven years old. 

Oh, so the bossam was actually not that great. It came out of the IP kinda dry and tough, and I was a little low on brown sugar, so when I put the last little topping on and put it in the oven to glaze up, it was a little lackluster

and I mean that literally. It usually comes out of the oven absolutely GLEAMING. And I forgot to get lettuce to wrap the meat and wrice in. But it was fine. 

Oh, I forgot to link to the recipe. Here it is. I don’t usually make the extra sauce; I just do the salt and sugar brining, and then the brown sugar-cider vinegar-salt thing for the top. And usually it turns out great! 

Poor Damien has been driving around all week and went straight from Concord to the court house in Keene to the art show. Anyway, Lucy’s work was extremely cool, as usual. 

 

Blessedly, Sophia took the other kids to see the art show after they ate, and stayed to bring Lucy home afterward, because Damien and I were just about deconstructed with exhaustion. Damien’s been doing a million extra things this week — getting the pool into shape, performing minor surgery on one of the ducks, fixing the lawn mower, and so on. And just cheerfully agreed to figure out how to move the hose spigot to the outside of the house, so I don’t have to go in the scary basement. 

The baby ducks have been spending their whole day outdoors this week, and only coming inside for the night. They get along great with the big ducks! Coin immediately recognized them as Guys He Is In Charge Of, and busily herded them toward the pen where the food is. So I have no worries that they’ll do fine when they start spending their nights in the duck house. They need to grow some more grownup feathers, so they stay warm and dry enough. 

They still pile themselves on top of each other all the time, which cracks me up. They have NO concept of personal space, and basically live on top of each other as often as they can, despite having an acre of land to roam around on; but they are also apparently completely oblivious of each other. 

I am so very fond of these dumb, dumb creatures. We don’t know yet if they’re girls or boys, though. If there is one boy, that will be fine, in proportion to the number of females we have — but if there are two or more boys, we’re gonna have to figure some things out! 

Right now, Shaq and Tulip (the pekins) are still yeeping, and only Zippy has learned how to quack. Hilarious. 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

Today, I’m gonna go back to Millie’s house and get her bed, which feels A LITTLE WEIRD, but it’s a beautiful little carved wooden bed, painted white, and Corrie really needs a bed. Millie would be so absolutely delighted to know that she’s getting it. 

And we shall have spaghetti for supper. One of the kids mentioned that we are having spaghetti a lot lately. And she is right! We are. 

5 from 1 vote
Print

White Lady From NH's Guacamole

Ingredients

  • 4 avocados
  • 1 medium tomato, diced
  • 1 medium jalapeno, minced
  • 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped roughly
  • 1 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 2 limes juiced
  • 1 tsp chili powder
  • salt and pepper
  • 1/2 red onion, diced

Instructions

  1. Peel avocados. Mash two and dice two. 

  2. Mix together with rest of ingredients and add seasonings.

  3. Cover tightly, as it becomes discolored quickly. 

5 from 1 vote
Print

pork spiedies (can use marinade for shish kebob)

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Mix together all marinade ingredients. 

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

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

    Serve in sandwiches or with rice. 

 

5 from 1 vote
Print

Rebecca's chicken bacon pie

Ingredients

  • double recipe of pie crust
  • 1 pound bacon, diced
  • 4 ribs celery, diced OR one big bunch of leeks, diced
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 1 bunch thyme, finely chopped
  • 3 chicken breasts, diced
  • 2-3 potatoes, peeled and diced
  • 6 Tbsp butter
  • 6 Tbsp flour
  • 3 cups concentrated chicken broth (I use almost double the amount of bouillon to make this)
  • 2 Tbsp pepper
  • egg yolk for brushing on top crust

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 425.

  2. In a large pan, cook the bacon pieces until they are browned. Take the cooked bacon out and pour off most of the grease.

  3. Add the onion and celery to the remaining bacon grease and cook, stirring, until soft. Return the bacon to the pan.

  4. Add the thyme, pepper, and butter and cook until butter is melted. Add the flour and whisk, cooking for another few minutes.

  5. Whisk in the chicken broth and continue cooking for a few more minutes until it thickens up. Stir in the chicken and potato and keep warm, stirring occasionally, until you're ready to use it.

  6. Pour filling into bottom crust, cover with top crust, brush with beaten egg. Bake, uncovered, for about an hour. If it is browning too quickly, cover loosely with tin foil.

5 from 1 vote
Print

Basic pie crust

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Print

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

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

Ingredients

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

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

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

Instructions

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

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

    Add them to the brine so they are submerged.

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

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 423: A week of winging it

Happy Friday! I remember the days when I used to huddle on the toilet with my laptop, getting as much writing done as I could while the kids were occupied in the bath. Now my kids are older, my time is more and more my own, and I’m sitting here drying off from the incredibly rowdy sink bath I just gave the ducklings, trying to get some writing in before, I don’t know what, the end of the month, or the end of the world. 

The whole week has been something of a rowdy sink bath, which I guess means it got the job done, but it wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing that would make people want to eat in my kitchen.

Actually I ended up with some pretty tasty meals, considering the lack of planning. And the surfeit of ducks. 

Here’s what we had:

SATURDAY
Aldi pizza

Damien is slowly recovering, but he’s been SO sick with bronchitis, and dang, that man does a lot around the house. Which I try to notice when he’s doing it, but I REALLY notice it when he’s not doing it. So I made the executive decision to skip the dump run this week and just do the Walmart shopping, and then we went to Moe’s college graduation! Summa cum laude, with a special award in literature!

The speakers were truly terrible (Jodi Picoult, who basically just bragged about how some people couldn’t handle it when she wrote “erection” in one of her books, so thanks for that, Jodi), but we’re extremely proud of Moe. The next day he moved to his new apartment, and the next day, he started his new job as youth librarian at a public library! But on Saturday, we went and got yummy Chinese food with the graduate, and the kids at home had Aldi pizza.

SUNDAY
Burgers, chips

Sunday was Mother’s Day, Damien (still quite sick!) was rushing to finish fixing Moe’s brakes, and the kids were helping him move, so I had a very satisfying afternoon uprooting some chokecherry trees that were threatening a baby lilac

and then we had a tasty meal of burgers and chips, with coconut custard pie for dessert. 

Yeah man. Nothing like a burger after yard work. Like I said on Facebook, the kids gave me truly excellent presents, not least of which was seeing everybody pitching in to help each other out because they love each other. 

 

Good stuff. Good kids. Good day. 

MONDAY
Pasta with spicy spinach sausage sauce (?)

I went shopping again on Monday and picked up a little food without a clear plan. Got home and made a sauce with what we had.

I squeezed about a pound of hot Italian sausage out of its casings and browned that up, then added some diced onion and a lot of roughly-chopped garlic. Then I added oregano, a lot of paprika, and a little cayenne pepper, a can of pureed tomatoes and a can of crushed tomato and a big slosh of red wine, and then I cooked in a big bag of baby spinach until it was all cooked down.

I mixed it up with a few pounds of cooked penne, and served it with freshly-grated parmesan on top. I wasn’t really sure if people would like it, even though it smelled fantastic, so I made four big loaves of french bread. 

Here’s my recipe for that:

Jump to Recipe

I proofed the dough in the slow cooker set to “keep warm,” and it came out super puffy, which is fine with me.

People scoff at puffy fluffy American-style bread, but you know what? It is puffy and fluffy, and some people are into that! You know, one time someone referred to me as “that great whale of a woman,” and it really stuck in my head. I guess I have a certain sympathy for sort of loosely-shaped, warm and blobby creations, be they whales or women or loaves of bread. Or be they whatever.

Anyway, it was a nice meal, although a little spicier than I meant it to be.

I did like the combination of the paprika and the spinach. I started abruptly loving spinach during my first pregnancy, and I have never looked back. 

TUESDAY
Spicy chicken sandwiches, chopped salad

I had a bunch of chicken thighs and decided it would be worth my while to skin and bone them to make these wonderful sandwiches, so I prepped that before we had to get a kid to not one but two medical appointments. Which turned out to be mighty frustrating, so I was glad we had a delicious supper.

The recipe calls for whole shishito peppers, but I had a bunch of red, orange, and yellow bell peppers instead, so I just cut them into big slabs, browned them up a bit in the seasoned oil that the chicken had cooked it, and then finished them under the broiler. 

Isn’t that beautiful?

The sandwiches were tasty as always. I used Tony Cachere’s seasoning on the chicken, and I guess some kind of bulky rolls, and we had the roast peppers, raw red onion, melted American cheese, and BBQ sauce. 

One of my all-time favorite sandwiches. 

I had a couple of bags of some kind of Southwestern chopped salad kits that were on sale that I kept forgetting to serve last week, and they turned out to be kind of a coleslaw-style mix of chopped cabbages, with crunchy tortilla strips and some sort of shredded cheese, and I guess chipotle dressing. They were fine. 

WEDNESDAY
Sausage potato asparagus soup, french toast casserole

Wednesday I had a bit of a dilemma: I had to make supper, and yet I had not gone shopping for supper, and the only reason a moth didn’t fly out of my wallet was because I couldn’t find my purse. So I mooched around the kitchen a bit and found: Sausage I bought for pasta but didn’t cook, some very old potatoes, an old onion, and some more asparagus from the garden,

and a leftover loaf of fluffy puffy french bread. And a stray pouch of instant mashed potatoes. And a lot of duck eggs, of course. This felt PLAUSIBLE.

It wasn’t exactly soup weather, but it’s not hot yet, either, so I settled on soup. 

I browned up the sausages and cut them into coins, then added some butter and threw in a bunch of garlic and diced onion and cooked that until it was soft. Then I fixed the mashed potatoes with milk, rather than water, plus extra milk, and added that, plus a bunch of chicken broth and a lot of pepper. Then I threw in the potatoes and the asparagus (chopped into pieces), and kept it simmering until the potatoes and asparagus were soft. 

Really very fine soup! Hearty and full of flavor, and the asparagus made a nice herby counterpart to the spicy sausage, and added some good texture, too.

I knew the kids weren’t gonna go for it, and they also don’t like duck eggs that are identifiable as eggs — i.e., they will eat them baked into things, but not scrambled or fried or as omelettes. So I tore up the french bread

and made a french toast casserole with milk and duck eggs, vanilla and sugar, with butter dotted on top, and more sugar and some cinnamon. Baked until firm. (Actually I baked until the top was firm but the inside was still a bit gooshy, so we just popped it in the meekrowahvay. 

All good! We got home quite late on Wednesday, because a kid needed a prom outfit, which we miraculously found at the Salvation Army. Well, it’s maybe less of a miracle and more of a situation where the kid has a very specific style, which perhaps I cultivated in her by shopping a lot at the Salvation Army, and also she’s a bit of a weirdo. Anyway, I really liked the soup. 

I cut up the potatoes that were too sprouty even for soup, and set them to dry so I could plant them the next day. I also saved out the sprouting eyes I cut out of the firmer potatoes, and I planted those, too, plus another sprouting onion I found. I’m not sure what-all will come up. We will see!

THURSDAY
Roast pork ribs, corn on the cob

Thursday I did a ton of gardening. I carted around so much compost, and I got my pumpkin seeds and corn and potatoes planted, and I repaired and added a bunch of fencing. 

The fence is constructed more or less in the same way as I put meals together this week: It may not be pretty, but it does the trick (in this case, the trick of keeping hungry ducks and wild rabbits out). I also confirmed that I have THREE peach seedlings growing! Last fall we extracted the seeds from inside the peach pits from my tree and planted six of them in pots in the ground, so I’m really happy with this. I have been keeping an eye out to see if any of the HUNDREDS of peach pits that fell to the ground had sprouted spontaneously, and they haven’t! I guess they’re like the ducks: They can probably manage to reproduce on their own under the right conditions, but a little help comes in handy. 

Then I had a medical appointment I was kind of dreading, but it went better than expected, and then I charged into the supermarket on the way home and brought home a truly random assortment of foods that I thought could be served quickly.  Thursday ended up with a pretty coherent meal: Roast pork ribs (salt and pepper them heavily, put them on a pan with drainage right up under a hot broiler, and flip them once) with BBQ sauce, corn on the cob, and salt and vinegar chips. 

Maybe not the most nutritionally balanced meal known to mankind, but it took about 20 minutes to throw together. Really sweet corn, yum. 

FRIDAY
I don’t really know

What I have is frozen shrimp that was on sale, and some cucumbers. I always think that surely, surely the kids must secretly like shrimp, because who doesn’t like shrimp? But they really just don’t. Damien is also neutral on shrimp at best. I think I might saute shrimp for myself and cook rice in chicken broth to pacify the kids, and they can have ramen or peanut butter or whatever. And cucumbers!

It’s a half day because of Teacher Appreciation Week, so I gotta change out of these wet duck bath clothes and run and get the kids and pick up a present for a kid’s friend, and then we have, you’ll never guess, a medical appointment, and Damien is gonna cover adoration while I take the kid to that, and then he will pick up the other kids who have a full day because nobody appreciates their teachers. I feel pretty strongly that I am forgetting something, but I guess it will just have to be a surprise! 

Tomorrow I gotta go shopping, and we gotta get caught up on the dump, and I gotta go to confession, and Lucy is going to the prom, and Corrie is going to a birthday party, and then Damien and I are seeing Stephen Malkmus! Lena gave him two tickets and he asked me out on a date, and I said yes even before I remembered I had a bunch of coupons for free frosties at Wendy’s. So, quite a Saturday for the Fishers. I may or may not be driving to Rhode Island on Sunday. 

And that’s-a my story! If you’re a teacher, I appreciate you, even if I didn’t even briefly consider signing up to bring in finger sandwiches or mini cupcakes. 

Print

French bread

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

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 420: Get your veils ready

You may notice that today’s Vol. is 420. I was gonna make a pot joke, but, much like people who smoke a lot of pot, those tend to be lame. I decided instead to stay classy and stick with my usual highbrow humor involving dog balls. 

Well, happy Friday WITH MEAT. This is a whole week of Sundays, liturgically speaking, and I can’t say that we rested a lot, but we certainly ate well! Here’s what we had this week:

SATURDAY
Passover seder food

I’ve been wrestling with various things, and so this is the year we decided we were going to have Passover on its actual date, rather than on Holy Saturday. So I looked it up and found that the last day of Passover WAS on Holy Saturday. I took this as a little ass-pat from God, signaling that it’s ok to do our best to honor both my Jewish heritage and our Catholic faith this way, and we were going to have a nice, gradual transition into peeling them apart next time. THEN I realized that people generally have their seders on the first or second day of Passover, and not the last day. Oh well! Next year. (If you didn’t follow that, don’t worry about it. It’s just me fretting.) 

So I spent most of Holy Week cooking and baking. We did manage to do Stations of the Cross a few times this Lent, and got to confession, and on Friday I printed out an at-home Tenebrae service, collated and stapled a packet for everyone, located seven candles, and then took a three-hour nap instead. Which is just as well, because even with older kids, getting ready for Passover and the Easter Vigil on the same day is a LOT. 

Here’s the table, ready for the ceremonial part of the seder:

Elijah did a huge part of leading the seder this year, and he did a wonderful job. It was lovely.

Everyone loves the seder. It is such a gift. 

Then it was time to eat!

The menu is: Chicken soup with matzoh balls,

gefilte fish,

chopped liver,

spinach pie,

cinnamon garlic chicken, roast lamb,

and charoset;

and for dessert, store-bought macaroons, chocolate-covered jelly rings, jelly fruit slices, chocolate-covered coconut, and pistachio halvah; and I made a lemon sponge cake and chocolate-covered matzoh caramel crunch.

The recipes for everything I made are on this page, except for the sponge cake. I followed this recipe from Cinnamon Schtick, except that I forgot to add the lemon juice and orange juice; so instead, I simmered up the juice with a bunch of sugar and made a citrus syrup, and then I poked lots of holes in the cake and drizzled the syrup over it before wrapping it up for later. 

It was GREAT. I rushed taking it out of the pan, so I broke it, but that was okay because it gets cut up anyway. I think I will do it that way from now on, with the syrup drizzle. 

So, then, after everyone ate as much as they could manage, we rested up a bit and then cleared things up a bit, and Damien did a first load of dishes, and then we got dressed for the Easter Vigil! We are extremely photogenic and our house looks really nice right now!

Without naming names, the one for whom lack of sleep would have been most disastrous did sleep through most of it,

which is a good thing because it was three hours long. Gorgeous liturgy, beeswax candles, glorious music, lots of adult baptisms and confirmations. Wonderful. Exhausting. Wonderful. 

Moved the easter baskets to the dining room and conked the heck out. 

SUNDAY
Leftovers

Leftovers, of course. The best leftovers of the year.

Plus of course Easter candy. 

Later in the day, I boiled a few dozen eggs, and we colored them outside, because it suddenly got warm, finally!

 

We blew a few duck eggs and I dyed one with feathers, which are, of course, waterproof. Might make it into a Christmas ornament at some later date. 

MONDAY
Buffalo chicken wraps, cheez balls

Monday I very reluctantly dragged myself off shopping. It was hard to feel the urgency about bringing yet more food into the house, but we really did need to eat dinner.

I always get a little riled at how expensive frozen buffalo chicken is, so I got a bunch of cheap frozen chicken fingers and cooked them, then covered them in buffalo sauce (melted butter, a little honey, and a bunch of hot sauce) and cooked them some more. 

We had wraps made with tortillas, ranch or blue cheese dressing, shredded pepper jack cheese, shredded lettuce, and crunchy fried onions. 

The buffalo chicken was . . . okay. I guess it needs to be batter fried, rather than breaded, in order to taste like store-bought buffalo chicken. The flavor was fine and I was so hungry, they actually tasted great to me, but the kids were less enthusiastic. 

Monday was a fairly exciting day because I forgot to tell you that, on Sunday night, as we were drifting off to sleep after that lonnnnnnnnng weekend, the smoke alarm went off. Turned out to be the lint in the dryer! Some things had come apart and the lint was everywhere and was smoking! So, but we did not burn up, hooray smoke alarm!

However, on Monday, Damien had to work on the dryer. The laundry room is a TIGHT SQUEEZE, and when he moved the dryer, the sink got knocked out of the wall, and the pipe broke and started spurting water everywhere, which tripped a fuse and put the power out. The cat chose this moment to nab a mouse and start dashing around the house with the squealing victim in his mouth, and the dog, of course, elected the follow the cat around, because he really needed to know what the cat’s butt smelled like right then. 

We’re just gonna draw a veil over the next forty minutes or so, but the upshot is that Damien fixed everything and threw the mouse outside and the dog found out the information he needed and now everything is fine, amen. For my part, I supplied stifled giggling throughout. 

TUESDAY
Muffalettish sandwiches with homemade cheese, Doritos, vegetable platter

Tuesday, Corrie suddenly remembered that I promised I would start on her treehouse over vacation, and here it was Tuesday already. So to the hideout we went, and honestly, we’re going to have to draw another veil over the part where we finally agreed on which tree it would be, but I have to admit, she picked a really good tree. 

I had bought a used copy of Tree Houses You Can Actually Build, but it turned out it was a book we couldn’t actually manage not to lose, so I found a kid whose library card hasn’t been suspended and sent her in with a sticky note with the title on it, and now we have another copy of the book! 

Then I remembered I was planning to make cheese for supper, so I did that, but I was super distracted, and something went a little amiss. It actually tasted fine — very light and pleasant in flavor — but it was quite grainy and kind of unsightly.

However, I was on a roll, so once the cheese was done I zooped off to Home Depot and bought eight pressure treated 2×6 boards and a dozen lag bolts. I had set aside some cash for the Sunroom Which Is Not To Be, so I figured I would invest a little into making the frame for the treehouse really strong with new materials, and then we can just bash the rest of it together with whatever crap we have lying around. There’s not a metaphor there; you’re wasting your time. Just keep scrolling. 

So then we had sandwiches for supper. I can’t really call them muffaletta sandwiches, but they were tasty. I made an olive salad with green and black olives, banana peppers, parsley, olive oil, and red wine vinegar, and I sliced up some baguettes and we piled on sandwich pepperoni, hard salami, mortadella, and ham, and the shaggy mozzarella I had made. 

Actually quite a good sandwich, and I sure was starving by dinner time. 

WEDNESDAY
Oven fried chicken, baked potatoes, corn on the cob

Wednesday, I prepped the chicken and also made a marinade for Thursday’s meal and got that meat marinating, and then I started right in building! And almost immediately realized that I really can’t do this myself, REALLY. I could, with great effort, trundle the wood onto the site, but that was as far as I got. So I trimmed the boards down to seven feet and then realized I needed to go to, NO, NOT Home Depot. Harbor Freight, which is Home Depot for losers. I got a drill bit that’s 75% the size of the lag bolts I want to put in, and I bought a pack of ten phillips head drill bits, because I’m an unreformed loser of drill bits. And I can’t be alone, or why else would they sell them in packs of ten? 

So it was QUITE a bit more of a struggle than I expected, but we finally got one board up in the tree, nice and centered and leveled. We just screwed it into place, to be drilled and bolted later.

Check it out: A Level Board Up In A Tree. 

It is going to be a seven-foot square platform with the tree in the center 

with a railing around the outside, and no walls but a tall post in each corner holding up a slanted, transparent plastic roof. She wants a rope ladder so she can pull it up after herself, and nobody is arguing with that. 

In the afternoon, I threw some potatoes in the oven, dredged the chicken in seasoned flour and got that cooking, zooped off to drop off Corrie for a sleepover, came home, turned the chicken and started the corn boiling, and we had a very delicious, summery meal. 

Oh, here is my recipe for oven-fried chicken. 

Jump to Recipe

The weird thing was, Sophia, Lucy, and Irene had left for a concert in Boston, and Corrie was away with her pal, so it was just a little bitty family of five at home. Naturally, I had cooked for twelve. Luckily, Clara stopped by, so I foisted some chicken on her. Lena also came by, but escaped chickenless. 

THURSDAY
Pork gyros with spicy fries and homemade pita

Thursday I had a neat interview in the morning, and then in the afternoon, Damien and I put up a second treehouse board. I guess I was thinking that the first board would be the hardest one, because it was, I don’t know, the first one.

But it turns out the second one is actually harder because . . . .you have to make it not only level in itself, but level with the first one, and flush on the ends, and also you are screwing it to a tree which is guess what? Round! And also, the world’s greatest tree house tree happens to be growing out of the side of the stream bank, so there isn’t actually anywhere to stand, per se. And I guess I assumed that all drill bits are magnetic so they don’t just randomly fall out of the drill, but guess what? They are not! And they do1

If you have any veils left, it wouldn’t hurt to draw it over the struggle we had with multiple levels, multiple pencil lines, multiple pencils, and of course multiple drill bits which are now presumably a few miles downstream.

But we got that mofo in, and it is level in every direction, and flush. And thorough!

Then we had to both get back to our actual paying jobs, and then I had to make supper. 

LUCKILY, as I mentioned, I had genius-ly started the pork marinating the night before, and I also had made some garlicky yogurt sauce.

Jump to Recipe

So in the afternoon, first I made some pita bread. I cannot even imagine what made me decide to try a new recipe at this time of day on this kind of day, but that is what I did. I made a double batch of this recipe from King Arthur Flour and it was not that great! 

Truth be told, I was rushing the teeniest bit, so I probably made multiple mistakes, so it’s probably not the recipe’s fault. It wasn’t terrible, it was just not the puffiest pita known to mankind. 

(This is obviously the underside of the pitas; the topsides were a little bit puffy.)

The meat, however. Oh.

I had a semi-boneless pork butt, and I had cut it into sort of thick, flat slabs, and then I scored them deeply, like I was cutting a mango out of its skin, and that’s how I marinated the meat. I was planning to broil it in the oven, but I forgot I would be needing the oven for french fries. So I just seared the hell out of the meat in frying pans. I had three slabs about this size:

When they were deeply browned and a little charred on both sides, I hacked it into pieces with some kitchen scissors and continued cooking it until it was cooked through, letting it absorb plenty of the juice and marinade. 

So we had warm pita, yogurt sauce, tomatoes, feta, spicy fries, and some very saucy, juicy pork, and some hot sauce on top. Too messy to really assemble into a gyro, but DANG. It was delicious, and so juicy. 

Just the best thing I’ve eaten in a long, long while. I hope I can recreate the marinade. I started with a recipe, but it didn’t taste like much, so I added a bunch of stuff. Here’s the best I can remember: 

Jump to Recipe

Although I wonder if there was some lemon juice in there. Anyway, they were the best gyros I’ve ever made. 

FRIDAY
Burgers, chips

And we’re wrapping up Meatster Week with hamburgers, which have become something of a luxury item.

I have one last picture on my camera roll for the week, and I don’t remember which day this was, but it’s proof that I did get a few workouts in

A lot of yoga is about subtle things, like how you place your feet or where you turn your gaze. And sometimes Sonny really helps me with that. What a gentleman. 

One last veil for the dog balls, folks. You know what to do. 

 

Print

Oven-fried chicken

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Print

pork gyros marinade (non-tomato)

Ingredients

  • 1 cup olive oil
  • 1/4 cup white wine vinegar
  • 2 Tbs honey
  • 2 Tbs sumac
  • 3 Tbs paprika
  • 3 Tbs garlic powder
  • 3 Tbs onion powder
Print

Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 415: O bagels! O fortuna!

And a happy Friday to you! It was all fortuna, no tuna, this week. Just now I changed out of my pajama pants into my yoga pants, and I’m working in bed. I am grounded for the day because Damien got up revoltingly early to drive the girls to the train station, whence they (including Damien) are headed into NYC to see famous J-Hope’s famous solo concert; and they are spending the night. But while we were on our way to school, the universe, sensing that my husband was out of town, playfully lit up all the lights on my dashboard 

I’m no expert, but I interpreted this as “turn around and go home,” so I tried to, but the car started losing power, so I turned on the hazards and tried to go to the mechanic, but it died at the fence company which is just down the road from the mechanic and also from our house and which, in fact, GPS claims IS our house. Like Instacart will send groceries there and everything, unless I make a really big fuss.

So Damien called AAA from the train in NY and I called Elijah at home, who is driving Damien’s car because his car is broken and Damien drove Sophia’s car to the train station, and I emailed the schools and said we were having a Fisher Flop-out, and I begged for an adoration substitute, and eventually everyone got where they belonged, but not before I vented a little emotion at the poor tow truck driver, and expressed how frustrating it was to break down so close to the mechanic. I said I considered pushing my car, but seeing as it was uphill, I didn’t think I would make it; and he said, and I quote, “Pawbly nawt.” 

But I’m on a gratitude kick lately, so I thanked God that I had remembered my phone (which I forget about half the time), that it wasn’t horribly cold out, that we had AAA, and that Elijah was home so he could rescue us, and that I had decided to change out of my robe and into a jacket this morning, so when the fence guy came out to find out why we were parked there, I only looked like a partial nutcase. (On the fact that I was still wearing my fuzzy pink flowered pajama pants, I was prayerfully nuetral.)

Anyway, poor old lady. Off she goes. 

It may be the alternator. But it may just be the battery! Pawbly it’s the battery. 

Well, here’s what we ate this week. And please note, we’re not really great at eating simply and frugally for Lent. We have other skills, like accumulating cars. We now have six cars parked in front of the house most days, and you’d think that would mean we always have a way to get where we need to be!

AND YET. 

SATURDAY
Lasagna, cannoli dip

On Friday night, Damien made a stupendous lasagna, following this labor intensive but incredibly rewarding recipe from Deadspin. Look at this gorgeous beast. 

He also made a mini lasagna for Millie. 

(It’s not actually as tiny as it looks here!) The lasagna was a delayed birthday dinner for Elijah. SO GOOD. 

and let me tell you, I made an attempt to calculate the calories for this thing, but my phone started shaking and sweating, so I just called it a day. 

Eljah requested cannoli for dessert. Actually he requested Cosmic Brownies, but I said he could aim a little higher for his 21st birthday dessert. (Recall he had a cake last week, on his actual birthday.) Then I couldn’t find cannoli shells anywhere in town, so I got cannoli chips, ricotta cheese, AND cosmic brownies. (This is important later.)

I blended together what cream cheese I could find, a bunch of ricotta, a bunch of powdered sugar, and some almond extract, and served that in ramekins with the cannoli chips, along with maraschino cherries and rainbow sprinkles. I swear I took a picture, because I arranged it nice and fancy-like, but it has vanished. 

SUNDAY
Leftovers featuring lasagna; taquitos 

Sunday we had probably half the lasagna still left over, so that was the star of the show. I also bought frozen taquitos and the served a few leftovers, but mainly we were all there for Lasagna, Continued. 

I brought Millie’s lasagna over and she gave me a bowl of bread pudding with raisins in it.

It tasted exactly like the bread pudding my mother used to make, and I haven’t tasted it since I was a kid. This gave Millie much delight, and me too! It happens that this is a few days after the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death, so if you think of it, please send up a prayer for her. With raisins!

In the afternoon, on a whim, I decided to make bagels. I have only tried making bagels once before, and I grievously misread how much water to use when boiling them, so they turned out pretty rough. But I did get from that day one of my favorite pictures ever: 

Just . . . look at us. The chair with the back broken off. The laundry basket full of pots and pans. Something that appears to be an inflatable foil rocket on the floor. And the toddler who is having the BEST DAY OF HER LIFE, AGAIN. It just needs a chunky couple making out in the corner and a dog furtively lapping out of a mug of beer, and it could be one of those Flemish peasant paintings where people are doing whatever the hell they want. 

This batch of bagels, we didn’t have QUITE that much fun with, but they turned out somewhat better. We followed the King Arthur Baking recipe, except I had light brown sugar instead of dark. You make the dough, let it rise for 90 minutes, cut it into lumps, 

let those lumps rest for half an hour,

and then shape the bagels and boil them,

add toppings, and then bake them.

Benny helped me shape the bagels, which you do by rolling the dough into a ball, poking your finger through the center, and then twirling them around in the air. We quickly learned that it is possible to twirl them too long, and/or too violently! Luckily, the floor is spotless. Just kidding, we threw that one away.

We made a double recipe and made sixteen (well, fifteen) bagels, poppy seed, sesame seed, plain, and salt. 

They were not as puffy as I would have liked — hard to imagine slicing these to make a sandwich! —

— but still pretty great piping hot from the oven. I love doing a little baking on a Sunday afternoon.

You can see they were fairly flat, but the texture inside and out was great, and everybody liked them and said I should make them again. Not sure how to make them puffier. Any ideas? 

MONDAY
Kielbasa, potato, brussels sprouts sheet pan dinner, oatmeal bread

For supper, we had an easy peasy one pan dish with red potatoes, brussels sprouts, and kielbasa. I cooked it halfway, then drizzled it with a sauce made of honey, mustard, minced garlic, and red wine vinegar, and finished cooking it. This is two pans’ worth heaped into one pan:

This looks faintly Flemish, too, come to think of it. 

I usually just serve one-pan dish on its own, but for some reason I felt it really needed a side dish, so I made this quick oat bread, which I chose because it was simple, but which you could make if you’re looking for gluten-free recipes (it uses ground-up oats instead of flour). It was . . . fine. 

I undercooked it (the missing chunk in the middle is where I cut a piece to see if it was done), but for some reason decided to finish it in the microwave instead of the oven., which . . . worked . . . but there is a reason people don’t do that. But I don’t know how much better it would have been if I had baked it properly. Pawbly would have been decent with some butter or jam on it. 

Honestly, I look back on this week and it’s like watching an old home movie, and you watch your past self careening around and you’re like, “oh, wow, look how crazy and silly we were back then!” Except this was four days ago. I’m not complaining! It’s been so beautiful out, with a thaw every day, and I’ve been getting fresh air and feeling pretty lighthearted, actually.

But I’m not being . . . streamlined, in my activities. Not streamlined at all. 

Anyway, you really can’t argue with hot fresh bread, and it was a decent meal. 

Monday is also the day we discovered we had several desserts in the house. See, usually we have dessert on Saturday and Sunday, but in Lent, we just have it on Sunday, and spend the extra money bumping up the food pantry donation. But we got confused and bought two desserts for the weekend, and then we realized Elijah needed a birthday dessert, and then I also bought those previously mentioned Cosmic Brownies as a birthday bonus. And then we forgot to eat them. So there we were on a Monday with Klondike Bars, some kind of ice cream things, and Cosmic Brownies in the house, in Lent. 

So I told the kids if they could come up with a liturgically plausible reason, we could just eat it anyway. So Lucy looked up some saint that starts with a C, I forget who, and then they ate Klondike Bars. It’s called the Domestic Liturgical Living and it has ice cream in it. 

TUESDAY
Vermonter sandwiches, fries

Everybody likes Vermonter sandwiches! Roast chicken breast, thick slices of sharp cheddar cheese, sliced green apple, bacon, and honey mustard dressing. The kids like this on ciabatta rolls, but they didn’t have any, so we had sourdough bread. You can see I was in a bit of a hurry because I was so hungry, so I kind of clobbered mine together, and also skimped on the honey mustard, sadly.

A tasty freaking sandwich. 

Then, incredibly enough, it was St. Seraphina’s day or something. Here is Benny, making the case. 

So obviously they had ice cream cones. 

WEDNESDAY
Gochujang pork ribs, rice, sesame broccoli 

I knew Wednesday was going to be a busy day, so I actually got those pork ribs marinating on Tuesday; and then in the morning on Wednesday I cut up the broccoli and set up the rice in the Instant Pot. So Wednesday afternoon, I got home late and just pushed the rice button, started the ribs roasting, and threw the broccoli in the oven right at the end, and everything finished cooking at the same time. Just about every other single thing in my life is out of control, but gosh darn it, I know how to plan a meal. 

The ribs were marinated in gochujang, honey, brown sugar (why both? I forget), roughly chopped garlic, and soy sauce. The broccoli was soy sauce, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. Good freaking meal. 

Wednesday evening, Irene pointed out it was the one-week anniversary of Ash Wednesday, so we had Cosmic Brownies. Listen. It’s a fine balance. 

THURSDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, raw veg

Thursday I took Millie to the eye doctor and the DMV so she could get her license renewed. She is 92 and not the worst driver I’ve encountered, not by a long shot. The worst driver I’ve encountered is from Massachusetts. Really just anyone from Massachusetts. 

I had made some kind of mistake when buying bread, and we only had a little sourdough, so I made half the sandwiches with sourdough and half with regular sandwich bread, and then also I used pre-sliced Aldi provolone, forgetting that that ish just does. not. melt.

So they were not the world’s greatest sandwiches, but friend-os, when you are counting calories and it is dinner time, even the worlds not-greatest sandwich tastes pretty freaking good. Also, pickles don’t count. Have some pickles!

I also made a big vegetable platter which I don’t think anyone even touched. 

It looks pretty good to me right now, though. Do I recommend processing a bunch of food photos on a Friday in Lent? Not really! Well, it depends what your goals are, I guess. 

Thursday night I more or less finished a captive ball carving. I didn’t make measurements or anything, but just winged it, so the “ball” is pretty blobby-shaped, but the kids were impressed anyway. It makes a pleasant “slock-slock” noise when it slides back and forth. I cut myself three times and had to sand a blood stain off part of it, so you could say the whole carving thing is going pretty well. 

FRIDAY
Pancakes? 

Damien, Sophia, and Lucy, as I mentioned, are off living the high life (?) in New York and won’t be back until late Saturday, so I figured no one could stop me from making pancakes for supper. I guess maybe I could make waffles.

The timing is a little silly because I don’t have any good maple syrup in the house, but I hope to later this weekend! Sonny and I have been collecting sap every afternoon and should have at least twelve gallons by Saturday, which should boil down to about a third of a gallon of syrup. Nights below freezing and days above freezing are when the changing barometric pressure really pushes the trees to start getting their sap flowing.

This is five gallons of sap:

It tastes like water, but you can discern the sugar if you focus! 

Damien dragged his old wood stove out of his office for me before he left

and yesterday, on the way to pick up the kids from school, someone had put three pots on the side of the road with a “free” sign. Really BIG pots, all with lids! Note the seltzer can for scale. 

So they just need a good scrubbing and I’ll probably use the smaller two for boiling sap. I am not sure what the biggest one with the heavy duty spigot was used for. Any ideas? I’m thinking of turning it into a heated water dispenser for the ducks, but I haven’t decided yet. 

In closing, yes, Corrie fits inside the big pot

and yes, she still looks like Baby Hermes. 

Well, goodbye! 

 

Print

One-pan kielbasa, cabbage, and red potato dinner with mustard sauce

This meal has all the fun and salt of a wiener cookout, but it's a tiny bit fancier, and you can legit eat it in the winter. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 lbs kielbasa
  • 3-4 lbs red potatoes
  • 1-2 medium cabbages
  • (optional) parsley for garnish
  • salt and pepper and olive oil

mustard sauce (sorry, I make this different each time):

  • mustard
  • red wine if you like
  • honey
  • a little olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • fresh garlic, crushed

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400. 

    Whisk together the mustard dressing ingredients and set aside. Chop parsley (optional).

    Cut the kielbasa into thick coins and the potatoes into thick coins or small wedges. Mix them up with olive oil, salt, and pepper and spread them in a shallow pan. 

    Cut the cabbage into "steaks." Push the kielbasa and potatoes aside to make room to lay the cabbage down. Brush the cabbage with more olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. It should be a single layer of food, and not too crowded, so it will brown well. 

    Roast for 20 minutes, then turn the food as well as you can and roast for another 15 minutes.  

    Serve hot with dressing and parsley for a garnish. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 411: You can’t fufu all the people all the time

Happy Friday! The star of my week was MY NEW FRYING PAN. I love this thing. I wish it had two “helper handles” rather than one long one and one helper, but other than that, it’s everything I wanted. Tons of frying space, even heat transmission, high walls, and you can just scrub it clean with no rigamarole. Always Avoid Rigamarole, Guys; that’s my motto. AARG. 

I’ve also been enjoying the paring knife I ordered to bump up my purchase to get free shipping. Feeling very fancy in the kitchen these days. 

Here’s what we ate this week. Well, starting with last week, because it got a li’l weird:

FRIDAY
Seared lemon basil scallops on coconut rice, spicy fried eggplant, and stuffed clams 

One of my earliest memories is going to a potluck in kindergarten and barely being able to see over the top of the table, and being absolutely bewildered and overwhelmed by the array of unfamiliar foods. I vaguely felt that I wasn’t allowed to take anything that I didn’t normally eat (I didn’t even recognize some of the utensils. SALAD TONGS, what??), so I got some baked beans and brought them back to my seat. I was actually fine with this, because I knew what beans were and I liked them! But a mom came over and clucked at me for just getting beans, and loaded up my plate with a bunch of other stuff. I don’t remember what, but the important thing was that someone else was in charge. 

 Anyway, now I am fifty years old, and when I am in charge, I tend to make a bewildering array of unfamiliar foods myself. I enjoy this, but I would also enjoy a plate full of beans. 

So I seared the scallops sort of casting one eyeball at this recipe, and they turned out nice, only I used too much oil 

They do cook up fast, though, so if you happen to have some scallops, this is a very decent choice of preparation. Before I did that, I put some frozen stuffed clams in the oven, and also I fried a bunch of eggplant. 

Here’s my recipe for fried eggplant

Jump to Recipe

It’s good to start at least an hour before dinner, because you need to salt the eggplant to draw out the moisture, then dredge them in batter and fry them, and you don’t want to crowd the pan.

They’re SO GOOD, though. Totally worth it. The batter includes baking powder, so you get those crisp, knobbly, bubbles on the outside when they fry, and the inside is just melty tender. I wish I had made some yogurt sauce or maybe some kind of spicy tomato thing, but there were no complaints.

I heated up the coconut rice from last week’s Thai meal and served it with the scallops, rather than saving it for Leftover Day on Saturday, because I knew the kids weren’t crazy about it, and I was. 

So it was a bit of a weird meal, but undeniably tasty. 

The other kids were eating pizza at the library (which is what inspired me to make a Grownup Meal), but Corrie was home, and didn’t want any of the foods I cooked, so I took the leftover eggplant batter and made a fried Corrie.

And I do believe this is what she ate for dinner. 

SATURDAY
Leftover Buffet, french bread pizza

A little spaghetti carbonara, a little Thai chicken, and this and that. 

I forgot to tell the kids to save the leftover leftover ham, though. Oops. 

SUNDAY
Italian sandwiches, fries

Sunday after Mass, I did something I’ve been hyping myself up to do for weeks: I cleared off the landing. For a while, it was the bedroom of a kid who would rather sleep on the landing than share a room with siblings; and then, predictably, it became a dumping area.

Corrie and I set to work (she owes me money for a book order, and she doesn’t mind being a runner for cleaning projects, as long as someone else is in charge), and three hours and six trash bags later, it looked like this:

Instagram-worthy, no. Much much much much better, definitely. A spot for the Barbie Dream House, plus Corrie’s typewriter and sewing machine. 

I bought a bunch of cleaning products and I’ve been tackling various areas of the house one at a time, lately. Because it turns out that when I feel powerless and overwhelmed for . . . . reasons . . . . it helps an awful lot to clean something! You peek your head over the tabletop, see the news headlines, and are overwhelmed by the incomprehensible and unfamiliar chaos, and you think, “Well, I know one thing I can fix.” It helps! And it’s cheaper than heroin.

I knew I was going to be working on this cleaning project all day, so I planned sandwiches for supper. Looks like we had salami, capicola, prosciutto, provolone, basil, and oil and vinegar. I had bought some tomatoes, but the kids forgot to bring them in from the car, and they froze, so that was out, bleh. 

I did buy a jar of those pickled vegetables, giardiniera? and threw them in the food processor along with a can of black olives, a little olive oil, and some red wine vinegar, and made it into I guess a sandwich spread. I don’t know if there is a name for this, but I liked it. 

We also had fries. Always a popular meal.

Also on Sunday, I discovered that the part of the oven door that I thought was permanently black because the enamel had been burnt off, was actually just coated with burnt-on grease. So I’ve been scrubbing away at that. I just … want things clean. Cleaner. 

MONDAY
Omelettes, roast squash sticks(?), spinach

Monday I tackled the laundry room. I didn’t take a “before” picture, but it was a “there’s a floor here somewhere” situation. Another few bags of trash, and here is the “after.”

You can’t really see it, but I labelled all the shelves. But I did it in CHALK, which you can erase, because there are few things more depressing than tackling a chaotic mess and uncovering permanent but irrelevant labels you put on last time you organized it, back when you were young and still full of hope. Now I am old and full of chalk. But at least I know where my sheets are. 

Also on Monday I got a little bit mad about egg prices and decided we weren’t gonna get pushed around, so I made omelettes. Look, this is a food blog, not a “life choices that make perfect sense” blog. This is the meal I meant to save the ham for, but it got tossed (because the kids were following the rules I had made; can’t complain).

The kids tried to persuade me that deli turkey and raw onion is a normal thing to put in omelettes. IT’S NOT. That’s weird. But I was making omelettes to order, so that’s what they had. 

I myself had cheddar and spinach, which is a DELIGHT. 

As is my new pan! Have I mentioned my new pan? I really like it. 

Then I had a couple of butternut squashes which I cut into thin pieces and roasted, with olive oil, cardamom, brown sugar, and cayenne pepper. This didn’t actually work very well.

The flavor was good, but I think if you are going to cut squash into such thin pieces, it would need to be deep fried to make it crisp; and if you are going to oven roast it, you should cut it into chunks. Also it took FOREVER to cut the squash into such small pieces. 

Don’t get me wrong, I gobbled it up. It was just a little peculiar. I actually mixed it up with some leftover shredded spinach and it was pretty tasty. 

TUESDAY
Hamburgers, chips

I’m a little nervous about the future of ground beef in this country, so I decided we might as well have burgers while we can. A couple of the big kids were over, and we just had burgers and chips, easy peasy. Simple pimple. Pretend I didn’t say that. 

Tuesday I also tackled the infamous White Cabinet and Environs, which looked like this:

I remember buying this cabinet NEW, which was an incredibly splurgy purchase at the time. It was going to change my life and make everything orderly and pristine. And it did, for about eleven days. Then the shelves started falling out, and the frame got all crooked so you couldn’t put the shelves back in, and this is more or less how it’s looked ever since. It looks like it has shelves, but they randomly tip forward and disgorge their contents onto the floor, and then people stack random things on top of that. Which is not my FAVORITE. 

So on Wednesday, I got a saw and a drill and this plank of wood that’s been hanging around in the kitchen, sawed that up, and built a sort of interior frame under each shelf. Then I sorted everything and threw out three more bags of trash, and now it looks like this:

THE DOORS CLOSE. Obviously haven’t gotten up to the “and environs” part yet, and my floor looks how floors look in New Hampshire in February, so I’m not even gonna apologize for that. 

But look! Over three days later, and it hasn’t fallen apart inside yet. 

The kids are pretending to be enthusiastic about having a place for everything, and that’s good enough for me. And I found eleven pairs of scissors (not a made up number).

WEDNESDAY
Chinese pork, pineapple, crunchy rice rolls

Wednesday the plan was char siu, but I was fooling myself about being home at the right time of day to baste a roast pork. So I made a marinade and put it in the Instant Pot with the pork and set it for 22 minutes. 

I have actually done something similar, with pleasant results, on days when I have enough time to take the cooked pork out of the Instant Pot, cut it, and then simmer it on the stovetop with the sauce for half an hour or so, to give the sauce a chance to thicken up and coat the meat. 

Jump to Recipe

But it being Wednesday, I didn’t have time for that, so I just cut up the meat and served it with pineapple and crunchy rice rolls.  

Tasted fine. It did have that nice char siu flavor, even if it wasn’t all glossy and sticky and lovely. 

On Wednesday morning, I realized I had kind of painted myself into a corner with the menu. My original plan was to make injera on Thursday, and you are supposed to start that fermenting at least four days ahead of time. Obviously I didn’t do that. So what I did was prep all the stuff for Thursday’s dinner on Wednesday morning. I’m just basically riding some kind of wave of nervous energy here. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but I’m trying to put it to good use while it does.

I’ve also been doing some more wood carving in the evening. I like to listen to the wonderful show Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin in the evening and use that time to whittle. Here’s a couple of works in progress:

The first one is a hair ornament, and I think I just need to sand it a bit and stain it. The leaf, I don’t know what it is. It’s a thing that helps me sleep at night. 

Makes me remember it’s almost time to tap the trees, though!  I was telling the kids how, last fall, I went around identifying all the maple trees while they still had foliage, and tying orange cloth on them so I could find them in early spring. So Irene goes, “ohhhh, so I shouldn’t have been pulling those off all winter?” 

She was kidding. Pretty sure. I somehow ended up with ten kids who are constantly kidding. I am not sure how that happened. 

THURSDAY
Kuku paka, fufu, basmati rice, ube pudding

Thursday was a snow day, so I was delighted to realize I (a) had all the time in the world to cook and (b) had already done a lot of the hard part the day before. Behold, my mise en placing:

Clockwise, that’s onion; coriander, cumin, turmeric, and cayenne pepper; and ginger and garlic. 

Here is the recipe I was following, from my new best friend Recipe Tin Eats. 

You salt and pepper your chicken thighs and drumsticks and then brown them in oil. In your NEW PAN, if possible. 

Then you take the chicken out and fry up your onion, then ginger and garlic, then the spices, then add pureed tomatoes, coconut milk, and some kosher salt. Then you put the chicken back in and let it simmer. 

I let it simmer for about an hour, and then I moved it to the slow cooker for the rest of the day. 

My dears, it smelled incredible. As Nagi points out, this could easily be an Indian dish, but it is actually North African. So I thought it would be a great time to try  that Fufu mix I bought quite some time ago. 

I have never had fufu and struggled a bit to explain it to the kids. As far as I can tell, it’s a staple in Nigeria and Ghana (which I realize is West Africa. Look, I went to public school), and it’s good for filling you up when you don’t have a huge amount of meat, and it’s also good for sopping up sauce or juices. It’s made from starchy vegetables like cassava, yams, or plantains that you boil and then pound the hell out of in a giant mortar. Or, if you are me, it’s made out this white powder from a box:

I watched a few videos and concluded that nobody in this house has had fufu before, so I could basically do whatever I wanted. So I boiled a kettle of water and slowly added it to the powder while beating it viciously with a wooden spoon, until it became a very thick dough.

Then I added more water to the pot and let it cook for a little bit, and then I took the dough and formed it into balls. This was not easy, because for some reason, when I took it out of the boiling water, it was pretty hot. But somehow I managed. 

Fufu is supposed to be super smooth and free of lumps. OH WELL.  
I decided it would be wise to also make a big pot of rice! I made basmati rice (I rinsed the rice and put it in the pot with 1.5 cups of water for every cup of rice, brought it to a boil, then let it simmer for I think 18 minutes, and then turned off the heat, fluffed it, and let it sit for another ten minutes. Turned out great.)

So here’s the chicken curry after cooking in the slow cooker all day:

Dang, you guys. The meat was incredibly tender, and the sauce was MAGNIFICENT. So savory and warming and friendly and rich, but not too spicy. (I did cut the cayenne pepper in half, which Nagi suggested might be wise.) 

I had a thigh and a drumstick and it was such a filling meal, I didn’t even eat all of it, which is kind of. . . not how I usually act. 

The kids all tried the fufu, and nobody was crazy about it, which is understandable. I thought it was super good when you pull off pieces and roll it around in the sauce.

Probably not gonna make fufu again, but it was a fun experiment. I do want to order it in a restaurant at some point, to see how it’s supposed to taste! I will most definitely make this curry again, though. Damien and I really loved it. 

While I was hunting in the cabinets for the fufu mix, I found another little international impulse purchase, and it seemed like a reasonable time to use it. 

This is just basically instant pudding. You just add hot water, stir, and pour it into molds and let it set in the fridge for a few hours. 

We opted for PURPLE HEARTS OF UBE. 

I liked it! Tasted yammy. Again, no one else was crazy about it, but at least now we know. 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

The last few days were a bit challenging for the kids, so I decided to relent and serve Regular Old Spaghetti today, and they are glad. 

Oh, it turns out the plank of wood that was in the kitchen, that I sawed up to fix the white cabinet? That was a piece of Benny’s door frame that fell off. 

Look. One thing at a time. All one can do is try. 

Print

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

  1. 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. 

  2. Mix flour and seasonings in a bowl, add the water and teaspoon of oil, and beat into a batter. Preheat oven for warming. 

  3. Put oil in heavy pan and heat until it's hot but not smoking. Prepare a tray with paper towels.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.  

  6. Serve with yogurt sauce or marinara sauce.

 

Print

Quick Chinese "Roast" Pork Strips

If you have a hankering for those intensely flavorful strips of sweet, sticky Chinese roast pork but you don't want to use the oven for some reason, this works well, and you can have it in about an hour and a half, start to finish. You will need to use a pressure cooker and then finish it on the stovetop.

Ingredients

  • 4+ lbs pork roast

For sauce:

  • 3/4 cup soy sauce
  • 1/4 cup oyster sauce
  • 1/4 cup hoisin sauce
  • 1/4 cup mirin
  • 3/4 cup honey
  • 1 tsp white pepper
  • 2 tsp Chinese five spice

Instructions

  1. Blend all sauce ingredients together. Put the pork in the Instant Pot, pour the sauce over it, close the lid, close the valve, and set to high pressure for 22 minutes.

  2. When pork is done, vent. Remove pork and cut into strips, saving the sauce.

  3. Put the pork in a large sauté pan with the sauce and heat on medium high, stirring frequently, for half an hour or more, until sauce reduces and becomes thick and glossy and coats the meat.

What’s for supper? Vol. 410: You put the child in the coconut and eat it all up

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

SATURDAY
Leftover Buffet with frozen french bread pizza

Nothing to report, except that I finally broke down and ordered a new frying pan. I’ve had this 15″-inch paella pan from Aldi that I use constantly, because it’s so nice and big and I like how it has handles on both sides. 

But the metal is very thin (which is appropriate for a paella pan, but I almost never make paella), so it’s not great for frying; and I really cannot deny that we’ve been steadily eating little scraps of nonstick surface material pretty constantly for several years now. And it gets rusty if you don’t dry it after washing, which of course we don’t.  But it’s so big! And has handles!

So I bullied my money-loving heart into looking at a bunch of new pans and good used pans. Super hard to find a fifteen-inch frying pan, it turns out, except for cast iron, which I DON’T WANT. I know how to season them and I know how to cook with them. I just don’t want them, and I don’t have to explain myself! 

I settled on this fourteen-inch stainless steel one from Cuisinart, with a long handle and a short one. It cost five cents less than $40 you need to spend to get free shipping, so I also ordered a paring knife and used my new customer discount, so I got free shipping and a paring knife and a pan for less than the pan by itself. Yay!

Gosh, this is a boring story. Sorry. Anyway, that was Saturday. 

SUNDAY
Chicken caprese sandwiches, chips

Sunday I finally followed through on my dire warnings to the family (I really know how to market things) and forced everyone to sit down on Sunday afternoon and watch that 2021 Macbeth with Denzel Washington. Hoooooo boy, it was great! Absolutely wonderful. My eyes were bugging out half the time, and I gasped at least five times, and laughed several times, too, which is how Macbeth is supposed to be.

 

My only teeny tiny quibble is that the character of Macduff was not really anything special. You can do a lot with that role, and he really didn’t, unless I missed it. But overall, very thoroughly enthusiastically recommended. Most of the kids at home right now were not familiar with Shakespeare yet, but they followed it well enough, and enjoyed it. Corrie (who is nine) just straight up could not follow it, so she read Case Closed instead, which is fair enough. 

Next we are going to watch Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which is his take on Macbeth. We watched The Hidden Fortress last week, which made me want to see Throne of Blood, but I thought we should see regular Macbeth first. (I think we did a free trial of Apple Whatever to watch Macbeth, and then cancelled it when the movie was over.) 

When the movie was over, we had supper, which I had cleverly prepped in the early afternoon. Roast chicken with salt and pepper, tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil and vinegar on ciabatta rolls; and chips. 

Actually I think we were out of olive oil. 

I forgot, I also made a sort of bread pudding in the afternoon, just for a snack. We had a pile of stale french bread from last week, and there was an unopened carton of eggnog left over from New Year’s Eve.

I know that sounds like an insanely long time ago! but it was sealed up and it tasted fine. So I tore up the bread and put it in a buttered casserole dish, mixed some eggnog together with a bunch of eggs and poured that over the bread and let it soak for a while. Then I dotted it with butter and topped it with cinnamon sugar, and baked it until it was firm, probably 35 -40 minutes.

Not stupendous, but pleasant, and I felt thrifty to have used up some old food, and the kids were surprised to have a fresh-baked little snack in the afternoon. 

MONDAY

Monday was Sophia’s driving test, and she passed! Woo hoo!

I have now taught six kids how to drive, and only four of them have hit my parked car, that I can remember, and only one of them was somehow mad at me for it. 

The next one in line to get her license is this punk

and as you can see, she already knows the basics. (SHE IS SEVENTEEN, SOB.) 

I don’t remember what we ate on Monday. Oh, ham. Plus hot pretzels and peas. No wonder I didn’t take a picture. 

TUESDAY
Thai chicken thighs, coconut rice, tomato and cucumber salad

Tuesday, I didn’t have to go anywhere besides the regular run, so I was pretty hyped to have time to try two new recipes: First Thai Tumeric Chicken (Gai Yang Khamin) from Recipe Tin Eats. For once in my life I was smart and did not tell the family that I was going to be using fish sauce, which, as we know, smewws wike cat fwow-up.

The marinade only has a few ingredients, but there are several powerhouses in there: Fish sauce, oyster sauce, crushed garlic, and turmeric, plus brown sugar and pepper. I was sadly out of white pepper (I think I used it to fend rabbits off my tulip bulbs), so I used black. 

Nice marinade. 

Then, while that was marinating, I was even more hyped to make the side dish that Nagi recommends, which is coconut rice. Now, I love coconut rice far, far more than is reasonable. I mean it’s something I think about kind of a lot. If you filled up an entire room with coconut rice and told me I had to eat my way through to the middle to rescue my child from death, I would do it, and then lovingly take her hand, ask her to hang on a second, and then go ahead and eat the rest of the coconut rice. 

The government, in its wisdom, sent me a random EBT card (which we don’t usually qualify for) because we qualified for reduced lunch at some point, but because of Covid(?), and our school (which we don’t go to; and the school we do go to doesn’t offer lunch) didn’t serve school lunch over the summer, and they felt bad about it, or something? This isn’t the first time this has happened. Anyway, I had a magic money card, so I bought a big sack of jasmine rice. I feel that the more government stupidity you can convert into rice, the better, so I got a really big sack. With elephants on it!

Here is the Recipe Tin Eats recipe for coconut rice. You have to rinse the rice, of course, and then soak it for an hour. Then you drain it, add warm coconut milk with water and some sugar and salt dissolved in it, and cover and cook it in the oven for 40 minutes, then let it rest 15 minutes before fluffing and serving. I did it exactly like she said and it turned out SO GOOD. Absolutely fluffy and light, evenly cooked, wonderfully fragrant, not sweet, but rich. Oh man. 

She also said this chicken and rice is often served with tomatoes and cucumbers, so I made up a big bowl of that with no dressing or anything, because I figured the kids might want something really straightforward. 

The chicken is simple, but it does need to be basted twice. It didn’t turn out with a thick, sticky sauce like hers did, but maybe that would have happened if I left it in the oven a little longer, or basted it more thoroughly. It was still extremely tasty, and juicy!

The turmeric was the star, and the oyster sauce and fish sauce just gave it a sort of robustness, and the whole effect was very warming and pleasant, a little bit tangy, but not aggressive or spicy; and the flavor permeated the meat. It wasn’t wildly popular with the family, but they ate it. Maybe I will experiment with the sauce and see what I can do to make it thicker. 

All in all, quite a delicious meal. 

The kids were meh about the coconut rice! Can you believe that? I was forced to eat my way through the entire roomful almost all by myself. 

WEDNESDAY
Hot dogs, veg and hummus, french fries

Wednesday is just always a day of shenanigans, so I planned a very easy meal. I even splurged on a few bags of those “quick cook” fries, which I was delighted with when I tried them one other time. Well, it DIDN’T WORK. They were just as slow as any frozen fry! Very disappointing. I was forced to drown my sorrows in hot dogs while I was waiting. 

THURSDAY
Spaghetti carbonara

On Thursday, my beautiful new pan finally arrived. The paring knife has yet to come, but I hope they didn’t forget, because I gotta pare some stuff. But look at this lovely pan:

PIC 

(There is no pic, actually, because I managed to crack the faucet last night, so poor Damien is in there putting a new one in, and I don’t want to bother him.) 

Sadly, it came after I already fried up three pounds of bacon for spaghetti carbonara; so the horrible old paella pan had a fittingly glorious swan song, I guess.

Maybe I posted this picture

with the caption “Spectacular new image from the Hubble telescope. This is a protoplanetary nebula with an unusual amount of infrared radiation. God is such an artist.”

and I guess today I should probably share the zoomed-out version, which is this:

I still think it’s pretty!

Goodbye, old pan. You were always terrible, but at least your handles didn’t fall off. 

Damien is making some rash statements about how now I can throw out the old pan. I don’t really know what he means by that. It’s something old and gross for which I have frequently professed my hatred, and he wants me to just get rid of it, like it’s garbage? What if I need it? 

He knows me, so when he saw me transforming into a pan goblin right before his eyes, he hastily suggested that maybe I could use it in my garden. And now you know the main reason I have a garden: So I can put old crap in it, to avoid throwing it away, which would give me a deep and personal pain that you might not be able to understand if you grew up flying to Hawaii for Thanksgiving and having a mariachi band at your First Communion party.

Anyway, I went out into the yard (which, unlike some people’s childhood yards, has neither a hydraulic pool cover nor an aviary) and got my new stock pot, which I recently bought for myself for a treat, and which was full of ice with feathers floating in it, because. . . look, it’s complicated. I had my reasons. I cleaned it very thoroughly. And I AM going to use my old, gross stock pot in the garden. It’s going to be a garden pot. With handles! 

You know what, I don’t like your tone. I’m not saving you any coconut rice. 

So I prepped all the bacon and the cheese and ground pepper and whatnot

Pretty pretty! and then this comes together nice and quick. YUM YUM. It’s fine for me to have seconds, because I did twenty minutes of pilates today. Well, more like eighteen minutes, with two minutes of shouting, “Come ON, lady!” 

And I didn’t overcook the pasta!

FRIDAY
Mussels and eggplant??

So Friday, I knew the kids were going to be at a library lock-in event, where they would be fed pizza, so I thought it was my chance to make something nice for me and Damien. But it’s Friday, so fish. Well, one thing and another, blah blah blah, and by the time I got to the fish counter, I was a little rattled, and came away with a pound of scallops, some fingerling potatoes, and two big eggplants. Because menu planning is kind of my THING. 

There are various recipes using at least two of those ingredients together, but I think I’ll probably just do something really simple with the scallops, like sear them and serve them with lemon butter with hot pepper flakes or something, and then maybe do fried eggplant slices.

Jump to Recipe

Maybe some noodles or risotto or something. And throw the potatoes out the window! Throw them in the garden. 

Have you seen my garden? This is my garden today. 

I’m growing snow. It’s going great.  It’s organic. 

Like many people, I spent a certain amount of time this week tear-assing around the house scrubbing stuff and fixing little things. By the time we get through the last confirmation hearing, this house is going to be spotless. Which is good, because at some point, I’m going to fill the whole thing up with coconut rice. The whole thing! 

Print

Spaghetti carbonara

An easy, delicious meal.

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

Print

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

  1. 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. 

  2. Mix flour and seasonings in a bowl, add the water and teaspoon of oil, and beat into a batter. Preheat oven for warming. 

  3. Put oil in heavy pan and heat until it's hot but not smoking. Prepare a tray with paper towels.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.  

  6. Serve with yogurt sauce or marinara sauce.

What’s for supper? Vol. 405: Where I been

Happy Friday! It has been AGES since I’ve done a What’s For Supper. Sorry! First it was the day after Thanksgiving, and I just couldn’t bear to talk about food; then the next Friday I had hernia surgery so I wrote myself a doctor’s note to skip it; and then it was a week after surgery, and I hadn’t cooked anything, so didn’t have anything to say; and now it is two weeks after, and I have been so successful at allowing myself to rest and recover, I have sadly forgotten how to do that wording thing. The writing. Not to mention the cooking. 

HOWEVER, it is Friday! Happy Friday from behind a pile of Amazon and Etsy boxes. I ordered almost everything online this year (frequently reminding the children that, as they open their presents, they should keep in mind that, while their mother was shopping, she went through a whole bottle of opioids). Last night, Damien and I unboxed everything and checked it against my list.

Result: I only seem to have ordered one present twice, and accidentally thrown away a different one. This is pretty good, considering the volume! So I reordered the lost one with priority shipping and a pleading note to the seller, and Damien is going out this afternoon and filling in the gaps (because once we saw everything all piled up, it became evident that — oh, you know. We needed to rectify certain inequities. He is also buying presents for the dog and the cat, who will absolutely notice and be very hurt if they don’t get presents. And yes, he ordered special Christmas treat worms for the turtle, who will not notice if he doesn’t get a treat, but we still feel that the Incarnation is for turtles, too, in some way. Anyway, he’s getting worms. 

Sophia put up the Christmas lights inside and out, Elijah did the grocery shopping, and the older kids took turns picking kids up from school, and everyone has been cooking and cleaning and keeping the household ticking along very nicely while I just lolled. And truly, just as important and doing all the huge amount of work he did, Damien has also been tirelessly reminding me that I have to rest and I’m not being lazy or making a big deal out of nothing, and that nobody is mad at me for recuperating. I only needed to hear it 46,000 times. Maybe a couple more.

So I mostly just lurked about and showed up for meals that other people made. One such meal was Benny’s birthday, and she requested Damien’s magnificent lasagna from the Deadspin recipe

and a “dirt and worms” dessert, which she made herself, for her actual birthday. Then next week we had her party with friends, which featured a fire and hot chocolate bar outside, lots of giggling, and a parakeet cake. 

I did look up tutorials on how to make parakeets out of gum paste, and then Benny and I made some very serviceable parakeet shapes, with their beady little eyes and weird little lumpy beaks and puffy necks and everything. Then we started decorating them with melted candy melts, and this is where things went a little off the rails. 

Still clearly parakeets, but with a little dash of “you poor dear, what happened?”

I also decided it would be fun and easy to do one of those moves where you melt chocolate and use a piping bag to swirl it around on an acetate cake collar, and then just wrap it around the cake and peel the collar away, and voila, you have 

look, first you downgrade your mental image from an airy filigreed bird cage encircling the two birds, to a just sort of fancy maybe sort of bramble-like backdrop design. Then you walk away for a little bit, take some deep breaths, face reality, and get to work salvaging all the bits that broke off, and sticking them into the cake randomly so it looks like a couple of parakeets are . . . I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re being on a cake, with things sticking out. Benny made a bunch of green hearts and added sprinkles and she was happy, which is what matters. We had fun making weird birds together. 

The next day was my birthday, my FIFTIETH, when it turned out my heart’s desire was for Damien to bring home McDonald’s. Most of the adult kids came over, and Clara made some lovely key lime pies, and it was absolutely swell. 

The last couple of days, I have been actually hoisting myself out of bed in the morning, and even cooking a bit. Yesterday we had pork spiedies

which were a little bland, but fine. While I was hacking up pork, I went ahead and made a second dinner: Carnitas and beans and rice. Looks promising. 

I wrapped that up and we’ll have it on Saturday, which promises to be a bustling busy day, so it will be nice to have dinner squared away. I absolutely loathe cleaning raw meat off cutting boards and knives, so only having to do it once for two meals was irresistible. 

Today I’m going to make sabanekh bil hummus (spinach and chickpea stew) from this Saveur recipe, and serve it with store-bought pita. 

It’s easy and so savory and tasty. Damien likes it, too, and he’s not generally a big chickpea fan. 

I have not done one single speck of Christmas baking, except for a bake sale back in November. I might get ingredients for buckeyes, which are no-bake treats (it’s just basically peanut butter, butter, and powdered sugar mushed into dough and then rolled into little balls, then dipped in melted chocolate). Most definitely something the kids can do basically on their own, as you can see from this pic from a few years ago

and maybe some more sugar cookies to decorate, because after school today the kids will finally be on vacation. Here is my recipe for dough that you don’t have to chill, and that keeps its shape when you bake it. 

Jump to Recipe

We have a set of star cookie cutters in graduated sizes, which you can double up (I mean make two of each size), ice them, and then stack them to make a tree, IF YOU WANT. 

If you want to pose like this for every single photo, there is not much I can do about that, apparently. 

I don’t honestly have a lot of Christmas baking specialties — just pretty standard stuff. On Christmas morning, we have cinnamon buns, bacon, OJ, egg nog, and fruit, and on Christmas evening, we get Chinese takeout (except for one kid whose relationship with Chinese food was permanently tainted by a stomach bug, so she gets a sandwich from Jersey Mike’s).

I think I settled on Alton Brown’s recipe for cinnamon rolls, because they’re meant to be made the night before and then baked in the morning. But I’m not locked in, if anyone has a suggestion for a better recipe!

And then Hanukkah starts on Christmas evening! So at some point I will probably make potato latkes, maybe sufganiyot, maybe rugelach! 

If I don’t manage to post anything in time, I wish you all, every last one of you, even the mean Russian bots, but especially people who need someone to care for them, and people who have been wearing themselves out caring for other people, a warm and good and holy last days of Advent, and a Christmas day of peace and joy with our favorite baby boy. I love yez all. 

5 from 1 vote
Print

pork spiedies (can use marinade for shish kebob)

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Mix together all marinade ingredients. 

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

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

    Serve in sandwiches or with rice. 

 

Print

Carnitas (very slightly altered from John Herreid's recipe)

Ingredients

  • large hunk pork (butt or shoulder, but can get away with loin)
  • 2 oranges, quartered
  • 2-3 cinnamon sticks
  • 4-5 bay leaves
  • salt, pepper, oregano
  • 1 cup oil
  • 1 can Coke

Instructions

  1. Cut the pork into chunks and season them heavily with salt, pepper, and oregano.

  2. Put them in a heavy pot with the cup of oil, the Coke, the quartered orange, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves

  3. Simmer, uncovered, for at least two hours

  4. Remove the orange peels, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves

  5. Turn up the heat and continue cooking the meat until it darkens and becomes very tender and crisp on the outside

  6. Remove the meat and shred it. Serve on tortillas.

 

5 from 1 vote
Print

No-fail no-chill sugar cookies

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

Servings 24 large cookies

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350.

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

  3. Add egg and extracts.

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

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

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

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

  8. Let them cool completely before decorating!