Tag: sandwiches

What’s for supper? Vol. 461: You can certainly try

Happy Friday! The kids have been on February vacation this week, and we’ve been surprisingly busy with various activities, parties, unavoidable whatnot, and of course snow. Snow snow snow. And food. Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Just a regular shopping day, with regular leftovers, supplemented by taquitos. I was pretty happy to have leftover vindaloo and rice from last week. 

When I went shopping whole chickens had been advertised @99 cents a pound, but when I got to the store, there was only one small bird left. I asked the meat guy if he had any more in back, and he said they had all gotten snapped up by people hysterical about the coming snow. So we complained a bit about people who live in New England but still get hysterical every time there’s snow in the forecast, and I guess he was so enchanted by my kvetching that he wanted to do me a favor, so he grabbed a big organic chicken and went out back, and when he brought it back, it was labelled 99 cents a pound. Score! I was only recreationally kvetiching, but it’s nice when it pays off sometimes. 

SUNDAY
Chicken ranch wraps, Storitos

Sunday after Mass, I ended up going on a bit of a wild goose chase. The original plan was that Damien and I would have a lovely Old Parents’ Day Out, toddle up to Brattleboro and visit the restored camera shop, get some tasty lunch from a Greek food truck, and stop by the convenience store that I’ve been told has a good selection of bulk Indian spices.

But poor Damien was sick and exhausted, so I went by myself, got sneered at by fancy camera people, was fairly grossed out by the spice store that was overpriced, grimy, and didn’t even have cardamom, and belatedly realized that ONCE AGAIN, I’d fallen for the old hippie trap. This town always promises it’s going to be a funky and whimsical hodgepodge of quirky graffiti, multi-culti eateries, and cozy used book stores. Just, you know, fondly preserved architecture all layered in jubilant palimpsest with glassy art galleries and fanciful urban updates. It always seems like it’s gonna be such a good time.

In reality, it’s all glum homeless men shuffling down the sidewalks and artsy people who don’t have time for you. And that is pretty much it. All the graffiti has been copied off Etsy, and instead of normal air, it’s just pot smoke, absolutely everywhere. SO much pot smoke. Bleh. The hippie trap! I fell for it again. I did meet a nice dog, though. 

Anyway, determined to at least get my money’s worth from the parking meter, I sat in my car with the seat warmer on and prowled through Facebook marketplace until I found a Polaroid camera, and drove off to get that. Nearly four hours later, I finally got home with the dang camera, and oops, I forgot one kid had a thing at the library, so we had to go right out again. But have I mentioned the car has seat warmers? Actually both cars do, but my car has been humbly waiting under the snow for a new fuel pump.

Seat warmers is one of those things that felt like unthinkably futuristic luxury to me when I was growing up. Finding out a friend’s mom had seat warmers was like finding out they were secretly a rajah or something. That, and skylights, and built-in microwaves, and the Barbie Dream house with the little hot tub that has a rubber bulb and, when you squeeze it, it makes bubbles in the water. I also had one friend who had a split level home with carpeted stairs, and I always felt like I was stepping into an alternate reality where everyone is a billionaire. Like, WHAT, you don’t have to open the front door by ramming it with your shoulder, and then immediately trip over a wood stove that’s draped with wet mittens? Instead you have some kind of FOYER? And a LIGHTED DOORBELL? With BOSTON FERNS? I was living amongst sultans, emperors, dwellers in a sumptuary futuristic wonderland. My friend Dena even had a waterbed!????!!!!

Anyway, if you are wondering if my new HRT is making my brain work better, no. However, sometimes when I gabble on and on about pointless things, people give me a chicken, so write that down.

Anyway, on Sunday, only a small group was home for dinner, so I just roasted up some chicken breasts and served them on wraps with lettuce, shredded cheese, and ranch dressing. I also got a cheesecake order and made a cheesecake. And that was that. 

MONDAY
Ina Garten roast chicken, steamed broccoli

Chicken time! I went with Ina Garten’s lovely, easy recipe, skipping the thyme and fennel. So basically plenty of butter, kosher salt, and pepper, and you stick some entire heads of garlic and lemons up in there, throw some vegetables around, and roast it without even touching it or basting or anything. It’s SO easy, tasty, and juicy, and comes out well every single time. 

While the chickens were resting, I steamed up a bunch of broccoli, and it was a yummy meal. 

I pulled out some of the garlic, because I like eating garlic, and weirdly it had turned blue in spots? I have no idea what that’s about. I did eat it. 

I think it was Monday that we got the first big snow dump of the week. This is snow that fell on top of several feet of previous snow, and we’re all kind of over it. Because we live on the highway, our road always gets plowed, so we weren’t stuck in our homes like some people, though! Some of my family in Rhode Island, who got way more snow than we did, had to manually shovel little tracks thrugh their streets so they could leave their homes! And they are vegetarians, so no one even gave them a reduced chicken. 

TUESDAY
Kielbasa, brussels sprouts, red potatoes

Tuesday, Corrie and I went out to buy party supplies. We went to uhhhh five stores. She’s crazy, I’m crazy, I don’t know. Anyway, we got the party supplies and got home and two of the kids were like, when are we leaving? For indeed I had forgotten I said I would get them to a thing and also another thing, I forget what. So we did that, with seat warmers. And eventually came home again. 

Dinner was a sheet pan meal of kielbasa, red potatoes, and brussels sprouts. This is a fairly divisive meal in the family. Some people are bananas for it, and some find it repulsive. So I split the difference and make it whenever I want to, but feel bad about it. I, myself, am in the bananas column, though. It’s so beautifully simple, and so beautifully salty. Here’s the recipe: 

Jump to Recipe

This recipe actually calls for cabbage, but you can just swap in brussels sprouts cut in half, and it’s even easier. You cook it for a while, then slop on the sauce and cook it a little longer, and boom, hot meal with a protein, a starch, and a green veg.

This is a meal that cries out for some kind of hot, chewy bread, like beer bread or hot pretzels, but I felt accomplished enough to have made dinner at all.

Yum. 

The older kids helped Corrie make her desired ice cream pies for Wednesday. It was a bespoke amalgamation of graham cracker crust, black raspberry ice cream, mint chocolate chip ice cream, twin snakes (which are gummy worms with two flavors, or something), and Skittles, all frozen together. 

Oh and I made the piñata, which was supposed to be a dragon egg shape. The kids basically grabbed me by the shoulders and made me repeat the words “there is no earthly reason to get papier mache involved.” So I just cut two ovals out of cardboard and attached their edges together with more cardboard (so basically an oval box), and then taped brown and gold scale shapes all over it, and everyone agreed it was a very fine dragon egg piñata indeed. Lucy and Irene mercifully agreed to make the desired treasure hunt, so I was off the hook for that. 

WEDNESDAY
BLTs, Pringles, ice cream pie

Wednesday was Corrie’s Actual Birthday, and also I got another cheesecake order, and also I had a rather intense interpersonal meeting, and then spent the rest of the day cleaning (?) I think? It’s a duck blur. But Corrie had requested BLTs for her birthday dinner, and no one was mad about that.

Clara came over, Corrie loved all her presents, and we had a good day. Lucy and Irene were away in Boston seeing Conan Gray, and I have been reliably informed that he did, indeed, wear his little sailor suit. 

We got more heavy snow, but the kids were spending the night in Boston, so I was glad they weren’t on the road. I’ve been spending about half my time in migraine town (thanks so much for that, Anthem/Blue Cross Blue Shield), and honestly even looking at the snow was more than I could handle much of the week. I mean everyone feels that way at this point. We better not have a drought this summer! 

THURSDAY
Calzones, fruit, birthday cake

Thursday was the party. The original plan was to invite lots of people for the party, then allow a select few to stay for a sleepover. But February vacation is a tough time to throw a party, because many people were sick or away on trips; and it turns out people don’t really do sleepovers anymore? Which I absolutely see the sense of.

So three kids came over and had a stay-late, or, I forget what it’s called. But they had their party and then stayed on to have dinner and have the FUN part of the sleepover, which is lying around drinking soda and eating candy, running around and yacking and getting into little fights while your parents hide in the other room. But nobody had to have a miserable night being too cold or too hot on someone’s floor, and no parents had to worry that their kids were in a house full of guns and vicious animals and sex offenders. So the guests stayed until about 11 and then went home, and it worked out great. 

It was a vaguely Dungeons & Dragons-themed party, but I never did work up any enthusiasm for imaginative snacks or decorations. Luckily Corrie had plenty of ideas. She made fancy labels, and the snacks were: Bugles (dragon claws), candy robin eggs (dragon eggs), punch (dragon blood), ginger ale (ale) and root beer (beer). The original plan was to twist brown packing paper into vines and transform the house into . . . I don’t even now what, an underground cavern with vines or something. But I was so tired, so we just taped up some gold foil tablecloths from the Dollar Store, and voila, it looked Different And Fancy. Good enough. 

The treasure hunt was set up so that the pinata was the prize at the end. I couldn’t find a baseball bat for the pinata, but a candle stick worked fine

I had been so proud of myself for remembering to reinforce the cardboard around the hanging part, so it didn’t immediately rip itself apart under its own weight and fall down. But instead, the zip tie it was hanging from broke, and it fell anyway. Luckily, these girls like stomping on things

so they got their candy! 

Dinner was calzones, which, happily, all the guests liked. I made twelve. 

They look dumb with the little food label on top, but I don’t know how else to keep them straight. Mine was olive, with a little ramekin of warm sauce, yum. 

Anyway, the kids are old enough that they entertained themselves, and I was just on standby. The one thing I did spend a lot of time on was the cake. She had initially requested a Kuo-toa cake, which I was not enthusiastic about. But we eventually settled on a D20 cake. For reasons I can’t explain, I persuaded her to let me try to make it three dimensional, rather than just piping a design on top of a flat cake. 

So I actually baked the cake on Wednesday. I used two hexagonal pans in different sizes, and put one on top of the other, then cut the top layer in angles. 

Then I just sat there staring at it for a really, really long time, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. 

I ended up carving up the scraps and building up the angled edges into equilateral triangles that reached the edge of the bottom layer. 

Then I sat there staring at it for a really long time again. I made some marks with a knife, and also some chalk, which, chalk is edible, right? Anyway, my kids have all eaten a lot of chalk.

Then I just did a bunch more carving and shaving and piecing together, and I mixed up a big bowl of very thick frosting (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk) and basically spackled it all together. I came up with something that looked . . . convincingly geometric. 

 

At this point I realized that, for the result I was likely to get, I could have made things a lot easier on myself. If I had this to do again, I would bake a dome cake plus a large sheet pan of cake, and then cut the sheet into a bunch of equilateral triangles, then cut the dome into facets and stick the triangles on it. But my specialty is learning on the fly about things I hope never to do again.

Anyway, I ended up with this

and then piped the thick frosting into the cracks until it become one continuous surface. Then I stuck my finger in a cup of milk and smoothed the frosting out as best I could. I don’t usually bother with a crumb coat, but I had cut this cake up so much, it was half crumb at this point.

I also wanted to make the different planes of the shape more pronounced, because what I had was less of a icosahedron and more of a really bumpy hexagon. ANYWAY, I ended up with this:

So I jammed this in the fridge to chill and harden up a bit. This was on Wednesday. 

On Thursday, Corrie and I made our very first mirror glaze. I kept finding recipes with ingredients I have never even heard of, so I went with this recipe from Chelsweets. It only has five ingredients: White chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, unflavored gelatin, sugar, and gel food coloring; and you can work with it at a lower temperature than most recipes. I made a triple recipe and I think that threw off the heating times, but it still worked out more or less as she described.

We made four bowls: Blue, dark pink, lavender, and white with gold flakes. I wish I had skipped the lavender, because it just diluted the other colors. I also didn’t pour it correctly. But the main thing is, Corrie was absolutely delighted with the results. She threw some black sanding sugar over the top and declared it perfect. 

It was cool! It really did resemble one of those marbled resin RPG dies. So I let it sit for a bit, then trimmed off the drips and let it chill for a while longer. Then I piped lines and numbers on it. I thought perhaps I should put “11” on the top face, since she was turning eleven, but this suggestion was shot down with scorn, because it is a D20, so obviously it has to say “20” on top. Okay with me!

As I have repeatedly lamented, I have shaky hands and I’m not great at piping, but this turned out better than I hoped. I got a little confused about which way the numbers should face, but nobody noticed but me. 

The drawback of using white chocolate in this mirror glaze is that it loses its shine a bit after a few hours, but, again, I was the only one who thought so. I was afraid the glaze would continue to flow and travel right off the cake, or that the gold flakes would all drift down to the bottom, but that did not happen.

And she loved it! 

I actually liked the flavor of the glaze. It tastes mainly like sweetened condensed milk/white chocolate, which is a flavor I, a degenerate and uncultured swine, happen to enjoy. One of the guests said she loves Corrie’s parties because the cakes are so cool, which made me feel good. Then she corrected herself and said that the main reason she likes Corrie’s parties is because of Corrie, and THEN because of the cakes, and that made me feel even better. These kids are all right. 

The big kids got home safe and sound in time for cake. Then that evening we got some hard and scary medical news about someone I love very much, so I would really appreciate your prayers about that. I will tell you, this week, this month, and this year have been . . . difficult. Dih. Fih. Cult. For health, for relationships, for work, for finances. Many many opportunities for trusting in God. Which is what Lent is, so there you go. 

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa

We ran out of oil this morning, because of course we did; but Damien was finally able to see a doctor, and there’s even a possibility I’ll get my migraine meds this weekend. Tonight we are having quesadillas, and then on Saturday we are going to the CIRCUS, which I bought tickets for a while back. It’s hard to believe this post started with a gifted organic chicken and ends with a circus, and yet it’s still full of me just basically kvetching, but there you go. You think I’m kvetching here! You should hear what an earful God gets. At least it’s not snowing. I think it’s gonna snow tomorrow, though. 

Oh, I forgot to share my calzone recipe. Here you go!

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Calzones

This is the basic recipe for cheese calzones. You can add whatever you'd like, just like with pizza. Warm up some marinara sauce and serve it on the side for dipping. 

Servings 12 calzones

Ingredients

  • 3 balls pizza dough
  • 32 oz ricotta
  • 3-4 cups shredded mozzarella
  • 1 cup parmesan
  • 1 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 tsp oregano
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1-2 egg yolks for brushing on top
  • any extra fillings you like: pepperoni, olives, sausage, basil, etc.

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400. 

  2. Mix together filling ingredients. 

  3. Cut each ball of dough into fourths. Roll each piece into a circle about the size of a dinner plate. 

  4. Put a 1/2 cup or so of filling into the middle of each circle of dough circle. (You can add other things in at this point - pepperoni, olives, etc. - if you haven't already added them to the filling) Fold the dough circle in half and pinch the edges together tightly to make a wedge-shaped calzone. 

  5. Press lightly on the calzone to squeeze the cheese down to the ends. 

  6. Mix the egg yolks up with a little water and brush the egg wash over the top of the calzones. 

  7. Grease and flour a large pan (or use corn meal or bread crumbs instead of flour). Lay the calzones on the pan, leaving some room for them to expand a bit. 

  8. Bake about 18 minutes, until the tops are golden brown. Serve with hot marinara sauce for dipping.  

 

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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. 459: Superb chow

Happy Friday! We are having a bit of a “choose your own adventure” day today, except that it’s my car’s . . . throttle sheath pin housing, or something . . . that chooses our adventure. The rather implausible plot involves an ice skating field trip, the court house, adoration, and of course cheesecake deliveries, and it can either be slightly complicated but doable, or . . . not. Come on, throttle sheath pin housing! Or whatever! Don’t actually be the fuel pump that’s broken!

Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers + ravioli 

Just a regular day of chores, plus Corrie had a birthday party to attend. Did you know that many small movie theaters will let you rent out their entire place for a couple of hours and show a DVD of your choice, and it’s not as expensive as you might think? Is this only a small-town New England phenomenon? Anyway, it’s a neat option, especially when it’s super cold out, which it was much of the week. 

It was Benny’s shopping turn, and she chose ravioli for her frozen food/dinner supplement/treat, which I think is pretty cute. She’s not wrong; ravioli is delicious! I was actually still migrainey (I’m having a bad head month because we have new, terrible insurance and they’re still mulling over the likelihood that perhaps I want to inject myself once a month just for sport, and how can they possibly know if I really need this medication or not?), so I just shopped to get us through the weekend and then came home. Photophobia when everything is covered with snow is no joke, phew. 

SUNDAY
Hot wings, vegetable platter, hot pretzels, chips, potato salad; brownie sundaes

Sunday was, of course, the day of the Superb Owl. On the way home from Mass, I delivered a cheesecake with wild blueberry topping, which was very well received. I forgot how much tastier wild blueberries are! I used this recipe which calls for lemon zest, lemon juice, ginger, and thyme. I skipped the thyme and it was still yummo, a nice tart complement to the sweet, creamy cheesecake. 

I made a batch of potato salad following the recipe from Sip and Feast, which has you brining the potatoes for several hours before mixing in the mayo. I have made this before, and apparently forgot that I was the only one who likes this style of potato salad, oh well. 

The big kids went out to play D&D with Elijah, Benny made some brownies for dessert, and Corrie and I made some big hot pretzels. We used the King Arthur recipe, which has turned out great before, but the pretzels are a bit small. So I doubled the recipe but made a single recipe’s worth of pretzels. 

I did let the dough rise a little too long and it got a little crusty, so the dough was a little lumpier than it should be, but we forged ahead.

The dough needs to be rolled out surprisingly long! We got it to about three feet.

You bathe them in baking soda water for a few minutes before baking, and then you brush them with melted butter as soon as they come out of the oven. Heavenly. 

We ended up having these as afternoon snacks, rather than part of dinner, because I really wanted to eat them hot. Then we surrendered the kitchen and Damien made a huge bunch of hot wings using the Deadspin recipe except I just got a bottle of blue cheese dressing, rather than making it. 

Then we deliberately poisoned our minds and perverted our hearts with the halftime show, and had a lovely meal with the chicken, raw vegetables, chips, and potato salad. The chicken wings were scrumptious, as always. Damien also made a batch of plain fried wings without hot sauce, for those who are babies. 

For dessert, we had brownie sundaes. And that was that!

MONDAY
Strawberry chicken salad

Monday I did the rest of the grocery shopping. I figured we would have plenty of leftover chicken, and I was right, so I made a light dinner, and if people wanted more food, it could be wing time again. and roasted up some chicken breasts, and served that on salad with strawberries, almonds, and feta cheese. 

The strawberries are HUGE this year. 

TUESDAY
Pork spiedies, chips, hot spinach dip

When I made the list, I discovered that I was a little sad thinking about all the yummy Super Bowl food I hadn’t made this year. Then I realized I’m the chief of police, I can do whatever I want. So I cut up a bunch of bell peppers, red onions, and mushrooms, and started some pork marinating for spiedies

Jump to Recipe

and put together a little casserole dish of spinach dip. I didn’t really follow a recipe. I just cooked spinach in the microwave and squeezed out the water, then combined it with a bunch of cream cheese, sour cream, parmesan cheese, and I think provolone, and I guess garlic powder, salt, and pepper, and when it got close to supper, I baked it. 

I like spinach in many forms, but I gotta admit, smothering it in several forms of cheese is ELITE. 

The spiedies turned out great. I tried to convince myself to toast the rolls, but I was too hungry. Just slapped on a bit of mayo, and they were fab.

None of the kids would even try the spinach dip! Crazies. They liked the spiedies, though. 

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs

Wednesday, I started getting serious about all the baking orders for Valentine’s Day. I ended up selling six mini cheesecakes

and these are topped with a heart-shaped strawberry before they go out, very cute. I just cut the strawberries in half and use a little cookie cutter to make the shape.

I also made another full-sized cheesecake with blueberry topping, and then I cut up some leftover cakes into wedges, dipped them in melted chocolate with a little shortening stirred in (this makes the chocolate smoother, and it sets more firmly), and topped them with strawberry hearts. 

Aren’t they cute?

I had some leftover chocolate, so I made a bunch of heart and skull molds, and I used them for one rather gothic medium-sized cheesecake, which just sold, hooray!

For supper, I made some very pedestrian meatballs. Here’s my recipe:

Jump to Recipe

Then I tossed them in the crock pot with some jarred sauce, and supper was easy. 

Good old spaghetti and meatballs. Wednesday is a complicated day because we get home at 4 but then Benny has writer’s group right around supper time, and it’s only an hour, so it doesn’t make sense to come home in between. I passed the time by trying to remember the shortcut in between two roads, and I got lost for long enough that I just had time to check out Market Basket, which I HATE, and discovered to my sorrow that their cream cheese is, indeed, the cheapest in town. I also grabbed some ground pork because someone inquired about a Québécois tourtière, which I have never made before, but which I had a very slow and detailed dream about making. Now I can make my dreams come true, I guess. 

Wednesday I was supposed to have an interview for a writing gig, but it got cancelled. It’s their loss! Let’s see how easy it is to find someone else who can tell a rambling, pointless story about tourtière!

THURSDAY
Roast beef sandwiches, french fries

Thursday I finally pulled out the giant eye of round roast I got a while back, when it was on such a lovely sale I could not resist. I returned again to Sip and Feast for this deli-style roast beef recipe, which always turns out excellent. It’s super easy. You just season the meat very heavily,

roast it at 500 for half an hour, turn the oven down to 300, and continue cooking it until it’s as well done as you like. Then you wrap it up 

and let it chill for a long time, sharpen yo knife, and slice it thinly. 

I wish I had taken it out of the oven a little sooner, because I like it really rare; but it was still truly delicious, super juicy with tons of flavor from the crust. 

I cooked up a bunch of fries and set out horseradish and mayonnaise and sliced tomatoes, and then I made one final batch of sauce for cheesecakes, this time strawberry

and I figured I would eat when I got back. Another busy evening! Damien covered a meeting about the middle school’s upcoming trip to DC, and Benny and I went to an informational night about a newish charter high school in town.  Silly little kid thinks she is old enough to go to high school next year, so we’re humoring her by checking out all our options. Oh me oh my. 

To my sorrow, I had eaten so much roast beef while I was slicing it up that I wasn’t hungry when we got back, so I didn’t eat an actual sandwich. HAPPILY, I made a tremendous amount of roast beef, so we should have plenty leftover for Saturday when it’s leftover day. 

FRIDAY
Bagel, egg, cheese sandwiches

I can hear Damien wrestling with the car. He also just texted me with a list of places I need to be for the rest of the day, because I was sitting there with a marker and a paper plate trying to work it out myself, and it was obvious someone with a functioning brain needed to step in. The guy who just came to pick up a cheesecake with strawberry sauce informed me that my mailbox is missing a number. What I didn’t tell him is that I know that, and I already went out to buy a replacement number, but I got the wrong one. What I did tell him is, “Oh, it’s hard when there’s snow everywhere. Everything is white, not like when there’s grass.” I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but anyway we delivered the cheesecake.

I am going to try my hand at making one of those Swiss rolls with a pattern baked into the cake, for Valentine’s Day tomorrow. This plan includes at least three different things I’m really bad at, so I have high hopes! What is wrong with me! Nobody knows! 

P.S. It is the fuel pump.

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pork spiedies (can use marinade for shish kebob)

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Mix together all marinade ingredients. 

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

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

    Serve in sandwiches or with rice. 

 

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Meatballs

Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs. 

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400.

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 458: Eine Kleine Purse Broccoli

Happy Friday! It took me most of the morning to persuade my computer to turn on. But I DID persuade it, so I’ve got that going for me. Also, I slept extremely late, so I’ve got that going for me, too. But I slept late because it’s day 3 of a migraine, so I’ve got that going against me. Corrie is home sick, and we are watching Pingu. I truly can’t discern if that’s for me or against me. I like Pingu a lot, but it is LOUD. We’ll call it neither a win nor a lose, but a noot-noot, and get on with things. 

Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Regular shopping and chore day, nothing to report. My leftover buffet turned out pleasingly tidy.

I can feel my past self casting destitute eyes on all that parchment paper and just gazing with longing at such wanton luxury. Parchment paper is one of those things that, once I started using it, I can never go back. Parchment paper, Magic Eraser, ziplock bags, Swiffer, Scrub Daddy. I’ve been bashing myself a lot lately for how dirty I’d always kept my house in the past, and it just now occurred to me that it’s only recently we’ve had the budget for cleaning supplies like this. So I’ve been very hard on myself for not having kept things spic and span with the aid of a rag and some water. With twelve people in a then-650-square-foot house. Ah well. Sorry, past self.

(My house is still dirty, however. It’s just a mystery.) 

SUNDAY
Roast lamb with yogurt sauce, Jerusalem salad, pita

Sunday I went a little crackerdog in a productive way for once, and did a large amount of cooking and baking. The first thing I made was a double batch of rugelach dough. It’s not really in season (more of a Chanukah thing), but on the other hand, it’s always a good time for rugelach. This was a “thank you” package for a Patreon donor. 

AND HERE, I must pause and beg your pardon if you are a donor and I owe you a perk. I’m really sorry it’s gotten away from me so badly. Please, please, if I owe you something as a thank-you for your patronage, message or email me, remind me what it is, and give me your address! And I truly am sorry. I am a worm. 

Anyway. Argh. So, here is the rugelach recipe. While that was chilling, I made six little Valentine’s mini cheesecakes, all of which sold, so that was nice. 

Then I got some dough rising for pita for supper. I went to the Kitchn recipe, which I swear I’ve used before, but it felt unfamiliar, not sure why. Set that to rise and made a batch of yogurt sauce

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and discovered, to my sorrow, I had bought regular yogurt instead of Greek. At least it wasn’t vanilla, which I’ve also done, but the texture is just unsettling with the savory taste. Then I made a quick Jerusalem salad, which has different variations. This time I just did chopped tomato and cucumber, fresh lemon juice, parsley, a little olive oil, and salt and pepper. 

And then I got the lamb in the oven! Well, first I googled whether it’s safe to eat lamb that has been in the freezer for . . . uhhhhh really quite a long time. Google said yeah whatever probably, kill all humans lol. So I went ahead and scored the meat and prepped it according to Tom Nichols’ grandmother’s incredibly easy and inexplicably delicious recipe. 

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Got that in the oven. The kids were going to a movie, and Damien had to go to a retirement party, so we ate really early, which is something I always want to do anyway. My ideal meal schedule would be coffee around 9:30, lunch at 1:00, snack at 3:30, and dinner at 4:45. Alas, life is not like that. But Sunday it was pretty close!

Then I spent the afternoon rolling and baking rugelach. They turned out pretty cute!

By the time it was almost dinner, I was kind of tired of being in the kitchen, so while the lamb was resting, I opted to bake the pita all at once in the oven, rather than making them on the stovetop. To my delight, most of them actually puffed up and separated into two layers! Actual pita pockets!

They didn’t look like much (oven pita is paler than pan pita), but they were soft and pleasant, and you can’t beat fresh hot bread for dinner. 

The lamb turned out excellent. 

Juicy, tender, and full of flavor (and did not kill any humans). This is such a minimum effort, maximum results recipe. I served some crumbled feta, and it was a super yummy meal all around. 

Poor Damien actually had to leave before dinner, but I think he ate when he got back in the evening. Benny and Corrie and I just hung out and played cards and watched TV. And that was Sunday. 

MONDAY
Chicken caprese sandwiches chips

Monday I had signed up to give blood, and two neat things happened. One was that I passed the iron test, which I failed the last three times I tried to give blood. Two was that they tested my iron without me even noticing. I’m used to a finger stick test, but this time they did it with LASERS. It clips onto your thumb and I guess if you have enough red blood cells, it interrupts the laser? Or something? Anyway it was cool. And I was really happy about my iron levels. I have been eating fortified Cream of Wheat for lunch most days for months now, and I think that’s what did it. One of these days, I’m gonna get one of those iron fish to cook with, too. 

When we got home, I cooked a bag of breaded chicken cutlets that has been haunting the freezer for some time. Served on baguettes with basil, tomatoes, mozzarella, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper. 

And chips. Good stuff. The chicken is from Walmart, and I’ve found that their frozen chicken products that are breaded but uncooked are actually quite tasty, and they don’t take much longer than pre-cooked and frozen chicken. 

TUESDAY
Beef and broccoli stir fry, rice, wontons

Tuesday was chock-a-block full of meetings and appointments and by the end of the day, I was feeling like something you find in the drain at the end of the day. I had bought a small hunk of beef a few weeks ago, so I made a rather lackluster stir fry. I had my doubts about the amount of beef, so I rummaged further in the freezer and found some wontons, I think from New Year’s Eve. I just cooked them in chicken broth. Went to cook some rice in the Instant Pot and remembered that the pot was frozen into a bank of snow because I’ve been using it as a duck waterer. So I had to cook it on the stove like a peasant. 

So it was, yanno, food that was hot. It was fine. Kind of validating that, when I do go to the trouble to make my own sauce and broth, it really is a lot better. 

WEDNESDAY
Omelettes, sausage, biscuits

Wednesday I finally yelled at myself to go to the doctor because, well, for the last five months, the left side of my face tingles and goes numb randomly throughout the day, but reliably between 6:30 and 7:30 P.M. There are a number of things that could be causing this, and I’m leaning toward perimenopause because why the hell not? But I am getting a brain MRI to rule out MS, which I really don’t think it is, but once someone suggests MS, you kinda have to either run away from home and live the rest of your life in a cave in Tenneseee, or go get a brain MRI. Then I had regular errands and we got home not terribly late, so I started the sausages cooking and then quickly made a batch (a SINGLE recipe. I had to halve my own recipe!) of biscuits. Here’s that recipe, which makes 20 biscuits.

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I’m gonna have to go through and downsize all my recipes, le sigh. Anyway, this is a nice, reliable recipe and the biscuits are light and fluffy inside, with a fragile, buttery crust on top. 

It includes egg and cream of tartar, which sounds unnecessarily complicated, but it’s still very quick, and comes out rich and light.

While the biscuits were baking, I chopped up some ham and onions, shredded some cheese

and quickly turned out seven sloppy omelettes. I just cannot cook a tidy omelette to save my life. 

Tasty, though.

I wish the ducks would start laying again! Last year, they had started laying at this point again already. Oh well. Like the old Polish saying goes, you can’t rush a duck. 

THURSDAY
Hot dogs, spicy fries

And here is a picture of that!

A slightly more interesting picture is the one I took earlier in the day, headed out for afternoon driving, bound and determined to get healthier

It’s not stupid if it works. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Damien is covering adoration, and Corrie and I are now watching Milo and Otis. This movie really holds up! Delightful. 

I guess the Super Bowl is this weekend. I was at a thrift store and decided not to buy a potato spiralizer, and I have no regrets about that. I can say this because I did make potato tornados for the Super Bowl one year, using various techniques, and let me tell you, the issue with that whole project was not my lack of a potato spiralizer. Leave them potatoes alone, is what I say. I couldn’t help but notice, though, that, on the same day as I made the potato tornados, I made some sausage rolls, and those look quite tasty. We shall see. I also saw a recipe for fried mac and cheese balls which is basically the ultimate Lucy Chow, so I may make that. Gotta make a few cheesecakes to sell this weekend. 

But first, maybe a little purse broccoli. Just to balance things out. 

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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

 

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Tom Nichols' Grandmother's Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

  • boneless leg of lamb
  • olive oil
  • garlic powder
  • garlic salt
  • oregano

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 325.

  2. Slash the meat several times, about an inch deep.

  3. Fill the cuts with plenty of garlic powder.

  4. Slather olive oil all over the meat.

  5. Crust it with garlic salt. Sprinkle with all the oregano you own.

  6. Cover meat loosely with tinfoil and cook three hours. Uncover and cook for another 30 minutes.

 

5 from 1 vote
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moron biscuits

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

  3. Grate the chilled butter with a box grater into the dry ingredients.

  4. Stir in the milk and egg and mix until just combined. Don't overwork it. It's fine to see little bits of butter.

  5. On a floured surface, knead the dough 10-15 times. If it's very sticky, add a little flour.

  6. With your hands, press the dough out until it's about an inch thick. Cut biscuits. Depending on the size, you can probably get 20 medium-sized biscuits with this recipe.

  7. Grease a pan and bake for 10-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

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

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

Well, here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers with buffalo chicken

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

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

or this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUNDAY
Chili verde, corn balls

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

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

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

Here’s my recipe for that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of curiosity, I weighed it first, and

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

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

And that’s-a my meatball story. 

THURSDAY
Chicken wraps, baked potatoes, brief thought of salad

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese

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

5 from 1 vote
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Spicy Chili Verde

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

Ingredients

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

For the salsa verde:

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

For serving:

  • lime wedges
  • sour cream
  • additional cilantro for topping

Instructions

  1. Preheat the broiler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 from 1 vote
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Simple French onion soup

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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Meatballs

Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs. 

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400.

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 452: The road to heaven is paved with pavlova

Happy Friday! I am putting off going out into the blowing rain to bring a secret santa present in to a kid who forgot it. The kids are miffed about the rain in general, because it’s washing away all the snow right before Christmas. But I am not mad about the break from the freezing cold! So maybe I am looking forward to going out into the rain, after all. 

I should warn you, I’ve gotten VERY crafty lately. Some people feel guilty for not doing a lot of crafts at Christmas. Please don’t do that to yourself! I enjoy crafting, and that is literally the only reason I do it. No moral issues whatsoever, except that I’m trying to be better about cleaning up after myself afterwards, or at very least not getting so much glue on Damien’s work table. Ok, you have now been warned re: the crafts!

Here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers and pizza pockets

Saturday was just a regular errands day, and I got my skeleton pals decorated for Christmas. 

Not the most creative display, but they look pretty cheerful. 

Saturday evening, I got busy and made ten little pavlova balls, a batch of lemon curd, a batch of raspberry coulis, and a dozen sugared raspberries. I’d been drooling over this recipe for pavlova bombs from Recipe Tin Eats, but it was too much work for a regular dessert, and no one in the family would want it for their birthday. NO ONE BUT ME, THAT IS. And it was almost my birthday! 

SUNDAY
Adults Chinese food; kids ravioli; pavlova bombs for all

Sunday after Mass, Damien had to work, but I spent a very pleasant afternoon stringing lights all over the living room and dining room and tree. Actually the tree part was less pleasant, because I thought and thought and thought about which way I wanted to string the lights together so that they would end up with the right end of the plug at the bottom, and I still messed it up. I think I probably plugged it into itself somehow, which helps no one. Also I was listening to my favorite Christmas album, but it was a bad connection and kept stopping and starting, and I was getting a little huffy. 

So I begged the kids to help me, and they obligingly got up and unstrung all the lights, so I could start over. While they were taking the lights off the tree, Damien came in, and they instantly started trying to convince him Christmas was over and he had slept through it.

And there we have the duality of teenagers: They are good kids, but they are terrible kids. 

Then Damien and I went out to eat! (My actual birthday was Monday, but weekend birthdays are better.) We had pork buns and egg rolls, and I had some kind of sizzling triple delight situation

and it earned its name. Then we came home and I put together the pavlova bombs!

 The reason I made the pavlovas the night before is because the way to keep them from cracking is to bake them, turn off the oven, and then leave them in there for a long time to cool down very, very slowly. So I left them in there overnight, and then took them out in the morning and covered them with plastic wrap. Then on Sunday evening, I whipped some cream and put the lemon and raspberry filing in pastry bags, and assembled the sugared raspberries and some mint leaves, and Benny chopped up some roast pistachios for me.

Here’s all the elements. Don’t the pavlovas look pretty? They’re so dainty and glossy, but they’re very stable.

To fill the pavlovas, I poked a hole with a skewer in the bottom and swizzled it around inside a bit to make room for the fillings. First I put in the raspberry coulis, which was pretty thin, so it was really more like letting it drip in, than piping it in. Then I piped in the lemon curd until the pavlova was full. Then I plugged the hole with a dab of whipped cream, turned it over, and topped it with a big blob of whipped cream. Then each one got garnished with a sugared raspberry, a few mint leaves, and a sprinkle of chopped pistachios. 

Prettiest thing I’ve ever made in the kitchen.

And when you break them open, they’re even prettier!

Absolutely fantastic. The two fillings were wonderfully tart, which was excellent with the sugary pavlova and the cool whipped cream. Then some of the spoonfuls also had the nuts and the mint, and wow, it was just luscious and exciting. The different flavors and textures played with each other SO well.

Nagi’s recipe is clear as a bell, and I have no questions or clarifications. My only tiny quibble is that the lemon curd has lemon zest in it, which is obviously great for the flavor, but not so much for the texture. At first I thought I had let the egg scramble while I was cooking the curd, but it was just the zest. This is the MINOREST of minor quibbles, though, and honestly, if I ever make this again, I’ll probably just follow the recipe exactly again. 

Then I got presents! I’m a little embarrassed to be 51 years old and still getting this many presents, but I really love getting presents, so this is what we do. Damien gave me a cheese-making kit, some gorgeous earrings, a special beautiful mug, and Brisbane by Eugene Vodolazkin; Benny gave me a drawing of Our Lady of Guadalupe; Lena gave me a storytelling card game; Sophia gave me some lovely enameled tin earrings; Clara gave me a wonderful mystical blue ceramic bowl she made, and Lucy gave me a pair of socks she knitted for me, with a skull pattern. 

Amazing gifts, every last one. Then we retired to watch the new Spinal Tap movie in bed, and it was so gently amusing that I feel asleep halfway through. 

Oh, one last thing! These sugared raspberries were so nice.

They’re super easy, but you have to make them ahead of time. You just brush them with egg white and then roll them in sugar. It’s supposed to be sanding sugar, which is more coarse and sparkly than table sugar, but I didn’t have any. The regular sugar turned out great. The raspberries have this fragile little sweet, crackly shell on them that feels really special. Definitely adding this into my arsenal for garnishing future fancy desserts. 

MONDAY
Chicken pot pie

Monday I gleefully took out the chicken pot pie I made made and froze before Thanksgiving. I left it wrapped in three layers of tinfoil and heated it up (without thawing it) for a few hours in a lowish oven, and then turned the oven up for about half an hour before supper, until I could hear the pie bubbling.

The very center was still a little cold, so I nuked it and it was great. 

Crust still flaky, filling nice and tender and tasty. I was very pleased. I adore chicken pot pie.

We decided that Tuesday would be a Fisher Flop Out day, because the logistics of getting to school were gonna be horrendous. So we stayed up a little late and watched Gremlins, because it turns out I’ve been caring too deeply about a lot of the wrong things most of my life, and it’s actually an okay movie, whatever. The story about how she found out Santa isn’t real gets me every time. 

TUESDAY
Aldi pizza

Tuesday, Damien and I took a kid for a long-awaited medical appointment out of state, and we are gone alllllll day. When we got back, Damien dropped me and kid off at home, then got some pizza and cooked it and I basically just ate pizza and flopped around exhaustedly and then went to bed. 

WEDNESDAY
Roast beef sandwiches, chips

On Wednesday, I cooked a hunk of roast beef in the morning, again following the first part of this recipe from Sip and Feast. I dry brined it with kosher salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder for 90 minutes, then cooked it at 500 for 15 minutes, then turned it down to 300 and let it cook for another half hour or so. Then I let it cool, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge. Cut up some tomatoes and put some nice smoked gouda on a platter, and put everything away. 

Then I set out and dropped off some paperwork, loaded a bunch of clothes into the dryer at the laundromat, picked up the kids, and went to . . . deep breath . . . Five Below and Old Navy and Barnes and Noble and Michael’s, and then back to the laundromat, and when we got home, BOY were my feet glad I had already mostly made supper. Damien sliced up the meat and we had lovely, lovely sandwiches. 

I put mine under the broiler to melt the cheese, then added the tomatoes and some horseradish sauce. An absolute delight of a sandwich. (You may recall that, last time I made roast beef sandwiches, the oven died before I could toast the bread properly, and then you may recall that the moment after Damien fixed the oven, the dryer broke. You are now all caught up with Fisher Appliance Calamities, except that the trick that makes my car start stopped working, and we think maybe the alternator damaged the battery. Whatever, it’s fine, it’s whatever!) 

That evening, I made 22 of these little 12-pointed paper stars. I made a little video to show how it’s done. 

While I snipped, I listened to Christmas With the Louvin Brothers 

which is just a great album. I prefer this so VASTLY over those smarmy 50’s cocktail lounge versions of these songs that everyone thinks of as essential Christmas music. Start your kids on this album young, so they’re not jerks about it when they get older! 

THURSDAY
Ham, peas, mashed potatoes

I really don’t know what I did all day Thursday. I think I slept late and then ???. Oh, I did some sad banking and then spent an absurdly long time trying and failing to buy a dryer. Like, I want to give Home Depot my money, and allegedly they also want that? But you’d never know it, by the way their website is. (BAD.) 

It was a rare day in which I hadn’t done any dinner prep, so thank goodness for ham. When we got home, I sliced it up and put it in a dish with some water, covered it with tinfoil, and put it in the oven to warm up (it was already cooked, and it heats up faster if it’s sliced) and then quickly made some mashed potatoes and heated up some peas. 

I didn’t take a picture, but here are twelve photos of the last twelve times I made this exact same meal, each time to wild acclaim from my family:

Nobody can open a bag of frozen peas like me, I tell you. 

Thursday night, I hung up all the stars I had made

The yellow ones are made with this paper from Michael’s that comes in four related shades in one pack. I used three different shades for each star, and I like the effect. I also got some red foil paper, and was annoyed to discover it is only foil on one side! Oh well. 

I also sliced up a bunch of oranges to dry. I put the slices on baking racks on a pan in a 250 oven for about two hours, flipping them every half hour or so.

They were still somewhat juicy at this point, but they were starting to get little brown marks from the racks, so I just left them out to air dry more overnight. 

FRIDAY
Fish tacos, guacamole

Oranges still a little damp! That’s okay; they’re dry enough to work with.

It’s raining, as I mentioned, but I was already kind of sweaty from yoga, so I went out and clipped a bunch of pine needles for some stars I want to make. I think the oranges, some cranberries, and these stars will make a really pretty garland. I like making Christmas decorations that will continue to look bright and pretty after Christmas, when there is still plenty of winter left and we will need some color. Here is a garland from a few years ago, that we left up long after Christmas: 

This one has oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruit, but this year I’m just doing oranges. 

So then I discovered that the Christmas card I made for a dear friend, and which I had miraculously chased everybody in the house down to sign, had somehow gotten wet, and I set about making a replacement card and maybe went a little crackerdog over this for various reasons, at which point Damien suggested that HE could go to the laundromat, mail my card, drop off the forgotten secret santa present, go to adoration, and pick up the kids, and I didn’t even have to put pants on. Then he brought me some coffee and headed out into the rain. I guess I will go wipe the glue off his worktable, and then we will be even. 

We’ve heading into the home stretch of Chanukah

and I am thinking about blintzes and latkes and maybe sufganiyot. Heck, maybe I will make one or more of those tonight. The kids are not crazy about fish tacos, but nobody can resist a jelly donut. Yeah, I think I will make some jelly donuts. Usually I follow a King Arthur recipe, but I think I will try Smitten Kitchen’s version this year. Smitten Kitchen has been very good to us lately, and I like the looks of those donuts. 

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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.

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

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

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

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

SATURDAY
Leftovers and popcorn chicken

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

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, fake doritos, pickles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY
Birthday lasagna, birthday cake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tree-ready. 

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Second lasagna, garlic bread

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

THURSDAY
Meatball subs, vegetable platter

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Tuna boats, fries

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

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No-fail no-chill sugar cookies

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

Servings 24 large cookies

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350.

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

  3. Add egg and extracts.

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

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

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

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

  8. Let them cool completely before decorating!

 

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Cumin chicken thighs with chickpeas in yogurt sauce

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

Ingredients

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

For garnishes:

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

Garnishes:

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

     -Chop up some cilantro for sprinkling if people like.

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

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

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

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

So I guess we’ll have . . . 

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

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

Okay, on to this week’s food! 

SATURDAY
Leftovers for kids

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

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

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

SUNDAY
Pork chops, risotto, Brussels sprouts slaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

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

MONDAY
Ham, peas, mashed potatoes

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

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

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY
Chopped Italian subs, fries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a before and after, so far:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Hamburgers, chips, vegetables and dip

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

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

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

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

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

THURSDAY
Omelettes and homemade dinner rolls

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

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

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

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

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

Into the oven they went, for about 25 minutes. 

You guys, they turned out SO GOOD. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Pizza

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

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

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

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

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

Print

Instant Pot Risotto

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers with chicken three ways and burritos 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that was the weekend! 

MONDAY
Chicken biryani, mango

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY
Garlic pork chops, baked potato, string beans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Italian wedding soup, focaccia

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

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

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

Anyway, it turned out FANTASTIC.. 

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

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

The soup was also very nice. 

An excellent meal overall. 

THURSDAY
Spaghetti with sausage sauce

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

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

Here’s the side view. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yum yum. 

FRIDAY
Bagel egg cheese sandwiches, OJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUNDAY

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

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

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

MONDAY
Ziti with sausage and Alfredo sauce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY
Pulled pork, tater tots, roast butternut squash rings

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Nachos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THURSDAY
Banh mi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the recipe for that: 

Jump to Recipe

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Peach waffles, eggs, OJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ducks so crazy. 

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

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

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Clovey pulled pork

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

  4. When pork is tender, shred.

 

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Pork banh mi

Ingredients

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

Veggies and dressing

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

Instructions

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

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

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

  4. Toast a sliced baguette or other crusty bread. 

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

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

Ingredients

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

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

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

Instructions

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

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

    Add them to the brine so they are submerged.

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

 

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 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. 

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French bread

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

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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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.