Tag: seder

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

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

SATURDAY
Passover seder food

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

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

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

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

Everyone loves the seder. It is such a gift. 

Then it was time to eat!

The menu is: Chicken soup with matzoh balls,

gefilte fish,

chopped liver,

spinach pie,

cinnamon garlic chicken, roast lamb,

and charoset;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUNDAY
Leftovers

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

Plus of course Easter candy. 

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

 

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

MONDAY
Buffalo chicken wraps, cheez balls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY
Muffalettish sandwiches with homemade cheese, Doritos, vegetable platter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

THURSDAY
Pork gyros with spicy fries and homemade pita

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

The meat, however. Oh.

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

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

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

FRIDAY
Burgers, chips

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

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

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

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