Tag: Smitten Kitchen

What’s for supper? Vol. 453: Eat Pray Ugh

Happy new year! I remember once reading a guide to confession that said if you aren’t sure if a sin is venial or mortal, just tell the priest, “I am unable to judge the severity of my actions.” So that’s where we are, except with food. Except that I am very able to judge it; I’m just too busy licking icing off my chin to decide what to call it. 

If you don’t mind, I’ll just do a highlights reel of the last few weeks, rather than the typical day-by-day account. My camera roll is a mess, I have put on 924 pounds, and I made so much cheesecake, I blew out the oven door. More on that later!

Okay, here’s some yummy food!  

We’ll start with a cozy little pot of applesauce I made during Chanukah. I put a bunch of cut-up apples (including peels and cores) in the Instant Pot with some water and cooked them, then ran the collapsed apples through the foley mill to get rid of the debris. Cooking them with the peels on makes the color lovely and pink. Then I added some cinnamon and a little butter, and continued cooking it down in a pot. Lovely color, didn’t need any sugar. 

This was, of course, to accompany POTATO LATKES, the sine qua non of Chanukah. I had shredded the potatoes in the food processor the night before, and stored them in a bowl of water in the fridge to keep them from turning brown. If you put the shreds in cold water immediately and let them sit for a bit, they remain mostly white even after you take them out of the water again! 

I more or less followed the NYT latke recipe, which calls for eggs, flour, salt, baking powder, and pepper. It results in a puffy latke that is absolutely delightful. 

We had these for dinner as a side dish, but I can’t remember what the main was. 

Later in Chanukah, I made sufganiyot: Little jelly donuts. I’ve tried different recipes, but this time I went for the Smitten Kitchen one, which has you rolling out the dough and cutting it into rounds, rather than dropping dollops of batter into the hot oil. If I remember, I made the dough the night before, then cut it out and fried it. The recipe includes an option for filling them with jelly and THEN frying them, but I opted to fry and then fill. 

Absurdly delicious, and beautifully plump. Definitely doing this recipe from now on. 

I also, for reasons I can’t clarify, decided to make blintzes this year. (Well, last year, I guess.) I have a very old memory of my grandmother (the mean one) making blintzes when she moved into our house. Nobody was allowed in the kitchen, and I could hear her violently whacking the frying pan on the table to get the wrapper out of the pan.

I did not find it necessary to do that! Making the wrappers was a pretty steep learning curve, though, and I absolutely had some misfires, and probably my wrappers were a little too thick. (They are essentially slightly undercooked crêpes — undercooked because you fill them and then fry them.) The classic recipe calls for farmer’s cheese/pot cheese, but I used ricotta, which is very close. 

I followed Smitten Kitchen’s recipe, and they turned out wonderful. 

And yes, when I took my first bite of that combination of flavors I haven’t had since I was about six, I wept a tiny bit. My poor mean grandmother, what a life she had. Poor her, poor them, poor everybody. At least we have blintzes. 

I made a simple cherry sauce from frozen cherries. Can’t find the recipe, but it was just, like, a cornstarch, lemon juice, sugar, water kind of thing. 

INCREDIBLE. 

I do believe next Chanukah I will make EITHER sufganitot OR blintzes, but woof, everything was so good, I don’t really have regrets.

And we played dreidel! I miraculously remembered to get chocolate coins to bet with, and Sophia surprised everyone with gift cards to a local bookshop.  

I think we managed to light the candles 6 out of 8 days, and we lit the Advent candles more than half the time,

which is not a bad record for this vicinity. 

On Christmas eve, I decided I wanted to try that cinnamon star pull-apart bread I see everyone making, rather than my normal cinnamon rolls. I followed the Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe, and I even watched the video. I formed the stars and then put it in the fridge overnight, and it looked promising!

In the evening, we decorated the tree. Usually I put up lights outside the house and set up the nativity scene in the beginning of Advent, then add lights inside on the third Sunday, and then we decorate the tree on Christmas Eve. 

We went to Midnight Mass That Is Actually At Midnight, Which In Theory I Love But Also Zzzzzzzzz, and Benny was serving, and it was lovely and beautiful, but also there was enough exhaustd and overstimulated weeping and lamenting from certain quarters that I decided not to even try taking pictures in the church. But many of the kids looked very nice. We did take a few pics at home. 

We staggered home with the addition of Elijah, who spent the night on the couch. We lugged all the presents and stockings out and sprinkled candy around according to tradition, and got into bed by 2:30. I left a note for the kids to please take out the cinnamon bread and let the dough warm up when they get up. (They are allowed to get up whenever they want and open their stockings, which have candy and a few small presents; but they can’t wake us up to open the rest of the presents until 8:00.)

So I got up and baked the bread, and it was not great! Just didn’t keep its shape, and I thought there was too little cinnamon and sugar for the amount of bread.

No one really complained, though. we had tons of bacon, oranges, grapes, and pomegranates, orange juice and eggnog, and candy and chocolate galore. The kids gave each other such excellent presents. 

Moe joined us via video (he’s currently working two jobs and couldn’t get here in person, alas), Clara came over in the morning, and Lena came by later in the day. So a lovely day all around, much laughing and goofing around. Later, we had our traditional takeout Chinese feast

and all was well.

I haven’t yet mentioned that, right before Christmas, I baked and sold a large number of cheesecakes. I think a total of 14? It’s possible this is a legal gray area, but they were delicious and nobody arrested me, so we have that going for us. I even sold the one that got caught on the oven rack and half the top got ripped off.

I gave the lady a discount and showed her a photo of how it was damaged, but check out how I fixed it:

I do like making pretty food! I also offered strawberry sauce and blueberry sauce. 

After Christmas day was a bit of a blur. Like lots of other people, we ate a lot of candy and hung around in our pajamas and watched movies. We watched Stranger Things (still have to see the final episode), which we enjoyed with some heckling, and Wake Up Dead Man, which we all LOVED. At some point I made a double batch of buckeyes.

This is a recipe that I used to have to assemble all my montessori powers so I would be cool with the kids rolling the dough into balls with their grubby hands and coming out with buckeyes of all uneven sizes, and then not freaking out when they splattered hot melted chocolate all over the place while dipping them. Oh how times have changed! This time, I made the dough and nobody felt like making buckeyes. So it stayed in the fridge for several days, until I finally got tired of looking at it. The dough was a little dry, so rather than rolling it, I scooped half-balls with a melon baller

and rather than dipping it in chocolate, I just drizzled melted chocolate over the top. 

The kids called them “gentrified buckeyes.”  The only downside to this model is that, when you refrigerate them, it’s super easy to flick the chocolate off and eat the plain candy underneath, if for instance you can’t each chocolate but you certainly can eat 927 plain balls of peanut butter, butter, sugar, and vanilla. I’m just saying, if they’re completely robed in chocolate, you have to work harder to denude them, and you only eat maybe 600 of them. 

Eventually, we wobbled our way toward eating actual food again. I made beef barley soup and challah one night.

Here’s my soup recipe:

Jump to Recipe

and here’s my challah recipe:

Jump to Recipe

I did one loaf with sesame seeds, one with “what the hell happened to my bagel?” seasoning, or whatever the off-brand is called

Honestly they were a little dry and not as chewy as you want challah to be, but still nice. Can’t beat freshly-baked bread. 

Another night we had just plain old broiled pork ribs, seasoned with salt and pepper and shoved up under a hot broiler, turned once. This remains one of my favorite ways to serve pork ribs. 

Looks like we had mashed potatoes, too. Aren’t you glad I’m here to narrate this perplexing imagery? 

The other night, we had oven-fried chicken and some bare-bones pasta salad. 
 

Here’s my recipe for oven-fried chicken:

Jump to Recipe

As you can see in the background, I had started my next goofy project, which was Sophia’s birthday cake. She once again requested to be surprised, which is honestly the one thing I can guarantee, with my cakes. She did ask for a strawberry cake with lemon cheesecake frosting, and I was feeling ambitious for some misbegotten reason, so I decided to make a fresh strawberry cake without artificial strawberry flavoring. I once again turned to Sally’s Baking Addiction, and followed this recipe, which has you puree strawberries and then simmer them until the volume is reduced by half. The idea is that you impart strawberry flavor into the batter without making it too runny. 

Well, I will cut the suspense and tell you the cake did not turn out great. It did taste like strawberry, but it was really dense and a little gummy. I don’t know if this is my fault — cakes are not my forte — but that is how it turned out. I did bake it in a bundt pan, because I wanted that shape, but I don’t think that was the problem. However, since I did have a cake with a hole in the middle, I did what any red-blooded American would do: I filled it with Skittles. 

But first I made a lemon cream cheese frosting, using this recipe from Sugar Spun Run, and it was absolutely delicious. Fluffy and creamy and perfectly sweet-tart.  

Anyway, back to the surprise part! Sophia loves Conan Gray, so I decided to model the cake after his newest album cover.

 

So I ended up with a vaguely hat-shaped cake (I used a second pan to make the top part) with a slightly blurry little fondant sailor perched on the brim. 

You can’t really tell, but one of his wee hands is curled up so he can clutch one of the candles. Here he is before I added the water or sky or whatever

Did I mention the frosting was delicious? I don’t know, little kids are much easier to please! Anyway, Moe had come over to stay for a few days, and Clara and Elijah came by, and we all had lovely calzones

Here’s my basic calzone recipe. (I just use premade pizza dough.)

Jump to Recipe

And then, after presents and cake, the youngest and the oldest in the family shuffled off to bed and left the birthday girl and pals to watch Zoolander and eat this charcuterie board I made:

That’s pretty, right? I was pleased with it. I made the chocolate leaves when I was drizzling the buckeyes, and had leftover chocolate. I just piped them onto parchment paper and stuck them in the freezer until it was time to use them. And I realized I now know how to make pie crust roses, strawberry roses, AND salami roses. 

This birthday was actually Jan. 1, which means I didn’t mention our New Year’s Eve! Which is, you’ll be surprised to hear, food-centric. We had sushi and pork dumplings. I usually make the pork dumplings from scratch, but couldn’t find dumpling wrappers anywhere in town, so I just bought some frozen ones. 

For the sushi, I got some good rice and made a pot of seasoned rice.

Jump to Recipe

I got tons of nori sheets, and . . . let’s see. Smoked salmon, raw ahi tuna, steamed shrimp, avocado, mango, red caviar, cucumber, carrot matchsticks, fried SPAM, and an assortment of sauces, hot mustard, and so on. Sesame seeds and furikake. I forget what else. 

and everyone made sushi and we had fun! Oh, and Benny made taiyaki filled with nutella and jelly. I was honestly just crushingly tired by this point, so I don’t have much in the way of photos. I do have a short video I took by accident, and I watched it six times before I figured out what the hell I was doing. Then I realized I was cleaning off my phone’s camera lens with a napkin, frowning at it, LICKING it, and cleaning it off with a napkin again. If you send me $900 I will share the video. 

That night, we watched It’s A Wonderful Life, which we saved for when Moe was here, and then we counted down to midnight, shot off the cheapy little confetti guns I got at Walmart, had some sparkling cider in plastic cups

and staggered off to bed. 

The very last thing Damien did in the year 2025 was to go down in the basement and thaw out the bathtub pipe, which had frozen even though we left it running a trickle; and then on the very first day of 2026, the oven door broke. I was actually just peeking at the calzones to see if they were done, and the glass inside the oven just kind of fell apart and slid off the door. It didn’t look to me like it had exploded at all, so I uhh went ahead and fed those calzones to my family, and they enjoyed them, and nobody died. 

Then today, Jan. 2, our new dryer arrived (Damien has been going to the laundromat for the family for over a week now), and he is taking out the old one and putting in the new. Because of my past cleverness, this involves unscrewing about forty screws with which I attached plexiglass to the laundry room door last summer to keep the rain from getting in, and also dismantling the makeshift greenhouse I set up on the back steps to keep my pomegranate trees from freezing. SO YOU SEE, marriage isn’t 50/50, if you want it to work. It’s 100/100. He puts in 100% of the work actually keeping the household functional, and I mess around with fondant and pomegranates, 100%. And that’s our secret!  Anyway, don’t forget about the video. $900 firm. I know what I got. 

   

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Beef barley soup (Instant Pot or stovetop)

Makes about a gallon of lovely soup

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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


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

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

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

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

 

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Challah (braided bread)

Ingredients

  • 1.5 cups warm water
  • 1/2 cup oil (preferably olive oil)
  • 2 eggs
  • 6-8 cups flour
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1.5 tsp yeast
  • 2 egg yolks for egg wash
  • poppy seeds or "everything bagel" topping (optional)
  • corn meal (or flour) for pan, to keep loaf from sticking

Instructions

  1. In a small bowl, dissolve a bit of the sugar into the water, and sprinkle the yeast over it. Stir gently, and let sit for five minutes or more, until it foams.

  2. In the bowl of standing mixer, put the flour (starting with six cups), salt, remaining sugar, oil, and eggs, mix slightly, then add the yeast liquid. Mix with dough hook until the dough doesn't stick to the sides of the bowl, adding flour as needed. It's good if it has a slightly scaly appearance on the outside.

  3. (If you're kneading by hand, knead until it feels soft and giving. It will take quite a lot of kneading!)

  4. Put the dough in a greased bowl and lightly cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap. Let it rise in a warm place for at least an hour, until it's double in size.

  5. Grease a large baking sheet and sprinkle it with flour or corn meal. Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Roll three into "snakes" and make a large braid, pinching the ends to keep them together. Divide the fourth piece into three and make a smaller braid, and lay this over the larger braid. Lay the braided loaf on the pan.

  6. Cover again and let rise again for at least an hour. Preheat the oven to 350.

  7. Before baking, make an egg wash out of egg yolks and a little water. Brush the egg wash all over the loaf, and sprinkle with poppy seeds or "everything" topping.

  8. Bake 25 minutes or more until the loaf is a deep golden color.

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Oven-fried chicken

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Sushi rice

I use my Instant Pot to get well-cooked rice, and I enlist a second person to help me with the second part. If you have a small child with a fan, that's ideal.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups raw sushi rice
  • 1 cup rice vinegar
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 Tbsp salt

Instructions

  1. Rinse the rice thoroughly and cook it.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the rice vinegar, sugar, and salt, and cook, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved.

  3. Put the rice in a large bowl. Slowly pour the vinegar mixture over it while using a wooden spoon or paddle to fold or divide up the cooked rice to distribute the vinegar mixture throughout. You don't want the rice to get gummy or too sticky, so keep it moving, but be careful not to mash it. I enlist a child to stand there fanning it to dry it out as I incorporate the vinegar. Cover the rice until you're ready to use it.

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. 448: November, no cry

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

SATURDAY
Leftovers + taquitos 

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

SUNDAY
Tacos al pastor, black beans, pomegranates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I followed this recipe pretty much exactly

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

MONDAY
Chicken quesadillas, chips, beans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very photogenic, too.

Another win for Sip and Feast!

WEDNESDAY
Marcella Hazan sauce with sausage on pasta

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

THURSDAY
Chicken burgers, puffed corn, broccoli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle?

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

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Tacos al pastor

Ingredients

  • 8-10 lbs pork butt or loin

For the marinade:

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

For serving:

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

Instructions

  1. Thinly slice the pork.

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

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

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

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

 

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Instant Pot black beans

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

 

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Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce

We made a quadruple recipe of this for twelve people. 

Keyword Marcella Hazan, pasta, spaghetti, tomatoes

Ingredients

  • 28 oz can crushed tomatoes or whole tomatoes, broken up
  • 1 onion peeled and cut in half
  • salt to taste
  • 5 Tbsp butter

Instructions

  1. Put all ingredients in a heavy pot.

  2. Simmer at least 90 minutes. 

  3. Take out the onions.

  4. I'm freaking serious, that's it!

What’s for supper? Vol. 319: In which I rest on pie laurels

Hap the Friday! I didn’t do a What’s For Supper last week because of course it was the day after Thanksgiving, and I assumed you already knew what we were having for supper. We aren’t amazing turkey leftover wizards anyway, so the following week wasn’t too spectacular. How about if I just do the highlights of the last two weeks? Who will stop me?

Here’s some of what we had the last few weeks: 

Pulled pork, cole slaw, french fries, Hawaiian rolls

Damien made this yummy pulled pork using the Deadspin recipe. For me, pulled pork is what you make when you have lost all interest in life and yet there is this hunk of meat to deal with, so you conceal it inside some kind of pot as quickly as possible and then pull it out at dinner time when it’s too late for anyone to get away; but Damien took a lot more trouble over it, and it showed. 

The next day, Damien also made a gigantic lasagna or possibly two lasagnas, also from Deadspin. 

Somewhat less photogenic, but ravishingly delicious. This recipe requires you to make a ragù and a béchamel sauce and let me tell you, any time I have to use the ålternate keybœard twïce in a sêntence, you know it’s going to be tæsty. 

Beef barley soup and store bought croissants 

Yaas, beef barley soup. This one, I made, and it was a cold, drizzly day, just perfect for building up a hearty, heartening soup. Garlic, salt and pepper and olive oil, carrots and onions, beef broth and red wine, beef, barley, and then mushrooms. 

Jump to Recipe

That was the week before Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving went great! I started baking on Tuesday. On Thursday, all my weird little chickens came home to roost, if temporarily

and my son’s gf also came over, and my brother and his bf, and we all had an excellent time, talking and laughing and shouting important opinions about obscure movies. Damien made the turkey injected and basted with white wine and lime juice and stuffed with sausage and oyster stuffing. I didn’t see or get a photo of it roasted, but here is the carving:

and he also made the gravy. He also made the mashed potatoes at the very last minute, because I put all the food on the table and told everyone dinner was served and then wandered around with a confused expression, and then he suddenly realized all I had done was boil a bunch of potatoes. So he mashed them and threw in a bunch of milk and butter, and mashed them, oops! Everything he made was scrumptious.

You can find the recipes for all my Thanksgiving foods here. 

I did fully made candied sweet potatoes using this recipe from My Forking Life, and they turned out great. This recipe includes a little fresh orange juice, which is nice. I think next time I may include actual slices of oranges. 

I had my annual internal query about what the difference is between yams and sweet potatoes. Sometimes I look it up and sometimes I don’t, but it doesn’t matter, because I never remember. So I thought about it for a while while I was cutting them up, and then I double-checked the bag, and it said “Mr. Yammy Sweet Potatoes.” So there you go. 

I also made parker house rolls using my own recipe, and they turned out nice and cute,

hard as a rock, and dry as a bone, and just about tasteless, so I need to find a new recipe.

I made cranberry orange bread which was fine, a little dry

spanakopita triangles to start us off, which were delightful

and we had a cranberry sauce vortex!!!

and three pumpkin pies, and a festive pecan pie that turned out rather pretty

I learned how to make pie crust roses from this website. Good to know! Very easy.

and I was inspired to make an apple pie that turned out quite lovely.

Refrigerating the pie for half an hour before baking helps all the decoration keep its shape). I gave it a little egg wash and sugar sprinkle and it was nice

Although the apples inside were a little chompy, to be honest. Can’t have everything.

I also made a few quarts of vanilla ice cream, and a quart of butternut squash ice cream with curry candied nuts, following a recipe from Blue Apron. (I ran out of pecans and they were like a dollar each this year, so I made it with 3/4 walnuts.) 

I really really liked the squash ice cream. It distinctly had all the flavors in the title — squash, curry, candied nuts — and it just worked. Really good autumnal flavor with just a little fiery edge from the curry. 

And finally, Dewey brought a lovely dense, moist gingerbread made using the Smitten Kitchen recipe,  plus a jar of heavy cream that the kids shook to whip up into whipped cream, so that was fun

Oh and I made a bunch of mulled cider with cinnamon stick and orange slices. 

And that was Thanksgiving, and it was great! 

Moving on!

Turkey ala king

When I was little, we had turkey ala king constantly, and I really loved it. I don’t know if it was the fun of having toast with dinner or what, but it felt like such a treat, and it was just so cozy and comforting, even with the mushy, muddy peas. So I was determined to recreate it, even though I knew in my heart that not many people would want it. I think my mother used to make it just by adding some cream of mushroom soup to leftover turkey, and throwing in some canned peas and heating it up; so I decided to elevate it by making a cream sauce with real cream, and adding fresh mushrooms, and using frozen peas (well, that’s not elevated very high, but it’s better than canned!). 

And it tasted . . . fine.

I think I was the only one who ate it, except for also one kid who came home super late and would have gladly eaten microwaved roadkill. So I guess I got that out of my system. I’ll probably forget and try it again in five years or so, and rediscover that this is just an intrinsically medium-okay dish and I can just move on with my life. 

Anyway, we used up the turkey. 

I also threw the picked-over carcass in the Instant Pot with water and some carrots and celery, onions, salt and pepper, and a little cider vinegar. I would have added herbs and whatnot, but we were fresh out.

I cooked it on high pressure for two hours, and I got about a gallon of good, golden bone broth, which I put in the freezer for future souping. 

Chicken broccoli stir fry and rice 

Boneless skinless chicken thighs were on sale, so I cut it in strips and fried it up with broccoli spears, sliced mushrooms, and two bottles of teriyaki sauce, and served it over rice.

Right after Thanksgiving, I always jump at the opportunity to buy bottles of sauce, because it’s one of the few weeks of the year I know I won’t give myself a hard time about it. It’s normal and fine to buy bottled sauce. It’s there for a reason, and people should never feel guilty about it. Except me. I’m different, and I should feel bad. 

And that’s it! Today I’m running away to go see the great and glorious Leticia Ochoa Adams speak, so I don’t really know what they’re having for supper at home! Spaghetti, I suppose. Maybe they can have nothing ala king. 

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Beef barley soup (Instant Pot or stovetop)

Makes about a gallon of lovely soup

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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


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

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 210: Carbonara, yes.

The fog’s getting thicker, and Leon’s getting larger! There is no Leon. I am Leon. Here’s what we had to eat this week:

SATURDAY
Pizza

We had our usual combination of plain, pepperoni, and olive, and also there were some leftover mushrooms we fried up, and then Damien cut up some anchovies (leftover from last week’s anchstravaganza) just for my two slices, so everyone was happy. 

Saturday was the day the kids showed me the part of the woods they’ve apparently been clambering around in all spring. A beautiful and blessed place with an underground stream you can hear but not see. They found the  spot on the top of the hill where the spring that feeds our stream emerges from the ground, and there is a long string of enormous, moss-covered rocks that got shoved around by some passing glacier many thousands of years ago. Sometimes I can’t believe we’re allowed to live here.

I also got some hardier saplings and shrubs in the ground (in NH, there may be a frost any time until Memorial Day, so only the toughest stuff is safe to plant outside) — a pink crabapple sapling, a mock orange shrub, and some forsythia I got started in pots last year and then forgot about. Looks like the day lilies I transplanted made it through the winter, too! And I have a pile of purple and yellow pansies waiting for a home. We did have some snow this week, and the heat is still coming on every night, but we’ll get there. 

SUNDAY
Rigatoni in béchamel with little meatballs

I saw this recipe on Smitten Kitchen, where she adapted it from Marcella Hazan. Basically, you make a bunch of little meatballas (that was a typo, but I’m letting it ride), you make a big batch of white sauce, and you boil up a bunch of rigatoni, and you mix it all up with a bunch of freshly-grated parmesan, and then bake it until it all melds together. 

Look at these wonderful little meatballas, twinkling like the stars in the sky!

Normally I bake meatballs, which is faster and not so messy, but this recipe seemed worth going the extra mile for. Here’s the recipe, which I will probably not make up a card for, as this dish got increasingly cursed as the day went on.

Don’t get me wrong: it was completely scrumptious.  Imagine the aroma:

Just the coziest, most creamy, savory thing imaginable.

But like I said, it was cursed. I ended up spending something like five hours making it, which is completely unreasonable. And there were some . . . interpersonal problems that cropped up along the way, and I don’t think I’ve processed them fully yet. If it’s okay with you, we’ll just move along. 

MONDAY
Buffalo hot dogs, hot pretzels, broccoli and dip

Buffalo hot dogs are hot dogs with blue cheese, hot sauce, and chopped scallions on them, and they are my current favorite hot dogs. 

Can we all stop for a moment and admire the stellar chopping job I did with that one scallion? 

Scallions are one of several things I’m currently sprouting on my windowsill.

The others are celery, which is coming along nicely

and horseradish, which is just sitting there like an asshole. 

It was sprouting, until I put it in water, and then nothing. Whatever. You can be replaced, pal. Don’t you ever for a second get to thinking you’re irreplaceable.

There’s also this. I’m not sure what the expectations are here. 

Well, there’s no rush. 

TUESDAY
Chicken salad with strawberries, nuts, and cheese

Old reliable. I bought one of those cartons of mixed greens, and then also some other lettuce just for the lizard, as well as some pea sprouts, which I happen to know he likes. I told Moe I had bought his lizard some pea sprouts, and he said, “Oh, good. I was just feeding him apples, which he is tired of, so he got mad and pooped in his water dish.”  That’s what kind of house we’re running here.

The salad was greens, as I said, and roasted and sliced chicken breast, strawberries, feta cheese, and your choice of almonds or walnuts  (miraculously left over from Passover), which I didn’t bother toasting, but which I admit are much nicer lightly toasted microwaved. Tasty salad, though. 

Some bottled dressing and there it is. 

WEDNESDAY
Pulled pork sandwiches, coleslaw, fries

I tried a new recipe for the pulled pork this time. It was, as far as I can recall, chunks of pork, a diced onion, several minced garlic cloves, some sliced jalapeños, a bunch of chili powder, a can of Coke, and generous sloshes of soy sauce, wine vinegar, and Worcestershire sauce. I put it in the slow cooker and let it cook for about six hours.

As is so often the case with these things, it smelled PARADISAL and tasted fine. 

I ended up putting some bottled sauce on it, just to give it a little more punch.

If you’re looking for a pulled pork/carnitas recipe that has tons of flavor on its own, do try John Herreid’s recipe, which we made last week. 

I’ll put Lena’s tasty coleslaw recipe at the end, but really I just made the dressing with mayo, white vinegar, and white sugar, and it was fine.

THURSDAY
Spaghetti carbonara, nice grapes

There was this NYT recipe that caught my eye, Springtime Spaghetti Carbonara, and I managed to snag it before it disappeared behind the paywall. Sort of a combination of pasta primavera and spaghetti al carbonara. It called for English peas, asparagus, and basil. But I couldn’t find the peas, and the basil got shoved to the back of the fridge, where it froze. It turns out Irene was trash talking me behind my back about planning to put vegetables in anyway; so I just made good old spaghetti  carbonara.

Jump to Recipe

 

No ragrets. I can’t think of another dish with so few ingredients that tastes like such a luxury. 

Irene, because she has to get worked up about something, was horrified to discover that you throw raw eggs in at the end. Which is how you make this dish, and she’s always eaten it happily, and they’re not really raw, because the hot pasta cooks it. I guess it just doesn’t taste right until you add a little dash of outrage. 

Irene is the kid, by the way, who was on a Zoom meeting yesterday, and got it into her head to stay perfectly still until her classmates started scrambling around, closing tabs and shutting down programs in an effort to unfreeze her. IRENE. 

FRIDAY
Probably Matzoh brei (pronounced to rhyme with “lotsa pie”)

They had cases of matzoh for 75% off, so I did what I had to do. Check your supermarkets and see what you can find! This is a neat little breakfast or brunchy dish that’s easy to make and has lots of variations. Some people have it with jam, which I find a little bleh; but I have to admit, it’s basically french toast, so there’s no reason not to eat it that way. 

Jump to Recipe

I like it as a savory dish with salt and pepper. If you had some crisp fried onions, that would be excellent. The important thing is to cook it in hot oil, so it gets really crisp on the edges. Here’s some matzoh brei in its basic form:

I think I may also make Giant Chocolate Pancake, and maybe some oven fried potatoes, because I am fat, but I could be fatter!

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Coleslaw

Ingredients

  • 1 head cabbage, shredded
  • 2 carrots, grated
  • 5 radishes, grated or sliced thin (optional)

Dressing

  • 1 cup mayo
  • 1 cup cider or white vinegar
  • 1/2 cup lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. Mix together shredded vegetables. 
    Mix dressing ingredients together and stir into cabbage mix. 

 

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Spaghetti carbonara

An easy, delicious meal.

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

 

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matzoh brei

A quick little dish you can make whenever there's matzoh around. Rhymes with "lotsa pie." One sheet of matzoh per serving. I like mine with just salt and pepper, but you could have it with jam

Ingredients

  • 1 sheet matzoh
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • oil for cooking

Instructions

  1. Break the matzoh into pieces about the size of saltines, and put them in a bowl.

  2. Pour hot water over the matzoh pieces and let it sit for a minute to soften. Then drain off the water and press on the matzoh pieces to squeeze out the water.

  3. Pour the beaten eggs over the matzoh and mix a little so the matzoh is all eggy.

  4. Heat up a little oil in a pan. Pour in the matzoh and egg mixture and fry, turning once. You want it crisp on the edges.

  5. Serve with salt and pepper and fried onions if you want it savory. You can also take it in a sweet direction and serve with jam and powdered sugar.

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 154: Ragu! Sing it with me! Raguuuuuuu!

I think Corrie speaks for all of us when she says:

Here’s what we ate this week (with some links to Christmas baking and candy recipes at the end):

SATURDAY
Birthday! Stuffed shells, garlic bread, veg and dip, birthday cake

Sweet Benny wanted a rose-themed birthday. Easy enough. We made some giant paper flowers and hung them from the ceiling. Here it is, halfway decorated:

and the night before, Benny and I made some fruit roll roses.

She’s a wonderful kid to work with, and she never gets offended if you say, “Sweetheart, Mama’s ears are tired. Can you stop talking for a few minutes?” She just laughs and says, “Yeah, I like to talk.” Then she keeps talking.

I couldn’t find the Fruit by the Foot strips I was looking for, so we got regular fruit roll-ups, unrolled them, cut them into four strips, and pinched the ends together to make one long strip. Then we started rolling it up in a tight roll to make the center of the rose; then we rolled up the rest loosely, twisting and occasionally folding and smooshing the strip. I don’t know if I can describe it better than that. Some of the turned out more rose-like than others!

Then we stuck toothpicks in the bottoms and stuck them in the cake. I used a Wilton leaf tip to make the leaves, and added some dots for garlands on the sides. My first leaves, not too shabby!

She was delighted with her cake. When Damien put it in front of her, she just sat there, smiling and smiling.

She requested stuffed shells. I didn’t have my recipe in front of me, so I checked out the box. Let’s see . . . cottage cheese . . . zucchini . . . yeah, okay, this box is fired. I went and found my recipe. Recipe card at the end.

For a party activity, we made flower crowns. These were first graders, and they definitely needed some help from the moms, but I bet they could do it on their own the second time around. We made circlets out of wired pine garlands, then made standard tissue paper flowers with a little bell at the center, threaded through the pipe cleaner. (Yes, I still call them pipe cleaners instead of chenille stems. Take that!) We attached the flowers on with the pipe cleaners, then tied wisps of tulle to both sides of the flower just to add some poofiness, then tied ribbons to hang down the back. I didn’t get any good pics, but can probably do a tutorial if anyone is interested. Not a bad party activity, and the girls looked adorable, and ready for the Kentucky Derby.

SUNDAY
Roast beef sandwiches, chips

Damien roasted a couple of chuck roasts. He covered them in salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and seared them in very hot oil, about three minutes per side, then roasted them in a 325 oven for about 90 minutes. Then he let them rest for a bit, then sliced it up. We put it on rolls with horseradish sauce and provolone, and put them in the oven for a few minutes to toast up. I also had tomatoes in mine.

I had a jar of sliced pepperoncini, but they were a weird color, so I threw them out. Aren’t you glad I’m so tired I thought that was worth writing down?

MONDAY
Ham, mashed potatoes, peas, roast brussels sprouts

Me, sadly flipping through supermarket flyers: So . . . do you guys . . . maybe . . . want ham?
Benny: HAM. HAM. HAMANDMASHEDPOTATOESANDPEAS.
Me: Okay! But how about Brussels sprouts instead of peas, just to mix things up a little? Brussels sprouts are on sale right n-
Benny:

So that’s what we had. I also roasted some Brussels sprouts, because they were on sale and I like them.

Benny was irate.

TUESDAY
Sweet and sour chicken stir fry, rice

Clara had been asking for this meal, which I make very authentically by cutting chicken into pieces and cooking them, then adding steamed vegetables from a bag and sauce from a jar, and schlorping the whole thing over rice.

It was extra schlorpy, because I didn’t drain the vegetables sufficiently. I even found a few cans of water chestnuts in the cabinet. I took them out of the cans and everything.

Oh, I cooked the rice in the Instant Pot using the 1:1 method. Works every time. I like the IP for rice because it comes out nice and sticky, and you can make it ahead of time and just let it stay warm until you’re ready.

WEDNESDAY
Ragù on fettuccine, garlic bread

Damien started making his amazing ragù the night before, and this was the ragù that surpassed all previous ragùs. He uses this Deadspin recipe, and this time, he used a pound of pork, a pound of veal, and . . . hold onto your butts . . . a pound of pancetta, which he ground by hand.

He ran a bunch of onions, celery, and carrots through the food processor, and threw in a bunch of anchovies, wine, and olive oil, and a little tomato paste, and let it cook a good long time. I gained eleven pounds just smelling it.

It was fantastic.

I know it doesn’t look like much in this pic, but it’s one of those foods where the flavor just blooms inside your mouth. Can’t figure out if that’s a creepy thing to say or not, but it sure was exciting. Also, every time the kids asked what was for supper, I would sing out, “ra-GUUUUUUUUUU!” to the tune of Veggie Tales “Cebu,” and it really annoyed them. Ha ha!

THURSDAY
Pork ramen

Sometimes this gets pretty elaborate, but this time it was just cheapy ramen, some boneless pork ribs sautéed in olive oil with soy sauce and sliced, some sautéed mushrooms, chopped scallions, and soft boiled eggs. Oh, and crunchy noodles. Spicy sesame seeds and hot sauce.

I was starving, and this tasted like heaven. Salty, salty heaven.

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle for kids, possibly bouillabaisse for me.

I got some kind of frozen mixed seafood whatnot for like $4 a few weeks ago, and it’s calling to me.

Okay, that’s a wrap! Now, how about Christmas baking? Got anything good? I haven’t even thought about it yet, but I’ll probably make chocolate caramel nuts, which make good token presents. Here’s my post with a photo guide to the recipe from Smitten Kitchen. You really need a photo guide, because it goes through something like eleven alarming stages before things turn out fine at the end. This post includes links to other helpful basic December recipes, including fudge, nut brittle, buckeyes, and rum balls.

Hanukkah is over, but that’s no reason not to make rugelach, so here is my recipe and photo guide for that.

Finally, if you feel like you have to decorate cookies, here is a recipe for sugar cookie dough that you do not have to refrigerate. You can also use this dough recipe for beautiful stained glass cookies, which always impress. This post has some photos of the process.

 

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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. 

How to make chocolate caramel almonds without panicking

When we manage to make treats for Christmas, we usually make fudge and buckeyes, sometimes rum balls or peanut brittle, and of course rugelach. Last year, looking for something a little more decorative, I tried chocolate caramelized almonds from Smitten Kitchen. You don’t need a candy thermometer to make them, and you can use whatever kind of sugar or sprinkles you like, so they are adaptable gifts for just about any holiday.

Here’s the ingredients list from Smitten Kitchen:

  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1 1/2 cup whole almonds
  • 1/2 teaspoon flaky salt
  • 8 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
  • Approximately 1/2 cup cocoa powder, sanding or coarse sugar, or sprinkles to coat

You will want a good, heavy pot and some parchment paper or silicone pads for this, too.

I’m trying very hard not to run afoul of recipe copyright laws here, so I’m going to send you right to her page to get the detailed directions. Basically you put sugar and water in a pot and bring it to a simmer, add the almonds and simmer them until they’re caramelized, stir in the salt, and then spread the almonds out on a pan covered with parchment paper.

Put the pan in the freezer for a few minutes until they are set. Then break them up and dip them in melted chocolate; then roll the chocolate-coated almonds in various fancy coatings. Let them set again, and then you can store them for quite a long time at room temperature.

Here’s my reason for writing a whole post about it: In the detailed instructions for caramelizing the almonds, she says,

“Once the liquid has fully evaporated, it will become sandy and you will think something has gone wrong; it has not. Continue stirring and the sandiness will dissolve into a bronzed but clear liquid; this is the caramel.”

I was glad of the reassurance, and prepared myself not to freak out. But then! I freaked out anyway! Weird stuff happens in that pot!!! So I’m sharing the photos of the caramelization process here, so you can see how it goes and maybe not panic like I did.

Here we are simmering, fine, very good:

then it got thicker, and yes, there are soap-like bubbles forming:

the the liquid was just about evaporated, and all was well:

then, sure enough, it started to get dry and a little bit cakey, and I was like, “Wow, she was right! That is sandy.”

Then it got dry and even more sandy, and I thought, “Good thing she warned me, because this does not look normal at all. I would definitely be worrying right now.”

Then this happened. And it went on and on. Just kept on being sandy. I didn’t stop stirring, but it was the stirring of futility. I assumed the candy gods were onto me, and knew I had no business in any kitchen, smitten or otherwise. Look at this!

Yeah, these are totally ruined. Great, now they’re clumping. No one said anything about clumping. Dammit. Almonds are expensive! Dammit!

But wait! Down there in the center of the pot, under all the nuts, there’s a little, kind of syrupy patch!

Well, hallelujah! Those little bastiches are caramelizing after all, aren’t they.

And there they were, coated with caramel, just like Smitten Kitchen said. So I put them on parchment paper, slid them in the freezer, and went to sit down for a bit.

I was so emotionally spent by this time that I left them in the freezer for a few days, rather than the suggested five minutes, until I did the next step. I don’t recommend this, as they got a little soggy; but you will be the best judge of what kind of load you can carry at this point in the evening. It still worked, but they weren’t as crunchy as they might have been.

Now I’ll send you back to Smitten Kitchen for the rest of the directions. You’re going to pour the nuts into melted chocolate, stir to coat, and then pick out the almonds and roll them around in your sugars or sprinkles or whatever. It’s messy and time-consuming, especially if you’re making a large batch, so don’t think you can just zoop-zoop-zoop (as my mother used to say) and be done with it.

The good news is, you can make them ahead of time and then store them at room temperature for a long time. Here’s the finished product:

I wish I had a brighter picture of the finished product. They were so pretty, especially the sugar-coated ones! They looked like little Christmas gems. (I buy up expensive seasonal-themed sugars and sprinkles after holidays, when they are marked way down. This doesn’t work, as the kids tend to develop an unconquerable hunger for tiny little bats in May, but it’s a good theory.)

I think these almonds make nice treats on their own, or they would make lovely accents to a package of fudge or cookies. Just keep telling yourself, “It’s supposed to look this way,” and you’ll probably be right.

 

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 65: The importance of being parchment paper

Ooh, I’m in such a hurry! We’re headed out for a day trip as vacation week wraps up. I’ll just have to talk about food and skip the jokes, to save time.

SATURDAY
Chicken burgers

We decorate the tree on Christmas eve, and then we went to “midnight Mass” at 10 PM. Part of me was sad and a little irritated that the parish wasn’t giving us our rare and special twice-a-year midnight liturgy this year; but the other part was like, HOME BEFORE MIDNIGHT, WOOOOO! Because we did manage to get all forty presents wrapped, but there were still ten stockings to fill . . .

SUNDAY
Christmas brunch; Pupu Platter for 15

Our traditional Christmas morning brunch is  cinnamon rolls, bacon, grapes, orange juice, and egg nog.

christmas-brunch

 

Tip: The way to keep kids from drinking egg nog until they throw up is . . . buy tiny cups. Cheers!

eggnog-small-cups

I made Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon roll dough the day before, and rolled out the rolls in the morning.

cinnamon-buns-red-pan

I made a double recipe, which was insane. I make this same mistake every year. We ended up throwing out both unused dough and uneaten cinnamon buns, and we brought a pan to my mother-in-law’s house, too.

We ordered Chinese from the restaurant down the road. We used to do the whole “Thanksgiving recreation” meal, or sometimes a glazed ham with cherries and pineapple rings, until we realized nobody wanted a huge, formal meal, and also it was kind of crappy that everyone else gets to relax and have fun on Christmas, but I was spending all day cooking. So, Pupu platter!

pupu

MONDAY
Leftover chinese food, leftover chicken burgers

Plus some extra frozen pork rolls my husband picked up because he is crazy. I also threw in some sad peppers and avocados I found in the fridge, because it felt like we hadn’t eaten vegetables in six years. Somehow the vegetables are always the first to drop out.

leftover-pupu

Finished making caramel chocolate-covered almonds from Smitten Kitchen today. This project had been lagging on and on for weeks. We eked out a few batches in time to give to teachers, and finally finished the rest on Monday.

If anyone’s interested, I have a series of photos showing exactly what the caramel should look like while it’s cooking. It goes through an alarming series of transformations, all of which are normal. Just say the word and I will share the pics.

I made the first few batches right, but then I got lazy and didn’t separate the caramelized almonds properly. So I just broke it up into clusters, rather than individual almonds and dipped those into chocolate, which was way easier and faster and just as good. I thought the gold sugar was especially pretty.

almonds-done

This recipe could be used for any time of year — just change the colors of sugar and sprinkles you use.

TUESDAY
Hamburgers, chips

Husband ran out to the store for meat while we all lazed around eating chocolate and playing video games.
We also made stained glass cookies, on the principle that it is better to make Christmas cookies late and slightly crabby then not to make Christmas cookies at all. We used this foolproof sugar cookie recipe for the dough. Then we sorted out some Jolly Ranchers by color, bagged them, and smashed them.

candy-crush

Then we cut them out and used smaller cookie cutters or knives to make cut-outs inside the cookie shapes. You’re supposed to bake the cookies part of the way, then fill them with candy bits, and then finish baking, but I forgot, and filled them before baking.

filling-cookies

They turned out great! Note the parchment paper.

cookies-baked

Look, I even made a corny pro-life cookie.

baby-cookie

That baby head-to-pelvis ratio is pretty accurate for Corrie, as I remember it.
Irene, of course, made a skull with glowing red eyes:

skull-cookie

Murry Christmas, weirdo. The key to the success of this recipe is, and I cannot stress this enough, USE PARCHMENT PAPER. Not wax paper, and not (brrr, your poor molars) tin foil. Parchment paper. If you don’t have parchment paper, do not make these cookies!

WEDNESDAY
Bacon, Brussels sprouts, and eggs; french fries

How I love this one-pan dish from Damn Delicious. It would make a wonderful brunch, but I think it’s super for supper, too. Bacon needs balsamic honey, eggs need hot pepper, and everyone plays well with Brussels sprouts, what do you know about that?

bacon-eggs-pan

I had microwaved leftovers for breakfast the next day, and had a banner day for productivity. I owe it all to protein, and Brussels sprouts. Even kinda congealed, it was so very good.

bacon-leftovers

THURSDAY
Spaghetti and meatballs, salad

I stuck with Fannie Farmer’s recipe for meatballs, which is basically one egg and half a cup of breadcrumbs for every pound of meat, plus whatever spices and herbs. I used about 6.5 pounds of beef and a little ground turkey, and made 85 wonderful meatballs. Rather than frying them, I put them on a broiler pan and cook them in a medium-hot oven. They keep their shape and don’t get all greasy, and it’s so much easier.

meatballs-pan

Yum yum. We were pretty much snowed in all day, so I was happy to have a very hearty meal.

spaghetti-meatballs

Speaking of snowed in, here is my recipe for completely delicious hot chocolate: Put into a pot one heaping tablespoon of cocoa powder and two heaping tablespoons of sugar for every mug of hot chocolate you want. Add enough water to make a thick syrup, and mix over low heat until the sugar is all melted. Then add the milk and a glug of vanilla. Stir and heat until it’s hot.

Benny insisted on drinking out of her doll tea set. As I mentioned before, the key to success and happiness in life is and always will be TINY CUPS.

FRIDAY
I think pizza.

And now my poor family is waiting for me in the car! Happy trails. Hope you are all having a wonderful Christmas and using parchment paper like I said. I’m not kidding.

What’s for supper? Vol. 63: Nuh-no.

SATURDAY
Chicken burgers, chips

Nothing to report. I do remember asking my husband if we should have salad, and he said no, and I took that to mean that we should just sort of avoid vegetables all week. This, we accomplished.

SUNDAY
Gochujang bulkgoki with nori, rice, roast broccoli

This is such a swell recipe. I cut up the pork and set it to marinate the night before, so on Sunday we had our normal busy day and still had a great supper at a normal hour. Here’s the recipe:

per 1.5 pounds sliced pork:

1 bag matchstick carrots
1 white onions sliced thin

5 generous Tbs gochujang
2 Tbs honey
2 tsp sugar
2 Tbs soy sauce
5 cloves minced garlic

Mix the sauce together and then combine it with the meat, carrots, and onions, and then let it sit in the fridge overnight. Then fry it up in a little oil and serve it with rice. You can make nice little bite-sized bundles on your plate with lettuce or nori.

gochujang-plate

And now I have a caucasoid confession: this time, I used way, way less gochujang than the recipe calls for. Some of my kids are super tired of spicy food, and I really wanted them to eat it; so I cut it by a third. Mistake. It was still spicy by kid standards (duh: even a little fermented pepper paste is still fermented pepper paste), but it just tasted so diminished. Never again. I am so sorry.

The broccoli was also not great. I cut it up small and put it on baking sheets with olive oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, and sesame seeds and put it under the broiler. I used too much soy sauce, and it tasted kind of harsh, and damp. Bleh. I mean, it was a pretty good meal, but it could have been so much better!

MONDAY
Pepperoncini beef rolls

Well, all the sadness and regret of the past was washed away with Monday’s meal, also from my friend Elizabeth, who gave me the bulgoki recipe. So you take some cheap chuck roast and put it in a crock pot along with some jarred pepperoncini with the stems cut off. Let it cook all day. And that’s it!

pepperoncini-beef-in-pot

Shred and serve on rolls with cheese and horseradish sauce.

I used potato rolls because they were cheap, but crusty bread would have been even nicer. I put the rolls under the broiler for a minute to toast them up a bit before adding the meat and cheese. I had swiss cheese, which was perfect, but provolone or havarti would be good, too.

pepperoncini-beef-sandwiches

Don’t forget to save some juices for dipping, because he who dips hot sandwiches into meat drippings is happy indeed. So toothsome, so fulfilling, so gratifying for all your senses.

This goes right into the rotation, no question. YUM.

TUESDAY
Taco Tuesday!!

I snuck a pound of turkey meat, which was on sale, in with the beef, and no one noticed.

WEDNESDAY
Sausage, egg, and cheese muffins

I didn’t burn the muffins! I think this might be the first time ever. I also am thrilled all over again with my two-burner nonstick griddle.

muffins-eggs-and-sausages

I can make dinner for twelve in two batches, instead of in five or six. Maybe I was just hungry, but these tasted so good, I was offended all over again when I thought about last time I had breakfast at McDonald’s.

THURSDAY
Chicken Olé! and chips; cake and cake and cake

Chicken thighs were on sale, so I had this great idea to put them in the crock pot with a bunch of jarred salsa verde, and then just sit back and let deliciousness happen.

Cold, hard, chicken facts had other plans.

First, utterly predictably, I had the infuriating job of trying to de-bone piping hot chicken thighs. And then, as I know perfectly well but forgot, thighs don’t really shred very well; they just kind of separate into slabs, and a low, slow heat makes them kind of slimy. Also, the salsa verde got very thin from cooking all day. So I was left with a kind of greenish soup.

We drained the meat and piled it on tortillas with lots of cheese, sour cream, and jarred jalapenos, but it was not great.

chicken-ole

Oh well! It was easy! This would have been a fine combination of flavors; it just wasn’t great in the crock pot. Live and learn. Maybe someday, I’ll look up an actual recipe.

Thursday was my birthday, and my dear husband had a stray use-it-or-lose-it vacation day, so he made a cake with the preschoolers while I loafed around eating Skittles and watching Clash of the Titans.

benny-mama-cake

(Abba, check out the apron! I forgot to tell you, she loves it. She did write a thank-you note, but the picture on it was so alarming and weird, I couldn’t bring myself to send it. She is a strange child.)

The cake came directly out of a five-year-old’s imagination. So cute.

my-cake

Then, my friend Roberta stopped by with the cake and cupcakes from her office party. There was a lot. I let the kids just eat all the cupcakes they wanted all day. I’m telling you, there were a lot of cupcakes. After I decided they had had enough, I made a huge rookie mistake and left the box on the table. So Corrie went back

corrie-cake-2

and, bearlike, helped herself one last time

savaged-cake

I asked her what she was doing, and she explained very earnestly, “I nuh-no, Mama!”

corrie-cake-3

And I believe her. I nuh-no what happened to that giant bag of Skittles, either.

FRIDAY
Says here “spaghetti.” I think I can manage that. 

Oh, I meant to tell you, I found a quite easy recipe that we’re making as token gifts for various people. It’s chocolate caramel crunch almonds from Smitten Kitchen, and you have to scroll way down to the end of the page to get to it. It’s technically candy, but you don’t need a candy thermometer. This recipe won my heart with this line:

Once the liquid has fully evaporated, it will become sandy and you will think something has gone wrong; it has not.

And guess what? It got sandy, and I thought to myself, “Oh, it’s just like she said! I won’t worry, because this is supposed to happen.” Then it stayed sandy for way longer than I thought it should, and I went ahead and thought something had gone wrong after all. But then it changed into caramel. Amazing.

You can get nice, cheap almonds at Aldi, but do not use Aldi chocolate chips to coat the almonds! Aldi chocolate chips do not melt! Weird, but true.

Making or baking anything neat for Christmas? I wouldn’t mind a second recipe to go with the almonds. I was thinking of candy cane fudge, but I’m pretty tired of fudge.