Happy Friday! I don’t know what got into me, but we had quite an adventurous week in food. I hope you guys like hearing about food! Here is what we had:
SATURDAY
Meatball subs, salad, cheesecake
Saturday is usually leftover day, but a friend of my mother-in-law very kindly brought over a huge amount of delicious food — so much that we ate it for two days, and I still have some fancy pasta to cook at a later date. She also brought fruit and flowers. Thank you, Marian!
After shopping, I did a bunch of gardening. I weeded out a whole bunch of beds and planters, composted them, and got a bunch of seeds in the soil. I used almost exclusively seeds I had saved from last year, and basically if you had to choose one thing to write on my tombstone, that would be it. I’m so proud of myself. I planted zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, forget-me-nots, phlox, sunflowers, tithonia, chicory, allium, and misc. If anything actually comes up, I will be insufferable.
Anyway, it was a ton of work and I was so delighted to sit down to a yummy and hearty meal made by someone else.
The kids have been snacking on the meatballs all week.
In the evening, when I lay down to rest my heavy head and watch stupid reels on Facebook, I heard a desperate peeping, just outside my window, saw that the ducklings — really teenagers now — had escaped from their pen and were trying to throw themselves into the trash.
If I were new to ducks, I would say I hope they get smarter when they reach adulthood, but I am not new to ducks.
SUNDAY
Leftovers, strawberry shortcake
Sunday after Mass, the junk guy came by to give me an estimate for how much it would cost to haul away all our crap. We had a dryer and two loveseats lurking about, which is pretty standard for us (we do go through loveseats), but there is also a bunch of porch and roof debris, and also a Regret Pile, which is stuff I dragged home because it was free, and now it has sat there for long enough that I am ready to admit I’m never going to use it. The estimate was fair but considerably higher than I expected! So we agreed he would just come get the Regret Pile, mainly because it is full of rusty nails, and I would pay the amount of money I am getting from a different guy in exchange for our two junk cars. I guess this is that girl math I’ve been hearing about.
Then it was time to get some planting done! Time was a-wasting!
I dug out a ton of compost from my heap, and spread it out and planted a long line of sunflowers in front of the house and down the road, hoping that the traffic will prevent bunnies from gobbling up all my seedlings this time. I also got a bunch more marigold and cosmos seeds in.
Then I pictured the yard without the Regret Pile, and acknowledged it still looks like crap, and when the flowers bloom, it will just look like flowers near crap. So I trotted around and did a big clean-up, including cutting up the old torn pool liner, which was too heavy for me to move in one piece. I did salvage some roughly rectangular pieces to use as weed barriers around my pumpkin garden. There are a lot of wild blackberries in that spot, so I need all the help I can get!
Here you can see the pumpkin bed in the background, with the rest of the pool liner in the foreground.
By dinner time I was again very happy to have an easy meal of leftovers, and the shopping kid had chosen strawberry shortcake for dessert, and I was also happy to have sensibly bought a ready-made angel food cake and squirty can whipped cream.
And everyone was happy.
MONDAY
Spicy chicken sandwiches, raw vegetables and dip
Monday I returned to an old favorite: Spicy chicken sandwiches with peppers, onions, and cheese. I cheaped out and did not buy shishito peppers, which are nice because you can just cut the tops off and then cook them like that. Instead, I got some colorful bell peppers and trimmed the seeds and membranes and cut them in half. I cooked them in the pan I had used to cook the chicken, and they took FOREVER. Pretty, though.
While they were cooking, the cheese was melting onto the chicken thighs, and then it was just a matter of piling it all onto toasted rolls and adding red onion and BBQ sauce. So delicious.
Raw broccoli and watermelon chunks for sides. I am once again trying to pull away from always serving carbs for a side!
TUESDAY
Pizza
Tuesday I fell into garden despair. Nothing I planted will grow. It will all just be arid, sterile trash dirt forever and all my efforts will have gone to waste, because I did everything wrong. This is a normal stage of gardening, at least for me, and I always feel this way at some point.
However, Damien took a close look at the pond I dug and never finished and also was despairing about, and it is full of tadpoles! So at least one frog thought it was good enough, anyway. Damien brought some babies in to admire for a bit
Then he put them back in the pond. One summer we had a jar with a tadpole in it on the table for weeks and weeks, and it was terrible. The poor thing grew one leg and then stopped, and it was NOT GREAT. Not making that mistake again! We learn!
We had pizza for supper, plain and pepperoni.
WEDNESDAY
Peanut chicken wraps, tempura chive blossoms, crunchy rice rolls, string beans
Wednesday, I had been planning a meal that I thought possibly only I would like, but I was pretty excited about it anyway. I made a peanut sauce from this recipe and added it to a pre-shredded mix of cabbage and carrots.
and then I went out and chopped off 3/4 of my chive blossoms.
I only recently found out that if you chop down your chives after they bloom, they will bloom again. I have a VERY hard time pinching and culling and all the things you need to do if you want more growth later, but I figured I’d be more motivated if I did something with the flowers I chopped.
One year I put them on pizza, and that was not a hit. So I started some infused vinegar with some of them. You just wash the blossoms and stuff them in a jar, then warm up some white wine vinegar, pour it over the blossoms, let it cool, then cover it and put it away for a few weeks.
It’s supposed to turn an even deeper pink over time. Then I washed and trimmed the rest of the flowers, and set them to dry thoroughly. For I was planning to DEEP FRY THEM.
When it got close to suppertime, I started heating some oil in a pot, then started some chicken tenders cooking, and made a simple tempura batter using flour, corn starch, and seltzer. I was following the recipe from Woks of Life. They recommend cutting off the entire stem and using a fork to dip the blossoms in batter and fry them, but I left a few inches of stem and left that as a handle for dipping. Then I tossed them in the hot oil, just a few at a time. Tempura needs space!
This is possibly the most exciting frying I have ever done. I made a video of one batch, and the sound alone is thrilling. If you’re into that kind of thing!
They fry up extremely quickly, and then I fished them out and gave them a little sprinkle of salt.
They taste sharp. Not like onion and not exactly like chives, but just kind of brightly bitter and wild. HOWEVER, the tempura batter clings to every tiny petal, and each blossom is an exquisitely fragile, crackly little explosion in your mouth.
Absolutely fantastic. Like onion fireworks. I dipped some in the dipping sauce that the recipe calls for (except I didn’t have mirin, so I used rice vinegar and some honey), and they were excellent with and also without. Like popcorn for the emperor.
Corrie and Damien were enthusiastic about them; the other kids, not so much. I had made a lot of extra batter, and the oil was still hot, so I made some tempura string beans for the heck of it.
Corrie was really egging me on at this point. She and I feel the same about food. We just love every single thing about it, from choosing it at the store to prepping it, to cooking it, to plating it, to eating it. She watched me intently as I tried my first chive blossom, and then breathed intimately, “Now try it with the sauce.” The upshot of this encouragement was that I started to show off a little, and so ooops, started a small to medium fire on the stovetop, and was able to demonstrate how to put out a fire with salt, so that was a win as well. Someone who loves cooking that much is going to need to know how to put out a fire.
I cooked a whole bunch of chicken tenders, so the people who just wanted chicken on wraps could have that, and those who wanted the whole peanut slaw chicken thing could have that.
Holy moly, it was a good meal. Enough people liked the peanut sauce that I’ll be making these wraps again. It was super easy, especially with the shortcuts of pre-shredded cabbage and frozen chicken, and the flavor and textures were very pleasant.
I may or may not make the chives again. Maybe if Lena is over. She would appreciate them! But what a delight to discover how easy tempura is to make! Corrie and I agreed that broccoli should be our next tempura. The string beans were okay, but something with a lot more texture would be much more exciting.
THURSDAY
Ground beef doner kebabs
Thursday I tried a second recipe I’ve had my eye on for a while: That viral ground beef doner kebab thing. Of course real doner kebab is shaved off a rotisserie-cooked hunk of meat, but people keep telling me this oven recipe is really good. So I skulked around a few recipe sites and got the general idea. I think I ended up putting in kosher salt, black pepper, aleppo pepper, cumin, green za’atar, and some grated onion and some Greek yogurt.
You divide the meat into lumps and roll them out thinly between two sheets of parchment paper.
Then you peel the top sheet off and loosely roll up the bottom sheet with the meat mixture inside.
I did this with about three pounds of meat, and then set them aside and made a garlic yogurt sauce and chopped up some tomatoes and cucumbers and parsley.
Then I went outside and sternly told myself it was time to stop averting my eyes every time I pass by my potting table. It was truly disgusting, and so heaped up with miscellaneous gardening stuff that it was unusable. There were lots of pots and bins half-full of soil that I had meant to use for cold sowing and never did, and they had collected months of rain water, and then people (me) had put trash on top of it all, so it smelled TURRIBLE.
Well, I cleaned it up! Yay!
You’ll have to take my word for it that this is a vast improvement. You can see from the bare spots in the grass that the mess was not confined to the table!
Also, my pumpkins are most definitely growing, double yay! Many pumpkin yay!
I mean of course they are growing. I did everything right, and they always grow. I just thought they wouldn’t this year, that’s all. Corrie asked if I had read poems to them and sang songs to them, and maybe I did. That’s my business.
Behind the pumpkin bed you can see the Regret Pile, which is much bigger than it looks here, and has gotten all overgrown with Virginia creepers and wild blackberries, which is another reason this is the one we are paying someone else to deal with. When that’s gone, I’m gonna mow all that growth down and turn it into a little hill garden. There are already some really stalwart irises there. Lots of possibilities! And it will be visible from my bedroom window. This is my current view:
Not unbearable, but flowers would be nicer. Not to be dramatic, but I am expecting to be in bed for a while in the fall, and I will be very grateful to myself if I can look at flowers while I recuperate.
I trimmed the trees that had grown up in front of my protest sign, and I weeded a bit, and then mowed the heck out of the yard for a good forty minutes, and then I cleared up the side of the house where there was still some roof debris. Damien has been doing a lot of dump runs, and the yard is already so much better than it was. Feels great. My goal is to be able to go into the back yard and look around without wincing about anything I see.
When we got home from the afternoon whatnot, all I had to do was cook the rolled-up meat for about half an hour, and then unfurl it.
They all came out just lovely. More crisp on the edges, more juicy in the middle, and it smelled incredible. I broke the sheets of meat up a bit and put them back in the oven for a few minutes
but basically just served them as is, and people tore off what they wanted. I put out some black and kalamata olives, and oh man, it was good stuff.
I went for store bought pita, because it was just too dang hot to make even quick-baking flat bread. I’m definitely making this meal again. (Ground beef was $2.99 a pound last week, so I bought about 18 pounds of it and put it in the freezer!)
The only thing I would change is I would line the pan with more parchment paper, under the rolls, to make the clean-up easier. Also you are supposed to drizzle the cooked meat with lemon juice, which I did squeeze and set aside but then forgot about. Also maybe I would put a little hot sauce on top. Oh, and next time I will be sure to roll the meat right up to the edge of the parchment paper, so more of it gets crisped up. But even if I don’t do any of this, it was an excellent meal, and popular. I think only one kid had pop tarts for supper, which is a pretty good record for this vicinity.
FRIDAY
Tuna sandwiches and chips
Damien and I are probably gonna get out for some sushi or something, while the kids have tuna at home. He has been working SO much lately, including lots of trips out of town, and I barely remember what he looks like. That is a lie. I have every detail memorized forever. Still, it will be nice to go out!
We have declared the ducklings old enough to start spending their nights outside. They have been outdoors all day, but we bring them in at night, and everybody hates this process. Coin has very much decided that he is in charge of them, so I think they will be fine.
Clara has moved to Boston. Benny will be graduating from 8th grade this coming week, and Lucy will be graduating from high school right after that. It’s been nonstop field trips and field days and special events, but there are just a few more weeks of school for everybody. AND, for a few weeks from now, Damien reserved a rustic campsite for two nights for us. We will be kayaking in! I am EXCITED.
I have three, count ’em, THREE wonderfully healthy peony plants that are fixin to bloom. Probably in about a week.
Oh the suspense! Oh the everything.
