Tag: What’s for Supper?

What’s for supper? Vol. 460: It was the shroopiest of times, it was the doopiest of times

Happy Friday! The other day I thought of a really clever pun for this week’s food post title, and decided not to write it down because I would definitely remember it later. Now it is later, and, well.

It’s just as well. These things are always disappointing. One of my kids once had a dream about a fiendishly clever new advance in technology that would revolutionize the way we fight wars, and she woke and and DID write it down so she’s remember it. In the morning, she looked at her notes, and it said “bag of bees.” 

Anyway, I’m sorry it’s the first Friday in Lent and this post is gonna be full of the yummy things we ate for Valentine’s Day and for Mardi Gras and also because I’m a cooker of yummy things. Some years I come up with a putatively clever gimmick to shield the viewer from graphic (=meat) content, but we are solidly in bag of bees territory here, mentally. All buzz, no honey. I don’t know. Well, here is what we ate:

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizza

Saturday was shopping day, and I had the pleasure of paying for it almost entirely in cash earned from selling cheesecakes. That felt pretty good. 

Saturday was, of course, Valentine’s Day, so along with frozen pizza, I also got corn dogs as a romantic gesture, because only Damien and I like them. We didn’t eat a single corn dog like in Lady and the Tramp or anything. Don’t get the wrong idea. 

We all gave each other chocolate and candy, and for dessert, I decided to try my hand at one of those fancy decorated swiss rolls. I followed the directions from The Squeaky Mixer, which were nice and clear. (I see she also has a post for a master guide on decorated swiss rolls!) It was very pleasant using a small bowl and whisk for a change. I love my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but it was nice to move more slowly. 

This recipe requires a very tender cake, so you can’t over mix anything. I did use the standing mixer to make stiff egg whites, which get folded into the batter. 

After you do that, you set aside a little bit and color it, and put that into piping bags (well, sandwich bags). The trick of putting the bags in cups and folding back the tops over the rim before filling them is SO helpful, especially if you just have a small amount in each bag

Then you grease and line a cookie sheet and pipe your design onto it. It opted for the old classic Valentine message: Shroopy doo.

Origin story: 

I wish I had spent a little more time coming up with an actual design, but I did manage to get the letters all backward! Then you freeze the design for a bit, to help it stay intact. 

Then I used a large bag to pipe the rest of the batter over the design. I took a pic just before I covered up the decorated part with plain batter.  

Here is where I made my first mistake. The pan is a rectangle, and you only decorate one half of it, because the other half is going to get rolled up and no one will see it. But I decorated the long half, rather than the short half. So at this point, I was locked into rolling a long, thin roll, rather than a short, stout swiss roll. Not necessarily a mistake, I guess, but not what I intended.

So you bake it for a short time (it’s a very thin cake), take it out of the oven, turn it out of the pan, and carefully peel the parchment paper off the bottom, revealing the baked-in design. I took a video of this part, and you can hear me breathing heavily. 

 

Here is where I made my second mistake, and this one was a doozy. I sprinkled the cake lightly with sugar and covered it with a damp towel and carefully rolled it up. 

The wrong way.

I rolled it so the design was on the inside. And I didn’t notice until it had cooled for about twenty minutes. So I unrolled and re-rolled it the other way, but of course it cracked, which is the one thing you’re trying to avoid with a swiss roll! 

I was annoyed at myself, but not devastated, because if something is going to go wrong, it’s best when the mistake is super obvious and super avoidable in the future. One has simply not to be a bonehead, and it will work out better next time!

So while it was cooling, I whipped the heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla, carefully unrolled the cake, spread it with the cream, and rolled it back up again, and let it finish cooling. 

It was, indeed, the shroopy doo-est of cakes. 

You can see that I festooned it with leftover molded chocolate from another project, and that really shrooped things up, I think. 

I actually used double the amount of cream filling, because, I don’t know, I like cream filling. When I sliced the roll open, it had a decent spiral, considering it was a long, skinny cake. (I know from watching Great British Baking Show that the spiral is very important.)

It was so bland, though. Next time I make one of these, I will do a layer of something with a stronger flavor on the inside along with the cream, and will  probably dress up the outside, as well. But honestly, I considered this project a success, because everything turned out well except for two things that are easy to correct next time. We live to roll another day. 

In the afternoon, we watched Yojimbo, and in the evening, we watched Moonstruck. Each perfect Valentine’s Day movies, in their own way. 

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips, king cake

Sunday our old friend Elijah was over, and it was another weekend where I felt powerless to resist making a bunch of big hamburgers (I had bought a bunch of ground beef while it was still on super bowl prices). I also got a sudden urge to make a king cake before Lent descended. I found a King Arthur Baking recipe and thought, oh yeah, I’ve used this recipe a few times before. Started putting it together and I was like . . . mmmmmm I don’t think I have used this recipe before. It calls for dry milk, which I didn’t have any of. It also calls for lemon oil or zest, which I also didn’t have, so I used orange zest. Then I tried to figure out what I could possibly use as a substitute for dry milk. You’d think wet milk is the answer, but that only works if you decrease the other liquid, which it was too late to do. I don’t even remember how I resolved it, but the dough I ended up with was less “soft and silky” and more “disgusting” and “something I don’t want to touch.” 

It requires two rises, and, by adding plenty of flour, I managed to coerce it into a reasonable shape. I added the cream cheese filling and then discovered there was a jar of homemade strawberry topping left over from cheesecake, so I spread that on, too.

Things are looking up! Many of us have untidy back stories, but we turn out well anyway! So why. not this king cake! All I had to do was fold over the margins and pinch them together, and carefully place the whole thing into a bundt pan. 

Well , . ., ,,,

I got the fuckin thing in the pan. Possibly the ugliest transfer possible. If there were king cake police, I’d be in jail for life for what I did to that dough. 

ANYWAY, I baked it, and it actually came out of the pan more or less intact, and I shoved a baby-sized rubber alien up in there, and drizzled it with three colors of icing, and threw some edible gold flakes on top because why not. 

It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. I did overbake it, so it was a little dry, but it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t filled so much as infiltrated with cream cheese and strawberry.

I was cutting it up and passing out pieces, and Damien’s piece was last, with the rubber baby clearly visible. He was in the other room, so the kids and I declared that whoever gets the baby has to buy everyone ice cream, and then we gave Damien his piece. In other words, we shrooped his doo. Shrooped it good. 

MONDAY
Pork vindaloo, basmati rice, naan, mango

Monday I salvaged my good name in the kitchen. This meal turned out absolutely delightful, and I was very pleased with myself. 

In the morning, I assembled my spices for this pork vindaloo recipe from Bon Apetit. 

Then you just pulverize them all together and marinate chunks of pork in the resulting paste. The recipe calls for pork shoulder and pork belly, but I just used a rather fatty loin, and it was fine. I only used half the number of guajillo chiles it called for, and it was still quite fiery. I would do it that way on purpose. Hot enough to really light up your head, but not enough to make it hard to taste anything else. 

So I set the meat to marinate

cut up the mangoes, set up the rice, and made the dough for naan. I used the King Arthur Baking naan recipe, and this time I really had made it before. I decided I would get fancy and weigh the flour, rather than measuring it by volume like I usually do. Well, I had to add so much extra flour to get the texture right, I don’t know what the point was! 

But they turned out so, so good. I made a double recipe, which should yield 16 flatbreads, but I divided the dough into only eight pieces, so they were a nice, generous size. I cooked them in a very hot iron frying pan, wiped it out with a damp cloth in between fries, and brushed the pieces of naan with melted butter on both sides when they came out of the pan. PERFECT. 

They were SO soft and nice, I was just delighted. Probably the best naan I’ve ever made. 

The whole meal was delightful. 

I got a little ramekin of yogurt to sooth my mouth when the meat got too hot. I want to make this again right away, but it doesn’t feel very Lenten!

TUESDAY
Mardi Gras

I have such mixed feelings about Chili’s having somehow become our traditional final place of debauchery before Lent. The restaurant was practically empty, but they seated us next to the bathroom anyway. It was fine. I ordered some kind of chipotle chicken bowl and it was perfectly fine. Then we followed up with our other, equally dubious tradition and headed over to Price Chopper to pick out individual tubs of ice cream.. I got a Ben and Jerry’s thing with a caramel core and pieces of blonde brownie. Damien was sick and Elijah was working, so we brought them to-go boxes. And that was our festal meal! Shroopy doo.

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and salad

On Wednesday I was the one who was sick, so Damien brought the kids to Mass. I spent the afternoon ruthlessly decluttering the dining room (four bags of trash, yay!), and for supper we had spaghetti and salad, and, just to round out the church basement dinner vibes, white bread with butter.

THURSDAY
Roast drumsticks, mashed potatoes, roast butternut squash

Thursday I was busy all day, and for the life of me, I can’t remember what with. So I threw together supper at the last minute. I just sprayed the chicken drumsticks with cooking spray and seasoned them heavily with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder. I roasted them and then put them in a covered baking dish in a low rack in the oven to stay warm, so I could use the broiler to make the butternut squash. I peeled and sliced up two squashes and laid the disks in a pan on parchment paper. I may or may not have sprayed them with cooking spray, but I definitely put a little heap of brown sugar on each one, and then sprinkled them pretty heavy with a lovely biryani masala by Spicewalla. 

I had a five-pound bag of potatoes, and the original plan was to bake them, but you really cannot make baked potatoes for seven people when two of them look like this:

Five potatoes total in the bag! I used to buy potatoes like this on purpose, and slice them into these ludicrously long french fries; but it was definitely not a deep frying kind of night. I just boiled them and mashed them, and I did a pretty poor job, too. Very lumpy. The squash was great, though!

I just adore Indian spices on squash. Really tasty and interesting. 

It turned out to be a pretty good meal despite the potatoes. 

And that’s-a my story. 

FRIDAY
Grilled cheese and tomato soup

I’m actually really looking forward to this meal. I may even throw some leftover rice into the tomato soup. The kids got an early release from school because there is a big storm coming. I saw the highway department pre-salting the roads before the snow even started, so I guess it’s gonna be a doozy. 

I guess we are gonna try our Fisher Family Mandatory Lent Film Party again this year. Damien and I are both exhausted and couldn’t come up with anything creative, so we’re going to watch Spartacus, which I haven’t seen in many years. I remember it being very sweaty. The kids have been lots of fun to talk about movies with lately, though, so I have medium-high hopes. 

In conclusion, you will have a lizard in your pocket. Be you. Shroopy doo. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 456: Please hold

Happy Friday! Let’s talk about food, all the food, and nothing but the food. Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizzas

Just a regular day of shopping and errands. I forgot to buy frozen food to accompany the Saturday leftovers, so instead we ate the frozen food I had bought for the kids’ lunches. And that’s how you get to be a professional cooking blogger! 

SUNDAY
Burgers and chips

Elijah usually comes over on Sundays, and even though in reality he’s an adult and taller than me, in my head he’s still the little guy who once woke up from a nap trembling, and didn’t stop trembling until we gave him a hamburger. So I try to make sure he gets lots of hamburgers. 

Ground beef was on what passes for sale these days – $3.49 a pound – so I stocked up a bit. Maybe we’ll have burgers next week, too!

I like my burgers absolutely slobberingly smothered with ketchup and mustard, and piled up with pickles. 

MONDAY
Waffles and home fries

Monday was, of course, MLK Jr. day. It’s only in the last few years that NH made this a holiday. We used to mark MLK day by stopping for fries or something on the way home, because I would feel bad about forgetting that the schools were open but the library was closed, so the kids would spend 40 minutes after school shivering on the library steps before I got them, ever MLK day. Thanks a lot, Martin. But this time we didn’t have school! So nobody got fries. Damien went to Moe’s house to work on his car, and the rest of us had waffles and home fries. 

The waffle recipe:

For the home fries, I peeled potatoes, cut them into wedges, drizzled them with oil and seasoned them with salt, pepper, chili powder, and garlic powder, and roasted them in a hot oven until they were browned. I didn’t turn them, because I like having a roasty, crackly part on the bottom and a golden toasty part on the top. 

Also I forgot. But they did turn out nice. 

Waffles were okay, not the greatest, not sure why. 

It’s possible that waffles are only really good if you have a third thing with them, like meat or even just fruit, or eggs. Anyway, it was a filling meal.

On Sunday, I tried making some chocolate strawberry hearts I saw online (and I truly looked for the reel to link back, but I can’t find it. It’s by Foodbites). You cut the strawberries into heart shapes with a cookie cutter, then make a base with melted chocolate, stick the strawberry on it, and embellish it with more chocolate. Like this:

Pretty and simple!

Well . . . 

AN ATTEMPT WAS MADE.

The good news is, we live in a very pretty place. I truly would rather live where there’s ice and there’s snow and the whalefishes blow, but it’s not dull! We get these dazzling, exhilerating skies.

I mean also, I hardly ever shovel anymore, so that definitely helps my attitude toward winter. 

TUESDAY
Chicken quesadillas, fake Doritos

Tuesday I spent most of the day driving here and there and there and here, including out to Nelson with my apple pie money to buy a used mini refrigerator from FB Marketplace. Actually, it’s a beverage refrigerator, which makes it the perfect size for, say, four cheesecakes.

[Here, there should be a photo, but my heart quailed at the prospect of letting even such a friendly crowd see how gross my floors are right now. It’s just been super icy, so we have to put down a lot of dirt and salt outside, and guess where that ends up? Boo! Oh well. Imagine a nice little fridge with perfect shelves inside.]

All my adult life, I have wanted a little spot just to store my baked goods where no one will disturb them, and now I have it! I also had a wonderful chat with the seller, a kindred spirit who loves being in the kitchen and hates being at Market Basket. She had a lot of kitchen supplies for sale because the person who is not allowed in this post withdrew funding, and her culinary school got shut down. We chatted for a while in her spectacularly organized basement, she gave me a couple of springform pans for free, and I left feeling motivated to organize my life. (This did not happen, but I enjoyed the feeling while it lasted.)

For supper we had chicken quesadillas using the chicken left over from last week’s subpar enchiladas. I goosed them with some, I don’t know, chili powder, salt, and cumin, or something like that, and they were fine. I threw some jalapeños in mine, too. 

Everything is fine. 

WEDNESDAY
BLTs, party mix

Wednesday we had BLTs purely because my menu thus far was so thrifty, and I felt like a-splurgin’. I made a second attempt (the first one was about three years ago, and ended in tragedy) to toast the bread all at once in the oven, using that technique where you put the two oven racks close together and use the top one to hold the pieces of bread upright.

This time it worked! The secret, as any halfwitted housecat could have explained, is not to move the racks after the bread is in place. My mistake in the past was pulling the racks out so I could reach them easily, and then carefully putting the bread in there, and then trying to slide it all into the oven, and of course all the bread slithered down into the pan, defeating the entire purpose. Instead, you have to leave the racks where they are and carefully stick your hand into the oven to put the bread in. Then it works. 

This is yet another one of those things that I finally got the hang of only once it became less urgent. When we had twelve people in the house and I was trying to toast 24 pieces of bread at once, this would have been a handy hack indeed! Too soon old, too late schmart. Anyway, we delivered the bomb. I mean we had yummy sandwiches.

I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out why I like party mix so much.  I got the store brand, so none of the individual elements were that good. The pretzels and corn and tortilla chips were stale, and the cheetos, while pleasingly caveman club-shaped, were undeniably greasy. I guess it’s because of the variety that it seems like a treat. Also, it’s called “party mix.” I guess if they called it “Stale But Miscellaneous,” I would be less avid a fan. 

This is why I haven’t been writing a lot lately. My brain just stands there, ruminating slowly over little bits of straw, like an elderly cow who has forgotten how to leave the barn. I’m . . . it’s January. We’re fine. 

THURSDAY
Gochujang bulgoki, rice,  seaweed, sesame chicken

It’s been a while since I”ve made this excellent meal! Pretty often, I will just marinate pork ribs in the marinade, and then grill or broil them. But this time, I decided to go Full Bulgoki. Here’s the marinade:

Jump to Recipe

You can make this with beef, but I prefer it with pork. 

So in the morning, I sliced up a couple of onions and shredded a bunch of carrots in the food processor, and sliced a bunch of boneless pork ribs as thinly as I could, and set that to marinate together. Then I set up the Instant Pot with rice and water, cut up the broccoli, and even located the sesame oil and sesame seeds, which sometimes wander off to parts unknown right when I need them. 

I don’t even know what I did the rest of the day, but I was — oh wait, I do! Starting back in mid-December, I have trying to finish this complicated application for a thing, but they sent it back and said their new policy is that they need copies of everyone’s social security cards. Lucy’s has, of course, gone missing. So we went to get a replacement, and it turns out you need a government-issued ID for that. Which we don’t have, because I haven’t gotten around to finishing teaching her to drive yet. So we decided to go for a non-driver ID, and to get THAT, you need. . . .your social security card. Tra la la! Your call is very important to us! Have you signed in at the kiosk? The kiosk is only for individuals with an appointment! Appointments cannot be made online, but must be made by phone. Please have your social security card ready before calling. 

Well eventually we rustled up some backups, and I vouched for her, and she got the thing, and I got the thing, and I sent off the application, and all manner of things shall be whatever. 

This is a long way of saying that, when I got back home, I was extremely glad that all I had to do was press the rice button, pan fry the meat mixture, and throw the broccoli in a hot oven with sesame oil, soy sauce, and sesame seeds, and in about 25 minutes, we had a meal that was completely yummo. 

The bulgoki is often eaten wrapped in lettuce, which is also delicious, but I like using seaweed. You tear off a bit and use it as a scoop to grab up a little rice and meat

It’s just so good. I think bundles is the superior form of food. 

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle

The kids asked for this, and I wrote it down on the menu, but I will probably kidnap Damien into a pizza place. I was going to be kind and make the tuna noodle for the kids, but they are all in the kitchen right now, being SO loud, and also they were hogging both bathrooms this morning, so I feel like I need to do something. Vive le resistance. They can make their own casserole. 

Like much of the country, we are expecting anywhere from one to two feet of snow, and — again, speaking as the lady of the house who has been promoted to “you stay inside; we’ll handle the shoveling” — I’m all for it. We were in a drought for most of last summer, and my pumpkins really felt it, so I hope all this snow will replenish the water table. I hope a lot of things. Please hold. Your hope is very important to us. 

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Gochujang bulgoki (spicy Korean pork)


Ingredients

  • 1.5 pound boneless pork, sliced thin
  • 4 carrots in matchsticks or shreds
  • 1 onion sliced thin

sauce:

  • 5 generous Tbsp gochujang (fermented pepper paste)
  • 2 Tbsp honey
  • 2 tsp sugar
  • 2 Tbsp soy sauce
  • 5 cloves minced garlic

Serve with white rice and nori (seaweed sheets) or lettuce leaves to wrap

Instructions

  1. Combine pork, onions, and carrots.

    Mix together all sauce ingredients and stir into pork and vegetables. 

    Cover and let marinate for several hours or overnight.

    Heat a pan with a little oil and sauté the pork mixture until pork is cooked through.

    Serve with rice and lettuce or nori. Eat by taking pieces of lettuce or nori, putting a scoop of meat and rice in, and making little bundles to eat. 

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:

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and here’s my challah recipe:

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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.)

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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.

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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. 451: Lasagna in the highest

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

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

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

SATURDAY
Leftovers and popcorn chicken

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

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

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

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

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, fake doritos, pickles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY
Birthday lasagna, birthday cake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tree-ready. 

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

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

Jump to Recipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEDNESDAY
Second lasagna, garlic bread

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

THURSDAY
Meatball subs, vegetable platter

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY
Tuna boats, fries

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

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No-fail no-chill sugar cookies

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

Servings 24 large cookies

Ingredients

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350.

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

  3. Add egg and extracts.

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

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

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

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

  8. Let them cool completely before decorating!

 

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Cumin chicken thighs with chickpeas in yogurt sauce

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

Ingredients

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

For garnishes:

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

Garnishes:

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

     -Chop up some cilantro for sprinkling if people like.

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 446: Whoopy once! Whoopy twice!

Happy Friday! HAPPY HALLOWEEN! The kids made their costumes almost entirely on their own this year. I made one component each for Benny and Corrie’s costumes, and the older kids did it all themselves. Sweet! I haven’t seen them all put together yet, but I will share when I do. (Honestly, I would have been a little sad if they had 100% taken over the costume-making.) 

Also this week, Damien and I (mostly Damien) FINISHED THE ROOF. Well, basically. Maybe not every little detail, but it is doing what a roof is supposed to do, and I’m pretty happy. Especially since we’re suddenly getting all the rain we didn’t get all summer!

I got pretty cook-y and bake-y this week, and a little bit spoooooky. Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Anniversary Indian food!

Saturday we got most of the shingles up, until we ran out of shingles. This was our anniversary; this is our anniversary picture. 

28 years! 

So we ran out of shingles, we gave up, cleaned up, and went out to eat at the local Indian restaurant, Royal Spice, which I heartily recommend if you’re anywhere in the area. They are SO nice and the food is SO good. We got the same fried vegetarian whatnot appetizer platter we always do, with the cute little stand that holds three kinds of chutney; and then Damien got some kind of lamb dish, maybe kadai? and I got a beef chettinad curry. Of course we both had rice and garlic naan. The waiter actually congratulated us on how much we ate (all of it). He said it made him happy. It made us happy, too! And it made my nose run. 

Then, in order to avoid going home, we stopped for ice cream. I was surprised to see how many other people were buying ice cream. It was nippy out! Maybe they were also avoiding their children. 

Oh, the kids had Aldi pizza. 

SUNDAY
Leftovers and chimichangas 

Sunday after Mass, I went shopping and Damien finished the roof! Here it is when we started taking it off a week ago:

and here is where we are almost done putting it back on.

Actually, darn it, the picture I was going to share is where it’s not quite done. I guess I’ll have to come back later. I would run out and take a picture now, but it’s raining right now and I am still in my payamas. 

The kids spent most of the day working on their costumes. The house is such a wreck, SUCH a wreck, you wouldn’t believe. Partly because of costume making, partly because we’ve been working on the roof rather than making sure kids actually clean, rather than just pantomiming it. But I’m holding off on a cleaning rampage until after Halloween, because we’re about to be hip-deep in candy wrappers. You have to let that happen for a few days, and THEN you can clean. 

MONDAY
Chicken tenders, caprese salad with skull cheese, french bread

Monday I suddenly realized that, if I was gonna use the silicone skull molds I bought on a whim, it needed to be this week. So I made a batch of mozzarella using my kit. I’ve taken to heating the cheese in the final stage longer than it says in the instructions, for a total of three minutes or more, and that has made it much stretchier and smoother. I also bought some kitchen gloves, and that helped a LOT. Because when you heat cheese, it’s, uh, hot. 

So I made a batch and planned to make individual skulls, but it doesn’t stay pliable for long, so I opted to just smoosh it over the molds in slabs.

I cooled it in water and then ice water for about fifteen minutes, and then peeled it off. SO SATISFYING. Here’s a little video of that. 

Then I cut the cheese into individual skulls, but I wasn’t happy with the square effect.

So I sort of grudgingly (not that the whole thing was anyone else’s idea besides mine) trimmed off the square edges with a paring knife, and I made a caprese salad.

I usually serve this salad undressed and let people add their own oil and vinegar, but the skulls looked much more defined after I splashed a little balsamic vinegar over them. 

Very pleased with this. 

Then I decided to try a balsamic reduction, which I’ve been meaning to do for some time. I can’t find the specific recipe, but I think it was just a cup of balsamic vinegar and half a cup of brown sugar or something, simmered until it’s thick and syrupy. I had pretty much the lowest-quality balsamic vinegar one can find (thank you, Aldi), and the recipe warned me that reducing it would make it even worse, but I liked it anyway, so there! I like good food, but I also like bad food, which has made my life much simpler. 

Then I decided we needed some fresh bread, so I made a big batch of french bread

Jump to Recipe

and decided to make twelve little loaves, rather than four big ones. They turned out pretty cute. 

Then when I got home, all I had to do was heat up some frozen chicken tenders, and we had a nice little meal. 

I told the kids on the way home that I had prepared a spooky surprise for supper, and they were incredibly impressed by the spooky caprese. I mean one of them took a PICTURE and sent it to her FRIEND GROUP. Let me tell you, you may think you’re over wanting to impress the cool kids by the time you’re fifty years old, but when you have four teenage girls in the house, it does sneak up on you sometimes. (I think they expected feetloaf, which they swear I have made in the past. I have not. I have made zombieloaf, which they were weirdly unimpressed by, and anyway who can afford ground beef?)

I keep seeing recipes for mozzarella where you just use milk, vinegar, and salt. The kit I got has rennet and citric acid. If you’ve done both, do you have any comment about the difference? The kit is plenty easy to use, and the cheese is great, but I like having options. 

TUESDAY
Ina Garten roast chicken, baked potato, mashed squash

Sometimes I look at my camera roll to remind myself what I did on a particular day, and it looks like I spent Tuesday morning noticing the pretty leaves in the back yard, the burgeoning trash heaps in various rooms of the house, the one fingernail I hit the hardest with a hammer, some fluctus clouds, people being dumb on social media, and misc. Eventually I got my ass in gear and got a couple of chickens roasting, using Ina Garten’s simple recipe again, minus the thyme and gravy.

Actually, wait, I had to take a kid to an appointment on Tuesday! I forgot. I always tell myself I’m so lazy and waste so much time, and then I look at my calendar, and . . . well, sometimes I am lazy and waste time, but sometimes I’m not and I don’t. It all evens out. 

Anyway, before the afternoon run I threw the chicken in the oven, and I prepped some potatoes and some butternut squash (I made a little video showing how to prepare it so it’s easy to cut and peel) and then ended up cooking it in the slow cooker anyway, so I didn’t really need to bother peeling it first! I just dumped it in the slow cooker with half a cup of water and set it to high, and let it go for probably three hours. Worked great. 

When I got home, I mashed it up with some cinnamon, a little chili powder, a pinch of salt, and a bunch of honey, and then covered it and put it in the oven to stay warm while the chicken and baked potatoes finished up. 

Chickens turned out lovely. I think you can see how crisp the skin is.

It’s kind of fun cutting the chickens up and out pops the heads of garlic and the lemons. Hello, boys! You did your job so well!

So it was a great little cool-weather meal of tasty chicken, mashed squash, and baked potato. Not the most artistic photos, but I was so hungry. 

 

You can see I squeezed some of the garlic right out of its wrappers and ate them, yum yum

WEDNESDAY
Basic asian pork chops, rice, sesame broccoli

Wednesday we had another appointment and I didn’t get going on supper until it was later than I would have hoped. The original plan was bulgoki, but believe it or not, I can’t find gochujang anywhere in this town. I gotta order some. They did have it at the International Market, but to everyone’s sorrow, it’s closing. I’m so sad about this. They were awfully nice, and they carried foods that no one else did. 

I did stop by to pick up some bargains as they liquidate, and they were out of gochujang but they did have these cans of BBQ sauce.

The guy on the can seemed confident, so I opened it up and off, it looked so gross. It was a solid, gritty chunk swimming in orange grease. I thought maybe if I heat it up and whip it a bit, it would help. 

It did not!

It tasted like . . . something a dog who lives on the docks would eat with reluctance. I don’t know. But it smelled bad and tasted bad and life is short, so I threw it away and made a quick sauce out of soy sauce, brown sugar, and garlic powder, and marinated the pork chops in that. 

When I got home, I poured the leftover marinade on top and roasted them under the broiler

and they were perfectly good and juicy. They tasted like soy sauce, brown sugar, and garlic. No complaints. 

I roasted a tray of broccoli with sesame oil, a little soy sauce, and sesame seeds, and cooked a pot of rice, and there you are. 

Damien has been working away furiously on his car all week. It has many, many things wrong with it, and it’s been a huge project, so I was honestly just so impressed that, when he went out to buy some more tools and parts, he also came home with caramel apple wraps, because even when he’s stressed out and overworked, he’s a nice daddy and always thinking about those kids. 

I was still riding the high of the mozzarella skull success, so I got the idea to use the molds again and make some candy skulls (we always have candy melts in the house). I made the caramel apples real quick and then stuck the skulls and some sprinkles on the apples, and they were pretty cute. 

That night we watched The Invisible Man from 1933, and it was a hoot. If you’re looking for something to watch that’s a tiny bit scary but really mostly silly, and pretty short, this is a good one. I wasn’t expecting it to be funny, but it was!

THURSDAY
Hot dogs, chips, chicken soup with rice, crostini, skull cake

Thursday the menu said we were having hot dogs (I had been expecting to have to go to a third doctor’s appointment an hour away, but it got rescheduled, so I found myself at home with an easy meal and extra time), but when I fished the hot dogs out of the freezer, they just didn’t look great at all.

I mean they’re hot dogs, so it’s not like they spoiled or something, but they just seemed like Discouragement Food, and who needs that. So I looked in the freezer again and found some chicken parts, and made a simple soup. I cooked the chicken in water for an hour or so, then pulled out the chicken and sorted out the meat and bones and — man, you guys know how to make chicken soup, but I’m in too deep now! Let me tell you, the dog was INCREDIBLY interested in this part, and wanted me to know, I mean really really know, that if I NEEDED anything, like for instance if I needed someone to EAT SOME CHICKEN, then HE WAS HERE, and I should not hesitate to call upon him. What a guy.  

So I put the meat back in the pot and dumped in a bunch of chopped carrots, celery, and onion. Didn’t have any herbs in the house. Let it cook for several hours and acknowledged that it tasted hot, wet, and, if you used all your powers of concentration, slightly chickeny. So I added some concentrated chicken broth and bunch of pepper, and about an hour before dinner, I added a bunch of rice, and let that simmer until the rice was a little bit exploded. 

I sliced up the leftover bread from the other night, drizzled it with olive oil, and sprinkled it with garlic powder and salt, put it in the oven, and forgot all about it. So they were PRETTY CRUNCHY, but oh well. I did also serve the hot dogs and chips that were on the original menu. 

Ahem. 

In October, I’ll be host
To witches, goblins, and a ghost
I’ll serve them chicken soup on toast. 
Whoopy once!
Whoopy twice!
Whoopy chicken soup with rice!

You see, I am using my literature degree! I use it all the time. 

I also spent several hours writing an essay, then got to a point where I realized it was crap, I’m a crap writer, my mind is gone, I can’t do this anymore, I need to go get a job cleaning Greyhound busses, etc. etc., and decided to make a cake. 

I was actually originally thinking to use my skull molds yet again, and make jello skulls, but the only gelatin I had in the house is unflavored. I briefly considered making rosewater Jello skulls, but pivoted to cake, and then remembered I had bought a cake pan at a thrift store for $2. It’s for making spherical cakes (it’s two hemispherical pans and two silicone rings to hold them steady while they bake), and I thought I could somehow . . . carve it into a skull? 

Which I couldn’t, really, but I did cut out eyes and a nose, frost it, and then frost the ramekin it was standing on for the teeth part. I realized too late that it had a Dios de las Muertos look, and I could have really gone to town with flowers and stuff, but I ran out of time. 

Then I went back and reread my essay and it was actually fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine, so I took out the line that might get me sued and sent it off. So now you know, my creative process involves cake, and sometimes a frosted ramekin. Go ahead and jot that down. 

The kids were moderately impressed by this third spooky surprise, but after supper it was time to carve pumpkins, so we forgot to eat the cake, and it’s still sitting there on the counter, grinning at nothing and slowly drooping. Who among us. Anyway, now I know those pans work well, so that’s something! 

Oh and the soup was fine. Tasted like chicken. 

FRIDAY
Bagel, egg, and cheese

This is the first Halloween since 2010 that we’re not going to the Halloween Parade at the school. The youngest kids are both in middle school and they have aged out. Ah, me. The older kids are going out with their friends tonight, but Corrie is going trick-or-treating with me and Damien, so, phew. Also the rain just stopped, and it’s supposed to stay more or less clear tonight, PHEW. 

It just now occurred to me that, for the spooky caramel apples, I could have put the candy skulls on the apples FIRST, and then stretched the caramel sheets over them, for a potentially creepy “oh no, it’s coming through the walls” effect. Next year! 

Also, here’s something nice, that I totally forgot existed: Carole King singing Chicken Soup With Rice. 

Before I forget, here is my post about what we have for All Soul’s Day, which is Sunday. Not putting away the skull molds yet, let me tell you. 

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French bread

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

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 445: Follow the fellow who fixes your roof

Today’s food post will be mainly a roof post! That’s how it be sometimes. 

So, here we have a representative sample of some of the wood we pulled down from the roof. Just in case you were wondering why it seemed so urgent to do this project.

We’ve had a leak for quite a while, but we had a storm a few weeks ago and it busted right through the living room ceiling. So off we went. 

We started on Thursday of last week, and pulled off the old shingles, edge, and flashing, and opened up the eaves to see how bad the damage was. It was actually not as bad as we feared! But we did have a bit of a tough moment when we discovered that 2x4s are not actually two by four inches. I guess maybe you knew that, but we didn’t — mainly because the existing trusses were rough-cut wood that actually does measure 2×4.

So that added a few trips to Home Depot, and a lot of staring up at the roof and saying, “But . . .what? What??” 

This is a roof over the first story of the house only, but there is quite a steep drop-off in the ground on one side. I stuck mainly to the less-scary side, and Damien worked on the more-scary side. He discovered that whoever fixed the roof last ran out of flashing and used a bunch of metal newspaper printing plates from 1976, so that was kind of neat. 

There have been a few other spot repairs on the roof, we discovered as we tore layers away. Some of them looked vaguely familiar; some of them had clearly been done by other boneheads. I think it was on Friday that we realized we have been living in this house for almost 20 years, and it was really time to stop calling the previous owners “they.” As in, “I can’t believe they did it this way” and “I can’t believe they just left it like that.” Because, like I said, for twenty years, it’s been us. There is no they. They are we. 

I masked up and clambered around pulling all the horrible old moldy, mousy insulation out

It was also very much we who did a terrible job putting tarps down, so there were rusty nails and scraps of rotten wood and bits of chewed-up insulation all over the place, in among the tall grass and wet blackberry thorns and whatnot. So I wandered slowly and furiously around with a magnet for a while and got most of the nails and crap cleaned up, and redid the tarps, so there. I’m making it sound like I did most of the work, but actually Damien did most of the work. 

SATURDAY

Saturday, Clara’s boyfriend came over and did a ton of work replacing and shoring up trusses and laying down new decking, and talking us through the rest of the project. Then I went back to Home Depot for some more wood and dropped a 8×10 sheet of plywood on my foot and broke my little toe, which is something I like to do from time to time. My toe is now more or less pierogi-shaped and permanently grey, and the toenail grows in three distinct pieces. All just part of my feminine mystique. Then I went to Home Depot a few more times and also got pierogis, and we had that and leftovers for supper. 

I was a little bummed to be missing the No Kings rally, so I went out with a staple gun and gussied up my skeletons. 

So there. 

I think it was on Saturday that Damien fell off the ladder. He tumbled really well, and didn’t hurt himself, thank God. But it was a good wake-up call for us to both be super super careful! 

SUNDAY
Beef barley soup and pumpkin muffins

Sunday we went to Mass of course, and then stopped at the store for some meat and milk and whatnot to help us limp through the week without actually shopping.

Corrie has been aching to learn how to make her favorite meal of soup and muffins, so I gave her a very little bit of direction, and off she went making beef barley soup

Jump to Recipe

very much enjoying the process

My recipe calls for diced tomatoes, but she doesn’t like that, so she skipped it. 

Then she started on the muffins

Jump to Recipe

and everything turned out great!

Nothing like sitting down to a delicious meal you made yourself. 

Damien spent the day fitting plywood onto the roof for decking. It is, like everything else in our house, oddly shaped, so it took a long time! But he got it done and then absolutely swaddled and taped the heck out of it, because the rain was on the way. And it rained all night and into the next day, and man, that was nerve-wracking, listening to the rain fall. We both kept looking up at the ceiling, hoping and praying everything would stay dry. 

MONDAY
Roast chicken, peas, noodles

It did stay dry! Wonderful. While Damien worked on the eaves or something, I went back to Home Depot for nails or something. I think it was also Monday that we got the drip edge on. The days really blurred together this week. I did see a nice rainbow at Home Depot, so that was something. 

I roasted the chickens following Ina Garten’s super easy recipe. I didn’t have all the ingredients, so I just threw the garlic and lemons in there, and had the seasoned butter on the top, and they turned out absolutely scrumptious. No searing or flipping or basting or anything. They did take a little longer than expected, but it was worth the wait. 

We didn’t have much in the house for sides, so I just cooked some egg noodles and served them with butter, and heated up some frozen peas. Unsophistication at its best. 

I was looking at this plate and trying to think what it reminded me of. Then I realized: Toy food. It looks like toy food. 

Not a thing wrong with that! 

TUESDAY
Chicken quesadillas

I guess it was Tuesday we got the drip edge on. I don’t know. I’m probably forgetting a bunch of things we had to do. Damien had a bunch more carpentry to do, because the eaves and soffits and whatnot are in tough shape in spots. While he wrestled with that, I went upstairs and caulked the frame of the window (we suspect water is getting in under the siding from the window frame) and loosened up the siding around the window, much to the consternation of Maggie the Cat, who mostly lives in that room.

Then I swept all the crap off the roof, which was harder than you’d think! I don’t know if you’ve ever swept a sloped surface above your head, but it makes you feel like your arms are just about useless.

Then, o then, we finally started on the water and ice shield! This was exciting, because it meant the structural part is basically done, and also because it was going to rain again. It is fancy self-adhesive stuff, and BOY IS IT ADHESIVE. I guess I would kind of like to draw a veil over Tuesday, but the upshot is that we went up and down the ladder 923 times

and we kept at it and kept at it, and by gum we got that roof and part of the wall covered with high quality water and ice shield. 

and then it DID rain again that night, and the roof did stay dry. WHEW.

The kids made chicken quesadillas for supper. I purposely made two big chickens so there would be leftovers for that, and the kids did great. 

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday Damien and I were both just so freaking exhausted, we decided to just stick to our day jobs on Wednesday, and we both got some writing done. Damien has been going back and forth from working on the roof to doing all his regular work all this week – pretty amazing. That evening, we dressed up and drove to Concord for the tenth anniversary party for In Depth, which is one of the papers Damien writes for. The snacks were quite good, but we decided to stop at Burger King on the way home anyway. 

I had bought sandwiches, popcorn, and Swiss Rolls for the kids at home, so they didn’t have to cook. I think they spent the evening working on Halloween costumes. We got home late and collapsed. 

THURSDAY

Thursday we had school conferences, which I went to 

while Damien started in on the tar paper layer.

In the morning, I had fried up a bunch of Italian sausages, cut them up, and put them in the slow cooker to stay warm all day. So when we got home around 5, all I had to do was cook some spaghetti and then discover that yes, I had turned on the slow cooker, and yes, I had plugged it in, but! the power strip I had plugged it into was not plugged in. No.

I didn’t really think we needed to dine on All Day Room Temperature Sausage, so we just had plain spaghetti, and it was a little sad. But at least we had tar paper. 

FRIDAY

Friday Damien finished the tar paper and we started in on the step flashing between the roof and the house wall. For whatever reason, I got the heebie jeebies and couldn’t get myself to get up on the roof, so Damien ended up doing most of it.

Then we ran out of flashing, briefly considered putting the newspaper plates back up, and decided we should just go back to Home Depot. So I’m gonna do that after adoration, and he’s gonna finish putting them on, and we may or may not be able to get the waterproof tar sealant stuff on tonight. I don’t now what’s for supper, and I’m struggling to feel like this is my problem. I will probably pick up some tuna. 

AND THEN, the only thing left is to put the shingles on! And of course reattach the siding. And rebuild the soffits and fascia boards, and a few other miscellaneous things, and of course haul away all the debris. I’m sure in a few weeks, when it’s really truly done, we’ll feel proud and relieved, but man, this project has really taken it out of us. It’s only about 115 square feet of roof, and we’ve been thinking it would be sort of a test project to see if we could fix the whole main roof on the rest of the house in the spring, which, I don’t know. Maybe. It’s pretty high up there. Lotta roof. Much ladders. Keep hitting our thumbs with hammers. You know. 

It’s our 28th anniversary tomorrow, and you’ll never guess, it looks very much like we will be spending most of it on the roof. Better than in the grave!

Well, goodbye! 

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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. 

2 from 1 vote
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Pumpkin quick bread or muffins

Makes 2 loaves or 18+ muffins

Ingredients

  • 30 oz canned pumpkin puree
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup veg or canola oil
  • 1.5 cups sugar
  • 3.5 cups flour
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • 1.5 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/2 tsp ground cloves
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger
  • oats, wheat germ, turbinado sugar, chopped dates, almonds, raisins, etc. optional

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter two loaf pans or butter or line 18 muffin tins.

  2. In a large bowl, mix together dry ingredients except for sugar.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix together wet ingredients and sugar. Stir wet mixture into dry mixture and mix just to blend. 

  4. Optional: add toppings or stir-ins of your choice. 

  5. Spoon batter into pans or tins. Bake about 25 minutes for muffins, about 40 minutes for loaves. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 444: And don’t forget to put garlic on my grave

Happy Friday! in haste, in haste, for this is day two of me and Damien putting in a new roof, which we hope to finish by Sunday. It’s a small area, about 115 square feet, and only one storey up, but it’s something we’ve never done before, so I’m pretty impressed with us so far. (If you are wondering how one motivates oneself to take on a project like this, it helps to have no choice, and that’s my whole advice.)

Here is what we ate this week!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and I think pizza pockets

I myself had leftover chicken biryani with extra raisins and almonds, and it was yum dot com. 

SUNDAY
Vermonter sandwiches, fries

Sunday we made our annual trip to Wellwood Orchard in Vermont, and first we stopped at the cemetery to visit my parents’ grave. We said a decade and I planted some crocuses (I’ve planted various things over the last few years, including roses and lilacs, and they keep mowing them down. It’s very Claremont) and, just because I thought it was funny, some garlic. My parents didn’t agree on lots of things, but they certainly had similar views about garlic. (= It is good.)

We had a lovely time picking apples. Bunch of photos here: 

 

The kids are old enough that nobody insisted on each having their own separate little bag, so we got two half-bushel bags and filled them up, which is the same amount of apples as lots of little bags for about half the price. It’s a little late in the season, so there weren’t tons and tons of apples, but we did get some nice big ones. Nothing like a very in-season apple! It’s like a different fruit from what you get the rest of the year. 

For supper, we had Vermonter sandwiches, which is toasted sourdough bread, sliced chicken or turkey, sharp cheddar, green apple, bacon, and honey mustard. The meat I had was an entire frozen turkey breast (99 cents a pound, could not turn it down), but I made the mistake of slicing it first and then roasting it, rather than the other way around, so it kinda tried up. It was still semi-frozen in the morning and I really wanted to prep it ahead of time so we could eat as soon as we got back. But we all came home hungry, so it was fine. 

MONDAY
Honey soy chicken wings, coconut rice, sesame broccoli 

Monday the kids had the day off for Indigenous People’s day, and I fulfilled my promise to get to work on Corrie’s Halloween costume. 

Any guesses what this is going to be? She made the mask/head (not pictured) herself. 

She also made this unrelated mask

and was somewhat offended when I jumped in alarm, but then I showed her the picture, and had to agree, it was alarming. 

Supper was a great plan but turned out a tiny bit disappointing. Chicken wings were on sale (1.99/lb) so I got a bunch and made this marinade from Recipe Tin Eats. She specifically mentions that they are sticky, and that it can be very disappointing when chicken wings don’t turn out sticky, so she shows you how to achieve stickiness (pouring off the liquid from the cooked chicken, and then basting it with the marinade three times). I followed the directions exactly, but they really just didn’t turn out sticky. 

They were fine, just not amazing. 

I also made a bunch of coconut rice, also using a Recipe Tin Eats recipe. In this one, she promises it will be fluffy, not gluey, and I’ve made this recipe before and it really does turn out good. You make it in the oven. Then I made a tray of broccoli (just some sesame oil, soy sauce, I think garlic powder, and sesame seeds) and I didn’t really plan who was going to be in the oven when at what temperate, so it kind of baked, which is not ideal.

So overall, a decent meal, but I was bummed because I was expecting it to be spectacular. I made up for it by eating about a cubic yard of coconut rice. 

TUESDAY
Pizza

Tuesday I don’t even remember what I was doing — I think maybe I picked up a big bunch of materials at Home Depot, among other things — but I was completely exhausted by the time we got home from school, and I was so delighted with myself for having made three pizzas in the morning. So then I just about wept when Corrie reminded me there was an open house and pumpkin carving at the school at 5. But I got myself together and put my shoes back on and we went, and it was actually lovely.

 

I finally met her new teacher, who turns out to be a former homeschooler, so that explains a thing or two! (Like why they are reading Beowulf and why Corrie was researching the history of the Angles).

Damien got the pizzas in the oven and it was hot and ready when we got home, and then I collapsed like a bunch of broccoli. 

WEDNESDAY
Burgers, chips, raw vegetables

Wednesday I did a bunch of fall yard work. I composted some of the garden beds, planted a bunch of seed garlic and the nine peach pits we prepared, and mulched it all with duck hay. Still gotta mulch the strawberries, peach saplings, and rhubarb. Here’s a picture of what I did, because this post is kind of low on pictures!

Oof, it’s getting so grey and drab and chilly out there. 

I also did some more chimpy hardscaping in front, and planted a ton of spring bulbs in front and in back — daffodils, tulips, crocuses, alliums, and some kind of purple and orange fluttery-looking flower, I forget what it’s called. And mulched it all. 

Oh, do I hate planting bulbs in the fall. You’d think it would be an encouraging act of hope, staking out a claim for tomorrow, doing what you can to put your trust in a brighter future and so on. And it is that, but it feels awful, just futile. Fall is just tough. Everything is dead or dying, everything smells old and rotten, the birds are leaving, everything is leaning and weary and worn out. Plus I always manage to kneel in dog poop while I’m planting, and this year was no exception. But I got those mofos into the ground, and maybe they will even grow, who knows. 

I knew Thursday was going to be super busy, so I made supper Wednesday evening. 

Looking very promising. The recipe calls for boneless, skinless chicken thighs, but I was using turkey breast (the second whole turkey breast I got. This one was more suited for my purposes). 

THURSDAY
Chicken and dumplings

So Thursday we started on the roof. We didn’t completely know how damaged it was under the shingles, so I was pretty nervous about what we might find. We spread some tarps on the ground, climbed up, and started pulling the shingles and flashing away. It was nippy up there! Sunny but windy. 

About an hour into it, I heard traffic slowing down, and saw that cars were having to avoid my giant inflated fried egg that had blown into the road, and we decided that we are dumb enough to think we can do roofing, but we don’t need to compound that by getting sued by some driver who has whiplash because of our escaped inflated egg. So I climbed down and YOU KNOW WHAT? Climbing up a ladder is kind of scary, but nowhere near as scary as climbing down a roof and turning yourself around to get onto a ladder to climb down it! But I retrieved the egg, and we got all those shingles off

The roof underneath turned out to be rotten in the spots we expected, but quite a bit of it is sound. We talked to my brother, who is a builder, and he affirmed that we can definitely do this thing, and gave us some good advice about where the water is probably coming in and what to do about it. Very encouraging! I won’t share any pictures because I’m in no frame of mind for the internet to tell me we’re doing it all wrong.

I went out to pick up some more caulk and a tool to remove siding, and some more tarps, and then I picked up the kids while Damien started in removing the rotten wood. When I got home, I heated up the chicken I had made the previous evening.

I guess you would call it a chicken stew. It is this chicken and dumpling recipe from Sip and Feast, and when I got back, I made the dumpling dough, which calls for butter, milk, AND sour cream. This is an insanely rich recipe, and my only complaint is that I cooked the dumplings at least twice as long as recommended, and they still didn’t completely cook through, and were kind of damp. 

But I just had to serve it eventually, and it really was delicious

and, as I hoped, a very tasty, cozy, and nourishing meal after a chilly day on the roof. Damien and I thought it was great, although if I make it again, I may skip the peas. The kids were not impressed, and most of them didn’t even try it. Oh well! At this point, I’m storing up recipes to make again when it’s just me and Damien in the house. 

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese

Damien just went off to Home Depot for lumber, and when he gets home, we’re gonna start pulling out old mousy insulation, pulling off siding, waterproofing and caulking, and start rebuilding trusses and decking. We got our hands on a roll of high-end self-adhering water and ice shield, and, well, we are at the age when we’re pretty excited about that.

I also have a doctor’s appointment so my stupid doctor can tell me it’s okay to keep taking my medicine, because look at me, I’m still alive, which we definitely wouldn’t be able to determine vie telehealth. In anticipation of this visit, I have carefully arranged to gain ten pounds since our last visit, so I’m looking forward to this. 

I did find one final head of garlic in the garden, which I missed before. So, in answer to your question: Yes, I do think I’m the queen of the underground, but at least I’m willing to help with the insulation. And occasionally make undercooked dumplings. 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 441: Mama the Hutt

Happy Friday! Boska!

SATURDAY
Leftovers and Aldi pizza

Just a regular Saturday, as far as I can recall. The shopping turn kid is a thrift store fanatic like me, so we ended up adding three stops to the normal run. I got this cake platter which I’m not 100% sure is a cake platter, but it was in the kitchen section. 

I figured if it was actually a plaque and toxic or something, I could just put a piece of parchment paper on it before serving food. You can see it has these invaluable holes for trapping meringue and caramel, which will be important later. 

I also bought a wig (new in package! I like excitement, but not lice excitement) that may or may not come in handy for the Halloween costume I may or may not wear. 

On Saturday, I started making ice cream for a baked Alaska for Clara’s birthday! Actually, I think I started on Friday. Actually, I started last week, because I was confused about what the date was. Long story short, I ended up making ice cream something like seven times before I figured out that someone had set the freezer at the lowest setting and that’s why my ice cream kept going wrong. THAT’S WHY. 

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, tomato soup

Damien was planning to start Monday’s birthday meal, but he was feeling terrible, so I took over. It was the Deadspin chicken cutlets, which are so delicious, we always make three times as much as we need, so we can just keeping eating them all week. 

I think I had about nine big fat chicken breasts, and I sliced each one into four thin cutlets, and then I pounded them flat. Wrapped those up and put them in the fridge, and made the sauce, which is olive oil and red pepper flakes, onions, garlic, canned tomatoes and their juice, tomato paste, and a ton of red wine. 

Then I made an orange pound cake (I used a Krusteaz mix and added orange juice and zest), and got back to making ice cream, which I had to interrupt the other day because oops, no corn syrup in the house. 

Nice easy supper, grilled ham and cheese and tomato soup. 

Truly an unbeatable weekend meal. 

So when I asked Clara what she wanted for her birthday, she said “the fanciest ice cream known to mankind,” and it was my idea to make a baked Alaska. The plan I eventually came up with was this:

So all the elements were: 

-Orange pound cake with orange glaze (Krusteaz mix)
–Olive oil saffron ice cream with burnt orange ripple
–Triple chocolate ice cream with hazelnuts
-Fresh strawberry jam (2 lbs strawberries pureed, juice of half a lemon, maybe 3/4 cup sugar)
-Blackberry ice cream 

I can’t seem to find the recipe for the blackberry ice cream, but I wasn’t crazy about it anyway. It left kind of a film on my teeth, and it didn’t get you to sieve out the seeds, so it was seedy. Probably could have anticipated that, but I did not. 

I ended up churning the saffron olive oil ice cream twice (freezing the bowls in between, so this was over the course of several days), and the damn stuff still would not freeze. So I ended up rescuing it this way, thanks to a suggestion on Reddit: I put it in the freezer in the mixing bowl for 25 minutes, and also froze the whisk attachment, and then scraped the sides and whisked it for a few minutes to combine it, then put it back in the freezer for 25 minutes, then took it out and mixed it, etc. I did this about six times, and eventually it turned into actual (if soft) ice cream, WHEW. So that’s good to know! Sometimes ice cream just will not freeze, but it can be saved!

Anyway, here is a picture of the orange caramel:

It didn’t come out as dark as in the recipe, but hooooo boy. Was this ever up my alley. 

I will tell you now that the saffron olive oil ice cream was good, not incredible. It did taste like olive oil and saffron, and it went really well with the orange caramel, and it was incredibly rich and creamy, and turned out a gorgeous intense yellow. Just not something I’m going to rush out and make again. (You should know the recipe is written in a slightly nutty way. For instance, these are the first three ingredients:

So you’re thinking, “ah, she will have you add cornstarch at two different times.” Nope! Just four teaspoons of cornstarch, but confusing. Oh well. 

MONDAY
Chicken cutlets, baked Alaska 

Monday I made the strawberry jam, which is always a lovely way to spend half an hour: 

I got all the elements assembled and into the bowl around 2:00, which. . . should have been soon enough. 

For a more detailed guide on how to assemble a Baked Alaska, I wrote it all out in this post, when I made one for our 25th anniversary. 

Then I put the tomato sauce for the chicken in the slow cooker to stay warm, and got hopping on the chicken! You coat each piece in salted, peppered flour, then in beaten eggs, and then in a mix of half breadcrumbs, half grated parmesan cheese. Then you fry those suckers in olive oil. 

When they are browned on both sides, you lay a basil leaf on each one, top it with a slice of provolone, and lay a scoop of hot sauce over the top.

Beautiful. Magnificent. We generally only have this meal on special occasions, because it’s labor intensive and expensive, buy wow is it good. I was happy Damien was able to enjoy eating it without having labored over it all day, for once!

After we recovered from feasting for a bit, I made a meringue. Last time I made a meringue, the sugar was a little gritty, so I tried a technique from King Arthur Flour where you combine the egg whites and sugar  (I actually hedged my bets and used superfine sugar, which is sugar whirred up in the food processor) with cream of tartar and salt and whisk it over a pot of simmering water until the sugar dissolves. 

and then you beat it in the standing mixer as usual until it’s stiff. Worked great! No gritty sugar.

Then you pull the baked Alaska out of the freezer, flip it and ease it out of the bowl, slap meringue all over it, and either bake or torch it. 

This baked alaska was, like so many of us, beautiful but unstable. Some of the ice cream was softer than I wanted, and the caramel was pretty oozy. So I handed Clara the torch and she did the honors.

 You can see it sliding! Exciting!

Then I slopped a little bit spiced rum on it, and we lit that on fire, too. It never stays lit as long as I expect it to, but it’s pretty. 

When I sliced it, you could see that I . . . well, remember when I was making the brick patio and I really tried to get the layers level, and I really did what I could, but at a certain point I just embraced the wobble? That is basically what happened here, except this time I didn’t hit myself in the face with a shovel. 

Sort of a Jabba the Baked Alaska situation. 

Jabba wah ning chee kosthpa murishani tytung ye wanya yoskah. Hoh hoh hoh hohhhh, and haaaapy birthday. 

Anyway, it was delicious. Will absolutely be making the chocolate hazelnut recipe again (it’s made with dark chocolate, cocoa, and Nutella, plus toasted hazelnuts), and the orange caramel part, if not the olive oil saffron ice cream, and will use that meringue technique going forward, too. Everyone was stuffed with food, and sat around and yakked and laughed, and she liked her presents, and we had a nice time. Yay!

TUESDAY
Leftover chicken cutlets

Tuesday, as planned, we had leftover chicken. I had been planning spaghetti with sauce and cut up chicken, but I was so exhausted by evening, I told everyone to just do whatever they wanted. I myself toasted some bread and made a little sandwich. 

Actually quite a big sandwich! Yummy. 

Then one kid started to flip out at another kid, and I asked kid 2 if she wanted me to intervene, and she said, “Can you do it without escalating the situation?” and I thought about it, and said, “No.” Then I fixed myself a bowl of saffron olive oil ice cream with burnt orange caramel swirl, sat on the couch, wrapped myself in a blanket, and pretended I was alone. 

Alone with my ice cream. 

If you are wondering how my weight loss journey is going, it’s going great. I find that if you fry My Fitness App in olive oil, it comes out a really nice toasty brown. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken burrito bowl

Wednesday I didn’t super duper have a plan, but I had a bunch of chicken legs that were on sale, so I put them in the pressure cooker with some salsa and some water and pressed the “poultry” button. 

When they were done, I pulled the meat off the bone and put it in the slow cooker with the rest of the jar of salsa, and used the pressure cooker again to make a big pot of plain rice. I served the chicken and rice with corn, cilantro, sour cream, shredded pepper jack cheese, lime wedges, and a sophisticated garnish of flaming red Takis.

And a little hot sauce on top. And it was very good! 

THURSDAY
Kielbasa, brussels sprouts, red potatoes

Thursday I suddenly remembered I promised I would take Corrie to some kind of turtle presentation at the library. So I zipped around prepping supper, and left it on the stove with a note on when and how to cook it, but then I forgot to tell anyone to do it, and they texted me, but I guess I had my ringer off? Sorry, busy admiring turtles. 

Look at those pulkies!

The kids smartly figured out to put the food in the oven, and I came home in time to finish cooking it.

Here’s the recipe:

Jump to Recipe

So it cooked halfway, and then I stirred it up and poured the sauce over it and finished it cooking, and then finished it under the broiler to crisp up the brussels sprouts. Oh do I love some crisped-up brussels sprouts.

I actually didn’t have any honey, so I used brown sugar. I ended up needing a lot more than I expected to make it as sweet as honey, and then I ended up using more brown sugar than I meant to, so it turned out quite sweet. Nobody complained, though! This is such a great fall meal. It would have been really good with some beer bread or biscuits, but this was not the day for that. 

Here’s the beer bread recipe anyway.

Jump to Recipe

and here’s what it looks like. 

I don’t really miss drinking at all, at this point. It’s been over two years! I do miss having beer and wine in the house to cook and bake with, though. (Obviously I go out an buy it if I need it, but it’s a hassle.) Anyway, mmmmm, beer bread. 

FRIDAY
French toast casserole, hash browns

Still trying to figure out how much bread to buy now that the chief sandwichman of the house has moved out, and we have a ton of bread hanging around, so french toast casserole it is.

(For this, you just tear up bread, mix it with milk and egg batter with maybe some vanilla and a little salt, pour it into a buttered casserole dish, dot it with butter, and sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on top; then bake until the egg is firm.)

Perhaps I will give the children a thrill and put chocolate chips in it. Not that they deserve it, but who among us. 

Print

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

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

Ingredients

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

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

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

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400. 

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

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

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

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

    Serve hot with dressing and parsley for a garnish. 

Print

Beer bread

A rich, buttery quick bread that tastes more bready and less cake-y than many quick breads. It's so easy (just one bowl!) but you really do want to sift the flour.

This recipe makes two large loaf pan loaves.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups flour, sifted
  • 2 Tbsp baking powder
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 12-oz cans beer, preferably something dark
  • 1 stick butter

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 375

  2. Butter two large loaf pans. Melt the stick of butter.

  3. I'm sorry, but you really do want to sift the flour.

  4. In a large bowl, mix together dry ingredients, and stir in beer until it's all combined and nice and thick.

  5. Pour the batter into the loaf pans and pour the melted butter over the top.

  6. Bake for about 50 minutes until it's crusty and knobbly on top.

What’s for supper? Vol. 439: We put the “disgrazia” in . . . everything.

Happy Friday! Today’s post will be about food, and gardens, and home improvement projects, and that’s it. 

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Especially lavish leftovers, since, incredibly, we still had some steak from last week. I’m struggling mightily to cook less food now that we only have seven people in the house, but, like I said, I’m struggling. 

While I was out shopping, Corrie made two loaves of banana bread. She’s getting really great in the kitchen! It turned out scrumptious, tender and moist. 

Here’s the recipe. 

Jump to Recipe

Sophia has also been baking more, now that the cooler weather has arrived. She made some really intense apple cider muffins with cider buttercream topping later in the week, but I forgot to take a picture. But three cheers for kids who bake! 

I myself made some pretty lousy applesauce. We had these lousy apples 

from our elderly apple tree, Marvin, which the kids feel sentimental about, so every year I make applesauce.

I washed all the spiders off, cut the apples in half, and cut out as many bad spots as I could manage. I took this picture:

because this was an especially large and pristine specimen. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to this tree to produce better apples. I’ve tried nothing, and I’m fresh out of ideas. 

I put the apple halves in two stock pots with about 3/4 cup of water and set them to simmer. Then I burned one! But I did not burn the other. I let it cook until the apples were soft, and then I put the pot in the fridge. (This is not a necessary step in the recipe; I just didn’t feel like dealing with it anymore that day.) 

Oh, also on Saturday, I fulfilled my end of a contract and dyed Corrie’s hair bright pink. She’s happy with it, but less enthusiastic about having her photo online all the time (sorry, kids. I have regrets), so I will just show you a photo of the dye we used

It is Lime Crime Unicorn Hair, and the color is “Juicy.” The label is the most egregiously illegible thing I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve squinted at a LOT of hair dye. But I have to say, this stuff adheres really, really well. The color is exactly as advertised (I did bleach her hair pretty light first), and it’s staying put so far. 

SUNDAY
Roast beef sandwiches with smoked gouda, garden corn, chips

The beef round eye hunks were still on sale, so we got another one and Damien seasoned and slow cooked it in the oven, and it turned out perrrrrfect. Very juicy and delicious. Unfortunately, the pictures I took make it look like something the plumber would hold up while saying, “Well, HERE’S your problem,” so I’ll skip photos. 

I splurged on some smoked gouda from the deli, and I also bought a jar of hot pepper sandwich spread

and oh man, that was a great combination. 

I see now that my table is gross. I’m not deleting the picture as an act of humility and penance in the face of the way I acted yesterday on social media. Anyway, really great sandwiches.

I picked the second round of corn from the garden, and Damien cooked it in the husk on the grill, and it was sweet and juicy and delicious. Lovely meal. 

Then it was time to make the apple sauce, as I’d been promising! So I set out to look for the foley mill, which I only use once a year to make apple sauce, but for which there is no substitute. Couldn’t find it in the island cabinet, but I did find a bag of rotten potatoes, so I threw that away and scrubbed out the inside of the cabinet. Then I thought, well, the other cabinet could probably use some cleaning, too, especially since it’s not even a cabinet, it’s just a ghastly conglomeration of wire shelving and milk crates and spidery misc. So I started pulling stuff out, and I DID find the foley mill, but then I got to thinking how much I didn’t want to go through that again next year, and how it wouldn’t be that hard to replace this chaos with some actual shelving, so I started looking for scrap wood, and then I thought for once I would treat myself and take some measurements and actually buy some wood specifically for this project, so I went to Home Depot and got back and settled in among the musty old double boilers, dusty candy molds, fusty wedding cake pans and bottles of terrible vermouth, and greasy pencils and bent measuring spoons that had slithered down into the gap, and I got going with the saw and the drill

and Corrie comes in and said, ” . . . I thought you were gonna make apple sauce.” 

I was! I mean, I am! This is the process! For some reason. 

Well, it took seven hours, and it’s not quite done. My pride will not allow me to show you photos of what the new shelves look like. They are level, and made out of real wood, and not likely to fall apart soon, and they are better than what we had, so that’s a win. I just can’t seem to take a picture where they don’t look like they were built by a Dr. Seuss bird, and possibly photographed by a second Dr. Seuss bird who is the first bird’s enemy. But I did fill two cartons with stuff to throw away, which is always nice. 

In my defense, I have built things out of wood before, but I’ve never built something that has to fit inside something else, and it involved more precise  measuring than is . . . customarily my style. 

Anyway, we delivered the bomb. I mean we found the foley mill. I mean I built some shelves. I mean we started making some applesauce!

MONDAY
Garlicky pork chops, homemade applesauce, baked potato

So Monday I actually finished making the applesauce. I spooned the cooked apples, peels and cores and all, into the foley mill. If you’re not familiar with this device, it’s basically a pot with a strainer for a bottom, and in the middle is a crank. When you turn the crank, a tilted blade forces the apples (or whatever) through the strainer, so only the soft, edible parts get pushed through the holes. Turning the crank also makes a spindle scrape the underside of the strainer, depositing the applesauce (or whatever) into the bowl below. It also has three little brackets so the mill stays in place over the bowl while you crank it.

Actually I have a picture!

Just a nicely-designed device. Of course you can peel and core your apples before cooking them, and then you won’t have to strain them out afterward; but it’s so much easier this way (assuming you’re not using a recipe that includes a trip to Home Depot), and cooking the peels along with the insides gives you more flavor and color (if you have nice apples!). Apples that are red, for instance, will result in a lovely dusty rose-colored applesauce. 

When I got it all cranked through, I put the apple pulp into the slow cooker with some butter, white sugar, and lots of cinnamon, and let that go all day. 

Pork chops were on sale, and I really struggle with cooking pork chops so they’re not dry. I thought Nagi might have a solution, and she did! She has a recipe called “Just a Great Pork Chop Marinade,” and even though it’s made with soy sauce, brown sugar, and garlic, she promised it just tastes savory, not Asian, and she was right. It also has dijon mustard, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce. I marinated the chops for several hours, and then broiled them right up under the broiler (the recipe calls for grilling, which would have been nice). SCRUMPTIOUS.

I will absolutely be returning to this recipe. These are probably the juiciest pork chops I have ever made. 

I threw a bunch of potatoes in the oven for 40 minutes or so, and we had the pork, applesauce, and baked potatoes for a very fine fall meal. 

Someday the kids are going to have applesauce made from actual good apples, and they’re gonna realize . . . well, you know what, it doesn’t matter. They liked the applesauce, and this was a very popular meal. And I delivered the bomb. 

TUESDAY
Buffalo chicken wraps

Tuesday Damien and I and a kid spent all day on the road and at a largely useless and frustrating doctor’s appointment, so I was very glad I had planned an easy dinner: Buffalo chicken wraps. 

Or, I was glad until I realized I had planned it, but not actually bought any buffalo chicken. A small error! Damien gallantly zipped off to the store and bought some, and we had a late but popular meal: Tortillas with buffalo chicken, blue cheese or ranch dressing, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, shredded pepper jack cheese, and crunchy fried onions.

We still have a giant backlog of tortillas in the house, so get ready for more wraps. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken with chickpeas and piquant onions, Jerusalem salad, yogurt sauce, pita

Wednesday I made a dish I haven’t made for quite some time: Chicken with chickpeas. It’s a middle eastern-ish recipe and none of the steps are hard, but I’m always a little surprised at how many elements it has. I guess I have it in my head that it’s an INCREDIBLY SIMPLE meal, and it really isn’t. It’s just regular-easyish. 

Anyway, I got the chicken marinating, cut up the onions, and made the lemony onions side dish and the yogurt sauce and the Jerusalem salad. Tons of color!

I’ll put all those recipes at the end. Oops, I guess I don’t have a card for Jerusalem salad. Well, it’s just tomatoes, cucumbers, fresh cilantro and/or parsley, some olive oil, and lemon juice, salt and pepper. All of these dishes really want fresh lemon juice, if you can manage it. Bottled lemon juice always has kind of a stale stank to it, so if you’re going to use it in a dish that doesn’t get cooked, I always try to do fresh. 

Then when I got home, it really was very simple and easy to just chunk the chicken and chickpeas and onions into the oven. This recipe has you marinating the chicken in a spiced yogurt sauce, which makes the meat moist as heck, but even more importantly gives the skin a magnificent texture. 

The marinade kind of melds onto the skin and make it, like, chicken ultraskin. 

Sometimes I keep the chicken warm while giving the chickpeas some extra time in the oven to crisp up, but it was already super late and we were starving, so I just served it, along with some store-bought pita. I do like chickpeas with a little crunch, but soft and savory is also very good!

Really wonderful meal. 

On Wednesday I realized I had never picked the peaches from my tree, which is funny, because last year at this time, I was picking for the 476th time and blanching and freezing them as fast as I could, and still being neck-deep in peaches. I guess it’s pretty common for peach trees to be on a schedule like this. 

The peaches this year may be few but some of them are HUGE. 

This is not some kind of optical illusion photo. They’re the biggest peaches I’ve ever seen! They’re delicious, too, super juicy and nectar-y. I’m saving the pits from the biggest ones, and I’ll try to sprout them. Last year I used a method where you dry the pits for a few days, pry them open to get the inner seed out, and plant them in pots in the ground in the fall, so they get cold stratified and can sprout easily in the spring. 

I did this with six seeds, as I recall, and got two good seedlings, which are now in the ground and doing great. I have hopes of turning the side yard, which is currently overgrown with goldenrod and wild grapes, into a little orchard. Right now it has the apple tree, a very young peach tree, a valiant blueberry bush, and of course the ubiquitous wild raspberries. I would like a cherry tree, but I’ve struggled with fungus on cherry trees in the past, so maybe I will do a nut tree in the spring. Lucky me! Always something to look forward to. (The other new peach tree is by the duck pen, so eventually they will have some natural shade and, presumably, some windfall snacks. I’m not worried about them eating the pits because they routinely mooch around the existing peach tree, and they have figured out how not to eat pits! Which makes two things they have figured out. The first thing is screwing.)

THURSDAY
Rigatoni alla disgraziata with homemade cheese and homemade bread

Thursday I overextended myself, and I don’t even know why. I guess I was cooking my feelings, and also I had some pretty little eggplants from the garden that also wanted to be cooked. 

The plan was rigatoni alla disgraziata,

Jump to Recipe

which is a meatless but very hearty pasta dish. It is not difficult. You toast up a bunch of breadcrumbs in oil, and then take them out of the pan and fry up your eggplants in more oil. 

No need to peel them. But at this point I realized I didn’t have as much eggplant as I thought, so I added some diced onion. Then you add tomato sauce to the eggplant, then you boil up some rigatoni, mix the breadcrumbs into the eggplant sauce, and stir it all together with torn-up mozzarella, and top it with grated parmesan. I also tarted up the jarred sauce with some chopped tomatoes and fresh basil. 

I decided to make fresh mozzarella cheese for this, and that was a good idea, except I decided to make a double recipe, and I was unsure about the timing of the chemistry part of it when you’re making a double batch. I really struggled with getting the almost-finished cheese to a high enough temperature before stretching it. The stretching is what gives it that stretchy, string-like texture, but it’s really hard to stretch hot cheese without gloves! I don’t know why I don’t have gloves!

Anyway, the cheese tasted fine but was very grainy, because of the heating/stretching issue. 

I hope that, because it’s folded into the pasta and is supposed to melt a bit, it wouldn’t matter much, and it didn’t matter that much, but it was a little sad. I was a little sad. 

I decided to cheer myself up by making bread, and that was where I really went wrong. First the dough rose right out of the bowl and slopped itself all over the windowsill and floor, and then I decided to get cute and make twelve separate little loaves, and then I realized I was LATE, like “text your teenager and promise you have not forgotten them” late. So I zipped through the process as fast as I could, which, believe it or not, does not produce the highest quality of food.

The good news is, we ate so late, everyone was happy to see anything hot and ready. I did take some pictures, but they’re not great, and it was not a great meal. These are decent recipes which I recommend! Sometimes things just don’t come together, and we all live to fight another day. I did buy some gloves for future cheese. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just regular old pizza, no fancy tricks. And that’s-a my story. We live to fight another day. 

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Banana bread or muffins

adapted from Quick Breads, Soups & Stews by Mary Gubser

Ingredients

  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 3 ripe bananas, mashed well
  • 1/2 cup chopped nuts optional

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 375.

  2. In one bowl, sift flour, baking soda, and salt together.

  3. In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well in between. Add mashed bananas and mix well.

  4. Gradually add the dry ingredients and blend well. If you're adding nuts, fold them in.

  5. Grease 12 muffin tins or a loaf pan and pour the batter in.

  6. Bake 20 minutes or longer, until the top is slightly browned.

 

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Cumin chicken thighs with chickpeas in yogurt sauce

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

Ingredients

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

For garnishes:

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

Garnishes:

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

     -Chop up some cilantro for sprinkling if people like.

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

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

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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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Rigatoni alla disgraziata

A hearty, meatless pasta dish with eggplant, breadcrumbs, and mozzarella

Ingredients

  • 2 lg eggplants with ends cut off, cut into one-inch pieces (skin on)
  • salt
  • 3/4 cup olive oil, plus a little extra for frying bread crumbs
  • 3 cups bread crumbs
  • 3 lbs rigatoni
  • 6 cup marinara sauce
  • 1 lb mozzarella
  • grated parmesan for topping

Instructions

  1. In a very large skillet or pot, heat up a little olive oil and toast the bread crumbs until lightly browned. Remove from pan and set aside.

  2. Put the 3/4 cup of olive oil in the pan, heat it again, and add the cubed eggplant. Cook for several minutes, stirring often, until eggplant is soft and slightly golden. Salt to taste. Add in sauce and stir to combine and heat sauce through. Keep warm.

  3. In another pot, cook the rigatoni in salted water. Drain. Add the pasta to the eggplant and sauce mixture. Add in the toasted breadcrumbs and the shredded mozzarella. Stir to combine. Serve with grated parmesan on top.

 

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French bread

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

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s for supper? Vol. 434: Shawarmageddon

Happy Friday! Hope this finds you well. It finds me listening to Mozart Piano Sonata No. 5 in G and then suddenly AN AD FOR FREAKIER FRIDAY, which is essentially a war crime. Not to mention the Lay’s potato chip ad, which features someone loudly chomping on a chip right into the microphone. WHO WANTS THAT?

Anyway, so, here’s what we had this week. Some pretty good summer meals, a new recipe, and another successful kid-made meal! To wit: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers, onion rings

Saturday is a blur. I vaguely remember angrily cleaning the refrigerator out. Don’t know if I’ve ever cleaned the fridge out without being angry. 

SUNDAY
Parking lot pizza

Sunday we went to Canobie! I got an unexpected royalty check and it was enough to pay for most of the trip, so I was feeling pretty triumphant about that. I was riding the migraine train all weekend, but I medicated and caffeinated myself to the max, and when we got there, Damien gave me his sunglasses, sent the kids away, and put me on an inflated tube, and we floated around the lazy river together until I felt a little more embodied. 

We stayed for seven hours and it was a pretty great day. I have no regrets about having all those babies, but DANG life is easier without babies.

I posted some pics here if you want to take a look. 

We left the park at nine and chose the nearest pizza spot that was still open, which turned out to be the elegantly-situated Salem House of Pizza. 

All your bodily needs, from the lashes of your eyes to the soles of your shoes, catered to in one spot. I was kind of fascinated by “Bread Makery.” If only there were a word for that! We have a local business called “Jenna’s Butcher” and we used to have a “The Barbery.” I feel we should RETVRN to . . . I don’t even know, whatever. Just, everyone, before doing anything, ask me. 

On the other hand, I’m the one who was very excited to have found this very old penny with a rare misprint on it. It says “ONE CENT” backwards!

So I posted about it on Facebook and started thinking about how valuable it might be if it were cleaned up, and maybe it would even pay for a new roof, and I showed it to Damien, and he gently pointed out that it was a regular penny that I was holding upside down. 

Yeah, well. I’m still starting a roof repair fund. So far, I have one cent. 

Anyway, this pizza place closed at 10 and we got there at 9:15, but they were still pretty mad! So most of us skulked outside while the pizzas cooked, but Corrie opted to have a seat inside, and have a chat with her favorite person

and I have to admit, that pizza was frickin delicious. Possibly because it was the freshest possible pizza imaginable, as they essentially pulled it out of the oven and threw it at us. But it was also very late and we had all logged our 10K steps and then some; but it was also just good pizza. We ate it on the car hood and it was fab. 

I fell asleep a few times on the way home. Sadly, I was driving. But I did wake up again right away, and filed the experience away to my “maybe we are getting too old for this kind of thing” folder. 

MONDAY
Salad with chicken, blueberries, almonds

Monday was a bit of a blur, but I did get supper on the table. Roast chicken breast over salad greens, with blueberries, minced red onion, crunchy onions from a can, and sliced almonds (toasted in the microwave). 

This salad is good with feta or blue cheese, but I didn’t buy any. I think I had blue cheese dressing on mine, and it was good. The blueberries are sweet this year. As you can see, we also had watermelon, and it was another massively juicy one. 

TUESDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips, pickles

Tuesday the new swing I ordered (after the old swings broke mid-swing) arrived, and Corrie put it together herself,

and now she lives on the swing. 

Seriously, I thought she would probably like it, but I did not anticipate she would be on there 23 hours a day. We had a tire swing when we were growing up, and it was The Place, so I get it. I still remember the smell of the rubber tire, the sound of rainwater sloshing around in the bottom, the prickle of the frayed rope, the sway of the ground passing by. Dragging your fingertips over the roots of the tree as you drift through leafy shadows. Ah, summer. 

We had a blessedly easy dinner of grilled ham and cheese, with chips and pickles. 

Last night I dreamt I was in college again, and it was pretty terrible. I was carrying hay-bale-sized rolls of toilet paper upstairs for the whole dorm, and nobody even said thank you, and my friend Dena from elementary school was there, and she didn’t like me anymore.

The dream did not include one of my actual greatest college experiences, which was getting drunk as a skunk at Penuche’s, and then staggering next door to Jesus Grocery and asking for a hot dog, and the polite Pakistani cashier gently explaining they didn’t have hot dogs, but he could make me a chhham and cheese for a dollar twenty-five. Best chhhham and cheese I’ve ever had. But this one was pretty good, too. 

Tuesday evening, Sophia started prepping for her marvelous Kid-Made Meal of the week. First she shopped for and then made tiramisu, following this recipe, and she made the exact same mistake I made last time I made tiramisu, and mixed the egg custard and the cream parts together, rather than having them as separate layers. I was happy to be able to reassure her that it wasn’t a disaster and everyone would love it anyway.

I also showed her how to skin and bone chicken thighs, and she did that and made the marinade and got the chicken marinating for the next day. And cleaned up! 

WEDNESDAY
Shawarma, pita, tiramisu

AND OH WHAT A SHAWARMA IT WAS. Here’s my oven shawarma recipe.

Jump to Recipe

I still hope to use that rotisserie spit I got at my favorite store, but this recipe works great, especially if you give the meat plenty of time to marinate. 

Sophia also made pita, using this recipe. Guys, it was so much better than any pita I’ve ever made. I’m so impressed. Also, her yogurt sauce was better.

Jump to Recipe

Also, the shawarma was better! I don’t know what she did (and when I asked, she said she just followed my recipes!), but it was a completely fantastic meal. 

Served with tomatoes, cucumbers, feta, black and kalamata olives. We lost the parsley, but didn’t miss it. 

Amazing. I know shawarma is supposed to be in little bits, but the chicken was so tender, we didn’t bother. 

The tiramisu was also splendid. I didn’t get a picture, because I was too busy arguing with myself that I would rather have tiramisu than get a gold star in food today (yes, I have a sticker chart, and yes, I give myself a gold star if I stick to my calorie goal. And yes, the tiramisu was a good trade). 

THURSDAY
Vietnamese-style meatballs, rice, peas, cherries

New recipe! I ended up using just ground beef, rather than beef and pork; I had lemon zest rather than lime, and I didn’t make the sauce. Still super delicious, very flavorful, with all the good stuff: Fresh garlic and ginger, cilantro, fresh mint, fish sauce, and of course the citrus zest, plus red pepper flakes and scallions. And eggs and panko crumbs, as long as I’m listing all the ingredients. I made a double recipe and ended up with about 75 meatballs, which means I made them smaller than they were supposed to be, but I thought it was a good size. The fish sauce makes them quite salty, so smaller is good. They are baked in the oven, so that’s easy. 

I made rice on the stovetop like an absolute peasant, because I completely forgot about fixing my Instant Pot, which just flashes and beeps and does nothing else. We had just plain peas, which some of my kids are weirdly enthusiastic about, and cherries. 

So kind of an odd but satisfying meal. I’ll probably make the meatballs again, and will probably make the spicy sauce, which calls for peanuts, yum. 

I also started phase 1 of  Project Enormous S’mores, which was homemade graham crackers. I made a triple batch of dough from this recipe, and put it in the fridge to chill

and I was going to make a giant slab of marshmallow, but the recipe was pretty adamant that you don’t want to make homemade marshmallows when it’s humid out, which it sure was. I think I’ll try again on Saturday. Benny is the chief S’mores lover, and she will be out of town on Saturday, so it would be fun to have all the stuff ready for Sunday.

For the giant chocolate bar element, I just keep buying bags of chocolate chips (not all at the same time, because that would be expensive. Instead, I am buying them a few at a time, which is thrifty. In some way), and I’m probably gonna melt them in a double boiler with some Crisco, and then spread that in a pan lined with parchment paper, and put it in the fridge to set. That should work, right? 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

Or, as one of my kids used to call it, “pigsnetti.”

What did your kids call spaghetti? Tell me cute things! Right now, I don’t have anyone in my house who mispronounces things in a cute way. I do have a bunch of teenagers who started out saying things like “kway-sa-DILL-a” and “GWACK-a-mole” to be funny, but now it’s just habit and they just say it that way automatically, and some day they’re going to be very embarrassed in front of someone they care about. But that’s not my problem! 

The summer really is wrapping up, and I didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted to, yet. I have to get back to Corrie’s treehouse (which is still just two planks bolted to a tree!), and I haven’t made any progress on the front walkway at all. I honestly wouldn’t feel bad if I just set that project aside for the spring, but I do want to make that treehouse. We are planning one more ocean trip, but man, it went by fast!  So fast. We have a kid starting college in a few weeks, and, sighhhh, also a kid moving out into their first apartment. Yeah, I gotta get that treehouse done. 

Anyway, tell me the cute way your kid says spaghetti. 

5 from 2 votes
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Chicken shawarma

Ingredients

  • 8 lbs boned, skinned chicken thighs
  • 4-5 red onions
  • 1.5 cups lemon juice
  • 2 cups olive oil
  • 4 tsp kosher salt
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp pepper
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes OR Aleppo pepper
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 entire head garlic, crushed OR bashed into pieces

Instructions

  1. Mix marinade ingredients together, then add chicken. Put in ziplock bag and let marinate several hours or overnight.

  2. Preheat the oven to 425.

  3. Grease a shallow pan. Take the chicken out of the marinade and spread it in a single layer on the pan, and top with the onions (sliced or quartered). If you kept the garlic in larger pieces, fish those out of the marinade and strew them over the chicken. Cook for 45 minutes or more. 

  4. Chop up the chicken a bit, if you like, and finish cooking it so it crisps up a bit more.

  5. Serve chicken and onions with pita bread triangles, cucumbers, tomatoes, assorted olives, feta cheese, fresh parsley, pomegranates or grapes, fried eggplant, and yogurt sauce.

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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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