Green Beans to Soup Beans

Despite the very spotty germination on my Kentucky Wonder green bean plants that resulted in exactly nine plants growing to maturity this year, I have actually been harvesting green beans. I have two gallon-sized bags of green beans in the freezer right now, thus ensuring my favorite green beans+bacon+onions for Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, given the fact that I never did put up fencing for the plants to climb, I also have a lot of beans that get lost in the jungle and grow too much before I harvest them. This makes them tough and starchy. Not what I want to a green bean to be.

But it IS what I want a soup bean to be.

Green bean on the right, soup bean on the left.

"Soup beans" are what I call those green beans that over-mature on the plant before I find them. Some of those over-mature ones I leave to dry out, and then I save them to plant for next year. But most of them, I freeze as soup beans. 

It takes me a few days to harvest enough beans to bother with, but when I do have enough, I go through them and separate them into green beans and soup beans based on their size. All of them get the stem ends snapped off. The green beans are frozen whole. The soup beans are chopped into short lengths before being frozen.

Like so.

And then I have a bag of bean pieces ready to just throw right into soup when I make it.

Soup beans in soup.

I have about a quart of soup beans in the freezer right now, and I'll just keep adding to it as long as the plants are still producing beans and I keep missing them until they're too big.

Snapshots: Spirit Time

As the daylight hours grow ever shorter, the candles on the table have reappeared.

Before-school breakfast candles.

I do have new taper candles, but they're not 100% beeswax. The children love the smell of the real beeswax candle stub that's still in the candle holder, so I continue to burn it for them. It apparently gives them the strength to face the school day, and who am I to deny them that?

This past week was a spirit week at school for homecoming at the school we play sports with. I don't usually have enough spirit to really enjoy spirit weeks, but I was pretty proud of Poppy's hair for crazy hair day on Monday.

Pigtails on the sides, plus a bun on top surrounded by cosmos. 

The flowers made it to after lunch before wilting and starting to fall off, which is pretty good for a seven-year-old running around at recess and so on.

Later in the week on the day for our school colors, the cheerleaders were instructed to wear their giant sparkly hair bows.

Spirited cheerleader at breakfast (with the strengthening candles burning, you'll notice).

And then they cheered at the homecoming volleyball game.

A bevy of bows.

In non-homecoming news, I wrote a thank-you note to the girls at school who gave us the apple butter a couple of weeks ago, and they responded by giving me another jar of apple butter. Sometimes virtue really is its own reward.

The apple butter is good on regular old sourdough bread, but I suspected it would be even better on this slightly sweet oat quick bread, so I made a couple of loaves of that.

And so it was. If you have apple butter around, I encourage you to try it.

I was at the store on Tuesday, and some random guy passing my cart glanced in and said, "Whoa, that's a big ground beef."

I guess. I was thinking I should have bought two. My sense of scale is way off with food anymore. He did not remark on the two giant bags of Crispy Rice cereal, however.

While I was in that city, I stopped to go in a very old church there that I had never seen. It took me a second to figure this out when I walked in.

Clearly marked, but how to access the holy water?

After a second of examination, I deduced that I needed to put my finger underneath the wooden box to activate the holy water, which then dripped onto my finger. I can see the practicality of this obvious COVID-holdover, but I did feel a bit like I was in a public bathroom waiting on an automatic soap dispenser.

I found a few more sunflowers on my run the other day.

Along with some white cosmos from the garden and some of what my kids call "cotton grass."

I still don't see a freeze in our forecast, so it's possible I may be able to find sunflowers for a little while yet. They're certainly getting more scarce, though.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Beef, Chicken, Pork, Lamb

Friday

Short version: Baked beans, garlic bread, cucumbers with ranch dip, chocolate pudding with cream

Long version: I woke up in the morning to 61 degrees in the kitchen, which is why I decided to simmer beans. Might as well use propane to heat the house and cook something at the same time.

I cooked a pot of pinto beans, which I then made into baked beans, mostly because I had some bacon left over from breakfast and the oven was already on to cook brisket.

I also baked bread this day, so I made garlic bread to go with the beans. I made the pudding because I had some cream that was starting to get just a bit sour. This whole meal was very popular with the three children at home.

Saturday

Short version: Brisket, fried potatoes, raw tomatoes, leftover pudding

Long version: The brisket I had cooked the day before, and some boiled potato slices left from making camp food for A. and the boy who were gone hunting.

I had my brisket in a very good salad.

Very large, too.

Sunday

Short version: Fried leftover Spanish omelet, raw green beans, strawberries and cream layer cake

Long version: A. was still hunting with one boy. I had made a Spanish tortilla for them to take with them that I forgot to put in the cooler. One of the children at home with me is not much of a fan of Spanish tortilla, but he does like fried potatoes a lot. So I decided to chunk up the Spanish tortilla and fry it.

This was very popular, particularly with the one who doesn't like Spanish tortilla. Win.

The cake was experimental. I had a pint of cream that was starting to sour and a box of yellow cake mix my mother had sent home with me from Colorado.

The cake was supposed to be "extra moist," and I'm guessing it's because the instructions called for three eggs. That seemed like a lot of eggs to me.

The box assured me that Betty's got my back, though, so I went with it.

I did not, however, use the canola oil called for, instead substituting butter. I also used some of that cream with the water to be added.

I overbaked the cakes, so they definitely were not "super moist," but then I added strawberry/rhubarb jam on each layer and completely covered the whole thing with whipped cream, so it was good.

Cake layers.

I actually thought I over-sweetened the whipped cream, so that the cake as a whole was too sweet, but no one else seemed to mind it. They were just pleased that I actually made a layer cake. I rarely bother with layers.

Monday

Short version: Lamb and chickpeas, rice, cucumbers, leftover cake

Long version: I had mostly made the main part of this the day before, simmering a big pot of chickpeas and a bag of lamb stew meat and a shank to make both stock and meat. Those two things, plus tomatoes, onions, garlic, paprika, thyme, oregano, lemon juice, yogurt, and cornstarch, made the lamb that went over the rice.

Tuesday

Short version: Lamb chops, leftovers, mashed potatoes, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: The chops were the marinated ones I had sent along with A. for their hunting trip. He had never cooked them, so I did. A couple of kids had the leftover lamb and chickpeas, because they prefer their meat off the bone and I didn't have enough lamb chops for everyone, anyway.

Wednesday

Short version: Creamy chicken and sausage, leftover rice or mashed potatoes

Long version: I did not have a solid plan for dinner, except that I knew there was a rotisserie chicken in the refrigerator from my trip to the store the day before. Minus the drumsticks, of course, because that's what I eat as I drive home.

Some of the chicken had been eaten, unbeknownst to me, but there was just enough left for dinner. I shredded that, added a diced link of smoked sausage that had come back from A.'s hunting trip, frozen diced onion, frozen peas, the rest of someone's milk that didn't get finished at breakfast, and cream.

Steamy.

Everyone got to choose either mashed potatoes or rice, and that was dinner.

Thursday

Short version: Pork chunks and milk gravy, porky rice, cucumbers with ranch dip, apple crisp with cream

Long version: Yet another pork loin--actually a half loin this time, but I bought two--cut into steaks and chunks, pan fried, and then gravy made with milk and cornstarch.

Erma Bombeck used to claim that in her childhood home, they ate so much gravy it was a beverage. I'm beginning to feel like that, although I don't hear anyone complaining about it.

I had saved the liquid from cooking the pork shoulder awhile ago, freezing it when I had used all the lard on top of it. That's what I used to cook the rice.

Someone had given me about a dozen elderly apples. They were mostly something like Yellow Delicious, which are a bit too sweet for a crisp, but they needed to be cooked, so crisp it was.

Refrigerator check:

As always, Daisy dairy is well represented.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

Online Educating

It's fair to say, I think, that I am something of a Luddite. I don't like technology, I am not comfortable with it, and I use just as little of it as I can get away with. 

This is sometimes a challenge, though, because of course it's very hard to avoid technology in our current culture, and most especially in education. Even more especially, in online education.

Our school has an online program in which I help students with special ed. accommodations in English. This year, for the first time, the program has a regular writing component. The students are supposed to write a two-sentence reflection at the end of each lesson. In our brave new world, we of course have had to specify that any student using AI to generate an answer will receive a zero on that assignment.

They do it anyway, but it's pretty obvious and several students have in fact failed their assignments because of it.

Something else that should have been obvious to me but wasn't came to my attention yesterday when I was working with one of my students. This particular student doesn't appear very frequently for our scheduled meeting time every week, but he was there yesterday. He happened to be on a quiz in his coursework. I can't give him the answers, of course, but I can read it to him.

So that's what we were doing. There were a couple of questions he asked to skip and come back to later, because he wanted some time to think about them. When we got to the end of the quiz, we went back to those two questions. 

I read the first one again. Silence. I read it again. And this time I hear, "Hey, Siri . . ."

What?

"Ty!" I exclaimed. "You can't ask Siri!"

"Why not?"

"Because that's cheating. You need to know the answer on your own."

"But I don't know it."

"Well, then, take an educated guess. But you can't ask Siri."

Honestly, it never occurred to me that students do this. But of course they do. I mean, it never occurred to him NOT to do it. For these kids, the answer is always available if they just talk to their phones or whatever.

In the end, he chose his answers and got a 75% on his quiz. This is a pretty good grade for him, so I was able to point out to him that yes, he can in fact pass his quizzes without the help of a computer. 

Not that I think he'll never ask Siri for the answer again, but I guess he knows now not to do it in front of a teacher.

Snapshots: More School Stuff

We only have a single key to our post office box. I'm always afraid we're going to lose it, so I found the most obnoxious keychain for it that I could.

A tiny Converse shoe one of the kids got at the health fair. It always makes me smile.

This week on our playground/track field, I removed a tiny barrel cactus, and an even tinier prickly pear cactus.

Helpfully marked with hula hoops for me by the students.

There have been many inconveniences associated with our school being under construction for two years, but it is kind of fun to walk back to my office and see this:

Giant crane!

Remember when I mentioned that I took one semester of elementary education classes in college before deciding teaching wasn't for me? That was in large part because of things like this:

Once again, God bless the teachers who will do things like this. I would rather scrub milk from the cafeteria floor (which I do).

And last, the cosmos you all helped me identify are blooming like crazy, which allows me to have a very cheery vase of flowers on the table.

Very purple, too.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: With Cucumber Photos

Friday 

Short version: Boneless pork chops with cream gravy, rice, cucumbers with salt and vinegar

Long version: These were the chops I cut from the whole loin. All I did was fry them and make a gravy in the pan with cream, water, and cornstarch.

I had made chicken stock earlier in the day with the chicken bones from the day before, and I used that stock to cook the rice.

The Armenian cucumber plants are protesting the cooler nights with brown leaves, although we haven't had a frost to actually kill them yet.

Saturday

Short version: Cheeseburgers on homemade buns, oven fries, pickles

Long version: I was baking bread, so I made some buns. And that's why I made cheeseburgers. This time, I broiled a pan of them rather than frying them on the stove. This allowed me to make ten patties and not get grease all over the stove top. But it also required me to monitor them in the broiler on the floor, which I dislike doing.

There's really no good way to make hamburgers. At least, for the quantity I need to make.

Pickles are a pretty sketchy vegetable, but I have a lot of them, so there you go.

I made a couple more quart jars of pickles with the very last of the dill plants for the year.

Sunday

Short version: Michaelmas chicken, baked potatoes, cucumbers with salt and vinegar, stabby cake with whipped cream

Long version: This was the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, although we really just celebrate it as Michaelmas. Goose is traditional for a Michaelmas feast, but hard to come by. The chicken I roasted was over seven pounds, so I figure it wasn't too far off in size to a medieval goose.

I started making a cake several years ago for my children to stab. It's a devil's food cake, because St. Michael is traditionally depicted stabbing the devil with a sword when he cast him out of heaven. Usually I just make Grandma Bishop's chocolate cake and call it close enough, but this year I used a recipe for an actual devil's food cake. It had more liquid and more cocoa powder. I followed Grandma Bishop's method, though, and poured the hot coffee over the butter to melt it and so on. 

I didn't have any yogurt, so I used sour cream and milk. And I accidentally used a teaspoon of cornstarch instead of baking soda. I realized my mistake in time, however, so the finished cake just had a bit of cornstarch in it. No big deal.

I never make frosting for this cake, mostly because I don't want to haul out the mixer. Sometimes I just dust it with powdered sugar, which I prefer. But my family likes whipped cream more, so this time I made some with my immersion blender.

Monday

Short version: Leftovers, cucumbers

Long version: Diced leftover chicken, leftover rice, leftover gravy, all together in a skillet. And cucumbers.

Must be a work day.

I did not serve this cucumber that was hiding near the fence. It went to the chickens.

Tuesday

Short version: Chicken soup, biscuits, oatmeal-raisin cookies

Long version: I spent several hours in the kitchen this day, turning the chicken carcass into a chicken and vegetable soup--I also used the rest of the gravy in it, so it was slightly creamy--making the cookies, assembling a casserole for the next day, and on and on.

I actually ended up having to go somewhere just before dinner and didn't get home until 5 p.m. I was tempted to just slice some bread instead of making biscuits like I had planned, but biscuits don't really take that long and they do make everyone very happy. Especially important when the main course is soup.

Wednesday

Short version: Enchilada casserole, cucumbers with salt and vinegar

Long version: This was the casserole I had put together the day before. I used bull meat in it. I am SO CLOSE to the end of the bull meat. A mere, um, four years after we butchered it. Ahem.

Thursday

Short version: Baked pasta, leftovers, cucumbers with ranch dip, chocolate chip cookies

Long version: I had just a little bit of uncooked ground beef left from the hamburgers--maybe half a pound--so I browned that and added it to the roasted tomato sauce I had made on Saturday while I was baking bread. Then that went into a casserole with pasta, Parmesan, and a bunch of asadero cheese.

It's a good thing I made a whole 9"x13" pan because we ended up with two extra kids here for dinner.

The children had the pasta, along with the cucumbers and ranch dip. And the chocolate chip cookies, which also had some peanut butter in there to replace some of the butter. More protein that way, you see.

A. had the last of the enchilada casserole, plus a bowl of the chicken soup. And then some pasta.

I just had soup.

Refrigerator check:

I have nothing particular to say about this, I guess.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

Letting Go

When my children were all very young, it was always a big event the first time they could go camping with their dad and not with me. I always expected there to be an early return due to a crying child that first time. Sometimes it happened. Sometimes it didn't.

Now they all camp at least once a year. I don't go, because I don't like camping, but they all do. And they don't need me with them all the time anymore. Dad is just fine.

This year, the two older boys--now 14 (and a half!) and 12--upped the ante. They asked if they could go on a camping trip with just the two of them. No Dad.

We said yes.

The plan was to take them somewhere pretty close just for a night. One of them had a deer hunt in the area closest to our house this past weekend, and I suggested to A. that perhaps this would be the right time for them to do their solo campout. It's only about half an hour away. It was going to be dry and warm. There is cell service there. It seemed like a good opportunity.

So A. loaded their packs, gave them many instructions, and dropped them off.

Small boys, big country.

And then, of course, both A. and I spent some time imagining all the unlikely things that could go wrong in the 15 hours they were there.

Could a mountain lion or bear have attacked them? Could there have been an unexpected storm with lightning strikes? Could someone have fallen in the fire? Could one of them have been bitten by a rattlesnake?

Yes. Any of those things COULD have happened. But none of them did. What it came down to is that those boys are comfortable camping, hiking, and hunting, and we trust them in that environment.

There were several elk that ran by in the stream bed just about twenty feet from their campsite in the middle of the night. This of course woke them up, because elk are huge and it sounded like stampeding horses, but that was pretty much it for excitement.

No deer, either, so the hunt wasn't successful. But the campout was. And I'm sure there will be many more in their future.