To Each Her Own

I was at the grocery store with the oldest son last week and I told him he could choose an ice cream flavor. He surveyed the options for a minute before deciding on black cherry.

That was pretty much the last flavor available that I would have chosen. 

These were the small cartons of ice cream, so I also got butter pecan for the rest of the family. All of them like that one, although again, I don't care about it at all. It doesn't actively repel me like black cherry, but I still won't bother eating it.

I did choose one for myself, though: chocolate moose tracks. Chocolate, peanut butter, and more chocolate? That's more like it.

A tale of two ice creams.

A. has always preferred fruit-flavored candies, ice creams, and desserts. I have always preferred chocolate. Preferably with peanut butter. He does not understand this. I likewise do not understand why anyone would eat black cherry ice cream when they could have chocolate moose tracks.

Variety is the spice of life, they say, and I guess that means our lives are plenty spicy.

So tell me: What kind of ice cream do you pick, given the choice?

Snapshots: Granola and a Walk

I had an unfortunate incident with granola this week. I had some in the oven when Poppy came in to tell me about the very boring passage in her children's Bible, in Exodus, that described the Ark of the Covenant in great detail. I told her those details had allowed people to re-create the Ark, and then we got to looking at pictures, and then . . .

Boooo.

Luckily, granola browns--and burns--from the edges in, so I was able to salvage about two-thirds of it from the center.

The actual burned third on the right went to the chickens.

The four pigeons we got from the wagon tramp have been released into the wide world. Every morning I see them take off about sunrise to wheel and glide around our almost-ghost-village.

Resting on the barn roof before their sunrise flight.

And then the dogs and I went down the road to check on the horses' water in the pasture they're currently in.

Hi, Cora.

And Bill.

Milkweed buds have such an interesting shape.

The children and I went down the hill on Friday to go swim with our friends who work on the giant ranch with a pool. It's the only pool in the county, and can only be used by employees of the ranch, so we're very lucky they invite us along. It's one of my children's favorite days of the summer, and I always take the opportunity to get some below-the-hill flowers.

All yellow.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Delayed Pizza

Friday 

Short version: Chicken, biscuits, tomato/cucumber salad, apple/pear crisp

Long version: I had enough chicken left from the bag of leg quarters I had thawed earlier in the week to separate them into thighs and drumsticks and roast them. Which is what I did.

Standard baking powder biscuits that went in with the chicken.

Standard biscuits, non-standard shapes. As ever.

The salad had cherry tomatoes and cucumbers from the store, which are never as good as garden tomatoes and cucumbers, of course, but good enough with homemade ranch dressing and pickled onions.

Saturday

Short version: Wedding food

Long version: This was the night we were at the giant ranch wedding. The food came from a local (-ish, maybe 130 miles) Mexican restaurant. It was beef or chicken fajitas with flour tortillas, rice, beans, chips and salsa, and, of course, dessert. Way better than most wedding food. The cake was even pretty good. I didn't try the vanilla/raspberry cake, not being a fan of fruit in cakes, but I did like the German chocolate cake.

Because I didn't have to cook dinner, I spent some time canning apricots and rhubarb. All of our apricots got killed by frost, but my friend down the hill in a much warmer town has a couple of trees at her place. She told me last week they were starting to drop their fruit, so I made a trip to town on Wednesday mostly just to pick apricots. It's a long way for fruit, but these are the only apricots we're getting this year, and a year without apricot jam is a sad year indeed.

I ended up with about eight pints of apricot jam. And then, since I had everything out and the kitchen was all sticky already anyway, I made some rhubarb jam, too.

I know this is not eight pints of apricot jam. There was an un-canned quart jar in the refrigerator already.

Sunday

Short version: Chicken tetrazzini, apple/pear crisp with vanilla ice cream

Long version: It was quite chilly this day, so that simmering the chicken bones from Friday's meal to make stock provided some welcome heat to the house. With the meat I pulled off those bones, plus the stock, and then spaghetti, onions, garlic, cream, milk, peas, and cheese, I made a casserole of something like chicken tetrazzini. No mushrooms, though.

It was quite tasty, and very filling.

I used one quart jar of canned apple slices and one quart jar of canned pear slices for the crisp. Canning fruit is always worth it, even though it's a huge pain at the time.

Monday

Short version: Sloppy joe sandwiches, leftover pasta, carrot sticks, ice cream

Long version: We were supposed to have a guest join us for pizza, but then he re-scheduled for Thursday. Since the main reason he was coming was to try sourdough pizza, I decided to bake the already-prepared crusts with sauce and then freeze them in the pan so we could still have it Thursday. This meant I needed something pretty last-minute for dinner.

Luckily, I had cooked some ground beef earlier in the day just to have on hand, so I made some of that into sloppy joe meat to have on the bread I had baked in the afternoon. One child had the last of the pasta.

Tuesday

Short version: Steaks, mashed potatoes, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: While I was organizing the big meat freezer a bit, I found some packages of steaks. I thawed one package of rib steaks and one of sirloin steak. We haven't had steak in awhile, and A. was inspired to grill them. This happens very infrequently, but grilling really is the best way to cook meat.

Dad plate.

Wednesday

Short version: Leftovers, green peas

Long version: We had enough leftover steak for everyone to have some, and then I had leftovers from a random lunch I had made a couple of days previously with ground beef and rice.

Thursday

Short version: Pizzas, green salad with vinaigrette, crispy rice treats

Long version: We were supposed to have pizza on Monday, when a guest was coming who can only eat sourdough and had never had sourdough pizza. But then he had to cancel, but asked if he could come Thursday, instead.

Since the whole point of him coming was to try the pizza, I decided to save the pizza for Thursday. The way I did that was to bake the crusts until baked through, then top them with the pizza sauce, let them cool in the pans, and then wrap up the entire thing in plastic wrap and aluminum foil to freeze. So all I had to do this day was thaw them, top them, and bake until the cheese was slightly browned.

I was baking bread again this day anyway, so I also made one extra pizza in my smaller pan, because we ended up with another guest coming, too. So one big pizza was just cheese; one big pizza was Italian sausage, bacon, and pickled onions; and the smaller pizza was bell pepper, onion, tomatoes, and collard greens.

So pretty.

Ready to bake. The only one that had any leftovers was the plain cheese.

Refrigerator check:

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

A Shortage of Wildflowers

Last year was such a great year for wildflowers. We had multiple kinds for months, starting in May and going through until about September.

This year? Not so much.

We just didn't get rain. At least, not early enough. It was so dry in the spring that nothing grew. No grass, no flowers, no nothing. The rains finally started, but too late for most of the flowers.

What has been coming is late, small, and underwhelming. Last year at this time, the roads were lined with exuberant yellow clover, vibrant orange globe mallows, and lots of other things. I made so many arrangements. For the dining room table, for the bookcase in the living room, for wherever I felt like putting flowers.

This year everything is stunted, sparse, and limited.

But still! I do have some flowers.

Early-morning arranging.

I do appreciate that the silver nightshade (the purple flowers) has finally recovered after getting mostly eliminated during a poorly-timed hailstorm a couple of years ago.

 

The bookcase flowers are harder because they have to be taller.

The yellow clover and apricot branches do most of the heavy lifting.

Even in lean years, there's always something. A good lesson in general, I guess.

Snapshots: A Giant Wedding

When I stopped at the dollar store for milk last week, I was highly amused by this contradictory gardening display outside the store.

Potting soil and extremely fake flowers? Pick your type of gardening, I guess.

My own garden, which is very much Not Fake, has been having a rough time of it this year. The complete lack of rain in the spring meant things didn't grow all that well and were still pretty small. Then we got hail a week ago that caused quite a bit of damage. I actually went to Tractor Supply when I was in town on Wednesday and bought some tomato plants. Literally a few hours after I planted those on Friday . . .

Those are the new tomatoes drowning in the row next to the ones covered with milk jugs.

That is a lot of hail.

Despite the beating they took, I think everything has enough growth still on it to pull through. I hope, anyway.

We were all watching that storm Friday night and wondering if the giant wedding we were supposed to go to Saturday was even going to happen. The bride was our agriculture teacher and FFA advisor. Her family owns a huge ranch down the hill, and that is where the wedding was. They invited over four hundred people, so everything was outside, and getting to the spot required driving several miles of dirt road.

Eldest was helping them set up, and he told us in the morning that the wedding was definitely still on, so we got all dressed up in the afternoon and went.

I should note that "all dressed up" meant we were following the dress code of "country formal/cocktail." And THAT meant starch, and lots of it. The boys all wore jeans and button-ups with their boots and hats, which was pretty standard for this wedding. The boys' teacher/bride is very insistent on them ironing carefully for all their FFA events, and middle son did his best ironing in her honor. I helped the youngest do his ironing. He'll be starting FFA next year, so he needs to practice now. Eldest thought he would have time to come home and get himself ready for the wedding, but didn't end up having time, so I ironed his clothes for him and brought them down when we went.

A. didn't wear western clothing, but I ironed his shirt for him, anyway. It was a lot of ironing, which I hate, but I love this teacher, and the wedding was worth it.

This ranch is in a spectacular location, and by some miracle, the extremely threatening storm we could see during the entire ceremony passed to the south of us without a single drop of rain at our location. 

We had to drive through a small river on the way there, but no big deal.

It was beautifully decorated and all the flowers were real.

I appreciated this very much.

I also appreciated the big tents for the reception.

The sun was out when we were eating, and it would have been very uncomfortable to have no shade for very long.

One nice thing about living here is that dancing is still very common. Everyone here learns to two-step, which is a very forgiving kind of dancing. You don't have to be good at it, as long as you can follow the flow of dancing and not get in anyone's way. The result of having a common form of dance that everyone learns is that everyone dances. Little kids, teenagers, adults are all out on the dance floor. It makes for a very fun wedding.

We didn't stay for all of the dancing, because by the time the special dances were done and the general floor was opened up, it was already almost 9 p.m. and we were all ready to go. Well, except Poppy. She LOVES to dance. We stayed for a bit so she could dance with her friend, and then A. and I each did one dance with her before she reluctantly agreed it was too late for her and we should go home.

The view of the party from the parking area.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Car Crisp

Friday 

Short version: Tuna mac and cheese, carrot sticks

Long version: I just made macaroni and cheese and added a big can of tuna to it. The cheese sauce had some of the American cheese we got from commodities, some sharp cheddar, and, at the last minute when I thought it needed more flavor, some Parmesan.

Saturday

Short version: Lamb chops at home, girl dinner on the road

Long version: This was the day Poppy and I went to our last parish church. We went into town before Mass, about 30 miles from the church, to get milk. We got this at the dollar store, and while we were there, we happened to see something called Talenti gelato layers. It looked really good, and Poppy said she was hungry, so we shared it.

We ate the whole thing, and that was our dinner.

At home I left a bag of marinated lamb chops that A. fried. I think they ate them with bread and butter, but I'm not sure about that. I am sure that they had vanilla ice cream, though, because Dad is fun like that.

Sunday

Short version: Salisbury steaks with milk gravy, mashed potatoes, frozen corn or Holy's cabbage, rhubarb crisp with vanilla ice cream

Long version: I still have quite a few pucks of caramelized onions in the freezer, which are very handy for things like the gravy. I still have a couple of bags of Holy's cabbage in the freezer, too, which are likewise easy.

I feel like this is a very Brady Bunch kind of meal.

I didn't have any strawberries, so the crisp this time was just rhubarb. I used the same topping with nuts and oats that I used on the last strawberry-rhubarb crisp I had made, but got a couple of comments that it's not the best for the rhubarb crisp. Noted.

I made the crisp earlier in the day and wanted to re-heat it a bit before dinner. However, it was in a metal pan, which meant I couldn't put it in the microwave. And it was hot enough that I didn't want to run the oven just for that.

But it was also hot enough for . . .

A dashboard oven. I felt very clever.

Monday

Short version: Beans and rice, leftover vegetables, peanut butter cookies

Long version: I just mixed together the rest of the leftover rice that had been cooked in the ham/bean liquid, plus the remainder of the beans with a bunch of butter. This was a surprisingly popular meal.

Tuesday

Short version: Chicken and rice, green salad with vinaigrette, watermelon

Long version: I took out a bag of chicken leg quarters, three of which I simmered until I could pull the meat off. I used that and the resulting broth, plus a bunch of the frozen caramelized onions, to make the chicken and rice. This has thyme in it also, and every time I make it, someone invariably mentions that it tastes like Thanksgiving stuffing. Luckily, they all like stuffing.

A. brought the watermelon home from town the day before. It was, of course, a watermelon with seeds, and it was very good. Hooray for watermelon season.

Wednesday

Short version: Jalapeno sausage, leftover chicken and rice, porky rice, raw radishes or bell peppers

Long version: I mostly made the rice because I had liquid left from the last time I made a pork shoulder that I wanted to use up. It works very well for adding to the water for cooking rice.

The children who are not enthused about sausage or spice had the leftover chickena and rice.

Thursday

Short version: Cottage pie, green salad with ranch dressing, ice cream with chocolate sauce

Long version: I was informed by my children that they will always eat salad if it has lots of ranch dressing on it. I don't typically make ranch dressing because I am the main salad consumer and I prefer vinaigrettes, but I guess that's good to know.

Refrigerator check:

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

Mission Complete

Poppy and I have been going to all the far-flung churches in our very spread-out parish for the past year. She wanted to see all of them. Most of them are quite old, some are very beautiful, all of them only have Mass once a month.

This past Saturday, we went to the final church. It's not that far from our house--about thirty miles--but it's in quite a dramatic location.

After turning off the paved road.

It's an adobe structure that was sheathed in local cut stone.

This is the only church in our parish that is privately owned. It is also the oldest church in our parish. The family that owns the ranch takes care of it.

Some of the older owners of the ranch are buried right under the church. Their tombstones are under the statue of Jesus there in the center.

Poppy and I climbed up to the rear choir loft, from which we had a good view of the giant pieta at the entrance to church.

Most of the grave markers in the surrounding old cemetery were hand-carved sandstone.

It was a good thing we had time to look around the cemetery before Mass, because this was what was coming towards us as we were going in to Mass.

Dramatic.

The storm hit during the Gospel reading. It was mostly over by the time we left, thankfully, and the dirt road was still passable.

And that's it. Our tour of the parish churches is concluded. It was fun, but I appreciate only having to drive ten miles to our regular church.