Snapshots: A Birthday Postscript

I subbed at school this week. That meant I had to wear a walkie talkie the whole day.

I never used it, but I had it.

The room I was in had like two dozen of these odd "paintings" in it.

Animals wearing glasses? Okay.

On Thursday, I went to the very far away football game. It was howling wind when I got to the field and I really did not want to get out of the car.

I could actually see the field from my car, but watching from here would have lacked spirit.

So I put on my coat, grabbed my blanket, and sat on the cold bleachers for two hours. It was about 58 degrees with at least a 20-mile-an-hour wind.

The sun was directly in my eyes for the first fifteen minutes, too, which was extra fun.

Good thing there was a hood on my coat. Brrr.

The apricot tree is showing more yellow, which is our only "fall color."

The last brave show of the cosmos, which mostly froze on Friday night.

The last table flowers.

And the last bookcase flowers.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

P.S. Today is, unbelievably, Poppy's 9th birthday.

And there she is, with her extremely long braids, painting a card for her cousin. It's fun having a girl.

Friday Food: Delayed

Friday 

Short version: Fish sticks with tartar sauce, broccoli/rice casserole, frozen corn

Long version: I planned this meal around the broccoli that needed to be used. One child had agreed with me that broccoli with rice and cheese was awfully good, so I made a casserole with those things. I didn't use a recipe.

Since the casserole needed to be in the oven, I also put some of the fish sticks from commodities in there. Which is why I needed to make tartar sauce.

And since the oven was on anyway, I put some corn in there, too.

Homestyle cafeteria food. Very yellow and brown, but surprisingly good.

Saturday

Short version: Italian sausage, pasta with pesto, creamy leeks, pickled radishes

Long version: Good thing I got all those oven-baked things done the previous day, because this happened this day:

No bueno.

I turned the oven on to preheat for peanut butter cookies in the morning, and it didn't heat. Sigh. My appliance repair guy--A.--diagnosed a failing igniter. Again. This range is only two years old, but that is apparently the lifespan of an igniter in a "heavily used" oven. I think mine falls into that category.

Anyway. A. ordered the part and I was without an oven for the rest of the week.

Thankfully, my plan for dinner did not include the oven.

I needed to harvest basil, so I did that and made pesto. Which is why I made pasta. And that's why I made Italian sausage links. Leeks go well with those, and we still have lots of those in the garden. I cook sliced leeks slowly in butter and chicken stock until they're very soft, and then add a little cream.

Very pink pickled radishes added to plates after this photo was taken.

Sunday

Short version: Beef and bean tacos in homemade corn tortillas, Mexican slaw, pots de creme

Long version: I had lots of beans I had made earlier in the week--a mix of pinto and black--that I hadn't used. So for dinner this night, I used one pound of ground beef and the beans to make a filling for the corn tortillas I made.

I need to start making more tortillas because I have like fifteen pounds of cornmeal masa on hand thanks to commodities. Tortillas use a lot of masa. And now it will be cool enough that I can make tortillas without wanting to crawl into the freezer.

The Mexican slaw was just thinly sliced cabbage, spices, and vinegar. This is better than lettuce on tacos, in my opinion. More flavor and texture.

I needed a non-baked dessert for our Sunday dessert. And I was low on milk. Pots de creme it is!

Monday

Short version: Chicken and rice, green salad with ranch/tartar dressing

Long version: I used one of the butchered roosters to make more or less this, which also uses some of the caramelized onions from the freezer. Having the onions already made makes this a very easy meal to make. I'm getting low on the onions, though, alas.

This is a good dish to make with the roosters because A) I never remember to take them out of the freezer the night before, and I can just put the entire frozen rooster in the pot to simmer until I can get the meat off, and B) There isn't a ton of meat on the roosters, but it's enough when cooked with the rice.

Also, cooking the roosters makes stock to use to cook the rice. Very handy.

For the salad dressing, I just combined the last of some ranch dressing with the last of the tartar sauce. They're close enough in flavor that this works well.

Tuesday

Short version: Hamburger steaks with gravy, mashed potatoes, pickles

Long version: A straightforward cafeteria-style meal. 

Except maybe the pickles. A cafeteria would have served canned green beans, I bet.

Wednesday

Short version: Stove-top pasta, carrot sticks

Long version: I subbed at school this day. I knew I would be, so I prepped the pasta sauce the night before. I used the skillet I had used to make the hamburger steaks to make it, with the half pound of ground beef left from making taco meat, one link of leftover Italian sausage diced up, the leftover creamy leeks, and a jar of the pasta sauce that came with commodies. Plus extra spices and things.

I had some leftover pasta, but not enough, so I cooked some more when I got home and then dumped the sauce in the pot with the cooked pasta and the leftover pasta to heat up everything before adding some of the shredded asadero cheese from the freezer. Plus a little heavy cream and some garlic powder for extra flavor.

This would have been better baked, but as that wasn't an option, stove-top worked.

Thursday

Short version: Leftovers at home, Sonic on the road

Long version: I drove 175 miles in the afternoon for a 6 p.m. junior high football game. After the game, I got the football player Sonic at his request before driving 175 miles home. Thankfully, this is the last away game of the season.

The four at home had leftover pasta or chicken and rice. Looks like they also had canned peaches.

I had gone to Walmart before the football game*, as the town the game was in was only about twenty miles from a Walmart. We got home at 11 p.m. and the only thing I unloaded right away were the bags with the dairy stuff in them. It was in the forties overnight, so I figured everything else would be okay.

Refrigerator check:

Featuring my Walmart dairy.

The house was 55 degrees when I got up at 6:30 this morning--the latest I will ever sleep in--so I started a fire while my coffee was steeping. And that is why it is now 7 a.m. and I am just now posting this.

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

* I always bring coolers and a gallon ice cream tub with frozen water** when I go to the grocery store. Given that it was in the fifties and the sun had set by the time I was at the game, everything was just fine in the coolers for the four hours it was in there.

**Way better than loose ice because it doesn't melt all over everything.

Let There Be Light

One of the consistent home improvement things we've done since moving into this house eight years ago is adding light. We've put lights up everywhere. In the kitchen, in the dining room, in the bedrooms, in the living room . . . We just keep adding light to every room.

For the first several years, those lights were all of the plug-in variety, because A. really didn't want to have to do any wiring. However, after the incident when half his office lost power and he was forced to work on the wiring there, he has added electrician to his resume. This has opened up great new opportunities for lighting in our house. And I have taken advantage of it.

Every room in our house except the bathrooms had an ceiling fan/light fixture in it when we moved in. These have become something of a hazard in recent years as our sons have grown. And grown. And grown. 

Two out of the three boys are now six feet tall or taller. The third will probably be the tallest of all of them. A. is over six feet tall. This meant that all of them heartily dislike any fixture that hangs low enough for them to whack their heads on. Which the middle boy kept doing on the overhead fixtures in his bedroom and the living room.

 This is not a problem that is going to get any better as the boys keep growing, so I started looking for different light fixtures.

Neither of those rooms needed overhead fans, so I just looked for lights. I wanted flat lights, for maximum head clearance. And they had to cover the bulbs, because I hate exposed light bulbs. In fact, the living room light fixture was almost never on because it had exposed bulbs and I refused to be in the room when they were glaring in my eyes.

After much searching online, I found a fairly cheap and plain fixture for the younger boys' bedroom, which A. duly put in. The middle boy was delighted to not have to worry about bumping his head anymore. As did A., who passes through that room to get to his office.

Next up was the living room light. I bought a larger and nicer fixture for that room, since it's a public room and also bigger space. It has a glass shade over the bulbs, and was much more difficult to install. The size and weight of it, plus some less-than-clear instructions, caused some cussing on A.'s part, but he triumphed in the end.

I made sure to take a before photo of the ugly fan light fixture in the living room.

It was always so dusty too. Yuck.

And now for the after:

Ta da!

And a bonus shot from directly underneath.

Everyone is very pleased with this new light. There's a good six inches of clearance for even the tallest in the family, and the light is muted enough that I will allow it to be on when I'm in the room.

What lights will I replace next? I am limited only by Amazon's selection. And A.'s patience.

Snapshots: A Sleepy Butterfly

Our Sundays start pretty early, because Mass at our church is at 8 a.m. We don't have time for anything elaborate for breakfast before we leave, so this is the one day of the week that the kids have cereal. I do make a second breakfast when we get home around 9 a.m., though. Last Sunday, I made biscuits. I set out all the available biscuit toppings on the table when they were ready.

Butter, honey, plum butter (thanks, sis!), strawberry preserves, and apricot jam. There were enough biscuits for everyone to try every one of these things. On separate biscuits, I mean.

I recently used the last of the rendered tallow I had in the refrigerator. I need to render some more of the many pounds of suet in the freezer. It's difficult to find the motivation to do this sometimes, as it's a tedious and greasy job, but this jar of tallow I saw at the grocery store is a pretty good motivator.

Twenty dollars for a pint certainly made me think WOW!!, but not because I was amazed at the low price.

This is the time of year the Monarch butterflies are migrating to their warmer overwintering regions. I'm not sure if we're on the route for the butterflies that are going to Mexico, or the ones going to California, but in any case, there are a LOT of Monarchs floating around right now. I spied this one in the planter outside the bank last week.

A pretty rest stop during a long trip.

Jasper hasn't taken any long trips lately, but he still feels the need to rest.

Sleepy dog.

We are definitely coming to the end of fresh flower season. We could get a freeze at any time now, which means every week might be the last week for flowers. But for this week, I still have some.

On the table (look at those wee sunflowers).

And on the bookcase.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Kitchen Work for a Cause

Friday 

Short version: Pollock, mashed potatoes, fancy collard salad, cucumber salad, crepe cake

Long version: I had three bags of Pollock fillets that I got from commodities. At least, I think they were fillets. Maybe they were planks? They were very regular rectangles that looked to have been cut from fillet, anyway. Each bag had eight planks. Two bags would have been enough for this meal, but I decided to cook all of them in anticipation of making a fish pie with leftovers.

To that end, I put all the fish pieces in my biggest Pyrex in the oven, covered with foil, and then on top of those put the leeks I had cooked in chicken stock and cream.

And then they just would.not.get.cooked. 

I had put them in frozen, because that's what the package said to do. The package also said one bag would cook from frozen in twenty minutes. After an hour, they were so far from cooked they were still cold.

At that point I split them up into two Pyrexes in the oven. Still not cooking fast enough given that it was now 6:15 p.m. So I put two-thirds of them in my biggest stainless steel pan on the stove and simmered them until they were done. Which took only about fifteen minutes.

So annoying.

I made the fancy collard salad--fancy meaning it had dried cranberries, toasted pecans, and pickled onion slivers in it--because our priest was joining us for dinner and he actually likes collard salads as much as I do.

The cucumber salad was just cucumbers, pickled onions, and ranch dressing. For those who do not appreciate collard salads.

I made the crepe cake to use the five leftover crepes from the previous Sunday's after church breakfast. I layered them with sweetened whipped cream and rhubarb jam to which I had added some plain mashed strawberries.

Saturday

Short version: Breakfast sausage patties, beans and rice, carrot sticks, cookies

Long version: Two tubes of Great Value premium breakfast sausage made into thin patties and broiled. 

I took out one quart jar of frozen pinto beans that appeared to have been cooked with a ham bone, given the fat on top of the beans. I added a sauteed onion, garlic, and some tomato sauce to them. Since there was quite a bit of liquid in the beans, I cooked rice right in with the beans, and then I added some leftover cooked rice to it, along with butter. At the last minute, I also dumped in the grease in the sausage pan. 

That's three kinds of fat in the beans and rice. Predictably, my family thought they were the best beans ever.

The cookies were this week's snack cookies: peanut butter, oats, and chocolate chips.

Sunday

Short version: Fish pie, frozen peas, coconut cake

Long version: I used to make this fish pie all the time when we lived on the lake in New York and ate lots of lake trout. It's a good use for leftover fish. In this case, all that leftover Pollock. 

The original recipe came from Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking. That recipe calls for mushrooms and peas in the fish part, which I did not use, and thyme and parsley, which I did use. 

Come to think of it, I didn't actually use the recipe much at all except for the herbs. Instead I just dumped all the saved juices from cooking the fish, which included all the cream and leeks left, into a pan with another sliced leek and simmered that until the leek was soft. Then I thickened it with cornstarch before adding it to the fish.

Creamy. And herby.

I also had almost enough mashed potatoes for the topping on the fish pie. I used some of the instant potato flakes we've been getting from commodities to bulk up the leftover mashed potatoes so there would be enough. 

This really is a surprisingly good use for leftover fish. Even Poppy said, "I don't even like fish, but this is so good."

For the cake, I used one of the bags of yellow cake mix we got from commodities. I made it into a sheet cake and used coconut oil instead of butter in it, plus coconut extract and shredded sweetened coconut. The frosting was more or less a buttercream with a little cream cheese and more coconut extract. And then there was more coconut all over the top.

Everyone LOVED this. I don't know why I've been under the impression that my family doesn't like cake all that much. Maybe because they never actually request it. They certainly eat it with enthusiasm when I make it, though.

Monday

Short version: Sausage, leftover fish pie, cucumbers, leftover cake

Long version: I didn't have quite enough of the fish pie for it to be the main course, but I had enough of it to be a side dish. Which is why I cooked one package of smoked beef sausage. Then there was enough for everyone.

Sausage and leftovers.

No one thought there was enough cake, since there was only enough left for everyone to have one small piece. but a small piece is better than none. That's what I told them, anyway.

Tuesday

Short version: Cheeseburgers on homemade buns, fried potatoes, pickles, cranberry-pecan bread

Long version: I had made the hamburger buns the day before when I was baking bread, which made this a relatively quick meal to make. The fried potatoes were just a few big potatoes that I peeled and diced before frying in tallow, covered first to get soft, and then uncovered to get crispy.

The bread was this oat and yogurt bread, with extra honey added, as well as pecans and some of the many dried cranberries we've been getting from commodities. It's a good way to use up a lot of the cranberries, and it is a very good bread.

Wednesday

Short version: Low-effort hamburger with baked beans, rice, cucumbers with ranch dip

Long version: I spent all afternoon in the kitchen cooking for a gathering of priests that our priest was hosting the next day. One of the things I made for them was baked beans. I was heartily sick of the kitchen by the time dinner rolled around, so I just browned some ground beef and ladled in some of the baked beans to serve over rice.

I also, handily, still had a jar of the juices from the oven chicken I had made the week before that was more or less similar to barbecue sauce spices. So I put some of that in with the meat, too, to flavor it some more. 

Thursday

Short version: Leftovers or concession food

Long version: On this day I spent all morning in the kitchen, baking for a silent auction at school to benefit one of our high school students who has been in and out of the hospital with a difficult-to-treat condition. I made a coconut cake, crispy rice treats, and cranberry-walnut bread.

The brownies were Poppy's contribution. She got up twenty minutes early so she could make them before school.

The auction was during the volleyball game after school, to which I went and at which Poppy was cheering. The football player met us there after practice, too, so the two kids with me had concession food for dinner. Before I left for the game, I had a salad with some of the leftover meat from the night before in it.

The ones at home had the leftover hamburger/baked beans/rice from the night before. Plus a few crispy rice treats I saved for them.

Refrigerator check:

Ginger ale for the upset stomach that we had in the house this week.

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

An Unexpected Wedding

Early last week, our priest asked me if I would be able to witness a wedding he would be celebrating at one of our mission churches. 

This church, to be specific.

He needed two witnesses to sign the official paperwork, both for the church and for the state. This couple was coming from out of state, knew no one in the area, and wasn't bring their own witnesses.

This meant I had never met the two people getting married. However! I love weddings, and I love this particular church, so I said I would be happy to attend and act as a witness. Another parishioner who lives near the church agreed to be the second witness, and we were all set.

I was very curious to meet this couple and to know how this wedding came to be at this particular church. I felt sure there was a story there. Indeed there was, and now I will share it with you.

Let's call the couple Henry and Jessica, in the interests of their privacy. They were very friendly and chatty, and very happy to share their story.

In 2016, Henry rode 4,000 miles on a bicycle from Florida to California as part of an initiative to raise funds and awareness for housing non-profits like Habitat for Humanity. Their route took them through our county. He has a picture of himself standing in front of that mission church's sign. He never forgot the church, or New Mexico. He told me that this was his favorite state of the ones he rode through.

Fast forward to now. Henry and Jessica live in Michigan. They have birthdays just one day apart in the first week of October and planned a trip to New Mexico so Henry could introduce Jessica to the state, and also so they could attend the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque to celebrate their birthdays. They were engaged, but didn't want the big wedding their families would insist on. 

Jessica is Catholic, and they did their pre-marital preparations at her parish in Michigan. But when they decided to make this trip to New Mexico, Henry showed her his photos of his time here and she saw the one of the church in the middle of nowhere. She suggested they get married there while they were on vacation. They didn't tell anyone they knew that they were going to do this.

They contacted our archdiocese, from whom they got the necessary approval and who contacted our parish priest, and there they were, with a wedding scheduled for 2 p.m. on a Thursday at a mostly-closed, remote New Mexico church.

And there I was, witnessing the wedding of two very nice people I met five minutes before their ceremony.

They didn't have a photographer, either, so I took some pictures of the ceremony for them with my phone, which I will not share with you because, again, privacy. But here's the altar just before the wedding.

After the wedding, they were continuing their New Mexico tour by going to Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. I'm sure they'll have a lot of fun and go home with a lot of stories to tell from those places, but I'm also sure nothing will beat the story of their wedding. 

Snapshots: First Fire and Flowers

It's the shoulder season of fall, and that means that we have both fresh flowers:

On the table.

And on the bookcase.

Plus the ones I put together just yesterday.

And fire:

The first fire of the season, yesterday morning.

I had a heck of a time getting that fire going, thanks to the fact that it looked like this outside.

That's not fog. It's a cloud, and our elevation is high enough that we were just in it.

Everything was damp, there was no draft, and every time I opened the stove to check on the fire or add wood, it just billowed smoke out. It was very unpleasant. I did get it going eventually, though.

The morning before, it was 59 degrees in the house. That would have been a good morning to have a fire, but all the wood was wet from being in an untidy pile outside on the ground, where it was dumped when it was delivered unexpectedly on Monday. 

The kids went to work yesterday afternoon, though, and had it all stacked within a couple of hours. They were helped in this endeavor, amusingly, by our priest. He came to dinner and was very eager to help stack wood. I suppose he appreciates such a straightforward, physical task, that is so unlike what he usually has to do.

We are happy to oblige him by providing the opportunity for labor. Never in short supply at our house.

On Michaelmas, we had fire and flowers together at breakfast. Our usual candles were joined by our St. Michael candle--these are readily available at any grocery store in New Mexico--and the youngest boy's St. Michael keychain that he carries in his pocket every day.

A very liturgically appropriate breakfast table.

Continuing the religious theme, I was amused to see that Poppy's brown scapular that she wears every day under her shirt was perfectly framed by the opening in the back of her shirt yesterday.

I spy with my little eye . . .

Another back shot for Poppy so I could show her what her hair looked like before Mass on Sunday:

Big bow on a looped braid.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.