Friday Food: Halloween Revelry on Repeat

Not listed in our menus: The large quantities of sugar my children (and, okay, me) have consumed at various Halloween-related parties and events. 'Tis the season.

Friday

Short version: Chicken tacos, leftover pork, canned black beans, zucchini, squash, carrot sticks

Long version: I had a few pieces of chicken left from the previous night's dinner, so I shredded the meat and made it into tacos by making a sauce with onion, garlic, and tomato juice left from draining the tomatoes I roasted the week before, plus spices. I used the same sauce to simmer the zucchini.

There was enough chicken for the boys to have tacos. A. ate a couple of leftover pork ribs and tortillas and cheese. I ate the beans and zucchini with leftover squash, cheese, and sour cream. Cheese and sour cream make anything good.

Saturday

Short version: Restaurant food

Long version: This was the day of the village Halloween celebration. The restaurant had a buffet with a baked potato bar with a lot of toppings, plus hot dogs. I had a plate full of pulled pork, chile beans, and Fritos, and it was exactly what I wanted to eat.

There was also a dessert buffet that featured the dessert that is also always exactly what I want to eat: cake. There was a chocolate cake and a red velvet cake. I had some of each. It was a very happy dinner.

Sunday

Short version: Chicken-fried venison with cream gravy, mashed potatoes, cauliflower with garlic, green peas

Long version: On the previous Monday, Rafael's son Ray showed up at our door with this:

Hello, deer leg.

I took it as a compliment that he handed it over to us in the exact condition it came out of the field. No nicely trimmed roast this time.

I didn't have room in my refrigerator at the rental house for that chunk of flesh, so I brought it up to our new house and stashed it in the refrigerator there. I left it there until Saturday to age a bit, then brought it back here and did the initial butchering. Meaning, I cut it all off the bone into rough cuts and trimmed off all the dry outside part. A. also hacked the bone into pieces and made stock with those.

I used the leanest and cleanest chunk to cut off some steaks for dinner on Sunday. These I pounded with my rolling pin:

The extra-burly rolling pin my dad made for me. It's so heavy, I had to make sure not to pound too much and ruin the meat.

Then I dredged the steaks in corn flour that had been mixed with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika, and fried them in tallow.

I very much dislike frying things like this, but this is one of A'.s favorite preparations for meat, so I indulged him.

I even made the cream gravy--milk in the pan after the meat came out, scraped the bottom, then added cornstarch dissolved in more milk, plus a bunch of salt and pepper.

I indulged myself with the cauliflower. I just steamed the florets in the skillet until the water was evaporated and the cauliflower was tender, then added olive oil and a clove of mashed garlic, plus salt and pepper. The cauliflower got a little brown and a lot garlicky, and it was so good. Too bad I'm the only one that eats cauliflower. That's why I also made the peas.

I usually have a photo of a cute, smiley baby somewhere in these posts. Unfortunately, this week's baby has looked like this most of the time:

"Abandoned on the kitchen floor yet again. WHYYYYYY MEEEEE?

"Mother, your care this week has been unacceptable. I'm considering filing a complaint."

I'm gonna go ahead and blame those convenient infantile villains, The Emerging Teeth.

Monday

Short version: Pork, pasta, roasted sweet potatoes/onions/bell peppers, roasted beets, sauteed beet greens with garlic

Long version: Man, those pork things A. bought are HUGE. Extra-thick, with a thick layer of fat on the top and they took forEVER in the oven, even at 425 degrees.

The beets--and the greens--were from our very own garden.

I pulled out the smallest ones because I wanted them to cook through in the oven while the pork was cooking. Big beets take like two hours to roast. Then again, so did the big pork chunks.

Anyway.

The beets were delicious. The beet greens were fine too, but I don't grow beets for the greens. That's also why I don't grow swiss chard, which is essentially beet greens without the beets. I prefer collard greens.

Anyway again.

The children were pleased to have beets again. So was I. Yay for A. and his foresight in planting those beet seeds way back in July.

Tuesday

Short version: Oven-fried chicken, roasted potatoes, roasted bell pepper and onion, green salad

Long version: Am I possibly over-using the oven-frying method with corn flour? Yes. Does my family care? Quite the contrary. I made five leg quarters--so five drumsticks and five thighs--figuring I'd have some left over to make chicken salad for Cubby's sandwich the next day. There was none left over.

I put a few raw beet leaves in with the lettuce for our salad. No one noticed, and it's a good way to stretch the store-bought lettuce.

I made bell pepper and onion again because I noticed after I got home from the store that one of the peppers I got already had a bad spot and thus needed to be cooked pronto. I hate it when I do that.

Wednesday

Short version: Venison chili, tortillas and cheese, canned black beans, sauteed zucchini/peppers/carrots

Long version: Based on what I've been seeing online, chili appears to be the cool thing to serve for Halloween dinner before trick-or-treating. Chili eeeeeverywhere. I like feeling I'm hip and trendy because I served the right food on the right day. Even if the only reason I served it is because I had all the rough bits left from cutting up a deer haunch and it was 42 degrees that day and thus the perfect day for simmering tough meat all day.

Anyway.

My chili is browned stew meat+onions+garlic+canned mashed whole tomatoes and juice+chili powder+cumin+a little vinegar. And definitely enough salt. Under-salted chili is a bummer.

I usually serve it with rice, but this time I just microwaved tortillas with cheese, rolled them up, and stuck them in each bowl of chili for dipping.

I ate the vegetables with mine. The zucchini was the very last that was in my refrigerator. The end of an era.

The bell pepper and carrots came from Jack's lunch box. I guess his tuna sandwich was too filling for him to get to the vegetables. Good thing he had his Halloween party a few hours later so he could fuel up on Mummy dogs, deviled eggs with spiders made out of olives, and Ding Dongs and cupcakes to fill in the nutritional gaps.

Thursday

Short version: Scrambled eggs, leftover chili, leftover black beans, rice, pureed squash

Long version: A few weeks ago when A. was at Walmart, he was lured in by the display of "decorative" squashes. He bought three of the larger, more unusual ones. He was pretty sure they were actually edible squash, despite not being labeled as such. The pinkish, pumpkin-y looking one proved to have a bad spot on it yesterday and thus needed to be cooked immediately.

This squash was about the size of a basketball, and I was reminded why I don't ever buy squash that size. Because processing one takes up the entire kitchen and results in way too many dishes.

An autumnal mess in the kitchen.

I ended up with a gallon or so of pureed squash. Some of it I made into a creamy squash soup using a jar of the venison stock we made with the bones of the deer haunch. We brought a jar of the soup to Ray--along with a loaf of bread, which is an excellent trade for about eighty dollars worth of meat--and a jar of it to Rafael. There was still plenty of squash left over for dinner.

The children were less than thrilled with this. I still haven't won them over to squash, but I haven't given up.

We went to church at 5 p.m., which meant that dinner needed to be something that could be ready more or less immediately after we walked in the door at 6 p.m. The squash and rice were made ahead of time, so scrambling the eggs and heating up the leftovers was all that needed to be done before we ate.

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