Friday Food: Cursed Baked Beans

Friday

Short version: Curried split peas, garlic bread, fried eggs, roasted carrots

Long version: Unsurprisingly, the children who ate the curry--that is, all of them but Charlie--very much enjoyed dipping their bread in their curry.

I was considering making sourdough naan, but then I remembered the pita bread and decided to save myself the shrieking of the smoke alarms.

Saturday

Short version: Carnitas-style pork, rice, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: The pork was this giant package of pork A. picked up at the grocery store a few weeks ago that was just labeled "pork for tamales." It was big chunks of what looked like pork butt, and it cooked up very nicely. I appreciated that it didn't have a bone in it, so there was actually very little waste.

Literally just as I was about to start dishing up dinner, another of our elderly-lady neighbors (not Miss Amelia) called and said she had some cheese she wasn't going to eat and would we like it? So A. sent the boys over there with a loaf of bread, and they came back with the cheese and TWO ENTIRE kitchen garbage bags full of food.

"Some cheese," huh?

Included in that spectacularly generous haul were two avocados. One was too far gone for us--the chickens very much enjoyed it--but the other was fine and needed to be used right away. So we had an avocado in our salad, and it was very exciting.

Sunday

Short version: Same pork, oven fries, same salad (minus the avocado), chocolate chip cookies

Long version: When I was about ten years old, I remember at a restaurant my dad telling me I had to order something besides salad and french fries. Because that's all I ever wanted to eat.

And now here I am thirty years later, and I still just want to eat salad and fries.

Therefore, I made myself some salad and fries for Mother's Day. Plus some leftover pork, to make it a bit more balanced. (Happy, Dad?)

The chocolate chip cookies I had actually made several days before, but I froze some for Sunday so I wouldn't have to bake again. I let each child have two cookies this time, and they were gratifyingly amazed at my largesse.

One of the ewes very appropriately had a lamb this night, and I took a picture for you:

Okay, so it's four days old in this picture already, but still: AWWWWW.

Monday

Short version: Pulled pork sandwiches, frozen green beans

Long version: Is this the same pork that I cooked on Saturday? Yes, it is. Made more exciting by cooking the leftover pork with barbecue sauce this time.

Tuesday

Short version: Not pork! Cheese pizza, green salad

Long version: Since I was making bread, I used some of the dough to make one pizza. It had green garlic and fresh basil in addition to the cheese. This time I decided to try a method for the sauce that the person who wrote about it swore made for the best pizza ever. The tomatoes aren't cooked into a sauce before they're put on the pizza, but rather just drained and spread on raw.

Since one more pan to make pizza sauce sometimes feels like the proverbial straw on this pizza-making camel's back, I thought I would try this.

Yeah, no. It just made the crust soggy and didn't taste as concentrated and good. As I suspected. Never again.

The same neighbor that gave us the cheese+bags o' food dropped off yet more food this day. The county delivered a box of food to every senior citizen in the county, and she said she couldn't eat it all herself, so she gave some to us.

My favorite is the can of spinach that's called "Freshlike." Not really fresh, but freshlike.

Wednesday

Short version: Bunless hamburgers, oven fries, frozen green beans, and the g--d--- baked beans

Long version: Can we talk about the baked beans? I really need to talk about the baked beans.

It all started with the white navy beans that were in the box of food Rafael gave us a month ago. These are traditionally used to make baked beans, although I haven't felt motivated to actually start with dried beans and make baked beans.

But then! Early on Monday, I decided I was ready to make baked beans. So I quick-soaked half the bag of beans, added all the stuff to them (bacon, onion, vinegar, maple syrup, ketchup), and put them in a 300-degree oven. There they stayed for six hours, at which point they were most definitely not done. Not even soft. So I took them out of the oven and simmered them on the stove for another three hours.

Still not done.

Nothing daunted, I cooled the pot down and put it in the refrigerator overnight, pulling it out in the morning and putting it back on the stove. Where it sat simmering ALL DAY. Like, ten hours. And were they done at the end of those ten hours?

Kind of.

I mean, they were soft enough to eat, but not, like, falling apart and making the beans all saucy, like baked beans are supposed to be.

Just how old WERE these beans?

Cubby and Poppy actually ate some with their dinner, and they tasted pretty good, but I was kind of mad that they were still not as soft as they should have been, so I determined the next morning to simmer them until they were REALLY SOFT, by God.

I put them on the stove, turned the burner to like medium-high to start them simmering, and then . . . got in the shower.* Leaving the beans on.

By the time I got out of the shower and remembered them, they were most definitely scorched. And not soft. I took the top layer of beans out of the pot and put them in another one (leaving the scorched layer on the bottom of the pot, and let me tell you how fun THAT pot was to clean--it was my enameled cast iron one, so it can't be scrubbed hard). And then I just left them there, because honestly, I was SO DONE with the beans.

I still heated them up and served them at dinner, though, even though they STILL weren't as soft as they should have been and definitely tasted scorched. None of the children seemed to notice, though.

After all that effort with the beans, I was almost tired enough to conk out on the front steps with the dogs:

Except Jack beat me to it.

Thursday

Short version: Breakfast sausage, pasta, frozen green peas

Long version: The school Sysco program has started offering five-pound tubes of pork breakfast sausage, which my children were very excited about. It's loose sausage, obviously, so I just fried it as patties.

The pasta had just butter, cream cheese, garlic powder, and pepper on it.

I ate some leftover vegetables with the singular leftover hamburger patty, because I don't actually like breakfast sausage all that much.

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

* In my defense, sneaking off for a shower is a delicate operation due to Poppy's possessiveness of my time and person. So when I see a window of opportunity when she's distracted, I have to make a run for the bathroom and get in the shower before she notices I'm gone.