Friday Food: Harvest Pictures!

Friday 

Short version: Tacos with leftover taco stew meat, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: Nah.

Saturday

Short version: Very exciting bull stir-fry, leftover rice, fresh bread

Long version: Lately I've gotten very lazy with my stir-fries, relying on pressure-canned bull meat and bags of frozen stir-fry vegetables from the store. There's nothing wrong with this, and it does make a tasty dinner very quickly.

It is, however, nowhere near as good as this stir-fry was.

I took out a bag of bull meat labeled "stir fry" in the morning. Every time we butcher, I save some of the cleanest lean pieces and slice them very thinly, labeling them this way for (I bet you guessed this) stir fry.

However, knowing what I know now about the toughness of this bull meat, I elected to cut the thin slices of meat again in thin slices in the opposite direction, thereby creating much smaller thin pieces. Those I marinated in soy sauce, corn oil, vinegar, garlic powder, and ginger powder all day.

I was going to use one of those handy bags of frozen vegetables, but decided to take a tour of the garden first to see what it had to offer in the way of stir-fry vegetables. This is what I found:

Lots of garlic scapes, a little sprouting broccoli, and some collard greens. Not bad.

To that I added some thinly sliced store carrots (which I did with the mandoline blade on my grater--a terrifying procedure), some lamb's quarters that were already in the refrigerator, and some frozen green beans.

I also, very unusually, had fresh ginger. A. bought me a root awhile ago, which I peeled and froze. I grated it for this and used about a teaspoon.

I've never actually cooked with fresh ginger before. I couldn't tell that much difference from when I use ginger powder, but maybe I needed to use more of the fresh ginger.

Anyway, the ginger plus soy sauce, vinegar, and peanut butter comprised the sauce, and the whole thing was delicious.

I had pulled bread out of the oven only an hour before dinner, so when the children were all circling around the kitchen after consuming all the stir-fry, searching for more food, I let them have bread and butter. Which disposed of one whole loaf.

Sunday

Short version: Pork and sauerkraut, baked potatoes, roasted green beans, lettuce with vinaigrette, Floating Islands

Long version: I used the very last pint jar of last year's sauerkraut on the same day I harvested the very first of this year's cabbages. I didn't use the fresh cabbage to make sauerkraut, though. You'll see that later this week.

Is it a salad if it only has lettuce in it? Not sure, but that's what it was: just lettuce with a vinaigrette.

And then we have the Floating Islands. What is Floating Islands? Well may you ask. It's what I made for Sunday dessert. The full story will be coming shortly. Until then, you'll have to live in suspense. Or take the time to Google it yourself if you're really desperately curious, I suppose.

Monday

Short version: German (?) stew meat, fried potatoes, coleslaw, chocolate pudding

Long version: I cooked the stew meat in the morning with just onion, green garlic, and some chicken stock I had hanging around int he refrigerator. I didn't have any specific plan for it. At dinnertime, I decided to make it sort of like barbecue, so I put in some ketchup, mustard, vinegar, and maple syrup. Then A. tasted it and exclaimed, "The flavor! It's German!"

It was kind of like sauerbraten, actually. I was maybe a little heavy-handed with the vinegar. Luckily, I love sauerbraten.

I made this pudding the day before because I had six egg yolks left from making the Floating Islands. The pudding was way better than the Floating Islands.

Tuesday

Short version: Wascally Wabbits, mashed potatoes, beet greens, leftover coleslaw, leftover pudding

Long version: Is "Iron Chef" still a thing? That was the show where the contestant/chefs didn't know what ingredients they were getting until it was presented to them and then they had to scramble to make it delicious.

I feel like I could do a rural mom version of that show. This day's episode would have featured the two rabbits that appeared in my kitchen at 10 a.m.

The reason they appeared in my kitchen is that two of the rabbits were out of the casita. A. thinks they may have been out there since the last time the door was forced by some predator, and those two had just been living like wild rabbits, hiding during the day and coming out to eat at night.

In any case, since they were out, they were, uh, harvested. 

So we had rabbit.

Because I have a lot of dill in the garden right now, I separated the rabbits into pieces, browned them, and simmered them with diced onion, lots of dill, and some rooster stock. Then I added some sour cream at the end.

The meat was tasty in the end, but you know, I just really don't like the rabbit meat that much. I find it to be a lot of effort to make palatable, and even then, it's not great, just pretty good.

Anyway.

I cooked beet greens because the heavy rains we got beat down my beets*, so I pulled out the worst-looking ones. The beets were very small, and I ate those in my lunch salad. The greens I cooked for dinner--butter, vinegar, salt.

Wednesday

Short version: Leftovers and randomness, leftover meringue and caramel sauce

Long version: The majority of the family had leftover pork and sauerkraut for their protein. Cubby had leftover rabbit. He also had leftover mashed potatoes heated up with cheese. The other kids had tortillas with cheese as their starch. And everyone had frozen green peas.

I had just a little meringue left from the Floating Islands, and quite a bit of caramel sauce. So I drizzled some of the sauce on the meringue and the kids had dessert yet again. Calvin announced of this, "This is pushing the limits on sugar."

Yeah.

Thursday

Short version: Steaks, curried split peas, rice, sauteed garlic scapes and snow peas

Long version: I did some harvesting earlier in the day the resulted in this:

A beautiful sight indeed.

I sauteed the scapes and snow peas just with olive oil and salt until the peas were tender and the scapes were a little crispy. 

Crispy garlic scapes are one of my favorite vegetables. Hooray for A.'s excessive garlic. I will eat all the scapes he lets me have.

This was one of those meals where the children just kept on eating. Every one of them had seconds of something, some had thirds. I don't know why they do this some nights, and other nights barely finish their servings. 

Anyway, they ate a lot. It was a delicious dinner, I must say. A. cooked the steaks and he does better keeping them rare, so that probably helped, too.

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

* Jack was really into their homophone lesson in school last year. He would appreciate that sentence.