Friday Food: Birthday Flan

Friday 

Short version: Turkey soup, breakfast sausage patties, chocolate revel bars

Long version: "Is this . . . turkey soup?" A. asked. "Wasn't Thanksgiving a long time ago?"

Yes on both counts. But it was turkey soup I had taken out of the freezer.

I had made a very large pot of soup with the last of our very large turkey and the very large amount of broth I made from the carcass. I omitted any starch before freezing, though, as potatoes or rice or whatever tend to get mushy in the freezer. So to the container of soup I took out of the freezer I added rice and the some leftover mushrooms and onions.

The sausage was separate. 

Cubby made the revel bars. He wanted to make cookies in the afternoon, which I told him he could do if he cleaned up the kitchen afterwards. The revel bars were a recipe he found in one of my cookbooks that involved a layer of basically oatmeal cookie dough, then melted chocolate, then a topping of oats and nuts. They came out well, and it made a LOT of cookies. 

So many bars.

And more importantly . . .

Dishes I did not wash. Hooray.

Saturday

Short version: Tacos, carrot sticks

Long version: I had made quite a large batch of taco meat earlier in the week, and we ate the last of it this night.

Sunday

Short version: Quail, shepherd's hand pies, roasted potatoes, green salad, chocolate revel bars

Long version: A. went quail hunting with Cubby and Calvin at some public land a few miles from our house. He got four quail. They hung overnight and I roasted them this day. They were tasty, but very small.

That's why I made the shepherd's hand pies, too. For those, I used the extra pie crust I had put in the freezer when we made the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, plus some shepherd's pie meat from the freezer, and a bit of cheese. The children enjoyed them very much.

Monday

Short version: Shepherd's skillet, broccoli soup, apple/pearsauce and cream

Long version: Due to various chores that needed to be done when we got home from school before it got dark outside, I didn't even start making dinner until 5 p.m. Which meant speed was the name of the game.

I had some of the shepherd's pie meat left, so I micowaved a couple of giant potatoes, diced one and a half of them, and fried those with the meat.

The other half of the potato went into a soup for Cubby, who accidentally gouged a very large and very bloody furrow into the roof of his mouth on Sunday. He couldn't eat anything solid that would press into the top of his mouth when he swallowed, so I made a quite thin soup for him with the potato, leftover broccoli, some random cooked onion, a jar of beef stock, shredded cheddar cheese, and sour cream, pureed in the food processor.

He also had the apple/pearsauce. And then the rest of the children had the same thing, because who can resist apple/pearsauce with cream?

Tuesday

Short version: Meatloaf, rice, carrots, caramel milk

Long version: The ground beef we got from our last cow is definitely more lean than I like it, because it was a range cow and just didn't have a lot of fat on it to start with. I still had a package of fat from the cow we got a few years ago, though, which I recently rendered. So I melted some of that tallow and mixed it in to the meatloaf mixture. Much better.

Earlier in the day, I had made A.'s requested birthday dessert for the next day, which was flan. Flan requires making a caramel, and then, of course, I ended up with a pot that had rock-hard caramel all over the inside. Rather than boil that off with water to clean it, I heated milk in the pot and mixed the melted caramel into the milk. 

That was a pretty big hit, as you might imagine.

Wednesday

Short version: Birthday steaks, twice-baked potatoes, green salad with ranch dressing, flan

Long version: I know I saw a package of hanger steaks in the freezer, which is a particularly choice cut, but I couldn't find it when I went to get steak out for A.'s birthday dinner. I informed him he would have to settle for New York strip steaks and filet mignon.

He was fine with this.

I baked the potatoes the night before with the meatloaf, and then scooped them out, mashed, and stuffed them, so when I got home from work, they just needed to be baked another half hour.

The flan was from a recipe A. sent me. I've never made flan before, and so, predictably, I made some mistakes. The recipe calls for blending the custard mixture, and mentions it may need to be done in two batches.

It definitely does. But I didn't. So that caused a huge mess.

The caramel also refused to get smooth, despite my constant stirring, also at the behest of the recipe. A., who used to make flan years ago, came in while I was trying to get the caramel smooth and told me he always left the caramel alone without stirring to start melting in a single layer first. So I stopped stirring, and sure enough, it smoothed out.

I also forgot to cover it with foil when I put it in the oven, but I remembered after only twenty minutes or so, so no harm done.

The birthday boy very much enjoyed his dessert, particularly the texture. It was pretty sweet, though. Kind of inevitable, with all that condensed milk and caramel.

The following is a photograph the MiL sent me of a giant squash she grew or bought, I'm not sure which:

A., the appreciator of all giant vegetables, of course asked her for some seeds.

Thursday

Short version: Leftover meatloaf, leftover rice, lettuce with ranch dressing

Long version: I made it to the end of the marathon that is the last week of school before Christmas break, but I was not exactly bursting with energy by the time we all made it home after the last fun-filled day of school. That's why I made the most low-energy dinner possible with the leftovers I purposely planned for earlier in the week.

I didn't even put anything with the lettuce, which is why it was just lettuce, not a salad.

Whatever. The semester is over, our very long break has begun, and everyone is going to sleep in this morning. It's the most wonderful time of the year. 

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