Friday Food: Ram Lap and Many Desserts

Merry Christmas Eve! I've been making an awful lot of treats lately, but there must be real food too, of course. Like so . . .

Friday 

Short version: Split pea soup, leftovers

Long version: I brought home some leftover ham from the school cafeteria last week, so I made some split pea soup with it. Happy Cubby.

Calvin, who is not a fan of soup, had leftover meatloaf, rice, and carrot sticks.

A. had some of the soup and then some steak and rice.

I had a salad with the last of the meatloaf in it.

Saturday

Short version: Birthday pizza, carrot sticks with ranch dip, chocolate pudding with whipped cream

Long version: Jack's birthday request meal. 

I usually buy store-brand semi-sweet chocolate chips. In this pudding, I used fancy Ghirardelli milk chocolate chips that my mom brought me, which are much better chocolate chips, but which made the pudding too sweet. It wasn't inedible by any means, but I definitely should have cut the added sugar to compensate for the sweeter milk chocolate. Oh well. 

I had a salad with some leftover steak, the very last of the store lettuce and a handful of arugula that's still hanging out in the garden. Arugula really is amazingly hardy stuff.

Sunday

Short version: Beef stir-fry, rice, baked apples with cream

Long version: Our meals were getting to be pretty sad in the vegetable department because we were pretty much out of fresh vegetables, so I decided to make a stir-fry and use the frozen bags of vegetables.

We'd been having so many rich desserts that I made the call to have baked apples for our regular Sunday dessert. Baked apples are about the most wholesome dessert possible. 

I had frozen a few gallon-sized bags of peeled apple slices when I got a surplus of apples in the fall, and I used one of those bags. To the apples I added cinnamon and a container of . . . something. The something had been in my refrigerator for so long that I forgot what it really was, other than it was a mixture of butter and some kind of sugar left from making a long-gone dessert, so I figured it would keep. Tasted kind of like brown sugar and butter.

Anyway. The apples were good.

Monday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers, pasta, frozen green peas, pureed calabaza

Long version: I used the last bit of pizza sauce with the pasta, along with butter, for the kids. 

I took the bag of pureed calabaza from the freezer. And I found the peas! I knew I had at least two big bags of frozen green peas in one of the big freezers outside, and I finally found them when I was re-organizing one freezer so I could put in the new 50-pound bag of flour.

I actually had three big bags of green peas. So we're all set for peas for awhile.

Tuesday

Short version: Ram lap, roasted potatoes, leftover peas and calabaza

Long version: The lap on a sheep is the breast. This was from the ram A. butchered just over a year ago. He cut off the lap, which is flat, thin, and boneless, and cut it into two pieces. I found these when I was re-organizing the freezer and thought I'd better use it.

The lap has more fat than meat on it, and the best way to cook it is to roll it up and slow cook it, kind of like pork belly. So I rolled it around six minced cloves of garlic, some already cooked onion, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and oregano, and cooked it for a couple of hours at 300 degrees. I drained off the fat as it rendered off and used some of it for the potatoes.

If I'm to be completely honest, I didn't even eat any of the meat. I really dislike any sort of meat that has such a high percentage of fat in and on it, so I just ate potatoes and vegetables. Everyone else, however, LOVED it. The kids all had seconds, and Cubby declared that this is what he wants for his birthday dinner.

Okay then.

Wednesday

Short version: Italian sliders, leftover pasta, garlic bread, carrot sticks with curry dip

Long version: Italian sliders=very small ground beef patties seasoned like meatballs, fried and covered with marinara sauce and asadero cheese.

How many times have I explained that? Probably too many. 

Thursday

Short version: Breakfast sausage patties, chicken curry soup

Long version: The soup was a masterpiece of found food. It started with a quart of curried split peas from the freezer that I had way oversalted when I made them originally. To that I added the stock I had made from the quail carcasses last week, a bag of already-cooked chicken from stock-making when we were butchering the meat chickens, some already-cooked onion, chopped potatoes and carrots, green peas, and a bit of cream to finish it off. 

I cooked the sausage separately, although I actually cut a bit up and added it right to my bowl of soup. It was tasty.

In non-dinner news, I made cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Christmas is the only time I make cinnamon rolls. I used a different recipe this time, and they came out very, very well. I used all white flour, and next time I would increase the cinnamon by about half a teaspoon, but otherwise, two thumbs up.

I even had some Christmas-y sprinkles that were at the bottom of a container of store-bought sugar cookies one of the students at school gave me. I had saved them for some unknown purpose, and it turned out to be just enough sprinkles for four of the cinnamon rolls, one for each kid.

Festive cinnamon rolls ahoy.

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