Friday Food: Fruit for Dinner

Friday 

Short version: Bull and potato skillet, still-frozen green beans

Long version: A. and Cubby weren't home at dinnertime, so the younger three had a skillet combination of shredded bull meat, sliced microwaved potatoes, the last of the enchilada sauce, and shredded cheese. Pretty tasty, actually.

I had some leftover hamburger, some of the potato, and some very forgettable squash. It was a variety called Atlantic Giant that is really grown more for size than flavor or texture. I mean, it's technically edible, but pretty wet, bland, and stringy. I gave the rest to the chickens.

Definitely a case of quantity and not quality.

Saturday

Short version: Barbecue pork, bread, leftover rice, orange slices

Long version: I had promised Jack and Poppy that I would take them for a special adventure, to make up for the fact that they kept being left at home when A. took the older boys camping in the fall. We went to one of our (relatively) nearby towns, where we went to a dinosaur museum and also ate lunch at a local place.

I did not order from the children's menu for them, which was a good call seeing as how Jack ate an entire giant burrito, plus some of Poppy's quesadilla. Kid's an eater for sure.

Anyway. 

It was fun, but I was very, very tired by the time we got home. So I just opened a couple of cans of the commodities pork, fried it in a pan, added barbecue sauce, and called it good. It was pretty good, actually.

I was even too tired to peel and cut up carrots or something. So instead I cut up some of the oranges I had just gotten at the grocery store. Fruit for dinner? Unheard of. (At least in our house.)

Sunday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers (on buns!), green salad, green beans, chocolate soup

Long version: I made the buns because I'm in the midst of Christmas Bread Baking Season, which means that I'm baking bread every other day (because each batch takes two days) to give to various people. And that means plenty of opportunities to steal some dough for pizza or garlic bread or, in this case, buns.

The chocolate soup was supposed to be pots de creme, but it didn't set. So it was almost entirely liquidy. Kind of like really chocolately, slightly thick chocolate milk. No one seemed to mind.

Monday

Short version: Cafeteria chicken tacos, grapes

Long version: This was our first day back in school after three weeks of Thanksgiving break and remote schooling. Whenever we come back from a long break like this, I feel particularly exhausted after work. It's so much harder to get back into a routine than to just continue with one.

Luckily, the school cook had given me a bunch of extra chicken tacos, so I heated those in the oven--with extra salsa and cheese because they were amazingly bland--and served them with grapes. 

Yes. Fruit for dinner again. I don't know what's happened to me.

Tuesday

Short version: Pork steaks and sauerkraut, baked potatoes, green salad 

Long version: These were cheap pork steaks from the grocery store, but I do love pork and sauerkraut. I need to plant more cabbages to make more sauerkraut this summer.

And A. wants to get a pig. That would certainly ensure the pork supply.

Wednesday

Short version: Leftovers, squash, still-frozen green beans

Long version: We had church after school and didn't get home until about 6 p.m. That's why I made sure to have plenty of leftovers on hand, so all I had to do was heat things up when we got home.

A. had the last of the stir-fry with a bit of extra bull meat and some leftover potatoes. Luckily, he's not fussy about things like needing rice to eat with stir-fry.

Poppy, Jack, and Calvin had tacos with corn tortillas, cheese, and some taco meat I made with ground beef and black beans.

Cubby and I had barbecue pork and potatoes.

This was not the overly large and tasteless squash. This was a much smaller, pumpkin-looking squash that I baked when I was baking bread. Much tastier.

Thursday

Short version: Skillet food, steamed broccoli, salad

Long version: This skillet had the last of the shredded bull meat fried in some tallow, the other half of a can of tomato sauce, cumin, garlic powder, chile powder, rice, and shredded cheese.

I had the salad--shredded cheese, leftover taco meat, some of the broccoli, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

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

T.T.: A Highly Tedious Kitchen Task

I spend more time in the kitchen than the average person, and many of the tasks in a kitchen can be described as tedious. But one of the most tedious things I have ever done is skin hazelnuts.

I skinned said nuts in pursuit of homemade Nutella. A worthy goal, but man, standing there rubbing and picking at all those hazelnuts, I really had to question whether the end result could possibly be worth it. 

I more or less used this recipe, although I ended up with more hazelnuts than called for, so I had to adjust quantities somewhat. It definitely doesn't need as much salt as is called for--I used half the amount--but it does need all the powdered sugar. That's what kind of sticks it all together, so you can't skimp too much on it.

Anyway. I made Nutella. It requires skinning hazelnuts, which is definitely not as easy as the recipe would have me believe.

So the real question, of course, is was it worth it?

Yes. 

The homemade version isn't as smooth, because it doesn't have large quantities of palm oil in it like the commercial version. What it does have, however, is a much more pronounced hazelnut flavor. 

Because of all those hazelnuts. That I skinned. 

So there's your tip: Skinning hazelnuts is a serious pain, but it's worth it if the end result is homemade Nutella.

Unrelated photo that has nothing to do with either Nutella or hazelnuts.