Friday Food: Triple Cheeseburgers

Friday 

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers, rice, pan-fried sweet potatoes, raw and cooked green beans

Long version: Some of the green beans went in the pan with the burgers, because the adults in our house prefer them cooked. The children like them raw. To each his own.

Saturday

Short version: Second verse, same as the first

Long version: I had more ground beef that I made into more hamburgers, mostly because one child had been announcing all afternoon that he couldn't wait to have some "juicy, fatty meat" for dinner. Okay, then. Must be a growth spurt.

There was leftover rice. I even made more sweet potatoes. The only difference was that the raw vegetable this time for the children was broccoli. I told them all how when they were toddlers, we used to play a game with broccoli where it was a tree in summer when they started eating, and then became a tree in the fall as they ate off the "leaves," and then progressed to a winter tree when only the trunk remained, finally becoming firewood and getting burned when they had eaten it all.

This inspired them to eat a lot more broccoli than they would have otherwise, so I guess it's not just a game for toddlers.

Random photo break!

Sun hats are a good idea here even in January.

Sunday

Short version: Italian cube steaks, spaghetti, green salad with ranch dressing, chocolate chip cookies

Long version: "Italian" just means I cooked the cube steaks in a tomato sauce, which also had onion, garlic, and bell peppers in it. I used the sauce from cooking the meat for the spaghetti, too.

Yeah, that's about that.

Monday

Short version: Split pea soup, ploughman's lunch

Long version: I had made the split pea soup the day before with a bag of the yellow split peas that are a frequent excess commodities item, the ham bone from our Christmas Eve ham, and two quarts of stock from the chickens. Tasty.

I had planned to serve bread and butter and cheese with it, and while the children were in the kitchen with me, I was telling them about a ploughman's lunch. I was slightly off in my description, I guess, because I said it was bread, cheese, pickles, and beer. I didn't get the onion in there. 

In any case, the children thought bread, cheese, and pickles sounded great, so I added some dilly beans to their plates of bread and cheese, and everyone was happy.

A. was the only one who had a beer, though.

Tuesday

Short version: Beef stir-fry, rice, rinsed salad

Long version: I took out a package of fajita meat from our new beef processor, and I noticed while I was cutting it into smaller pieces for the stir-fry that it smelled like onion or garlic. I guess they must have put some kind of seasoning on it. 

There were no obvious spices on it, and it tasted good in the stir-fry anyway. Which also included onion, garlic, bell peppers and onions from my Misfits Market box that needed to be used up, and a bag of carrots the school cook gave me because they were likewise elderly and needed to be used quickly.

Those carrots don't look a bit their age.

The rinsed salad was mine. I wasn't sure there would be enough stir-fry, so I made myself a salad. It had bacon and walnuts and cheese and sweet potato and beets. I added the last of the jar of ranch dressing that was in the refrigerator, then licked the spatula I had used to scrape out the dressing jar. Which is when I tasted mold.

Booooo.

I looked at my salad with moldy dressing on it, considered the awful option of throwing all of it away . . . and instead dumped it all into a sieve and rinsed off all the dressing.

The end result was slightly watery, but still tasty. And not moldy.

Wednesday

Short version: Sausage 'n stuff

Long version: What a random collection of foods. The sausage was actually from Texas. I absolutely bought about a dozen packages of sausage at the grocery store there and brought it home in a cooler. Because we can't get good sausage here, and it's just such a handy thing to have on days I don't want to cook.

Like work days. Which this was.

So we had both smoked beef sausage and smoked boudin. Then there was some leftover rice, and a can of corn I heated up with butter.

And THEN, the school cook had sent me home with two grilled cheese sandwiches, green beans, and cherry cobbler. She thought our chickens would eat the first two things, but one child really wanted one of the sandwiches instead of rice with his sausage, so he had that. And A. and I ate some of the green beans instead of the corn. 

Oh! I also microwaved a sweet potato, and Poppy and I had that.

So random. But everyone was happy.

Thursday

Short version: Bunless cheeseburgers, roasted potato cubes, carrot sticks with ranch dressing, oatmeal-raisin cookies

Long version: Is three nights of burgers in one week too much? I guess not, because no one complained.

I made the oatmeal cookies for the cookie jar this week, and this time I actually looked for a high-altitude-specific recipe. I have had trouble with oatmeal cookies flattening in the oven before here on our high plateau. I used this recipe, which needed more cinnamon and waaaay less baking soda.

It's particularly annoying because I always halve the amount of leavening when I'm baking because of the altitude here, but I went ahead and followed the recipe this time. It's supposed to have been developed for high altitudes. In which case, it should have had half the amount of baking soda that is in a cookie made at a typical altitude, instead of twice the amount.

I should have checked other recipes beforehand, I guess. 

So now I have several dozen cookies that taste like baking soda. Yuck. Luckily, my kids don't seem to notice. And I have learned my lesson. No more trusting random Internet recipes without some verification.

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