Sunday, October 20, 2024
Friday, October 18, 2024
Friday Food: Someone Turns Seven Today
Friday
Short version: Chicken Spanish rice
Long version: I made this skillet meal with leftover rice and left it at home for A. to feed the boys before he brought them to the football game. I was already at the volleyball game with the cheerleader all afternoon. She had a hot dog from the concession stand for dinner.
I ate a salad before I left, and then beef jerky and pistachios during the football game.
It did not pour rain during the game this time, but I was still very grateful that the mercy rule took effect for us at halftime (if one team is more than 50 points ahead at halftime, the game is over) so we could go home. Football takes foreeeeever, and 8 p.m. was quite late enough for me, thank you.
Saturday
Short version: Spaghetti and meatballs, individual garlic bread
Long version: I had some roasted tomato sauce in the refrigerator I had made earlier in the week, so pasta seemed like a good option. Poppy wanted to help me make the meatballs, which is why they ended up being much smaller than the ones I made myself.
Sunday
Short version: Lamb ribs, baked potatoes, baked beans, tomato/cucumber/feta salad, cookies, rice pudding
Long version: We have several bags of lamb ribs in the freezer that have been there for almost a year for the very good reason that I really dislike cooking them--so fatty and awkward to fit in a pan, to say nothing of trying to cut them apart--and also don't want to eat them.
The boys all like them, though, so I cooked some. I just covered them in foil and baked them for a long time. That's why I also made the baked potatoes and the rice pudding. I hadn't been planning on serving the rice pudding, but then the hunters came home and were very hungry even after eating dinner and cookies, so they had the rice pudding, too.
Monday
Short version: Pork chunks in milk gravy, last of the baked beans, garlic bread, cucumbers
Long version: Yes, I am making these pork chunks a lot. They're fast to cook, which is much appreciated after work.
Tuesday
Short version: Chicken fajitas, pinto beans
Long version: I have only one pepper plant in the garden, but it has been producing quite a few peppers. They look like hot peppers, but they have no heat to them and are pretty much just bell peppers. So I used those, onion, and three big chicken breasts to make fajitas. I even marinated the chicken.
I was very proud of my forethought, yes. And they were very good fajitas. I did not, however, cook the vegetables and chicken together.
Thursday
Short version: Pork, cornbread, tomato/cucumber/feta salad
Long version: This was a GIANT pork shoulder butt roast. It was so big I had to use my biggest Pyrex to get it in the oven, which I dislike because then I have to use aluminum foil to cover it. And then I have to throw the aluminum foil away.
I prefer using a dish with its own washable lid, is what I'm saying.
Anyway. This pork roast is not the kind with tons of fat that gets very tender, so even though I did cook it for a long time, I still ended up slicing it and then heating up the slices in the pan juices, enhanced with mustard and maple syrup.
My sister arrived for a visit this day. She brought many fun things from her local farmers market, including the lemon cucumbers and tomatoes I used in the salad.
Refrigerator check:
Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Green Beans to Soup Beans
Despite the very spotty germination on my Kentucky Wonder green bean plants that resulted in exactly nine plants growing to maturity this year, I have actually been harvesting green beans. I have two gallon-sized bags of green beans in the freezer right now, thus ensuring my favorite green beans+bacon+onions for Thanksgiving dinner.
Of course, given the fact that I never did put up fencing for the plants to climb, I also have a lot of beans that get lost in the jungle and grow too much before I harvest them. This makes them tough and starchy. Not what I want to a green bean to be.
But it IS what I want a soup bean to be.
"Soup beans" are what I call those green beans that over-mature on the plant before I find them. Some of those over-mature ones I leave to dry out, and then I save them to plant for next year. But most of them, I freeze as soup beans.
It takes me a few days to harvest enough beans to bother with, but when I do have enough, I go through them and separate them into green beans and soup beans based on their size. All of them get the stem ends snapped off. The green beans are frozen whole. The soup beans are chopped into short lengths before being frozen.
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Snapshots: Spirit Time
Friday, October 11, 2024
Friday Food: Beef, Chicken, Pork, Lamb
Friday
Short version: Baked beans, garlic bread, cucumbers with ranch dip, chocolate pudding with cream
Long version: I woke up in the morning to 61 degrees in the kitchen, which is why I decided to simmer beans. Might as well use propane to heat the house and cook something at the same time.
I cooked a pot of pinto beans, which I then made into baked beans, mostly because I had some bacon left over from breakfast and the oven was already on to cook brisket.
I also baked bread this day, so I made garlic bread to go with the beans. I made the pudding because I had some cream that was starting to get just a bit sour. This whole meal was very popular with the three children at home.
Saturday
Short version: Brisket, fried potatoes, raw tomatoes, leftover pudding
Long version: The brisket I had cooked the day before, and some boiled potato slices left from making camp food for A. and the boy who were gone hunting.
I had my brisket in a very good salad.
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Online Educating
It's fair to say, I think, that I am something of a Luddite. I don't like technology, I am not comfortable with it, and I use just as little of it as I can get away with.
This is sometimes a challenge, though, because of course it's very hard to avoid technology in our current culture, and most especially in education. Even more especially, in online education.
Our school has an online program in which I help students with special ed. accommodations in English. This year, for the first time, the program has a regular writing component. The students are supposed to write a two-sentence reflection at the end of each lesson. In our brave new world, we of course have had to specify that any student using AI to generate an answer will receive a zero on that assignment.
They do it anyway, but it's pretty obvious and several students have in fact failed their assignments because of it.
Something else that should have been obvious to me but wasn't came to my attention yesterday when I was working with one of my students. This particular student doesn't appear very frequently for our scheduled meeting time every week, but he was there yesterday. He happened to be on a quiz in his coursework. I can't give him the answers, of course, but I can read it to him.
So that's what we were doing. There were a couple of questions he asked to skip and come back to later, because he wanted some time to think about them. When we got to the end of the quiz, we went back to those two questions.
I read the first one again. Silence. I read it again. And this time I hear, "Hey, Siri . . ."
What?
"Ty!" I exclaimed. "You can't ask Siri!"
"Why not?"
"Because that's cheating. You need to know the answer on your own."
"But I don't know it."
"Well, then, take an educated guess. But you can't ask Siri."
Honestly, it never occurred to me that students do this. But of course they do. I mean, it never occurred to him NOT to do it. For these kids, the answer is always available if they just talk to their phones or whatever.
In the end, he chose his answers and got a 75% on his quiz. This is a pretty good grade for him, so I was able to point out to him that yes, he can in fact pass his quizzes without the help of a computer.
Not that I think he'll never ask Siri for the answer again, but I guess he knows now not to do it in front of a teacher.
Sunday, October 6, 2024
Snapshots: More School Stuff
Friday, October 4, 2024
Friday Food: With Cucumber Photos
Friday
Short version: Boneless pork chops with cream gravy, rice, cucumbers with salt and vinegar
Long version: These were the chops I cut from the whole loin. All I did was fry them and make a gravy in the pan with cream, water, and cornstarch.
I had made chicken stock earlier in the day with the chicken bones from the day before, and I used that stock to cook the rice.
Saturday
Short version: Cheeseburgers on homemade buns, oven fries, pickles
Long version: I was baking bread, so I made some buns. And that's why I made cheeseburgers. This time, I broiled a pan of them rather than frying them on the stove. This allowed me to make ten patties and not get grease all over the stove top. But it also required me to monitor them in the broiler on the floor, which I dislike doing.
There's really no good way to make hamburgers. At least, for the quantity I need to make.
Pickles are a pretty sketchy vegetable, but I have a lot of them, so there you go.
Sunday
Short version: Michaelmas chicken, baked potatoes, cucumbers with salt and vinegar, stabby cake with whipped cream
Long version: This was the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, although we really just celebrate it as Michaelmas. Goose is traditional for a Michaelmas feast, but hard to come by. The chicken I roasted was over seven pounds, so I figure it wasn't too far off in size to a medieval goose.
I started making a cake several years ago for my children to stab. It's a devil's food cake, because St. Michael is traditionally depicted stabbing the devil with a sword when he cast him out of heaven. Usually I just make Grandma Bishop's chocolate cake and call it close enough, but this year I used a recipe for an actual devil's food cake. It had more liquid and more cocoa powder. I followed Grandma Bishop's method, though, and poured the hot coffee over the butter to melt it and so on.
I didn't have any yogurt, so I used sour cream and milk. And I accidentally used a teaspoon of cornstarch instead of baking soda. I realized my mistake in time, however, so the finished cake just had a bit of cornstarch in it. No big deal.
I never make frosting for this cake, mostly because I don't want to haul out the mixer. Sometimes I just dust it with powdered sugar, which I prefer. But my family likes whipped cream more, so this time I made some with my immersion blender.
Monday
Short version: Leftovers, cucumbers
Long version: Diced leftover chicken, leftover rice, leftover gravy, all together in a skillet. And cucumbers.
Must be a work day.
Tuesday
Short version: Chicken soup, biscuits, oatmeal-raisin cookies
Long version: I spent several hours in the kitchen this day, turning the chicken carcass into a chicken and vegetable soup--I also used the rest of the gravy in it, so it was slightly creamy--making the cookies, assembling a casserole for the next day, and on and on.
I actually ended up having to go somewhere just before dinner and didn't get home until 5 p.m. I was tempted to just slice some bread instead of making biscuits like I had planned, but biscuits don't really take that long and they do make everyone very happy. Especially important when the main course is soup.
Wednesday
Short version: Enchilada casserole, cucumbers with salt and vinegar
Long version: This was the casserole I had put together the day before. I used bull meat in it. I am SO CLOSE to the end of the bull meat. A mere, um, four years after we butchered it. Ahem.
Thursday
Short version: Baked pasta, leftovers, cucumbers with ranch dip, chocolate chip cookies
Long version: I had just a little bit of uncooked ground beef left from the hamburgers--maybe half a pound--so I browned that and added it to the roasted tomato sauce I had made on Saturday while I was baking bread. Then that went into a casserole with pasta, Parmesan, and a bunch of asadero cheese.
It's a good thing I made a whole 9"x13" pan because we ended up with two extra kids here for dinner.
The children had the pasta, along with the cucumbers and ranch dip. And the chocolate chip cookies, which also had some peanut butter in there to replace some of the butter. More protein that way, you see.
A. had the last of the enchilada casserole, plus a bowl of the chicken soup. And then some pasta.
I just had soup.
Refrigerator check:
Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Letting Go
When my children were all very young, it was always a big event the first time they could go camping with their dad and not with me. I always expected there to be an early return due to a crying child that first time. Sometimes it happened. Sometimes it didn't.
Now they all camp at least once a year. I don't go, because I don't like camping, but they all do. And they don't need me with them all the time anymore. Dad is just fine.
This year, the two older boys--now 14 (and a half!) and 12--upped the ante. They asked if they could go on a camping trip with just the two of them. No Dad.
We said yes.
The plan was to take them somewhere pretty close just for a night. One of them had a deer hunt in the area closest to our house this past weekend, and I suggested to A. that perhaps this would be the right time for them to do their solo campout. It's only about half an hour away. It was going to be dry and warm. There is cell service there. It seemed like a good opportunity.
So A. loaded their packs, gave them many instructions, and dropped them off.
Sunday, September 29, 2024
Snapshots: Ready for Winter and Holding Onto Summer
A. brought home a cord of cedar that needed to be stacked. It's still a marvel to me that we have children who can do that now.
Friday, September 27, 2024
Friday Food: Lucky Pork
Friday
Short version: Early chicken salad sandwiches, chicken and rice skillet, football food
Long version: This was the night I took the three younger children to the very wet football game. I gave them the choice of eating before we left, or bringing their own money for concession food.
They all chose to eat before we left. So they had chicken salad sandwiches, and then I brought beef jerky, dehydrated apples, and peanut butter cookies with us to the game.
At home, I left a skillet of chicken, rice, beans, spices, and cheese.
Saturday
Short version: Pizzas, cucumbers with ranch dip
Long version: One cheese pizza, one with pepperoni and some leftover bacon. The sauce was roasted tomato sauce, which is much superior to a sauce made with just canned tomatoes.
Sunday
Short version: Pork, cornbread, tomato/cucumber/feta salad, disastrous rice pudding
Long version: I cooked a very large pork shoulder, and some of it I shredded and mixed with maple syrup and mustard. Very typical for my kitchen. Standard cornbread, too.
The rice pudding is where it all went wrong.
I don't know why, but this time, the rice pudding, at the very END of the baking, dripped all over the oven. I have never had this happen before, so of course it must happen almost exactly one week after getting a brand-new oven.
If I were trying to find a substance that would wreck an oven more thoroughly, I couldn't have topped this one. The combination of rice starch, sugar, and milk is just impossible to get off the bottom of a hot oven. I turned the oven off right away and scrubbed for some time with baking soda and dish soap before I gave up and just resigned myself to the fact that my new oven is no longer pristine.
Monday
Short version: Leftover pork and pizza, cucumbers with ranch dip, cookies
Long version: This time I fried the some of the pork in its rendered lard. The pizza served as our starch for this meal. As did the cookies (oatmeal/almond/peanut butter/chocolate chip).
Tuesday
Short version: Leftover pork in burritos, more cucumbers, hot cocoa
Long version: I had to substitute this day, so it was lucky I had randomly cooked so much pork on Sunday. This time I just wrapped it in flour or corn tortillas with cheese and salsa.
Hot cocoa because some people were still hungry. And there is something thrilling about getting hot cocoa--with a marshmallow!--on a random Tuesday night.
In case you're wondering, this is how I make cocoa: A tablespoon (I use an actual spoon, but I think it's close to a measured tablespoon) of sugar per mug of cocoa, plus one more for good health, slightly less than a tablespoon of cocoa powder for each mug, and a pinch of salt for each mug, all put in a pot. Add a bit of cold water and then heat this on the stove until the powders are dissolved. Then use a mug to measure out the milk, adding however many mugs of milk are needed. Heat and stir until as hot as you want it, then add a splash of vanilla.
Marshmallows if you're feeling indulgent.
Wednesday
Short version: Meatballs, spaghetti, fried potatoes, yet more cucumbers
Long version: All the pork was gone and this is a work day for me, but I did have a bag of meatballs I had stashed in the freezer for just such a night. I took those out before I left for work, along with a bag of roasted tomato sauce. Then when I got home, I just broiled the meatballs and then roasted them with about half the sauce until they were done.
The other half of the sauce went on the spaghetti. I was too lazy to grate Parmesan, so I just added a large amount of butter to it, plus a bit of extra garlic powder and Italian herbs.
I microwaved a couple of potatoes and then diced them to fry for A., who doesn't eat spaghetti.
Thursday
Short version: Roasted chicken pieces, roasted potatoes, sauteed calabacita/tomato/onion, raw green beans, bread with butter and honey or apple butter
Long version: Chicken leg quarters are always cheap, and so I tend to get those even though I dislike separating the thighs and drumsticks. But that way, A. and I can have the thighs, which we prefer, and the children can have the drumsticks, which they prefer.
There were four of each kind of chicken piece, and all I did with them was liberally spice them with paprika, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and a small amount of maple syrup, and then roast them at 425 degrees until they were done.
My favorite summer skillet of vegetables:
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
God Bless the Teachers
Ever since I started working at our school five years ago as an elementary Educational Assistant (what we used to call a teacher's aide), which morphed into librarian, online English tutor, and frequent substitute for both elementary and high school classes, people have been asking me if I'm going to get my teaching license.
No. Nope. Not gonna do it. Louder for the folks in the back? NO, I DO NOT WANT TO BE A TEACHER.
In fact, I started college as an elementary Ed. major and switched to a plain old English degree after one semester because I disliked the education classes so much. It's just not for me. And working at a school has only strengthened my conviction that being a classroom teacher is not a good idea for me.
It has also given me a great gratitude for real teachers. I honestly do not know how they do it, but I'm so, so glad they do.
That said, I'm teaching this week because our 4/5/6 teacher is sick. I was her substitute yesterday, and will be again today. There are only 11 students in her room, but that's one of the bigger groups at our school, and there are unique challenges to dealing with three different classes of students in one room. To say nothing of the individual needs of each student within those three classes.
Or maybe actually thanking all real teachers, because I know at least some of you are real teachers. If you are: Thank you. You are so appreciated.
Also, what's your best classroom management tip? I can use all the help I can get.
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Snapshots: Salad and Wet Football
One of my jobs at school is lunch monitor, and part of that is serving the elementary kids at the salad bar (middle school and up can serve themselves). I don't know if this is common in all schools now, but when I was a kid, we certainly never had access to a salad bar like this.