Friday Food: I Fixed My Deli Drawer!

Friday 

Short version: Fiesta scrambled eggs, leftover rice, coleslaw

Long version: Fiesta scrambled eggs means I add salsa and grated cheese to them. Sometimes pinto beans if I have an open jar, but I didn't this time.

I had a helper to crack the dozen eggs, which was nice.

I have what seems like unending cabbages coming out of the garden, so it is definitely coleslaw time.

Saturday

Short version: Enchilada casserole, leftover coleslaw, fresh bread with apricot jam

Long version: I had a very long day in the kitchen, what with all those apricots to deal with, plus bread to bake. It was fairly cool this day, though--in the mid 80s--so I took advantage by doing as much kitchen work as possible. 

Since the oven was on anyway to bake the bread, I made the casserole--shredded bull meat, beans, corn tortillas, cheese, homemade enchilada sauce--and baked it while the bread was in. Then at dinnertime, I put the whole casserole in the microwave just to re-melt the cheese. 

Sunday

Short version: Bull big macs, home fries, green salad with vinaigrette, chocolate pudding with cream

Long version: No steak for Father's Day? Nope. Because we don't have any. Luckily, A. loves cheeseburgers. Especially with homemade sourdough buns and Big Mac sauce.

I would typically have made oven fries with this meal, but it was hot and I didn't want to have the oven on at a high temperature for 45 minutes. So instead, I microwaved a few big potatoes until they were mostly cooked, then chopped them and fried them in a skillet.

Father's feast frying. (Yay, alliteration!)

Monday

Short version: Leftovers, customized ice cream

Long version: The kids finished the enchilada casserole. A. had the last hamburger patties (no buns) and leftover rice. I had a salad.

And it was hot, so we all had ice cream. A couple of kids had mint chocolate chip. We also had vanilla ice cream, which was topped with either apricot puree, maple syrup, or chocolate syrup, depending on preference.

I had the chocolate syrup. It's the taste of my childhood. Well, the taste of my childhood was actually Hershey's syrup, and the syrup I make is better, but it's the same idea.

Tuesday

Short version: Breakfast burritos, raw produce, more ice cream

Long version: I unearthed a bag of elk chorizo at the bottom of one of the chest freezers, so I decided to cook that this night. I also made scrambled eggs with cheese, but separately, because only half the family likes chorizo. So the burritos were either chorizo and egg, or the last of a can of refried beans I found in the refrigerator and egg.

All of the children asked to have chocolate syrup on their ice cream this night. I have converted them. A. stuck with his apricot jam. He's always been a fan of fruit and ice cream.

Wednesday

Short version: Lamb curry, rice, maple lemonade

Long version: I found a boned leg roast from a ewe that we butchered way back in October. I seemed to recall that that sheep was a bit strong-tasting, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to use the extra curry liquid I had frozen one time when I was making curry and made it far too strong. I had taken out some of the liquid to dilute what was left, and froze the extra sauce, which was stock+curry powder.

I also used the last of the cooked yellow split peas that were in the freezer, along with carrots, potatoes, peas, already-cooked onion, and sour cream.

The meat definitely smelled gamey while I was browning it, but that wasn't noticeable in the end result, so it was a good use for the curry.

After dinner, all the children decided to make themselves lemonade with the bottled lemon juice I buy in bulk, and maple syrup. I suspect it was heavy on the syrup, but I just considered it their dessert and let it go.

Thursday

Short version: Roasted chicken and gravy, garlic bread, roasted carrots, sauerkraut, ice cream

Long version: It was cool enough to roast the whole chicken that had been hanging out in the freezer for awhile, so I did that.

Well, I thought it was cool enough, but then it ended up being 80 degrees in the kitchen by the time I was done, so maybe not. Good chicken, though. I made gravy with the juices and milk and cornstarch, too, which was also good.

Refrigerator check:

Please note that I have already replaced the hanger on my deli drawer, rather than piling everything up on the shelf for months. I'm very proud of myself, yes.

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

Sweet Relief

For a lot of reasons, we don't have air conditioning in our house. We do have a giant old window unit that can theoretically be put in the kitchen, but I hate the thing so much (and A. hates it even more) that it very rarely actually gets put in.

We don't typically have temperatures over 100 degrees, and more importantly, the humidity here is usually pretty low, so it's manageable. 

But there are days. Days when a hot wind has been blowing constantly, and there are thunderstorms brewing all around that raise the humidity level. Days when I have to bake bread or otherwise heat up the kitchen. 

Days when the outdoor temperature readout on my shiny new Honda's dashboard informs me it's 100 degrees*. 

Those days are not comfortable.

We have ceiling fans, and my bedroom is on the east side of the house, so I can usually get by with reading in my bed with the fan going during the hottest part of the day.

But if a storm rolls in? Then the wind will pick up, the temperature will drop twenty degrees in thirty minutes, and all windows and doors in the house will be opened to let an honest-to-goodness cool breeze blow all through the house.

Bedroom curtains billowing in a cool breeze from a storm.

Air conditioning is nice, and certainly convenient, but there is nothing like the feel of a cool rain-laden breeze after you've been sweating all day. 

Nature's A/C is perfect.

*Although to be honest, this was when I had driven somewhere off our high plateau, so it was only about 94 degrees at my actual house at this moment.

Snapshots: Preserving

My friend called me this week to let me know that the apricots at her mom's house were ready to pick and I could take as many as I wanted. I had to be in that city for an appointment with one child on Friday, so we picked some apricots.

Box on the left is the very ripe ones I picked up from the ground. The box on the right is the less-ripe ones we picked from the tree.

Very ripe apricots do not have much pectin, so they won't really thicken and gel. With the box of ripe ones, I just made a sweetened apricot puree for yogurt. I made jam with the slightly underripe ones.

This is two and a half gallons of apricot jam. It won't last nearly as long as you'd think.

I had started bread dough that morning. I typically make my bread dough in my big stock pot, but I knew I would need that to make jam. So instead I used a dedicated dough bucket I bought awhile back and hate because it's square. This makes it hard to mix in and even harder to clean the dough out of the corners. I had mistakenly ordered it thinking I was getting a round one and then I couldn't return it, so I'm stuck with it. 

It comes in handy at times like these, I suppose. And I was very pleased when I thought to use my old 8-inch square baking pan as the lid for it. The pan is very old and kind of rusty, so I don't actually bake in it anymore.

Flipped over, though, it makes for a nice tight lid.

I also finally got around to "krauting," as my children call it.

With some help, of course, because few things are more fun than smashing sliced cabbage with a rolling pin.

I have more cabbages coming out of the garden, so I decided to make a skillet of Holy's cabbage and try freezing and thawing a small amount to see if the taste or texture was affected. I suspected it would freeze (and thaw) well since it's so soft to start with.

I was right. 

So then I made a couple of very large batches of it to freeze.

I (over) filled my biggest 14-inch skillet twice and ended up with three quart bags of cooked cabbage for the freezer.

Unfortunately, yesterday when I was driving to the village, the road was absolutely carpeted with grasshoppers. Thousands of them. They haven't made it to my garden yet, but I don't see how they could miss it. It's looking likely that there might not be a lot of other things that make it to harvest this year. But at least we have sauerkraut and apricot jam, right? Right.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.