Friday Food: A Failure

Friday 

Short version: Throwaway meatloaf, baked potatoes, last-minute egg salad, salami and cream cheese, raw green beans, baked mystery apples with cream

Long version: Starting right off with the failure here. I had had ground beef in the refrigerator since Monday, when I bought it at the store. I had meant to cook it earlier in the week, but heat and tiredness from in-service week derailed me.

Our meat is so fresh out of the freezer that I never have a problem keeping it in the refrigerator for a few days. I wasn't sure about store meat, though. I did smell the meat before forming the meatloaves, and it smelled okay. But as it was cooking, it started to smell . . . not okay. Not bad, exactly, just kind of funky.

It tasted that way to me, too. I'm very sensitive to flavors, though, so I had A. taste it, too. He thought it was okay. So I served it. 

A. ate a few bites and vetoed it. He said it tasted gamey. Again, not really rotten, just not very good. 

So I quickly grabbed other available sources of protein, which were some hardboiled eggs I had on hand that I made into egg salad, and the salami and cream cheese.

The apples were from a grafted branch on the tree next door. A. had grafted several varieties onto the existing tree there, and we didn't know which variety this was. This is the first year there's been apples on that branch. They were quite large, and partially red, so I was hoping they would be good saucing apples. When I started peeling them, however, they were pretty dry and hard to peel, also almost inedibly tart when I tasted them. 

I peeled and sliced them anyway, and cooked them most of the way in the microwave, to see if they would get soft. The small green apples on that tree never do get soft when cooked--although they are delicious raw and perfect for drying--so I thought I'd better try that out first. They did get soft. I finished baking them in the oven with a lot of maple syrup, sugar, cinnamon, and cloves, and they broke down even further.

A. thinks these were an old variety of apple that are meant for pies. One of the varieties he grafted came from his uncle's farm near Blackrock, and they were pie apples. That's why they're so large and tart. 

So the meal ended well, even if it started disastrously.

Oh, and I ALSO completely burned the garlic bread I had baked with the regular bread and had intended on having for dinner after the first day of school.

Definitely not my best day in the kitchen.

The one kid that had eaten most of his meatloaf before A.'s pronouncement didn't get sick in any way, so I guess the meat was okay, just overaged. I still gave it to the dogs and chickens, though. That made me feel a little better about wasting fifteen dollars' worth of meat. But just a little.

Saturday

Short version: Lamb, rice, green peas

Long version: Pretty much all the meat I have left needs to be braised, stewed, or otherwise cooked a long time to get tender. Like the bag of lamb shanks and stew meat I pulled from the freezer in the morning. I put it, still mostly frozen, in a pot with water, onion ends, carrot, and celery, and simmered that until I could pull the meat off.

I used that meat and a little of the resulting broth, along with onion, garlic, tomatoes (from the garden, yay!), paprika, oregano, thyme, lemon juice, and cornstarch plus yogurt, to make some saucy meat to go on top of the rice.

It turned out quite well. Shanks really do produce some nice, tender meat if they're cooked right.

Sunday

Short version: Tuna-rice skillet, dressed-up ice cream

Long version: I hadn't taken any meat out to thaw, so I planned on making tuna/salmon patties. But then I didn't have any bread crumbs, and I didn't want to haul out the food processor to make some. I did have leftover rice, though.

So!

Rice+one big can of tuna+onion+mayonnaise+butter+a tiny bit of milk+grated cheddar=something like tuna noddle casserole. But with rice. In a skillet.

We had three kinds of ice cream on hand: vanilla, cookies and cream, and mint chocolate chip. So everyone got to choose their ice cream and then dress it up with either chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookie crumbles from the freezer, or chocolate syrup. Or all three! It's a Sunday! Anything goes!

Monday

Short version: Fried pork, bread and butter, pickles, ice cream

Long version: First day of school! And work for me. I knew I would be exhausted, which is why I had stashed a bag of cooked pork butt in the freezer. I took that out to thaw in the morning and fried it with spices when I got home.

I didn't have the energy to even cut carrot sticks, but I do have a lot of homemade pickles on hand right now, so everyone got one of those. And then A. remarked several times how good they were with the meat, so I guess that was a winner.

Ice cream because it was the first day of school. I didn't put out all the toppings, though, which is what differentiates Weekday Ice Cream from Sunday Ice Cream. I guess.

Tuesday

Short version: Leftovers, lamb-y rice, raw radishes and green beans, lemon jello

Long version: Tuesday is one of my days off from work, so I wouldn't typically need to have a meal of leftovers on this day, but I was in the city with a child at the doctor. So, A. had the leftover stewed lamb with the rice, which I had cooked in a jar of lamb stock that had been in the refrigerator long enough. Two children had the last of the fried pork, plus the lamb-y rice. Two children had rice and beans, just made with a half can of pinto beans that had been in the refrigerator awhile, with the addition of butter and garlic powder.

The jello was for the sick child, but he didn't want it. Everyone else was happy to finish it.

Wednesday

Short version: Sandwiches and Crunchy Cheese Snacks at school and home; cottage cheese, cherries, and bananas at home

Long version: We had a Vigil Mass for the Assumption of Mary at 5:30 p.m. this day. Our school is in the village where we go to church. School gets out at 4 p.m. I decided it wouldn't be worth it to rush home only to leave again an hour later. So I brought dinner with me to work.

By that I mean I threw sliced bread, rotisserie chicken meat, salami, ham, mayonnaise, and mustard in a bag to make sandwiches after school/work. I also brought the Crunchy Cheese Snacks I had bought at the store the day before. These are a store brand version of crunchy Cheetos. Unlike the store brand of Fritos, these don't taste just like Cheetos, but they were okay.

We got home a bit after 6:30 p.m. A. hadn't had a chance to eat because he had been driving the school bus, and Poppy had been playing with her friend, so she hadn't eaten either. I made them sandwiches and they got some Crunchy Cheese Snacks, too. 

Two boys who had eaten sandwiches already were hungry again. They had the cottage cheese and bananas (not together). We all had cherries, which tasted SO GOOD after a very hot church service. It was over 90 degrees and our church has no air conditioning. Cold, sweet cherries were very welcome after sweating profusely for 45 minutes.

Thursday

Short version: Sausage and potatoes, or pasta with pesto and chicken, cucumbers with salt and vinegar, watermelon

Long version: I had a little of the meat left from the rotisserie chicken I bought at the store on Tuesday, so I chopped that and added it to pasta with pesto. 

A. and I had the sausage, which was the very last package of smoked sausage I bought a long time ago from a store that is not close enough for me to get to often. There were two baked potatoes in the refrigerator from Sunday, so I diced those and added them to the pan with the sausage. I also found some already-cooked diced onion in the refrigerator, so that went in with the sausage and potatoes.

I was very excited to find a real watermelon (with seeds!) from Texas at the grocery store, so of course I bought one. It was a really good one, and we're going to save the seeds.

It was, of course, giant. As all watermelons with seeds are.

Refrigerator check:

Lots of watermelon in there.

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

First Day of School Thoughts

I can't be the only one who still has to think hard for a second while looking at the little arrow that denotes "greater than or less than" in math to remember which way it's supposed to point. The way I still remember it is that the greedy alligator eats the bigger number (the open part of the arrow faces the bigger number). I figure if that's what stuck in my head almost forty years ago, that must be a good mnemonic. So that's still how I explain it to the first graders.

One of my duties in the lunchroom is serving the elementary kids from our well-stocked salad bar. Some of the students were really surprised that I didn't remember exactly what they like on their salads. As if my brain is still in its prime and can keep the individual salad combinations of 28 kids on file over three months of summer. Give me a couple of weeks, though, and I'll have "Andrea=lettuce+cheese+ranch dressing+ham bits" taking up valuable space in my memory again.

I spent almost an hour trying to set up four Zoom meetings for the semester. This should have taken me about ten minutes, but every time I set the time parameters and saved them, the ending time would inexplicably change to the same as the beginning time. Over and over. It was so frustrating. I kept changing things in settings and re-scheduling the meetings until eventually it worked. Why did it finally start working? No idea, but at least I got it done. And that's pretty much my technology experience in a nutshell.

We have a couple of very spirited teachers, bless them, who always come up with a theme for the beginning of school and decorate accordingly. This year's theme is Hollywood, mostly because that was the prom theme last year so we already had a lot of props and decorations for it. 

This is by the front office.

They laid out a long length of red paper on the path leading to the cafeteria where all the kids go in the morning so they could "walk the red carpet," gave them all VIP bracelets and star-shaped sunglasses, and had the staff act as the adoring crowds lining the red carpet and being all excited to see them.

Most of the kids loved it. A few did not. I get off the bus with the kids, so my role in this was actually to reassure our one new first-grader that this was not as scary as it looked. She sort of believed me. At least she actually went into the school, which didn't look like a given when she first saw the scene outside the cafeteria.

The first day is so tiring. Everyone in my house went to bed early last night. Let's hope they'll be well-rested and ready to go for the second day.

Snapshots: Now THAT's Rain

I could not believe my eyes when I looked at our rain gauge after a night of rain.

Almost full!

We had got a half inch the night before, as well, which means that the total for these two days is actually almost a quarter of all the rain we get on average in a year.

So that was pretty exciting.

Let's see what else . . .

I made some pickles with my award-winning Armenian cucumbers after I picked them up from the county fair display.

Using an old pickle jar, of course.

At work, I found piles of books someone had dumped in the back storage room we use for classroom texts, and since books are my domain at school, I was sorting through them this past week when I had time during teacher in-service. Many of them were old textbooks, and one of them is pretty much our family manifesto:

Yup.

I didn't actually read the book, but I think it's about rhetoric and argumentative writing and so on. In any case, this is now what I say whenever anything devolves into a verbal squabble at dinner. Which is a lot. My kids say, "Stop saying that, Mom!" To which I reply, "Then stop arguing."

Never.

Speaking of school, it starts tomorrow and at least one child has been getting ready:

I found her school supply list on the school Facebook page and she started going through the box of supplies I bought to find hers, put her name on everything with a Sharpie, and put it all in her backpack.

Her brothers showed no inclination whatsoever to prepare themselves for the dreaded event, so she asked if she could sort out their supplies for them.

This girl, man. Built different, for sure.

And what do her brothers wish to do instead of going to school?

Add to their collection of spent ammunition, for one thing.

It was pretty funny that when that boy said, "Hey, Mom! Come see my shell collection!" I thought, "He has sea shells? How'd he get those?"

Silly me. You'd think after all these years in the country, I would know he was talking about gun shells. I'll just never be a real country mouse, I guess.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.