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.

Very large, too.

Sunday

Short version: Fried leftover Spanish omelet, raw green beans, strawberries and cream layer cake

Long version: A. was still hunting with one boy. I had made a Spanish tortilla for them to take with them that I forgot to put in the cooler. One of the children at home with me is not much of a fan of Spanish tortilla, but he does like fried potatoes a lot. So I decided to chunk up the Spanish tortilla and fry it.

This was very popular, particularly with the one who doesn't like Spanish tortilla. Win.

The cake was experimental. I had a pint of cream that was starting to sour and a box of yellow cake mix my mother had sent home with me from Colorado.

The cake was supposed to be "extra moist," and I'm guessing it's because the instructions called for three eggs. That seemed like a lot of eggs to me.

The box assured me that Betty's got my back, though, so I went with it.

I did not, however, use the canola oil called for, instead substituting butter. I also used some of that cream with the water to be added.

I overbaked the cakes, so they definitely were not "super moist," but then I added strawberry/rhubarb jam on each layer and completely covered the whole thing with whipped cream, so it was good.

Cake layers.

I actually thought I over-sweetened the whipped cream, so that the cake as a whole was too sweet, but no one else seemed to mind it. They were just pleased that I actually made a layer cake. I rarely bother with layers.

Monday

Short version: Lamb and chickpeas, rice, cucumbers, leftover cake

Long version: I had mostly made the main part of this the day before, simmering a big pot of chickpeas and a bag of lamb stew meat and a shank to make both stock and meat. Those two things, plus tomatoes, onions, garlic, paprika, thyme, oregano, lemon juice, yogurt, and cornstarch, made the lamb that went over the rice.

Tuesday

Short version: Lamb chops, leftovers, mashed potatoes, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: The chops were the marinated ones I had sent along with A. for their hunting trip. He had never cooked them, so I did. A couple of kids had the leftover lamb and chickpeas, because they prefer their meat off the bone and I didn't have enough lamb chops for everyone, anyway.

Wednesday

Short version: Creamy chicken and sausage, leftover rice or mashed potatoes

Long version: I did not have a solid plan for dinner, except that I knew there was a rotisserie chicken in the refrigerator from my trip to the store the day before. Minus the drumsticks, of course, because that's what I eat as I drive home.

Some of the chicken had been eaten, unbeknownst to me, but there was just enough left for dinner. I shredded that, added a diced link of smoked sausage that had come back from A.'s hunting trip, frozen diced onion, frozen peas, the rest of someone's milk that didn't get finished at breakfast, and cream.

Steamy.

Everyone got to choose either mashed potatoes or rice, and that was dinner.

Thursday

Short version: Pork chunks and milk gravy, porky rice, cucumbers with ranch dip, apple crisp with cream

Long version: Yet another pork loin--actually a half loin this time, but I bought two--cut into steaks and chunks, pan fried, and then gravy made with milk and cornstarch.

Erma Bombeck used to claim that in her childhood home, they ate so much gravy it was a beverage. I'm beginning to feel like that, although I don't hear anyone complaining about it.

I had saved the liquid from cooking the pork shoulder awhile ago, freezing it when I had used all the lard on top of it. That's what I used to cook the rice.

Someone had given me about a dozen elderly apples. They were mostly something like Yellow Delicious, which are a bit too sweet for a crisp, but they needed to be cooked, so crisp it was.

Refrigerator check:

As always, Daisy dairy is well represented.

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

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.

Snapshots: More School Stuff

We only have a single key to our post office box. I'm always afraid we're going to lose it, so I found the most obnoxious keychain for it that I could.

A tiny Converse shoe one of the kids got at the health fair. It always makes me smile.

This week on our playground/track field, I removed a tiny barrel cactus, and an even tinier prickly pear cactus.

Helpfully marked with hula hoops for me by the students.

There have been many inconveniences associated with our school being under construction for two years, but it is kind of fun to walk back to my office and see this:

Giant crane!

Remember when I mentioned that I took one semester of elementary education classes in college before deciding teaching wasn't for me? That was in large part because of things like this:

Once again, God bless the teachers who will do things like this. I would rather scrub milk from the cafeteria floor (which I do).

And last, the cosmos you all helped me identify are blooming like crazy, which allows me to have a very cheery vase of flowers on the table.

Very purple, too.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.