Friday Food: Someone Turns Seven Today

This little seamstress here. Happy birthday to Poppy.

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.

Wee meatballs.

A. was hunting and camping with the two younger boys, so I let the two children at home make their own garlic bread. They get to choose what spices they want in it and knead those in. Always fun.

You may notice there were no vegetables on that plate. I counted the tomatoes. 

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.

Because I have four children, that's why, and two of them didn't want the peppers and onions.

Wednesday

Short version: Bacon cheeseburger casserole, frozen peas, marshmallows with chocolate sauce

Long version: I made the casserole while I was in the kitchen the day before. I dislike doing this the day of, because I feel like I spend way too much time in the kitchen preparing two full meals. But I really like it the day we eat it, when all I have to do is stick it in the oven.

I mostly made this casserole because A. brought home a bunch of the boiled potatoes I had sent camping with him. So I used those--plus a few extra I microwaved--ground beef, onions, ketchup, mustard, a few diced dill pickles, the last of the American cheese A. had bought, some grated cheddar cheese, and the remnants of a couple of cups of milk unfinished by children.

It ended up being very good.

Not very pretty, though.

I gave the children a marshmallow each, dipped in the chocolate syrup I make. The reason I did this is because one child was daunted by the amount of math homework he had to do, so I figured he could use some extra energy. And we were out of cookies.

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:

The Persian melon on the top shelf came from the farmers market, too.

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

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.

Green bean on the right, soup bean on the left.

"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.

Like so.

And then I have a bag of bean pieces ready to just throw right into soup when I make it.

Soup beans in soup.

I have about a quart of soup beans in the freezer right now, and I'll just keep adding to it as long as the plants are still producing beans and I keep missing them until they're too big.

Snapshots: Spirit Time

As the daylight hours grow ever shorter, the candles on the table have reappeared.

Before-school breakfast candles.

I do have new taper candles, but they're not 100% beeswax. The children love the smell of the real beeswax candle stub that's still in the candle holder, so I continue to burn it for them. It apparently gives them the strength to face the school day, and who am I to deny them that?

This past week was a spirit week at school for homecoming at the school we play sports with. I don't usually have enough spirit to really enjoy spirit weeks, but I was pretty proud of Poppy's hair for crazy hair day on Monday.

Pigtails on the sides, plus a bun on top surrounded by cosmos. 

The flowers made it to after lunch before wilting and starting to fall off, which is pretty good for a seven-year-old running around at recess and so on.

Later in the week on the day for our school colors, the cheerleaders were instructed to wear their giant sparkly hair bows.

Spirited cheerleader at breakfast (with the strengthening candles burning, you'll notice).

And then they cheered at the homecoming volleyball game.

A bevy of bows.

In non-homecoming news, I wrote a thank-you note to the girls at school who gave us the apple butter a couple of weeks ago, and they responded by giving me another jar of apple butter. Sometimes virtue really is its own reward.

The apple butter is good on regular old sourdough bread, but I suspected it would be even better on this slightly sweet oat quick bread, so I made a couple of loaves of that.

And so it was. If you have apple butter around, I encourage you to try it.

I was at the store on Tuesday, and some random guy passing my cart glanced in and said, "Whoa, that's a big ground beef."

I guess. I was thinking I should have bought two. My sense of scale is way off with food anymore. He did not remark on the two giant bags of Crispy Rice cereal, however.

While I was in that city, I stopped to go in a very old church there that I had never seen. It took me a second to figure this out when I walked in.

Clearly marked, but how to access the holy water?

After a second of examination, I deduced that I needed to put my finger underneath the wooden box to activate the holy water, which then dripped onto my finger. I can see the practicality of this obvious COVID-holdover, but I did feel a bit like I was in a public bathroom waiting on an automatic soap dispenser.

I found a few more sunflowers on my run the other day.

Along with some white cosmos from the garden and some of what my kids call "cotton grass."

I still don't see a freeze in our forecast, so it's possible I may be able to find sunflowers for a little while yet. They're certainly getting more scarce, though.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.