Friday Food: Snowy Days

Friday 

Short version: Chili/rice skillet, toast

Long version: We had our All Saints Day Mass at 5:30 p.m. and we had to leave early and stay after since I'm Church Lady this month.

That's why we ate early, at around 3:30 p.m. I just heated up leftover rice and chili with cheese for our before-church meal. And then when we got home around 7:15, the kids all had some toast before bed.

Saturday

Short version: Christmas in November

Long version: In an attempt to make a meal that would result in leftovers, I pulled out a whole ham from the freezer and baked that, along with a pan of scalloped potatoes. This is typically what I make for Christmas dinner, but there's no law that says I can't make it other times, I guess.

The worst part of scalloped potatoes is cutting all the potatoes thin. There's really no easy way to do this, but I've decided I'd rather use my knife than the mandolin blade on my cheese grater. I hate that thing.

Anyway. It made a lot of food.

It also made some really awful dishes to scrub, which is the second-worst part of scalloped potatoes.

This was not actually Christmas, however, so our vegetable was just pickled carrots. And I did not make a dessert. Heaven knows there's been enough sugar consumption in our house since Halloween.

Sunday

Short version: Pizza, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: One full half-sheet-pan of pepperoni, one cast iron skillet of cheese.

And no Sunday dessert. The kids had been eating from their personal candy bags all day. They definitely did not need a dessert.

Monday

Short version: Ham and rice skillet

Long version: We actually got home two hours early from school thanks to a snowstorm, so I could have cooked something more involved than my planned leftovers in a skillet+cheese. But I stuck with my plan, which was just to dice leftover ham and fry it in lots of butter, then add leftover rice, frozen peas, some onion powder, and grated cheddar cheese.

This then gave me time to crawl into bed and hibernate for an hour or so while the wind blew snow and sleet against my window. Way better than sitting in my office listening to that and worrying about the state of the roads. Hooray for early release on a snowy afternoon.

Tuesday

Short version: Lamb ribs, baked potatoes, pickled carrots

Long version: We really have very little meat left in our freezer, which is why I'm now unearthing and using things like lamb ribs. I just marinated these in olive oil, vinegar, salt, and garlic powder, and the cooked them covered at a low heat for awhile. 

I didn't even try to cut them into individual pieces, which is only possible with a cleaver and some aggression. A. had cut them into pieces of about four or five ribs each when we were butchering, and I figured that was small enough for everyone to gnaw the meat off.

The potatoes went right in the oven with the ribs. And the pickled carrots are popular with everyone. I guess I should've made a bunch more jars of them when I was dealing with the avalanche of carrots. Next time.

Wednesday

Short version: Sloppy joe sandwiches, potatoes, cucumbers with ranch dip

Long version: I went directly from work to the parish hall to set it up for a funeral reception, which meant I didn't get home until about 5 p.m. Thankfully, I already had some buns I had made when I was baking bread on Sunday, as well as ground beef in the refrigerator. So I made sloppy joe meat with the beef, already-cooked onions from the freezer, and ketchup, vinegar, molasses, and Worcestershire sauce (I don't have any ready-made barbecue sauce on hand at the moment).

There were a few servings of scalloped potatoes left, and one baked potato. So I chopped and fried the baked potato and apportioned out the various potato preparations to bulk up the sandwiches a bit.

The cucumber was the last Armenian cucumber from the garden. Well, except for the several jars of pickled cucumbers in the refrigerator. 

Thursday

Short version: Leftover lamb ribs, hamburgers, baked beans, cornbread, pickles

Long version: There were quite a lot of lamb ribs left over, which I re-heated in the oven while I was baking the cornbread. This time I put some barbecue sauce on them, too, which A. tells me I should always do.

I had just enough ground beef left to make four small hamburgers, so those of us who are not enthused about lamb ribs had those.

I made the baked beans from pinto beans mostly because it was snowing and blowing all day. It seemed like an opportune time to simmer beans for a long time. And then I baked them while the oven was on to bake gingersnaps.

I'm leaning kinda heavily on the pickles-as-vegetable thing lately. These were cucumber pickles.

Refrigerator check:

Pickles on display on the bottom shelf: sauerkraut, carrots, and cucumbers.

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

A Non-political Poll

We have a poll of great import today, and it has nothing to do with the presidential election. It may be divisive, however, so I'm asking everyone to please remain respectful. 

The question at hand: What is the best Halloween treat? 

I am of course thinking about this because we've had the Halloween haul in our house for the past week, and it's always interesting to see what everyone chooses to eat first.

So much to choose from.

One son goes right for the Skittles.

One will allow no one to touch his Reese's.

Another can't choose and eats indiscriminately.

And Poppy? Her favorite was this weird novelty thing that looked like a paint roller and was rolled over the tongue.

A. has a great fondness for popcorn balls, which are a packaged thing I had never seen before moving here. He will also eat all the sour things, chewy things, and generally non-chocolate things that I always considered the garbage candy. He even likes Laffy Taffy, which is sort of inconceivable to me.

As for me, I'm mostly with the Reese's kid--particularly Reese's Pieces, although they are rare--but I do love Hundred Grands, which don't really seem to be a thing anymore. I don't think any of the kids got any this year.

Luckily for me, I seem to be particularly sensitive to chocolate that picks up the taste of other candy, which happens when they're all jumbled around in a bag. The chocolate will taste a bit like the lollipops or whatever, which I find disgusting and which keeps me from eating it. No one else seems to notice this, though, so I guess that's just me.

So tell me: What is your favorite Halloween treat? And bonus question: Do you notice that weird flavor transfer to chocolate in a mixed bag of candy?

Snapshots: First Freeze, Halloween, and All Saints

Our first freeze was Wednesday night, which meant everything remaining in the garden needed to be harvested.

Beets.

The mostly red tomatoes, plus a few peppers.

And the mostly green tomatoes, that will ripen slowly in that box for the next couple of months.

Not pictured is the basil, with which I made quite a bit of pesto for the freezer. The parsley and thyme can survive a light frost, so they're still out there for now, but otherwise, the 2024 garden is done.

Next, Halloween.

I remembered that someone--I think the MiL--had given us a bat cookie cutter, and it seemed like I should use that somehow for Halloween. My bread is not big enough for the width of it, though, so I cut the scrambled eggs with it. It only sort of worked.

Egg bat. If you use a lot of imagination.

I arrived at the school at 3 p.m. for the elementary Halloween party absolutely laden with bags.

Costumes and party offering of cheese and crackers.

The children were not enthused about trick-or-treating this year being in the daylight, but they did greatly enjoy their candy sorting and trading.

One very meticulous child's sorting. I particularly like the Twix laid out in a "T."

November is one of my mayordoma months, which meant I needed to change the altar linens for the feast day of All Saints on November 1. The color for feast days is white, so I went ahead and changed the (fake) flowers, too.

All Saints altar.

Somewhat relatedly, this time of year the rising sun makes some very cool patterns of light on the cross and religious art on a wall of my living room.

May our light shine before all.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.