Friday Food: Re-imagined Food

Friday 

Short version: Sonic on the road, toasted bean burritos at home

Long version: I was gone until about dinnertime with one kid in town. He got Sonic before we started our drive home. A. used canned refried beans, cheese, and flour tortillas to make toasted burritos for the kids at home.

Saturday

Short version: Pizzas, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: I hadn't made pizza in awhile, but I had a giant blocks of asadero cheese (my mozzarella substitute) in the refrigerator that needed to be shredded and frozen, plus I had dough on hand for baking bread. Sounds like pizza time to me. I even found the very last bag of roasted tomato sauce from last year that had gotten to the bottom of the freezer. To that I added frozen pesto cubes to make the sauce.

I had some pepperoni in the freezer, too, as well as the chopped bell pepper from when my friend had given us salad ingredients. I had frozen the bell pepper for something later. So one pizza was pepperoni, bell pepper, and pickled onion, and one was just cheese.

Pizza time.

Sunday

Short version: Roasted chickens, baked potatoes, asparagus, frozen corn, brownie sundaes

Long version: I got these whole chickens from extra commodities food that was left at school. They were already seasoned, so all I did was drizzle on some olive oil and roast them.

Everything else went in the oven with them, too, which is the easiest way to make dinner.

I totally forgot I was planning on making brownies until about ten minutes before we ate. Luckily, that's about how long it takes to get these brownies in the oven. Then I just delayed dessert long enough for them to cool down a bit before I served them with ice cream and the chocolate syrup I almost always have in the refrigerator.

Monday

Short version: Chicken paprikash, mashed potatoes, Holy's cabbage or sauerkraut

Long version: I had made two chickens specifically to have leftovers. And then I used the leftover chicken to make chicken paprikash. That used up the paprika sludge from dying Easter eggs, plus leftover chicken, onions, garlic, and a bunch of sour cream. 

The mashed potatoes I made with all the leftover baked potatoes, scooped out, re-heated, and pureed.

And the cabbage came from the freezer. Very handy to have. I can actually just microwave it right in the bag for thirty seconds so I can get it out of the bag, then dump it into a bowl and microwave a few more minutes until it's hot. One kid doesn't like it, so he had some of the raw sauerkraut that's been in a jar in the refrigerator since last summer.

Tuesday

Short version: Leftovers

Long version: I went to the last track meet of the year, leaving a list on the refrigerator of all the available food for dinner. The kids all got their own dinners--mostly mashed potatoes and cheese, but at least one had pizza--and then A. and I finished the pizza when I got home. The trackster ate a green chile cheeseburger, french fries, and a milkshake with his team before we left town.

Wednesday

Short version: Smoked sausage, garlic bread, leftover vegetables

Long version: This particular sausage is some kind of Walmart brand. Not Great Value--some "fancier" brand that's still made by Walmart. It's actually pretty good.

Two packages fit perfectly in a 12-inch skillet.

I had made the garlic bread when I was baking bread a few days earlier, and there was leftover corn and cabbage. This made for an easy after-work meal.

One child had been sick, so for him I made rice in chicken stock and he had a small bowl of that. The one who doesn't like sausage had the rest of the chicken paprikash with the rice.

Thursday

Short version: Not jambalaya or cookies

Long version: I had a lot of rice left, four sausages, and some chicken and chicken stock I had made with the chicken carcasses. Sounds like jambalaya to me. 

I cooked onion, garlic, and celery, then added the jambalaya spices--cumin, chili powder, paprika, a bit of cayenne, Worcestershire sauce--and some tomato sauce before dumping in the diced meats, rice, and just a little stock. Easy and good.

I had made the cookies earlier in the day: chocolate chip with peanut butter added. I didn't make cookies during Lent, and the children are very happy now that I'm making them regularly again. Easter is a joyous season, indeed.

And then no one ate any of it because A. had taken the elementary school on a field trip at which they had pizza. The extra pizza came back to the school, one of the boys snagged an entire pizza, and then the older two boys ate the entire thing on their way home. Poppy had one piece, too. A. had eaten at a Chinese buffet while he was waiting for the children to finish at the museum. So no one was hungry and I saved the jambalaya for the next day.

Well, I ate a scoop of it in chicken stock as a soup, but there's still plenty left.

Refrigerator check:

Jambalaya in the red pot, ready for tomorrow.

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

The Countdown Begins

Many years ago--seven years ago, to be precise--I came up with the idea of counting down to the last day of school with a piece of candy for each child each day as they get on the bus. It was an idea born of desperation to get small children on the bus with a minimum of drama.

I started this tradition when I only had two children in school. We were living in New York at the time, which has school until agonizingly late in the month of June. Now we live in New Mexico where we get out of school in mid-May, and I have four children getting on the bus every day. None of them are very small anymore, either.

But still, every year when we have twelve days left of school, the egg cartons come out and the candy goes in.

Ready for the countdown. 

Come on, summer. 

Snapshots: Back to Walking

One of Poppy's classmates brought his chess set to school, and there was quite a bit of interest in it during recess.

In addition to the boy who brought the set, Poppy and another girl know how to play, which is pretty impressive for a first-grade class.

We got some eggs from our neighbor. One of them was really strange.

First time I've ever seen a wrinkled shell. The egg inside was fine, it just looked kind of creepy.

My dad had a pair of cowboy boots that he bought when I was just a year old. He doesn't have much use for cowboy boots, but they turned out to fit his eldest grandson very well. Those 44-year-old boots put in their first real day of cowboy work at a branding last week.

As my dad said, they finally got their spurs. Literally.

I've had some very irritating and slightly painful swelling in my hands and feet recently, which has meant I do not want to be running. I can walk, though. And when I walk, I can bring my cell phone, which I do not do when I run. That means pictures!

I found some flowers on my walk yesterday that I added to the remaining two roses from the Easter flowers I bought. Plus the decorative alliums that are blooming right now in the mechanic's pit garden.

The obviously-cultivated roses look a bit self-conscious in the midst of the wildflowers.

And at church, I discarded the wilted flowers--which was most of them--and managed to put together one smaller arrangement for the altar.

Last year's Easter flowers lasted a lot longer, but that's okay. They really only needed to last through Easter morning. Anything else is just a bonus.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.