Friday Food: A Roof Picnic

Friday 

Short version: Tuna patties, lamb-y rice, garden cabbage

Long version: Poppy and I harvested the first cabbage from the garden this day.

No dolls to be seen in the cabbage patch, alas.

Poppy has been asking for, oh, four months now when the cabbages will be ready, so this was a big day for her. 

So. Two cans of tuna made into patties--with bread crumbs, eggs, mayonnaise, and mustard--rice cooked in lamb stock, and wedges of the cabbage.

Ta da! Dinner.

Saturday

Short version: Ram in wine sauce, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, chocolate ice cream

Long version: And on the second day of garden cabbage, there was coleslaw. This coleslaw, to be specific, and man, it sure is good.

The ram meat was a bag labeled "kebab," which meant it was small pieces cut from the back leg, so it would be tender. The ram meat is pretty strongly-flavored, however, which is why I marinated it in olive oil, vinegar, and lots of garlic powder. It still smelled kind of rank when I started cooking it, but by the time it was done, it was fine. No off taste at all. Hooray for marinating.

All I did for the sauce was add red wine to the pan, then some pickled onions diced fine, and then cold butter off heat. It's really magical how cold butter swirled into a sauce will thicken it right up.

One child had happened to spy the chocolate ice cream when I was getting the meat out of the freezer, and asked wistfully if we could have it this night. So we did.

Sunday

Short version: Sausages, leftover rice, baked beans, green salad with vinaigrette, triple chocolate ice cream sandwiches

Long version: I've been getting a package here and there of different sausages available at Walmart, to see which ones my family likes. This night, I cooked one package of plain smoked beef, and one of jalapeno-cheddar. The jalapeno was surprisingly popular, so I guess I'll get that again.

Poppy had asked me if we could have a picnic outside. I told her she and her brothers could go ahead, but that Dad and I prefer to eat inside. After some discussion among the children, it was decided that they should eat on the shed roof to get high enough to avoid the grasshoppers. And that is what they did.

Can you spot the children in their leafy bower?

This meant A. and I got to eat together with just the two of us. Like a date or something.

Date food.

I hadn't made anything for Sunday dessert, but I had lots of double chocolate peanut butter cookies in the cookie jar, and a little chocolate ice cream left. So I combined the two into a sandwich.

A most excellent idea, if quite messy.

Monday

Short version: Scrambled eggs, leftover mashed potatoes with cheese, cucumbers and grape tomatoes

Long version: My children get unreasonably excited about leftover mashed potatoes heated up with cheese stirred in. It is awfully good. They probably would have eaten just that, but I also scrambled some eggs since I still have a lot on hand.

I can think of no entertaining caption for this photo of a plate of food. So here. A photo of food.

Tuesday

Short version: Pizza, leftover sausage, frozen green beans

Long version: I made just one cheese pizza, and then portioned out the leftover sausage to supplement it.

Wednesday

Short version: Primal enchilada casserole, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: When I was switching all the food from our old freezer to our new one, I found a package of beef heart from the last cow we got. That was about two years ago, so I wanted to get rid of that. In the past I've given the heart to the dogs. It has a slightly iron taste, and the texture is a little off for me.

However, it occurred to me we could try grinding it with the rest of the elk meat. So that's what we did. I was joking that we had made a primal blend of the sort sold at a premium at fancy meat shops. Which is, actually, what we did. Except I think the primal blends include liver, and that I will never do. Liver ruins everything for me, no matter how little of it there may be.

Anyway. 

I used some of the resulting ground meat to make an enchilada casserole, mostly to use up the remains of three bags of corn tortillas that only had broken pieces of tortilla left in them.

Thursday

Short version: Pork, pureed potatoes, pureed calabaza, frozen green beans

Long version: We're getting into weather hot enough that I do not want to be cooking at 4 p.m. in an already-warm kitchen. So I made a pork shoulder in the morning, and then just shredded some of it and fried it in the rendered lard with spices at dinnertime.

I also baked potatoes with the meat, which I then scooped out and pureed. Half the children love them this way. The other half do not appreciate the texture. I don't, either, which is why I usually mash them with a potato masher.

Only the adults ate the calabaza. The children had the green beans.

Dad plate.

Refrigerator check:

My family will look in this full refrigerator and say with completely straight faces that "There's no food in this house."

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

The End of the Paschal Candle

Remember when we brought home the old Paschal candle from church to burn? That turned out to be way more fun than I thought it would be.

First of all, it was cool to have such a big candle in the house. It was about a foot tall when we started burning it, which is the biggest candle I've ever had at home. 

Also, it was decorated on the outside with raised wax that burned in an interesting way. For instance, the blue raised cross on the front resisted melting when the wax around it was melting, which resulted in the cross being much more prominent for awhile. The gold paint used on it looked really neat when it melted, too, all sparkly and forming a separate pool of molten wax in the middle of the melted clear wax.

Since this is a Paschal candle, it is lit in our church only for the Easter season, baptisms, and funerals. I decided we would just burn it during the Easter season and then bury the remains.* The Easter season runs from Easter Sunday through Pentecost Sunday, which was last Sunday. We burned it all day on Sundays in that time, as well as a couple of other rainy, dark days. 

By this weekend, all that was left of the candle was a pit in the sand I had secured it in, with melted wax in it. I had sunk the candle down a couple of inches in the sand to make sure it wouldn't tip, so the pit was pretty deep. The heat from the flame continued to melt wax around the outside that then flowed into this pit, and so the flame kept burning, even with no actual candle left.

It was actually really neat to see this, particularly on Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost is the celebration of the Holy Spirit being sent to the church. The Bible story about this describes the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire from heaven coming to the apostles, which made this ever-burning little flame in our house most appropriate.

I kept thinking that surely the flame would go out anytime during the day on Sunday, but it was still burning when I went to bed. A. finally blew it out before he went to bed.

I was kind of curious to see how much longer it would have burned like this, but the children were adamant that Easter was over and so we couldn't burn the candle anymore. Poppy took it upon herself to dig the hole and bury the remains.

She marked the spot appropriately, too.

Thus ends the Paschal candle. We don't replace it at church every year--it's originally about three feet tall, so it doesn't burn down all that fast--which means we won't have one next year, but it was fun while it lasted.

* This candle had been blessed, so it had to buried, not just thrown in the trash.

Snapshots: Below-the-Hill Flowers

We live on a high-elevation plateau. Most of our trips out of our county involve going down a hill that drops us more than a thousand feet in elevation. Here in the West of the United States, elevation determines weather to a large extent. That means that here on our plateau, we are about ten degrees cooler than below the hill at all times, with much more wind. 

The weather difference also means a difference in animals and plants. The wildflowers are different down there. A. has been feeding our friends' extensive managerie below the hill this weekend while they're away, and I asked him to bring me some wildflowers from there.

He did.

Those big globe things are the flowers of the yucca plant. Interesting, if sort of hard to incorporate aesthetically into an arrangement.

Indian paintbrush. Tomie dePaola wrote a whole children's book about these flowers.

And some bonus flowers from above the hill when I took Poppy to play with her friend at the park and the two girls spent about half an hour running around gathering flowers for the moms.

We had a very chilly and wet day most of Wednesday. It was only 62 degrees when I woke up, so I decided to start the woodstove just to drive the chill and damp out of the house.

A June fire.

I also lit the remains of the Paschal candle to cheer up the living room a bit.

It has been a remarkably wet spring so far, which means happy plants in the garden.

Happy collards and cabbage.

Happy beets and carrots.

Unfortunately, the wet doesn't seem to be discouraging the grasshoppers, which are back in the thousands.

This is the house wall in the back garden. This is not happy.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.