Friday Food: Ribs x 2

Friday 

Short version: Asian-ish pork ribs, porky rice, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: A. bought some already-cut pork ribs that were on sale after the Fourth of July. These were convenient to cook and eat, but kind of weird-looking.

Very long and sort of awkward.

Instead of using barbecue spices on them, I cooked them first in soy sauce and vinegar to cook until tender  in the morning. At dinnertime, I made a coating for them of more soy sauce and vinegar, plus garlic powder, ginger, and brown sugar, and broiled them.

The rice was cooked in the de-fatted juices I poured from the pan after initially cooking the ribs.

The salad was not my lettuce, because the cursed grasshoppers have eaten all my lettuce, but it did have tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden.

So far holding out against the hoppers.

Saturday

Short version: Giant pot of pasta with meat sauce, more salad with vinaigrette, ice cream

Long version: We had some people stop by right around dinnertime, on their way home from a road trip. I had never met them before, and one of them was a ten-year-old boy, so I figured pasta was a safe bet. Also, I could kind of make it ahead, which was helpful because I wasn't sure of their schedule.

I made the meat sauce the morning before. Not knowing how much they would eat, and anticipating feeding nine people, I made two pounds of pasta, which was a LOT of pasta. We maybe ate a third of it this night.

Luckily, leftover pasta will not go to waste. The kids ate from that pot for the next few days.

Sunday

Short version: Grilled chuck steaks, boiled potatoes, frozen corn, milkshakes or not

Long version: This was what I had been planning on making for our anniversary dinner, except our anniversary was the day before and this is not really a meal that holds very well to accommodate uncertain schedules. So we had our anniversary dinner this day instead.

The steaks were chuck steaks, which are not super tender. I marinated them in a mustard vinaigrette before they were grilled, and A. kept them more on the rare side.

Grilled meat always tastes best.

I made two whole packages of steak--about five pounds--which made for a lot of leftovers. I did that on purpose, figuring if we were lighting the grill, we might as well cook all the steaks. Leftover steak is always appreciated.

The sides were nothing special. Neither was dessert. I offered to make milkshakes for anyone who wanted them, since Sundays are supposed to be for homemade desserts and I hadn't made one. Only one child and A. chose a milkshake instead of plain ice cream. I used vanilla ice cream, but made chocolate milkshakes with cocoa powder.

I pretty much never bother with buying chocolate milkshakes anywhere, because nowhere makes a chocolate milkshake that actually tastes like chocolate. I use a LOT of cocoa powder, so mine are very chocolatey. As it should be.

Monday

Short version: Post-pool leftovers

Long version: Our friends invited us to the pool this day. There is only one pool within a hundred miles. It's on the big ranch down the hill and can only be used by employees of that ranch, which our friends are. We were there for five hours and got home right about dinnertime.

Everyone was exhausted--and sunburned, definitely should've reapplied sunscreen, oops--so I just set out the leftover pasta, steak, and potatoes, and let everyone choose their dinners.

No vegetable. Oh well.

Tuesday

Short version: Brisket, potatoes, still-frozen peas, cherries

Long version: I got home from a trip to town right at dinnertime. I had taken out the last chunk of already-cooked brisket to thaw, and fried that in tallow with taco spices. I intended to serve it in tortillas, but the children had apparently already had tortillas with both breakfast and lunch. So instead A. had it in tortillas with cheese, and the children just had the meat with leftover potatoes.

Wednesday

Short version: Tuna/salmon patties, oven fries, frozen peas, peaches and cream

Long version: This was a request of Poppy's. I thought it would be cool enough to run the oven for the fries and all this day, but then it still ended up being almost 80 degrees in the kitchen by the time I was done.

Good dinner, though. Everyone was happy with it. I used two big cans of tuna and the very last can of salmon from excess commodities.

A. bought the peaches in town from a truck on the side of the road. The best place to buy fruit.

Thursday

Short version: Barbecue ribs, cornbread, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: Didn't we just have ribs? Yup. But this time I finished cooking them in barbecue sauce, so obviously, totally different.

Refrigerator check:

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

How Good We Have It

Every so often, I will re-read a book called Women's Diaries of the Westword Journey, by Lillian Schlissel. As you might gather from the title, it is a collection of diary entries written by women who migrated west with the wagon trains and so on in the 1800s.

There are many reasons I like to re-read this book, but one of the main reasons is that it reminds me how comparitively easy my life is now. 

Those women were cooking over open fires, when it wasn't raining, blowing wind, or otherwise unsuitable for fires. 

They were hauling water from streams, when they could get water. 

They were walking miles a day, or riding on uncomfortably jouncy and hard wagon seats. 

They were sewing all the clothing for themselves and their large families. 

They were scrubbing that clothing in streams, if they were lucky. 

And they were doing all of this while almost constantly pregnant or nursing a very small baby.

I was contemplating this the other day as I was making Mexican Wedding Cookies. I don't make these cookies often, because they take much more time and effort than most cookies. I have to chop walnuts, grind walnuts (I use my immersion blender), cream butter with my hand mixer, roll the balls individually to bake, and then roll them again individually in powdered sugar. 

However, a woman in 1890 making these cookies would have started by cracking and shelling all the walnuts. She would have had to grind the nuts in a molcajete. She would have had to cream the butter by hand with a spoon. She would have had to pulverize the sugar for rolling in a mortar and pestle. She would have had to build a fire in her cookstove and keep it at just the right temperature for baking.

This is a truly unimaginable amount of work to the modern cook. It occurred to me that this is most probably why they were considered wedding cookies, too, because no one would go to so much effort for anything but a very special occasion.

Truly a labor of love.

It's good to keep things in perspective sometimes. Mexican Wedding Cookies do that for me.

What are you most thankful for in our modern age?

Snapshots: Twenty-two Years

A. and I celebrated 22 years of marriage yesterday.

I always put our wedding album out on the table for the kids to look at. And they always remark how young we look in the photos.

I made a very pink vodka slushie for us to toast with. It's pink because of currant juice made with the wild currants the kids picked for me.

Poppy has been reading the Ramona Quimby books and, like every child who reads those books, she had to try making tin-can stilts like Ramona's.

She made them herself and got quite accomplished walking on them after some practice.

Washing beloved stuffed animals always results in a rather concerning clothesline.

Sheep and Jeremy the Rat, hung out to dry.

I finally replaced my speedy purple shoes that were falling apart.

Not purple. Not all that speedy, either, I guess.

My biggest accomplishment this week was completely emptying the younger boys' room and rearranging it when we cut their bunk bed into twin beds.

There was so. much. stuff. in this room.

Edited to add: I forgot the flowers this week! Shocking. You can see what is on the table right now in that photo above with the anniversary drinks. And then last week, I added a couple more sunflowers to the altar flowers before bringing them to church.

This week's altar flowers were very similar, except I bunched the sunflowers together a little more.

It's definitely sunflower season.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.