Friday Food: So Many Plan Bs

Friday 

Short version: Leftover cottage pie

Long version: Another trip to town--and a bad night's sleep--wiped me out. When I got home I just asked A. to heat up the rest of the cottage pie for dinner. He did, everyone ate, the end.

Saturday

Short version: Spanish tortilla, apple slices

Long version: Poppy requested the Spanish tortilla kind of out of the blue. I had a lot of eggs on hand and was going to be at the volleyball game with a couple of kids in the afternoon, so it seemed like an opportune time to make this in the morning to have on hand.

I used quite a lot of tomatoes in it, since I have quite a lot of tomatoes at the moment.

I had meant to serve cucumbers, but the ones I pulled from my garden were inedibly bitter. This year I tried again planting pickling cucumbers along with the Armenian cucumbers that are actually a variety of muskmelon. I think the grasshoppers ate all the Armenian cucumbers vines, though, because all I have are pickling cucumbers. And they are always bitter. I probably don't water enough or consistently enough, but it's still annoying.

Anyway. I had stashed some of Rafael's apples in the refrigerator, so we had those instead.

Sunday

Short version: Pork or lamb ribs, cheesy mashed potatoes, corn, chocolate-covered peanut butter balls

Long version: I had one rack of pork spareribs, which is not enough for everyone. That's why I also took out a bag of lamb ribs. Only two members of the family actually like the lamb ribs. This way there was enough for everyone without everyone having to eat lamb ribs.

I had polled the children earlier to see if they would rather have potatoes in some form, or macaroni and cheese. Of course they didn't agree, but eventually compromised on cheesy mashed potatoes. The only time I add cheese to mashed potatoes is when I re-heat leftover mashed potatoes, but I indulged them anyway. All I did was stir in some grated cheddar after mashing the potatoes with the milk, butter, and sour cream.

This recipe for peanut butter balls. I hadn't made them in awhile and forgot that I definitely do not need a full cup of chocolate chips to coat the peanut butter balls. Maybe 2/3 of a cup. I always add a bit of coconut oil to the chocolate chips to thin it a bit, and I used dark chocolate chips this time. That's a good idea, because the peanut butter mixture is very sweet.

Monday

Short version: Tuna Mac, green salad with vinaigrette, marshmallows with leftover chocolate shell

Long version: My plan for this night had been pizza, but then it was much cooler in the house than it has been and my bread dough took way too long to rise. It wasn't ready in time to make pizza crust, so I had to figure out something else for dinner.

I made this recipe (times six), and then added frozen peas and a big can of tuna. This made a LOT of tuna mac.

It almost completely filled my biggest casserole dish.

I re-heated the chocolate from the night before and let the kids dip marshmallows in it, just to get it out of the refrigerator before I forgot about it. A Labor Day treat, I suppose.

Tuesday

Short version: Cottage pie, pickles or tomatoes with mayonnaise, crepe cake

Long version: Again not what I had planned to make. I had taken chicken breasts out to thaw, but then I saw that the children were having barbecue chicken for lunch at school. I had quite a lot of the cheesy mashed potatoes left, and I had also made such a large quantity of the meat mixture for the cottage pie last week that I had frozen some of it.

I actually heated the meat and potatoes separately before combining them in the casserole dish, and then I stuck it under the broiler with bits of butter on top to get crispy. It came out well.

The kids got dill pickles. A. got sliced tomatoes with mayonnaise on them. This sounds kind of weird, but the mayonnaise gets a little diluted with the tomato juices and makes a kind of dressing for them. So good.

The crepe cake was just because I had four crepes left from the ones A. made after church on Sunday. I layered them with a mixture of strawberry jam and currant jelly, plus whipped cream.

Not the prettiest, but much appreciated after a return to the dreaded school after a four-day weekend.

Wednesday

Short version: Chicken in tomato-cream sauce, rice, frozen peas, experimental apple crisp with cream

Long version: Third night in a row I didn't make what I had planned, again because of the school lunch. I had been thinking I would make chicken parmesan and spaghetti. Then I saw the school lunch for the day was spaghetti with meat sauce.

Yet another plan B.

I did have a lot of roasted and pureed tomatoes on hand I wanted to use. So I first browned and cooked the chicken breasts in olive oil and butter--the butter helps them brown much better--then when they were cooked, I took them out and added some pickled onion slivers and a couple of cloves of garlic. After those had cooked for a bit, I added some of the pureed tomatoes and a little cream. I sliced the chicken before putting it back in the sauce, just so more of the surface area would be saucy.

The sauce was good, but the chicken was still a bit bland. As is often the case with boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Which is why I don't typically buy them.

A. and I had been to the coffee shop in one of the nearby villages in the morning after Mass, and the lady who runs it asked us if we would pick some of the abundant pears and apples from her trees in the village.

Would we? OF COURSE we would.

The apples were Granny Smiths. I cooked some of them in a skillet--the same one I had reduced tomatoes in earlier--with water, maple syrup, cinnamon, cloves, and a bit of apple cider vinegar. I was going to give these to the children for breakfast in the morning, but then I decided to make a crisp with them for dessert instead.

The apples were already cooked, so I thought I would try cooking the topping--flour, oats, sugar, spices--on the apples in the microwave before putting it under the broiler to get more crispy.

I microwaved the crisp for about seven minutes before broiling it, and everyone told me it was the best crisp ever. Okay. I think it was because the ratio of apples to topping skewed heavily to the topping this time, but it's good to know that method works. A much better way to make a crisp when I don't want to run the oven for an hour.

Thursday

Short version: Leftovers, corn on the cob

Long version: The children had the leftover tuna mac. I used the rest of the chicken for A. and me, but I chopped it up more and made more sauce for it with more tomato puree, some sauerruben, paprika, and sour cream to make a kind of chicken paprikash. A. had his with leftover rice.

I got the corn at the grocery store while I was in town. I haven't been going to the town with the produce truck, unfortunately, so I have to rely on the produce at the grocery store. Luckily, this store has pretty good produce.

Refrigerator check:

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

Twice-pickled

This has not been a good year for cucumbers. For the past several years, I have grown Armenian cucumbers. These are not cucumbers at all botanically, but rather a variety of muskmelon. I don't like them quite as much as real cucumbers--they have a faint taste of muskmelon that is detectable when eating the Armenian cucumbers raw--but they have the great advantage of never getting bitter. Even when they grow to huge sizes, they're never bitter. This was a frequent problem I had with true cucumbers. Also, the Armenian cucumbers make excellent refrigerator pickles, which is my main use for cucumbers.

This year, I planted the Armenian cucumbers, and then I decided to try again with pickling cucumbers. I noticed early in the summer that the grasshoppers had eaten only the cucumber vines that were already climbing. They had left the vines still low on the ground. I think it was the Armenian cucumber vines they ate, because I have zero Armenian cucumbers.

I am getting some cucumbers, but they are almost all bitter. Predictably. So I haven't made any pickles from them.

However! One of the former teachers at school showed up to the county fair with lots of cucumbers and mentioned she's been getting great quantities. So I texted her to ask if she would be willing to sell me some cucumbers so I could make pickles. She responded that she wouldn't sell them, but she'd be happy to take some pickles.

Thus, the year's first refrigerator dills have been stowed away.

We already ate one of the pint jars of dill pickles. Rather than throw away the pickling liquid, however, I re-heated it in the microwave and used it to pickle some carrot ribbons.

I do this a lot with the liquid from the pickled onion slivers I almost always have in the refrigerator now. When I finish the onions the first time, I either re-heat the liquid and pickle more onions, or I pickle (store) radish slices.

Pickle trio.

This way I always have some kind of pickle on hand. I only use the pickling liquid once more before dumping it, but at least I get more than one use out of it. I was dismayed to see a gallon of white vinegar priced at over four dollars last week at the store, so I feel like the less of it I have to use, the better. 

Didn't vinegar used to be cheap? I feel like even the gallon of vinegar was like two or three dollars not too long ago. But maybe I'm misremembering.

Anyway. We have pickles, and that makes everyone happy.

Snapshots: Come Walk With Me

We haven't checked in on the horses in awhile. I wonder what they're up to . . .

Grazing, as usual.

This is what it looks like in our almost-ghost village.

Dead trucks.

Dead roads to nowhere.

When I was in town on Friday, I parked next to a truck almost as old as the one in the above photo, although this one was still on the road.

Barely. How does one do this to a truck?

It's green-chile-roasting season in New Mexico. You can buy giant sacks of green chiles in the grocery store and bring them right out to the parking lot to be roasted.

The chile-roasting area at this store is cordoned off by upside-down shopping carts.

I didn't do anything too interesting with flowers this week. I'm pretty much in "all sunflowers, all the time" right now. This is what I did for the altar today.

More apricot branches, more sunflowers, and kochia seed heads.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.