Friday Food: Here Comes the Tongue

Friday 

Short version: Pizzas, carrot sticks with ranch dip, chocolate pudding

Long version: Everything aligned for pizza this day: I had bread dough in process; I had pureed roasted tomatoes in the refrigerator; I had a whole block of asadero waiting to be grated and put in the freezer. That definitely all adds up to pizza.

I didn't have any pepperoni on hand, so one pizza had cooked bacon and pickled onions on it, and the other was just cheese.

I made the chocolate pudding for the sick child with a sore throat. And everyone else, too, of course.

Saturday

Short version: Aged lamb roast, roasted potatoes, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: We're getting to the forgotten and daunting cuts of meat at the bottom of the freezer now as we prepare to put the whole cull cow we're buying from our neighbor in there. I found a lamb roast labeled 2022 and figured that wasn't getting any younger. Ahem.

This was the afternoon Poppy and I took our drive to the mission church. I knew we wouldn't be getting home until just about dinnertime, so I prepped everything before I left.

I had apparently put a marinade in with the roast before I froze it, so all I did was brown it and leave it in the skillet for roasting. The potatoes I pre-roasted, stopping before they were all the way browned. This meant that all A. had to do was turn the oven on to 400 degrees and put the skillet with the roast in first, then the pan with the potatoes about fifteen minutes later. 

It was all pretty much done when we got home at 5:15 p.m. All I had to make was the salad, which was also easy because the lettuce was already washed and the dressing was the ranch dip from the night before.

We don't have roasts very often, and this was appreciated.

Sunday

Short version: Tacos de lengua, refried beans, chocolate peanut butter balls, cookies

Long version: Continuing my facing down of freezer things I would rather avoid, this was the day I cooked the tongue.

Tongue tastes fine, and there's a lot of meat there due to the size of a cow's tongue, but they are just . . . daunting.

It looks just like what it is.

Tongue is cooked whole slowly to tenderize before the thick covering is peeled off--that's where the taste buds are, which is very much not appealing*--and I chose to do this in my pressure-cooker/canner.

Partially I did this because that's the only pot I have big enough to fit the tongue, but also A. had replaced one of the valves on the top to see if I could get it to hold pressure after it stopped working, and I wanted to test that. I duly brought the pot up to pressure and was delighted to find that it does indeed work again. 

I pressure-cooked the tongue at about 11 pounds pressure for around an hour and a half, in water with chopped garlic, onion tops, and bay leaves. Then I peeled it, cut out the nasty bits, and chopped the remaining meat up.

I made corn tortillas this night on my cast-iron griddle pan, so when I was done with that, I used the hot griddle pan to fry the meat in beef tallow with spices.

We had lettuce, tomato, pickled onions, queso fresco, sour cream, hot sauce, and salsa to top them with, along with the refried beans. 

The tongue was 4.5 pounds uncooked, but I probably only ended up with around two pounds of meat in the end. I had invited our priest and his brother to come for dinner, and there was just enough meat for everyone.

And yes, I did tell them what I was cooking ahead of time. Tacos de lengua are not uncommon here and these are not picky eaters, so they didn't hesitate. Or if they did, they didn't tell me.

The brother doesn't eat gluten, which is why we had the chocolate peanut butter balls. The cookies were this week's snack cookies--peanut butter, oats, chocolate chips--that I had made this day, so I put those out too and everyone could choose their dessert.

Monday

Short version: Potato soup with optional sausage and collards, leftover corn bread

Long version: I had made a very large pot of pureed bacon and potato soup over the weekend for the sick child, figuring if I made a big one I could use up some of the many potatoes I have on hand and freeze some soup for future illness (minus the dairy I added at the end).

This is the soup we had this night. To bulk it up and add some more flavor, I diced and fried a package of andouille sausage, along with some diced collard greens. Those I added to the bowls of the family members who would appreciate them. 

I had made cornbread for our post-church breakfast the day before, and there were just enough pieces of that left for everyone to have one with their soup.

Basketball started this day. Our basketball player is the one person who really dislikes soup. Since he wasn't here at dinnertime anyway, he got to have leftover lamb and pizza when he got home.

Tuesday

Short version: Pasta bake, leftovers

Long version: I had some roasted and pureed tomatoes in the refrigerator, so I used those, a package of loose Italian sausage, some already-cooked onion and roasted garlic from the freezer, heavy cream, grated asadero cheese from the freezer, the fat and some of the broth from when I boiled the tongue, and pasta to make a pasta bake that A. could put in the oven while I was at First Communion class. That way, dinner was ready when I got home at 5:45 p.m.

I also topped this whole casserole of pasta with slices of a cheese mysteriously labeled "melting cheese." It's some kind of Mexican cheese the child with me at the store asked to get. I was curious what it might be, so I did buy it, and it turns out to be pretty much fresh whole milk mozzarella. Good to know. Like fresh mozzarella, it can't be grated easily, which is why I sliced it instead.

Ready for the oven.

A. doesn't appreciate pasta as much as the children do, so he got the last big bowl of potato soup, to which I added more collard greens and some of the cooked Italian sausage. I also made him quesadillas with the last four homemade corn tortillas and the last of the refried beans. Plus cheese, of course.

Wednesday

Short version: Chicken-fried pork chops, milk gravy, mashed potatoes, green peas

Long version: Although it is more work to make pork chops this way--with the egg wash, seasoned flour, and individual browning before baking--they are so appreciated that I do it anyway. I need to remember that it always takes more salt than I think it should, though. And more fat in the pan when I'm browning them. That flour can take a lot of salt and absorb a lot of fat.

Thursday

Short version: Rotisserie chickens and gravy, lamb-y rice, cucumbers with ranch dip, surprising cookies

Long version: I was at Walmart this day and was delighted to find the frozen rotisserie chickens in the meat section. These are four dollars for a whole chicken. I got two and just re-heated them in the oven for dinner. After rinsing out their bags with hot water, I had enough liquid to make some gravy, too. This is definitely the cheapest convenient meat I have ever seen. Almost as cheap as the chicken leg quarters, which are definitely not convenient and are kind of gross to cut up.

I made the rice with some lamb stock I had had in the refrigerator and wanted to use up.

The cookies I found on a clearance rack at Walmart. I always look at this, although most of the "deals" aren't really very good. It's mostly strangely-flavored candies, and they are not cheap enough to be tempting. This time, however, I saw bags of dark chocolate wafer cookies from Austria. I love wafer cookies, but they're usually the most artificially-flavored garbage out there. These, however, were not artificially flavored. They were also only one dollar each because they expire this month. I took a chance and bought four bags.

These were SO GOOD. If you see these, buy them.

Especially if you see them for one dollar.

Refrigerator check:

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

* Ha ha. Appealing, peeling a tongue . . . Insert your own joke here.

Tumbling Tumbleweeds

Tumbleweeds are so iconic of the American West: blowing about on the wide-open spaces, a fixture of western movies, almost as recognizable as the cowboy.

They are also awful.

We live in the land of the tumbleweed, which is actually an invasive plant called a Russian thistle. They grow big, plentiful, and prickly, drying in the ground and then getting uprooted by the wind to blow about and disperse their seeds.

Still firmly rooted and biding their time.

They are wretched plants. They are stiff and sharp, embed their prickers into the sheep's wool, and this year, they are EVERYWHERE.

We must have gotten rain at just the right time for them, because I've never seen so many. Even the one year when they formed a solid four-foot-high bank of tumbleweeds against the garden fence, I don't remember seeing so many in the ground. They're currently still rooted, but in the next month, they'll start blowing free, and then we're really in for it. 

All the dark patches in this field are Russian thistle.

There's really nothing to be done about them at this stage except wait for them to build up against fencing and then pitch-fork them into piles to burn. And hope that next year isn't such a banner year for them.

Snapshots: A Far-flung Church

After quite a bit of work by A. and the eldest boy, the brown truck has been towed to the semi-retired mechanic in the village for help with the rodent-chewed wiring.

Good thing we have a one-ton van that can tow anything.

I always put up a string of white lights around the iron divider running between the kitchen and dining room right after daylight savings time ends. I call them my time-change lights. I bought a new string last year, which I carefully wound up and put away. When I plugged them in this year, only half the string was working. 

WHY does this seem to happen with all lights now? I can't get more than one year out of them before they're only partially functioning.

I did try replacing one bulb that looked burned out, but when that didn't work, I gave up and ordered another string.

I did use the half-working string of lights around the kitchen window, so at least I didn't have to throw them away.

Winter lights.

We don't have a lot of deciduous trees around here to give us fall color, but the apricot trees do turn a nice yellow.

The windmill apricot is almost at peak color.

We have several mission churches in our parish that have a Mass once a month. I've been to all of them but one. I've been meaning to go to it for awhile now, but it's about 70 miles away and not on the way to anywhere, so it's a definitely commitment to get there.

Poppy said she'd go with me, though, and we finally had nothing going on the second Saturday of the month when Mass is celebrated there, so off we went.

There's a whole lot of nothing getting there. It was even less populated than around our house.

The town the church is in is at the beginning of these hills.

It's a plain old church.

The inside is quite plain, too, with unfortunate ceiling tiles.

Not much around it.

But they do have an outhouse.

Nice sunset on the way home.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.