Friday Food: In Which We Eat Feet

Friday

Short version: Meatballs, leftover pasta, cucumbers with ranch dressing

Long version: I had taken a package of loose Italian sausage from the freezer, thinking I would use it somehow with some leftover pasta and tomato sauce. Then A. came home from the store with ground beef. So instead, I used that plus the sausage to make meatballs and just heated up the leftover pasta. 

I made extra sauce for the meatballs with the rest of the giant can of tomato paste I had opened earlier in the week, plus caramelized onions I had on hand, garlic, and spices. I blended this all up with my immersion blender.

A. was near a store because he was bringing the cow we brought to our neighbor to the butcher, which means that in a few weeks, we will have many hundreds of pounds of ground beef on hand. And ti won't be watery store ground beef either. So exciting.

A. brought the cucumber home, too. That I just sliced and mixed with the last of the ranch dressing in the refrigerator.

And there it is.

Saturday

Short version: Pigs' feet and ramen, butterscotch pudding

Long version: I think you can probably guess that I was not the one who made this meal. Anytime you see feet or other, um, unorthodox meat products, you can be sure A. is behind it. And so he was.

He cooked the pigs' feet in water, soy sauce, etc. first to get them tender, then strained out the solids and put the feet back in the strained liquid with collard greens. At the end, he put in the ramen noodles from several packets of the instant kind.

I was highly amused by this illustration on one of the bags of pigs' feet. 

All the kids ate the ramen. Most of them ate the feet. They are more adventurous than I am. I had a salad with leftover pork in it.

I had made the pudding just because we had about half a gallon of milk that the children informed me was no longer good for drinking. It seemed okay to me when I tasted it, so I used the rest of it to make this butterscotch pudding.

For some reason, it was quite thin. I don't know if it's because I didn't use the optional cream this time, or if I didn't heat it long enough, but it was still eaten.

Sunday 

Short version: Ham, baked potatoes, green salad with vinaigrette, apple crisp with whipped cream

Long version: An extra spiral-cut ham I bought when they were on sale around Christmas and baked potatoes in the oven makes for a very easy dinner.

I made the crisp using a few Gala apples that the kids weren't enthused about eating raw, plus a jar of the apple slices I canned last fall. The topping needed more butter, even though I used almost two whole sticks. 

We didn't have any ice cream on hand, but whipped cream is an acceptable substitute. I just in the last few months realized that I have a whisk attachment for my immersion blender that is perfect for making whipped cream.

I've had this for like three years now and just figured this out. Oh well. Better late than never!

Monday

Short version: Leftovers, elderly cookies

Long version: A. and the one child who really likes them had leftover pigs' feet and ramen. The rest of us had leftover chickpea stew with some leftover ham added to it.

The cookies were some the youngest boy had brought home from school. He had an entire quart jar of double-chocolate peanut butter cookies he had left at school before Christmas break. Which meant they had been there a full month. Curious, I tried one. And it was fine.

Kind of amazing. I mean, it was maybe a little drier than when they were fresh, but still amazingly good. So everyone ate those.

Tuesday

Short version: Ham and potato casserole, raw bell peppers or cucumber, yogurt with strawberry jam

Long version: I almost always make something early in the day on Tuesdays that can just be heated in the oven by someone else while I'm at First Communion class with Poppy. This time, I chopped up a bunch of leftover ham, some peeled potatoes, and some caramelized onion, plus rendered lard, and stuck that in the oven covered with foil while I was baking bread. This got the potatoes all the way cooked. 

Eldest put that in a 400-degree oven, uncovered, about half an hour before I got home, so it would get a little crispy. I added some grated cheddar at the end, too.

Teamwork dinner.

I hadn't made strawberry jam in awhile, and when I did this day, I ended up with some that didn't fit in the jar. My family really loves yogurt with jam, but I don't often let them have it because it uses so much jam so quickly to sweeten the plain yogurt. However, if they put just a small scoop of jam in the yogurt, and then sweeten further with maple syrup, the strawberry flavor is there without decimating the jam. So that's what they did.

Wednesday

Short version: Mediocre pork chops, rice, green salad with vinaigrette

Long version: A. got a package of assorted pork chops that were all very large and somewhat thin. These are a challenge to cook in the quantity I need, because they don't really fit in pans very well. I had to split them between a half-sheet baking pan, which I stuck under the broiler to brown, and a skillet in which I browned the remaining three. They all had soy sauce, vinegar, and garlic powder on them, and they all went in the oven to finish baking after being browned. Except the ones under the broiler didn't really brown very well because they released too much liquid.

I used the skillet to make a kind of stir-fry sauce for them with more soy sauce and vinegar, plus ginger, sugar, and some of the liquid I had strained out from cooking the pigs' feet. And cornstarch to thicken.

I also used some of the pigs' feet liquid to cook the rice. I typically make basmati rice, but only had the short-grain rice on hand that I use for rice pudding. This is much stickier, and not preferred by my family, but as it was all I had, that's what they got.

All together, not the highest quality meal that's ever come out of my kitchen, but it was fine. 

Thursday

Short version: Leftovers at home, salad and concessions food on the road

Long version: I went to a basketball game in the afternoon, leaving a pot of pasta I had made with the remainder of the sauce from the meatballs, plus grated asadero cheese. Also leftover pork chops and rice, which didn't really go flavor-wise with the pasta, but everyone managed.

I brought a salad with me in the car and ate that before going into the game at 4 p.m. 

Road food.

The basketball player was desperately hungry after his game, and the concession stand had already closed. I stopped at a gas station before we left town and bought him two chimichangas. He ate half of one before admitting he didn't feel well. So I ate the other one on the way home. And then he was feeling a little better when we got home and ate some of the pasta.

Refrigerator check:

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

An Unusual Benefit of Online Shopping

Several months ago I stumbled upon a YouTube series of videos that followed a family living in the mountains of somewhere in Eastern Europe. It was a remote place, and the way of life there was markedly unlike our modern American life. This family heated their house and cooked on a wood-fueled stove, which the mother of the family started every morning.

I also start our woodstove every morning, so I was interested to see how she did it. She used a small stick that she shaved into a firestarter by splitting it very finely with a big knife all on one end.

It looked like a serious drag to have to do that every morning. 

I start our woodstove using the kids' old math books (thin paper that catches easily), torn-up Amazon delivery boxes, and kindling my boys split for me.

The nascent fire.

Five minutes later. 

What that mother wouldn't give for paper and cardboard to easily start her fire, and here I am drowning in it.

As always, a little perspective is an excellent thing.

Snapshots: Mardi Gras

We had an unfortunate start to our new school semester this month. Our new school was supposed to be ready for the students when we got back to school after break. The entire last week of last semester was spent moving into the new classrooms. But when the time came, there were some issues that kept the new facility from passing inspection for the kids to be there.

The old classrooms were already in the process of demolition. There was nowhere for the students to go.

BOOOOO.

The first week of classes was outright canceled. The second week was online. 

Poppy having a cheerily-named Brain Break, which pretty much means an opportunity for the kids to get up and move. This was some weird video where they were hopping around trying to avoid a Yeti.

Not a single person in this house likes online schooling, at all, so we're all relieved that we can go back in person tomorrow. 

The house always looks a little bare after the Christmas decorations are put away, so I put out some Mardi Gras decorations I had.

The latest re-made candles were, coincidentally, purple, which is perfect for Mardi Gras.

I didn't have very many Mardi Gras decorations, so I decided to add something to them. I had seen randomly online somewhere the idea of a Mardi Gras tree, which is just a Christmas tree decorated in the Mardi Gras colors of green, purple, and gold. I liked this idea, so I bought a foot-tall tree, some additional beads, and a dozen small ornaments.

Poppy and I spent some time fluffing up the tree, adjusting the ornament strings to make them smaller (the long strings were ugly and made the tree look sort of hairy), and strategically draping beads.

Poppy asked what we would use for a star. I didn't really have anything, but as she was playing around with the extra gold string we had cut from the ornaments, she discovered that if she pulled along them, they unraveled and got kind of fluffy. She did this to all of the extra strings, and then I took them all and tied them together to make a sparkly, fluffy decoration for the top of the tree.

The finished tree.

I am not a "decor" person, and this is definitely silly, but I love it.

I particularly like how it reflects the candlelight.

I needed just a little bit of tomato for some chicken corn chowder I was making, and I didn't want to open a whole can of them. I remembered a bag of whole tomatoes I had stuck in the freezer just before we left for New Orleans. They were the last of the small garden tomatoes that had been ripening in the kitchen, and I didn't want them to get wrinkly and gross while we were gone. I just rinsed them off and threw them in a bag to put in the freezer.

A taste of summer.

It always seems like it won't be worth the bother of putting such a small quantity in the freezer, but they always get used.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.