Friday Food: Delayed Pizza

Friday 

Short version: Chicken, biscuits, tomato/cucumber salad, apple/pear crisp

Long version: I had enough chicken left from the bag of leg quarters I had thawed earlier in the week to separate them into thighs and drumsticks and roast them. Which is what I did.

Standard baking powder biscuits that went in with the chicken.

Standard biscuits, non-standard shapes. As ever.

The salad had cherry tomatoes and cucumbers from the store, which are never as good as garden tomatoes and cucumbers, of course, but good enough with homemade ranch dressing and pickled onions.

Saturday

Short version: Wedding food

Long version: This was the night we were at the giant ranch wedding. The food came from a local (-ish, maybe 130 miles) Mexican restaurant. It was beef or chicken fajitas with flour tortillas, rice, beans, chips and salsa, and, of course, dessert. Way better than most wedding food. The cake was even pretty good. I didn't try the vanilla/raspberry cake, not being a fan of fruit in cakes, but I did like the German chocolate cake.

Because I didn't have to cook dinner, I spent some time canning apricots and rhubarb. All of our apricots got killed by frost, but my friend down the hill in a much warmer town has a couple of trees at her place. She told me last week they were starting to drop their fruit, so I made a trip to town on Wednesday mostly just to pick apricots. It's a long way for fruit, but these are the only apricots we're getting this year, and a year without apricot jam is a sad year indeed.

I ended up with about eight pints of apricot jam. And then, since I had everything out and the kitchen was all sticky already anyway, I made some rhubarb jam, too.

I know this is not eight pints of apricot jam. There was an un-canned quart jar in the refrigerator already.

Sunday

Short version: Chicken tetrazzini, apple/pear crisp with vanilla ice cream

Long version: It was quite chilly this day, so that simmering the chicken bones from Friday's meal to make stock provided some welcome heat to the house. With the meat I pulled off those bones, plus the stock, and then spaghetti, onions, garlic, cream, milk, peas, and cheese, I made a casserole of something like chicken tetrazzini. No mushrooms, though.

It was quite tasty, and very filling.

I used one quart jar of canned apple slices and one quart jar of canned pear slices for the crisp. Canning fruit is always worth it, even though it's a huge pain at the time.

Monday

Short version: Sloppy joe sandwiches, leftover pasta, carrot sticks, ice cream

Long version: We were supposed to have a guest join us for pizza, but then he re-scheduled for Thursday. Since the main reason he was coming was to try sourdough pizza, I decided to bake the already-prepared crusts with sauce and then freeze them in the pan so we could still have it Thursday. This meant I needed something pretty last-minute for dinner.

Luckily, I had cooked some ground beef earlier in the day just to have on hand, so I made some of that into sloppy joe meat to have on the bread I had baked in the afternoon. One child had the last of the pasta.

Tuesday

Short version: Steaks, mashed potatoes, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: While I was organizing the big meat freezer a bit, I found some packages of steaks. I thawed one package of rib steaks and one of sirloin steak. We haven't had steak in awhile, and A. was inspired to grill them. This happens very infrequently, but grilling really is the best way to cook meat.

Dad plate.

Wednesday

Short version: Leftovers, green peas

Long version: We had enough leftover steak for everyone to have some, and then I had leftovers from a random lunch I had made a couple of days previously with ground beef and rice.

Thursday

Short version: Pizzas, green salad with vinaigrette, crispy rice treats

Long version: We were supposed to have pizza on Monday, when a guest was coming who can only eat sourdough and had never had sourdough pizza. But then he had to cancel, but asked if he could come Thursday, instead.

Since the whole point of him coming was to try the pizza, I decided to save the pizza for Thursday. The way I did that was to bake the crusts until baked through, then top them with the pizza sauce, let them cool in the pans, and then wrap up the entire thing in plastic wrap and aluminum foil to freeze. So all I had to do this day was thaw them, top them, and bake until the cheese was slightly browned.

I was baking bread again this day anyway, so I also made one extra pizza in my smaller pan, because we ended up with another guest coming, too. So one big pizza was just cheese; one big pizza was Italian sausage, bacon, and pickled onions; and the smaller pizza was bell pepper, onion, tomatoes, and collard greens.

So pretty.

Ready to bake. The only one that had any leftovers was the plain cheese.

Refrigerator check:

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

A Shortage of Wildflowers

Last year was such a great year for wildflowers. We had multiple kinds for months, starting in May and going through until about September.

This year? Not so much.

We just didn't get rain. At least, not early enough. It was so dry in the spring that nothing grew. No grass, no flowers, no nothing. The rains finally started, but too late for most of the flowers.

What has been coming is late, small, and underwhelming. Last year at this time, the roads were lined with exuberant yellow clover, vibrant orange globe mallows, and lots of other things. I made so many arrangements. For the dining room table, for the bookcase in the living room, for wherever I felt like putting flowers.

This year everything is stunted, sparse, and limited.

But still! I do have some flowers.

Early-morning arranging.

I do appreciate that the silver nightshade (the purple flowers) has finally recovered after getting mostly eliminated during a poorly-timed hailstorm a couple of years ago.

 

The bookcase flowers are harder because they have to be taller.

The yellow clover and apricot branches do most of the heavy lifting.

Even in lean years, there's always something. A good lesson in general, I guess.

Snapshots: A Giant Wedding

When I stopped at the dollar store for milk last week, I was highly amused by this contradictory gardening display outside the store.

Potting soil and extremely fake flowers? Pick your type of gardening, I guess.

My own garden, which is very much Not Fake, has been having a rough time of it this year. The complete lack of rain in the spring meant things didn't grow all that well and were still pretty small. Then we got hail a week ago that caused quite a bit of damage. I actually went to Tractor Supply when I was in town on Wednesday and bought some tomato plants. Literally a few hours after I planted those on Friday . . .

Those are the new tomatoes drowning in the row next to the ones covered with milk jugs.

That is a lot of hail.

Despite the beating they took, I think everything has enough growth still on it to pull through. I hope, anyway.

We were all watching that storm Friday night and wondering if the giant wedding we were supposed to go to Saturday was even going to happen. The bride was our agriculture teacher and FFA advisor. Her family owns a huge ranch down the hill, and that is where the wedding was. They invited over four hundred people, so everything was outside, and getting to the spot required driving several miles of dirt road.

Eldest was helping them set up, and he told us in the morning that the wedding was definitely still on, so we got all dressed up in the afternoon and went.

I should note that "all dressed up" meant we were following the dress code of "country formal/cocktail." And THAT meant starch, and lots of it. The boys all wore jeans and button-ups with their boots and hats, which was pretty standard for this wedding. The boys' teacher/bride is very insistent on them ironing carefully for all their FFA events, and middle son did his best ironing in her honor. I helped the youngest do his ironing. He'll be starting FFA next year, so he needs to practice now. Eldest thought he would have time to come home and get himself ready for the wedding, but didn't end up having time, so I ironed his clothes for him and brought them down when we went.

A. didn't wear western clothing, but I ironed his shirt for him, anyway. It was a lot of ironing, which I hate, but I love this teacher, and the wedding was worth it.

This ranch is in a spectacular location, and by some miracle, the extremely threatening storm we could see during the entire ceremony passed to the south of us without a single drop of rain at our location. 

We had to drive through a small river on the way there, but no big deal.

It was beautifully decorated and all the flowers were real.

I appreciated this very much.

I also appreciated the big tents for the reception.

The sun was out when we were eating, and it would have been very uncomfortable to have no shade for very long.

One nice thing about living here is that dancing is still very common. Everyone here learns to two-step, which is a very forgiving kind of dancing. You don't have to be good at it, as long as you can follow the flow of dancing and not get in anyone's way. The result of having a common form of dance that everyone learns is that everyone dances. Little kids, teenagers, adults are all out on the dance floor. It makes for a very fun wedding.

We didn't stay for all of the dancing, because by the time the special dances were done and the general floor was opened up, it was already almost 9 p.m. and we were all ready to go. Well, except Poppy. She LOVES to dance. We stayed for a bit so she could dance with her friend, and then A. and I each did one dance with her before she reluctantly agreed it was too late for her and we should go home.

The view of the party from the parking area.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.