Friday Food: Double Fridge Photos

Friday 

Short version: Tuna noodle casserole, frozen peas

Long version: In the summer when it's hot, I often make dinner in the morning to just be re-heated at dinnertime. The best option for re-heating without heating the kitchen is the microwave. My 13"x9" glass Pyrex just barely fits in my microwave. So I could re-heat the tuna casserole in the microwave and then brown the bread-crumb topping quickly under the oven broiler.

I would prefer to put the peas in the casserole, but my children do not agree with that.

Saturday

Short version: Sausage and potato casserole, radishes, ice cream

Long version: Second day in a row of casserole, mostly because the two pounds of loose Italian sausage wouldn't have been quite enough for everyone cooked into patties or something. But combined with potatoes, tomatoes, beet greens, asadero cheese, and cream? It was enough.

I just kept pulling things out of my freezers to add to this.

It's the woodchuck version of mise en place.

This casserole was apparently specifically engineered for the Y chromosome. Poppy wasn't too wild about it, but the boys LOVED it. One described it as "beautiful." His brother raised his eyebrows at this and replied, "Maybe the way Danny Devito is beautiful." (It was not a pretty dish.) "But it's delicious, Mom!"

Sunday

Short version: Pizzas, ranch dip, carrot sticks, cake

Long version: A. told me he really liked the vegetable pizza I had made last time, so I made another one, this time with diced garlic scapes, bell pepper, and collard greens on it. And apparently, two of the children also prefer vegetable pizza. Hooray!

The other pizza had some deli ham on it that I was informed was unpleasantly slimy. I investigated and found that it was, but once I diced it and fried it in some butter, it made a good pizza topping.

The cake was the extra of the Bonnie Butter cake I had made for our Fourth of July flag cake. I baked some of the batter in a standard cake pan and froze it in the pan. I sliced that in half and layered the rest of the frosting from the flag cake in the middle with strawberry-rhubarb sauce, and then covered the whole thing with whipped cream.

The top layer of cake completely fell apart when I was picking it up to put it back on, but I pieced it back together. And whipped cream covers all problems.

Yikes.

All better.

Monday

Short version: Lamb burgers, pasta with pesto, coleslaw, cheesecake with strawberry/rhubarb sauce

Long version: Our newest fourteen-year-old requested this for his birthday. Well, he requested lamb, pasta with pesto, and cheesecake. I'm out of lamb steaks or chops, but I did still have a few bags of ground lamb, so I used a couple of those to make lamb burgers. 

All meat is better grilled, but lamb especially. So I used the grill to cook them.

And none of them fell through the grate, hooray!

The basil is doing pretty well so far this year. I used some of the fresh basil to make pesto, and then used the last few cubes of frozen pesto from last year, which was enough for a lot of pasta. And I had half a cabbage in the refrigerator, thus, coleslaw.

Birthday boy plate.

I used a different recipe for the cheesecake this time, which was stupidly simple and seemed just as popular as the much more complicated Cook's Illustrated recipe I had been using. I used the food processor to make a nut crust again, since I never have graham crackers, so I could use the food processor to make the filling, too.

I doubled it, which was a good call, but it is handy to have a cheesecake recipe that doesn't make a fifty-pound cheesecake. I mean, I don't need that at this stage of my life, but I might some day.

Tuesday

Short version: Roasted chicken, potatoes, carrots, green beans; leftover coleslaw; not-baked beans; butterscotch brownies and ice cream

Long version: I never think to buy whole chickens, but A. does. It was slightly cooler this day, and I thought maybe I could roast a whole chicken without turning my kitchen into one of Dante's circles. 

Because the oven was on for the chicken, I decided to bake a dessert before I turned it up higher than 350 degrees. I wanted to make some kind of bar cookie and did a quick search to see if there was anything new I could try that my family would like. I found this recipe for what were called "butterscotch brownies," although I wouldn't call them brownies. They're really more like chocolate chip cookies with all brown sugar.

I actually really liked this recipe. It was incredibly easy, thanks to the butter being melted and it being baked in one pan. I used just one (microwaveable) bowl and a spoon to mix it. The end result is very sweet--not surprising, given that there's more sugar in it than flour--with almost candied edges. It has a good flavor thanks to all the brown sugar, and my family loved them. It's definitely a recipe that would not be as good with sweeter chocolate chips; dark chocolate is the way to go.

After those baked, I turned up the oven to roast the vegetables and finish roasting the chicken. I made gravy for the chicken, too, with milk and cornstarch.

We had a last-minute guest join us for dinner, which is why I made some very quick not-baked beans on the stove using four cans of pinto beans.

Wednesday 

Short version: Chicken slop, sausages, rice

Long version: There was a surprising amount of chicken left over, mostly white meat, that I chopped up and re-heated in a skillet with the rest of the gravy. I added a bit of extra cream to it, too.

I had made chicken stock in the morning with the most recent chicken carcass, plus one from a rotisserie chicken that had been in the freezer, so I used some of that stock to cook the rice.

I cooked just one package of jalapeno/cheddar sausages for the three who like them. That way they didn't need as much of the chicken slop and there was enough.

Thursday

Short version: Meatballs in marinara, leftover pasta and pesto, pickled radishes, ice cream

Long version: A. brought the younger two to town for errands and a sports physical. They got Sonic there. 

I had made meatballs in the morning, using two pounds of ground beef and the other half of a big can of tomato sauce I had opened for pizza sauce on Sunday. I figured those would go well with the pasta and pesto we still had left.

There wasn't very much vanilla ice cream left, which is why I gave it to the two boys at home with me. Even split between two it wasn't much. Split between four would have been ridiculous.

Refrigerator check:

This was right after dinner.

And this was a couple of hours later when A. got home with groceries.

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

How Far Is Too Far?

Last time A. went camping with the kids, he bought a sleeve of those big red Solo cups for the gallons of milk and lemonade he kept in the cooler. When he got home, I collected all of those and washed them to use again.

I used one of them on the Fourth of July to give the son home with me a very patriotic-looking watermelon slushie. After he finished his slushie, he started to throw the Solo cup away. I stopped him and told him I would wash it to use again. He was incredulous.

"Mom. Seriously? I have never heard of anyone re-using a Solo cup."

Really? I mean, is that really that strange? They're thick plastic! They're easy to wash! Why wouldn't you re-use it?

He was also shocked that I wash out Ziploc bags. And empty sour cream containers. The tray with top that A. brought home from a McDonald's breakfast. Pretty much any glass jars. And I sometimes save sheets of aluminum foil if they haven't gotten dirty, although I don't go so far as to wash those.

I even wash and re-use birthday candles.

These have been used I think twice and have at least one more use in them.

It never occurred to me that any of this was really that strange, but maybe it is. What do you* think? 

* Although I suspect that if you read here with any regularity, you are most likely also a re-user.

Snapshots: Books and Mystery Flowers

One of the things I did while most of the family was gone was sort through all the books we had culled from our bookshelves when summer started. I went to World of Books, an online book re-seller that will also buy books, and entered all the ISBNs for each book to see if they would buy it. They make this process fairly easy. They even provide the shipping label for free and allow it to be shipped in any box that will fit the books.

In progress.

I had around a hundred books, and about a third of those were accepted. I duly shipped the box of books off and am now anticipating a check to arrive shortly for a little over thirty dollars. Not a lot of money, but more than I had before. The other two-thirds of the books were donated to Big Brothers/Big Sisters.

I managed enough flowers for both the table and the bookcase this week, including, excitingly, the very first sunflowers.

The sunflowers, like everything else this year, are small and sparse, but I'm happy to have whatever I can find.

A. brought me some of the mystery flowers that are growing in the crack at the edge of the schoolhouse gym, near where the horse trough was. I don't know what these are. They don't look like wildflowers to me. Maybe they're some kind of domestic flower that self-seeded there. I left them, hoping I would be able to get seeds from them to plant, given that they're clearly well-adapted to our climate. But it was nice to have a few for the vases.

They're an interesting mix of purple and white.

I don't know why I found it so pleasing that all the children chose different cereal before church on Sunday.

Cheerios courtesy of my mother. We don't typically buy those because the generic versions of them aren't that good and we buy the generic giant bags of everything.

And last, I'm still enjoying our flag in the dawn's early light.

So handy that the wind blows almost constantly to make the flag wave.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.