Friday Food: Kitchen Work for a Cause

Friday 

Short version: Pollock, mashed potatoes, fancy collard salad, cucumber salad, crepe cake

Long version: I had three bags of Pollock fillets that I got from commodities. At least, I think they were fillets. Maybe they were planks? They were very regular rectangles that looked to have been cut from fillet, anyway. Each bag had eight planks. Two bags would have been enough for this meal, but I decided to cook all of them in anticipation of making a fish pie with leftovers.

To that end, I put all the fish pieces in my biggest Pyrex in the oven, covered with foil, and then on top of those put the leeks I had cooked in chicken stock and cream.

And then they just would.not.get.cooked. 

I had put them in frozen, because that's what the package said to do. The package also said one bag would cook from frozen in twenty minutes. After an hour, they were so far from cooked they were still cold.

At that point I split them up into two Pyrexes in the oven. Still not cooking fast enough given that it was now 6:15 p.m. So I put two-thirds of them in my biggest stainless steel pan on the stove and simmered them until they were done. Which took only about fifteen minutes.

So annoying.

I made the fancy collard salad--fancy meaning it had dried cranberries, toasted pecans, and pickled onion slivers in it--because our priest was joining us for dinner and he actually likes collard salads as much as I do.

The cucumber salad was just cucumbers, pickled onions, and ranch dressing. For those who do not appreciate collard salads.

I made the crepe cake to use the five leftover crepes from the previous Sunday's after church breakfast. I layered them with sweetened whipped cream and rhubarb jam to which I had added some plain mashed strawberries.

Saturday

Short version: Breakfast sausage patties, beans and rice, carrot sticks, cookies

Long version: Two tubes of Great Value premium breakfast sausage made into thin patties and broiled. 

I took out one quart jar of frozen pinto beans that appeared to have been cooked with a ham bone, given the fat on top of the beans. I added a sauteed onion, garlic, and some tomato sauce to them. Since there was quite a bit of liquid in the beans, I cooked rice right in with the beans, and then I added some leftover cooked rice to it, along with butter. At the last minute, I also dumped in the grease in the sausage pan. 

That's three kinds of fat in the beans and rice. Predictably, my family thought they were the best beans ever.

The cookies were this week's snack cookies: peanut butter, oats, and chocolate chips.

Sunday

Short version: Fish pie, frozen peas, coconut cake

Long version: I used to make this fish pie all the time when we lived on the lake in New York and ate lots of lake trout. It's a good use for leftover fish. In this case, all that leftover Pollock. 

The original recipe came from Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking. That recipe calls for mushrooms and peas in the fish part, which I did not use, and thyme and parsley, which I did use. 

Come to think of it, I didn't actually use the recipe much at all except for the herbs. Instead I just dumped all the saved juices from cooking the fish, which included all the cream and leeks left, into a pan with another sliced leek and simmered that until the leek was soft. Then I thickened it with cornstarch before adding it to the fish.

Creamy. And herby.

I also had almost enough mashed potatoes for the topping on the fish pie. I used some of the instant potato flakes we've been getting from commodities to bulk up the leftover mashed potatoes so there would be enough. 

This really is a surprisingly good use for leftover fish. Even Poppy said, "I don't even like fish, but this is so good."

For the cake, I used one of the bags of yellow cake mix we got from commodities. I made it into a sheet cake and used coconut oil instead of butter in it, plus coconut extract and shredded sweetened coconut. The frosting was more or less a buttercream with a little cream cheese and more coconut extract. And then there was more coconut all over the top.

Everyone LOVED this. I don't know why I've been under the impression that my family doesn't like cake all that much. Maybe because they never actually request it. They certainly eat it with enthusiasm when I make it, though.

Monday

Short version: Sausage, leftover fish pie, cucumbers, leftover cake

Long version: I didn't have quite enough of the fish pie for it to be the main course, but I had enough of it to be a side dish. Which is why I cooked one package of smoked beef sausage. Then there was enough for everyone.

Sausage and leftovers.

No one thought there was enough cake, since there was only enough left for everyone to have one small piece. but a small piece is better than none. That's what I told them, anyway.

Tuesday

Short version: Cheeseburgers on homemade buns, fried potatoes, pickles, cranberry-pecan bread

Long version: I had made the hamburger buns the day before when I was baking bread, which made this a relatively quick meal to make. The fried potatoes were just a few big potatoes that I peeled and diced before frying in tallow, covered first to get soft, and then uncovered to get crispy.

The bread was this oat and yogurt bread, with extra honey added, as well as pecans and some of the many dried cranberries we've been getting from commodities. It's a good way to use up a lot of the cranberries, and it is a very good bread.

Wednesday

Short version: Low-effort hamburger with baked beans, rice, cucumbers with ranch dip

Long version: I spent all afternoon in the kitchen cooking for a gathering of priests that our priest was hosting the next day. One of the things I made for them was baked beans. I was heartily sick of the kitchen by the time dinner rolled around, so I just browned some ground beef and ladled in some of the baked beans to serve over rice.

I also, handily, still had a jar of the juices from the oven chicken I had made the week before that was more or less similar to barbecue sauce spices. So I put some of that in with the meat, too, to flavor it some more. 

Thursday

Short version: Leftovers or concession food

Long version: On this day I spent all morning in the kitchen, baking for a silent auction at school to benefit one of our high school students who has been in and out of the hospital with a difficult-to-treat condition. I made a coconut cake, crispy rice treats, and cranberry-walnut bread.

The brownies were Poppy's contribution. She got up twenty minutes early so she could make them before school.

The auction was during the volleyball game after school, to which I went and at which Poppy was cheering. The football player met us there after practice, too, so the two kids with me had concession food for dinner. Before I left for the game, I had a salad with some of the leftover meat from the night before in it.

The ones at home had the leftover hamburger/baked beans/rice from the night before. Plus a few crispy rice treats I saved for them.

Refrigerator check:

Ginger ale for the upset stomach that we had in the house this week.

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

An Unexpected Wedding

Early last week, our priest asked me if I would be able to witness a wedding he would be celebrating at one of our mission churches. 

This church, to be specific.

He needed two witnesses to sign the official paperwork, both for the church and for the state. This couple was coming from out of state, knew no one in the area, and wasn't bring their own witnesses.

This meant I had never met the two people getting married. However! I love weddings, and I love this particular church, so I said I would be happy to attend and act as a witness. Another parishioner who lives near the church agreed to be the second witness, and we were all set.

I was very curious to meet this couple and to know how this wedding came to be at this particular church. I felt sure there was a story there. Indeed there was, and now I will share it with you.

Let's call the couple Henry and Jessica, in the interests of their privacy. They were very friendly and chatty, and very happy to share their story.

In 2016, Henry rode 4,000 miles on a bicycle from Florida to California as part of an initiative to raise funds and awareness for housing non-profits like Habitat for Humanity. Their route took them through our county. He has a picture of himself standing in front of that mission church's sign. He never forgot the church, or New Mexico. He told me that this was his favorite state of the ones he rode through.

Fast forward to now. Henry and Jessica live in Michigan. They have birthdays just one day apart in the first week of October and planned a trip to New Mexico so Henry could introduce Jessica to the state, and also so they could attend the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque to celebrate their birthdays. They were engaged, but didn't want the big wedding their families would insist on. 

Jessica is Catholic, and they did their pre-marital preparations at her parish in Michigan. But when they decided to make this trip to New Mexico, Henry showed her his photos of his time here and she saw the one of the church in the middle of nowhere. She suggested they get married there while they were on vacation. They didn't tell anyone they knew that they were going to do this.

They contacted our archdiocese, from whom they got the necessary approval and who contacted our parish priest, and there they were, with a wedding scheduled for 2 p.m. on a Thursday at a mostly-closed, remote New Mexico church.

And there I was, witnessing the wedding of two very nice people I met five minutes before their ceremony.

They didn't have a photographer, either, so I took some pictures of the ceremony for them with my phone, which I will not share with you because, again, privacy. But here's the altar just before the wedding.

After the wedding, they were continuing their New Mexico tour by going to Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. I'm sure they'll have a lot of fun and go home with a lot of stories to tell from those places, but I'm also sure nothing will beat the story of their wedding. 

Snapshots: First Fire and Flowers

It's the shoulder season of fall, and that means that we have both fresh flowers:

On the table.

And on the bookcase.

Plus the ones I put together just yesterday.

And fire:

The first fire of the season, yesterday morning.

I had a heck of a time getting that fire going, thanks to the fact that it looked like this outside.

That's not fog. It's a cloud, and our elevation is high enough that we were just in it.

Everything was damp, there was no draft, and every time I opened the stove to check on the fire or add wood, it just billowed smoke out. It was very unpleasant. I did get it going eventually, though.

The morning before, it was 59 degrees in the house. That would have been a good morning to have a fire, but all the wood was wet from being in an untidy pile outside on the ground, where it was dumped when it was delivered unexpectedly on Monday. 

The kids went to work yesterday afternoon, though, and had it all stacked within a couple of hours. They were helped in this endeavor, amusingly, by our priest. He came to dinner and was very eager to help stack wood. I suppose he appreciates such a straightforward, physical task, that is so unlike what he usually has to do.

We are happy to oblige him by providing the opportunity for labor. Never in short supply at our house.

On Michaelmas, we had fire and flowers together at breakfast. Our usual candles were joined by our St. Michael candle--these are readily available at any grocery store in New Mexico--and the youngest boy's St. Michael keychain that he carries in his pocket every day.

A very liturgically appropriate breakfast table.

Continuing the religious theme, I was amused to see that Poppy's brown scapular that she wears every day under her shirt was perfectly framed by the opening in the back of her shirt yesterday.

I spy with my little eye . . .

Another back shot for Poppy so I could show her what her hair looked like before Mass on Sunday:

Big bow on a looped braid.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.